Lessons on Trans Liberation From the U.S. South

Organizers in southern states recognize that they need to go beyond providing direct services right now to protect trans people.

By Nick Fulton

March 7, 2025

Source: Waging Nonviolence


Ted Eytan, “Capital Pride Parade” (2018) / CC BY-SA 2.0

In a recent exchange between President Donald Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills, she publicly declined to comply with Trump’s executive order banning transgender athletic participation. The governor’s act of defiance made headlines as electeds, advocates and organizers grapple with how they might respond to the president’s anti-trans agenda.

This practice of defiance and dedication to trans lives is nothing new to reformers in the U.S. South who have a message to national organizers: the fight may look different but the endgame remains the same. We have to protect our trans neighbors fearlessly and without exception.

On the campaign trail, then-candidate Donald Trump and allies spent over $215 million on anti-trans ads. Since his inauguration, the president has taken aim at gender-affirming care, transgender military service, any practice of inclusion in sports and schools, and so much more. This new far-right political landscape is a change of ideology nationally, but in states like Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina and others in the South, providing resources and safe spaces for trans people in spite of conservative anti-trans legislatures is nothing new.

“The focus for folks across the movement has to be on helping [trans] people through this crisis,” said Adam Polaski, communications and political director at the Campaign for Southern Equality, or CSE.

CSE is a North Carolina-based organization that in 2023 launched the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project, designed to close the gap between the consequences of anti-trans laws and the support that transgender youth and their families need. One way the initiative supports transgender youth is through direct emergency funds, small grants that support travel and lodging for individuals seeking gender-affirming care with unimpacted providers. After providing over $500,000 in direct emergency funds to 1,000 families and individuals across the south, CSE expanded the project to serve trans folks in need on a national scale — renaming the project the Trans Youth Emergency Project.

“These bans and executive orders are unfair and cruel, but also they are not the end game for families,” Polaski said. “And there is help that’s available. It is going to be harder to access your care, it is going to be unnecessarily expensive, but it is possible and the Trans Youth Emergency Project is here to help people through that.”

In 2023, North Carolina advocates and organizers faced three bills targeting trans youth. The bills ban gender-affirming care for minors, restrict how gender identity can be discussed in schools, and prohibit transgender athletes from competing on girls’ sports teams. While organizers with Equality North Carolina, the state’s ACLU, and North Carolina’s Association of Educators worked in opposition to the legislative efforts, they all became law under the Republican statehouse. Initiatives like the Trans Youth Emergency Project seek to mitigate the damages of these Republican-led initiatives and provide protections and resources for trans folks outside of traditional political lobbying.

“Sometimes we have to reimagine the way that it looks like to win or to have influence,” Polaski said. “And so maybe you can’t stop the bad bill from passing, but let’s create a program that helps work around the bill, or helps blunt the impact of the bill.”

That route of influence, through direct community service, is a note that Polaski hopes carries significance for activists and organizers on a national scale.

“I hope more organizations are considering the ways that they can respond to people’s immediate needs, which could be through financial resources,” Polaski added. “It could be through tangible guidance and tangible information that often has to be kind of custom and tailored, and one on one. Folks have unique experiences, a fact sheet is not going to help them through a particular crisis.”

CSE’s national program expansion is a model with southern roots that finds consistency with work being done in other southern states.

“In the South we’re focusing on survival,” said Brooke Lever, a community organizer in Memphis who has been producing queer showcases and installations for over seven years. “There is an anger, and I don’t know how best it can be directed, but I do know people that have actually been doing the grassroots organizing for years in Memphis.”

Lever specifically mentioned My Sistah’s House, a grassroots, transgender-led organization in Memphis, Tennessee, that provides services for primarily Black and brown transgender and non-binary individuals. My Sistah’s House provides safe spaces, emergency shelter and access to health and social services in a state ranked “negative” in every category of LGBTQ equality by The Movement Advancement Project.

