Content note: this post references transphobic violence and suicide.

We mark Transgender Day of Remembrance this year having experienced profound loss and struggle. We know of at least 27 transgender people lost to violence since last TDOR, and many more lost to suicide. We have lost two trans elders this past year: Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Lady Java. Here in our Boston community, we continue to mark the murders of three Black trans women whose deaths led to the creation of TDOR: Chanelle Pickett, Monique Thomas, and Rita Hester. 

We remain targets of increasingly hostile transphobia through the medical industrial complex, legislation, the courts, and the media. As a Boston Workers Circle community, we have a stake in fighting this anti-trans movement, not only for our trans and nonbinary members, but for all trans and nonbinary Bostonians, residents of the Commonwealth, Americans, and people around the world. Were our founders alive to witness the ways in which fascism is making use of transphobia to further its gains, they would urge us to resist it with everything we have, so closely does it mirror the ways in which fascists go after workers, women, people of color, disabled folks, and many other marginalized groups.

Our slowness to name and fight the uptake of transphobia into current organizing among fascists has made us seriously vulnerable. The instinct to wall off trans and nonbinary people and our oppression as bad for politics has made us both worse at fighting our opposition, and has enabled attempts to eliminate our community. Among trans and nonbinary people, more and more community members are understanding our targeting as part of a larger project of transgender genocide, especially given its intersections with white supremacy, colonialism, and patriarchy.

It should be made clear, however, that transphobia, and its relationship to fascism, threatens all people. The refusal of cisgender people to align their struggles with ours puts us all at risk, including LGBQ people, intersex folks, gender non-conforming people, and, yes, even cisgender women and men. People were starting to understand this when puberty blockers were being banned wholesale, but the right is still moving faster than we are. What will cisgender people do now, given that states are beginning to carve out treatments specifically for trans and nonbinary folks while allowing the same treatments to be used by cisgender people? In all but name, but we are in the midst of a public health emergency which has and will continue to lead to the preventable deaths of trans and nonbinary people.

We must look to the lessons of our founders in developing our response. When they declared in 1905 their intention to fight, “sickness, premature death, and capitalism,” they saw themselves not as mere witnesses to the oppression of their fellow workers but as actors with the power to fight that oppression if properly organized. We, too, must see ourselves as active participants in an escalating conflict that is only getting started with its persecution. When the right has the money and a hold on most levers of violence, every single one of us is needed to bring the people power that will be required to achieve liberation for all. We will need to continue pushing in the courts and legislatures, of course, but more than that, we must follow the example set by our founders and create the alternatives that will give us true autonomy. If established medical institutions will not prioritize our community’s care, we cannot simply wait for them to change their minds; we must create institutions that will serve our communities. If legislatures create immoral and unjust laws, we will have to be willing to challenge or break the law to save human lives, as our Workers Circles ancestors did when they joined other Jewish labor organizations in funneling money to union members and later partisans in Europe during WWII.

Our cause–to “fight sickness, premature death, and capitalism”–is clear. The time to accurately name transphobia as a driver of premature deaths of transgender and nonbinary people is overdue. With lives on the line, the moment to act on this knowledge is now. To truly honor our dead, we must fight like hell for the living–those surviving now, and those who will follow us.