Trans leaders seek hope, action this Trans Day of Visibility
The International Transgender Day of Visibility, recognized globally for more than a decade, is, for many trans Americans, taking on a new weight this year as President Trump and his administration seek to deny their existence.
Orders signed by Trump since his return to office in January aim to bar transgender troops from serving openly in the military, end federal support for gender-affirming care for minors, ban trans girls from school sports, and prohibit federal prisons from housing trans women in female facilities. None of the orders use the word transgender.
An order Trump signed hours after his inauguration on Jan. 20 declares the government recognizes only two sexes, male and female, which federal agencies have used to justify cutting funds for LGBTQ services and removing references to trans people from government websites, including web pages for the Stonewall National Monument in New York.
'To a lot of people, [Trans Day of Visibility] means hope,' said Rachel Crandall-Crocker, the Michigan-based psychotherapist and transgender rights activist credited with founding the day in 2009. 'It means we will resist, and we're not going back into the closet — it's a unified, strong voice saying, 'We are here. We are here, and we're not leaving.''
When Crandall-Crocker started Trans Day of Visibility 16 years ago, she had no intention of founding a worldwide movement; she just wanted to help transgender people connect. At the time, the only day dedicated to the community was Trans Day of Remembrance, which honors lives lost to anti-trans violence.
In an interview, Crandall-Crocker said she created Trans Day of Visibility, sometimes referred to by the acronym TDOV, with her wife, Susan Crocker, to focus on the living.
'First, it was slow,' she said, 'and then it began to snowball, and snowball and snowball until it turned into the international movement it is right now.'
Celebrations are slated across the globe this year, including marches and educational events in major U.S. cities. More than a dozen lawmakers are expected to attend a rally Monday evening on the National Mall, roughly a mile from the White House, where Trump has signed most of his executive orders.
Last year, landmarks like New York's One World Trade Center and Niagara Falls were lit in pink, white and light blue, the colors of the transgender flag. Trans Day of Visibility also drew renewed attention last year when it landed on Easter Sunday, Christianity's holiest day.
Religious conservatives and President Trump's reelection campaign criticized former President Biden, the first to acknowledge Transgender Day of Visibility in 2021, for issuing a presidential proclamation urging Americans to uplift 'the lives and voices of transgender people throughout our Nation and to work toward eliminating violence and discrimination based on gender identity.'
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, then spokesperson for Trump's campaign, demanded Biden apologize for the proclamation and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) who is Christian, called the declaration 'outrageous and abhorrent.' Capitalizing on the backlash, Trump pledged to make Nov. 5 — the date of the 2024 presidential election — 'Christian Visibility Day.'
Crandall-Crocker said the nationwide attention last year's Trans Day of Visibility garnered, negative or otherwise, ended up benefitting the cause — everyone everywhere was talking about trans people.
'Actually, that gave us a lot of advertising and publicity,' she said. 'I don't think that's what they wanted. However, that's really what happened. It really helped us enormously.'
It also put transgender Americans under a more powerful microscope, and some event organizers said they are bolstering security measures this year out of an abundance of caution.
'This year, visibility comes with that layer of not feeling safe,' said Sean Ebony Coleman, executive director of Destination Tomorrow, a New York nonprofit. 'This year, I think we — trans folks, particularly Black and brown trans and gender-nonconforming folks — need to be more intentional about what that visibility is actually going to mean for us and choosing time and spaces to be visible.'
Coleman said he wants the community to show a united front against the Trump administration's policies targeting transgender rights — and what he said is an inadequate response from Democrats — and demonstrate to the world that trans people are multifaceted individuals whose identities extend far beyond their gender.
'We are a brilliant, resilient community, and I just need folks to see it,' he said. 'I'm gonna do everything in my power to make sure folks see that — that they see us for who we truly are.'
For trans people, visibility has also come at a cost. Trump's executive orders and policies effectuated by his administration seek to sharply curb transgender rights and remove them from public life. Outside Washington, more than 800 bills introduced this year in state legislatures would negatively impact trans and gender-nonconforming people, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker.
'While there's been such a focus on visibility, there hasn't been enough focus on vitality,' said Raquel Willis, a writer and community organizer. 'What does it mean that you can see a trans person on a runway or a magazine cover or a television or film screen, when many trans people still face so many barriers to employment, to healthcare to housing, to safety and security? I think that those narratives have been really drowned out by the sheen of visibility, and that's a problem.'
'We have to move beyond visibility for visibility's sake,' added Willis, the founder of the Gender Liberation Movement, a grassroots collective that calls attention to issues around bodily autonomy and gender. 'We need to use visibility to drive folks towards action.'
In 2021, Willis, recently named one of Time's Women of the Year, organized Trans Week of Visibility and Action, which mobilizes in defense of trans rights. The venture, which Willis launched with Chase Strangio, an ACLU attorney who last year became the first trans person to argue before the Supreme Court, supplements Trans Day of Visibility with direct action and political education.
Trans Week of Visibility and Action, now a Gender Liberation Movement project, is raising money this year for the Trans Youth Emergency Project, which supports access to gender-affirming health care.
'We are living in a time when our existence is under attack from so many different angles, and a lot of us right now are having to draw strength, not just from our community, but from the legacy of those who came before us — people who refused to be erased, who found ways to care for one another when the world didn't,' said Ash Orr, a transgender rights organizer in West Virginia.
Fighting to be recognized as oneself is something Orr is perhaps uniquely qualified to discuss: He is the lead plaintiff in a legal challenge to a Trump administration policy preventing trans, nonbinary and intersex Americans from changing the sex designations on their passports, a policy that has caused confusion and concern within the community over whether they can travel safely.
Officials in Denmark and Finland recently advised transgender and gender-nonconforming travelers to proceed with caution in the U.S., citing the new policy, and trans people across the nation — including the actress Hunter Schafer — have shared on social media stories of their passports being updated to reflect their sex at birth, rather than their gender identity, against their wishes.
Orr, who sued the Trump administration in February alongside six trans and nonbinary Americans, argued in the lawsuit that the policy, which stems from the president's two sexes order, is 'motivated by impermissible animus.'
Orr is also no stranger to making himself visible. In December, while the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case that will determine whether statewide bans on gender-affirming care for minors are constitutional, Orr and a friend took their prescribed doses of testosterone at a protest outside the court.
'That moment, as vulnerable as it was, was an act of resistance,' Orr said. 'Taking care of my body, affirming my existence, refusing to hide.'
'That wasn't just about me,' he added. 'It was a reminder that trans people, we are not theoretical. We are living, we are breathing, we are surviving in public.'
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