This week we observed the Transgender Day of Remembrance — a devastating annual event where we memorialize the hundreds of people who were killed over the year simply because of their gender identity.

I did the usual public social media shares of on-point news articles; checked in, quite privately, with the (on average) two suicidal people in my life at any given time; and fielded questions from other transfolks and good allies who were wondering if I was okay.

Of course I was not okay.

A tax on privilege

Nearly 400 people in my community were violently killed this year.

That is the conservative global figure for reported murders with a clear anti-trans animus. It does not include people erroneously misgendered by the media (“a black man in his mid-20s cross-dressing as a woman” etc.), or the suicides that are endemic to my community.

Did you know the life expectancy for a Black transwoman is 35?

By the afternoon I was moving from the despair part of grieving and into fury, so I posted this call to arms on my Facebook wall:

Cisgender people (that’s all of you who are not transgender): Today might be a good day to think about paying the tax on your privilege.

I then made a few suggestions, including the Catherine White Holman Wellness Centre, Trans Life Line, Saige Community Food Bank, and Pace Society.

A cisgender person I care about, but who is not immediate to the problem, posted a tone policing comment, saying quite correctly that I would catch more flies with honey and perhaps I should invite people to help rather than saying that they are somehow required to step up.

I tried to be patient in my reply.

I said something about the nature of intersecting alliances, and how I have lots of advantages, which makes me feel obligated to do scary dangerous things (like being an out, non-binary transgender lawyer with a relatively public life) so that more marginalized trans people won’t have to, and so it will be easier for them in the future.

I stood by my point about a tax on privilege.

An unequal binary

Because of the job I’m doing at the moment, I have the profound honour and frustration of talking to small groups of people who have had hard lives but who have never been invited to think about how privilege applies to them.

In these conversations I explain that a binary is a choice between two things that are usually unequal.

I draw two columns on flip chart paper, with the privileged side of the binary on the right and the subordinate side on the left. We start with men and women. Then we move on to class, and race, and sexual orientation, and gender identity. In these groups usually everyone in the room proudly identifies as working class or lumpen, so we put the employer on the privileged side so everyone can feel included in being oppressed by someone.

Then I invite the participants to place a coloured dot on the identity markers with which they identify, and I watch the oppression clusters emerge on the paper.

In the discussion that follows, we notice everyone has a number a privileges and oppressions at the same time. Then I launch onto a soapbox to talk about how it is totally unreasonable to expect marginalized and oppressed people to achieve equality (or better yet to explode the binaries that oppress us all) all by themselves without any resources.

Reconciliation is something that uninvited settler colonial people need to take responsibility for, rather than leaving it to Indigenous people. Ending sexualized violence against women needs to be an issue that men take up. Fighting white supremacy is white people’s work, and it has to happen in an intersectional way.

Breaking glass floors

My initial Facebook post was about a very personal issue for me — the murder of my community with impunity. But it is a very uneven pattern of violence. Most of the trans people who are killed are tranfeminine, people of colour, doing sex work.

I am a trans person, but I’m also a white lawyer. I don’t experience transmisogyny, and I’m not at the same kind of risk as the people who get killed. Because I benefit from my whiteness, I have an obligation to stand up for people who don’t and to follow their lead in dismantling the system that makes us uneven.

Lots of my spoons (my personal energy) go into being out and obvious as a non-binary transgender person, because I can. It is possible for me to leverage my whiteness, my professional credentials, my other privileges to make the world safer for other trans and non-binary people for whom acting as lessons for the public would be impossibly dangerous. I can do this, so I should. That’s my tax. I let people learn about us from watching me.

I also do a hell of a lot of free legal work, pay the high end of the sliding scale, bring food to the meeting, pick up the tab when I have a good job, and drive people home. That’s not something that gets me an ally cookie — it’s just my job.

The tax on privilege means those with power and credibility should pay, and speak up, and work, so that folks in the middle of the issue (today it is how we get murdered with impunity, tomorrow it will centre on somebody else’s specific horrible context and struggle) can hold themselves together and stay alive.

People with access to privilege need speak up against racist jokes, march with Pride, put a pronoun field on nametags, stand up to the police, insist on accessible venues and ASL interpreters, make sure there is vegan food and bus tickets at the gathering, and take take turns entertaining somebody’s baby so the parents can come to the event.

I actually love paying taxes. It means we get hospitals and schools, and some of us get clean public water. But you don’t get congratulated for paying the social justice tax on privilege. It is part of the job of living our values. If we don’t do this, we are reinforcing glass floors, and that is not part of any kind of activism I recognize.