Trans organizing, advocacy, and parties

Backstory

First, some backstory, Katelyn Burns posted an article to her newsletter titled “We Lost the Trans Athlete Debate, We Will Win the Next Fight”. In it, among other things, she says:

While the centrist consultant wing of the Democratic party might want elected officials to abandon trans issues because of how unpopular the Dem position is on trans athletes, I think they should instead start making the point that this is a mostly settled issue now given how few trans athletes there are now in the US.

I recommend reading the whole article to get a feel for its energy. Then, Corinne Green quoted it saying, among other things:

how have y’all managed to go through 6yrs of this & come out with even worse politics & less pride than you started with? whoever thinks like this should go executive direct natl lgbt orgs & leave the rest of us alone

The more interesting conversation, in my opinion, happened when Katelyn asked in a reply “What does winning in the near term look like to you?”. I recommend just reading it.

Everything else

I want to focus on what I think is the core difference between Corinne and Katelyn’s messaging: Katelyn is not advocating for building anything. Note the quote above: “While the centrist consultant wing of the Democratic party might want elected officials to abandon trans issues because of how unpopular the Dem position is on trans athletes, I think they should instead start making the point that this is a mostly settled issue now given how few trans athletes there are now in the US.”

I want to highlight some things here. The overall thing to understand about sentences like this is that boil down to asking Power to do things. Their influence relies on the author’s influence, wealth, or other proximity to power. Why should elected officials care what you think? Elected officials do not take positions because they are correct, but because of the tug and pull between different power sites in their constituency.

And the second thing is that by focusing on Power and asking Power for concessions, Katelyn does not give her audience anything actionable. Katelyn presumes the democratic party, in its current form, will exist in the current electoral landscape, and that these things can not be changed.

This is a good moment to bring in Corinne’s response to Katelyn:

the shortest distance b/w here and winning? frankly? the dissolution of the democratic party and the end of the us. i’m not an accelerationist, but existing reality has a well-known accelerationist bias anyway. there’s no near term winning to be had bc we’ve wasted decades ignoring organizing basics

There is a thread attached to this, but this is a more dense reply than you might think. What Corinne is saying here is: we need new organizations. I think this is obscured by the fact that Corinne phrases it in terms of destruction, the destruction of the Democratic party. In fact, some readers might be confused that I position Katelyn as the one not building anything, when Corinne is actively calling for the dissolution of the country and the party.

I want to outline one thing about parties, something I have learned in union organizing. Every single policy in a party’s program does not need to appeal to everyone, nor conform to popular opinion. Every person needs to see themselves in the party’s political program, but not in every paragraph of said program.

Here is a labor organizing example. I work in a non-profit with a mix of white collar, blue collar, and pink collar labor. When I talk to white collar workers, pay is lower on their list of issues. They could have gone to for-profit and made more, but they care more about other things. That being said, they make enough to live. So, they care most about work impact, mission, transparency, community, and so on. When I talk to blue and pink collar workers, though, their pay is the biggest stressor in their lives.

So how do I navigate this? Well I have a demands list, and I demand pay raises, quarterly financial transparency statements, and enforcement mechanisms to keep the organization accountable to the wider community. Every type of worker sees themselves in the list, even if every point is not their top issue. Hell, some workers may not want to be accountable to the community. But they see themselves in the other issues, that they care more about, and that is enough to pull them into coalition with everyone else.

This is what an organization can do. As an Iranian transgender person, I can confidently tell you there is shit Iranians care about that trans people give 0 fucks about, and vice versa. Furthermore, why would they? But an organization that is legitamately interested in solving their issues can go, have conversations, and develop a political program that unites them under one banner - even if not on the same points. This also applies to different interests within communities.

This is why I say Corinne is advocating for building something: that last line “we’ve wasted decades ignoring organizing basics” hints at it. We need to organize. Not ask democratic lawmakers to do something, but force them to. This is also why Corinne drags national advocacy organizations. She correctly calls out “we are not going to get anywhere sending middle class white people on lobbying ventures”.

But why, exactly, are we not going to get anywhere sending them on lobbying ventures? It is because the reason they are in the room - their middle-classness, their whiteness, and their willingness to cooperate - already seperates them, their priorities, and their problems with the rest of us. And yet, they will be put in rooms where they are the only transgender person, and they will speak for all of us. In rooms where important decisions are made: newsrooms, press conferences, senate floors, and so forth, they. will. speak. for. all. of. us. Does that not spark even a glimmer of rage in you, like it does for Corinne? Like it does for me? Is this not injustice? Is this not a perpetuation of the same shit?

Let me share another anecdote. I recently talked to an old transgender comrade of mine, let us call her “M”, one who has been going through a crisis. I told her that I think her political work needs to change.

Recently, a local non-profit lost their government grant that funded a transgender youth homeless shelter. M raised money to house the kids that were there for a year, a noble win. She raised about $30k.

But I pushed her, I said ’this is not organizing’, because the systems remain the same. We must organize and push for systemic change before we can be free. And we can not escape from the systems. The only way out is through. So, M asked me “how would you recommend doing a campaign to end trans youth homeless?”

I said, “by running a campaign to end all youth homelessness, thus broadening the potential base of power and coalition options.”

M then said, “But then you’ve lost the transness”

I said, “M, they are fucking homeless.”

Our kids are homeless, my dears. We can no longer ask for survival. We have to take it.

“Human social systems are self-organizing. Indeed, something much like this thought is already embedded in the use of the term “organizing” to label work that challenges oppressive aspects of our society. Often when we organize, we try to build a smaller system of our own within the overall system we live in that is influential enough to change the whole system’s behavior. This is a potential role for a mass movement, a workers’ party, a set of direct actions. It’s the sort of thing we can do in a room.

This, above all, illustrates the key problem with deference: it focuses the very capacity that we have to reconstruct the whole house to the specific rooms that have already been built for us. It advertises itself as deferring to marginalized voices and perspectives, but in conceding so much creative space to the blueprint of society, it is perhaps better understood as deference to the built structure of society.

I am arguing here for another approach—one that concedes that we have to start with the interactions that we have most control over, but that keeps in view the point of changing how those interactions go: to rebuild the whole of society, not just our interactions. Rooting ourselves here thus gives us a constructive politics.”

- Olufemi O Taiwo, Elite Capture, How The Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)