Interview: Noah Buchanan, Founder of the Trans Radical Activist Network
The Trans Radical Activist Network planned a day of sharing trans stories and resisting hate. Right wing groups want you to believe they’re violent extremists.
by Evan Urquhart
In the wake of the horrific Nashville school shooting on March 27, right wing media has sought to blame the trans community for the actions of the shooter, who is believed to have been a trans man. One group in particular has been singled out by the outrage machine: Trans Radical Activist Network. Their April 1st event, which was branded “Transgender Day of Vengeance,” largely flew under the radar before this week, although some on extreme right had targeted them even before the tragedy in Nashville. False claims that Trans Day of Vengeance was a violent event have spread through the right wing press in recent days. Twitter removed posts relating to the event, many of which were made by right wing accounts condemning it, under policies that prohibit incitement to vioence.
Assigned spoke with Noah Buchanan, the founder of TRAN, about what the group stands for, and about the right wing attacks on the group, which we learned had started even before the Nashville shooting, that he and others associated with TRAN have been facing.
Assigned: Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Noah Buchanan: My name is Noah. I am a student mental health therapist, getting ready to graduate in November of this year.
Assigned: When and why did you originally found TRAN? What can you tell me about it?
Buchanan: The purpose of TRAN was to bring people together and to make things better for trans people. TRAN is mostly about developing resources for the public. We’ve developed a stop trans hate tracker, so any trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming, even intersex people, could report any type of hate, as little as being spit upon. Another resource we just released is an interactive legislative tracking map, and we’re also going to be adding some for positive legislation. We’re trying to develop resources for trans people, and the public.
Assigned: When did you decide to do an event around Transgender Day of Visibility/Vengeance?
Buchanan: We started seeing the hashtag #TransDayofVengeance last year. I started seeing more people use it, so I was like “Let’s just go with it!”
Transgender Day of Visibility is important, we definitely weren’t meaning to disrespect the importance of it, however the fact is that all of us, as a community, we’re getting attacked. We need to be united, to get together and share our stories. That’s what Trans Day of Vengeance is, it was just a protest of unity, getting together, in front of SCOTUS, sharing our stories, discussing solutions on how we can beat transphobia, and doing a march. It wasn’t anything spectacular, nobody was promoting violence. We’re not going to endorse violence, it is not welcome in the protest, and if people show up to Trans Day of Vengeance and they have the intention to start violence we will disassociate from them, because we want to protect our siblings, at the end of the day.
Assigned: Talk a little more about the hashtag #TransDayofVengeance, what that has meant in the trans community.
Buchanan: As a community, as a whole, we’ve been getting violence from all places. Legislation, physical, mental, it’s everywhere. We’ve been experiencing this for a long time, going back to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, they were dealing with this same crap, this whole time. Gatekeeping within our community. Not achieving full liberation, being erased and put in the background, not having our work acknowledged.
We believe no one fights alone, no one gets left behind. There was a protest recently that helped inspire this. We had communists, we had socialists, we had anarchists, they all showed up, and we overpowered the fascists that were there. It was so powerful because we had that protection, and we stuck together,
Assigned: So, was this a fascist rally… and a counterprotest? Tell me more, tell me what it was, when it was, give me the whole story.
Buchanan: It was on March 10, it was in Sacramento, when Chloe Cole showed up. There was a bit of a ruckus at this counter-protest, I don’t know if you heard, but there was a lady that pulled out a gun at the protest. Nobody was hurt, thank goodness.
Editor’s note: The protest against gender-affirming care in Sacramento, and the larger counter-protest, were written about in both the mainstream and anti-fascist press. Mainstream sources have reported that most protesters on both sides were non-violent, and that police declined to connect isolated incidents of violence with individuals from either side. An anti-fascist news outlet reported that trans-supportive counter-protesters confronted members of extremist groups, and that one far-right activist drew a gun and pointed it at the counter-protesters.
Assigned: Let’s talk more about what’s been happening recently. In between the planning of your event and the event itself which is planned for April 1st, there was a shooting, in a school, in Nashville. What would you like to say about the shooting, and about the shooter?
