If Solidarity Is Possible, So Is a Pro-Trans Majority

I’m no stranger to hard mornings. Wake up, scroll the news, get a pulse on the moment, experience increasingly authoritarian and fascist GOP-controlled state governments and the Trump administration. Those mornings, I struggle to get out of bed—let alone feel hope, vision, or strategy. I doubt you are a stranger to hard mornings, even as you muster whatever energy reserves you have to get through the work day, show up for your young kids and/or aging parents, respond to an ICE watch shift, make another five calls to your elected officials, and check in on your friends and neighbors. It’s a lot.

What helps me make sense of those hard days is remembering that, while the communities and movements I’m a part of don’t have the power we need to stop the bad and build the good just yet, power and powerlessness are not static. To be clear, when I talk about power, I am talking about the ability of a person, group, or coalition to meaningfully influence or shape the actions, decisions, and beliefs of individuals, groups, organizations, and society. Powerlessness means we don’t have that ability yet.

Solidarity is far more possible than I once believed. This lesson, learned through organizing with my political home, Guilford for All, has continued to nourish my belief that we can organize across differences (race, class, gender, etc.) and build power, even when things feel bleak.

When I stay present with my grief over our communities not having the power we need, and as that grief reflects my longing for more freedom, safety, and justice, I am better able to feel the deep sense of possibility that comes from trusting that our relative power and powerlessness is not set in stone. More power is on the table—if we cultivate it and contend for it.

To build this kind of power for trans liberation, as part of a broader vision of democracy that benefits working-class people across race and gender, organizers and strategists need to take responsibility for some critical tasks.

We must counter the regressive narrative central to the Right’s anti-trans story. But we can’t do that solely on savvy narrative strategy and communications: we have to mesh that tactic with organizing that builds new political majorities, contests for governing power, and offers compelling visions for the future that are only possible if people join us. 

Breaking the Right’s frame

Last year, I texted two friends of mine to ask if they’d like to collaborate on a conference presentation focused on growing the power of social justice movements to make meaning for millions of people. Specifically, I asked Anna Castro (Principal Narrative Strategist at Transgender Law Center and architect of the Trans Agenda for Liberation Narrative Lab) and Cayden Mak (Publisher at Convergence Magazine, and former Executive Director of 18 Million Rising), whether they would collaborate on a proposal about lessons and insights from our work in service of building and cultivating a pro-trans majority. I feel honored that they said yes.

Over a series of video calls, we realized that a major obstacle to building a pro-trans majority is the underlying assumption that only a minority of people will support trans people or trans issues—an assumption seemingly shared by people across competing political ideologies.

It’s expressed differently depending on the community. In social justice-oriented trans communities you might hear someone say, “We don’t work with cisgender people; only trans-for-trans organizing will keep us safe or free.” In progressive communities that focus on racial and/or economic justice, it can emerge as, “I think transphobia is a problem, but I don’t think we should take a pro-trans stance. It will alienate the people we need to organize.” Our neighbors who claim they’re not political may say something like, “Why are we talking about trans people? I don’t care. I care about how my eggs are eight dollars a carton now.”

And then: vociferously anti-trans right-wingers, who say things like, “Transgenderism is a threat to our country,” or “Kamala Harris is for ‘they/them’, not for you.” Right-wing politicians and groups have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars to convince us that not only are trans people a problem, but that most people are—or should be—against us.

…we have to believe that our ideas, visions, and values can become the most popular ones.

In 2024, right-wing electeds and conservative PACs spent over $200 million dollars moving anti-trans messaging across various platforms. As awful as that is, I draw hope from knowing that all that money being used to deploy and disseminate messaging hasn’t cultivated an anti-trans majority.

A recent Voss Research and Strategy poll found that only 35% of people surveyed believe that “there should be policies in place to ensure transgender views and lifestyles do not harm society.” On the other hand, nearly half of the respondents—49%—believed that “transgender people should have the freedom to be themselves and live their lives.”

The right-wing’s $200 million messaging investment did manage to shift some people’s perspectives. It has encouraged people who hold anti-trans beliefs to double down on this strategy out of a belief that more people agree with them than actually do—leading otherwise centrist or progressive-leaning influencers to back away from supporting trans people, emulating what they perceive as the majority. 

The Right has created “social proof” for anti-trans views, playing to people’s tendency to emulate what they perceive to be the most popular beliefs or actions of those around them—especially when they are uncertain or conflicted. This has led people who believe in trans rights to continue to underestimate the level of support they have in our communities, while people who hold anti-trans beliefs overestimate the number of people who agree with them.

If a pro-trans majority is on the table, how might we cultivate it?

Anna, Cayden, and I, along with our friend Nikko Viquiera (Senior Vice President of Programs at Race Forward), identified four pillars necessary for a majoritarian and pro-trans strategic orientation: building majorities, practicing solidarity, contesting for governing power, and offering a vision.

