The Nazi Party of Germany did not burn the patient records of the institute. Instead, they hunted the patients down.
Therefore, I will do the opposite. We, at the Trans Formations Project, have always been aware this reality could come for us, too. So we have decided to burn our patient records.
We will destroy all data we can find about our volunteers.
And we will save the library.
Our data, our research, our analysis, our writings - are available. We will be working hard to store them in as many digital and physical archives as we possibly can. If you are able to offer an archive, please reach out to alex@transformationsproject.org.
One of the personal contributions to this organization that I am proudest of was the suggestion of a phoenix as our logo.
Trans people, by and large, are born into intolerance and hatred. Those trans people who come out or transition are trans people who, despite a lifetime of abuse directed at our authentic selves, choose to love ourselves anyway. Trans people who come out are almost entirely trans people who go searching for others like them, and find themselves in doing so.
I dug myself out of the ashes of my trans elders. And so too will those who come after us.
Trans people will always be here. We will outlast any empire, any regime, any ideology that paints us as anything but what we are - a variation on humanity that deserves to be cherished, loved and celebrated.
Trans people after us will go looking through these ashes too - and I intend them to find us.
Trans genocide has been ongoing. We have been tracking its exhaustive and endless creep towards today for the past four years.
In 2022 the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention declared the “gender critical” movement to be explicitly genocidal against trans people:
Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement
On March 13th of this year the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention released a “Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States”, here:
Red Flag Alert for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States
The Trump administration, on the day of Trump’s Inauguration, released an Executive Order titled, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government."
It defines transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people out of legal existence.
The propaganda report from the Department of Health and Human Services argues explicitly for conversion therapy and argues that transgender and nonbinary people do not exist.
It claims our healthcare is “experimental” and “unproven”, despite being older than antibiotics.
The Trump regime cancelled transgender health research.
The regime erased transgender people from the Stonewall National Monument.
It is awarding the Medal of Freedom to a man who called for "every gender affirming care doctor to face Nuremberg-style trials".
It has been torturing transgender people under the state's care in incarceration for years.
Trump just declared that trans people are an acceptable target.
Trans genocide is here.
Whatever happens next - the trans people who come after us deserve to know we fought like hell.
They deserve to know we were here. We did not go quietly.
The regime is coming for trans people.
They’re already calling us “Nihilistic Violent Extremists”
What's left is to fight like hell. With bricks. With teeth. With punches. With words. With every means necessary. What's left is to defy them with every breath we have left.
Every life matters. Every second matters. Every person who realizes the truth matters. Every time we speak the truth in public, someone hears it. Every time we fight, we inspire others. Show others like you what's possible. Fight, speak, organize like it's your last stand. It is.
If they will kill us regardless, the work is now to make meaning with the time we have left. Make radical art. Speak the truth. Love as loudly as you can. The choice, under full blown fascism, is to face death in surrender, or to face death in resistance. Only one matters.
Who will you be, at the end? If you do not resolve yourself, as soon as possible, to the grim reality, or the true stakes of the choices we are faced with at this moment, you will lack the conviction in the split second opportunities you will be given to act. Fascism makes the wrong choices easy.
Fascism makes the cruel, shallow, and cowardly choices socially rewarding, easy, and obvious. Unless you resolve yourself, in advance, to make the hard choices that will be your only opportunities to resist, you will fail. Steel yourself to make impossible choices. For love.
Do or die. Those are the stakes. Kindness costs everything when it really matters. What are you doing to prepare yourself, really, to be radically kind, even if it means losing everything? What are you doing right now to resolve yourself to choose love, even if it means death? That's the work.
Trans organizers have a "joke" amongst ourselves. We often say, "the trans agenda is an average life expectancy".
At every Trans Day of Remembrance, we hold each other, and we cry, and we say, in wavering voices of relentless hope, "Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living."
So that's what we do now. That's what trans people have always done. We mourn the dead. We remember them. We carry their legacies with us to pass on to those who find us. But we cannot stop there. Despair is compliance by another name.
We fight like hell for the living. And we do not go peacefully.
It has been an honor to organize with you throughout the story of the Trans Formations Project. Our work here mattered. It matters now. And it will matter, for those to come.
Our work does not stop here. It only changes form.
Whatever the next iteration of your work looks like, remember: our people will rise from these ashes too.
They deserve to see that we loved them fiercely enough to fight for them.
Trans people deserve a world better than this, kinder than this, more loving than this.
Trans people deserve an average life expectancy.
You can also read this here: mailchi.mp/transformati...
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