Trans Day of Vengeance cancelled amid ‘credible threat to life and safety’
Trans Day of Vengeance has been cancelled over safety fears. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP)
The trans activist group organising ‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ cancelled the event following a “credible threat to life and safety”.
The demonstration was organised by the Trans Radical Activist Network (TRAN) and was slated to take place on Saturday (1 April) at 11am in Washington DC, outside the Supreme Court building.
Following the tragic Nashville school shooting on 27 March, where three staff and three children were killed by Audrey Hale, who uses he/him pronouns, the event faced a wave of threats on social media.
Organisers for the protest said TRAN has received a “flood of raw hatred directed toward the trans community after the Tennessee shooting” and the group does not have the resources to fully protect attendees.
“Individuals who had nothing to do with that heinous act have been subjected to highly serious threats and blamed only because of their gender identity,” organisers said in a statement on TRAN’s website.
“This is one of the steps in genocide, and we will continue our efforts to protect trans lives.
“While we wholeheartedly believe in the mission and message we put forth for Trans Day of Vengeance, we must prioritise the safety of our community and the people that make it up.”
Speaking with Buzzfeed News, Bo Belotti – one of TRAN’s organisers – said Trans Day of Vengeance was “action-oriented”.
“The idea is that we want more than visibility, we want more than a hypothetical spot in the room,” Belotti said. “We want the seat at the table. We don’t want to just see trans folks represented in media as tokens.
“We want trans people in their everyday lives to be able to live lives free of transphobia.”
In recent days, Twitter has taken steps to remove around 5,000 posts sharing details about Trans Day of Vengeance on the platform.
The social media site removed tweets referencing the event regardless of the context in which they were posted, meaning posts both promoting and criticising the event were deleted.
“We do not support tweets that incite violence irrespective of who posts them. ‘Vengeance’ does not imply peaceful protest. Organising or support for peaceful protests is ok,” Twitter’s trust and safety lead Ella Irwin said in a tweet.
Both anti-trans conservatives and trans rights activists saw this as Twitter silencing them, but for differing reasons.
Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene had her congressional account suspended after tweeting a graphic about the event.
“My Congressional account was suspended for seven days for exposing Antifa, who are organising a call for violence called ‘Trans Day of Vengeance.’ The day after the mass murder of children by a trans shooter,” she tweeted in response to the strike.
She went on to tweet that the “planned event is being whitewashed by global brands and the left” whilst “there’s still no acknowledgement of the innocent Christians that were slaughtered in Tennessee by a trans mass shooter”.
On the other hand, Evan Greer, the director of Fight for the Future, described Twitter’s actions as an example of “double standards in content moderation”.
CBS News quoted them as saying: “They are slow to moderate content targeting trans people, but quick to silence us when we speak out or push back.
“‘Trans Day of Vengeance’ is not a specific day or a call for violence.
“It’s a meme that’s been around for years, a way of expressing anger and frustration about oppression and violence the trans community faces daily.
“Context is everything in content moderation, which is why content policies should be based in human rights and applied evenly, not changed rapidly based on public pressure or news cycles.”
