We're All We've Got (And We're All We Need)
Solidarity, inclusion, and life on the margins
“Because I am not religious,” writes multi-hyphenate author and activist Sarah Schulman in her new book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, “my point of view is that heaven and hell take place on earth.” By now, you've likely seen the video of 6-year-old Ward Al-Sheikh Khalil wandering through the flaming skeleton of a school obliterated by an Israeli missile earlier this week. Hell is what we have created in Gaza. Over the last 20 months, image after image of this hell has left me immersed in the self-pity and liberal guilt that I imagine many Americans feel when we are reminded that we live in a violent empire. I have tried to reject the opportunistic tug of selfish individualism and egoism that would rather I either avoid this tragedy or transform it into a mere personal shame, the kind that can be overcome by buying the right yard signs and t-shirts to indicate my refusal of this poor girl's fate. “The bystander is often so used to being powerful without effort,” writes Schulman, “that they fantasize a simple change in attitude fixing the pain of the victim.”
Most of Fantasy and Necessity is devoted to answering the question of how those appalled by this genocide can best act ethically as allies to the Palestinian people and broaden their movement for building power. As Schulman notes, demands for and expressions of solidarity are often relationships of inequality—a hand reaching up or down rather than across. “When other people’s actions trap us, we dream of relief,” she writes. “We dream of rescue, of our screams being heard, of the flood of our pain breaking down the walls people build between themselves and the world. The afflicted courageously risk their remaining freedom, status, and very lives in hopes that someone out there will listen, hear, and act.”
Doing so can be necessary but also humiliating, requiring those already suffering violence or denied basic freedoms to make their pain legible to the very people inflicting that violence or denying them that freedom. Because of this, the decision to stand in solidarity with someone less powerful than you “can never be heroic or perfect.” Schulman, a longtime activist and organizer, has dedicated much of her nonfiction work to the complexities of movement building, which often necessitates embracing complexities among people. “It is the change, the peace, and justice we seek that is more important than being right in our living rooms,” says Schulman. She wants to humble our expectations for those with and without power alike—those who imagine they can step into a struggle and quickly find a solution, and those who have lived within that struggle their entire lives, who imagine the risks inherent to solidarity are easy to overcome. This is why, in Schulman’s telling, solidarity is both “necessity” and “fantasy”—like democracy and equality, solidarity is an ideal we must strive for with the full knowledge we may never reach it.
The chaotic nature of these relationships is, in many (but not all) instances, less of a barrier among people who already exist on the margins. Forced to negotiate their existence in a world that actively and passively rejects it, they are both more conscious of each slight by the self-interested and more accustomed to navigating them to reach a given goal. They are not surprised by the messy naivete of those at the center of our culture and are more adept at helping people overcome it. Life on the margins is also, more often than not, a pluralistic existence in contrast to the intentionally homogenous nature of life at the center of American life—mass produced, well-trained, and herded into little boxes on the hillside.
This is why, I suspect, you’ll find so many transgender people within the BDS movement and the protests against the genocide in Gaza. A few weeks ago, NYU ungraduate Logan Rozos had his diploma withheld and his student biography scrubbed from the school’s website after using his speech at the university’s graduation ceremony to "condemn this genocide and complicity in this genocide.” That Rozos is gay, Black, and transgender seems far from irrelevant to his courage and defiance—many transgender people find ourselves controversial in most rooms that we enter, and this leaves many of us with an instinct to act on our authentic principles even when it offends the people in that room.
This dynamic is often a target of mockery by the Israeli state and its right-wing and liberal allies in American politics and media. While the Israeli government has spent the last two decades attempting to portray itself as a gay paradise (see Schulman’s earlier refusal of their “pinkwashing”), they have also attempted to portray campus protesters against the war as entitled, purple-haired, and rendered fundamentally ludicrous by their gender nonconformity. When Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to a joint session of Congress in DC last year, he repeated an old joke about queer people standing in solidarity with Palestinians as akin to “chickens for KFC,” a jibe contradicted by the queer Palestinian movement and made all the more shallow by the laughter and applause it received from American politicians who have dedicated their careers to eradicating trans people from public life.
If you watch the Trump administration closely, you can see a similar effort to put forward something like gay inclusion. See the National Park Service’s erasure of the letter “T” from its pages for the Stonewall National Monument that notably left behind “LGB”, or the effort to purge drag queens from the Kennedy Center by openly gay Richard Grenell, who nonetheless fired its new director after it came out he opposed same-sex marriage. The separation of cisgender queers from the “LGBTQ community” has been paired with the promise of inclusion in fascistic movements at home and abroad. One wouldn’t even be surprised to see a Trump White House “Pride” event helmed by Grenell, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Caitlyn Jenner—the inevitable result of decades of mainstream advocacy whose goal was never justice but simply an invitation to an unjust system.
In a survey of LGBTQ adults released earlier this week, a Pew poll found—ten years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges—a clear gap between feelings of acceptance and inclusion among transgender adults and cisgender LGBQ adults (a not particularly surprising result given who is currently the main character in right-wing nightmares). 61% of LGBTQ adults agree the US has a “great deal or more” acceptance of cisgender lesbian and gay people, but only 13% say the same about transgender people.
The most fascinating number to me, however, is not a question about the cishet world’s perspectives on us but a curious set of statistics about our connections with each other: While 41% of transgender adults told Pew they feel “extremely/very connected to the broader LGBTQ community,” just over half that amount of LGBTQ adults overall (23%) say the same. Likewise, 63% of transgender adults say “all or most of their friends are LGBTQ,” but just 30% of gay and lesbian adults and 26% of bisexual adults say the same. Two-thirds (67%) of transgender adults describe their identity as transgender as “very important to who I am as a person,” while just over half (54%) of gay and lesbian adults and just 29% of bisexual adults say the same about their sexual identity.
