March 31 is Trans Day of Visibility. It was first held in 2009 as a counterfoil to the memorial Trans Day of Remembrance, intending to celebrate and highlight the lives of trans people. It entered into a queer cultural calendar demarcated by awareness and visibility. These days are statements of affirmation: We’re here, and you can’t hide us away.

This stake in visibility has a long history. On 1 July 1972 the first UK Pride march – then billing itself as International Gay Pride Day – began in Trafalgar Square. A typewritten and photocopied programme proclaimed, “We are gay and we are proud and we are going to enjoy ourselves.”

At the top of the programme, a notice testifies to the atmosphere that surrounded this day of celebration. Several people had recently been arrested by plainclothes police in Battersea Park “for the same old things”, fined between £100 and £400 (about £1,100 to £4,400 now).

The relatively recent Sexual Offences Act had decriminalised homosexuality – in private, mind you, and between men aged 21 and over, and not in Scotland or Northern Ireland – but penalties for ‘public offences’ had been made significantly more severe, and police crackdowns on gay venues, public parks, and cruising spots were common.

This first march, then, had a significance that is sometimes lost in the massive crowds and corporate-sponsored stages of 21st-century Prides. To say ‘We are gay and we are going to enjoy ourselves’ was a statement of public visibility in the face of open and intentional persecution by the state. It was to say that the queer community would not be constrained by legislative freedom that told us we were acceptable – so long as we were out of sight.

This was a conscious political choice. In 1981 the march was relocated from London to Huddersfield in support of the Gemini Club, a gay nightclub and locus of queer activity in the North, which was being harassed and threatened with closure by the West Yorkshire police.

In the 2020s, the ‘gay rights’ struggle of 50 years ago is at once very different and much the same. Our taxonomies of gender and sexuality have exploded in pursuit of better and more detailed representation (with an accompanying proliferation of flags on social media and at queer events). The all-too-gradual, post-Section 28 acceptance of LGB people in media and in the public eye has awakened a keen sensitivity to the specific marginalisation of trans people, giving rise to a modern movement for trans liberation and trans visibility.

“This high-profile embrace of trans individuals in culture and aesthetics belies a political climate in which trans people fare worse with each passing year”

Heartstopper star Yasmin Finney represents perhaps the apex of positive trans visibility in the UK: a trans actress playing a trans character whose storyline honours her transness (the challenges of transferring from a boys’ to a girls’ school, for instance) without being exploitative or miserable. Her most recent role, a central character in the forthcoming 60th-anniversary programming of Doctor Who, is almost too on-the-nose in its symbolic value. A young Black trans woman proudly and positively represented in the archetypal international BBC standard – how far we’ve come!

But this high-profile embrace of trans individuals in culture and aesthetics belies a political climate in which trans people fare worse with each passing year. Increases in representation – like Finney’s success – are derided as ‘woke’ or ‘politically correct’, this decade’s bywords for those racist and homophobic slurs now considered too ungentle for the front page of The Times.

Our existence as a community and, often, our lives as individuals, are highly public. Media monitor Dysphorum identified 7,525 articles about trans people in the UK media in 2022, the overwhelming majority of which are trans-hostile. Analogising trans women with predatory men is commonplace, as are demonstrably false claims that young people are being rushed into gender-affirming surgeries. Scaremongering about ‘gender ideology’ – a dog whistle used to describe almost any LGBT-positive legal reform or social progress – paints a picture of trans people as far more influential and dangerous than the tiny 0.5 per cent of the population we comprise.

In January of this month alone there were 1,202 articles, about 38 a day. Anti-trans hate crimes are up nearly 500 per cent since 2015, with media coverage identified as a key driver. We are, if anything, hypervisible.

We are policed like our predecessors of Battersea Park infamy, but in lieu of aggressive patrols is constant – and intentional – monitoring of where we go to the toilet, where and how (and with whom!) we have sex, how we raise our children, what our bodies look like, who we turn to when we are assaulted or abused… We are here and we are gay, but we aren’t having any fun.

The question is left to us: What do we do with Trans Day of Visibility?

Perhaps we ought to think about the political statement our visibility makes. For our predecessors of the 60s and 70s, it was about showing that you couldn’t be hidden away. Now we’re out in the open and we need to figure out what to do with that. We’re here, we’re gay, now what?

I worry that the struggle for visibility threatens to erode the struggle for solidarity. I worry the push for individual recognition when we are already exposed as a community pits us against one another, competing to be the Most Visible, the Most Normalised (or else the Least Visible, the Most Oppressed). On social media in particular intra-community discourses quickly turn bitter: Can bisexuals use the word lesbian? Is the mainstream appeal of drag bad for trans women? Does X sexuality or Y gender identity need more space in the conversation, more time in the calendar?

“I’m not advocating for us being less visible, but advocating for a different – purposeful – visibility; visibility beyond the scope of a few congratulatory Instagram tiles”

But our division – even though it may be the pursuit of perfection – is the far right’s solidarity. We witness this in the mounting attacks on drag events around the world. When Patriotic Alternative besieged a children’s event in my hometown of Norwich their banners and slogans didn’t discern between drag and transness, because that is how they see us. The campaign of toxic visibility has reached its successful conclusion: tar all queers with the same brush (dangerous to children, unsuitable for public life, omnipresent and frightening).

Of course I’m not advocating for us being less visible, but advocating for a different – purposeful – visibility; visibility beyond the scope of a few congratulatory Instagram tiles and hibernation until Trans Awareness Week in November. A celebration of our differing needs and desires through the common line of our queerness. Visibility through indivisibility.

What does this look like on a tangible, practical level? It means making yourself available to those who are struggling. It means getting off Twitter and into your local community – not just the club but the food bank, the swap shop, the befriending group. It means getting away from visibility as a means to an end and a thing that divides us, flags and all. It means embracing the ways it unites us: the rallies to protect our events and spaces, the mutual aid projects and fundraisers, the arts collaborations, the tenant’s unions. It means stepping up as a leader or an advocate if you’ve been quiet (or stepping back and yielding the space to someone new if you haven't). It means looking after each other.

In 1972 we came out of the closet and into the streets. Now we’re here – it’s up to us what we do with it.

Cleo Madeleine is the Communications Officer at Gendered Intelligence.

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