Knowing Her Truth: Chicago Organizer on Growing
Up Trans
From Tennessee to Chicago, this activist
has fought for transgender rights by
spearheading multiple organizations.
written by Talia Wright
edited by Clare Mackert
Standing in front of several hundred people, LaSaia Wade’s smile speaks for itself. She mounts the makeshift stage with a microphone in hand, takes one satisfied look at the cold but inspired crowd and says, “I’m here to say that I’m here to love you. My love speaks for itself, my breath speaks for itself, and my footsteps that I left behind walk for themselves.”
Federal Plaza erupts into cheers. Blue, pink and white transgender pride flags fly high, fluttering brightly in the crisp wind. People raise signs illustrated with fists clenched in solidarity, and many hands join congratulating both themselves, Wade and her fellow organizers for their success at taking the streets of Chicago.
Transgender activist LaSaia Wade helped organize the Trans Liberation Protest that took the streets on March 3, 2017. At an estimated 2,000 people in attendance, the rally was the largest protest Wade has organized.
“It’s nerve-wracking,” she says. “The day of the rally is a lot of making sure everyone is in their place; everyone is going to show up, everyone has their speeches done.”
Wade has been organizing for years. As a 30-year-old black transgender woman originally based in Tennessee, Wade knows her way around the activist scene.
“As an experienced organizer, it doesn't take me long to organize. That’s what I love about Chicago,” she says. “Chicago is a city that really don’t take no shit with the people, but it's hard to get people to organize after you get to the rally.”
Wade acts as the executive director of Brave Space Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to the safety and training of trans and gender-nonconforming people. She can get funding to hand out free mace and tasers to those who show up to their training classes. Brave Space Alliance works side-by-side with one of Wade’s other organizations, BTGNC Collective (Black Trans and Gender Non-Conforming Collective).
BTGNC Collective started as a response to the death of a trans woman named TT, or T.T. Saffore, who was murdered on Chicago’s west side.
“No one was making the noise that they needed to make on a scale that could actually shape organizations. So, we got together,” says Wade.
Wade’s organizing background didn’t start in Chicago. Although she is originally from Chicago, Wade attended high school and college in Tennessee, and that’s where her work first began to take root.
Wade was called to organize when she was in college, after her close friend, a transgender woman who went by Beautiful Lisa, was murdered.
“She taught me the ways of the transness. The force, if you want to put it that way. She was gorgeous,” Wade says.
Beautiful Lisa opened a new world for Wade. She helped Wade put on her first bra, something she didn’t know anything about, and helped her figure out her name. Beautiful Lisa was the first link to Wade’s transness. After she was killed, her death brought out a new side of Wade. She became an activist, but the work she was doing was toxic.
Around 2012, Wade started to make a change. She did more research, read more books and discovered intersectionality.
For many, intersectionality speaks to their identity in a way that regular feminism does not. Maneet Mander, president of Herstory, a Columbia College Chicago organization dedicated to giving platforms to women of all identities, cites intersectionality as the scope from which she sees the world.
“[Feminism] doesn’t acknowledge the adversaries and other racism that women of color face,” she says. “I’m Indian, so I know what it’s like to be a minority and a woman, and intersectional feminism is an approach that can help me combat both areas.”
With these new ideas in mind, Wade started to travel and got an internship with the Audre Lorde Project in New York, which gave her extensive training on intersectionality and organizing.
Wade began to use the work established by other women of color as guidelines to her own activism, politics, and gender identity.
Her work led her to start an organization called the Tennessee Trans Justice Project, TNTJ for short. TNTJ started as a grassroots organization dedicated to educating people on trans issues.
The transition from Tennessee to Chicago activism was jarring. Both cities had different ways of maneuvering politics and policy, and when Wade moved back in 2016, she had to jump in head first.
“[The Southside of Chicago] looks completely different than how the work is done, and I’ve noticed that everything that happens in Chicago people do it in your face,” She says. “Tennessee was a completely different thing. Everything is hidden up under the books, and no one wants to tell you anything.”
Wade says she’s noticed it is relatively easy to get people to protest in Chicago, with the Trans Liberation Protest being a primary example. People are willing to help, she says, where in Tennessee it would be difficult to get 25 to 100 people out in the streets.
But she has. In fact, she has a third, new collective that was born out of the Trans Liberation Protest. The Trans Liberation Collective was created by a group of trans activists, conceptualized on Feb. 24, to bring full liberation to trans people.
Wade’s partner, a trans organizer named Xavier MaatRa, has watched her grow into her role as an organizer here in Chicago.
When Wade had just traveled to Chicago she had been in a very reflective space, where she sat back and observed the organizing being done around her, MaatRa says. “I feel like I’ve seen her be able to move to a new place, adjust to the culture, connect to people, meet new people and still connect to the same issues the same way and still do the same thing she was talking about doing in Tennessee.”
As a child, Wade always knew she was different. Smiling, she describes herself as a “Pillsbury dough person” whose body started changing once she got to high school. Her waist started changing, she developed hips, and she says that her body wasn’t matching what was conventionally thought of as a “boy,” and she loved it.
“It was like my body was forced into this being that it needed to be at the time that I needed it to be,” she says, recalling the memory.
Eventually, people began to comment on her body with derogatory language that drove Wade to the Internet for guidance. She began to question everything. Slowly but surely, her researching led her in the right direction. When she finally found the correct language, she went with it and slowly discovered herself in the process.
“Coming out was hell,” Wade says. At 17, she came out to her family and started to dress more femininely. “After I told my parents I was transitioning, my father didn’t even talk to me for two years straight in the same household. We was like ghosts to each other,” she says.
While taking hormones and being estranged from some of her family members, her emotions were up and down. She struggled to find her place both in her family and in the trans community. She was going through a dark time. “I tried to kill myself twice because I didn’t know where my community was. I thought I was the only one,” Wade says. “I didn’t understand what was going on around me.”
On her 20th birthday, Wade swallowed a handful of her mother’s antidepressants shortly before her parents took her out to a Chinese restaurant. By the time they got there, Wade was feeling the full effects of the pills. She passed out in the restaurant and woke to her mother sitting on her chest, smacking her in the face to wake her up.
Wade recalls the memory with a laugh. “She brought me back to life by smacking me to life, just like a black woman. She brings the life.”
Afterward, Wade’s entire perception of herself changed. She spent the next couple of days locked in her room, trying to stay hydrated and healthy. Eventually, her mother came in with some sound advice.
“I need you sit in that motherfucking mirror before you come to me,” Wade’s mother said to her. “Figure out who the fuck you are before you tell me who the fuck you are.”
Those words stuck with Wade for the rest of her life. They are a part of her daily routine and her activism. “How can I be strong and an advocate for not just myself, but for my community, without knowing my truth is my truth, unapologetically?” she questions.
Knowing her truth and advocating for others requires so much emotional labor that Wade often has to take a break from it all. From sun-up to sun-down, she’s putting emotional energy into her work. Every day she worries that she’s going to get a text alerting her that another trans woman was murdered.
Being an organizer has taken a toll on her emotional health, and Wade has started to look into other outlets, such as her lotion business and interest in beekeeping. She says that the biggest issues in the trans community are largely economic, especially regarding jobs and healthcare.
“We need to be able to have jobs, to be able to eat, to be able to survive,” Wade says. “We can organize all day and every day but if we can’t eat when we go home, what are we doing?”
"No one was making the noise they needed to make on a scale that could actually shape organizations."
A sign at the trans liberation protest.
Photos by: Talia Wright