For Trans Puerto Ricans, Passing Laws Is Only Part of the Battle for Liberation

This is the last piece in a partnership between Autostraddle and Transgender Law Center to provide data and reporting on why anti-trans violence occurs. Read more of the series. You can also find more data compiled by Transgender Law Center here.

On February 25th, 2020, Alexa Negrón, a Black trans woman experiencing homelessness, was killed in Tao Baja, Puerto Rico.

After police were called on her for using a McDonald’s restroom, patrons of the restaurant posted videos of the interaction on social media, spreading false rumors that she was a man in disguise, peeping on women in the bathroom — flames that were fanned by rightwing media.

Within 24 hours she had been shot. The horrific attack was also filmed, and widely shared.

Six known trans murders occurred on the island in 2020 — five trans women and one trans man—the majority of whom were Black, Indigenous, and poor, experiencing housing instability and supporting themselves through sex work. Trans and queer activists on the island say Alexa’s murder didn’t merely mark the beginning of this violent wave, but that it’s emblematic of the intersecting systems and struggles that coalesce to threaten Boricua trans lives.

Puerto Rico has been rocked in recent years by two major hurricanes, earthquakes, blackouts and other failures of infrastructure, all of which have been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. The barrage of catastrophes—which resulted in thousands of deaths—left thousands more to process profound trauma, robbing many of any sense of stability.

While such events could seem merely unfortunate, activists say they are a predictable result of the island’s centuries-long battle against imperialism, most currently in the form of its status as a U.S. territory.

“Anti-trans violence is rooted in our colonial structures,” said Dania Warhol, founder of Espicy Nipples, a transfeminist network centering the Black trans experience in Puerto Rico. They cite religious fundamentalism—the remnant of Spanish colonialism that paints trans people as depraved—but also imposed legal frameworks that limit possibilities for how oppressed communities respond to crises that are often a direct result of U.S. exploitation of the island.

An example of this is the declaration of a recent state of emergency over gender-based violence—issued by newly-elected governor Pedro Pierluisi—a hard-fought battle won in the wake of protests responding to a sharp rise in intimate partner violence in the wake of Hurricane María, and then again during COVID-19. While Pierluisi has stated publicly that the executive order does cover trans and gender-nonconforming people, it does not explicitly say so in the law.

“We want the inclusion of trans people in this state of emergency, and we want their inclusion in writing,” emphasized Pedro Julio Serrano, founder of Puerto Rico Para Tod@s. “It is a victory, but we need to make sure it includes everyone targeted by gender violence.”

Dania Warhol remains wary of the state of emergency because of its focus on expanding the powers of government agencies. “When they declare a state of emergency, they usually want to take away our rights,” they said, noting that similar orders in the past gave disproportionate amounts of resources to law enforcement. “Giving more power to the government and to the state isn’t something we can afford right now.”

Many of the same laws outlined in the Biden administration’s touted Equality Act have existed in Puerto Rico for years. Out of all U.S. states and territories, Puerto Rico ranks 20 out of 56 in terms of legal protections for LGBTQ individuals. Yet, its inclusive laws are enforced unevenly, with police often playing a leading role in discriminating and perpetrating violence against trans people.

Puerto Rican police are described by trans activists as having a pattern of harassing and assaulting sex workers, immigrants, and women, defending perpetrators of gender-based violence while criminalizing their victims. In all six trans murders that occurred last year, police misgendered the victim every time. Activists claim officers regularly sensationalize trans survivors in their reports, which are often shared verbatim by local media, resulting in the exact type of misinformation that led to Alexa’s murder.

“We can’t rely on the police here,” said Joanna Cifredo, reigning Miss International Queen of Puerto Rico, and spokesperson for Arianna’s Center. She describes a protest she attended in October of 2020 at la Oficina de la Procuradora de las Mujeres (the Office of the Attorney for Women), drawing attention to government inaction on violence against trans women. Upon returning to their cars, which were legally parked in a nearby lot, all the participants’ vehicles had been ticketed.

“The police were standing there with their motorcycles just to see our faces when we got the tickets,” Cifredo recalled. “Just to see the joy on their faces, I’ll never forget it.”

