In the imperialist era, the Olympic Games were never just about athletics or international goodwill. The United States and other Western imperialist powers dominated the bodies that planned, organized and carried out these events, always striving to use this platform to further their global aims.

It’s a remarkable accomplishment that countries of the Global South and socialist countries like China, Cuba, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea can field skilled athletes who can challenge and win medals despite the global athlete drain by the U.S. and Europe.

The 2024 Summer Games in Paris will go down in infamy for allowing the Zionist apartheid regime of “Israel” (and its master, the U.S.) to compete while committing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. Meanwhile, Russia is banned from the games because of the U.S.-NATO proxy war in Ukraine.

This year, in addition to the usual colonialist and racist dynamics, the Olympics has been gripped by the global trans panic and a calculated hate campaign against trans women on social media. 

First came a concocted outrage campaign labeling the Olympics opening ceremony as “blasphemous” because of a tableau featuring drag performers and dancers seated around a table. Far-right groups and media labeled it a parody of Da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper” and a deliberate insult to Christianity and Christians. 

In fact, the performance was based on the famous painting “The Feast of the Gods” by Dutch artist Jan van Bijlert, which is housed in a French museum. The painting depicts a celebration of the gods of Greek mythology.

But the main target of the anti-trans attacks has been Imane Khelif, a woman boxer from Algeria.

Trans women banned by IOC

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) does not allow trans women to compete if they went through the wrong puberty – that is unless they were able to use puberty blockers and transition before adolescence – among other Draconian restrictions that amount to a blanket ban.

This is an impossible standard to meet for trans women athletes in most countries, and increasingly even in the few Western countries like the U.S. and Britain where some trans youth were able to transition early because of rampant attacks on life-saving gender-affirming care, especially for kids.

This year, only one trans man athlete (boxer Hergie Bacyadan from the Philippines) and two nonbinary athletes (soccer player Quinn from Canada and runner Nikki Hiltz from the U.S.) are competing out of 193 openly LGBTQIA+ athletes.

Since no trans women are competing in this year’s Olympics, the trans panic has instead targeted cisgender women who don’t meet white Western standards of “femininity.”

(Cisgender is a term that describes people whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were assigned at birth. Transgender describes people whose gender identity does not align with the sex they were assigned at birth.)

Welterweight boxer Imane Khelif of Algeria and featherweight boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan (identified at the Olympics as Chinese Taipei), both cis women competing in Paris, were previously disqualified by the International Boxing Association (IBA) at last year’s Women’s World Boxing Championships in New Delhi. 

Allegedly, when the boxers were subject to undisclosed testing under new anti-trans rules, these two women’s tests showed some XY chromosomes in addition to the more common XX chromosomes for cisgender women.

Toxic bigotry targets athletes

Last year, the International Olympic Committee broke ties with the IBA over corruption and financial malfeasance. The IBA has refused to release details of the women’s tests. The IOC – no friend of trans people, as we have seen – included Khelif and Lin in this year’s games without issue.

CNN reported: “The IBA did not say what test the pair had been subjected to. ‘The athletes did not undergo a testosterone examination but were subject to a separate and recognized test, whereby the specifics remain confidential,’ it said.

“IOC spokesperson Adams dismissed the IBA’s test, calling it ‘arbitrary,’ and said the pair were disqualified by the IBA ‘without any due process.’”

Humans have wide chromosomal variations, including cisgender women who have some XY chromosomes and cisgender men who have some XX chromosomes, among other combinations.

Both Khelif and Lin were assigned female at birth and identify with their assigned genders. Both have lived as women their entire lives; neither identifies as trans nor were they ever diagnosed as intersex. They have always competed in women’s athletics. Both have suffered many losses as well as victories on their road to the 2024 Olympics.

None of this mattered to the far-right hate campaign that exploded on social media after Italian boxer Angela Carini resigned in tears during a match against Khelif on Aug. 1. The ongoing, highly coordinated international campaign against trans people and trans rights, based in the United States, was searching for an opportunity, and seized on a white woman’s tears to demonize an Arab/African woman whom they deemed “masculine.”

Hateful memes and headlines flooded social media and some mainstream media, including the Boston Globe (owned by the notoriously anti-trans New York Times). The fake campaign of outrage at a “male” hitting a woman during a boxing match was picked up and spread virally across the globe – including, shamefully, by some “leftists” who went full-in on anti-trans hate and misogyny.

Before her next bout, Khelif was subject to hateful propaganda by Hungarian opponent Anna Luca Hamori, including an extremely racist meme depicting Khelif as a monstrous minotaur in the boxing ring against a smaller feminine opponent. After Khelif defeated Hamori on Aug. 3, she flashed an “X” with her fingers – a dog whistle to the racist and anti-trans fascists watching.

On Aug. 9, Imane Khelif won the Olympic gold medal, defeating China’s Liu Yang in the final. 

“Hours before Khelif battled for a gold medal in the women’s welterweight division Friday night, women arrived at Roland Garros wrapped in Algerian flags, many with no interest in boxing, but with the sole aim at supporting the 25-year-old boxer thrust into a worldwide clash over gender identity and regulation in sports,” the Associated Press reported.

Support from Palestinian team

The Italian boxer, Carini, later issued a half-hearted apology to Khelif. There have been rumors that she was pressured by the IBA and the NATO Italian government (headed by fascist Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni) to throw the match. NATO member Hungary is similarly headed by a far-right regime that wages open war on LGBTQIA+ people.

The Algerian government and people responded with outrage to the charges against Khelif and the hate campaign fueled by white European governments and media, and celebrity bigots like “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, YouTube star Jake Paul, and Twitter/X owner Elon Musk. The large Algerian diaspora in France has turned out to loudly support Khelif in her matches.

