#trans resistance

[radicalgraff]

Queer Activists Redecorated key sites of transphobic cultural production and policymaking across Naarm / Melbourne in observance of Trans Day of Resistance

[cock-holliday]

I think trans people need to be MORE threatening, tbh. “I’m not a big scary transgender” speak for yourself. “Trans people are not a threat” they should be. “A trans person used this bathroom and no one got hurt” and it’ll stay that way if you learn to mind your business. As long as there is a violent reactionary base against trans people, there should be a scarier group of trans people for them to be afraid of pissing off.

[ravenlunaticart]

We Will Always Persist

———————————————

With the rising waves of fascism and hatred flung towards trans people I am inclined to say fuck you to transphobes and bigots. We have always been here and we will always persist. I will no longer show compassion for those who wish me dead.

So here is three cheers to my trans siblings and our resilience, joy, and love.

[venice-1987]

Trying to make your oppression a competition, and lifting up the voice of one subgroup of a larger marginalized community only ensures division and the silencing of those that are seen as “having it better” and thus perpetuating the oppression we do face that no one else faces

Yes, this is about the trans community. Unite and fight, don’t make this the oppression Olympics. Call attention to your specific marginalization so we may fight it, but don’t do so by saying that its a worse problem than other people’s oppression, because that silences your siblings

[sipdev]

"You cannot kill us in a way that matters.

We will outlive you and your hate."

First line is a paraphrasing of personsonable, second line is a paraphrasing of 'we will outlive them'.

[2-late-2-the-party]

In this dark age of the US passing a horrendous amount of anti-trans bills, I’m reminded of a particular sermon that I heard a pastor give one Christmas Eve. He was a guest pastor, not our usual one. Our usual one was sick. Nevertheless he gave a great sermon. I would absolutely go to his sermons in the future if I knew what church he led regularly. Alas, this was a few years ago now, and I have no way of finding him or going back to ask. Still, I want to share some of what he said. Before anyone jumps to conclusions about the point of this post, I would like to clarify that I grew up going to an LGBTQ+ friendly church. Most of if not all of the queer adults I knew growing up, I knew from church, and I will forever be grateful for having grown up in a community with queer adults to look up to.

Back to the Christmas Eve sermon.

The guest pastor brought up the slaughter of the innocents. For those of you who don’t know, the slaughter of the innocents was when the King of Judea at the time, Herod, ordered the execution of all children two and under in the vicinity of Bethlehem. He had heard of this so-called ‘Son of God’ who was apparently born. He saw this as a threat to his power, and wanted no rivals or upstarts. This ‘son of god’ this light, was a threat to him and the power he held over the populous.

‘Many people don’t like talking about this part of the bible,’ our pastor said. ‘It’s brutal, and ugly, but I think it’s important not to forget.’

He went on to talk about how this is how those in power, the corrupt ones, react to those who threaten the status quo.

Those who’s power corrupts them hoard it like dragons on piles of gold. They don’t need the gold, but they mustn’t let anyone else have it, lest the illusion of their authority be stolen from them as well. The dragon fears the one who sees his wealth is pointless. The dragon fears those who see through the illusions he has cast upon the cowering villagers in the valley below. King Herod feared the coming of Christ, as he might uproot and destroy his carefully planted crops of power. Who could tell what a seed of doubt could do. How it could spread, take out the system one careful root at a time.

Those who uphold the patriarchy fear trans people because we have power. We have the power to see through the system that the patriarchy has built and liberate people from it. That’s why they want to eradicate us, legislate us from existence. It’s why they don’t want trans youth to grow into trans adults. It’s a slaughter of the innocents, an eradication of those with the power to shine a light on the oppressive status quo.

They’re scared of us, as they should be.

Because we won’t let them write us out of existence. We will keep fighting, and we will keep liberating ourselves and others and exposing the powers that be for what they are. We will take them down, one oppressive and frivolous rule at a time, and we will win, no matter what it takes.

