Fascists are coming for transgender people because they want to control every single person’s ability to speak, dress, and comport themselves. For fascism to work, they need to tell you who you are and for you to believe it— or at least be too terrified to object.
That’s what the gender panic around trans people has always been about: it’s a Trojan horse to police people of all genders, demanding that each person conform to white Christian supremacist standards of how they think the world should be (small, scared, servile, subjected).
Make no mistake: this is literal gender-policing and it’s meant to terrorize a population at scale. As Stephen Chukumba points out in his piece, “Yes. Those are cops outside the women’s restroom,” white supremacy is a through-line that runs through anti-blackness and anti-transness. He writes:
I keep hearing people ask, How did things get this bad?
The truth is—they didn’t suddenly get bad. They got familiar.
For those of us who have lived under the weight of state-sanctioned discrimination, the signs are unmistakable. This is what it looks like when a government decides that a group of people is a problem to be managed instead of human beings to be protected.
I am the child of African immigrants, raised as a Black American in a country that has always struggled—and often failed—to live up to its promises of freedom and equality. I was raised with the knowledge that America’s ideals were aspirational, not guaranteed. I learned early that rights can be conditional, fragile, and unevenly applied.
Black people in this country have seen this movie before.
We were the ones pulled over for driving while Black.
We were the ones snatched off street corners by police jumping out of vans.
We were the ones watched, policed, surveilled, and brutalized as a matter of routine.
We were the children blocked from entering schools by lines of armed officers.
This was not ancient history. It is living memory.
So when I see guns outside a women’s restroom, I don’t see a policy debate. I see Jim Crow with a new target. I see the same playbook, lightly rebranded. I see fear dressed up as “privacy.” I see cruelty reframed as “common sense.”
Chukumba’s essay is worth reading in its entirety. I hope you spend some time with his words.
Gender Policing Is Also a Part of Our Recent History
I also want to echo that the policing of gender— the policing of everyone’s gender— is also within recent memory. The fascists are reaching back to the “cross-dressing bans” of the sixties and seventies. Men could be punished if their hair was too long. Women weren’t allowed to wear pants. Any kind of visible gender nonconformity regularly resulted in arrests, beatings, and sexual assault— particularly for trans, queer, and gender-fabulous people.
The brutality was a demand that people conform, because the moment people start to feel free and express that freedom in how they show up in the world, they are much harder for weak men to control.
This is a claw-back of rights that affects us all. Fascists target trans people as an excuse to expand that policing to everyone else’s gender expression and bodily autonomy. It’s a craven, cowardly bid to control the population at scale and incentivize neighbors to turn against their neighbors.
It’s a tale as old as time: keep us divided so we can’t unite against them.
There’s an antidote, though: Don’t let it work.
Refuse to abandon your transgender neighbors: Don’t let them abduct us, erase us, criminalize us, or strip us of our rights. Don’t let them scapegoat us as a public danger at the very moment when a child rapist has poured billions of OUR dollars into his personal gestapo. Donald Trump and his entire Cabinet are terrorizing the population at scale. Donald Trump and his entire domestic abuse apparatus are a clear and present danger to women, children, and vulnerable groups.
Speak up and out— to everyone:Call your representatives, even if you think it doesn’t matter because they’re Republicans and won’t listen. Evidence shows they do feel the heat of constituents ire. Show ‘em some dissent. Call your elected officials even if they’re Democrats. Why? Because transphobia— a manufactured fear of trans people— cuts across party lines. These people need to hear that trans people matter to you.
Claim trans people as valued neighbors, even if you don’t know us (yet). Fly a trans flag outside your place. Put a trans flag on your bumper, especially if you’re not trans. Remind your peers that most people don’t know, or don’t think they know, a trans person. Remind them they’re getting all their talking points from a group of grifters with a history of abusing women and children. Anyone trying to get you to hate someone you barely know (or don’t know at all) is trying to manipulate you.
Be loud and proud in your authenticity: Be in your body the way YOU wish to inhabit it. Cut, style, and color your hair the way you choose. Wear what makes you feel joyful. Paint your nails. Don’t shave if you don’t wanna. Wear makeup— or not. Embrace hobbies and interests that bring you joy, regardless of how they are gender-coded. Be whimsical and centered in the face of fear-mongers.
Now is the moment for audacity. Now is the time for a radical declaration of interdependence. We don’t win this by closing the blinds and tucking our heads down. We win this by locking arms with each other, so they can’t pick us off one by one. The sooner we realize this and organize at the local level, the better.
Don’t know how to get started?
I suggest hosting an impromptu, un-fancy block party or house party. Start getting to know one another. Talk about what’s going on. Socialize. Share food. Start talking about how you might form a neighborhood union to take care of each other and practice being in community with one another.
Fascism needs fear to thrive. We win this by becoming bigger than our fear and embracing each other.
We don’t need to dominate them: we just need to create a more beautiful pattern.
Thank you Assemblywoman Debra Mazzarelli, Ea Himmelbjerg, flightlessblrbs, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.
