Tag Archives: trans

Trans Day of Visibility: Gender Justice League challenging Trump orders, planning Trans Pride Seattle 2025 — UPDATE: Capitol Hill’s Seattle LGBTQ+ Center applauds new ‘Welcoming City’ law

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(Image: City of Seattle)

UPDATE: Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell was on Capitol Hill Monday to sign new “Welcoming City” legislation hoped to strengthen protections “from harmful federal actions, specifically for people seeking reproductive health care and gender-affirming treatment.”

CHS reported on the City Council’s approval of the new ordinance here earlier this month seeking to affirm the city as “a welcoming and supportive place for LGBTQ+ community members” while extending Washington State’s Shield Law’ “into city law,” and protecting “people seeking or providing reproductive or gender-affirming care in Seattle from arrest or prosecution.” The Shield Law prohibits Washington courts from enforcing out-of-state subpoenas seeking information related to protected health care services that are lawful in Washington, according to the State Attorney General’s office. Continue reading →

From its new Capitol Hill home, Three Dollar Bill Cinema readies for the 18th year of TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival with screenings beyond the neighborhood

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A scene from Anhell69

As it prepares for the 18th year of the TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival, Capitol Hill film nonprofit Three Dollar Bill Cinema has also made a change of address.

The organization has a new Capitol Hill home, moving its offices into the newly formed E Pine complex of Gay City. LGBTQ health and community facility Gay City moved into its new Capitol Hill space last summer on E Pine and took on a new mission as “Seattle’s LGBTQ+ Center.”

Next week, Three Dollar will host the 18th TRANSlations to kick off Seattle’s month of peak film festival activity including the return of the SIFF: Seattle International Film Festival starting May 11th.

TRANSlations gets the festival ball rolling starting Thursday, May 4th with screenings and events both online and in-person. For Capitol Hill film lovers, the 2023 festival will be an excuse for a field trip out of the neighborhood. Continue reading →

March for Trans Lives crosses Capitol Hill

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(Image: Chloe Collyer)

(Image: Chloe Collyer)

A Trans Day of Visibility march filled Broadway Friday night as participants traveled from Volunteer Park to Cal Anderson Park in an event organized by a March for Trans Lives group that describes itself as a new “community based organization who believes in non violent acts of protest.”

The event featured speeches and drag performances at Volunteer Park before marching down Broadway around 6 PM. The 2023 TDOV arrived amid efforts to provide more protections across the country. In Olympia, lawmakers have been trying to shape legislation to provide more protections for runaways who may come to Washington to seek gender-affirming care. Another bill from 43rd District Sen. Jamie Pedersen would make it easier and safer for the state’s residents to change their name, a boost for privacy “for people who are trans or queer, those escaping domestic violence, and refugees,”

Friday’s organizers asked attendees to not engage with police and to refrain from unlawful activity. Continue reading →

CHS Pics | Triumphant September return readies Trans Pride Seattle for future Junes

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Volunteer Park and its new amphitheater proved a worthy host for the return of the annual Trans Pride celebration in Seattle. September also held up its end of the bargain.

Friday night on a gorgeous late summer Seattle night, hundreds gathered in the park for a return of the important LGBTQ celebration that organizers decided to move back to September to provide an easier logistical and financial restart after years of pandemic postponements.

CHS reported here on the effort to bring back Trans Pride Seattle and its move to Volunteer Park, a Capitol HIll setting with a long history providing a space and center for queer events and rallies including its part in Seattle’s first Pride celebrations in 1974. Continue reading →

Trans Pride Seattle returns with a September night for togetherness and freedom in Volunteer Park

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A scene from Trans Pride Seattle 2019

By Elizabeth Turnbull

By 2019, Trans Pride Seattle had grown into a surprisingly massive event with huge crowds rallying on Capitol Hill for a celebration of civil rights, love, and good times. 2020 brought the pandemic and a move to online-only events to mark traditions like Pride. 2021 came and went without an in-person Trans Pride celebration.

Now this year, it is time to rally together again but Trans Pride 2022 will be an event in transition, indeed. Seattle’s Gender Justice League has recovered in time to pull together a September version of the annual event that will bring a different take on the celebration. Moved to Volunteer Park, Trans Pride in 2022 will focus on being together, for this year at least, moving on from its past marching through the streets of the Hill. The police are a pain to work with, organizers say. Instead, Friday night, the crowds will come together to hear speakers and entertainers to enjoy a summer evening in Volunteer Park.

The event is designed to create a safe and celebratory space to bolster a sense of togetherness and freedom.

