C A P T I V E G E N D E R S trans embodiment and the prison industrial complex eric a. stanley & nat smith, editors advance praise for captive genders _________________________________________ “Captive Genders is an exciting assemblage of writings—analyses, manifestos, stories, interviews—that traverse the complicated entanglements of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and the production of gender normativity. Focusing discerningly on the encounter of transpersons with the apparatuses that constitute the prison industrial complex, the contributors to this volume create new frameworks and new vocabularies that surely will have a transformative impact on the theories and practices of twenty-first century abolition.” —Angela Y. Davis, professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz “The purpose of prison abolition is to discover and promote the countless ways freedom and difference are mutually dependent. The contributors to Captive Genders brilliantly shatter the assumption that the antidote to danger is human sacrifice. In other words, for these thinkers: where life is precious life is precious.” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California “Captive Genders is at once a scathing and necessary analysis of the prison industrial complex and a history of queer resistance to state tyranny. By analyzing the root causes of anti-queer and anti-trans violence, this book exposes the brutality of state control over queer/trans bodies inside and outside prison walls, and proposes an analytical framework for undoing not just the prison system, but its mechanisms of surveillance, dehumanization, and containment. By queering a prison abolition analysis, Captive Genders moves us to imagine the impossible dream of liberation.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly and editor of Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity c a p t i v e g e n d e r s Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex e d i t e d b y e r i c a . s ta n l e y and nat smith Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex Edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith All essays © 2011 by their respective authors This edition © 2011 AK Press (Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore) ISBN-13: 978-1-84935-070-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2011920478 AK Press 674-A 23rd Street Oakland, CA 94612 USA www.akpress.org akpress@akpress.org AK Press UK PO Box 12766 Edinburgh EH8 9YE Scotland www.akuk.com ak@akdin.demon.co.uk The above addresses would be delighted to provide you with the latest AK Press distribution catalog, which features several thousand books, pamphlets, zines, audio and video recordings, and gear, all published or distributed by AK Press. Alternately, visit our websites to browse the catalog and find out the latest news from the world of anarchist publishing: www.akpress.org | www.akuk.com revolutionbythebook.akpress.org Printed in Canada on 100% recycled, acid-free paper with union labor. Cover image: Marie Ueda, photo from the White Night riots, San Francisco, CA 1979 Courtesy of the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society. Cover by Kate Khatib | www.manifestor.org/design Interior by Michelle Fleming with Kate Khatib contents Acknowledgements................................................................................ix Introduction: Fugitive Flesh: Gender Self-Determination, Queer Abolition, and Trans Resistance.....................................................1 Eric A. Stanley out of time: from gay liberation to prison abolition Building an Abolitionist Trans & Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got..........................................................................15 Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, Dean Spade “Street Power” and the Claiming of Public Space: San Francisco’s “Vanguard” and Pre-Stonewall Queer Radicalism.................................41 Jennifer Worley Brushes with Lily Law..........................................................................57 Tommi Avicolli Mecca Looking Back: The Bathhouse Raids in Toronto, 1981.........................63 Nadia Guidotto prison beyond the prison: criminalization of the everyday “Rounding Up the Homosexuals”: The Impact of Juvenile Court on Queer and Trans/Gender-Non-Conforming Youth...............................77 Wesley Ware Hotel Hell: With Continual References to the Insurrection..................85 Ralowe T. Ampu Regulatory Sites: Management, Confinement, and HIV/AIDS....................................................................................99 Michelle C. Potts Awful Acts and the Trouble with Normal: A Personal Treatise on Sex Offenders..................................................113 Erica R. Meiners How to Make Prisons Disappear: Queer Immigrants, the Shackles of Love, and the Invisibility of the Prison Industrial Complex................123 Yasmin Nair Identities Under Siege: Violence Against Transpersons of Color...............................................141 Lori A. Saffin walled lives: consolidating difference, disappearing possibilities Krystal Is Kristopher and Vice Versa...................................................165 Kristopher Shelley “Krystal” “The Only Freedom I Can See:” Imprisoned Queer Writing and the Politics of the Unimaginable...............................................................169 Stephen Dillon Being an Incarcerated Transperson: Shouldn’t People Care?...............185 Clifton Goring/Candi Raine Sweet Out of Compliance: Masculine-Identified People in Women’s Prisons..................................................................189 Lori Girshick My Story............................................................................................209 Paula Rae Witherspoon Exposure............................................................................................215 Cholo No One Enters Like Them: Health, Gender Variance, and the PIC...217 blake nemec bustin’ out: organizing resistance and building alternatives Transforming Carceral Logics: 10 Reasons to Dismantle the Prison Industrial Complex Using a Queer/Trans Analysis.............................235 S. Lambel Making It Happen, Mama: A Conversation with Miss Major.............267 Jayden Donahue gender wars: state changing shape, passing to play, & body of our movements........................................................................................281 Vanessa Huang Maroon Abolitionists: Black Gender-oppressed Activists in the AntiPrison Movement in the US and Canada...........................................293 Julia Sudbury AKA Julia C. Oparah Abolitionist Imaginings: A Conversation with Bo Brown, Reina Gossett, and Dylan Rodríguez..................................................323 Che Gossett tools/resources Picturing the PIC Exercise..................................................................345 Critical Resistance Questions for Abolitionist Work: 7 Easy Steps...................................349 Critical Resistance Addressing the Prison Industrial Complex: Case Studies....................355 Nat Smith Resource List.....................................................................................357 Contributors Bios..............................................................................359 acknowledgements Like all struggle we have not acted alone. We would like to acknowledge the labor, support, and guidance of the following people: Ralowe T. Ampu, Ryan Conrad, Angela Y. Davis, Jay Donahue, Jason Fritz, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Donna Haraway, Rachel Herzing, Rebecca Hurdis, Kentaro Kaneko, Colby Lenz, Matt Luton, Toshio Meronek, José Muñoz, Yasmin Nair, Isaac Ontiveros, Julia Chinyere Oparah, Adam Reed, Andrea Ritchie, Chris Smith, the late Will Smith, Dean Spade, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Chris Vargas, and Ari Wohlfeiler. Working with organizations, collectives, and with unaffiliated people is essential to grounding the analysis put forth by this book. While central to the project of abolition, writing must always be produced within the context of action. Similarly, action devoid of analysis often makes for shaky ground upon which to build. AK Press has been supportive of this project from its beginning many years ago. We are also grateful for the people who have and continue to organize with the Bay Area NJ4 Solidarity Committee, Critical Resistance, Gay Shame, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, and the amazing people who organized Transforming Justice, the groundbreaking conference held in 2007. Captive Genders is evidence of a collective dedication to abolishing the prison industrial complex (PIC). When we first started talking about a possible writing project in 2006 we wanted to push the LGBT movement towards a deeper understanding of the role the PIC plays in our lives. Specifically we wanted to focus on the ways in which the LGBT ix Captive Genders mainstream, through its racist logic, relies on the PIC and is used by the PIC to criminalize transgender, gender variant, and queer people. We also wanted to push the anti-prison and PIC abolition movements to more centrally incorporate and foreground the struggles of transgender, gender variant, and queer people. We started by making it clear that we wanted to emphasize writing from folks currently inside as well as former prisoners. Importantly, discussions of exploitation, inclusion without tokenization, and risking prisoner safety due to the content of our correspondence were in the forefront. We attempted to contact all of the members of Transgender, Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice Project’s contact list as well as our personal contacts. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project and additional organizations encouraged members to contribute. Of the hundred or so letters sent out and ads posted in prisoner publications, we received relatively few responses. This makes sense because prison mail is “unreliable” as guards will often tamper with or simply destroy it, whether it is considered contraband or they just don’t feel like sorting mail that day. Furthermore, guards sometimes hold a vendetta against activist and/or “othered” prisoners and frequently “disappear” their mail. While our letters explained openly and honestly what we were attempting to accomplish, some folks inside were understandably wary from being burned by supposed claims of support by others in the past and declined to submit. While we recognize that access to writing resources, supporting documents, and editorial assistance are limited if not completely absent inside, only a small number of the submissions were editable within our timeframe and our own limited resources. Additionally and unfortunately, authors of a few pieces we had chosen for publication were un-locatable as their housing had changed (and a few folks were released on parole!) and thus we could no longer contact them (though we tried). Because of these and other reasons related to mail communication and the busyness of our lives, it took a long time to gather pieces that we felt demonstrated a broad and essential scope. Finally, a few contributions (from both within and outside prison) we were holding out for never materialized and there are definitely some important ideas and voices missing. However, we collectively covered a lot of important ground that will make room for even more organizing and writing in the future, and we invite you to join or continue your participation in both. Ultimately, Captive Genders is a powerful offering of struggle, innovation, comeuppance and sorrow; a call to arms and a cry for true, self-determined justice. x fUgitive flesH: gender self-determination, Queer abolition, and trans resistance Eric A. Stanley We always felt that the police were the real enemy. —Sylvia Rivera Bright lights shattered the dark anonymity of the dance floor. The flicker warned of the danger