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Spade_PrefaceandConclusionNormalLife.pdf
NORMAL LIFE
Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the
Limits of Law
DEAN SPADE
South End Press Brooklyn, NY
Preface
7
In 2002, I opened the doors of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP). I had raised enough grant money to rent a desk and a phone at a larger poverty law organization, and had spread the word to other service providers like drug treatment centers, legal aid offices, mental health centers, needle exchanges, and community organizations that I would be providing free legal help to trans people. I never would have guessed the number of people who would call the organization for help or the gravity and complexity of the problems they face.
My first call came from the men’s jail in Brooklyn.1 Jim, a 25-year-old transman, was desperate for help; he was facing a se- vere threat of rape and already experiencing harassment. Jim is a trans person with an intersex condition.2 He was raised as a girl, but during adolescence began to identify as male. To his family he remained female-identified, but in the world he identified as male, changing clothes every night when he returned home and trying to avoid contact between his family and everyone else he knew. The stress of living a “double life” was immense, but he knew it was the only way to maintain a relationship with his fam- ily, with whom he was very close.
When Jim was nineteen, he was involved in a robbery for which he received a sentence of five years probation. During the second year of that probation period, Jim was arrested for drug possession. He was sentenced to eighteen months of residential
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drug treatment and sent to a male residential facility. In what was a purportedly therapeutic environment, Jim discussed his inter- sex condition with his counselor. His confidentiality was broken and soon the entire staff and residential population were aware of Jim’s intersex condition and trans history. Jim faced a threat of rape and the staff of the facility refused to help or protect him. Out of fear and self-protection, he ran away from the facility.
I met Jim after he had turned himself in, wanting to deal with his outstanding criminal charges so that he could safely apply to college and get on with his life. Jim was now in a Brooklyn men’s jail, again facing a threat of rape. The jail administration’s refusal to continue Jim’s testosterone treatments had caused him to menstruate; when Jim was strip searched while menstruating, other inmates and staff learned of his status.
Jim and I worked together to convince the judge assigned to his case that Jim could only safely access drug treatment services in an outpatient setting because of the dangers he faced in resi- dential settings. Even when we had convinced the judge of this, we faced the fact that most programs were gender segregated, and would not be safe places for Jim to be known as a trans person with an intersex condition. When I contacted facilities to find a place for Jim, staff at all levels would ask me questions like “Does he pee sitting or standing?” and “Does he have a penis?” indicating to me that Jim would be treated as a novelty and his gender and body characteristics would be a source of gossip. Some facilities said they would not accept Jim because they were not prepared to work with someone like him. Those that did not outright refuse his application indicated their inadequacy to provide him with appropriate treatment. The few lesbian and gay drug treatment programs I identified seemed inappropriate because Jim did not identify as gay and was, in fact, quite unfamiliar with gay and lesbian people and somewhat uncomfortable in queer spaces. Eventually, the judge agreed to let Jim try outpatient treatment on a “zero tolerance” policy where a single relapse would result in jail time. Jim, under enormous stress, engaged in treatment where
Preface 9
he was always afraid he might be outed and where his participa- tion in the daily hours of group therapy required hiding his iden- tity. Not surprisingly, Jim relapsed. Now he would be sentenced to prison.
When I went before the judge to request that Jim be placed in a women’s prison because of his well-founded fear of sexual assault in men’s facilities, the judge’s response was, “He can’t have it both ways.” Once again, Jim’s gender and body status and his inability to successfully navigate the gender requirements of the extremely violent systems in which he was entangled—because of his involvement in criminalized activity stemming from his poverty—was considered part of his criminality and a blamewor- thy status. The judge “threw the book” at Jim, sentencing him to the maximum number of years possible for violating parole and requiring him to serve the time in a men’s prison.
Another client I met around the same time was Bianca, a nineteen-year-old transwoman. Bianca came to me for help with a range of issues. First, she wanted to sue her high school. In 1999, Bianca was attending public high school in the Bronx. After strug- gling with an internal understanding of herself as a woman for several years, Bianca eventually mustered the strength to come out to her peers and teachers. She and another transgender student, a close friend, decided to come out together. They arrived at school one day dressed to reflect their female gender identities. The two students were stopped at the front office and not allowed to enter school. Eventually, they were told to leave and not come back. When their parents called the school to follow up and find out what to do next, their calls were not returned. They were given no referrals to other schools, and no official suspension or expulsion hearings or documents. I met Bianca three years later. She had been unable to obtain legal representation, and when I began in- vestigating the possibility of a lawsuit, I discovered that the statute of limitations had expired. She no longer had a viable legal claim.
When I met Bianca, she was homeless, unemployed, and try- ing to escape from an abusive relationship. She was afraid to go to
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the police both because of fear of retaliation from her boyfriend and because she rightly feared the police would not only refuse help, but also humiliate, harass, or hurt her because she was trans. All of her identification (ID) indicated a male name and gender; there would be no way for her to interact with the police without being identified as a trans person. As we searched for places for Bianca to live, we ran up against the fact that all of the home- less shelters insisted on placing her according to birth-assigned gender; Bianca would be the only woman in an all men’s facility, and she was afraid of the abuse she could face in such a situa- tion. Women’s shelters for domestic violence survivors refused to recognize her as a woman and thus were unwilling to take her in. When Bianca applied for welfare, she was given an assignment to attend a job center as part of participation in a workfare pro- gram. When she tried to access the job center, she was brutally harassed outside, and when she finally entered and attempted to use the women’s rest room, she was outed and humiliated by staff. Ultimately, she felt too unsafe to return and her benefits were terminated. Bianca’s total lack of income also meant that she had no access to the hormone treatments she used to maintain a femi- nine appearance, which was emotionally necessary and kept her safe from some of the harassment and violence she faced when she was more easily identifiable as a transwoman on the street. Bianca felt her only option for finding income sufficient to pay for the hormones was to engage in criminalized sex work. At this point, she was forced to procure her hormone treatments in un- derground economies because it would have been cost prohibitive to obtain her medication from a doctor since Medicaid—had she even been given those benefits—would not cover the costs. This put her in further danger of police violence, arrest, and other vio- lence. Additionally, because Bianca was accessing intravenously injected hormones through street economies, she was at greater risk of HIV, hepatitis, and other communicable diseases.
Preface 11
Jim’s and Bianca’s stories, it turned out, were not unusual. As the calls continued to pour into SRLP, I found there was an enormous number of people facing a series of interlocking problems related to being basically unfathomable to the administrative systems that govern the distribution of life chances: housing, education, health care, identity documentation and records, employment, and public facilities, to name but a few. My clients faced both the conscious bias of transphobia that produces targeted violence as well as numerous administrative catch–22s that render basic life necessities inaccessible. Each client’s story demonstrated the inter- weaving of these different types of obstacles. On the bias side, I heard consistent reports of police profiling, police brutality, and false arrest; sexual harassment and assault; beatings and rapes; fir- ings from jobs; evictions; denials and rejections from caseworkers in social service and welfare agencies; rejections from legal services; and family rejection. The impact of each of these situations was exacerbated by the ways gender is an organizing principle of both the economy and the seemingly banal administrative systems that govern everyone’s daily life, but have an especially strong presence in the lives of poor people. My clients did not fit into gendered administrative systems, and they paid the price in exclusion, vio- lence, and death. Most had no hope of finding legal employment because of the bias and violences they faced, and therefore turned to a combination of public benefits and criminalized work—often in the sex trade—in order to survive. This meant constant exposure to the criminal punishment system, where they were inevitably locked into gender-segregated facilities that placed them according to birth gender and exposed them to further violence. For immi- grants seeking an adjustment of status that would enable them to live legally in the United States, just one prostitution charge could destroy their eligibility. Even admitting that they had ever engaged in sex work to an immigration lawyer would disqualify them from receiving assistance with the adjustment of status process.
