> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://the-greatest-fool.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Making The Resistance Irresistible This Trans Day of Visibility - URL: https://the-greatest-fool.ghost.io/making-the-resistance-irresistible-this-trans-day-of-visibility/ - Published: 2026-08-27T06:30:17.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-27T06:30:17.000Z - Author: Austen Howard Note: This post was originally published on March 31st, 2026. The content of this post was drawn from the teachings of Black and POC queer and trans culture workers, including: - Audre Lorde - Tony Cade Bambara - Kristianna Smith - Kai Cheng Thom - Mariame Kaba - Adrienne Maree Brown - Pamela Sneed - Holiday Simmons - Ingrid LaFleur - Nadia Owusu - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Aleks Dugham-Manzur - Sizwe Inkingi and all the names I have yet to or may never know. *“My loves, I will always remember the ripe pleasure of conspiring with you in the afternoon sun, the thrill of co-creating small but tangible shifts, the joy of dancing together against decorum.” - Nadia Owusu* We live today in a world dominated by the global resurgence of fascism. Internationally, 2LGBTQIA+ peoples are positioned as national identity threats and laws are being enacted to drive displacement while also restricting movement. We are being detained, tortured and killed in broad daylight. Our Black, POC, Indigenous and migrant siblings are, as always at the nexus of intersecting oppressions determined to uphold a system of exclusion. *“Before, when we held these conversations internationally and locally, our eye was towards advancing something. Now, we are holding on for dear life to avoid losing everything.” - Aleks Dugham-Mansur* Every day we are faced with a social and political narrative that asks “Whose lives are worth safety?” and tells us ours are not. Of course we are scared. Of course we are angry. Of course we are in pain. We know that our emotions are powerful. They are sacred. They are relational. Our shared pain helps us find each other and share the carrying. Our pain can be fuel. On this International Trans Day of Visibility, I want to center our Joy as infinitely more powerful. *“Detroit taught me about the pleasures derived from participating in and supporting innovative ancestrally rooted loving communities.” - Ingrid LaFleur* We share our pain, but we also share our longings, our desires, our dreams for what a future based in collective liberation and care can look like. We share what Audre Lorde called “the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self”. How do we respond to a dominant narrative whose primary tool of oppression is to divide us along gender, sexuality, race, economic, national, and ability status lines? We respond with coalitions that are impossible to divide. The nature and history of our oppressions differ widely, but the same political playbook used against 2LGBTQIA+ folks is used against every other minority group. The attacks against us are interconnected and we cannot respond to them with siloed organizing. To create a resilient movement, we must create a sense of belonging. I have always felt the greatest sense of belonging and power in spaces of joy. There was a community space, a bar - now gone - in my neighborhood full of Black, white, POC, straight, gender diverse, cis, queer, disabled, fat, skinny, religious, spiritual, non-spiritual. It was filled with office workers and sex workers. It was a place to go whether you never worried about money or couldn’t afford a single drink (and inevitably someone would buy you one). There were drag shows, burlesque performances, art events, dance parties, birthdays, memorials, fundraisers, and nights for a quiet drink among friends. Always, there was joy and belonging. Always, there was care. When I was a trans, queer, disabled kid in the deep south desperately searching for a reason to keep living, it wasn’t the protests I dreamed of. It wasn’t the angry instagram posts or all-caps tweets. It wasn’t even a big, strong queer elder to come yell at the people in my life making it feel impossible to stay. I dreamed of that bar. I dreamed of those people. I dreamed of a place that prioritized care, where differences were a unifier, where you could be silly and loud and gay and weird and sexual and loving and messy and joyful - and yes, angry and scared and sad- in safety. I longed for a light-soaked and fun future built in collaboration. When I searched “boys kissing” on the internet, I was looking for people like me experiencing pleasure. It was seeing my elders embody joy that reassured me I had a future. *“When my body feels good, my life feels good, and I want to keep going, and fight for my right to exist and love and grow and evolve ... That doesn’t mean the absence of discomfort or awkwardness or hard conversations or learning. But the majority experience should be presence - being fully alive.” - adrienne maree brown* *“The aim of each thing which we do is to make our lives and the lives of our children richer and more possible. Within the celebration of the erotic in all of our endeavours, my work becomes a conscious celebration - a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered. ”* *\- Audre Lorde* So how do we bring the sense of pleasure and belonging from the party into our organizing? *“Difference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within that interdependency of different strengths, ac hnowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.”* *\-Audre Lorde* The primary tool of the oppressor is tell us that our differences are dangerous. By highlighting and vilifying the differing experiences of white and Black, refugee and citizen, rural and urban, poor and economically secure, housed and unhoused, disabled and abled, english speaking and non-english speaking, they deprive of us of a fount of power with immense potential to co-create a better future. They want me to return to the farming town I was raised in and feel such overwhelming fear and anger that I dare not talk to a single one of my neighbors. They know that not just past the differences between my elderly, cis, straight, southern baptist neighbor and I, but **within** those differences, lies a mutual longing for change. They are counting on us using the same divide and conquer strategy they birthed to disarm ourselves. *“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” -Audre Lorde* Our anger is warranted. Our anger is sacred. It belongs in our bodies. But we cannot build a movement based on fear. Only by centering the power of pleasure, community and our differences can we co-create a resilient revolution and imagine new, better ways of caring for each other. Employing the trauma-response to dehumanize each other as the driving force of our activism is merely attempting to re-purpose the tools of our oppressors. Change is relational. There is enormous power in collectively imagining and relating a future based on a structure of care. That fundamental truth has largely been forgotten or stamped out. So on this International Trans Day of Visibility, I encourage us to bring the fullness of ourselves into our neighborhoods. I don’t want you to be naive. I don’t want you to be unsafe. I do encourage you to be uncomfortable. How do we see the humanity in the “other” even when we are angry and scared? How do we become comfortable being in community with those who speak and live differently? How do we create spaces that make life worth living? How do we move past punishment? How to we build a movement identity that includes as many folks as possible? How do we make the revolution irresistible? *“Can I let people into where my visioning happens? Can we be intimate at the level of our longings? What as a society can we truly long for?” - adrienne maree brown* *“The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of the difference.” - Audre Lorde* *“We need to learn how to practice love such that care- for ourselves and others- is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience.” - adrienne maree brown* *“What happens when we avoid being playful and imaginitive with one another and we avoid grieving with each other - all we have is anger to pop off at ... We have to be able to envision what we want beyond not this ... We need to be able to embody that as a state of rage.” - Kristianna Smith*