to: the queer and trans community in san diego (occupied Kumeyaay lands)
from: haven rittershofer-ongoco (they/them/elle/siya)
originally published September 2022
Title Cover Image Description:
Black digital art on a lavender background. Two forearms and hands with circuit inspired designs frame a brain in the center. The brain and forearms are "dissolving" and "smoke" rises from the brain. In the smoke are the words, "who are we for us?"
Note to reader: I use the terms 'harmer/abuser' instead of the term 'perpetrator,' which is often used by the criminal (in)justice system to signify someone who should be punished. A more ideal term may be 'person who harmed' (but that is lot of words). Perpetrator tends to imply that there are only two distinct/opposite categories (a binary) that a person can be labeled: victim or perpetrator. In reality, harm is usually much more complex. I support and hold no judgement towards folks who are empowered to use the term perpetrator, though, I may invite them to define their relationship to the term and ask if it aligns with getting us closer to collective freedom.
update 10/21/22: Support NY uses “perpetuator” instead of “perpetrator” to draw attention to the fact that interpersonal violence is pervasive and cyclical. I am updating the website version to reflect this language.
Topics include suicidality, substance use, self-harm, intimate partner violence, and other (unfortunately) common harms experienced by the queer/trans community. I state this to empower you to decide how you'd like to interact with this text. I hope you can take your time, sit in activation, center healing and curiosity, and move through complexities this may bring up.
More on 'binary' terminology here. Recommended options for additional mental crisis and wellness support: BlackLine, Translifeline (short term) and Abolition-Based Mental Health Providers, National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color (long-term).
All underlined text is links! Use the QR code to access the web version. All artwork and poetry are my own (unless otherwise stated). Please do not redistribute them outside of this zine without my consent. If you want a tattoo hmu tho ;)
Above Image: A semi-realistic drawing of a hawk moth I made for one of my childhood best friends. I even got to tattoo it on them! Oh how we've changed since those days on the "shooting stars" soccer team <3 But I also feel like we are trying to get back to the freedom of expression we had back then...
While I try to make the language in this zine accessible to folks of many backgrounds, there are some terms I feel are necessary. I provide their definitions below. Please feel free to reach out if you need additional support.
abolition - a broad political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.
accountability - process of taking responsibility for harm, apologizing, and committing to change (discussed in depth in this zine).
authentic/authenticity - completely genuine.
BIPOC - Black Indigenous Person of Color. This umbrella term represents racial + ethnic identities that are most marginalized, harmed, and dis-empowered in our society. QTBIPOC = Queer Trans + BIPOC. Those who are QT + BIPOC are even more disempowered.
capacity - mental or emotional ability to care for one another.
capitalism - economic and political system where the country's trade and industry are controlled by private businesses with minimal state/government interference. Capital = wealth. In america, a capitalist country, this is how wealth is distributed:
Top 5% of the population (~16 million people) own 65% of wealth
Lowest 80% of the population (~270 million people) own 11.7% of wealth
Very few people hoard most of the money in america. American media, research, and politics are funded by money. This means those who have the most money have the most influence in our society. If we break up the wealth by race, and take assets (such as cars and property) minus debt (graphic here):
white families on average have $63,000
Black families on average have $808
carceral/incarceration - terms that describe prison/imprisonment on many different levels (not just within jails, but also within ourselves, relationships, actions, and mindsets).
cis/cisgender - person who identifies as the gender they were assigned at birth.
cisheteropatriarchy - cisgender + heterosexual + patriarchy. System of power that cisgender, heterosexual, men benefit from and that harms women and the LGBTQIA+ community. Often paired with "white" to become "white-cisheteropatriarchy" to signify that white, cis, het, men have the most power in our society. See "oppression" definition for the different levels of harm this system dominates.
colonization - process of taking land and resources from the original inhabitants by force and imposing a system of governance without consent. Colonizers believe they are superior to those they colonize.
collective - a group.
criminalization - process by which society decides which activities to punish. Society deems groups of people to be “criminals” who are undeserving of rights and protections once they have broken "laws." Criminalization enacts abuse. Some are excused from punishment (for example, presidential pardons) and entire groups are deemed more or less punishable.
decolonization - transforms the consciousness of the colonized through the reclamation of the Filipino [or Indigenous/pre-colonial] cultural self and makes space for the recovery and healing of traumatic memory, and healing leading to different forms of activism. It is an open-ended process. It is a new way of seeing. As a way of healing, it is also a promise and a hope (Center for Babaylan Studies). If we go back far enough in our lineage, there is a time before colonization. Decolonization starts with connecting there.
embody/embodiment - to unite or represent physically. Often used in the phrase 'embodied emotions' to refer to connecting emotions to body sensations. From Embody Lab's definition: "Embodiment is a process of realizing each aspect of our self. Feeling and experiencing its connection to the whole. As the unapologetic expression of that full self, embodiment can be understood as the [opposite] of oppression."
framework - an essential set of beliefs underlying a concept or idea.
intersectionality - describes how systems of inequality based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, class and other forms of discrimination “intersect” to create unique dynamics and effects.
liberation - freedom; specifically from systems of oppression.
gender binary - The idea that there are only two genders — male and female — which are assigned at birth based on genitalia, each marked by very specific physical characteristics, behaviors and roles, and that individuals cannot change genders or exist between or beyond conventional notions of male or female. Gender nonconformity (GNC) is when the way a person appears or behaves doesn’t match social expectations around the gender binary.
generative - creating and exchanging empowerment.
mad - "madness” used to be a widely accepted term in society to describe mentally ill and/or neurodivergent people. The reclamation of “mad” rebels against psychiatry's power to diagnose. Mad activists seek acceptance within society as they are, rather than being seen as a problem to be fixed or seeking inclusion within a broken system.
marginalization - to exclude a group of people so they have less access to a voice, resources, and freedom.
microaggression - small-scale verbal, emotional, or physical interaction between those of different races, cultures, beliefs, or genders that un-intentionally causes harm.
mutual aid - people work together to meet the needs of everyone in the community. Differs from charity, which features a one-way relationship between an organization and recipients, and often responds to the effects of inequality but not its causes. Mutual aid is an act of solidarity that builds sustained networks between neighbors.
neoliberalism - a set of economic policies and practices that increase the role of the free market (capitalism) and make changes to state (government) policy.
The free market is an economic system where prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.
Neoliberalism has dominated america, Canada, and the UK for over 30 years. In this time, political and economic policies have changed so that private companies have limited government regulation (for example, lots of tax cuts and incentives) but the companies have large political influence . The result is governments provide little support to the public, such as healthcare, and instead, private companies provide these services (that's why there is no universal free healthcare in america).
In neoliberalism, private companies "compete" to sell products to consumers. It reasons that companies with the most buyers have the "best products" and deserve to make the most money. In reality, this competition is held on completely unequal grounds (discussed later).
neurodivergent - person whose brain functioning differs from what's considered "normal" or "neurotypical." This is an umbrella term where folks experience differences from neurotypicality in a variety of ways and intensities.
oppression - exercising power over others in an unjust and harmful manner (see the four I's of oppression) and graphic below.
Above image: Four "I's" of Oppression graphic. More in-depth explanation here.
Below image: A a graphic that shows forms of oppression. Many of these forms are related to one another. They are maintained through the "I's" of oppression. For example, let's take look at 'cissexism:'
Ideological cissexism: "There are only two genders. Those who claim they are not one of these genders are inferior." The belief that gender is binary and that transgender/nonbinary/GNC folks are inferior comes from many sources, including white supremacy, colonialism, 'science', and religion.
Institutional cissexism: "People are assigned either female or male at birth." "There are only two options for restrooms: men and women." The medical field and restrooms are examples of institutions that upholds the belief.
Interpersonal cissexism: "You transgenders are freaks!" "I would never give a trans person a job." "I'm not going to use your correct pronouns." People interact with one another to uphold the belief. This helps the dominant group (cisgender people) maintain privilege given to them.
Internalized cissexism: "I believe I am inferior and less-than because I am transgender." Cissexism is internalized and those that are oppressed by interpersonal, institutional, and ideological oppression harm themselves.
patriarchy - system where cisgender men are primarily in power over morals, politics, religion, families, and more. Patriarchal societies give most authority to men while marginalizing women, femininity, and gender-variance.
practice - a way of putting values into action. a practitioner is someone who is experienced in a particular practice.
privilege - unearned benefits and advantages from systems that oppress others. Privileged people often accept false negative assumptions about oppressed groups and believe there superiority is justified.
white privilege is a special set of advantages granted to white people; especially those who resemble those already in power in society.
punitive - inflicting or relating to punishment.
queer - used as an umbrella term for the LGBTQIA2S+ community. Queer used to be a slur and since has been reclaimed by many as a celebration of not fitting into social norms.
resilience - ability to resist unfavorable effects.
self-determination - a person makes decisions to control their own life. decisions are not made by others on their behalf.
settler-colonialism - indigenous peoples of a colonized region are displaced by non-native settlers who permanently form a society there.
sex work - any form of labor involving trading something sexual for something of value. The distinction between prostitution and sex work is that prostitution is a legal term describing a criminal offense that penalizes performing sexual acts in exchange for something of value. Sex work describes a broader range of activities such as phone sex, exotic dancing, creating pornography, some of which are legal in the US.
The sex trade describes an informal economy where individuals trade something sexual for something of value.
state - a nation ran by a government. example: "the state" funds police to respond to violence. a response to violence outside of "the state" is community response teams.
systematic - often used to describe how institutions work together to oppress marginalized people.
trans/transgender - one’s gender is different from conventional or cultural expectations based on the sex that person was assigned at birth.
transformative justice - a framework for responding to harm outside of government funded resources so survivors can seek healing, harmers can seek accountability and change, and the conditions for harm are transformed to reduce likelihood of it reoccurring (discussed in-depth in the zine).
trauma - intense physical and psychological stress reactions with lasting unfavorable effects. Resiliency and personal experience influence impact. It can be caused by single events and/or constant stressors. symptoms do not need to be immediate nor directly tied to an event.
western/westernization - western culture is the lifestyle and core values of Europe and the countries colonized by Europeans. For example, UK, America, Canada. Some countries, such as in the Latin Americas, resist or adopt western culture more than others. Core values include individualism, personal responsibility, materialism, scientific rationalism (science is more important than emotions and morals), and the rule of law. These values have origins from Catholicism and the Enlightenment. Westernization is the process of a minority group adopting the customs and attitudes of the dominant (western) culture. This process usually happens by force and as a means of survival. See these videos: Me or We? Cultural Difference between East and West and The Indigenous world view vs. Western world view.
white savior complex - white people from a developed nation or privileged positions enter spaces of oppressed peoples with a mindset and goal to "save" them. In reality, this act is to make the white folks feel better about themselves and/or force beliefs and customs they benefit from. The complex is made up of policies, charities, nonprofits, award groups, and more.
white supremacy - beliefs and systems that enable white people to maintain power over people of other races. Systems that uphold white supremacy include healthcare, housing, government, and jobs. Examples are how non-white infant mortality rates are significantly higher and how white people are more likely to get a job than a non-white person with the same qualifications. White supremacy culture includes behaviors, norms, and standards of white supremacy that may be harder to see or name. Characteristics include perfectionism, defensiveness, valuing quantity over quality, power hoarding, either/or thinking, and fear of open conflict. See more on White Supremacy Culture in Organizations.
