Trans folks need more than just visibility

On Mar. 31, trans people around the world take over the internet with their snazzy little pictures. They’re often wearing fashionable going-out outfits from back when going out was a thing, while their eyelids may be painted with bright colours and emphasized with sharp liner. They sport mullets, shaved heads or gloriously long curtains of hair. They pose with partners or best friends or negotiate with the camera alone. They might accompany their photos with long, heartfelt, emotionally charged captions or short, cynical, humourous ones. Is there some kind of a virtual party? Have the queer sex clubs opened their doors again already? No—it’s International Trans Day of Visibility (TDoV). 

This day of recognition was founded in 2009 by Michigan-based trans activist and psychotherapist Rachel Crandall Crocker. Crandall Crocker wanted an alternative to November’s Trans Day of Remembrance—a day focused on celebrating trans people while we were alive.

These days, TDoV is an annual event for trans people to stand up and witness one another by indulging in quasi-ironic selfie posting; for our allies to signal their solidarity with our struggles through infographic shares and hashtags; and for corporations to paint their brand image in a more benevolent, socially engaged light by posting the least controversial statements their PR teams can ring up. 

Now, on the 12th anniversary of this global event of recognition, it’s perhaps worth interrogating the methods through which we advocate for ourselves. Is it time for us to move past just visibility? 

TDoV is a reimagining of representation on our own terms. Cisnormative society at large can be quite aggressive in its erasure of trans existence, preventing us from existing by blocking access to gender-affirming health care, forcing us into conversion therapy, barring us from public life by enacting legislation against us and relegating us to the margins through employment and housing discrimination. 

These anti-trans powers also create images with the intention of mocking us or stoking fear about us, making trans people into monsters or the butts of raunchy jokes. Like the rest of my generation, I grew up with Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill, Lieutenant Einhorn and The Crying Game’s Dil. The traumatic effects of having these disturbing stereotypes be your only points of reference for what a trans person is cannot be overstated: You grow up believing that transness is a disgusting, dirty secret; a fetish, a scandal, a crime. TDoV works to make room for actual visibility, to gesture to the world that trans people are real people. 

But there are constraints on what visibility can actually do. TDoV asks for nothing other than to witness us, to acknowledge our existence. I’m not sure that’s enough—and I want us to be audacious enough to ask for more. It’s telling that TDoV has found international popularity in contrast to the Trans Day of Action (TDoA), an annual march and rally held by the Audre Lorde Project in New York since 2006 that aims to advance specific trans-related policy goals. Though it’s difficult to quantify how successful TDoA has been at reaching its goals, they’ve succeeded on another front—connecting trans people to one another while firmly grounding our struggles in issues like disability justice, anti-racism and police abolition. The necessary politics of TDoA are far less acceptable to wider society than a day like TDoV. Visibility is a lot more palatable than action; and if you unfocus your eyes, you might even be able to confuse the former for the latter.   

Many of our allies—and the legions of brands that seek to sell us their wares—use TDoV to express solidarity. We can intuit that the intent behind this is to ease the oppression we face. But when I’m being beat down in a darkened alleyway, I don’t want a good samaritan to shine a flashlight on my face—I want them to wrest my assailant off of me. I want them to provide me with the means to ensure that I don’t ever need to be moving through darkened alleyways. 

At its best, TDoV is a nod of solidarity between trans people across the world, reaching out to one another with our presence. At its worst, it’s a paltry marketing effort, an opportunity for companies and individuals to reach out and lazily put forth empty statements of acknowledgement to try and score points for their brand image, personal or otherwise. “Trans people exist,” tweeted Oreo’s official account, in an attempt to gain face from recent allegations of using child slavery. 

Of course we exist. Even our worst opponents acknowledge that. Throughout 2020, we were as visible as possible, lights shining grossly bright on us from every wing of the stage. We were assumed omnipresent—in public toilets, in women’s sports, in pediatric clinics, controlling the media, mobbing people off of Twitter. Every magazine, newspaper and podcast wanted to talk about us. 

And where this hyper-visibility ended up was a new wave of bills attempting to legislate us out of public life entirely. This year saw a record-setting 82 anti-trans bills being introduced at state legislatures all across the U.S.: Arkansas passed a bill on Mar. 29 banning gender-affirming health care for trans youth; Mississippi and Arkansas both banned trans women from women’s sports; and Texas, South Carolina and other states are considering similar legislation. Out of the legislature and onto the internet, public figures like J.K. Rowling and Dan Savage side with transphobia, while the media takes an increasingly aggressive stance toward our communities. Pseudo-intellectual pundits like Jordan Peterson and Abigail Shrier find their way into the limelight solely by publicly opposing trans rights. 

Many of us are tired of being visible, tired of being scrutinized and puzzled over every hour of our lives. Many of us don’t want visibility—we want action. And yet, because of how successful anti-trans propaganda has been, the public has begun to believe that even an invocation of the trans community is a form of political activism. 

I want us to think beyond simple invocation. I want our protections against discrimination to be an inalienable fact, not a discussion. I want all forms of our gender-affirming health care to be covered, from hormone therapy to voice training to surgeries to hair removal. I want us to never worry about whether we pass as cis or how to word our requests in the most polite, least threatening way possible. Most of all, I want us to have the audaciousness to ask not just for what they think we deserve, but for what we know we deserve. For what we need. 

And herein lies the true problem with TDoV: We’ve become so tainted by the paltry scope of the political field our opponents have relegated us to that we can no longer see the bigger picture. While it can be emotionally invigorating, a sympathetic nod should not be confused with a helping hand. Simple acknowledgement is not an action in itself; it’s only a precursor to the movement that’s meant to follow. Put up branded billboards letting others know that you’ve seen the mythological sinking ship, but it won’t stop sinking until someone comes to fish it out of the deep, dark depths. How long until we shift our activism away from being visible, and move on to something a bit more substantial? How long until our allies stop waving at us from the safety of the sidelines, and start helping us out of the wreck? 

For me, TDoV is a day much like any other. I’ll go to work in the morning, buy a coffee at noon, cook dinner and watch a horror movie in the evening. I won’t necessarily feel empowered or held. But I’ll try to exercise more restraint with my internet use than usual. There’s nothing I need less than the miserable surrealism of a sea of PR statements professing solidarity, interrupted occasionally by news about hateful legislation or a link to a grossly underfunded health care crowdraising campaign. I just hope the ways we’re fighting for our lives aren’t crowded out by all this visibility.