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Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex Edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith

ISBN-13: 978-1-84935-070-9

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Cover image: Marie Ueda, photo from the White Night riots,

San Francisco, CA 1979 Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society.

Cover by Kate Khatib I www.manifestor.org/ design Interior by Michelle Fleming with Kate Khatib

BUILDING AN AB LITI NIST

TRANS AND QUEER VE ENT WITH

EVERYTHING WE'VE G T

Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, Dean Spade

As we write this, queer and trans people across the United States and in many parts of the world have just celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. On that fateful night back in June 1969, sexual and gender outsiders rose up against ongoing brutal police violence in an inspiring act of defiance. These early freedom fighters knew all too well that the NYPD-"New York's finest"-were the frontline threat to queer and trans survival. Stonewall was the culmination of years of domination, resentment, and upheaval in many marginalized communities coming to a new consciousness of the depth of violence committed by the govern- ment against poor people, people of color, women, and queer people both within US borders and around the world. The Stonewall Rebellion, the mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and the campaign to

Captive Gender!,

free imprisoned Black-liberation activist Assata Shakur were all powerful examples of a groundswell of energy demanding an end to the "business as usual" of US terror during this time.

Could these groundbrealdng and often unsung activists have imag- ined that only forty years later the "official" gay rights agenda would be largely pro-police, pro-prisons, and pro-war-exactly the forces they worked so hard to resist? Just a few decades later, the most visible and well-funded arms of the "LGBT movement" look much more like a corporate strategizing session than a grassroots social justice movement. There are countless examples of this dramatic shift in priorities. What emerged as a fight against racist, anti-poor, and anti-queer police violence. now works hand in hand with local and federal law enforcement agen- cies-district attorneys are asked to speak at trans rallies, cops march in Gay Pride parades. The agendas of prosecutors-those who lock up our family, friends, and lovers-and many queer and trans organizations are becoming increasingly similar, with sentenc:e-and police-enhancing leg- islation at the top of the priority list. Hate crimes legislation is tacked on to multi-billion dollar "defense" bills to support US military domination in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Despite the rhetoric of an "LGBT community," transgender and gender-non-conforming people are repeatedly abandoned and marginalized in the agendas and priorities of our "lead" organizations-most recently in the 2007 gutting of the Em- ployment Non-Discrimination Act of gender identity protections. And as the rate of people (particularly poor queer and trans people of color) without steady jobs, housing, or healthcare continues to rise, and health and social services continue to be cut, those dubbed the leaders of the "LGBT movement" insist that marriage rights are the way to redress the inequalities in our communities.

For more and more queer and trans people, regardless of marital status, there is no inheritance, no health benefits from employers, no legal immigration status, and no state protection of our relationship to our children. Four decades after queer and trans people took to the streets throwing heels, bottles, bricks, and anything else we had to ward off police, the official word is that, except for being able to get married and fight in the military,2 we are pretty much free, safe, and equal. And those of us who are not must wait our turn until the "priority' battles are won by the largely white, male, upper-class lawyers and lobbyists who know better than us.3

Fortunately, radical queer and trans organizing for deep transfor- mation has also grown alongside this "trickle-down"4 brand of "equality'

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

politics mentioned above. Although there is no neat line between official gay "equality" politics on the one hand, and radical "justice" politics on the other, it is important to draw out some of the key distinctions in how different parts of our movements today are responding to the main problems that queer and trans people face. This is less about creating false dichotomies between "good" and "bad" approaches, and more about clarifying the actual impact that various strategies have, and recognizing that alternative approaches to the "official" solutions are alive, are politi- cally viable, and are being pursued by activists and organizations around the United States and beyond. In the first column, we identify some of these main challenges; in the second, we summarize what solutions ·are being offered by the well-resourced5 segments of our movement; and in the third, we outline some approaches being used by more radical and progressive queer and trans organizing to expand possibilities for broad- based, social-justice solutions to these same problems.

The Current Landscape

BIG PROBLEMS "OFFICIAL" SOLUTIONS TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACHES

Queer and trans Legalize same·-sex Strengthen Medicaid and Medicare; people, poor marriage to allow win universal healthcare; fight for

people, people people with health transgender health benefits; end of color, and im- benefits from their deadly medical neglect of people in

migrants have jobs to share with state custody minimal access to same-sex partners quality healthcare

Queer and trans Pass hate crimes leg- Build community relationships and in- people experience islation to increase frastructure to support the healing and regular and often prison sentences transformation of people who have

fatal violence from and strengthen lo- been impacted by interpersonal and partners, family cal and federal law intergenerational violence; join with members, com- enforcement; collect movements addressing root causes

munity members, statistics on rates of . of queer and trans premature death, employers, law violence; collaborate including police violence, imprison-

enforcement, and with local and federal ment, poverty, immigration policies, institutional of- law enforcement to and lack of healthcare and housing

ficials prosecute hate vio- Jenee and domestic

violence

Captive Genders

BIG PROBLEMS "OFFICIAL" SOLUTIONS , TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACHES

Queer and trans Eliminate bans on Join with war resisters, radical vet- members of the participation of gays erans, and young people to oppose

military experience and lesbians in US military intervention, occupation, and violence and dis- military war abroad and at home, and demand

crimination the reduction/elimination of "defense " budgets

Queer and trans Legalize same-sex End the use of immigration policy to people are targeted marriage to allow criminalize people of color, exploit by an unfair and same-sex internation- workers, and maintain the deadly

punitive immigra- al couples to apply wealth gap between the United States tion system for legal residency for and the Global South; support current

the non-US citizen . detainees and end ICE raids, deporta- spouse tions, and police collaboration