[boy-gender]

hey dude, this might be a loaded question so no need to reply if you don't want to. but how do you deal with being surrounded by transphobia, like hearing people say transphobic shit and having to see radfem blogs/accounts or posts? a year ago i started to argue and beef with any terf i came across on here because of how fed up i was with being treated like shit and being walked all over, as a trans guy. but obviously that only did damage to my mental state and was a form of self-harm where i would go on terf blogs and hate read and argue with them. i still do it now sometimes and i'm trying to stop but if i do, i feel otherwise helpless in this world seemingly filled with transphobia. i just want to be myself and exist as i am, without weird cunts calling me a fetishist or a tranny or a mentally ill lesbian for being t4t. radfems and their allies make me so angry and i feel like if i don't at least show them that i hate them, they will start to abuse me again.

idk i have a lot more to say on this situation but yeah. do you have any advice or any experience on this?

I have very much been in your position, and sometimes I still fall into old habits of seeking out arguments online. It never makes me feel better, but I get so angry I feel like I'll explode if I don't put it somewhere. I actually found a few things that helped me reframe it though:

First, if I get into an argument here, on this blog, I am platforming the hate. I have to reblog it to argue with it, which means I am passing it on. This blog has hundreds and hundreds of followers, most of whom I assume are trans. Do I want to be a part of exposing them to the vitriol I see? It's bad enough I had to see it, I don't want to inflict it on other people. There are going to be trans people here who aren't as strong as me, who are in a bad place, who are in active crisis, and their safety is more important than an argument. Them seeing that one last bit of crap, that one horrible sentence that really sticks with them, could be the thing they torture themselves with past the breaking point. I don't want to give that to people.

This is why I don't reblog terfs to argue with them, I don't ever post the hatemail I get, and I don't show off hate I find in the wild. If I find something like a law that is hateful that can be fought against and has actionable options, or if someone is confused but I feel they're asking something in good faith and can be corrected, those I will reblog and speak about. I'll even talk about my own personal horrible experiences, because those are my stories and I can control how impactful I write them and how much of the nastiness of them I pass on. But those are very different scenarios.

I've started, when I see hate, to focus on my followers instead, and ask myself: do they need to see this? can anything be accomplished by having more eyes on this? can anything i say change the situation? could the harm done by passing this on outweigh any benefit? And once I've assessed those risks, I often find it isn't worth the argument. The best way to handle terfs is to block them, don't platform them, report them if you see something that violates community guidelines, and mark them as red on shinigami eyes to give others a heads up. You can even make a post like "hey username123 is a terf, you should block them" without passing on the shit they say.

But those are all public facing problems. I have a private tiktok, I have sideblogs with no followers/I remove the followers, and there are anonymous options like reddit and other worse cesspools. No risk of passing that shit on, so what holds me back from going there and having a field day?

One simple tenet. My being trans, being vocally and visibly and obnoxiously trans, annoys them far more than anything I can ever say. Terfs are, at the heart, a reactionary group. They don't exist without something to react to. Like a fire slowly being cut off from oxygen, they will wither and kill each other in infighting if left in isolation. Atleast the regular online scum will. This doesn't apply to ones that have the actual power to lobby for real world harm like joanne and the other big ones- but the odds of you talking to them online are slim. Let the terfs implode on each other and continue to exist. Your existence in a world that wants you dead is a radical act of defiance, and your existence despite what terfs say to you makes them froth at the mouth. No fact you could educate them with, no insult you could give them, will ever make them as upset as you simply living your trans life, thriving.

Piss them off with queer joy, is what I'm saying. It's far more effective. Not only do I not post hate I get, I never vagueblog or acknowledge it either. People sit there refreshing my blog constantly waiting to see the attention I'll give them with a snappy reply, and it never comes, and then they refresh more. I can literally see them doing this with an IP tracker and it's hilarious to me. What I do instead is for every piece of hate about trans people, I make two positivity posts about trans people. I FLOOD the tags with positivity and support. I drown out the hate that no one knows I got- because surely someone else has gotten it too. To me it's reassuring to go to a tag and see the love outweigh the hate- which it does. For every terf you find dozens of trans people in love with who they are. I would rather be a part of that. I'd rather pass that on.

