It's been a few weeks now since the US election upended everything and put trans people directly in the line of fire of some truly horrific people. Considering Trump's slate of appointments to important positions, it seems quite clear that Trump is intent on forcing trans people back into the closet or the grave (whichever's easier), and so we can expect the years ahead to be very, very difficult for trans people. Naturally, therefore, a lot of well-meaning people are asking what they can do to defend the trans people that they care about.
To that end, I've written this article, which contains things you can do to protect trans people in a hostile environment. I've not written a great deal about basic allyship stuff about pronouns and stuff: this has been talked to death and honestly, it's of questionable value. What I've discussed here is largely practical interventions that you can make to keep trans people surviving and thriving as much as possible when the regime is dead-set on preventing this from happening.
Keep trans people socially involved
The initial aim of all this anti-trans policy that's being pushed through is to isolate us socially. People with fewer social ties are easier to victimise, easier to make out to be villains and ultimately easier to intern or eliminate. Moreover, social isolation and shame is one of the few things that humans tend to think is worse than death, and the regime probably thinks that if they can isolate trans people in the USA enough, we'll all either detransition or kill ourselves, making us no longer a problem. As bleak as it is, this suggests a simple way to help defend the trans people in your life: make friends with them, invite them to dinner and make sure they're involved in your community.
This may take a little persistence: trans people are, after all, understandably twitchy at this juncture, and we're often dealing with unrelated mental health struggles on top of this all. Don't be pushy, but be persistent: keep inviting people to things even if they do say no. In the long run, a decent meal and the company of people who are willing to share a community with us means a lot. Community events can also be really good for this, especially if you're willing to make warm introductions to people in the community.
This point, by-the-by, is one that church groups are particularly well-set-up to execute on. You're organised, you have strong community bonds and this is an excellent opportunity to support marginalised and vilified people, which is very much in your mandate. And as much as I have to say this, you don't even necessarily need to be fully on board with the whole "trans rights" thing: not wanting us to die is enough, and if you can do that... well, a lot of trans people will still mistrust you, but that's just something you'll have to deal with. Keep showing up, and eventually you will be able to help.
Employ trans people and keep them employed
Employed people are harder to push around, and people employed in a critical professional capacity are even harder to mess with. Having a regular source of income creates stability and allows us to respond to shitty policy far more effectively than we can if we're poor and unemployed: if we have money coming in we can do things like moving, emigrating or using our money to route around shitty laws. Healthcare and other benefits are deeply important to trans people, and this will remain true even if trans healthcare is restricted: having a doctor that's hamstrung by shitty laws is still way better than having no doctor at all. Being employed gives us status and dignity in wider society, as your average society really, really hates unemployed people. And finally, being employed creates social ties with co-workers, which as I've discussed above are really important for staying sane.
Unfortunately, trans people already have serious issues with unemployment and underemployment, and this is only going to get worse, with bathroom bills and similar shit making it increasingly easy to bully trans people out of the workforce. We're therefore going to have to make a serious, concerted effort to keep as many trans people as possible employed. You have a few levers you can pull here: the first is to proactively seek out trans people and encourage them to apply to your jobs, which will help a lot, as trans people often simply don't apply for jobs that they're qualified for. Once trans people are through to the interview stage, avoid panel interviews (a notorious source of hiring bias) and work to screen out anyone whom you know to be biased from the process. You'll probably also have to drop or work around "culture fit" criteria: a lot of us are more than a little odd. Do not, however, drop technical or other standards: the people you hire still need to be effective in the job to be happy.
As for the trans people who have difficulty finding a good fit with serious, highly-skilled work: this is a chance for all the managers, SCRUM masters and other bullshit artists to shine. Everything I've written about in my blog that I've told people not to do (with the exception of the bigotry): do it as hard as you possibly can. Create repeated data platform migrations. Switch management modalities as much as you possibly can. Create jobs primarily centering around managing cards in JIRA. Write job descriptions so vague that you can hire basically anyone. You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create bullshit jobs for a good cause: use all your creativity and all your understanding of bureaucratic muck to shield people from the coming storm. You probably can't explicitly say that this is what's happening, but you can implicitly signal it in a hundred little ways, at performance reviews and in your side-channel communication. Make sure that you've communicated to the people you hire that this is what you're doing though: we tend to go a little up the wall otherwise.
Share your networks proactively
Of course, you might not be in a position to hire us directly: in such a case, however, there is still a thing you can do: share your professional networks. Thanks to the isolation we face, and the general aura of weirdness around us, we often have quite limited professional networks, and the networks we do have tend to be with people who are themselves in marginal situations. Networking is difficult and often risky for us, and people often simply don't wish to engage with us as who we are. This means that sharing your professional networks with us can have an outsized impact. Warm introductions can do a lot to help mitigate the bias we face in employment and (for those of us working on our own account) in the business world. Having people actively vouch for our skills can help a lot in keeping us economically afloat and protected, and as a bonus, it usually helps us find better work that we're happier in. Furthermore, in the case of legal or similar trouble, sharing your networks can put us in touch with a wide range of professionals that can help defend us if we're attacked from those angles.
A lot of trans people are going to have difficulty building the confidence to ask for this, so you're going to have to be proactive. Ask trans people if they'd like introductions, introduce them to safe and interesting people that you think they'd get on with, and advocate for them vigorously and proactively (with their permission, of course). Reshare their writing (I am definitely not putting this in out of base self-interest, and how dare you accuse me of that!), invite them to speak at conferences and wherever possible, make sure they're known in the right spaces. Once again, the more connected we are to the world around us, the harder we are to break.
Unionise
You will notice that the common thread through all of these points has been building strong, interconnected networks. There are obvious reasons for this: with these networks in place, it's much harder to seriously victimise trans people without first breaking those networks down. With these networks in place, you can still do damage to trans people, but it's much, much harder to actually break us. This suggests one thing that we can do that will significantly improve all of the above situations: join or start a union.
Unions make it much easier to institute fair hiring practices, they make it much harder to fire people unjustly, they provide representation when people get fucked around, they make sure that healthcare and other benefits are adequate, and they do an awful lot to ensure fair pay. They can also act as a remarkably effective bulwark against companies doing shitty things. Unions are amazing.
Joining a union and helping to make it as strong as it is an excellent way of building your capacity to defend the trans people in your life, and as a bonus, it also helps you defend yourself and everyone else. I cannot recommend it enough.
As I've said before, these coming years are going to be very hard for trans people everywhere, and especially in the USA. The coming regime is going to attempt to isolate and break us, and they have the full force of the state (albeit inexpertly applied) on their side. We're going to have to fight damned hard to survive, but we have the tools to do so. If you're positioned to do any of the above things for the trans people in your life, I highly recommend doing so.
As a lot of you will know, I am myself a trans woman. While I'm in New Zealand, and thus spared the brunt of the Trump administration's bullshit, things aren't exactly sunshine and roses here either. A fair amount of what I've written here thus also applies to me.
To that end, if people are keen on helping a trans woman out, I would very much appreciate:
a) People amplifying my voice if they're so inclined: having more readers and more reach is very valuable to me
b) Introductions to any people who might have engineering or writing projects that they'd like me to take on. The writing speaks for itself: as for the engineering, I work with Python, PostgreSQL and Vue/Nuxt: I also know a fair amount about other web technologies. I enjoy data work (both data engineering and stats) and full-stack web dev, and I also offer Engineering-Lead-as-a-Service services for startups that might find it useful. If there's anything interesting out there, please drop me a message!
c) If you're feeling generous, donations to my Liberapay or Patreon help even out my income at this early stage of me growing my consultancy, which is extremely helpful