Stand Up and Fight for, and Alongside, Your Trans Siblings

We stand on the shoulders of giants who came before us. We stand on the shoulders of STAR of Sylvia, Marsha, Victor, Bambi, Bubbles, Bebe, Cavika, Andorra, Lola, Miss Pixie, Mark, and Chelsea. On the shoulders of all those who believed we had the power to forge a better world for the trans kids thrown away by our society into the streets. Who are the whole reason we had a queer rights movement in the first place. Who were used by that movement to fight on the front lines only to be thrown under the bus and discarded by the very movement they started. We stand on the shoulders of Leslie Feinberg, Storme DeLarverie, Miss Major, the queens of Compton’s cafeteria riots. Of Lee Brewster and Judy Bowen. Beth Elliot, Lou Sullivan, Riki Wilchins, and Gwen Smith. Of the Lesbian Avengers and Bash Back. Of Act Up and Queer Nation. Of all those who came before us and used their power to stand up and fight back. Because we all have the power to stand up and fight back.

We just don’t realize we do, sometimes, so we wait for someone to tell us what to do. We wait for someone to lead us. Eugene Debs once said:

I am not a leader. I do not want you to follow me or anyone else. If you are looking for Moses to lead you out of the capitalist wilderness you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could. Because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists who use your heads and your hands.

We do not need to wait around for someone to give us permission to fight back. Because if we do, we will be waiting and waiting and, at this moment, we do not have time for that. We do not have time to wait around for the large nonprofit groups to come and save us. Because let’s be clear, they are not coming to save us. The only ones coming to save us are us. We are all capable, together, of being the ones who move us out of this moment.

But very importantly, we need to fight for and alongside, hand-in-hand with our Black and Brown trans siblings who are the most vulnerable group in our society. Who are overwhelmingly discriminated against in employment and housing. Who are the majority of those of our siblings being murdered in the streets every year. Whose beautiful spirits and joy are the fire that keeps our community burning. Who are the voices we should be centering in our movement.  And who we should be protecting with our lives. And when the situation is too dangerous for our siblings to fight for themselves, those of us with more privilege should be putting our bodies on the line to fight for a world that upholds, celebrates, and truly cares for our Black and Brown trans siblings. Until all of us are free, none of us are free.

The far right is extremely organized and mobilized and marching us towards fascism. If this moment feels familiar, it’s because we have been here before.

Although gender-variant people have existed, been embraced, and even celebrated in many cultures across the world and history there was another time that very similarly mirrored the present moment we are facing. We should not forget that pre-1933 Berlin was the queer and trans capital of the world. People lived openly as trans and queer. They used different terms back then to describe the similar experiences. There were over 100 queer and trans bars in the city. Queer and trans folks were thriving.

Magnus Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Science. Hirschfeld and the Institute were opponents of racist ideology, but were also implicated in histories of eugenics and colonialism—an implicatedness that, to be politically consistent, we must reckon with. The Institute was also one of the first places that offered gender-affirming surgeries that laid the groundwork for current-day gender-affirming surgeries. They offered hormone replacement therapies and had a vast library devoted to the history and study of queer and trans people. Also, the institute provided gender-diverse people a place to live and commune together. Although trans people had made progress, feelings about trans people were split throughout Germany with many seeing trans people as a threat to their way of life and to the idea of German decency and morality. Most of the Nazis’ fear of transness focused mostly on trans women as a threat to their concepts of masculinity. Also, because Judaism traditionally recognized a spectrum of different genders and because Hirschfeld himself was Jewish, they associated transness with Judaism and believed the fight for trans people’s existence to be part of a plot to undermine western societal norms. The Nazis whole ideology was based in eugenics, so any steering away from what was seen as the norm, especially in regards to gender, needed to be eradicated. So ,even as trans people continued to make progress in Germany, they experienced a backlash that was weaponized by the Nazis to build their power.

In 1933, after Hitler was appointed Chancellor, one of the Nazis’ first acts of aggression was to run Hirschfeld out of the country (where he died two years later in exile) and burn the library to the ground. They arrested most everyone living in the institute and sent them to the early versions of the concentration camps. The Sturmabteilung then set up headquarters in the Eldorado, the largest and most prestigious trans bar at the time, to make a statement. While the experiences of trans people during the Holocaust were complex and based on many factors like class, race, and how exploitable their skills were to the Nazis, almost none of them survived because they either were killed or took their own lives. Nazis used the attack on trans people to establish their power and make a statement of control. Like I said, if it feels like we’ve maybe been here before, it’s because we have.

What the far right is currently doing is using their attack on trans people to sow division and establish the beginnings of their power. They have launched a full-scale attack on our lives and our existence and they’re not even trying to hide it. At the recent CPAC convention, Daily Wire political commentator Michael Knowles announced to cheers that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.”

The existence of trans people is a threat to the core of fascist ideology. We are a threat to privatized reproduction and the nuclear family. We are a threat to the idea that you must follow the rules that capitalism and society lay out for us. We are a threat to the power of cisgender heterosexual white men and their idea of what masculinity is supposed to look like, especially the notion that they are innately deserving of power over others. We are a threat to the false morality of fascism. We are a threat to blindly following orders. We are a threat to the moralistic ideals of their sect of Christianity. We are a threat to the values of colonialism.