The Trans Literature Preservation Project: A Practical Guide to Resisting Censorship
THIS IS A CALL TO ACTION. Censorship affects all of us, and if Project 2025 gets its way, the entire trans publishing industry is at a significant risk of criminalization. In this article, I lay out the problem and the stakes, and suggest a broad action plan with dozens of potential response ✊
What I cover:
- Citations from P25
- Historical overview of American obscenity law as pertains to trans people
- Assessment of trans censorship in Nazi Germany
- Three core philosophies for resisting fascist censorship
- An action plan broken down by interest group (readers, authors, etc.)
I took absolutely no pleasure writing this article, but I have a lot of research around obscenity law and historical precedents for this that I know nobody else has access to, and getting the information out there is crucial right now 😔
The core thesis of this article - one that echoes much of the other advice that I’ve seen floating around leftist spheres over the past week - is that our best defense against this type of censorship is mass grassroots action. If every person who reads this picked five books they want to preserve and five people they want to share this with, it would have a much broader impact than if a singular group of readers attempts to document and archive the entire corpus.
A centralized preservation effort can do immense work, of course, but it won’t be accessible to the trans people who need to read trans books and see trans joy to survive whatever comes next.
The more copies there are the more likely it will survive. Anyone who has extra space on their hard drive should consider picking a few things and storing copies