By Meg Foley Yoder
To mark Trans Day of Visibility 2026, the Carr-Ryan Center convened voices from three continents to grapple with a paradox: the visibility once prized as a path to rights and recognition now carries new risks amid deepening political backlash worldwide. The online panel, “Trans Visibility in Challenging Times: Risks, Resilience, and Radiance,” gathered activists whose lives reflect both hard-won progress and mounting backlash. Moderated by Jean Freedberg, a Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Fellow at the Carr-Ryan Center, the conversation quickly shifted from celebration to a reckoning with what visibility now costs. As Pau González Sánchez put it, “Visibility is a tool, not an end goal.”
“Visibility is a tool, not an end goal.” ––Pau González Sánchez
In recent years, trans people around the world have made significant gains in legal recognition, political representation, and cultural visibility. Yet those advances have been met by a deepening backlash, in which visibility itself can invite political attack. For example, the same week as Trans Day of Visibility, India enacted the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill 2026, underscoring how quickly rights can be rolled back. Established in 2010 to move the narrative beyond violence and toward joy, empowerment, and presence, Trans Day of Visibility now unfolds in a far more hostile global landscape—one that complicates its original vision.
For Rikki Nathanson, Senior Advisor for the Global Trans Program at OutRight International, the backlash has heightened the stakes of visibility. “It is incredibly necessary,” she said, citing legal and political challenges from Pakistan to Argentina to the United States. “Now is a time where we need to be visible because things are becoming so difficult for trans people globally,” she added.
Yet visibility, the panelists agreed, is neither simple nor uniformly safe. It can empower, but it can also render people more vulnerable. “Being visible can mean constant scrutiny, exposure to hate, burnout, and the pressure of representing an entire community,” said González Sánchez. “Those impacts are often invisible, but they are deeply felt.”
His own work reflects that tension. In Panama, he helped found one of the first support networks for trans men, which grew from a handful of individuals into a nationwide community of hundreds. Visibility made that growth possible, allowing people to find one another. But it also came at a cost, particularly in contexts where legal protections are fragile and increased exposure can invite harm.
Across Latin America, González Sánchez described a quieter form of backlash: funding restrictions and policy shifts that have forced organizations to scale back services, limit programming, or censor their work. “This becomes a form of structural backlash,” he said. “It’s not always loud or visible, but it quietly weakens the very networks that sustain our communities.”
That tension between visibility and safety was echoed by Henry Tse, Executive Director of Transgender Equality Hong Kong, whose work has centered on legal battles over gender recognition. “Being visible for me served a really strategic purpose,” Tse said, explaining how visibility became central to his legal work. In Hong Kong, trans people seeking to change the gender marker on their identification documents were required to undergo full gender-affirming surgery, including invasive procedures that many did not want or need. Tse, who was himself the plaintiff in the case, brought that policy to court, ultimately helping to overturn it. But pursuing that case meant stepping into public view, exposing himself to scrutiny, misrepresentation, and the very risks that visibility can invite.
Inside the courtroom, visibility itself became part of the argument. Tse described how opposing lawyers constructed elaborate and often implausible scenarios to argue against trans inclusion, raising fears about access to gendered spaces that he said bore little resemblance to everyday reality. In response, Tse and his legal team relied not only on legal reasoning but on lived experience, using his own presence to challenge those claims and to demonstrate the gap between abstract anxieties and the realities trans people navigate.
Still, the panelists cautioned against treating visibility as a universal goal. For some, visibility can open doors to recognition and rights. But in many contexts, they emphasized, it can also expose individuals to harm, making the choice to remain unseen a necessary form of self-preservation. “Not everyone can or should be visible,” said González Sánchez. “Safety, mental health and survival come first.”
Nathanson echoed that concern, emphasizing that safety must remain the starting point for any strategy. “What does it mean for your organization to operate safely? What does it mean for your community members or the people that you serve to be able to access the services that they need to access safely?” she said. In such cases, the decision to step back from visibility is not a retreat, but a deliberate and often political act.
Nathanson also referenced the broader historical and cultural context, noting that gender-diverse people have existed across societies long before contemporary terminology emerged. In many parts of the world, she said, identities and roles that fall outside binary gender categories were recognized within their own cultural frameworks prior to colonization. The language now used to describe trans identities, she suggested, often reflects Western systems imposed on societies that had long acknowledged gender diversity in different ways. In that sense, debates about visibility today are not only about recognition, but about who defines it, and on whose terms.
For some, visibility can open doors to recognition and rights. But in many contexts, they emphasized, it can also expose individuals to harm, making the choice to remain unseen a necessary form of self-preservation.
For Tse, the meaning of visibility has shifted over time. Earlier in his life, after transitioning in the United Kingdom, he was able to live without drawing attention to his identity, moving through the world with a degree of anonymity. It was only after returning to Hong Kong, where legal barriers made that invisibility impossible, that visibility became necessary. “The meaning of visibility changes over time,” he said, as experience and political context can reshape what it means to be seen.
Across the discussion, a consistent theme emerged: visibility is not a fixed goal, but a conditional and often precarious strategy. It can create pathways to recognition, legal rights, and community, but it can also expose individuals to new forms of risk, particularly in moments of political backlash. The question, the panelists suggested, is not whether visibility is inherently good or bad, but how it is used, and at what cost.
As Trans Day of Visibility continues to evolve, visibility itself is no longer a straightforward aspiration. In a world where recognition can invite both affirmation and attack, being seen has become a more complicated, and more consequential, choice. As González Sánchez put it, the question is not simply whether to be visible, but “how, when and for what purpose we choose it.”
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