Only weeks before, police had dragged their feet in an investigation after a 19-year-old cis woman, Rosimar Rodriguez, was abducted from in front of her home. Despite pleas from her mother, it took four days for officers to take any action. Her body was discovered only two miles from where she had originally been taken.

“When we protest in front of the governor’s mansion, police come out like G.I. Joes for people holding pots and pans, wearing flip flops. But when it comes to looking for a girl who’s been abducted, it takes four days.”

“Police are an instrument of oppression,” Serrano corroborated. “We’ve done trainings for them, passed laws, but they are not implemented correctly. I myself have been in the rooms, having these conversations with police chiefs. But it goes in one ear and out the other. It doesn’t trickle down to their subordinates.”

In addition to being targets for state violence, trans organizers also describe mistreatment from the Puerto Rican left. Though trans people have been integral to grassroots movements across the island, they say they are simultaneously left out of the work of mainstream feminist groups and treated as a distraction by radical organizations, who often see trans and queer struggles as secondary to Puerto Rican independence.

On July 25, 2019, trans and gender-nonconforming organizers staged the now-iconic Perreo Combativo, a raucous dance party in front of la Catedrál in Old San Juan as part of the massive #RickyRenuncia protests, calling for the resignation of then-governor Ricky Roselló.

“At the same time that we were having this big dance party,” Dania Warhol recalled, “other protesters were calling us names, saying mean things about the way people were dressed and about their bodies.” In response to threats, trans people and their allies formed a line between dancers and their harassers. “In that moment, we had to protect ourselves.”

While the scene Warhol describes is indicative of the violence trans Puerto Ricans face from all sides, it also illustrates the ways trans communities are organizing to provide each other with the exact spaces, protections, and resources the state denies them.

While recent tragedies on the island have hit already-struggling trans communities particularly hard, they have also led to an explosion of organizing. In the last five years, three new trans-run clinics have opened, and countless organizations have formed. Communities are employing a range of strategies to address anti-trans violence, including policy change, continued protest, and building solidarity economies on the ground.

“I joined the Ms. International competition because it provided a platform,” said Cifredo of her title in the popular pageant. “I see myself as a Trojan horse who can now get at these tables and be a voice for the community.”

On the one-year anniversary of Alexa Negrón’s murder, Cifredo organized a meeting between trans community members and candidates for public office. Some of the biggest issues they hoped to push were the decriminalization of sex work, providing housing for trans elders, and ensuring that gender-affirming healthcare is widely accessible—including in rural communities.

Espicy Nipples organized a Queer Brigade which did outreach to trans sex workers, distributing emergency resources, while also conducting surveys, gathering information on the most lacking supports. “People aren’t just telling us they need condoms,” Warhol said. “We’re hearing, ‘I need a house, a cell phone, to be included in a medical plan.’’’

Trans community members have created a host of projects to support one another during the pandemic, amidst a decided lack of aid from the U.S. government. La Laboratoria Boricua de Vogue offers voguing classes, and throws outdoor balls. Bartering systems where drag performers swap clothes, do each other’s makeup, and skillshare have become a common way to build networks and pool resources. Live streams where artists perform and give tutorials have helped trans people crowdsource needed funds.

After two trans women, Serena Angelique Velázquez Ramos and Layla Pelaez Sánchez, were found in a burned out car in April 2020, hate crime legislation brought federal charges against their suspected attackers. However, this legal action allowed the U.S. government to pursue the death penalty, overriding the Puerto Rican constitution which expressly prohibits it. Trans activists are calling against the use of capital punishment, demanding Serena and Layla’s lives be honored in the ways their community determines, not by further entrenching U.S. colonial authority.

“We want to take power away from the state and put it into our communities,” says Warhol. “Our community needs funding, education, housing, to create our own sense of security.”

Up to now, Warhol says the demand to defund police has largely been seen as a cry from U.S. activists, but Black trans Boricuas hope to shift that perception: “’Defund’ is not popular here. You don’t hear it a lot, but we’re trying to change that.”

