Trans Day of Vanishing
Lily Alexandre (youtube, bsky)
Discovered 4/30/2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqhiup5qSY8
Lily Alexandre is one of my favorite video essayists. She is consistently putting out high-quality, thoughtful content. Her works tend toward the artful, while still maintaining a cohesive thesis. While her videos do not meet the same standards of research as essayists like Alexander Avila (with the notable exception of her guide to DIY hormones), she maintains a solid position on my watch lists. “Trans Day of Vanishing” (Alexandre 2025),1 her most recent essay, is no exception. It is one of the most moving short films I have seen recently, and poses a vital question in our current crisis. Given the vast amount of transphobic rhetoric and legislation passing in the Anglosphere, should transgender people begin to recede to the underground and stop advocating for ourselves? Should we stop seeking attention and validation from a world which has shown us its teeth?
She concludes with ambivalence, though there is good evidence to support the idea that she would like to see us remain visible. After all, she continues to post videos on trans issues and attend protests, placing herself in the position of advocate. While safety remains paramount, we need to stay active in our communities, to remain resilient and protect transgender youth. She offers small, community-focused events as an excellent model of natural network-building and advocacy. Her emphasis on the local network contrasts with the second theme of the essay, that of the digital surveillance state. Through an analysis of the 2021 Jane Schoenbrun film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, Alexandre details how the abundance of computer-based communication media, combined with the desperation of isolation, leads children down dark paths. Her own experience as a transgender teen mirrors the experiences of World’s Fair’s main character Casey. In her analysis, she makes the claim that the grooming of queer children is an intentional side-effect of transphobic legislative policies. While I agree that this is a direct effect of conservative ideology, I want to temper some of the potentially conspiratorial conclusions this can lead us towards. Thereafter I’ll try to shed some light on the tactics queer folk can use within the surveillance state to protect themselves and affect long-term change.
We’re All Going to the World’s Fair
Before we dive into this, I want to acknowledge that the things I am about to say are informed by my own experiences and research into childhood sexual abuse and power dynamics generally. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me.
As content creators - and in the age of social media we are all content creators - we are in control of the personas we present online. There is power in that - a potentially desperate kind of power, a grabbing for attention which only gains its grounding on the viewer’s interest. So you have to play for that attention through controversy, sexuality, or shameless advertisement. I think this is familiar to all of us who want to attract attention, both online and off. Consider the World’s Fair protagonist Casey. She is pleading for the attention of an older male - a stand-in for her neglectful father? - who seems to see real creative potential in her. This relationship turns intimate, involves power plays on the part of the older man, and culminates in the termination of Casey’s online persona, much to the dismay and concern of her older suitor.
Lily explains how she can relate. When she was a teenager, she would often meet with an older man.
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My relationship with this man was only sustained because I was in a life and body I found deeply disorienting. … Being seen by him, it turned out, was not power. It was obligation and guilt - and frequently, fear for my safety or his. … Blocking the guy and firing off a pithy message felt good in the moment, but my isolation is what led me to him in the first place. … Once I got him to leave me alone I was left with one fewer friend but otherwise in the same position as when I’d started. (Alexandre 2025, 13:46-14:45)
Does Lily think that her interaction with her groomer parallels the transgender politics of visibility? A paradoxical, push-and-pull, desire-and-detestation roundabout of a relationship?
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The unique terror that defined my teen years has returned. The kind that comes when your life is completely at the whims of others, and you have no idea what they plan on doing to you. (Alexandre 2025, 15:09-15:16)
In slipping back into her childhood years, she’s realized the political context for her childhood trauma.
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I used to think the converging forces of homophobia, misogyny, and Internet poisoning just happened to produce someone susceptible to grooming. …it was never a question for me that everyone in the world, no matter their political alignment, deeply regrets what happened to me. Everyone wants children to be safe. Since landing back in this child’s body, the teeth gritting realization I’ve come to - the one that’s cost me hours of sleep - is that what happened to me was not an oversight. It was in fact the intended outcome of every policy and social norm which aims to make queerness an unspeakable matter. People working to exclude us from public life … know that doing so will result in the grooming, abuse, and assault of queer children with nowhere else to turn. (Alexandre 2025, 16:35-17:44, my emphasis)
Lily’s argument is strong. All the evidence points to a direct causal chain from conservative legislation to the isolation and abuse of queer youth. This correlation is so well known that it is hard to believe that anybody in power who is concerned with these issues is ignorant of it. However, Lily’s argument, if left unchecked, can lend itself to conspiracy.