of the coming raid. Well experienced, people stopped dancing, changed clothing, removed or applied makeup, and got ready. The police entered, began examining everyone’s IDs, and lined up the trans/gender-non-conforming folks to be “checked” by an officer in the restroom to ensure that they were wearing the legally mandated three pieces of “gender appropriate clothing.” Simultaneously the cops started roughing up people, dragging them out front to the awaiting paddy wagon. In other words, it was a regular June night out on the town for trans and queer folks in 1969 New York City. 1 Captive Genders 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.1 Forty years later, on a similarly muggy June night in 2009, history repeated itself. At the Rainbow Lounge, a newly opened gay bar in Fort Worth, Texas, the police staged a raid, verbally harassing patrons, calling them “faggots” and beating a number of customers. One patron was slammed against the floor, sending him to the hospital with brain injuries, while seven others were arrested. These instances of brutal force and the administrative surveillance that trans and queer folks face today are not significantly less prevalent nor less traumatic than those experienced by the Stonewall rioters of 1969, however the ways this violence is currently understood is quite different. While community vigils and public forums were held in the wake of the Rainbow Lounge raid, the immediate response was not to fight back, nor has there been much attempt to understand the raid in the broader context of the systematic violence trans and queer people face under the relentless force of the prison industrial complex (PIC).2 Captive Genders is in part an attempt to think about the historical and political ideologies that continually naturalize the abusive force of the police with such power as to make them appear ordinary. This is not to argue that the types of resistance present at the Stonewall riots were com2 Introduction monplace during that time, nor to suggest that trans and queer folks do not fight back today; nonetheless one of our aims is to chart the multiple ways that trans and queer folks are subjugated by the police, along with the multiple ways that we have and that we continue to resist in the face of these overwhelming structures.3 I start with the Stonewall riot not because it was the first, most important, or last instance of radical refusal of the police state. Indeed, the riots at San Francisco’s Compton’s Cafeteria in 1966 and at Los Angeles’s Cooper’s Doughnuts in 1959 remind us that the history of resistance is as long as the history of oppression. However, what is unique about the Stonewall uprising is that, within the United States context, it is made to symbolize the “birth of the gay rights movement.” Furthermore, dominant lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) political organizations like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF) attempt to build an arc of progress starting with the oppression of the Stonewall moment and ending in the current time of “equality” evidenced by campaigns for gay marriage, hate crimes legislation, and gays in the military. Captive Genders works to undo this narrative of progress, assimilation, and police cooperation by building an analysis that highlights the historical and contemporary antagonisms between trans/queer folks and the police state.4 This collection argues that prison abolition must be one of the centers of trans and queer liberation struggles. Starting with abolition we open questions often disappeared by both mainstream LGBT and antiprison movements. Among these many silences are the radical trans/queer arguments against the proliferation of hate crimes enhancements. Mainstream LGBT organizations, in collaboration with the state, have been working hard to make us believe that hate crimes enhancements are a necessary and useful way to make trans and queer people safer. Hate crimes enhancements are used to add time to a person’s sentence if the offense is deemed to target a group of people. However, hate crimes enhancements ignore the roots of harm, do not act as deterrents, and reproduce the force of the PIC, which produces more, not less harm. Not surprisingly, in October 2009, when President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law, extending existing hate crimes enhancements to include “gender and sexuality,” there was no mention by the LGBT mainstream of the historical and contemporary ways that the legal system itself works to deaden trans and queer lives. As antidote, this collection works to understand how gender, sexuality, race, 3 Captive Genders ability, class, nationality, and other markers of difference are constricted, often to the point of liquidation, in the name of a normative carceral state. Among the most volatile points of contact between state violence and one’s body is the domain of gender. An understanding of these connections has produced much important activism and research that explores how non-trans women are uniquely harmed through disproportionate prison sentences, sexual assault while in custody, and nonexistent medical care, coupled with other forms of violence. This work was and continues to be a necessary intervention in the ways that prison studies and activism have historically imagined the prisoner as always male and have until recently rarely attended to the ways that gendered difference produces carceral differences. Similarly, queer studies and political organizing, along with the growing body of work that might be called trans studies—while attending to the work of gender, sexuality, and more recently to race and nationality—has (with important exceptions) had little to say about the force of imprisonment or about trans/queer prisoners. Productively, we see this as both an absence and an opening for those of us working in trans/queer studies to attend—in a way that centers the experiences of those most directly impacted—to the ways that the prison must emerge as one of the major sites of trans/queer scholarship and political organizing.5 In moments of frustration, excitement, isolation, and solidarity, Captive Genders grew out of this friction as a rogue text, a necessarily unstable collection of voices, stories, analysis, and plans for action. What these pieces all have in common is that they suggest that gender, ability, and sexuality as written through race, class, and nationality must figure into any and all accounts of incarceration, even when they seem to be nonexistent. Indeed, the oftentimes ghosted ways that gender and heteronormativity function most forcefully are in their presumed absence. In collaboration and sometimes in contestation, this project offers vital ways of understanding not only the specific experience of trans and queer prisoners, but also more broadly the ways that regimes of normative sexuality and gender are organizing structures of the prison industrial complex. To be clear, Captive Genders is not offered as a definitive collection. Our hope is that it will work as a space where conversations and connections can multiply with the aim of making abolition flourish. gender lockdown Gender seems to always escape the confines of the language that we use to capture it. This makes for a difficult place of departure for a book that is 4 Introduction about, among other things, gender. For sure, some firmly identify as one or more particular genders while others have a more shifting relation via their racialized bodies, gendered desires, physical presentations, and the words available to comprehend these intersections. Neither a solidly fixed understanding of oneself nor a more fluid idea of gender is necessarily more radically deconstructive than the other. Trans/gender-non-conforming folks are not the answer to the “riddle” of gender, nor are they immune to the assimilationist longing embodied by other marginalized people. To this end, a gendered identity (or any other identity) imagined outside the context of the political offers very little. Here, then, we attempt to always understand gender and sexuality within the space of the political to build beyond generality. Furthermore, one’s gender identification and sexual identification are always formed in a series of thick relations to each other. While we acknowledge that gender identity is not co-terminus with sexuality, these connections must be carefully attended to, as they cut through class, race, ability, and nationality, as well as time.6 Captive Genders offers no comprehensive theory of gender or sexuality that would be useful as an abstracted description. Nor does it assume that it represents the lived experiences of particular people beyond its authors. We do, however, highlight a number of tendencies that can and sometimes must become abstracted. For example, we know that trans people are disproportionately incarcerated in relation to non-trans people. Yet we also know that some, perhaps many, trans/queer people, as a result of experiencing relentless violence, are in favor of incarceration and believe in its claims of safety. In many ways this book lives among these contradictions as it works to move conversations toward abolition and away from a belief that prisons will ever make us safer. As a theoretical and embodied practice, gender self-determination is one of the politics that holds this project together. Echoed through the dreams of other liberation movements’ understandings of identity and power, gender self-determination at its most basic suggests that we collectively work to create the most space for people to express whatever genders they choose at any given moment. It also understands that these expressions might change and that this change does not delegitimate previous or future identifications. Gender self-determination also acknowledges that gender identification is always formed in relation to other forms of power and thus the words we use to identify others and ourselves are culturally, generationally, and geographically situated. In other words, terms that are more common now, like “transgender,” are relatively new to our vocabu5 Captive Genders laries and are not inclusive of all of our embodied experiences. Gender self-determination believes that there are multiple ways to work one’s gender and sexuality—and while they might have material differences, they must not be hierarchized in the name of realness.7 chain links In the recent past, the term prison industrial complex has been offered to begin to name the enormity of the prison system. Indeed, “the prison,” or the material buildings that comprise prisons and jails are only one component of the PIC. Immigration centers, juvenile justice facilities, county jails, military jails, holding rooms, court rooms, sheriff’s offices, psychiatric institutes, along with other spaces build the vastness of the PIC’s architecture. Along with these more recognizable spaces, understanding the PIC as a set of relations makes visible the connections among capitalism, globalization, and corporations. From prison labor, privatized prisons, prison guard unions, food suppliers, telephone companies, commissary suppliers, uniform producers, and beyond, the carceral landscape overwhelms. Other than the facilities themselves and the economic and geopolitical connections, the PIC also helps us to think about the practices of surveillance, policing, screening, profiling, and other technologies to partition people and produce “populations” that often occur far beyond the walls of the prison.8 This book suggests that 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. We also acknowledge that trans/queer folks, especially those of color and/or low income, experience overwhelming amounts of personal violence that must be attended to. Here we are not attempting to discredit the severity of this personal violence, but we are suggesting that relying on the PIC as a remedy actually produces more harm and offers little. What, then, might a world look like in which harm is met with