Trans struggles in Puerto Rico demonstrate that inclusive legal language alone is ineffective at protecting trans lives. Approaches to liberation that focus on passing laws, but not redistributing resources, inevitably fall short. Expanding state power further cements the same inequalities that compound trans suffering, and fuel trans death. Only by placing needed resources directly in the hands of trans communities — healthcare, housing, food, education — can trans people finally have the autonomy they need to support themselves and each other, a task for which they have already demonstrated a profound capacity.

The political landscape remains fraught, but as leftist struggles across Puerto Rico and its diaspora seek true independence for the island, trans activists insist they are not a distraction, but central to Puerto Rican liberation.

“Trans people are modeling what it means to be authentic,” said Cifredo. “To fight for a better society, to heal, and to actualize love in policy and in space.”

The State of Trans Lives in the Birthplace of the American LGBTQ Movement

This is the fourth piece in a partnership between Autostraddle and Transgender Law Center to provide data and reporting on why anti-trans violence occurs. Read more of the series. You can also find more data compiled by Transgender Law Center here.

New York has long been heralded as a progressive place, especially for LGBTQ issues. Many youth born elsewhere come here looking for a space to define themselves on their own terms. I was one of them.

The history of the Stonewall uprising, the ballroom scene, and the extravagant Pride parades are just a few historical examples of why New York City has become an LGBTQ touchstone. But each year, New York state ranks among the highest in the country when it comes to anti-trans homicides. Between 2017 and 2020, at least nine trans individuals were reported murdered in New York state, making it one of top five states that are most hostile to trans people. It’s possible that more murders went unreported.

The numbers contradict existing stereotypes wherein the South is discarded as hotbeds of conservatism. One could argue that the way New York has branded itself as progressive allows it to conceal the violence that is inflicted on marginalized communities like trans people.

Cecilia Gentili has witnessed the true nature of New York’s violence for the past ten years as a community advocate. Prior to that, she was a long-time undocumented sex worker who had been incarcerated in a migrant detention center.

“We as a state like to be portrayed as the progressive state, but in reality, part of that equation comes from keeping conservatives from upstate content,” Gentili commented. “And that means not passing legislation that is supportive of sex workers or trans people or LGBT rights or women’s issues.”

Indeed, when examined more closely, the Stonewall uprising—which has now acquired international recognition as the impetus for the LGBTQ movement in the U.S—occurred because of the brutality of the New York Police Department during its raids of queer gatherings. Similarly, the underground balls were a response to widespread family rejection and poverty. Queer families became a source of abundance when LGBTQ youth were denied basic resources that anyone would need to survive.

The policing that forced a response from icons like Marsha P. Johnson, Miss Major, and Sylvia Rivera is still a marked presence in the city. The NYPD is the largest police force in the country today, and is unique in that it has what it calls a “counterterrorism bureau,” something typically reserved for militaries. In 2011, former mayor Michael Bloomberg boasted the following: “I have my own army in the NYPD, which is the seventh largest army in the world.”

There is a history of NYPD targeting trans people for arrest, disrupting their lives and contributing to a cycle of poverty that entraps trans people in a web of violence. And state laws long supported the NYPD’s abusive behavior. Up until recently, Section 240.37 of the New York Penal Code allowed officers to arrest trans people if they suspected them of “loitering for the purposes of prostitution.” Community organizers called it the “walking while trans” law because of the way it criminalized trans people simply for existing.

“This is just another case of how much the lives of trans people are decided by cisgender people who have no idea of our experience. And it’s all a power game,” Cecilia Gentili told me.

As a response to ongoing violence against trans people and sex workers. Cecilia Gentili founded DecrimNY, an initiative helmed by a number of organizations working to end the criminalization of sex work altogether in the state.

As an effect of the heavy police presence, Black residents have historically been more likely to be entangled in the criminal legal system than their white counterparts. While Black people account for about a quarter of the city population, they make up nearly half of all arrests.

