Questioning Transphobia

This video is a speech given by Katherine Cross (who blogs here occasionally and often at Nuclear Unicorn and The Border House) of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project on the topic of liberation, reproductive freedom, and the impact on trans people:

As usual, I cannot easily transcribe videos. If someone would like to, or point me to a transcription, I will be extremely grateful.

Transcript provided by TAL9000:

Video opens on a text screen, reading “from Abortion Rights to Social Justice, Building the Movement for reproductive freedom 26th annual conference CLPP & PopDev, Hampshire College, April 13-15.”

(fades in to Ms. Cross standing behind a lectern adjusting the microphone. On-screen text: Katherine Cross, Sylvia Rivera Law Project)

“Hello Everyone”

Audience: “Hi! Hi! Hey!” (from various people)

“Hey”

“So. Just what is a right? You see, there is something about rights, those things we keep fighting and dying for, those amorphous evanescent phantoms of liberty that keep us striving toward the infinite horizon of change. Rights are what movements like ours are built on. And so what are they? The Sylvia Rivera Law Project, a nonprofit that provides free legal services to low-income trans people and trans people of color in New York City, has a rather novel idea of what rights are.”

“We believe that a right is something that you can touch. Can taste. Can live and breathe. It is something tactile, material, with a size and shape that is known and something that is more than a phantom of a whisper of a thought on parchment, a right is the recognition of your humanity.”

(applause from the audience. Katherine pauses)

“For SRLP, this has meant one thing. Rights require justice in order to be exercised. In order to be something more than theoretical. If a woman has a right to reproductive choice, but cannot afford it, then for all practical intents and purposes she has no right to reproductive choice. That is reality, and it is reality that the Sylvia Rivera Law Project has attended to. Human dignity requires material conditions, it requires economic justice, and it requires the power that knowledge brings. There is a reason that Know Your Rights brochures are our most popular offerings. Unknown rights are no rights at all.”

(Brief pause for applause)

“We see in all of our fellow sisters, brothers, and siblings a member of a wider human family that has been denied that humanity. At Sylvia Rivera, we take the cases few others will. We take the cases that strive for humanity where prejudice and petty hatred has most forgotten it, because their rights matter and because we count”

“What are these rights, however, that I keep talking about in the airy abstract? The rights of transgender people of color. Of low-income trans people. Of immigrant trans people. Of trans women who society has forgotten. My sisters. Sex workers. Our incarcerated family members. We make humankind our business. A humankind that is holistic, that forgets no one, that celebrates the love and joy of humanity within us all, that elevates our art, our poetry, our struggles, and our quotidian joys in the midst of an oppressive society where patriarchy pushes down. From the smallest name change case to the largest Appellate Court case on access to medicaid, we are there, fighting for rights that are real.”

“A right on paper is no right at all. A right that is coupled with economic liberty, however, a right that comes with the material resources needed to access it, is a right that can be exercised. A right that is known, that is understood, can be struggled for and it can be won. That is why we at Sylvia Rivera have struggled against the doubts, the fears, the worries and the hand-wringing that attend a law project’s work and seem to only promise death by a thousand cuts. We have fought through these doubts because we know that our clients are more than clients. They are sisters, brothers, and siblings, they come from the communities that we serve and that we are a part of, that we know, they live and breathe with us too, and they are artists, poets, lawyers, teachers, and activists. There is no bright red line between activists and clients, lawyers and plaintiffs, service providers and the served.”

“Whither the link to reproductive justice, however? If a trans woman cannot legally change her name, she loses access to the rights that she supposedly has. The name she has given her own body is not recognized by authorities that then wield the structural power over her to name her as they wish and not as she wishes. If a trans woman must be sterilized before she can legally change her gender, where are her reproductive rights? If she is considered an unfit parent purely by dint of her being trans, where are her reproductive rights? If a genderqueer person who is undocumented finds themselves at the mercy of the INS or other institutions that continually discriminate against undocumented and immigrants in this country, where are their reproductive rights? How can a sex worker who is transgender access health services without enormous risk simply because of their profession and their gender? Where are their reproductive rights?”

(Applause)

“All of these people are united in seeing their bodies policed by authorities that think they know how to manage our lives better than we do. Sound familiar? Just as the Hyde Amendment ensures that Roe v Wade is merely theoretical for millions of American women, so too does heteropatriarchy more generally ensure that trans people’s bodies are not our own. I share with my cisgender sisters the painful fact that my body is public property, and that my rights are contingent on that fact. Sylvia Rivera, the namesake of our organization, said enough is enough. We, as a collective, continue that cry.”

“Liberation is a collective process, goes our popular slogan. What that means is that none of us wins unless everybody wins. None of us is safe until all of us are safe. Citizenship realizes its promise only when humanity is universally recognized and is not contingent on gender, skin color, or national origin. Equality is not just a word. It is not a soundbite. It is no benighted slogan. It is a truth, a thing with substance, with real dimensions, that can be felt, and that can be lived. Transgender people cannot live their lives without a measure of reproductive justice, and reproductive justice cannot exist in a world where trans people’s bodies are not our own. When we fight for the right to name ourselves we are fighting for the right to control our bodies and our existence. When we fight for healthcare access, we are fighting for our bodies and the right to live. When we fight prison injustice, we are fighting against an oppression that criminalizes us for existing. When we fight, we share the cause of reproductive justice. Our bodies, our choices.”

(Applause)

(Applause continues as she concludes) “Thank you very much for sharing this space with me”

(Fade out to a similar screen to the opening one. The url clpp.hampshire.edu/conference is shown on it)