LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back
"You fight the fights that need fighting."
It was a good time to be queer. A tipping point had been reached, allowing transgender people unprecedented ability to live as themselves. Freedoms previously unthinkable were finally reality.
Then the backlash came. Rising fascist inclinations required an “other” to be against. Antisemitism grew, along with fear of immigrants. And of course, this included the queers.
It began with name calling. Then it grew to attacking books and suppressing knowledge. Eventually it grew to much more violent oppression.
The advances were lost. People were forced to hide who they were. Rights were stripped. Trans people died.
Everything I have written so far describes two societies:
Germany in the 1920’s and 30’s.
America in the 2010’s and 20’s.
As a result of Germany’s failure to stop fascism1, the growth in trans acceptance was set back by decades. The setback was so brutal that, today, someone like President-Elect Donald Trump can say, “the radical left invented it just a few years ago,” and many people believe him. Author and anti-trans activist JK Rowling described the idea that the Nazis went after trans people as a “fever dream.” Their statements happened despite there being photographs of the Nazis burning the books of the Institute for Sexual Science, which was the location of the earliest sex reassignment surgeries2. Nearly 40 years after Dora Richter became the first trans woman ever to receive vaginoplasty surgery, the Stonewall riots in New York City were triggered by police targeting those they saw as cross-dressing men. Of course, we know now that many they were targeting are better understood as transgender women.
Of course, things in Germany got much worse than they are at the moment3. But so far, there is little to differentiate the two. Instead of trans people going on to be accepted in the first half of the 20th century, nearly a century went by before anything approaching broad acceptance would happen. And the question, of course, is this: What happens now?
Will history repeat, and a trans person in 2100 will cite articles like this one to show just how close we were, only to have to retreat to the shadows once more?
To borrow language from the ill-fated campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris:
We are not going back.
Four weeks ago, trans people held our breaths, hoping that our nightmare could end. $200M had been spent othering and demonizing us with lines like, “Kamala fights for they/them,” with little to no response by democrats running for office.
Personally, I had a hope: that maybe if it didn’t work, the transphobic fever that has gripped the Republican party would break. They’d understand that this is at least bad strategy and move on.
That didn’t happen. Trump won easier than most imagined, and the Republicans now hold the House and Senate, in addition to holding a friendly 6-3 conservative majority in the Supreme Court.
Instead of breaking the fever of the Republicans, this seems to have already emboldened them, with Speaker of the House already making petty anti-trans rules in the US Capitol, and bills already being proposed that would require trans people to use restrooms that match assigned sex at birth on any federal property. This would include federal courts, post offices, national parks, and the DC-area airports. Trump plans to ban transgender people from serving in the military, a move estimated to cost $18B. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on the Tennessee ban on gender affirming care for minors. The election of Trump poses deep threats to that case.
But none of that is the worst part.
The worst part was that some Democrats moved to say that the reason they lost was that they stood up too strongly for transgender people. This was coupled with calls from centrist liberals to be more moderate. The Democratic party caving on trans rights would be catastrophic to my community.
But we are not going back.
“We are not going back.” I don’t know how many times Vice President Kamala Harris said that in her campaign, but it was a regular feature and chant in her stump speech. While, to my knowledge, she never used the word “trans” or “transgender” in her campaign, she did apply that sentiment to LGBTQ+ rights. That promise won her 86% of the LGBTQ+ vote in the election, without which the Trump win wouldn’t have just been “convincing”, it would have been a landslide of epic proportions. We showed up for her, despite her strategy of just ignoring the attacks on trans people4. Harris won the LGBTQ+ vote by 15 points more than Biden did in 2020, when many other demographics shifted towards Trump.
But make no mistake - I’m not going back, at least not willingly. I lived in the closet for decades and will never go back. I will do what I need to in order to maintain access to health care, and help other trans people do the same. I’ll work with cisgender friends to protest and ensure our rights to bathrooms, and to keep us from being erased from schools. Will that work? I don’t know. Maybe they’ll commit me and force testosterone injections into me. But they will have to force it, because I’m never willingly going back.
