in February of this year I founded a
brand new organization, Trans Feminism
International and I'd like to take a
moment to talk about why such an
organization is so crucial in these
difficult times. This presentation has
content warnings for mentions of
violence and various kinds of oppression
including state violence and
transmisogyny. Trans women experience
exceptional levels of violence and we're
at the dangerous intersection of both
transphobia and misogyny. Of the hundreds
of trans people killed each year nearly
all are trans women, nearly all are
people of color, many are poor and many are
sex workers. When we talk about violence
against trans women were also talking
about racism and classism, poverty and
the discrimination against those who
survive through sex work. There's a
suggestion that transphobic violence is
something quite simple: an individual
perpetrator attacking an individual
trans victim, probably in a dark alley in
a sketchy neighborhood. But this is the
Hollywood version of violence. It's very
convenient and most importantly it fits
easily into a model of crime and
punishment by the state. All we need is
better laws they tell us and more
prisons. We need the state to protect us.
Life and violence of course are not so
simple. Trans women face systemic
violence and that includes state
violence. It was only a few decades ago
in the West that being trans was an imprisonable offense and in a hundred
ways the state still discriminates
against us.
Combined with exclusion from wider
society as well as many of the spaces
that call themselves feminist and queer,
many of us are forced into precarity. We
experience unstable housing and
homelessness,  we experience workplace
discrimination. We resort to criminalized
work including sex work. And what's the
result? Trans people are
disproportionately funneled into the
prison system where we experience
dramatically higher levels of isolation,
harassment, violence, assault. Trans women
are especially vulnerable to abuse in
these facilities and nearly all are
incarcerated in men's prisons. US
statistics show that 24 percent of
trans inmates report at least one sexual
assault. Just one recent example, last May,
Roxana Hernandez, a Honduran trans woman
and part of the migrant caravan passing
through Mexico
and seeking asylum in the US was
attained by US Immigrations and
Customs Enforcement. She was kept in a
cold room known as an icebox with the
lights on 24 hours a day. She was given
inadequate food, inadequate medical care
and she died. She was literally killed by
the US immigration and prison system.
In England and Wales, the number of
transgender prisoners has doubled over
the last two years. In February of this
year, the Ministry of Justice announced
that it's officially moving a number of
trans women from women's prisons into
men's prisons despite reports of
violence, assault and suicide. Everywhere
incarcerated trans women represent an
invisible erased population despite
recent changes that have favoured a
privileged few, the rest of us remain as
vulnerable as ever. As a working-class,
precarious and very visible, trans woman
these issues are close to my heart and
my two novels,  Margins and Murmurations and
Conserve and Control have queer
incarceration as a central theme. At the
center of my stories are powerful
activists who are trans women and sex
workers. After publishing my first novel
I contacted a group called LGBT books
to prisoners to see if we could get
some copies of the books to trans woman
in US prisons. After a successful
crowdfunding campaign we got 80 copies
printed and sent. With some private
support, another hundred copies were sent.
As a result I've received hundreds of
handwritten letters from incarcerated
trans women, some written in solitary
confinement, some impossibly heavy with
horrific stories of abuse and many
written with hope and determination to
survive. Last year through the
connections I've been so fortunate to
make I helped establish Books Beyond
Bars UK, an organization to get books to
trans and queer folk in prison. Now I'm
building Trans Feminism International to
create more of these projects, to offer
support to trans women, and to build
alliances so that we can escape
precarity
and fight violence on our own terms. Projects will include self defence,
accessible health care and, yes, joining
the fight for prison abolition and the
decriminalization of sex work, because
violence is complex and our response to
violence needs to be just as nuanced.