Non-immigrant clients also faced severe documentation problems and specific catch–22s related to identification and
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health care. Proof of having undergone gender-confirming health care, especially surgery, is required by the majority of ID-issuing agencies in the United States including Departments of Motor Vehicles (DMVs), the Social Security Administration (SSA), and departments issuing birth certificates to change gender on the ID.3 However, the majority of private health insurers and state Medicaid programs have rules excluding this care from coverage, which means that those who cannot pay for this care out-of- pocket probably cannot get it and thus cannot change the gen- der on their IDs. In New York, this care is deemed essential for changing gender on birth certificates, though the state simultane- ously has a Medicaid program that explicitly excludes this care from coverage. For most trans people, these rules make getting correct ID nearly impossible. Not having appropriate identifica- tion creates difficulties and dangers when dealing with employers or the police and other state agents, trying to travel, attempting to cash checks, or entering age-restricted venues: the person’s trans identity is exposed every time ID is shown. These barriers make it exceedingly difficult for trans people to gain the economic re- sources necessary to obtain gender-confirming health care if this is something they want or need. These administrative policies and practices severely constrain access to health care and employment for most trans people.
The stories I heard from my first clients and continued to hear from the trans people I met through my work at SRLP portrayed a set of barriers—both from bias and from the web of inconsis- tent administrative rules governing gender—that produce signifi- cant vulnerability. The impact of these conditions ranges across subpopulations of trans people: even those with class privilege, education, white privilege, US citizenship, physical and mental ability perceived as average or above, and English-language skills experience many of these hurdles. Those with such privileges have many of the same ID problems, often cannot afford health care, experience incidents of physical attack, have their parental rights terminated by courts, are arrested for using bathrooms or barred
Preface 13
from gender appropriate bathrooms at work and/or school, are discriminated against in hiring, are discriminated against by in- surance companies, and lose family support. Most experience a downward mobility in terms of wealth/income because of their trans identities. However, access to certain privileges that serve in determining the distribution of life chances (e.g., whiteness, per- ceived ablebodiedness, employment, immigration status) often of- fer some individuals degrees of buffering from the violences faced by people of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, indigenous people, prisoners, foster youth, and homeless people. The most marginalized trans people experience more extreme vulnerability, in part because more aspects of their lives are directly controlled by legal and administrative systems of domination—prisons, welfare programs, foster care, drug treatment centers, homeless shelters, job training centers—that employ rigid gender binaries. These intersecting vectors of control make obtaining resources especially difficult, restrict access to zones of retreat or safety, and render every loss of a job, family support, or access to an advocate or a health care opportunity more costly. The most marginalized trans populations have the least protection from violence, experience more beatings and rapes, are imprisoned at extremely high rates, and are more likely to be disappeared and killed.
This book looks at the conditions that are shortening trans people’s lives and investigates what role law plays in produc- ing those conditions and what role law could or should play in changing them. In the last two decades, the public discourse about trans identities and trans rights has changed significantly. Concern about the exclusion of trans people from gay and lesbian political strategies has heightened. Media coverage of trans issues has increased. Emerging trans political formations have begun institutionalizing by creating new nonprofit organizations and professional associations focused specifically on trans issues, work that also produces new terminology, knowledge, and advocacy tools concerning gender identity and expression. These develop- ments are raising important questions about trans politics. What
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is the relationship of trans political strategy to the strategies of the lesbian and gay rights work that has garnered so much atten- tion in the last three decades? What role should law reform play in trans political strategy? How will forming nonprofits focused on trans issues impact trans people’s lives and trans resistance politics? Who should lead and what forms of leadership should trans politics utilize? What relationship does trans politics have to other political movements and issues? Specifically, how does trans politics interface with anti-racism, feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-imperialism, immigration politics, and disability politics?
In proposing what role law reform should have in trans resis- tance, this book draws from the insights of Critical Race Theory, women of color feminism, queer theory, and critical disability studies to reveal the mistakes and limitations of white lesbian and gay rights strategies. Critical political and intellectual tradi- tions have generated a vivid picture of the limitations of reform strategies focused on legal equality for movements seeking trans- formative political change. These traditions have highlighted the ineffectiveness of the discrimination principle as a method of identifying and addressing oppression, and have illustrated that legal declarations of “equality” are often tools for main- taining stratifying social and economic arrangements. Further, these traditions provide ways of understanding the operations of power and control that allow a more accurate identification of the conditions trans people are facing, and the development of more effective strategies for transformation than the liberal legal reform framework permits. Scholars and activists in these tradi- tions such as Ruth Gilmore, Andrea Smith, Angela Davis, Lisa Duggan, Grace Hong, Roderick Ferguson, Chandan Reddy, and Angela Harris4 describe the operation of key political develop- ments, such as the decreasing bargaining power of workers, the dismantling of welfare programs, the growth of the prison indus- trial complex (PIC) and immigration enforcement, and the rise of the nonprofit formation, and also identify the complexities involved in practicing resistance politics in an age of cooptation
Preface 15
and incorporation. This book examines these questions from a critical trans political perspective, applies the analysis these tradi- tions have developed to the struggles facing trans people, and il- lustrates the ways trans resistance fits into the larger frameworks being developed in these conversations.
To that end, the chapters that follow raise concerns that have emerged with the institutionalization of the lesbian and gay rights agenda into a law reform-centered strategy. These concerns cau- tion trans scholars and activists to learn from the limitations of that approach. The compromises made in lesbian and gay rights efforts to win formal legal equality gains have come with enor- mous costs: opportunities for coalition have been missed, large sectors of people affected by homophobia have been alienated, and the actual impact of the “victories” has been so limited as to neutralize their effect on the populations most vulnerable to the worst harms of homophobia. Further, the shifting discourse and strategy of lesbian and gay rights work toward privatization, criminalization, and militarization have caused it to be incorpo- rated into the neoliberal agenda in ways that not only ignore, but also directly disserve and further endanger and marginalize, those most vulnerable to regimes of homophobia and state violence.
This book demands a reconsideration of the assumption that trans politics is the forgotten relative of the lesbian and gay rights strategy, and that its focus should be to seek recognition, inclusion, and incorporation similar to what has been sought by lesbian and gay rights advocates. Instead, I suggest that a more transformative approach exists for trans politics, one that more accurately conceptualizes the conditions trans people face and more directly strategizes change that impacts the well-being of trans people. Such an approach includes law reform work but does not center it, and instead approaches law reform work with the caution urged by the critical traditions to which trans politics is indebted and of which it is a part. It makes demands that exceed what can be won in a legal system that was formed by and exists to perpetuate capitalism, white supremacy, settler colonialism,
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and heteropatriarchy. It is rooted in a shared imagination of a world without imprisonment, colonialism, immigration enforce- ment, sexual violence, or wealth disparity. It is sustained by social movement infrastructure that is democratic, non-hierarchical, and centered in healing. This book aims to describe some of what that critical trans politics requires and suggest what models we al- ready have and might expand for practicing critical trans politics.