Black trans women face compounded violence, as they’re targeted in more ways than one. A legal case that rose to national recognition in 2019 was that of Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco, who was arrested on misdemeanor charges. Some of Polanco’s charges had to do with sex work. Her bail was set $500, an amount she couldn’t afford to pay. She was consequently jailed at Rikers Island, famous for stories of cruelty that occurred within its walls. The jail has in the past been nicknamed “Torture Island” and “Gladiator School.”

On June 7th, 2019, Polanco died from a preventable seizure while in solitary confinement. Video footage surfaced last year showing guards laughing at Polanco as she lay unconscious in her cell. Staff did not provide proper healthcare that may have prevented the seizure, nor did they fulfill their obligations to keeping her alive while she was unconscious.

Her death was one of the many that were commemorated in the Brooklyn Liberation March, on June 14th, 2020. The event is reported as having the highest turnout for trans lives in U.S. history, and it occurred during the ongoing Black uprisings. The thousands of attendees, all wearing white, showed up to listen to Black trans activists speak to how violence against Black trans people occurs from both police and civilians.

For many, the march was a return to the roots of Pride month, as a protest against state-sanctioned violence. But the event couldn’t have happened without the momentum built by Black trans leaders who’ve forced the mainstream to acknowledge the margins. While many point to the Trump administration as the source of violence, many Black trans people have been decrying their plight for many years.

“I think that they keep using Trump as the problem. And Trump was only a problem that they allowed to be a problem,” said LaLa Zannell, who has been a crucial figure in Black trans communities and has devoted over ten years of work to ending violence. LaLa’s comment speaks to the way Trump was an embodiment of a national culture that is bigger than any one president — a culture that disregards the value of trans lives.

Chin Tsui has experienced this throughout his incarceration after immigrating from Hong Kong as a child. After being kicked out of his family home for being trans, Chin was left vulnerable while living on the streets. Chin was repeatedly a victim of human trafficking, wherein his life was threatened and he was coerced into performing illegal activity for his traffickers. Eventually, Chin ended up in immigration detention. He was put into solitary confinement for 19 months, often 24 hours a day, because he is a trans man.

According to Transgender Law Center, “LGBT people are rarely screened for human trafficking and until an expert asks the right questions, victims suffer in silence and fear.”

“Being an immigrant and trans, you’re a big target,” Chin told me. When Homeland Security Investigations confirmed his convictions were tied to him being a victim of trafficking, ICE reconsidered his case. Chin was released in March of 2020, after over two years in immigration prison.

Chin’s life illustrates what happens when trans people are denied the resources they need to thrive: housing, employment, and adequate identification documents, among other things. The poverty rate in 2015 for NYC was 19.9 percent, but trans people experienced poverty at a rate of 37%, according to the U.S. Transgender Survey. When seeking housing, 27 percent of trans people found themselves homeless, and almost one in three avoided a shelter for fear of being mistreated for their gender identity.

“We’ve seen that for public shelters, when we sent community members to public shelters in the city, they experienced a lot of violence,” said Cristina Herrera, who founded the TransLatinx Network in 2007 to address the needs of transgender immigrants. “And some are at women’s shelters and we’d see that there’s a lot of violence coming from cis women.”

Herrera’s two decades of advocacy work has led her to witness how trans communities develop shame and self-doubt as a result of countless barriers in their lives. These internal battles become their own additional obstacles that trans people must overcome.

“Many times they choose not to report [attacks] because dealing with violence, being a survivor of violence, it creates a lot of shame. You feel a sense of guilt in a way, because you blame yourself for not putting yourself in better situations and better economic opportunities,” Cristina explained. “But our communities are set up to fail.”

In 2019, community members celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, with New York City being chosen as the year’s site of World Pride. The resilience of trans communities had reverberated all around the globe. But it wasn’t without loss.

Trans communities shouldn’t have had to build resilience through suffering, through mourning.

I asked LaLa Zannell what gives her hope. “Every day I get up, I have hope. Because I know that somebody is not here no more,” she said. “I’m able to wake up and catch that first breath in the morning. There’s hope because I’m still here. It’s another day for me. I am honored to be here, still have another 24 hours. And there’s hope for me to get something done, to leave something here, to push something, to advance something, to combat something.”

