No Compromise on Trans Lives

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Content Warning: This piece deals directly with genocidal anti-trans bigotry, including slurs.

In social media posts on Oct. 5, Donald Trump called Annie Andrews, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate for South Carolina, a slur.

Specifically, he called her a “trannie,”[sic] a word all too familiar to many of us.

One might expect that handed such a political lay-up Andrews, who is cis, would at least offer a token condemnation of his bigotry, use it as an example of how the current administration's hatred is hurting honest Americans, how we should all unite to be a better country, etc. etc..

The response almost writes itself, and there was a time not that long ago when Democrats running for office could at least muster it, however hollow in practice.

This did not happen.

While dismissing the slur as a “distraction” in remarks to WYFF News, Andrews didn't condemn it, or Trump's bigotry. Indeed, a campaign spokesperson emphasized to the Greenville News that she is staunchly anti-trans herself, that “the Democratic candidate has also been clear that she does not support biological men in women's sports or performing gender surgeries on minors.”

This is particularly sickening because Andrews, a pediatrician, damn well knows that every single major medical organization consistently supports trans youth care.

She was far from alone. Indeed, so many Democrats turned anti-trans that there’s now a whole list of them.

In a September Fox News interview Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico, a progressive darling, publicly reversed his previous pro-trans stances, opposing trans girls “playing in girls' sports if it endangers safety or fairness” and saying he would “absolutely” support a ban on trans youth surgeries. Said progressives (even, as we’ll get to, some trans ones) tied themselves in knots claiming that he didn't mean what he clearly did. Talarico removed these already dubious doubts with further comments declaring his strict belief in the gender binary, only two sexes allowed.

Ohio Democrats then turned harshly against trans communities, as gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton called trans girls “boys” and promised to preserve the state's anti-trans laws, while longtime Rep. Marcy Kaptur muttered about “transgender ideology” and openly bragged about supporting Republicans in voting for federal anti-trans bills. North Carolina Rep. Don Davis, who last year supported criminalizing trans healthcare providers, did the same, bragging about a 2024 state trans sports ban even most of his own party opposed.

Alaska U.S. Senate candidate Mary Peltola went even farther, supporting banning trans women from public bathrooms. Unsurprisingly, accounts then emerged from multiple former staffers that she has repeatedly used the slur “faggot.” California Gov. Gavin Newsom, almost certainly a 2028 presidential candidate, has spent the past two years spouting increasing amounts of anti-trans hatred, vetoing pro-trans legislation and cozying up to the far-right.

Last week the official party apparatus joined in, with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee itself releasing an ad for South Carolina congressional nominee Nancy Lacore touting her backing of a trans sports ban.

In a grim but entirely predictable escalation, as this piece was going through edits Josh Turek, the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate for Iowa, released an ad calling for a ban on federal funds for trans healthcare, a position only previously held by the far-right.

In my other job, at the Asheville Blade local journalism co-op, I reported on anti-trans comments and policy positions from Jamie Ager, the political dynast who's the Democratic candidate for NC's 11th congressional district. We then faced one of the worst waves of bigotry and harassment I've ever seen, one that overwhelmingly came from well-off liberals and centrists. This ranged from assertions that the “one job” of trans people, including journalists, was to support Ager no matter what he did or said, to those who just dropped the facade and ranted about “the rainbow cult” or called us slurs.

A curdled mix of denial and cruelty quickly became clear: Ager hadn’t actually said what he’d clearly said. He hadn’t taken the position he’d clearly taken. If he did, well, we deserved it anyway.

I am far from alone. Over the past year, as the rhetoric “we have to abandon trans people to win the election” has seeped from the political class on down to party faithful on the ground, many of us have seen people in our neighborhoods and workplaces, the same ones who said how “brave” we were for years, tell us to shut up, that our rights never mattered anyway.

This is a notable shift, if one that is not exactly shocking to many of us. We’re long used to Democrats offering hollow statements of support, but little else in practice, Yet this cycle has now seen more and more of the party's candidates embrace open anti-trans bigotry — often in the exact same terms used by Trump — and enthusiastically support many of the same anti-trans policies as their Republican opponents.

This bigotry is not coming from some grassroots push, propaganda to the contrary. It is instead that of media moguls, well-heeled campaign consultants and the liberal upper crust, taking up the genocidal push of megachurch pastors and far-right billionaires.

