Stanley-Eric-Captive-Genders-Trans-Embodiment-and-Prison-Industrial-Complex

Captive Gendersspace. And we can’t just go “fuck that” and walk away. It’s a process; wehave work to do to earn it, we have to do it based on our politics. Thething you learn in prison is everybody’s a number, anybody can say anything,but not everybody can do anything; anybody can talk the talk butnot everybody walks the walk, and if we want people to pay attention tous and take us seriously, we have to walk the walk. We have to do workand then we have a right to demand, and we should be strong in thosedemands. And we all know that organized queers have never been knownto be the quiet ones.RG: When the Welfare Warrior Research Collaborative, a research andactivist group made up of low-income queer and trans people, mostlyof color, interviewed our community about interactions with the police,the people who identified as trans and the people who identified as currentlyhomeless had the highest rate of interactions with the police. Ofseven people who identified as sex workers, five of people had been stripsearchedmore than once. Nine people reported policing targeting basedon gender expression, five of these nine people said they had been stripsearchedmore than once. Thirty people reported that police stereotypeand target them based on sexual identity, and of these thirty people, fourteensaid they have been strip-searched at least once.As Angela Davis explains, the abolitionist movement and radicalfeminist movements must understand strip searches performed by policeand prison guards as a form of sexual violence, “if uniforms are replacedwith civilian clothes—the guards and the prisoners—then the act of stripsearching would look exactly like the sexual violence that is experiencedby the prisoner who is ordered to remover her clothing, stoop and spreadher buttocks.”Some imagine that if you stretch the politics of large unions to includeeveryone, all “workers,” then that will garner the greatest amount ofprotection for people. Some might imagine that this would protect queerand trans folks who consistently navigate this kind of sexual violence fromthe police. Personally, I have great doubt that mainstream union politicswill ever expand enough to encompass the priorities of low-income transpeople within informal and underground economies, as well as the quiteformalized system of incarcerated labor. Abolition is relevant for peopleexcluded from unions and union politics because people and communitiesare already taking care of and protecting themselves. For peoplewho are doing work that is criminalized, an abolitionist politic supports340