Through story, art, history, and reflection, this zine aims to introduce you to key elements of transformative justice - a way of responding to harm away from punishment and towards healing and freedom. I believe that once we develop a relationship to words and legacies, we can become empowered by and act through them.
My story is one of breaking oppressive molds that I participated in and was forced into, then finding transformative justice as an anchor to begin healing myself and imagining freedom in community. Parts of my story may not resonate with you due to my socioeconomic (social and money), academic (undergraduate degree in engineering), and white privileges. However, I know many other queer and trans folks whose ongoing traumas prevent them from having loving, lasting connections. Many of us are not finding answers to justice and healing within the options that exist.
We are all forced to give up parts of ourselves to maintain resiliency against oppressive systems. Many of us are not only experiencing harm, we are also harming others as we fumble to survive, seek safety, and figure out what it means to live. What's left of us when we no longer desire the dreams we were told to dream? What tools do we have to stitch together new selves, relationships, and communities after we harm one another? The answers lie in the history, present, and future of liberatory movements, teachings, and lived experience of those who have been most oppressed and marginalized.
This zine poses questions, information, and story to encourage reflection. I suggest answering through creativity (art, movement, poetry, writing, time in nature) to imagine your relationship to the words, values, and practices discussed. The process from unbinding from learned ways of protection, justice, and harm is difficult. Take your time, sit with things, talk with folks, leave whatever doesn't serve you, and interact with links (all underlined text) as needed.
What you have within you, your unique story and experiences, is more than enough to connect to this work. In fact, you are exactly what we need to imagine and achieve liberation for us all.
Acknowledging the land is a transformative act that works to undo the intentional erasure of Indigenous peoples and is the first step in decolonizing land relations (California Indian Culture & Sovereignty Center).
See the full Land Acknowledgement
While this work is newer to me, and may be new to you for a variety of reasons, it is has been done for generations. Here, I acknowledge and express gratitude to the Black women, femmes, QTBIPOC folks, mad and disabled folks, Indigenous communities, sex workers, folks of these intersectional identities, folks I've experienced joy and struggles with, and grassroots efforts that have informed this work, my revolution, and this zine. I will not take any profits, and ask instead that you contribute to mutual aid efforts and invest time in further learning about and discussing this work as it calls to you.
The queer and trans community in san diego is beautifully, painfully, complex. We hold many truths:
Living and remembering lineages of immigration, settler-colonialism, indigeneity, enslavement, and intersections of these.
Holding diverse cultures, values, identities, privileges, and traumas.
I want to connect receive and give care with folks. I want to experience collective joy and uplift, protect, and hold one another. There’s something holding me back.
When I speak with other queer and trans folks, we all want "community" and deep connections. If we have them, we fear losing them and feeling lasting hurt. In the wake COVID-19, human rights cancellations, and collective reckoning, we seem ready to create and maintain the life-giving relationships we desire. Unfortunately, I'm finding we (myself included) don’t have the tools, skills, capacity, nor momentum to support the needs, healing, and liberation of us all.
How could we?
Knowledge and voices of our ancestors and elders are buried due to AIDs, colonization, and poorer health outcomes.
Queer, Black, indigenous, holistic, and ancestral teachings are discredited and censored.
Communities are scattered and locked behind bars due to red and lavender lining, COVID isolation, and mass incarceration.
Our power is taken away through unfair laws and unjust systems.
These relentless forms of violence make navigating spaces and sustaining connections aligned with one another's values and interests confusing, discouraging, and even painful.
To further complicate things, I am running into harm within our community at almost every turn.
Harm is in casual conversations with microaggressions.
Harm is in "queer" groups who center cis, white, wealthier, able-bodied folks and dismiss invitations to increase their accessibility and centered populations.
Harm is in intimate partner violence (IPV) and self-injury.
Harm is in lgbt nonprofits whose leaders fail to own up to their mistakes and hold onto power.
Harm is in "accountability" processes where instead of healing the outcome is exclusion, death threats, and torn families.
I have personally witnessed and experienced verbal and physical assault, groping, stalking, transphobia, threats, and microaggressions - from strangers and friends alike - all within "queer" centered spaces. I am causing harm due to ignorance, privileges, and unhealed trauma. Why do we repeat the same patterns of violence that the system uses against us?
With the stressors we face and the complexity of our community, mistakes and harm are bound to happen. However, what scares me the most and prevents me from being my most authentic self, is our responses to harm.
When the trauma we face goes unhealed, we tend to hurt ourselves and others we love and care about.
When we respond to violence with violence, we cannot change the conditions of harm to prevent it from happening again.
The cycle of harm is inexcusable yet understandable. Oppressive forces are tricky and powerful. They are entangled in our beliefs, behaviors, connections, and liberatory spaces. When we experience systemic oppression we may not have the energy nor tools to confront violence within ourselves and our own community. Fear of punishment and desire for self-protection can prevent us from apologizing, sitting in discomfort, and imagining ways to change conditions of harm.
This lack of capacity, fear, and resources when confronted with violence leaves us little option but to turn to our learned forms of 'justice' modeled by the very systems that harm us: blame, assault, policing one another's behavior and expression, neglect, scare tactics, and more. These patterns cause division and trauma for connections and generations to come.
Despite these harms, there's many generative spaces and organizations in san diego building momentum:
Mobilization for police abolition and reproductive rights;
Mutual aid and community gatherings over queer literature and local food;
Art shows and outdoor groups centering QTBIPOC and disabled folks;
Anonymous community pages raising awareness of perpetuators and calling them 'in' rather than 'out;'
Hundreds attending naloxone training events at local gay bars to combat the opioid epidemic.
Can we create a reality where harm within our spaces and relationships doesn't break this momentum, but instead informs us of how we can better care for one another?
The queer community is a galaxy with infinite origins, needs, and wonders. Many of us don't grow up learning how to be in community with folks different from us - BIPOC, white, 2-Spirit, immigrant, settler, privileged, low-income, houseless, disabled, survivor, sober, in recovery, neurodivergent; lovely and all deserving of care. When we inevitably make mistakes and cause harm while trying to survive, experience joy, and be in community, what are our options for healing and justice?
Do the answers lie within the same systems that oppress us, or somewhere else?
We have broken away from the pre-written stories at least once already - are we not sexual, romantic, relational, and gender deviants!?
What frameworks, knowledge, and practices can we leverage to make our dreams of life-giving connection a sustainable reality?
If we want to move towards collective liberation for our vast community, where do we begin?
The Gender Galaxy graphic shows gender beyond the binary man/woman definition. To me, it represents that my gender cannot be contained by earth-bound and socially-constructed limits. My gender is as complex and brilliant as galaxies. Some folks even identify within a celestial gender system (CGS)!
In march of 2021, I removed a part of me meant for the enjoyment of others. Having top surgery freed me to question: who am I, for me? It lead me to reflect upon the systems, institutions, relationships, and internal disharmony I felt throughout my life.
I dreamed of becoming a biomedical engineer to help those harmed by illnesses (such as my mom who suffered from cancer and beat it) get back to a "life worth living." I sought to build relationships grounded in mutual respect and autonomy to experience love, trust, and vulnerability. By 2021 I had achieved these things. I was engaged to a wonderful partner who was kind, intelligent, supportive, caring, and who'd been with me through critical times in my gender journey. I was working in the "best" biotech companies in san diego at the cusp of cutting-edge research. But I wasn't happy.
I was brought up believing that my worth was tied to my achievements.
A "woman" in engineering with straight A's.
A confirmed catholic church leader.
A club founder and president.
A biomedical researcher.
A collegiate athlete, team captain, and board of regents speaker.
Even my queer relationships were on a pre-destined track where "success" and "happiness" were controlled by capitalism, gender roles, monogamy, and marriage.
I found it easier being "good" at things - the praise, recognition, (both things I was uncomfortable and terrible at receiving), availability of friends, protection from oppression, and reliable income. Being good at things made me valuable. But what did I value?
The moments where I felt truly alive weren't in my awards, scores, and achievements. They were the times I laughed the most,
Times I changed,
Times I felt pure freedom of expression,
Times spent in nature,
Times I felt seen, and
Times I went against what was expected and centered my genuine self.
My journey to align my body with my inner self revealed that I had limited tools to sit in my vessel and create an internal, rather than external, sense of worth. What was this "life worth living" I was trying to help get people back to? And was it set up for everyone, even myself, to live authentically?
As my physical scars healed, mental and emotional ones tore wide open. I reflected on my forced gender assignment and upbringing as girl;
My lifelong participation in the athletics that exploited my body and broke my mind;
My catholic confirmation that taught me to feel shame instead of pleasure;
My participation in upholding white supremacy and capitalism in micro-aggressions, silence, ignorance, and guilt;
My intimate relationships that limited me through expectations;
My neglected Filipino heritage due to generational trauma and colonialism;
My chronic pain and mental illness;
My internalized heteronormativity, monogamy, and cissexism...
It was overwhelming. Gender-affirming care through hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and top surgery lifted the dense fog that had been preventing me from connecting to my body's emotions. But these emotions came like a tidal wave that flooded my system, and I had limited skills to stay afloat.
I felt anger, abandonment, disgust, shame, and grief as dreams I was told to dream no longer aligned with who I was becoming and what I valued. I had no fucking clue how to love my new self - I was never taught that. I didn't know what trans joy looked like, all I saw was trans harm, pain, and violence. I received microaggressions, transphobia and cissexism, medical trauma, inaccessibility, and marginalization that my privileges as a previously cisgender-identifying person shielded me from. I desperately craved new experiences and deep connections help me process these emotions, but due to quarantine restrictions and prioritizing safety, I had limited success.
My existing relationships were tested. With no access to a trans mentor, medical and mental health providers who didn't understand me, and cisgender partners, friends, and family that made mistakes and hurt me despite their best intentions, I felt incredibly alone in my gender journey. One time in particular, I was hurt by my partner at the core of my most vulnerable trans self. I didn't want to sever my relationship with them. I knew it wasn't their intention to hurt me.
The only way I knew to protect myself was to put up a wall between us. They didn't know how to take responsibility or help heal me, so they left that wall there. Because of this, I felt so distraught; unable to heal and receive love from the person I trusted the most when I needed it the most.
During my transition and life upheaval, I was grasping to feel loved and experience generative, safe connections. There were people around me saying they loved me, but it wasn't sinking in. The fear of being harmed prevented me from being vulnerable enough to let love into my freshly carved chest.
At times, feelings rose to new heights, levels of activation beyond what I felt equipped control.
I turned to tactics that I thought would bring me safety from the systemic and interpersonal harm I was experiencing.
I neglected relationships with people I felt didn't understand me.
I exercised my partner's guilt over harming me to control their actions.
I felt the heat of anger, shame, and grief consume me like never before.
I injured myself to feel something, anything when I was spiraling in depressive episodes and relationship conflicts.
I numbed my body, the vessel I fought so hard to achieve, so I couldn't feel. When I couldn't feel, I didn't care. This made it easier to let in thoughts of ending this cycle of pain.
There is a particular bridge I knew as the "gateway to the gayborhood." In highschool and on visits back home from college, I looked at it in wonder and hope. My closeted self wanted to experience the freedom this gateway promised. And now, I was living a 2 minute drive from this bridge, openly queer and trans, but feeling hopeless and alone. I was looking at this bridge as my way out.