Zannell’s words echo the signature exclamation from Miss Major: “I’m still fucking here.”

The cycle of loss makes it easy to forget that trans people have long thrived before the first police raid on Stonewall Inn, in cultures all around the world. And many years, from now, trans people will continue giving birth to social movements, families, artistic innovations, and more.

Just as Chin Tsui said to me, “I’m not asking the whole world to accept us, but they need to know we are here, we’re not going nowhere.”

The Barriers that Keep Trans People From Thriving in Texas

This is the third piece in a partnership between Autostraddle and Transgender Law Center to provide data and reporting on why anti-trans violence occurs. Read more of the series. You can also find more data compiled by Transgender Law Center here.

Before the end of the first quarter of 2021, twelve transgender individuals have been violently killed. Since 2017, there have been 139 reported murders of transgender individuals in the United States, according to research from Transgender Law Center. The murders in Texas over that time make up nearly 10% of them. These numbers do not just reflect the lives that were taken away, they reflect the lives that will continue to be in danger until further change is made.

The biggest threat against trans folks in Texas — and all over the world — isn’t just a weapon. It’s a wall. The barriers put in place to keep transgender people, trans women of color especially, from living within our society eventually keep them from living at all.

Like many Black trans women, Mya Petsche has dealt with these oppressive systems firsthand in Dallas, and shares her experience as a way to educate others to prevent that same hardship. Her activism began on Trans Day of Remembrance in 2019 as she read through the long list of names being memorialized that night. “I was thinking just how tragic it is that someone could take someone else’s life away because they fear what other people think of them or what they think of the other person.”

Petsche explained that fear is nearly inescapable for trans individuals: “We have to live in fear… having to watch our backs. We have to be silent or scared to go to the restroom or do anything that people could call ‘confrontational’.”

To Petsche, the violence ends where access begins. For trans people, that is making sure that housing, jobs, and gender-affirming identification documents are accessible. These are basic necessities for any human being before they can live a fulfilling life. Petsche isn’t the only one who believes that increasing access to resources will decrease anti-trans violence in Texas.

Verniss McFarland, a national community mobilizer, consultant, and local leader in Houston acted on that belief when they founded The Mahogany Project in 2017. The non-profit works to “reduce social isolation, stigma, and acts of injustice in TQLGB+ Communities of Color” by providing a safe and affirming space for trans people to be uplifted in the community as well as by increasing their access to resources and self-defense tools. McFarland makes a point that one of the primary issues that trans people face concerns body autonomy: the right to govern one’s own body without the influence of an external party.

“People telling people what to do with their body, how their body should exist, how their body is offensive to others, whether their body belongs…” McFarland remarked. “One of the biggest things that I think is wrong here is individuals telling another individual what to do with their body.”

Controlling trans bodies has long been the implied goal of the Texas legislature. In our current 2021 legislative session, several bills have been introduced that are either anti-trans or directly affect the lives of transgender individuals:

• House Bill 1424 would allow any medical professional to refuse care to a transgender individual by way of religious freedoms, even if the procedure in question is live-saving care.
• House Bill 3083 would legally protect any pharmacy or pharmacist who refused to provide medication due to “religious belief” or “moral conviction.”
• House Bill 1148 prohibits trans minors from amending their birth certificate to match their gender identity. Not having up to date identification makes it difficult to get a job or driver’s license. It also makes it dangerous to navigate spaces where you need to show ID.
• House Bill 369 aims to criminalize HIV, which would not only keep trans individuals with HIV from accessing treatment but would also keep sexually active trans individuals from getting tested.

This is nothing new. In 2017, there was a legislative attempt to prohibit trans people from using the right restrooms in schools and public buildings (like many hospitals, parks, DMVs, and government buildings) and additional bills introduced to keep schools and local governments from protecting trans people from discrimination.

The message sent to trans people? We don’t want you in our public places. The goal is to keep trans bodies from receiving care. The goal is to keep trans people out of society, whether that means scaring us into isolation or letting us die. The introduction of these bills encourages members of the public to fabricate “what if” scenarios to incite fear to and justify violence against trans individuals, specifically trans women.