healing and support, rather than the displacement and reviolation produced by the PIC?9 6 Introduction outlawed life Trans/gender-non-conforming and queer people, along with many others, are born into webs of surveillance. The gendering scan of other children at an early age (“Are you a boy or a girl?”) places many in the panopticon long before they enter a prison. For those who do trespass the gender binary or heteronormativity, physical violence, isolation, detention, or parental disappointment become some of the first punishments. As has been well documented, many trans and queer youth are routinely harassed at school and kicked out of home at young ages, while others leave in hopes of escaping the mental and physical violence that they experience at schools and in their houses. Many trans/queer youth learn how to survive in a hostile world. Often the informal economy becomes the only option for them to make money. Selling drugs, sex work, shoplifting, and scamming are among the few avenues that might ensure they have something to eat and a place to sleep at night. Routinely turned away from shelters because of their gender presentation, abused in residential living situations or foster care, and even harassed in “gay neighborhoods” (as they are assumed to drive down property values or scare off business), they are reminded that they are alone. Habitually picked up for truancy, loitering, or soliciting, many trans/queer people spend their youth shuttling between the anonymity of the streets and the hyper-surveillance of the juvenile justice system. With case managers too overloaded to care, or too transphobic to want to care, they slip through the holes left by others. Picked up—locked up—placed in a home—escape—survive—picked up again. The cycle builds a cage, and the hope for anything else disappears with the crushing reality that their identities form the parameters of possibility.10 With few options and aging-out of what little resources there are for “youth,” many trans/queer adults are in no better a situation. Employers routinely don’t hire “queeny” gay men, trans women who “cannot pass,” butches who seem “too hard,” or anyone else who is read to be “bad for business.” Along with the barriers to employment, most jobs that are open to folks who have been homeless or incarcerated are minimum-wage and thus provide little more than continuing poverty and fleeting stability. Back to where they began—on the streets, hustling to make it, now older—they are often given even longer sentences. While this cycle of poverty and incarceration speaks to more current experiences, the discursive drives building their motors are nothing new. Inheriting a long history of being made suspect, trans/queer people, via 7 Captive Genders the medicalization of trans identities and homosexuality, have been and continue to be institutionalized, forcibly medicated, sterilized, operated on, shocked, and made into objects of study and experimentation. Similarly, the historical illegality of gender trespassing and of queerness have taught many trans/queer folks that their lives will be intimately bound with the legal system. More recently, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has turned the surveillance technologies inward. One’s blood and RNA replication became another site of susceptibility that continues to imprison people through charges of bio-terrorism, under AIDS-phobic laws. desiring abolition Living through these forms of domination are also moments of devastating resistance where people working together are building joy, tearing down the walls of normative culture, and opening space for a more beautiful, more lively, safer place for all. Captive Genders remembers these radical histories and movements as evidence that our legacies are fiercely imaginative and that our collective abilities can, and have, offered freedom even in the most destitute of times.11 In the face of the overwhelming violence of the PIC, abolition—and specifically a trans/queer abolition—is one example of this vital defiance. An abolitionist politic does not believe that the prison system is “broken” and in need of reform; indeed, it is, according to its own logic, working quite well. Abolition necessarily moves us away from attempting to “fix” the PIC and helps us imagine an entirely different world—one that is not built upon the historical and contemporary legacies of the racial and gendered brutality that maintain the power of the PIC. What this means is that abolition is not a response to the belief that the PIC is so horrible that reform would not be enough. Although we do believe that the PIC is horrible and that reform is not enough, abolition radically restages our conversations and our ways of living and understanding as to undo our reliance on the PIC and its cultural logics. For us, abolition is not simply a reaction to the PIC but a political commitment that makes the PIC impossible. To this end, the time of abolition is both yet to come and already here. In other words, while we hold on to abolition as a politics for doing anti-PIC work, we also acknowledge there are countless ways that abolition has been and continues to be here now. As a project dedicated to radical deconstruction, abolition must also include at its center a reworking of gender and sexuality that displaces both heterosexuality and gender normativity as measures of worth.12 8 Introduction The Stonewall uprising itself must be remembered and celebrated as a moment of a radical trans/queer abolitionist politic that built, in those three nights, the materiality of this vision. As both a dream of the future and a practice of history, we strategize for a world without the multiple ways that our bodies, genders, and sexualities are disciplined. Captive Genders is also a telling of a rich history of trans/queer struggle against the PIC, still in the making. This is an invitation to remember these radical legacies of abolition and to continue the struggle to make this dream of the future, lived today. This piece has benefited from the critical attention of Angela Y. Davis, Toshio Meronek, and Adam Reed. I am also indebted to The Institute for Anarchist Studies who provided support for the completion of this introduction. 1. 2. 3. 4. notes For a conical history of Stonewall, see Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1994). For more on the raid, see “Man Injured During Rainbow Lounge Raid in Fort Worth Speaks Out,” The Dallas Morning News. Accessed January 8, 2011: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/070709d nmetrainbow.13a0e378.html Also, during the Stonewall uprising, many gays and lesbians disagreed with the rioters. The Mattachine Society of New York put up a sign that read, “We homosexuals pled with our people to please help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the village.” Thus, I am not suggesting that during the riots all LGBT people understood the relationship between police repression and queer resistance. However, it seems important to chart how radical resistance gets rewritten under the name of a more conservative political agenda. Captive Genders focuses mostly on the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. A more transnational reading would offer important insights not always present here. For more on the argument that Stonewall began the “gay rights” movement in the United States, see David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006). The consumer-driven, anti-political festival of modern Gay Pride celebrations still occurs during the last weekend in June in commemoration of the Stonewall uprising. For more critiques of Gay Pride, see the work of the activist collective Gay Shame. 9 Captive Genders 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. For a useful reading of gender (as understood by non-trans women) in relation to punishment, see Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London: Routledge, 1994). It is also important to highlight that women, trans, and queer people (specifically of color) have done much, if not most, of the anti-PIC organizing in the United States. For more on the Compton’s Cafeteria riots, see Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria [DVD], dir. Victor Silverman and Susan Stryker (San Francisco: Frameline, 2010). In this introduction, I use “trans” as an umbrella term to signal a wide range of gender non-conformity. I also often use “trans/queer” as a way to mark the connections between gender and sexuality and how they are often conflated via the PIC. Furthermore, if someone identifies as a “transvestite,” “tranny,” “queer,” or any other identity that is sometimes considered to be derogatory, an ethic of gender self-determination would make space for that identity as equally valid. See Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans, The Prison Industrial Complex and the Global Economy (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2003); Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Also, for more on the relationship between globalization and imprisonment, see Julia Chinyere Oparah, Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison-Industrial Complex (New York: Routledge, 2005). Figuring out responses to anti-trans/queer violence that do not reproduce harm needs much more critical attention. Community accountability models are one example, however, when the person that caused harm is “random” it becomes much more difficult to imagine alternatives. This is not to suggest that working in the informal economy is less moral than working in more traditional jobs. Indeed, at times it is actually safer and more beneficial to remain in these jobs. I also do not want to suggest that sex workers, in every instance, have no other choice. Under capitalism, most have little choice in regard to their working conditions. However, I do want to mark the ways that this labor makes one more vulnerable to the PIC. The case of the New Jersey 4 (NJ4) is another shattering example of the ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality make contact through the crushing force of the PIC. The NJ4 is a group of young, Black, queer/gender-non-conforming people from Newark, NJ, that were hanging out on a summer night in New York’s West Village. As they were walking down the street, a man standing on the corner met them with sexual advances. The situation escalated as 10 Introduction 11. 