“Look around you — do you feel weak?” London Trans+ Pride 2024
CW: discrimination, transphobia, self-harm, assault
After a quick lunch of Prêt sandwiches consumed on the pavement outside The Langham — a luxury hotel just beyond Regent’s Street — I gathered our litter and wandered down a side street in search of a bin. I was hoping to get back quickly before the amassing crowd of trans+ people and allies in Langham Place began to march towards Wellington Arch.
The five-star hotel had put up temporary fencing to separate the waiting Bentleys from the mob. As I passed, I heard a departing guest shout: “what do you think of the party, Baba?” An older gentleman paused before getting into the back seat of a car. With a smile and a laugh, he called back: “in my country, we’d stone them to death.”
Just down the road, out of sight but not out of mind, a crowd of fascists had convened in characteristic chaos, and were being feverishly mined for content by a click-desperate media. Even before we set off, there had already been reports that a LTP steward had been assaulted, and we were given ominous warnings to stay away from certain places and never to travel alone.
I got back to my group, electing not to tell them what I’d heard, and we joined the march.
This is how London Trans+ Pride 2024 began for me: with reminders of adversity, of real and ready threats of violence, of people unable to think of trans+ people as anything other than attention-seeking purple-haired perverts or curious cultural aberrations to be legislated against and corrected — by force, if necessary, — if indeed they thought of us at all.
That’s how it began, that’s not how it ended.
We started our stop-start march through some of the busiest streets in Europe, setting off late as always. Confused shoppers walked on or stopped to watch and pointed their phone cameras at us. I imagine many were shared online alongside a full gamut of comments. I made sure my ‘NO MORE DEAD TRANS CHILDREN’ placard faced the pavement, the cameras and the curious public.
Having been to LT+P marches for several years, I’m familiar with the rhythms and routine of the day, but this was the first year I’d brought our seven-month-old puppy Alba. She’s been to Oxford Pride and Pride in London before — I made sure she was socialised early to collective action. Alternating between carrying her and being dragged along by her made this a rather more tiring march than previous years, but the inconvenience is nothing compared to the joy she seems to have brought to others in the crowd.
Little will break the ice more than an adorable puppy, I’ve learned in the last few months, so it was no surprise to me how many strangers hopped over and asked if they could say hello to Alba. What did surprise me is the number of people who became visibly emotional at the unconditional love of my chaotic little dog. The armchair psychologist in me thinks that when a person is subjected to so much conditional tolerance at best and complete rejection at worse, there’s something powerful in the uncritical unconditional love of a small dog.
A young nonbinary person tentatively approached me during the speeches, telling me Alba reminded them of their family dog when they were growing up. Possibly projection, but I sensed something deep and longing in the way in which they spoke to me. Their arms and shoulders were covered in a tight patchwork of mean scars that I recognised far too well. I made sure they got as much time with Alba as they could.
Joy, pride, and connection is how I would characterise London Trans+ Pride. In a march comprising people who are at the sharp edge of state-sanctioned prejudice, biased science dressed up as objective reality, populist scorn, and sneering memes pumped into social media by AI bots paid for by shadowy ultraconservatives aiming to manipulate public discourse, you may be forgiven for expecting more vitriol, more violence. You will, however, find the opposite among the 55,000 marchers. Groups of lesbians chanting ’No LGB without the T’ faster and faster until they dissolve into laughter, androgynous giants carrying pithy placards about trans rights that put my pun game to shame, thousands of strangers (purple-haired or not) linking arm-in-arm, metaphorically and literally, to demand respect and rights with an outstretched hand and a smile that only just conceals the rage.
On the fringes of the march, I approached a member of our Met police chaperone and asked which rally they preferred: us or the racists. A loaded question, of course, but without missing a beat, she replied: “this one, without doubt.” She continued: “the atmosphere is always so friendly, there’s rarely any trouble, it’s such a good vibe.” For a group of people whose rights and freedoms are pummelled daily for headlines and to appease those radicalised by conservative trolls on the Internet, I would agree. In the dichotomy of laugh or cry, the community seems to have chosen laughter, fun, ‘trans joy’ — a phrase you see a lot in t+ spaces.
The march merited little more than a footnote in the BBC coverage; a sub-clause in an article covering the much smaller but louder fascist march happening at the same time. “55,000 trans+ people and allies stage joyous peaceful annual march in London” isn’t as clickable as dripping headlines about far-right ghouls, as the engagement economy has discovered in the past 10 years, to all our cost. The combined number of fascist protestors and counter-protestors doesn’t even come to half the estimated attendance of London Trans+ Pride.
LT+P may not get the same coverage of the highly corporate Pride in London, or even much smaller marches happening on the same day barely a mile away, and I’ve come to realise that that’s fine. The march isn’t for the impartial spectator, it’s not for the average disinterested person scrolling through their feed. It’s not for them, it’s for us.
I’ve often heard it said that the proliferation of people identifying as trans/nonbinary is all down to Covid cabin fever, the weeks and months we spent terminally online inside while the plague raged outside the front door four strange years ago. It’s hard to ignore the irony of this myth being perpetuated by unwitting trolls radicalised by their Facebook feeds while trans people physically gather in their masses to socialise and demand their rights. I doubt the atmosphere would be quite so friendly at a march demanding the restriction and erasure of certain people and their freedoms; just look at the far-right, something of which I have first-hand experience.
I fall into the thin sliver of the Venn diagram of people to have attended both marches by progressives demanding rights, and ultraconservatives demanding those rights be destroyed. I attended several EDL rallies — a pre-Brexit organisation now largely consigned to history, but whose foul legacy and leadership lurches on — as part of my undergrad studies, in which I hawkishly observed and asked Theroux-esque questions to other bald, white people with identical backgrounds to me. I can validate that Met officer’s opinion. Better are the marches where people lovingly stroke my dog and find in each other a shared struggle for love and acceptance, than those where the only real bond is hate, and cans of lager are thrown at fellow protestors for supporting the wrong football team.
The mirthful chuckle at the thought of legally bludgeoning queer people to death with rocks is now just a jarring duff-note in my memory of Saturday, as are the vague warnings about avoiding certain Tube stations, or rumours about stewards being assaulted by rabid beer-fuelled fascists on the prowl.
What will remain with me from London Trans+ Pride 2024 is a moment from the speeches under Wellington Arch. It’s a vivid flashbulb memory of Olivia Campbell-Cavendish’s cry of community and camaraderie, family and friendship; a question so powerful and prescient that it is less a question and more of a dare. To a crowd of 55,000 trans, nonbinary and genderqueer people and their allies of all stripes, packed in tight to the swelling grounds around Wellington Arch, with the weight of a scornful society, a hostile media, and an indifferent state bearing down on us, she asks: “look around you — do you feel weak?”
That’s what we have. It is irrevocably ours, and it is where our power lies: our solidarity and our community. That’s why LT+P is barely reported on. Our community is the strength we take with us into our jobs, into unfriendly spaces, into places where we dilute or dismiss our authentic selves for the sake of others, or for the sake of our safety.
“Do you feel weak?” In that moment, no one could have.