Queer and trans Legalize same sex Join with struggles of queer/trans and families are vul- marriage to provide non-queer/trans families of color, nerable to legal a route to "legalize" imprisoned parents and youth, na-

intervention and families with two par- tive families, poor families, military separation from ents of the same sex; families, and people with disabilities the state, institu- pass laws banning to win community and family self-de-

dons, and/or non- adoption discdmina- termination and the right to keep kids, queer people tion on the basis of parents, and other family members in

sexual orientation their families and communities

Institutions fail Legalize same-sex Change policies like hospital visita- to recognize fam- marriage to formally tion to recognize a variety of family ily connections recognize same-sex structures, not just opposite-sex and

outside of hetero- partners in the eyes same-sex couples; abolish inheritance sexual marriage of the law and demand radical redistribution of in contexts like wealth and an end to poverty

hospital visitation and inheritance

Building cm Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

BIG PROBLEMS "OFFICIAL", SOLUTIONS TRANSFORMATIVE APPROACHES

Queer and trans Advocate for "cultural Build ongoing, accountable relation- people are dis- competency" training ships with and advocate for queer and proportionately for law enforcement trans people who are locked up to

policed, arrested, and the construction support their daily well-being, healing, and imprisoned, of queer and trans- leadership, and survival; build com-

and face high rates specific and "gender- nmnity networks of care to support of violence in state responsive" facilities; people coming out of prison and jail; custody from of- create written policies collaborate with other movements to ficials as well as that say that queer address root causes of queer and trans

other imprisoned and trans people are imprisonment; work to abolish pris- or detained people equal to other people ons, establish community support for

in state custody; stay people with disabilities and ellminate largely silent on the medical and psychatric institution- high rates of impris- alization, and provide permanent onment in queer and housing rather than shelter beds for all trans communities, people without homes

communities of and poor com- munities

I. How Did We Get Here? The streams of conservative as well as more progressive and radical queer and trans politics developed over time and in the context of a rapidly changing political, economic, and social landscape. Although we can't of- fer a full history of how these different streams developed and how the more conservative one gained national dominance, we think it is impor- tant to trace the historical context in which these shifts occurred. To chart a different course for ou,r movements, we need to understand the road we've traveled In particular, we believe that there are two major features of the second half of the twentieth century that shaped the context in which the queer and trans movement developed: (1) the active resistance and chal- lenge by radical movement to state violence, and subsequent systematic bacldash,7 and (2) the massive turmoil and transformation of the global economy. 8 Activists and scholars use a range of terms to describe this era in which power, wealth, and oppression were transformed to respond to these two significant "crises"-including neoliberalism, the "New World Order," empire, globalization, free market democracy, or late capitalism.

Captive Genders

Each term describes a different aspect or "take" on the current historical . moment that we are living in.

It is important to be clear that none of the strategies of the "New World Order" are new. They might work faster, use new technologies, and recruit the help of new groups, but they are not new. Oppressive dynamics in the United States are as old as the colonization of this land and the founding of a country based on slavery and genocide. However, they have taken intensified, tricky forms in the past few decades-,-particularly because qur governments keep telling us those institutions and practices have been "abolished." There were no "good old days" in the United States-just times in which our movements and our communities were stronger or weaker, and times when we used different cracks in the system as op- portunities for resistance. All in all, we might characterize the past many decades as a time in which policies and ideas were promoted by powerful nations and institutions (such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund) to destroy the minimal safety nets set up for vulnerable people, dismantle the gains made by social movements, and redistribute wealth, resources, and life changes upward-away from the poor and toward the elite.9

Below are some of the key tactics chat the United States and others have used in this most recent chapter of our history:

• Pull Yourself Up by Your Bootstraps, Again 'Ihe US government and its ally nations and institutions in the Global North helped pass laws and policies that made it harder for workers to organize into unions; destroyed welfare programs and created the image of people on welfare as immoral and fraudulent; and created interna- tional economic policies and trade agreements that reduced safety nets, worker rights, and environmental protections, particularly for nations in the Global South. Together, these efforts have dismantled laws and social programs meant to protect people from poverty, violence, sickness, and other harms of capitalism.

EXAMPLE: In the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented by the United States under

Democratic President Clinton to make it easier for corporations to do business across borders betv?een the United States, Mexico,

and Canada. Unfortunately, by allowing corporations to outsource their labor much more cheaply, the agreement also led to the loss.

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

of hundreds of thousands of US jobs and wage depression even in "job receiving" countries. lO Additionally, human rights advocates

have documented widespread violations of workers rights since NAFTA, including "favoritism toward employer-controlled unions; firings for workers' organizing efforts; denial of collective bargaining

rights; forced pregnancy testing; mistreatment of migrant workers; life-threatening health and safety conditions"; and other violations

of the right to freedom of association, freedom from discrimination, and the right to a minimum wage.11 Loss of jobs in the United States

reduced the bargaining power of workers, now more desperate for wages then ever, and both wages and benefits declined, with many

workers now forced to work as "temps" or part-time with no benefits or job security.

EXAMPLE: In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which ef-

fectively dismantled what existed of a welfare state-creating a range of restrictive and targeting measures that required work, limited aid,

and increased penalties for welfare recipients. lhe federal government abdicated its responsibility to provide minimal nets for poor

and working-class people, using the rhetoric of "personal responsibil-

ity'' and "work" to justify the exploitation and pain caused by capi- talism and racism. Sexist, racist images of poor people as immoral,

fraudulent drug addicts fueled these policy changes. Since then, differ-

ent cities have adopted local measures to gut economic safety nets for poor, homeless, and working-class people. In San Francisco, Mayor Newsom's notorious 2002 "Care Not Cash" program slashed welfare

benefits for homeless people, insisting that benefits given to the home- less were being spent on "drugs and alcohol."12

" Scapegoating The decrease in manufacturing jobs and the gutting of social safety nets for the poor and working class created a growing class of people who were marginally employed and housed, and forced into criminalized economies such as sex work and the drug trade. This class of people was blamed for the poverty and inequity they faced-labeled drug dealers, welfare queens, criminals, and hoodlums-and were used to justify harmful poli- cies that expanded violence and harm. At the same time, criminal penal- ties for behaviors associated with poverty, like drug use, sleeping outside, .

Captive Genders

graffiti, and sex work have increased in many parts the United States, and resources for policing these kinds of "crimes" has also increased.

EXAMPLE: In the 1990s, states across the· United States began to sign into law so-called "Three Strikes" measures that mandated

standard, long (often life) sentences for people convicted of three

felonies, many including non-violent offenses. California's law has re-

sulted in sentences of twenty-five years or more for people convicted

of things like shoplifting. The popularity of Three Strikes laws have

been fueled by a growing cultural obsession with criminality and

punishment that relies on images of violent and dangerous "career

criminals" while functioning to imprison enormous numbers oflow-

income people and people of color whose behaviors are the direct

results of economic insecurity.

