That’s it. That’s the tweet. That’s the title of the op-ed. That’s the content of the op-ed. That’s the ask. The trans movement needs you to lie to cis people: we need you to tell them you won’t vote for transphobic Democrats. Regardless of whether you can or can’t stomach voting for transphobic Democrats, you have to tell anyone who asks (and anyone who doesn’t, if you’re the kind of person who tells people things without their asking – I see you, Posters) that you can’t and won’t vote for transphobic Democrats.
We’ve all been inundated with reporting like this recent article from The 19th quoting trans people saying they’re voting for transphobic Democrats. The Advocate recently published this soul-crushing interaction from outside a Virginia town hall (during which Rep. Vindman [D-VA-7] treated trans attendees so poorly he later issued an apology – not even Rep. Moulton [D-MA-6] has felt the need to apologize for his transphobia):
One transgender woman described the choice as one between “callous dismissal and active hatred.” She lamented that Vindman had no primary challenger who might have forced a debate over votes like this one.
Yet as the meeting broke up, attendees were still walking out with yard signs for Vindman and Sen. Mark Warner.
Even after Vindman had left, one of the transgender women acknowledged what she expected to do in November.
“I hate to say it,” she said. “I’m still going to have to vote for him.”
How does that make you feel? Because it makes me feel bad.
Trans journalist Erin Reed – who is, frankly, one of our only public figures with reach and credibility willing to consistently call Democrats out on This Shit – is asking you to withhold your vote from the worst of the worst. But I’m not here to tell you to vote for them and I’m not here to tell you not to vote for them. What you do in the voting booth you have to live with, but what you do outside of the voting booth we all have to live with.
And we can’t live like this.
We aren’t living like this – we’re getting crushed, the least visible and most vulnerable of us first, even if it’s not yet you. (Get ready for the impact of the EHB regulation nobody’s told you about as insurance plans roll over and renegotiate, though!) By the time Trump took office again, nearly half of the trans people under 18 in the country had already had their HRT and surgery outlawed with barely any appropriately serious coverage in cis media. If anything, reporting has often represented the opposite and has pointedly failed to talk to trans families here in places like Louisiana, who are reading these headlines on multi-day drives to clinics where they can still get treatment wondering what the fuck these cis journalists and politicians are talking about. We aren’t living like this, and nobody knows it but us, and we need to make this clear standing shoulder to shoulder. We are moving into an AIDS-level crisis without an Act Up.
***
Cis people are out here lying about us constantly – the vast majority of what cis people say about us is absolute bullshit, but bullshit is politics (also, politics is bullshit). The President of the United States of America is using the t-slur and claiming you abuse children and that Haitian Americans eat cats. The Department of Health and Human Services is claiming you’ve mutilated yourselves but every cis man in the country should be on testosterone and that Tylenol causes autism. Governors say you pee in litterboxes while teachers perform surgery on your classmates. Legislators call you demons in committee hearings and post white supremecist memes on Twitter. The news publishes “initial reports” from LibsOfTikTok that you commit every mass shooting. Federal documents call you terrorists and everyone is working tirelessly for a ceasefire.
And not only are the vast majority of Democratic elected officials and electoral candidates remaining completely silent in the face of this billion dollar extermination campaign, and not only do most of the ones who don’t remain silent use “pro-trans” states’ rights talking points (which, to be fair, our own nominally trans and queer advocacy organizations gave them), but a significant fraction of them are actively running ads explicitly saying they want to enact the same policies as Republicans, reinforcing these lies. The number of shits the Democratic party has given about any of this so far is negative.
So why are we nodding with resigned assent as cis people define us not only in their own words but with their own words coming out of trans mouths?
There are more than enough trans people already available to represent the concept of reluctantly (or – saints preserve us – eagerly) supporting transphobic Democrats. They’re already in every article. They’re already in all the interviews. They’re already on social media. The executive directors of national LGBTQ organizations are already pushing this with pathetic smiles on network television. The one single trans Congresswoman barely deigns to mention us and when she does it’s to call trans Twitter rude for opposing anti-trans policy. That base is unfortunately completely covered and you couldn’t possibly add anything to it even if you wanted to.
Trans shame is all over cis media. That’s cis people’s job.
What isn’t represented anywhere visible is trans pride. That’s our job. And we aren’t fucking doing it.
***
Deference and accommodation and reassurance and smiling through gritted teeth and parting ourselves out are choices that should be made with intention and purpose informed by and with community experience and guidance – I need to be whatever this doctor wants me to be to get the diagnosis my insurance demands, or I need them to write me this prescription for reliable testosterone access, or I need two cis people to vouch for me to get surgery, or I need this cis person to think I’m binary-identified to get this apartment, or I have to use my cis-passing voice to be respected in this meeting, or if I don’t stay stealth this man will murder me, etc.
