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Fighting for All Our Lives: How Queer Resistance Protects Everyone’s Freedom
Queer politics does not simply advocate for inclusion; it challenges the very structure that renders certain lives less liveable in the first place.
Apr 24, 2025
On April 16, the U.K. Supreme Court made a landmark ruling that the legal definition of a “woman” must refer solely to biological sex. The implications of this decision were immediate and severe—trans women may now be strip-searched by male officers and excluded from spaces where their safety and dignity depend on recognition. At first glance, the decision may seem like a dry point of legal semantics. But in reality, it reflects a far deeper and more dangerous shift: the consolidation of an authoritarian political logic that treats trans lives as expendable in the pursuit of social order and hierarchical control.
This is not a policy based on scientific evidence or democratic deliberation. It is part of a wider cultural strategy designed to fracture public solidarity, weaponize identity, and enforce a hierarchy of who deserves protection. These strategies rely on well-worn tools: the stoking of moral panic, the resurrection of essentialist binaries, and the reduction of rights to a zero-sum contest. At the centre of it all is a necropolitical logic—one that governs through the threat of exclusion and disposability, using the unequal and conditional distribution of life, rights, and freedom as a tool to maintain dominance, privilege, and control.
Yet these politics do not operate only on a material level. They work most powerfully through identity—through constructing certain groups as more or less deserving of life. This is where queer necropolitics becomes a vital framework for understanding the terrain we are on. In this logic, queerness itself becomes a site of state violence, not because it poses a real threat, but because it disrupts the neat social categories authoritarian capitalism needs in order to manage, discipline, and divide us.
Transphobia as a Form of Moral Panic
The U.K. Supreme Court’s decision is only the latest episode in an escalating series of culture war skirmishes that target trans people under the banner of protecting women. These moral panics, like those which target and continue to target migrants, queers, and sex workers, rely on sensationalism and fear rather than evidence. They mobilize deep-seated anxieties about gender, identity, and social change into a reactionary demand for order and exclusion.
Proponents of these anti-trans positions often frame themselves as defenders of feminism. They argue that allowing trans women into women’s spaces compromises safety or dilutes hard-won rights. But these arguments closely mirror the language and tactics of far-right populist movements. They draw on a worldview in which society is fractured into antagonistic identity blocs, and in which any gain by one group must come at the cost of another. This zero-sum logic reinforces the idea that rights are scarce—and that groups must compete for recognition, safety, and survival.
The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded?
Critically, these arguments lack grounding in either biology or social science. Claims about fixed “biological sex” ignore the robust and growing scientific consensus that sex is not binary and that human sexual traits exist along intersecting spectrums. From chromosomal variation to endocrine diversity, biological reality defies the simplistic male-female binary that the court ruling seeks to enshrine. Social science, too, has long shown that gender is a social construct with material effects, shaped by context, power, and historical processes.
Yet despite this, trans women continue to be painted as dangerous intruders, especially in spaces like sports or prisons. In sport, arguments against inclusion often rely on misinformation and biologically essentialist (and deeply racist) assumptions. However, both scientific research and legal analysis show that trans athletes face no inherent advantages—and are often at a disadvantage due to systemic barriers and social exclusion.
Through casting trans inclusion as a threat to cis women’s rights, this rhetoric not only distorts the goals of feminism but plays directly into the authoritarian politics it claims to resist. Instead of building coalitions among those historically marginalised, it encourages rivalry and suspicion. The question becomes: Which oppressed group will be chosen for protection by the state, and which will be excluded? In this framework, protection is no longer a right—it is a prize to be fought over.
The Necropolitical Logic of Authoritarian Capitalism
These attacks reveal a profound transformation in how power is exercised. It is no longer enough to control access to resources, wealth, or institutions. Authoritarian capitalism now governs at the level of life itself—who is deemed socially legitimate, who is recognized by the law, and who is left to navigate violence and precarity without protection. This form of rule is what theorists have identified as necropolitics: the power to determine who lives and who dies, not only physically, but socially, economically, and symbolically.
A queer necropolitical perspective deepens this understanding. It shows how queerness—particularly trans identities—are positioned as excessive, abject, or threatening within systems that demand legibility and conformity. Queer bodies do not just live precariously under this regime; they are actively made precarious. Their visibility becomes grounds for surveillance; their autonomy becomes justification for abandonment. Crucially, queer life—and by extension, any life that resists being neatly classified and controlled—is often only tolerated when it serves a political purpose or stays out of sight.
This logic did not emerge in isolation. It evolved from the earlier structures of neoliberalism, which systematically turned basic goods—such as housing, education, and healthcare—into commodities to be fought over. Under neoliberalism, survival became a matter of individual competition. But as the failures of that model have become increasingly visible, its competitive logic has migrated: Now it is identity itself that is rendered scarce. Rights are no longer distributed through citizenship or universal protections, but through contest between demographic groups.