It's also really rewarding. I can see in the tags of my reblogs- some posts have thousands- of people saying they didn't know they had options for their lives, thanking me, thanking other people who contributed to the thread, being so reassured and excited to learn there's hope. I suggest not just reblogging positivity, but also creating your own. Put your defiance into the world and let it give other people strength, and then when they come back and comment on it, take strength from them.

As for the world at large? Maybe I'm a bit more nihilistic, but I look at it two ways. First, trans people can never be totally eradicated via genocide. We are a group that occurs naturally and we will always grow back. If every trans person in the world were killed right now, and all knowledge of us erased, within a decade there would be more people who realized they were trans. They might lack community, they might lack the vocabulary to describe themselves, but they will exist again. Our culture might die- our people will survive. It will be horrific and tragic and a blight on the world that what was here was lost, but trans people and nonbinary people and gnc people and queer people will always grow back again, make a new community, carve out a new place in history. We always have, we always will. An interrupted history is still a history.

Second, the majority of people do not want us dead. The system may want us dead, and a very vocal minority with a lot of money and resources want us dead. But polls show over half of gen z identifies as some type of queer. Polls show most people disapprove of us being political hockey pucks. The violent reaction to us that you see is the death rattle of the conservatives, and they know this, which is why they're using the last of their power to do one last act of catastrophic harm. They only have the power to attack the most disenfranchised among us- queer people, PoC, the mentally ill or disabled, the extremely poor- and they will use it. Historically bigots get loudest right before their entire platform collapses in the mainstream. If we make it through the next decade, through the isolation and poverty and violence, we've made it. That's a big if for some of us. For many of us, we won't make it as individuals. I'm not gonna sugarcoat that. But our people will live on, and new trans people will come after we are gone

Now I'm speaking directly to you, anon. For now, my biggest motivator I can give you is to be here to see victory. Endure. Stay with us. I'm staying whether I like it or not. Stay to see all the queer people who will come next and all the beauty they'll bring and the things we will make. Come sit on my picnic blanket and watch the sunset with me. We might not be okay, but we can be not okay together, and we can start getting better together after that.

[psychomorphary]

I love when hateful anti-trans words are transformed into affirming words of power. The church can try to bring us down, but we'll always prevail! Their hatred of us just makes us sound more metal, and it makes us resilient. Transjoy is resistance! Smash the patriarchy! Smash the gender binary!!

[settlercolonialismisbad]

user @superman works for a commercial insurance company and is comfortable harassing trans people on their posts on social media, blocking them, and makes jokes about denying trans people coverage. just fyi.

[radicalgraff]

Trans Resistance sticker spotted in Montreal, Quebec

[cock-holliday]

You love to see it

Love and support to everyone who helped fuck the snitch line up. I hope the same level of intensity is kept up to help people who will be brutalized by the new ruling going into effect April 27th.

Trans rights now!

[kiraleighart]

invent your own gender

be gay

kill god

take his place

[blondefoxmedic]

My resistance and joy of being a trans person is solely based on the opinion that while i know they can and will make my life hard, i can make theirs harder in a very polite kinda way.

[thegirlmirage]

Rejoice! TERFs know nothing about being trans! Anything they say about being trans can be completely disregarded as it's often completely untrue or a misrepresentation at best!!

You don't need to stress about the things they say because they are committed to burning books. Speak to your fellow trans people or transition yourself to learn new and exciting truths hidden by bad actors!

Rejoice in knowledge! Spread knowledge!

[yourwhispereddreams]

Today is Trans Day of Visibility. We will not be silenced or erased. We are here, we were always here and we always will be here.

Trying to destroy us will only result in your own impending destruction and doom.

As for my trans siblings, I love you. Be proud, be loud and keep fighting. The world is hostile to us, but we're stronger together.

[baphometta-am]