12. the NJ4 repeatedly refused his verbal harassment. He began shouting louder, flicked a cigarette toward one of them, and threatened to “fuck them straight.” A fight broke out and a number of the NJ4 were physically attacked and the man was wounded but fully recovered. Not surprisingly, all four of the women were found guilty and were subsequently sentenced to between three and a half and eleven years in prison. As gender-non-conforming Black queers, their offense was survival, and they were punished harshly for it. For more on alternatives to imprisonment, see Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists (Oakland, Calif.: Critical Resistance, 2005) and Abolition Now!: Ten Years of Strategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, Calif.: AK Press, 2008). My many conversations with Angela Y. Davis continue to help me clarify the point that abolition is not imagined as only in response to the horrors of the PIC. 11 oUt of time from gay liberation to prison abolition BUilding an aBolitionist trans and QUeer movement witH everYtHing we’ve got Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, Dean Spade As we write this, queer and trans people across the United States and in many parts of the world have just celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. On that fateful night back in June 1969, sexual and gender outsiders rose up against ongoing brutal police violence in an inspiring act of defiance. These early freedom fighters knew all too well that the NYPD—“New York’s finest”—were the frontline threat to queer and trans survival. Stonewall was the culmination of years of domination, resentment, and upheaval in many marginalized communities coming to a new consciousness of the depth of violence committed by the government against poor people, people of color, women, and queer people both within US borders and around the world. The Stonewall Rebellion, the mass demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, and the campaign to 15 Captive Genders free imprisoned Black-liberation activist Assata Shakur were all powerful examples of a groundswell of energy demanding an end to the “business as usual” of US terror during this time. Could these groundbreaking and often unsung activists have imagined that only forty years later the “official” gay rights agenda would be largely pro-police, pro-prisons, and pro-war—exactly the forces they worked so hard to resist? Just a few decades later, the most visible and well-funded arms of the “LGBT movement” look much more like a corporate strategizing session than a grassroots social justice movement. There are countless examples of this dramatic shift in priorities. What emerged as a fight against racist, anti-poor, and anti-queer police violence now works hand in hand with local and federal law enforcement agencies—district attorneys are asked to speak at trans rallies, cops march in Gay Pride parades. The agendas of prosecutors—those who lock up our family, friends, and lovers—and many queer and trans organizations are becoming increasingly similar, with sentence- and police-enhancing legislation at the top of the priority list. Hate crimes legislation is tacked on to multi-billion dollar “defense” bills to support US military domination in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Despite the rhetoric of an “LGBT community,” transgender and gender-non-conforming people are repeatedly abandoned and marginalized in the agendas and priorities of our “lead” organizations—most recently in the 2007 gutting of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of gender identity protections. And as the rate of people (particularly poor queer and trans people of color) without steady jobs, housing, or healthcare continues to rise, and health and social services continue to be cut, those dubbed the leaders of the “LGBT movement” insist that marriage rights are the way to redress the inequalities in our communities. For more and more queer and trans people, regardless of marital status, there is no inheritance, no health benefits from employers, no legal immigration status, and no state protection of our relationship to our children. Four decades after queer and trans people took to the streets throwing heels, bottles, bricks, and anything else we had to ward off police, the official word is that, except for being able to get married and fight in the military,2 we are pretty much free, safe, and equal. And those of us who are not must wait our turn until the “priority” battles are won by the largely white, male, upper-class lawyers and lobbyists who know better than us.3 Fortunately, radical queer and trans organizing for deep transformation has also grown alongside this “trickle-down”4 brand of “equality” 16 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement politics mentioned above. Although there is no neat line between official gay “equality” politics on the one hand, and radical “justice” politics on the other, it is important to draw out some of the key distinctions in how different parts of our movements today are responding to the main problems that queer and trans people face. This is less about creating false dichotomies between “good” and “bad” approaches, and more about clarifying the actual impact that various strategies have, and recognizing that alternative approaches to the “official” solutions are alive, are politically viable, and are being pursued by activists and organizations around the United States and beyond. In the first column, we identify some of these main challenges; in the second, we summarize what solutions are being offered by the well-resourced5 segments of our movement; and in the third, we outline some approaches being used by more radical and progressive queer and trans organizing to expand possibilities for broadbased, social-justice solutions to these same problems. the current landscape big problems “official” solutions transformative approaches Queer and trans people, poor people, people of color, and immigrants have minimal access to quality healthcare Legalize same-sex marriage to allow people with health benefits from their jobs to share with same-sex partners Strengthen Medicaid and Medicare; win universal healthcare; fight for transgender health benefits; end deadly medical neglect of people in state custody Queer and trans people experience regular and often fatal violence from partners, family members, community members, employers, law enforcement, and institutional officials Pass hate crimes leg- Build community relationships and infrastructure to support the healing and islation to increase transformation of people who have prison sentences been impacted by interpersonal and and strengthen lointergenerational violence; join with cal and federal law movements addressing root causes enforcement; collect of queer and trans premature death, statistics on rates of including police violence, imprisonviolence; collaborate with local and federal ment, poverty, immigration policies, and lack of healthcare and housing law enforcement to prosecute hate violence and domestic violence 17 Captive Genders big problems “official” solutions transformative approaches Queer and trans members of the military experience violence and discrimination Eliminate bans on participation of gays and lesbians in US military Join with war resisters, radical veterans, and young people to oppose military intervention, occupation, and war abroad and at home, and demand the reduction/elimination of “defense” budgets Queer and trans people are targeted by an unfair and punitive immigration system Legalize same-sex marriage to allow same-sex international couples to apply for legal residency for the non–US citizen spouse End the use of immigration policy to criminalize people of color, exploit workers, and maintain the deadly wealth gap between the United States and the Global South; support current detainees and end ICE raids, deportations, and police collaboration Queer and trans families are vulnerable to legal intervention and separation from the state, institutions, and/or nonqueer people Join with struggles of queer/trans and Legalize same sex non-queer/trans families of color, marriage to provide imprisoned parents and youth, naa route to “legalize” tive families, poor families, military families with two parfamilies, and people with disabilities ents of the same sex; to win community and family self-depass laws banning adoption discrimina- termination and the right to keep kids, parents, and other family members in tion on the basis of their families and communities sexual orientation Institutions fail to recognize family connections outside of heterosexual marriage in contexts like hospital visitation and inheritance Legalize same-sex marriage to formally recognize same-sex partners in the eyes of the law 18 Change policies like hospital visitation to recognize a variety of family structures, not just opposite-sex and same-sex couples; abolish inheritance and demand radical redistribution of wealth and an end to poverty Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement big problems “official” solutions transformative approaches Queer and trans Advocate for “cultural Build ongoing, accountable relationcompetency” training ships with and advocate for queer and people are distrans people who are locked up to for law enforcement proportionately policed, arrested, and the construction support their daily well-being, healing, leadership, and survival; build comof queer and transand imprisoned, munity networks of care to support and face high rates specific and “genderof violence in state responsive” facilities; people coming out of prison and jail; custody from of- create written policies collaborate with other movements to address root causes of queer and trans that say that queer ficials as well as imprisonment; work to abolish prisand trans people are other imprisoned or detained people equal to other people ons, establish community support for in state custody; stay people with disabilities and eliminate medical and psychatric institutionlargely silent on the alization, and provide permanent high rates of imprisonment in queer and housing rather than shelter beds for all people without homes trans communities, communities of color, and poor communities i. How did we get Here? The streams of conservative as well as more progressive and radical queer and trans politics developed over time and in the context of a rapidly changing political, economic, and social landscape. Although we can’t offer a full history of how these different streams developed and how the more conservative one gained national dominance, we think it is important to trace the historical context in which these shifts occurred. To chart a different course for our movements, we need to understand the road we’ve traveled. In particular, we believe that there are two major features of the second half of the twentieth century that shaped the context in which the queer and trans movement developed: (1) the active resistance and challenge by radical movement to state violence, and subsequent systematic backlash,7 and (2) the massive turmoil and transformation of the global economy.8 Activists and scholars use a range of terms to describe this era in which power, wealth, and oppression were transformed to respond to these two significant “crises”—including neoliberalism, the “New World Order,” empire, globalization, free market democracy, or late capitalism. 19 Captive Genders Each term describes a different aspect or “take” on the current historical moment that we are living in. It is important to be clear that none of the strategies of the “New World Order” are new. They might work faster, use new technologies, and recruit the help of new groups, but they are not new. Oppressive dynamics in the United States are as old as the colonization of this land and the founding of a country based on slavery and genocide. However, they have taken intensified, tricky forms in the past few decades—particularly because our governments keep telling us those institutions and practices have been “abolished.” There were no “good old days” in the United States—just times in which our movements and our communities were stronger or weaker, and times when we used different cracks in the system as opportunities for resistance. All in all, we might characterize the past many decades as a time in which policies and ideas were promoted by powerful nations and institutions (such as the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund) to destroy the minimal safety nets set up for vulnerable people, dismantle the gains made by social movements, and redistribute wealth, resources, and life changes upward—away from the poor and toward the elite.9 Below are some of the key tactics that the United States and others have used in this most recent chapter of our history: The US government and its ally nations and institutions in the Global North helped pass laws and policies that made it harder for workers to organize into unions; destroyed welfare programs and created the image of people on welfare as immoral and fraudulent; and created international economic policies and trade agreements that reduced safety nets, worker rights, and environmental protections, particularly for nations in the Global South. Together, these efforts have dismantled laws and social programs meant to protect people from poverty, violence, sickness, and other harms of capitalism. EXAMPLE: In the early 1990s, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented by the United States under Democratic President Clinton to make it easier for corporations