Trans Folx were Right

And we should have listened better

By Timothy P. Holmberg 

At the dawn of the Trump era, gathered around the food spread at many gay cocktail parties, the word “trans” occasionally floated through the air. Usually between two polarized gaggles of gay men, the debate percolated as to whether there was really common cause with trans and other folx. The discussions usually bore a striking resemblance to the gulf of understanding and the apathy of many outside the gay community. 

What was clear to an uninvolved observer was that pushing back against engrained understandings of gender and gender expression was going to be a long and uphill battle. Even in a community so experienced in the effects of fear and marginalization.

To candidly sum it up: we got ours, good luck getting yours. 

Clearly, at the time, many in the LGB and even the T community felt the gains that had been made couldn’t really seriously be challenged by the incoming clown car of the Trump administration. 

How wrong we were. 

It should have been apparent. Even a cursory examination of Trump’s 2016 campaign should have more than validated his demagogue credentials. Anyone who so seamlessly could dance between lampooning a disabled reporter and advocating violence against dissenters should not have been doubted. 

Trump’s entire persona was built on goading herds to indulge their most crass instincts. 

The moves against the LGBT community were small and tepid at first. A testing of the waters to see the response. He plucked at individual threads and strands until he found one that would give. Divide and conquer. 

Eventually, Trump settled on the trans community as his target of choice. He bet that the gay community in particular would stay mute out of fear they might be next. Or perhaps out of an overconfidence that society had certainly moved beyond hating them. Love is love, right? 

History has taught us *many* times over, the hazards of failing in our solidarity against evil. At the end of WWII, a powerful poem by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller put this into words:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

(More on the poem and its author here https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...)

Todays version of the poem would likely go more like this:

First they came for black, brown and native peoples, 
But I was not black or brown or native
And so I stayed silent and went about my business
Then they came for the Democratic Socialists, Unionists and Marxists
But I was neither of those
And so I stayed silent and went about my business
Then they came for the trans folx, the gay men and lesbian women
I hesitated, but I was also not among them
And so I stayed silent and went about my business
Then they came for me
And I watched as my neighbors looked away
And they did not speak for me, but went about their business . . . 

The tyranny of our silence is the best weapon our adversaries have. And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is counting on it continuing. 

As the saying goes, “silence is the voice of complicity”. And today, that silence is almost deafening as we wake up to the assault that has gathered all around us during our distraction. They now come for us, and the question we must ponder is whether those who remain will do what many of us have failed to . . . 

(Epilogue: like many gay men, I have only occasionally spoken in defense of our trans folx. The writing of this was a cause for self reflection that I hope many undertake. 

My generation was steeped in firm notions of gender roles as finite and absolutely binary. My conception of my own identity as a gay man, a deeply emotional and personal struggle for all gay men, was still rooted in a binary view of gender. My coming out felt liberating in the sense that I was no longer accountable to society’s sexual or gender constructs. I valued the gender fluidity in our community at the time of my coming out even if I did not internalize it myself. Drag performers were to me, a direct and inspiring challenge to the imposed gender social construct. 

I reported on the trans community often during my days with the Gay & Lesbian Times. Through my friend who is native Hawaiian, I was introduced the the Hawaiian gender conception called Mahu (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Māhū). And later, I learned our own native peoples had embraced as many as five genders. 

Even with all these influences, I still struggled. My own past inertia of a gender binary world was a structure and landscape I was familiar with, even while simultaneously loathing the limitations it imposes on us all. 

We all struggle with change in certain ways. New language, new norms, or no norms at all. People naturally hold to familiarity and fear chaos. Like driving to a coffee shop on roads whose name and path changes daily.  

Today, I strive to balance familiarity with the blessings of discovery. And to hold strong to solidarity, decency and the concept of grace. Those guideposts will always be present in a just society.)