Rivera Transform Fault

Transcription

A system of racialized gender norms operates as social control. It creates narrow places where people can be - very specific roles and routines and expressions for specific types of people. These roles are heavily policed. These roles line up to create a system of gendered racialization that cultivates the life of white people, men settlers, and owners, while others - people of color, indigenous people, people with disabilities, immigrants, queer and trans people, women, workers, and poor people - are exposed to hunger, homelessness, violence, pollution, imprisonment, policing, and deportation. Enforcing and policing these lines is an urgent and complex matter. It happens everywhere: in schools, courts, health centers, welfare offices, at checkpoints, in families, at jobs, in the media, in therapists' offices, in shelters, and jails, and prisons. People who don't fit into their prescribed categories and roles or who are hard to read are considered suspicious and face surveillance, criminalization, and violence. Or they are considered disruptive and excluded from the programs and institutions that operate through these binaries. Our relationships to these categories is a matter of life and death. Trans politics is a politics of resistance against violent gender norms. Trans people have been told that we are impossible, that we do not exist, that we are not who we say we are, that we are incomprehensible, and that we must be left out or left behind because our issues are not politically viable. We demand the impossible - our own survival. But there are some significant dilemmas for trans politics, like other contemporary political struggles. We're encouraged to direct our energies towards reform project that won't actually help us. We're told that if we can get the law to say good things about us, we'll be free. We are primed for this message, living in a culture that pretends that racism, ableism, and sexism are over because of civil rights laws. We're told we're all equal now, there's nothing to complain about, if you're having a hard time it's your fault. We're told that the solution to transphobia is to get the law to declare us equal - that that is the most important change we can make. But we know better. In reality during the period when legal equality was supposedly delivered, when sexism, racism, and ableism supposedly became forbidden, material inequality has worsened. And things have gotten especially worse for women, people of color, people with disabilities, poor people, immigrants, and prisoners. The wealth gap has widened. Wages have lowered. More people work as temporary workers, less have health care or retirement benefits, and more are facing foreclosure. Laws have been changed to make it harder to strike or use our collective power against our bosses. Welfare programs have been slashed. Record numbers of anti-abortion laws have been proposed and passed. And the apparatuses of racialized control have grown - like imprisonment, immigration enforcement, and war for profit. The US has become the most imprisoning country in the world, having only 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners. The imprisonment of immigrants has quadrupled since 2001, and the Obama administration has deported more people than any prior administration. Meanwhile, resources are directed at record-breakingly long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that are killing and destroying millions so that war profiteers can make big money. We know that these systems of criminalization, immigration enforcement, and warfare target people of color, people with disabilities, women, indigenous people, queer and trans people, and immigrants at home and abroad. We know that the declaration of legal equality is a shoddy window-dressing for growing violence, imprisonment, warfare, and growing material inequality. Trans politics demands our survival. And we're asked to turn that demand into a demand for legal rights that will not deliver relief from poverty and violence. We're supposed to put all of our energy and rage and creativity into a narrow demand for anti-discrimination laws and hate crime laws. These interventions rest on assumptions that we can't afford and don't believe. The police and courts and prisons will never protect us. They are our most significant predators. Legislative declarations that say people can't fire us won't work. They haven't resolved the racial wealth divide or the gendered pay gap. They haven't stopped housing discrimination against people of color or people with disabilities, and they do nothing to address the biggest dangers facing marginalized groups. They don't intervene on neoliberal economic policies that transfer wealth upwards. They don't stop increasing criminalization. They have no impact on an immigration system designed to make some lives nearly impossible so that others can be enriched. What we need is a critical and discerning trans politics - one that rejects invitations to inclusion in systems, arrangements, and institutions that are deadly and monstrous. We are already practicing that politics. We have to. We are already doing work to help each other survive these conditions. We are already doing work to dismantle the systems that shorten our lives. And we're doing work to build alternatives to the systems that exist - to build a world that we actually want. The survival work is not social work-style paternalism. It refuses to separate the deserving from the undeserving. It refuses to blame you for your homelessness or poverty or unemployment or deportation. It will not do a background check on you, make you pee in a cup or take a pill, or tell certain story in order to deserve shelter or food or bus fare. It is based in solidarity and mutual aid. It invites those facing the violence of contemporary conditions to come get some help and to join others looking at the root causes of those conditions and taking up collective action to transform them. The dismantling work is about evaluating the systems that are feeding our people into the monstrous jaws of displacement, imprisonment, and deportation, and figuring out how we can take those systems apart, brick by brick. Efforts to decriminalize sex work, to stop gang injunction laws, to stop police collaboration with immigration agencies, to decriminalize drugs and get rid of three strikes laws and mandatory minimum sentences are good examples. Many of these efforts are about changing laws, but they're not about adjusting the cover story to get the law to say something different about us. We don't believe what the law says about itself. Instead, we're looking at what the law actually does to us - how it really works - and focusing on strategies that eliminate poverty and violence. This is a matter of life and death - of who will be deported, who will be caged, who will have shelter, and who will survive. We know that existing systems are motivated by empty promises of safety and economic well-being, but actually deliver brutal violence. We need to build systems and ways of being together that will really deliver what we need. We need to build health care that doesn't normalize a narrow understanding of a healthy body, mind, or gender. We need to build food systems that support the land and our bodies and make sure everyone has good food. We need ways of dealing with conflict that don't rely on the idea caging or exiling anyone. We are working on building these. To do that, we are also building ways of working together - practicing how we want the world to be right now: democratic, collaborative, horizontal, care-based - not competitive, hierarchical, or cut-throat. We are experimenting, which we're good at, since we're smart and lively and creative. Critical trans politics has big demands and they are emerging all over. We want an end to prisons and borders and poverty. We want everyone to have decision-making power about our lives. We don't want bosses or corporations or the politicians they own telling us how we will work, live, or be together. We want to come up with the answers that work for people, collectively, together. Our trans politics must be based in solidarity. If it is aimed at our survival, it cannot be, is not, and has never been separate from a politics that opposes colonialism, racism, sexism, and ableism. Freedom from gender norms is impossible unless we dismantle everything that co-constitutes gender systems. We will be invited to justify and legitimize those systems: to have criminal penalties enhanced in the name of protecting us, to have new prisons built designed especially for us, to serve in their militaries, to embrace prosecutors and corporations and police and politicians because they say something nice about us, to support wars that won't benefit us but can be waged in our names. We will reject these invitations, demanding transformation that reaches those in the worst circumstances. We will make this violence impossible, not just slightly more palatable. We're not interested in becoming the complacent spouses, the patriotic soldiers, the border guards, the police, the obedient taxpayers. We seek to abolish those roles and the systems that create them.