Sharing this from our friends at LGBTQ Action RI
Event Details
Why “Trans Day of Joy”?
Trans Day of Remembrace (TDoR) was founded in 1999 to memorialize the murder of Rita Hester in Allston, MA. It's observed annually on November 20.
Since then, TDoR continues to draw attention to violence faced by trans people, especially instances of violence against Black and Latina trans women.
Sarah Lamble writes about turning mourning into collective action:
“ Our task is to move from sympathy to responsibility, from complicity to reflexivity, from witnessing to action. It is not enough to simply honor the memory of the dead—we must transform the practices of the living.”
This is at the heart of Trans Day of Joy.
Trans Day of Joy is about coming together around resilience, love, and acceptance.
Trans Day of Joy is not just a gathering, a rally, or a response to the ongoing spread of misinformation and disinformation around "gender ideology in schools" — it’s about recognizing what’s achievable when we unite across differences and transform what’s possible for our communities.
The lives of trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people are so much more than the ongoing headlines of tragedy.
We’ve all seen the increase in anti-LGBTQ, anti-transgender attacks. But that’s not who Rhode Islanders are. We’re here because Rhode Island has a wonderful, dynamic, engaged community of transgender people and allies, and we want to celebrate that.
Messaging
But some politicians [and far-right activists] are rejecting those values and targeting LGBTQ kids for bullying and mistreatment, just because of who they are.
The politicians [and far-right activists] behind these attacks are trying to force schools to violate that most basic trust.
Rhode Islanders want schools that support all of our students. Every student deserves the opportunity to learn, to thrive, and to be themselves. That’s what we are celebrating here.
These continued efforts to disrupt teaching books, curriculum, and honest information about the realities of race and LGBTQ identities are about excluding students. (Most titles targeted by book challenges focus on themes of race and LGBTQ identities.)
Transgender youth are part of our communities. Transgender children, like any children, have the best chance to thrive when they are supported and can get the care they need.
Specifically, transgender youth whose families support their gender identity have a 52% decrease in suicidal thoughts, a 46% decrease in suicide attempts, and significant increases in self-esteem and general health.
A systematic review of 44 studies revealed that transgender youth often have to make a painful choice of “whether they want to live authentically and openly as themselves, or whether they want to maintain social support and physical and emotional safety.”
Best-practice medical care is backed by years of rigorous research and recommended by major medical associations in the US—including American Psychological Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and other leading health authorities.
Medical decisions are best left to patients, their families, and their healthcare providers, in accordance with medical best practices.
Efforts to disregard medical best practices and tie the hands of healthcare professionals are contrary to public health and wellbeing. It opens the door to even more obstacles to people accessing the health care they already need and often struggle to access.
(We know criminalizing abortions doesn't stop abortions, it just makes them less safe. This is similarly true of best-practice medical care for trans individuals who need access.)
We decided a long time ago in RI that everyone is welcome and should have the same opportunities to contribute and succeed. RI has been on the forefront of civil rights for trans people for more than 20 years. We were the 2nd state in the country to protect trans people from discrimination in 2001. We should continue to build upon that legacy and support transgender kids and their families.
We cannot let attacks on transgender people take hold in Rhode Island. The target on trans rights (especially legislative attacks on trans and gender-diverse youth) is by design.
Out-of-state interest groups spend millions of dollars to sow panic in battleground states. Over the past two years, anti-trans bills gained steam in other parts of the country. But we’ve said no in Rhode Island, and we will continue to.
Gender-affirming care can involve a young person, along with their family and caregivers, and their mental health providers and their physician, determining what the best course of treatment is. It's about being respectful and listening to a child in order to figure out what the right steps are for a family in their specific situation.
Research indicates gender-affirming medical care for trans youth can result in better mental health outcomes, but lawmakers are twisting science to deny access to healthcare for youth who need it.
The prevalence of anti-trans bills have adverse effects the mental health of youth. The divisive language used to describe merely existing or teaching about the realities of diversity—"ideology", "agenda", "recruiting", "indoctrinating"—are all weaponized to stoke fear and anger toward a vulnerable population.
Guiding principles:
Lean into positivity and joy
Lean into shared values
Lean into RI’s track record of equality, supporting and affirming transgender residents
Take care when talking about specifics of medical care or citing statistics. Depending on the audience, this can cause people to tune out what we are saying.