“There’s a direct chain reaction… it’s another form of violence if we’re being honest,” said Emmett Schelling, the executive director for Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), a statewide policy, advocacy, and education organization has worked to fight laws and propositions as a form of harm reduction.

Schelling, who often testifies against discriminatory legislation at the Capitol recently found himself testifying in favor of a bill for the first time — House Bill 73. “It was a literal elimination of gay and trans panic as a legally allowable defense here in Texas and filed by Representative Gina Hinojosa. It sucks. That’s our good bill.”

Gay and trans panic is legal defense, which claims that a person’s sexual orientation or gender expression can trigger violence against another person. It was debunked by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973, but continues to be used as a murder defense to this day. Schelling asserts that transphobia isn’t actually the main issue here; the violence clearly conveys the larger struggle of marginalized communities existing in a society founded on the systemic structure of white supremacy.

“We’re not just fighting a trans-specific oppressive system,” Schelling said. “We’re fighting a system that’s rooted in white supremacy because white supremacy is the brother of transphobia which is why when we see the manifestation of the violence is largely geared towards black trans women and trans women of color.”

Diamond Stylz, the executive director of Black Trans Women Inc., an organization that is dedicated to the socioeconomic empowerment of black trans women, takes it a step further. If white supremacy is on one side of the coin, she argues, misogyny is on the other. Just as the majority of murdered Black trans women are killed by their intimate partners, Black cis women are often killed in similar ways. “The CDC told us in 2015 that Black cisgender women have one of the highest rate of intimate partner homicide. Cisgender women and trans women need to get together and really figure out how are we going to stop the violence against us,” Stylz said. “Change legislation with sex workers. Decriminalize it. That will stop violence. Adding legislation that adds stigma doesn’t work.”

This stigma not only encourages police officers to mistreat trans women, but it also encourages to neglect them, which can lead to the police just allowing fatal encounters to happen.

“I’ve been in a situation like that where they spilled my tea, and the whole tone of the police change. Once they find out I’m not a cisgender woman, they say, ‘You should have fought back,’” Stylz explained.

The problems trans people face are not simple. They are deeply rooted in the American legacy of violence that have plagued marginalized groups for centuries.

In 50 years, I want us to be beyond fighting for the right to exist. I want us to be in a situation where resources are readily available, where some resources aren’t even needed anymore. When someone has the fantastic realization that they’re trans, I don’t want any feelings of fear or worry to follow. I want there to only be peace — something that in 2021, many of us can’t find in life or in death.

The answer is eradicating stigma through education and action. We need people to know what the problem is, we have to work together to dismantle the oppressive systems above us by being true allies to each other, by listening to each other, and by creating access for each other. We must break down the barriers that are intent on keeping trans people out of society and out of existence. Trans people should not have to show up to save our own lives alone.

The Roots of Anti-Trans Violence

This is the introduction to a partnership between Autostraddle and Transgender Law Center to provide data and reporting on why anti-trans violence occurs. Read more of the series. You can also find more data compiled by Transgender Law Center here.

Year after year, journalists reported the ongoing murders of trans people — the majority of them Black trans women — demonstrating the “epidemic of violence.” The reports of community members’ deaths caused continuous ripples of grief and fear.

Under the legal system, these homicides were interpersonal acts: one individual committing a crime against another. In reality, these deaths are not singular events. Rather, the theft of trans lives is made possible by the neglect and violence of many institutions. Murders are the result of multiple incidences over the course of a trans person’s life: every time we’re abandoned by our families, every time we are refused healthcare, every time we are denied access to a homeless shelter, every time the police profile us as sex workers and incarcerate us.

Trans people are trapped in a web of violence wherein the very entities charged with caring for us instead treat us as disposable.

Who has blood on their hands? Not just perpetrators of the homicide. The federal government, state legislatures, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, police forces, homeless shelters, prisons, healthcare providers, and discriminatory employers all contribute to making us vulnerable.

In order to end the violence, we have to understand its roots. We have to transform all the conditions that lead to the violence in the first place.