Noah: Audrey Hale. When I first heard about this, it shocked me, and in the same breath it really disheartened me. I think the shooter’s identity is irrelevant. Gender identity should not be the focus of the shooter. What he did was wrong. But, we should be talking, to some degree, about how this person may not have had access to the type of care that might have prevented this. We don’t need to be giving people more guns, we need to be giving people compassion, and empathy.
Prior to this unfortunate event, the Daily Wire had already been writing about us. They have been writing about us since, I want to say, early March.
Editor’s note: Buchanan provided links showing that the start of the Daily Wire’s targeting of TRAN was in an article on March 6. The far right site continued to reference the group in their propaganda during the month of March, before the shooting on March 27.
Noah: I got contacted by [Daily Wire writer] Luke Rosiak, asking for me to make a statement, and I chose not to talk to fascists. Ever since then, we’ve had right wingers harassing us, even before [the Nashville shooting]. When it happened, I feel like that was their golden opportunity to set it up as if we were responsible for this, when that of course was not the case.
Assigned: Tell me about, after the shooting, the kind of response from the right wing that has been directed at TRAN.
Noah: We had to lock down our accounts. I took down our page about our chapters, because we had email addresses on them. I had to remove the contact forms, because I was getting emails telling me I needed to die, I needed to eat shit. Our Facebook messenger has been getting blown up with people saying “you guys are a terrorist group, you guys will be finished.” Bigots have been mass-reporting my TikTok videos, and they were successful getting one taken down, about Matt Walsh. I’ve been up most of the night, blocking, reporting, I’ve made most of my accounts private.
Yesterday somebody found my phone number, so I’m in the process of changing my phone number now. It’s been affecting us, as a whole, pretty bad. People are scared, but we’re trying to keep hold, keep true, and just realize that this was going to come, one way or another. The hate has been escalating for years. So I mean, in a sense, this was already gonna happen.
Assigned: I know that, in many of the articles that I’ve read in the right wing press, they’ve talked about TRAN’s support for self-defense training. That’s something that can be controversial within the trans community as well. Can you talk about why and how your group has approached self-defense training, and what you’ve done there?
Assigned: Considering the political climate, it’s getting dangerous for us. We don’t actively promote saying “Hey, we’re going to help you get armed,” but we support the second amendment. If you wanna be armed, you should be. We’re also gonna offer different forms of self-defense that could be even as small as karate. Just something, a way to defend ourselves, to protect ourselves.
Assigned: Talk about the reason why you think that is needed.
Noah: What I try to encourage is using your voice. I would hope it would never have to resolve to using a weapon. For me, my moral belief, using your voice is being assertive. You can do that without being aggressive. However, I do think it is important, if people do come at us, we need to learn how to defend ourselves. It’s dangerous these days for trans people to be walking around. People need to feel safe, plain and simple. We should be able to use our voice without having to defend ourselves, but we also want to help trans people, if they do have to defend themselves.
Assigned: So, let’s go back to your event. Is it still happening? What’s the schedule, what’s the plan?
Assigned: Not a lot of people are talking about this, but the Trans Day of Vengeance event was actually supposed to be done in two settings. One in DC I’m personally not in charge of, my co-founder is in charge of that. I am running an online event, it’s called Trans Day of Liberation because I rebranded it after all this. It’s gonna occur on the same day, April 1, at 2pm PST, and we’re going to have a Q&A, open mic, some entertainment, to make it fun for people. Get together! We want to make it kinda like what DC was doing, sharing our stories, sharing the problems that are going on and discussing the solutions. That’s, essentially, how DC was gonna be.
Editor’s note: At the time we went to press we were unable to confirm whether the DC event was going ahead as scheduled. After publication it was confirmed that the Trans Day of Vengeance march and rally planned for April 1 at the US Supreme Court was cancelled by the organizers due to safety concerns.
Assigned: Do you have anything you want to say to trans people who are feeling really scared right now?
Noah: To all the trans people, and the nonbinary people, and intersex people, all of you. I know that this time is very scary. But we must stick together. We must unite. Please.
We are human beings. We have the right to exist. You are all authentic, you’re beautiful, and that needs to be shown. Don’t ever, ever, hide your pride. Don’t ever be ashamed of who you are. And know that you are not alone. There are people around you, whether you recognize it or not, there are people around you to support you.
