The Democrat-ification of Trans Pride

How Gender Justice League killed the Trans Pride March

Gwendolyn Hart

The current iteration of Seattle’s trans pride day came about in 2013, after gay marriage was won in Washington State. In the wake of that victory, transgender people still lacked access to healthcare, faced employment discrimination, and were being targeted for acts of violence. There was a mood to get organized and start seriously agitating against these issues, so a march for trans rights was held.

If you happen to visit the Seattle Trans Pride event today, you won’t find any of this. It’s now a music festival in the style of a miniature Coachella sponsored by Starbucks and Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal, where vendors pay $450 for a license to set up a booth.

The group that “produces” (their word) Seattle Trans Pride as a music fest is called the Gender Justice League, an “advocacy” group which emerged out of the 2013 march. The original Trans Pride March was not welcomed by the establishment or “progressive” Democrats like Jayapal. At that time Democratic Party city councillors responded with, “Trans Pride? That’s not a real thing.” The only politician to join in the first Trans Pride March was socialist Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant. Yet the role of GJL over the years has not been to agitate against the establishment, but to cozy up to it and suppress the movement.

Since comfortably settling into the establishment several years ago, the GJL has refused to hold a trans march anymore. It would interfere with their ability to produce a sufficiently sanitized event, you see. And they are hostile to anyone else putting on a march for trans rights when they won’t. It’s true, you can go check the Trans Pride Seattle website where they say as much. It’s the first item in their “Frequently Asked Questions.”

In 2013, they said they would take a stand against the corporatization of Pride and promised to never take corporate money. Now, you may notice Starbucks and other corporate sponsors are funding them. Well they noticed your noticing, and explain (also on the homepage) that they haven’t broken their pledge because this money is being laundered through these corporations’ “employee resource groups”. These “ERGs” are just a way for corporations to direct their money into donations that generate good PR for the company.

Why is Starbucks paying to have their logo displayed prominently on Trans Pride Seattle’s website and materials, anyway? Besides the usual PR reasons, they would also very much like you to forget that when Starbucks employees in Seattle started to unionize, the company threatened to revoke coverage for transgender healthcare if they wouldn’t back down. The GJL is helping these people launder their image.

The Gender Justice League is hardly unique. They are just like the Lavender Rights Project, Seattle Out and Proud (the group producing the Seattle Pride Parade), and all the hundreds of non-profit liberal “advocacy” groups across this city and this country. They have astroturfed the movement for queer liberation into a parking lot for corporate advertisers, just so they can wheedle money out of them.

The Seattle Pride® Parade (yes, that symbol is a part of its name and yes it does mean it’s a registered trademark) plays host to hundreds of businesses and such huge corporations as Alaska Airlines, a megacorporation with a $4.5B net worth that has transformed the SeaTac International Airport into its own personal fiefdom. Seattle Pride [registered trademark] certainly makes good money on it, considering these businesses are paying anything from $430 to $5,750 to buy a contingent in the parade (plus $600 add-ons for vehicles).

The less grandiose events are no different. This year, Pride in the Park played host to banks, health insurance companies, and landlords like Greystar, the gentrifying corporate behemoth that has likely contributed more to the eviction crisis of transgender people in Seattle than any other company.

These corporate vendor fairs have nothing to do with the militant struggles that actually won gay rights.

Recently, the heads of these Pride [registered trademark] advocacy groups were invited to a ceremony at Seattle City Hall, where the All-Democrat City Council held a hollow show of pageantry “affirming” Transgender Day of Visibility. And they gave the city councillors a right-proper tongue bath of praise for all the nothing they’re doing.

As socialists and activists at city hall that day pointed out, the city council is doing nothing about the transgender eviction crisis. They’re doing nothing about ICE and its targeting of transgender immigrants. Less than a month after this sham ceremony, a transgender UW student was murdered in the middle of her student housing – and they’re doing nothing about that too!

This is the political role that these groups play. They form a firm layer of bought-and-paid-for PR insulating Democratic politicians from accountability. And when the mood in the movement starts to get too militant, they insert themselves as middlemen bartering with the politicians for the smallest possible concessions to make the rest of us shut up and go away.

We have to break the movement away from the deathgrip of the Democrats and their political stooges. To beat the anti-trans attacks, we need a movement with militant leadership that will organize walk outs, sick outs, and strikes. Socialists need to crash these sell-out dominated events, organize militant marches and demonstrations of our own (see left), and agitate for an independent movement and a new working-class party.

Socialists are organizing the trans march now, to fight for all these things.  Join us June 26 @ 6 PM to build a militant movement for trans liberation.