Autostraddle has partnered with Transgender Law Center to study how anti-trans violence is embedded in our society. We chose to feature four regions that are among those with the highest rates of anti-trans violence: Louisiana, Texas, New York, and Puerto Rico.

We’ll present data and reporting that features local community organizers who represent the possibility of a future of interdependence and mutual care among all people. We’ve also included resources, organizations, mutual aid funds, and collectives from each region, majority trans-led, for readers to donate and support.

We must plant new seeds. We must water them so trans people get to bloom without fear.

How Louisiana’s Antiquated Laws Set Trans People Up for Violence

This is the first piece in a partnership between Autostraddle and Transgender Law Center to provide data and reporting on why anti-trans violence occurs. Read more of the series. You can also find more data compiled by Transgender Law Center here.

I originally moved to New Orleans out of desperation. Fresh out of the psych ward, and not long after going “full time” and leaving the career I’d spent tens of thousands of dollars in grad school money on – and maybe because I was feeling dramatic – I collected my cat, everything I owned, and dipped. If I was going to survive, it wasn’t going to be in the Bay Area.

New Orleans was a revelation. Even though it didn’t end up being my home, it was exactly what I needed at the time. I’ve never felt more connected to a community. Never felt more affirmed. Never met so many beautiful, creative, or kind queer and trans people of color. To some degree that’s by necessity. While New Orleans is, in some ways, a bubble of acceptance and freedom of expression, it’s still in Louisiana. Not that the South is uniquely inhospitable to trans people – when I lived there, I was never followed home by a threatening man in a truck, for example. This has happened to me at least four times in Oakland, California.

It is important to be honest about the violence that our communities – trans, gender non-conforming, Black, disabled, immigrant, sex worker, and/or people of color communities – face. But we’re more than just murder victims. It’s just as important to be honest about the beautiful and expansive organizing, mutual aid, and resistance work being done within those same communities. Some of it is explicitly anti-violence work, but some of it is just taking care of and loving one another. Some of it is just re-affirming each other’s humanity and our right to exist.

Because that’s not always apparent. Over the last four years, according to Transgender Law Center’s research, 11 trans people were murdered in Louisiana. All of them were Black. All of them were trans women. All were under 33 years old. That includes one woman who was just killed in January in Baton Rouge. We can’t talk about violence without talking about this reality. But, of course, there’s more to the story.

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the nation, and if it were its own country, would have the highest in the world. Of the 11 cases mentioned above, most remain unsolved. In some of the cases, alleged perpetrators were arrested and/or charged – but is that justice? It won’t bring our sisters back and will likely have no effect on the issue writ large. We know that much of the interpersonal violence our community faces is at the hands of intimate partners. We also know that Louisiana’s prisons and jails are disproportionately filled with Black people.

It also has the third-highest poverty rate in America. But rather than address that poverty – or the many reasons some Black trans women, often spurned by employers, turn to alternative economies like sex work – Louisiana simply criminalizes the problem. And according to the laws on the books, queer and trans people engaging in sex work is a major problem.

“Our system is operating under this Napoleonic law, right?” said Wendi Cooper, Executive Director of Transcending Women, with palpable exasperation. “It’s as if we’re stuck back into like, the 1800s.”

The Crimes Against Nature by Solicitation (CANS) law is indeed a 19th-century law, still on the books in Louisiana, that criminalizes non-procreative sex. People convicted of exchanging oral or anal – but not vaginal – sex for money are charged with felonies and get longer jail sentences. Until 2012, it required anyone convicted under it to register as a sex offender. This was the “only instance in which an offense that does not involve children, the use of force, violence, a weapon or lack of consent required registration as a sex offender,” explains the Center for Constitutional Rights. While the law has changed in recent years, those convicted prior to 2012 are still registered as sex offenders (and charged with felonies).

“[Crimes against nature laws are] being used as a tool to target Black trans folks,” explained Nathalie “Nia” Faulk, a self-described ebony Southern belle who works at the intersections of history, performance art, and cultural organizing. “Anytime you get caught up in the crimes against nature laws, you get this scarlet letter that says ‘I’m a sex offender.’ It feeds into this ideology of trans people being predators.”

