Why Protests Always Matter: For Trans People, Instilling Belief Leads to Change
The biggest thing that changed that day in Nebraska three decades ago? Us. We began to believe that trans people being visible could make a difference, that small acts of protest made a difference.
photo by Piper Bly
by Riki Wilchins
We’d had enough, that day in 1995. Two men were on trial for the murder of Brandon Teena, a young trans man killed in Nebraska on Christmas Day two years earlier, and a group of trans folks and queer allies decided we would travel cross-country for a crucial court hearing.
Some 40 of us flew to Kansas City and then drove to Falls City, Neb., for a memorial vigil, all of us wearing black “Transexual Menace” T-shirts. Among our ranks were the authors Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein, and a young, wannabe New York filmmaker named Kimberly Peirce researching an unlikely passion project tentatively titled “Boys Don’t Cry.”
I didn’t know what our vigil would change at that moment. It certainly wasn’t going to bring Brandon back or change the sickening history of the case. Two men would be convicted in the killing, though a bigoted local sheriff, Charles Laux, was culpable as well.
Maybe the biggest thing it changed was us: beginning to believe that perhaps trans people being visible could make a difference. You never know what a small act—like the recent protests at Stonewall Inn or outside NYU’s Langone Medical Center—will do. Or what the protests happening today across the country will accomplish.
But they always do something.
During our debriefing afterward in Kansas City, while bemoaning the fact that the news media typically ignored the murders of trans people, we resolved that from that moment on, whenever one of us fell, someone would at least show up and force the news media to cover it.
Yet even as we were feeling proud of our bold new plan, we learned that back east, near Boston, a Black trans woman named Deborah Forte had been murdered. You could see the blood drain from everyone’s faces in our group, which included the founder of GenderTalk Radio, Nancy Nangeroni, who was flying back home there.
From then on, beginning with Debbie, for the next two years whenever we got word of another murder — every couple months — Nancy, I and others would book tickets to the city and announce a “Menace Vigil.”
We never thought it would work. As I once told an interviewer, trans people were like unicorns then. Almost nobody knew one or had seen one in the wild. The term transgender wasn't in general use. The big emphasis was on self-acceptance and passing, in that order.
Trans people being visible, voluntarily outing ourselves, was entirely new. And demonstrating was practically unheard of. We were afraid of looking like idiots, a handful of us standing around in a strange city.
But something magical happened that we never anticipated. Somehow, when people flew in from out-of-town, it made it a big event. And local people who had never demonstrated in their lives or even considered doing so would feel empowered to show up, too.
I recall a few of us at a vigil for Christian Paige, on a freezing Chicago morning, right by the Picasso statue at City Hall. We started leafletting but were practically invisible. Then they drifted in, in twos and threes, and suddenly there was a crowd of trans people, and for that one morning everyone going into or out of Chicago City Hall knew the name “Christian Paige” and that she had been killed in their city.
Fast forward two decades. I was reading CNN when I came across a photo that stopped me cold: A nationwide rally had been called to protest the murders of Black trans women like Debbie and Christian, and in New York City alone thousands of people showed up, all in white t-shirts.
I stared at that picture for a long time. It still gives me chills.
Our protests today show that we won’t take the assaults on our lives lying down. They show we will stand up on our hind legs and fight back. We don’t need cisgender acceptance, but we do demand our basic human rights.
When Attorney General Loretta Lynch made her “We see you” remarks in 2016 after the Department of Justice filed suit against North Carolina’s HB-2 bathroom bill, I turned to my wife and daughter with tears in my eyes and said, “Well, we’re finally normal.”
I thought the need for protests and demonstrations and vigils had passed.
I was wrong. We need all three, now more than ever.
And it’s not about big numbers, For example, two dozen hirsute trans men just might walk into the Capitol one day soon to use the “right biological” bathroom before the cameras of CNN. Something like that could change the national dialogue.
It’s not about numbers, it’s about determination and showing up.
That day back in Nebraska three decades ago, we did enjoy a small but important victory. You see, Sheriff Laux’s indifference and bigotry had set off the chain of events that led to Brandon Teena’s murder. Teena had filed an earlier rape complaint against the two men who later killed him, but instead of investigating, Laux turned around and told the men what Teena had reported.
On the day of our vigil, though, Laux and his Sheriff’s Department had to engage head on with the trans guy coordinating our security, an off-duty cop named Tony Baretto-Neto. Our message: Your sheriff lets a transgender man die; you end up dealing with another transgender man who carries a badge and gun, just like you. That’s how change happens.
It was Tony who worked with the department to keep us safe when the local neo-Nazis showed up in a pickup spitting at us and trying to run some of us down. And it was Tony who would go on to coordinate security at most of our vigils and protests over the next two years.
So if you were wondering what’s going on and how to cope, let me offer a suggestion: Get up, stand up, suit up, and show up. Hand out a flier, hold up a sign, (lovingly) menace someone.
We may not realize it yet, but if all three million of us rise up together, we are an unstoppable force.
Riki Wilchins writes on trans theory and politics at: www.medium.com\@rikiwilchins. Her two last books are: BAD INK: How the NYTimes SOLD OUT Transgender Teens, and Healing the Broken Places: Transgender People Speak Out About Addiction & Recovery. She can be reached at TransTeensMatter@gmail.com.