No Pride Without Trans Pride

To launch the Trans Pride UK, CALLING have created a powerful campaign: “No Pride Without Trans Pride”. The billboard campaign will run across London in a media partnership donated by JACK (part of BUILDHOLLYWOOD, the street advertising specialists).

The “No Pride Without Trans Pride” campaign highlights the dangers that debating the rights of marginalised communities poses to all citizens. The campaign reframes the trans rights issue as everybody’s issue. When you debate or diminish the human rights of one community enshrined in law, it sets an unfortunate precedent.

Trans Pride UK launched this year. A formed collective of over 14 Trans Pride organisations from across the UK and Ireland, together committed to learning lessons from the queer past, planning ahead and avoiding the neo-liberal corporisation’s of Pride, and the over external consumption of Trans culture. The organisation fosters grassroot organising skills, shares best practice, values, and stories, ensuring that heritage is prioritised over hedonism.

The campaign also celebrates the historic role trans people played in establishing Pride as a protest, despite the movement moving away from its original roots in recent years.

Beautiful, hand-made protest posters print the basic rights called for by the trans community onto the legislative documentation that threatens the freedom of gender-nonconforming people. Reams of public documentation – from the Gender Recognition Act to the diminished rights of trans people in civil partnerships – provide the raw materials for the billboards.

Launching on 1st July for the Pride season, “No Pride Without Trans Pride” also challenges the direction and intentions of today’s mainstream Pride celebrations. Whilst visibly celebrating LGBTIQA+ culture is vital, the Pride movement’s heritage was one steeped in the fight for human rights. Acknowledging that the first ever Pride protest was led by Black trans women in the US in 1969, “No Pride Without Trans Pride” calls for us to return to the roots of the Pride march, as the struggle for trans rights continues.