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Gwendolyn Ann Smith

transgender woman who founded Transgender Remembrance Day

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 12, 2026
Entity authorityQ28748026 ↗
Source-derived summary

Gwendolyn Smith (born 22 July 1967) is an American transgender woman from the San Francisco Bay Area who co-founded Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day to memorialize people who have been killed as a result of transphobia. Trans/Active: A Biography of Gwendolyn Ann Smith is a biography about Smith published in July 2017.

Life

Born July 22, 1967, Smith is a transgender activist, writer, and graphic designer. From 1993 to 1998, she ran the Transgender Community Forum on AOL, which was one of the first public online forums for transgender people. Since 2000, she has been a columnist for the Bay Area Reporter. Her column is called "Transmissions." Her essay, "We're all Someone's Freak," is in the Norton Reader 14th edition. She also manages the website Genderfork.

Smith founded a website called Remembering Our Dead, which memorializes people (going back to 1970) who have died as a direct result of hatred and prejudice based on gender. Today the list is hosted on the Transgender Day of Remembrance website, which now (going back to 2007) publishes information about people who have been murdered due to anti-transgender violence. In 2012, Gwendolyn Smith wrote an article for Huffington Post titled, "Transgender Day of Remembrance: Why We Remember".

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Gwendolyn Ann Smith” is transgender woman who founded Transgender Remembrance Day. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Gwendolyn, Smith and transgender, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1967, 2017, 1993, 1998—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1967-07-22. For this dossier, Gwendolyn, Smith and transgender is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “transgender woman who founded Transgender Remembrance Day” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28748026. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1967, 2017, 1993 and 1998.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

Best used for
  • Subject orientation
  • Search vocabulary
  • Locating named sources
Verify next

The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Gwendolyn Ann Smith”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Gwendolyn Ann Smith primary sources, Gwendolyn Ann Smith archive and Gwendolyn research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Gwendolyn Ann Smith”?
  2. What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
  3. Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Gwendolyn Ann Smith” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.