“Algerian flags lined Roland-Garros’ lower sections, and Khelif entered the arena second, to the night’s loudest cheers and deafening chants of ‘I-MANE!,’” Yahoo Sports reported of the Aug. 6 match.

France, the Olympic host country, was the colonial occupier of Algeria and ruled with an iron fist until driven out in 1962. 

The Palestinian delegation issued a statement in solidarity with Khelif, which condemned “the unethical behavior targeting the distinguished Algerian champion …. The Palestinian Olympic Committee stands in full solidarity with Imane Khalif [who] exemplifies excellence, determination and resilience.” 

‘It can destroy people’

Nonbinary Olympic runner Nikki Hiltz declared: “Anti-trans rhetoric is anti-woman. These people aren’t ‘protecting women’s sports,’ they are enforcing rigid gender norms and anyone who doesn’t fit perfectly into those norms is targeted and vilified.”

Many women of color have noted that Dutee Chand, Caster Semenya, Annet Negesa, and Serena Williams are among the other Black and Brown women who have been accused of being men for outperforming white athletes.

In an interview with SNTV, Khelif said: “I send a message to all the people of the world to uphold the Olympic principles and the Olympic Charter, to refrain from bullying all athletes, because this has effects, massive effects. It can destroy people, it can kill people’s thoughts, spirit and mind. It can divide people. And because of that, I ask them to refrain from bullying.”

Sally Jane Black, an organizer of the Protect Trans Lives Coalition and the Oct. 19 National March and Speakout for Trans Lives in Columbus, Ohio, summed up: 

“Even if Imane Khelif were trans, she should still be allowed to compete in the Olympics as a woman. Let’s not lose sight of that, even as we address the fact that the anti-trans movement is wrong about who she is due to their narrow and hateful definition of womanhood.”

On International Workers’ Day 2024, workers in the U.S. could swear that Senator Joe McCarthy and Minister Cotton Mather had returned from the dead.

More than 35,000 Palestinians, including 14,000 children, have died in just over 200 days of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza – funded, armed and given political cover by Washington. Yet any expression of opposition to the mass slaughter of Palestinians is labeled “antisemitism” by politicians of both capitalist parties and the corporate media. 

Congressional hearings reminiscent of the Red Scare anti-communist spectacles of the 1950s target university officials. Depending on how pliable they are, they are driven from office – like former Harvard President Claudine Gay, the first Black person to serve in that post – or they are given marching orders to crack down on student protesters, like Columbia University President Minouche Shafik.

After two weeks of violent police raids against campus Gaza Solidarity Encampments coast-to-coast, Columbia and other schools are now carrying out mass suspensions, threatening to prevent student activists from graduating. Right-wing politicians have called for students who participate in the encampments to be blacklisted from future employment.

Nor is it just Republicans. On April 29, 23 House Democrats called on Columbia President Shafik to “end” the encampment that sparked a nationwide student uprising, or resign. And of course, Genocide Joe Biden himself joined fascist House Speaker Mike Johnson in threatening the heroic students and faculty resisting at Columbia.

This comes after months of police attacks, targeted arrests of organizers, and slander campaigns against pro-Palestine protesters.

Yet the student encampments continue to grow and spread day by day.

Whipping up anti-trans hate

At the same time, another witch-hunt is unfolding across the U.S. targeting transgender people. 

In many ways, this hate campaign – now underway for three years and growing ever-more dangerous – set the stage for how opponents of genocide in Gaza are being treated.

So far this year, 550 anti-trans bills have been introduced in state legislatures in 42 states, along with 47 national bills. This includes some of the most drastic measures yet – cutting off all access to gender-affirming health care regardless of age, banning all restroom access, threatening the livelihoods of teachers, librarians and other workers if they are queer or respect the rights of trans students, and generally attempting to force trans lives out of existence.

State hearings on trans issues have the same tenor as the Congressional anti-Palestine hearings, driven by fascist politicians who repeat long-discredited theories or bigoted political and religious ideology as fact. When trans people and supporters show up and try to be heard, they are often silenced, driven out, or arrested.

Typical of this approach is the Cass Review commissioned by the British government, where anti-trans attacks are also at a fever pitch. This so-called review to advise the National Health Service policy on treatment of trans youth dismissed over 100 scientific studies to cherry-pick a handful that reached anti-trans conclusions. 

The supposedly impartial review was carried out by a team that excluded trans people, but included known transphobes who collaborated with Florida’s DeSantis administration.

And yet the Cass Review is already being used by the British government to cut off access to care, not only for trans youth, but also trans adults. It is being favorably cited by U.S. far-right politicians and “liberal” media like the New York Times and The Guardian to manufacture consent for anti-trans genocide.

Like the opponents of genocide in Gaza who are unjustly accused of antisemitism, no amount of evidence will suffice to refute the witch-hunters’ charges of “grooming” and “social contagion.” Like those accused of witchcraft in 17th century New England, the only way trans people can prove their innocence is to stop existing – death.

No more Odessa massacres!

The witch-hunt rhetoric directed at pro-Palestine students and faculty and at trans people escalates the danger of fascist violence, whether from “official” repressive bodies of the state (police and national guard) or “unofficial” neo-Nazi aligned movements. It’s an attack on the rights of the whole working class and all oppressed people, and must be fought with unity and urgency.

Ten years ago, on May 2, 2014, fascist gangs were given the green light by the U.S.-backed coup government in Ukraine to carry out a bloody massacre of nearly 50 activists and workers at the House of Trade Unions in Odessa. The working class movement in Ukraine was smashed and thousands of organizers driven into exile in its wake.

Anti-fascists from Ukraine to the U.S. warned then that Washington’s support for neo-Nazi terror abroad would boomerang here. Now this is visible for all to see.

The working class is making important gains in organizing, from Starbucks to Amazon to the United Auto Workers victory at Volkswagen in Tennessee. But this progress is threatened by the attacks on the political and civil rights of students, teachers, and LGBTQIA+ people. 