This shift has produced a kind of demographic austerity. If trans people gain access to gender-affirming care, it is framed as coming at the expense of cis women’s services. If migrants seek asylum, it is painted as a drain on national resources. If Black communities organize for safety and justice, it is seen as threatening the status of white working-class voters. These dynamics reflect a necropolitical state that no longer promises inclusion through shared humanity, but only conditional recognition based on identity, utility, and submission.
In this way, trans people—and queer people more broadly—are turned into political symbols whose lives can be bartered, debated, or denied. Recent legal commentary has detailed how trans voices were excluded from the court’s reasoning. Policy analyses show how access to gender-affirming services is increasingly restricted. Meanwhile, broader populist movements are reinforcing essentialist identities globally—such as the Trump administration’s recent effort to promote racial essentialism and reject race as a social construct.
These are not isolated developments. They are the global grammar of a resurgent necropolitical order.
The Necessity of Queer Resistance to Necrophobic Politics
Faced with these conditions, the most urgent political task is to reject the premise that life must be earned through conformity. Queer politics does not simply advocate for inclusion; it challenges the very structure that renders certain lives less liveable in the first place. It refuses the logic of scarcity, of competition, of “deservingness,” and insists instead on a politics rooted in abundance, solidarity, and mutual care.
This form of resistance is especially vital in confronting necrophobic politics—the cultural and institutional tendency to reject or erase those who live outside normative scripts of gender, sexuality, race, or ability. Queer resistance confronts this head-on, not by asking for tolerance, but by building new ways of relating, surviving, and resisting violent normative logics. It appears in grassroots movements for the collective ownership of our spaces, mutual aid networks, in trans-led care collectives and cooperatives, and in artistic and theoretical projects that imagine life beyond legibility.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in.
The point is not simply to expand the margins of acceptability. It is to dismantle the very system that produces social death in the first place. As recent academic research and political analysis show, authoritarian capitalism survives by creating artificial crises of identity, which can then be managed, exploited, or repressed. Queer resistance makes those crises unmanageable. It refuses to play the game of identity competition. It recognizes that our survival depends not on winning favor from the state, but on transforming the conditions that make such favor necessary.
This resistance is already under way. Across courts, classrooms, and communities, people are challenging the reduction of identity to threat and fighting to build alliances across difference. Even as the far-right attempts to recapture the public imagination with a nostalgic vision of fixed categories and rigid roles, queer communities continue to model what it means to live otherwise—to live together and otherwise—outside the confines of binary thinking and zero-sum fear.
The culture and legal war against trans people is not a side issue. It is a central front in the struggle over what kind of society we want to live in. Will we be divided into discrete groups, each vying for conditional safety under an authoritarian state? Or can we build a world where life is not reduced to a bargaining chip, but recognized as fundamentally shared, entangled, and worth protecting—simply because it exists?
Queer politics answers this question with a resounding refusal to accept the terms as they have been offered. It defines freedom not as something won by denying others their rights or survival, but as the shared pursuit of joy, dignity, and possibility through the creation and exploration of diverse ways of living. And in doing so it provides the radical blueprint for a different and better future.
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Governor Vows to 'Vigorously Defend' Maine From Trump Attack on Trans Women
"This is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a president can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation," said Janet Mills.
Apr 16, 2025
Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills responded Wednesday to a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit against the state for defying President Donald Trump's efforts to ban transgender women and girls from female sports by vowing to defend the rule of law against what she called the White House's illegal attacks.
"Today is the latest, expected salvo in an unprecedented campaign to pressure the state of Maine to ignore the Constitution and abandon the rule of law," Mills said in response to the lawsuit, which accuses state officials of "openly and defiantly flouting federal anti-discrimination law by enforcing policies that require girls to compete against boys in athletic competitions designated exclusively for girls."
The suit comes days after the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) announced it would begin cutting off federal K-12 education funding following an agency investigation and after the state rejected a list of the Trump administration's demands regarding transgender student-athletes.
"This matter has never been about school sports or the protection of women and girls."
Mlils argued Wednesday that "this matter has never been about school sports or the protection of women and girls, as has been claimed, it is about states rights and defending the rule of law against a federal government bent on imposing its will, instead of upholding the law."
The Trump administration's sweeping war on transgender rights includes redefining Title IX anti-discrimination law to cancel protection for trans and nonbinary people, trying to reinstate his first-term ban on openly transgender people from military service, ending "X" gender markers on passports, banning federal support for gender-affirming healthcare, pressuring schools to censor lessons and materials about trans and nonbinary people, erasing transgender people and stories from government-run institutions and websites, and much more. Hundreds of anti-trans bills have also been passed or proposed in nearly every state.
Announcing the lawsuit at a DOJ press briefing, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi—who warned that other noncompliant states including California and Minnesota might also be sued—said that i"this has been a huge issue" for Trump.
"We have exhausted every other remedy," Bondi added. "We tried to get Maine to comply. We don't like standing up here and filing lawsuits, we want to get states to comply with us."
