When times get hard for the queer community, trans people get left behind. That is not a new accusation: it is a pattern with decades of evidence behind it. The piece published by LGBTQ Nation from the Transgender Strategy Center names it plainly, and it deserves a plain response.

The piece opens with a phone call. A young trans woman of colour, ringing for help starting her own organisation, says something that I suspect a great many trans elders have thought but rarely say aloud: "The gays hate us. They steal our words, our culture, but don't want to help us when we're literally fighting for our lives." The person taking that call at the Transgender Strategy Center had heard versions of it before. So have I. What strikes me about it is not the anger, though the anger is entirely earned. It is the resignation. She had already made her peace with it.

The funding tells the story

You do not need personal testimony to see the gap, though the testimony matters. The numbers do the same work. According to the 2024 LGBTQ Funders Tracking Report, for every $100 given to LGBTQ+ causes, roughly three cents reaches trans-specific organisations. Three cents. And that was before the current administration began reversing government grants and tightening the landscape around anything carrying the word "trans."

The Transgender Strategy Center has been told, by philanthropic advisors, to consider removing the word "trans" from funding applications. To think about changing their name entirely. They have been told that not everyone will survive this funding crisis, and that the small, boots-on-the-ground organisations doing the unglamorous work of health outreach to the most vulnerable are the ones most likely to disappear. This is not bureaucratic abstraction. These are organisations keeping people alive.

The room that went quiet

The piece describes a national health conference where a panel of mostly cis gay men talked about their success in fighting executive orders and recovering millions in funding. When someone asked how the trans community had been involved, the room went quiet. The eventual answers: trans people are "hard to work with," "hard to find," and "should be at the table." Should be. As though their absence were a logistical oversight rather than a structural choice.

In three decades of the HIV/AIDS movement, the largest organisations received funding for trans programming and almost never elevated a trans person to executive leadership. Trans women, lesbians, and cis women cared for gay men who were being decimated by a disease the government refused to acknowledge. That history of mutual care is the real story of queer community. The version that edits out trans people is not the history: it is a convenient rewrite.

What solidarity actually looks like

The piece is not without hope, and neither am I. Pedro Pascal has been consistently vocal in defence of trans people, using his platform to push back against erasure when it would have been easy to stay quiet. Ariana Grande made a significant donation to trans and queer organisations, putting real resources behind the words. Across the country, gay men are turning up at city council meetings, calling their representatives, writing cheques to trans-led organisations when nobody is watching. Some are literally walking trans women home from bars, standing between them and hecklers at protests.

That is solidarity. Not a hashtag, not a Progress Pride flag on a profile picture, not a post about "protecting the dolls" from someone whose social circle contains no trans people and certainly no trans people of colour. Solidarity is what you do when the cameras are not on you, when there is no cultural credit to collect, when showing up is inconvenient.

The T was never an addition

Trans people have existed across every culture, every society, every period of recorded history. Trans people were at Stonewall before it became a feel-good narrative. Trans people have been at every uprising, every fight for dignity, every moment where queer people of any description stood up and said: we exist, and we are not going away. The sanitised version of that history, the one that centres certain identities and quietly removes others, is not memory, it is erasure.

The Transgender Strategy Center will keep doing the quiet work: empowering trans leaders, building trans organisations, keeping people connected to services and to each other. But the piece they have published is a direct ask, and it deserves a direct answer. If you are LGB and you have not yet shown up for the T, now is the time. Not because it is politically convenient, not because the optics are good, but because trans people have been there for you, and the fight for shared humanity cannot be won by some of us leaving others behind.