'Our love is radical': why trans activists lead the way in protest movements

Fifteen years before Rosa Parks was arrested, Pauli Murray took a seat in the whites-only section of a bus.

At age 29 in March 1940, Murray was jailed in Virginia after rejecting a bus driver’s order to move to the back. Years later, the legal scholar’s writings on racism served as Thurgood Marshall’s “bible” for the Brown v Board of Education decision banning school segregation – and helped shape Martin Luther King Jr’s beliefs in non-violent resistance.

Murray’s profound civil rights legacy is often erased, as is a key part of her biography. She described herself as a mixture of genders with language that closely resembles contemporary definitions of non-binary and trans male identities: “maybe two got fused into one with parts of each sex” and “one of nature’s experiments; a girl who should have been a boy”.

Murray’s extraordinary and forgotten role in influencing some of the biggest civil rights advancements of the 20th century is an early example of the way transgender and non-binary leaders have been at the forefront of so many historic struggles.

This has become especially apparent during the upheaval of 2020, when trans activists have spearheaded protest movements and uprisings far beyond LGBTQ+ liberation. They have been pivotal leaders in racial justice, anti-fascism, immigrant rights, prison abolition, disability justice, housing advocacy, privacy, labor, indigenous organizing, sex work decriminalization, Covid mutual aid and much more.

While the dominant headlines on trans issues have focused on death and culture wars, on the ground, trans people are on the frontlines of activism, organizing some of the most powerful demonstrations against police violence this year, standing up to rising far-right violence and exposing neo-Nazis, and defending the safety and rights of the most marginalized.

“We’ve always led the charge. We’ve always been protectors. That is just who we are as people,” said Mariah Moore, a New Orleans-based organizer for Black Trans Circles, a healing program. “We’re naturally birthed that way. For trans folks, there are so many of us who are trying to save our communities, because we see what is happening, and it’s just something that naturally comes out of us. We’ve always been freedom fighters.”

Trans people, she said, have no choice but to become experts in resistance.

Fighting in an era of backlash: ‘Never doubt Black trans power’

The ability of trans leaders to mobilize and organize was on full display on 14 June, when thousands of demonstrators flooded the streets of Brooklyn for an emergency rally to fight escalating violence against Black trans women. Overlooking the sea of demonstrators dressed in white, the organizer Raquel Willis declared to thunderous applause: “Let today be the last day that you ever doubt Black trans power.”

Trans activists are leading the charge while facing an unprecedented assault on their basic human rights. The international backlash to trans people follows a rapid increase in mainstream visibility over the last decade, including the whistleblower Chelsea Manning coming out in 2013, Laverne Cox gracing the cover of Time magazine a year later and groundbreaking Hollywood projects such as Pose.

Amid a worsening epidemic of violence against trans people, the Trump White House and American conservative movements have adopted a clear mission to pass policies that explicitly dehumanize trans people, erase trans identity and ban from public life anyone who doesn’t fit the traditional binary.

“We are criminalized for being who we are,” said Rojas, a 39-year-old gender-nonconforming organizer (who goes by a single name), who has been advocating for the rights of queer and trans people incarcerated in California prisons. “It has to be us fighting for us. There isn’t anyone else who is going to come and fight.”

But when trans people fight for their own liberation – and win – they aren’t the only ones who benefit. In June, the US supreme court ruled it was illegal for employers to fire people because they are trans. It was a victory secured by trans lawyers that not only helps protect trans people, but also affirms the rights of cisgender queer workers, women and others marginalized in US workplaces.

Ravyn Wngz, a Toronto Black Lives Matter activist, spoke of the brilliance and impact of trans liberation leaders in a viral speech this summer after local BLM protesters were arrested for “defacing” racist statues.

“You’re lucky that this is all we did. You’re lucky that we’re appealing to your humanity. You’re lucky that we’re not asking for vengeance or revenge. Because that’s easy. But our love is radical. It’s abolitionist. It’s a future where each and everybody has what they need, what they deserve, what they want,” she said. “We’ve been doing it every single way possible to let you know what we deserve, what we need. And you don’t even have to dream it up. We’ve done the work for you.”

The forgotten ‘transcestors’

It’s not a coincidence that trans and gender-nonconforming scholars and activists have ended up shaping social movements, said the historian Dr Susan Stryker. The story of how Pauli Murray became “one of the most under-appreciated, influential people in the US in the 20th century” was crucial to understanding why, she said.

Murray did not adopt a “trans” label or different pronouns from those assigned to her at birth, but she attempted to access testosterone hormones and wrote under the pen name “Peter Panic”. Murray is largely remembered for coining the term “Jane Crow”, making the case that America could not solve racism in the south without addressing the particular oppression of Black women. The thesis was a precursor to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality decades later.

Related: 'We are resilient': the activist sheltering trans people in Trump's America

Stryker said Murray’s non-conforming gender and “trans-ness” was a critical part of why she became such an influential and effective activist in so many struggles: “The more different kinds of barriers to access that you have because of the body that you move through the world as … the more you’re told you don’t belong. And the more different ways that the world basically tells you, ‘Shut up, go away,’ or ‘Stop existing,’ the more you know.”

There is a special kind of strength and knowledge that comes from developing a “robust sense of all of the different ways that the world can shit on you”, said Stryker, known for her work documenting a trans uprising in San Francisco that pre-dated the 1969 Stonewall riot and was nearly forgotten.

Better known examples of influential trans activists who didn’t receive mainstream recognition until after their deaths are Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson. The trans women were key leaders in the queer liberation movement in New York City and the Stonewall uprising, which inspired annual Pride celebrations around the globe.

In one celebrated speech in 1973, Rivera screamed “y’all better quiet down” at a group of white gay men, noting that she had defended their rights while they had done nothing for the liberation of trans women of color like her who had been beaten and raped in jail.

As the gay men in the crowd booed her, she mocked their “middle class white club”, saying: “That’s what you all belong to! Revolution now!”

The speech encapsulated how trans liberation leaders have fought for the rights of other oppressed people – even those who rejected them.

“I just think about our ‘transcestor’ Marsha P Johnson looking at this moment and just feeling powerful, because she is the inspiration for these actions, and for what we are fighting for ,” said Ola Osaze, director of the Black LGBTQIA+ Migrant Project.

“But we have a lot more work to do.”

In our Trans freedom fighters project, the Guardian is spotlighting the work of trans and non-binary movement leaders on the frontlines of 2020 organizing and activism. Read our first interview here