Gay and Trans Freedom Is Everyone’s Freedom

Be who you are, choose your path, and let’s do it together. A big reason to support LGBTQ rights.

If you’re reading this, I bet we share certain values. Everyone wants to be free. Everyone wants to be in charge of their own body, to choose their relationships, to be part of society and sometimes just to be left alone.

Trans people share these values too.

There are forces that would like nothing better than to control us

Today, right-leaning political agendas are closing in on us. Whether they’re Neo-Nazis or other forces on the extreme right, or the MAGA that passes for mainstream in the United States these days, or the self-declared “liberals” who use language they believe is more “civil” but essentially sympathizes with and enables the right wing, they harm LGBTQ people.

Some people do it professionally, out in the open. They have names, sets of ideas, agendas, co-conspirators, organizational support, and massive funding.

They work through religious right-wing organizations, multinational companies, neoliberal regimes, and white supremacy (“las derechas religiosas…las empresas multinacionales…los regímenes neoliberales y al supremacismo blanco en Europa, en América, en África,” as Katia Rejón and Arlen Molina wrote in Volcánicas).

And since 2020 — as ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio put it in the New York Times several days ago — “groups like Alliance Defending Freedom and the Heritage Foundation,” which oppose gay and trans people alike, “took aim at the positions of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association and other mainstream medical establishments in the United States.” The political result: today, gender-affirming care for minors is banned in nearly half of the states, as is a trans kid playing sports with other kids of their gender.

This political onslaught isn’t truly about making rules for children, since it seeks to restrict adults too. Recently, hundreds of legislative initiatives have focused on “restricting or removing access to gender-affirming medical treatment, criminalizing our use of certain restrooms and preventing us from obtaining identification that matches who we are and how we live in the world.”

As Strangio put it, this results in “the slow erosion of our legal protections and attacks on our dignity, our humanity and our ability to live safely and participate in public life.”

How they do it

Right-wing media intensely, deliberately portray gay and trans people alike as “evil” and therefore deserving to die. This is similar to the treatment they’ve given to abortion providers in the past. They’re racist and classist in these baseless pronouncements that some people deserve to die. They broadcast these death threats to a mass audience.

On this point, please watch this nine-minute video that Media Matters posted last week, describing the eliminationist rhetoric. This is why trans people are saying that people are threatening to kill us. These are just a few examples of what we mean.

Here’s another important article published this month by David Ingram. Chaya Raichik, aka “Libs of TikTok” on social media, doesn’t explicitly make statements that most people would find instantly recognizable as bomb threats, but there have been at least “33 instances, starting in November 2020, when people or institutions singled out by Libs of TikTok later reported bomb threats or other violent intimidation.” This is not a coincidence. Trans people have been aware of this for years, which is how it finally got reported by NBC.

A few hours after the NBC story was published, three high school girls beat two younger classmates, one of whom died the next day.

Here’s some context: In April 2022, Raichik drew negative attention to an LGBT-inclusive teacher in Owasso, Oklahoma; the teacher received death threats and resigned. A year later, Raichik drew negative attention to a Tulsa-area school librarian, whose school district received a series of bomb threats. Though Raichik does not live in Oklahoma and isn’t an educator, in January 2024, she was named as an adviser to an Oklahoma library committee that decides what books students may read. That’s when, only two weeks later, a nonbinary student in Owasso was murdered.

It’s hard not to arrive at the conclusion that intensifying an anti-LGBTQ climate — yes, to the point of violence — is what Raichik was appointed to do. This is yet another example of what we mean when we say that authorities are trying to eliminate us.

The Oklahoma state superintendent Ryan Walters, who forced out a gay teacher last year, is the one who wanted Raichik on that committee. This is happening in many places on every level of politics.

Why they do this

Trans people did nothing to hurt them, so what motivates these people?

Anti-transgender initiatives are their smokescreen for an endless list of other ways they try to control us. They are anti-immigrant. They oppose reproductive autonomy, including abortion rights. Some are science denialists who oppose climate change mitigation and vaccines. Others willingly ignore others’ science denialism in those areas while they collaborate in denying facts about the bodies and lives of trans people, enabling the allies they’ve picked on the anti-trans front by not calling out their many other unscientific falsehoods. They seek to overturn elections. They corrupt and are corrupted by the money that flows into right-wing politics.

Anti-trans initiatives are a distraction. They’re also a way of dividing us. Dividing us is a way for them to weaken our collective power.

Ultimately, they want to control us — those of us who are transgender, as well as those of us who aren’t — so they can be richer and more powerful.

This harms everyone

This harms all of us by not letting us control our own bodies; access information; be parents according to our own values; be teachers of history and science; write, curate, and give others access to websites and libraries; live according to our own identities; and determine our own futures.

Anti-LGBTQ people publish their claims and “questions” in newspapers and on social media.

They do this to create the impression that “people are saying” this-or-that about trans people, or that trans people have collectively endorsed such-and-such unreasonable thing and everyone else is “starting to push back.”

They do this to sow doubt about gender transitions, identities, and appearances so people believe that their comments are valid questions.

