Transphobic Trouble and the Need for Solidarity

Why we need to stop transphobia even if it’s risky 

A few years ago, my American high school held a die-in to protest police murders of Black people. A die-in is a public protest where people lie down like they’re dead to disrupt activity and call attention to political violence. Conservative critics predictably called the protest “performative” but one of my favorite teachers, Mercy Carbonell, defended the students in a way that stuck with me. She said something to the effect of: “Even if these protests don’t immediately change material circumstances, you change yourself by doing them.” 

I’ve thought a lot over the past few years about the idea that societal transformation begins by changing the way we relate to each other. My boarding school was an expensive private one full of what the Bennington College Principal would’ve called “the cubs of our most successful predators,” per Gillian Rose in Love’s Work. I thought it was meaningful that some of them rejected the imperialist ideas reproduced in us and entertained the idea we could become something other than what we were programmed to be. It gave me hope we could build a kinder world than the pharaonic financial pyramid many of us were born on top of. 

In that vein, I like how transgenderism also embodies that possibility for personal and societal transformation. I like how the trans people I’m friends with take responsibility for their happiness and live the way they want to live instead of conforming to others’ expectations. I think I get along with those friends because, on a certain level, we understand each other. We’re both trying to become something other than what we were raised to be. My mother and immediate Indian family expected me to be a money-making mule in a patriarchal structure where men financially provide for the group. I didn’t want to be financially responsible for anyone other than myself. That made me a wayward son, and after that family partially disowned me, I found emotional homes in queer communities full of people who were also trying to reinvent themselves. My friends on Karangahape Road and I are enthralled with the potential for transformation. We become fashion designers, It Girls, writers, painters, poets, dancers, or people of different gender identities. We create a culture of possibility that makes life worth living.

Anti-transgender ideology is an attack on the potential for transformation. In her Bookforum review of Jacqueline Rose’s The Plague: Living Death in Our Times, Sarah Nicole Prickett identifies England’s virulent transphobia as an outgrowth of its rigid class system. “The classism that seems so native to England... manifests as a distaste for pretense, for striving, even for straying. At the heart of both classism and transphobia is this insistence on staying put. ‘When you’re born, you’re done for,’ Prickett writes, citing writer Arnold Bennett’s correspondence with writer Hugh Walpole. In that sense, transphobia’s a contemporary spin on the age-old idea nothing should ever really change. Its curtain-twitching and pocket-watching adherents use society’s discomfort with gender experimentation as a Trojan Horse to introduce people to other conservative ideologies. If transphobia takes root in New Zealand, it’ll metastasize into a violent fascism dedicated to keeping all of us in our place. Because of that, it’s in our collective best interest to stop it. 

Unfortunately, transphobes are social murderers who’ve gained access to American and English monopolies on force. They use those monopolies to forcibly detransition people, abuse them, and incite others to kill them. New Zealand media figures’ response to this so far has been to deride state-sponsored persecution of trans people as a “culture war issue,” call the civil rights issue of toilet access an “attack on bathrooms” and host radio panels full of bigots. I think they imagine the issue will dematerialize if they don’t pay attention to it, like babies think their mothers do when they leave the room. They’re wrong, and if we trust them to sound the alarm for us we won’t hear about it until anti-transgender legislation passes a right-wing parliament. In a 2016 interview, Jon Stewart said that liberals “pass around eviscerating videos of [right-wingers]... and make fun of them” while right-wingers gather in restaurants and figure out how to take over school boards. Anti-trans campaigners are one of those obsessive right-wing groups. If we don’t expel their ideology from New Zealand it’ll become law sooner rather than later.  

Right-wing political violence is coming to New Zealand whether we like it or not. We can’t ignore it. The peace neoliberal governments bought with low interest rates and cheap credit is over, economic pain’s proliferating, and capitalists will try and displace that pain onto minoritised groups to redirect anger away from themselves. David Seymour and Winston Peters would feed trans people to Moloch in an instant if it served their interests, so we have to make it a no-go zone even if that entails risk. Transphobes are fascists and expelling their ideology won’t be safe. Posie Parker caucuses with Nazis and they seem fine eliminating anyone in their way with force. But we can’t give into fear and let them do it. 

Since 2017, I’ve risked my life multiple times for antifascist political causes. I’ve held signs at Trump rallies where his supporters have threatened to tear me limb from limb. Police have maced, teargassed, and beat me with batons at Black Lives Matter protests. Cops have shot people’s eyes out, kidnapped people, and thrown them in the back of vans at protests I’ve been to. White supremacist militiamen have threatened to shoot me with automatic weapons, revved their cars at me during street protests, and made it explicitly clear they want to paint the concrete with mine and others’ blood. I went to so many Black Lives Matter protests during the summer of 2020 that I became intimate with the possibility I might die. I left papers with my housemate before each protest containing friends’ and family’s contact information and notes for them in case someone killed me. My mortality went from the fringe of my perceptual world back to its center. But I had faith I was working towards a better world instead of acquiescing to a Darwinian one. I don’t regret it and I’m proud of refusing to let atrocities happen without pushback. 

I love my life and I don’t want it to end. But in the past few years, I’ve seen the open casket wake of a child murdered by a police officer, hundreds of black-clad riot police massing like storm clouds to brutalize protestors, people wandering shell-shocked outside a synagogue massacre, and proto-concentration camps for migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border. These memories have coalesced into an ironclad belief: Never again. No sociopolitical stability is worth this. Fascists want us atomized, isolated, and deluding ourselves the bell tolls only for others until they come for us too. Solidarity is the only effective response to their violence. They’re going to want to kill us for it and in the coming years, some of us may die. But until then, we’ll live fully and completely. 

Kieran McLean is a dual American-NZ citizen who used to work as a reporter in the States. He currently lives in Tāmaki Makaurau.