Self Organized Trans Pride Assembly

Pride began as a riot against police brutality at the Stonewall Inn in 1969, building on a series of protests during the 50s and 60s, with transgender people at the forefront. In Greece, the first pride events were organized in the 80s and 90s as gatherings or parties. With the first institutionalised Pride since 2005, we are already witnessing its deviation from the original insurrectionary spirit.

Our joy is revolutionary. Yet our joy has nothing in common with the multinationals that sell our identities as commodities or with the political parties that promise salvation and institutional acceptance, side by side with the cops who enforce systemic and class violence. Watching colonial systems like Israel "cover up" the genocide of the Palestinian people with our flags. Seeing transgender people erased again and again, even within LGB(TQI+) organisations.

Our joy is revolutionary but it does not find its place within institutional Pride. Our rage does. It recognises no company, no capital, no state as good or moral. No cosmetics brand has stood with us, no cop has made us feel safer. The capitalist system, beginning with its exploitation of workers, treats us and our bodies as resources to be consumed. From it, we expect nothing but our loss. No Pride hand in hand with our oppressors, only resistance to the systems of power that uphold capitalism and imperialism. No Pride in war and genocide, no matter how much marketing tries to present the West as our saviour. No state grants us rights. On the contrary, they strip them away and then sell us crumbs back.

Our organising begins with us, horizontally, from the grassroots. We are individuals who, through an open assembly, created the self-organised Trans Pride of Athens.

Our struggle to secure basic human needs like housing, work, and healthcare has tragically become part of our everyday life. Transgender people still face limited and costly access to essential medicines and procedures for gender transition, degrading treatment from medical staff, the pathologisation of our identities by psychologists and psychiatrists and deliberate fearmongering and misinformation. This is the reality we continue to endure. Threats and attacks against us are increasing in all aspects of public and private life. Our very existence is perceived as a challenge and a threat. The verbal and physical violence inflicted on us is presented as a "moral cleansing" by the patriarchal, colonial regime, with institutions applauding and enforcing similar practices against every marginalised community.

Those of us who are sex workers, whether trans or not, face similar violence, with distorted arguments and exclusion from our right to exist. We fight for the establishment of our workers' rights, the abrogation of the pornophobic laws of this state that push us to illegal activity, the nullification of stigma, and protection against repression. Similarly, whether immigrants or natives, we denounce racist laws, nationalist rhetoric, work-related obstacles, complicated and exhausting procedures of gaining official nationality and residence permit, and concentration camps.

In the trans community, intersectionally marginalised people, due to class, race, immigrant identity, or disability, we are the most vulnerable.

We witness our erasure from history, restrictions on our right to parenthood, the legal recognition of our identities, and the pathologisation of our very existence. We demand the end of all burdens that make our lives unbearable. We take to the streets, to schools and universities, to hospitals, among friends and in our neighbourhoods, resisting every form of attack and terror.

Every expression of oppression and intolerance is but another head of the same beast, the system of power, stretching from the benches of parliament to the patriarch's (head of the family) table in the family home. Gender, the first tool of social control, is used by the state as a weapon. Whether through war or "family," religion or "biology," it cuts like a knife in the ruler's hand. This mythical gender kills. We are tired of speaking politely, tired of debating philosophically, about whether our lives are valuable or not. For every asshole out there, we are the immigrants stealing your jobs. We are the freaks growing up inside your homes. We are the scapegoats made in the news. We are a threat to the nation. We are the guilty secret buried under the family table. We are the danger to your so-called traditional marriage.

We are the monster that speaks your language and we cannot go on like this. Now, the monster does not just speak: It clamours, it thirsts, it fights. It does not just ask for acceptance; it demands life. It does not wait for justice; it grabs it. Through the fragments of our bodies, the future that threatens your very foundations is born.

We are the virus in your cis-software.

We lost Zackie Oh, beaten to death by the average Greek homemaker. We lost our trans sisters in Evin prisons to colonialism. We lost Anna to transmisogynoir. We lost Dimitra to years of transphobia and conversion practices. We lost Vangelis to homophobia.

As transgender people we have always existed and will continue to exist everywhere.

We call - on the 4th of October, in Klafthmonos Square at 17:00, for the self-organised Trans Pride march.