#movement-building #queer #lgbt #trans #pride #cohost-repost
2023-06-05
while I'm thinking about queer movement building:

I need people to realize that the lower bound of how many of us there are in the US is 0.5%, or 1,650,000. The higher bound is 5%, or 16,500,000(Pew).

But everything is so disconnected, and being out is either so risky or so normalized depending on where you are that trans people often aren't finding each other for a few reasons¹.

We need something that acknowledges that it's a coalition while still giving infrastructure for the movement. Because right now it's writing messages in a bottle on social media and hoping it gets to the right people, and that just doesn't scale as fights get harder.

we have community as in hangouts and support but we need the other half -- community as in union halls, community as in ways to mobilize people, community as in ways to filter the news so people who can't deal with the deluge still hear what they need to hear. Community as in self-defense through solidarity, through having enough people willing to come to aid that you won't be fucked with by the average rando. Community as in the equivalent to village bells that start ringing when the hostile march comes to town, to get everyone into the square to shout them down.

I have no idea how to get there. History is an instructor, but also doesn't acknowledge how fast the world is now -- the structures there won't work, because most of them are from before there was a phone in every house, let alone a smart one. But it's a thing we need to be thinking about. The tools are out there, but not in a way that's useable. Certainly not for non-technical people. But we can't keep having to rebuild things every time some new big bad thing happens like we have been.

10 million people. You could probably get 1 million of those in one city without even flying. it'd be a big lift. But like.

Nothing has come close to a trans show of force.

if we're 5% of the population, that means with the upper bound there, there's 394,400,000 of us, though many aren't out or have realized yet. And the 5% is probably under-reported even in the US.

Anyway some day I'd like to be in a place where we can get 500k people to take and hold every intersection in 42nd street.

globally, we're more than the entire population of the united states. And unlike hereditary things, the statistics probably hold broadly.

¹ there's a very real phenomenon of trans people getting offended when other trans people ask if they're trans, which like.... i get, but also really makes in person random community building harder. it's a thing to chew on.