The Sky Is Falling: Panicking Will Not Save Us, Organising Will (Patreon)

Originally I wrote this on my tumblr in response to the publishing of the Cass Review, but as I feel this advice is important I realised the limited visibility and shareability of that post was running counter to my intentions. I’m putting it up as a public post on my patreon because I don’t yet have another writing blog or outlet but as soon as I figure out what I want to do there I’ll put it there too. The assembly structures I am describing here are based primarily on the reports of American comrades and trans organising in the North and directed as organising guidelines for trans people in London, but I want to remove those specificities to make this broadly available to trans people in all the places that trans lives are under attack.

We have been saying for years that the anti-trans project is genocidal. I have been saying for years that we are facing genocide. Cis people are starting to realise that this is true and repeat it to other cis people, but without direction, repeatedly describing our situation achieves very little. This is why the following thoughts are shaped around the structuring of trans organising to democratically arrive at conclusions that will best help trans people to survive and then deliver those conclusions to cis allies so that they can help.

I will also be talking below extensively about the problems of the activist faction of our community, but these are known quantities, not original thoughts. I am not attacking our activists for being in privileged positions that give them the time to be involved in organising, for having the education that makes their activism possible, or for desiring to avoid putting themselves in positions of power over others in their organising. I am simply trying to show the blindspots that emerge from our confirmation biases, describe how we use our time most effectively to empower the whole community and our allies to act, and urge our most anarchist leaning activists to not let a phobia of organised structures completely frustrate any organising whatsoever.

In their excellent book Abolition Revolution, Shanice Octavia McBean and Aviah Sarah Day outline various stages of the development of Sisters Uncut, the abolitionist feminist organisation working around the UK, and when they discuss the moment that made Sisters most notorious - their response to the murder of Sarah Everard by Metropolitan Police Officer Wayne Couzens - they are quite pointed in highlighting that it was the years of preparation, planning, consciousness raising, discussion, organising and community building that Sisters engaged in that made their quick, decisive and inspiring response possible and therefore brought police abolition as a feminist issue into the mainstream public consciousness.

Two days after I first wrote this as a tumblr post, The Dyke Project dropped a banner on Westminster Bridge declaring “HANDS OFF TRANS HEALTHCARE” - this was only possible because they were organising for a long time before the Cass Review was published. Both this and the vigil for Sarah Everard were acts of spectacular protest, but we can and must learn the same lesson about the response to government attacks on the provision of services for our community.

For the survival of young trans people, robust community structures must be developed immediately.

Efforts to change the electoral situation will proceed at a snail's pace and will be entirely at the whims of what is politically expedient. It will turn around, but it will take a long time. At the voting level, everyone who cares about trans people needs to make it clear that they won't vote for liberal parties that are doing nothing to stop our extermination unless those parties reverse position, and to be clear about this: the liberals will most likely not listen. They are PR Brained Psychopaths and they don't want to get into this "controversial" issue in a way that might cost them further popularity and the easy election win. 

In the UK this is straightforwardly the case: Labour will not side with trans people against our extermination. Wes Streeting, inhuman lab experiment and Labour Shadow Health Secretary has said that activists need to "stop protesting to ask us to be better opposition and start protesting to ask us to be better government", in other words their electoral promises are cynical reactionary bargains and deals to get them into power and the only point at which they will change anything is once they are in government, if at all. I know this sounds very "push Biden left" but I'm not saying give up now - to repeat, everyone who cares about trans people in the UK should tell Labour to get fucked right away, and then keep doing it as loudly as possible, but it's just not going to change until after the general election at least.

Another way to help could be through legal routes, like the work that The Good Law Project has been doing for trans people for several years now, but I don't know enough about the law to know if it can be used to challenge this at all.

The US situation as best I can determine varies wildly from state to state, as does the European situation. If you find yourself in a place with liberals who will help, then congratulations, your vote may save lives - the need for you to organise is no less and if you are in a state to which trans people are fleeing to seek refuge, it is arguable your need to organise is even greater.

We have to accept there is no electoral solution right now to this genocidal campaign against trans people, and while those efforts are ongoing trans people and cis allies need to fucking organise. Trans exclusive / separatist organising is riddled with issues, I don't want to cast hopelessness around but there are really very few of us and while it's absolutely necessary to privilege trans voices in trans organising and give us the deciding power and the autonomy, we need to utilise the support and time and labour of every cis person who is willing to help in whatever way they can.