They do this to familiarize the public with anti-trans talking points.

They do this to shift the reference point so that they’re in charge of a “debate” they started and are profiting off of.

Before long, many people gleefully imitate them, while many others feel anxious and don’t know how to resolve their anxiety. Though they may not realize what they’ve been tricked into and trapped by, the tropes are hate speech, and the fears are a moral panic not grounded in reality.

Gender liberation is for everyone

Dr. Marquis Bey, whose work I’ve talked about before, gives a profound explanation in this one-hour video. Blackness and transness, to them, aren’t best understood as immutable characteristics used to split people into groups. These words aren’t just “demographics” with unambiguous meaning. In their view, Blackness and transness are ways of turning the concepts of race and gender inside-out and freeing ourselves from them. A category contains its opposite, contains the keys to escape the category. They are “modalities.” They are ways of being and knowing. These labels are continuously reinterpreted, and they do the work of interpretation.

We are called to let go of the system, flee the system, resist the system. We do it even when we end up challenging ourselves beyond what we were ready for. When we break down human categories that separate and limit us, we realize that the work is ours to do, and that everyone else is responsible too and is invited in.

This work is big. This work is for you. This work will save your life.

Question what you think you know about trans people

Increased media attention to trans people — positive or negative — might lead many people to believe that “transgender” refers to a clearly defined, firmly established, consistently recognized group that benefits from inclusive treatment.

But, as Strangio put it, media representations can generate “a false sense that the [trans] community possesses a degree of stability and power that, in reality, continues to elude us.”

Just because you increasingly hear the word “trans” doesn’t mean that trans people enjoy increasing opportunities and security. It might mean the opposite. The daily news report is that anti-trans forces are trying to rope all of us into their angry messaging and their coercive plans.

They want you to be skeptical of trans people. They don’t want you to question what they’re doing. Question what the right-wing is up to.

How to spot disinformation about trans and nonbinary people

When a messaging strategy repeats a contradiction with no interest in examining or resolving it but simply moves on to promote the next contradiction, it might be disinformation: an intentionally false narrative.

You can spot disinfo when they say there’s a billionaire-funded transgender lobby but won’t give details.

Or when they say that huge numbers of trans people are taking over the world and then backtrack and say that LGBTQ people are a tiny group about whom nothing is known.

Or when they say that trans people endorse some “ideology” even though there is no transgender manifesto, no transgender membership card, no transgender dues payment structure, no transgender pope.

Or when they accuse trans people of being simultaneously too rigid and too fluid in our beliefs about gender.

Or when they insist it is good and correct to say that physical sex is all there is to being a man or a woman, yet simultaneously they complain that trans people are the ones who have incorrectly reduced the idea of “man” and “woman” to sexed body parts.

Or when they complain that trans people’s identities are based on gender stereotypes, yet they themselves judge and call out trans people who don’t fit gender stereotypes.

Or when they insist that each person’s sex at birth remains forever apparent to everyone else, yet they claim it’s necessary to repeatedly telegraph a person’s sex through “he” or “she” pronouns.

Or when they say that we ought to treat each other free from masculine and feminine gender stereotypes, yet they resist “trans” and “nonbinary” challenges to those stereotypes.

You’ll also see it when they claim they want to investigate some group’s identity or alleged motivations, yet their “questions” aren’t designed to produce answers.

They target one group at a time, trying to divide our time and attention, hoping we split our resources and run out of time and money.

Imagine a better future

We can’t let them distract, divide, or limit us. We have to transcend it and unite.

We can do this in everyday life.

We can diversify what we’re reading and watching. We are alive on this shared planet, and we have an opportunity to learn and feel something new every moment. We’ll be transformed by how we choose to expand our experiences.

We can help those creators find jobs and audiences if that’s what they seek and if they want our help.

We can affirm the option of resting, restoring our energy, and just existing. No one has to prove themselves to us. Everyone has the right to be here.

We can have exciting ideas about who we include in new projects we make and organize, and we can find appropriate ways to meet those people, connect with them, and invite them.

We can share in each other’s joy.

We can humbly refrain from talking about what’s still outside our expertise, even as we strive to become competent to talk about more topics. We can keep trying and getting better.

If someone prompts us to say or do something and we’re not sure what it’s about and we’re not comfortable with their request or their attitude, we can decline to respond immediately, discuss it with a trusted person, and consider our decision carefully.

We have to make sure every one of us (including trans people) is free, extends and receives respectful recognition as members of society, and has access to the resources we need.

We can remember we’re not in charge of running other people’s lives. If we are doctors, psychologists, social workers, lawyers, judges, teachers, or parents, we provide the attention and care that’s within the scope of our relationships and our jobs, and we hope that everyone is happy. We don’t decide what are valid ways for someone else to exist.

We hope that they are happy because they exist and that they are a little bit happier because we existed here with them, as we are happier too because they are here with us.

We haven’t won yet, but “it ain’t far / to this land from where we are.”

We don’t have to let our part in a bad situation continue. We can be the one who speaks up, says no, and charts a different course. When a problem is big, we can ask for help getting free.

That’s how we’ll defeat the forces that seek to control us.