Sadly, rather than condemnation and pushback, trans gentry and other prominent figures in the “Gay Inc” network of establishment organizations have too often met this threat with calls to “compromise” on our most basic rights. Indeed, party apparatuses have mobilized to crush even mild dissent from queer and trans Democrats within their own ranks.

Still, we're told that we still have to support these candidates even as they openly attack us. That if we abandon trans athletes and youth (and doctors, and anyone who lives in the South) this will somehow be enough, as if those are acceptable sacrifices or that bigotry would magically stop there.

It never works this way, of course. Not only are they evil pseudoscience in their own right, trans sports bans lay the legal foundation to deny our very existence and exclude us from other major areas of life. Bans on trans youth care cement a set of prohibitions they can steadily increase the age limit of, well into adulthood, until our healthcare is banned entirely. Indeed, this is exactly the course they’ve followed wherever they’ve been inflicted.

So this is a reminder that any compromise in the face of an escalating genocide is both incompetent and craven. To even suggest it is treason in wartime and, at long last, our communities must treat it as such. It is a warning about what we are up against, where this anti-trans turn among the Democrats came from and how we can — must — fight it.

There is no acceptable compromise on our very rights and lives. None. Ever. If we want to survive, it's time to act like it.

Part of the genocidal propaganda against our community is that Democrats are simply responding to a popular backlash, one sown by trans people going “too far” in ways vague or entirely fictional. It is a version of the lie told by abusers around the world: look what you made us do.

Instead, from the start the anti-trans campaign, including among Democrats, has been a thoroughly elite project.

This does not require any single shadowy group in a smoke-filled room. Much of the gentry conspiracy against trans rights has happened in public, relying on the willingness of liberal and conservative gentry alike to preserve capitalist hierarchies at the expense of any communities that threaten them.

After opposition to equal marriage collapsed in the mid-2010s, the far-right set its sights on trans rights as its next wedge issue. This included literal hate groups, like the Alliance Defending Freedom, backed by megachurch pastors and wealthy Christian fundamentalists.

The next year saw their first trial run, using North Carolina's gerrymandered far-right legislature to pass the notorious HB2 bathroom ban. In a pattern that will become familiar, the law also targeted labor rights and anti-discrimination protections more broadly.

Too often the fate of HB2 is used as a nostalgic example of how widespread opposition to anti-trans laws used to be and, indeed, the bill drew condemnation from around the country, alongside a major boycott.

However, as someone on the ground (I publicly came out in its midst) the reality was very different. The initial bill passed with some Democratic support. When public backlash, boycotts and plenty of organizing in the South did put the legislature under serious pressure, establishment Democrats brokered a sham repeal — trans organizers in N.C. dubbed it “HB2.0” for a reason — that left much of it intact for years. Gay Inc groups in the state turned their attention to discouraging trans groups from criticizing Democrats for their betrayal.

While liberals enjoyed a premature victory lap, the far-right took a much more accurate set of lessons: if pressed, plenty of Democrats and liberal institutions would not seriously defend trans rights.

In October 2017, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that far-right leaders gathered at the Values Voters Summit were already putting their attention to “divide and conquer” tactics targeting trans rights that they felt would draw support from liberal gentry.

“A trend emerged during the session, as various speakers wrapped their opposition to non-discrimination measures in rhetoric passing as progressive: transgender rights were depicted as anti-feminist, hostile to minorities and even disrespectful to LGB individuals,” the report read.

This included a presentation from one fundamentalist campaigner about specifically targeting trans athletes, students, domestic abuse survivors and more to try to push their propaganda that our rights “only come at the expense of others.”

The ensuing years saw a steady drumbeat of anti-trans laws. Some were defeated, but others stuck, especially on the nonexistent issue of trans athletes (particularly trans women) in sports and youth care.

This was as based on pseudoscience and creepy obsessions as the bathroom bills. But the far-right, itself an elite faction far too many liberals indulge as somehow more authentic, knew that Democratic gentry resented trans activism (especially the increasingly loud and working class variety) and were looking for a way to pull off a Clintonian abandonment of a troublesome constituency.

In 2022 they gained a major accomplice, The New York Times, which increasingly laundered anti-trans talking points as if it were outright news, often from openly bigoted conservative groups.

We now know that this came due to “a directive from above,” as former NYT editor Billie Jean Sweeney later told Trans News Network, from publisher A.G. Sulzberger, who inherited his position from his father.