EXAMPLE: Under President Clinton's 1996 welfare reforms, any- one convicted of a drug-related crime is automatically banned for

life from receiving cash assistance and food stamps. Some states have

since opted out of this ban, but for people living in fifteen states, this

draconian measure presents nearly insurmountable barriers to becom-

ing self-sufficient. Unable to receive cash assistance and subject to job

discrimination because of their cr.iminal histories, many people with

drug-related convictions go back into the drug trade as the only way

to earn enough to pay the rent and put food on the table. 1he lifetime

welfare ban has been shown to particularly harm women and their

children. 13

• Fear-Mongering

The government and corporate media used racist, xenophobic, and mi- sogynist fear-mongering to distract us from increasing economic disparity and a growing underclass in the United States and abroad. The War on Drugs in the 1980s and the Bush Administration's War on Terror, both of which are ongoing, created internal and external enemies ("criminals" and "terrorists") to blame for and distract from the ravages of racism, capital- ism, patriarchy, and imperialism. In exchange, these enemies (and any- one who looked like them) could be targeted with violence and murder. During this time, the use of prisons, policing, detention, and surveillance skyrocketed as the government declared formal war against all those who it marks as "criminals" or "terrorists."

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

EXAMPLE: In the 1980s, the US government declared a "War on Drugs" and drastically increased mandatory sentences for violating

drug prohibition laws. It also created new prohibitions for accessing

public housing, public benefits, and higher education for people con~

victed of drug crimes. The result was the imprisonment of over one

million people a year, the permanent marginalization and disenfran-

chisement for people convicted, and a new set of military and foreign

policy intervention justifications for the United States to take brutal

action in Latin America.

EXAMPLE: Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, politicians manipulated the American

public's fear and uncertainty to push through a range of new laws and

policies justified by a declared "War on Terror." New legislation like

the PATRIOT Act, the Immigrant Registration Act, and the Real ID

Act, as well as new administrative policies and practices, increased the

surveillance state, reduced even the most basic rights and living stan-

dards of immigrants, and turned local police, schoolteachers, hospital

workers, and others into immigration enforcement officers.

• The Myth That Violence and Discrimination Are Just About "Bad" Individuals

Discrimination laws and hate crimes laws encourage us to understand oppression as something that happens when individuals use bias to deny someone a job because of race or sex or some other characteristic, or beat up or kill someone because of such a characteristic. This way of thinking, sometimes called the "perpetrator perspective," 14 makes people · think about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism in terms of individual behaviors and bad intentions rather than wide-scale structural oppression that often operates without some obvious indi- vidual actor aimed at denying an individual person an opportunity. The violence of imprisoning millions of poor people and people of color, for example, can't be adequately explained by finding one nasty rac- ist individual, but instead requires looking at a whole web of institu- tions, policies, and practices that make it "normal" and "necessary'' to warehouse, displace, discard, and annihilate poor people and people of color. Thinking about violence and oppression as the work of "a few bad apples" undermines our· ability to analyze our conditions systemically and intergenerationally, and to therefore organize for systemic change.

Captive Genders

This narrow way of thinking about oppression is repeated in law, policy, the media, and nonprofits.

EXAMPLE: Megan's Laws are statutes that require people convicted of sexual offenses to register and that require this information be avail-

able to the public. These laws have been passed in jurisdictions around

the country in the last two decades, prompted by and generating pub-

lic outrage about child sexual abuse (CSA). Studies estimate that l in

3 people raised as girls and 1 in 6 people raised as boys were sexually

abused as children, as a result of intergenerational trauma, commu-

nity- and state-sanctioned abusive norms, and alienation. Rather than

resourcing comprehensive programs to support the healing of survi-

vors and transformation of people who have been sexually abusive,

or interrupt the family and community norms that contribute to the

widespread abuse of children, Megan's Laws have ensured that people

convicted of a range of sexual offenses face violence, the inability to

find work or a place to live, and severely reduced chances of recov-

ery and healing. Despite the limited or nonexistent deterrent effect

of such laws, they remain the dominant "official" approach to the

systemic problems ofCSA. 15

EXAMPLE: As we write this, the Matthew Shepard Local Law En~ forcement Enhancement Act has recently passed in the US Senate,

and if signed into law would give $10 million to state and local law

enforcement agencies, expand federal law enforcement power focused

on hate crimes, and add the death penalty as a possible punishment

for those convicted. This bill is heralded as a victory for transgender

people because it will make gender identity an included category in

Federal Hate Crimes law. Like Megan's Law, this law and the advocacy

surrounding it (including advocacy by large LGBT nonprofit orga-

nizations) focus attention on individuals who kill people because of

their identities. These laws frame the problem of violence in our com-

munities as one of individual "hateful" people, when in reality, trans

people face short life-spans because of the enormous systemic violence

in welfare systems, shelters, prisons, jails, foster care, juvenile punish-

ment systems, and immigration, and the inability to access basic sur-

vival resources. ·These laws do nothing to prevent our deaths, they just

use our deaths to expand a system that endangers our lives and places

a chokehold on our communities. 16

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

• Undermining Transformative Organizing

The second half of the twentieth century saw a major upsurge in radical and revolutionary organizing in oppressed communities in the United States and around the world. This powerful organizing posed a signifi- cant threat to the legitimacy of US power and capitalist empire more broadly, and therefore needed to be contained. These movements were undermined by two main strategies: First, the radical movements of the 1960s and '70s were criminalized, with the US government using tactics of imprisonment, torture, sabotage, and assassination to target and de- stroy groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and Young Lords, among others. Second, the growth of the nonprofit sector has seen social movements professionalizing, chasing philanthropic dol- lars, separating into "issue areas," and moving toward social services and legal reform projects rather than radical projects aimed at the underlying causes of poverty and injustice. 17 These developments left significant sec- tions of the radical left traumatized and decimated, wiping out a genera- tion of revolutionaries and shifting the terms of resistance from revolution and transformation to inclusion and reform, prioritizing state- and foun- dation-sanctioned legal reforms and social services over mass organizing and direct action.

EXAMPLE: The FBI's Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTEL- PRO) is a notorious example of the US government's use of infiltra-

tion, surveillance, and violence to overtly target dissent and resistance.

