“Every single culture on this planet,” Leslie Feinberg, anti-racist white, working-class, secular Jewish, transgender, lesbian, female, revolutionary communist, explained in an interview in 1996, “every society, every continent, including the North Pole, has always had a range of gender expressions no matter how gender was expressed. And that the oldest, oldest written and oral traditions show us that sex change was once a very sacred path in ancient times, and that intersexuality can be found as part of the creation stories everywhere of all peoples. But we haven’t always been reviled and hunted and hated. That there was a beginning to that and therefore there can be an end to it, and we don’t have to accept it, that bigotry–any form of bigotry or racism–is just a product of human nature that we just have to accept because, ‘well, what can you do, you know?’”

Leslie calls us to attention through hir words to locate ourselves within the grand span of human history. Ze points us very directly to an important truth we must carry forward in our organizing: if systems of oppression can be made by humans, they can be unmade by humans. Since our last Transgender Day of Visibility, we have seen an ever-increasing ratcheting of control over our lives as transgender people, a project by politicians, Christian nationalists, and other right-wing actors to target the resources we need to live. Trans people–particularly trans women of color, immigrants, and youth–bear the brunt of this attack, but the anti-trans project being implemented threatens any human who wishes to work, go to school, worship, use the bathroom, access medical care, and walk about in their communities without fear of being reported, arrested, harassed, assaulted, or killed. As I have detailed in previous writings on TDOV and TDOR, transphobia is a system which seeks to narrow the broad set of possibilities for human existence which should be available to all of us, possibilities which are our right by virtue of being born.

This broad spectrum of existence should be inalienable, but as with so many rights due to oppressed peoples across the world, we know that our access to these rights can only be guaranteed by how well we can remain organized in order to defend them, to prevent backslide, and to fight for their advancement. It is not all bad news–there are certainly those with access to power who are providing some of the necessary friction between the Trump administration’s plans and the survival of our community. But we cannot rely on those in power–corporations, politicians, judges–to do the work for us.

Recently, I have been discussing with BWC staff and members one essential piece of the mode of our organizing: our commitment to seeing ourselves as a part of the solution to our deeply unjust world. We already know that we cannot afford to wait for some person or entity within the State to ride to our rescue; we take organizing into our own hands, and we assume that we can create a liberated future–because we know we must. The work of justice cannot be outsourced, contracted, or off-shored–the deep injustice wrought by American empire is ours to fight, and to fight in its totality, in all the myriad of ways it manifests: capitalism, racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, militarism, ableism, and many other systems working to divide us. We cannot address transphobia without linking our organizing to other movements of resistance, just as surely as we cannot maintain a movement for justice without integrating the knowledge, history, organizing, and rituals of the trans community.

The work of creating enough friction to slow the advancement of the Trump administration’s authoritarianism is ours; there is no one to replace us. For the sake of our trans and nonbinary ancestors, for our trans and nonbinary members, and for all our future descendants, we must set ourselves to the work before us: to provide accompaniment, to pressure medical facilities, organizations, and associations, to raise the cost for politicians who target or attempt to sacrifice trans people, and to practice our politics in our daily lives, where we must be ever open for the possibilities that gender liberation holds for all of us.

Transphobia is a system created by humans, and it’s up to us, as part of the broader movement for gender liberation, to dismantle it. It is within our power to build a future where no one is ever, “reviled and hunted and hated.”