Struggle-La Lucha and the Struggle for Socialism Party salute our LGBTQIA+ and Two Spirit siblings this Pride Month, at a critical juncture in the fight for transgender and queer liberation.
It is no exaggeration to say that advances won through decades of blood and sacrifice are at risk today. How the working class responds to this moment is a test of the greatest seriousness.
From trans panic to trans genocide
Four years ago, SLL’s 2022 Pride Month statement called on the workers and oppressed to “Resist the capitalist ‘trans panic’ strategy.” We wrote then: “The only way fascist movements have ever been defeated is by people uniting and fighting back.
“It is not enough to rely on elections or hope that friendly politicians will save us. They won’t. The Democratic Party is tied by a million threads to the same capitalist class that demands these anti-people measures.”
The campaign of demonization has only intensified since then.
For the past 18 months, Donald Trump’s regime has been steadily putting in place all of the infrastructure, legal and otherwise, to make it impossible for trans people to exist in public, and to justify the dehumanization and extermination of trans lives on a mass scale.
In this, like the evisceration of Black voting rights and reproductive rights, the U.S. Supreme Court is Trump’s enthusiastic and loyal collaborator.
Trans people have been raising the alarm of approaching genocide for several years now. Earlier this year, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued its “red flag alert” about the advance of trans genocide in the U.S. And it’s spilling out around the world – especially in Latin America, where Trump-allied forces are seizing power in country after country backed by Pentagon aggression.
The targeting of trans people began more than a decade ago, after right-wingers lost their campaign against same-sex marriage in 2015. Ideologues of the Christian Nationalist right and the Republican Party determined that the most vulnerable part of the queer rainbow was the trans community, who were just beginning to emerge into broad public view and make tentative gains after decades of struggle.
These powerful influencers, with the financial backing of the most right-wing elements of the capitalist class, agreed that the way forward was to paint the trans community as a danger to children, to women, to “the family” as an institution of patriarchal control.
Between Donald Trump’s attempted coup on Jan. 6, 2021, and his second election in 2024, the ruling class as a whole moved decisively behind the anti-trans witch hunt – which before had been considered a fringe movement.
Capitalist fear, capitalist revenge
Why? The anti-trans tsunami had much to do with the 2020 George Floyd Uprising, which scared the rich and powerful.
In that moment of profound working-class solidarity with the Black community, in which trans and queer people played a highly visible role, the capitalists recognized their own vulnerability. They were terrified, and as soon as the movement subsided under police blows, they sought revenge.
They agreed that trans people – just 1% of the population – were an excellent target. Not just as a divide-and-conquer tactic, but to set an example of what would happen to those who resisted.
Now, the 2026 U.S. National Security Strategy has declared trans people a terrorist threat. Health care monopolies in so-called “blue,” “sanctuary” states are preparing to hand over lists of trans youth, their parents, and their providers to Washington for prosecution; any lower court injunctions are temporary at best.
Identification documents are being invalidated at the state level, and the State Department is tampering with trans people’s passports. The government plans to implement changes to firearms purchasing to prevent trans people from arming themselves in self-defense.
With all this information at its disposal, the regime is assembling lists of trans people and those who support them.
What do you think Trump, Stephen Miller, RFK Jr., Kash Patel and their ilk plan to do with this information?
The Trump government and its backers make no bones about their intention to eliminate trans lives. Believe them.
No other countries are willing to provide asylum, for fear of harming their economic relationship with U.S. imperialism or inviting Trump’s military wrath.
There is no room, no time left, for illusions or wishful thinking that the midterm elections or 2028 will change the equation. Democratic Party leaders have spent the past year and a half collaborating with fascists and blaming trans people for Kamala Harris’s election loss.
Get organized, get ready to fight
Trans people live with this weight on their shoulders every day. Violence stoked by the anti-trans campaign has led to the murders of at least 13 trans and gender nonconforming people in the last three months. Suicide – or more accurately, social murder – is claiming more and more lives, especially among trans youth, as the door is slammed shut on their futures.
Cisgender workers who stand in solidarity with their trans siblings today are protecting themselves too.
After trans people, the fascists are coming for the rest of the LGBTQIA+ community, and then for everyone else the capitalists see as a threat. Their broken system can’t offer any future beyond environmental collapse, rigid conformity, and increasingly desperate conditions. All they have left to maintain power is repression and fear.
Will our unions, mass organizations, leftist parties, and working class embrace the spirit of the heroic Stonewall Uprising and join the fight for trans lives?
Or will potentially millions be sacrificed in the U.S. and worldwide – a historic setback with dire consequences for generations to come?
This Pride Month, we urge you to get organized. Get prepared for community defense. The rapid response networks developed to combat ICE kidnapping of immigrant siblings are a good model to start from.
We won’t go quietly. We must fight for every trans life. An injury to one is an injury to all.
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