to do business across borders between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Unfortunately, by allowing corporations to outsource their labor much more cheaply, the agreement also led to the loss 20 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement of hundreds of thousands of US jobs and wage depression even in “job receiving” countries.10 Additionally, human rights advocates have documented widespread violations of workers rights since NAFTA, including “favoritism toward employer-controlled unions; firings for workers’ organizing efforts; denial of collective bargaining rights; forced pregnancy testing; mistreatment of migrant workers; life-threatening health and safety conditions”; and other violations of the right to freedom of association, freedom from discrimination, and the right to a minimum wage.11 Loss of jobs in the United States reduced the bargaining power of workers, now more desperate for wages then ever, and both wages and benefits declined, with many workers now forced to work as “temps” or part-time with no benefits or job security. EXAMPLE: In 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which effectively dismantled what existed of a welfare state—creating a range of restrictive and targeting measures that required work, limited aid, and increased penalties for welfare recipients. The federal government abdicated its responsibility to provide minimal safety nets for poor and working-class people, using the rhetoric of “personal responsibility” and “work” to justify the exploitation and pain caused by capitalism and racism. Sexist, racist images of poor people as immoral, fraudulent drug addicts fueled these policy changes. Since then, different cities have adopted local measures to gut economic safety nets for poor, homeless, and working-class people. In San Francisco, Mayor Newsom’s notorious 2002 “Care Not Cash” program slashed welfare benefits for homeless people, insisting that benefits given to the homeless were being spent on “drugs and alcohol.”12 The decrease in manufacturing jobs and the gutting of social safety nets for the poor and working class created a growing class of people who were marginally employed and housed, and forced into criminalized economies such as sex work and the drug trade. This class of people was blamed for the poverty and inequity they faced—labeled drug dealers, welfare queens, criminals, and hoodlums—and were used to justify harmful policies that expanded violence and harm. At the same time, criminal penalties for behaviors associated with poverty, like drug use, sleeping outside, 21 Captive Genders graffiti, and sex work have increased in many parts the United States, and resources for policing these kinds of “crimes” has also increased. EXAMPLE: In the 1990s, states across the United States began to sign into law so-called “Three Strikes” measures that mandated standard, long (often life) sentences for people convicted of three felonies, many including non-violent offenses. California’s law has resulted in sentences of twenty-five years or more for people convicted of things like shoplifting. The popularity of Three Strikes laws have been fueled by a growing cultural obsession with criminality and punishment that relies on images of violent and dangerous “career criminals” while functioning to imprison enormous numbers of lowincome people and people of color whose behaviors are the direct results of economic insecurity. EXAMPLE: Under President Clinton’s 1996 welfare reforms, anyone convicted of a drug-related crime is automatically banned for life from receiving cash assistance and food stamps. Some states have since opted out of this ban, but for people living in fifteen states, this draconian measure presents nearly insurmountable barriers to becoming self-sufficient. Unable to receive cash assistance and subject to job discrimination because of their criminal histories, many people with drug-related convictions go back into the drug trade as the only way to earn enough to pay the rent and put food on the table. The lifetime welfare ban has been shown to particularly harm women and their children.13 The government and corporate media used racist, xenophobic, and misogynist fear-mongering to distract us from increasing economic disparity and a growing underclass in the United States and abroad. The War on Drugs in the 1980s and the Bush Administration’s War on Terror, both of which are ongoing, created internal and external enemies (“criminals” and “terrorists”) to blame for and distract from the ravages of racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and imperialism. In exchange, these enemies (and anyone who looked like them) could be targeted with violence and murder. During this time, the use of prisons, policing, detention, and surveillance skyrocketed as the government declared formal war against all those who it marks as “criminals” or “terrorists.” 22 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement EXAMPLE: In the 1980s, the US government declared a “War on Drugs” and drastically increased mandatory sentences for violating drug prohibition laws. It also created new prohibitions for accessing public housing, public benefits, and higher education for people convicted of drug crimes. The result was the imprisonment of over one million people a year, the permanent marginalization and disenfranchisement for people convicted, and a new set of military and foreign policy intervention justifications for the United States to take brutal action in Latin America. EXAMPLE: Following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York, politicians manipulated the American public’s fear and uncertainty to push through a range of new laws and policies justified by a declared “War on Terror.” New legislation like the PATRIOT Act, the Immigrant Registration Act, and the Real ID Act, as well as new administrative policies and practices, increased the surveillance state, reduced even the most basic rights and living standards of immigrants, and turned local police, schoolteachers, hospital workers, and others into immigration enforcement officers. “Bad” individuals Discrimination laws and hate crimes laws encourage us to understand oppression as something that happens when individuals use bias to deny someone a job because of race or sex or some other characteristic, or beat up or kill someone because of such a characteristic. This way of thinking, sometimes called the “perpetrator perspective,”14 makes people think about racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism in terms of individual behaviors and bad intentions rather than wide-scale structural oppression that often operates without some obvious individual actor aimed at denying an individual person an opportunity. The violence of imprisoning millions of poor people and people of color, for example, can’t be adequately explained by finding one nasty racist individual, but instead requires looking at a whole web of institutions, policies, and practices that make it “normal” and “necessary” to warehouse, displace, discard, and annihilate poor people and people of color. Thinking about violence and oppression as the work of “a few bad apples” undermines our ability to analyze our conditions systemically and intergenerationally, and to therefore organize for systemic change. 23 Captive Genders This narrow way of thinking about oppression is repeated in law, policy, the media, and nonprofits. EXAMPLE: Megan’s Laws are statutes that require people convicted of sexual offenses to register and that require this information be available to the public. These laws have been passed in jurisdictions around the country in the last two decades, prompted by and generating public outrage about child sexual abuse (CSA). Studies estimate that 1 in 3 people raised as girls and 1 in 6 people raised as boys were sexually abused as children, as a result of intergenerational trauma, community- and state-sanctioned abusive norms, and alienation. Rather than resourcing comprehensive programs to support the healing of survivors and transformation of people who have been sexually abusive, or interrupt the family and community norms that contribute to the widespread abuse of children, Megan’s Laws have ensured that people convicted of a range of sexual offenses face violence, the inability to find work or a place to live, and severely reduced chances of recovery and healing. Despite the limited or nonexistent deterrent effect of such laws, they remain the dominant “official” approach to the systemic problems of CSA.15 EXAMPLE: As we write this, the Matthew Shepard Local Law Enforcement Enhancement Act has recently passed in the US Senate, and if signed into law would give $10 million to state and local law enforcement agencies, expand federal law enforcement power focused on hate crimes, and add the death penalty as a possible punishment for those convicted. This bill is heralded as a victory for transgender people because it will make gender identity an included category in Federal Hate Crimes law. Like Megan’s Law, this law and the advocacy surrounding it (including advocacy by large LGBT nonprofit organizations) focus attention on individuals who kill people because of their identities. These laws frame the problem of violence in our communities as one of individual “hateful” people, when in reality, trans people face short life-spans because of the enormous systemic violence in welfare systems, shelters, prisons, jails, foster care, juvenile punishment systems, and immigration, and the inability to access basic survival resources. These laws do nothing to prevent our deaths, they just use our deaths to expand a system that endangers our lives and places a chokehold on our communities.16 24 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement The second half of the twentieth century saw a major upsurge in radical and revolutionary organizing in oppressed communities in the United States and around the world. This powerful organizing posed a significant threat to the legitimacy of US power and capitalist empire more broadly, and therefore needed to be contained. These movements were undermined by two main strategies: First, the radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s were criminalized, with the US government using tactics of imprisonment, torture, sabotage, and assassination to target and destroy groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and Young Lords, among others. Second, the growth of the nonprofit sector has seen social movements professionalizing, chasing philanthropic dollars, separating into “issue areas,” and moving toward social services and legal reform projects rather than radical projects aimed at the underlying causes of poverty and injustice.17 These developments left significant sections of the radical left traumatized and decimated, wiping out a generation of revolutionaries and shifting the terms of resistance from revolution and transformation to inclusion and reform, prioritizing state- and foundation-sanctioned legal reforms and social services over mass organizing and direct action. EXAMPLE: The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) is a notorious example of the US government’s use of infiltration, surveillance, and violence to overtly target dissent and resistance. COINTELPRO was exposed when internal government documents were revealed that detailed the outrageous work undertaken by the federal government to dismantle resistance groups in the 1960s and ’70s. Although the program was dissolved under that name, the tactics continued and can be seen today in current controversies about wiretapping and torture as well as in the USA PATRIOT Act. Overt action to eliminate resistance and dissent here is as old as the European colonization of North America.18 EXAMPLE: In the wake of decades of radical organizing by people in women’s prisons and activists on the outside decrying systemic medical neglect, sexual violence, and the destruction of family bonds, California