Talofa lava, and happy Trans Day of Visibility – TDOV!
Today is about celebrating trans lives. It’s about raising visibility of our contributions, our achievements, our strength, and our resilience. It’s about honoring the legacy of our transcestors, past and present, and celebrating our creative and caring ways of being in community with one another.
Over the past year, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, two-spirit, nonbinary, trans, and gender diverse people have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 and the economic and social impacts of the pandemic, along with heightened systemic racism, increased violence, and anti-trans legislative attacks in more than 30 states.
In this moment, pausing to honor all that we have, and all of the care that continues to flow through our communities, feels all the more important.
At Pride Foundation, we’re working to raise the visibility of two-spirit, trans, non-binary, and gender diverse folks every day through our TRANSform Culture program (formerly TRANSform Washington), which I have the honor to lead alongside an incredible group of community organizers. Together, we are working to advance equity and justice through messaging research, storytelling, and intentional culture change work. We continue to care for one another and for our communities from a place of trust and deep love, and have done so in formal and informal ways.
Rather than being reactive to a particular legal or policy threat, TRANSform Culture is developing a network of relationships to engage in long-term cultural transformation work in the Northwest. Every element of this work is grounded in developing, maintaining, and centering long-term relationships with communities—developing messaging and sharing with individuals and groups on the ground supporting our communities, rather than doing it for communities.
Together, we are building the knowledge, tools, and capacity to use media to shift the way our movements understand and talk about our communities, using messages that honor our raw stories and lived experiences.
Please join us today in celebrating TDOV. And please join us in the work everyday to shift culture to keep everyone in our communities safe—to transform the world so that we can all be seen as whole people, we can all be connected in community, and we can all thrive.
Wondering how to take action for TDOV? Here are a just a few ideas.
Support BIPOC trans-led organizations doing work on the ground across our region like so many of our Crisis Community Care Fund and Community Grants recipients.
Check out the Trans Agenda for Liberation, a “community-led guide towards the world we deserve.” We especially wanted to highlight today Pillar 1 of the agenda that encourages us to support trans communities by trusting in the leadership of Black trans women and femmes. Look to the leadership and brilliance of groups like the Black Trans Task Force.
Take part in a TDOV event! Here are just some of the organizations hosting virtual TDOV events across our region:
Agaiotupu Viena is the Director of our TRANSform Culture program.