Furthermore, this country has made progress on trans rights. At the moment we can get health care through the ACA, serve in the military, and more. Representation in media is still minimal but growing. We need more.
Which is why cisgender government officials negotiating trans rights is completely unacceptable.
The strategy of silence has been proven ineffective. As John Oliver said:
If what you want is a centrist campaign that's quiet on trans issues, tough on the border, distances itself from Palestinians, talks a lot about law and order, and reaches out to moderate Republicans, that candidate existed, and she just lost.
It can be tempting to take on a moderate tone. It can be more tempting to cloak it in “strategy” of incrementalism, with discussions of limited political capital. I personally disagree. In the Aaron Sorkin film The American President, the Chief of Staff rebukes the President’s pragmatism, saying, “We fight the fights we can win? You fight the fights that need fighting!” A viable political party must be one of conviction, and I truly believe that failure to demonstrate that conviction is part of the reason the Democrats lost this time. And even if they lose, I’d rather lose fighting than lose being quiet.
I have a non-binary teenager who is amazing and deserves to grow up unafraid of their government. I have friends with trans kids and other queer kids. Most of my friends are queer. And if you think I’m going to just sit here while you negotiate away our rights in the name of some sort of pragmatism? You couldn’t be more wrong, because I will fight every day for my kid and my friends. I may never get the world I wanted to live in. But I will absolutely do what I can to make sure that the next generation sees exactly that, without having to wait another 100 years just to get back to today.
So, here’s my promises:
To Republicans: I’m not going down without a fight. I’m here, and I intend to still be here, and to do what I can to stand against your attempts to harm me and other trans people, among others. I will team with others to make your every attempt to come after us as difficult as possible.
To Moderates: The time for inaction and passivity is over. Stand with us, and do it loudly. I put a lot of ideas on how to do that in my previous article. But now is not the time for silent or secret allies.
To Democrats: Stand with us. Firstly, because it’s the right thing to do. Secondly, because you’re going to lose if you don’t. And if you don’t, you deserve to be challenged in the primaries and by independents, and you deserve to lose. I will absolutely vote for primary challengers who oppose Democrats who do not vocally stand with trans people. I might even run myself, if my own representatives aren’t standing with me.
Those are my promises.
We’re not going back. Ever.
-Celeste
This article was part of a mass action organized by author and activist Julia Serano, whose work I admire deeply and cite regularly on this blog. She is maintaining a running list of creators who have contributed similar articles, and I strongly encourage you to check it out and read a few more. Returning readers will recognize my friends Billie Hoad and Mae Forrest Barnes!
You may have a reaction to the use of this word, but it is an accurate word. If you have not read up on fascism, I strongly encourage you to do so (or watch a shorter video here or a longer video here that’s kind of related). If, in doing so, you come to the conclusion that fascism is not happening, then great. But given the destructive nature of the ideology, it’s worth being able to spot and push back on. To put it in a way I hope is uncontroversial: There are absolutely fascists (because there always are). The only question is their reach and their influence. But one thing fascists do is try to make accusations of fascism sound unhinged, such that no one can label them for what they are. But fascism exists, and we need not be afraid to label it as such.
The history of transgender people is far older than this, across many cultures dating back thousands of years.
And nothing I’m saying here should in any way be understood as minimizing what was done to Jewish people in the Holocaust. The vast majority of those targeted were Jewish. But it is also true that queer people were targeted. And of course, we see rising antisemitism as well, which we also need to be on guard against. I highly recommend Abigail Thorn’s excellent video on antisemitism, particularly if you believe that “support for Israel” means someone is not antisemitic. The video was created before Thorn’s gender transition, which explains her gender presentation and name in the video.
Erin Reed described this strategy as “facetanking” in the lead up to the election. This term comes out of video game culture, in which a co-op group will send one member to effectively just take colossal amounts of damage while the rest are able to pursue the objective. In this case, the Democratic party effectively tried to use trans people this way, letting us absorb all the damage, in hopes that this would win them the election. It didn’t work.