Queer for the Revolution

Role models are hard to come by when your history has been taken from you, no one who’s anyone looks like you, and you’re brought here just to survive. We’re not here to cause any trouble, we just want to play by the rules collect our check and go back home. I was taught not to take anything that isn’t mine so I folded my hands and remained silent too scared to step out of line and break something. Even though I was always too scared to creep close to the line, it was clearly marked off. For my community to survive women must support their family, maintain the family honor, and stay out of trouble. “A woman’s life is never really hers,” my mom would tell me, “first you belong to your father, and to escape you get married so you can belong to your husband.” My parents left our country so that I could live a different life than they did, only to find that our lives would belong to a sneakier version of the same monster.

Terms like gay, lesbian, and queer were marked off with rainbow ribbons reserved for the white faces that were scene in the media. I was taught not to take anything that didn’t belong to me so I folded my hands and remained silent. We were too busy fighting for our right to work, to go to school, to live in this country, and not be harassed by those in power. Getting near those terms meant trouble that we could not afford. How could we take ownership over our own bodies if we were just trying to fit in and not be noticed? Masculinity and femininity were defined by the colonizers that had taken our history of nonconformity and demonized it. Learning to adhere to these definitions were signs of success and status. Fighting to resist these definitions would mean taking a step in the wrong direction and disappointing those who had sacrificed so that I could have opportunities that had not been available to them.

What I never knew was that concealed behind the rainbow colored flag and white faces on the media was my own history that is also deeply rooted in resistance to the gender binary and gender nonconformity. Mogul, Ritchie and Whitlock worked to uncover the truth that, “Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, and immigrants, particularly immigrants of color, were systematically policed and punished based on actual or projected “deviant” sexualities and gender expression, as an integral part of colonization, genocide, and enslavement” (1). The fear of immigrant communities being associated with sexual and gender nonconformity finally made sense. My body had been predestined to being policed long before my parents had arrived to this country, before my mother had to hand over ownership of her body to my grandfather and father. Maintaining colonial social order was dependent on erasing the history of sexual “deviance” and replacing it with criminalization and dehumanization. James Baldwin cleverly realized: “The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”

Conformity is a desire that we are conditioned into believing that we need in order to survive. But we won’t allow for our bodies to be controlled or our sexualities to be predefined for us any longer. I am aware that my body is worth much more than the curvey Latina that is brought into your family sitcom as an afterthought of “representation”. It is time that we make it clear that there are many more possibilities outside of the heteronormative institutions of marriage. I refuse to fold my hands and remain silent as our communities are forced to comply with oppressive institutions and as they are brutalized and demonized by those in power. We will be so loud and unapologetic that the stain of our existence can’t be erased from history anymore.

State violence and fear tactics have allowed for the justification of violence and dehumanization of those who do not or cannot comply with the norm. State institutions have done little to protect trans and queer communities of color, and many cases they have directly been the perpetrator of violence. In Denver the family of Jessie Hernandez, a non-binary teen, is still fighting to protect themselves against police and state violence after Jessie was assassinated by the police. This is not an isolated occurrence as non-conforming communities of color are often oversexualized and dehumanized in mainstream culture which allows for police violence against these communities to be easily justified (Mogul, et. al. 50). Just a few weeks ago in West Des Moines, Iowa a hotel owner called the police after two black transgender women attempted to buy a room to rest in on their way to a funeral. ACLU staff, Chase Strangio, writes, “Just the fact of their blackness and their transness prompted hotel staff to call the police to report suspected prostitution.” The dehumanization and oversexualization of specifically trans and often visibly queer people of color is restricting on their very existence. While marginalized trans and queer communities continue to fight for their right to exist, mainstream movements are just beginning to recognize this as an issue.

There is no doubt that state and institutionalized violence in Mexico has also restricted the existence of trans, queer and other marginalized communities, but the Mexican revolution provides us with an example of how pockets of tolerance and resistance can exist. Amelio Robles was a transgender man who allowed to adjust his birth certificate to accurately depict his identity and he was accepted as a colonel in the Zapatista rebel forces. In Gabriela Cano’s coverage of Amelio’s life, she writes, “En el combate se abandonaron pudores y reservas ancestrales y surgieron algunos espacios de tolerancia como el que permitió a Robles empezar a construirse como un hombre, y gozar de una relativa aceptación de sus compañeros de armas/ In combate taboos and ancestral reservations were abandoned and some spaces of tolerance emerged allowing Robles to begin identifying himself as a man, and enjoy relative acceptance from his armed partners.” It is time that we allow for our own revolution that explicitly creates space for all identities to be accepted.

Justice for trans, queer people of color is decolonization. We are fighting for the rights that were stolen from us when imperial and colonial order was imposed us. We will not allow for our communities to be made invisible and to be dehumanized in the name of colonial order. Regardless of the fear, violence and suppression, we have a right to exist and to be unapologetic about our existence. We refuse to comply with the notion that unconformity is a step in the wrong direction, instead it is a step towards a more humanizing and just community that recognizes and protects everyone's right to exist.

Getting to Queer Justice

One of the valuable lessons I am taking away from “Gender, Justice, and Sexuality” is that people (myself definitely included) will almost always make assumptions about things that they know very little about. At the beginning of this semester, although I could say without any hesitance that I identified as someone who loved and accepted those who do not fit the gender or sexuality norm, I knew very little about what injustices LGBTQ people in America have experienced historically and what they still face today. I wrongfully assumed that the equal right to marry was the most important issue on the gay rights agenda and since that had been achieved, things would pretty much be downhill from here on for LGBTQ people.