NOTES 1. These two case studies are adapted from my article, “Compliance
Is Gendered: Transgender Survival and Social Welfare,” in Transgender Rights: History, Politics and Law, eds. Paisley Currah, Shannon Minter, and Richard Juang, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 217–241.
2. “Intersex” is a term used to describe people who have physical conditions that medical professionals assert make them difficult to clas- sify under current medical understandings of what constitutes a “male” or “female” body. Because of these understandings, they are often targets for medical intervention in childhood to make their bodies conform to gender norms. Extensive advocacy has been undertaken to stop these in- terventions and allow people with intersex conditions to choose whether or not they desire medical intervention that would bring their bodies into greater compliance with gender norms. Jim is a person with an intersex condition who is also transgender, but there is no evidence that people with intersex conditions are more or less likely than others to have a trans identity. For more information, see www.isna.org.
3. I have not included a complete list of current policies in this vol- ume because they change frequently. However, my article “Documenting Gender,” Hastings Law Journal 59 (2008):731-842, includes descriptions of state and local policies and their requirements as they existed at the time of publication. Advocacy organizations such as the Sylvia Rivera Law Project (www.srlp.org), the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (www.thetaskforce.org), the National Center for Lesbian Rights (www. nclrights.org) and the National Center for Transgender Equality (www.
Preface 17
nctequality.org) can be contacted to obtain updates about changes to these policies.
4. See, e.g., Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007); Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Grace Kyungwon Hong, The Ruptures of American Capital: Women of Color Feminism and the Culture of Immigrant Labor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Angela P. Harris, “From Stonewall to the Suburbs? Toward a Political Economy of Sexuality,” William and Mary Bill of Rights Journal 14 (2006): 1539–1582; Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press: 2004); and Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005).
In 2005, TransJustice, an all- people of color trans or ga niz ing initiative at the Audre Lorde Pro ject, or ga nized and led the first annual New York City Trans Day of Action for Social and Economic Justice.1 Since its in- ception, the event has taken place on every Friday before New York City’s Pride weekend in June, with the Dyke March following on Saturday and the Pride Parade on Sunday. The Trans Day of Action brings together organizations and individuals from across the New York City area who are unified around a set of demands centered in racial, economic, and gender justice. The statement announcing the first Trans Day of Action provided a stark analy sis of racialized- gendered state vio lence in the United States:
Gender policing has always been a part of the United States’ bloody history. State- sanctioned gender policing targets Trans and Gender Non- Conforming [tgnc] people first by dehumanizing our identities. It denies our basic rights to gender self- determination, and considers our bodies to be property of the state. Gender policing isolates tgnc people from our communities, many of which have been socialized with these oppressive definitions of gender. As a result, we all too often fall victim to verbal and physical vio lence. This transphobic vio- lence is justified using medical theories and religious beliefs, and is perpetuated in order to preserve US heterosexist values.2
The statement goes on to identify many areas of concern, including the high unemployment rate of people of color, increased targeting of immigrants through Social Security and dmv policies, the failure of New York City’s anti- discrimination law to be implemented or enforced by the Commission on Human Rights, police brutality, and state- sanctioned mass murder of communities of color, as illustrated by the “blatant gov- ernmental negligence in the Gulf region during Hurricane Katrina.”
CONCLUSION
“THIS IS A PROTEST, NOT A PARADE!”
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The Trans Day of Action for Social and Economic Justice in New York City stands in profound contrast to many aspects of Pride celebrations around the United States and around the world. Such celebrations have been critiqued for their consumerist and patriotic themes; their mar- ginalization of queer and trans people of color, low income people, im- migrants, and people with disabilities; and their drift away from po liti cal re sis tance and toward entertainment and corporate sponsorship. Major corporate brands like Budweiser, TD Bank, Delta Airlines, Walgreens, and even oil companies sponsor pride celebrations around the world. In Edmonton, Alberta, protests arose in 2009 when the Edmonton Pride Parade was officially renamed the “TD Canada Trust Pride Parade and Cele bration on the Square.”3
In 2013, controversy erupted when transgender military whistleblower Chelsea Manning was selected as an honorary marshal for San Francisco’s Pride parade. Promilitary gay and lesbian activists and ser vice members protested Manning’s se lection and it was ultimately revoked. The debate continued, and Manning was selected again and this time remained an honorary marshal in 2014’s San Francisco Pride. The controversy high- lighted the ongoing tension between those who identify Pride as part of a queer and trans protest culture for a leftist movement for sexual and gender liberation, and those who want Pride to reflect a politics of includ- ing lgbt people in existing US po liti cal structures.
The annual San Francisco Trans March was initiated in 1999, first as a party in the Tenderloin neighborhood and later as an or ga nized march that occurs on the Friday night of Pride Weekend preceding Satur- day’s Dyke March and Sunday’s Pride Parade. Controversy surrounding San Francisco’s Trans March illustrates the questions currently facing trans politics about whether to proceed in the model of lesbian and gay rights work or choose a more critical path. In 2006 racial- and economic- justice– focused trans activists criticized the march’s organizers for in- viting a representative of the District Attorney’s office and Bevan Dufty, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, to speak at the pre- march rally. A letter of protest by the Trans/Gender Variant In Prison committee (tip) about speaker invitations demonstrated the concerns. The letter highlighted the role of the District Attorney’s office in tar- geting trans people, people of color, people with disabilities, youth, and poor people. It outlined specific stories of trans people facing vio lence in San Francisco’s jails for criminalized be hav ior resulting from poverty against whom the District Attorney’s office pursued harsh punishments
“this is a protest, not a parade!” 119
and long sentences. It juxtaposed the targeting and vio lence faced by trans people at the hands of the city’s criminal punishment system with the commitment of the District Attorney’s office to prosecute anti- trans hate crimes, describing how such efforts, if anything, worsened vio lence against trans people in the city. It noted that although statistics suggested that law enforcement personnel were responsible for a significant portion of hate vio lence against trans people in San Francisco, none had been prosecuted for hate crimes by the District Attorney’s office. The letter further objected to the inclusion of Supervisor Dufty, noting his mem- bership in the conservative block of the Board of Supervisors and his opposition to legislation that would help poor and working class people by preventing evictions and creating low- income housing. The letter also described how having a police escort for the march and inviting the Dis- trict Attorney negatively impacted participation by people on probation or parole. Finally, it argued that these invited public officials were not real allies of trans San Franciscans, but were instead exploiting the event to gain votes and legitimize institutions and approaches that harm trans people.4
These Pride and Trans March controversies demonstrate the tensions arising between a strain of trans politics that desires increased visibility for trans people and endorsement of trans people’s lives by officials and institutions currently in power, and a strain that seeks to build justice for trans people by challenging these same officials and institutions for the ways they endanger and harm trans people. TransJustice’s work in or ga niz ing the Trans Day of Action in New York City raises demands that exceed visibility, inclusion, and recognition. Their work directly resists collusion with criminal punishment systems and other sites of racial, economic, and gender vio lence. The or ga niz ing methods employed by TransJustice, including governance and leadership by people of color and a focus on membership development, produce conditions for formulat- ing a transformative racial and economic justice- centered trans agenda. Critiques of the speakers invited to the 2006 San Francisco Trans March by tip demonstrate the kind of critical trans politics that many small, people of color– led trans organizations are practicing.5
Trans re sis tance is emerging in a time when cultural “common sense” tells us to strug gle for nothing more than incorporation into the existing social order. We are continually invited to participate in building and growing the systems of control that shorten trans lives. The inclusion and recognition offered by these invitations is not only disappointingly
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solely symbolic, but also actually legitimizes and expands harmful con- ditions. We can translate the pain of having community members mur- dered every month into a demand to expand the punishing power of the criminal system that targets us. We can fight to have legislatures declare us equal through anti- discrimination laws and watch as the majority of trans people remain unemployed, incapable of getting id, denied social ser vices and healthcare, and consigned to prisons that promise sexual assault and medical neglect. Structured abandonment, poverty, and im- prisonment remain the reality for the majority of trans people, yet law reform strategies beckon us to seek legitimacy and protection from bru- tal legal regimes that only protect the wealthy. The paths to equality laid out by the “successful” lesbian and gay rights model to which we are as- sumed to aspire have little to offer us in terms of concrete change to our life chances. Our inclusion in that model legitimizes systems that harm us and further obscures the causes and consequences of that harm.
