Or: why Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism is more real than you think
Nomi Arwen Karemaker, 2026
Introduction: why am I writing this?
As I am writing this, it is purple friday. By now we have hopefully all seen the latest statistics on the acceptance of homosexuality by Dutch youth and its very significant and quite frankly depressing decrease over the last 4 years. With purple friday being celebrated at schools only by a minority of allies today, I feel it’s time to be loud, to speak our truth. In this piece I want to show the beauty and the power of the trans community in particular; its pragmatic community-based services and what they mean to me, to you, society and for the future. Because what better way to reclaim some of our hope than to show that our strongest survival strategy we have is each other: unified, sharing precarity and an unstable, scary existence while also sharing resources, advice, places to sleep, emotional and physical support and love.
Mutual aid services
I was 16 years old when I started estrogen. My parents could not bear to see me go through puberty anymore and around my birthday they broke and decided they had to do something. With the waitlist for transgender care being too long (and since then only having increased, something I will touch upon later), my voice slowly lowering and the threat of my facial hair quickly rushing at me like a hounding wolf looking to catch its prey, they decided to buy me HRT from the UK. This has been one of the most impactful decisions to my transition process and I am forever grateful for this.
Not everyone is this lucky.
Let me rephrase that. Basically no one is that lucky.
Most of us do not have the money, the support, to get HRT through these means. Legal means. So we come together, within this shared precarity, to share resources.
Mutual aid services are defined by their informal nature: a community of people with mutual needs, goals, struggles and desires comes together and forms a support network that, in the case of the transgender community, has been proven to be far more effective and crucial to the survival and thriving of trans people than any statutory system is.
To put this in more practical (Dutch) examples, we have organisations like T-RRex (Trans Radical Resource Exchange) that help trans people with DIY injections for both estrogen and testosterone, organize events to raise awareness about DIY practices and means to acquire HRT, but also haircuts, clothing swaps and generally creating an ecosystem of mutual aid that shares its resources.
A few weeks ago, my mother came to me with an urgent request. A colleague of hers has a daughter who is currently on DIY estrogen. Astrovials, one of the biggest online sellers of HRT for estrogen monotherapy, was down. With Astrovials being down, she would be without hormones in only a matter of time, which could have major mental and physical health risks, not only because it would change her hormone balance from one day to another but also because it would start her puberty again, causing major dysphoria. I did what I have been conditioned to do: reach out to the community. I asked the transfem dispuut of the Koornbeurs for help, for links to any sort of websites that were still up. But what I saw happen was even more emancipating than I could have imagined. 2 people, 2 people, offered to give and/or sell some of their estrogen away. To this person that they did not even know. All they knew was: “this is a trans person. And they need help”. That, that is how strong and binding our community is. With the help of the transfem dispuut this person who would have been in major mental and physical distress is now set to thrive and continue their transition process again.
This is who we are. This is mutual aid. We fight for eachother, we share, we do not watch our brothers, sisters and siblings die. Not on our watch.
Queer utopianism
This sharing might all sound very communist, very idealist, and the reason for that is because it most definitely comes from a shared idealism. And this idealism to which I will now refer to as queer utopianism, an imaginative cultural theory that directly rejects the “here and now” and instead acts upon free, cis hetero-nonconformative, liberated futures, is the basis of our survival. What I hear a lot of right-wing Dutch people say lately is how leftism is always “very idealist and beautiful in theory, but never actually attainable or executed in practice”. For some, this even is how they explain why leftism is “for young, naïve people”
Queer utopianism shows the opposite: concrete utopia.
We, quite literally, are being the change we want to see in this world. And this is something that statutory services should be taking more advantage of: we are already showing them how it’s done, all they have to do is copy+paste, to involve trans/queer communities that already function as the safety net for trans people the system failed to take care of.
So when anyone ever jokingly mentions fully automated luxury gay space communism (F.A.L.G.S.C), do know that there is at least some truth to this, in the sense that we use these hopeful utopian horizons as a starting point to take real, practical actions.
The power of community
Not only resources get shared, though. The trans community as I know it is one of the most loving, supporting and truly bonded groups of people I have seen in my life. As a trans woman, the single most important part of my social transition was trans people enabling me to think about gender in a constructive way, helping me socially transition by having my back and being able to talk about topics that no one else will really understand.
As a trans woman, the single most important part of my mental health related to gender was speaking to other trans people. Quite frankly, the gender therapy they give you at the gender poli in the netherlands, if I have to speak from personal experience, is kind of a joke. And this may very well be the case because most gender therapists are not trans people.
Am I saying that gender therapy is useless? Absolutely not. But I am stressing the fact that our community actively mentally supporting each other when it comes to gender is equally and unmistakably crucial to our mental survival. To be understood can sometimes be more valuable than to get advice from yet another cis doctor about how to cope with the slings and arrows of outrageous dysphoria.
“An animal caught in a trap will gnaw its own leg off to survive. What will you do?” (On why we do what we do)
“And by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep.” -Hamlet
1 in 10 trans people attempted suicide last year. 36% of young queer people seriously considered suicide in the past year, of which 40% was trans. Transgender youth that were not able to get access to HRT were twice as likely to commit suicide than those who could. (The Trevor Project, 2025)
We do what we do, protest, share, survive, because we have no other choice. Because it’s a dire, cruel and bleak world where we are still oppressed, still hated for who we are, still misunderstood. Healthcare systems still fail us and it’s quite literally killing us. We do what we do because we share one of the most uncertain and daunting existences one could lead.
On the flipside, transgender people who report living in an accepting community commit suicide at less than a third of the rate. Community is how we survive. Love is how we survive. Sharing is how we survive.
So to all my trans brethren, sisters and siblings: Keep fighting, keep sharing aid, keep talking to each other, supporting each other, protesting, keep looking at the horizon of a utopian future, where we can finally rely on the systems that were supposed to protect us. For now, let’s survive. Together.
Literature:
England, E. (2022b). ‘Homelessness is a queer experience.’: utopianism and mutual aid as survival strategies for homeless trans people. Housing Studies, 40(7), 1545–1562. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2022.2108381
The Trevor Project 2025 U.S. National Survey on the Mental Health of LGBTQ+ Young People. (z.d.). https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2025/