legislators in 2006 proposed a so-called “gender responsive corrections” bill that would allow people in women’s prisons to live with their children and receive increased social services. To make this plan 25 Captive Genders work, the bill called for millions of dollars in new prison construction. The message of “improving the lives of women prisoners” and creating more “humane” prisons—rhetoric that is consistently used by those in power to distract us from the fundamentally violent conditions of a capitalist police state—appealed to liberal, well-intentioned feminist researchers, advocates, and legislators. Anti-prison organizations such as Oakland-based Justice Now and others working in solidarity with the resounding sentiment of people in women’s prisons, pointed out that this strategy was actually just a back door to creating 4,500 new prison beds for women in California, yet again expanding opportunities to criminalize poor women and transgender people in one of the nation’s most imprisoning states.19 The United States loves its heroes and its narratives—Horatio Alger, ragsto-riches, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” streets “paved with gold,” the rugged frontiersman, the benevolent philanthropist, and Obama as savior, among others. These narratives hide the uneven concentration of wealth, resources, and opportunity among different groups of people—the ways in which not everybody can just do anything if they put their minds to it and work hard enough. In the second half of the twentieth century, this individualistic and celebrity-obsessed culture had a deep impact on social movements and how we write narratives. Stories of mass struggle became stories of individuals overcoming great odds. The rise of the nonprofit as a key vehicle for social change bolstered this trend, giving incentives to charismatic leaders (often executive directors, often people with privilege) to frame struggles in ways that prioritize symbolic victories (big court cases, sensationalistic media coverage) and ignore the daily work of building a base and a movement for the long haul. This trend also compromises the accountability of leaders and organizations to their constituencies, and devalues activism in the trenches. EXAMPLE: Rosa Parks is one of the most well-known symbols of resistance during the African American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. She is remembered primarily for “sparking” the Montgomery Bus Boycott and as the “mother of the civil rights movement.”20 In popular mythology, Ms. Parks was an ordinary woman who simply decided one day that she would not give up her seat to a white person in a “lonely act of defiance.”21 In reality, Ms. Parks was 26 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement an experienced civil rights activist who received political education and civil disobedience training at the well-known leftist Highlander Folk School, which still exists today. Ms. Parks’s refusal to give up her seat was far from a “lonely act,” but was rather just one in a series of civil disobediences by civil rights leaders to target segregation in public services. The Civil Rights Movement of the period was a product of the labor and brilliance of countless New-World African enslaved people, African American people, and their allies working since before the founding of the United States, not simply attributable to any one person. The portrayal of mass struggles as individual acts hides a deeper understanding of oppression and the need for broad resistance. EXAMPLE: Oprah’s well-publicized giveaways22—as well as a range of television shows that feature “big wins” such as makeovers, new houses, and new cars—have helped to create the image of social change in our society as individual acts of “charity” rather than concerted efforts by mass groups of people to change relationships of power. These portrayals affirm the false idea that we live in a meritocracy in which any one individual’s perseverance and hard work are the only keys needed to wealth and success. Such portrayals hide realities like the racial wealth divide and other conditions that produce and maintain inequality on a group level, ensuring that most people will not rise above or fall below their place in the economy, regardless of their individual actions. In reality, real social change that alters the relationships of power throughout history have actually come about when large groups of people have worked together toward a common goal. Together, the tactics that we describe above function as a strategy of counter-revolution—an attempt to squash the collective health and political will of oppressed people, and to buy off people with privilege in order to support the status quo. This is a profoundly traumatic process that deepened centuries of pain, loss, and harm experienced by people of color, immigrants, queer and trans people, women, and others marked as “disposable.” For many of us, this included losing our lives and our loved ones to the devastating government-sanctioned HIV/AIDS pandemic and ongoing attacks from family, neighbors, and government officials. Perhaps one of the most painful features of this period has been the separating of oppressed communities and movements from one another. Even though our communities are all overlapping and our struggles for 27 Captive Genders liberation are fundamentally linked, the “divide and conquer” strategy of the “New World Order” has taught us to think of our identities and struggles as separate and competing. In particular, it was useful to maintaining harmful systems and conditions to create a false divide between purportedly separate (“white”) gay issues and (“straight”) people of color, immigrant, and working-class issues to prevent deep partnerships across multiple lines of difference for social transformation. In this context, the most visible and well-funded arms of LGBT organizing got caught up in fighting for small-scale reforms and battles to be recognized as “equal” and “visible” under the law and in the media without building the sustained power and self-determination of oppressed communities. Instead of trying to change the system, the official LGBT agenda fought to just be welcomed into it, in exchange for helping to keep other oppressed people at the bottom. But thankfully that’s not the end of the story. As we describe below, this period also nurtured powerful strands of radical queer and trans politics organizing at the intersections of oppressions and struggles and in the legacy of the revolutionary freedom fighters of an earlier generation. Despite the powerful and destructive impacts that the renewed forces of neoliberal globalization and the “New World Order” have had on our communities and our social movements, there are and always have been radical politics and movements to challenge the exploitation that the United States is founded upon. These politics have been developed in communities of color and in poor and working-class, immigrant, queer, disability, and feminist communities in both “colonized” and “colonizing” nations, from the Black Panther Party in Oakland to the Zapatistas in Chiapas to the Audre Lorde Project in New York. As the story of Stonewall teaches us, our movements didn’t start out in the courtroom; they started out in the streets! Informing both the strategies of our movements as well as our everyday decisions about how we live our lives and form our relationships, these radical politics offer queer communities and movements a way out of the murderous politics that are masked as invitations to “inclusion” and “equality” within fundamentally exclusive, unequal systems. Sometimes these spaces for transformation are easier to spot than others—but you can find them everywhere, from church halls to lecture halls, from the lessons of our grandmothers to the lessons we learn surviving in the world, from the post-revolutionary Cuba to post-Katrina New Orleans. 28 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement These radical lineages have nurtured and guided transformative branches of queer and trans organizing working at the intersections of identities and struggles for collective liberation. These branches have redefined what count as queer and trans issues, losses, victories, and strategies—putting struggles against policing, imprisonment, borders, globalization, violence, and economic exploitation at the center of struggles for gender and sexual self-determination. Exploding the false division between struggles for (implicitly white and middle-class) sexual and gender justice and (implicitly straight) racial and economic justice, there is a groundswell of radical queer and trans organizing that’s changing all the rules—you just have to know where to find it. In the chart below, we draw out a few specific strands of these diverse radical lineages that have paved the way for this work. In the first column, we highlight a value that has emerged from these radical lineages. In the second column, we lift up specific organizations striving to embody these values today.23 deepening the path of those who came Before radical lineage contemporary descendant The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), Liberation is a collective process! among many other organizations, has The conventional nonprofit hierarchishown just how powerful working cal structure is actually a very recent collectively can be—with their staff phenomenon, and one that is modeled and volunteers, majority people of off corporations. Radical organizacolor, majority trans and gender-nontions, particularly feminist and women conforming governing collective, SRLP of color-led organizations, have often is showing the world that how we do prioritized working collectively—where group awareness, consensus, and whole- our work is a vital part of the work, and that doing things collectively helps us ness is valued over majority rule and to create the world we want to see as individual leadership. Collectivism at we’re building it. its best takes up the concerns of the few as the concerns of the whole. For example, when one member of a group or community cannot attend an event or meeting because the building is not wheelchair accessible, it becomes a moment for all to examine and challenge ableism in our culture—instead of just dismissing it as a “problem” that affects only people who use wheelchairs. 