However, Mills said that U.S. District Judge John Woodcock's April 11 order for the Trump administration to unfreeze funding for a children's nutrition program that was suspended over the transgender athlete issue "reinforces our position that the federal government has been acting unlawfully."
Mills stoked Trump's ire for resisting his threats to cut off federal funding if she did not move to ban transgender women and girls from female teams—an action that would violate state law explicitly prohibiting gender identity-based discrimination. During a February White House meeting with governors, Trump called out Mills for her defiance and again threatened to cut off funding.
"We're going to follow the law, sir," Mills replied. "We'll see you in court."
This further incensed Trump, whose demand for Mills to apologize was widely mocked. The Trump administration then temporarily forced new Maine parents to register their newborns for a Social Security number at a government office rather than at hospitals, a policy quickly rescinded amid public uproar.
Earlier this month, Maine sued the Trump administration in a bid to stop it from implementing any funding freeze.
"For nearly two months, Maine has endured recriminations from the federal government that have targeted hungry school kids, hardworking fishermen, senior citizens, new parents, and countless Maine people," Mills said Wednesday. "We have been subject to politically motivated investigations that opened and closed without discussion, leaving little doubt that their outcomes were predetermined."
"Let today serve as warning to all states: Maine might be among the first to draw the ire of the federal government in this way, but we will not be the last," Mills said.e "My administration and Maine's attorney general will vigorously defend our state against the action announced today from the Department of Justice."
"This is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a president can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation," she added. "I believe he cannot."
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Naked Kennedy Center Staffer Rips 'Villainous Liar' Trump and 'Nazi Wannabe' Musk
"I have called Trump out on his bullshit and dare him to fire me for being unapologetically queer, and critical, for showing up everyday in my best red lip and woke gender ideology that says don't fuck with me."
Mar 20, 2025
"Walk away or fight?"
That's what one program director at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. asked in response to U.S. President Donald Trump's bigoted attacks on racial, religious, and sexual minorities—and the artist literally bared all of himself while mulling the question.
"Trump has taken over the Kennedy Center, and that's a place where I work. He has banned drag performers from its stages. And as the saying goes, 'we're all born naked and the rest is drag," Tavish Forsyth, the associate artistic lead for the Kennedy Center's Opera Institute, said in a YouTube video, wearing nothing but an 8-bit rainbow-striped heart digitally superimposed over his groin.
Trump recently took over the Kennedy Center, firing its board, appointing himself chair of the body, and
replacing its members with loyalists in what many critics believe is a bid to remake the venerable institution in his own image.
Washington Post associate editor Marc Fischer wrote Wednesday that "there has been much worry in the anti-Trump world that the president will turn the Kennedy Center into an easy-listening temple, a reliquary for washed-up middlebrow acts, a refuge for the few artists who wave the MAGA flag. Kid Rock in the Opera House, Jason Aldean in the Concert Hall."
Reflecting his administration's attacks on LGBTQ+ people, Trump has canceled or proscribed performances deemed "woke," including a concert featuring the Gay Men's Chorus and the National Symphony Orchestra's A Peacock Among Pigeons: Celebrating 50 Years of Pride.
Calling Trump a "villainous liar," Forsyth asked: "Does staying make me a collaborator or somehow complicit in a hostile government takeover that is systematically targeting the rights, livelihood and liberty of poor people, queer people, Black, brown people, people of color, immigrants, Muslims, victims in war-torn countries, ethnic cleansing, women... Gosh when I put it like that, it seems kind of obvious: Fuck Donald Trump and fuck the Kennedy Center. But, on the other hand, is staying holding the line and living to fight another day?"
Forsyth called Trump's move to install himself as the head of Kennedy Center's board "surprising, because he seemed so busy draining dams, damning alliances, siding with killers, endorsing genocide, erasing trans and queer people from history, deporting people who have every right to live in a land of immigrants—a stolen land—and doing everything in his goddam power to seem like a big tough man while Nazi wannabe [Elon] Musk, systematically erodes the government while selling Cybertrucks to the next generation of American war criminals."
"And now that I've said all this shit, people will name me radical, crazy, Antifa, terrorist, pot-smoking, faggot, hippie, whatever the fuck," Forsyth continued. "I also fear that I make myself unemployable. To which I also say, 'Fuck it!' If I'm unemployable, then let it be because I chose to be unrulable. Let it be because I choose me, my beloved family, and stand in solidarity with communities that equally deserve to be free."
"Every bone in my body says run," Forsyth confessed. "And I haven't been sleeping well for over a week. My heart says love one another. My ego says don't let them win. Don't give up. Don't abandon a worthy cause... I have called Trump out on his bullshit and dare him to fire me for being unapologetically queer, and critical, for showing up everyday in my best red lip and woke gender ideology that says don't fuck with me. I threaten him to arrest me for breaking his unjust laws that threaten diversity."
"Shoot your shot, Donald," he added. "The rest of you, should I quit the Kennedy Center or wait to be crucified for this man's sins?"
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