Trans liberation is your liberation

Why the FBI targeting a trans woman of color affects all of us and how we should respond.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently attempting to silence a Black trans woman, an author, and a prominent voice of the transfeminist movement. Here’s why this affects you (you meaning everyone); this is not an isolated incident, far from it. This is just the modern manifestation of a long history of state strategy to dismantle solidarity and silence those that dare to speak up about their own oppression. This should be a signal flare to everyone, trans liberation is a fight for bodily autonomy and self determination which are foundational elements to the liberation of all oppressed peoples. There is only one effective solution, and one I am actively calling for: a revived, militant, modern day Rainbow Coalition.

A prominent transfeminist author was recently forwarded a letter from the FBI informing her to cease all online activities as well as the publishing of an upcoming book due to Herr Trump’s executive order deeming all “gender ideology” to be terror activity. Framing a young black woman’s attempt to vocalize and share her own experiences and the experiences of trans women and trans women of color as “terror activity” is cut and dry state repression, the kind the same people doing it will moralize about when they need to bomb another South American country or spread more propaganda about Gaza, China, Iran.. you pick. It’s the same justification they have used to murder black activists in the very recent past, when Fred Hampton decided to feed and educate the black, white and latino working class of the US they called that terror and killed him in his sleep.

Today, these kinds of activists are not building parallel militant power structures; they’re simply highlighting the experiences of an oppressed people, humanizing themselves in the process and that in itself is enough of a threat. This reveals the new face of this current stage of American brand fascism: it is a regime built on a mandatory narrative. Its power depends on the dehumanization of its targets. Therefore, the act of humanizing testimony, sharing one’s own lived reality especially as a black woman from the south, let alone one who is trans and living in spite of systemic violence, becomes a fundamental attack on the regime’s foundation. Her crime is not plotting terror; it is simply wielding her voice to educate others. She is not stockpiling weapons; she is writing about systemic racism, transmisogyny and queer discourse. In an age where solidarity is the only true force to counter fascism, the burger reich identifies queer and black folks highlighting their oppression at the hands of the white upper class as a dangerous act of rebellion.

Fascism requires a scapegoat to function, they call us “groomers” and “pedophiles” all while we recently learned the Fuhrer impregnated a 13 year old and witnessed the murder and disposal of the child’s body after it was born. When marginalized people humanize themselves, when they offer a new perspective, and dismantle this caricature it makes the lie untenable. It replaces the state’s propagandized image with one that fosters solidarity and empathy. The state can raid an office or crush a pantry, but it is much harder to crush a connection formed in the mind of a reader. When they write about their experiences, they aren’t distributing rifles. Rather, distributing the tools of recognition, allowing the reader to see and feel the machinery of oppression. This is the bedrock for solidarity and a precondition for something like a new Rainbow Coalition, which is what the state really fears.

By criminalizing a trans woman’s voice, the state is preemptively attempting to sever this foundation of empathy before it can form.

A system built on unequal distribution of wealth and the subsequent hierarchy that forms as a result of that must deny its own violence to maintain its own thin veneer of legitimacy. The simple act of identifying the forms of violence that exist are now becoming a threat and Fascism’s only option is to double down on that repressive violence in order to maintain itself. This does not bode well for any oppressed people’s attempt for liberation; be that the liberation of women’s bodies, of Black or Indigenous peoples in the imperial core and abroad, or those of migrants who are currently being kidnapped by an extrajudicial military force and taken to torture work camps.

The ultimate goal of this specific act of repression is not just to subjugate trans people, but to erase the very fact of trans existence from public life and legal recognition. They’re not afraid of people like this building an army, they’re terrified of them building an audience. I am here to suggest that maybe they should be afraid of us building an army. The paper-thin pretext they’re using to kidnap migrants and silence trans women of color will be the same pretext they use to take away women’s rights, to continue or even enhance the enslavement of Black Americans via the prison industrial complex, to kill and silence anyone who speaks out against injustice.

To understand why we must act swiftly to build a real popular front to act as a bulwark against the forces of the 4th Reich you may need a bit of history.

In the late 1960s, a young man in Chicago named Fred Hampton did something truly radical. He built a coalition that brought together working class people across racial lines. He united the Black Panthers with the Young Patriots (poor working-class whites from the Appalachias) and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican liberatory group). Their platform wasn’t complicated: feed the hungry, educate the illiterate, provide healthcare, and protect communities from police violence. They united across racial lines on the basis of shared class struggle. They recognized that the real enemy wasn’t each other, but a system that impoverished and violently policed them all.

To the American state, this solidarity was the ultimate threat. The FBI’s COINTELPRO program, a dedicated operation to surveil, infiltrate, discredit, and neutralize liberation movements, specifically targeted Hampton. They called his work “terror.” They spread lies to split the coalition and fracture solidarity. And on December 4, 1969, they executed him. Police, acting on an FBI informant’s floor plan, raided his apartment and murdered Fred Hampton in his bed.

The parallel today is stark and terrifying. Previously, the state feared a coalition uniting people across race. Today, it fears an intersectional coalition uniting struggles across race, gender, and sexuality. The playbook is laughably identical, identify the unifying voices and neutralize them. Trans activists are not organizing breakfast programs, but they are performing essential, and dangerous work: building the consciousness that makes a new Rainbow Coalition possible. The FBI’s letter to a transfeminist author is modern-day COINTELPRO in action. By isolating and crushing one small movement, the state apparatus is able to send a warning shot whilst setting a dangerous new precedent for any other marginalized people who may dare to attempt the same.

