Trans Organising: The Assembly Model

I recently released a video on my YouTube channel about trans people in the UK and how I believe we can best organise in order to help us survive anti-trans fascism. In it I discuss harm reduction and trans assemblies as the two best ways in my opinion that we can organise, and walk the audience through a template for how to structure an assembly meeting. In the interests of spreading this advice as widely as possible I have reproduced it here for those who find written pieces preferable to video. I have also written various other pieces about necessary steps in trans organising on this substack for those interested in taking on the challenge of community organising themselves.

I am delighted to say that since releasing the video I have heard from multiple trans women I know in other countries that they are taking this structure and organising local trans assemblies. It feels worthwhile to say here that all of them identify the same first hurdles: finding a venue, having money for things (including a venue), and the number of high-strung conflicts in their local community. This makes sense and aligns with a lot of common problems people are starting to acknowledge in trans communities. I have added in this piece a few suggestions for likely venues to hold this kind of event, but more broadly I think it is worth acknowledging there are harder and easier parts of this process. If you want to do this, it will be hard. A lot of it will be boring, a lot of it will be stressful, there will be some crashouts, but in the end if we can make it happen it will be worth it. Godspeed girlies.

Our community is facing a wide array of harms which will certainly grow worse in unpredictable ways in the short term future. In order to reduce the effects of these harms I believe that the best strategy is for local communities of trans people and allies to self organise structures that act as community resources. Challenging the wider narratives around trans people may eventually make change at the legal or governmental level but in the meantime trans people are going to die unless the community can take care of them instead. For example: there is likely going to be a growing number of trans prisoners, and prisoner support should grow in kind; HRT is already becoming harder to access for many and this is likely to get worse, so DIY HRT groups and community run blood testing facilities must materialise; economic instability and employment discrimination will lead to an increase in the number of trans sex workers, so sex worker solidarity networks providing safety resources, support and signposting must grow also. As a more involved structure than mass demonstrations I also believe that assemblies will work better at channeling large numbers of people into organised structures.

As a very basic definition, an assembly is a facilitated, structured conversation where a group is able to come together to identify their needs and problems and then begin to enact solutions. Assemblies are a form of organising used everywhere from direct action groups to actual parliaments and the UN. The idea of holding trans assemblies is to get the community to gain a more developed and cohesive class consciousness. We are all aware things are shit, we are all forced to be more informed than most cis people on politics, but this is usually manifests in helpless pessimism, whereas discussing the problems (and actual solutions) with other trans people helps us see and understand trans people as a class.

Materially, the situation is that there are many times more people who view themselves as allies than there are trans people, since we are such a small section of the population. Within this group of self-identified allies there is a much smaller set who are absolutely willing ready and able to do anything that the trans community tells them would be helpful. Though this group is smaller than the overall trans-positive population they are still a larger group than trans people ourselves. This is a resource that should be taken seriously in any broad trans political organising strategy. Holding community assemblies makes us able to utilise this resource where we currently cannot because our allies don’t know at present what would be useful for them to do, and part of the reason for this is that we haven’t talked amongst ourselves with enough intent and clarity to be able to identify what they could do for us.

With all that said, how do we actually go about holding trans assemblies?

Meet regularly, I’d say every two weeks, with a venue open for a couple of hours before the start of the assembly for a volunteer group to cook food for everyone. With the venue open, people can come in and socialise, get ready for the meeting, help with the food if they want, or use the space for anything else (perhaps they have legal or medical admin they’ve been putting off). Then, when the assembly begins, start with a rundown of the agenda by the facilitators (the agenda should have been available to everyone before the meeting and the facilitators should have volunteered at the end of the last assembly).

After this, floor speeches. Allocate a number of slots for fixed length speeches for any attendees to give their perspectives on whatever they’d like. If they want to use this time to talk about community mess, that’s just fine, if they want to use their time to talk about the assembly itself, great, if they wanna just let their feelings out, that’s vital, if they wanna promote their surgery fundraiser, literally why not. After this move into the agenda items. Either discuss by taking hands in the room, or for some more involved discussions, break out into smaller groups and have a chosen representative from each group feed the answers of the group back to the facilitators.