Several times, I was close to going to emergency mental health services (also known as being 51/50'd or going to a crisis house). Having heard horrible stories of trans folks experiencing trauma from these places, this didn’t feel like a safe nor helpful option. I was lucky none of the folks I was close to non-consensually reported me. I am forever appreciative to the humans that came to me in crisis, and physically held my fragmented self together, but it wasn't enough.
I couldn't keep living like this. I didn't think I was going to make it.
Eventually, I hit a breaking point. In a moment of conflict with my partner, all of these unhealed feelings swelled within me - fear, hurt, abandonment, resentment, shame. These feelings erupted into violent words towards the person who was fumbling to care for me but I couldn't let in. In this moment, and many smaller moments before this, I hurt my partner in ways I never thought I would. I made them feel unsafe.
I immediately regretted what I said and felt disgusted at my behavior. I didn't recognize myself - I genuinely strove to be a refuge for all folks I interact with. How did it get this far? How do I repair? What are the consequences and what will our relationship look like now? Can they ever feel safe with me again?
It didn't feel like an option to talk to a friend or family member about the hurt I caused. This isolation came from my deep-rooted individualistic mindset, shame, and fear. I was worried that the situation was so complex that I would be misunderstood, judged, and punished. It was selfish, but I didn't want to be labeled as an unsafe person and lose what little queer and trans community I had.
There was a sea of circumstances that lead to the hurt:
Decades of repressing my queer and trans self,
Dismissed desires of relationship anarchy,
Harmful relationship patterns and unhealed hurts,
Generational and interpersonal trauma,
Chronic pain,
Under-addressed power dynamics,
Neurodivergence,
Isolation...the list goes on.
NONE of these things excused the harm. But, if I wanted my partner to heal and if I wanted to take accountability and change, I needed space, support, and understanding for these realities to exist.
That’s how I felt: too complicated to truly understand, yet unequipped to change the harm I was feeling and causing, alone. So, as I do (Virgo and researcher), I turned to the wisdom of experienced practitioners to try and envision a new path.
1. I bought the Accountability Mapping Series
2. Downloaded Kai Cheng Thom’s “So You’re Ready to Choose Love”
3. Attended several Embody Lab workshops
4. Started the Transformative Justice Mixtape
5. Found a trans & polyamorous affirming therapist
Through these practices and care sources I found embodied emotions, compassion, accountability, and understanding. I discovered ways to help heal the harm I was subjected to and caused, and authentically experience the love I craved. I finally found that the fragmented values, practices, and beliefs I sought to embody - autonomy, abolition, feminism, queerness, anti-capitalism, social justice, conflict resolution - were nestled in a tree rooted in rich soils of transformative justice. These frameworks blossomed and fruited and ripened and made their way home - to me.
Image Description: Abstract tree with magical froots, flowers, mushrooms. The roots swirl into a pool shaped like a human figure.
Transformative justice (TJ) put words to the reality that I felt, helped me lay to rest the dreams that were not my own, and gave me a foundation to build a life aligned with my values.
TJ gave me the courage to question my 12-year dream-turned-reality to become a biomedical engineer. It helped me see I was contributing to systems of harm I so desperately wanted to change.
TJ gave me the strength and insight to end an engagement that was beautiful as it was restricting. It gave me hope that pursuing connections in a way authentic to me (relationship anarchy) would leave room for transformation and love beyond my imagination.
I began to do things that have pushed me into rapid growth and change. When I laid to rest my dreams of biomedical engineering, I applied to a PhD program in clinical psychology. My vision was to create mental health technology that amplifies the needs of the most marginalized and proves that systemic oppression causes and worsens mental illness. I even made a whole-ass website! I wanted to 'infiltrate the system' so to speak: use profits from this technology to undo the systems of oppression exposed by mental illness. Luckily, I wasn't admitted. I now realize I don't have the capacity to survive within and battle against the biomedical institutions.
Instead, I leapt into the mental health field. Here, I see entirely new forms of personal, interpersonal, and institutional oppression. I worked as a peer support 'specialist' for a state-funded crisis house. The 'crisis house' (or Short Term Acute Residential Treatment) is an alternative to emergency psychiatric hospitalization or 'step-down' (less intense version) from long-term institutionalization. Most folks admitted are impacted by houselessness, significant mental illness, substance use, and/or incarceration.
Sharing space with these folks,
Listening to their unique yet interwoven stories and conditions that lead them there,
Going on walks and cooking together, at times
Being mistaken for one of the residents (literally the highest compliment I received), and
Learning what they need to not only survive but live - this was being in community.
During one group I facilitated, a trans transitional age youth (TAY) shared their struggle with fentanyl use. I sat in awe as elders in the room with decades of lived experience with opioid dependence immediately directed their care and attention towards them. These elders shared their stories and looked the TAY in the eye to assure them there is still hope. They pleaded with them to stop before "it was too late." I left that evening feeling hopeful, inspired, and energized by this display of community care.
When I came into work the next week, I found out the youth had died from suspected fentanyl overdose. I mourned. The support was there: community, caring clinicians, case management, a psychiatrist and nurse. It wasn't enough. This is when I learned that "house" funded by the state, the very embodiment of institutional oppression, cannot possibly be be a home - especially for someone trans in crisis.
Another time I was working the late shift and sitting in the office with the lead clinician (an older, queer, white woman with a license in therapy) and an intern (a Black woman in her early 20's with an associate's degree in counseling). At around 10 pm, a younger, Black patient came down to the office and shared symptoms of extreme discomfort and fast heartbeat due to her new psych meds. Based on lived and community experience, her symptoms suggested to me that she was having a panic attack due to the side effects (fuck you, big pharma). The lead clinician told her that the nurse wouldn't be in for another 2 hours. The patient said she might want to call 911, but the clinician dismissed her and said she was 'fine' and that we couldn't help her. The patient swiftly left. I asked the clinician why we couldn't call 911. Her response was, "she's just over-reacting, it's something new every night with her." The clinician said that sometimes patients "like that" respond best to "tough love."
I was disgusted. I paused and looked at the intern, who sat there in silence and looked back at her computer. I said, "I'm going to go check on her," then walked into to the foyer after the patient, sat on the couch to attempt to relax the tense atmosphere. I listened to her as she paced back and forth. She expressed the pain of not being believed, being dismissed, and not being heard - in a place that was supposed to support her in crisis. She ended up calling 911 and leaving with the paramedics. I sat in discomfort, conflict, and shame the rest of the shift.
Why couldn't I break the "rules" and help the way the woman wanted to be helped?
Was the intern so burnt out from her own experiences of oppression that she didn't have capacity to help the patient?
Why didn't I challenge the clinician who used the patient's history, race, and mental illness as reasons to deny her help?
Who are we to decide what people in crisis need?
How can I work in this place where such significant power dynamics exist between patient and clinician, and where without a degree, my voice doesn't matter?
When oppressed people, who are already disempowered, are diagnosed as 'mentally ill' by criteria made mostly by cis-het white men, they can be completely stripped of self-determination. Diagnosis can cause marginalized folks to be further harmed. I learned that true healing and understanding cannot possibly come from practitioners who uphold the harms created by institutions of oppression.
I currently work for a nonprofit for adolescents impacted by substance use (SUD) from low-income (and highly policed) areas. The SUD field is full of punitive practices influenced by the War on Drugs and the Prison Industrial Complex. "Success" is often defined by sobriety, people are referred to as 'clean' and 'dirty' (person-first language here), and non-consensual reporting is very common (more here). I am most appalled that some clinicians believe that observed urinalysis drug testing (viewing an adolescent's genitals while they urinate to ensure they are not using a method to get out of the test) is a 'natural' consequences of their 'bad behavior.' Clients, clinicians, and myself have expressed extreme discomfort at this protocol, and I have initiated call-ins to change this process based on trauma-informed research and personal anecdote as a trans person. I have been met with dismissal,
I am trying to shift the culture towards harm reduction, but it's exhausting fighting a lonely, uphill battle against a system reinforced by decades and generations of abuse. The people in power prioritize profits and 'alignment' with the state-funded rules, over trauma-informed practices. It is much easier for them to accept things as the way they are than to own up to harms being caused. Here, I am learning that 'nonprofits' who claim to be social-justice oriented are still complicit in upholding oppression.
The youth I work with are my real teachers. Together, we collaborate on building a 'network of care' that they desire, centered on what brings them joy and gets them closer to safety. I listen to what they think they need, and when they aren't sure, we brainstorm together. They are teaching me that laughing, playing games, and resting after a difficult session or when they just don't have capacity, is not only nice it's necessary. Being my authentic self has been easier with them too. While adults are oftentimes 'afraid' to say the 'wrong' thing, the youth ask questions to better understand me, and some have affirmed my gender expression when I show up in skirts or we talk about thrifted clothing in ways I haven't experienced in a workplace before.
While I'm not doing my paid job, I get to volunteer as a hotline operator on a grassroots (non-sate funded) platform by and for trans folks. I learn something new every call:
New ways to leverage folk's joy to increase resiliency;
New connections to grassroots orgs and practitioners that center abolition; and
New truths, traumas, hardships, and dreams from trans/GNC folks of all different ages and backgrounds from all over the world.
Here, I see the power of peer support and community knowledge. We don't all need masters degrees and money from the state to create the world we want to live in.
I am finding joy and building resilience in art, nature, movement, mutual aid, and creative spaces.
I am healing generational harm by reconnecting with and caring for my Lola (filipino grandma), accessing her memories and forming new ones together.
I am learning new skills to foster connection and integration to my vessel and to my community - things I'd like to center and share in a new world.
My worth is no longer confined to fulfilling the dreams of others, it is in listening, distributing, dreaming, uplifting, remembering, resting, creating, transforming, and being.
I dream of discovering how I can contribute to collective liberation as I build resilience, heal my tender and broken parts, and fumble towards love and connection. In pursuing the things that make me, me, I am empowered to sit in discomfort as desires, relationships, and realities shift. I welcome this discomfort - it provides me the insight necessary to grow and change rather than sit in cycles of harm. If I want to build the generative connections I seek, it all starts at home - within my vessel transformed. Within my haven.
I came into transformative justice as many do.
I was encountering harm first-hand in my own community and interpersonal relationships.
I was shaken through my gender journey into confronting my past, my heritage, my traumas, and my learned ways of 'justice.'
I was seeking accountability for myself, loved ones, and my perpetuators outside of punishment-based tactics that continue the violence I wanted healed and changed.
I was searching for a way to embody my emotions and begin to embrace my past, grapple with my present, and dream of a future.
Transformative justice gave me hope.
Hope that someday I can contribute to a pod, a community, and movements grounded in values and practices centered on our most oppressed.
Hope to connect with other individuals, groups, and organizations already doing this work.
Hope to have difficult discussions, lean into discomfort, and uplift the generations of work already done.
Hope to empower others with the words, tools, feelings, and practices that exist within them already.
Hope to help folks lay a foundation to build generative connections; connections that dream, hold each other through pain, sit in accountability, heal one another, and create joy.
Hope that I can use my privileges, lived experience, and generational knowledge as a white filipinx, trans-GNC, queer, mentally ill, chronic pain buggy (human?) with access to the works, time, and a passion to research, to give folks access to self, interpersonal, community, and collective liberation.