What these numbers describe is a deeply fascinating testament to the functional purpose of “the LGBTQ community.” While many cisgender queers see themselves (loosely and uncertainly) folded into the mainstream of society via their access to marriage rights, it seems likely this came at the expense of their attachment to any queer community. While Pew does not offer any of these statistics over time, it’s easy to imagine why mainstream acceptance by straight family, friends, coworkers, and employers following the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell led to fewer people “needing” anything like a specialized community where they might find resources, pleasure, joy, or camaraderie as queer people.
Transgender people, on the other hand, still find purpose in these communities because of our continued (and genuinely worsening) exclusion from broader society. Our nonconforming appearance, our particular health needs, our preponderance in criminalized sex work, our violation of the patriarchal power’s reproducibility (long story), our widespread poverty and homelessness—at every turn we are denied, as the Reverend J Mase III recently put it to me, “the blessings of mundanity.”
But that denial does not come without its silver linings. The same liberal institutions that attempt to dignify the undignifiable in Gaza have likewise spilled a great deal of ink enflaming their wealthy audience’s anxieties about “transgender activists,” and when you find yourself on the margins, the best way to avoid being pushed off the edge is often reaching out your hand.
Alongside Schulman’s book, I’ve been reading Omar El Akkad’s One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. It is a searing indictment of the failures of American political and cultural institutions to grapple with their cowardice, self-interest, and amorality in the face of relentless slaughter, starvation, and cruelty. As the title suggests, El Akkad’s critique is of the mechanisms that defend such brutality while going to great lengths to establish their reputation as civilized and liberal. “While the terrible thing is happening, while the land is still being stolen, and the natives still being killed,” writes El Akkad, “any form of opposition is terroristic and must be crushed for the sake of civilization. But decades, centuries later, when enough of the land has been stolen and enough of the natives killed, it is safe enough to venerate resistance in hindsight.”
At multiple moments throughout the book, I heard many rhymes between his critiques of liberal cultural industries in the face of the Palestinian genocide and my critiques of these same people and institutions’s hesitancy or outright exclusion of transgender people and our rights—the inversion of risks, the focus on tone and civility, the numbing effect of rendering a situation so “complex” that most stay silent, desperate to never hold an actual principle and instead take the position that gets them yelled at the least.
Though the consequences for transgender people in the US are of course far from as violent or devastating (one reason I have refused to use the word “genocide” for the unfolding repression of transgender people in the US is because, for most audiences, the word invokes the kinds of mass militarized slaughter now unfolding in Gaza), the muscles being exerted by people in power bare a striking resemblance. As Fred Moten once said, “the coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
It’s also clear to me that the same fascistic right-wing targeting transgender people in the US sees Israel as not just the backdrop for Evangelical fantasies of the end times but as a model for an apartheid state based on nationalistic supremacy. At the heart of that nationalism is a faith in essentialist identities and naturalized figments of patriarchal power that transgender people defy—it’s why transphobia is such a potent political tool for other nationalist movements in Russia, Hungary, and across the Western world. In this way, transgender solidarity against the war in Gaza is both politically and philosophically consistent, a unified push against systems that oppose our self-determination, “however much more softly” because it threatens the foundations of their mythology.
Transgender rights advocates, in fact, often make similar appeals to solidarity in the face of efforts to police our lives, censor our speech, and criminalize our healthcare. I have written extensively about the relationship between transgender exclusion and broader demands for rigid patriarchal gender norms, white supremacist power, and the dispossession of the working class and marginalized groups across the board. But as El Akkar notes, these appeals for shared interests often miss what people are losing when they only act in moments they face (or may one day face) personal risk. “There is an impulse in moments like this to appeal to self-interest, to say these horrors you are allowing to happen, they will come to your doorstep one day,” he writes.
“To repeat the famous phrase about who they came for first and who they came for next. But this appeal cannot, in a matter of fact, work. If the people well-served by such butchery ever truly believed the same butchery could one day be inflicted on them, they would tear the system down tomorrow. And anyway, by the time such a thing happens, the rest of us will already be dead.
No, there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future, but know that a terrible thing is happening to you now. You are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice. You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the blood-stained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity. Forget even the dead if you must. But at least fight against the theft of your soul.”
It is worth asking when inclusion requires you to leave your soul at the door. And to the degree that souls exist, they must exist in the connections we have with others, the recognition that there is no such thing as any one person’s humanity but only our collective humanity. Alongside the more than 50,000 dead, including over 15,000 children, it is our humanity that I see dying in Gaza.
In her history of ACT UP New York, Schulman notes a common refrain in meetings and protests—we’re all we’ve got and we’re all we need. Isolated and quarantined, the radical movement born amid the height of the AIDS crisis found itself alone and ripe for scapegoating and fear-mongering. What many queers knew then and many of us know now is that power must be built vertically before it can be deployed horizontally, and it is in partnership with the least that we can succesfully challenge the dominance of those with the most. As transgender people find ourselves pushed to the margins of our culture and society, we will rightfully and understandably push back against our erasure and exclusion. But even if we win inclusion into the spaces and narratives now trying their best to forget us, we should be skeptical of the price of entry.
Outstanding! So thoughtful and impactful. Thank You!