It’s 2024, ten years past the so-called “trans tipping point,” and while we’ve made gains, it is a widely acknowledged reality among most trans communities that the situation around our civil rights has severely devolved in the past decade. Today, trans rights are the subject of an international moral panic and anti-trans legislation has been introduced in several countries around the world, including both the U.S. and Canada. The so-called “gender critical” movement has arguably become an industry unto itself, spearheaded by notorious figures such as billionaire Elon Musk and Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling. It’s also launched—or boosted—the careers of self-styled cultural figures such as Jordan Peterson, Matt Walsh and Posie Parker.
At the heart of all this, and perhaps most worrying of all, is the apparent normalization of transphobia among the general population. It has, in some circles, become common and even trendy to endorse fear, hatred and disgust at the very idea of our public existence—to the extent that the subject of our human rights have been weaponized as a wedge issue by countless politicians over the past four years. Yet this social panic, like most social panics, is based on fear and misinformation—it can be resisted and transformed through solidarity work and coalition-building.
It therefore seems clear that the LGBTQ2S+ community—and particularly those of us in roles of leadership, cultural influence and social privilege—is in dire need of a strategy to transform our relationships with those who misunderstand and fear us. In order to push back, we need to develop stronger collective skills and capacity to engage in education, coalition-building and solidarity work with the communities that have been specifically targeted by transphobic and homophobic propaganda: migrants, working-class white people, the heterosexual parents of suburban nuclear families, to name a few. In short, we must learn how to talk to transphobes, and we must learn to do it well.
To some readers of Xtra, this may seem like common sense; to others, it is likely to feel very much at odds with the popular social justice culture of the last decade. A decade ago, my own younger radical queer activist self would have found it unthinkable that I would ever embrace such an idea—I probably would have denounced it as mealy-mouthed liberalism. Yet today, as a slightly older radical queer, I am convinced that finding a way to persuade those who fear us that we are not, in fact, so different after all is the only way for us to win the future that we long for: a future that is safer and more just for everyone.
Popular social justice discourse throughout the 2010s was dominated by a particular style of identity-focused intersectional feminism—a style that many young millennial cultural workers, writers and media-makers (including myself, in some small ways) were a part of articulating. For many of the queer and trans people within this milieu, the notion of educating others out of prejudice came to be seen not only as an ineffective strategy for social change but antithetical to the project of liberation entirely because of the burden it places on us to act as ad hoc ambassadors for our entire communities. The sentiment of “it’s not my job to educate you” became a common refrain among us, as did a certain resistance to the idea of doing the “emotional labour” of discussing the rights of marginalized groups with outside audiences.
“It is increasingly clear that ‘it’s not our job to educate you’ is not a winning strategy for a movement seeking social change.”
While I remain sympathetic to this line of thinking—it is indeed a burden to have to defend one’s humanity to potentially unsympathetic audiences, and such a responsibility should never be placed on the shoulders of the most vulnerable among us, such as children and youth—it seems increasingly clear that “it’s not our job to educate you” is not a winning strategy for an entire movement seeking widespread social change.
For those of us who identify as activists, advocates, cultural workers and social change-makers, educating others purposefully, persuasively and well is actually an essential part of the job description. It’s one of the most important capacities for trans rights advocates and allies to develop.
One of Canada’s most prominent contemporary trans rights activists is Fae Johnstone, a trans woman in her late 20s. The executive director of Momentum (and an occasional Xtra contributor), a national-level advocacy network for queer and trans rights, Johnstone has spent years developing strategies for building solidarity between the struggle for trans rights and the struggles of people who might never before have considered themselves to have anything in common with the trans community.
“I love speaking with people who challenge me,” Johnstone says, “It shows me where they are … We often tell people to give us the benefit of the doubt and to believe that we are who we say we are. And for many [straight cis] people, their biological sex is how they understand their gender identity. If we are asking people for the benefit of the doubt about who we are, then we need to give them the benefit of the doubt to tell us how they understand themselves.”
Johnstone underlines the importance of authentic connection with those we seek to persuade: “The thing I would like queer and trans people to do as advocacy,” she says, “[is] get off social media and grab a beer with the dude who lives around the corner […] talk to the Muslim mom who is concerned about what they are teaching [about gender] in schools and is acting in the best interests of her kid, talk to the factory worker and the farmer who don’t know anything about us.”
As a former family therapist for parents of queer and trans youth and a mediator of social issues-based conflict today, I find a lot of resonance in Johnstone’s perspective with my own experience of professional practice. Simply put, most people are more willing to try to understand others once they themselves feel understood.