COINTELPRO was exposed when internal government documents

were revealed that detailed the outrageous work undertaken by the

federal government to dismantle resistance groups in the 1960s and

'70s. Although the program was dissolved under that name, the tactics

continued and can be seen today in current controversies about wire-

tapping and torture as well as in the USA PATRIOT Act. Overt ac-

tion to eliminate resistance and dissent here is as old as the European

colonization of North America. 18

EXAMPLE: In the wake of decades of radical organizing by people in women's prisons and activists on the outside decrying systemic medical

neglect, sexual violence, and the destruction of family bonds, Califor-

nia legislators in 2006 proposed a so-called "gender responsive cor-

rections" bill that would allow people in women's prisons to live with

their children and receive increased social services. To make this plan

Captive Genders

work, the bill called for millions of dollars in new prison construction.

The message of"improving the lives of women prisoners" and creating

more "humane" prisons-rhetoric that is consistently used by those

in power to distract us from the fundamentally violent conditions of

a capitalist police state-appealed to liberal, well-.intentioned feminist

researchers, advocates, and legislators. Anti-p'rison organizations such

as Oakland-based Now and others working in solidarity with

the resounding sentiment of people in women's prisons, pointed out

that this strategy was actually just a back door to creating 4,500 new

prison beds for women in California, yet again expanding opportuni-

ties to criminalize poor women and transgender people in one of the

nation's most imprisoning states.19

• The Hero Mindset 'The United States loves its heroes and its narratives-Horatio Alger, rags- to-riches, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," streets "paved with gold," the rugged frontiersman, the benevolent philanthropist, and Obama as savior, among others. These narratives hide the uneven concentration of wealth, resources, and opportunity among different groups of people-the ways in which not everybody can just do anything if they put their minds to it and work hard enough. In the second half of the twentieth century, this individualistic and celebrity-obsessed culture had a deep impact on social movements and how we write narratives. Stories mass struggle became stories of individuals overcoming great odds. The rise of the nonprofit as a key vehicle for social change bolstered this trend, giving incentives to charismatic leaders (often executive directors, often people with privilege) to frame struggles in ways that prioritize symbolic victories (big court cases, sensationalistic media coverage) and ignore the daily work of building a base and a movement for the long haul. This trend also compromises the accountability of leaders and organizations to their constituencies, and de- values activism in the trenches.

EXAMPLE: Rosa Parks is ·one of the most well-known symbols of resistance during the African American Civil Rights movement in

the 1950s and 1960s. She is remembered primarily for "sparking" the

Montgomery Bus Boycott and as the "mother of.the civil rights move-

ment."20 In popular mythology, Ms. Parks was an ordinary woman who simply decided one day that she would not up her seat to a

white person in a "lonely act of defiance."21 In Ms. Parks was

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

an experienced civil rights activist who received political education

and civil disobedience training at the well-known leftist Highlander

Folk School, which still exists today. Ms. Parks's refusal to give up her

seat was far from a "lonely act," but was rather just one in a series of

civil disobediences by civil rights leaders to target segregation in pub- lic services. The Civil Rights Movement of the period was a product

of the labor and brilliance of countless New-World African enslaved

people, African American people, and their allies working since be-

fore the founding of the United States, not simply attributable to any

one person. The portrayal of mass struggles as individual acts hides a

deeper understanding of oppression and the need for broad resistance.

EXAMPLE: Oprah's well-publicized giveaways22-as well as a range of television shows that feature "big wins" such as makeovers, new

houses, and new cars-have helped to create the image of social change

in our society as individual acts of "charity" rather than concerted ef-

forts by mass groups of people to change relationships of power. These

portrayals affirm the false idea that we live in a meritocracy in which

any one individual's perseverance and hard work are the only keys

needed to wealth and success. Such portrayals hide realities like the

racial wealth divide and other conditions that produce and maintain

inequality on a group level, ensuring that most people will not rise

above or fall below their place in the economy, regardless of their indi-

vidual actions. In reality, real social change that alters the relationships of power throughout history have actually come about when large

groups of people have worked together toward a common goal.

Together, the tactics that we describe above function as a strategy of counter-revolution-an attempt to squash the collective health and po- litical will of oppressed people, and to buy off people with privilege in order to support the status quo. This is a profoundly traumatic process that deepened centuries of pain, loss, and harm experienced by people of color, immigrants, queer and trans people, women, and others marked as "disposable." For many of us, this included losing our lives and our loved ones to the devastating government-sanctioned HIV/AIDS pandemic and ongoing attacks from family, neighbors, and government officials.

· Perhaps one of the most painful features of this period has been the separating of oppressed communities and movements from one another. Even though our communities are all overlapping and our struggles for

Captive Genders

liberation are fundamentally linked, the "divide and conquer" strategy of the "New World Order" has taught us to think of our identities and struggles as separate and competing. In particular, it was useful to main- taining harmful systems and conditions to create a false divide between purportedly separate ("white") gay issues and ("straight") people of color, immigrant, and working-class· issues to prevent deep partnerships across multiple lines of difference for social transformation. In this context, the most visible and well-funded arms of LGBT organizing got caught up in fighting for small-scale reforms and battles to be recognized as "equal" and "visible" under the law and in the media without building the sustained power and self-determination of oppressed communities. Instead of try- ing to change the system, the official LGBT agenda fought to just be welcomed into it, in exchange for helping to keep other oppressed people at the bottom.

But thankfully that's not the end of the story. As we describe below, this period also nurtured powerful strands of radical queer and trans poli- tics organizing at the intersections of oppressions and struggles and in the legacy of the revolutionary freedom fighters of an earlier generation.

II. Reclaiming a Radical Legacy Despite the powerful destructive impacts that the renewed forces of neoliberal globalization and the "New World Order" have had on our communities and our social movements, there are and always have been radical politics and movements to challenge the exploitation that the Unit- ed States is founded upon. These politics have been developed in commu- nities of color and in poor and working-class, immigrant, queer, disability, and feminist communities in both "colonized" and "colonizing" nations, from the Black Panther Party in Oakland to the Zapatistas in Chiapas to the Audre Larde Project in New York. As the story of Stonewall teaches us, our movements didn't start out in the courtroom; they started out in the streets! Informing both the strategies of our movements as well as our everyday decisions about how we live our lives and form our relationships, these radical politics offer queer communities and movements a way out of the murderous politics that are masked as invitations to "inclusion" and "equality" within fundamentally exclusive, unequal systems. Sometimes these spaces for transformation are easier to spot than others-but you can find them everywhere, from church halls to lecture halls, from the les- sons of our grandmothers to the lessons we learn surviving in the world, from the post-revolutionary Cuba to post-Katrina New Orleans.

