The Gender & Sexuality Alliance hosted speaker Sonya Saturday on Nov. 15 to honor Transgender Day of Remembrance, observed annually on Nov. 20. Saturday, a resident of California, joined through Zoom in Academic West 112. 

Saturday is a transgender cartoonist, whose work ranges from comic strips to coloring books. Her first creative outlet was theatre, but later came into comic writing in her college years. Her comic strip “Load” ran in The Independent Florida Alligator, the daily student newspaper of the University of Florida. 

Saturday’s comics often feature self-described “edgy” humor, as well as some cartoonish gore and horror. Over time, some of her comics have become an exploration of herself—especially as she came into her transgender identity. She’s also published satirical adult coloring books with a political focus, in time for the 2016 and 2020 elections. 

“For me, the whole point of trans awareness and trans visibility is to continually show the world that we exist,” Saturday said. “When you’re invisible, it’s easy for people to forget that you’re real. A big reason we have so many people denying that transness is a real thing is because it’s only recently that they’ve had to think about us at all.”

GSA also displayed a memorial outside of the Diversity & Inclusion Center in the bottom floor of the ELC. The memorial was composed of drawings contributed by club members as well as posters with supportive slogans. The main focus of the memorial, however, was a large poster featuring the names of transgender individuals who were killed this year.

Maria Wooden ’26, GSA’s First Year representative, spoke on her experience as the main organizer for this event.

“Organizing this event had stressful moments, but for the most part it was quite enjoyable,” Wooden said. “It was super easy to communicate with Sonya Saturday, and I could tell she was very excited to talk with us.”

Due to the nature of this holiday, efforts to honor it can often be emotionally heavy. While Saturday did touch on some of her experiences with mental health, she made sure to keep the talk light-hearted.

“This talk was so important because of how positive it was,” Wooden said. “Sonya didn’t sugar coat anything, but was able to share her trans journey with us in an uplifting way. I am happy to know that both the audience and our speaker had a great time.”