“I think he saw this as a political project, that he could take a stance that the hard right would like, that the Trump campaign might like,” Sweeney recalled. “He pursued that, because he thought it was a position — spreading anti-trans discrimination, spreading anti-trans disinformation — was something he could push and most readers would say 'well, I don't know much about it.' He thought it was something there'd be no cost for.”

It did not go unnoticed, or unchallenged — contributors to the paper and other journalists organized a massive open letter in early 2023 criticizing the turn to open bigotry, and coverage from queer and trans media steadily increased. But Gay Inc groups, who supposedly existed to stop this very scenario, held back. Apparently even a basic boycott or demanding the firing of bigoted reporters was a step too far.

So the NYT, naturally, kept escalating.

The Times' turn encouraged other establishment media to become far more open about their own barely concealed transphobia, and similar pieces started making the rounds in outlets like The Atlantic.

This had real results on the ground. Conservatives crafting anti-trans laws started referencing these articles to portray them as commonsense bipartisan measures rather than genocidal bigotry. While the NYT wasn't the only factor, it's hard to see the resurgence of open transphobia outside the far-right happening nearly as quickly or as severely without their influence.

Online, plenty of trans journalists faced sharply increased harassment from liberals when we'd criticize these publications — especially the Times — or those who wrote for them.

The increasing transphobic turn among liberal gentry combined with the Biden administration's own comparative hostility to trans rights after they took office in 2021 created a steady drumbeat of growing, explicit institutional transphobia.

While it didn’t get nearly enough attention at the time, the Biden administration made it more difficult to access trans healthcare, reducing the rights of trans individuals to appeal its denial, making religious exemptions far easier and pointedly excluded trans people from post-Roe regulations protecting reproductive healthcare.

My TNN colleague Corinne Green, in the federal trans public policy trenches at the time, remembers that the healthcare regulations were so bad that multiple organizations convened emergency meetings when they were announced. But publicly Gay Inc largely kept their silence.

While the Obama administration had its own problems on the trans rights front — especially in its brutal treatment of trans immigrants — they had occasionally threatened states with a denial of federal funds if they passed openly anti-trans laws. Under Biden, the federal government explicitly refused to do a damn thing.

So the far-right kept escalating. By 2023, a Data for Progress survey found that “LGBTQ+ Adults Do Not Feel Safe and Do Not Think the Democratic Party Is Doing Enough to Protect Their Rights.” Forty percent of trans respondents had already considered moving due to the barrage of anti-trans laws, and eight percent said they'd already done so.

While it's worth taking any single survey in context, it still translates to thousands — if not far more — people forced out of their homes. That has only escalated since, to the point that even local governments in places like Seattle are setting aside funding to deal with the number of trans refugees. While there remain strong and defiant trans communities in plenty of states with openly hostile governments — and plenty of “blue” areas are less safe than they look — these threats are also real.

While hard to measure, on the ground plenty of us witnessed increasingly open bigotry, job discrimination and violence. Increasingly, these didn't just come from conservatives. Liberal transphobia, always lurking under the surface, steadily became far more open.

Leading up to the 2024 election, things kept getting worse. By mid-2023 it was already clear that the Biden administration’s emerging regulations on trans sports were riddled with loopholes to allow de facto bans nearly everywhere. They were so bad that 14 trans state legislators signed an open letter opposing them.

As the massive NDAA defense bill was taking shape in the summer of 2024, it included a provision banning healthcare for trans children in military families. It would later pass with overwhelming bipartisan support in December. Biden didn't veto it, or stop the anti-trans provisions when he could have easily done so, given his influence within the party still controlled the Senate.

In the 2024 election, the Democrats' backing of the Gaza genocide and contempt for its own coalition, combined with the incredible incompetence of the Harris campaign, lost them a thoroughly winnable fight against a senile fascist.

Kamala Harris has a long record of transphobia, especially her role in denying basic rights and healthcare to trans inmates while California’s attorney general. As a candidate she continued the party's slide, refusing to allow any trans speakers at the DNC for the first time in over a decade. Instead of opposing the clearly illegal anti-trans measures inflicted by state governments, the same ones driving trans people from their homes, she vaguely said in an October interview with NBC that she’d follow the law.

It was absolutely unsurprising when, post-election, Harris revealed she was sympathetic to trans sports bans.

Nonetheless, mostly due to the openly genocidal goals of the far-right, trans voter turnout for Democrats actually increased that year. As analysis from TNN's own Mady Castigan showed, without trans support Democrats would also have lost in places like New Jersey and Minnesota.