The only way to resist this attempt to fracture and isolate us is to build a powerful and united coalition built on true intersectionality. To build the coalition we need, we must truly understand the nature of this fight. This isn’t just about “inclusion.” It’s about a fundamental realignment of power. This is where transfeminism becomes the key.

Transfeminism is not a niche concern. It is a branch of feminism that understands a simple, revolutionary truth. This truth is that the liberation of trans women is inextricably linked to the liberation of all women, and by extension, to the liberation of all people from the cage of gendered oppression. Transfeminism argues that you cannot dismantle the patriarchy, a system built on controlling bodies, while leaving its most precise and violent tools untouched.

Those tools are the false idea of a gender binary and the state’s authority to dictate who gets to claim which body, which life, which future. The state claims the right to define what a “legitimate” body is, to restrict healthcare, and to criminalize self-determination. If they can legislate what a trans woman does with her own flesh, her own hormones, they reinforce the precedent to legislate a cis woman’s uterus, a disabled person’s right to live, or anyone’s choice in how they appear in the world.

When the state polices a trans woman’s body and voice, it is testing the waters to gain feedback on its power to police everyone’s body, healthcare, family structure, and expression. The ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth is the precedent for banning abortion or birth control for all. They start with the most marginalized to perfect the tools of control, and then they broaden the scope.

This isn’t hypothetical. It’s historical. The same police who raided gay bars and trans havens were the same forces used to break strikes and surveil civil rights leaders. The repression is never singular. Rest assured, this is just a rehearsal.

So when we talk about trans liberation, we are not asking for a special exception to the rules. We are demanding the abolition of the rules themselves. We are fighting for a world where the state has no authority over our bodies. Defending trans women of colour is not an act of charity for a marginalized group; it is an act of collective self defense. The fight for the right to exist and speak is the frontline in the battle for self determination, a principle every one of us will need when our turn comes, and under this regime (and likely every future one going forward), everyone’s turn is coming.

That is the call of transfeminism: to see our fates as linked. To understand that the boot on one trans woman’s neck is fitted for all our throats, and to recognize that pulling it off of hers will require all of our hands.

The lesson here is not merely one of solidarity, but of strategic materialist action. The Panthers didn’t unite with the Young Patriots and Young Lords over abstract goodwill; they united around concrete, shared material needs: food, health, housing, and protection from police violence. Their solidarity was a survival pact. A 21st-century coalition must be the same, not a vibes based hashtag, not a marketing campaign, but a mutual-aid network built on a shared analysis that our oppressions are interlinked through the same oppression via state machinery.

This means moving beyond symbolic gestures to a coherent party program built on direct action and material support. Ours must be a platform that links Labor movements fighting for workplace democracy and against wage theft with trans service workers facing harassment and discrimination. Palestinian youth organizations resisting surveillance and apartheid with Black liberation groups fighting gang databases and predictive policing. Tenants’ unions fighting evictions with disability justice advocates demanding accessible housing. Indigenous land defenders challenging resource extraction with migrant justice networks fighting extrajudicial kidnappings and deportations.

These forces must be united under a shared ideology: Community control of housing and healthcare. The dismantling of the police, prison, and border-industrial complexes. The collectivization of resources to guarantee food, safety, and dignity for all.

This demands a brutal honesty about the current state of the organized left in the West. While groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Communist Party of Canada, or the International Marxist Tendency (IMT), and various “Democratic Socialists” may correctly identify capitalism as the enemy, their praxis too often reduces to parading, pamphleteering, and endless book club debates. This is a leftism of performance, not power. It mobilizes for a rally but not for a blockade; it circulates a petition but cannot orchestrate a large-scale rent strike or form a community defense network. In the face of fascist escalation like the targeting of this author’s work, their response would likely be a sternly-worded statement and a call for a march on a weekend afternoon. This is not strategy; this is radical politics as a hobby, go out and be loud for a bit then retreat home for doordash and netflix.

A new coalition must then operate on fundamentally different principles:

Defending the Targeted, materially: This means more than press releases. It means legal defense funds resourced by union dues, rapid-response networks to document state harassment, and secure, decentralized communication channels built by open source collectives. It means labor unions using their bargaining power to strike in defense of trans workers, and community organizations providing sanctuary and material support to those in need.

Escalation. We must match the regime. If they legislate trans existence as “terror,” our response cannot be just a petition. It must be widespread non-compliance, coordinated court crowding, strikes that halt “business as usual”, and direct community intervention to block enforcement.

Infrastructure, not rhetoric. Formal alliances must be operational. This may mean a Migrant Justice group within a major union. Socialist and anarchist blocs providing consistent bodies and resources to Indigenous land back struggles. Palestinian youth organizers and trans mutual-aid networks sharing security and media training.

This most recent example of targeted repression is a litmus test. Will we let the state simply crush the most marginalized among us for fear of their critique or will we react with a renewed capacity to build counter power. The current left bloc in the West, with its marches and study circles, builds a leftist subculture. We need to build a leftist counter-society and one with its own resources, defenses, and ability to disrupt.

The new Rainbow Coalition will not be born in a lecture hall. It will be forged in the concrete work of keeping each other alive, housed, and free.

Oh, and if you fuck with what I am saying then go and support transfeminists materially. Like right now.