Suggestions to decenter divisive rhetoric, pivot away from “gender ideology in schools” & redirect conversation:
“Of course parents want to understand what their children are learning at school. Divisive presentations or rhetoric that preys on unfounded fears aren’t the way to do that. I encourage people to talk to their kids, talk to their kids' teachers, talk to the amazing transgender young people who are thriving and leading in our communities.
We’ve all seen the increase in anti-LGBTQ, anti-transgender attacks. But that’s not who Rhode Islanders are. We’re here today because Rhode Island has a wonderful, dynamic, engaged community of transgender people and allies, and we want to celebrate that.”
Quotes
Note: Take care when getting too in the weeds on medical care or science when talking with general audiences. We know that we can lose people’s attention that way.
The gender-affirming model of care affirms diversity in gender identity and assists individuals in defining, exploring, and actualizing their gender identity, allowing for exploration without judgments or assumptions. This does not mean that all youth need to undergo medical transition; indeed, this is often not the case.
Gender-affirming care is highly individualized and focuses on the needs of each individual by including psychoeducation about gender and sexuality (appropriate to age and developmental level), parental and family support, social interventions, and gender-affirming medical interventions.
--Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, “Gender-affirming Care Saves Lives”
“The medical establishment is not woke,” Dr. Safer explains. He also explains that there is no big financial conspiracy on behalf of the medical establishment, a lie some opponents have claimed. “The areas of medicine that are brought in for gender-affirming care are heavily mental health, pediatrics, primary care, endocrinology. If you look up where the money centers are in medicine, those are not there.”
Guest Chase Strangio of the ACLU hits on the political realities: “Why are people doing this? We are approaching midterms and a 2024 presidential election,” Strangio explains. Anti-trans legislation has increased over 800% since 2018, Stewart spells out.
--GLAAD.org’s “Jon Stewart sets the record straight on gender-affirming care"
"...some parents claim teaching children about the reality of gender diversity is developmentally inappropriate, partially stemming from fear that it will spur more children to want to change their gender identity.
Jack Turban, a Stanford University psychiatrist who studies the mental health of transgender youth, said research has not pinpointed what might cause people's gender identity to differ from their assigned sex. But, as he wrote in a 2020 Scientific American article, one thing is certain: "What good science shows us is that when we accept transgender people, they thrive."
Today, transgender people are estimated to make up less than 0.5% of the U.S. population. GSAFE, which advocates for LGBTQ protections in schools, used to hear about one to three anti-LGBTQ incidents per year in Wisconsin. Now, co-executive director Brian Juchems estimates it's that many per week.
"Being an LGBT kid isn't political, but it's been politicized," he says.
"What we're seeing is that outside forces, outside funding, outside organizers are coming into the local school level and local community levels and introducing these divisions into our school districts."
--PBS Wisconsin, “Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric roils Wisconsin, providing political fuel for the right”
- Event: Trans Day of Joy
- Description: Join us for Trans Day of Joy! This is an outdoor event for community members, families, and allies to gather around resilience, love, and acceptance. This will feature speakers, local organizations/resources, and opportunities for further advocacy/action.
- Saturday, November 12, 11:30am - 12:30pm
- Rain Date*: Sunday, November 13, 11:00am - 12:00pm
- *If we need to move indoors on Sunday, mask wearing will be encouraged.
- Please follow LGBTQ Action RI and The Womxn Project for updates.
- Location: Contemporary Theater - Amphitheater
- Address: 327 Main St, South Kingstown, RI 02879
- Parking: Street parking on Main St should be plentiful
- Supporting organizations: LGBTQ Action RI, The Womxn Project, GLAD, Youth Pride, Inc., Haus of Codec, TGI Network of RI, URI Gender and Sexuality Center, South County Pride, PFLAG of Greater Providence, RI Queer PAC, Sojourner House, Contemporary Theater Company, UU Congregation of SC, SAGE RI, RI Democratic Women's Caucus, Beyond the Stacks, Towards An Antiracist North Kingstown (TANK), Planned Parenthood of Southern New England, Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, Thundermist Health Center, and others!
- This event is planned for Saturday, November 12th but has a rain date of Sunday, November 13th. In the case that we need to move indoors on Sunday, we will encourage mask wearing.
- Feel free to bring signs!
- We encourage de-escalation and ask you to be mindful of any potential counter-protestors. Please direct any press to LGBTQ Action RI.
- Community speakers* will have 5 minutes. If you’d like some messaging to reference, please view here.