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

These radical lineages have nurtured and guided transformative branches of queer and trans organizing working at intersections of identities and struggles for collective liberation. branches have re- defined what count as queer and trans issues, losses, victories, and strate- gies-putting struggles against policing, imprisonment, borders, global- ization, violence, and economic exploitation at the center of struggles for gender and sexual self-determination. Exploding the false division between struggles for (implicitly white and middle-class) sexual and gen- der justice and (implicitly straight) racial and economic justice, there is a groundswell of radical queer and trans organizing that's changing all the rules-you just have to know where to find it. In the chart below, we draw out a few specific strands of these diverse radical lineages that have paved the ,vay for this work. In the first column, we highlight a value that has emerged from these radical lineages. In the second column, we lift up specific organizations striving to embody these values today.23

Deepening the Path of Those Who Came Before

RADICAL LINEAGE

Liberation is a collective process! The conventional nonprofit hierarchi- cal structure is actually a very recent

phenomenon, and one that is modeled off corporations. Radical v

tions, particularly feminist and women of color-led organizations, have often

prioritized working collectively-where group awareness, consensus, and whole-

ness is valued over majority rule and individual leadership. Collectivism at its best takes up the concerns of the

few as the concerns of the whole, For example, when one member of a group or community cannot attend an event or meeting because the building is not wheelchair accessible, it becomes a mo- ment for all to examine and challenge ableisrn in our culture-instead of just dismissing it as a "problem" that affects

only people who use wheelchairs.

CONTEMPORARY DESCENDANT

The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), among many other " has

shown just how powerful working collectively can be-with their staff and volunteers, majority people of

color, majority trans and gender-non- conforming governing collective, SRLP

is showing the world that how we do our work is a vital part of the work, and · that doing things collectively helps us

to create the world we want to see as we're building it.

Captive Genders

RADICAL LINEAGE CONTEMPORARY DESCENDANT

"Tric.lde up" change! We know that Queers for Economic Justice in when those in power say they will New York City and the Transgender,

"come back" for those at the bottom of Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice the social and economic hierarchy, it Project in San Francisco are two great will never happen. Marginalization is examples of "trickle up" change-by

increased when a part of a marginalized focusing on queers on welfare, in the group makes it over the line into the shelter system, and in prison systems,

mainstream, leaving others behind and these groups demand social and eco- reaffirming the status quo. We've all nomic justice for those with the fewest

seen painful examples of this in LGBT resources and the smallest investment in politics time after time-from the maintaining the system as it is.

abandonment of transgender folks in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to the idea that gay mar- riage is the first step toward universal

healthcare. Instead, we know that free- dom and justice for the· most oppressed people means freedom and justice for everyone, and that we have to start at the bottom. The changes required to

improve the daily material and spiritual lives of low-income queer and transgen- der people of color would by default in- dude large-scale transformation of our entire economic, education, healthcare, and legal systems. When you put those

with the fewest resources and those facing multiple systems of oppression

at the center of analysis and organizing, everybody benefits.

Be careful of all those welcome mats! Critical Resistance is a great example Learning from history and other social- of this commitment. In the group's

justice movements is a key principle. focus on prison abolition (instead of re- Other movements and other moments form), its members examine their strat-

have been drained of their original egies and potential proposals through power and purpose and appropriated the question "Will we regret this in ten

for purposes opposing their principles, years?" This question is about taking a either by governments working to long-term view and assessing a potential

dilute and derail transformation or by opportunity (such as any given proposal corporations looking to turn civil un- to "improve" or "reform" prisons or sen- rest into a fashion statement (or both). tencing laws) against their commitment Looking back critically at where other to abolishing-not expanding or even movements have done right and gone maintaining-the prison industrial

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

RADICAL LINEAGE CONTEMPORARY DESCENDANT

wrong helps us stay creative and ac- complex. The message here is that even countable to our communities and our though it might feel nice to get an invi-

politics. tation to the party, we would be wise to ask about the occasion.

For us, by us! The leadership, wisdom, FIERCE! in New York City is a great and labor of those most affected by an example of this principle: By building issue should be centralized from the the power of queer and trans youth

start. This allows those with the most to of color to run campaigns, organize gain from social justice to direct what one another, and challenge gentrifica- that justice will look like and gives al- tion and police violence, FIERCE! has

lies the chance to directly support their become a powerful force that young leadership. people of color see themselves in.

At FIERCE!, it is the young people directly facing the intersections of age- ism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia,

and transphobia who identify what the problems, priorities, and strategies should be rather than people whose

expertise on these issues derives from advanced degrees or other criteria. The role of people not directly affected by the issues is to support the youth in

manifesting their visions, not to control the political possibilities that they are

inventing.

Let's practice what we preach! Also An inspiring example of praxis can be known as "praxis," this ideal strives for found in the work of Southerners on

the alignment of what we do, why we're New Ground (SONG), based in Adan- doing it, and how we do it-not just in ta, Ga. SONG strives to integrate heal- our formal work, but also in our daily ing, spirit, and creativity in their work lives. This goes beyond the campaign organizing across race, class, gender,

goals or strategies of our organizations, and sexuality to embody new (and old!) and includes how they are organized, forms of community, reflective of our

how we treat one another, and how we commitments to liberation. SONG and treat ourselves. If we believe that people other groups show that oppression is of color have the most to gain from the traumatic, and trauma needs to be ad- end of racism, then we should support dressed, acknowledged, and held both and encourage people of color's leader- by individuals and groups of people. If ship in fights to end white supremacy, trauma is ignored or swept under the and for a fair economy and an end to rug, it just comes back as resentment,

the wealth gap. People in our organiza- chaos, and divisiveness. We are all tions should get paid equally regardless whole, complex human beings that

Captive Genders

RADICAL LINEAGE CONTEMPORARY DESCENDANT

of advanced degrees, and our working have survived a great deal of violence to conditions and benefits should be gen- get where we are today. Our work must erous, If we support a world in which support our full humanity and reflect

we have time anµ resources to take the world we want to live in. care of ourselves, as well as our friends, families, and neighbors, we might not

want to work sixty hours a week.

