With the passing of the draconian Trans Rights Amendment Act (2026), the queer community and its allies need to stand together in solidarity. The recently passed act is dehumanising because it prevents trans people from determining their own gender identity. It rolls back rights previously conferred to the community under the 2014 NALSA judgement and criminalises medical professionals and kinship networks who extend their support to trans people.
The outcry of rage from the community, the mass protests and organised dissent across the country have been moving and significant to witness. Resistance has taken many forms – from designers and writers creating art in dissent, the community organising safehouses for trans people who were evicted from their homes, to lawyers and mental health professionals stepping up and providing accessible support to the community.
And yet, there’s scarce involvement of allies and folks outside of the queer community in this movement. I wonder if it’s because of the expectation to show up perfectly within social justice movements. To speak up, participate in advocacy or be a part of a movement, we must be a perfect ally.
Before participating in the struggle for trans rights, people may feel they should understand every aspect of harm caused by the law, be well-versed in their understanding of the gender spectrum and know the right language before posting on social media.
The movement for trans rights has a long and complex history and the trans community is diverse and multifaceted. No movement or community can be reduced to a monolith.
For someone outside, the expectation to understand all these intricacies before participating in the conversations may bring pressure.
If making a mistake is or showing up imperfectly could incur censure and criticism, not doing anything begins to feel like the path of least resistance.
On the left, there is an all-pervasive idea that we must always be ‘good’, ‘right’, and ‘moral’ in our politics. If we are not, we may be cast off onto the side that is ‘shameful’, ‘wrong’, and ‘bad’. The idea that making a mistake, causing harm or doing something wrong reveals our deeper, inherent badness is a carceral one. Carceral logic implies that when we do wrong, we deserve to be cast away from society and punished, instead of being seen as human and capable of change.
Underpinning carceral feminism is the belief that people who do harm are ‘deviant’ or ‘monstrous’, rather than people just like us who grew up within an unequal and violent society. The logical extension of these ideas is that people who do harm should be imprisoned. Ironically, being ‘tough on crime’ is an ideologically conservative stance, which only leads to the most vulnerable and marginalised people receiving punishment.
When carceral ideas percolate into social justice movements and our psyches, they tend to invoke a deep shame. Rather than moving us to take accountability or allowing us the space to grow and learn, shame paralyses us. It prevents us from showing up and participating in political struggles that we want to pledge our allyship to, but may not know everything about to begin with.
In short, the pressure to be perfect stands in the way of our movements being truly intersectional. Our movements then become fragmented and operate in silos.
I find myself curious about why it feels so hard to allow for imperfection in our movements.
Partly, I believe that many of our movements are deeply personal to us and our identities. When people supposedly ‘on our side’ make mistakes it feels all the more agonising. For a trans person, another queer person misgendering you can feel more hurtful than a straight person, because you expect more from your community and allies.
It can bring up pain and wounds from our histories, making us fear that we will never be understood or cared for in the ways that we hope. This makes political projects more complex to navigate. I find myself curious about what accountability systems we can integrate into them to repair harm.
What could accountability look like without practices of shaming? Can repair exist without punishment?
This intolerance for mistakes and imperfection also stems from our own relationship with parts of us that we deem ‘selfish’, ‘bad’, ‘immoral’, or ‘oppressive’. Each of us carry these parts from the threads of our lives existing within an oppressive and unequal social fabric. For example, we may believe deeply in gender equality, but still fall prey to sexist assumptions from time to time.
We tend to split off the oppressive parts within us and disavow them. When someone else causes harm or behaves politically imperfectly, we may project our own shame onto them. The oppressor is cast outward, instead of us looking too closely within. It’s easier to do this. Far more terrifying to look too closely at the fact that within each of us lies the capacity to harm.
Confronting the oppressor within is important work, because we can only be gentle with others when we are gentle on ourselves. We can only be comfortable with imperfection in our movements and politics when we confront our own humanness and flawedness.
I write because it’s vital to think about intersectionality in our movements, in a world growing increasingly more fragmented and violent towards minorities. Growth, accountability and care are more important to build cross-movement solidarities than ever.
Vicky Reynolds writes about this idea in her work, “‘Leaning In’ as Imperfect Allies in Community Work”–
“Ally work is complicated and messy… We do not often have the luxury of time to step out, call a meeting and discuss strategies and develop perfect responses, as we need to respond in the moment. That is why it is useful not to hold ourselves to a perfect standard of ally acts, but to reflect after such events to critique our actions, strategize how to take on the broader social issues, and make repair, if that is required. For these reasons it is useful to engage with ally work as an imperfection project.”
All this to say, that you don’t need to have a degree in gender studies to understand that if a marginalised population is loudly criticising and protesting a measure that is purported to help them, there is something amiss. If you don’t know any trans or queer people, showing up for us is a way to know us better. Amplifying trans voices, listening to our community with curiosity and care, showing up to protests and signing petitions is where you could begin.
We need solidarities and allyship from communities around us to lean in against the rising tide of fascism. For this struggle, and the others to come.
Reference:
https://vikkireynolds.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/2013-leaning-in.pdf
Farah Maneckshaw
Farah Maneckshaw (she/they) is a relationship therapist and creator of Mirrored Room (@inthemirroredroom), a queer-led mental health initiative. Their research interests lie within the fields of mental health, gender, sexuality, disability and their intersections. As a writer, she enjoys writing about mental health from a socio-political lens. In her free time, you will find her watching as much trashy reality t.v. as is humanly possible or demanding affection from reluctant cats.