It was then that the mask truly came off.

As trans voters' reward for increasing support in a dire year, Democratic officials immediately started scapegoating our communities for their loss. This followed a long pattern of transphobia — Julia Serano's classic book on transmisogyny is titled Whipping Girl for a reason — but also conveniently distracted from their own catastrophic failures. The party can never fail, it can only be failed.

Just days after the election Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, the son of a real estate attorney, declared his backing of trans sports bans (in an interview with The New York Times, naturally), saying “I have two daughters. I don't want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”

New York Rep. Tom Suozzi, who comes from a family of prominent lawyers and lodges with a fundamentalist cult in Washington, D.C., used similar bigotry in other remarks to the Times, calling trans girls “biological boys.”

In March 2025 Newsom, whose business and political careers were bankrolled by the Getty oil billionaires, went openly anti-trans on his newly-minted podcast, calling trans women in sports “deeply unfair.” He went on to veto a slew of pro-trans bills, including a measure that would have protected trans healthcare providers from extradition to other states.

It wasn't just in California that the shift from rhetoric to anti-trans actions happened swiftly. One “purple” state, North Carolina, tells the tale. N.C. Rep. Don Davis, for example, started voting in line with Republicans on nearly every anti-trans (and anti-immigrant) measure that made its way to the House floor, including far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Green's bill that would have banned all trans youth care and sent doctors to prison. The Democratic Party is still enthusiastically backing his re-election run.

Things weren't much better at the state legislature. While heavily gerrymandered in Republicans' favor, in 2024 voters had elected Democratic Gov. Josh Stein in a landslide and broke the GOP supermajority to help sustain his veto.

But despite that support, two major anti-trans laws sailed through the legislature thanks to Democrats. The first was a sweeping law that hit everything from state health plans covering trans care to changing gender markers. A Democratic lawmaker helped break Stein's veto. Another bill, to explicitly permit trans children to be placed with openly transphobic foster parents, passed with substantial Democratic support. Stein signed that last one.

During this genocidal escalation, many of the organizations supposedly meant to defend trans rights stayed largely silent. When Stein signed that anti-trans law, for example, state and regional Gay Inc groups who'd previously condemned it said nothing.

As the midterms approached, open Democratic transphobia worsened dramatically. From reporting by the Washington Sun we now know that this was not organic, but a change pushed by the party's well-heeled consultants:

“A Democratic strategist, granted the ability to speak anonymity to speak candidly, told The Sun the breakthrough for Democrats to adopt more conservative positions on trans rights came last year, when Rob Sand, now the Democratic nominee for governor in Iowa, was asked by a conservative radio host rather he thought transgender girls belonged in girls' sports. Sand responded with a simple 'no.' The strategist said the moment immediately circulated among party political strategists.

'Rob Sand just did it, and it was fine. 'There's power in numbers, and all you have to do is tell these people you have the majority opinion. And then you can just say it.'”

The salt of the earth this ain't.

By contrast the people they're targeting very much are. Trans people are, overwhelmingly, a working class demographic. We make far less money than cis people working the same jobs, face Great Depression-era levels of poverty and unemployment and far higher rates of homelessness. On so many levels, the attacks on our communities are the wealthy waging a genocide against a particularly defiant group of the poor.

Ironically, that “majority” opinion remark is bunk. For all their supposed political savvy, polling repeatedly even shows that anti-trans attacks don’t motivate voters, with the issue consistently ranking low priority. They’re doing this because they want to.

That “it was fine,” along with the bigotry of “these people” also stand out. Democratic consultants felt free to push this bigotry because they knew that the official LGBTQ+ Democratic and Gay Inc groups wouldn't do a damn thing, that supposedly pro-trans members of their own party would stay quiet — or even actively stifle dissent — in the name of party unity.

Indeed, the reporting itself noted that consultants predicted they could continue taking anti-trans stances “without as much backlash from local and state LGBTQ advocates, Democratic allies and even campaign staffers.”

Not for the first time, their cowardice cost the rest of us greatly.

So throughout this year we've seen a steady escalation. In plenty of states and districts, trans voters are now faced with two major party candidates who both support anti-trans laws, call trans women men and back our increasing segregation from public life. We are still told, with increasing fervor, that we must vocally back them anyway.

Central to this is a paradox that Serano pointed out in a recent essay: trans communities are supposedly too small and unpopular to matter, so turning against us makes political sense. But we also still have to vote for anti-trans Democrats because if we don't, it could cost them the election.