The bigoted politicians, the neo-Nazis and the big capitalists behind them will not stop with demonizing the Gaza solidarity movement and trans community. The purpose of the witch-hunts is to shatter the ability of the working class and oppressed to resist.

Don’t wait for an Odessa massacre to happen here! Mobilize to resist the bosses’ witch-hunts!

Trans and queer activists and allies mobilized to defend a family Trans Day of Visibility event in Brooklyn, New York, on March 30. The event at Marsha P. Johnson State Park included arts and crafts, informational tabling, and a drag story hour for children and parents. The annual event was targeted for a second year by far-right anti-trans protesters. 

The community response was organized by NYC Queer and Trans Defense. This grassroots movement was created by activists in response to the growing number of fascist threats against queer events and venues, including drag story hour and Pride events at libraries, museums, and other public facilities in New York City.

Eight bigots showed up to protest the trans event, making hateful chants and waving signs like “God save our children” and a large U.S. flag. The goons would have been quickly dispersed and chased off by the defenders but were protected behind metal fencing by at least 12 armed New York State Troopers and parks police inside, as well as several NYPD cops stationed outside the park gate.

Outrageously, State Troopers and parks police brutally attacked a community defender, using the excuse that he briefly sat on the grass. The defender was jumped and wrestled to the ground by several of the armed goons, then handcuffed and handed over to the NYPD. He was taken to the 19th Precinct and released afterward with a violation – the kind of charge that would normally warrant a ticket, at most, not a violent arrest.

Despite this, community defenders successfully created a barrier of safety between the fascists and the families and performers who came out to the TDOV event. They held trans and other queer community flags and rainbow umbrellas, shook noisemakers, cheered, and sang to drown out the far right. 

Thanks to their efforts and the discipline of the parks’ workers and performers, the event went forward without any major disruptions.

The park that sponsors the annual TDOV event is named after Stonewall combatant Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman who played a historic role in founding the modern LGBTQ+ liberation struggle. Together with Sylvia Rivera, Johnson founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) to protect trans street youth and fight for their voice within the early gay-lesbian rights movement.

International Trans Day of Visibility is marked every year on March 31. 

To get involved and learn about future actions, follow NYC Queer and Trans Defense on Instagram.

I was a preteen when the first edition of Transgender Warriors — the foundational text by the late, great Leslie Feinberg—was published in 1996. It came into the world at a pivotal time for me, providing the life-changing context that would help me to understand who I was and who came before me. Context that, before this book, could only be found scattered in disparate places, passed down in whispers and folklore, or translated and excavated from bigoted depictions of historical trans figures deemed deviant by the status quo.

In Transgender Warriors, Leslie writes, “I couldn’t find myself in history. No one like me seemed to have ever existed.” This is a reality that so many trans people have faced early in their lives, myself included. Our histories have been erased and whitewashed. We are told that transness is new, that transition is unprecedented. We know this to be patently untrue, but anti-transness continues to find new ways to protect the binary (see the contemporary emergence of gender reveal parties). It remains up to us to track down and preserve our own histories for ourselves. Leslie’s work showed me that it was possible to make history—to find, create, and archive the histories of those who laid the groundwork for us, who showed us how to move beyond the gender binary, and who existed all throughout time as their most full, beautiful, and expansive selves. “Making history” in this way would become central to my own archival work and artwork, and it was Transgender Warriors that remained my constant reference point in these explorations.

Leslie’s worldview is truly inclusive, showing us transness belongs to everyone. As a kid, I was a basketball fanatic. A budding athlete, I loved sports, but felt alienated from much of the straight, hyper-masculine culture that surrounded the NBA. Watching Dennis Rodman publicly and proudly play with his gender presentation, wearing sparkly tops and wedding dresses, hanging out at gay bars, refusing to conform to anyone’s repressive expectations, and telling USA Today, “If you don’t like it, kiss my ass . . . I’m the guy who’s showing people, ‘Hey, it’s all right to be different,’” changed my life. I wanted to be him: a Black superstar being themselves in the public eye, having so much fun in the clothes that made them feel good. I bought Rodman’s memoir, his Chicago Bulls basketball jersey, and pierced my ears to feel myself in the gender abundant space, to which Leslie directs us so poignantly.

In his memoir, Rodman opened up about how he had dressed “as a girl” since he was a child. Many mocked him, but many others expressed gratitude and support. Leslie writes of Rodman: “Bulls Coach Phil Jackson remarked to the media that Rodman ‘reached a heart space with other members of the team I’d never anticipated. Dennis has been a real blessing for us, because he’s like a heyoka.’ Jackson explained that among the Lakota people a heyoka ‘was a cross-dresser, a unique person . . . respected because he brought a reality change when you saw him.’” Rodman and Leslie both changed my reality, unlocking so much inside of me that I had been afraid to let out.

Many years later, I started a short correspondence with Leslie by email, shortly before hir death. Leslie captured the essence of our conversation in the newly released version of Stone Butch Blues. We were discussing the incredible organizing and advocacy happening both on behalf of and led by CeCe McDonald, a young trans woman who had been criminalized and incarcerated for fighting back against a racist and transphobic attack in 2011. It was deeply meaningful to be in touch with Leslie at this time, and to have the opportunity to speak about freedom with someone who had, at such a core level, shaped and changed my life for the better. Leslie understood the intimate connections between labor organizing, anti-capitalist organizing, and prison abolitionist organizing. Zie understood that none of us are free until all of us are free; that, though painful, it was also hopeful and liberating to fight alongside our fellow warrior CeCe, who was braving the front lines of the inhumanity of incarceration, paving the path for the decriminalization of Blackness and transness.