Contemporary po liti cal conditions terrorize and shorten the lives of trans people, and threaten to subsume trans re sis tance. Trans people are told by legal systems, state agencies, employers, schools, and our families that we are impossible people who are not who we say we are, cannot exist, cannot be classified, and cannot fit anywhere. We have been told by lesbian and gay rights organizations, as they continu- ally choose to leave us aside, that we are not po liti cally viable and that our lives are not a po liti cal possibility that can be conceived. At the same time, we are told that we have to run our re sis tance organizations like businesses, that participatory or collective models of governance are inefficient and idealistic, that we must tailor our messages to what the corporate media can understand, and that our demands need to fit within the existing goals of the institutions that are killing us. The demands that are emerging from the most vulnerable trans communities for the aboli- tion of prisons, police, and borders, and for full trans- inclusive health- care and food, housing, and education for everyone are the kinds of demands that are incomprehensible to reform movements focused on rights claims. These broader, transformative demands cannot be won in courts, and they emerge from those for whom narrow legal reform de- mands have little to offer. White- led, lawyer- dominated lesbian and gay rights organizations— even those that have added a “T” to their mission statements— cannot comprehend these demands and cannot win them using narrow elite media and law reform strategies focused on inclusion. To the extent that they try to incorporate trans people into their work,
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they will do so narrowly, focusing on those deemed “deserving” and/or “innocent,” ignoring the actual conditions facing the most vulnerable trans people. The inconceivability of the very lives of trans people, espe- cially trans immigrants, trans people of color, indigenous trans people, and trans people with disabilities, and the perceived impossibility of the demands and methods of re sis tance emerging from the most targeted and impacted populations, are symptomatic of the inherent conflicts and divides produced (and often hidden) by the philanthropically controlled models of advocacy that dominate today’s social movements.
Some emergent projects, in addition to those already discussed throughout this book, stand out as examples of a developing trans politics that demands more than what is offered by the narrow space of neoliberal cooptation. In the next section, I offer examples of such projects, includ- ing: diverse community solutions to vio lence that do not rely on policing or criminal courts; Transforming Justice, a national alliance of organi- zations and individuals focused on trans imprisonment in the United States; advocacy strategies targeting transphobic practices in New York City’s welfare system; and prison letter- writing projects. These projects demonstrate the necessary disruption offered by substantive demands and by par tic u lar pro cesses of mobilization— who is doing the work, how they are doing it, and what it is creating. These projects are instructive both because of what they are accomplishing, and because of what we can learn from the significant challenges and obstacles they face. These challenges include lack of resources to support the work; overwhelming need from vulnerable community members; lack of developed leader- ship in community members; and the vulnerability of leaders to harms associated with racism, sexism, poverty, deportation, imprisonment, dis- ability, and transphobia. Acknowledging and engaging with these ob- stacles is essential for furthering this work.
Community Solutions to Vio lence That Do Not Rely on Police
Across the country, racial- and economic- justice– centered feminist, queer, and trans organizations are developing methods of addressing vio lence that do not involve the police or criminal courts. This work has been taken up in different forms and with different areas of focus. Groups working on these strategies in recent years include Safe outside the System (sos Collective) of the Audre Lorde Pro ject in New York City;6 For Crying Out Loud! and Communities Against Rape and Abuse (cara)
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in Seattle;7 The Northwest Network of Bisexual, Trans, Lesbian and Gay Survivors of Abuse,8 Creative Interventions in Oakland,9 Community United Against Vio lence (cuav) in San Francisco,10 Philly Stands Up!,11 Pro ject nia12 in Chicago, and generationfive and Generative Somatics, among many others. These organizations contend that policing and crim- inal punishment exacerbates racist, colonial, sexist, homophobic, ableist, transphobic, and anti- immigrant vio lence in their communities, and are experimenting with transformative approaches to dealing with harms such as intimate partner vio lence, child abuse, and bashing. These orga- nizations resist the idea that vio lence is caused by bad people who need to be punished. Instead, they understand the root causes of vio lence to be the abusive and exploitative power relations produced through sys- temic racism, sexism, transphobia, colonialism, ableism, poverty, and criminalization. These organizations are developing a range of strate- gies aimed at addressing vio lence without feeding the criminal punish- ment system. These strategies include work to prevent vio lence; work to increase the capacity of communities to support survivors of vio lence; work to help people who have engaged in harm to stop doing harm; work to immediately respond to and stop harm as it occurs; and work to build the capacity of individuals and communities to form healthy relation- ships, resolve conflict, support vulnerable members, and identify and break patterns of intimate and family vio lence.
The Northwest Network, for example, has been providing “relationship skills” classes in the Seattle area for over a de cade. This strategy has been developed and implemented primarily by queer people of color at the or ga ni za tion. These classes help build a shared language among people within friend circles and subcultures about how and why vio lence is so pervasive in sexual and romantic relationships. The classes provide con- crete skills for negotiating between partners, supporting friends who may be becoming isolated or harmed inside relationships, and identi- fying community norms that may contribute to patterns of vio lence. The classes sometimes specialize in par tic u lar topics of interest, such as polyamory or how to support survivors of vio lence. The classes are a long- term strategy. They provide immediate tools to those who enroll, but they also build the long- term capacity of Seattle’s queer and trans subcul- tures and social groups to prevent, identify, and address intimate partner vio lence. They aim to shift from a context in which people only seek out “specialists” in intimate partner vio lence when vio lence in a relationship has reached a crisis point, to a context in which the skills and capacities
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that are often housed in domestic vio lence ser vice providing agencies are de- professionalized and diffused throughout communities, thereby contributing to the prevention of partner vio lence. The Northwest Net- work came to this strategy by analyzing data that showed that people got far better support at domestic vio lence agencies than from families and friends, but rarely reached out to these agencies until crisis events had taken place in their lives, often involving police or courts.13 Since people reach out earlier to friends, family, and acquaintances, the Net- work deci ded it was essential to educate nonprofessionals to understand intimate partner vio lence and its causes and provide support to survivors or people who may be in a relationship that is heading toward vio lence.
