On transphobia, memory and mourning.

Trans Day of Remembrance hit different this year.

My first Trans Day of Remembrance was just after I left school for London. I had arrived in Camden with three hundred pounds, an impractical degree and the everyday hope of maybe, if I was really lucky, meeting fascinating people of all genders and every possible sexuality and being altered by them. I was lucky. Because that’s exactly what happened. And since then, my feminism has been grounded by with the work of trans and queer activists. I road-tested my adult politics and red-teamed my ethics in the solidarity and energy of cultural movements at the raw edge of contested social change. And yes, that’s exactly how I thought about it at the time, because I was twenty and pretentious, although in practice it involved a lot of standing awkwardly in the kitchen at parties. 

This, though, was the ritual, and from the start, the community made sure the new arrivals understood its significance. Once a year. Come together, say the names, count the dead. Murdered, neglected, killed in police custody. Here’s the list. Trigger warning. Yes, I’m still going to use trigger warnings, firstly because it matters and secondly because fuck you, that’s why.

We count the dead. At first, I didn’t understand why it mattered. Wasn’t it a bit …well, morbid? There was so much energy and excitement and joy in the London trans community, in butch nights and coffee dates and dance parties, and I was too new on the scene to have lost anyone I knew. Friends who had lived through the eighties talked darkly about how it used to be, the harassment and ignorance and violence. It was possible, in those days, to imagine that that we were done with all that darkness, that we were living in the future our elders suffered and fought for.

But every year, the list reminded us of the human cost. The hundreds of names and photos of lovely strangers who deserved better. Collective mourning that makes trans lives grievable and social violence visible. So many communities formed in adversity - religious, sexual or cultural - develop these grief-rites, and the trans community is my community. Long before I came out as non-binary myself, trans and non-binary people were omnipresent in my world, as colleagues and roommates and friends and lovers, through years of expanding possibilities and, well.

Years like this. 

Like I said, it hits different. 

And it matters more. Because when people’s lives are a punchline, it is a political statement to carry on insisting that those lives matter. That they are grievable. Remembrance is part of the work of persecuted communities in dark times. And part of that work is remembering what it was like before.

Right now, it is essential to remember what it has been like to get to change your name, your pronoun, your presentation and have that choice respected, or at least met with something other than open contempt - god, we ask for so damn little. It is vital that we inscribe the feeling of being able to make and remake our bodies, to unbuckle the straitjacket of binary gender. It is so important that we hold on to that standard. Because there are so many ways to lose your life. 

Beyond the grim tally of those we have lost to bigotry and violence is an immeasurable loss of energy and hope and potential to the savagery of social shame. To the soul-murder of daily existence in a culture that denies you the freedom to define yourself. A culture that confiscates the tools of self- care. A culture where you are expected to sacrifice your happiness on the altar of other people’s social norms if your temperament or desires happen to differ. Some lives are stolen all at once, and some are merely made unlivable. Undermined and eroded and chipped away. 

Ten years since Time magazine announced the ‘trans tipping point’, the air is thick with gender panic and we’re all choking on the chemtrails of  paranoid backlash. Transgender and non-binary people have been selected as scapegoats for a savage cultural rejection of modernity - as folk-devils in a movement that seeks to reinstate ‘traditional’ sex and gender norms, by force if necessary. The mounting hysteria of gender panic unites the Christian Right with second-wave feminists, reactionary liberal pundits with authoritarian leaders.  Last year in the United States, more than 85 anti-trans bills were signed into law, while the Trump campaign pumped tens of millions of dollars into campaign adverts whipping up popular fear of gender deviance. Kamala is for They/them - Trump is for you. Real slogan, in case you were wondering. Trans people are, at best, dismissed as delusional victims of a ‘social contagion’; at worst, we are collectively vilified as sexual predators, groomers and corrupters of children. Almost everyone I know is frightened of how much worse it’s going to get. Trans Americans and their families are building their escape plans in case they need to leave the state or the country. And amid rising violence, the Human Rights Campaign has declared a state of emergency for trans and queer people.

Sex and gender are not stable ideas. What it means to be a man or a woman has changed utterly in the space of a generation. Not because of trans rights. Because of the relative success of women’s liberation, and because of the slow collapse of neoliberalism. Because women have more options now, and women’s freedom undermines the basic, brutal heteronormative bargain that has been the bedrock of capitalism: the expectation that most women, eventually, will be obliged to do the emotional, domestic and reproductive work without which society ceases to function, to do that work seamlessly and for free. A particular consensus about both gender and sex is essential to that bargain. But it turns out that that’s a bad deal for a lot of us, and a lot of us, given the option, are opting out.

In the teeth of this global gender shock, the far right has weaponised transphobia. As the critic Andrea Long Chu observes, “The anti-trans movement is driven by a deep, unconscious dread that society will not have enough working female biology to support the deteriorating nuclear family — and, with it, the entire division of sex itself.”  In America and elsewhere, the attacks on trans and queer people and the attacks on divorce law and abortion rights are part of the same violent ideology: the mania to get sex back under control. 

That means making sure people don’t seek to change their gender or their sex  - not unless they do so to bring them into line with social norms. (There is, after all, no chorus of condemnation for cisgender people who get testosterone shots, breast reconstruction or hormone replacement therapy). It means that the state gets to tell you whether you’re a woman and conscript you into childbearing if it chooses. It means making sure that sex determines gender: if you’re born a girl, you must live as a woman, which means your body belongs to your husband, to the state, or both. Your body, my choice. Forever. 

There’s no room for trans people in this new gender orthodoxy. Trans people give the lie to the whole thing. By coming out and staying out, trans and non-binary people prove that biology need not be destiny - that sex can be changed and gender chosen. 

Milan Kundera reminds us that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. It’s important to grieve individual lives lost to violence. But in the middle of an international effort to erase the trans experience, the work of remembrance is even more urgent. It speaks dignity in the face of contempt.

It’s happening so fast. It’s already getting harder to hold on to how it felt during those years where it was becoming, for the first time, socially acceptable to be transgender. It is hard to remember those moments of safety and silliness and promise and possibility. Coming out has not been cost-free. Not even for me, with all my privilege. It was never going to be. I’ve lost jobs and homes and opportunities and friends and witnessed fifteen years of transphobic attacks on my community. But I have also had fifteen years of a kind of gender freedom that the closeted teenager I used to be hardly dared to imagine. I have had five years of living more fully and deliciously in my own body than I thought possible before I finally started telling everyone, no, actually, they/them. Those years were worth it. I want more. I want more for me, for my loved ones, and for the people I meet today who are twenty and prententious and precious, whose first experience of trans community has been mass protests, persecution police violence, vigils. I remember when things were better. I will not accept that they can’t be that way again.