Many transgender warriors came before Leslie, and many will come after. The moment we exist in right now—a moment that continues to expand in its willingness to recognize the massive political, cultural, and aesthetic contributions of trans people, both today and throughout history—was made possible in no small part by hir work. And every time we platform and learn from trans writers, workers, artists, storytellers—including those who are disabled, who are poor, who are incarcerated, and who have been previously silenced—we allow Leslie’s immeasurable legacy to live on.

About the author 

Tourmaline is an activist, filmmaker, editor, and writer. She is most notable for her work in transgender activism and economic justice, through her work with the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Critical Resistance and Queers for Economic Justice. She is co-editor of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility with Eric A. Stanley and Johanna Burton. She served as the 2016-2018 Activist-in-Residence at Barnard Center for Research on Women.

Source: Beacon Broadside

Two weeks ago, I had a gender-affirming surgery called an orchiectomy (google it if you’re curious). It’s rude and not a good idea for cisgender people to ask trans people, “Have you had x, y, or z surgery?” – you will probably get an answer along the lines of “Take a long walk off a short pier.” But I’m choosing to talk about mine publicly to make a point.

Bodily autonomy is an issue that is core to all women, cis and trans, living under this patriarchal capitalist system. It’s essential for all transgender people and to every person, really. It encompasses everything from gender-affirming care and reproductive freedom to piercings, tattoos, and hair styles. It’s the simple, basic right to feel at home in the body you were saddled with at birth. 

Until the end of 2022, I was undecided about whether I wanted any gender-affirming surgeries. The gender dysphoria (again, google it) I felt about certain body parts retreated a great deal after I started hormone replacement therapy and began living as my true self – as a woman. But the vicious attacks on trans rights, especially on trans health care, convinced me I should at least get this one operation – to eliminate my need for one of the medications I might soon be banned from acquiring legally and making forced detransition by the state somewhat more difficult.

So, in a very real sense, it wasn’t my choice to get surgery.  But I’m glad I still could take necessary preventive action to protect myself against genocidal transphobic laws.

If you’ve never had to think about having surgery to put a roadblock in front of politicians who want to rob you of your identity – well, this International Women’s Day might be a good time to reflect on how that would feel. Similarly, you might consider how it feels to be a cis woman, trans man, or nonbinary person who needs an abortion in the U.S. today.

Surviving while trans 

I know that I’m lucky to have health insurance paid for by my employer, which allowed me to get my operation despite the exorbitant copays and deductibles that come out of my pocket. So many trans people have no insurance at all. And yet, my access to gender-affirming care is immediately threatened, even though I live in a so-called Blue State. In this case, I have lost access to my doctors and specialists as of Feb. 29.

Like many thousands of New Yorkers, trans and cis, I’m a casualty of a battle between two corporate giants: UnitedHealth Group, the country’s largest private insurer, and Mount Sinai Health System, one of the largest health care providers in New York City. 

Last year, United and Mount Sinai couldn’t agree on who should get a bigger cut of profits through obscene health costs, and United declared all Mount Sinai-owned hospitals and affiliated doctors out of network. A New York State law requiring 60 days continuing coverage expired at the end of February. It’s one of the largest mass expulsions of providers ever but has barely been reported by the corporate media. 

Many affected New Yorkers who have Mount Sinai-affiliated providers may not even know what has happened until the next time they get sick and try to schedule an appointment. 

This profit-driven attack has an outsized effect on trans New Yorkers. Mount Sinai’s Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery is a national leader in trans medicine, and its doctors have a policy of “informed consent” for trans adult patients. This minimizes the gatekeeping that the medical industry has traditionally used to prevent trans people from getting gender-affirming care, which is still all too common. 

It took more than a year of appointments, invasive questions, and scheduling headaches to arrange my orchiectomy. But then I had to fight tooth and nail to reschedule my surgery before the Feb. 29 drop-dead date, after which my insurance would no longer cover it.

Now, thousands of trans people who relied for our care on doctors affiliated with the Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery are unable to see our caregivers and will have to struggle to find gender-affirming care experts among the very limited pool of qualified providers available in the city.

New York State and City politicians brag about providing a safe haven for trans people. But state and local officials have done nothing to prevent or address this transphobic attack by two capitalist monopolies.

Solidarity and revolution

Across the country, the health care system is in freefall, accelerated by the pandemic (which is still ongoing, despite what Genocide Joe and his CDC say). The rental and housing market across the U.S. is untenable. Food prices have driven millions more to already overwhelmed food banks while right-wing governors and Democratic mayors slash school lunch programs. Boeing’s dangerous, underfunded, and outsourced aircraft are a symptom of the utter chaos that engulfs U.S. airports daily.

When my spouse and I ride the subway or walk home at night, we have to be alert and prepared to fight. Like all women, we face the threat of sexual violence; as trans women, we face the added threat of transphobic violence, which grows by the day, prodded by the hateful rhetoric of politicians, social media “influencers,” and the New York Times. Black trans women – always the majority of those we have to mourn on the annual Trans Day of Remembrance – face racist violence, too.

All of the infrastructure of daily life that workers depend on is one good push away from complete collapse. We all know it but are engulfed in trying to survive our own daily life-and-death crises. Likewise, the left and progressive movements are maxed out trying to oppose the genocide in Palestine. How do you fight on every front at once?

This International Women’s Day, solidarity is more important than ever. Personal solidarity, woman to woman, cis to trans; of men toward women; of white people toward BIPOC communities; of all workers, against the bosses and politicians that seek to keep us divided.

Solidarity isn’t just mutual aid, though those efforts are critical for trans people and other marginalized communities – for what the Black Panthers called “survival pending revolution.” 

There’s the key word: revolution. 

Women need a revolution that overturns the capitalist social system and its political institutions. Trans people, immigrants, Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities, people with disabilities and the homeless, LGBTQ+ and youth – all workers – need a revolution. 