One of the organization’s founders, Kayla Gore, converted a six-bedroom house into an emergency housing facility for “TLGBQ people in need of shelter.” As the organization looks to expand impact they have raised funding to build 20 tiny homes to increase their capacity to offer housing services to the communities they serve.

Local organizations addressing gaps in care with direct services continue to be a proven model of impact in the South. But meeting the needs of trans folks at this moment is even deeper than direct services.

“Social media is propagating this idea that we [trans people in the South] are isolated and alone,” Lever said. “So planning in-person events and having opportunities to work with one another and collaborate with one another artistically is like a spiritual activity. In Memphis, I’ve been seeing a really great response in sort of doing what I think we’ve always done. The people who care [about trans people] find places to make space.”

Addressing the needs of the community and making space for that community to exist, are two directives coming from organizing in the South. Similarly in Atlanta, groups are meeting this new political moment with the things that have always worked: fighting shoulder to shoulder.

“If you don’t fight now, when are you gonna fight?” said Jason Arnold, an LGBTQ organizer and co-chair of community outreach at PFLAG Atlanta. “I have a voice. I have a platform. And with those things, I want to be able to lift my trans siblings up here in Atlanta. Ask trans people, how can I support you? How can I show up for you? What do you need from me?”

PFLAG Atlanta’s work involves community education, where hard conversations create room for growth. PFLAG Atlanta is moving to support trans folks and their families through support groups tailored to trans teens, parents and allied groups.

“When I lead conversations about gender-affirming care I will ask folks, ‘Who here takes Viagra? Who takes hormones? Who’s had hair transplants? Who’s on birth control?’” Arnold said. “Welcome to gender-affirming care, because you don’t even know it, but you engage in it every day. So it’s not a case of them, it’s a case of us.”

Putting these attacks aimed at trans people in a larger community context is essential to opposing harmful legislation, according to Arnold. This work is happening at a time when Georgia’s Republican state senate voted to pass Senate Bill 39, which would block state money for gender-affirming care in state employee and university health insurance plans, Medicaid and the prison system. The bill faces another vote in the House and potential legal challenges before it could become law.

As national organizations and activists search for answers on how to protect trans rights under a Trump administration, the messages from organizers in the South are to double down on services, education and resistance.

“We don’t see enough direct support for folks,” Polaski said. “There are families and people who are uniquely impacted and really tangibly impacted by these attacks. They need information. They need financial support. They need community. And so I think that should be a focus of the movement for the coming years.”

While activists have lost some political influence to protect the trans community, Polaski says that showing up in every other means of care will be essential over the next two years.

Providing care means providing direct services but it also means showing up. Queer visibility can also be a form of resistance and protest, which is a note that Lever says national organizations should pay attention.

“I was taught to believe that queer visibility and queer power is radical,” Lever said. “I definitely have felt a shift as I’ve gotten older. What are the priorities for an LGBTQ rights organization? Is it to make enough money to self-sustain and grow? Or is it to distribute resources until it’s empty?”

Listening to organizers working on trans liberation in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee and other southern states tells a story of communities eager to do what they can to meet this moment by defending trans folks in new ways and old ways alike.

“When we fight back, that is how they see our presence,” Arnold said. “We’re fighting like we’ve always been fighting. Now we get vocal, now we get loud, now we show them our strength in numbers.”


Nick Fulton (he/him) is a freelance journalist covering social justice movement building, LGBTQIA+ organizing, and progressive political commentary through a lens of liberation. In his full-time capacity, Nick works in political media for a criminal legal reform non-profit working to end mass incarceration and advocating for the dignity of incarcerated people. Previously, Nick has held positions at Color Of Change, The Global Women’s Institute, The Global Situation Room, and more. Nick is based in Washington D.C.

Tom Robbins: Kooky Fabulist, Potent Prognosticator

Fred Baumgarten

 March 7, 2025

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A 1967 ad for Robbins’s KRAB radio show, Notes From The Underground, drawn by Walt Crowley. Walt Crowley collection at the Seattle Public Library. Public Domain.

