please visit his site instead of just using this transcript. Or if you read the transcript, please visit his site.

I'm posting it here to draw people in

Transcript:

If you’ve learned a lot about leadership and making a movement, then let’s watch a movement happen, start to finish, in under 3 minutes, and dissect some lessons:

A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he’s doing is so simple, it’s almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!

Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it’s not about the leader anymore — it’s about them, plural. Notice he’s calling to his friends to join in.

It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.

The second follower is a turning point: it’s proof the first has done well. Now it’s not a lone nut, and it’s not two nuts. Three is a crowd and a crowd is news.

A movement must be public. Make sure outsiders see more than just the leader. Everyone needs to see the followers, because new followers emulate followers — not the leader.

Now here come two more, then three more. Now we’ve got momentum. This is the tipping point! Now we’ve got a movement!

As more people jump in, it’s no longer risky. If they were on the fence before, there’s no reason not to join now. They won’t be ridiculed, they won’t stand out, and they will be part of the in-crowd, if they hurry. Over the next minute you’ll see the rest who prefer to be part of the crowd, because eventually they’d be ridiculed for not joining.

And ladies and gentlemen that is how a movement is made! Let’s recap what we learned:

while I'm thinking about queer movement building:

I need people to realize that the lower bound of how many of us there are in the US is 0.5%, or 1,650,000. The higher bound is 5%, or 16,500,000(Pew).

But everything is so disconnected, and being out is either so risky or so normalized depending on where you are that trans people often aren't finding each other for a few reasons¹.

We need something that acknowledges that it's a coalition while still giving infrastructure for the movement. Because right now it's writing messages in a bottle on social media and hoping it gets to the right people, and that just doesn't scale as fights get harder.

we have community as in hangouts and support but we need the other half -- community as in union halls, community as in ways to mobilize people, community as in ways to filter the news so people who can't deal with the deluge still hear what they need to hear. Community as in self-defense through solidarity, through having enough people willing to come to aid that you won't be fucked with by the average rando. Community as in the equivalent to village bells that start ringing when the hostile march comes to town, to get everyone into the square to shout them down.

I have no idea how to get there. History is an instructor, but also doesn't acknowledge how fast the world is now -- the structures there won't work, because most of them are from before there was a phone in every house, let alone a smart one. But it's a thing we need to be thinking about. The tools are out there, but not in a way that's useable. Certainly not for non-technical people. But we can't keep having to rebuild things every time some new big bad thing happens like we have been.

10 million people. You could probably get 1 million of those in one city without even flying. it'd be a big lift. But like.

Nothing has come close to a trans show of force.

if we're 5% of the population, that means with the upper bound there, there's 394,400,000 of us, though many aren't out or have realized yet. And the 5% is probably under-reported even in the US.

Anyway some day I'd like to be in a place where we can get 500k people to take and hold every intersection in 42nd street.

globally, we're more than the entire population of the united states. And unlike hereditary things, the statistics probably hold broadly.

I feel like the pandemic response shattered a lot of the solidarity economy, a lot of the movements of solidarity, etc.

because it showed that, even though it's all from understandable pressures, everyone decided that things taking extra effort was a big nope for them. I'm not talking the people who couldn't afford not to work their jobs when forced, but the gestalt of public opinion that allowed everything to happen.

Because it also happened in left spaces, and showed who didn't actually have anyone's back when times were tough. And the answer was, deafeningly: large swathes.

and yeah, a lot of that can't be blamed on anyone -- a prisoner's dilemma that's societywide was failed. but when you talk about ideals and then decide they don't matter after a few months, man, that's not something the movements have really recovered from, have they?

in person spaces being dicey gets in the way or organizing, sure, especially when no one bothers to do the work to figure out better ways to exist inside things like zoom. But previous years, when it wasn't A Political Football, we were working on those better ways, and they just got shouted down by the people who didn't want to change.

I'm sure protests being dicier is part of it -- you wouldn't want to infect your peers -- but cops ramping up their brutality has more to do with that. Along with, well, the most active organizers all becoming mysteriously tired as long covid is still downplayed.

I'm thinking about this because of the rising tide of anti-trans hate, and how many people 'on my side' will still refuse to do the simplest of things until it's too late, collectively, to really change much and just live with it.

instead they yell about harry potter and it's author, at people who aren't in positions of power, where no one will see it but all the people they brag about it to. the number of non-trans leftists doing this instead of anything useful is huge and I just. folks.

I'm still optimistic but everyone's focusing on the cheese so hard that they're ignoring the trap.

The thing about the pandemic? at the start we did upstart mutual aid stuff, just some randos, all across the nation and the world, sharing how we did things, what didn't work, what did. And then no one from the broader left bothered to help, and many derided it because it wasn't done by orgs that were too busy trying to get bernie sanders elected because they couldn't read an existential threat if it was right infront of their face. Or an organizing opportunity, I guess.

And it feels like we're just 20 people per county still, fighting against an opponent we can't see the whole of, who the officials keep lying to us about, who no one wants to support, as we try and keep people fed. Except it's felt like that for the last 1.5 decades, and certainly the last five, though I wasn't around for that.

The broader left is up to their ears in guns, and still afraid of any interpersonal conflict that might make them lose a friend over defending a targeted group. Whether they should still have those guns isn't up to me to decide, but i'm gonna say it speaks a lot about how much 'community defense' actually matters.

idk where I'm going with this. Just, reflecting on that first year where things were simultaneously their worst and their best, in terms of how possible it was to help people instead of throw them down the bucket. But, just like it was then, everyone says you're overreacting, even after the death count got to a 9/11 per day.

I don't think things are as dire as certain trans journalists who aren't willing to clarify that half of these bills are unable to pass. But things are bad, in terms of how little we have for real support compared to previous years.

That's the thing about the broader online left, especially. They refuse to see wedges they aren't pushing on themselves.

people couldn't even sway themselves towards fighting when it was them at risk too. Then the vaccines came out and, well, most returned to normal on the left. Everyone with front-line jobs still was grinding at them without much protection. Still are, the ones who aren't dead.

and just, I think part of why the left is still licking it's wounds in general (some places are doing good work!), and mostly silent (except for the overeager people saying 'its capitalism' to every message they see that is implying that, maybe, capitalism is the problem) is that, well. Caring about trans people is now an inconvenience instead of a social capital generator. Even if it's unconscious. And it's funny how that always happens as things are getting worse.

not to mention everyone on the left that demands citations for "i think you're wrong for things I've like, actually experienced on the ground" but not "Trans people are groomers", which is SURPRISINGLY MANY OF THEM.

anyway, we protect us and all that. I'm confident in our ability to do that if things get bad enough, but until then, all that most of us can do is survive and exist in a holding pattern for now, because of how much everything worse has gotten. Once necessity dictates getting fired from work becomes less of a priority than survival more people will be able to fight, but like. trans people built so much of the current left, with blood, sweat, tooth, claw. So much of the community people found there. We had people, highly communicating everything they were doing with each other, transmitted through the community we already developed, pulling various orgs and groups and cliques and circles kicking and screaming out of being book clubs. Its not like we had much to lose.

And again it's co-opted and twisted :) I should be used to it by now.