Thank you very much for this lovely message. I'm really sorry things are looking so bleak for you. I'm not USAmerican, but I've been watching the the situation there spiral into fascism with horror. Things are not looking so good here in Europe either, in general, it's quite a dark moment in history.
I write about history because it gives perspective for times like these. Every time I read about a horrific moment in history, the horrors are not what stay with me but the endless human resilience that lead humans to endure and build something beautiful from the ashes. Human kindness, bravery and resilience - humanity - shines brightest in inhuman times. We have survived so many terrible times and we will survive this as well. One of my best friends is a trans masc German, a proof that even genocide can't erase trans people, so neither will this US administration. Knowing we are not the first people to face such times, nor to survive such times, makes me feel less alone. So maybe I can tell you some stories of trans and queer history in the US, and perhaps that'll make you feel tiny bit less alone.
The period of New World chattel slavery is one of the darkest periods in history, but Black people were able to survive even that and create vibrant cultural expressions from the ashes. People always resisted slavery. There was not a moment, when everyone gave up. In Caribbean, slaves escaped all the time and became Maroons, who found home in the insular communities of the surviving indigenous Taino people of the genocides against them. They formed mixed settlement of indigenous people and escaped slaves, where their languages and traditions were mixed together to create a new culture, that preserved two traditions under threat of annihilation. They resisted constantly the tyrannical colonial powers, waged guerilla warfare against them and assisted in slave rebellions even when the punishments for them were extreme and severe. There were maroons in US as well. They didn't have dense jungle islands where they could hide their settlements in the US South, but they had swamps they used in a similar way. In the swamp settlements the maroons also were joined by indigenous people escaping the genocidal onslaught as well as other outcasts of the colonial society. Together they survived and resisted. In US too the slaves didn't just escape to freedom, they orchestrated numerous slave rebellions from the very beginning to the bitter end.
There were also some white abolitionists too, who did the right thing. John Brown was of course one of them. He believed it was his secret duty as a Christian to wage war against US until slavery was abolished and he gladly died for it. But I want to shout out a trans masc abolitionist, Public Universal Friend. Public Universal Friend has possibly the most wild and interesting story ever. The Friend was a Quaker. Quakers have always been abolitionists, even in England before slavery was banned there. The Friend lived from 1752 to 1819 in New England, dressed mostly masculine, rejected gendered pronouns and used instead The Friend and PUF as pronouns (though some of the Friend's followers referred to the Friend with he/him), became a Quaker cult leader, made the Friend's cult followers to free their slaves and preached about gender equality, universal salvation and abolition of slavery. Basically the Friend was a cult leader for good. Truly chaotic good alignment. I write about the Friend more in my post about some cool historical queer figures.
Another story starts with a pioneering American trans man, Alan L. Hart. He was born in 1890 and presented as a boy from a very young age. His parents and grandparents accepted him as a boy. In school he was forced to present as a girl, but in college he fully presented as a man. He became the first recorded trans man to surgically transition in US in 1917-1918. He was not only pioneering as a trans man, but as a doctor as well. He was instrumental in developing x-ray screening for tuberculosis, which at the time was one of the leading causes of death. His contribution has saved thousands of lives.
He was undoubtedly a trans man (he expressed it to his doctors to gain access to medical transition and in an interview after he was outed once and in all the possible ways he could really), but still couple of decades after his death in 1980s and 90s, trans-exclusionary lesbians "reclaimed" him as a historical lesbian figure. This caused a battle in the Portland queer community. Trans people, who had of course been part of the community forever, did not take such blatant erasure lying down and protested the organizations, who insisted on misgendering Hart and touting him as a "lesbian hero". They were not alone though. After being presented with the historical facts, the Lesbian Avengers joined their trans siblings in the fight. Eventually the organizations, which had kept misgendering him relented, but some trans-exclusionary lesbians still kept bringing doubt to his very clearly expressed gender identity even afterwards.
Lesbian Avengers, a direct action group, has many amazing stories in their history. One of those is told in Weird Little Guy's podcast episode Fire Will Not Consume Us. The podcast is about fascists, and this particular episode tells the story of how KKK waged a war against a rural gay bar kept by a local elderly straight couple, who had lost a child to AIDS. Their gay patrons called the lady their mom. The Lesbian Avengers showed up to stand with their gay brothers against the KKK. They chanted "Fire will not burns us. We'll take it and make it our own." to burning crosses and a KKK preacher telling them they would burn in hell. They had an fire-eating act, during which they chanted that chant, they had started after Hattie Mae Cohens and Brian Mock, a lesbian and a gay man, had been murdered with a Molotov cocktail thrown into their apartment. I really recommend that episode, it's a beautiful story of solidarity and resistance.
The lesson I take from these stories, and history in general, is that survival is resistance and we survive with solidarity. Alone we are outcasts, but together we are strong. I can only imagine how lonely it must be for you right now, but you are not alone. You have never been. Behind you is a long line of trans and queer ancestors, who stood in the same ground before you. Around you are so many facing the same enemy.
