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Chapter 5

Law Reform and Movement Building

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Social movements aiming to mobilize people around shared imaginations of transformation must contend with ques- tions of infrastructure: how to devise methods of participation and decision-making, build and sustain leadership, create shared political analysis, and generate and manage resources to feed the work. If we are to focus on “bottom-up” mobilization for trans- formative change rather than top-down empty declarations of equality, we need to build social movement infrastructure that can support mobilization. This chapter begins with an analysis of why and how law reform–dominated agendas stem from pro- fessionalized, lawyer-overrun, foundation-funded organizational structures that have come to dominate social justice work in the context of neoliberalism. This chapter also introduces a useful tool, developed by the Miami Workers Center (MWC),1 that considers social movement infrastructure in a way that helps us re-imagine the role of law reform tactics in resistance work focused on mobilization. Finally, this chapter provides several detailed examples of how organizations committed to trans lib- eration can and are creating movement infrastructure and critical trans political practice.

Having examined the limitations of traditional law reform strategies as well as some of the questions that emerge when using

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law reform tactics as part of trans resistance, this chapter now considers the broader question of how to place law reform proj- ects in the context of trans movement building. The most visible lesbian and gay rights work has been criticized for its central fo- cus on law reform goals, with critics arguing that such a narrow focus yields only formal legal equality gains that do not reach the most vulnerable targets of homophobia.2 Further, the legalis- tic approach of that work has been linked to concerns about an unjust distribution of power and leadership, especially when the work is funded and directed largely by white, upper-class profes- sionals who inevitably create an agenda that centralizes the con- cerns and experiences of people like themselves. Understanding the problems that this centering of legal demands has created in current lesbian and gay politics—a tendency nascent in emerg- ing trans politics—requires an assessment of how the nonprof- itization of social movements has changed the nature of political resistance work in the last four decades. Examining critiques of nonprofitization that are coming from activists opposing crimi- nalization, immigration enforcement, and various other forms of state violence today, we can begin to think about how to find an appropriate role for legal work in trans resistance and as a means for building social movement infrastructures that are accountable to and centered in racial, economic, and gender justice.3

The rise of neoliberalism in the last forty years has presented social movements with two interconnected challenges to the po- litical direction of queer and trans political resistance.4 First, so- cial movements have had to contend with the impact of neolib- eralism on their constituencies. Dismantling of economic safety nets like welfare and public housing coupled with the growth of criminalization have devastated poor communities and commu- nities of color. Increased immigration enforcement has greatly jeopardized already embattled immigrant communities, forcing them into crisis mode as they become increasingly exploitable by employers, less able to access social services, and entangled in prison and deportation systems. As Ruth Gilmore describes, the

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rise of neoliberalism from the 1970s to the present has caused the growth of a shadow state of volunteer-based and/or non- profit organizations that fill the gaps in social services created by the government abandonment.5 The political, economic, and so- cial conditions resulting from neoliberalism—including further imperiling poor communities by cutting survival services—have presented significant challenges to social movements trying to build resistance. At the same time, a second challenging dynamic has emerged: social welfare has increasingly become dependent on private businesses and foundations. Corporate funders have become the sponsors and benefactors of social services. The out- come is the privatization of social welfare programs. Not sur- prisingly, the increased need for survival services and decreased public resources for all social justice work has created troubling, often catastrophic results. This situation translates into overreli- ance by many organizations on income from corporations and accumulated wealth stored in foundations. This often leads to a disconnect from the driving forces behind the organizations’ work: the transformative change being demanded by directly impacted communities.

Critical Ethnic Studies scholar Dylan Rodríguez has de- scribed this trend of nonprofitization of social movements in the context of the explosive liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s. In response to the significant challenges those movements raised to white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, capitalism, and co- lonialism, and to their success in generating widespread support and solidarity and shifting essential paradigms, US law enforce- ment infiltrated and attempted to destroy those movements, of- ten through criminal prosecution and violence.6 Rodríguez argues that the emergence of the nonprofit industrial complex represents the carrot that corresponds to the stick of criminalization of so- cial movements. Together, these two forces established narrow parameters in which social movement work could occur—solely in forms that do not threaten the white supremacist political and economic status quo of the United States. Thus, work that fills

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in gaps in services and provides limited survival support while simultaneously stabilizing and advancing existing inequities is funded, and work that exposes and challenges those root causes and conditions of harm and subjection is targeted for destruc- tion. As Rodríguez writes,

[T]he structural and political limitations of current grass- roots and progressive organizing in the United States has become stunningly evident in light of the veritable explo- sion of private foundations as primary institutions through which to harness and restrict the potentials of US-based progressive activisms. . . . [T]he very existence of many social justice organizations has often come to rest more on the effectiveness of professional (and amateur) grant writers than on skilled—much less “radical”—political educators and organizers. . . . [T]he assimilation of political resistance projects into quasi-entrepreneurial, corporate-style ven- tures occurs under the threat of unruliness and antisocial “deviance.”. . . [F]orms of sustained grassroots social move- ment that do not rely on the material assets of institution- alized legitimacy . . . have become largely unimaginable within the political culture of the current US Left.7

Key Concerns with the Emerging Model of Nonprofits

In recent years, the critique of nonprofitization has grown and scholars and activists have outlined how this trend impacts the development of resistance politics.8 A key observation of this analysis is that, along with the rise of nonprofitization and phil- anthropic control, there has been a shift away from the tradition- ally central strategy of social movement work: building change by mobilizing the participation of a mass base of directly im- pacted people who share an experience of harm and a demand for transforming it. These critics have identified some key ways that nonprofitization has dangerously modified social movements and moved them away from being participatory and mass-based.