Robust community structures means community structures that are helping young trans people get healthcare as an absolute basic starting point, but it means a lot more than that besides. We need community structures that are consciously organised by people who are taking responsibility for the community roles they are in and being completely explicit with each other about the nature and function of their organising. We need HRT community resources so trans people can survive medical segregation, we need drug user harm reduction spaces so that what people turn to in despair doesn't kill them, we need sober spaces so that people can get away from unhealthy coping responses, we need conflict resolution structures so that our problems are dealt with privately and nobody is left completely isolated, but more than any of those things, and in order to have all of those things, we desperately need trans assemblies

Assemblies are how we will get a community of robust radical organisers, because only by repeatedly practising the ongoing process of democracy can people learn how to do it in a way that will facilitate their own organising. We have to empower the whole community to answer our own questions, come up with solutions, organise people into structures to enact those solutions and then do them. All this means is that an open door event convenes frequently (at least fortnightly) to discuss what is happening in the community. Trans people get the mic for allotted time, and discuss the issues, and then whatever voting structure the assembly uses facilitates further discussion, for example through working groups - the assembly breaks into smaller groups to discuss the topic and then representatives report the outcomes of those discussions back and consensus is reached from what the representatives report.

We have to get people engaging in this process because in order to effectively combat this situation trans people must agree on the solutions and then tell cis allies how to help and so far we haven't been doing that. We really really haven't been. But we could be with a little work. And as I'm saying, doing this will also empower everyone in the community to organise toward specific solutions for specific issues like HRT provision, sober spaces, housing, food, etc.

I want to preempt here the thoughts that I know it's easy to have when this stuff feels overwhelming, that community organising "isn't enough" or it's too small to make the necessary change.

One of the ways that states maintain asymmetry in conflict with marginalised people is the dependence that the community has on resources the state controls. In concert with capitalism, the modern neoliberal state has disempowered and alienated individuals to a point where so much of the basics of survival and feeling like a human being feel out of our hands, and as soon as you start even just sharing regular meals with people that you're in community with you feel infinitely freer.

Controlling the entire supply and distribution chain of HRT is how the state is able to say with such ease and swiftness that trans people can't have it. The power to reverse that is in the hands of the trans community and cis allies, if they simply begin to build community structures. The advantage of the state disappears, the independence and autonomy of the community materialises. The ability to meaningfully negotiate how any group of people engage with, delegate responsibility to, and consent to the power and policing of the state is in direct proportion to that people's ability to be self-sufficient, that's why controlling the land is so important to states, but the same logic applies in every part of our lives: food, work, housing, community, public space access, healthcare.

So

Writing a constitution for your trans assembly doesn't have to mean policing the space and it absolutely must not mean that everyone who enters aligns perfectly with the constitution and is ideologically pure. Purity is the antechamber of fascism. Writing a constitution for the organisational structure of an assembly means figuring out core values and processes. It means that the people who come into your space can depend on the space to operate in the ways that you have laid out and for there to be clear expectations for their behaviour in the space, without being rules to access the assembly.

For example your assembly might be a sober space, and that doesn't have to mean that you're turning away trans people at the door because they smoked a joint on the way, but it means that the assurance of no ongoing drug use at the event makes it a safe place for people in recovery to attend and have their voices heard. You can create structure and assume the temporary responsibility of that structure to facilitate the assembly without ingraining power or authority over others, and such power that you do wield is mitigated by explicitly communicating your values and org processes. Community power is often far more insidiously and deeply entrenched by unstated positions based on interpersonal relationships than organising positions, and the more rigorously defined roles, processes and constitutions of organisations are, the safer the community can be.

For example, outlining conflict resolution values and processes doesn't mean that you will act as a community resolution service, it means that if anyone has problems with someone taking the mic at the assembly there is a clear framework through which they can take issue and if someone is allowed to speak at the assembly it means that your organisation is satisfied that any issues are resolved, or you're indifferent, or whatever stance you've taken in your constitution, but not that you're "platforming" or supporting someone that someone's friends don't like. Explicit frameworks and structure allow distancing from the interpersonal in this way.

The assembly, as a democratic structure pointed towards the issues that affect the majority of those assembled, is liable to expose that trans issues are working class issues and vice versa. For example, it seems like almost a given that many speakers will use the last 30 seconds of their time to say “also I have a gofundme for XYZ surgery or healthcare fund or rent survival fund or legal battle, so please check that out and help me if you can” and it is categorically their right to do that, but it obviously points to the financial precarity that the community faces, which again is something that our activist faction - comprising a fair few middle class liberals - are often blind to. 

