This article reflects on the positioning of trans identities and intimacy in the January 20, 2025, executive order on "defending women" and argues that, despite the order's positioning, intimacy, and especially trans intimacy, is one of the many necessary resistance strategies that are crucial for this moment. To examine how intimacy is and has always been a resistance strategy, especially for trans folx in the Deep South, the authors use a blend of scholarship as well as their experience as two trans people living in Alabama, who have fallen in love against the backdrop of this regime's rise to power.
Fugitive Freedom Dreaming (2024) is a cinematic poem filmed at Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose in St. Augustine Florida between 2022 and 2023.1 Also known as Fort Mose, this territory was established in 1738 during the Spanish occupation. Guiding the reader through the film that structures the work offers a way to read the film as a means of claiming queerness as an integral component of Black liberation. The work is a counter narrative to the dominant perceptions of the Spanish Florida colonial period for which evidence of rebellion is more often than not erased, overlooked, minimized, and/or for all intents and purposes, made absent from Floridian collective memory. In this piece, I contextualize the historical context of the film, the visual and aural strategies employed in filmmaking, and the means by which the piece is a poetic intervention for celebrating the underrecognized histories of maroon cultures in the United States. From this praxis of spiritual and intellectual curiosity, I assert a queer Black aesthetic that opens up space for me as a Black artist living, surviving, and thriving in the midst of the contemporary reality of the settler colonial state of what is now called the United States of America.
Trump's second administration highlights the limitations of existing metronormative framings of queer people's safety and well-being; are LGBTQ2S+ people safe anywhere in the United States under Trump's second term, be it urban, rural, or somewhere in-between? What lessons can we learn from queer communities in rural environments who have been at the front lines of resisting anti-LGBTQ2S+ policy? This article explores the perspectives of rural LGBTQ2S+ people during Trump's first ninety days, and explores the implications of the anti-LGBTQ2S+ policy that has been sweeping conservative states well before Trump's second rise to power.
In this article, I will explain how the erasure of digital resources is a continued white supremacist attempt to not only strengthen the United States's colonial power but also erase people with intersex variations, trans, nonbinary, and gender-diverse groups, and migrant communities of color. Through my reflexive account, I will elaborate on the real-life effects of these acts and how I proceed with the chaos and targets that surround me and other intersecting communities. Last, I urge the public naming of these oppressive acts to resist these attacks of necropolitical violence.
In an era of intensifying anti-trans rhetoric and policy, visibility has become a fraught and contested terrain. This research centers the experiences of parents of transgender youth as they navigate the emotional, political, and ethical complexities of raising children in a hostile sociopolitical climate. Drawing on a framework of queer worldmaking, we explore how families engage in acts of resistance through strategic boundary-setting, collective care, and intentional silences. Visibility, often heralded as liberatory, can instead expose families- especially those who are Black, Brown, Indigenous, or undocumented-to heightened surveillance and risk. Through academic-activist collaboration, we argue that research can be a form of resistance, co-creating space for reflection, storytelling, and survival. Parents of trans youth are not merely witnesses to cultural conflict-they are agents of change, crafting alternative infrastructures of care and advocacy. Strategic invisibility emerges not as retreat, but as a radical tactic for protecting trans joy, autonomy, and futures.