Image Description: A black digital drawing on a white background. An abstract depiction of the ylang-ylang flower, a native plant of the Philippines with medicinal properties. The roots spell "BLOOM" and a butterfly is in the upper right corner.
in a collectively liberated world, we can
seek joy
fracture
embrace justice
heal
transform
in communion with the land
our ancestors
and one another
to nurture the conditions
where we all bloom
We are the ones shining light on the lies and inconsistencies in our current reality, and we are the ones dreaming up, remembering and practicing mutual ways of being in community with each other.
-adrienne maree brown
What conditions do we need liberation from?
We need to explore our relationship to oppression to understand the conditions we need liberation from. Similar words for oppression include 'pain,' 'force,' 'cruelty', 'suppression,' and 'suffering.' Oppression is the opposite of freedom.
Oppression occurs at internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and ideological levels (The four I's of Oppression). Key forms of oppression include racism, cissexism, classism, religion, and ableism. The beliefs underlying these forms include white supremacy, the patriarchy, and neoliberalism. Together, these beliefs and forms create systems of oppression that give power, wealth, and freedom to the privileged at the expense of the most marginalized.
It is difficult but necessary to evaluate how oppressive systems are in our thoughts, actions, and core beliefs. Systems can both give us privilege and control us. Those who are harmed by one form of oppression may feel empowered by another form to cause harm.
Once we know how ourselves, our loved ones, and our community are oppressed and privileged, we begin to see how these harms and inequities impact us all. I encourage you to review the terms introduced in this section in the glossary, to visit Plant and People's Resource, and to examine your privileges and Implicit Biases.
What does it mean to liberate collectively?
Angela Davis, (activist, author, philosopher, and founder of Critical Resistance) describes how difference is the very glue that binds community together. Westernized society profits from individualism, isolation, and independence. These beliefs prevent us from realizing that our struggles are intimately connected.
In contrast, interdependence, the practice of trust, transparency, and mutual collaboration, has provided resilience for generations to Indigenous, Black, immigrant communities, and others who face oppression. One of the core Indigenous Filipino values is kapwa, or the awareness of a shared identity. It is the opposite of individualism, where the "ako" (self) and the "iba sa akin" (others) are one in the same. Dr. Francisco-Menchavez explains kapwa as an "ideal of collectivism and group welfare" where mutual exchange of support is a "step towards the greater good of the Filipino community."
In queer, trans, and BIPOC communities today, practices of mutual aid center values of acknowledging oppression, redistributing wealth, and existing with (solidarity) not for (charity) those who need support. Mutual aid and interdependent practices recognize that state systems are not going to help us. They allow us to build momentum, autonomy, and community care outside of systems of oppression.
I saw a post that says how mutual aid is not selfless, it's selfish. Contributing to community wellness outside of the state is creating the liberated world I want to be a part of. It's letting go of the twisted truths that the system tells us (such as the best way to live is to work your ass off now, hoard wealth until you are 60, and only start living after retirement. Oh, and people who don't have money are lazy and that's their individual fault). It is leaning into collective care for internal freedom.
By recognizing where our privilege intersects with another's oppression, and moving into action rather than basking in shame, guilt, and uncertainty, we can enable mutual mobilization towards liberation of us all.
How does collective liberation feel, look, emerge?
In her book, The Politics of Pleasure, author and activist adrienne maree brown illustrates how authentic - not performative - joy and pleasure in the midst of oppression is key to resilience and imagining freedom. Performative joy comes at a cost, whether at the price of self-authenticity or of another's joy and autonomy. In contrast, authentic, erotic, pleasurable, joy is life-giving, anti-oppressive, generative, and empowering.
By looking to our pre-colonial past, we can begin to dream of a future where we all experience joy authentically. One example is, babaylans, mystical shamans and healers who often blurred western understandings of gender. Babaylans wielded social and spiritual power in pre-colonial Philippine society and remind us how to build a life of justice and peace for all through service, celebration, preservation, and unconditional love. The founder of the Center for Babaylan Studies describes the re-connection to these these ways of being as a form of decolonization. Decolonization "transforms the consciousness of the colonized through the reclamation of the Filipino cultural self and makes space for the recovery and healing of traumatic memory, and healing leading to different forms of activism. It is an open-ended process. It is a new way of seeing. As a way of healing, it is also a promise and a hope."
Creators of science fiction, art, and other expressive mediums ignite our imaginations. They create hypothetical answers based on societies oppressions to the questions: "what if, if only, if this goes on...?"
Through nurturing our authentic joy, centering mutual care, unleashing our imaginations, and decolonizing, we can not only dream of collective liberation, we can begin to create it.
Reflection
The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion (adrienne maree brown). What systems of oppression do you benefit from? How are you oppressed? Which systems, institutions, beliefs, and expectations do you need freedom from? How can you center decolonization?
If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together (Lilla Watson). Saviorism and competition are counterproductive to liberation. What truly binds you to the liberation of others? How can you ensure that you show up vulnerably in spaces where you hold more privilege, so its not the labor of those more marginalized to make you feel 'comfortable?'
Performative joy oftentimes appears because we are not getting a need met - we need to feel safe so we lie, we need to feel seen so we change our actions and appearance, we need to feel loved so we buy this or do that. How do you distinguish between your experiences of performative and authentic joy? If your joy comes at a cost, what is truly necessary for you to feel free, grow, love, and exist with minimal harm to self or others?
Focus on authentic joy - What emotions come up as you visualize, feel, and dream of it? Does any artwork, books, spaces, events, activities, people come to mind? Consider your community, their needs, oppressions, joy - what is your vision of collective liberation?
Miriame Kaba describes hope as a discipline. What do you need to ensure you keep up your hope of liberation?
By a young age, my family, sports teams, white supremacy, the patriarchy, and catholic ideologies instilled in me the core beliefs of service and sin. I was always opening doors for others (to the point my friends and I would have sprint-offs to see who could open the door for each other first; I usually won - I didn't get the nickname "the red flame" in track for no reason), helping my friends, family, elders no questions asked, volunteering, playing and studying hard. I was known as the kind, intelligent, athletic, studious girl and rule follower. I learned early on that this behavior not only greatly reduced punishment in the forms of time-outs, butt-smacks, soap in the mouth (my least favorite), extra laps/push-ups etc., more importantly, it prevented disappointment.
Disappointing my parents, friends, coaches, teachers and others in positions to care for me was something couldn't stomach. It physically and emotionally pained me. It dropped my soul to my gut and made me want to crawl inside too. I was so afraid of failing that I made it my mission to always succeed (with a healthy dose of privileged conditions to help). This perfectionism and desire to serve became so entwined in who I was that it became who I was. When all I did was learn skills, solve equations, fulfill pre-set roles, and serve others, what was left of me? Did I fill myself up with the needs of others to bury my own needs, so deep, that I couldn't connect to my queer, trans self?
(Side bar, another reason I did not want to sin was the catholic sacrament of reconciliation. It terrified me! Imagine confessing your wrongdoings to an old cis white man who literally has no context about who you are or your life, then asking for forgiveness! How the heck is this stranger supposed to absolve me from the immense guilt and shame I carried after hurting someone?! How is this healing?! At the time, I didn't have these words, but I did feel extremely uncomfortable: I profusely sweated, felt nauseous, and did almost anything to get out of going to church on those days.)
Fast-forward to summer of 2020. I had been severed from catholicism for 3 years, openly queer for 4, retired from college athletics for one, and was at the beginning of my gender journey. I, like many, took to reading, unlearning, activating, shifting, changing, and re-learning during the movements sparked after the murder of George Floyd. As someone newer to the non-monogamous scene, I also engaged in workshops and literature at the intersection of racial/gender power dynamics within dating and relationships.
When covid restrictions lifted in 2021 and I started to engage in new connections with QTBIPOC folks, I found myself constantly worried I was going to harm them. I was 'doing' the things I learned: being transparent and explicit about my privileges, checking in and asking for feedback, engaging in mutual aid, trying not to take up too much space, etc. I thought by acknowledging my privilege then policing my own behavior, I could reduce the chances of me making mistakes and unintentionally causing them harm. I thought I was protecting our connection, but really, I was afraid.
Afraid to make a mistake and lose a friend.
Afraid to be punished if I didn't know things.
Afraid to disappoint them.
Afraid to lose community.
Afraid of not being loved as someone stepping into the world openly trans for the first time.
Acting from a place of fear and misguided protection put a wall up between myself and others. My vulnerability was too entangled in shame and transness for me to tell them apart, so I kept them hidden. I reverted to familiar patterns of servitude - putting their needs, desires, selves before mine. This way, I could fulfill a role and reduce likelihood of my fears becoming a reality. Around this time, one of my QTBIPOC relations reflected something beautiful, as they struggled to feel fully held by me: "you have the knowledge and skills, you're just missing the 'skin' of it."
In that moment, while sitting on a park bench and feeling the crisp dusk air, simmering in silence, discomfort, and activation, I knew.
I was missing the care.
I was missing the compassion.
I was missing the vulnerability from the depth of my core, not just the perfection of my actions.
I was viewing myself as only worthy of care through service. I did not realize that my liberation was bound up in theirs; that both our oppression and our joy are intimately connected. Capitalism, the patriarchy, religion, and white saviorism taught me to trade my authenticity for the illusion of safety.
How terrible to believe I should be punished if I do not understand or make a mistake.
How dreadful to believe that I am only worthy of care if I earn it.
These beliefs keep me from forming deep relationships I need for life beyond survival. I want to believe in something more.
The poem below is an expression of how I continue wrestle with vulnerability in all connections and spaces I share. I am working to believe that I am deserving of care and love, from folks consenting to provide it, just for being me. I know that this belief will get me closer to my own liberation, and help me connect with the liberation of others.
skin
i used to abandon my skin to feel ok
it's recognition prickled and bristled
so i burrowed deep into my flesh
over time i built insulation
materials sourced from false truths
this ensured
sensations could not reach me
i suffocated
i tore two gaping holes
an attempt to get the filling out
i must have missed some
remnants still wriggle and tingle
my brain severs the connection to forget they're there
but then i forget who i am
and who others are to me
and it's easier to let go
i try to take the pieces out
but it's hard to find them
they slither from my scars without warning
leap from my sockets and cloud my vision
crawl to the tips of my fingers and buffer reception
just when i think i know them
they storm back inside my gut
where the shame and desire for control live
then re-emerge in a new shape
they're tricky
i am extracting morsels slowly
catching the tail ends as they squirm away
parasites feeding off my synaptic transmissions
distorting my consciousness
leaving me to decipher between what is sharp
and what is tender
i wont give up
until every fragment is removed
doused in flames
ignited by transcestors
liberators
abolitionists
friends
hope
poured from my molten core
i refuse to abandon it any longer
my largest organ
for binding with it is communing with my vessel
entwining with the earth
it is healing all that is past
being in what is now
dreaming of what will come
it is opening vulnerable pores
to absorb the sun and the chemicals
and all that is raw and imperfect and perfect
i was disillusioned to believe
it is barrier to keep me safe
lies told by those who sold me the insulation
then profited off my dissonance
they are wrong
it is the conduit
through which all life passes
i see elements conducted through it
my power is harnessed at our interface
out to in
in to out
where they meet
is where i am whole
is where i am home
i feel my cells rejoice at this acknowledgement
finally they are known
soak it in they say
let it out they cry
this is all they ever wanted
i will not abandon my skin
for then i abandon everything
We always felt that the police were the real enemy.
