They want you to feel powerless and to surrender and to let them trample everything and you are not going to let them. You are not giving up, and neither am I.
—Rebecca Solnit
After the election, most everyone I knew in the trans community, including me, felt crushed by the presidential results, especially given that the Democratic leaders seemed to be blaming us for their losses. Wrongly, I might add, since they stood by silently while the Republicans spent more than $215 million dollars on attack ads against Kamala Harris suggesting she was “for They/Them.”
But regardless of the cowardly finger pointing, many of my trans siblings seemed to feel as if there wasn’t any fight left in us, especially outside of the blue states. Some even refused to watch the news for weeks. Others began looking at moving out of the county. Thousands of trans people have already moved out of the South over the last few years as the MAGA movement increasingly targeted us, and more will do so now.
People, and not just the trans community, felt powerless about the next four years. I did too. As a trans man, I wasn’t sure how I felt about living in North Carolina under Trump, even if I am in Asheville.
But author/activist Rebecca Solnit is right. Trump and his people want you to feel powerless and they want you to surrender. But we aren’t going to let them. We aren’t going to hide or shut out the world. Or go into what Stacey Abrams calls “internal exile.”
We aren’t going to wait for four years or until someone else fixes it for us—because we need to be the ones who will fix it. We can’t just let them railroad Project 2025 through. We know he is coming after us as trans people but he is also coming after all the issues we care about too; we are just the beginning.
The prospect of him deporting millions of immigrants, dismantling Medicare, Social Security, DEI, the ADA, and the Department of Education and passing a national abortion ban also terrifies us.
For older trans folks, though, the truth is that we’ve been doing this all our lives—and for decades, we didn’t have the Democratic Party leadership behind us. Just a few weeks ago, Democrats voted to cut off medical care for trans kids of people serving in the military.
We didn’t have the support of the major national LGBTQ organizations behind us. Other elite institutions and even members of our own community often turned their backs on us.
But that didn’t stop us then and it shouldn’t stop us now. We relied on ourselves, and we can do it again. We need to show up, and not just for ourselves. We need to show up for all the issues and for all our people and for all our coalitions. Our job, according to Stacey Abrams, is not just to survive the next four years; our job is to win.
Abrams points out that state and local governments will be critical tools in the next four years. It’s one of our weapons. States, according to Abrams, can protect the vulnerable through lawsuits filed by state attorneys or by states passing laws to protect communities. That’s already happening in California.
But we don’t have to wait on politicians. Our best bet is to rely on ourselves, our movements, our coalitions—and the leaders will follow.
Leah Greenberg, co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, an organization with a mission to resist Trump and the GOP’s agenda, argues against cooperation with Trump, something that our elite institutions and some leaders in the Democratic Party have been slithering towards.
Greenberg argues that eight years ago our movements did not obey, but our electeds were just as wobbly back then as they are now, and had to be pressured to step up and fight Trump’s agenda. Basically, we organized on the local level to either win or exact political consequences.
Sen. Chuck Schumer was saying then what some Democrats are saying now: “We lost. An election is an election. Maybe we should work together.” Indivisible folks and others protested daily outside his house and office.
It wasn’t just the Women’s March. Getting the Democrats in line, consistent, and united was the first significant success Indivisible had back then, and should be the same one we need to focus on right now. The resistance impulse was the product of organizing by grassroots movements, not the Democratic electeds. Now is not the time to doom scroll. It is time to organize.
Many big challenges face us, but none looms larger more right now than trans people in sports, the top Republican legislative target. While scientific research itself suggests otherwise, Republicans—and shamefully a few Democratic leaders—are arguing that trans girls should not be allowed to play in sports. One state Democratic leader from New Jersey went so far as to call trans women men and argued that they should be banned from sports.
These arguments ignore medical research that suggests that not only do trans women mostly perform similarly to cisgender women, they are in fact at a disadvantage. While it is an emerging topic of research, initial studies show that trans women had lower lung function and scored lower than cis women and cis men on a jumping test that measures lower body power.
There is no research that indicates that trans girls or trans women have an advantage over cisgender women in sports. People operate from some vague sense that at one point trans women had more testosterone, but they fail to understand the modern implications of puberty blockers, and how interrupting a young person’s testosterone to take estrogen can actually have a significant weakening impact, leaving them at a disadvantage in sports.
The only measurable advantage is that trans women may have a stronger hand grip, but again the tests indicate that trans girls and trans women have a weaker hand grip than cis men.