“If you think trans people *are* capable of tanking your favorite candidate via our criticisms and protests, doesn't that imply that your candidate (and their consultants and strategists) totally fucked up in their political calculations here?” she wrote. “And if they did fuck up, shouldn't you be reaching out and complaining to *them* (rather than berating trans people), in hope that they might reverse their bad decision?”

The bigotry became so blatant that, in Ohio, even trans and queer Democrats historically loyal to the party began to speak up against it. The party apparatus tried to censor those in their own Pride caucus who criticized Acton's bigotry even when they reluctantly said they'd still vote for her. Texts from the caucus chair, exposed by other members, later revealed that party higher-ups blamed them for Acton's bad press and considered any outreach to disgusted queer and trans voters “an unwelcome distraction.”

Several county parties had already condemned Acton and Kaptur's turn to open bigotry. On Oct. 5, caucus vice chair Arienne Childrey, one of the party's own candidates for an Ohio state house seat, resigned in disgust.

“For party leadership, the caucus is simply a sales team,” she wrote in an open letter of resignation. “The job, in their eyes, is not to represent the LGBTQ+ community to the party, but to sell Democratic candidates to the LGBTQ+ community, regardless of the harm those candidates may cause.”

“The ODP would like everyone to believe they are a 'big tent party,'” she continued. “However, their successful efforts to silence the Pride caucus — even in cases where we are simply begging our candidates not to trade our lives for perceived electoral advantage — has proven otherwise. The tent hasn't gotten any bigger, it has simply shifted, leaving many trans individuals, progressives, and allies out in the rain.”

This, however, remains the only major example of Democratic figures criticizing the party's transphobic turn outside a primary, while calling out specific candidates. Supposedly pro-trans Democrats have largely stayed silent, or even enthusiastically endorsed the transphobes.

The excuse used, around the country, by those remaining party backers is that trans people still must support Democrats for our own good, or the greater good of the nation. That once in office they will magically reverse course.

This is nonsense. The entire course of the past decade puts the lie to it.

It is also countered by the party's similar turn against immigrant communities, starting with “secure borders” rhetoric, supposedly to win elections, and then eventually joining in on passing laws like the Laken Riley Act that gave ICE far more power to carry out their atrocities.

Events overseas, especially in the U.K., also provide a massive warning sign. Labour's liberals, some of whom advise major Democrats, took increasingly anti-trans stances and then quickly moved to inflict an incredibly brutal set of policies intended to. Now they're wholesale kicking trans people off healthcare, driving them to suicide and the BBC is censoring even innocuous pro-trans speech. Trans patients who go into hospitals for illnesses like cancer are simply being left to die.

Liberal governments are just as capable of murdering us as conservative ones.

Democrats' tepid action gave way to hollow statements. Then they stopped even those. Then came bigoted rhetoric, followed quickly by actively supporting anti-trans policies. Why would they change course when given more power? The obvious next step are Democrats joining in with the Trump regime on further attacks on trans rights.

If you think this implausible, they're already publicly promising that the result of a blue wave will be far more collaboration than confrontation. Democratic leadership has already ruled out impeachment or other steps against the Trump administration. Sen. Tammy Duckworth ranted on C-Span last month that Democrats should allow Trump to “save face.” Rep. Ted Lieu, likely the next caucus chair, told MsNow in a Sept. 25 interview that if his party wins “the best use of time is to pass bills that hopefully Trump will sign.”

There is, in the end, no real difference between a fascist and a quisling.

At every step, us angry trans radicals warning of betrayal were correct and the “be patient, they'll get better” liberals were completely wrong.

This has, however, not stopped those liberals from continuing, even at this late hour, to make excuses and call for compromise.

This summer, at a time when anti-trans shifts from Democrats were escalating and a major organization's intervention could have given them second thoughts, the progressive Center for American Progress instead joined the fight on the side of the transphobes, conceding sports bans as a way to “turn down the temperature” and “take the issue off the table” in exchange for leaving adult trans healthcare alone.

It's worth remembering that the era of American politics most marked by “grand compromises” was the prelude to the Civil War. They don't work, and every concession on our rights just gives the enemy more ground for their next attack.

A similar willingness to betray trans people around the country came from Rep. Sarah McBride, the only trans person in congress. McBride has long been more interested in cementing her own career than our rights (the first bill she passed was a sop to hedge funds) and willing to excuse her anti-trans colleagues. But as the bigotry within her party has escalated so has her collaboration with it.

