Caring for Trans Community
A collective document about caring for trans community
Collected by Tiffany Sostar following community conversations and consultations in 2022 and 2023.
Download the 49-page PDF here.
From the document:
This document is, at its heart, about caring for trans community. This care might take the form of quiet friendship, vocal advocacy, public support or private support. It might be as simple as using someone’s pronouns or as involved as advocating for policy change. These actions of care might be understood as solidarity (though you’ll find some reflection on the limits of this framing in this document). These actions of care might be understood as compassion, companionship, connection, as movements towards justice and liberation, as love. They might be personal and private or very public.
This document is about actions of care, whatever they are, however you understand them, towards and with and within trans community, by which we mean, the vast expanse of gender expression and identity that is not cisgender (cisgender is when the sex you were assigned at birth aligns with the gender you know yourself to be).
We are sending this document out into a world that is increasingly hostile to trans community, especially to trans youth, trans women, racialized trans people, and disabled trans people.
This hostility is not new, and no injustice exists in isolation. Hostility towards trans community has always impacted different groups in different ways at different times, and always intersects with other systems of power and control.
Legal protections only go as far as other hostilities allow.
We hope that one action of care that extends from this document and these conversations is an interest in and invitation towards connecting with trans communities across difference, finding each other and caring together.
There are so many communities, including trans people who are racialized, who live in rural contexts, who are incarcerated, street involved, or otherwise disconnected from structural supports and “legitimate” trans identities and experiences. These are communities that governments fail to serve, and that have been left or pushed out of queer spaces.
In times like these, I think we can lose connection with the reality that trans folks and our allies have been supporting each other’s mutual existence forever. And maybe it’s hope-building to know that communities that have had less structural access have developed a richness of resources and conversations, skills and knowledges, networks of mutual aid and care to support one another in getting our needs met. There’s possibility in connecting to and working to strengthen these mutual aid systems because maybe this loosens our attachment to institutions and strengthens our connections to each other.
I hope that disconnected communities will be motivated to repair or build connections, and allow us to orient ourselves towards the movement, honouring the work, knowledges, and lineages in these communities. I hope we can remember that our liberations are collectively bound, and that this isn’t the start of something new but it is an opportunity for connection.
– Aakhil, contributor
Trans community includes people from every community. Every community includes trans people.
This document is a collective action of care extended from everyone involved in this project to every trans person who may come across this document, and we hope that it invites you, beloved reader, whoever you are, to join us in caring and in being moved to action by that care.
“Bearing witness to how many people want to do right and want to make active change and be supportive, it does inspire hope.”
– A contributor, about reading this document. We hope you feel the same.
This document has been shared in the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work. You can also hear an audio practice note about its creation and our hopes for the project here.
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