As the postal survey on same-sex marriage looms, conservatives looking to spook voters into selecting “no” have increasingly made scapegoats out of trans and gender nonconforming bodies. From the Australian Christian Lobby advertisement, where a mother expresses concern that her son’s school told him he could wear a dress, to Tony Abbott’s fears about “gender fluidity” being taught as part of the curriculum, trans people – and especially young trans people – have been deliberately made targets by the right. Legalising same-sex marriage, they argue, is just one small step on the pathway towards ever more depraved concessions – that is, young trans people feeling safe and supported to explore their identities.

It’s been a cruel reminder that when queer rights are debated in the public sphere, trans bodies routinely wear a disproportionate cost. In contrast to the right’s attack on trans youth, the mainstream yes campaign has largely ignored gender nonconforming bodies altogether in its fight, with ad campaigns that exclusively feature two white, thin, cisgender queer people. This GetUp! clip, rather than explicitly oppose the transphobic nature of the right’s campaign materials, features two presumably cis people in a heterosexual marriage talk about “fairness” as if it were an abstract, intangible concept. For decades, a significant portion of cisgender gay advocates have mocked the idea that trans people have a place in the queer rights landscape at all – “we just want to get married, we don’t want anything extreme”.

There’s the argument that appealing to on-the-fence voters by presenting a campaign that speaks to normalcy and assimilation is the most straightforward way for our goals to be achieved. However, that’s little comfort to trans people who have been excluded by the respectability politics of the mainstream same-sex marriage campaign. After all, is a win really a win if we have to exclude our most vulnerable community members to achieve it? It’s not enough to say we can focus on trans people after marriage equality is achieved, when trans people are being viciously targeted as part of debate right now.

In queer politic and academia, the term “homonormativity” refers to the privileging of LGBT individuals who replicate hegemonic, heteronormative structures such as marriage, procreation and cisnormative gender identity. This hierarchy positions those at the bottom – trans people, queer people of colour – as a hindrance to homonormative groups receiving rights, and attempts to silence their voices in debate. We cannot allow these divisions to fragment our community in such a way.

If you truly believe in fighting for queer rights, your activism can’t stop at marriage. Not when nearly half of young trans people in this country have attempted suicide amid shocking rates of bullying and discrimination. Not when gay refugees and asylum seekers detained on Manus Island currently face the impossible decision of returning to home countries where homosexuality is punishable by execution, or living in Papua New Guinea, where it is a criminal offence. These issues aren’t isolated from one another – they’re all part of the same struggle.

Trans people, along with queer people of colour and other non-normative queer identities, have always been on the frontlines in the fight for progress. Internationally, the struggle for queer rights has only been made possible because of the sacrifices of trans women of colour like Marsha P Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Right now, trans folks need marriage equality campaigners to show that same solidarity. We need you to stick up for us. We need you to actively confront and challenge the virulent transphobia that the right have made central to their arguments against equality, rather than downplay our identities and role in queer communities – all for the sake of reassuring conditional voters we’re “just like you”.

It’s vital that we ask: who gets to be visible when we privilege one type of queer experience as the norm? What kinds of bodies are allowed to exist in those conditions? Why do we force ourselves to believe the only way to make progress is to appeal to people who would only accept us at our least subversive? I have seen what it looks like when queer communities and organising groups embrace the notion that we achieve real progress together, not divided. It is beautiful and it is powerful and it can enact change in a way that is inclusive of all queer identities. That is the future, I think, worth fighting for.