QUEER POWER, TRANS POWER: A Manifesto by Modern IDENTITY Inc.

queer power trans power manifesto 2020-2025

PHOTOGRAPHS BY STAS GINZBURG MANIFESTO BY QWEEN JEAN

AFTERWORD BY ROHAN ZHOU-LEE FOR DEANDRE MATTHEWS

Xander, March

for Jayland Walker, Brooklyn Bridge, July 2022

Paris

L’hommie, Abolition Park (City Hall), NYC, July 2020

Sab, Drag March, Tompkins Square Park, NYC, June 2023

Giovanna, Tommy Playboy Memorial Service, Angel Orensanz Foundation, NYC, May 2023

Kalani, Dyke March, Washington Square Park, NYC, June 2022

Greg Von Laveau, The Stonewall Protests, Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem, May 2021

Aletheia & Jay, Slut Walk, Jackson Heights, Queens, September 2022

Pink durag, Queens Pride, Jackson Heights, Queens, June 2023

My pride flag, LA Pride, Los Angeles, June

Stonewall Protests, Christopher Street, NYC, May 2021

Crown & cigarette, Queens Pride, Jackson Heights, Queens, June 2023

Caresha & Aiyr, Da Bronx Pride Festival, South Bronx, June 2023

Eliya, Memorial for Antonio Armstrong, Harlem, NYC, December 2021

Laday E. Tucker, NYC Pride, Washington Square Park, NYC, June 2021

manifesto:

qweenjean

THE FUTURE LOOKS LIKE YOU AND ME. BLACK. TRANS. BEAUTIFUL. UNAPOLOGETIC.

Our stories began long before we were created, rooted in the resistance of those who came before us. Our family is bound together by the knowledge and emotional truth that we are born and created as human. Therefore, we demand dignity, compassion, and liberation for our siblings, elders, and future generations. We are a community of gender-expansive warriors, leaders, and artists—the shepherds of liberation, who teach, love, and serve through fellowship.

For too long, the wickedness of homophobia, transphobia, and racism has sought to destroy us. It aims to barricade us from love, to isolate us, and to starve us of our humanity. But we resist! We combat these forces with joy, radical expression of our bodies, our voices, and our solidarity. We break the molds of binary marginalization and emerge as miraculous clusters of treasure, a wondrous cornucopia built on the dreams of those who came before us.

We are conditioned to shrink our minds, our voices, our hearts, and our rage in order to survive and to make advances within a blatantly racist and fascist system.

TODAY, WE DECLARE: NO MORE! WE REFUSE TO WAIT FOR LIBERATION TO BE GRANTED. WE CLAIM IT. WE CREATE IT. WE DEMAND FREEDOM, AND WE DEMAND IT NOW!

In the summer of 2020, the entire world watched as George Floyd’s life was stolen, pinned beneath the barbaric system and the corrupt knee of racist cops. The revolution for Black liberation had revived all over this country and reached every corner of the globe. It reverberated with an undeniable fury and unified roar. Black people’s pain shattered the thermostat. There was no excusing or justifying this brutal lynching. Ahmaud Arbery. Breonna Taylor. Nina Pop. Tony McDade, murdered in Tallahassee just two days after Floyd. We assembled in the streets to mourn the weekly deaths of precious Black and Brown lives that were violently taken that entire year. The community was able to grieve and exercise our right to disrupt all status quo systems that denied their complicity, perpetuating lies and cover-ups by law enforcement. Our trans siblings were targeted, beaten, dismembered, and shot. We were done dying!

The fight for Black Trans Liberation has transformed how we think, respond, and engage with the world. Together, we dismantle the oppressive systems that attempt to dehumanize us, delegitimize us, and deny us our voices. Our ancestors fought with audacity. They cared for our people and nurtured their dreams. We bear the fruit of their labor, and we now take the mantle. We honor and celebrate our fearless leaders, advocates, artists, doers, visionaries, sex workers, and revolutionaries such as Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, Audre Lorde, Octavia Spencer, June Jordan, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Pauli Murray, and Cecilia Gentili. Both my mothers: Kim Watson and Ceyenne Doroshow. They all worked tirelessly to agitate, educate, and organize. We stand on their shoulders. We carry their fight forward.

Historically, trans siblings and gender-nonconforming deities have been subjected to violence and erasure. We bear witness to their suffering and honor their power. Their fight is our fight, and our fight is global. A free Palestine. A free Congo. A free Sudan. A free Haiti.

WE REJECT THE FALSE BORDERS THAT DIVIDE US. WE ARE STRONGER TOGETHER, ACROSS EVERY LAND. EVERY OCEAN. EVERY RIVER.

