MC and is used by tli< i|ueer people. We also n movements to rnoiv o rransgender, gendr fil to emphasize wrii >i isoners.

Importantly, cni/ation, and riskinr, mndence were in tlu mbers ofTransgender, lact list as well as oui ni additional organiza

Onnder

Eric A. Stanley

u . I el i rhat the plice were the real enemy. Sylvia Rivera

>sted in prisoner publi ikes sensebecause pils with or simply destroy ilont feel like sortiii]', vendetta against aci iv 'car" theirmail. Wliilc were attempting to ai uy from being burncil mi declined to submii iiipporting documenls, y absent inside, only ,i l i l i our timeframe ai u I nately, authors of a lew ile as theirhousing liad and thus we could no hese and other reasoir. >ur lives, it took a Ion) 1 , ad and essential scope u and outside prison) re are definitely sonu collectively covered .1 even more organi/inj.; o n or continu ye un is a powerful oFerin^ cali to arms and a 11 \E FLESH:

ll|jln>, shaiiered the dark anonymity of the dance floor. The flicki M . I ..I (lie danger of the coming raid. Well experienced, people ,!,{ ,]., dianged clothing, removed or applied makeup, and got I I . . I . . . I M c cnrered, began examining everyone's IDs, and lined up i i n / l ' r i i d e r non-conforming folks to be "checked" by an officer in 1,1 cnsure that they were wearing the legally mandated three ' o. le .ippropriate clothing." Simultaneously the cops started ! |i. < > p l e , dragging them out front to the awaiting paddy wagili. i \vniils, it was a regular June night out on the town for trans . i . , 11-, , 111 I % 9 New York City. ,
1

Captive Genders

As the legend goes, that night the cops did not receive thdr payoff or they wanted to remind the patrons of their precarious existence. In the shadows of New York nightlife, the Stonewall Inn, like most other "gay bars," was owned and run by the mafia, which tended to have the connections within local government and the vice squad to know who to bribe in order to keep the bar raids at a minimum and the cash flowing. As the first few captured queers were forced into the paddy wagn, people hanging around outside the bar began throwing pocket change at tke arresting officers; then the bottles started flying and then the bricks. With the majority of the patrons now outside the bar, a crowd of angry trans/queer folks had gathered and forced the plice to retreat back into the Stonewall. As their collective fury grew, a few people uprooted a parking meter and used it as a battering ram in hopes of knocking down the bar's door and escalating the physical confrontation with the cops. A tctica! team was called to rescue the vice squad now barricaded inside the Stonewall. They eventually arrived, and the street battle raged for two more nights. In a blast of radical collectivity, trans/gender-non-conforming folks, queers of color, butches, drag queens, hair-fairies, homeless street youth, sex workers, and others took up arms and fought back against the generations of oppression that they were forced to survive.1 Forty years later, on a similarly muggy June night in 2009, history repeated itself. At the Rainbpw Lo unge, a newly opened gay bar in Fort Worth, Texas, the plice staged a raid, verbally barassing patrons, calling them "faggots" and beating a number of customers. One patrn was slammed against the floor, sending him to the hospital with brain injuries, while seven others were arrested. These instances of brutal forc and i the administrative surveillance that trans and queer folks face today are ( not significantly less prevalent or less traumatic than those experienced by the Stonewall rioters of 1969, however the ways this violence is currently understood is quite different. While community vigils and public forums were held in the wake of the Rainbow Lounge raid, the immediate response was not to fight back, or has there been much attempt to understand the raid in the broader context of the systematic violence trans and queer people face under the relentless forc of the prison industrial complex (PIC).2 Captive Genders is in part an attempt to think about the historical and political ideologies that continually naturalize the abusive forc of the plice with such power as to make them appear ordinary. This is not to arge that the types of resistance present at the Stonewall riots were com-

nionplace during that time, or to suggest that trans and queer folks do not fight back today; nonetheless one of our aims is to chart the mltiple ways that trans and queer folks are subjugated by the plice, along with I he mltiple ways that we have and that we continu to resist in the face urdiese overwhelming structures.3 I start with the Stonewall riot not because it was the first, most important, or last instance of radical refusal of the plice state. Indeed, the riots at San Francisco's Comptons Cafetera in 1966 and at Los Angeles's Ooper's Doughnuts in 1959 remind us that the history of resistance is us long as the history of oppression. However, what is unique about the Sionewall uprising is that, within the United States context, it is made to Nymbolize the "birth of the gay rights movement." Furthermore, domiiiatit lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) political organizalions like the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) and the National Gay and l,esbianTask Forc (NGLTF) attempt to build an are of progress starting with the oppression of the Stonewall moment and ending in the current lime of "equality" evidenced by campaigns for gay rnarriage, hate crimes Icgislation, and gays in the military. Captive Genders works to undo this narrative of progress, assimilation, and plice cooperation by building n analysis that highlights the historical and contemporary antagonisms i between trans/queer folks and the plice state.4 / This collection arges that prison abolition must be one of the cen(tcrs of trans anc j queer liberation struggles.. Starting with abolition we open questions often disappeared by both mainstream LGBT and antiprison movements. Among these many silences are the radical trans/queer irguments against the proliferation of hate crimes enhancements. Mainstream LGBT organizations, in collaboration with the state, have been ^ working hard to make us believe that hate crimes enhancements are a nec- cssary and useful way to make trans and queer people safer. Hate crimes j enhancements are used to add time to a person's sentence if the offense is j deemed to target a group of people. However, hate crimes enhancements j 1 ignore the roots of harm, do not act as deterrents, and reproduce the forc lof the PIC, which produces more, not less harm. Not surprisingly, in 'October 2009, when President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law,'extending existing late crimes enhancements to include "gender and sexuality," there was no ( mention by the LGBT mainstream of the historical and contemporary f ways that the legal system itself works to deaden trans and queer lives. As J antidote, this collection works to understand how gender, sexuality, race,