Let me rephrase Lily’s main point. The conservative politic directly benefits from the widespread abuse and grooming of queer youth. It furthers their narrative of the pedophile queer, utilizing the public’s disdain for pedophila2 to further their eugenic-genocidal agenda. In reality, if there is an association between queer identity and childhood sexual abuse it is that we are far more likely to be the victims of said abuse. That being said, if the conservative’s goal is explicitly to groom queer children, it is only because it fits under the larger umbrella of amassing power for the cisgender, white male. Their goal is to make everybody else vulnerable, thus making them susceptible to all forms of power abuse. So it is not that the conservative party is inherently an underage sex-cult, it is only that sexual abuse falls under this terrible umbrella of control.
It is a remarkable attestation to Alexandre’s character to publish something of this quality and this depth of confession. However, I don’t want to condone the potentially paranoid conclusions which one may draw by taking her at face value. I also have trauma from a sort of parasocial grooming on the web. I also am a transgender woman. Although I live in a much smaller city, and my traumas are less direct, I see you, Lily, and I know your struggles. Stay woke, but don’t let them take your rationality in the process.
Now, let’s turn from the personal to the political.
The Consolidation of Power in Panoptic Surveillance and the Politics of Visibility
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Why bother to pump light into this utter blackness?
[Beat. Lily fixes her eyes on some distant object. The camera switches from handheld to public CCTV, Lily looking you straight in the eyes.]
So they can see you. (Alexandre 2025, 44:30)
Lily’s experience as a highly visible trans person highlights the general trend of panoptic surveillance in the modern police state. Throughout the video she records at night, in unconventional places - by a grain mill, under a bypass, in the streetlight glow of a Toronto cul-de-sac. When we were young, trans people were shuttered from public view. We were desperate for visibility in much the same way that Casey was - somebody to see us, to validate our existence, no matter the cost. Now we have very thoroughly entered the public view - but, Lily asks, at what cost?
In the subscriber-exclusive video “I’ve Been Lying To You For Years” (Alexandre 2025a), Lily discusses our topical essay and the secrets she hid in it. I won’t spoil them (they don’t change the content of the video), but I want to quote her discussion of the wide arc of the essay.
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The first several scenes mostly make a rational argument against disappearing, and it seems like that’s what the video is, but then the protest happens, and the tear gas goes off, and the cops chase me down the street, and the rest of the video is driven by pure survival instinct. (Alexandre 2025a, 14:27)
Yes, she says, visibility is an essential part of the political strategy. The sort of visibility we need, however, is not the visibility we are being given. Queer people deserve to have their own voices be heard, not to be given voice by those who want to see us disappear. But, the political strategy doesn’t reflect the lived reality of trans folk under repressive regimes. Not all of us want to be visible. In my own case, growing up in rural Kansas as a trans woman (at the time, a bi boy), I was expected to be ostentatious and proud; essentially I was expected to be a ‘yass queen’ kind of queer. I hope it is apparent that that is not at all who I am.3
With the recent backlash to trans-affirming politics, including the UK supreme court’s ruling this April, it is no surprise that many trans people want to stay in the closet. Escalating violence has asked us to consider what we will do if public visibility is no longer an option. But the view that all trans people should recede from public view, for the sake of our own safety, is a reactionary position which neither I, nor I think Alexandre, can support.
Visibility gives us power when we can control it. But when we are watched without our consent, it becomes a vulnerability.
We live in an era of panoptic surveillance. Cameras are everywhere, identities fingerprinted (2), our data scraped, conglomerated, and sold for a profit. The existence of Palantir and the excesses of the AI hype machine ought to be enough evidence that visibility is a problem for everybody, not just the queer community. But this same weaponized visibility can be a tool for good.
In light of the atrocities happening in LA, the general response has been to use social media to blatantly shame the invading federal agents. Perhaps this is only a desperate claw for power against a military incursion - but it is clear that Angelenos are spreading the word loud and clear. There is no fear here, only blatant resentment and strong resistance. While the LA incursion is about Latino immigrants, it is essential that we provide a unified front. Their struggle against the rising tides of fascism are the same as ours.
How we decide to use our visibility - how we decide to show ourselves - is of increasing importance. Lily discusses the approach taken by the film collective 75shots, which aims to highlight the (anonymous) experiences of queers in places where their identity is criminalized. She speaks about the underground nature of the invite-only screenings, the intimacy and sense of community they bring.
