A founding member of Resisting Transphobia in Edinburgh describes the origins of the group and plans for the future.

“How did the group start?”

“It’s sort of in the name.  Resisting transphobia in Edinburgh started as a very reactive thing, and I’m going to cast my mind back to this time last year or a little bit before, where, to be honest, it was a really bad time to be trans in Scotland and in the UK.

At the beginning of February in 2023, and some of you might be getting deja vu here, there was a Let Women Speak rally in Glasgow. Let women speak is the platform for Kelly J Keen, also known as Posie Parker, who is a far right activist and transphobe.  She held a transphobic and far-right rally in Glasgow’s George Square. It’s a very large, very significant area of the city and there was a counter protest that I attended.

And there were things about that counter protest that worried me. There were a lot of trans youth who were there who were very visible who were attending the cabaret against hate, but who clearly did not know very much about keeping themselves safe. There were fascist photographers in that crowd taking photos of these young people. And there was a massive gap between the protest and the rally. Now that on the one hand is good in terms of safeguarding, but on the other it did not feel effective.

To me personally. Brianna Ghey was murdered on the 11th of February. And we also in Edinburgh, out in Portobello, had a transphobic ex social worker holding a fear mongering conference or talk about education for parents of children.

In February of last year I was looking for hope and I was looking for answers. I felt like there was a really big gap in terms of organising, coordinating against this kind of fear mongering and hatred in our city and in Scotland.

And I was very heartened, therefore, to see at the end of the month that a group called rs21 Edinburgh were holding a talk entitled resisting transphobia in Lighthouse books, and I think this is really where it got started, because I went along to that talk.

I think I spouted out to Leslie at the end, who was one of the speakers, about how stressed I was about this, about how concerned I was about the situation with trans youth, about the gap that there seemed to be in organising.  And lastly, well, he was very, he was very cheerful, smiley, welcoming, as those of you who mostly know him to be, and we went along to the pub, and he said, Well, look, we also want to do something about this as rs21.

And I got invited along to have some zoom meetings with them. And lo and behold, at the end of the month, somehow, with support from members of rs21, and some other people who we had picked up that evening, at the end of the talk in Lighthouse books, we had cobbled together this big open meeting, that was really intended as an opportunity to just bring the community together and start talking, start understanding what concerns were out there. Try and identify what the themes were, trying to identify meaningful actions underpinning them.

And in many ways, it’s a bit of a hodgepodge, right?

Resisting transphobia is reactive as it sounds. It’s trying to push back. And there were a lot of things that were about pushback, there was pushback about misinformation that we talked about. There was pushback about specific events, like Let Women Speak, who are coming to our fair city next Saturday. I hope people will know that there is a counter-protest organised for that.

And it has remained a bit of an umbrella. It’s an umbrella organisation, there is no one view, there is no one set agenda. But some things have emerged from it, I think, the delightfully intersectional way we try and be in our outlook.

We understand that struggles for trans liberation are not separate from the struggles for any other marginalised groups, and we are also intergenerational.

We recently said farewell to one of our oldest members, who had been very active in the early stages of RT, she passed away in her 80s. And we also have young people, we have teenagers who are involved. And that is wonderful, because we are sharing knowledge and competencies and skill sets across generations.

And we are also internationalist in outlook.  One of the things that we have been doing is showing our support for Palestine since the beginning of the genocide in October.

All together, and I love repeating and parroting this, I think we work on the principle that successful movements require a diversity of tactics and we aim to embrace that.”

“What are your hopes for the future?”

“We started in a reactive way and I would like not to have to be reactive. One of the things that I think we’ve done in the past year that was most hopeful and most forward looking was a panel event that we held in October. And some of the speakers are here in this room and we had Leslie we had Gina we had also Nat and Tilly, all talking about trans liberation.

So thinking forward beyond the struggles against hate and against oppression, thinking beyond the struggles for rights, looking at what liberation might mean, in the sense of true freedom to be ourselves, having things that the state can’t take away from us.

And exploring again, those intersections between the struggle for trans liberation and other movements, looking at our history, and finally thinking about what we can do now. And I think a lot of the people who came to that within about 80 people in this room, and a lot of the people that I was speaking to afterwards, were feeling empowered.

I think at that point in terms of community building, I don’t have one particular direction that I would like us to go in. I would like us to continue to be a community that feels agency in each of us to coordinate around the things that we see, that we think are important, and to feel empowered with the people that we’re working with to make a change.”

“A word about joy?”

“There’s a smile on my face right now. This room is full. Once again, we keep on filling up Augustine’s and this is not a small space.

It is so joyful to me that we come together, that people come together to rally against the bad but also to celebrate the good.

We’re here on Trans Day of visibility. And I look at us, we have our flags out. We are building a community and it is with that strength of the community that we can have the space where we are allowed to feel joy, we create spaces where we can be ourselves and just normalise ourselves.

I think for me that is so much the thing and maybe it’s a bit of an ageing thing of passing through the need for recognition and into a space where I just want to be left alone to hang out and have a cup of tea with my friends.

And this is me thinking that old and crotchety on a Sunday afternoon. But this brings me joy of just being able to relax with people that I know understand me that I am comfortable around and I hope that we can all really enjoy having this space this afternoon.”

“Thank you very much.”