lokifan | I found out I’m in a Pink video!!!

I found out I’m in a Pink video!!!

Wildly I didn’t post about it at the time??

oracne posted this Pink video and I watched it, and halfway through went !!! wait that’s me!!!

(Warning: the video does have some upsetting images - swastikas & the KKK etc, a gun and then kids running through a school. Briefly but I wanted to mention it!)

It has a bunch of imagery of protests, and fighting for our rights - in a delightfully intersectional way - and at 2:42 there’s an image of BWithTheT. I’m the furthest on the right, with long bi-coloured hair (pink at the top, then purple & blue) in a lilac t-shirt. You can’t tell in the video but it says SISTERS NOT CIS TERFS.

I was there with one of my best friends - sadly you can’t see her, but you can blurrily see her sign - STOP CONSULTING BIGOTS ON TRANS RIGHTS. At 2:54 I’m not there but the rest of B With The T is, including a QUEER SOLIDARITY sign <3

We were there, at the head of London’s 2019 Pride march, as part of 4 community groups to demonstrate solidarity with trans people.

I can’t remember if I’ve talked about this on DW, but in 2018 I marched with Pride in London, as I usually did. I was a community marcher that year I think, not with any particular group. And I had a sign that said FUND CAHMS, KEEP QUEER KIDS ALIVE. (CAHMS = Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services.) And when they read the sign, a lot of very young-looking people, and in some cases their parents, cheered and waved and gave me high-fives. Which was lovely but made me pretty emotional, in how it spoke to these kids needing help they weren’t getting. Me and my friends were near the back, as community marchers, and we noticed the increasing numbers of bi and trans flags and that there were loads of trans teenagers and how lovely that was.

And then we got to the end, went to collapse in St James Park, and found out that TERFs had led the march.

A bunch of lesbian transphobes laid down in front of the march and refused to move unless they were allowed to lead the march. The organisers agreed. These people led the fucking march and handed out leaflets about how trans rights were bad for women, bad for lesbians. I’ve honestly got tears in my eyes again just thinking about it, all the kids we saw with trans flags, maybe at their first Pride, and the first thing they get is that they still don’t belong.

Now to give the organisers a small bit of credit, I think their agreeing was panic rather than transphobia. (Though you could say that backing down to those people was transphobia - it was treating solidarity with trans people as negotiable - and I wouldn’t disagree.) Because the next year, it was trans solidarity that led the march.

An activist acquaintance posted in a bi activist group I was in, asking if anyone wanted to be part of a walking group called B With The T. And I felt that this was exactly what I wanted and needed to do after the sickening horror of 2018, and also just in general. As a queer woman feminist, I feel VERY strongly about fighting the attempts to use me as a human shield for transphobia. The myth that lesbians are hurt/damaged by trans rights was central to the 2018 TERFs and it’s such bullshit. The idea that the right for trans rights is fundamentally an intra-community squabble between feminists and/or lesbians and trans people is still continually pushed in the British media, including nominally lefty papers. And ofc the backlash against trans rights that’s only got more intense was already in full swing. I felt support for trans people among the rest of the community was like, THE issue to prioritise, at least for me.

So me & my BFF joined the group, and then we found out we were actually leading Pride!

It was all very hush-hush because the organisers were worried about the TERFs showing up again. Mentioning it on social media was forbidden.

Since we were leading the march, we got invited to this breakfast beforehand. Pride organisers were there with badges that read not a fucking party planner <3, and we got to hang out and meet the others marching. There were four groups, L with the T, G with the T, B with the T, and Queer with the T. I was so exhausted lol, I’d been up half the night packing cos I was about to move, but it was wonderful. Everyone was so great.

And then we got to lead, and there was no music from a corporate float to drown out our chants - Trans women fought for me, please learn your history! and Black trans lives matter! - and people were so happy to see us. We got to demonstrate that the T is part of the wider queer community, indivisible - and of course there were several trans bi people in the group - and that queer solidarity outlasts any attempt from a small, loud, cruel minority to gain acceptance from cishet institutions by scrambling over the bodies of trans people.

Nobody’s in this alone. I mean, isn't that part of the point of Pride?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

rionaleonhart

Oh, wow, it's absolutely rad that you're in the video! (One of my housemates was in a protest photo that crops up on news articles about protests and/or trans rights every so often; it's always strange to see!) And I'm glad you had a good experience at the 2019 march, even if 2018 was rough.

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I found out I’m in a Pink video!!!

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