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Going to a 75shots screening is not difficult … but it requires just enough energy that those who do bother showing up tend to be curious, passionate people. … That one-inch barrier, it turns out, is also a pretty good security measure. … This points to a way that trans people might be able to continue to exist openly without drawing the wrong kind of attention - speaking in public, but only addressing each other. (Alexandre 2025b, 32:10ff)
She’s talking about a kind of public code speak. As an example she talks about the “shrieks” of trans music (I can only guess she’s referring to Black Dresses or femtanyl, both of whom, I am learning, happen be from Lily’s native Toronto) as a sort of poison-dart frog coloration: both a warning and a symbol for others of our ilk to lean in and discover ourselves. This one-inch barrier, whether it is cringe or a whisper network, works well to carve out a space for the community, but it will not work against infiltration from those who truly want to see us disappear. Again, it’s the trade-off of high visibility.
In the end, the ability to truly disappear from public view is fading. Queers in this world - every minority identity - have been presented a binary choice: pretend we aren’t who we are and try to be normal, or stand out loud and proud in bright bold colors. Neither of these can be the long-term answer; it certainly cannot be the answer for all of us. Instead, we should strive for longer-lasting, quieter communities, global networks of people connected by identity, irrespective of age, class, or nationality. These communities last longer and affect more change in the long run than any short-lived flame or dispute. While we must keep fighting, for the majority of us the answer is not to join the front lines, but merely to continue living, to raise our children and love each other to the best of our ability in a world not meant for us.
Addendum - Highlighted Comments
@Edamame_bean
The complete isolation of nearly every frame of this video, the fact that for nearly all of it there is not a single other person with you… The fact that when finally we see someone else, a group, a crowd, when this isolation is finally contrasted with a brief moment of incredible community and solidarity, it is immediately and brutally attacked by the police… Incredibly powerful, thank you for this video Lily.
^ This is not entirely true. She explicitly mentions her filming partner in the first scene.
@the_d12rose
Only 17m in. I had a nearly identical experience in childhood, and much like my queerness at that age, your realization of “this was intentional” has been drifting around the edge of my consciousness for awhile. So much so that as soon as you said “I always thought everyone wanted children to be safe.” I knew what you’d say next and just thought to myself, “Ah… yes. Of course it is.” Aimed straight at my heart, girl. Solidarity to survivors. ✊
Galactipunk
Watching this video was fascinating to me. I’m aroace, neurodivergent and trans. I’ve been dealing with chronic loneliness and alienation for as long as I can remember. A lot of what this video covered didn’t feel like a dystopian possibility but rather a fact of life for me.
I think the hardest part of all this is that you end being forced to pick your fights. Being aroace, arguably one of the most obscure parts of the queer spectrum, forces me to endure countless sights of discrimination, bigotry and denial of my own existence from every part of society. Yet I know that I’m in a group nowhere enfranchised or large enough to hit back. I’m forced to only stand my ground and defend myself when I have something real to lose or when I think a fight is actually winnable. I’ve had to leave social groups that I loved being in just because I saw the fight as unwinnable. If I tried to be as visible as possible, then no one would understand me because no one knows what my identity even means. The fights that I see as winnable are often those that are underground. So I end feeling forced to act underground.
It’s easy to embrace that loneliness as empowering. To internalise the sensation of being alone in this world with everyone out to get you. It gives you a sense of true agency, freedom and control in an otherwise bleak and hopeless scenario. It lets you confront every aggression you experience with such flippant rejection that you’re not hurt by it. To me, it’s how I’ve managed to hold on for this long. But it eats away at you.
Some times, rarely, I get confronted with an (often hypothetical) scenario that is alien to me: Being in an actually comfortable place where I feel loved and understood. A place where I feel like I can love people to my utmost degree and express who I am with no fear and no rejection. Those scenarios break me. They remind me that despite everything I go through, I am still such a vulnerable person. Yet, they also reveal that despite everything I’ve endured, I can still love people and feel like I belong somewhere.
Bibliography
Footnotes
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Citations to this video will follow the closed caption transcript available on YouTube. ↩
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This is a controversial point, but I want to make clear that minor attracted people as a group are also unfairly maligned. Research points to minor attraction as a sexuality as unintentional and hard-wired as any other. Most MAPs are non-offending - childhood sexual abuse is far more likely to occur as a matter of power posturing. See (Walker 2021) for some rare sociological research to this end. ↩
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I have to say that I really dislike the association of cis male drag with trans women, or even with queer culture broadly. I don’t have any issues with the practice as it exists today within small circles and as a genuine expression of identity, but its origins as a sexist pastiche of womanhood through cross-dressing burlesque performances - a legacy which persists in shows like Ru Paul’s Drag Race - mars its ability to be a truly emancipatory practice. ↩