29 Captive Genders radical lineage contemporary descendant Queers for Economic Justice in “Trickle up” change! We know that New York City and the Transgender, when those in power say they will Gender Variant, and Intersex Justice “come back” for those at the bottom of Project in San Francisco are two great the social and economic hierarchy, it examples of “trickle up” change—by will never happen. Marginalization is focusing on queers on welfare, in the increased when a part of a marginalized shelter system, and in prison systems, group makes it over the line into the these groups demand social and ecomainstream, leaving others behind and nomic justice for those with the fewest reaffirming the status quo. We’ve all seen painful examples of this in LGBT resources and the smallest investment in maintaining the system as it is. politics time after time—from the abandonment of transgender folks in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) to the idea that gay marriage is the first step toward universal healthcare. Instead, we know that freedom and justice for the most oppressed people means freedom and justice for everyone, and that we have to start at the bottom. The changes required to improve the daily material and spiritual lives of low-income queer and transgender people of color would by default include large-scale transformation of our entire economic, education, healthcare, and legal systems. When you put those with the fewest resources and those facing multiple systems of oppression at the center of analysis and organizing, everybody benefits. Be careful of all those welcome mats! Learning from history and other socialjustice movements is a key principle. Other movements and other moments have been drained of their original power and purpose and appropriated for purposes opposing their principles, either by governments working to dilute and derail transformation or by corporations looking to turn civil unrest into a fashion statement (or both). Looking back critically at where other movements have done right and gone Critical Resistance is a great example of this commitment. In the group’s focus on prison abolition (instead of reform), its members examine their strategies and potential proposals through the question “Will we regret this in ten years?” This question is about taking a long-term view and assessing a potential opportunity (such as any given proposal to “improve” or “reform” prisons or sentencing laws) against their commitment to abolishing—not expanding or even maintaining—the prison industrial 30 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement radical lineage contemporary descendant wrong helps us stay creative and accountable to our communities and our politics. complex. The message here is that even though it might feel nice to get an invitation to the party, we would be wise to ask about the occasion. For us, by us! The leadership, wisdom, and labor of those most affected by an issue should be centralized from the start. This allows those with the most to gain from social justice to direct what that justice will look like and gives allies the chance to directly support their leadership. FIERCE! in New York City is a great example of this principle: By building the power of queer and trans youth of color to run campaigns, organize one another, and challenge gentrification and police violence, FIERCE! has become a powerful force that young people of color see themselves in. At FIERCE!, it is the young people directly facing the intersections of ageism, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia who identify what the problems, priorities, and strategies should be rather than people whose expertise on these issues derives from advanced degrees or other criteria. The role of people not directly affected by the issues is to support the youth in manifesting their visions, not to control the political possibilities that they are inventing. An inspiring example of praxis can be Let’s practice what we preach! Also found in the work of Southerners on known as “praxis,” this ideal strives for the alignment of what we do, why we’re New Ground (SONG), based in Atlandoing it, and how we do it—not just in ta, Ga. SONG strives to integrate healing, spirit, and creativity in their work our formal work, but also in our daily organizing across race, class, gender, lives. This goes beyond the campaign goals or strategies of our organizations, and sexuality to embody new (and old!) forms of community, reflective of our and includes how they are organized, how we treat one another, and how we commitments to liberation. SONG and other groups show that oppression is treat ourselves. If we believe that people of color have the most to gain from the traumatic, and trauma needs to be addressed, acknowledged, and held both end of racism, then we should support and encourage people of color’s leader- by individuals and groups of people. If trauma is ignored or swept under the ship in fights to end white supremacy, rug, it just comes back as resentment, and for a fair economy and an end to chaos, and divisiveness. We are all the wealth gap. People in our organizawhole, complex human beings that tions should get paid equally regardless 31 Captive Genders radical lineage contemporary descendant of advanced degrees, and our working conditions and benefits should be generous. If we support a world in which we have time and resources to take care of ourselves, as well as our friends, families, and neighbors, we might not want to work sixty hours a week. have survived a great deal of violence to get where we are today. Our work must support our full humanity and reflect the world we want to live in. Groups like Creative Interventions Real safety means collective transand generationFIVE in Oakland, Caformation! Oppressed communities lif., Communities Against Rape and have always had ways to deal with Abuse in Seattle, Wash., and the Audre violence and harm without relying on police, prisons, immigration, or kicking Lorde Project’s Safe OUTside the Syssomeone out—knowing that relying on tem (SOS) Collective, have been creatthose forces would put them in greater ing exciting ways to support the healing and transformation of people who have danger. Oppressed people have often survived and caused harm, as well as known that these forces were the main sources of violence that they faced—the the conditions that pass violence down from one generation to another. Becentral agent of rape, abuse, murder, and exploitation. The criminal punish- cause violence touches every queer and trans person directly or indirectly, creatment system has tried to convince us that we do not know how to solve our ing ways to respond to violence that are transformative and healing (instead of own problems and that locking people oppressive, shaming, or traumatizing) up and putting more cops on our is a tremendous opportunity to reclaim streets are the only ways we can stay our radical legacy. We can no longer safe or heal from trauma. Unfortunately allow for our deaths to be the justificawe often lack other options. Many tion for so many other people’s deaths organizations and groups of people through policing, imprisonment, and have been working to interrupt the detention. Locking people up, having intergenerational practices of intimate more cops in the streets, or throwing violence, sexual violence, hate violence, more people out will never heal the and police violence without relying on wounds of abuse or trauma. the institutions that target, warehouse, kill, and shame us. resisting the traps, ending trans imprisonment Even in the context of growing imprisonment rates and deteriorating safety nets, the past decade has brought with it an upsurge in organizing and activism to challenge the imprisonment and policing of transgender and gender-non-conforming communities.32 Through high-profile lawsuits, human rights and media documentation, conferences and trainings, 32 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement grassroots organizing, and coalitional efforts, more individuals and organizations are aware of the dynamics of trans imprisonment than ever. This work has both fallen prey to the tricky traps of the “New World Order” that we described above and also generated courageous new ways of doing the work of transformation and resistance that are in line with the radical values that we also trace. What was once either completely erased or significantly marginalized on the agendas of both the LGBT and antiprison/prisoner rights movements is now gaining more and more visibility and activity. We think of this as a tremendous opportunity to choose which legacies and practices we want for this work moving forward. This is not about playing the blame game and pointing fingers at which work is radical and which is oppressive, but rather about building on all of our collective successes, losses, and contradictions to do work that will transform society (and all of us) as we know it. Below are a few helpful lessons that have been guided by the values above and generated at the powerful intersections of prison abolition and gender justice:33 1. We refuse to create “deserving” vs. “undeserving” victims.34 Although we understand that transgender and gender-non-conforming people in prisons, jails, and detention centers experience egregious and often specific forms of violence—including sexual assault, rape, medical neglect and discrimination, and humiliation based on transphobic norms—we recognize that all people impacted by the prison industrial complex are facing severe violence. Instead of saying that transgender people are the “most” oppressed in prisons, we can talk about the different forms of violence that people impacted by the prison industrial complex face, and how those forms of violence help maintain the status quo common sense that the “real bad people”—the “rapists,” “murderers,” “child molesters,” in some cases now the “bigots”—deserve to be locked up. Seeking to understand the specific arrangements that cause certain communities to face particular types of violence at the hands of police and in detention can allow us to develop solidarity around shared and different experiences with these forces and build effective resistance that gets to the roots of these problems. Building arguments about trans people as “innocent victims” while other prisoners are cast as dangerous and deserving of detention only undermines the power of a shared resistance strategy that sees imprisonment as a violent, dangerous tactic for everybody it touches. 33 Captive Genders We know that the push for hate crimes laws as the solution to anti-queer and -trans violence will never actually address the fundamental reasons why we are vulnerable to violence in the first place or why homophobia and transphobia are encouraged in our cultures. Individualizing solutions like hate crimes laws create a false binary of “perpetrator” and “victim” or “bad” and “good” people without addressing the underlying systemic problem, and often strengthen that problem. In place of this common sense, we understand that racism, state violence, and capitalism are the root causes of violence in our culture, not individual “bigots” or even prison guards. We must end the cycle of oppressed people being pitted against one another. 2. We support strategies that weaken oppressive institutions, not strengthen them. We can respond to the crises that our communities are facing right now while refusing long-term compromises that will strengthen the very institutions that are hurting us. As more and more awareness is being raised about the terrible violence that transgender and gender-non-conforming people face in prisons, jails, and detention centers, some prisoner rights and queer and trans researchers and advocates are suggesting that building trans-specific prisons or jails is the only way that imprisoned transgender and gender-non-conforming people will be safe in the short-term. Particularly in light of the dangerous popularity of “gender responsiveness” among legislators and advocates alike, we reject all notions that we must expand the prison industrial complex to respond to immediate conditions of violence. Funneling more money into prison building of any kind strengthens the prison industrial complex’s death hold on our communities. We know that if they build it, they will fill it, and getting trans people out of prison is the only real way to address the safety issues that trans prisoners face. We want strategies that will reduce and ultimately eliminate the number of people and dollars going into prisons, while attending to the immediate healing and redress of individual imprisoned people. 3. We must transform exploitative dynamics in our work. A lot of oppressed people are hyper-sexualized in dominant culture as a way to create them as a threat, a fetish, or a caricature—transgender women, black men, Asian and Pacific Islander women, to name a few. Despite often good intentions to raise awareness about the treatment of transgender and gender-non-conforming people in prisons, we recognize 34 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement that much of the “public education” work around these issues often relies on sexualization, voyeurism, sensationalism, and fetishization to get its point across. In general there is a focus on graphic descriptions of people’s bodies (specifically their genitals), sexual violence, and the humiliation they have faced. Imprisoned people (who are usually represented as black) and transgender people (who are usually represented as transgender women of color in this context) have long been the target of voyeuristic representation—from porn movies that glorify rape in prison to fetishizing “human rights” research distributed to majority white, middle-class audiences. As transgender people who often have our bodies on display for non-transgender people who feel empowered to question, display, and discuss us, we know that this is a dangerous trend that seriously undercuts the integrity of our work and the types of relationships that can be formed. Unless we address these exploitative power dynamics in our work, even our most “well-intentioned” strategies and movements will reproduce the prison industrial complex’s norms of transphobic, misogynist, and racist sexualized violence. Research, media, cultural work, and activism on this issue needs to be accountable to and directed by low-income transgender people and transgender people of color and our organizations. 