Good morning,
I’m Lauralee Carbone. I use she/her/hers pronouns.
I’d like to talk about the intersectionality of race and gender. There is no pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.
Centering the lives of trans and gender diverse BIPOC is the only way to achieve our collective liberation. At the core of this belief lies our commitments to racial and economic justice, intersectionality, accessibility, inclusion, and sex positivity. The work is about reducing state harm and violence, increasing sustainable employment, and engaging in advocacy and education work with service providers to create safer, affirming, and affordable care for all trans and gender diverse people. Achieving these goals is not possible without an explicit anti-racism lens that closely examines and resists anti-Blackness and uplifts Indigenous sovereignty.
We recognize that in order to move the trans community towards liberation, we must address the violence and oppression that targets trans BIPOC, and especially Black trans women and femmes. If we can solve these injustices for trans BIPOC, it will solve things for all. Because our work must dream of a world where all trans people have what is needed to survive and thrive, we need to explicitly center the dismantling of anti-Blackness in all of our work. Defunding police, prisons, and other structures that uphold racism and colonial systems of power and leveraging our power and resources to topple the structures that uphold white supremacy and lead to grave disparities and death is necessary.
The numbers are in. Every issue and experience with transphobia is dramatically exacerbated by the additional intersections of racism and anti-Blackness. These experiences are compounded further for those with additional intersections, including queer and disabled people, women, immigrants, and sex workers, among others.
The 2015 U.S. Trans Survey highlights these disparities. Black trans and gender diverse respondents reported experiencing homelessness, poverty, violence, and mental health distress at significantly higher rates than white trans people and cisgender Black communities nationwide. They also experience significantly higher rates of police harassment, violence, arrest, and incarceration among Black respondents, with Black trans women being four times more likely to be incarcerated than trans people generally. Since the COVID pandemic, it has only gotten worse for our beloved communities.
Lack of secure and affordable housing, policing and the prison industrial complex, medical racism and healthcare access issues, and increasing gentrification and generational wealth disparities, among other issues, contribute to the systemic violence that trans and gender diverse BIPOC communities face. Systemic and structural racism and oppression exist alongside interpersonal violence, and both severely impact BIPOC, especially women. In 2020, 44 trans people were murdered in the US, an all time high, the majority of whom were Black and brown trans women. I mourn these valuable lives lost, and celebrate the trans and gender diverse communities across WA State that tenaciously survive, and fight for collective liberation from these structures that seek to destroy.
Prioritizing and committing to anti-racism and resisting anti-Blackness requires thoughtfulness, intention, resources, transparency, and accountability: this is why we need an expansive anti-racism action plan to infuse and prioritize anti-racism throughout our organization and all of our programming. This is what the work of building Beloved Community is about.