Zoe Armstrong, Gem, Rowan Alvarez, Jaye Watts, DL Helfer^, Justice Ameer Gaines, Donnie Anderson^, Giona Picheco, Aarav Sundaresh, Evan Jones, rep. from URI Gender & Sexuality Center (MC: Volta Tran & Simon Olsen)
* This is a tentative list of everyone who’s offered to speak! We can determine what’s a feasible line-up. (Maybe: Janson Wu?)
^ Will not be able to speak if moved to the rain date (Sunday). - Discussing topics around gender-affirming care, especially for youth, can be new or even uncomfortable for some. It’s okay to say, “I don’t know.”
- If you’d like to learn a little more, please feel free to read Movement Advancement Project’s Get the Facts: Best Practice Medical Care For Trans Youth.
- Also, a powerful episode of Jon Stewart’s Take Down can be viewed here, where he debunks myths about gender-affirming care.
- You may also want to take a look at some messaging.
- If you’d like to learn a little more, please feel free to read Movement Advancement Project’s Get the Facts: Best Practice Medical Care For Trans Youth.
- Have questions? Reach out to V! Her email is [email protected] and you can text/call her at (401) 400-2064.
Why “Trans Day of Joy”?
Trans Day of Remembrace (TDoR) was founded in 1999 to memorialize the murder of Rita Hester in Allston, MA. It's observed annually on November 20.
Since then, TDoR continues to draw attention to violence faced by trans people, especially instances of violence against Black and Latina trans women.
Sarah Lamble writes about turning mourning into collective action:
“ Our task is to move from sympathy to responsibility, from complicity to reflexivity, from witnessing to action. It is not enough to simply honor the memory of the dead—we must transform the practices of the living.”
This is at the heart of Trans Day of Joy.
Trans Day of Joy is about coming together around resilience, love, and acceptance.
Trans Day of Joy is not just a gathering, a rally, or a response to the ongoing spread of misinformation and disinformation around "gender ideology in schools" — it’s about recognizing what’s achievable when we unite across differences and transform what’s possible for our communities.
The lives of trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people are so much more than the ongoing headlines of tragedy.
We’ve all seen the increase in anti-LGBTQ, anti-transgender attacks. But that’s not who Rhode Islanders are. We’re here because Rhode Island has a wonderful, dynamic, engaged community of transgender people and allies, and we want to celebrate that.
Messaging
- Every parent hopes our laws will ensure our children’s safety, protection, and freedom.
But some politicians [and far-right activists] are rejecting those values and targeting LGBTQ kids for bullying and mistreatment, just because of who they are.
- Our schools should protect all students—including LGBTQ students—so they can learn and thrive in a safe environment.
The politicians [and far-right activists] behind these attacks are trying to force schools to violate that most basic trust.
Rhode Islanders want schools that support all of our students. Every student deserves the opportunity to learn, to thrive, and to be themselves. That’s what we are celebrating here.
These continued efforts to disrupt teaching books, curriculum, and honest information about the realities of race and LGBTQ identities are about excluding students. (Most titles targeted by book challenges focus on themes of race and LGBTQ identities.)
- All youth deserve love, acceptance, and support from their families and communities.
Transgender youth are part of our communities. Transgender children, like any children, have the best chance to thrive when they are supported and can get the care they need.
Specifically, transgender youth whose families support their gender identity have a 52% decrease in suicidal thoughts, a 46% decrease in suicide attempts, and significant increases in self-esteem and general health.
A systematic review of 44 studies revealed that transgender youth often have to make a painful choice of “whether they want to live authentically and openly as themselves, or whether they want to maintain social support and physical and emotional safety.”
- We know not everyone may understand what it means to be transgender, but transgender youth and their families need access to the best information and care to decide what is right for them.
Best-practice medical care is backed by years of rigorous research and recommended by major medical associations in the US—including American Psychological Association, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and other leading health authorities.
Medical decisions are best left to patients, their families, and their healthcare providers, in accordance with medical best practices.
Efforts to disregard medical best practices and tie the hands of healthcare professionals are contrary to public health and wellbeing. It opens the door to even more obstacles to people accessing the health care they already need and often struggle to access.
(We know criminalizing abortions doesn't stop abortions, it just makes them less safe. This is similarly true of best-practice medical care for trans individuals who need access.)
- This has no place here in Rhode Island.