Tom Robbins changed my life. When a friend gave me a copy of his novel Jitterbug Perfume, which I consider his best, in the late 1980s, Robbins was already past his prime, when it was fashionable to think of him as a post-sixties “underground” hippie writer with a “cult” following. By the time Gus Van Sant attempted to bring his “hippiest” work, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, to the silver screen in 1993, it was a flop.

Nonetheless, Jitterbug Perfume worked its Robbins-esque magic on me. In my late 20s and still flailing around to find meaning in my life, filled with immature neuroses, I found deep solace in the book’s simple message: Lighten Up! That might sound like a bunch of pop psychology nonsense, but behind it was a ridiculous, hilarious, and touching tale involving a searching young woman – a Robbins’ staple – the Greek god Pan, lots of sex, and a trip (the psychedelic kind?) through time and history.

Robbins had a gift for slowing or stopping time in his narratives, which the reader experiences as a kind of reflection on mortality and eternity – or at least, that’s how I did. He also had a gift for spontaneity, silliness, and word play, always word play. It wasn’t just that the book’s motto was “Lighten Up”; the book itself modeled how not to take oneself too seriously. That was the brew that made me into a more mature person, I’d like to think, as well as a Robbins devotee.

Robbins went on to produce only four more full-length novels after Jitterbug. He was a slow and reclusive writer. When he died a few weeks ago at the ripe old age of 92, I decided to reread another of them: Skinny Legs and All, published in 1990, six years after Jitterbug Perfume.

Skinny Legs is set in the rural South – where Robbins grew up – Manhattan, and Jerusalem. While the author is up to many of his old tricks – a female protagonist, ancient gods and goddesses, even animated inanimate objects – Skinny Legs has a serious purpose. The overall setting is what we then called the Middle East conflict, and the plot variously involves artists-as-peacemakers, what we now call Christian Zionists trying to hasten the rapture, and the Dance of the Seven Veils as allegedly performed by Salome.

Robbins structures the book around the dance, with each chapter representing the dropping of one of the veils, which are the illusions that humanity hides behind to justify bigotry, war, and destruction. They are, in Robbins’ view — which was informed not only by ancient myth but also by Eastern philosophies — caught up in the denial of the feminine force in the world and the aggressive, oppressive dominion of patriarchy. This is surely why he chooses female protagonists, even though in 2025 such a choice would be more fraught. Once again, the nature of time is a theme, embodied by a character named Turn Around Norman, a Fifth Avenue busker who turns so slowly as to make his movements invisible.

Let me come clean: Skinny Legs and All is too long and didactic, in those senses not his best work. Robbins even recapitulates the “lessons” of the seven veils in the last chapter. And I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Robbins’ lengthy mytho-historical lectures. He goes to pains to tie the name “Palestine” to an early, somewhat Pan-like and bigender deity named Pales, but whether the etymology or the god were those things seems up for debate. Likewise, he uses a version of the Dance of the Seven Veils that he cleverly ties to earlier prototypes, which may or may not have been the same thing. Even so, I had fun spending time with Tom’s kookiness once more.

What impels me to write, finally, is Robbins’ far-seeing vision. Skinny Legs resonates nearly as loudly as it did 35 years ago. I couldn’t read it without thinking constantly about the persistence of illusions, the same “veils” he wanted to rip from us then. He wasn’t always right, though perhaps he may be forgiven for his time; for example, he reduces Israel-Palestine to a war of religions and “Arabs vs. Jews.” We know today that it is anything but that – a crime of white settler colonialism, rather.

