I went to a Trans Unity Rally yesterday. I did not know that the public would be invited to give speeches. By the time I narrowed down exactly what I wanted to say, they were done with that part of the event. But this is what I wanted to say to my city, to my state, to my country, to the world.
Hi, my name is Rosalarian. I'm a trans nonbinary writer and artist who has been making queer and trans books for over twenty years. What I have to say is a bit grim, but I promise there's a light at the end.
You know how conservatives keep claiming we're a newfangled fad, something that just popped up a few years ago, invented by Big Woke TM to undermine traditional family values? Well, there's a reason they can make those claims, and have other people believe them. It's because they destroyed our history. And they're trying to do it again.
Weimar Berlin was a time and place where sex and gender were being studied and documented. Studied not like plants or animals or bacteria, but as sentient human beings. Our ancestors were writing down their stories, coming out of the closet, out of the shadows, into the light, where they could be celebrated for their wisdom. Because let's face it, transition gives us wisdom that the cis would never know without us.
We all know what happened next. Our history and literature was destroyed. Our people were destroyed. Those who survived were hidden away. We were back in the shadows. The cis could pretend we didn't exist, that we never existed at all. But, we rebuilt. Our community recovered. We returned to the light. But we are on the cusp of repeating this same cycle. Today, it's book bans. Tomorrow could bring book burnings. But we are not going to let it go the same way it did 90 years ago. (Not even a full century. We didn't even get 100 years between genocides.)
Trans people will always exist. We are a natural phenomenon. You could destroy every single trans person alive today, and new trans people will be born tomorrow. I do not want those future trans people to have to go through what we did. I don't want trans people in the future to think they're freaks of a kind that has never been seen before. I don't want the cis to be able to claim that we were never here.
To do that, we need to preserve our records, our history, our literature. We need to keep it safe enough to survive this regime, safe enough to survive, even if we don't. I have been referring to this as "building lifeboats." You hope you never need to use the lifeboat. You hope your ship stays afloat with no problems. But if you need those lifeboats and you don't have them, it turns a disaster into a catastrophe.
Between censorship, propaganda, and disinformation, the internet cannot be trusted to preserve the evidence of our lives in perpetuity. It's very easy for bad folks to press a button and destroy huge sections of the internet. Tik Tok went down to demonstrate to us just how easy it is for them to do it. They've told us their strategy.
Folks, it's time for all of us to become archivists. It's much, much harder for them to track down hard copies to destroy. Download any information you can find about us. Buy trans books. Write your own stories, your own history. Save them offline. Put them on paper, back them up digitally on flash drives, and then hide them. Hide them in the walls, hide them with your cis allies. If all of us do this, it increases the chances for this knowledge to survive. The Transfeminine Review has a lot of information on this, and I encourage you to visit their website for more detail.
But again, this is building lifeboats. To increase our chances of not needing them in the first place, we need to combat censorship like never before. They always start out by censoring pornography, always under the guise of "saving children." It's an easy way to destroy the first amendment in a palatable way. Here's the thing. All of us, every single one of us here, is a degenerate pervert in their eyes. Just by existing, standing here, in our winter coats, we might as well be having an orgy on the Capital lawn. Our existence is pornographic, and they are trying to ban all porn. They are trying to ban us.
You might want to rail against this by saying our existence is not inherently pornographic, and that's true. Being trans is no more pornographic than being cis. But a lot of trans people are sex workers. Some of my own work is pornography. Those of us in the sex industry have been fighting this fight for a long time already. We have our own knowledge and tools that we want to share. I implore you not to throw us under the bus in the name of respectability. I implore you to fight for us, and fight with us. I beg you all to please remember how vital we are as soldiers in this fight, and how worthy our lives are. How we're worth saving, too. Don't leave us behind.
Trans solidarity means TRANS SOLIDARITY. It means solidarity with the messy ones, the weird ones, the impolite ones. I don't want to have to use the lifeboats. I want every single trans person who is alive right now to still be alive four years from now. No exceptions.
Thank you.
End note: I'm planning to get more involved with the organization that held this rally. As much as I love organizing my own events like the Lansing Zine Project, joining with other existing organizations means building stronger networks and sharing resources. I encourage everyone reading this to find out who is already doing The Work in your area, and help them out.