What can you do to help?
João Espírito- Santo, Trans People of Colour Youth Engagement O icer at Mermaids on how to combat anti- LGBTQ sentiment in the mainstream media
The most important advice is to constantly assess what you invest energy into. We’re often pushed into action out of a place of anger towards injustice, either by personally experiencing it or by being exposed to other people’s hardships. This anger is justi ied and deserves to be honoured. However, it’s important to re lect on how we channel it.
If we allow ourselves to only advocate for trans and queer rights when in response to transphobes on social media or people invested in chronically antagonising us, we’ll be kept in a reactive loop giving more airtime to endless surface- level debates, instead of on how trans people are not predators; how we deserve basic human decency.
This can easily lead us into looking at the trans and queer struggle in a vacuum, while sending us into burnout, without bringing any substantial improvements for trans people. Trans and queer joy is radical and essential to keep our activism sustainable, so we can’t forget to invest in dedicated initiatives and spaces for our communities’ wellbeing.
Direct action can include organising to write mass complaints or signing open letters as a response to queerphobic pieces of media. Following that, contributing to protests such as the demos that took place in front of the BBC’s headquarters, either by joining them or amplifying them through our networks.
Liberation starts with the mind. Actively looking up resources and spaces like books, articles, podcasts, documentaries, educational TikTok accounts, book clubs or archives that help us contextualise trans struggle as a working- class struggle, a Black and Brown struggle, a feminist struggle, as a police and Surveillance State matter, and so on is the ir st step to start building movements of solidarity. Solidarity towards liberation for all is our biggest strength. A great place to start [ learning] is Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice and What Can White People Do Next: From Allyship to Coalition by Emma Dabiri.