About

As a trans person, part of my survival has been reliant on my willingness to educate, to empower, and to care for allies. The context of our time and place means I no longer have to strip and expose myself to build allies because we now have access to information and experiences that were once impossible to know outside of our own. And I began to see how white folk and non-Black people of color were still asking and expecting this of Black people. I had also done it. Over time it became clear that we—those of us with privilege—were stuck in Awareness: stuck in this idea that we need personal stories and connections to change or to care about the rights and treatments of others. But I don’t need to be your friend to be your ally, to be in Transformative Solidarity with you. I began to see moments when my participants, hearing the stories of others, shut down, never to begin again. We had no tools to help us move through the moments we were called out, so we banned calling out. We had no tools for the moments we felt triggered, so we made our triggers the responsibility of others. We had no tools to face the honesty of who we were, so we set regulations on how others could talk to us. I watched and continue to see organizations and activist groups benefit from the very thing they are trying to change, sometimes aware and sometimes not.

I didn’t want to keep repeating the same processes, the same practices, as though they would create the systemic shift we keep saying we want. This desire and the process of interrogating my own becoming led to the creation and development of a framework, The Transformative Solidarity Model, which is a guide for becoming. This model asks the question, how do you want to show up? It is about learning how to move through all the emotions and barriers that come from the process of Transformation.

The Transformative Solidarity Model and the Five Guiding Principles facilitates accountability internally and externally.

Not just within activism but within our relationships as well.