Real safety means collective trans- Groups like Creative Interventions formation! Oppressed communities and generationFIVE in Oakland, Ca- have always had ways to deal with lif., Communities Against Rape and

violence and harm withour relying on Abuse in Seattle, Wash., and the Audre police, prisons, immigration, or kicking Lorde Project's Safe OUTside the Sys- someone out-knowing' that relying on tern (SOS) Collective, have been creat- those forces would put them in greater ing exciting ways to support the healing danger. Oppressed people have often and transformation of people ':'ho have

known that these forces were the main survived and caused harm, as well as sources of violence that they faced-the the conditions that pass violence down

central agent of rape, abuse, murder, from one generation to another. Be- and exploitation, The criminal punish- cause violence touches every queer and ment system has tried to convince us trans person directly or indirectly; creat-

that we do not know how to solve·our ing ways to respond to violence that are own problems and that locking people transformative and healing (instead of

up and putting more cops on our oppressive, shaming, or traumatizing) streets are the only ways we can stay is a tremendous opportunity to reclaim

safe or heal from trauma. Unfortunately our radical legacy, We .can no longer we often lack other options. Many· allow for our deaths to be the justifica- organizations and groups of people tion for so many other people's deaths have been working to interrupt the through policing, imprisonment, and

intergenerational practices of intimate detention. Locking people up, having violence, sexual violence, hate violence, more cops in the streets, or throwing and police violence without relying on more people out will never heal the the institutions that target, warehouse, wounds of abuse or trauma.

kill, and shame us.

Resisting the Traps, Ending Trans Imprisonment Even in the context of growing imprisonment rates and deteriorating safety nets, the past decade has brought with it an upsurge in organizing and activism to challenge the imprisonment and policing of transgender and gender-non-conforming communities. 32 Through high-profile law~ suits, human rights and media documentation, conferences and trainings,

Building cm Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

grassroots organizing, and coalitional efforts, more individuals and orga- nizations are aware of the dynamics of trans imprisonment than ever. This work has both fallen prey to the tricky traps of the "New World Order" that we described above and also generated courageous new ways of do- ing the work of transformation and resistance that are in line with the radical values that we also trace. What was once either completely erased or significantly marginalized on the agendas of both the LGBT and anti- prison/prisoner rights movements is now gaining more and more visibil- ity and activity. We think of this as a tremendous opportunity to choose which legacies and practices we want for this work moving forward. This is not about playing the blame game and pointing fingers at which work is radical and which is oppressive, but rather about building on all of our collective successes, losses, and contradictions to do work that will trans- form society (and all of us) as we know it.

Below are a few helpful lessons that have been guided by the values above and generated at the powerful intersections of prison abolition and gender justice:33 ·

1. We refuse to create "deserving" vs. "undeserving" victims. 34

Although we understand that transgender and gender-non-conforming people in prisons, jails, and detention centers experience egregious and often specific forms of violence-including sexual assault, rape,· medi- cal neglect and discrimination, and humiliation based on transphobic norms-we recognize that all people impacted by the prison industrial complex are facing severe violence. Instead of saying that transgender people are the "most" oppressed in prisons, we can talk about the dif- ferent forms of violence that people impacted by the prison industrial complex face, and how those forms of violence help maintain the status quo common sense that the "real bad people" "rapists," "murder- ers," "child molesters," in some cases now the "bigots" -deserve to be locked up. Seeking to understand the specific arrangements that cause certain communities to face particular types of violence at the hands of police and in detention can allow us to develop solidarity around shared and different experiences with these forces and build effective resistance that gets to the roots of these problems. Building arguments about trans people as "innocent victims" while other prisoners are cast as dangerous and deserving of detention only undermines the power of a shared resis- tance strategy that sees imprisonment as a violent, dangerous tactic for everybody it touches.

Captive Genders

We know that the push for hate crimes laws as the solution to an- ti-queer and -trans violence will never actually address the fundamental reasons why we are vulnerable to violence in the first place or why ho- mophobia and transphobia are encouraged in our cultures. Individual- izing solutions like hate crimes laws create a false binary of "perpetrator" and "victim" or "bad" and "good" people without addressing the underly- ing systemic problem, and often strengthen that problem. In place of this common sense, we understand that racism, state violence, and capitalism are the root causes of violence in our culture, not individual "bigots" or even prison guards. \% must end the cycle of oppressed people being pitted against one anothe1:

2. We support strategies that weaken oppressive institutions, not strengthen them.

We can respond to the crises that our communities are facing right now while refusing long-term compromises that will strengthen the very insti- tutions that are hurting us. As more and more awareness is being raised about the terrible violence that transgender and gender-non-conforming people face in prisons, jails, and detention centers, some prisoner rights and queer and trans researchers and advocates are suggesting that building trans-specific prisons or jails is the only way that imprisoned transgender and gender-non-conforming people will be safe in the short-term. Par- ticularly in light of the dangerous popularity of "gender responsiveness" among legislators and advocates alike, we reject all notions that we must expand the prison industrial complex to respond to immediate condi- tions of violence. Funneling more money into prison building of any kind strengthens the prison industrial complex's death hold on our communi- ties. We know that if they build it, they will fill it, and getting trans people out of prison is the only real way to address the safety issues that trans prisoners face. \% want strategies that will reduce and ultimately eliminate the number of people and dollars going into prisons, while attending to the immediate healing and redress of individual imprisoned people.

3. We must transform exploitative dynamics in our work. A lot of oppressed people are hyper-sexualized in dominant culture as a way to create· them as a threat, a fetish, or a caricature-transgender women, black men, Asian and Pacific Islander women, to name a few. Despite often good intentions to raise awareness about the treatment of

. transgender and gender-non-conforming people in prisons, we recognize

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

th::ix much of the "public education" work around these issues often re- lies on sexualization, voyeurism, sensationalism, and ferishization to get its point across. In general is a focus on graphic descriptions of people's bodies (specifically their genitals), sexual violence, and the hu- miliation they have faced. Imprisoned people (who are usually repre- sented as black) and transgender people (who are usually represented as transgender women of color in this context) have long been the tar- get of voyeuristic representation-from porn movies that glorify rape in prison to fetishizing "human rights" research distributed to major- ity white, middle.class audiences. As transgender people who often have our bodies on display for non-transgender people who feel empowered to question, display, and discuss us, we know that this is a dangerous trend that :Seriously undercuts the integrity of our work and the types of relationships that can be formed. Unless we address these exploitative power dynamics in our work, even our most "well-intentioned" strategies and movements will reproduce the prison industrial complex's norms of transphobic, misogynist, and racist sexualized violence. Research, media, cultural work, and activism on this issue needs to be accountable to and di- rected by low-income transgender people and transgenderpeople of color and our organizations.