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One critique of the effect of the emergence of the nonprofit sector as the single location for social justice work is that it has separated the provision of direct, survival-based services from organizing. Social services operating on a charity model— disconnected from any political mobilization aimed at getting to the root causes of the need for these services—receives funding while social justice organizing that engages people in need toward a shared goal of transforming conditions tends to be either under- funded or completely unfunded. Nonprofits using particular single strategies (e.g. services alone, or law and policy reform without services or organizing, or media monitoring and response without organizing or services) tend to be siloed, further contributing to the de-politicization of survival services. Consequently, services organizations offer little opportunity for vulnerable communities facing poverty, homelessness, unemployment, deportation, and criminalization to build networking relationships for analysis and resistance. Instead of deploying survival services as a point of politicization, a locus from which people can connect their immediate needs to community-wide issues of maldistribution and harm, services are provided through a charity or social work model which individualizes issues to each specific client and too often includes an element of moralizing that casts social service “clients” as blameworthy. People are treated as if their homelessness or joblessness is a result of their personal failure to be sufficiently industrious, rather than a result of structural conditions produced by capitalism, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. By buffering some of the worst effects of capitalist maldistribution, then, these services become part of maintaining the social order; they both naturalize systemic inequity and preclude sustained engagement with the political and economic conditions that produce that inequity by focusing on its symptoms instead of root causes.9

Critics have also pointed out that the increase in the quantity of nonprofit organizations has been accompanied by a greater

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prevalence of service-based and policy reform work, rather than the base-building organizing that produces the mass mobilization required for effective social justice movements.10 This means that the nonprofit structure undermines the transformative potential of social justice work. Because social justice nonprofits are funded through foundations—frequently directed by corporations and wealthy individuals—the strategies of this work have become more conservative, focusing on small reforms that stabilize sys- tems of maldistribution that benefit those funders. Base-building, mobilizing organizing that emerges from communities facing a daily onslaught of poverty and violence and demands massive re- distribution has been replaced by policy work that tinkers with harmful systems or produces merely symbolic change and service work that alleviates suffering for very few and legitimizes the sta- tus quo. Service and policy reform organizations typically engage in change directed by educated elites (e.g., lawyers, administra- tors, social workers, public health experts), and produce narrow political demands that maintain the status quo.

The governance structures of most nonprofits, characterized by boards consisting of donors and elite professionals (sometimes with tokenistic membership for the community members who are directly affected by the organization’s mission) perpetuate dy- namics of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, and xenophobia. Racism, educational privilege, and classism within nonprofits mirrors colonialism in the way that the direction of the work and decisions about its implementation are made by elites rather than by the people directly affected by the issues at hand. Nonprofits serving primarily poor and disproportion- ately people of color populations are frequently governed almost entirely by wealthy white people with college and graduate de- grees. Staffing follows this pattern as well, with most nonprofits requiring formal education as a prerequisite to working in ad- ministrative or management-level positions. Thus, the nature of the infrastructure in many social justice nonprofits often leads to concentrated decision-making power and pay in the hands of

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people with education, race, gender, and class privilege rather than in the hands of those bearing the brunt of the systems of maldistribution. Consequently, the priorities and implementa- tion methods of such organizations frequently do not reflect the perspective or approach that might be taken by the people in whose name the organization operates. This dynamic leads to the reproduction of the very same systems of maldistribution that or- ganizations are purportedly targeting. Inside those organizations, white elites determine the fates of the vulnerable and get paid to make decisions about their lives while people directly impacted are kept out of leadership.

Part of the reason that decision-making power in nonprof- its becomes concentrated in the hands of elites is because of the way organizations secure funding. The foundation funding of nonprofits takes the direction of the work out of the hands of the people affected by it and concentrates it on the agendas and time lines of funders, discouraging long-term self-sustaining movements from emerging. The process of successfully applying for funding, including having 501(c)(3) status (the IRS code for nonprofit organizations that are exempt from federal taxes) or a fiscal sponsor, researching applicable grants, writing formal fund- ing requests using specialized language, having an awareness of current trends in funding, and having personal relationships with funders requires skills, relationships, and networks that are con- centrated among people with wealth and white privilege. Being able to direct work and spin it to a funder’s values is, more often than not, the key to successful fundraising. Furthermore, as po- litical strategist and author Suzanne Pharr has pointed out, the use of short-term funding cycles (often 1–5 years) and the focus on producing deliverables that demonstrate quantifiable impact in measures that funders believe to be significant has meant that nonprofit organizations have been encouraged to operate on short-term goals rather than being supported in building long- term sustainable structures to achieve transformative demands.11 Under this model, funders seek to see concrete returns (e.g.,

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statistics about numbers of clients served or clear evidence of policy change) on their investment within a limited grant period. Base-building work that involves less concretely tangible returns or changes that work on a longer time horizon—such as the growth of shared political analysis within a community or rela- tionship building—is undervalued and discouraged. This model encourages organizations to identify goals that can be achieved quickly, not to implement the long-term strategies necessary for more transformative changes to politics and culture.