As an illustrative example, I was talking to someone (not a liberal, but) fairly materially comfortable who wanted to use her privilege to help facilitate trans assemblies, and I raised this idea, that it may be wise to direct speakers as to when and how to use their time for plugging fundraisers in order to keep the speeches efficient, and she said “should we let them?” Like, should it be allowed for people to use some of their time to ask for money.

To bring the discussion around to one of the most difficult topics in this field, anti-carceral community structures must include community mental health resources, and I say this is one of the hardest topics we can talk about because it is. Among the activist faction of our community I have known some who stigmatise and would happily dispose of inconvenient, disruptive Mad trans people and some who furiously burn themselves out trying to keep any trans person they can out of psych wards. I have also been both of these at times, to my chagrin. I am also one of the Mad trans people and have been kept out of psych wards by people who have put a tremendous effort into my wellbeing. If you have loved a trans person who has been through the psychiatric system you must recognise the need for our community to develop trauma informed systems to help trans people get the help they need without being incarcerated by the state’s farcical excuse for a mental healthcare system. This is no small task, and even those I know in intentional living communities, communes and so on describe mental health responses as one of the hardest things for a community to deal with, but as much as we are a community full of people who are struggling, we are also a community full of people with all the tools we need to figure out how to help people who are struggling if we can open and sustain an honest and fearless dialogue about it.

Structures emerging from assemblies are going to be born out of people authentically discussing the issues that affect them rather than an abstracted group (even if they're a group within a marginalised community) taking on the responsibility to be the architects of liberation, which has various advantages. For one, the paternalism of radicals is often hard to spot from the inside, but the way that activists and more politicised members of a group take on the responsibility to be the ones making it all happen is a huge stunting force against anything actually happening because of the distinction and therefore alienation being made between the politicised and non-politicised community members (this is why it's good to offer free food at your assembly and anything else that can give it a bit more social pull). Structures born out of assemblies benefit from the insights of "ordinary" non-politicised community members which are frequently free of the prefigurative political frameworks the politicised members will apply that can make opportunities for organising slip through the cracks. At the same time, the politicisation of those non-politicised members is a huge part of the aim and itself a huge benefit of giving people a space for discussion. The structures that will come out of a democratic assembly to tackle the problems discussed therein will comprise new and old organisers who are all invested in getting something done in a way that a recruit to an org set up by politicised actors to tackle a problem won't.

The opportunities for solidarity abound too. Many trans people have experiences with sex work and are currently sex workers. Many radical trans people don't or aren't, because a lot of radicals come from comfortable positions that have kept them away from the economic pressures trans people experience to do sex work (be it survival or for example saving for surgery). A trans assembly is more well-equipped to produce a structure to support and protect trans sex workers than the radical politicised factions of either trans or sex worker communities. Furthermore, someone with experience in creating and maintaining a community democratic space like this is well-equipped to cross into another community and help to create one like it there, at which point you could even convene to discuss community solidarity with the full force of both assemblies.

Consciousness raising is a fantastic thing for the organisers of an assembly to approach that doesn't risk calcifying power in community positions too. Some amount of consciousness raising is the natural result of holding an assembly, but you can take proactive steps too. If the organisers who facilitate the assembly also facilitate a reading group (maybe right afterwards for those who want to stick around, or maybe not if that would be too tiring) there is immediately a direct route for the politicisation of community members through a social avenue, and you're not positioning yourselves as teachers or big brain theory geniuses, you're learning together.

Panicking will not save us, organising will.

The job of leaders is to make more leaders, and creating a space for people to learn how to organise by giving them the practical experience of democracy is the most empowering thing that we can do to start to solve our problems. We will win this fight with robust community structures. The protests will go on, the farce of electoralism will go on, but the struggle is where the real politics is happening.

It is essential for the coming decades that we answer the questions of organising in communities where everyone is suffering. These are the most pressing questions of the next 50 years.

One of the first answers is to escape the trauma response mindset that gives us a sense of a foreshortened future and learn to breathe, think more slowly and make structures built to help our communities far into the future. You aren't building a lifeboat to make it through the storm, you're building a sustainable life on your island, knowing that survivors will wash upon your shores daily and when they do your island will get that little bit bigger and that little bit more beautiful.