Building majorities

A majority is what wins long-term. In order to achieve durable systemic change, we must act under the imperative of cultivating and wielding the power of a pro-working class, pro-racial justice majority that includes trans people.

Cultivating majorities is not easy work; ask any organizer or communicator—especially if they’ve done electoral or union-focused work that has demanded their efforts produce a majority. Frankly, any organizer worth trusting has hard-won experience of the importance of enough people power to win change—and in a democracy, a majority is what you can count on to win.

Many of us, myself included, have felt the pain of losing campaigns or efforts for positive change or for stopping harmful actions because our collective efforts did not generate a majority. I’ve been a part of protests with tens of thousands of people in the streets, but the power reflected in those mobilizations hasn’t been strong enough to un-elect warmongering governing leaders. I’ve participated in electoral campaigns where we lost by just over a hundred votes.

Despite these losses, we have to believe that our ideas, visions, and values can become the most popular ones. That we can convince more people to join us, and that we’ll resonate. If we impose our ideas and values from the top down, we can win short-term successes at best, but we run the risk of undermining long-term popular ownership of those ideas and values, and we become susceptible to backlash. At worst, we end up practicing or reinforcing authoritarian ideas, particularly during a period of rising ethnonationalism and authoritarianism in the US and globally.

I’ve been a part of winning context-specific majorities required for Guilford for All’s endorsed candidates to get elected to office. The long-term vision of our statewide parent organization, the Carolina Federation, is to build a new political majority. While this work is very much still in progress, my 20-odd years of participating in and choosing to lead within social justice movements has taught me that solidarity is the practice that makes building majorities possible. 

Practicing solidarity

We practice solidarity on principle. Solidarity—taking action against oppression that doesn’t seem to directly affect you for the sake of our shared liberation—is a practice we all must engage in no matter our identities.

Solidarity builds the trust in ourselves, in others, and from other people that makes it possible to build power across race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality. If we believe that only some of us have to practice solidarity while others don’t, we become less powerful. We become less skilled at the practice of solidarity; we become hardened to other people’s pain, and we run the risk of not sustaining the majority we need.

I was not the only person whose social media feeds were flooded with content from Heated Rivalry, the Canadian TV show on HBO whose main characters are closeted gay hockey players. Over and over I saw people reference (with sobbing-and-heart-eyed-emojis) the line: “I’m coming to the cottage,” a nod to the moment when the main characters choose to take a trip together to practice partnership, not solely hooking up like they had for years.

When we act together—fight together—to make life tangibly better for ourselves and others, we are more likely to believe that the people we act alongside are worth protecting.

There’s this understanding in behavioral science that action precedes belief, especially if the belief that undergirds the action is in tension with another belief we hold. This holds true whether we are taking action or witnessing the actions of others, particularly if we are meaningfully in relationship with the people taking action.

What made the cottage moment possible in Heated Rivalry was witnessing the bravery of another player coming out by publicly kissing the man he loved at the Stanley Cup celebration. That action preceded the main characters’ belief that more could be possible. Choosing to go to the cottage then reinforced their safety in each other so they could take another brave action: coming out.

When we act together—fight together—to make life tangibly better for ourselves and others, we are more likely to believe that the people we act alongside are worth protecting. We can’t wait for people to be perfectly pro-trans or have all the right words and analyses about any of our identities before we act in solidarity and fight for the public institutions and communities that reflect the democracy and economy we deserve.

The truth is, people we organize and communicate with likely hold conflicting beliefs; for example, believing that there are only two genders and sexes, and also believing that people should be free to be themselves. But if we invite people to act in solidarity and take action to make their lives materially better—in a way that also protects trans people—they will be more likely to hold positive beliefs about trans people and be less swayed by anti-trans arguments.

Yes, we still say “ouch” when people say things that hurt us, and it doesn’t mean we can’t hold boundaries or can’t have expectations that people treat us with dignity. What it does mean is knowing that the people we organize with, or who could be a part of the majority we are building, are not our enemies. It means we give grace to become more practiced at solidarity, to build trust and repair harm, and to know that building a majority is the way we are all going to survive.

One of the thinkers I return to often is Amílcar Cabral, an agronomist from Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde who led efforts to free those nations from Portuguese colonialism. Cabral once wrote:

Always remember that the people are not fighting for ideas, nor for what is in men’s minds. The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children.

While the narrative strategist in me knows ideas and stories matter, the organizer in me knows that people care most about meaningfully improving their lives. It’s not enough to believe a pro-trans majority is possible and to work to make it real by practicing solidarity. We need to actually solve the problems we are facing and meaningfully improve the lives of trans and cis people across race and class. This informs the third pillar: the ability to make those changes, which is governing power. 