It took only a few classes to realize that marriage equality and justice for all LGBTQ people was not at all the same thing. But what exactly does justice for all LGBTQ look like? In order to answer that question I want to talk about the words “queer” and “justice” to get at a starting point of understanding of both and what each word means.

            To begin with, when I say the word “queer” I am talking about it in its reclaimed sense of the word. While “queer” most simply means “odd or different,” homophobic people have historically used the word as an insulting word for someone who is attracted to the same sex or for people who are thought of as lesser because they do not fit into the binaries around gender and sexuality that our culture values.

The reclaiming of queer happened within communities of LGBT people who decided to embrace their difference instead of feeling shame about it. Queer now can be a way of finding an identity that relates to anyone who doesn’t quite fit into “normal,” when it comes to gender and sexuality. Queer acknowledges that not all people can relate or fit into the sex and gender binaries of our culture. In this sense, Queer can be used as an umbrella terms to include all LGBT people, but it also leaves room for those who may not feel that their experiences perfectly fall into the categories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender. PFLAG , a network of LGBT people and their friends, family, and allies, gives a great description of why queer can be helpful as an identifier; “It is a fluid label as opposed to a solid label, one that only requires us to acknowledge that we’re different without specifying how or in what context.”

             Now that I have laid out a basic understanding of queer, let’s talk about what justice means to me. Being a Peace and Justice major, every year I get asked by my professors to give my working definition of what justice is. It’s honestly a lot easier to point out what justice is not, because I end up studying more about injustices in order to try and get at what justice actually is.

If injustice leads to people struggling (and sometimes failing) to simply survive in the world, then justice must lead people to being able to thrive in the world. This kind of “thriving” should not be mistaken with living in such a way that thrives at the expense of others, but rather thrives with and in relationship to others. This definition that works best for me because it doesn’t place justice as a stationary thing, but something that can only be known by what outcomes it creates for people. If the action or thing does not create conditions for people to thrive in their lives, or move them closer to thriving, then it is not justice.

           This definition of justice can be applied to understand what Queer Justice is as well. Right now, our society is one in which many queer people will have to struggle to merely survive. There have been steady improvements towards legal acknowledgement for queer people, but it has been met with furious pushback and can by no means be said to have given all queer people what they need to thrive. While conservative Americans cringe at the “eroding moral framework of our once great (straight?) nation” due to granting same-sex partners the legal right to marry, many queer people (especially queers of gender and ethnic minorities) “still ain’t satisfied” and need a lot more to happen to get them to a place of thriving.

           I don’t want to belittle the legislative work that has helped move things in a just direction. Urvashi Vaid, LGBT activist and author of the above link to “Still Ain’t Satisfied,” acknowledges that legal equality matters significantly and that the policy wins for LGBTs in marriage equality, repealing “don't ask don’t tell,” and improvements in state-level anti-discrimination laws should not go uncelebrated. However, this does not mean that queer people are not still struggling to simply exist.

So, how are queer people currently struggling?

Criminalization and Sexual Abuse in the Criminal Legal System

 Queer people (particularly queer people of color) face criminalization in disproportionate numbers to straight white people. According to authors of Queer (In)justice, not only are queer people more likely to be arrested and sentenced to prison, they are at far higher risk of enduring sexual violence from inmate and prison officers alike once in prison. In fact, the book sites a 2007 study of six federal prisons that found that up to 67% of LGBT inmates reported being sexually assaulted.

Queer Youth Experiencing Homelessness

LGBT youth disproportionately face family rejection and homelessness as a result. The reason being that many homeless youth either leave their homes due to familial rejection and abuse after “coming out” or are forced to leave their homes all together. The National Coalition for the Homeless reports that 40-30% of homeless youth identify as LGBT. Many such homeless youth end up in the juvenile justice system. Some studies report that LGBT youth in the juvenile justice system are twice as likely to have experienced child abuse and homelessness as straight youth. 

Discriminationis still the law of (most of) the land

             Just because it is legal for same-sex couples to marry in all fifty states does not mean that they can’t get fired for doing so. Discriminating against LGBTQ people in the work place is still completely legal in most states. You can still be legally fired based solely on your sexuality in all the red states shown below. Queer people certainly cannot thrive in the United States if the majority of our state governments cannot even ensure that they can’t be legally discriminated against.

Social Stigma Persists

             You don’t have to look very far to discover that social stigma attached to identifying as queer or LGBT is highly prevalent. Being “opposed to gay marriage” has become a cornerstone in the Republican Party’s platform. Just yesterday, while walking through the Chicago airport, I watched a group of college age boys turn their heads and make eyes at each other when a gender non-conforming individual walked by them. A recent study by the Human Rights Campaign found that 63% of LGBT Americans report being discriminated against because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Frankly, I was surprised the number wasn’t higher.

So how can we seek justice in all of this?

             Queer Justice begins by questioning the normal, conventional, and assumed, not for its own sake, but because queer people have valid experiences outside these constructs. In order for queer people to experience justice, or being able to thrive in their lives, the starting point lies within questioning and deconstructing norms. In order for me to cast off any assumptions about what LGBT and queer people need justice in, I had to begin by questioning my norms and listening to valid experiences outside those norms. Queer Justice can only happen when people (myself included) are willing to acknowledge that queer experiences are valid even when they do not coincide with their own lived experiences. There is something so liberating about having your voice heard and your experiences validated. Right now, the best way I believe I can practice Queer Justice is by being quicker to listen and seek understanding and slower to place assumptions on people that are based off my own lived experiences. Queer Justice has taught me the value, and ultimately the justice, that can come from seeking understanding of lived queer experiences and points of view.