Late last month, on the Trans Day of Visibility (March 31), Jean Freedberg, Global LGBTQI+ Human Rights Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy’ School’s Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights, brought together trans activists from across the world for a conversation on power, change, and visibility.
“We want to focus on our solidarity,” Freedberg explained. “To discuss the issue of visibility, radiance, joy—and how we deal with being out, being proud, being visible in today's really challenging times.”
Freedberg was joined by Henry Tse, executive director of Transgender Equality Hong Kong, Rikki Nathanson, a trans Advocate from Zimbabwe and senior advisor at Global Trans Program at OutRight International, and Pau González Sánchez, a trans masculine community leader and LGBTQI+ rights advocate from Panama.
“A tool, not an end goal”
“Is visibility in fact the ultimate goal?” Freedberg asked Tse, Nathanson, and González Sánchez. “Is this the right place for us to be as a movement? And does the concept of being visible mean the same today as it did perhaps twenty or thirty years ago?”
González Sánchez replied that “visibility is a tool, not an end goal. It breaks silence. It humanizes our experience, and it can open doors to rights.”
He says he saw the power of visibility when he launched a trans men group in Panama—the first of its kind. It started out with just three men.
“We were just trying to find out if there [were] other people like us. And it’s amazing how our visibility helped others to find community…we started growing. There was forty, fifty, sixty [people], then two hundred and all over Panama at the national level,” he explains.
But that visibility, he said, can also be challenging.
“A very real cost”
“Visibility also comes with a very real cost to mental health and well-being,” he said. “Being visible can mean constant scrutiny, exposure to hate, burnout, and the pressure representing an entire community.”
Given that—and the dangerous conditions many trans people face across the world, he said, visibility can put trans people at risk.
“Speaking to the U.S. specifically, just between last year and this year, there’s been over six hundred anti-LGBTIQ bills that have been that have been introduced—and mainly targeting trans people,” Nathanson pointed out.
So “choosing not to be visible, especially in hostile contexts like the ones we’re living in right now, is also valid and a political decision,” González Sánchez explained.
Nathanson spoke to a moment in which her own visibility put her in danger.
“I went to a public restroom in a hotel in the city I was living in, and I was singled out by a political activist, and I was arrested at gunpoint,” she said. “Six police officers with rifles and visors and riot police and bundled in a van, taken to a prison, locked away for three days under the most inhumane conditions. I was stripped naked in front of five police officers. It was horrific.”
Visibility under the law
Nathanson ended up channeling this painful experience into a fight for the safety and visibility of others. After her arrest and acquittal, she sued the Zimbabwean government and the police commissioner on seven counts, including wrongful arrest and mental anguish. She won, and her lawsuit led to increased legal protections for trans people in her country.
“It brought trans people to the fore of the discussion in Zimbabwe and across the region of Southern Africa—that trans people have the right as everybody else, and they should not be discriminated against,” Nathanson said. “That that really the crux of what the judgment said.”
Tse also used his visibility in a lawsuit against his government, winning the right for trans people in Hong Kong to change the gender marker on their Hong Kong ID cards without surgery.
“Being visible for me served a really strategic purpose…when you have visibility in a controlled setting that's very much focused on helping the cause of lawsuits or policy reforms,” he explained, “when it’s done, it helps you back—with general acceptance and good visibility for the general trans population.”
He spoke about a booklet he made, “Transmen in Hong Kong, Visibility Versus Invisibility.”
“It’s basically the stories the stories of eight local trans men who were in the same situation as me. They allowed me to use their stories to convince the court that we deserve the right ID so that we can live a normal life in Hong Kong,” he explained. “This is my one of my main projects, strategizing the use of visibility in key fights for gender recognition.”
González Sánchez, too, took a fight to change his gender marker on his ID without invasive medical review to the supreme court of Panama, and eventually the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights. While González Sánchez fought this case, he was also gathering the stories of trans men over 40 in Panama to preserve their experiences as oral histories.
“It’s not just legal work,” he explained. “It’s about translating our lives’ experiences into human rights framework with the hope of creating lasting impact for future generations.”
Safety in numbers
Nathanson suggested that trans activists could pursue a “safety first” approach.
“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 asked. “That really is the starting point. And that could look that could look in in look like different thing—like deciding when to when to be visible, and when not to be visible, decide where to go to and where not to go to.”
She suggested that there’s “safety in numbers,” and encouraged trans advocates to band together, both with other trans groups, and with aligned groups working on different (but sometimes related) issues, like LGBTQ rights or women’s rights.
In this context, she explained, trans groups can both be visible within the space of their activist coalition, but “have a collective voice where it’s more ambiguous, and it’s sort of more invisible” in the wider world. This can ultimately help them expand and further their movement.
Freedberg, in closing the conversation, was optimistic about the power of those movements.
“The progress that we’ve made, we are going to keep building on it,” she said. “We are not going to be set back by those who want to stop us, those who can’t bear to see us living our lives authentically and with joy and with passion.”
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Banner photograph by Cris Faga/NurPhoto/Getty Images