At the Global Trans Conference in Munich in July, trans and gender-diverse movements addressed their essential roles in fighting democratic erosion worldwide. Providing core, flexible, and trust-based funding to those organisations is fundamental to strengthening everyone’s rights to plurality and self-determination. 

We’ve been seeing the recognition of gender identity being weaponised publicly by far-right actors as a way to produce a scenario of social anxiety and resentment. Often wrongly proclaimed as a “smokescreen” by progressive political parties and organisations, anti-trans politics have tangible consequences in the lives of trans and gender-diverse people, especially those who are racialised. According to TGEU’s Trans Murder Monitoring last report, 80% of the 321 trans and gender-diverse people murdered between October 2022 and September 2023 were also racialised; 94% of the victims were trans women or trans feminine people and 48% of them were sex workers. Yet, trans and gender-diverse movements globally don’t have enough funding to protect their lives or very basic material needs.

Globally, anti-trans campaigns and attacks on Black trans and gender-diverse movements need to be recognised for what they are: a global democratic erosion and a threat to the fundamental right of self-determination. 

Trans and gender-diverse movements call on philanthropy to recognise how their demands are inscribed in a broader landscape of democratic principles. There is an urgent effort to change the shared conception of trans rights as a concern of a particular group of people. Their call to action places the challenge of putting intersectionality into practice. 

Rather than attributing trans people’s demands to a secondary place, the activists who attended the Global Trans Conference were assertive in addressing how their agenda has become central to the current disputes around the societies we want to live in. 

Trans and gender-diverse movements deliberately invite philanthropy to apply a trans-informed lens and understand the need for core, flexible, and trust-based funding as an effective way to strengthen democratic principles globally.  

The activists who led the Global Trans Conference were determined to deconstruct philanthropy’s insistence on compartmentalising movements and agendas that are part of broader projects. Today, providing support for trans rights must be understood as an action that contributes to everyone’s access to education, justice, sexual and reproductive rights, food, human rights, autonomy and many other basic needs. 

Therefore, trans and gender-diverse activists have been leading fundamental changes in society. It’s not just about including trans and gender-diverse people in our current systems. Trans and gender-diverse movements are expanding hegemonic understandings of democracy and citizenship, disputing the frames that produce who is intelligible as deserving of rights and what lives are considered liveable. 

In 2010, Iyálorixa Mother Stella de Oxóssi (1925-2018) released her second book, “Meu tempo é agora”, in Brazil. A literal translation of its title would be “My time is now”. The title is an unapologetic claim by an Afro-Brazilian religious leader, which deeply resonates with our Afro-trans community and movements. It has been taking so long, too long. As the Global Trans and Gender Diverse Declaration states, trans and gender-diverse activists declare their right to exist, to feel safe, and to thrive in a world that values gender diversity now. 

Maria Clara Araújo is an Afrotransfeminist scholar and the Movement Partnerships Coordinator at the Black Feminist Fund.