The Audre Lorde Pro ject’s Safe outside the System (sos) collective has worked since 1997 to address vio lence facing trans and queer people, identifying police vio lence as a central threat to trans and queer people of color. One aspect of sos’s work is focused on increasing safe relation- ships in the Bed- Stuy neighborhood in Brooklyn. In Bed- Stuy, queer and trans people have faced ongoing police vio lence and homophobic and transphobic attacks by police and nonpolice alike. Recognizing that call- ing the police does not ensure safety to people in this neighborhood, sos has worked to build relationships with people working at corner delis and bodegas and other such spaces in the neighborhood. Through these relationships they seek to build a shared understanding of the risks of police vio lence and homophobia and transphobia in the neighborhood. The shop keep ers and other members of the neighborhood who have been drafted into sos’s program have agreed to be a safe place for people in danger and, if possi ble, not to involve the police. Through this work, sos has increased safety by building relationships, breaking isolation, and helping people hold the ground of the neighborhood together by supporting each other in the face of dangers.
Creative Interventions began in 2004 in Oakland and was formed to create community- based responses to interpersonal vio lence. Creative Interventions took on a focused pro ject with a set of partner organiza- tions, including Asian Women’s Shelter, Shimtuh, Narika, and La Cli- nica de la Raza, from 2006–9. Together, these organizations wanted to create different options for people experiencing vio lence and to explore these questions:
• How can family members, friends, neighbors, co- workers, and community members get actively involved in ending
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vio lence when their own loved ones are experiencing interper- sonal vio lence?
• How can we use our connection and care for people who are victims or survivors of vio lence to not only provide safety but also create opportunities for them to heal and reconnect to healthier relationships?
• How can we all provide greater safety for survivors or victims of vio lence even if they stay with or need to co- exist in the same com- munity with people who have harmed them?
• How can we get violent or abusive people to stop the harm they have caused, repair it, and change their attitudes and be hav ior so that they become part of the solution?
• How can we change violent be hav ior by using our connection and care for people who have caused harm rather than by using threats, punishment, or policing?
• How can we change everyday beliefs, practices, and skills to ad- dress, reduce, end, and prevent vio lence?
• How can we use all of the above to create the safe, respectful, and healthy communities we all seek?14
During this three- year period, Creative Interventions operated a space in Oakland where people could work together to respond to vio lence and harm happening between people they knew. In 2012, Creative Interven- tions published an extensive toolkit detailing how they did this work with the aim of providing support to people working to develop similar projects and resources. Creative Interventions also produced the Story- Telling and Or ga niz ing Pro ject (stop).15 stop is a collection of stories publicly available on the web that describes people’s experiences using community- based solutions to harm and vio lence. They also include footage from storytelling sessions the group facilitated in vari ous cities. The toolkit and the storytelling pro ject both help people access very con- crete examples of creative pro cesses that focus on building safety and ending vio lence without using police or social ser vices agencies that can bring more harm to the people involved.
Generative Somatics provides transformational training to activists, organizers, ser vice providers, and movement leaders, both individually and through work with organizations, to increase capacity for doing work to address injustice. Generative Somatics’ work combines the wisdom of somatics (body- centered healing work) and contemporary
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neuroscience with a deep social justice analy sis to look at how people’s physical, emotional, and social responses to vio lence and trauma oper- ate. Their holistic practices help build our capacity to treat each other differently and take actions that are more aligned with our values in our relationships, collaborations, and movements. Many activists have watched organizations and projects fall apart because of dysfunctional conflict and harmful reactions between collaborators. Generative Somat- ics’ work trains people to become aware of, honor, and transform our own reactions, especially those reactions that we have learned through vio lence, trauma, oppression, and/or privilege. It recognizes that many of our reactions might be based in survival responses to trauma. Many of us have experienced trauma from the widespread vio lence in our socie- ties, living under systems that devalue our lives, lock people in cages, and deny people the things they need to live. Trauma can come from long- term historical pro cesses that our families have survived— such as slavery, migration, and colonialism— that create coping mechanisms passed down between generations. These coping mechanisms may have been essential to survival, but might now be preventing connection or collaboration in par tic u lar relationships or organizations. Generative So- matics’ work operates through an explicit understanding of re sis tance politics, refusing to individualize our experiences of harm or reactions we might have that are not working for us, and instead putting these in the context of systems of meaning and control such as racism, colonial- ism, and heteropatriarchy. This work is one of the tools activists in many of the organizations discussed in this book are using to think about how we are deeply shaped by the injustices of the world we live in, and how we might become the kind of people needed for the new world we are trying to create.
Many people engaging in the kinds of work described above are also sharing strategies for directly responding to harm. When it be- comes apparent that someone within a friend circle or activist subcul- ture is harming others, people try out vari ous kinds of “community accountability” projects. These projects aim to have people who know each other work together to support the survivors to find healing and increased safety. They work to understand what the person who did the harm needs so that they never do it again. These projects recognizing that criminal punishment responses often mistreat the survivor and take decision making out of their hands and that they focus on caging the person who did the harm but provide no resources to prevent them
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from harming again. These pro cesses and projects try to provide what that system never has: increased safety and the prevention of harm. This work is difficult and experimental. Often people feel they have “failed” because it is hard for a small group of activists to provide people in crisis with the many things that healing requires, such as adequate income, housing, appropriate and useful mental health support or therapeutic programs, friendship, food, com pany, and emotional support. However, these pro cesses, though rarely satisfying, often provide more support and reduce the vio lence that would have occurred if the survivor had to choose between criminal punishment options or nothing. South End Press published an im por tant book about this work in 2011 called The Revo- lution Starts at Home. That book, along with the Creative Interventions Tool Kit and stop, are key resources for people interested in developing these kinds of projects.
Much of this innovative work has emerged hand- in- hand with the critique of non- profitization of anti- vio lence organizations. Anti- vio lence activists and organizations have come to realize that the last few de- cades of state funding for domestic vio lence work that focused the work on strategies of prosecution and criminalization has failed to reduce vio lence and has actually contributed to policing of communities of color. Women of color anti- vio lence activists have long critiqued the state co- optation of the movement, and are at the forefront of developing alternative approaches that reject policing and criminalization as solu- tions to vio lence. In this way, the critique of non- profitization and phil- anthropic control of movement organizations emerges alongside and intertwined with critiques of cooptation of social movements that has made them sites for expansion and legitimization of apparatuses of state vio lence.
The work to prevent and respond to vio lence outlined above engages each of the four pillars of social justice infrastructure described by the Miami Workers Center. These organizations and projects directly as- sist people in need (Pillar of Ser vice), create new paradigms for under- standing vio lence, and share these paradigms through vari ous po liti cal education programs (Pillar of Consciousness). They build participation in collective action while developing leadership by those most directly impacted by systemic, institutional, and interpersonal harm (Pillar of Power). The work explicitly avoids using the criminal punishment sys- tem. Many of these organizations also lead and participate in campaigns that include law and policy reform demands such as decriminalization
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of sex work or drug use, stopping police- ice collaboration, increasing poverty alleviation programs, rolling back mandatory reporting laws, and other reforms (Pillar of Law and Policy). These campaigns aim to reach the root causes of vio lence rather than relying on the state’s ca- pacity for punishment. Many of these groups are also working through or gan i za tional structures that aim to resist the harmful aspects of non- profitization and build infrastructure centered in racial, gender, and economic justice. All of this work is experimental, still developing, and requires consistent self- reflection and critique. Nonetheless, it illustrates how a critical queer, feminist, and trans antiprison, antivio lence politics is currently taking shape on the ground across the United States, address- ing the most urgent harms facing vulnerable populations.
