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Rev. Erin Walter
March 30, 2025
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756
www.austinuu.org
On the eve of Trans Day of Visibility, Rev. Erin Walter and Bis Thornton bring wisdom and beauty from diverse trans leaders, within and beyond Unitarian Universalism, as well as reflections and learnings from the recent All In For Equality Day and Texas UU Justice Ministry day at the Capitol.
Chalice Lighting
This is the flame we hold in our hearts as we strive for justice for everyone. This is the light we shine upon systems of oppression until they are no more. This is the warmth that we share with one another as our struggle becomes our salvation.
Call to Worship
THE INFINITE DIVINITY
by Rev. Jami YandleThe chalice is lit
And in the flames the memory of
Our trans and non-binary ancestors
Do a dance of freedom and liberation
Reminding us that
We are whole and holy
We are loved beyond all measure
And in our refusal to accept anything less
May we know we are rooted
In the infinite divinity
Not relegated to the outskirts
Of the web of all existence
But enshrined at its core
Enfleshed with stardust and fairy dust
An intentional creation of space where our many Gods live
Affirming Our Mission
Together we nourish souls, transform lives, and do justice to build the Beloved Community.
NOTE: This is an edited ai generated transcript.
Please forgive any omissions or errors.
Video
Hi, my name is E. Ciszek. I am a member of First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin. I’m also a professor and a scholar.
In spring 2025, the United States remains deeply polarized with ideological conflicts shaping public discourse and policy. The second Trump administration known for its aggressive stance on social issues has exacerbated these divisions, targeting the rights and lives of trans individuals. Mainstream and alternative media outlets amplify anti-trans narratives, framing them as central to America’s cultural and moral battles. Globally similar trends are unfolding as nations grapple with their own political and cultural upheavals. the hardline rhetoric of the Trump administration has emboldened conservative movements worldwide, leading to policies that marginalize trans populations. For parents of trans youth, this means confronting an onslaught of restrictive laws and hostile media narratives that undermine their ability to support their children in an increasingly adversarial public arena.
As we know, parents serve as the first and most consistent support system for children. When a child expresses a gender identity that’s different from their assigned sex at birth, parents become crucial decision makers and advocates. They have to balance their own emotions and uncertainties while ensuring their child receives care and acceptance and protection. This journey often reshapes their relationships, sometimes leading to estrangement from relatives or faith communities unwilling to accept their child’s identity.
Educational advocacy becomes a constant battle as parents work to secure their child’s rights to recognition, their access to appropriate facilities and protection from discrimination. Yet, shifting policies of political rhetoric create confusion, allowing schools to justify inaction or exclusion. Trans Students are often denied access to bathrooms, locker rooms, sports teams, not always due to explicit bans, but because administrators fear backlash or misinterpret evolving legal guidance. As a result, parents find themselves in ungoing struggles with school officials, filing complaints and sometimes pursuing legal action, all while trying to shield their children from the emotional tool of being treated as political controversies rather than students.
Medical decision-making, though highly visible, it’s just one aspect of this fight. Parents must navigate a shrinking landscape of gender-affirming care as clinics close under legal and political pressures. Many are forced to seek care across state lines or rely on underground networks. Beyond advocating for their children’s right to life-saving treatments, they also have to contend with the alarming reality that healthcare providers themselves are under constant threat, harassed, and even forced to shut down.
The current political climate places an extraordinary pressure on these parents, pressures that are magnified for non-white families. Some states have attempted to classify gender-affirming care as child abuse, exposing families to child protective services investigations or even the threat of family separation. For black, brown, and indigenous families who are already disproportionately surveilled and criminalized by the child welfare system, these risks are amplified by a long history of racialization and racialized state violence. graphic displacement is a reality for some as families might relocate to states with stronger protections, creating medical refugees who leave behind careers, extended families, community ties in order to access care.
Yet not all families have equal access to mobility. Those most affected by intersecting racial and economic injustice often face the fewest viable options for safe relocation. The idea that families can just move to safer states or countries to protect their trans children presumes access to wealth documentation and freedom of movement. This acknowledgement demands a recognition that some individuals are fixed in place by racial capitalism settler colonialism or migration status. And so when thinking about these families and these children, we need to think also about the liberatory infrastructures where people are, not just where they might flee to through the creation of networks of solidarity, of care collectives, and local resistance that accounts for immobility as a structural condition, not as a personal failure.
Meanwhile, parents who speak publicly risk harassment and political attacks with their private medical decisions subjected to public scrutiny and debate. This surveillance is especially acute for families of non-white trans youth whose bodies are frequently rendered hyper-visible by the media as symbols of social crisis, of deviance or moral decline.
Parents choosing to stay out of the limelight, particularly black, brown and indigenous families, not because they lack care or engagement but because visibility intensifies the dangers of violence and exploitation. When anti-trans rhetoric intensifies, these families are among the first to feel its consequences. Their navigation of healthcare, education, and social systems exposes the systemic gaps and barriers that affect other marginalized groups as well.