Though this simple fact of human nature is likely to seem obvious, what requires greater skill and complexity is using that knowledge to craft effective messaging and hold dialogues that are truly transformative. Working with people who may hold prejudiced views is not simply about making a lot of space for them to express those views. It is about listening to the emotions beneath the words, about being curious about what people really fear and long for—and then effectively responding to those deeper drives.
For example, parents who oppose gender-affirming content such as trans-authored books or classes or lessons about gender diversity in schools may speak at the surface level about specific school policies or practices. They might repeat transphobic rhetoric portraying trans people as predatory or mentally ill, which of course is hurtful for many of us to hear—as it was for me in my days as a family therapist.
Yet there is a great power in listening to the fear beneath the rhetoric. For nearly all parents, it is the fear of failing: to protect their children, to wisely guide their children, to pass on essential values and traditions to their children. It is also the fear of losing their children—the primal fear of every parent—as they grow up and away, flying into a different world that their guardians cannot understand. This fear is often exacerbated by the racism and xenophobia faced by racialized and migrant parents, whose relationships with their children are often undermined by dominant culture values of assimilation—which is perhaps part of why some migrant communities were overrepresented in 2023’s anti-trans “Million March” demonstrations in Canada.
As advocates for trans youth, the power in understanding these fears is that in understanding them, we become far more capable of responding in a way that is likely to bring those parents closer to understanding us. Similarly, understanding the fears of women who oppose trans inclusion in women’s spaces—which are primarily about losing protection from misogynist violence—makes us more capable of building solidarity with them, even when we do not always agree.
What can we say in response to such fears? We can be clear that our movement is not about taking children away from their parents, nor is it about telling parents that they don’t know what’s best for their kids. We can be clear that our greatest wish is to support parents and trans youth to be closer and more connected, to create pathways for happy and healthy families to thrive. We can send the message to cis women that trans people are their allies and comrades in the fight against patriarchal violence—that the priorities of women’s healthcare, women’s priority housing and supports for women experiencing intimate partner violence are indeed central to the vision of a trans-positive world. We can tell them that we understand them because we are not so different after all—and we are, in fact, on their side.
Johnstone also seems to believe in the vision of bridge building as advocacy, and she particularly stresses the importance of making what she calls the “pivot to shared values—that is, looking past political disagreements and our own moral judgment to the universal values that connect us as human beings. “We have looked at those who disagree with us as if they are not just logically wrong but that their values are morally wrong,” Johnstone reflects, “and that’s what makes it harder to win. The farmer is not your enemy, the factory worker is not your enemy, the conservative migrant mom is not either. They are friends who are yet to be made.”
“The key to victory—to truly transformative social justice movements—is and has always been solidarity.”
For those interested in building solidarity and understanding with those “friends yet to be made,” some key questions arise: Where to begin? How do we start those conversations, and with whom? And how can we protect ourselves when the conversation becomes toxic?
For those of us in fields such as arts, culture, media, education, leadership and advocacy, we can start by conceptualizing at least some of our work as an entryway to conversation. We can ask ourselves: Are we writing, creating art and media content, and hosting conversations in a way that aims to be accessible, relatable and open to dialogue? Can we use our platforms and positions to anticipate and speak to the fears of people who don’t understand us, and offer them a more hopeful vision?
For those who are not in a position to work with the public writ large, a good start can be leveraging existing relationships: looking for opportunities to open up conversation with family, friends, coworkers and acquaintances from a place of curiosity and intention to connect—when it is safe to do so.
Safety is, of course, a key consideration when taking on the work of shifting transphobic attitudes. We have to balance taking on meaningful risks for the sake of social change with our needs for dignity, respect and respite from the prejudice of the world. While it is important to engage with different perspectives, we are also allowed to set boundaries on how those conversations happen, giving ourselves permission to require respect from conversation partners and to leave unsafe situations is essential. Moreover, doing this work with the support of friends and community members rather than alone is far less likely to lead to burnout.
The key to victory—to truly transformative social justice movements—is and has always been solidarity. Trans people today are in the midst of a historic struggle for our rights and freedoms, and to win, we must cultivate a collective resilience and strength to rival that of all the activists and freedom fighters who came before us. We must win the struggle for the hearts and minds of the majority, not only for ourselves but for generations to come. To do so, we must be willing to develop curiosity and compassion for those who do not understand us. We must become messengers of hope and visionaries of a better world in a time of cynicism and bigotry—messengers of a world where everyone belongs.
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