Table of Contents
Life Survival: Neutrality - A Trans Woman’s Response
Neutrality is violence in a dress shirt. It's every family member who says "I love you but—" and then votes for people who want you dead. It's every friend who stays quiet when the transphobe starts talking because "I don't want to make it awkward." It's every institution that won't take a stance because "we serve everyone."
You serve everyone? Then you serve our murderers.
Trans people don't get the luxury of neutrality. We're walking, breathing refutations of the binaries that hold up white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism. Our existence is political whether we want it to be or not. So when someone says "I'm not transphobic," the only question that matters is: What did you do today? Did you correct the misgendering? Did you challenge the bathroom bill? Did you move money to the trans person who can't work because no one will hire them? Did you take the hit for speaking up when we were too exhausted, too terrified, too fucking done?
The fascists are organizing. They know our names, our addresses, our medical records. And you want to stay neutral? Your silence greases the gears of the machine that's grinding us into dust. So check yourself: What did you do today to keep us alive? If the answer is nothing, you chose a side—and it wasn't ours. Start now. Start scared. Start imperfect. But start.
Life Survival: Saving Ourselves - The Trans Response
Trans people know intimately that survival is both collective and granular. We've been DIYing hormones, passing down information in bathroom stalls and Discord servers, creating mutual aid networks while the state debates whether we deserve to exist. The earth doesn't need saving—but we do, and we know what saving looks like when the systems want you dead.
So yes: grow something. Compost. Mend your binder instead of buying new. Share your harvest with the trans kid who can't go home for dinner. Build the networks now—the gardens, the skillshares, the underground railroads—because climate collapse and fascism are coming for the most vulnerable first, and that's us. Your little acts of care won't stop the hurricanes, but they'll keep you tethered to something real when the state says you're unreal. They'll remind you that we've always survived in the margins, making beauty from scraps, turning harm reduction into art. Start with your hands in the dirt. Start with feeding someone who's hungry. Start with remembering: we are not consumers waiting for permission to exist. We are survivors building the world that comes next.
Life Survival: Fear - The Trans Response
Fear tastes like copper in your mouth when you're deciding whether to use the bathroom at the gas station. It's the cold sweat on your spine when someone clocks you mid-sentence, their eyes narrowing, recalculating. Fear is every legislative session where they debate whether you deserve healthcare, whether your body is real, whether your children should be taken away.
And here's the thing—they've always wanted us afraid. Afraid enough to disappear. To de-transition. To die quietly. But we've been screaming into the void for decades, and some of us survived long enough to realize: they're coming for us whether we're loud or quiet, passing or visible, assimilated or radical. So fuck their comfort. Name it: "I'm afraid they'll fire me." "I'm afraid my family will abandon me." "I'm afraid I'll be murdered for existing." Now feel your feet on the ground. Feel the air in your lungs. You're still here. Tomorrow, correct that pronoun. Tomorrow, wear what makes you feel whole. Tomorrow, show up to the city council meeting about the bathroom ban. Your fear is evidence you're alive. Your voice—cracking, uncertain, defiant—is the sound of refusing to be erased.
Closing
We're tired. Bone-deep, soul-sick tired of fighting for scraps of dignity while they sharpen their knives. But here's what they keep miscalculating: we've been dying and surviving and thriving in the cracks of their systems for generations. We know how to read the shifts in the air before the storm hits. We know how to pass down information like contraband. We know how to hold each other when the state won't.
This is the long game. Not the comfortable one, not the one where we get to rest, but the one where we become ungovernable. Where every act of care is sedition. Where your existence—messy, imperfect, defiantly visible—becomes the crack that splits their foundation.
They want us afraid. Isolated. Silent. Gone.
We're going to be loud, connected, and so fucking alive it burns. We're going to build greenhouses and protest signs with the same hands. We're going to grow food and rage with the same fierce attention. We're going to save each other because no one else will, and we're going to do it with dirt under our nails and fire in our throats.
The future isn't handed down from the powerful. It's built by the people they tried to erase, one stubborn act of survival at a time. We're building it now. Join us or get out of the way.