On 16 April I am in my girlfriend, Amy-Joy’s bathroom. We are at hers waiting for my metamour (her other girlfriend) to come down south so that we can celebrate her together. We have socials and raves planned. It is an attempt at a holiday, after many tough months not least because I am in the shadow of a series of transmisogynist assaults and a couple of sexual assaults.
I am reading that the Supreme Court has declared me, my girlfriend and most of my closest friends to be men. The public slurs and attacks play through my brain as I deliberate whether I should let my girlfriend know, and risk hurting her on her birthday. I decide that I must, because this attack is too huge and it impacts her directly, and because I cannot keep secret how much it has impacted me.
I tell her and we cuddle. Then I spend a day intended to be a rare moment of relief bifurcating myself between what’s going on, a planned demo foremost, and comforting her and being comforted by her. We organise to go almost straight from the first rave to the demo.
During a planned day alone I bounce from place to place in a manic episode, trying to outrun the dread I feel as I realise that the next time a bigot challenges my right to piss at a station or in a pub, they will have the full weight of the law backing them up. I attend a zoom call where I learn more devastating details about the ruling. I spin on the fact that the people who shove me at oncoming traffic or scream fag at me in the streets will be even more emboldened. I get messily drunk and barely sleep.
I am either at the best or worst time of my life and too much is happening and will happen and neither I nor anyone else impacted seems to know how to ground ourselves. Whatever ambiguities and limits to it, the ruling tears into the scant protections afforded to one of the most fragile social groups, who are routinely told to wait decades for life giving medical access and have face a 186% increase in hate crimes in five years.
It is now years since I first said that the left took too long to show us solidarity. And I am not sure if the unprecedented solidarity I am seeing now – from the electoral and revolutionary left, from the unions and the labour movement more broadly – is enough or not. I am beginning to get a sense that the protest will be huge, in my head I set on the idea that it will be about eight thousand people filling parliament square.
At pres for the first rave I see a group of joyful, sometimes scared, entirely vibrant and courageous trans girls. I am one of the dolls, huddled in a high-rise apartment overlooking the lights of the docklands as crunchy, industrial music blares out of a television speaker system. I dance in anticipation of dancing more.
We walk to the rave and meet a queue that takes over an hour to traverse of mostly cishets who are attempting to take our space. As I told them to expect on WhatsApp groups, they are mostly turned down at the door. It is crucial that queer folk have our spaces, that we get to dance with each other.
In the smoking room at FOLD, a queer venue that even promoted the demo, I bounce about again. I talk to people – cis and trans – about hope and hopelessness, the implications, and dance. I encounter good will and genuine empathy from cis LGB folk. I meet friends I haven’t in months, friends I see often, friends I don’t know yet.
And I dance for hours in a place I consider the best in the world to floor thumping, body sweating, legs swaying techno before heading out with another trans girl in tow who we deliver to her home. We barely sleep back at my girlfriends before we’re back on the train.
At the demo I am barely lucid. Despite raving sober I feel punch drunk after three days with hardly any rest. I am still bouncing. I talk to more people I have known years. I meet even more new folk. I network in the struggle. And me and my girlfriend get so bored of the inane and toothless chants (“trans rights are human rights”, “what do we want? trans rights! when do we want them? now!”) that we push better ones (“HRT, HRT, over the counter and for free!” “fuck assimilation, trans liberation!”).
When a group with a speaker system get the demo moving, I use deaf note to request that they play Free.99’s song ‘Trans Riot’, which blasts out into central London as my girlfriend, and I dance and jump about behind. ‘True Trans Soul Rebel’ by Against Me! plays soon after. We meet folk from the rave the previous night. We laugh and are joyful.
We move backwards through the march searching for our comrades with their Anti*Capitalist Resistance flags waving proudly in support of trans liberation. The march goes on and on and on and I fully believe estimates I read later of attendance being 20,000 plus. And then we go, exhausted but jubilant, to a Ukrainian vegan café called Cream Dream to celebrate her birthday more.
When we wake late the next day we still have another rave at FOLD. And I start writing this. And I don’t know the future. And I don’t know what any of the previous days mean. But I know who I love. And I have seen a world worth fighting for, even if I don’t know if we can win.
With notes and additions from Amy-Joy
Featured image: Large crowd of people with trans flags in background. Photo: Echo Fortune