4. We see ending trans imprisonment as pru·t of the larger struggle for transfotmation.

The violence that transgender people-significantly low-income trans- gender people of color-face in prisons, jails, and detention cemers and the cycles of poverty and criminalization that leads so many of us to im- prisonment is a key place to work for broad-based social and political transformation. There is no way that transgender people can ever be "safe" in prisons as long as prisons exist and, as scholar Fred Moten has writ- ten, as long as we live in a society that could even have prisons. Building a trans and queer abolitionist movement means building power among people facing multiple systems of oppression in order to imagine a world beyond mass devastation, violence, and inequity that occurs within and between communities. We must resist the trap of being compartmental- ized into "issues" and "priorities" and sacrificing a broader political vision and movement to react to the crisis of the here and now. This is the logic that allows many white and middle-class gay and lesbian folks to think that marriage is the most important and pressing LGBT issue, without being invested in the real goal of ending racism and capitalism. Struggling

3.5

Captive Genders

against trans imprisonment is one of many key places to radicalize queer and . trans politics, expand anti-prison politics, and join in a l,irger movement for racial, economic, gende1; and social justice to end alt forms of militarization, criminalization, and wmfare.

Ill. So You Think We're Impossible? This stuff is heavy, we realize. Om communities and our movements are up against tremendous odds and have inherited a great deal of trauma that we are still struggling to deal with. A common and reasonable response to these conditions is getting overwhelmed, feeling defeated, losing hope. In this kind of emotional and political climate, when activists call for deep change like prison abolition (or, gasp, an LGBT agenda centered around prison abolition), our demands get called "impossible" or "idealistic" or even "divisive." As trans people, we've been hearing this for ages. After all, according to our legal system, the media, science, and many of our families and religions, we shouldn't exist! Our ways of living and expressing our- selves break such fundamental rules that systems crash at our feet, close their doors to us, and attempt to wipe us out. And yet we exist, continuing to build and sustain new ways of looldng at gender, bodies, family, desire, resistance, and happiness that nourish us and challenge expectations.

In an age when thousands of people are murdered annually in the name of "democracy," millions of people are locked up to "protect public safety," and LGBT organizations march hand in hand with cops in Pride parades, being impossible may just be the best thing we've got going for ourselves: Impossibility may very well be our only possibility.

What would it mean to embmce, rather than shy away fi'om, the impossibility of our ways of living as well as our political visions? What would it mean to desire a future that we can't even imagine but that we are told couldn't ever exist? We see the abolition of policing, prisons, jails, and detention not strictly as a narrow answer to "imprisonment" and the abuses that occur within prisons, but also as a challenge to the rule of poverty, violence, racism, alienation, and disconnection that we face every day. Abolition is not just about closing the doors to violent institutions, but also about building up and recovering institutions and practices and relationships that nurture wholeness, self-determination, and transforma- tion. Abolition is not some distant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced. by our ancestors and friends. Ev- ery time we insist on accessible and affirming healthcare, safe and quality

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing rela- tionships, and being our full and whole selves, we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation: in the here and now and the ever after.

Maybe wrestling with such a significant demand is the wake-up call that an increasingly sleepy LGBT movement needs. The true potential of queer and trans politics cannot be found in attempting to reinforce our tenuous right to exist by undermining someone else's. If it is not clear already, we are all in this together. To claim our legacy of beautiful impos- sibility is to begin practicing ways of being with one another and making

· movement that sustain all life on this planet, without exception. It is to begin spealdng what we have not yet had the words to wish for.

NOTES

1. We would like to thank the friends, comrades, and organizations whose work,

love, and thinking have paved the path to this paper and our collective move-

ments for liberation, including: Anna Agathangelou, Audre Lorde Project,

Community United Against Violence (CUAV), Communities Against Rape and

Abuse (CARA), Critical Resistance, Eric Stanley, FIERCE!, INCITE! Women

of Color Against Violence, Justice Now, Lala Yantes, Mari Spira, Miss Major,

Mordecai Cohen Ettinger, Nat Smith, Southerners on New Ground (SONG),

Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), Transforming Justice Coalition, Transgender,

Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), and Vanessa Huang.

2. In the wake of the 2011 repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, queer and trans people

who oppose the horrible violence committed by the US military all over the

world have been disappointed not only by pro-military rhetoric of the cam-

paign ro allow gays and lesbians to serve, but also by the new debates that have

emerged since then about ROTC on college campuses. Many universities that

have excluded the military from campuses are now.considering bringing it back

ro campus, and some activists are arguing that the military should be kept off

campus because trans people are still excluded from service. The terms of this

debate painfully embraces US militarism, and forgets that long-term campaigns

to exclude the US military from college campuses and ro disrupt military re-

cruitment campaigns and strategies are based in not only the horrible violence

of the military toward service members but also the motivating colonial and

imperial purposes of US militarism.

3. This has been painfully illustrated by a range of LGBT foundation and indi-

vidual funders who, in the months leading up to the struggle over California's

Captive Genders

same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8, declared that marriage equality needed to

be the central funding priority and discontinued vital funding for anti-violence,

HIV/AIDS, and arts organizations, among others.

4. This is a reference to the "trickle-down" economic policies associated with the

Reagan Administration, which promoted tax cuts for che rich under the guise of

creating jobs for middle-class and working-class people. The left has rightfully

argued that justice, wealth, and safety do not "trickle down," but need to be

redistributed first to the people at the bottom of the economic and political lad-

der. Tridde down policies primarily operate as an<;ither opportunity to distribute

wealth. and security upward.

5. By this we mean the advocacy work and agenda-setting done by wealthy (bud-

gets over $1 million) LGBT-rights organizations such as the Human Rights

Campaign and the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force.

6. See the Sylvia Rivera Law Project's It's Wtir in Here: A Report on the Ti'eatment

of 7hmsgender and Gender Non-Conforming People in New York State Prisons

(available online at www.srlp.org) and Gendered Punishment: Strategies to Protect

Tfamsgender, Gender Variant and Intersex People in America's Prisons (available

from TGI Justice Project, [email protected]) for a deeper examination of the cycles

of poverty, criminalization, imprisonment, and law-enforcement violence in

transgender and gender-non-conforming communities.