Another problem with the dominance of the nonprofit sector has been the creation of a cultural shift in social justice activism toward professionalization, corporatization, and competition be- tween groups for scarce resources.

Funder-driven elitism led to a professionalization of social justice organizations where corporate business models are increas- ingly used to manage organizations. This trend is evidenced by a rise in nonprofits’ use of such terms as CEO (chief executive officer) and CFO (chief financial officer) for top-level staff,12 the prevalence of hierarchical pay scales in which people are compen- sated at very different rates based on valuations that are similar to those used in the private sector, and other white supremacist, classist, and often heterosexist labor practices that reflect capital- ist business values rather than social justice values. Many critics have lamented that young activists are increasingly looking at so- cial movement work as a career track and a paycheck; the expec- tation of being paid has become central to decisions about what kinds of activism and organizing these activists pursue.13 Business models of management that focus on top-down decision-making coupled with organizational structures in which educational, race, and class privilege often correspond to high positions in the hierarchy result in decision-making, compensation, and quality of life at work concentrated in the hands of white people with graduate educations (e.g., lawyers, social workers, people with degrees in nonprofit management).

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The increasing centrality of the nonprofit model is also a con- cern because of its role in the maldistribution of wealth in the United States. Nonprofits are one way that wealthy people and corporations avoid tax liability. Most of the money that gets redi- rected out of the tax system by philanthropy does not go to social justice. Christine Ahn has provided an analysis that encourages taxpayers to recognize that money funneled into nonprofits by wealthy philanthropists is actually tax money diverted out of the government and into focused causes.14 Even those of us who are critical of how the government spends tax money at present (pri- marily on war, immigration enforcement, and criminalization) can recognize that giving wealthy people a way out of being taxed and a way to support their pet projects is unjust. Wealthy people can put their money into foundations that bear their name, invest it where they choose, and are required to pay out very little of the money in the foundations each year—only 5 percent. This means that wealthy people get to keep control of their pile of money, shelter it from taxation, and sprinkle small amounts of it on whatever they like. According to Ahn,

The fact that most private foundations are governed by wealthy white men may partially explain why only 1.9 per- cent of all grant dollars in 2002 were designated for Black/ African Americans; 1.1 percent for Latina/os; 2.9 percent for the disabled; 1 percent for the homeless; 0.1 percent for single parents; and 0.1 percent for gays and lesbians. The majority of grants go to universities, hospitals, research, and the arts, while barely 1.7 percent goes to fund civil rights and social action.15

Even the tiny portion of philanthropic money that ends up in social justice organizations comes with strings attached that allow wealthy philanthropists to have a hand in directing the work. Ahn’s analysis instructs social justice activists to remain critical of the trend of nonprofitization—even, or especially, while

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making use of nonprofit structures in our work—because of its role in reducing tax liability of the rich and placing decisions about wealth redistribution in the hands of the wealthy.16 Ahn encourages social justice activists to view redirected tax money as their money. While rich people keep large amounts of money out of the tax system by funneling money through foundations that allow them to spend it on their own interests, everyone else has their income and necessities taxed to pay for wars. Meanwhile, city, state, and federal governments are complaining of deficits and pulling support from education, health care, transportation, and other vital infrastructure necessities. Ahn’s work points out how philanthropy and nonprofitization permits further theft of resources by the rich and increased loss of essentials to poor people.

Building Transformative Resistance: Tools and Strategies

Drawing on previous social movements that used a variety of strategies to build community resistance, the Miami Workers Center (MWC) developed a useful tool for analyzing the roles of various tactics in the project of mobilization: the Four Pillars of Social Justice Infrastructure. This model is helpful for under- standing how multiple strategies can fit together to build par- ticipatory, mass-based movements. The model also illustrates how the dynamics of nonprofitization and foundation control have created important obstacles to movement building. The Four Pillars that MWC describe are the Pillar of Policy, the Pillar of Consciousness, the Pillar of Service, and the Pillar of Power. The Pillar of Policy includes work that changes policies and institu- tions using legislative and institutional strategies, with concrete gains and benchmarks for progress. The Pillar of Consciousness includes work that aims to shift political paradigms and alter public opinion and consciousness, including media advocacy work, the creation of independent media, and public education work. The Pillar of Service encompasses work that directly serves vulnerable people and helps stabilize their lives and promote their

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survival, including work that provides critical services like food, legal help, medical care, and mental health support. Finally, the Pillar of Power is about achieving autonomous community power by building a base and developing leadership: building member- ship organizations of a large scale and influence (quantity) and de- veloping the depth and capacity of grassroots leadership (quality).

The Four Pillars model is aimed at assisting social justice movements to understand how these seemingly different kinds of work—which often are located in disparate nonprofit orga- nizations that do not collaborate extensively and sometimes cling narrowly to one or two strategies—are in fact intertwined, complementary, and essential. The Four Pillars model focuses on helping movements and organizations understand that the Pillar of Power—perhaps the most neglected area in the current non- profit industrial complex–dominated social justice context—is the most essential pillar for change and that, to be effective and avoid just stabilizing the status quo, the other pillars must be engaged to support the Pillar of Power.