America is regressing, but we are not afraid. In this country, transphobia has become a cornerstone of political campaigns. Hatred has been refueled and weaponized to fracture the fidelity of democracy itself. Gun violence, government corruption, job discrimination, climate collapse, and relentless attacks on our siblings’ rights have pushed us to the brink. The leaders of these systems have validated transphobia, racism, and fascism, turning them into tools of power. These misleaders are unable to coexist with all of humanity unless they maintain dominion, actively suffocating the lifelines and resources essential for collective wellness.

The desire to control our bodies and our strength reveals the insecurities of those who cling to these archaic structures. We reject their status quo, genocidal systems, and colonial legacies—deeply embedded thorns at our sides and in our minds. As trans people, we know what it means to audition for empathy, to appeal to the respectability of a society that fails us, only to be met with silence. But we do not need permission to exist. We simply exist! Our worthiness is not measured. It is inherent. It is sacred! It must be honored and protected by any means necessary. Our families are rebuilding, reimagining, and reinventing ways to cope, heal, and prosper. We will emerge from an era of uncertainty with a ferocious direction for transformation. Freedom is destined for us all!

TODAY WE RISE. WE RISE TO CONFRONT A NATION CRUMBLING UNDER ITS OWN FAILURES. WE RISE TO DEMAND A BETTER WORLD.

We demand an end to trans violence! We will no longer be discarded, brutalized, or silenced. We demand protections that are permanent, not convenient! Conditional freedoms are traps, and we reject them. We demand a future of abundance for all! Affordable housing, sustainable food, and opportunities that honor the full spectrum of our humanity. We demand the obliteration of fear! Fear is a poison that strangles our hope and drives the systems of oppression. We reject it.

Our community is a testament that joy supersedes all hatred and forms of bigotry. We assemble in the streets, celebrating the right to live unapologetically. We build sanctuaries where our siblings find solace, peace, and the truth of their existence. We value the voices of queer, Asian, Palestinian, disabled, Indigenous, sex workers, immigrants, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people who are uniting in building a better, inclusive, safe, expansive, regenerative, and loving world. Mother Cecilia Gentili once wrote: “It is better to live a short life of authenticity than a long life filled with lies and sorrow.”

WE ARE THE FUTURE. THE LEADERS. THE ARTISTS. THE WARRIORS. THE SHEPHERDS OF LIBERATION. TODAY WE DECLARE TO THE WORLD: WE ARE COMING FOR OUR FREEDOM. WE ARE COMING FOR YOUR SYSTEMS. WE ARE COMING WITH JOY, RAGE, AND LOVE. QUEER LIBERATION IS LIBERATION

Rinor, Jason & Yves, Justice for Jordan Neely, Midtown, NYC, May 2023

Isaac & Neptunite, The Stonewall Protests, Christopher Street, NYC, October 2020

Alana Jessica, The Stonewall Protests, Christopher Street, NYC, June 2021

Plutoe, Shea & Will, Black Transwomen Cookout, Herbert Von King Park, Brooklyn, August 2022

Pernell, Da Bronx Pride Festival, South Bronx, June 2023

Ramie & Osh, The Stonewall Protests, Christopher Street, NYC, October 2020

Josuawrth, Harlem Pride, West Harlem, NYC, June 2023

Crackhead Barney, Candlelight Vigil for Atlanta Victims, Washington Square Park, NYC,

SINCE TIME IMMEMORIAL ROHAN ZHOU-LEE

Golden kulintang gongs softly tinkle under the warm summer sun. I step around a small crowd, smelling jerk chicken, pancit, and jollof rice. The Pride flag I wear, with brown and black stripes, swirls as a cape beneath my bright red terno, or butterfly sleeves, meant for women to wear. I wear these alongside a dark purple bulldog harness, which is considered to be masculine. White feathery wings float in my periphery. The weight of months of little sleep, endless fundraising during a global economic crisis, worry over safety in a pandemic, and increased policing, seem to shimmer out of existence. Somehow, self-love along with love of the ancestors, delivered this entire procession peacefully, in harmony, to a park filled with food.

My name is Rohan and I am an Asian American, as much as I am a Black American. This was the end of the very first Blasian Pride, created a year after the police murder of George Floyd and the latest major Black Lives Matter uprising. Its vision is to uplift Black, Asian, and Blasian LGBTQIA2S+ community in the midst of homophobia and transphobia. It has gained greater weight for me as we see the rise in anti-LGBT legislation across the country. Yet, anti-trans and anti-queer hate is nothing new, but rather a practice instituted by colonization.

