Visibility Shifts Narratives: Transgender Day of Visibility 2025
Today, March 31, we observe Transgender Day of Visibility, a day dedicated to celebrating the creativity, resilience, and contributions of transgender and gender diverse people around the world.
We recently spoke with two dynamic trans activists — Diana Avdić, Executive Coordinator of kolekTIRV, Croatia’s leading transgender rights organization, and Daniyar Orsekov, TGEU’s Program Officer for Eastern Europe and Central Asia — for their perspectives at this critical moment in the movement for trans justice, rights, and liberation.
Both Diana and Daniyar were kind enough to share their work, to tell us about the progress they’ve seen, how “visibility shifts narratives” (as Diana reflected), how “transgender people will never stop” finding each other (in Daniyar’s words), building communities, and filling in the resources not provided by the state or by society at large.
Now, there is no way around the challenges of this moment, not when the Trump Administration is accelerating the global trend towards what writer M. Gessen has referred to as the “denationalization” of transgender people — that is, the process through which a community is excluded from a society that had previously, to at least some degree, guaranteed their legal rights. Put more simply, this is the process through which a vulnerable group loses the very right to have rights.
From its Day One Executive Order on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the Trump Administration has sought to erase transgender and gender diverse people from legal existence in the United States. This spans the junk science of defining sex based on a rudimentary understanding of chromosomes, to seeking to kick thousands of transgender people out of the armed forces, attempting to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors, trying to abolish trans-inclusive policies for youth and college sports, eliminating the X marker on U.S. passports, and literally erasing transgender people from U.S. government websites — even from the National Park Service’s page commemorating Stonewall rebellion, the uprising led by trans people of color that ushered in the modern era of LGBTQI+ politics.
There is zero question that authoritarian leaders and the anti-gender movement worldwide have been profoundly emboldened by Trump’s victory and the subsequent slew of Executive Orders. Turkey is proposing a series of legislative changes to limit access to legal gender recognition and gender-affirming surgery. In Chile, the anti-gender movement is fighting to repeal the country’s landmark 2019 gender identity law. In Colombia, anti-gender activists are working hard to block proposed government measures to support gender-affirming health care. In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, there are proposed measures to crudely define sex based on anatomy to parallel the U.S. Day One Executive Order and to introduce “foreign agents” and “anti-propaganda” laws based on those already implemented in Russia, Hungary, and Georgia. Moreover, Kazakhstani politicians are increasingly framing local queer, trans, and feminist activism as foreign interference funded by USAID under the Biden Administration.
The Trump Administration’s halt to almost all U.S. foreign aid and its moves to abolish USAID altogether have had immediate, devastating impacts on the LGBTQI+ movement worldwide. Daniyar noted that Transgender Europe had lost funding for two of its projects in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region, while Diana reported that kolekTIRV had lost the resources behind its two groundbreaking projects — one on public opinion, the other on trans health care.
That all said, the work that Diana, Daniyar, and their partners in the Balkans and across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia offer reasons for hope amidst the difficult landscape of the current moment.
Diana shared with us how kolekTIRV completed a nationwide public research campaign on attitudes towards transgender people in Croatia. The findings offered reason for optimism, including that conservative Croatians would still vote for a right-leaning political party even if it supported pro-trans policies — thus removing the fear-of-voter-backlash excuse that some politicians use at times to justify anti-trans positions. KolekTIRV also organized Croatia’s first National Symposium on Healthcare for Transgender and Gender Diverse Persons, bringing together more than 100 health experts from across the country plus a couple dozen international experts. Despite the immediate loss of funding, Diana remains very optimistic about building on the momentum from these two campaigns.
The anti-gender movement, active in Croatia since the 2013 since the right-wing NGO “In the Name of the Family” successfully led a campaign to write marriage discrimination into the country’s constitution, has been even more active over the last three or four years. That movement has recently been fighting to rescind the Ministry of Health’s guidelines for trans-affirming healthcare — though the Croatian Constitutional Court has rejected such calls, if only on narrow technical grounds so far. Diana explained how, relative to its Balkan neighbors, Croatia represents a high-value target for the anti-gender movement. This is because there is legal gender recognition available in Croatia; Zagreb has a growing visible transgender and gender diverse community; the capital’s local government is supporting LGBTQI+-affirming inclusivity programs for health care and education; and transgender NGOs are working with schools and hospitals to improve their services for all in Croatia, regardless of gender identity or expression.
Despite the growth of the anti-gender movement, Diana noted the accompanying surge in trans allies coming forward — including the 100+ health care experts attending last year’s National Symposium, as well as legal experts stepping forward as well. Daniyar similarly recognized the growing number of trans-affirming health care experts in Central Asia, even as anti-gender organizations such as the Kazakh Union of Parents (loosely affiliated with the Madrid-based extreme right anti-trans, anti-abortion group CitizenGo) pushes for anti-LGBTQI+ legislation.
Daniyar also shared how he has worked with parents groups in Kyrgyzstan and Moldova that support their queer and trans family members, sharing the account of Kyrgyzstani writer and dissident Oljobai Sharkir, who has published a memoir, Adam+ (that is, Person+) chronicling his journey supporting his transgender son’s transition and coming out.
Sometimes, the reasons for hope and the evidence of resilience come in smaller, less formal ways. That includes the growing number of volunteers stepping forward to help kolekTIRV hold community events, run support groups, and create social media. It includes the transwoman in Eurasia (specific location withheld for her safety and that of those she helps) who uses her training in chemistry to make hormone therapy when the government refuses to make such treatments available. And it includes the single donor covering all the costs of the hormone therapies provided by one clinic that, despite three years of the Russian invasion, continues to support transgender Ukrainians in their transitions.
Visibility can be dangerous, no question; Diana shared how she counsels transgender and gender diverse people considering coming out to put their safety first and build their trusted networks. But Diana is clearly correct when she posits that “visibility really shifts narratives.” The escalation of anti-transgender politics reflects how far transgender communities have come in recent decades, and while the pushback at the moment is both cruel and lethal, visibility remains essential for winning the narrative war essential to win transgender rights, justice, and liberation.