Other than contacting your legislators and giving money to organizations challenging Trump in court, it is important to get into the habit of refusing to obey unethical demands at any opportunity you are able to. Note that "disobedience" here does not inherently mean doing anything harmful, dangerous, or illegal, but doing things in a way that resists the pressure the Trump Administration and its enablers are putting on you to normalize and conform to its harmful, often genocidal expectations. It simply means "do that thing they don't want you to do." Also, none of this should stop at transgender people. A lot of the same noncompliance strategies will work for resisting racism, deportation, misogyny, and anything else.
This is not hyperbolic in any way: Trump's attacks on trans people are designed to give you so much anxiety that you will disappear, either by going deep into hiding, detransitioning, or taking your own life. If you decide that you need to "disappear" for your own wellbeing, I will not personally fault you for that, but as a group it is very important that we maintain that disobedience and live our lives as fully as possible.
Just a few ideas include:
If you are having a difficult time doing this, use resources available like Trans Lifeline.
Related to this, it is very important that we stick together and avoid participating in divisive rhetoric against other trans people. I've seen groups of more gender-conforming trans people absolutely spitting venom over trans people who don't try to pass as hard as they do, trans people who transitioned younger than they did, nonbinary people and people who use pronouns other than he/him or she/her, and behaving as though somehow the only reason we are under attack is because they transed too hard or something. This is all really silly: People have been attacking trans people for decades, and they've never only been attacking the particularly nonconformist ones. There is no way to be trans in a way that will convince these people you deserve rights. So please, resist any temptation to try playing "one of the good ones" by throwing other trans people under the bus. Getting us to abandon each other is part of the strategy.
You are, of course, welcome to be more disobedient by doing more of the things on this list, but staying alive and true to yourself, especially with as much joy and community as possible, should be your number one priority.
A few people on TikTok and other social media sites have been trying to bring back bright red lipstick as a sign that you are against Donald Trump. This is a nod to the fact that, during World War II, women in allied countries were encouraged to wear red lipstick as a patriotic symbol of the fight against the Nazis.
However, context matters: The reason women were encouraged to wear red lipstick during this time was because Hitler hated it. This was wrapped up in a lot of Nazi beauty ideals, as well as the fact that Hitler found most animal products repugnant. This does not translate into an anti-Trump statement very well. While there is a conservative movement against heavy makeup for the same reason Nazis had a problem with it, this is still kind of fringe in the right, at least for now. Plenty of Republican women wear red lipstick, and it's not something most right-wing people are inclined to spend a lot of time complaining about.
There are a couple things that conservatives and especially heavily pro-Trump conservatives really hate that you can wear, though:
Conservative ideology discourages people from caring about other people. As soon as it came out that wearing a mask protects other people more than it protects the wearer, they started flipping their shit about how they "don't work." They are trying to build a culture in which people only care about themselves. In that kind of culture, the most radically disobedient thing you can do is to care about other people, and wearing a mask shows this while making a critical difference in protecting other people.
Conservatives have heavily attacked practices that came from the queer community acknowledging trans people's existence and validity, one of these being anything displaying what pronouns you use. These became somewhat mainstream, to the point where they show up in people's email signatures pretty regularly. One of the Trump Administration's demands of federal agencies was that everybody remove their pronouns from their signatures; this kind of practice is one they absolutely don't want you to keep doing, because it's an implicit sign that you support trans people.
Because of this, you should do it. You can find enamel pins displaying your pronouns, put them in your email signature, put them on your social media profiles. This is especially important if most people would guess your pronouns correctly. If you use he/him while looking like a relatively gender-conforming cis man, or she/her while looking like a relatively gender-conforming cis woman, displaying your pronouns says "I acknowledge that even somebody who looks like me might use different pronouns than expected."
Enforcement of harmful demands relies a lot on the compliance of everyday people. A very common tactic used to enforce anti-transgender laws and expectations is snitching: They create things like dedicated phone lines and contact forms online, and rely on people using them to rat out trans people and their supporters "breaking the rules." You can typically avoid this by just minding your own damn business and not outing people, and most importantly, don't talk to law enforcement.
One of the good things about the fact that so many of these actions rely on tiplines and contact forms is that it's really easy for people to render them useless. Just a few examples:
If a store you have been shopping at decides to buckle to the anti-trans and otherwise anti-diversity environment the Trump Administration is setting up, don't shop there. If it involves a subscription or an account, request its closure and make sure if you are asked why you are closing that account, tell them exactly why you are leaving. When people started boycotting Target for ending its DEI initiatives, people were closing their Target Circle Cards over the phone and talking about why during the part of the process they were being pressured to keep the card.
Minimize your use of social media like Meta and Twitter/X that have instituted transphobic policies. If you are using one of these social media sites as a primary mode of communication with certain people and have no alternatives, minimize your use of them as much as possible (for instance, by deleting the Facebook app from your phone, but leaving Facebook Messenger).
A common way that people have fought back against corporate stuff like this is by leveraging review systems like Yelp!, but keep in mind it could be removed or be considered fraud if you leave a review of a product or service you have never actually used.
Another way to be super annoying is to use contact forms. When the CDC and other government websites started removing information relevant to trans people and other targeted individuals, every time I would investigate by going to a broken link, I would fill out the "are you satisfied with this information" form to say I did not appreciate the lack of information. Since I was not entirely sure if it would ever be read, I kept the text to copy and paste to avoid wasting too much of my own time.
A lot of news media companies have been avoiding reporting truthfully on the Trump Administration's behavior. You should use their contact forms to express your disapproval.
One of the tactics Republicans have used against queer and trans people is trying to reframe our art as obscene or offensive, taking it out of schools, museums, and other institutions. Where it is allowed, it may be torn from context in a way that completely neuters its significance ("Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres gets messed around a lot in this respect).
They are trying to create an environment where people think transgender and queer culture either doesn't exist or is degenerate, so supporting it by buying books written by trans people, going to museum exhibitions featuring trans artists, commissioning art from trans artists, and requesting their literature be kept at your local library help resist that.
This will not be relevant to everybody, but if you are in the position of being in something like a corporation or other entity where people are forming plans for complying with harmful demands, you can help delay or drag the process by using what I saw on Bluesky referred to as "being Colin Robinson." Colin Robinson is an energy vampire in the series "What We Do In The Shadows" who feeds by annoying and boring people.
This came up when discussing the CIA's recently-declassified "Simple Sabotage Manual," a World War II era document that contains a list of tips for delaying decisions at organizations and conferences that includes:
It should be noted that people have used some of these tactics when ICE shows up to try rounding up immigrants in public places, bringing up irrelevant things, talking at length, and just generally distracting them.
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