We Are the Reinforcements

by Comrade Jane

After 2016 I saw a lot of fear. Fearful people, myself included, showed out to march against Trump. In the beginning, there was a palpable sense of solidarity against it, but as time wore on, I became—as I suspect many of you did—increasingly demoralized. Effective and class-conscious protests like the airport shutdowns to stop the Muslim ban or the protests to shine light on the ICE camps gave way to performative displays of pink hats and inflatable diaper baby Trump balloons. As the momentum slowed, I realized people had slipped not into resignation, but into something more dangerous—hope. Hope that Robert Mueller or Bernie Sanders or someone would step up to stop him, but the one thing I didn’t see among the so-called “resistance” was anyone actually materially resisting. Everyone was waiting for someone else to do something.

It seemed that no one wanted to lay down their own bodies because there was still hope that things would go back to normal. “I want to go back to brunch” was the battle cry of the white liberal. This always felt a little silly to me, but until I accepted my own marginalized identity as a trans woman, I couldn’t put a finger on the exact reason why. “Back to normal” has never been an option for those on the outside. Back when? What is “normal”? Jim Crow? Indian schools? Fag drags? The idea that we could retreat back to the time before Trump, to the days of Obama or Clinton was fundamentally in agreement with the MAGA sentiment. Though they would deny it vehemently, liberals accepted the premise, disagreeing only on the details of when exactly America was “great”. Was it great when Reagan’s CIA poured crack into black communities and when Nixon’s men shot students who resisted his genocide in southeast Asia, or was it great when Clinton sexually assaulted his staff and when Obama’s drones bombed hospitals and wedding parties?

Those who lived on the other side of America’s imperial boot didn’t have such a nostalgic time to retreat and hope to return to. Many of those who lived on the line between privilege and marginalization, those who were queer, but also white, or wealthy, or cis and male first held out hope first that fascism could be beaten at the ballot box by voting for the slightly less objectionable fascists. When that failed, too many immediately switched to talk of who they could throw under the bus to win next time, be it Palestinians, or immigrants, or trans people. Then it was talk of where to flee to, forgetting to ask how they could help those who were stuck here due to disability or poverty, and ignoring how fascism is rising in the European countries where they hoped to escape. It was like watching the stages of grief—denial, anger, and bargaining play out in real time across the news and our social media feeds or with my friends and family.

When we have a hope of some retreat to safety, our minds are distracted by questions. Who will win this election or that? How badly will some politician hurt us? Is it morally permissible to, at the expense of someone else, support someone who opposes that politician in order to keep ourselves safe? But when you break through all that and come to acceptance, you can find yourself with a clearer view.

These questions are intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually draining. There’s a much easier question that instead fills our bodies minds and souls with energy: What can I do right now to keep our community and the people we love safe?

We are surrounded, we can’t go back. There’s never been a time when trans people, or any marginalized community in America, has truly been safe. Our job is simple, we build a new and better world for our people and those people who have bled alongside us. That is what I saw in our party when I first joined, and why, though I don’t have hope in the world, I do have hope in each of you. Some of us can’t go anywhere; some of us won’t. We aren’t grovelling at the knees of the city council or Congress begging for help, we’re rolling up our sleeves and doing the hard work of feeding and defending each other, because we’ve realized that the only people who will help us are each other: our queer chosen families, our marginalized friends and neighbors, and all of the working people of the world who stand with us in solidarity.