In an appearance on Politico's podcast last August she demanded any trans person with a public platform (“some very loud people who are shaming and calling people who disagree with them, even in just rhetoric, bigots”) be nicer to those who hate us and follow the Democratic Party's line. This delusional level of conformity to expect (in the middle of a genocide, no less) is what passes for serious political thought among the trans gentry.

This did not go unnoticed among anti-trans party hacks, who quickly marked her as a useful token. A November report, “Deciding to WIn” by consultant Simon Bazelon (son of infamously anti-trans Times reporter Emily Bazelon) openly called for Democrats to abandon queer and trans rights, citing McBride's “big-tent approach to complicated cultural issues.”

In a Sept. 14 open letter seeking a co-chair spot on the Democrats' Policy and Communications Committee, McBride bragged that she's provided cover for Democrats (even “when we haven't all agreed) in “very different districts” and “I would never ask a colleague to use a message that didn't fit their district.”

This is, to be clear, openly segregationist. The idea that trans rights are only worth defending in “safe” Democratic districts is functionally no different than “civil rights should be left to state and local governments.”

I happen to live in one of those districts McBride and her ilk are willing to write off as long as it gets them a promotion. The largest populations of queer and trans people live in the South. What would she have us do? Stay silent forever? “Just move?”

These are our homes and communities. It may never have dawned on McBride, the scion of a well-off family of Biden-connected lawyers, in her endlessly spoiled life, but those are often the difference between life and death for working class trans people.

It would be helpful if she had attached a chart to let us know what Cook PVI score our congressional district has to have before we get to quietly ask for healthcare.

During all this, major trans advocacy organizations could have intervened, providing pressure in the other direction. But the management of A4TE, the most prominent trans non-profit in the country, is more obsessed with raking in high salaries while firing most of their own on the ground organizers in an effort to crush their union. After their last round of layoffs, the organization holds more well-heeled directors than employees for them to oversee.

Notably Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, one of the organization's founders, (“the first openly transgender child of a member of Congress”), while no longer heading it, has since made the rounds to criticize trans communities for being too confrontational (to The New York Times, naturally) and opine that some trans sports bans might be justified.

For an equivalent, imagine that at the height of the backlash to the civil rights movements, prominent leaders started publicly declaring that they were ok with segregated water fountains as long as they got voting rights in certain districts.

Nor is it just think tanks and politicians. While there are notable exceptions (even, credit where due, among trans liberals) too many prominent media figures are responding to the elite onslaught on our rights by trying to excuse it.

In rationalizing language so tortured even a lawyer would groan, consultant Ari Drennen (who once claimed that being trans is “bourgeois”) chided even those Gay Inc figures who'd criticized Talarico's comments, writing that trans people need such bigotry as “rhetorical flexibility.” She claimed in comments to Vox that his position wasn't what it clearly was, “he talked about 'trans athletes.' He didn't say 'I don't like boys in girls sports' or 'I don't want men in women's sports.”

A stark example of where all this quisling nonsense leads leads was recently published in The New Republic, where Brynn Tannehill (“Naval Academy graduate, former naval aviator, author and senior defense analyst”) dismissed any on the ground resistance as useless, literally endorsed replicating the policy of the Nazis and forcing every single trans person in America into Canada.

“In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, when 30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned, they were released on the condition of signing an agreement to emigrate and surrender their property (effectively guaranteeing they would never return). This sounds horrible, but it is worth remembering that the people who emigrated had a much higher survival rate than those who did not,” Tannehill wrote. “Any sort of agreements to help usher transgender people out of the U.S. would face significant administrative, legal and diplomatic hurdles. But at the same time, all of the stakeholders here have something that the others want, be it skills, an end to the trade war or a Reich free of untermenschen.”

To these spoiled gentry, “trans rights” just meant personal advancement for those like them: a handful of well-off, overwhelmingly white and conservative figures in a few major cities. The rest of us are simply in the way, if not actively despised for “making them look bad.”

Justified criticism of prominent figures like these, online and elsewhere, has too often been dismissed by establishment figures as “infighting.” This is untrue. Trans communities want to survive. We want liberation. Trans collaborators want to secure their power and cushy lives at our expense.