Contesting for power

We aim to win governing power: We believe that government can be the solution to our problems at scale. We aim to win public institutions that care for and liberate all of us, and we have a responsibility to work with and shape the actions of our government.

We are not here to play small: big problems require big solutions. We can fight for universal healthcare so our government provides care no matter how much money we make, where we live, or where we were born. We can fight for fully funded public education that’s good no matter your zip code, that reflects the lives of everyone in the school, and that cares for teachers and custodians and bus drivers. We can make sure everyone has access to basic life resources: housing, food, water, community. Winning all of those things requires governing power. The way we win without being authoritarian, and having people buy in and own the victory, is through building a majority.

Governing power isn’t marked by elections and what happens in legislative sessions alone. Governing power is also reflected in how people in cities and counties, and states and countries, make administrative decisions. It shows up in the ways judges and juries interpret laws and set consequences when people break those laws—and in whether courts are the only way we can structurally resolve conflict, hold people accountable to shared agreements for collective well-being, and address harm. Governing power is who makes the rules over who controls the things that produce wealth, and who has the power to shape how people get compensated for the work they do. It’s in the ideas that seem like common sense that affect millions of everyday actions and non-actions.

…we need to see wedge issues not as “culture war distractions” but as opportunities to grow our majority and weaken their base of support.

It does us no good to act like we do not intend to govern as part of a diverse, democratic majority, especially when the Trump administration and its allies are using governing power to shape the world in an authoritarian, Christian nationalist image that benefits a handful of rich people at the expense of most of us.

We need governing power to turn the fourth pillar into reality: a vibrant political and economic democracy that frees all of us—including trans people.

Offering a vision

We foreshadow a vibrant political and economic democracy that liberates people across race, class, gender, sexuality, and national origin. We’re here to get free.

Every one of us who believes in freedom, democracy, and justice has to constantly project a future that working-class people across race, gender, sexuality, and national origin can see themselves reflected in and can see as a path to a tangibly better life. Not only that, it has to be more compelling and clear than whatever delusions and precarious access to human rights that authoritarians like Donald Trump, billionaires like Andrew Cuomo, and white Christian nationalists like Steve Bannon and the Heritage Foundation are offering.

The right wing is and has been targeting trans people as a way to undermine this vision of democracy and our economy for a number of reasons:

There was/is a meaning-making void

Lots of people don’t really know about trans people or have relationships with them. However, people do think about gender: how men and women act, look, love, and relate to each other and the world. How people think about gender has long been intertwined with race and religion.

Trans people seem to be considered politically expendable across ideology.

It isn’t just the right wing that’s okay with limiting trans people’s freedom and access to the full spectrum of human rights. It’s also people who identify as “progressive” who make the decision to remove gender identity protections from employment discrimination legislation for non-trans people who are gay, lesbian, and bisexual. This undermines our beliefs and practices of solidarity, which can limit our ability to build a durable progressive majority. 

Wedge stories and narratives about trans people and gender have been used as a way to grow a multi-racial and multi-gender conservative coalition.

We see examples of this in right-wing leaders organizing Black and Latine evangelical pastors to support the North Carolina “Bathroom Bill” in 2016, and in Mark Robinson using anti-trans narratives in his attempt to become the governor of North Carolina in 2024. The conservative coalition is becoming more diverse, and narratives about gender and trans people are central to that project. 

Anti-trans narratives are used to decimate public institutions.

Schools, libraries, Medicaid, and more are decimated through the use of anti-trans narratives, making billionaires richer and re-fashioning American public life to reflect a Christian nationalist and authoritarian society.

To put it bluntly: anti-trans narratives, stories, and policies have become central to the right-wing project in this time. To both build the “NO” coalition against authoritarianism and build the “YES” coalition that can win transformative change, it’s imperative to continually invite in and envision a “bigger we.” 

Envisioning a “bigger we” doesn’t mean we weaken our commitments to racial justice, migrant justice, or the working class. On the other hand, it requires us to double down on those commitments, as the people we need to convince to join us aren’t only white cisgender working- or middle-class people. It includes Black and Brown people, folks who’ve migrated to the US, people who are and aren’t formerly incarcerated, and even some trans people—people who the right wing contends for as they try to build a multi-racial, multi-gender coalition. The “bigger we” includes them, too.

To combat these stories and to foreshadow the democracy we want, we need to see wedge issues not as “culture war distractions” but as opportunities to grow our majority and weaken their base of support. Through practicing solidarity on principle, we can model for ourselves and for other people that they too can take action towards what they long for, even as they wrestle with the conflicting ideas in their heads—and that they are less alone in doing so. Defending our public institutions (schools, libraries, the kinds of healthcare we can access) and demanding and envisioning most of them gives people something material and tangible to fight for, not just fight against.

Instead of giving into the fear and isolation that our opposition hopes we feel, let’s bet on each other—and work together to win.