We decided a long time ago in RI that everyone is welcome and should have the same opportunities to contribute and succeed. RI has been on the forefront of civil rights for trans people for more than 20 years. We were the 2nd state in the country to protect trans people from discrimination in 2001. We should continue to build upon that legacy and support transgender kids and their families.
We cannot let attacks on transgender people take hold in Rhode Island. The target on trans rights (especially legislative attacks on trans and gender-diverse youth) is by design.
Out-of-state interest groups spend millions of dollars to sow panic in battleground states. Over the past two years, anti-trans bills gained steam in other parts of the country. But we’ve said no in Rhode Island, and we will continue to.
- We need to address misinformation about gender-affirming care.
Gender-affirming care can involve a young person, along with their family and caregivers, and their mental health providers and their physician, determining what the best course of treatment is. It's about being respectful and listening to a child in order to figure out what the right steps are for a family in their specific situation.
Research indicates gender-affirming medical care for trans youth can result in better mental health outcomes, but lawmakers are twisting science to deny access to healthcare for youth who need it.
The prevalence of anti-trans bills have adverse effects the mental health of youth. The divisive language used to describe merely existing or teaching about the realities of diversity—"ideology", "agenda", "recruiting", "indoctrinating"—are all weaponized to stoke fear and anger toward a vulnerable population.
Guiding principles:
Lean into positivity and joy
Lean into shared values
Lean into RI’s track record of equality, supporting and affirming transgender residents
Take care when talking about specifics of medical care or citing statistics. Depending on the audience, this can cause people to tune out what we are saying.
Suggestions to decenter divisive rhetoric, pivot away from “gender ideology in schools” & redirect conversation:
“Of course parents want to understand what their children are learning at school. Divisive presentations or rhetoric that preys on unfounded fears aren’t the way to do that. I encourage people to talk to their kids, talk to their kids' teachers, talk to the amazing transgender young people who are thriving and leading in our communities.
We’ve all seen the increase in anti-LGBTQ, anti-transgender attacks. But that’s not who Rhode Islanders are. We’re here today because Rhode Island has a wonderful, dynamic, engaged community of transgender people and allies, and we want to celebrate that.”
Quotes
Note: Take care when getting too in the weeds on medical care or science when talking with general audiences. We know that we can lose people’s attention that way.
The gender-affirming model of care affirms diversity in gender identity and assists individuals in defining, exploring, and actualizing their gender identity, allowing for exploration without judgments or assumptions. This does not mean that all youth need to undergo medical transition; indeed, this is often not the case.
Gender-affirming care is highly individualized and focuses on the needs of each individual by including psychoeducation about gender and sexuality (appropriate to age and developmental level), parental and family support, social interventions, and gender-affirming medical interventions.
--Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, “Gender-affirming Care Saves Lives”
“The medical establishment is not woke,” Dr. Safer explains. He also explains that there is no big financial conspiracy on behalf of the medical establishment, a lie some opponents have claimed. “The areas of medicine that are brought in for gender-affirming care are heavily mental health, pediatrics, primary care, endocrinology. If you look up where the money centers are in medicine, those are not there.”
Guest Chase Strangio of the ACLU hits on the political realities: “Why are people doing this? We are approaching midterms and a 2024 presidential election,” Strangio explains. Anti-trans legislation has increased over 800% since 2018, Stewart spells out.
--GLAAD.org’s “Jon Stewart sets the record straight on gender-affirming care"
"...some parents claim teaching children about the reality of gender diversity is developmentally inappropriate, partially stemming from fear that it will spur more children to want to change their gender identity.
Jack Turban, a Stanford University psychiatrist who studies the mental health of transgender youth, said research has not pinpointed what might cause people's gender identity to differ from their assigned sex. But, as he wrote in a 2020 Scientific American article, one thing is certain: "What good science shows us is that when we accept transgender people, they thrive."
Today, transgender people are estimated to make up less than 0.5% of the U.S. population. GSAFE, which advocates for LGBTQ protections in schools, used to hear about one to three anti-LGBTQ incidents per year in Wisconsin. Now, co-executive director Brian Juchems estimates it's that many per week.
"Being an LGBT kid isn't political, but it's been politicized," he says.
"What we're seeing is that outside forces, outside funding, outside organizers are coming into the local school level and local community levels and introducing these divisions into our school districts."
--PBS Wisconsin, “Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric roils Wisconsin, providing political fuel for the right”