-Sylvia Rivera
Transgender rights activist and one of the founders of STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries)
As the legend goes, that night the cops did not receive their payoff or they wanted to remind the patrons of their precarious existence. In the shadows of New York nightlife, the Stonewall Inn, like most other “gay bars,” was owned and run by the mafia, which tended to have the connections within local government and the vice squad to know who to bribe in order to keep the bar raids at a minimum and the cash flowing. As the first few captured queers were forced into the paddy wagon, people hanging around outside the bar began throwing pocket change at the arresting officers; then the bottles started flying and then the bricks. With the majority of the patrons now outside the bar, a crowd of angry trans/queer folks had gathered and forced the police to retreat back into the Stonewall. As their collective fury grew, a few people uprooted a parking meter and used it as a battering ram in hopes of knocking down the bar’s door and escalating the physical confrontation with the cops. A tactical team was called to rescue the vice squad now barricaded inside the Stonewall. They eventually arrived, and the street battle raged for two more nights. In a blast of radical collectivity, trans/gender-non-conforming folks, queers of color, butches, drag queens, hair-fairies, homeless street youth, sex workers, and others took up arms and fought back against the generations of oppression that they were forced to survive.
-Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex
The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is a living, breathing, adaptable, and expansive network of oppressive institutions and systems. Practices from these systems and institutions maintain and enforce oppression using surveillance, policing, denial of rights and more. The supporters of the PIC claim it solves economic, social, and political problems, however, the PIC truly upholds and protects capitalism, colonialism, the patriarchy, and white supremacy. Undoing and replacing the PIC is a pillar of abolitionism, one of the core values of transformative justice.
Prisons and policing does not reduce crime, rather, they increase harm and disappear human beings (more here). The PIC has its roots in enslavement, forced labor, colonialism, genocide, racist and cissexist laws, the presumption of guilt, and mass incarceration. The U.S. is the world leader in incarceration, and its policies are far from equitable. LGBTQIA2S+ people are "overrepresented at every stage of [the] criminal justice system, starting with juvenile justice" and child welfare system involvement (Prison Policy Initiative). Trans and GNC people of color, who reside at the intersection of cissexist and racist oppression, are even more vulnerable to the abuses of the PIC.
Adapted from the Critical Resistance definition, the PIC is...
fueled by: racism, xenophobia, sexism, capitalism, cissexism, heterosexism, ableism
as a response to "problems": fear, poverty, houselessness, joblessness, drug use, violence, political dissent
carried out by: prisons, police, surveillance, courts, criminalization, media, militarization, welfare and foster system
that targets and impacts: the young, queer and trans folks, women, the low-income, people of color, immigrants, disabled folks
and results in: fear, insecurity, and hatred; reduced resources and funding for social wellness and welfare (education, health, housing, etc); broken families and communities; disenfranchisement; human rights abuses; environmental injustice; public debt; marginalization; stereotypes; forced survival tactics; an increase in harm on an interpersonal, community, and societal level
The PIC prevents oppressed communities from gathering the momentum and collective energy needed to threaten the unjust systems in power. It tells us that immigrants, people of color, queer and trans folks, poor folks, disabled folks, folks that use substances, etc. are the problem and should be feared, isolated, and removed from society. The PIC keeps our mind off of the real pressures we face: the battle for resources that forces us to live a life of competition. A competition that is held on completely unequal grounds.
Anti-trans/queer violence and the reproduction of gender normativity are important ways in which PIC logics proliferate, dangerously unnamed. Gender normativity, understood as a series of cultural, political, legal, and religious assumptions that attempt to divide our bodies into two categories (men/women), is both a product of and a producer of the PIC. In this we mean to suggest that we must pay attention to the ways that the PIC harms trans/gender-non-conforming and queer people and also to how the PIC produces the gender binary and heteronormativity itself.
- Eric Stanley
Above Image: Interlocking Systems of the PIC graphic by Hannah Bowman at Christians for Abolition. Adapted from Maya Schenwar and Victoria Law’s book, Prison By Any Other Name. Various graphics and tools at Micah Herskind's Mapping The Prison Industrial Complex.
Reflection
What are the pressures that you and your community face? Reflect on the methods for survival you have you learned from a competitive and scarcity mindset. Who is responsible for and what is the impact of the scarcity of resources?
How has policing impacted you and those you love? Have you policed yourself, your own body and actions, your close relationships, those in your community or outside of it?
When have others policed your body, mannerisms, actions, or existence? How did it feel? What did you gain by policing others or yourself? What did you lose?
From Kai Cheng Thom's Loving Justice Workbook: Imagine a world without prisons and policing. What does this world look like? How is safety upheld? Who is free? What are the differences between survival and living?
One time in mid 2021, I was out at a local queer bar, when someone approached my group of friends. The two Black, trans folks in the group had described this person to me as a "Black nonbinary-identifying TERF (trans-exclusionary radical feminist)." When the person approached me, they gestured to give me a hug. My body immediately swelled with heat and activation, and I crossed my arms and said, "I don't want to talk to a TERF," then moved away. The last thing I glimpsed was a look of mixed shock and confusion across their face. I turned to my friends, expecting to see some sort of affirmation that I had done the "right" thing. I thought I was protecting all of us by putting up this boundary. The reality was much more complex.
Later that evening, one of my friends looked at me with kindness as they affirmed my need for self-protection against a perceived threat then helped me see that my actions had caused harm as well. The person was Black and nonbinary, and likely had multiple factors contributing to their views, including internalized cissexism, racial lenses, systemic oppression, lack of access to safely explore their identity, and more. By responding the way I did, calling them a polarizing term, I 'othered' the person. In that response I also 'outed' my two friends' views of them, preventing my friends from being able to invite the person into reflection and accountability, particularly through a racialized lens I would never understand. My friend said something along the lines of, "that person is Black, that's my people, I want to figure out how to be in community with them."
I'll never forget this, and I am so appreciative of their labor. When it became "them" vs. "me," I was in alignment with the PIC.
When we can hold space for complexity, sit in discomfort, and figure out ways to be in community with one another while maintaining boundaries and reducing harm, we invite room for change and liberation. More on a loving justice approach to conflict resolution here.
Mia Mingus, transformative and disability justice advocate and educator asks, "how do we respond to violence, harm, and abuse within our communities?" Building off our previous definition and reflection, we can see that the PIC, our society's oppressive "solution" to violence, likely impacts the ways we interact with harm.
Reflection
Who is your community? Does it include yourself, intimate relationships, political organizations, movements, folks of shared identity, spiritual places, neighborhoods, schools...?
Mingus states that "violence doesn't happen in a vacuum." In a vacuum - such as the empty void of outer space - air, molecules, and other ingredients for life don't exist. In reality, we live on earth. The land, our bodies, and our communities hold on to, react to, and adapt to both life-giving and harmful influences. The stress that violence produces impacts the health of our environment and natural resources, our genetic expression and inflammatory responses, and the power struggles and dynamics in our communities.
When we reduce harm to a single act, we miss the "atmospheric" conditions that cause it. Conditions include generational, relational, and individual trauma; fear and shame; and systemic oppression. Violence is learned behaviors for survival under these extreme conditions. Recognizing the conditions for harm does not excuse violence, it instead seeks to understand that the individual is not only to blame.
The PIC does the opposite - it uses the "vacuum" definition to pin the responsibility of violence on the individual. One example is how criminalization is used as a solution for domestic violence. In some california prisons, nearly 94% of women report being sexually or physically abused before they are incarcerated. This statistic suggests that these women are not getting the supportive conditions they need when faced with violence, and must resort to violence themselves to survive. This highlights that perpetuators are oftentimes victims too. By blaming individuals for causing harm in order to survive, the PIC excuses itself from the conditions of harm it creates. The PIC uses abusive tactics to maintain power, then abuses abusers, and leaves little to no support, justice, nor healing for survivors/victims.
The "atmospheric" definition of violence suggests that criminalizing perpetuators, without understanding the conditions for their abusive behaviors, causes us to be placed in opposition to one another. This is what the PIC wants because it divides us and breaks up our momentum. In her discussion of Loving Justice, Kai Cheng Thom (MSc, conflict resolution practitioner, author, and more) grapples with the complex reality of how many queer communities address harm:
Transformative Justice as a queer community strategy for addressing harm has most often relied upon the notion of “believing survivors” as a foundational element not only of theory, but also of praxis. In theory, we know that believing survivors is about affirming the spoken truth of people who have experienced assault and abuse, as well as overturning a paradigm in which survivors have historically not been believed, with devastating legal, social, and psychological consequences. Yet in practice, believing survivors often takes the form of a need to take sides, and the imperative to believe all survivors without further guidance about how to act can become intensely confusing and overwhelming when two or more people accuse one another of abuse, which is frequently the case these days.
-Kai Cheng Thom
It's more comfortable to label someone a perpetrator and ignore the conditions that caused them to harm. This way, we feel justified to enact abusive tactics to remove them from support, isolate them from community, and effectively dispose of them in attempts for 'reparation' and 'healing.' It is uncomfortable, ugly, and messy to see the reality of the conditions that causes one to learn and do harm, hold multiple truths, then help them change their behavior to prevent violence from happening again.
To change their behavior, perpetuators must understand the violence they caused and the conditions contributing to it. Understanding takes empathy, and oftentimes a perpetuators requires supportive conditions to access the empathy and vulnerability necessary to reflect, unlearn, and change. Removing an abuser's access to support is in line with punitive (punishment-based) practices of the PIC; it maintains conditions for harm and leaves little opportunity for healing, understanding, and redemption.
Transformative Justice (TJ) is a framework for responding to harm in a way such that survivors can seek healing, perpetuators can seek accountability and change, and the conditions for harm are transformed to reduce likelihood of it reoccurring. TJ gets us closer to collective liberation. TJ recognizes that interpersonal harm is rooted in oppression and works to change conditions that create, maintain, sustain, and support oppression, exploitation, domination, and harm. TJ links individual and collective justice by recognizing the impact of oppression and privilege on the survivor, the person who caused harm, and the broader community.
TJ is comprised of Community-based responses and interventions
TJ does not happen solely between the directly impacted parties. It is not forced, either, and may not include all parties simultaneously.
TJ Does not rely on state institutions and systems (ICE, foster care, prisons, non-consensual psychiatric care) which perpetuate harm.
TJ Does not perpetuate violence (stalking, disposing, isolating, policing) which prevents us from collective liberation.
Rather than punishment, which is done to perpetuators and perpetuates violence, TJ employs accountability which is done with perpetuators to interrupt violence and ensure transformation. This is not coddling nor being an abuse apologist.