To get it, we need not only a vision of a better world to fight for but also the crucial ingredient to actually make it happen: solidarity — in the streets, in our workplaces, in schools, in our communities and homes — the kind of solidarity that spurred students at Nex Benedict’s school to walk out of classes in defiance of the far-right government of Oklahoma.

Stop the genocide in Gaza! No trans genocide in the U.S.! 

Melinda Butterfield is a member of Women in Struggle-Mujeres en Lucha, an organizer of the Coalition to Protect Trans Lives, and co-editor of Struggle-La Lucha.

As I’m Dying I have so many people, from across all the eras of my life and all the communities I’ve felt so loved in, asking how can they help. By the time you read this, I may have died of a glioma in the left temporal lobe of my brain.
So how can you help?

You Can Fight against transphobia in society, in law, and in the streets. You can listen when trans people cry out that we are already being murdered and a vast worldwide network of power is in motion pushing toward our eradication. You can listen when we say what we need that’s currently unreachable or withheld. You can listen when we talk about the threats to our lives and freedom that are currently under construction or waiting in the shadows.
Learn from the oppressed the nature of their oppression.

Right Now powerful forces are using the state, their money, and their connections to make sure trans kids never see that there’s a way to live as themselves. As I write this, bills are being passed in the US which lay the foundation for the removal of the very idea of transness from the widely visible internet. I hope you seek out trans-created content wherever you live online and amplify it. I hope you read trans-recommended writing on the subjects of gender and transition. I hope you listen to what we say publicly until we’re no longer “those transgender people” but Hannah, Quinn, Andy… I hope if there are local organizations or campaigns that need volunteers you will step up and help. I hope if there are queer events in your area you will look into what they need and try to provide it. If necessary, contact the organizers directly and ask if there’s anything you can do.
If you are unwilling to spend time working for your values, you don’t have values.

Right Now government powers from school boards to executives are actively working on banning transgender people being in public as themselves and limiting or removing our access to gender-confirming medical care. Many already have. Both are condemnations to a short lifetime full of pain. Transgender people are among the most impoverished groups because of the normalization and amplification of transphobia. We need resources to escape regions actively trying to kill us and find new homes in, for now, safer places. I hope you will seek out people asking for help on social media. While there are groups like Rainbow Railroad that work to evacuate those that can handle their submission process and queue, many trans people don’t qualify or can’t wait. They need to get out. The place they can post their fundraisers or even just venmo/cashapp is social media. I hope you will send them what money you can.
If you are unwilling to put any resources toward your values, you don’t have values.

Right Now the worldwide conversation, on which the future of every trans person hinges, is driven by transphobes that want us erased from existence and history. That’s made milder and more widely palatable by a news media that frames everything around gender as a complex question when “Should people die for being trans?” is a simple one. I hope when friends or coworkers or strangers say transphobic things you will butt-in, even if it’s uncomfortable, and be an advocate for us. I hope you will actively take our side when we are attacked, verbally or violently, around you. I hope you will get one of the many trans flag “I’ll Pee With You” pins or patches, and wear it out. You might actually be asked to make sure someone can use the bathroom safely. I hope you are willing to live up to your words. Often what pride events need is people to physically stand between queers and the transphobes who want to hurt or kill us. I hope you’re willing to be brave and put your body on the line.
If you are unwilling to take any risks for your values, you don’t have values.

You Must Choose whether to be an ally or an accomplice. An ally is cheering from the stands as we are murdered. An accomplice is with us on the field fighting back.
I hope you will choose to be an accomplice.

Thanks In Advance,
Hannah Kolbeck🏳️‍⚧️

Source: trans-hopes.glitch.me

You can’t use a restroom in a public building, your school, or the airport without facing jail or violence. The medication you rely on to stay alive is suddenly denied you. 

You fear arrest for speaking in public or even walking past your neighborhood school. The government is collecting intimate medical and legal records about you – for what purpose, they won’t say, but you know it’s nothing good.

It sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it? But this is the daily reality facing trans people across the United States in 2024. An entire section of the population is being legislated out of existence before our eyes through a well-financed, coordinated campaign by far-right extremists, with nary a peep from the federal government. 

Between this year and last, half of U.S. states have passed anti-trans legislation or enacted executive measures against trans lives.

Threats of violence by neo-Nazis grow in tandem with the “official” attacks. Incursions by hate groups aimed at queer events and spaces are becoming more common even in “safe” cities like Los Angeles and Boston. 

In New York, the fascist Patriot Front held a march in lower Manhattan on Jan. 20; videos taken at the scene showed police allowing them to enter the subway system without paying and otherwise taking a completely hands-off attitude. The same day, New York cops viciously attacked a pro-Palestine march in upper Manhattan, targeting protest leaders and arresting at least 12 people.

While the Biden administration is neck-deep in Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, another genocide is being prepared right here by Biden’s political opponents – against transgender people.

More than 300 hate bills

Since Jan. 1, at least 317 anti-trans bills have been introduced in state legislatures across the country. These are being swiftly voted into law and are even more extreme than those in 2022 and 2023: total bans on gender-affirming healthcare for people of all ages, bathroom bans, refusal to recognize the identities of students and teachers, and increasingly, measures that would make simply being out in public illegal for trans people.

On Jan. 26, Utah passed HB257, a law banning trans students from using the correct restrooms for their gender, trans public employees from using the correct restrooms in their workplaces, and any trans person from using restrooms in public facilities like airports. Trans people could be imprisoned for up to six months – jailed with people of the opposite gender. The law depends on vigilante-style “citizen reporting,” like Texas’s snitch laws on abortion. 

The measure also ends gender-affirming care for trans youths and bans them from participating in sports, among many other attacks. Republican leaders bragged about how they revised the bill at the last minute in an attempt to prevent legal challenges like those that met Utah’s abortion ban. 