What we understand as queerness was valued in African, Asian, Pasifika, and Turtle Island cultures well before Europe realized the Earth was round. In Pasifika, which is not to be considered Asian American, a rich and wide variety of gender identities existed well before colonization and the imperial forces of the United States. It can be argued that claiming any of these identities is a powerful act of resistance. The last king of Uganda, Mwanga II, was what we know today as bisexual. During the Han Dynasty of China, Emperor Ai cut off his sleeve when he had risen from sleep so as not to disturb his male lover who was resting on his garb. This is now considered to be one of the greatest stories of queer romance in China. The hijra of South Asia as a gender survived the English invasion and their anti-same-sex relation laws. Evidence of same-sex relations can be found among the Harari of Sub Saharan Africa, even Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum from the Fifth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt.

The Blasian March is a process to decolonize for a better future. In order to do that, we must give ourselves permission to return to the ancient ways. These histories, alongside the 20th century resistance, especially during the Civil Rights Era, are critical to my work at the intersections of Blackness, Asianness, and Queerness.

BLACK POWER. ASIAN POWER. BLASIAN POWER.

In the past five years of organizing the Blasian March, I found myself excluded from both Black and Asian spaces. One BLM organizer had messaged me challenging one of our protest chants Asian Power!. Another suggested that I only went to Asian rallies. Others distanced themselves from me, ranging from backing out as speakers at the Blasian March to even going so far as calling me a media sellout. I understood that I only mattered as a Black person if I silenced my Asianness and reduced myself to a mere numerical statistic at their protests. I have also been ejected from Asian organizing spaces for being Black. This

pseudo political exile is deeply rooted in the white mythology that racial harmony cannot exist between Black and Asian communities. Black Asians are antithetical to the survival of identity, privilege, and contests for power within the political binary imposed on the Movement for Black Lives and Asian political struggle. This is constructed by the colonial state based on the mythology that we have never moved as one and in solidarity. These divisions, competitions for power, are because we live within colonial institutions that erase centuries of Afro-Asian resistance and liberation work. Starting with Filipino, Indigenous, and African maroons against the Spanish in the late 18th century, any point of progress in our society is done through the collective work of the oppressed. As a result we do not know our stories.

The Civil Rights Era exemplifies the quintessential symbiosis. In 1966, three years prior to the iconic Stonewall uprising, Tamara Ching, a trans Asian woman, along with other queer and trans people rose up against police brutality at the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco. This was two years before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., who collaborated with Asian American figures such as Grace Lee Boggs. Boggs and her husband James, who was Black, proved fundamental to the access to education for Black communities in Detroit. She was even labeled by the FBI as “probably Afro-Chinese” because of her involvement in the Black liberation work.

Dr. King also worked closely with Kiyoshi Kuromiya, one of the many Japanese Americans who survived the internment camps of WWII and joined many Black freedom fighters. Kuromiya marched with MLK on Selma and, when he was assassinated, would watch over the children. Kuromiya also made history as the first and only openly gay panelist at the Black Panther Party Convention of 1980, where Freddy P. Newton spoke openly in solidarity with the LGBT and women’s rights movements. This is in stark contrast to the homophobia and toxic masculinity within the present-day Black culture. Gender inclusivity has always been a critical thread in the Black liberation movement.

Another queer figure that we should look to is Bayard Rustin, an openly gay Black man who traveled to India and studied the techniques of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience. He incorporated these into his civil rights movement work, which would arguably become a hallmark of the time period. Unfortunately, he would decline in prominence in the civil rights movement after he was convicted of public sex.

During this period, the term model minority was developed to target Japanese American survivors of WWII, after a large wave of them joined Black organizers, particularly Richard Aoki and Nobuko Miyamoto with the Black Panthers and Yuri Kochiyama, who befriended Malcolm X. The last year of the Civil Rights Era, the

year King was assassinated, was the same year Asian America was born. Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka, who coined the term two years after the introduction of the model minority, founded the Asian American Political Alliance, an Asian student resistance group at UCLA Berkeley that collaborated with the Afro-American Student Union, the Mexican American Student Committee, and the Native American Indian Association to form the Third World Liberation Front. This solidarity group organized for ethnic studies to learn about our histories, teach future generations, and, as per their 1969 declaration, to resist capitalism and imperialism in unity with other non-white people.

Asian Americans have been just as critical to our collective liberation as Black people. Without any of these moments of solidarity, we would never have civil rights. The censorship, sanitization, and erasure of these facts are tools of white mythology. White mythology has taught Asian America that we don’t have any history on this stolen land. It has taught Black America that it has always been alone in the struggle for emancipation. What is most dangerous about white mythology is that we have internalized it as truth through the institutions of public education. In order for the colonial state to flourish, it must defund education, ban books, and invest in violent structures such as policing, which have killed Black and Asian people alike.