TJ Cultivates safety, healing, accountability, and resilience for all parties (survivor/victim, perpetuator, impacted community)
TJ asks how we can meet immediate needs (ex: stopping violence, getting medical care, accessing safety) in a way that gets us closer to our ultimate goal of increased safety and changed behaviors
TJ Does not use zero tolerance policies nor binary responses to violence that uphold disposability culture and punitive practices
Zero tolerance policies and binary responses don't consider the vast conditions that may lead someone break boundaries or cause harm
To clarify, it is not solely the responsibility of the victim/survivor to hold understanding for the violence they experience. Oftentimes, survivors are the ones most aware of the conditions that influence their perpetuator's actions, and this fact can help maintain the cycle of abuse. Abusers can use their victim's awareness and empathy of their conditions as a manipulative tactic to justify, excuse, and continue violence. By the time a survivor is able to end the abusive relationship, they may be in such a state of trauma and survival that all they have capacity for is a binary perspective of their abuser. The survivor may view their abuser as a "bad" person or perpetrator, and desire that they are punished. Here, it is the responsibility of community accountability teams (more on this later) to hold space for and affirm the survivor, prioritize their safety, healing, and self-determination, then check against the community's values to see if a punitive or transformative justice based response is the best course of action for the abuser, and the community.
Reflection
Explore roles in the Social Change Ecosystem at deepaiyer.com. We have a collective responsibility to the system of harm. We maintain it, cultivate it, and respond to it within ourselves, our communities, and beyond. What is your relationship to harm on an individual, interpersonal, institutional, ecological, and systemic level? What roles do you see yourself in each relationship? Are you a Bystander? Perpetuator? Survivor? Complicit? A Disrupter, Healer, Educator?
Read the poem We Will Not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown (full book here). How has cancel culture, zero tolerance policies, and binary responses to harm impacted you or your community? Imagine outcomes if responses instead were through a transformative justice lens.
Some mistake TJ as having no consequences for perpetuators, but this is not true. What is the difference between punishment and consequence? How can consequences be a natural, useful tool for creating safer spaces and offering opportunity for transformation? For example, a natural consequence may be community awareness about a harm, supported unlearning of misogynistic beliefs, or removal from a position of power. When do consequences cross the line into disposability culture - or throwing away someone's autonomy, safety, and opportunity for redemption?
Reflect on a time you have been harmed. Did you get the support you needed? What were the conditions surrounding the harm?
Reflect on a time it was difficult for you to understand how you've hurt someone, regardless of intention. What support did you need to help you understand? If you didn't get this support, what support do you think you needed? What are examples of barriers for an abuser to understand the impact they've caused (ex: unstable job or housing situation, privilege, self-protection, etc)?
I look to the evolution of butterflies, from earth-bound caterpillars to colorful, liberated beings, as inspiration for transformation. Caterpillars literally melt into a soup of cells in their chrysalis, and undergo the arduous task of re-configuring their scattered, scrambled parts into what appears to be an entirely new creature. Despite this significant change, the butterflies that emerge from their nourishing hubs retain all the memories they had when they were a caterpillar. Though it can be difficult, especially as a trans person who has taken gender-affirming HRT and undergone top-surgery to change my physical appearance, it's been imperative for me to integrate and honor my past - both difficult and generative times - to appreciate my present and imagine my future.
If healing is a way for a survivor to seek mending after being harmed (discussed later), accountability offers a path for a perpetuator away from destructive violence and shame and towards constructive redemption, dignity, and transformation. Accountability cannot be forced, it must be consensual and led by the individual seeking it (but invited and supported by their community). Accountability coupled with TJ is an alternative to punishment that ensures the harm is not excused nor minimized. Philly Stands Up, a grassroots, peer-run collective helping parties heal from intimate partner violence (IPV), defines accountability with these key stages:
Recognition - Self reflection to understand the actions and impact of harm, regardless of intent
Acceptance - The effect on the self, individuals, survivor(s), and community is seen
Apology - Acknowledgement of the harm and responsibility of actions claimed
Change - the inner beliefs and values evolve if necessary, the systems that perpetuate or influence harm are met, and the behavior that causes harm is shifted
Reflection
Embodying emotions has been key in helping me experience transformative accountability processes. For a sliding-scale, trans-POC guided course on embodied accountability mapping, that is free to QTBIPOC visit https://accountabilitymapping.thinkific.com.
We are not the worst things we've ever done. Think back to a time when you hurt someone. Were you held accountable? If so, what did this process feel like to you? If not, imagine seeking accountability - who would you go to and how would you engage in this process? What sensations come up in your body - sharp, heat, dull, aching, constant, heavy? How do these feelings evolve as you move through the stages of accountability?
Below I share my definition of embodied accountability that this course helped me write:
Accountability feels reflective, introspective, communal, and transformative → Taking whatever action or inaction that has caused harm to someone, holding it in my palm, keeping it outstretched in front of my heart to look at in all its complexity, to feel the rising heat, to own the shame. It is holding it out there long enough, by independently and collectively, so that it transforms from the action itself and reveals its inner core of hurt and pain. It is then reintegrating that emotional, spiritual, core into my body - placing it in my gut, asking others to support this integration - so that when the feeling or urge to re-enact the hurt comes again, the emotional core in my gut reminds me of the pain, and the efforts of my community to hold my pain and tend to the underlying harm are welcomed support. Accountable, transformed pain ignites cool understanding and gentle compassion towards my inner hurt, instead of raising heat and volatile actions. Accountability is paying this compassion forward to others, owning past actions, and contributing to justice, healing and safety for those harmed openly, honestly, and on their terms. It is committing to transforming my own conditions to reduce likelihood of the harm occurring again within the impacted parties and the wider community. Accountability is necessary for intrapersonal, interpersonal, and collective liberation.
Community Accountability (remember our earlier definition of community from TJ) extends beyond individual accountability. It includes creating practices that transform healing in response to and in prevention of harm, outside of the state criminal justice system. The founders of INCITE! Women and Trans People of Color Against Violence recognize that criminal justice oftentimes contributes to the very race and gender-based violence they seek to dismantle and offer alternative solutions to. This definition is adapted from INCITE! (2012) and The Audre Lorde Project (2010):
Community Accountability is a process in which a community comes together, centering lived experience of survivors and the most marginalized members to:
Note: Relationships are key for accountability. An outsider coming in to facilitate a process will have much less impact compared to a community with established connections coming together to hold its members accountable. For insight into the realities of messy, imperfect, complex, raw stories of harm and accountability processes within grassroots and activists communities, see: The Revolution Starts at Home and Beyond Survival.
Author’s Reflection: I love Sunday nights at a local queer club: dancing, drag, voguing, iconic fits, a bunch of queer and trans people having fun. It’s not too crowded, and people don’t get too intoxicated because many have work the next day. It’s a space where I feel free to express gender fluidity and gender-fuckery, I get hyped up by fellow qts, and we collectively celebrate the local drag scene. As amazing as this space is, harms that my friends and I have experienced there make me hesitant to go.
One time, I went with a group of smaller (relative to me, I’m 5’6”), femme-presenting humans. We were standing in the outdoor patio, waiting for a spinny picture thingy, when someone who I presumed to be a cis white (queer) man slightly under the influence got very close (we were all wearing masks because yes, COVID is still a thing). While telling a story, this person began to POUR A DRINK on one of my friend’s heads. I had to physically grab their hand to stop them and ask them to leave. They just laughed and said “it was a joke!” Their friends around them just laughed it off too.
Another time, a “man” would not leave two of my friends alone as they were dancing with each other. I walked up to that person and said “hey, they asked you to give them space, please back off.” His response, with a clear tone of disgust, was “ok fucking girl-boy thing whatever you are” - IN A PLACE FULL OF BEAUTIFUL DRAG QUEENS AND TRANS FOLKS. My thoughts were, ‘oh, so you can appreciate gender ambiguity when it’s entertaining to you but not when it is living, breathing, and enforces a boundary?’ I ended up laughing and blowing him a kiss as he walked away.
While I’ve felt empowered to used my masc-of-center privilege to help my femme friends, I’ve had difficulty getting help myself. One night, I was dancing with someone and having fun until they aggressively groped me. I immediately froze, but they continued to dance on me and touch me. I eventually backed away and went outside with one of my friends who noticed my mood change. After I told my friend what happened, they said, “yeah, it sucks when that happens,” as if it’s a regular occurrence for them. The rest of the night I was deeply conflicted. I saw my perpetuator walking around and dancing with others, but I just couldn’t come to say anything. My body was frozen and I didn’t know how to get help. My friend was acting as if it was no big deal (if it happens to them frequently, they may not have capacity to see it impact me). I thought my only other option was to get a ‘security’ person, but the perpetuator was POC so I didn’t want anything bad to happen. After that incident, I’ve had trouble letting my guard down to fully relax and experience freedom of expression in queer spaces, especially around alcohol and cis men. I just don’t have the capacity to repeatedly have boundaries crossed and folks around me don’t seem equipped to help.
What if queer spaces and events had clear community agreements that everyone could contribute and be accountable to? What if instead of ‘security guards’ (who are PIC-adjacent), we had ‘safety teams?’ They would be known and trusted members of the community, who could de-escalate crisis situations, be trained in harm reduction and identifying signs of overdose, and help people get home safely. They could even follow up with people who have been harmed to ensure they have access to safety and healing, and engage with people who caused harm to ensure they get the education needed to discontinue their behavior. I want people to feel like they can freely express themselves, and experience the joy of these types of spaces, because people in their community have their back and will be there to help if when harm occurs.
I'd like to imagine a world where everyone can access healing, accountability, joy, support, and transformation. This world doesn't exist yet. How can we work towards liberation in the world we live in now?
I begin with a pledge I've taken after Shira Hassan's Just Practice offering:
Every time Harm Reduction is talked about, I PROMISE to remember that harm reduction comes from queer POC, specifically trans women of color, in the sex trade and street economy. It comes from drug users, houseless people, people who are fighting to survive from harm caused by the state and from ourselves as we cope in oppressive conditions.
Please remember and honor this pledge.
Central question governing Harm Reduction (HR): What do you need to feel safer, supported, and taken care of? We can look to the history of HR to inform efforts today and dream of strategies for the future:
The Native Youth Sexual Health Network, founded by 2-Spirit youth, shares that HR is a way of life for Indigenous folks: "We have been keeping our communities safe and reducing harms long before the word 'harm reduction' came into the English language. It’s about reducing the many harms in our lives, not limited to just substance use (ie. colonialism, racism, homophobia/transphobia, criminalization, etc) through the tools that work best for us, without stigma or judgment. We also don’t define what harm is for other people."
In 1972, The Black Panthers updated their manifesto with explicit demands and efforts for preventative health care, health literacy for BIPOC and oppressed folks, and free breakfast programs.
The Young Lords, an Afro-Latinx radical group active in the 70's, occupied the Lincoln Hospital in South Bronx after inadequate care lead to the deaths of several Latinx patients. They outlined 7 demands to increase quality of care and self determination to patients, workers, and visitors and implemented acupuncture programs for folks impacted by addiction.
In 1970, trans revolutionaries Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera founded the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), to provide shelter and care to houseless trans youth and LGBTQIA+ folks in the street economy and/or impacted by criminalization.
Many contemporary HR practices are in direct response to the The War on Drugs declared by Nixon in 1971. Drug criminalization due to political and racist hysteria has led to egregious human rights violations and disproportionate policing of Latino, Black, queer, and trans folks. The impacts of this are far-reaching in the PIC, and in terms of HR, criminalization of substances ensures that the setting and manner in which folks can safely engage with drugs are limited (Drug, Set, and Setting).
