As 2024 draws to a close it’s likely you may be facing every day as we are, with a sense of dread as to what is likely to happen in the New Year. In America, President-elect Trump is making dire pronouncements about how he will come for trans people once elected, in the UK Keir Starmer’s Labour government is busy destroying as much trans healthcare and rights as it can, and in a host of other countries around the world there are far right elements wanting to do the same thing. We’ve been sounding the alarm for years now and urging people to get out, but we know that over the next year our community is likely to lose a lot of people.
We can’t let them get away with this
If there’s an inevitability to some of this and we are powerless to stop it, it remains important that whoever does this should not escape without consequence. There will come a time when this is all over and it’s widely recognised that a great wrong was done to transgender people, and we need to be ready for that moment. To that end, the best thing we can do is ensure that there is plenty of evidence ready, both to ensure hate speakers are forever rendered unemployable by association with their actions, and to support the successful conviction of those who have committed atrocities against us. It’s clear to us, that the time for collecting that evidence lies not in the future when it’s all over, but now, before they have happened.
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In 1947 the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal founded the Jewish Documentation Centre, whose function was to gather and collate as much evidence on Nazi war criminals as possible such that they could be brought to justice. The Centre had a part in bringing more than a thousand war criminals to justice, using low-tech information management and whatever witness testimony they could find.
We would like you to imagine for a moment what Simon Wiesenthal could have done had he been able to start the process before the Holocaust started, and with access to a 2024-style internet firehose of every Nazi sharing all they did on social media. A smiling Nazi from a picture could be identified by facial recognition software from an image taken years earlier, or the quiet unassuming office worker could be unmasked by the database pulling up their every antisemitic rant.
If you can understand how valuable such material would have been had it become available to war crimes investigators, we think you’ll start to grasp how the same approach could be of value to the transgender community now. This is our 1932, we have a unique opportunity to start a massive data grab of every information point, both online and in traditional media, to hold the perpetrators to account when they later try to disappear. We also have the huge advantage of not needing to worry about the analytics side of it, as future computing power will be unimaginably fast compared to what we have today, and will take care of joining the dots.
What will be needed for a Transgender Information Centre?
Creating such a Transgender Information Centre will be no small task, and is one which is both out of Trans Rescue’s scope, and available resources. It will require researchers to identify the data to be captured, it will require information specialists to create the storage scheme to contain it, and infrastructure specialists to work on creating a secure, robust, and distributed data storage infrastructure.
This document then is a call to arms for such a project, in the hope that it can encourage others to run with the idea. It will need that group experts to come together, and in that we believe the transgender community has an advantage. A trip to almost any hackerspace will show you how many trans people work in those fields, and it’s the interest of some of those people we hope this document will attract.
In the years following the Second World War a generation of Germans swore blind that they were never Nazis, and from that pool of fellow travelers a group of war criminals were brought to justice. We think that with the right information, this can happen to the UK TERFs and US MAGAs too. We know there are people out there with the skills for this, and even the resources, and we are sure many of them feel impotent and unable to do anything about the tide of hate. Here’s something for them, that may one day make a difference.
Header: James Cridland from Brisbane, AU, CC BY 2.0.
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