Despite their occasional objections to the contrary, a major reason their collaboration goes hand in hand with the more blatant transphobia coming from the far-right, Democrats and liberal media is that they're gentry who share a common hatred of trans communities as we actually exist. We are too working class, radical, queer and angry to ever really fit into their social order.

While money is key to the status of the gentry, their hold also relies on power over others, a permanent place in the social order at the expense, literally, of the rest of us.

Our very existence puts the lie to a key part of their power: the idea that the hierarchies of the late American empire are “natural” and that the only possible way of life is by conforming to them. Instead, we've found meaning and joy in breaking them.

So conservatives bellow for genocide, liberals quietly call for our segregation and trans gentry spend much of their time frantically reassuring their aristocratic peers that they're not like the rest of us.

It ain't infighting if we're not on the same side.

As much of a nightmare as we're facing now, a bipartisan consensus in favor of open anti-trans bigotry is a far worse scenario. It's worth hating the collaborators who got us there, and ensuring they can't do even worse.

So, let's review: playing nice with Democrats was supposed to result in them gradually supporting more trans rights. Instead they are aggressively embracing anti-trans bigotry and rolling them back. Prominent trans liberals, who were supposed to act as champions of those rights at the highest levels of power, instead are providing cover for their wholesale dismemberment.

Even the ones muttering some mild objections seem collectively incapable of getting a single transphobic Democrat to retract a single statement.

So much for “a seat at the table.”

To the extent that this approach was ever a strategy — and not just an excuse for a narrow elite to line their own pockets — it has catastrophically failed. Why should we listen to those who still push it?

The radicals were, once again, right.

So going forward we need to do the opposite of the bullshit that got us here. Recognize betrayal swiftly rather than making excuses. Base trans organizing far more in our working class communities, not gentry cliques. Put far less hope in prominent (and easily co-opted) individuals and far more in collectives and groups. Instead of incremental (and easily revoked) false progress, push for the trans maximalism we actually need to thrive. Organize outside the electoral system, and outside campaign season, instead of putting an ounce of trust in politicians.

Instead of yet more goddamn compromise, a lot more confrontation.

We’ve all heard “politics requires compromise,” ad nauseam, as everything keeps getting worse. Those in power love to repeat this, but not because it's true. Instead victory against oppression requires relentless, bloody-minded determination more than anything else. Compromise got us here.

In this light, the rage and radicalism of so many trans people on the ground, online and off, is a rational response to wholesale attacks on our existence. It is right to be done with incompetent servility masquerading as political maturity. It should've happened long ago.

A better way is shown through four simple words that, during this season of betrayal, have started to make their way through trans communities:

Trans Rights or Else.

From the NYT to Democratic consultants to the far-right, transphobia has gained such ground because it has too often gone unchallenged, including by supposed queer and trans leaders. That none of the major Gay Inc organizations could even muster up the guts to boycott the Times over the past four years, or demand a single firing, neatly tells the tale.

So instead we fight, without excuses or mercy. Make those Democratic consultants eat that “nothing will happen” and regret it for the rest of their lives.

The hard reality is that these fights will not just be against cis figures, either. The collaborationist “leadership” class played a key role in bringing us to this place, and it must be directly confronted if we've ever going to get out of it.

Their power must be dismantled wholesale, their careers ruined and they themselves excluded from our communities wherever possible. If you balk at this, then I have terrible news about the tactics required to simply hold a picket line, let alone wage anti-fascist resistance.

A diversity of perspectives is welcome; surrender can't ever be among them.

Going forward, the model is not electoral or sanitized non-profit campaigns; it's asymmetric conflict. If trans communities want to survive, we must do as much damage as possible to our enemies while keeping ourselves as intact as possible. For this, “big tents” matter a lot less than ferocity, solidarity and a willingness to fight.

So it's time to base our struggle not on what the gentry like but on the realities of our own working class communities and our very real strengths. Support trans people staying and fighting where we are, and an embrace of the caring and defiant cultures already nurtured there. Trans communities in “red states” should especially be backed, to the hilt, seen not as doomed but as cores of resistance in areas our enemies wrongly believe all theirs.

Every one of those that endures weakens the hold of our enemies. The same community groups that keep each other safe on the street can easily go on the attack when a politician decides that our genocide is their way to victory.

This is also far, far more efficient: the same resources funding one Gay Inc higher-up's monumentally bloated salary can easily bankroll multiple on the ground efforts saving lives for years to come.

