San Jose celebrates second annual People's Pride, demands "Smash Trump's trans bans"

San Jose, CA – On Saturday, June 21, around 280 people rallied at Saint James Park in downtown for the Second Annual People’s Pride, a march and celebration spearheaded by community organizers of San Jose to return LGBTQ Pride Month mobilizations to their radical and militant roots.

Romaine Charite, a San Jose transgender and nonbinary activist of the San Jose People’s Pride organization, emceed. They started by leading chants such as “Donald Trump has got to go” and “Trans rights are here to stay.”

In a statement read at the protest by Charite, the organizers cite Trump and his administration’s posture on transgender people, stating, “His executive order, ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism,’ legally erases trans, nonbinary, and intersex people by defining gender as male or female, and inseparable from sex. And recently, cut over a billion dollars in funding for HIV prevention programs.”

Charite also stressed that 900-plus bills that would negatively affect trans and gender non-conforming people are being considered nationally, a trend that Charite says is not just policy but “a blueprint for erasure.” This year’s theme for the Pride protest was “Smash Trump’s Trans Bans.”

In solidarity with other popular movements in San Jose, a program of speakers started with two representatives of the Silicon Valley Immigration Committee, Colin Garcia and Jessica Aviles, who provided speeches in both English and Spanish, respectively.

The immigrant rights organization demands “No deportations and no separation of families” as they work to advocate for victims of brutality and detention in the wave of ICE raids and arrests initiated by the Trump administration. SVIC is involved in the campaign to free Ulises Peña Lopez, a Sunnyvale father who they say was “brutally and unlawfully arrested by ICE and is being held at the Golden State Annex.”

Garcia tied together the fight for immigrant rights and trans rights, saying, “Racism, anti-immigrant and anti-transgender bias all work together, often with devastating results in the lives of Latino transgender people. The Trump administration has increasingly increased their attacks on both the trans, queer and immigrant community.”

Tim Phan from the San Jose State University chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, the national progressive student activist organization, spoke on attacks on trans athlete Blaire Fleming, a former student volleyball player. After a class action lawsuit against the NCAA in which Fleming was outed as transgender by her teammate, Phan said, “Death threats were sent online, she was getting harassed from right-wing transphobes everywhere she went, there were entire teams that dropped out just because they feared her existence, and her daily life was disrupted.”

Public support was built by students, who stormed her games with signs to counter hecklers, and a decision by a U.S. magistrate judge for the District of Colorado, who won Fleming the right to play in the tournament, in response to an injunction initiated by rival teams to sit her out. However, once in office, Donald Trump withdrew the Biden-era Title IX policy within the Department of Education that expanded protections against sex discrimination to transgender people and launched an investigation against San Jose State University as part of his executive order, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.”

Shaena Reyes with San Jose Against War stated, “Often as an out and queer person, when I say, ‘Free Palestine’ I am met with a ‘Well you wouldn’t be free if you lived there’ or ‘You know they hate queer folks over there’. To that I say, liberation is not conditional.”

Lyla Salinas recited a statement for the Freedom Road Socialist Organization on the legacy of the Stonewall uprisings, saying, “Pride began as an uprising against a brutal police raid, in New York City, 1969, at the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street. When bigoted police threw down the gauntlet, the inn’s patrons threw back the brick.”

Salinas added “Our Pride must honor Stonewall’s legacy, celebrate our identities, and struggle tooth and nail to defend our civil liberties. The best way to do this is to build a united front against Trump.”

The first half of the program speakers wrapped with chants like “Stonewall was a riot, we will not be quiet!” and attendees marched towards the heart of downtown into San Pedro Square, where the city of San Jose held a Pride shopping event. Onlookers watched and cheered in support as hundreds of protesters flooded the alley shouting, “It’s a trans revolution!” The march paused at the Qmmunity District, a patch of San Jose’s downtown known for its LGBTQ-owned businesses and the community’s staple gay bar, Splash.

A second round of speakers, like Sera Fernando, a trans rights activist and manager of Santa Clara County’s Office of LGBTQ affairs, added her experiences as a “Trans Filipina” growing up in San Jose.

The march ended with a return to the park, where local LGBTQ talent, like DJ headbdead and rock band Friendship Games, performed live music. Tacos from Silicon Valley Immigration were distributed, and safe sex resources were handed out from the table of Alyssa, Sex Educator and Doula.

Charite highlighted, “This is not a festival, it’s a mobilization and celebration for existing in spite of every attempt to exterminate us.”

#SanJoseCA #CA #LGBTQ #Pride

Source: https://fightbacknews.org/san-jose-celebrates-second-annual-peoples-pride-demands-smash-trumps-trans?pk_campaign=rss-feed