4. We see ending trans imprisonment as part of the larger struggle for transformation. The violence that transgender people—significantly low-income transgender people of color—face in prisons, jails, and detention centers and the cycles of poverty and criminalization that leads so many of us to imprisonment is a key place to work for broad-based social and political transformation. There is no way that transgender people can ever be “safe” in prisons as long as prisons exist and, as scholar Fred Moten has written, as long as we live in a society that could even have prisons. Building a trans and queer abolitionist movement means building power among people facing multiple systems of oppression in order to imagine a world beyond mass devastation, violence, and inequity that occurs within and between communities. We must resist the trap of being compartmentalized into “issues” and “priorities” and sacrificing a broader political vision and movement to react to the crisis of the here and now. This is the logic that allows many white and middle-class gay and lesbian folks to think that marriage is the most important and pressing LGBT issue, without being invested in the real goal of ending racism and capitalism. Struggling 35 Captive Genders against trans imprisonment is one of many key places to radicalize queer and trans politics, expand anti-prison politics, and join in a larger movement for racial, economic, gender, and social justice to end all forms of militarization, criminalization, and warfare. iii. so You think we’re impossible? This stuff is heavy, we realize. Our communities and our movements are up against tremendous odds and have inherited a great deal of trauma that we are still struggling to deal with. A common and reasonable response to these conditions is getting overwhelmed, feeling defeated, losing hope. In this kind of emotional and political climate, when activists call for deep change like prison abolition (or, gasp, an LGBT agenda centered around prison abolition), our demands get called “impossible” or “idealistic” or even “divisive.” As trans people, we’ve been hearing this for ages. After all, according to our legal system, the media, science, and many of our families and religions, we shouldn’t exist! Our ways of living and expressing ourselves break such fundamental rules that systems crash at our feet, close their doors to us, and attempt to wipe us out. And yet we exist, continuing to build and sustain new ways of looking at gender, bodies, family, desire, resistance, and happiness that nourish us and challenge expectations. In an age when thousands of people are murdered annually in the name of “democracy,” millions of people are locked up to “protect public safety,” and LGBT organizations march hand in hand with cops in Pride parades, being impossible may just be the best thing we’ve got going for ourselves: Impossibility may very well be our only possibility. What would it mean to embrace, rather than shy away from, the impossibility of our ways of living as well as our political visions? What would it mean to desire a future that we can’t even imagine but that we are told couldn’t ever exist? We see the abolition of policing, prisons, jails, and detention not strictly as a narrow answer to “imprisonment” and the abuses that occur within prisons, but also as a challenge to the rule of poverty, violence, racism, alienation, and disconnection that we face every day. Abolition is not just about closing the doors to violent institutions, but also about building up and recovering institutions and practices and relationships that nurture wholeness, self-determination, and transformation. Abolition is not some distant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Every time we insist on accessible and affirming healthcare, safe and quality 36 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing relationships, and being our full and whole selves, we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now and the ever after. Maybe wrestling with such a significant demand is the wake-up call that an increasingly sleepy LGBT movement needs. The true potential of queer and trans politics cannot be found in attempting to reinforce our tenuous right to exist by undermining someone else’s. If it is not clear already, we are all in this together. To claim our legacy of beautiful impossibility is to begin practicing ways of being with one another and making movement that sustain all life on this planet, without exception. It is to begin speaking what we have not yet had the words to wish for. 1. 2. 3. notes We would like to thank the friends, comrades, and organizations whose work, love, and thinking have paved the path to this paper and our collective movements for liberation, including: Anna Agathangelou, Audre Lorde Project, Community United Against Violence (CUAV), Communities Against Rape and Abuse (CARA), Critical Resistance, Eric Stanley, FIERCE!, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Justice Now, Lala Yantes, Mari Spira, Miss Major, Mordecai Cohen Ettinger, Nat Smith, Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP), Transforming Justice Coalition, Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), and Vanessa Huang. In the wake of the 2011 repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, queer and trans people who oppose the horrible violence committed by the US military all over the world have been disappointed not only by pro-military rhetoric of the campaign to allow gays and lesbians to serve, but also by the new debates that have emerged since then about ROTC on college campuses. Many universities that have excluded the military from campuses are now considering bringing it back to campus, and some activists are arguing that the military should be kept off campus because trans people are still excluded from service. The terms of this debate painfully embraces US militarism, and forgets that long-term campaigns to exclude the US military from college campuses and to disrupt military recruitment campaigns and strategies are based in not only the horrible violence of the military toward service members but also the motivating colonial and imperial purposes of US militarism. This has been painfully illustrated by a range of LGBT foundation and individual funders who, in the months leading up to the struggle over California’s 37 Captive Genders 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. same-sex marriage ban, Proposition 8, declared that marriage equality needed to be the central funding priority and discontinued vital funding for anti-violence, HIV/AIDS, and arts organizations, among others. This is a reference to the “trickle-down” economic policies associated with the Reagan Administration, which promoted tax cuts for the rich under the guise of creating jobs for middle-class and working-class people. The left has rightfully argued that justice, wealth, and safety do not “trickle down,” but need to be redistributed first to the people at the bottom of the economic and political ladder. Trickle down policies primarily operate as another opportunity to distribute wealth and security upward. By this we mean the advocacy work and agenda-setting done by wealthy (budgets over $1 million) LGBT-rights organizations such as the Human Rights Campaign and the National Lesbian and Gay Task Force. See the Sylvia Rivera Law Project’s It’s War in Here: A Report on the Treatment of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People in New York State Prisons (available online at www.srlp.org) and Gendered Punishment: Strategies to Protect Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex People in America’s Prisons (available from TGI Justice Project, info@tgijp.org) for a deeper examination of the cycles of poverty, criminalization, imprisonment, and law-enforcement violence in transgender and gender-non-conforming communities. This was a period of heightened activity by radical and revolutionary national and international movements resisting white supremacy, patriarchy, colonization, and capitalism—embodied by organizations such as the American Indian Movement, the Black Liberation Army, the Young Lords, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Brown Berets, Earth First!, the Gay Liberation Front, and the Weather Underground in the United States, and anti-colonial organizations in Guinea-Bissau, Jamaica, Vietnam, Puerto Rico, Zimbabwe, and elsewhere. Mass movements throughout the world succeeded in winning major victories against imperialism and white supremacy, and exposing the genocide that lay barely underneath American narratives of democracy, exceptionalism, and liberty. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Globalisation and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to Post-Keynesian Militarism,” Race and Class, Vol. 40, No. 2–3, 1998/99. For a compelling analysis of neoliberalism and its impacts on social movements, see Lisa Duggan’s The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy, published by Beacon Press in 2004. Public Citizen, NAFTA and Workers’ Rights and Jobs, 2008, at http://www. citizen.org/trade/nafta/jobs. 38 Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. Human Rights Watch, “NAFTA Labor Accord Ineffective,” April 15, 2001, at http://hrw.org/english/docs/2001/04/16/global179.htm. Corporations specifically named in complaints by workers include General Electric, Honeywell, Sony, General Motors, McDonald’s, Sprint, and the Washington State apple industry. Sapphire, “A Homeless Man’s Alternative to ‘Care Not Cash,’” Poor Magazine, July 1, 2003, at http://www.poormagazine.org/index.cfm?L1=news&category= 50&stor=1241. The Sentencing Project, “Life Sentences: Denying Welfare Benefit to Women Convicted of Drug Offenses,” at http://www.sentencingprogrject.org/Admin/ Documents/publications/women_smy_lifesentences.pdf. Alan David Freeman, “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination Through Antidiscrimination Law: A Critical Review of Supreme Court Doctrine,” 62 MINN. L. REV. 1049, 1052 (1978). Visit generationFIVE at http://www.generationfive.org and Stop It Now! at http://www.stopitnow.org online for more research documenting and tools for ending child sexual abuse. For a critique of hate crimes legislation, see Carolina Cordero Dyer, “The Passage of Hate Crimes Legislation–No Cause to Celebrate,” INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, March 2001 at http://www.incite-national.org/ news/_march01/editorial.html. Also see INCITE!-Denver and Denver on Fire’s response to the verdict in the 2009 Angie Zapata case at http://www.leftturn. org/?q=node/1310. For an in-depth analysis of the growth and impacts of “nonprofit industrial complex,” see INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence’s groundbreaking anthology The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, published by South End Press in 2007. For a deeper examination of the FBI’s attack on radical movements, see Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall’s The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret War Against Domesti...
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