Transforming Justice
Transforming Justice was a national alliance of organizations and indi- viduals focused on trans imprisonment in the United States. The pro ject emerged in 2005 from the staff of the Sylvia Rivera Law Pro ject (srlp), who identified a need to build shared analy sis about trans imprison- ment. srlp saw that after years of agitation by itself and by other small organizations, more attention (albeit very little) was beginning to be paid to the dire circumstances facing trans prisoners. However, there was not a base of shared po liti cal understanding among the smaller grassroots organizations who were beginning to do law and policy work on the issues regarding the nature of imprisonment, the dangers of prison re- form as a possi ble vector of prison expansion, and the alternative politics of prison abolition. As some of the larger lgbt organizations began to minimally take up the issue, it became clear that they were not connected to prison- related movements that had developed an analy sis about the ways reform efforts have repeatedly been co- opted by forces interested in expanding imprisonment.
In the 2000s, prison- focused activists were witnessing a disturb- ing new manifestation of this trend. New proposals were emerging for “gender- responsive prisons.” Purportedly in the name of making pris- ons better for women prisoners, proposals were emerging to build more women’s prisons— which would of course result in more women being imprisoned. Organizations concerned about gender and criminalization were recognizing and resisting this moment of co- optation of critiques of the treatment of women prisoners to imprison more women, and
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trans organizations saw potential danger in trans people’s experiences of vio lence being used to foster “reform” projects that would also expand imprisonment. srlp reached out to other organizations— both people of color- led small trans organizations like tgijp and larger organizations with lgbt projects such as the American Friends Ser vice Committee— to talk about the possibility of a national gathering where people could share their analyses and possibly come to some consensus about refus- ing to take up prison- expanding tactics. As the idea emerged, organizers from tgijp and tip16 in the San Francisco Bay Area introduced models and ideas for centering the experiences and leadership of formerly im- prisoned trans people in the or ga niz ing of the event. The group dis- cussed how this event could be a leadership development opportunity for trans people caught in the cycle of poverty and imprisonment, ways to include currently imprisoned trans people in the planning of and in the event itself, and how to utilize the support of lawyers and other profes- sionals at national organizations without centralizing their leadership.
Eventually, the group created a two- level planning method— local and national. A local weekly meeting called “Marvelous Mondays” was initi- ated, offering food and support to those who wanted to show up and get involved. As the word spread, the Monday meetings became an im- por tant gathering place for many formerly imprisoned trans women coping with addiction, poverty, discrimination, homelessness, and on- going criminalization. The local group worked on numerous projects, including creating a survey aimed at acquiring the perspective and input of imprisoned trans people on the pro ject that involved visit- ing currently imprisoned trans people in California with the survey and distributing it by mail nationally. The group also designed a website for the event and developed a pop u lar education curriculum to use with attendees. Members of the local group also joined in conference calls with the national planning group, which worked on fundraising for the event, crafting and sending out invitations to people around the country, and other aspects of programming. The national group included many attorneys and other allies to imprisoned trans people who aimed to pro- vide support to the pro cess while centering leadership development and governance of the pro cess by directly impacted people.
Ultimately, the planning pro cess resulted in Transforming Justice, a two- day conference focused on the experiences of imprisoned trans people. It was an invite- only event. The invited organizations were asked to send
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members who were trans people, formerly imprisoned people, people of color, or other wise part of highly criminalized populations. This was an im por tant strategy to disrupt cycles of leadership development in non- profits that tend to offer white people, people with educational privilege, and non- trans people opportunities to travel, build analy sis, and net- work. It was also aimed at preventing the event from being overrun by students, researchers, professionals and others who might drown out the presence and leadership of trans former prisoners. The result was a con- ference at which the attendance, participation, and leadership of trans women of color and formerly imprisoned trans people were centered, and where attorneys and other allied professionals with educational privilege were in the minority. The conference included opportunities for attendees to write to currently imprisoned trans people, discussions led by former prisoners about criminal punishment and immigration enforcement systems as well as priorities for change, interactive ses- sions that encouraged attendees to meet one another and learn about each other’s work, and discussions of the politics of prison abolition. The event also included a focus on sustainability in the work with health workers offering massage, quiet spaces, counseling, and other support for attendees. By the end of the weekend, the attendees had crafted and agreed to five points of unity:
1. We recognize cycles of poverty, criminalization, and imprison- ment as urgent human rights issues for transgender and gender nonconforming people.
2. We agree to promote, centralize, and support the leadership of transgender and gender nonconforming people most impacted by prisons, policing, and poverty in this work.
3. We plan to or ga nize to build on and expand a national move- ment to liberate our communities and specifically transgender and gender nonconforming people from poverty, homelessness, drug addiction, racism, ageism, transphobia, classism, sexism, ableism, immigration discrimination, vio lence, and the brutality of the prison industrial complex.
4. We commit to ending the abuse and discrimination against transgender and gender nonconforming people in all aspects of society, with the long- term goal of ending the prison industrial complex.
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5. We agree to continue discussing with each other what it means to work towards ending the prison industrial complex while ad- dressing immediate human rights crises.17
After the event, the organizers conducted in- depth evaluations with attendees about their experiences and began the pro cess of determining what role the Transforming Justice co ali tion might continue to play as a national alliance or co ali tion. The evaluation and planning pro cess again focused on questions of how Transforming Justice could be governed by those most directly impacted, how to further develop the leadership skills of people living in criminalized trans communities, how to avoid compromising the mission of the work due to pressure from funders, how to balance the benefits of maintaining paid staff positions for de- veloping leaders in communities that need employment opportunities against the costs of entering the competitive dynamics of nonprofit fun- draising, and how to create a sustainable structure that supports local grassroots or ga niz ing and does not consolidate power in a national body. Trans filmmaker Chris Vargas, with the organizers of Transforming Jus- tice, produced a video about the conference called “Make It Happen!”18 “Make It Happen!” was one of the first video resources available that talked about trans imprisonment and created a forum for the leadership of trans activists of color and formerly imprisoned trans people for tell- ing the story of that or ga niz ing. The video, posted online and available to be viewed free of charge, allowed the experience of the or ga niz ing the event and its message to travel beyond those who attended the event.
The Transforming Justice national co ali tion and resulting confer- ence models a trans politics committed to prioritizing the experiences, knowledge, and leadership of the most vulnerable. Transforming Jus- tice suggests ways of de- professionalizing social movement work while building participatory, perpetually self- reflective structures. Contemporary conditions make this work very challenging. Throughout the or ga niz ing of the conference, issues related to criminalization consistently came to the fore as members continued to face obstacles to their well- being. Several members strug gled with addiction, and relapses of individual or- ga niz ing members impacted the group. The housing insecurity of some members prevented them from consistently attending and participating in meetings or following through with commitments. Some key orga- nizers found the stress of working on the event impacted their mental health. Other organizers were imprisoned during the event planning
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and were no longer able to participate in the same way. Essentially, the very conditions that prompt the need for this work continue to threaten and harm it. The or ga niz ing itself can sometimes be a source of support for members during hard times, bringing people together who can offer understanding and share resources. Yet, doing under- resourced work to dismantle violent systems can also cause stress and undermine the health of people doing the work, as many people who have been burned out in nonprofits are well aware. Or ga niz ing in a context where most members are impacted by addiction and other health issues— problems often created by exposure to continued vio lence and trauma— can mean that significant conflict is a part of the environment. Resource scarcity can exacerbate the stress of the work in ways that worsen conflict. Par- ticipants in the planning pro cess who were in the role of allies, such as white lawyers and other nonprofit staffers with educational privilege, had to continually work on internalized dominance behaviors that can become obstacles to building leadership of directly impacted people.