The absurdity of the bigotry behind these arguments was revealed last year when trans women were banned from playing chess with cisgender women. Ironically, all it revealed was the sexism of those who are making the arguments who think that men are superior to women—even trans women must be superior, according to these arguments.
Bigotry against trans women in sports reveals blatant and toxic sexism towards cisgender women.
Despite the conclusions of scientific research, this week Congress voted to ban trans athletes from women’s sports. Significantly, only two Democrats voted with the Republicans; one Democrat from North Carolina voted present. The battle now moves to the Senate floor. Given the threshold in the Senate, we stand a good chance of blocking the bill if the Senate also votes on partisan lines.
Ironically, not much has changed at all at the elite institutional level since Trump was first elected. Like some Democrats, institutions are ready to compromise when grassroots movements are not. Media, social media institutions, and corporations are trying to reach a detente with the Trump Administration.
But real people are not ready to concede. We want to organize and push back. Trump does not have a mandate. He won by distancing himself from Project 2025, one of the most unpopular platforms ever. His supporters did not believe he would dismantle Social Security or some of the other insanely unpopular ideas in Project 2025, so they voted for him anyway.
That is a very weak position for Trump since the ideas have little popular support, and if the Democrats don’t see it, shame on them. Moreover Trump wants to enact his Project 2025 platform with one of the slimmest majorities that Republicans have ever had in Congress when they were in power.
As Greenberg points out, they had a 43-seat majority when they tried to overturn the Affordable Care Act, and now they only have a five-seat majority in the House. If we can hold Democrats united, we could turn up the heat on the weak Republicans.
How does this translate to trans legislation? We fight to win, or we exact political consequences.
Years ago, we waged a multiyear campaign to fight for inclusion in the Employee Non Discrimination Act. In 2007, the Democratic leadership wanted to pass ENDA, but faced some opposition to trans inclusion, and with the blessing of the Human Rights Campaign, gender identity was dropped in order to pass legislation to only protect gay, lesbian and bisexual employees.
Needless to say, there was a massive backlash from the LGBTQ community. More than 150 organizations that usually were usually afraid to challenge HRC and the Democratic leadership came together and signed a letter demanding that gender identity be included.
That organizing had an enormous impact. Never had HRC or the Democratic leaders been challenged like this before.
The leaders believed erroneously that all would quickly be forgotten. One HRC board member told me that the executive director told her not to worry about a fundraiser in San Francisco six months later because people would forget.
He couldn’t have been more wrong. More than 500 people showed up to protest and picket, and it was a SF Labor Council-backed picket line that politicians wouldn’t dare cross. Essentially, activists decided to exact political consequences since we didn’t win.
These protests continued for years, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi faced constant heat from local activists including protests outside her local Federal Building office and sit-ins taking over the Market Street and Castro intersection in SF where more than 20 local LGBT leaders got arrested while demanding trans inclusion in ENDA.
These organizing efforts were accompanied by litigation efforts by civil rights lawyers, which led to many victories in the legal system.
That said, the effort to make the Democratic leadership and HRC understand that there were political consequences to throwing transgender people under the bus was part of a broader movement for change that is important for us to remember in this critical moment.
What’s the toolkit for now? The thing to remember is that the things we do now help set the stage for elections in two years and whether we have free and fair elections in four years.
If they can knock us out as targets with little or no vocal opposition on trans sports, trans bathrooms, trans healthcare, or trans people in the military, not only will they strip us of our rights, they will simply move on to their next vulnerable target.
That’s why it was important to oppose the effort by Speaker Mike Johnson and Rep. Nancy Mace to ban trans people from using the bathroom. When more than a dozen activists from the Gender Liberation Movement showed up and did a sit-in in the Capitol Building, they blew Johnson and Mace up so much that Mace was seen wandering the building in a bewildered state.
It was a pivotal moment. It was the first, but certainly not the last, organized grassroots resistance to the anti-trans agenda of Trump and his MAGA movement. It lifted our spirits to see organized resistance.
Trump is not invincible. Just because he barely won the Presidential campaign does not mean he has a mandate or that he suddenly knows how to govern. We may not win every battle, in fact we may lose quite a few, but the battles we do win are important. As Solnit said about resistance, “The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything and everything we can save is worth saving.”
Indeed.
Gabriel Haaland, who is trans masculine, is the former president of the Harvey Milk LGBTQ Democratic Club and a union activist. He now lives in Asheville, North Carolina, where he is a member of Queers 4 Voting Rights, a grassroots antiracist group.
