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Marisol Payero, the President of the Kennesaw Pride Alliance, died Oct. 27.
The 22-year-old was a senior at Kennesaw State University studying History Education. She helped lead the opening of the KPA Pride Center after the university shuttered the LGBTQ+ resource center due to DEI cutbacks earlier this year.
“Known as Mari, she was one of the brightest and well-known voices in our campus community,” KPA wrote in a statement. “She had worked with Kennesaw Pride Alliance for years as an incredibly passionate person who tried her best to ensure events and programs were the best they could be. Mari put as much effort as possible into making Kennesaw Pride Alliance a place for all, advocating for events that pulled in voices of intersectionality including working to collaborate with CARC to boost voices from the Coharie Tribe of North Carolina, and collaborating with Queer Spirituality, an LGBTQ+ Resource Center community group, to spread voices of many different kinds of spiritual and religious organizations.”
Payero was of Dominican and Argentinian descent and a practicing Celtic Druid. Her friends and family remember her as having a bright smile and a natural gift for humor, a lover of Argentina and the color blue, and interested in dying languages and the recreation of the Taíno language.
“She was sly and full of humor, a hard worker, a friend of many,” KPA said. “She was a daughter, a sister, a niece, and a granddaughter. If you talked to her long enough, she could get through five topics without you having any input yourself. She was a fellow drinker of coffee with no sugar. She loved her students, often bringing them up in conversation; she loved her friends, you could not have a conversation with her without her mentioning them. She was the most organized of us currently in the Kennesaw Pride Alliance board, and we don’t know what to do without her. She was a lovely, vibrant, messy person, and we want to do anything we can to remember her as her whole self.”
Payero, who was transgender, died by suicide. Noël Heatherland, the Statewide Organizing Manager for Georgia Equality and a friend of Payero, noted the impact of anti-trans sentiment on suicidality among trans young people.
“Transgender, gender expansive, and queer people are significantly represented in death statistics due to hate crimes or the result of ending their lives…” they wrote. “Marisol isn’t just another death. She was a person, a human, a daughter, a sister, a friend. She was in her last semester before graduating. We will never get to see what she would have done in the world after graduating.”
However, KPA says that Payero’s family said her identity was not connected to her passing and cited school stress as the cause.
“Please remember, you are more than one facet of yourself,” the organization said. “Mari was more than just a trans-woman and more than just an activist. Her work had a widespread and amazing impact, but her impact on her family and her close friends will be something that cannot ever be taken away, and cannot be forgotten.”
Payero’s family has raised nearly $5,000 for her funeral service, which is scheduled for Nov. 9 at 2 p.m. at Iglesia Adventista Metropolitana de Atlanta, 5990 Oakbrook Parkway in Norcross. The family will receive visitors from 5 to 9 p.m. at Fischer Funeral Care, 3742 Chamblee Dunwoody Road.
Editor’s Note: This story was updated Nov. 5 to include a statement on Peyero’s passing by the Kennesaw Pride Alliance and edit language to align with her family’s wishes.
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