The feminist movement in the 70's led by Black women and femmes impacts the ongoing fight for reproductive health and access to safe abortions today.
Grassroots efforts of activists to create needle exchange programs and access to safer sex resources saved countless lives and reduced the impact of the AIDs epidemic in the 80's.
The Street Youth Rise Up (SYRU) project offers practical, no-judgement options for folks involved in sex trade/the street economy to find the resources they desire. SYRU recognizes that "risk" and "harm" must be defined by the individual, and they center body autonomy, medicated assisted treatment (MAT), legal information, and community empowerment.
Definition of Harm Reduction (HR), adapted from Shira Hassan: A philosophy and strategy that centers individual and collective models of care, self-empowerment and determination, designed to reduce harm associated with activities that pose risk. It meets folks exactly where they're at, is non-condemning, and aims to increase resilience as a foundation for individual resistance and collective liberation.
HR recognizes that our relationship with a practice can make it harmful, not the thing itself. One example is sex. The act of sex itself is generally not risky, but if folks do not have access to safer sex resources such as testing, barriers, and education on consent, then the risk for harm increases. Another example is peoples relationships with substances (drugs). Substances such as morphine (an opiate), derived from the opium poppy plant, have been used for thousands of years to relieve pain and as surgical anesthesia. We even have specialized receptors for these chemicals in our brains, because we can produce them endogenously (within our bodies) to help relieve pain (more here). Due to the War on Drugs and Pharmacological advancements, opioid (synthetic opiates) and heroin-related overdoses, HIV infections, and deaths have skyrocketed and are impacting our most vulnerable, who oftentimes are dependent on these substances as a means for survival. There are now risks with using these substances such as infection due to shared needles and overdose due to laced drugs (both of which are a result of putting profit before care of people). HR seeks to increase the safety of those using substances through practices such as education, naloxone distribution, needle exchanges, safety planning, and community response teams (san diego HR resource).
HR is creative and non-condemning. It seeks to come up with strategies to improve the safety and relationship with the "thing" or practice someone is involved in instead of shaming or judging the practice and/or person. For example, if someone is engaging in self-injury, we can make sure they have access to sterilization, they practice on parts of the body away from major veins/arteries, and they injure at a decreased depth and/or frequency. These are some of many techniques to reduce harm while they may seek alternative support and coping strategies. More on this here.
In HR, the person is the expert on what they need, while culture and shared experiences can help inform practices. HR is based in relationships. There are no pre-determined outcomes nor zero tolerance policies. There are no "experts" - everyone is a teacher and learner. Examples are survivor and peer led 1:1s, groups, meetings, and individual-centralized spaces where all inherent power is addressed.
HR recognizes that state-funded systems have the potential to further harm folks seeking care, and instead offers alternative strategies for folks to access the safety they seek. For example, crisis hotlines funded by the system engage in non-consensual active rescue, where they are bound by law to report to police or emergency services if a caller is suicidal or reports abuse. These practices increase the risk of suicidality, especially for trans and BIPOC folks who are at greater risk for harm by police (sign the petition for safer hotlines here). Alternative to these hotlines are peer support, mobile crisis response teams, warmlines, and community members equipped with the skills necessary to support members in crisis (more alternatives here). Note: If someone engages in state services such as calling 911, they are not judged. Instead, these situations can inform communities what types of alternatives they need to build. If a survivor or individual desires to engage with the state, folks in the community can decide (especially if they hold more privilege) if they have capacity to accompany them to provide support and reduce potential harm.
HR does not tolerate abuse. HR offers us practices to interrupt perpetuators and hold them accountable through supportive relationships, strong boundaries, and resources outside of the state to facilitate change. For example, in situations where a survivor of domestic violence desires to stay with their abuser and keep their engagement in support anonymous, a HR team may work to increase safety and resilience of the survivor enough to then consensually engage with the perpetuator and invite them to take accountability.
Reflection
In order to build the movements capable of transforming our world, we have to do our best to live with one foot in the world we have not yet created.
-Aurora Levins Morales
What types of activities do you view as 'risky' or 'harmful' that either you or community members engage in? Does handing out condoms promote sexual activity? Do needle exchange programs promote drug use? How do you view these activities? Do you hold any judgement or feelings?
Examples of HR in daily life include drinking water while consuming alcohol to improve hydration and using a condom during sex to prevent risk of STIs. How can we support those engaging in "risky", "dangerous", and "harmful" things for survival, in a way that reduces personal and collective impact, increases resilience, and centers self-determination, as we work towards a liberated world?
What our bodies require in order to thrive, is what the world requires. If there is a map to get there, it can be found in the atlas of our skin and bone and blood, in the tracks of neurotransmitters and antibodies. We need nourishment, equilibrium, water, connection, justice.
- Aurora Levins Morales, Kindling: Writings on the Body
Before we talk about healing we must define our relationship to disease - particularly the western-biomedical model of illness and treatment. As a biomedical engineer, I was taught that the body is a system, a network of machines made of living cells and electrical connections whose wellness and disease state could be quantified by signals. A biomedical engineer's goal is to make devices capable of translating the body's signals (heart-rate monitors, for example) so medical practitioner can determine if the signals are "abnormal" or out of balance. If a practitioner sees a signal is abnormal, they can make decisions to "fix" parts of the system and put it back in balance. In western medicine, this is where the care ends. Whole people are reduced down to functioning and faulty parts, doctors who barely know people's complex stories make a diagnosis to label what is "wrong," the faulty parts are "fixed" according to "standards" set by primarily cisgender, white men, and whole people are assumed to be "healed."
In western medicine, we fix people so they can get back to contributing to the very systems that are oppressing them, and influencing disease, in the first place. This cycle of breaking and fixing is key to maintaining the medical industrial complex (MIC), a system comprised of institutions like big pharma, biotech companies, insurance companies, and government regulatory bodies. The MIC is eurocentric by nature (the biomedical model is product of western medicine, which is shaped by white, cisgender, men in influential medical positions), leaving those who fall outside western cultural ideals vulnerable to misdiagnosis, mistreatment, and further oppression. The MIC encourages marginalized people to look inward - to their "faulty" biology - to blame for their ailments. A clear example of health inequity is COVID-19, where Black, Indigenous, and Latino communities in the U.S. have 4-6x higher mortality rates than white people, and trans folks are 3x more likely to suffer from debilitating long-COVID symptoms (article).
Therapy and psychiatry, arguably more "human-centered" practices of medicine, are not excused from fueling systems of oppression. The biomedicalization of mental illness has been leveraged by the mental health industrial complex (MHIC) for decades to shape society and generate profit. These diagnoses or "labels" have been used to support dominant oppressive structures throughout america's history:
For example, in the United States during the rise of the Black Power movement in the 1960s, diagnoses of schizophrenia shifted away from women to being applied primarily to Black men as a way of blunting and punishing social activism. As well, a host of diagnoses have been applied specifically to women to describe a range of responses to sexism and life transitions like menopause (Critical Inquiries for Social Justice in Mental Health).
'Homosexuality' was in the DSM until 1973 and conversion therapy still exists in over 30 states. 'Gender dysphoria' exists in the most recent edition of the DSM, and is arguably the 'newer' version of the 'homosexuality' diagnosis. Many HRT facilities and gender-affirming surgeons require that a trans person has a diagnosis of gender dysphoria before they start treatment. This label forces trans and gender-nonconforming people to feel as if something is wrong with them in order to get the care they need. By labelling entire groups of people under mental illness diagnosis, these people are 'othered' and more easily subjected to marginalization and oppression. Then, through therapy and prescription drugs, these targeted groups' thoughts can be dulled and even changed, to better fit in with society.
Research, funded by money, gives power to diagnostic oppression. Pharmaceutical companies earn billions in revenue from the diagnosis of mental illness and put that money into institutions that support the use of their products (Eric M. Greene). The MHIC governs everyone from clinicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, and case managers, to research institutions, police, and biopharma companies. It reinforces the belief that the individual is to blame for their mental state, not the structural issues and systemic violence around them.
If multiple children were breaking their arms due to a faulty playground, it would be ridiculous to repeatedly treat and cast the children individually without adjusting the playground to make it safer. But this is exactly what happens with mental illness in the MHIC. The MHIC reduces mental illness to a "brain chemistry imbalance" then "treats" the imbalance with solutions only for the individual.
In therapy, modalities such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) have the goal of changing "behaviors" and "thought patterns" so someone can better "fit" within their existing oppressive systems. The solutions offered by psychiatry are artificial chemicals such as SSRIs for depression. Research shows that antidepressants (for depression), anti-psychotics (for schizophrenia), and benzodiazepines (for anxiety) have limited, and sometimes worsening effects and cause long-term dependencies. Because this research is not as well funded, it is oftentimes overshadowed by research that says the opposite - that medicine is helpful. Supplying drugs as "band-aids" and altering thought patterns but ignoring the root of the problem covers up what the body and mind are trying to tell us: The oppressive conditions we are enduring are harming our bodies and minds. Sustainable wellness within these conditions is not possible for everyone.
I don't deny that therapy and biomedicine are helpful and oftentimes necessary to help us survive existing oppression. Within the oppressive medical institutions, there are individual doctors, therapists, and practitioners that are aware that illness is caused by harm beyond the individual's biology. Many practitioners understand that in order for people to get state-funded treatment, they must apply labels and diagnoses. I personally rely on a variety of medicines to keep my mental illness and chronic pain at manageable levels so I can make a living and interact with community (though I'm tapering off of antidepressants (with SUCKS) and trying to shift to more holistic approaches to reduce stress like acupuncture and hilot).
But what if we don't have to be 'labeled' and potentially subjected to further harm in order to receive care? What other options for healing, wellness, and resiliency are available to us outside of the MIC? Are there models of healing that don't blame individuals and oppressed communities, and instead foster collective responsibility to prevent, treat, and support those impacted by illness?
In their work, Narrative Medicine, Dr. Mehl-Madrona discusses how Indigenous healing systems recognize that when we are out of balance and harmony in our relationships - all of our relationships, including the self, land, spiritual, and community - we lose our resiliency and ability to fight illness. Elders define resiliency as a measure of relationship harmony about a central location, or "red road...the road of connecting to all of life from the center of your being, from your heart." When we stray from the red road, we lose resiliency and are more susceptible to disease. This emphasizes that "health and disease are inseparable from culture, geography, geology and spirituality." In order to heal, we must tend to our relationships beyond individualistic, biological parts to include collective healing. In the lens of TJ, if we want to help heal survivors of harm, we need to tend to ALL relationships - abusers, community, ecology, and conditions of harm - in a way that is aligned with our ultimate goal of collective liberation.
Image Description and Reflection: (Left to right) Tikbalang, Kapre, and Bakunawa, three creatures of the Aswang (Filipino mythology). Spanish colonizers/missionaries feared their grip on native peoples, so they distorted folklore to keep them from “sinning”. Now, I imagine Tikbalang, the half-horse spirit, rearing their true form as beasts fueling decolonization. Kapre, hanging in a native balete tree, reminds us to rest and connect with nature. Bakunawa, the “moon eater” is believed to be the cause of the lunar eclipse. Bikol peoples would feast and beat gimbals and balalongs to make noise to bring back the light. This reminds us that collective music and nourishment empower us to drive away darkness and bring back the light.
