BEYOND

SINGLE-ISSUE

LIBERATION

Person wearing a keffiyeh covering their face and head, dressed in a dark suit against a black background.

Anti-Trans and Anti-Palestinian sentiments

The same people targeting pro-Palestinian protestors are funding and pushing the anti-trans agenda.

As trans and racialized Muslims, we find ourselves at the intersections of identities targeted by white Christian nationalists, both liberal and conservative. Led by Black and Palestinian Trans Muslims, MASGD hosted a group of trans and racialized Muslim leaders from around Turtle Island to discuss the connections between anti-trans and anti-Palestinian politics and legislation. This work takes place during Pride Month, a time of protest and resistance for queer and trans people everywhere, and coincides with months of university encampments, both offering glimpses into utopian community possibilities. These efforts provide an opportunity to create spaces beyond anti-Black, anti-trans, anti-unhoused, and anti-poor systems and to build systems of care and pathways for transformative justice to thrive, such as supporting unhoused community members and food distribution.

THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN ANTI-TRANS & ANTI-PALESTINE SENTIMENTS

    1. attacks on Trans folks and Palestinians are based on a white Christian nationalist agenda seeking to protect the power of a few and bring about their vision of the kingdom of heaven on earth. They portray some people as disposable and dangerous, and they seek to have those people killed, incarcerated, or disenfranchised and displaced unless they can be adequately controlled, converted, and/or exploited. 

    2. Zionism as an ideology originated in evangelical christianity. 

    3. Both forms of hate originate in colonialism across the world. Anti-transness sentiment across the world is a product of settler colonialism, imperialism, colonization, white supremacy and the proliferation of christianity. 

    4. Conservative Palestinians and conservative folks who are racialized as Muslim have partnered with Christian zionists to promote anti-Trans legislation. 

    1. What’s known as the US is trying to move towards being an ethno-religious state for Evangelists like the zionist state is, and is using anti-Transness to move us there. Anti-Trans and anti-Palestinian legislation both emphasize the control of the body, its labor and its expressions through things such as:

      1. Mask bans to “target crime” that will disproportionately affect Black and poor folks, and Palestinian organizing efforts. This is also a tool of eugenics

      2. Anti-loitering laws targeting Trans sex workers

      3. Trans healthcare bans

      4. Drag bans

      5. Palestinian culture bans

    2. Anti-Transness and Anti-Palestinian policy targets our bodily and land autonomies, directly impacting one another. 

    1. Eugenics (and fascism) are a technology of genocide. Eugenics continue to be used as "biological solutions" or "hygiene" for "undesirable" or "impure" "traits" rooted in ableist, sanist, racialized, anti-Native sentiment and part of white supremacist colonial/empire projects. Transness is perceived and legislated as mental illness, reinforcing cishet reproductive purity across religious lines and rhetorically encouraging community violence and dehumanization. Both Transness and Palestinianness are threats to the white supremacist, fascist hierarchy and hegemony that genocide and its many technologies enforces/seeks to enforce.

    2.  Anti-Trans health legislation targets white Trans boys to ensure they are able to ‘reproduce’. Deployed with abortion bans and resistance to reform of laws that permit child marriage. 

      1. Actual impact is most severe for those Trans people who are Global Majority/BIPOC, poor or working class, and/or disabled or neurodivergent. Black and Indigenous Trans women/Two-Spirit are most often killed in early adulthood. 

    3. Anti-Palestinian legislation creates additional restrictions to protesting education and healthcare policies that restrict bodily autonomy. 

    1. Laws against “disguise” have been used to criminalize gender nonconforming dress and protest for centuries. 

    2. Anti-loitering laws used for decades to criminalize sex workers (disproportionately impacting trans folks and Black folks, colloquially known as the “Walking While Trans” ban) have been weaponized against Palestinian protestors and encampments.

    3.  Laws against trespassing used to criminalize unhoused people are directly applied to student encampment movements. 

    4. ID policies tend to hurt trans people, undocumented people, unhoused people, Black and Indigenous people, and survivors of intimate partner or family violence the worst. 

    5. All forms of criminalization particularly harm Global Majority/BIPOC, Trans, Queer, poor and working class, and disabled and neurodivergent people. 

    6. Anti-terrorism policy being used to target and separate Palestinian and Trans organizers who are at the forefront of anti-fascist organizing.

  • The same legislations are used to restrict access to accurate world history, including Palestinian history and access to books that reference Palestine, are used to restrict access to Queer and Trans information and stories. Book bans target all of us. 

  • The same organizations and individuals crafting anti-Trans legislation and funding anti-Trans candidates are crafting anti-Palestinian legislation and funding anti-Palestinian candidates. 

WHERE DO WE GO

FROM HERE?

Trans Palestinians, Trans Black folks, Two Spirit and Trans Indigenous folks, Trans immigrants, Trans unhoused folks, Trans disabled folks, Trans folks racialized as Muslim are all that stand between us and fascism and are the ones who know what to do. The most marginalized are at the intersections of harm that we discuss, and addressing the needs of the most marginalized and making a world for the most marginalized will encompass the need for everyone.

Identify how your community is being targeted locally? How is it targeted nationally? How is it targeted internationally?

1.

  • Here are some of the ways that your local community may be being targeted to be aware of: 

    • Building of cop cities

    • Surveillance policy that targets any marginalized community 

    • Anti-unhoused policy

    • Anti-immigration and anti-asylee policy

    • Anti-abortion policy

    • Anti-education policy 

  • Nationally, the FBI is targeting queer and trans organizers who are protesting Pride. We have already seen organizers get approached by the FBI in their localities.   

  • Internationally, identify the rise of fascism in the global north and impact on global south, as well as the entrenching of anti-trans sentiment across the globe. 

  • Help individuals identify what they can do & need

  • Map out community needs and resources

  • How do you take what you're already doing and make it bigger?

  • Work to broaden and deepen wherever you are to be able to work effectively. 

  • Communicate what you are good at and able to do, as well as the capacity you have.  

  • Identifying roles when applicable

  • Pool resources available within community; extend resources beyond community. 

  • Who is invisible within your community? Who does not have community?

  • How is outreach being done here? if so, who and how are they being identified? What identifiers are we using to create space that those most affected can find their way to.

Identify how your community is being targeted locally? How is it targeted nationally? How is it targeted internationally?

2.

Identify how your community is being targeted locally? How is it targeted nationally? How is it targeted internationally?

3.

  • Create a phase out plan from police and phase in plan about how to make community structures within muslim spaces. 

  • Host or attend street medicine trainings

  • Cultivate food distribution sites

  • Create robust pathways for support for everyone criminalized

  • Build community protection and community care mechanisms. 

  • Host or attend community security training as well as legal observer training. 

Identify how your community is being targeted locally? How is it targeted nationally? How is it targeted internationally?

4.

  • Moving learnings beyond actions and into everyday life

  • Creating community care and mutual aid networks

    • We can't turn to the state, we must turn to one another

    • Who has access to this? Who does not?

  • Create funding pathways that move community away from surviving capitalism

  • Consider: how do you share and extend resources to the most marginalized who should be leading? 

Remember: our solidarity is eldership to the infancy of white supremacy.

Toolkit by MASGD.
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Contributors include [List of names here].