I’m a Trans American—and I’ve Got Your Back if You’ve Got Mine

I am a transgender American. Non-binary, to be specific—a they/them that you might have heard something about.

But that is not the only identity I hold. Like all of us, I am many things. I am a lover of nature, most at peace in a forest, sleeping with nothing but a bit of fabric between me and the sky. I am the descendant of a grandmother who came through Ellis Island when she was eight years old, and on whose face I had never seen quite such love of America as when she returned to those halls for the first time many decades later, reminiscing about her literal first steps here. I am ever a student, always eager to learn new things and to grow in subjects from gardening to history to first aid. And I am a survivor, born into a home where struggle was inevitable, in which I was forged and hardened—but also made more fiercely loyal and loving—through endurance and reclamation.

There is, of course, more. None among us could be described in just a few sentences—we are all more beautifully complicated and messy and mysterious than that. We are all absurdly and wonderfully human.

But the identity that has perhaps most defined me, that I think might be the way that most people would describe me, is this: I am an organizer. I first worked to organize nurses at the largest healthcare system in Vermont over two decades ago. It was there that I first met then–Congressman Bernie Sanders, for whom I would later serve as a national delegate during his two presidential runs, and it was there that I first truly grasped the power that workers could claim when we come together to fight for what we believe in. For the Vermont nurses, that included safe staffing ratios, a ban on unsafe mandatory overtime, and other efforts to put patient care before profits—in other words, to shake a bit of the greed out of our corporatized healthcare system. And it was there that I truly learned that no one can do anything “for” working people—that our future relies on us, and how we choose to make it. No one gave those nurses anything. They organized, they made demands, and they didn’t give up until they won them.

In the decades since, I’ve been blessed to have been able to support many other workers across the country in organizing unions and fighting for concessions from corporations to improve their lives, their families, and their communities. And in nearly every one of those struggles, I have seen the same boss tactics designed to drive wedges between working people to break down their organizing. I’ve seen employers tell men that they’ll give them something if they throw the women in the shop under the bus—and vice versa. I’ve seen bad bosses try to pit people against each other by race, by age, by religion, by job title, by just about every other thing you could imagine. And all of it, of course, is a simple divide-and-conquer strategy, because if we are fighting each other, then we are not effectively fighting the CEO who is shortchanging all of us. He, of course, is laughing all the way to the bank as we waste our time and energy being angry at each other instead of focusing on the real villain.

Don’t take the bosses’ bait

In this moment MAGA is using attacks on immigrants and LGBTQ people—especially trans folks—as a battering ram to open the way for their entire policy agenda. Lately, I’ve had people ask me if I’m scared of working class people, given how many voted for and seem to cheer on the scapegoating of trans people for our shared problems. And my answer is no, because I will never be scared of working people. But also: it’s because I’m angry, too. I think that if you want to look at where the real fault line is in America, it looks a lot more like those who shed a tear for the killing of the CEO of a health insurance company that often denied necessary medical care because it prioritized profits over human lives—and those of us who had eyes that stayed dry. It looks like who understands that the difference between capital murder and “just business” in the modern-day United States is all too often a function of how many digits are in someone’s bank account.

And that, my friends, is most of us. Most of us feel that by now, in our bones. It’s why we’re angry. From the New Deal forward in America, we lived by the social contract that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can have a slice of the American Dream—”a chicken in every pot and a car in every driveway,” as the United Auto Workers put it when they were organizing their way into building the biggest American middle class ever.

And while that dream has always had different levels of access depending on who you were or where you came from, there were also those who pushed hard to expand it. When I think about the workers during the 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike—perhaps the most powerful strike in American history—it required both Black and white workers, and a powerful Women’s Auxiliary, all fighting together for their shared prosperity. They knew they could never hope to win what they needed from a massive corporation by acting alone or within identity silos. They knew—and they showed—that the path forward to actual victory against a seemingly unbeatable corporate titan depended on everyone sticking together, despite all the things that could have divided them.

I think about the strikers and martyrs of the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, who spoke dozens of different languages; of the Pullman Porters who organized to build the Black middle class; of the United Farmworkers who built a movement for economic and social justice that could not be denied; of the hospitals I’ve helped to organize; of the fighting Amazon workers and red-shirted teachers and striking grocery workers of today, and I know: this is the America I believe in. It’s an America where we understand that the only way to actually win—where we stop begging for crumbs and start demanding whole loaves—is by coming together. There simply is no other path. No one is coming to save us. It’s not the president who owns 19 country clubs and allows the richest men on the planet to slash our healthcare and education and Social Security to give themselves massive tax breaks. And it’s not the corporate Democrats who say pretty things in their ads but then turn around and block real progress for working people, choosing instead to side with the donor class. They’re just like all the other bosses, making promises I’ve seen get broken over and over for most of my life.

We are the solution

The solution, my friends, comes from us. Not anywhere else. And that—I guarantee you, having sat across from one too many corporate executives at bargaining tables—is what really terrifies them. They are scared of the majority of us coming together to reject their fear-mongering and divide-and-conquer nonsense and instead stand shoulder to shoulder. And it makes them shake in their boots precisely because that is the only true path to taking back our country from the people whose greed is tearing it (and us) apart. 

I write this to ask: will you join me in fighting the real fight? The one that really matters? Because if you will stand with me, I will stand with you. I don’t care who you are, where you come from, or who you voted for. I will have your back if you have mine. That’s the way this is supposed to work, and no matter how much they tell us to hate and fear one another, my question and my offer will stand.

And if you still are wondering about the “they/their agenda,” here’s an open invitation to come to the DMV with me when I next update my driver’s license (yep, with that little ‘ol X on it). But please do bring a book or some music, because I promise you that our trip to the DMV will be just as boring as any other time you’ve been there. How “normal” trans lives are is sometimes surprising to the point of discomfort for those who don’t know us well—and if you are one of them, more the better. Perhaps it will help you to see more clearly what the actual problem is, and that it hurts us both. 

After our trip to the DMV, we can head to the nearest picket line or rally against corporate greed, because that’s where the real action is. The fight for America’s future is in standing together with every stripe and creed of working people, indivisible, to demand something the CEOs want us to believe is impossible: that this country should work for working people instead of further enriching the obscenely wealthy.

If we do that, we just might have a shot at winning back the promise that they’ve stolen from too many of us: a real shot at the American Dream. But first, we have to stop falling for the bosses’ lies and dirty tricks. And so I’ll ask again: will you stand with me in fighting for working people and against corporate greed? 

Like I said, I’ve got your back if you’ve got mine.

Featured image by Kimmie Dearest