18/04/2025
This has been a long time coming, and we confess that it was prompted by others making similar decisions, but Trans Activism UK is officially disbanding.
If you’ve been looking at our social media, you’ll know that we’ve been inactive for a long time. This is for a variety of reasons, but it primarily boils down to the fact that we are very busy as individuals with our own personal projects (activism included), and we’ve not been immune to burnout.
We are a collective of disabled, neurodivergent and intersectionally marginalised folks who can only put so many eggs in so many baskets.
So, we have decided to finally make the call and say goodbye to Trans Activism UK.
We had a small amount of Treasury funds left over from previous fundraising, which we have chosen to donate to Rainbow Migration and Trans Safety Network.
We are so incredibly grateful for all of the amazing support we have received over the last few years, which has come in so many different forms. This includes not just people attending protests and supporting us online but also the stewards, first aiders, legal observers, people who let us borrow or even built us equipment, people who donated to BSL interpreters or charities through us, and guests we’ve had on fundraising live streams.
We’re also grateful to all of the people we have liaised with, from registered charities to smaller, fellow grassroots groups and individuals.
We’ve had such a beautiful, diverse and unforgettable range of speakers who united us as a community and helped to provide a feeling of solidarity that was desperately needed in very dark times.
The simple truth of the matter is that while we did engage in a lot of work behind the scenes in terms of far less visible activism, our most notable actions, our protests, are not what the UK needs right now.
We need actual, legitimate change.
This doesn’t mean that you should stop protesting. One of the most amazing things that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of years is the massive rise in local grassroots activism, where people have realised just how easy and accessible it can be to throw together action at the last minute anywhere in the UK.
But, the world needs more practical activism, both in the form of legal work being achieved by existing groups who are far more qualified than we’ll ever be, and action more radical than what we are capable of.
So we’re not just saying goodbye, we’re also saying ‘thank you’ to all of the people fighting for transgender, nonbinary and gender diverse people in the UK, at a time when things are, to be frank, fu***ng terrifying. You give us hope when it feels like there is none.
We’ll end this with a horribly cliche thing that we’ve said at pretty much all of our protests:
Trans people protest simply by waking up and taking a breath. Your existence is a form of activism, and that will never change.