But trans subservience has always been virtuoso performance, a fulcrum for leveraging cis ignorance, a careful manipulation of systems not designed for us to achieve lives we’ve designed for ourselves.
We’ve all done it. We’ve all had to. But it’s absolutely crucial to remember that our subservience is an act – an act of survival, often – but an act. If you can perform the trans subservience you don’t owe them you can damn well perform the trans pride you do owe the rest of us.
I am not talking out my ass. I have dedicated my life to trans advocacy, which I’ve been doing for fun and (non-)profit for nearly fifteen years at the state, local, and national levels. You’ve heard of laws I’ve passed and bills I’ve defeated and I have a better record against House Speaker Mike Johnson than Congressional Democrats. (Unfortunately, because the universe is perverse and transphobic to me specifically, there’s literally a new Rep. Mike Johnson in the Louisiana legislature filing the same kind of sewage as the old one.)
So I say this with all the weight I can put behind it: As a political strategy, as a comms strategy, as an advocacy strategy, as an organizing strategy, and as a point of trans dignity, we desperately need you to say you are not voting for and will not vote for transphobia.
When advocates walk into lobbying meetings or committee rooms to fight like hell against a healthcare ban, how are we supposed to get legislators to take us seriously about how unacceptable it is if every trans person anyone ever hears from is saying it’s acceptable? When hundreds of us show up outside capitol buildings or march through downtown streets, the contrast with the mass capitulation portrayed in mass media makes us look like unreasonable extremists simply for opposing anti-trans policy cis people decided to start passing out of nowhere. When journalists write about how the trans community is dealing with what’s being done to us and we wave it off, they’ll wave it off and more. When Democrats with zero core values get their positions from vibes, the vibes are cis media and cis consultants and cis Republicans, all of whom are pushing anti-trans policy and emphasizing the utter lack of repercussions – and hell, the the presence of actual fucking endorsements – for transphobia.
I do exactly that work, and there is a night and day, life and death difference between walking into a negotiation with an angry mob at my back with torches and pitchforks demanding trans liberation, threatening to break down the office door behind me, and walking into a negotiation alone. Walking into a negotiation with headlines already contradicting the arguments I’m making is barely distinguishable from showing up to lose. This is not a complicated concept – the more we demand the more we can hold, and the more we give them the more they take. If you’re doubtful, just look at the other guys’ success with this basic tenet of politics.
The Overton window on trans existence has been dragged so far to the right over the last decade that it’s letting in the breeze somewhere on the moon at this point, and yet we’re still showing up with self-effacing, pre-compromised asks and messaging tailored for cis comfort rather than trans needs. We have no north star to look to for a full-throated articulation of our vision for liberation, no battle flag to rally under, and we won’t have one unless we build it ourselves, brick through a window by brick through a window.
And anyway, what could you possibly say that’s more absurd or extreme than the lies being told about us? What could you possibly do to rival the magnitude of the destruction of access to HRT and surgery for trans people under 18 or our exile from every sport from competitive chess to recreational tennis to peeing in peace?
We cannot go too far in standing up for ourselves.
So ask your trans friends if they’d think less of you for telling reporters you can’t, won’t, or didn’t vote for a transphobic Democrat. Seriously. Ask them. Hit up your roller derby teammates or the group chat or Discord or organizing meeting. Ask the trans people in your life if they’d give a shit. They won’t.
If you’re not casting your ballot for a transphobic Democrat, tell cis people that. And if you are casting your ballot for a transphobic Democrat, no you aren’t, because we need you to do what we’ve always done to survive: lie to cis people. If you can’t do it for the community welfare and political positioning, do it for the trans pride you owe yourself.
Or at the very least shut the fuck up.
Corinne Green (she/they) is an LGBTQ and harm reduction activist, policy advocate, and professional photographer from New Orleans. Former President of Louisiana Trans Advocates, they’ve done policy for Equality Louisiana, Transgender Law Center, Equality Federation, and Gov. John Bel Edwards. Their legislative work includes California’s Gender Recognition Act, Louisiana’s Overdose Good Samaritan Act, and sex worker protections in New Orleans. Most recently, they co-founded Trans News Network, a nonprofit collective news outlet, and Trans Income Project, which runs a step-in payor program to transparently maintain trans Medicaid HRT coverage in response to Louisiana’s ban.
They can be found on Bluesky @ket.bsky.social.
