Photo: A protest in front of the White House celebrating trans youth. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
Wednesday, Nov. 20, marks the Transgender Day of Remembrance, when we mourn the trans victims of deadly and bigoted violence. With the bigoted agenda of the American extreme-right now poised to rise to the highest levels of power, the Democrats have essentially abandoned transgender people, along with numerous other oppressed groups, and huge swaths of the U.S. working class. We need to seize the opportunity to build an independent, militant movement not just to defend our communities from the extreme-right assault on our rights, but to fight for socialism and liberation.
‘Time to get organized and go on the offensive’
On Thursday, Nov. 14 in a cozy art space in San Francisco, California, dozens of trans and queer people gathered on mismatched furniture for a San Francisco Trans March volunteer meeting to prepare for the Transgender Day of Remembrance event. They were factory workers and teachers, social workers and artists, immigrants, Native people, parents, teens, people for whom this was their first organizing meeting, and long-time activists and organizers.
Despite Donald Trump’s recent election victory, the mood was not doom and gloom or fear of the future, but one of readiness to fight back.
“I’m sick of being in meetings that feel like a funeral … it’s not time to mourn our future, it’s not time to run and hide, it’s time to get organized and go on the offensive,” one attendee said at the meeting.
Beyond the immediate task of planning the Transgender Day of Remembrance event, they emphasized the need to continue organizing in the coming period to defend everyone in the targets of the incoming Trump administration — from defending immigrant communities from the threat of mass deportations, to mobilizing on Trump’s Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, as a show of force against the extreme-right agenda that has coalesced around him.
Meetings like this are not just happening in San Francisco, but across the country as millions reckon with the Democrats’ wholesale abandonment of working-class and oppressed people.
“Remain steadfast. These issues were neither born on Oct. 7, nor Nov. 5. The billionaire class is one billion percent dependent on your labor. We are not a persecuted minority, rather, an unorganized majority,” Queen Jean, an organizer with Black Trans Liberation in New York City, said in a statement. “This is not a defeat, this is the clarity we need to escalate our fight.”
Ash Orr, a West Virginia-based organizer for abortion and trans rights, said: “I know things are bleak right now, but this is not the time to turn inward. Our oppressors push individualism because we’re more vulnerable when we’re isolated. Instead, it’s time to connect with your community. Organize, support mutual aid efforts, and remember — we outnumber them.”
Remembering those taken from us
The Transgender Day of Remembrance is an annual commemoration of the trans lives lost in the previous year, including through explicit acts of bigoted violence and the more hidden kinds of structural capitalist violence that impact trans people as an ultra-oppressed sector of society. It’s well-understood by the trans community that any tally of the number of trans people killed each year falls far short of the true total, but there are 60 trans people that we know of who died of unnatural causes since the previous TDoR. The vast majority were trans women of color, who are among the most marginalized and demonized parts of capitalist society.
These deaths have come amid an all-out drive by the extreme-right to eliminate trans people from U.S. public life. In the last year, an incredible 532 bills have been introduced in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress targeting their (our) most basic rights, including the right to access necessary and life-saving health care, to have their identities legally recognized, to practice their culture, to engage in sport, and even to access public spaces like bathrooms. These have only amplified trans people’s long-existing oppression and marginalization, characterized by lower wages, higher rates of unemployment, homelessness, violence, and discrimination across essentially all aspects of public life, from housing access to healthcare.
Democrats’ blame game
Amid this violence and these attacks, the Democrats have postured as the defenders of trans rights. President Joe Biden boasted he “has your back,” despite doing nothing to safeguard trans rights and even aiding in anti-trans discrimination. Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign barely mentioned trans rights, and when questioned, she nebulously pledged only to “follow the law. After Harris lost to Republican candidate Donald Trump in the November election, some in her campaign began to argue that even a lukewarm defense of trans rights had alienated too many voters — a point of view expressed in subsequent days by top Democratic Party leaders and strategists and prominent liberal-leaning journalists from CNN and MSNBC to The Atlantic magazine.
