Liberation Letter: We Have Enough: Trans Liberation is Black Liberation

We Have Enough: Trans Liberation is Black Liberation

By aurelius francisco, FLM Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director  

What if…

we had everything we needed. 

–in this world 

–in this community 

–in this state 

–in this heart of mine & yours 

The first-ever iteration of FLM’s mission statement was a much too-long paragraph culminating our learnings to that point. A major reflection of mine at that time was our need to center the most marginalized in our community. Those on the margins of the margins, those at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression. We talked a lot about what it meant to have an organization founded by three Black men from the same place, though with differing backgrounds. We created one of our first trainings around this concept. And, most importantly to me, we put our thoughts and words into practice by intentionally recruiting other identity groups into our organization, specifically seeking the perspectives of Black and Brown women, queer, and trans people. Their voices and work have been instrumental in the growth of this living, breathing thing with a tax status. Mostly though, how we showed up mattered a great deal. These lessons remain. 

So as time has passed, being as clear as possible that I/we support, love, stand behind, and beside our queer, transgender, gender-nonconforming, lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, intersex, two-spirit and beyond community has been fundamental. It has set us apart from other Black-led organizations. I find this to be unfortunate more than worthy of the proverbial pat on the back. And that is the topic of this call to do better. 

I write this not to speak totally to FLM’s commitment to PRIDE as Protest year-round, but to share my journey in centering Black trans people in my activism. Simply put, transgender issues are Black issues and Black issues are transgender issues because Black transgender people exist. To erase, ignore, or deny this is to deny the existence of real-life human beings–an act of erasure that leads to harm towards transgender people, towards ourselves. Andrea Ritchie unpacks how the politics of invisibility lead to violence against Black women in her text “Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color.” Ritchie examines when people are pushed beyond the bounds of visibility they are forced into environments that are prone to be more violent, with little to no community attention to the pain they are enduring. This is what is done when Black folk choose to remain ignorant or outright prejudicial toward transgender and gender-nonconforming people. A lack of understanding can no longer be an excuse. Before I continue, an offering: here’s a necessary read, a resource and another one for you in the back. Oh! Here’s one more. 

I can’t tell you how many times I have been questioned for speaking up for trans and queer people, whether before going to a protest against anti-trans legislation at the Oklahoma State Capitol and people wondering why I spend my time in solidarity with these actions, or when in community spaces a person assumes their transphobic rhetoric will be seconded by me, and are shook when I disagree and share that I don’t believe trans issues are ‘distractions’ from Black issues. And this is the crux of the problem. Too often in our community, we move from a scarcity mindset – a white supremacy culture characteristic – that tells us that there are too few resources, too little time or attention to dedicate our bandwidth toward issues that are seen as different from our own experience. This mindset is problematic for numerous reasons. Namely because, as I said before, Black transgender people exist! They have always been here. There is enough time in the day to educate ourselves and then show up for our trans siblings. Because when we show up for them we show up for ourselves. Because none of us are free until all of us are free! Trickle-down liberation is not the path forward. Our liberation is a collective project, it will take all of us to get free, and no one is expendable. I have enough empathy, care, and love in my body and mind to disperse it across issues. And I have discovered that “Black issues”, things like police violence, mass incarceration, and redlining, are deeply connected to every other issue. In fact, every social issue is a Black issue because anti-Black racism is pervasive globally. Look across the spectrum; you cannot name a problem in our society that does not disproportionately affect Black people. This paradigm shift opens up all the space in the world to show up for all our people. Gender is a colonial social construct. When colonizers enforced a racial order that subjugated people with darker skin and made us an inferior class they also enforced gender standards of man/woman that dictated women as inferior. Our struggles are the same. 

I also believe we can and must get to a place where an action or issue doesn’t have to center ourselves to believe it is worth paying attention to. We should care because a vulnerable person or community is being persecuted. We should care because as Black people we know that feeling, we know that experience, we have felt it for more than four centuries. And we should want to end that persecution wherever it surfaces, whoever is under the boot of an oppressive force. 

To bring the point home, revered queer feminist Cathy Cohen theorizes Blackness as inherently queer. She states that in the radical potential of queer as a political frame rests all identities that stand against the norm. Blackness has always existed in the realm of “other” and thus is queer, radically different from the racial capitalist social order. 

As we continue to celebrate Pride year-round and not just in June, one of the foremothers of this movement for LGBTQ+ liberation, Marsha P. Johnson, comes to mind. Marsha P. has always shown up for ALL of US. We owe her memory and legacy the same solidarity across differences, toward a radical reclaiming of Blackness as queerness–a collectivist mindset that centers solidarity across communities of difference, from race to gender to class to nationality to ability to status. Who and what we prioritize our focus on is indicative of not just our morals but our shared humanity. I want a movement and a community that shows up as Marsha P. did, as Andrea Ritchie and Cathy Cohen do, as George M. Johnson does, as the DreamDefenders do, and as George “Conscious” Lee does. 

I know we have what we need to get free.