Ohio is a beachhead in the Midwest for hate measures. Despite their abortion ban being thoroughly rejected by voters in a statewide referendum, Republicans who dominate the state government have enacted some of the most brutal anti-trans laws this month. On Jan. 24, the state legislature overrode the veto of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who thought he could more cleverly achieve the same ends with executive measures. But DeWine’s planned attacks on trans lives just weren’t vicious enough for his colleagues.

Texas is attempting to subpoena medical records of trans residents who visit other states for care, while Florida and other states move to compile lists of trans state residents, including legal records related to name and gender changes. These are often paired with measures to rescind identification, like driver’s licenses and birth certificates. 

Florida is also attempting to force insurance companies to cover deadly anti-LGBTQ+ “conversion therapy” for trans children while denying them real health care. Oklahoma’s Department of Education hired Chaya Raichik, a transphobic social media troll who last year instigated bomb threats against the Tulsa School District, among many other targets. And on and on.

No protection from Biden, Dems

It seems almost impossible that the anti-trans panic that started a few years ago could grow so swiftly into a campaign of legal and extra-legal eradication. But with zero resistance from Democrats in the White House and Congress – and with the cooperation of more than a few – the fascist measures have advanced unimpeded. 

On Jan. 25, Democrats in Maine struck another blow against trans rights, joining Republicans in voting down a measure to make Maine a sanctuary state.

LGBTQ+ nonprofits tied to the Democrats have offered little opposition either outside of courtrooms. Yet the courts, both at the state and federal levels, right up to the U.S. Supreme Court, are dominated by the ultra-right. 

The result: Many tens of thousands of internal refugees are fleeing dangerous conditions for so-called “safe” states – often the most expensive like California and New York – which claim to be sanctuaries for persecuted LGBTQ+ people but provide no resources to make housing, health care, or jobs accessible. Millions more are without the resources or ability to flee, trapped under the domination of those who make clear they want to eliminate trans people.

A California activist recently told Struggle-La Lucha about a trans couple he is trying to find housing for. The couple fled Michigan – considered a “safe state” on the legislative front this year – after death threats. The prohibitive cost of housing is a major obstacle to providing refuge for them and other trans refugees.

Already, the Democratic Party and its social media operatives have started a campaign of attacks on LGBTQ+ people who criticize Biden’s inaction on trans rights and participation in genocide in Gaza, telling people they are “supporting Donald Trump” and threatening them with the prospect of being rounded up and imprisoned – or worse – for opposing Biden.

Who benefits?

Behind the coordinated nationwide campaign to dehumanize and eradicate trans people are wealthy capitalists who see the growing fascist movement as a guarantee of their grip on power. 

In this time of deepening political, economic, and military crisis for U.S. imperialism worldwide, there is no incentive among any section of the ruling class to oppose the politics of divide and conquer taken to the extreme. 

Recently, the New York Times ran an article on the role of the Claremont Institute, one of the well-funded think tanks coordinating the attacks on trans rights, abortion, diversity programs, and “critical race theory” – ironic, given the Times’ role in disseminating and normalizing anti-trans and anti-affirmative action propaganda. This and similar media exposes never touch on the underlying systemic roots of the crisis.

The whole capitalist class and its political institutions, including the corporate media, are deeply committed to keeping workers and other parts of the population fighting against each other rather than the profit system that exploits us. 

The Coalition to Protect Trans Lives, organizers of last October’s National March to Protect Trans Youth & Speakout for Trans Rights, released this statement: 

“Last Oct. 7, we brought together hundreds of people from across the U.S. on the front lines in Orlando, Florida. We said then that Orlando was just a first step toward building an independent fight-back movement in the spirit of Stonewall, AIDS activism, and the Civil Rights Movement. 

“This election year presents special challenges to our efforts to build an independent grassroots movement. There will be enormous pressure (in fact, it’s already begun) to drop every form of protest in favor of electoral campaigning for ‘lesser evil’ candidates, many of whom have already proven their utter indifference to trans rights. 

“But we believe it is necessary to persevere and continue the struggle in the streets – because whoever is in the White House and Congress next year, we will need to continue the fight for our very lives and the existence of our community. 

“We also remain committed to breaking down barriers and uniting with other communities that are under attack – Palestinian, Arab and Muslim people targeted for challenging the genocide in Gaza; immigrants and refugees facing execution at the U.S.-Mexico border; pregnant people whose lives and well-being are sacrificed to the altar of repressive abortion bans; workers whose access to healthcare, food, and housing are being stripped away by attacks on Medicaid, SNAP, and other social programs; and so many more.”The Coalition to Protect Trans Lives will hold an initial organizing call for 2024 on Wednesday, Feb. 7.  Readers who want to participate are urged to contact info@protecttranskidsmarch.org or fill out the interest form at ProtectTransKidsMarch.org for details.

In 1933, a town councilor in Paris was very concerned by what he called “a moral crisis.” This crisis was the fact that those known as ‘inverts’ at the time existed and, moreover, that they have the nerve to do so in public. ‘Invert’ was a common term for what we call members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community today. This counselor is remembered today for saying,

“Far be it for me to want to turn to fascism, but all the same, we have to agree that in some things those regimes have sometimes done good… One day Hitler and Mussolini woke up and said, ‘Honestly, the scandal has gone on long enough’ … And … the inverts … were chased out of Germany and Italy the very next day.”

Of course, they were not ‘chased out’ by fascists. They were murdered outside or inside concentration camps.