Some passages, however, could have been written minutes ago. The “new American dream,” Robbins writes (remember, in 1990), “is to achieve wealth and recognition without having the burden of intelligence, talent, sacrifice, or the human values that are universal.” And of evolution – you can make this about 2001: A Space Odyssey or Donald Trump, your choice – he says, “The monkey wrench in the progressive machinery of the primate band is to take its political leaders – its dominant males – too seriously. … [T]he dominant male (or political boss) was almost wholly self-serving and was naturally dedicated not to liberation but to control. Behind his chest-banging and fang display, he was largely a joke and could be kept in his place by disrespect and laughter.”

I wonder how Robbins would react today to the world.

Fred Baumgarten is a writer living in western Massachusetts.

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The World’s Most Dangerous Comic Artist Strkes Again!

Paul Buhle - Raymond Tyler

 March 7, 2025

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Eli Valley, Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque

New York: OR Press, 2025. 252pp. $45.00

Sometimes, unpredictably, a radical artist gets a real break. A recent New York Times Book Review “Newly Published/Graphic Books” section admiringly described Eli Valley’s new and startling book of drawings and side-texts as exploring “antisemitism and authoritarianism through woodcut-style texts.” Indeed, like the recent Guardian original featuring Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman in dialogue over the Israeli pogrom in Gaza, this brave cartoonist is a public hero.

Not to everyone, of course. Eli Valley was a dangerous artist long before Donald Trump’s Christian nationalists took power, openly aspiring to a near-future apocalypse in Israel—or rather, post-Israel, minus Jews who decline to convert. In the introduction to this newest work, Valley says of his already famously (or notoriously) satirical work that his critics hate him most for calling upon memory. Memory that “has come alive, history is both metaphor and alarm, and past trauma [that] has the power to illuminate and help mobilize against our current catastrophe” (p. xi).

That is: collective memories that have been twisted into justification for things otherwise beyond any moral defense. Or, put another way, memory in light of the seemingly exterminative Israeli assault upon the men, women, and—above all—the children not only of Gaza but increasingly the West Bank, and perhaps even Lebanon and Syria in the period ahead.

Valley has long been hated for his attacks on the rising U.S. Right, but never so much as now. Assaulted as a Nazi by “Zionists who had never encountered a Yiddish cartoon” of the kind that ridiculed the Jewish rich and foolish, and described by Steven Miller as “everyone’s favorite Nazi cartoonist,” Valley yielded not one inch of ground. He gleefully quotes a Newsweek journalist calling him “one of the world’s leading self-hating Jewish cartoonists and promoters of Third Reich-style Judeophobic propaganda” (p. xii). There is absolutely no truth in this charge leveled at Valley from the Newsweek journalist.

Eli Valley, “A Moral Outrage,” Jewish Currents

What follows the newsweek quote, is about 250 oversized pages of outrageous art and commentary, mainly exposing how the Jewish establishment has embraced the historic (and mostly unashamed) bloc of antisemitic Christian conservatives. There is no one quite so savage as Valley when he gets riled up—no one, at least, in the history of visual satire. Valley puts himself in front of an ideological firing squad, chest bare, daring them to shoot. Or rather, to keep shooting—because he also speaks for the non-Zionist, anti-Zionist Jewish community, a group more hated, by far, than actual, verifiable antisemites. He snatches a post-massacre headline from the Jewish Forward (Buhle and Valley are both past contributors to its pages): “After Pittsburgh, Jewish Groups’ First Fight is Against BDS—Not White Nationalism.” A phrase that says it all.

The very title Museum of Degenerates is clipped from a real-life Nazi anti-art venture that displayed paintings and novels in a German museum in the mid-1930s. For Valley, being assaulted in the pages of mainline Jewish publications places him alongside the younger generation of Jewish campus protesters—what Natan Sharansky once called “un-Jews” and what the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles denounced as “despicable” when his drawing of Ariel Sharon as Pharaoh was made into a poster on the UCLA campus. The long history of Jewish prophets denouncing the worst tendencies among Jewish power-holders had, evidently, come to be associated only with antisemites.