In fact, in the weeks since, Democrats have blamed just about everybody for their loss: Black men, Latin American immigrants, white women, Arab Americans — everybody, it seems, except for the capitalist class!
The result is that oppressed people have been told to be suspicious of each other, to blame and hold other groups responsible for Trump’s victory and the attacks that are sure to come from his administration, rather than the capitalists who President-elect Trump serves. Across social media there have been widespread calls for people to only organize “among their own.” But this is no time to silo ourselves off — that’s exactly what the ruling class wants, because it makes us easier to control and to attack.
The ruling class shifted rightward, not the masses
The Democrats have credited their loss to a supposed “rightward shift” in the American public. But in reality, the rightward shift came from the capitalists who both the Republican and Democratic parties loyally serve and represent.
Once the party more skeptical of launching imperialist wars, the Democrats have become equal warmongers to the Republicans, quarreling only over which foreign adversary to attack first. In a myriad of other ways, the Democrats now compete with Republicans to prove who is more right-wing, from President Biden’s fascistic “border security” regime to “tough-on-crime” posturing by Democratic governors like Gavin Newsom in California and Kathy Hochul in New York, to being united behind supporting Israel amid its genocide in Gaza. It was only a matter of time before they walked back their promises to LGBTQ people and women, too.
That’s why in the November 2024 election, 14 million fewer Democratic voters showed up at the polls, ultimately causing Harris to lose to Trump. In the same election, though, voters also supported progressive ballot initiatives in numerous states, including importantly on abortion, which succeeded even in states that voted strongly for Republicans. A poll from Oct. 24 by Data for Progress also found that a majority of voters were tired of anti-trans ads, were less likely to support a candidate who ran such ads and wanted candidates to talk about more important issues instead of attacking trans rights.
Forging a fightback campaign for trans and working-class liberation
The lessons of November 2024 are clear: the Democrats have abandoned trans people along with numerous other oppressed groups and a wide swath of the U.S. working class. We should take the cue and start building our own independent movement not just to confront Donald Trump as a person, but to overthrow the entire system that he represents.
As revolutionary socialists, we in the Party for Socialism and Liberation understand the oppression of transgender people to be intrinsically part of the capitalist system and the related oppression of women and all LGBTQ people. Trans people are part of the working class, and an attack on them is an attack on the entire working class. We have the same enemies: the billionaire warmongers, landlords, and bankers of the capitalist class, who benefit from our exploitation, marginalization, and division.
The focus on trans people is not arbitrary and doesn’t come in isolation: we need to understand this as the current iteration of the six-decade-long project of rolling back the gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The capitalist class knows that they cannot immediately attack the Black victory over Jim Crow and win, so they have adopted a strategy of creating a mass base out of the right-wing evangelical church for a cultural counter-revolution against the gains won in the 1960s, going after abortion rights, gay marriage, and now going after transgender people. Any victory they win in this campaign is a step towards creating the political conditions for overturning the entire Civil Rights framework.
Trans people’s needs are those of the entire working class: guaranteed access to healthcare, education, housing, and jobs; a healthy environment; and freedom from war.
It’s in the interests of cisgender (that is, people who aren’t transgender) people to fight to defend trans people’s rights because it actually helps solidify their own, too. Banning discrimination against trans people helps protect everybody from discrimination; protecting trans people’s right to healthcare is necessary to protect cis people’s right to healthcare, too; protecting trans people’s right to dress in public as they please, and use the pronouns they please, and use public facilities, helps protect everybody’s right to self-expression in our society.
This is the only way to win. The transgender heroes of our past, from Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson to Leslie Feinberg and Lou Sullivan, the Gay Liberation Front, and ACT UP, all knew the Democratic Party was a graveyard for social movements and organized militant movements to fight for our rights outside of it. More recently, we can learn from the militancy, vibrancy, and creativity of the movement for Palestinian liberation over the last year, which was only possible by unhitching their cart from the horse of the Democratic Party.
Now, as Trump prepares to enter office and bring unprecedented attacks against our communities, we have the chance to make a choice of our own and unleash a united and powerful fight for socialism and liberation directed by us, not by political servants of the billionaire class.