In 2019 Posie Parker gave an interview to Jean-François Gariépy. Parker is part of a British establishment of women fashioning themselves as feminists dubbed ‘Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFs. The political project of TERFs is to attack not patriarchal systems but the political rights, well-being, and dignity of transgender people. Parker is admired by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, herself the celebrity figurehead of transphobic hate. Gariépy is a podcast host and a white nationalist who believes in the genetic superiority of white people and frequently hosts infamous fellow white nationalist Richard Spencer. Earlier this year, Parker took her hateful rhetoric to New Zealand. She was met by cadres of the far right, including some wearing skull masks and patches for the neo-nazi Azov Battalion and Boogaloo Boys. They welcomed her with Nazi salutes. In an interview she gave while there, she invoked a classic anti-semitic trope.

“Do you not know that the billionaires who are — the billionaire men, who are pushing this ideology and funding it — Are you not aware of those people?”

Interviewer Kim Hill followed up Parker’s claim by asking, “No, tell me more” repeatedly as Parker failed to offer a shred of evidence. In the end, Parker refused to address the topic further.

J.K. Rowling, as well as other TERFs, expressed continued support for Parker, even as her ties to the far right deepen and become more undeniable.

As we can see, it is easy for people who start out not explicitly in support of fascism to be pulled into supporting fascists and fascist ideas. From the starting line of common cause, they can then introduce new scapegoats. People who fashion themselves as progressive, who have exposed themselves to the right, sometimes fall into their broader ideologies of hate with a tiny push.

Of course, TERFs are simply a small pool the right has won support from. The right has a broader population from which to recruit, and they attempt this by invoking child mutilation and the eternal canard of queer pedophilia. To be clear, the right-wing movement doesn’t care about pedophilia.  They lionize right-wing figures like Judge Roy Moore, who are linked to it. Trump has been accused of sexual assault by a woman who was 13 at the time, and was a close friend of child sex trafficker Jeffery Epstein. Trump even called him a “terrific guy” who likes women “on the younger side.” Of course, the far right aren’t the only ones who overlook ties to Epstein. There aren’t a lot of Democrats discussing Bill Clinton’s ties to Epstein and his Lolita Express. That said, right-wingers also wholeheartedly support child marriage. Any amount of time monitoring the far right will expose you to their support for abolishing age of consent laws. Even though a child is much more likely to be raped by a straight man, it’s queers that they smear.

Queer sexuality has always been perceived as a threat in our society. The general public has only recently become somewhat comfortable with homosexuality. Yes, today it’s okay to have queers in our sitcoms, giving way to an already tired trope of gay dads falling into the 1950s sitcom-style suburban heterosexual dichotomy of breadwinner and happy homemaker raising a precocious child with no room for a romance or sexuality in their lives. It’s a soft form of neutering.

On the other hand, gender-affirming care is a topic most people don’t know a whole lot about. It’s easy to invoke the boogeyman of Frankensteinian doctors performing dreadful disfigurements on innocents who are deluded by a shady cabal of villains. To be clear, gender-affirming care for minors requires a longstanding and pervasive pattern of the child asserting self-knowledge of their gender. This care takes the form of puberty blockers, which delay puberty and, therefore, the development of secondary sex characteristics. Should one choose to stop taking puberty blockers, their bodies then proceed along the typical path of development. Secondary sex characteristics are distressing and leave the patient forever with a body that makes them far more uncomfortable than it needed to be. Such care is well documented to lead to positive outcomes, including higher self-esteem and reduced suicidal ideation. But to the right, it is a horror, and to the evangelical right, it is an abomination before an angry God.

Fascism trades on the notion that national greatness has been lost. It sells the idea that the country was great and now is not due to being undermined by a scapegoated group. It says the country needs to be restored to a mythic past by breaking the scapegoat’s influence on society. They must purge the scapegoated element, they believe. Hand in hand with their fetishization of weapons, the final means is force. They may float the idea that the rest of society can avoid this by simply falling in line. But they know, in their endgame, that this will not happen. There will be no other option, and they gleefully anticipate the violence.

The elements they believe must be purged include the voting rights act and Black enfranchisement. Immigration from the South. Secularism. Women’s autonomy. To be restored is the domination of white men and subjugation of women. What is more of a threat to the rule of men over women than the idea that the categories of men and women themselves are not immutable?

Patriarchy developed hand in hand with the institution of private property and inheritance along patrilineal lines. As patriarchy developed, so did the gender binary. While the right likes to present the gender binary as eternal and universal, it is not. Anthropologists identify past and present cultures that recognize multiple genders around the world, most especially in pre-patriarchal, cooperative societies. Once there is patriarchy and private property, society divides into those who have property and those who have not. Because of the role of patrilineal inheritance, this happens along the lines of reproductive function. A binary arises, and notions of gender are then tied to this function. Therefore, to challenge the binary threatens patriarchy, and because we were carried to the present on the back of years of patriarchal societies, it is unthinkable to challenge this with evolving understanding. Despite the scientific community sharing the knowledge that biological sex and gender exist on a spectrum, the right insists that they have science on their side even when presented with the facts. They do so because accepting the falsity of the gender binary is unthinkable to them. As the gender binary begins to be challenged in science and society, they see the world changing. They become afraid and angry. Fear and anger in the face of a changing world wins Republicans votes, and for fascists, it provides a call to militant action.

In contrast, for Democrats, we’re an obstacle. Dems believe that they can reach their desired world by building a broad enough base to vote their enemies out. No matter how bad things get, the belief among the rank and file is that if they can get enough votes next time, they’ll somehow turn back the things that scare them. When it comes to winning votes, in a patriarchal and transphobic society, transgender people are a wedge. We’re small in number. Acceptance for us from the general public is tenuous at best and, with the slightest push easily reverses into suspicion and hatred. For most Democratic politicians, keeping their mouths shut is a far safer bet than taking a principled stand.

In the 2016 presidential debates, reporter Edward Luce posed the following question to Hillary Clinton:

“Democrats seem to be going out of their way to lose elections by elevating activist causes, notably the transgender debate, which are relevant only to a small minority. What sense does it make to depict J.K. Rowling as a fascist?”

