Captive Genders
Edited by Geo Eric A. Stanley & Nat Smith
Captive Genders explores the compounded forms of oppression and violence that trans, queer, and gender-non-conforming folks face within the prison industrial complex through a series of essays, analyses, mini-memoirs, and more.
“Passing hate crimes legislation to protect queer folks after they have been harmed is only feeding a racist, classist, and transphobic/homophobic industry that disproportionately targets and punishes those with the fewest resources.”
MY TAKEAWAYS
LGBT+ liberation is about so much more than marriage rights, hate crimes sentence enhancements, and other methods of weaponizing state violence for the sake of obtaining “equality” within an inherently unequal society.
More laws, more policing, more arrests, and more imprisonment will never result in a more just and free society. The prison industrial complex (PIC) will never cure homophobia, transphobia, or bigotry.
True liberation for trans, queer, and gender-non-conforming people is part of the abolitionist vision, and these groups have often led abolitionist struggles. This history must not be ignored or forgotten as the journey continues.
Targeting individual perpetrators of homophobic or transphobic violence for punishment via the criminal legal system ironically fails to link the individual acts of violence to the larger intersecting systems of heteronormativity, classism, and racism that empowered them in the first place.
Prisons enforce the gender binary through their segregated housing structure, and (often violently) police gender to enforce heteronormativity via clothing/appearance rules, sundry/supply restrictions, denial of medical care, and more.
The concept of LGBT-friendly prisons is a laughable attempt at addressing the compounded violence trans, queer, and gender-non-conforming people experience within the PIC (often at the hands of not only other prisoners but staff as well). Any proposal of “new and improved” prisons should always be rejected.
The police do not protect against nor prevent violence against trans, queer, or gender-non-conforming people; they are often the perpetrators of this violence.
“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.” (Morgan Bassichis, et al.)
Seeing that crime is a social construct, we are all at risk of being criminalized based on any portion of our identity the state may one day deem “dangerous”.
“To claim our legacy of beautiful impossibility is to begin practicing ways of being with one another and making movement[s] that sustain all life on the planet, without exception.” (Morgan Bassichis, et al.)