The Four Pillars model is useful for evaluating an organi- zation’s overall role in movement building, identifying areas of needed collaboration, and formulating a theory of change. If, for example, we acknowledge that depoliticized, stigmatizing direct service work that is disconnected from the Pillar of Power is the norm as part of the shadow state, we can develop ideas about what direct services that support base-building, leadership devel- opment, and mass mobilization might look like.

If survival services (food, shelter, legal services, and physical and mental health services) were part of a mobilization strategy, they would look very different from the social services models we see in nonprofit organizations today.

First, nonprofit organizations would have a goal of assisting vulnerable people to connect with others experiencing similar harms. Such connections help individuals build shared analysis about the conditions they are facing and gain leadership skills to contribute to resistance struggles. This might include making sure

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people are receiving services from others in the affected popula- tion rather than from outsider elites. Such a strategy would also include aiding people who receive services to learn how to take part in providing those services, which often means having their provision governed by former and current recipients of those services. It would mean seeing services as part of the project of bringing more directly impacted people into organizational and movement leadership, and as vital to building opportunities to form relationships and connections between people coming in for services and people already working in the organization. This model moves people from a “client” role to a “member” role, cre- ating space for members of vulnerable communities to acquire skills that will expand their participation and leadership in the struggles that concern them. Under the current social service model, people seeking services are often stigmatized for “depen- dency,” treated disrespectfully by professional service providers who have race, education, class, ability, and gender privileges oth- ers do not have, and provided help only for individual problems, if at all. Service work that operates to support the Pillar of Power understands services as immediately urgent but also as only one part of a much larger strategy to address the underlying and root causes that produce such urgent need.

The Four Pillars model allows for recognition of the vital need for all four pillars: direct services are not simply a Band-Aid, as is sometimes argued, but instead can be understood as an essen- tial part of building mass mobilization. Additionally, providing direct services not only allows the base of people most adversely affected to survive and politically participate, but also can serve as a road to participation in resistance work if those services are provided in a politicized context. People often come to political work through their own experiences and intimate knowledge of harm and need. Ensuring that direct services are locations for deepening the political understanding produced by interaction with systems of control, and mobilizing direct services as oppor- tunities to join with others facing similar harms, are essential to

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producing resistance strategies led and directed by those directly impacted by harmful systems.

Similarly, media justice work aimed at changing hearts and minds is not the single key strategy for change, as is sometimes presumed by those who are deeply invested in the idea that cur- rent political conditions are primarily the result of ignorance or misunderstanding on the part of voters or the public. However, critical media analysis and political education are important components of increasing political awareness and changing para- digms. This understanding can help us resist the belief that just getting that one “good” article about an issue in the New York Times will produce the change we want. The conditions under which we live do not result solely from ignorance or consent, and convincing elites to think about those conditions in a certain way is not the path to building meaningful transformation. The privi- leging of elite media strategies at the expense of other tactics can actually undermine the transformative potential of organizations. This view also reminds those of us committed to transformative change that elite strategies mired in a particular type of expertise, such as policy reform and work with the mainstream media, must always be engaged in service to the larger struggle to transform the underlying conditions that produce maldistribution. All strat- egies must work to build up the leadership of the most vulnerable people in the struggle. Realizing the interconnectedness of differ- ent strategies for change and their various roles in building mass movements allows organizations to resist the pressures created by competition for funding to operate competitively and separately from others engaging in different strategies.

We can engage a range of tactics in the Pillar of Consciousness in conjunction with work in the other pillars. Our paradigm- shifting work comes not only (if at all) through engaging with mainstream media, but also through making our own media, cre- ating political education programs that simultaneously build the leadership abilities of our constituencies, and a variety of other mobilization tactics. We lose an enormous amount of capacity

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for change when media work is limited to specific organizations that operate separately from other parts of the movement and that do not use membership models or engage directly impacted populations. Those organizations tend to be willing to water down messages to be palatable for conservative media outlets, or to use talking points that divide us by relying on tropes that assert norms of deservingness and undeservingness. Analyzing social justice movement infrastructure through the Four Pillars model helps integrate disparate, often competing strategies, and offers a chance to reframe the emphasis on elite media work, policy reform, and services created by the nonprofit industrial complex. It helps us recognize that power does not only reside in the board- rooms of the television networks or the offices of elected officials, but rather that transformation worth winning is accomplished through bottom-up mobilization.

The Four Pillars model and the critique of nonprofitization are useful for situating the role of legal work in trans resistance. Examining how nonprofitization concentrates agenda-setting and strategic decision-making power can reveal how and why law reform demands have reached such prominence in organizations run by lawyers and other people with privileges that make them more invested in formal legal equality. These interventions also help us identify what roles legal work should have in a critical trans politics focused on developing and mobilizing a base to cre- ate transformative change. These roles include17

Providing legal services to the most vulnerable trans peo- ple. Providing free legal assistance to trans people experiencing violence at the hands of administrative and legal systems (im- migrants, prisoners, people entangled in the child welfare system, people with disabilities, people receiving public benefits) can be an important Pillar of Service activity if it is tied into a mobiliza- tion strategy. Services can be an entry point into political organiz- ing if the services are part of a strategy of enabling people to build relationships with others experiencing similar harm, building

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leadership skills, and developing the shared political analysis that allows people to participate and lead in governing the provision of the services themselves.