When you have issues and goals identified, create working groups to achieve goals - you want to phone blockade the office of a transphobic politician so you’re creating a working group to plan it while taking hands in the room for potential participants; you want to start a regular letter writing program to trans prisoners so you create a working group who will find a venue and regular time to convene to write together; you want to make a community HRT production process, start a working group with volunteers to make it based on the estimated size of the need for supply, discuss in the assembly what people’s concerns are and how best to satisfy them; you have a lot of trans people with precarious housing, so you have a housing working group who are working closely with renters unions while putting together queer houseshares who need a flatmate with trannies about to be evicted. All these working group examples are based on organising I have seen, to be clear, but through an assembly they could be plugged into each other more effectively and benefit from each other’s and the community’s resources better. Also like, I think that existing community structures, at least ones I’ve seen, lack a sense of building towards something or capacity to actually make change for our group that a public assembly could achieve.

Consider having a fund for working groups that anyone can donate into - there are a lot of tech trannies and cis allies with comfy salaries who would love to contribute money rather than time. After the main discussion consider having something like a “member solidarity” section like renters union branches will do where people with specific issues bring them to the group and the room splits into volunteer bunches to help those people. After this, do your AOBs (any other business), get people to volunteer for next time to facilitate, take hands, take minutes & keep time, and make sure everyone knows who to speak to concerning the operations of each working group.

The point in getting people to volunteer to facilitate is to get the assembly to be self-sustaining. The organisers who initially set up an assembly like this should be able to step back and become non-essential in order for it to work as well as possible. Community structures shouldn’t depend on one person being present and working on them all the time.

This local assembly could have representatives feed back to a city or regional assembly, ideally with representatives changing each time - this is sometimes called using “spokes” - but the regional or city assembly should still be open to everyone. The same on a level above to a national assembly. A regional assembly can make projects like housing bigger, or put more funds towards HRT production that enables higher level safety & sterilisation than any small group could afford for their startup costs. It could also coordinate large marches or actions very effectively. A national assembly could mobilise enormous mass demonstrations, deliver political demands to the government and work in concert with trade unions to make sure that trans issues are taken seriously by organised labour.

The organised structure that makes the assemblies happen can be very small and isn’t the same as the assembly itself. It isn’t even the same as the facilitators, except maybe in the first meeting of each assembly. People aren’t joining an org by coming to any assembly, and the volunteer facilitators come from the community by design. This is similar to how some orgs will have paid staff organisers who aren’t the same as their chair, treasurer, secretary, comms officer and so on. The people who get together to organise the assembly are in an obvious position where they could hold power over the community, so getting the assembly out of their hands and into the hands of the community asap is an important part of this. It’s also worth saying that no trans person should be excluded from these - community conflicts aren’t the job of the assembly to resolve and the situation is too critical to be locking people out of the room. There is an unending wellspring of beefs in the trans community, and if people are excluded by these conflicts your assembly will either not happen or it will just represent one social clique. For these reasons I suggest that the people getting together to organise an assembly make constitutional and protocol documents right away to figure out how they get from organising the logistics of the first assembly to sitting back and letting it carry itself on its own momentum.

This is an important point, because if the point here is about trans community or class consciousness, it is important for people not to feel like they’re joining someone’s club or social clique, and for access to be as broad as possible for trans people. While it will be easier for people who are well known and well liked in the local community to get an assembly going, it shouldn’t sink or swim dependent on the reputations and social position of some one or some few people. If we want to avoid that it will work best for the committed organisers to facilitate the first meeting or perhaps the first few, but then having demonstrated the roles to everyone present get volunteers to take them on for next time. This also has the advantage of putting people into organising roles right away and giving them practical experience.

It is also important that local communities are organised by people actually in them. Here I am turning directly to the London left and in particular the Pelican House crowd: we all understand the problem of London orgs imposing themselves in other cities that are fundamentally not the same as London (as nowhere else in the UK is). For people outside the UK who are hoping to follow my advice here, I don’t think the London / Rest of the UK divide is how things are in every other country but I also know it isn’t unique. In many countries there are richer, more progressive urban centres where a lot of the queer and leftist population accumulates, and it’s not good when orgs that have achieved some success decide (with good intentions) to try and create a replica org under their control in a city where things are just not the same. To put it differently, Manchester trans people need to hold Manchester trans assemblies (I believe there have been one or two already) and Glasgow trans people need to hold Glasgow trans assemblies, and the same for Brighton and the same for Nottingham and every other place where there is a significant trans population and community. When I talk about local assemblies coming together into regional assemblies and regional into national, I don’t think this all will work well if it is a London org trying to create offshoots into other communities. However I have seen very successful examples where organisations don’t found chapters in communities that they aren’t in, but experienced organisers within those groups make themselves available for people in other communities who are founding chapters and support them in the setup process (I am doing this myself for my comrades abroad who are starting assemblies).