I have a story to tell for Trans Day of Remembrance, and it's weird, because I'm remembering a person I never met, who influenced my life anyway. Hir name was Amelia. If you knew hir, I hope I'm honoring hir memory.
When I figured out I was trans, in Boston in 2018, I started meeting some of the local community of nerdy trans people. And in one crowd, I felt like I was meeting a ghost, Amelia, who had died from being refused mental health treatment just months earlier, and whose absence left a somber mood.
Starting from what I heard from people remembering hir, I needed to find out more about Amelia. I found that ze had written a number of papers published in math journals. This echoed a worry I was confronting at the time: I was still involved in natural language processing research, I had published papers, and my old name would haunt me whenever I or anyone else referred to those papers. And yet, here I saw a trans person with several papers under hir own name. Ze must have been able to change it and reclaim hir publishing history!
I couldn't ask hir how, but just knowing that it was possible was enough to get me started.