BUZZ
Key Takeaways
- On Transgender Day of Visibility, around 40 participants rallied at Brown University to protest against increasing global anti-trans legislation, led by the newly formed student group TRANSformation.
- Organizer Levi Kim highlighted 616 anti-LGBTQ bills proposed last year, specifically criticizing five bills in Rhode Island that target transgender students' rights in sports and medical care.
- Speakers emphasized the resilience of the transgender community in the face of legislative attacks and the importance of youth activism against anti-trans sentiments.
- The protest linked local issues to global anti-trans laws, with references to India's new legislation stripping trans individuals of rights and calls for solidarity with other social justice movements.
On last Tuesday’s “Transgender Day of Visibility,” approximately 40 Brown University students and members of the local community gathered at the “Rock,” the school’s John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library, to protest global “anti-trans” legislative efforts.
According to The Brown Daily Herald, the new student group TRANSformation was behind the event at which organizer Levi Kim criticized the “616 anti-LGBTQ bills” proposed in various legislatures last year.
These bills “target[ed] a community that already faces disproportionately high rates of violence and suicidality,” Kim said. “Instead of addressing affordability or climate change or literally anything else, they choose to regulate the freedom of trans and gender diverse people.”
Kim pointed to five bills in Rhode Island that “specifically target transgender students’ ability to participate in sports and access medical care,” and claimed similar legislation “has been on the rise worldwide.”
“We will not be silent in the face of our attacks on our community,” Kim said.
Finn Tronnes ’28, an organizer with TRANSformation and speaker at the rally, emphasized the strength of the transgender community amid legislative attacks. As someone who grew up in the Midwest, Tronnes specifically called out Kansas’s new law invalidating transgender individuals’ driver’s licenses if they did not change back their genders on the documents.
“The more laws they try to try to erase our identities, the more ways we come up to reinvent ourselves and reimagine the world,” Tronnes said at the protest. “We resist by reminding politicians of the strength of our community, our resilience and our astonishing joy in trying times. We tell them that we’re not going anywhere.”
Kim added that students have a particular role in activism efforts given that a majority of anti-transgender legislation pertains to transgender youth.
“I think it’s essential that we are pushing back on so much of the trans hatred that’s coming from adults and really from a lot of the parents and the federal government,” Kim said. “We have the right to determine how we identify.”
The Daily Herald’s Zarina Hamilton, who covers “activism, affinity & identity” for the paper, links to an ACLU site which “maps” alleged anti-trans/gay legislation across the U.S.
For example, the (deep-blue) state of Delaware’s Senate Bill 55 — which “prohibits gender transition surgery for children due to the potential for an irrevocable procedure occurring when there is a significant probability that children will come to identify with their biological gender” — is considered an “attack on LGBTQ rights” by the organization.
The SteveAhlquist.news Substack reports that India passed a law last week “that strips trans people of their basic human rights,” including being “excluded from employment and welfare till they can hunt down a doctor who has the final say in their gender.”
In the above video of the event, Etta Robb, a “proud organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation” who participated in a Brown U. anti-Israel hunger strike two years ago, referenced “finding [their] trans dog mother” while residing in Philadelphia.
Robb also connected the Trans Liberation Movement to other revolutionary endeavors such as Cuba (where trans people aren’t able to access their “medicine” due to the U.S. blockade), Palestine, and Iran (excluding the actions of U.S. and Israel), and attacked capitalism, the “racist and transphobic prison system,” white supremacy, and ICE.