But there is more to say about Valley and the soul of his work, which he sometimes describes as a kind of Jewish prayer. The wonderfully humorous character of his drawings—perhaps unmatched in satirizing the rich since the German artists of the Weimar years—frequently offers more pain than laughter. Valley suggests that he draws upon Psalm 130:1, “From out of the depths, I call to you,” referencing the cantor or yorid, who literally descends a few inches to a lower point on the pulpit, so that he may lift up the spirit from the depths (pp. xvi–xvii). The depths are not pretty. Valley explains that he is going to maintain his commentary with each cartoon, recalling what he did and why. He is descending, in prose as well as pictures, in order to lift up.

Image Credit: Eli Valley, “Never Again Again,” The Nib.

Sometimes, he is ruminative, wondering whether a different set of visual choices might have been better. Sometimes—actually, very often—he is really, really funny. More often, he is not only bitter at what official Judaism has become in the U.S. but at what its loudest voices have made it seem to have become.

Thus, Trump himself is seen as an obese, decaying Nazi. But Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, also looks pretty decayed, as he denounces the African American leader of the Minnesota Democratic Party, Keith Ellison, for being too “Islamic”—that is, too close to the Left—to be made head of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. The Democrats have been doing splendidly since then, of course.

The visual text and the prose asides are unremitting and deathless in their expression. And sometimes, they are personal. In 2019, neoconservative New York Times columnist Bari Weiss went public with a campaign against an upcoming presentation by Valley at Stanford University. Students there had taken note of a drawing Valley had made for the Jewish Forward a decade earlier, about Jewish leaders in old Prague—a drawing actually adopted for tote bags at a National Jewish Student Journalism conclave. Stanford student Republicans reprinted the image, without permission, alongside an avowedly antisemitic image from Der Stürmer, the Nazi paper, as Israeli nationalists on campus demanded Valley be banned from campus for potentially “traumatizing” students. That Valley had actually been invited by Jewish student peace groups made no difference (pp. 96–97).

It goes on. That is to say, the campaign against Valley goes on. But perhaps it has carried his work further into the public sphere, especially among the peacenik Jewish public on campus and beyond. We can hope so!

Eli Valley has been torturing tribalist, occupied-territory-seeking Jewish neoconservative and neoliberal hawks for about a decade now. His art style is utterly unique, a combination of cartoon and comic art all mooshed together, with odd items galore. If many readers miss a detail or two (or three) in this delightfully oversized volume, it is likely due to the dense content and storylines, ruthlessly moral in an immoral world.

Peter Beinart, a Jewish commentator who moved leftward after becoming famous, says in the preface that if the cartoons in this book are “outrageous and absurd,” it is because we are living in an “outrageous and absurd moment in American Jewish life.” That is, the language of American Jewry remains overwhelmingly liberal, but the silence over the cruel reality of the occupation of the West Bank is deafening.

Beinart calls Valley’s work a “searing indictment of the moral corruption of organized American Jewish life in our age”—on the face of it, a pretty shocking observation. With a kicker: the book is also the Eli Valley story. As you might have guessed, reader, Valley is the son of a rabbi, raised with the imagery of the Jewish diaspora—imagery full of righteous suffering and apparent triumph, ever-insecure triumph.

Actually, the story is more complicated and even more interesting. His parents’ marriage broke up, the kids moved out with their mother, and there is even a photo of her somewhere in the 1970s, looking like Joan Baez, guitar and all. One fine, progressive secular Jewish parent is more than many Jewish Americans are lucky enough to have.

Valley’s Diaspora Boy is a bigger, tougher version of Mad Magazine, closer to the intensity of Mad Comics than its later incarnation. It is also an unrelenting critique of Jewish nationalism, the occupation, and the power structures that sustain them. Reader, look for this volume and dig in.

Paul Buhle is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch. Raymond Tyler is a radical comics writer; his newest book, “Black Coal and Red Bandanas: A Graphic History of the WV Mine Wars,” is forthcoming with PM Press.