Remembrance, Revenge, Revolt (2012)

On Transgender Day of Remembrance
Baltimore, 2012

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Each year, faced with the murder of trans people, we are asked to

REMEMBER. We are asked to hold candles and listen to politicians

mouth empty platitudes. We are asked to MOURN. But all our tears

cannot make sense of our pain, all our memories cannot halt the violent

reality of our lives under gender.

Let’s remember: it is this world that makes corpses of the bodies of

trans* people. It is the police, harassing and arresting trans* women. It

is the legal system and prisons, perpetrating the wholesale removal and

imprisonment of gender rebels and other undesirables. It is bourgeois

neighborhood associations that scapegoat trans* women and encourage

police persecution in the service of gentrification and the maintainance

of the capitalist order. It is transphobes and gaybashers committing

daily, interpersonal violence. It is the daily mechinations of class society,

that exclude and exploit trans* people. It is the power of the state, its

regulatory and disciplinary practices that make day-to-day survival a

war for trans* people. It is religion, with its condemnations and life-

destroying morality. It is white supremacy and patriarchy, which do the

work of domination on the bodies of trans* people of color and trans*

feminine people. It is the totality of civilization that is responsible for

each and every trans* death.

Let’s remember: these same mealy-mouthed politicians, these same

rich scum, these same police, mobilize trans* deaths to increase state

power. Politicians and police salivate at the thought of more hate crime

legislation to increase their budgets and expand their legal parameters.

The bourgeois gays and lesbians, who consistently put aside the deaths

of trans* people 364 days of the year in favor of assimilationist goals

like marriage, will trot out their gay politicians to “pay respect to the

dead.” Capital mobilizes to find ways to include the most respectable

trans* people to pull gender rebels into the theater of commodity society.

When those with a stake in the continued functioning of society speak of

trans* deaths, their mouths are filled with corpses.

Let’s remember: wherever there is domination, there is revolt. We do

not want more hate crime legislation. We do not want to assimilate into

patriarchal heterosexual society. We do not want trans* bosses, CEOs,

Senators, and police. We do not want a trans-positive capitalism, a trans-

inclusive military, a trans-friendly state. We want the police out of our

lives. We want the annihilation of all prisons, all courts, all states, all

laws. We want to end marriage, the church, the family, and all other

institutions that maintain patriarchy and property relations. We know

the destruction of gender violence is impossible without the destruction

of civilization. Nothing less than this will satisfy us.

This is not a call to cease crying, to ignore the power of memory, to push

off the pain in our hearts. To do so would be to replicate hard-hearted

militance and masculinist posturing. We want to cry, but we also know

that tears alone will not loosen the death-grip of gender.

Today let’s remember the past and plan for the future. Let’s understand

survival and revolt as inseparable. Let’s refuse the logic of individualism

that prevents our pain from implicating society, and thereby separates us

from our collective agency to fight back. Let’s take solace in the power

of vengeance, in the possibilities that become real only when we are

dangerous together.

NO TRANS* ARREST WITHOUT REPRISAL.

NO TRANS* DEATH WITHOUT REVENGE.

Solidarity with those behind bars, those free and fighting, and those

whose lives have been stolen. Against the logic of submission, toward

the destruction of gender. Our remembrance is revolt.

NO TRANS* ARREST

WITHOUT REPRISAL

NO TRANS* DEATH

WITHOUT REVENGE