Demystifying legal systems. Because legal and administrative systems cause enormous harm in the lives of trans people, lawyers and others with knowledge of and experience in legal systems can play a role in demystifying legal systems and collaborating with resistance organizations to build a shared analysis about how the law operates. Redistributing legal “expertise” is essential, since part of what legal systems aim to do is deskill and silence those most tar- geted by them, anointing only certain privileged people to operate as recognized actors within them. Lawyers in particular need to be careful of how we wield our expertise. We tend to take up dispro- portionate space in decision-making processes, and are trained in a professional culture that tends to enhance internalized domination behaviors. We are also some of the people most likely to be paid for social movement work. Sometimes lawyers can help movement leaders strategize around who the targets of various campaigns could be, or help locate the weak points in certain legal systems. However, this role is easily overstated; people targeted by violent legal systems usually know more about how those systems actually work, and lawyers often only know how they work on paper (and sometimes mistakenly believe that to be how they actually work). Legal training can often make people less rather than more adept at strategizing change because we get overly invested in how systems purport to work. In general, law school teaches people how to stop thinking outside of legal solutions to problems, which often means we can only think of ways to slightly tinker with harmful systems, thereby strengthening, stabilizing, and legitimizing them. The fo- cus of legal education is working inside the existing legal system. Even the small part of legal education that addresses poor people’s struggles is concerned with narrow reforms and courtroom strate- gies, not supporting rent strikes or squatting or prison abolition or indigenous land struggles. Essentially, legal education is not about actually challenging the root causes of maldistribution.18

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Developing law and policy reform targets as campaign issues. Because administrative systems cause enormous harm to trans people every day, issues related to how these systems operate tend to be deeply felt and broadly applicable to our constituencies. For that reason, law and policy reform targets can sometimes be a good place to direct our organizing. This organizing can provide opportunities to reframe an issue, bring directly impacted people who have not previously been part of political organizing into leadership, build shared political analysis about important forms of systemic harm, and establish and advance relationships within and between constituencies. When these law/policy reform cam- paigns are chosen, they can build momentum and membership in a movement organization. Winning certain reforms may even provide some relief to members experiencing harm. The limited effect of law and policy reform victories can also often build shared analysis among organizers about how empty legal equal- ity can be, and can generate enhanced demands for transforma- tion as organizing continues. Taking up law and policy targets can make sense when deployed as a tactic in service to a larger strategy of mass mobilization. If law and policy changes are won solely through the work of a few white lawyers meeting with bu- reaucrats or elected officials behind closed doors, this does not achieve the mobilization goals that require building a demand (and momentum behind that demand) across a broad spectrum of directly impacted people and winning it through collective efforts of a large group. The goals of this work should not be merely about changing what laws and policies say. Instead, the work should build the capacity of directly impacted people to work together and push for change that will significantly improve their lives. Ideally, those who are propelled into political action by involvement in a campaign stay with the work, continue to de- velop skills and analysis, and bring others to organizing. Together, people can construct increasingly broad imaginations of transfor- mative change. Even after small victories, enormous harms must still be addressed as newly won policies are often not followed or

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implemented, and important lessons are learned about sustained struggle and the effectiveness of collective action.

Providing technical assistance. A final important role for legal workers is to provide technical assistance to movements. Movement organizations run into many legal questions that law- yers can use their training to answer. Sometimes it is about filling out forms to create a collective or cooperative business that em- ploys members and raises money for our struggles. Sometimes it is about defending against government attacks that include illegal surveillance and criminal prosecution. Movement organizations are often targets of local and state governments, either in care- fully planned offensives or sudden police attacks on organiza- tional events, and the legal assistance that organizations can end up needing can be costly or difficult to procure. Having lawyers engaged with resistance organizations in ways that are focused on being of service to those organizations and their constituents instead of dominating their political agendas with legal expertise can be useful to forwarding transformative work.

The analysis provided by the Four Pillars model helps us think about the ways that so much social change work has become separated from mobilization in the context of nonprofitization. The model helps us re-evaluate our work, including our legal strategies, in order to re-center participatory movement building focused on leadership by and for those directly impacted. This analysis can also help us evaluate organizational and movement structures to ensure they produce space for political demands to emerge from the bottom up. As we let go of elite, liberal no- tions like the conviction that getting the right article placed in the New York Times or winning the right lawsuit will create equality, we can create broader social movement infrastructure that leads to transformation of the root causes of maldistribution of life chances. Rather than concentrate our limited resources on nar- row demands for inclusion that imagine that people experience transphobia separate from other systems of meaning and control,

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demands for deeper transformation emerge when we build par- ticipatory movements based in racial and economic justice values, and centralize the leadership of those most vulnerable to multiple vectors of control.

