It’s amazing how much a space can change overnight. That was my first thought and I walked into this year’s Dyke March. I knew that TERFs – trans exclusionary radical feminists – would be showing up any minute.

Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism has been on the rise in recent years. Vancouver has been home to TERF ideology for decades, and much of the conversation has been centered on feminist spaces and who belongs there.

TERF presence at Dyke Marches has been notable around the world this year. In London, England, TERFs were allowed to lead the city’s Dyke March. This is organized backlash against trans rights. The heightened transphobia trans women are experiencing more recently is the brunt of backlash against a wave of trans organizing which is shedding light on more non-binary and trans masculine identities. It’s worth mentioning WAVAW Rape Crisis Centre firmly believes that trans women are women.

Commercial Drive had felt very different the night before the Dyke March, at the Trans March. Every year both marches are held on Commercial Drive, on the Friday evening and Saturday morning respectively. On Sunday, the Pride Parade takes place, across town in the West End. Traditionally home to cis gay men, many participants from the East Van marches don’t bother going to the Pride Parade, preferring the smaller, more community-focused events.

The trans march is growing every year, and is starting to rival Dyke March in size. It has the feeling of a family reunion, if your family is politically boisterous and creatively gendered, with plenty of time to catch up and make signs before marching. There’s lots of hugging, pamphlets passed around, and a warm welcoming of newcomers. The march itself tends to startle unsuspecting people on restaurant patios, and the homemade signs are politically uncompromising. It ends with a modest festival at Victoria Park, where the more prepared roll out picnic blankets and the rest sit on the grass to enjoy some local performers.

The contrast was distinct between Trans March and Dyke March this year. I saw a lot of the same faces at both events, which speaks to the fact that the two communities overlap in ways that make it impossible to draw a line between them.

There were also many more people at Dyke March, and some of them had come explicitly to push out trans women. There is often backlash against the TERFs who attend Dyke March, but it usually looks like a few onlookers shouting or raising a middle finger at the participants.

This year, the backlash was within the march; we were brushing shoulders and raising a cacophony of competing chants. Commercial Drive, which twelve or so hours previously had been the site of a raucous family reunion at the Trans March, had been transformed into something else entirely.

There’s a time for celebration and a time to roll up our sleeves.

We can’t be silent when this sort of exclusionary practice is increasingly taking hold in our movement. WAVAW will continue to show up in these spaces and affirm, loud and clear, that trans women are women. We will resist any notion of feminism that excludes trans women.

In the aftermath of this year’s Dyke March, we’re asking ourselves how to refuse complicity with transphobia, especially when it’s conflated with feminism. We’re talking around the office about what our responsibility is in this and what is the best way to move forward in advocating for the inclusion of trans women in feminist spaces.

The contrast between the Dyke March and Trans March reminded me how the same space can be very different depending on who’s in it.

I don’t want us to take for granted that our work to include trans women in our organization is done just because the mandate has included them for decades. It scares me that transphobia is so outright in our city and that our shoulders brush with it in organizing spaces, and it troubles me to be doing the work of bridging feminist and trans communities knowing that trans exclusionary feminism never went away, and instead is on the rise.

I hope that we, feminists and trans people and dykes – especially those who, like me, are all three – are learning from what we saw this year and challenging our complicity. I hope we will completely drown out transphobia. Let’s keep coming together until we do.