“Trans Pride in itself is just a beacon for the general trans community,“ Ganesha Gold Buffalo, a SafeHouse advocate with the Gender Justice League told CHS. ”And it allows us to gather in a space where we’re in a time of being disconnected from the community on a lot of different levels.” Continue reading →

Why everybody should be part of the 2022 TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival

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A scene from Pronouns in Bio screening at this year’s festival

StormMiguel Florez

The TRANSlations: Seattle Trans Film Festival which starts this week centered around in-person screenings at Capitol Hill’s Northwest Film Forum, organizers have set out to create a festival for everyone and an event to help connect the trans community across the neighborhood, the city, and around the world. Taking place May 5th through 8th, the 2022 Seattle Trans Film Festival offers events and films that showcase transgender films by and for trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people.

TRANSlations lead programmer and filmmaker StormMiguel Florez said the whole point is to explore trans film, of course, but also for people outside the community to come along.

“We don’t have a lot of spaces where we get to celebrate ourselves this way and see ourselves this way and it is a festival that is welcoming to everyone, but it is our space to see and be seen and connect. Just to have that kind of reflection that we so rarely get,” Florez said. Continue reading →

As trial begins in cop killing of George Floyd, Black Trans Lives Matter march crosses Capitol Hill

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With reporting and photos by Renee Raketty

2021 has brought quieter weeks of protest and marches on Capitol Hill but activists were on the street this weekend to remind that Black Trans Lives Matter.

“I don’t care if you’re transgender, female or male. You’re disrespected, period,” one organizer told the Sunday group of marchers. “They see what they see because it is more important to them than who is in front of them — contributing to the patriarchy — than respecting what the human in front of them knows what they are.”

A crowd of about 75 people gathered around the Bobby Morris Playfield to light candles and hear speeches from BIPOC organizers for the Sunday afternoon march and vigil. Some attendees also wrote messages or the names of transgender people whose lives were cut short by transphobic violence. Still others brought flowers to lay at the site in their memory. Continue reading →

Huge crowd rallies for Trans Pride Seattle as fight for rights for all starts Capitol Hill Pride weekend

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With reporting by Emily Piette and Alex Garland

In what appeared to be the largest turnout ever for the event, thousands marched on Capitol Hill and rallied at Cal Anderson Park Friday night to celebrate Trans Pride in Seattle and remember those who came before to fight for human rights for all.

“Every motherfucking thing they took from us, we want it all,” echoed from the stage as poets J Mase III and Lady Dane Figueroa of the Black Trans Prayer Book implored the gathered crowd to reclaim the “whitewashed” legacy of Marsha P. Johnson, and Johnson’s role in the 1969 Stonewall uprising on the 50th anniversary of the watershed event in LGBTQ history and culture.

Continue reading →

Gender Justice League launches emergency fund for name, gender marker changes

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A marcher at 2016 Trans* Pride (Image: CHS)

A marcher at 2016 Trans* Pride (Image: CHS)

With a Donald Trump presidency looming, the Gender Justice League is raising money for an emergency fund to help transgender people change their legal documents to correspond with their identities.

Danni Askini, executive director of the group, launched an online fundraising campaign for clinics to help people change their identification documents and to provide direct funds to trans people who can’t afford to make the legal changes.

“We need to prepare for the potential State-sanctioned discrimination that is to come,”Askini writes. “Having legal identification documents that correctly correspond to our identities is the first step in helping us navigate a Trump regime as smoothly as possible.” Continue reading →

Trans* Pride 2016 dances through the rain on Capitol Hill

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TransPride2016- - 3

An incredible downpour didn’t stop Trans* Pride — but it definitely made more than a few people including Gender Justice League organizer Danni Askini consider calling it a night to head somewhere warm and dry. Instead, they danced:

Again in 2016, a few thousand members of the LGBTQ communities and their allies joined the Trans* Pride March, ending at Cal Anderson Park. This year, the event came under the shadow of violence both far — and right here on Capitol Hill. As volunteers scrambled to set up the Trans* Pride rally grounds in Cal Anderson, Askini answered questions and stood by beating victim Michael Volz who described a horrible assault Wednesday night by an anti-trans attacker. “Part of our efforts to do things like Trans Pride Seattle is to create community and solidarity so that people do not feel isolated,” Askini said at the media conference.

During the rally, District 3 representative Kshama Sawant recalled the start of Trans* Pride in Seattle. “I remember only 2013 I was a candidate for City Council running as a socialist. Everybody thought that was crazy,” Sawant said. “People also thought it was crazy that was there was the first year we had our first Trans* Pride march and rally. And there was not a single politician here.”

“This year we forced the Seattle City Council — the entire Council — to declare today officially as Trans* Pride Day.”

Friday night, marchers came to support each other, to be visible, and because some say Sunday’s official Seattle Pride parade is overcrowded, commercial, and exploitative. Continue reading →