In trans political spaces led by low-income people and people of color, demands are emerging that far exceed the possibilities of legal reform. Racial and economic justice struggles that call for prison abolition, health care and housing for all, an end to im- migration enforcement, and the end of poverty and wealth are significantly different goals than the inclusion and recognition- focused demands that typify litigation and legislation strategies. These emerging broader demands focus on the deep transforma- tions required to improve the life chances of those facing mul- tiple intersecting vulnerabilities and violences. These demands are shaped by a commitment to refuse compromises that divide constituencies with reforms that offer increased access to people with certain privileges while leaving others without access—or even more marginalized than before. This critical trans politics is emerging from membership-based organizations, including Southerners on New Ground (SONG), The Audre Lorde Project (ALP), Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment (FIERCE!), the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), and Communities United Against Violence (CUAV). These orga- nizations have developed shared values about building participa- tory movements, and are innovating and building on structures modeled in various historical and contemporary movements in the United States and abroad, especially women of color femi- nism. These organizations share certain key principles for structur- ing their work to be participatory and centered in racial and eco- nomic justice, and to resist some of the tropes of nonprofitization.

Some of the key principles that underlie and shape this work include

multiple vectors of vulnerability converging in the harms

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members face (such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, trans- phobia, homophobia, ableism);

- zation imagines for the world in the day-to-day operations of the organization itself, also known as practicing what we preach;

- ticing ongoing critical reflection rather than assuming there is a moment of finishing or arriving;

- ticipation, and focusing on building the leadership skills of those who face the greatest barriers to participation and leadership;

comes from below, deep change is not top-down or granted by elites;

- tween organizations, so that an organization’s constituency knows how decisions are made and where money is spent so that allied organizations and movements know what to expect from each other and can challenge each other to work according to shared principles of social justice and collaboration;

of the work and the change we seek and need and focusing resources on strengthening and building relationships.19

Several key strategies are being taken up by the various organiza- tions that are shaping their work through these shared values. First, the use of nonhierarchical governance models, including collective structures, is valued as a way of addressing the problem- atic concentration of decision-making power in a small number of elite leaders, such as executive directors and boards.20 Consensus decision-making is often a feature of such structures because it focuses on maximum participation and rejects the majority-rules

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approach that so often permeates nonprofit organizations and so- cial movements, creating greater barriers to participation in gov- ernance for people experiencing intersecting vectors of vulner- ability. Consensus decision-making also assists groups in focusing their process on building shared understandings and ensuring no important concerns are ignored simply because they are held by a minority of people.21

Second, many organizations are experimenting with ways to make the social movement organization workplace more fair to workers. This includes flattening pay scales, ensuring that all posi- tions come with benefits such as health insurance, and working to guarantee that the workplace and benefits are accessible to people who frequently face barriers to participation and leadership in social justice–related employment, particularly people without formal education, people with criminal convictions, people with disabilities, indigenous people, people of color, trans people, and immigrants. This also includes making sure that trans health care, reproductive health care, and mental health care are covered by insurance plans; creating flexible work schedules for people with disabilities and/or dependents; eliminating higher education re- quirements wherever possible; and providing extensive job train- ing rather than requiring applicants to already have developed professional skills. The aim of these initiatives is to avoid replicat- ing and entrenching disparities in educational, health care, and other systems within the organization.

Third, many of these organizations have implemented highly structured leadership development models and programs aimed at increasing the leadership and governance capacity of their constituents. For example, FIERCE!, an organization dedicated to building “the leadership and power of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color,” has created and implemented the Education for Liberation Project (ELP). This program offers stipends to trans and queer youth of color to enable them to participate in political workshops and intern- ships aimed at skill-sharing, analysis-building, and leadership

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development.22 Participants work through semester-long ELP program levels, starting with ELP 1, where they learn basic politi- cal history and basic organizing theory such as how campaigns are developed and implemented. Participants then move on to increased leadership and governance power in the organization as they move through additional ELP program levels. The goal is to develop ELP members into leader-organizers who then work to develop the leadership of other trans and queer youth of color. Leadership development programs like ELP work to identify potential leaders from the constituency, focusing on members whose experiences of intersectional vulnerability give them par- ticular insight into the operation of systems of control and power, and providing development training to deepen their capacity to lead. Some organizations stipend freedom school programs and internships23 to ensure that low-income and youth members can afford to come and learn political history, analysis, and organiz- ing strategies.24 Many such leadership development programs are tiered, providing low-commitment entry points to encourage new members to become involved and eventually move into deeper, more committed leadership roles as their knowledge of the issues and connection with the organization grows. These models focus on maximizing the participation of the most directly impacted people, deepening their leadership skills by helping them partici- pate in every aspect of the organization’s work.

Many of these organizations aim to be staffed entirely by members of the organization who come directly from the constituency impacted by its work, often proceeding through internal leadership development programs and into staff roles. Many also aim to have staffing consistently turn over as new members develop leadership capacities. In this way, the organization itself becomes a vehicle for developing skilled leaders while simultaneously undertaking organizing campaigns, providing services, and/or advancing advocacy. These organizations also often create and maintain explicit criteria to ensure governance by the most directly affected people. Many

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implement guidelines regarding race, ability, gender, gender identity, immigration status, or other quotas to guide hiring and membership growth.25 These guidelines help concretize organizational commitments about governance and leadership that can often erode as organizations are flooded with volunteers with race and educational privilege who want to help but who also often end up taking over due to their increased access to skills and professional development, their quantity of free time, and the dominating habits and attitudes that are often developed in people with such privileges. These organizations also often maintain a critique of “founders’ syndrome,” the dynamic that occurs when an organization’s founder stays in a paid leadership position too long, becoming a repository of organizational knowledge and control regardless of what the organization’s structure says about the democratic participation of all members. Keeping an eye on that dynamic, openly dialoguing about decision-making and leadership development, and encouraging staff turnover can ensure that the leadership and ownership of the organization do not become concentrated.

