Trans Liberation is Our Liberation
On Trans Liberation + What's Next for TL + A Free Resource
IN GRATITUDE
Thank you to everyone who attended this week's Zoom meet-up. It was a balm to be together, sharing thoughts, feelings, observations, and analysis with the TL community + a few new faces. As promised, we ended the call by sharing some of our personal sites of joy and gratitude: Florence and the Machine, a cherished, life-saving community of friends, beloved pets, fantasy football, roller skating, and the ancestors.
If you're reading this, we hope you take some time to center joy and gratitude, leaning into and exploring these essential components of our freedom dreams.
WHAT'S NEXT
Next month, Toward Liberation will be taking a pause. We're already looking forward to resuming meeting in January. In the meantime, we’ll announce the next book the first week of December to give those who have time and want to read ahead an early start.
During our time away from TL, I plan to read some books I'm excited about, including The Day God Saw Me As Black by D. Danyelle Thomas, and also revisiting passages from some of the works we’ve read since TL began in summer 2023. The books we've read and conversations we've had together have sharpened my analysis in ways I'll forever be grateful for. Each book gave me a gift that returns again and again as I process the world around me. If I had to sum it up, each book, in its own particular way, has made me better informed, more determined, and inspired than ever to fight for our collective liberation. They have affirmed to me that we are on the right side of history and that we are, in fact, being called to reclaim it.
“…[Solidarity] is the tie that binds women, queer, and trans people, as well as workers and debtors, fighting for freedom and equality today. Transformative solidarity is both a means and an end, the process of struggling together and a way of describing a kind of society that is more just and mutualistic.”
– from Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea
by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor
I'm prioritizing reflecting because, as the past few months have unfolded, I have thought of one book from the TL library more often than almost any other. Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea by Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor has been particularly influential in contextualizing what I was seeing from a lens of liberation.
(SIDE NOTE: If you're new to TL and want to engage in previous selections, I highly recommend Solidarity. Now, it is a challenging read and, at times, can have an almost textbook quality. Still, the historical and critical foundation necessary to understand how we got here and what must happen next is priceless.
Speaking of practical next steps, I also highly recommend Let This Radicalize You by Kellie Hayes and Mariame Kaba. And if you're interested in a different way to engage with the lessons found there, the very generous and ever-brilliant Mariame Kaba is offering free training sessions via Zoom for first-time organizers in January.)
ON TRANS LIBERATION
During Trans Awareness Week (which also not so incidentally saw Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to Congress being brazenly targeted with legislation that would prohibit her from using the women's bathroom at the Capitol) and Trans Day of Remembrance, I am reminded again that solidarity is pivotal to achieving our collective freedom dreams and keeping each other safe as we travel the road toward liberation.
The election cycle, where the GOP spent $143 million on a monstrous transphobic campaign, provides a glaring example of how our beautiful, divine diversity is being actively exploited and weaponized to prevent solidarity, the most powerful tool we have to create the world we imagine.
Over the past year, trans liberation has become intimately personal. But long before that, I began a journey of actively unlearning and confronting inherent transphobia that comes part and parcel with the hegemonic American culture I was born into.
All of my previous learning can be summed up into something very simple but profound:
There is no liberation without trans liberation.
My first encounter with this idea was at a talk given in 2017 by writer and activist Darnell Moore at the University of Houston. In his remarks, he led the audience through a thought exercise of understanding privilege. By the end of it, we could see that Black, trans, and differently abled women were the most marginalized identities in America.
It was something I'd never considered before in my entire Black cishet woman life. It was a moment that forever changed me and my understanding of liberation AND what it would take for everyone to get free.
Since then, I have learned and unlearned A LOT.
"The real crisis is not that gender non-conforming people exist, it's that we have been taught to believe in only two genders in the first place."
― Alok Vaid-Menon, Beyond the Gender Binary
Some of the most illuminating ideas about gender have come through Alok Menon, writer, performer and all around beautiful human who I first encountered at an online event, What If You Get to Be Free hosted by The Institute for Radical Permission, with Sonya Renee Taylor, and adrienne marie brown.
As I sat in my office watching the screen, parts of the world I knew at the time were remade, and I was awash in a fresh and abundant perspective on gender identity and, even more importantly, what it meant to be truly free. I immediately followed Alok's account on Instagram and have since learned so much more from their beautiful writings. Earlier this month, I was jazzed to see them perform live in Philly, where they proved to be even more riotously witty and incisive than what I have seen online.