As Reina Gossett, a queer transgender artist asserts, visibility is a trap, it creates an illusion of inclusion while intensifying vulnerability for those already marginalized. She speaks to the dangers of hyper-visibility for racialized trans people, dismantling the notion that visibility, for example, media attention or legal recognition automatically equals safety, is dismantled especially in volatile climates where black and brown trans bodies are surveilled, criminalized or politicized. Gossett really encapsulates why silence may be chosen over speech. When public attention increases surveillance and vulnerability, silence becomes a refusal to be consumed, to be co-opted or criminalized.
In a climate where schools and governments and media monitor trans kids and their families, silence can resist being co-opted, criminalized or sensationalized. Choosing not to testify, choosing not to post online, choosing not to speak publicly about a child’s identity or medical care isn’t passivity. It’s a strategy. It’s about refusing to feed systems that refuse, that reduce their lives to political battlegrounds. Silence becomes a form of care shielding trans youth from state media or public scrutiny. It’s also an act of refusal of the demand to always explain to justify or expose trans existence to satisfy cis normative curiosity or political debate.
By withholding information, parents can be carving out safer spaces for joy, transition or growth away from hostile visibility. Silence helps preserve dignity when the public sphere reduces trans-lives to spectacles. Silence is a counter surveillance tactic controlling what’s shared and with whom on whose terms for surviving in a landscape of hostile visibility. It’s not a retreat but a protective pause, a boundry around trans-joy transition and growth. Strategic silence can be a powerful tool of world-making, one that resists force visibility, embraces care and cultivates alternative ways of being and belonging in the face of trans antagonistic systems. It says we don’t owe you our child’s story. We’re busy building a better world for our child. And this is strategic invisibility as boundry-setting. It resists the assumption that transness must be made legible or palatable to audiences in order to be protected or valid.
Reading
ASKING FOR HELP
by Quinn Gormley“It is revolutionary for any trans person to choose to be seen and visible in a world that tells us we should not exist.”
-Laverne Cox
I locked myself out of my car recently. I called a garage and they sent a technician. Apparently, he tried to call me on the way over and I missed it. He left a voicemail, which meant he heard my message: “Hello, you’ve reached Quinn at the Maine Transgender Network.”
My trans status isn’t a secret. Being public about it is part of my job. But being public and being out to random men on the side of a quiet, rural road are very different things.
He arrived and we wrestled back into my Subaru. After handing over my insurance card, he got quiet for a minute. Nervously he asked, “You do the rainbow thing?”
It took me a second to put the pieces together. I froze for a moment. This question doesn’t usually end well. Tentatively I answered, “Yeah, I do the rainbow thing … Is that a problem?”
He shook his head and took a deep breath. And then he started to talk.
His kid came out a few nights ago and wants to transition. He’s very worried. He watches the news. He knows how trans kids get treated. i do too. I was a trans kid. I released the breath I’d been holding. This was a conversation I know how to have.
We talked for a while about how cruel the world is, about how his kid might very well get hurt. Lots do. He’s afraid to let them transition. But then we talked about how we can’t control the world. His kid is different and might get hurt either way. “So why not let them control what happiness they can? You can teach them how to handle the rest.” We talked about how happy kids are safer kids, because happy kids have adults they can ask for help.
A hug, a trading of numbers, and a few tissues later and he was on his way to the store to buy his son a clip-on tie and those Spider-Man shoes he didn’t give him for his birthday.
Sometimes the story does end well.
Video
ALL IN FOR EQUALITY DAY
By Joelle EspeutMy name is Joelle Espeut. My pronouns are she/her, also high girl, icy girl, city girl, material girl, and I am privileged to hail all the way from Houston, Texas.
And I just wanted to say I am a woman of many things. I am a community advocate. I am an around-the-way girl. I’m a fashionista. I’m an unapologetic black trans woman. Just a name a few. We are in Uncertainty Dark Con. Yes, yes, it’s real tricky right now. But that is not what I’m here to talk about. I’m here to speak about joy, hope and possibility-models.
Joy because even in the face of adversity and darkness and despair, we absolutely deserve to experience joy.
The hope that we lean into is the hope when we envision and imagine and think expansively about what our world can look like because we absolutely will prevail.
And possibility-models, because I, a black trans woman, will continue to stand and be a possibility-model for what can happen when you stand unapologetically and authentically in your trans-ness and in your identity.
And so because of that, and because of who we are, I want everyone here to lean into joy, hope, and possibility-models because that is where we will find liberation. Not just for trans people, but liberation for all.
Thank you.
Extinguishing the Chalice
We extinguish this flame, but not the light of truth, the warmth of community, or the fire of commitment. These we hold in our hearts until we are together again.
Benediction
The challenges that we face, the work that we face, will be like eating an elephant. But I tell people that the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. One bite at a time and we will win. So to recap, it will get better, stand together, unite, take care of yourself, take care of your community. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. When I say we’ve always been here, you say hell yeah, we’ve always been here, hell yeah, We’ve always been here! We’ve always been here!
– Anna Nguyen
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