Grassroots fundraising is also highly valued by these orga- nizations as an alternative and/or supplement to foundation funding.26 Raising money in small amounts from the directly impacted populations, from individual allies, and through rev- enue generating activities and events can increase the autonomy of organizations, releasing them from the limitations created by reliance on corporate funders and foundations. Some organiza- tions use membership dues, often available on a sliding scale, as a fundraising tool that also contributes to organizational account- ability as members have ownership of their work and a commit- ment to govern.27

These strategies reflect an awareness of the ways that nonprof- itization, foundation control, and the replication of racist, sexist, ableist, transphobic, and classist models of organization and gov- ernance restrict and contain social justice work. As trans politics continues institutionalizing in various ways, these models provide

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a way to avoid replicating the pitfalls of lesbian and gay rights and other political formations that have centralized the leadership of people with privilege and formulated strategies and demands that fail to improve the life chances of those most vulnerable to poverty, imprisonment, and violence. Political work rooted in broad participation, committed to centering the experiences of the most vulnerable, and focused on practicing resistance values at all levels is less likely to be co-opted by legal reform agendas that strengthen and legitimate systems of control and derail de- mands for meaningful transformation.

The critiques of nonprofitization and the innovative methods of building movement infrastructure that many resistance organizations are engaged in developing are particularly important given an analysis of neoliberalism and the central role of the population-management mode of power in producing political and economic arrangements. The context of neoliberalism has shifted and constrained resistance in many ways, including co-opting social movement work as a source of ideas and justifications for harmful state/corporate projects (e.g., the expansion of increasingly privatized prison and punishment systems). Social justice work has been shaped into shadow state work that stabilizes and legitimizes the maldistribution of life chances. As Paul Kivel points out, nonprofit work often operates as a “buffer zone.” This work provides very minimal services to those most disserved by the enormous wealth divide, “mask[ing] the inequitable distribution of jobs, food, housing and other valuable resources . . . shift[ing] attention from the redistribution of wealth to the temporary provision of social services to keep people alive.” It also “keeps people in their place in the hierarchy” by directing dissatisfaction with or resistance to unfair conditions into narrow channels that do not fundamentally disrupt the status quo.28 For these reasons, there is an urgent necessity to create movement infrastructure that has critical capacities to examine sites of co-optation, interrogate impact rather than simply intent, and avoid siloed and divisive methods and strategies.

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At the same time, it is evident that the very operations of power we critique in the broader world also need to be con- stantly examined within movement organizations and other re- sistance formations. Building institutions of any kind includes confronting the dangers of stagnation of leadership, ideas, ways of knowing, and mechanisms of distribution. As we create so- cial movement infrastructure, we constantly risk falling into the very modes of population-management power that we critique in state and corporate formations. Many resistant and self-declared “revolutionary” movements and formations have demonstrated that the capacity to create an imagined population in need of protection and imagined “threats” and “drains” is not solely an activity of nation-states and governments. Resistance organiza- tions and movements also frame deserving and undeserving pop- ulations, frequently collect standardized data that makes certain populations inconceivable or impossible, and establish modes of distribution that make some people more secure at the expense of others. Foucault warned that socialists have not dealt with the problem that the kind of population-focused power their models of governance wield has an inherent “state racism”—his term for illuminating the ways that power, when mobilized to cultivate the life of the population, always includes a process identifying “threats” and “drains” who must be killed through abandonment, massacre, or other means in order to protect that population.29 Anarchist formations also face these dangers. We must remem- ber that whenever we propose new systems of distribution and imagine a better world, we also—often unknowingly—establish disciplinary and population-management norms that marginal- ize and/or vilify. Even if we reject certain existing state forms, process-oriented and relentlessly self-reflective practice must at- tend all of our work if we are to resist the dangers of new norms that we invariably produce.

Women of color feminism is a political tradition that has confronted this danger head-on by analyzing the challenges that differences of all kinds present when politics is based on

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universalizing experiences. In Chela Sandoval’s study of “oppo- sitional consciousness,” she describes how women of color have resisted and critiqued white feminist thought, pointing to how it has tended to make the gender binary the central axis of cri- tique while ignoring the impact that race, class, culture, and other vectors of subjection have on experiences of gendered control.30 By talking about gender and sexism without examining and ac- counting for how race and other attributes mediate experiences of gender and sexism, white feminists constructed a purportedly universal category of women’s experience that actually hides and erases the experiences of women of color. Sandoval looks to the divides that emerged in feminist politics in the 1970s as a place to understand how social movements are commonly split amongst various groups who gravitate toward and rigidly cling to certain truth claims. These particular frames of “oppositional conscious- ness” become mutually exclusive, producing significant struggle between various wings of the movement. Sandoval argues that US feminists of color have created a different form of oppositional consciousness, which she calls “the differential form,” that resists the absolutism that often produces rigidity and stagnation in so- cial movements. The differential form of oppositional conscious- ness utilizes various articulations of truths as tactics practiced through a commitment to resisting violence and subordination, allowing practitioners to switch between them as necessary.31

