With the approaching inauguration of Trump looming overhead, many Queer people—and yes, we capitalize that word to represent our resistance to being labeled, categorized, or contained—understandably, are fearing what’s to come. It’s important to remember that although the Trump administration is more overt about its cishet white supremacy – we have been navigating cishet white supremacy all along.

Those rainbow-lit White Houses and corporate Pride banners? They’ve never been about our safety or acceptance—they’re about our assimilation. The state has never been our protector, no matter who sits in office.

As we strategize how we are going to survive, remember that we have been surviving.

Let’s be clear: not all queer people face the same threats. It’s not uncommon for people who share an oppressed identity to assume that they understand the experience of other Queers, or that they share the same fears, worries, and anger. Interlocking oppressions make someone’s experience extremely different. BIPOC, especially Black and Indigenous Queers have faced and will face greater threats than Queer folx who have the protective privilege of whiteness. Similarly, undocQueers, disabled Queers, Trans folx all face threats that are different (and often more severe) than those who don’t hold those identities, especially those who are not white. (A note on language: We use ‘folx’ with intention—not as a trendy spelling, but as an explicit marker of inclusion that acknowledges all gender expressions, abilities, races, and interlocking identities in our community. Our language, like our resistance, is deliberate.)

It’s important to know and own where you have protective privileges. Part of community building is understanding that depending on what interlocking oppressions someone holds, that they will be impacted in more serious ways. We must use the protective privileges we have to support the Queers that are surviving at the edges of “society.”

Building real community

Community is not only a tool for literal survival but the best “therapeutic modality”  to manage depression, anxiety, and trauma. The sense of belonging and care that exists in true community helps us battle isolation that often comes with depression and anxiety.

Now is the time to strengthen your communities; if you don’t have one, now is the time to start building. Community isn’t just your family or friends. It’s about establishing expansive relationships of connection that challenge the hierarchical structures of who we care for and who does the caring, which is usually expected only of women & femmes.

Community isn’t about who you go to Pride with, or who you want to hook up with. It’s about who provides care for you in concrete, material ways. Remember: care takes on many forms. Care can be marching in a protest, bringing soup to someone who is sick, helping someone pay rent, or bailing someone out of jail.

Care requires knowing our community. What are the concrete fears and needs of people?  What resources and/or care are you able to provide? Through ableist, classist, white supremacist ideals, we are taught not to ask for help. Community is where we resist those oppressive structures by normalizing that it’s OKAY to need, ask for, and give support. We may not all have the same abilities or resources, but we all have something to contribute.

But, we have to show up, and it starts with our existing relationships. Return those texts, run errands together, check up on people—these are not one time efforts; it is rather how you LIVE life. In doing so, we actually create MORE emotional and mental capacity because we are not doing it alone. Community is an active, intentional promise to each other and ourselves.

Learning from our history

It’s important to remember that Queers have survived and resisted other oppressive administrations and general anti-LGBT cultural norms and beliefs. Radical Queer movements and revolutionaries of our past are our survival guide. If you don’t know these histories (not just Queer movements in the USA but Queer movements internationally), this is an opportunity for creating community by gathering together for a Queer history group study.

Our Queer ancestors have shown us that resisting the oppressors is where we find our agency and our power, which in turn helps us fight the colonial depression, anxiety, and trauma that we experience.

Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, just two of our radical Queer ancestors, didn’t fight (including fighting against fellow LGBT community members) for us to back down now. We are taught that time and history are linear; the reality is history is now. Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are with us now, and we are stronger because of their intentional refusal to submit, to be governed, and to back down.

The power of resistance

Actively, intentionally refusing to submit  is a form of psychological resistance. Refusing to accept the laws and norms the right wing will institute is the empowered defiant stance of being ungovernable, the commitment to refuse becoming legible to right wing extremists, to refuse their colonial oppressions, and to keeping our Queerness Queer. Our unyielding refusal to accept the conditions of systematic oppression is part of healing our mental health.

Survival is not just about who stays alive; survival is about resistance. It’s taking back our agency and refusing to accept what is coming even when we are afraid. Queer survival is our collective past, our collective future, and our collective now of deliberate refusal to be governed.

Melissa “Mel” Lopez, LCSW is a licensed Queer mental health therapist in California. They incorporate anti oppressive and anti empire analysis into their therapeutic work. She can be followed @counseling4allseasons on Instagram.