Every year, as Transgender Day of Remembrance approaches (Thursday, November 20, 2025), my mind nor heart is ever far from Ms. Shade Schuler.
You don’t plan to be pulled into a story like Ms. Shade Schuler’s. It arrives the way grief often does…quiet at first, almost like a rumor, something you think you can set aside. But then a detail catches your breath. Then another. And before long, you realize the story is not waiting to be read. It is waiting to be witnessed.
Violence Against Black Transgender Women: A Global Human Rights Crisis
Shade’s name first found me that way…through reports of an unidentified body discovered in a Dallas field. The language was clinical and cold. “Decomposed remains.” “Unknown male.” “Possible homicide.” The kind of phrasing that strips a person down to a case number. It would take time before investigators learned the truth…the body was that of Ms. Shade Schuler, a 22-year-old Black transgender woman. The year was 2015 and she was one of an outbreak transgender women of color murdered across the United States that year. Of course, violence hasn’t necessarily stopped since.
By the time her name reached me, Shade had already slipped into the long shadow cast over transgender lives, the shadow where society relegates its most vulnerable. Yet something about her death resisted the usual forgetting. Something in her story kept tugging at me, soft but persistent. I’d never met her. I didn’t know much about her life. Honestly, I just knew here end. But proximity isn’t what summons us to injustice…truth is. And Shade’s truth was calling.
The world was silent.
Remembering Shade Schuler: Faith, Justice, and Sacred Memory
It stunned me that she was found so close to homes…less than a hundred feet from the ordinary. Children played outside, neighbors cooked dinners and cars passed by. Meanwhile her body lay hidden in a patch of overgrowth as though she belonged to no one. As though her killer knew no one would ever come looking. That is the kind of violence most people don’t understand…the violence of neglect, of abandonment, of treating a life as disposable. Shade did not die alone.
The world was just too busy to help.
The decision to travel to the spot where she was found was not something I reasoned out. I felt pulled from somewhere deeper. I didn’t go alone. Indeed, I led a group with Rev. Carmarion Anderson-Harvey, the fiercest and most faithful advocate for trans lives out there. The day felt heavy in a way that had nothing to do with weather. The heat wrapped around us like fur coat. The sun lingered long past its welcome.
Carmarion Anderson-Harvey and the Fight for Transgender Dignity
We turned down a gravel path that didn’t want to be found. Carmarion walked just ahead of me, the others a bit behind and none of us spoke. Words fall apart easily in places like that. We carried bread and a chalice, the simplest of things, yet they felt almost absurdly fragile. As if the sacred did not belong among weeds and scattered trash.
But holiness has never behaved that way.
At first, the place looked like any neglected lot. Then the smell reached us…old and earthy, undeniably dead. A scent that clung to the air long after the moment that produced it. My mind tried to reinterpret it, to soften what I knew was coming, but the body shaped stain on the ground refused to be reimagined. It was dark. Charred looking. Familiar in a way that made my stomach tighten. I’d assumed it was an old fire pit. It wasn’t.
That spot held the last evidence of Shade’s body. The earth had absorbed her long before the world admitted she’d gone missing.
The Spiritual Power of Witnessing Transgender Loss and Resilience
Something shifted inside me. Not a dramatic revelation…more like a slow undeniable settling. The way a truth presses into you when you’ve run out of ways to avoid it. Carmarion stepped closer and murmured a prayer under her breath. Everyone else bowed their heads in reverence. The air felt different, like it had thickened with memory. As if the ground remembered her more faithfully than the systems meant to protect her.
We lifted the bread and the cup to the sky. There are moments when ritual ceases to be ritual and becomes something else entirely and something raw, electric and uncontainable. This was one of them. The air hummed. Carmarion’s voice grew steadier. I felt the sting behind my eyes before I realized I was crying.
“This,” we said, “is the body and blood of Ms. Shade.”
Not metaphor. Not poetry. Truth.
Because if the divine is truly present in the lives of the oppressed…and every prophet worth listening to has insisted it is…then Shade had not been abandoned here. Not really. Her dignity had not been erased, even if the world tried. Her worth had not been lessened, even when the institutions meant to honor her identity failed her.
I bent down and touched the ground. It was warm. Too warm for the hour. And in that strange warmth, in that unbearable quiet, something like a whisper moved through me…
“What you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.”
I’d read those words a thousand times. But never like that. Never with dirt under my fingernails, heat settling on my shoulders and the outline of a forgotten woman pressed into the earth before me. In that moment, Shade stopped being a headline, or a symbol, or a tragic statistic. She’d become revelation.
Her life…and her death…spoke a truth to a world that still refused to hear.
That Black trans women are sacred.
That their lives are not tragedies waiting to happen.
That their bodies are not warnings.
That their deaths are not footnotes.
That the violence they endure is not inevitable.
That society must choose to stop it…actively…urgently…now.
Why Ms. Shade Schuler’s Story Still Calls the World to Action
It would be easy to minimize this tragedy. But… Ms. Shade Schuler ’s story is a global tale. It’s about how the world decides whose lives are fully human and whose are treated like afterthoughts. It is about whether we believe…truly believe…that every person carries the image of God. And it is about what happens when we don’t act as such.
I cannot pretend that visiting that place repaired the injustice done to her. It didn’t. But something happened there that refuses to fade…a kind of resurrection. The kind that doesn’t reverse death but refuses to let death have the final word. The kind that insists memory can be a form of uprising. The kind that resurrects a life unforgotten.
And so, I say it plainly, as I said it then:
I believe in the resurrection of Ms. Shade Schuler.
Not because her body rose,
but because her story refuses to stay buried.
Because her truth keeps rising in the hearts of all who refuse to look away.
Because she lives…not in the earth where she was found,
but in the fight she continues to inspire.
Black trans lives matter.
May the world hear her.
May the world change because of her.
And may her memory be a revolution.
Amen.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In