No group will be able to do all of what's needed. Instead it will be a wide array, ranging from a few people to hundreds, spread throughout the country. Some already exist, others will need to be formed. Some will be public, many won't. While coalitions and coordination are necessary, more decentralized networks less prone to gentry attack and co-option are a far stronger basis for our resistance.

So pick what's closest to you and start swinging. Odds are you and your friends, with an ounce of organization, can do far better than those we've been told to defer to.

Here the much-maligned online trans communities are actually a great strength. Not only do they provide resilient networks across national and state borders, but they're used to raising funds and not putting up with bullshit. It's time to see them as the powerful webs of information and connection they actually are.

If not for them, far more trans people would be in the morgue or on the street, while figures like McBride would face far less opposition for their betrayals.

On the ground, the tactics required will look many different ways in many different places. Sometimes it will mean that transphobic politicians (Democratic or Republican) get the Anita Bryant treatment. Others it will look like trans folks and our allies showing up in force (armed or otherwise) to deter attacks. Still others it will mean rushing money and supplies to bolster communities under particular threat. I'm sure that trans communities will develop a whole range of new ones as well. We're brilliant like that.

When this does require advocacy, it will need to be done with an eye towards what politicians actually respond to: fear and consequences. That means denying them all support if they so much as warmly glance at a transphobic talking point, and making their lives hell if they ever utter one. They're expendable; we're not.

The established Gay Inc organizations, including their Trans Inc subsidiaries, largely need to be torn down. They're a sink of considerable community resources that disproportionately goes to spoiled nepo babies who have proven either utterly incompetent or actively treasonous.

To the extent national organizations need to exist, they need to be overhauled, with far more egalitarian pay structures — no one making six figures — and geared towards confrontation. Even embracing the most basic pressure tactics, like boycotts and targeting influential anti-trans figures, would go a long way.

Trans people with more resources are absolutely welcome in this struggle, some already have, as long as they're committed to joining with working class communities and putting their funds to good use. In this they will, despite the hardships, find lives and connections infinitely more fulfilling than the gentry's. Why assimilate into a dying empire?

An underrated advantage we have is that. even now, trans genocide largely remains an elite obsession. Their real base isn't in its numbers, but in inherited wealth and deference given to a fairly small clique of elites. To paraphrase union organizer Utah Phillips, they have names and addresses.

When forced to fight, there aren't that many of them, and their cushy lives have left them weak. Ruin even a few of their careers, boycott even a single transphobic media empire into the ground, disrupt conservative conspiracies before they gain momentum and they will start losing strength with shocking speed.

This path has the power of being based in the history of what actually works. Compton's Cafeteria, Stonewall, the White Night riots and countless other examples throughout queer history remind us of our power at our riotous best.

While lesser known, so do radicals' effective attacks on the established “homophile” movement that, in Stonewall's aftermath, sought to shut down more militant queer organizing to, in their own words, “retain the favor of the establishment.” Sometimes a little bit of “infighting” goes a long way.

Notably ACT UP also made a point of attacking both major political parties for their homophobia and refusal to do a damn thing about the AIDS genocides. They took the fight to their enemies, not in sanitized, easily-dismissed protest but in direct action at their places of power and worship.

More recently, the successful effort last year to stop a ban on trans coverage in Medicaid initially came not from politicians or established organizations (though both later tried to take credit) but from grassroots trans organizing and aggressive media campaigns that focused on confronting Democrats rather than pleading with them. A similar push in Georgia, where significant radical activism pushed established groups to actually confront bigoted Democrats, staved off several anti-trans bills.

The anti-ICE resistance in Minneapolis saw working class solidarity between trans communities and immigrants — both populations abandoned by the Democratic Party — build powerful on the ground networks that dealt the genocidal paramilitaries a major defeat.

Last year, after genocidal hatemonger Charlie Kirk was assassinated, conservatives launched a full court press to make him a national martyr, and liberals largely went along with it. Newsom swore to “continue his work.” McBride declared she was praying for his family and backed a Republican resolution extolling him.

If they'd succeeded it would have been a considerable step towards enshrining fascism in the national culture. But they did not, because trans, Black and immigrant communities — especially those active online — refused to collaborate with the gentry's emerging consensus. They pushed back hard and turned Kirk into a laughingstock.

Alongside this are the countless incidents of community defense that don't come with shiny press releases but keep trans people like us safe on the ground.

That's our path forward.

So fuck compromise. It will get us nowhere but the grave. We are going to fight and we are going to win.

—Edited by Mira Lazine