This attention to resisting absolutism and practicing a flex- ible, thoughtful, reflective, tactical approach to resistance is an enormously useful model for resisting the dangers of institution- building and “state racism” outlined earlier. Women of color feminists have developed resistance practices focused on process, evaluation, consensus, transparency, and a healthy suspicion of universal claims about what constitutes liberation. These values and practices have heavily influenced much contemporary people of color–led queer and trans activism. These organizations often aim to operate with the assumption that their work is imper- fect, that they are likely to have unintentionally overlooked or

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excluded highly vulnerable groups, and that their strategies and structures require perpetual re-evaluation and adjustment. Self- critique and nondefensiveness are highly valued in these settings. A critique of institutionalization has become a central feature of the women of color–led analysis of nonprofitization.32

Many scholars and activists have asserted that we need to ex- amine whether we are working to keep an organization going or whether we are working toward the transformative changes we seek, in order to recognize and re-strategize when those two goals are at odds. This work has illustrated how and why resistance movements must be careful not to replicate business model ap- proaches to organizational growth that encourage us to chase any and all opportunities for funding in order to sustain and grow the organization by any means, even if we lose sight of our missions. This critical contribution also reminds us that the ultimate aim of social service organizations in particular is to put themselves out of business; ideally, their work aspires to reach and resolve the root causes of the need for services.

Prison abolition activists, many of whom ground their work in women of color feminism, offer an important analysis of how the societal norms and values that uphold and bolster practices of mass imprisonment in the United States also directly impact interpersonal and activist realms. Organizations like Critical Resistance, the Audre Lorde Project, INCITE!, Communities United Against Violence, and generationFIVE have been leading national and local work that includes an analysis of how the rac- ist, classist, patriarchal, and ableist frameworks that undergird the idea of imprisonment are also part of the consciousness of people who live in a culture based on imprisonment and criminalization. These frameworks have to be transformed in our bodies, minds, and lives, as well as in government structures. The framing of harm as a problem of bad individuals who need to be exiled is one that appears again and again, not just in our criminal pun- ishment systems, but in schools, employment settings, organiza- tions, activist formations, neighborhoods, groups of friends, and

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families. Abolitionists are trying to build models for dealing with harm that do not rely on exile, expulsion, or caging, but instead examine the root causes of harm and seek healing and transfor- mation for both people experiencing and people responsible for harm. This strategy is visible in “transformative justice” work that seeks alternative processes that do not use policing or criminal courts to address harm. GenerationFIVE, an organization whose mission was to “end child sexual abuse in five generations” has developed an approach to transformative justice based in their recognition that “state and systemic responses to violence, includ- ing the criminal legal system and child welfare agencies, not only fail to advance individual and collective justice but also condone and perpetuate cycles of violence.”33 They worked to develop re- sponses to violence, including intimate violence, that “transform inequity and power abuses . . . [provide] survivor[s] safety, heal- ing and agency, [create] community response and accountability . . . [and] transform[] . . . community and societal conditions that create and perpetuate violence.”34 Many scholars and orga- nizers are working to develop these principles and practices in a variety of settings, including in social and activist communities and networks. The “no exile” principle is challenging to imple- ment in a context where everyone has been socialized through the perpetrator-perspective to believe that the caging of people classi- fied as “dangerous” and targeted for banishment is a cornerstone of societal organization. Building practices to address harm while resisting exile as a solution is the kind of seemingly impossible political project that is not only attainable but has deeply trans- formative potential.

Racial, gender, disability, and economic justice activists around the United States and the globe are working on innova- tive organizational structures and practices that resist many of the worst dangers and obstacles presented to people struggling against the harms and violences of neoliberalism. These methods of analysis and models of organizing offer important, thought- provoking critiques of disciplinary and population-management

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power, illustrating the possibility of developing practices that can help build transformative change while avoiding the traps that have caught and destroyed many large-scale resistance projects. Focusing our critical political analysis on our own daily work and lives just as rigorously as we focus it on the large-scale operations of government and corporate systems is essential to building re- sistance work with the potential to meaningfully transform the existing distribution of life chances. As Foucault suggests,

the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attack them in such a manner that political violence that has always exercised it- self through them will be unmasked so that one can fight against them. If we want right away to define the profile and the formula of our future society without criticizing all the forms of political power that are exerted in our society, there is a risk that they reconstitute themselves.35

An emerging critical trans politics must take up these calls for innovation and creative engagement and offer our particular experiences with and perspectives on the operations of power and normalization to the resistant imaginations that are emerging.

NOTES 1. According to their mission statement, the Miami Workers

Center “helps working class people build grassroots organizations and de- velop their leadership capacity through aggressive community organizing campaigns and education programs [and] also actively builds coalitions and enters alliances to amplify progressive power and win racial, com- munity, social, and economic justice. [T]he Center has taken on issues around welfare reform, affordable housing, tenants and voter rights, ra- cial justice, gentrification and economic development, and fair trade. We have spoken out against war and empire, greed, racist policies, and dis- criminatory initiatives against immigrants and gay and lesbian people.”