Sex offenders have to tell every neighbor, landlord, and nearby school about their status, and the law prevents them from accessing certain jobs. Over 40% of people on the sex offender registry in Louisiana were convicted under CANS.

It’s very dehumanizing, adds Wendi Cooper, to be told “we don’t deserve to get assistance with our needs. We don’t deserve to be able to walk the streets. Or to let our presence be known.” But violence and trauma aren’t the end of the story. We also build community with our peers, our affinity groups, our cities, states, countries, planet. With those who came before us – and those who have yet to arrive.

That’s why Cooper started Transcending Women, a newly-formed organization she hopes can be an “agent of change” to spread resources, knowledge, and survival skills throughout the community. She aims to share practical necessities, to provide legal services – whether a name change or to support folks who have been criminalized by the system – and an advocacy program, that aims to work on political efforts like getting rid of CANS. She was part of the original lawsuit that struck down the worst parts of CANS, and she spearheaded the “CANS Can’t Stand” Campaign as well, which aims to take it off the books for good.

But not every initiative is a non-profit organization. “Our people are so knowledgeable and so brilliant – period,” said Spirit McEntyre, a musician, organizer, and facilitator. “[We] have so much history of surviving beyond survival. Thriving.” We know how to pull together resources, to make things work, to take care of each other.

They tell me about some of the ways they’ve seen this take shape in Louisiana. Spontaneous, grassroots Signal groups created to redistribute wealth and facilitate resource sharing, without the fees of a crowdfunding site or the strings of a non-profit organization, for example. But some institutional funding doesn’t hurt.

Nia shared no less than a dozen organizations doing innovative, crucial work in Louisiana. BreakOut!, for example, works against the criminalization of LGBTQ youth and does political education. That’s also one of the pillars of The Southern Organizer Academy, which Faulk co-directs, and whose mission is “building the capacity of trans and queer folks to go out into the world and create the change you want.” Last Call works documents intergenerational queer and trans stories about the past, and uses them “as a catalyst to manifest trans futures.”

Speaking of the future – what does it have in store for Louisiana’s trans community? What are all of these organizations building toward?

“I’m thinking of reconciliation,” envisioned Nia. “Like, centers and programs where folks can go to heal harm with their families, with themselves, with the system. …I’m thinking of cooperatives. So there’s food banks, and gardens, and maybe even just regular monetary banks that are run by trans people for trans people, to hold their money and teach them investment. I’m thinking about spiritual wealth. Deep funding that goes towards increasing trans spirituality and wellness and wholeness. I’m thinking Black trans art filmmaking initiatives, oral history initiatives, where we can document the beautiful, rich history that transness has…”

Her vision was so much bigger than what I can relay here. When I talk to trans people about the future of our community, I’m often struck by the beauty and love of our visions for ourselves and each other. But I’m also often struck by just how doable it all really is. Nothing our communities call for, march for, agitate for, is anything other than what so many cis, straight, white people take for granted every day.

When we talk about violence, we aren’t just talking about homicide. We’re talking about dating in loving, respectful ways with people who will claim us. We’re talking about having the right relationships with our biological families, with our elders, with our youth. We’re talking about access to living wage jobs, and being able to choose sex work if we want without fear of being labeled a sex offender or otherwise being seen as disposable. We’re talking about being able to go to school and focus on learning.

Because when we talk about violence, we have to think bigger. About the conditions that create and facilitate violence – both for survivors and perpetrators – and the reality that structural, systems-level violence is what affects all of us day to day. And that struggle is less visible than homicide is. The standard answers to homicide, like hate crime laws, tend to reify rather than transform the harms of that violence.

All of the organizations mentioned in this article, and each of the people interviewed, are doing anti-violence work, even if none of them are naming it so explicitly. Part of the bigger thinking about violence we need to do is engaging with, celebrating, and supporting the people helping to create lives for each other, to share the avenues of survival we’ve had to adapt, to wring the myriad joys and glories out of our lives and share them with our loved ones.