"Gender and sexuality don't just intersect with other systems like race, they are created by and through them. What many people forget is that the gender binary was imposed on Indigenous peoples across the world as part of a colonial project. Many societies have and continue to have alternative understandings of gender and sex outside of the white/Western definitions of "man" and "woman." This is one of the many reasons why trans and gender non-conforming people of color (and especially Black and indigenous people) experience disproportionate rates of violence." – Alok Vaid-Menon, Interview in HuffPost
Alok's powerful and beautiful offerings have solidified my awareness that fighting for and committing to solidarity with the trans community is essential to all of our freedom dreams. To riff on the old saying, a rising tide of trans liberation will lift the boats of every other marginalized identity.
Here's one example I thought a lot about during the election cycle:
What if restricting abortion access was centered as an issue of bodily autonomy, the common theme linking reproductive rights AND trans rights?
Those connections are, of course, already being explored and taught in many liberatory spaces.
But I wondered if that idea could have emerged as a show of solidarity between the trans community and what was one of the most significant unifying issues of the left: reproductive rights. What if it had become a campaign that combined messaging and financial resources so that the message was louder and more coordinated?
What if such a campaign helped people understand our common interests, declaring and affirming that every person has an inherent right to decide what is best for their bodies? Every one. At all times. Full and complete stop. What a show of solidarity that would have been!
But as I think about the organizing necessary to create such a campaign, I know that providing education or running one unified campaign isn't the only thing we must do. Many such acts of solidarity and education will have to occur over and over again. We are all at varying stages of the work of unlearning the barriers to freedom (if we even know they exist) that have been erected in our collective consciousness through systems that have deliberately and cunningly imposed a White supremacist, racial capitalist, settler colonist, patriarchal, imperialist framework upon us.
It will take deliberate excavation and examination of our thoughts, feelings, and preferences. Our very notions of right and wrong, and the identification that what we think are inherent notions can be a deceiving, insidious binary, must be challenged. It will take stopping our knee-jerk feelings of acceptance and rejection and examining and re-examining them repeatedly through a lens of liberation.
Along the way, we will undoubtedly be called to meet allies and co-conspirators to be where they are. To be effective, we must remember the privilege we hold regarding class, access, and education, political education and otherwise.
Recently, I was talking with a labor organizer about a canvassing team she led during the election. She shared that her team comprised two distinct populations that rarely occupied the same spaces. Part of the group was older, Black, working-class residents of North Philly, and the others were mostly younger, Gen Z nonbinary and trans folks, many of whom attended college in the Philly area.
She shared how it took some work to get the younger group to understand that many in the older group had simply never heard the word non-binary or had ever considered that pronouns could be chosen.
That example illustrated the importance of approaching conversations with intentional, loving care. To avoid assuming that someone, or anyone, is informed or misinformed. To offer the fruits of the areas where we have grown with mindfulness of how this world has inflicted its systems of hierarchy and oppression on us all. To remember the thoughts, feelings and prejudices we've all held at different points in our journeys.
To be honest, this won't always be possible. Sometimes, we'll need to abort the mission, walk away, and, as my Grandma would say, "leave it alone."
But that doesn't mean we don't try. And try again. Because we shouldn't automatically count anyone out. That's what the labor organizer taught the youngsters in her crew. Don't give up. Give the older folks a chance to learn what they don't know. Because one fact we will never outrun is that we all need each other. Some will just have to catch up and come later. And some will get left behind. Just like Harriet had to leave some on the plantation. They were ready but moving toward liberation can’t wait for everyone to be ready. At least, not at the same time.
Something else Grandma used to say often. "There's just no end to 'em." The 'em in her declaration was White people, and though she herself wouldn't have labeled it as such, it was also White Supremacy and the institutions and conditions that created the systems of oppression she waded through during her lifetime.
Over the last year, particularly as I've watched the ghoulish scenes from Gaza and the seeming unending cruelty inflicted upon the Palestinian people, I've found myself quoting Grandma more than ever. I have thought, muttered, dang near hollered out loud, "There's no end to 'em!" over and again. All the while, realizing anew how right Grandma was, (how right she is!) and how sharp her analysis was even without an awareness of systems of oppression. I chuckle to think how she would have reacted if I’d reframed her saying in those terms. I imagine she would have said, "The what now? Who?" 😂
There was so much wisdom in the things she said, and even moreso in what she demonstrated in action. She lived a life where there was no end to her love, her fight, and her drive to survive what meant to kill her. There was no end to the ways she fiercely protected those in her purview: family, neighbors, church members, and friends.
May we all declare, in the face of systems whose cruelty seems unending, that there is no end to US and our collective fight for liberation. Let there be no end to the lengths and even risks we are willing take to create with loving kindness, awareness and care, the solidarity that will save us all and lead us toward liberation.
In unending solidarity and with love,
connease