369

In 2018, the TGEU issued a press release on Transgender Day of Remembrance, reporting 369 transphobically motivated murders executed globally throughout 2017—each digit representing a life extinguished by hate. This stark accounting falls short of capturing all cases worldwide, as many trans and gender-diverse murder victims are misidentified in autopsy reports, erasing their individuality, leaving them undocumented and permanently misgendered. These figures require nuanced interpretation within their racialized, social, political, economic, and historical contexts, particularly given the increasing visibility/fetishization of transgender individuals in the West and the varying levels of cultural acceptance globally. 

In response to this accounting, I have collected 369 of my own tears, each preserved in microcentrifuge tubes —small plastic vessels used to suspend biological matter in time. What began as a methodical mourning practice, my grief expressed in saltwater, transforms into something approaching the sacred, a burial rite. The precision of scientific preservation cradles the immeasurable weight of loss, creating a memorial that insists on reverence for our most vulnerable while exposing how little our society values transgender existence. We have always sought containers for our grief. 

Found in crypts throughout Antiquity, artifacts known as Lachrymatory vessels were not filled with tears, as the romantic myth would have it, but with perfumed oils meant to soothe the soul of the departed and distract the senses of the mourners. Yet, the thought of a "tear-collecting vessel" persists in museology because it serves a purpose. While humans elevate mourning to an art form, crafting elaborate rituals around loss, Swaths of animals will memorialize their deceased through behavioural actions and genetic memory. These impulses reveal something essential: our desperate need to make the incorporeal, corporeal, to hold what cannot be held. despite archaeology debunking the tear-collecting vessel, it's mythic power endures—a testament to our refusal to let sorrow remain only a feeling, our insistence that grief, too, deserves preservation.