Launch Statement of the Lavender Guard

The first branch of the Lavender Guard is officially launching in Los Angeles, CA. We are trans Marxist-Leninists fighting for the defense and liberation of the trans and queer communities amid this period of intense reaction. Our immediate tasks are to recruit and train new cadre to be politically educated, to be able to offer firearm safety training, and to provide volunteer security services. During this initial training period our public organizing priorities will be focused on our press work, fundraising, and organizing book clubs. For more detailed information about our platform and future plans please visit our other website: lavenderguard.org.

We began organizing the Lavender Guard for three reasons:

1. Concerns over the escalation of bottom-up pogroms being launched against our community alongside discriminatory legislation being introduced top-down.
2. The clear failures of the liberal, reformist movement for LGBT liberation which has enabled the current wave of reaction and which has been integrated into the imperialist hegemony of the United States.
3. Disappointments with our contemporary vanguard parties who are split into two camps: those hostile or apathetic to trans liberation, and those who are sympathetic but without the will or means to stand up for us in a meaningful way.

The trans community has been pining for an organized, revolutionary effort to fight for our liberation and to protect our people by any means necessary, yet the most conscious and organized strata of the working class continues to flounder about as segments of the masses increasingly demand us to advance. Parties with historical roots have been stuck traumatized by the great counterrevolution of the 70’s and hold onto lines littered with outdated, opportunist, or otherwise revisionistic premises; they have given up on the possibility of building real, defendable people power. Others have allowed bureaucrats and opportunists to entrench themselves into power, limiting party democracy and criticism, protecting sex-pests, and taking a blasé approach to ideological development and consistency—they do not take seriously the science of scientific socialism. Part of our work, then, is to encourage an anti-revisionist revival of Marxism-Leninism—to challenge party lines—without succumbing to sectarianism. That latter point is important: especially in the midst of a rising fascist threat, a united front is of utmost importance.

This very fascist threat takes even greater priority. Because the masses of working trans and queer people have been increasingly beset upon by fascists and an onslaught of discriminatory legislation, there have been increased calls for organized community defense programs, for the armament of our people. Without leadership these calls have mostly been answered in one of two ways: the libertarian’s individualistic slogan of “one good guy with a gun” and by the anarchist’s black bloc style community defense initiatives. While we appreciate the latter group’s efforts and tactics, we perceive certain weaknesses of strategy and form; in contrast to Marxist formations which often lack short-term vision and are overly risk-averse, we see anarchist formations exhibiting the opposite problems. And to the former group, we say: strictly personal self-defense will not protect us!

We must be armed.

We must be trained.

And most importantly, we must be organized.

Organized community defense is the only way to protect ourselves. But this must include more than just guns! In this fight for survival, we must coordinate systems of mutual aid as well: HRT for those without the means to obtain it (whether due to financial or legal reasons), shelter for those with nowhere to go, protection from pimps and johns, etc. As state repression against our people escalates, it is up to us and us alone to keep each other safe. We must never allow ourselves to fall prey to the promises of the bourgeois state that they will protect us, that the Democrats will protect us, that liberalism will save us. It is precisely the representatives of the bourgeois state and their armed enforcers who are separating trans children from their parents, who are criminalizing our healthcare, who brutalize us in the streets, who protect the men who murder us, who launch drones which kill our international brothers and sisters, and so on and so forth… In short, we must never forget that queer struggle is class struggle!

Furthermore, we must be politically educated. Too many times, throughout the history of our movement, our efforts have been destroyed by class collaborationism, by social chauvinism (siding with one’s ruling class in the midst of imperialist war), by other sorts of strategic errors. The current movement, the one lead by liberals, is infested with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology which handicaps our ability to understand our oppression materially, which sets us off on the wrong path. Homonationalism, rainbow capitalism, pink-washed imperialism, identity opportunism—all these sorts of errors were and continue to be rife within the movement. Without a coherent political line that is anti-imperialist, socialist, and internationalist we will only fall prey to the same pitfalls. The revolutionary roots of our movement are inseparable from the fight for communism, and it is these very roots we hope to revive! The fight for trans liberation must be the fight for worker’s liberation—for communism. At the same time, our immediate priority must first be the fight for the self defense of the trans community and, consequently, the fight against fascism! As the great George Jackson once wrote:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.

Blood In My Eye, 1972

We hope to dutifully serve our community!

– Lavender Guard founders, Rachel Nagant and F.B.

Edits:

12/6/2022: Corrected criticism of other community defense formations to avoid conflating individualist and collectivist approaches; grammar and spelling.