The structural barriers to that leadership were many and allies strug- gled to participate in ways that were truly supportive of that leadership and did not overtake the space necessary for growth and cultivation. The Transforming Justice co ali tion planning and or ga niz ing experiences are instructive in describing the kinds of challenges that create per sis tent obstacles to these pro cesses, as well for articulating strategies for how to do work under such conditions. Transforming Justice had to devise inno- vative methods for addressing the challenges that come with doing work based in prioritizing the leadership of those most directly impacted.
In 2010, the national alliance sent a del e ga tion to the US Social Forum and conducted a workshop aimed at helping people from around the country who are active on issues related to the criminalization of trans people assess next steps for the national work. In 2011, the group hosted a gathering in Decatur, Georgia, to evaluate its work. Finding support for members (many of whom are not affiliated with organizations that have bud gets) to travel to meet together and supporting people whose parole conditions, lack of id, and other experiences that make travel dif- ficult were significant issues in planning the gathering. Ultimately, after this meeting, organizers recognized that they did not have sufficient re- sources to continue the alliance and dissolved Transforming Justice. The individuals and groups who had been involved continued their work and maintained connections to one another, but recognized that there were not sufficient resources available to fulfill their dreams of continuing to
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gather grassroots, formerly imprisoned people to build relationships and strategize together through a national alliance led by those most directly impacted. The work of Transforming Justice had a significant influence on the organizations and individuals who continue, to this day, to fight the criminalization of trans people. In many ways, it helped frame con- versations that are still developing and growing. However, the obstacles to ensuring that such work is led by those most directly impacted and is not dominated by or co- opted by better- funded organizations remain instructive. As larger lgbt nonprofits increasingly take interest in and win grant money to pursue criminal justice reform, it is a continuing concern that an or ga ni za tion focused on doing anti- criminalization work through the leadership of criminalized trans people could not sustain its efforts because of a lack of resources and support and the conditions facing the members themselves.
Human Resources Administration Advocacy, New York City
In 2010, TransJustice, the Sylvia Rivera Law Pro ject, fierce!, Housing Works,19 Queers for Economic Justice (qej),20 and others won a signifi- cant victory in their strug gle with the Human Resources Administration (hra) of New York City, the division of the City’s Department of Social Ser vices that administers welfare and other poverty- related programs. These groups, which formed a co ali tion they called the hra Review Com- mittee, won a policy that aims to address the discrimination and abuse trans people face in hra programs. Their 2009–2010 campaign built off earlier work taken up by the New York City Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center (the Center),21 the Sylvia Rivera Law Pro ject, and the Transgender Law and Policy Institute (tlpi).22
In 2005, the Center, srlp, and the tlpi worked with an hra advisory committee to draft a set of “best practices” that would address a range of issues faced by trans people seeking benefits and ser vices through the hra. The recommendations aimed to confront problems trans people have with hra’s gender classification procedures, discrimination in wel- fare offices, discrimination in workfare programs, placement in gender- segregated shelters, and more. The recommendations sought to create procedures to address these issues. After the Best Practices document was finished, hra and the municipal Law Department stalled; the docu- ment never became hra policy.
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In 2009, the hra Review Committee took up these issues again, this time creating a grassroots or ga niz ing campaign that used open meet- ings, the participatory membership structures of the organizations in the co ali tion, public petitions, and online social networking tools to raise awareness and build public pressure demanding that hra change its policies and practices. This work had emerged through organizations that center the participation of low- income, homeless people, and people of color in trans communities and that foster the leadership and or ga niz- ing capacities of these populations through campaign work focused on issues identified as the most urgent. The methods used to fuel this cam- paign departed significantly from the established model of lesbian and gay rights work. Rather than behind- closed- doors meetings between pro- fessional advocates and government officials, or in lawsuits with the least marginalized people headlining as plaintiffs, the work focused on col- lective action by low- income trans people of color. It happened through open eve ning meetings with poor and homeless trans people at the of- fices of grassroots organizations; food was shared, long conversations built a shared analy sis of experiences at welfare offices and in shelters, and strategies for changing those experiences were debated. It priori- tized change that impacts the daily lives of highly vulnerable trans people rather than advancing symbolic change. It centered po liti cally stigma- tized populations— public assistance recipients and trans people— and reframed their experience and their relation to the state. While there is no doubt that this was a policy reform pro ject, its relationship to the Pillar of Power significantly departed from the law and policy reform methods typically centered in lesbian and gay rights work. The specific demands brought to the table by the hra Review Committee will not end homelessness or poverty— they are incremental and reform- oriented— but they are part of a broader strategy and power analy sis rooted in and generated by the experiences of people facing multiple vectors of mar- ginality that demands change to the specific harms they face.
The pro cess of developing the campaign and bringing directly im- pacted people into its work was aimed at building the leadership of trans public benefits recipients, expanding the membership of racial and economic justice centered queer and trans organizations, and creating capacity for future campaigns. When the new policy was won, it was a watered down, thin version of the initially proposed “Best Practices” doc- ument drafted by the 2005 committee. However, this new policy was more
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effective, I would argue, than if the original document— drafted by white movement professionals (including myself ) without a community- based campaign behind it— had been immediately codified by hra. The hra, and all similar and related poverty- focused government agencies, do not follow their own policies, do not train their workers about their policies, and are unaccountable for their mistreatment of poor people. The pro- cess of winning the policy in 2010, even with its weakened language, is a more significant victory because the communities impacted by the policy are aware of it, consistently demand its enforcement, and continue to build relationships with other impacted people by distributing the policy (as a palm card) in welfare offices and trans gathering spaces citywide. The members of the co ali tion are aware of the policy’s inadequacies just as they are aware that hra is unlikely to follow its own policies. After all, they have witnessed and been subject to hra’s egregious be hav ior as public benefits recipients. However, their win is a significant moment in their mobilization efforts, which will not stop with this singular achieve- ment. This or ga niz ing produced a new set of community leaders who understand the inner workings of hra, who have deep relationships with one another and with organizations focused on their concerns, and who know that hra is a target they can force to make change. This policy reform was but one tactic in the broader work of these organizations to mobilize queer and trans people for racial, economic, and gender jus- tice. The trans women welfare recipients who worked tirelessly to win these policies are part of organizations that are also fighting to oppose immigration enforcement, police vio lence, and the criminalization of people with hiv. The relationships they built with one another and with the organizations that fought this battle connect them to other struggles and help reduce the isolation that makes so many trans people’s lives dangerous and short. The ongoing campaign taken up by many of these same organizations to end the New York State ban on Medicaid cover- age for trans health care is a continuation of this work, and was again done with strong leadership by trans welfare recipients. That campaign similarly uses direct action, protest, media advocacy, and legal work to build policy change fueled by grassroots mobilization.23 The hra cam- paign demonstrates how law and policy reform can operate as a useful tactic when taken up in a long- term mobilization and leadership develop- ment strategy and when focused on the immediate needs of highly vul- nerable populations. These features ensured that the win was not merely symbolic, was a moment of increased politicization of impacted people
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rather that pacification of re sis tance and legitimization of harmful condi- tion, and actually built re sis tance capacity for continued strug gle.