7. This was a period of heightened activity by radical and revolutionary national

and international movements resisting white supremacy, patriarchy, coloniza-

tion, and capitalism--embodied by organizations such as the American Indian

Movement, the Black Liberation Army, the Young Lords, the Black Panther

Party for Self-Defense, the Brown Berets, Earth First!, the Gay Liberation Front,

and the Weather Underground in the United States, and anti-colonial orga•

nizations in Guinea-Bissau, Jamaica, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Zimbabwe, and

elsewhere. Mass movements throughout the world succeeded in winning major

victories against imperialism and white supremaq, and exposing the genocide

that lay barely underneath American narratives of democracy, exceptionalism,

and liberty.

8. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, "Globalisation and US Prison Growth: From Mili-

ta1y Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism," Race and Class, Vol. 40, No.

2-3, 1998/99.

9. For a compelling analysis of neoliberaHsm and its impacts on social movements,

see Lisa Duggan's ]be Tivilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and

the Attack on Democra01 published by Beacon Press in 2004.

10. Public Citizen, NAFTA and Workers' Rights and Jobs, 2008, at http://www.

citizen.org/trade/ nafta/jobs.

Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement

11. Human Rights Watch, "NAFTA Labor Accord Ineffective," April 15, 2001,

at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2001 /04/16/globall 79 .htm. Corporations spe-

cifically named in complaints by workers include General Honeywell,

Sony, General Motors, McDonald's, Sprint, and the Washington State apple

industry.

12. Sapphire, "A Homeless Man's Alternative to 'Care Not Cash,"' Poor Magazine,

. July l, 2003, at http://www.poormagazine.org/index.cfm?Ll=news&category=

50&stor=1241.

13. The Sentencing Project, "Life Sentences: Denying Welfare Benefit to Women Convicted of Drug Offenses," at http://www.sentencingprogrject.org/Admin/

Documents/ publications/women_smy _lifesen tences. pd£

14. Alan David Freeman, "Legitimizing Racial Discrimination 'Ibrough Amidis-

crimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine," 62 MINN,

L. REV. 1049, 1052 (1978).

15. Visit generationFIVE .at http://www.generationfive.org and Stop It Now! at http://www.stopitnow.org online for more research documenting and tools for

ending child sexual abuse.

I 6. For a critique of hate crimes legislation, see Carolina Cordero Dyer, "The Pas-

sage of Hate Crimes Legislation-No Cause to Celebrate," INCITE! Women

of Color Against Violence, March 2001 at http://www.incite-national.org/

news/ _march0l/editorial.htmL Also see INCITE!-Denver and Denver on Fire's

response to the verdict in the 2009 Angie Zapata case at http://www.leftcurn.

org/?q=node/1310.

17. For an in-depth analysis of the growth and impacts of "nonprofit industrial

complex," see INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence's groundbreaking

anthology Ihe Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial

Complex, published by South End Press in 2007.

18. For a deeper examination of the FBI's attack on radical movements, see Ward .

Churchill and Jim Vander Wall's Ihe COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from

the FBI's Secret \Vttr Against Domestic Dissent, published by South End Press in

1990. Also see the Freedom Archive's 2006 documentary of Torture: Ihe \Vttr Against the Black Liberation Movement about the important case of the San

Francisco 8. Information available online at http://www.freedomarchives.org/

BPP/torture.html.

19. See Justice Now co-founder Cassandra Shaylor's essay "Neither Kind Nor Gen-

tle: The Perils of 'Gender Responsive Justice"' in Ihe Violence of Incarceration,

edited by'Phil Scraton and Jude McCulloch, published by Routledge in 2008.

20. Academy of Achievement: A Museum of Living History, "Rosa Parks," October,

25, 2005 at http:/ /www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/parOpro-l.

Captive Genders

21. Academy of Achievement: A Museum of Living History, "Rosa Parks," October,

31, 2005 at http://www.acbievement.org/autodoc/page/parObio-l.

22. CNNMoney.com, "Oprah Car Winners Hit with Hefty Tax," September, 22,

2004 at http://money.cnn.com/2004/09/22/news/newsmakers/oprah_car_tax/

index.htm.

23. We recognize that we mention only relatively well-funded organizations and

mostly organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City, two

strongholds of radical organizing and also places where a significant amount of

resources are concentrated. There are hundreds of other organizations around

the country and the world that we do not mention and do not know about.

What organizations or spaces do you see embodying radical values? 24. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project at http:/ /www.srlp.org.

25. Queers for Economic Justice at http://www.q4ej.org.

26. Transgender, Gender Variant, and lntersex Justice Project at http://www.tgijp.org.

27. Critical Resistance at http://W1cvw.criticalresistance.org.

28. FIERCE! at http://vvww.fiercenyc.org.

29. Southerners on New Ground at http:/ /\vww.southernersonnewground.org.

30. See Creative Interventions at http:/ /www.creative-interventions.org, genera-

tionFIVE at http://www.generationfive.org, Communities Against Rape and

Abuse at http:1/W\VW.cara-seattle.org, and Audre Larde Project's Safe OUTside

i:be System Collective at http://,VW\v.alp.org.

31. For examples of LGBTQ-specific organizations creating community-based re-

sponses to violence, see the Audre Lorde Project's Safe Outside the System Col-

lective in Brooklyn (www.alp.org), the Northwest Netv,ork ofBTLG Survivors

of Abuse in Seattle, and Community United Against Violence (CUAV) in San

Francisco (-www.cuav.org).

32. Particularly significant was the Transfortning Justice gathering in San Francisco

in October 2007, which brought together over nvo hundred LGBTQ and allied

formerly imprisoned people, activists, and attorneys to develop a shared analy-

sis about the cycles of trans poverty, criminalization, and imprisonment and a

shared strategy moving forward. Transforming Justice, which has now transi-

tioned to a national coalition, was a culmination of tireless and often invisible

work on the part of imprisoned and formerly imprisoned people and their allies

over the past many years. For more, see www.transformingjustice.org.

33. See the Transforming Justice Coalition's statement "How We Do Our Work" for

a more detailed account of day-to-day organizing ethics, which can be requested

from the TGI Justice Project at http://W\VW.tgijp.org.

34. Both of the lessons here were significantly and powerfully articulated and popular-

ized by Critical Resistance and Justice Now; both primarily based in Oal<land, CA.