Reimagining Indigenous Filipino mythology and sharing food and memories with my Lola brings me closer to healing my generational trauma. These times of remembrance and connection help me reckon with my mixed ancestry of colonizers and colonized. Art, food, and learning help me build capacity for empathy in the relationships and movements I am a part of.
We need embodied practices and strategies that strengthen and soften us on every level of our being-ness – not just our ability to critically analyze ideas with our intellect, but also to nurture our emotional health and also our spiritual connection to the ancestors and the natural world. We need to be able to track the furious pulsing of nervous systems in response to the stresses and violence of the colonial, capitalist world order, and we need to know how to soothe ourselves and each other in order to come back into compassionate and boundaried relationship.
-Kai Cheng Thom
Lineage of Healing Justice (HJ) - Cara Page, Black Queer Feminist memory worker, organizer, and founder of Changing Frequencies, is practitioner of HJ as a political strategy for movements. Page helps remind us that HJ is rooted in Black Feminist and Southern Black Radical traditions, and that movements for liberation include strategies centering care and protection for victims, liberatory workers, and community outside of state violence:
There is healing in building safe havens. During the abolition of slavery, the Underground Railroad served as a collaborative sanctuary for folks escaping enslavement that operated across racial, gender, and social boundaries.
There is healing in survival, nourishment, and rest. The Black Panther Party created community survival programs based off of the community's immediate needs such as benefit counseling, disabled persons services, community pantries, martial arts defense programs, nutrition classes and more.
There is healing in movement, joy, and chosen family. House Ballroom was birthed in the 1970s from Black and Latinx queer and trans folks. Houses provided support and belonging that biological family did not, while ballroom competitions uplifted freedom of expression, kinship, and chances at glory that systemic oppression denied them.
There is healing in storytelling. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition centers healing of Indigenous survivors and their communities through storytelling, community gatherings, tribal consultations, and resources for immediate and long-term care.
There is healing in shared history. Tsuru for Solidarity, a grassroots organization founded by Japanese American and Japanese Latin American WWII concentration camp survivors and descendants, builds solidarity with immigrant, refugee, and marginalized communities impacted by forced detention, deportation, and racial state violence. It seeks to coordinate "intergenerational, cross-community healing circles" to address trauma of these shared histories.
Healing Justice (HJ) is a political strategy to intervene in and confront generational trauma from oppression by recovering and remembering ancestral medicine and/or building new traditions that center our emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, and environmental well-being for our collective liberation. HJ is remembering. HJ is momentum-building. HJ is resting. HJ is fuel for resilience and dreaming.
Erica Woodland, a Black Queer LCSW and organization consultant at the intersection of trauma healing justice, HIV/AIDS, and the PIC, and cofounder of the Kindred Collective, outlines fundamental pillars of Healing Justice (HJ):
HJ is a community led response to interrupt, transform, and intervene on individual/collective trauma to sustain our emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, psychic, and environmental well-being.
HJ is an emergent process where practitioners constantly pause and assess to ensure strategies to address trauma, grief, crisis, and violence are in alignment with current conditions.
In the words of adrienne maree brown, emergent in the sense that the patterned shape of a flock of birds in flight or school of fish in motion is emergent; a shared internal compass that moves and shifts and is life-giving together; strategies that generate and reshape complex systems and patterns with relatively simple interactions (The Emergent Strategy Podcast).
HJ is a spiritual framework rooted in history and legacies of survival, ancestral traditions and practices.
HJ is a cultural strategy to honor our traditions and create models of holistic care and safety in relationship to our conditions.
HJ is a political strategy to decriminalize communal practices and traditions outside of the state, and seeks to end the persecution of practitioners who have community led strategies and structures of care for our collective survival and resilience.
HJ is a movement building strategy to sustain and fortify the imagination and bodies of our organizers and movement building organization.
Reflection
HJ demands that we rest, reflect, honor, and integrate. What is your relationship to these practices?
How has trauma and harm impacted you on a generational and cellular level? What parts of you need to be tended to or cared for?
What does healing feel like to you?
How has the MIC been complicit in violence in your own life or your communities? Who is healthy? Who is diseased? Who deserves/is eligible for care?
How can you find and prioritize ways of healing and community outside of capitalism? From a HR approach, this does not mean stopping all means of healing within westernization. Instead it asks if there are additional ways you can heal that are generative and empower the collective instead.
Recently, I was at a queer bonfire in mission beach. I was wearing a cute mini-skirt bathing suit with colorful butterflies and a white lacey top that showed off my top surgery scars, T-induced muscles :p , and chest tattoo. I felt so light and lovely in my outfit, and several folks at the bonfire had already complimented me, so I was feelin extra ethereal. As I was walking to grab something from my car, I heard a loud "EWWWW!" in my direction. I immediately paused and whipped my head to the side, and saw what I presumed to be an assigned-male-at-birth kid raised as a "boy," approximately five or six years old. The kid was frozen, pointing at me, with two parental figures and a sibling next to them. As I made eye contact with the kid who held my gaze with slightly mischievous eyes, they took their hand that was pointing at me and covered their mouth - a gesture that I interpreted as "oh shit, I got caught."
I expected something like this to happen. Back in pre-COVID era, before I had top surgery and started HRT, and was freshly out as 'non-binary' to my family, I sat in my mom's classroom sporting my signature curly redhead mohawk and androgynous clothing (I can't remember what outfit exactly, just picture whatever society equates to gender ambiguity haha). A third grader walked in and cheerily greeted, "Hi Mrs. R" to my mom, then looked to me and started, "Hi Miss-errrr Mr... are you a boy or a girl?" with a genuinely confused expression. I felt heat ignite across my face and my heart pump faster. I blurted the first thing that came to mind which was, "I'm neither!" Understandably, this answer was insufficient to a curious child who has likely never been unable to categorize someone's gender into one of the two bins associated with honorifics (which, in the contexts of English language and Westernized/Colonized culture, we should absolutely trash as they are rooted in classism, racism (property ownership), and gender-based violence). At the time, I wasn't firmly rooted in my gender identity nor vessel, and my mom was having her own battles (and continues to) with my gender, so my ability to address the situation holistically was limited. My mom swiftly changed the subject and sent the student to complete a task, leaving him without an answer to the question. On the ride home, all my mom was worried about was the kid's parents coming to her, angry and upset that she was teaching about 'trans' identities they don't agree with, and possibly her job being at risk. I felt so much shame. Since that day, I regularly think about what to say if anyone, but especially a child, asks me what my gender is.
I've been dressing more "femininely" lately (gendering clothing is stupid but gotta work with social constructs to paint the picture), and my clothing in juxtaposition to my more muscular, T-influenced form, baby stache, mohawk, tattoos, and piercings, has had me acutely conscious that I oftentimes present in a way that un-informed folks interpret as "a boy dressing as a girl." Aware that this presentation is more subject to misunderstanding, fear, and gender-based violence (though it comes with privileges as well), and the reality that I no longer live in the lavender-lined 'gayborhood,' my loved-ones ensured that I have pepper spray on me. I told them that I don't think I'll ever have to use it - that my voice is all I need. I'd already been called different slurs like "fag" (which I love to reclaim now) and "girl-boy," but the harmers were usually protected by motion or setting: in a vehicle, on a bicycle or scooter, at a bar etc. so I hadn't had too many opportunities to use it.
Back to the beach. After the kid covered their mouth, I paused a few seconds and waited to see if their parents would say anything. They fumbled some "uhhhs" and held expressions of feigned ignorance. I looked to the kid and said, "next time, before you say something hurtful, I hope you pause and choose love" (thanks Kai Cheng Thom). I then turned to the parents and said, in a neutral but firm tone, "this is a product of their upbringing," and walked away.
In processing with friends later, I wished I sat in that situation longer. I wished I asked the kid why their first reaction was to say that. To ask what about me invoked 'disgust' - or was it fear? To ask where/from whom did they learn that response. I wanted to tell them that they hurt my feelings, that I feel magnificent, and that everyone should be able to wear whatever makes them feel light and lovely. I wished I stayed and engaged the parents, asked them what their reaction was to me. Maybe give them a book recommendation like 'Julian is a Mermaid.' I didn't have the capacity nor words to do any of this at the time, but I am looking forward to the next opportunity to invite folks to sit in discomfort with me; to get to the "why" and then start answering the "for who?"
In moments like these, I am so grateful for folks like Alok Vaid-Menon, Kai Cheng Thom, and Merideth Talusan, who's works have encouraged me not only embrace my gender expression, but use my self-love to hold compassion for others unable to access this liberty for themselves. I am indebted to abolitionist and TJ leaders who have helped ignite within me a burning desire for these moments of conflict - big and small. It's no longer them vs. me. It's whole, complex beings, shaped by systems and experiences. I'm not alone, we're in it together.
The topics covered in this zine barely scratch the surface of transformative justice work. I believe that building and assessing our relationships to the Prison Industrial Complex, Transformative Justice, Accountability, Harm Reduction, and Healing Justice gets us closer to Collective Liberation. I invite you to reflect on your evolution to the frameworks, values, and practices shared in this zine, and see if your dreams of collective liberation have changed since you started. What colors, shapes, figures, light, words, feelings emerge? What are you called to explore, sit with, share, and discuss?
In the future, as I build knowledge, capacity, an accountability team, and practice, I look forward to continuing this zine and centering Disability Justice, Safety Planning, Team/Pod Formation, De-escalation Tactics, and more. I dream of making a local queer and trans centered response team, modeled after CAT-911, as a community alternative to 911 for minor first aid, mental health crises, and interpersonal conflict. I hope to begin a "transformative justice hub," inspired by NYC TJHub, where individuals and organizations can collaborate, gather support, hold one another accountable, host book groups and more. If you are interested in this work, have experience in it, or have any questions or feedback, please reach out!
haven.ongoco.ritt@gmail.com
Collective Liberation:
Taking up Space vs Contributing to Space
The Uses of Anger by Audre Lorde
Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy
Femme-Ally Conversation Starter for Masc-of-Center Folks
Is Masculinity Always Privileged? A Transman's Experience with IPV
Introduction to Collective Liberation
Prison Industrial Complex:
Invisible No More: Police Violence Against Black Women and Women of Color Study Guide
Pillars of White Supremacy - Rethinking Women of Color Organizing
Transformative Justice:
A Chicana Survivors Journey from Vigilante to TJ
We Will Not Cancel Us - adrienne marie brown
IDHA - Transformative Mental Health and Community Development
Miklat Zine - City of Refuge
T-MAPs (Transformative Mutual Aid Practices)
Accountability:
Accountability Mapping - Centered Accountability Course
Bay Area Transformative Justice on Accountability
Critical Interventions Toolkit
Harm Reduction:
Harm Reduction, Abolition, and Social Work
FHC San Diego Syringe Exchange and HIV/AIDs
On Point Harm Reduction San Diego
Girls Do What They Have To Do To Survive- YWEP
Healing Justice:
Healing Justice Practice Space Toolkit
Critical Inquiries for Social Injustice In Mental Health
Responses to Covid-19 Must Center Disability Justice
Comprehensive:
Support New York Survivor Support and TJ Collective
There Is Another Way by Ana-Maurine Lara
Arise Embodiment - Loving Justice Workbook
Transformative Justice Mixtape - Just Practice
AK Press: The Revolution Starts At Home and Beyond Survival