Her response was this:

“We are standing on the precipice of losing our democracy, and everything that everybody else cares about then goes out the window. Look, the most important thing is to win the next election. The alternative is so frightening that whatever does not help you win should not be a priority.”

Of course, there is always the next election, and we will always be told it’s the most important election of our lives. When’s the last time a politician told you that you should vote for them, but the stakes are lower than they were last time? They always tell us that their “democracy” itself is on the line, and in this way, they hope to win votes again and again. Also, and not for nothing, which Democratic politician had “the author of the most beloved children’s book series in the world is bad” as a plank on their platform? The question was the softest of lay-ups, allowing Clinton to reassure voters that Democrats weren’t about to champion icky transfolk who don’t even wield enough electoral power to make a difference in an election.

The right wing knows that any time Democrats express any support of transgender people, they are in aggregate being performative. The far right are militant and animated by their opposition to transgender people. Democrats, they know, are not likewise animated in support of us, and they’re certainly not militant. Liberals can be counted on to sometimes hold a candle and nonviolently observe a moment of silence for queer people, and one of those conditions is usually whiteness and bourgeois respectability. The murder of white university student Matthew Shepard in ‘98 brought liberals and their candles to memorials. The outpouring of support for an oppressed gay man was good and proper.  However, the multitude of murders of Black and Latina transwomen around the same time, such as Rita Hester, won only shrugs from the same liberals, many of whom expressed only that they were surprised that it didn’t happen more.

The sad truth is that while liberals and Dems today sometimes play lip service to us, fascists need us. They rely on the widespread hate and fear that’s so successful in animating their base. The world they want in their imagined endgame is one where we are crushed into non-existence to cleanse their society and to serve as a warning to people to get in line. Today, we are an animating force for them and the right writ large.

So what do we do? We turn to our greatest weapon…. solidarity.

The far-right can’t build a base of true solidarity because their ideal world is not solidarity but submission. They aren’t working with the likes of Posie Parker because they see her ilk as equals. They don’t intend to share power with women just because some women share one of their hatreds. Gay alt-right troll Milo Yiannopoulos was useful until he wasn’t, leaving him bankrupt and scrambling to regain relevance with his claims that he’s no longer gay and opening a ‘conversion therapy’ torture center. Fascism is an ever-tightening noose. As they make steps toward their end goal, they shed allied groups on a last-hired, first-fired basis because what they want is a hierarchy of oppressed and oppressors.

They want homogeneity. The book banning, denial of gender-affirming care, the anti-drag laws that threaten any trans person existing in public, the defining of parents of trans kids as child abusers allowing their children to be taken from them to keep them from gender-affirming care shows they see the threat we pose to homogeneity, and they want us gone. Pairing the act of taking children and placing them into another cultural group with Michael Knowles’ CPAC speech saying, “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely,” we start to see genocidal ideas gaining steam. While the right quibbles over definitions whenever this is pointed out, all the work they’ve been doing…. all the recruitments they gained from fear-mongering, and all of the alliances they made with anti-trans feminists and other groups is conferred into this push: eradicating transgenderism. Make no mistake, this can only mean eliminating transgender people. We are in their sights. They have been working to build the cultural machinery needed to destroy transgender lives. Furthermore, they won’t be satisfied to stop at us.

It wasn’t long ago when nearly everyone balked when ‘fascist’ was said. Over time, we’ve been seeing it used more frequently, even in mainstream media, as people examine the meaning of the word. We need to do the same for the word ‘genocide’. Genocide is one of those heavily charged words that we are loathe to trot out in a cavalier manner. This is understandable, but what’s clear is that the right wants to, eliminate us. Therefore, when we find ourselves asking, “are transgender people really a distinct cultural group that can be genocided?” we need to reflect on the fact that this question keeps presenting itself in the first place and act accordingly.

The left can be challenging to cohere into a united front. However, where the right has to content itself with alliances that will end up being purged, we can achieve solidarity. We want a cooperative society where poor, working-class, and oppressed people take the reins of progress. We don’t want a world divided between oppressor and oppressed, we want an end to oppression. As we recognize solidarity as our greatest strength, we need to understand that when this falters, this leaves us open to division. To leave any oppressed group behind leaves us vulnerable to division. It’s imperative that we reject this weakness. Leave the view of us as a wedge to the Democrats. We cannot make their mistakes.

Therefore we defend Drag Queen Story Hour. When they talk about ‘drag,’ they mean all trans people, but even if they didn’t, as drag performers are oppressed queer peoples, we stand with them in solidarity. When they attack gender-affirming health care, we protect trans people’s ability to survive and thrive in a hostile world. As they criminalize the parents of trans youth and try to transfer trans children into a system that seeks to crush their thriving and drive them into suicide, we fight back. When they pull books that accurately describe our existences from libraries or burn them, we defend knowledge of ourselves out in the world, available to all. The knowledge to help people understand and build compassionate relationships among oppressed peoples and the knowledge of trans kids to understand themselves is sacrosanct. We do all of this not just to uplift queer people. We do this because to achieve victory, we cannot be divided, we cannot concede an inch, we cannot compromise by giving up on any poor, working class, or oppressed peoples because when we do, they slide in the knife to split us down the middle.

Stand with us. Fight with us. Arm in arm and hand in hand, march with us into the world to come. We have a world to win, and nothing to lose but our chains.

A fundraiser was held at the Harriet Tubman Center for Social Justice in Los Angeles on April 23 to help with travel costs for activist Jordan Slack who will join an LGBTQ+ delegation sponsored by Women in Struggle. This solidarity trip with Cuba will give participants an opportunity to learn about Cuba’s revolutionary new family code. Delegates will return to the U.S. armed with the truth about Cuba and what we can learn from their experience.