Prison Letter- writing Projects
Around the United States and beyond, organizations focused on providing penpals to imprisoned trans people are emerging and increasingly col- laborating with one another. Some of these projects are student- run and affiliated with colleges and universities, some are part of nonprofit organi- zations that also do other work, and others are autonomous groups not affiliated with larger institutions. These penpal programs connect trans people and allies who are not imprisoned with imprisoned trans people to create supportive relationships and networks. Directly supporting in- dividual prisoners is something trans prison abolitionist organizations like tgijp and srlp have identified as a key part of their work, espe- cially given their awareness of the ways population- wide prison reform programs almost always lead to prison expansion, both in the realm of punishing power and in the construction of new facilities. Combating the isolation and exile logic of imprisonment by building relationships between individuals and communities on both sides of prison walls is an im por tant part of decarceration. Many trans prisoners lack family support and often have few or no connections to people on the outside. Having a relationship with a non- prisoner increases the prisoner’s ac- cess to advocacy tools and resources and can help with isolation and mental health. Penpal programs can also provide mutual opportunities for po liti cal education and involvement, and can provide key support in planning for life after release. The penpal relationship can also help expose the violences of imprisonment that often remain hidden when their targets are isolated from contact with the outside.
These projects are also im por tant to legal organizations like srlp and tgijp because many imprisoned trans people cannot be helped by lawyers— many of the horrors they live through have been condoned by courts and lawmakers24—so these organizations must find other ways to support their survival and po liti cal engagement. These projects utilize a variety of strategies to match prisoners with penpals, and to support the non- prisoner penpals in providing useful resources, coping with dif- ficulties that come up, and in remaining committed and consistent in their communication. In recent years, some of these projects, including Hearts on a Wire in Philadelphia, Black and Pink in Boston, srlp in New
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York, Bent Bars in London, and the Prisoner Correspondence Pro ject in Montreal have connected with each other on conference calls to share resources, challenges, and ideas for the continuation and advancement of the work.25 Prison penpal programs are a form of vital ser vice work in the sense that they provide direct support to people whose lives are extremely vulnerable and may help with issues such as vio lence, food deprivation, and lack of access to healthcare. This work also helps es- tablish support upon release to prevent re- imprisonment. At the same time, these projects are part of movement building: they foster the lead- ership skills of penpals on both sides of the prison walls through the exchange of po liti cal analy sis and personal experience. For queer and trans students and young people, these projects often provide a means of connecting to a queer and trans politics that centers on opposition to racism, poverty, and criminalization, an im por tant alternative to the pro- marriage, promilitary, pro- consumerism lesbian and gay politics that is most widely visible to emerging activists. In recent years, Black and Pink has expanded and currently has nine chapters across the United States, indicating that grassroots activists are increasingly engaging solidarity across prison walls as a compelling strategy for focusing queer and trans activism.26
These projects build nonprofessional relationships that ground po- liti cal practice and understanding in mutual care and trust. They are about connecting two penpals on shared ground for a mutual relation- ship, rather than creating a client/ser vice provider dynamic. The groups working on these projects center a critical analy sis of power dynamics that exist whenever prisoners and non- prisoners communicate, and they work to provide support to penpals to confront and examine those dy- namics. This provides an opportunity for the development of a social justice analy sis very different from what happens when non- imprisoned people come to relationships with imprisoned people only in professional service- provision settings. These penpal projects move beyond a depoliti- cized ser vices model that turns marginalized people in need into “clients” or “recipients.” These projects instead create conditions for supporting vulnerable people that are holistic and based in demands for transforma- tive change rather than structures of system stabilization. The projects I have briefly described above— community solutions to vio lence that do not rely on the police, the hra policy reform campaign, Transforming Justice, and trans penpal projects— offer just a few examples of the kinds of work being taken up by activists and organizations struggling to ad-
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dress conditions faced by trans and gender nonconforming people in ways that are part of a broad politics of racial and economic justice and that recognizes the central role of criminalization, immigration enforce- ment, and poverty in trans subjection. This work prioritizes building leadership and membership on a “most vulnerable first” basis, center- ing the belief that social justice trickles up, not down and that mean- ingful change comes from below. These projects are emerging in the same moment when many are challenging the structures of lgbt rights frameworks and formations that are reproducing harmful conditions. Challenges to the prioritization and resource concentration in marriage reform work are growing louder. Many are questioning the hate crime law strategy as a way to address vio lence and are opposing hate crime laws inclusion campaigns. Organizations like the Sylvia Rivera Law Pro- ject and the Peter Cicchino Youth Pro ject27 have challenged the lawyers- only, behind- closed- doors agenda setting and decision- making that has been typical of lesbian and gay rights approaches and that, sadly, are being emulated in emerging transgender legal circles.28 Additionally, in the United States and around the world, people are creating innovative mobilization models focused on trans politics that are deeply rooted in and connected to social movements for racial and gender justice, wealth re distribution, and opposition to imperialism.
The fruitlessness of “victories” in which trans identity is called upon to legitimize the exile logic of criminalization and the “equal opportunity” logic of anti- discrimination opens many key strategy questions for our re sis tance. The call to seek out formal legal equality through demands for inclusion in hate crime legislation and employment- focused anti- discrimination laws beckons trans populations to claim and embrace a kind of recognition that not only fails to offer respite from the brutalities of poverty and criminalization, but also threatens to reduce our strug gle to another justification for and site of expansion of the structures that produce the very conditions that shorten our lives.
We are invited to demand that trans people are “ human” when “ human” is still defined through colonial norms of race, gender, ability, and immigration status that actually limit the invitation to a very small part of the trans population.29 We must build a critical trans politics that refuses these invitations and that boldly resists the regimes of abandon- ment and imprisonment that beckon us. These other trans politics often appear impossible, incomprehensible, and not viable in the context of recognition and inclusion focused nonprofitized social movements. But
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such a trans politics is possi ble, and happening right now. Many trans activists and organizations are taking up critical engagements with the infrastructure of social change. By rejecting elite strategies centering law reform and mainstream media messaging, these locations of re sis- tance offer models of participatory, mobilization- focused strug gle led by those living on the sharpest intersecting edges of multiple systems of control. Such a politics is unrecognizable as “lgbt politics” in the cur- rent moment. Lesbian and gay rights politics has articulated an agenda centered in formal legal equality and single- issue politics embracing di- visive framings of “ family” and “law and order” in white supremacist, nationalist, homonormative terms. The existence of critical practices that resist the pulls of recognition despite the enormous pressures to be leg- ible in neoliberal terms demonstrate the collective desire for trans po liti- cal practices that actually address trans survival. It is this space, where questions of survival and distribution are centered, where the well- being of the most vulnerable will not be compromised for promises of legal and media recognition, where the difficult work of building participatory re sis tance led from the bottom up, is undertaken, where we can seek the emergence of deeply transformative trans re sis tance.
