Solidarity Fail on the Chat

This week a young trans adult in a group collaborating to defend trans youth left the chat. They said they’d talked with other trans folks who quit, and they’d all agreed our group was way too focused on the (mainly cis) parents.

I was mad. Why did they leave so abruptly? It felt like a door slam, a personal affront.

Yet I’ve done the same!

So tired

Years ago I quit a group unlearning white supremacy that met at a UU church—walked out into the night, mid-meeting. The organizer, a pastor, reached out: could I share why I left? There was growth that could happen if I did, he said, and talking would be a respectful thing to do.

Fair ask. Opportunity for growth. Respect, talking. But I was so tired.

I had been the only white person with a multi-racial family in that room. I experienced the little racist acts that others described committing. Their tears and shame exhausted me. Telling their stories was not wrong, but as I listened, my body felt like the aggressions they confessed were directed at me or mine, even though they weren’t.

The last straw was a white grandfather who confronted his 6-year-old granddaughter when she observed, correctly, that someone in the public library had “brown skin.” EVERYONE IS THE SAME. DON’T EVER SAY THAT. Proud of his eruption, he awaited praise for being a good white.

I knew I should propose that everyone is the same is the problem, not the solution. It was surely my job as a white person to start a conversation about colorblind racism with my fellow white person. Or to talk about what was going on with me. Instead I rudely fled.

Inside vs. outside the system

I wonder whether the young trans adult who left our group was also tired.

Let me describe what goes on in our chat.

The parents in our group organize to protest hospitals that cut off care to our kids and fight executive orders that expose trans children’s and families’ private data. They are calling for hospitals to reinstate care. Other work includes assembling kits with shaving cream and other personal care items for trans youth, some of whom have had to leave their families.

The trans adults want to move away from institutions and into mutual aid. They are focused on trans people meeting their own needs through community—it’s called autonomous care—and not being beholden to institutions for HRT or acceptance and dignity. After all, institutions are in the business of being in business, not the business of dignity, despite their blather about “compassionate care.”

The trans adults want to fight the health system too, but from outside the system. They are driven from an anti-capitalist view of life.

Solidarity fantasy

A rift opened when some parents rejected the idea of DIY care. Instead of saying “here’s what I want and here’s what I’m concerned about,” the parents shut down the trans person, who left.

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In the hours after, I remembered a chapter about solidarity failure in writer Sarah Schulman’s book The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. Groups working for justice are messy—people pit themselves against each other, stop listening. Schulman writes:

Both myself on the receiving end, and the people whom I am in solidarity with, can be angry, petty, victimy.

I was so glad she pulled back the curtain. We weren’t the only ones fighting each other when we weren’t each other’s enemy.

Earthquakes

Another idea of Schulman’s is “conflict is not abuse.” Act Up has a similar saying: “disagree with the idea, not the person.”

Probably many groups, not just ours, could think on this.

Justice work is fragile at generational lines, race lines, gender lines. The tension and blowups, Schulman notes, have happened in solidarity work throughout history. There is always a potential fault line wherever there is a historical lack of trust, and neither side is so equipped to sustain major tremors.

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Knee-jerk

After the trans person quit, parents got defensive. Our work is important, someone said. Our activism has succeeded in protecting vulnerable private information.

Others noted that affirming parents have our own mental health challenges under Trump 2.0. I can vouch for that. With our kids under attack, it’s likely not a coincidence that bodies in this group get sick so often and seriously and that we battle anxiety and depression.

And then a different parent—one of the moderators—asked us all to take a moment and consider that this is not the first time a young trans person has left the group.

Instead of knee-jerk defensiveness, they said, let's think about what changes we might make, if any, for members—especially young trans adults—to bring up concerns. If adult trans folks are telling us the care model we are fighting for didn’t work for them, we have to listen and discuss.

Stay in the room

In the hours after the trans person left, I slipped from anger to sadness. That young trans adults are willing to work alongside older, cis parents is incredibly meaningful to me, because it’s a bridge between my generation and my kid’s.

We lose a precious resource when someone quits.

None of us knows yet what the care model we are building for our kids looks like. But we won’t build it unless we stay in the room with each other.

We can build something better when we listen.

— N.R.

Noa Rabinow is a health care worker, an editor at Gender Defiant, and mom to a trans teen.