To achieve liberation, we must adamantly require the alliances our communities have practiced for centuries. Black Power must enter into symbiosis with Asian Power. Both must acknowledge Blasian Power, for we have the beauty of wielding both. All three must join with Indigenous, Latine, Jewish, Arab and other queer, anti-racist, and disability justice movements, for Blackness intersects all of them. If not, we will remain intellectually and willingly enslaved to the colonial state. In the words of Bayard Rustin: “You have to join every other movement for the freedom of the people.”

FIREBIRD

Three years later I am standing once more at Cadman Plaza in Brooklyn, New York. The sun has shined down on the people I lead every Blasian Pride. We had just experienced smoke from the wildfires in Canada that colored our skyline orange, and now we are marching for climate justice. Black and Asian LGBT leaders spoke on the impacts of environmental racism. An LGBT Korean drumming group danced in a circle around Afro- and Indo-Caribbean trans people.

In that moment I thought of Black-Asian solidarity figures, like Yuri Kochiyama and

Malcolm X, Nobuko Miyamoto, and James Baldwin. None of them made change within the confines of their races. These boundaries were instituted by colonization. While we draw power from the idea of race, we must also learn where and how to suspend its limitations that lend itself to white domination. When we remain rooted in siloes, or as Toni Morrison would refer to as singular narrative, we choose to keep on the chains of our oppressors. To silence Asian American work within Black liberation is to join the same oppressors who have inherited the chains that dragged us across the Atlantic. To engage in anti-Blackness is to ally with the same empire that displaced so many of our people out of Asia. To only fight for ourselves is to remain in a state of perpetual limitation, self-segregation, and thus auto-oppression.

I am standing tall, despite the harm and hate I have felt in both the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements. I have learned from the legacies of Bayard and Tamara, Kiyoshi and Marsha, the value of seeing beyond the margins instituted by white mythology. I have taken the pain of exclusion and made flowers for myself. I have planted seeds that I may never see bloom. I may never live to see them make fruit of stars. That no longer matters. What matters most is that our communities heal from the physical, intellectual, and spiritual violence of the empire. For our own survival, each of us must learn our stories regardless of race to create the next chapter. Paramount to our liberation is imagining our power beyond the barriers of minority to create community, because this self-segregation keeps us oppressed and away from entering what Rosemary Campbell-Stephens calls the global majority.

In the words of Grace Lee Boggs:

“THE TIME HAS COME FOR US TO REIMAGINE EVERYTHING.”

SPECIAL THANK YOU TO JEFF STREEPER

BIOS

Stas Ginzburg is a Brooklyn-based artist and queer refugee from Russia. He focuses on portrait photography, highlighting LGBTQIA+ communities and activism. His work has been featured at the Queens Museum, Photoville, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. His images are included in Revolution Is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation, a book published by Aperture in fall 2022. Ginzburg’s project Sanctuary, an intimate portrait series of queer, trans, and non-binary individuals in their homes, was shortlisted for the Arnold Newman Prize for New Directions in Photographic Portraiture (2024) and the Sony World Photography Awards (2025). Ginzburg holds a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design.

Qween Jean is an award-winning NYC costume designer, activist, and human rights leader. A Black transgender woman, she has dedicated her voice to advocating for marginalized communities. She is the founder of Black Trans Liberation, an organization committed to providing Black trans people with resources to thrive while combating homelessness and raising awareness about Black trans issues. In 2020, following the murders of Nina Pop and Tony McDade, Jean led Black Trans Liberation protests in New York City. Her greatest mission is to ensure that trans people can live long, joyful, and liberated lives. A proud theater professional, she joined the Board of Theatre Communications Group (TCG) in 2023 and received an Obie Award for Excellence in Costume Design. She holds an MFA in Design from NYU Tisch.

Rohan Zhou-Lee, whose gender identity is Firebird and pronouns are They/Siya/ Elle, is an international award-winning Black Asian dancer, trumpeter, writer, and public speaker. Their work has been published, performed, and presented across the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and Japan. In 2023, they became the first mixed-race Black Asian Open City Fellow for journalism at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. They are the founder of Blasian March, a Black-Asian-Blasian solidarity organization that emerged during the political upheavals of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through protests, free book fairs, and performing arts, Blasian March has received multiple honors, including a certificate of recognition from New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, and has hosted events in New York City, New Haven, Chicago, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Orlando. Zhou-Lee holds a Bachelor of Arts in Ethnomusicology from Northwestern University.