J ability, class, nationality, and other markers of difFerence are constricted, k. often to the point of liquidation, in the ame of a normative carceral state. Among the most volatile points of contact between state violence and : one's body is the domain of gender. An understanding of these conneo tions has produced much important ictivism and research that explores how non-trans women are uniquely harmed through disproportionate prison sentences, sexual assault while in custody, and nonexistent medical care, coupled with other forms of violence. This work was and contines / to be a necessary intervention in the ways that prison studies and activ( ism have historically imagined the prisoner as always male and have un til recently rarely attended to the ways that gendered difference produces carceral differences. Similarly, queer studies and political organizing, along with the growing body of work that might be called trans studieswhile attending to the work of gender, sexuality, and more recently to race and nationalityhas (with important exceptions) had little to say about the ?* forc of imprisonment or about trans/queer prisoners. Productively, we see this as both an absence and an opening for those of us working in trans/queer studies to attendin a way that centers the experiences of those most directly impactedto the ways that the prison must emerge as1 one of the major sites of trans/queer scholarship and political organizing.5 In moments of frustration, excitement, isolation, and solidarity, Captive Genders grew out of this friction as a rogue text, a necessarily unstable collection of voices, stories, analysis, and plans for action. What these pieces all have in common is that they suggest that gender, ability, and sexuality as written through race, class, and nationality must figure into any and all accounts of incarceration, even when they seem to be ^nonexistent. Indeed, the oftentimes ghosted ways that gender and heteronormativity function most forcefully are in their presumed absence. In collaboration and sometimes in contestation, this project offers vital ways of understanding not only the specific experience of trans and queer prisoners, but also more broadly the ways that regimes of normative sexuality and gender are organizing structures of the prison industrial complex. To be clear, Captive Genders is not ofered as a definitive collection. Or hope is that it will work as a space where conversations and connections can multiply with the aim of making abolition flourish. Gender Lockdown Gender seems to always escape the confines of the language that we use to capture it. This makes for a difficult place of departure for a book that is

ibout, among other things, gender. For sure, some firmly identify as one ni nore particular genders while others have a more shifting relation via llici racialized bodies, gendered desires, physical presentations, and the wonls available to comprehend these intersections. Neither a solidly fixed Und:rstanding of oneself or a more fluid idea of gender is necessarily mor.1 radically deconstructive than the other. Trans/gender-non-conformIng blks are not the answer to the "riddle" of gender, or are they immune lo l i e assimilationist longing embodied by other marginalized people. To lilis :nd, a gendered identity (or any other identity) imagined outside the i'oniExt of the political offers very little. Here, then, we attempt to always uiulcrstand gender and sexuality within the space of the political to build luycnd generality. Furthermore, one's gender identification and sexual i identification are always formed in a series of thick relations to each other.j Whie we acknowledge that gender identity is not co-terminus with sexuiilify, these connections must be carefully attended to, as they cut through i'lass, race, ability, and nationality, as well as time.6 Captive Genders offers no comprehensive theory of gender or sexualiiy tliat would be useful as an abstracted description. or does it assume lliat it represents the lived experiences of particular people beyond its iiuthors. We do, however, highlight a number of tendencies that can and sometimes must become abstracted. For example, we know that trans people are disproportionately incarcerated in relation to non-trans people. Yet we also know that some, perhaps many, trans/queer people, as a result of experiencing relentless violence, are in favor of incarceration and helieve in its claims of safety. In many ways this book Uves among these contradictions as it works to move conversations toward abolition and away from a belief that prisons will ever make us safer. As a theoretical and embodied practice, gender self-determination is one of the polines that holds this project together. Echoed through the dreams of other liberation movements' understandings of identity and power, gender self-determination at its most basic suggests that we collectively work to crate the most space for people to express whatever genders they choose at any given moment. It also understands that these expressions might change and that this change does not delegitimte previous or future identifications. Gender self-determination also acknowledges that gender identification is always formed in relation to other forms of power and thus the words we use to identify others and ourselves are culturally, generationally, and geographically situated. In other words, terms that are more common now, like "transgender," are relatively new to our vocabu-

Captive Genders

Introduction

laries and are not inclusive of all of our embodied experiences. Gender self-determination believes that there are mltiple ways to work one's gender and sexualityand while they might have material differences, they must not be hierarchized in the ame of realness.1
Chain Links

In the recent past, the term prson industrial complex has been offered to begin to ame the enormity of the prison system. Indeed, "the prison," or the material buildings that comprise prisons and jails are only one component of the PIC. Immigration centers, juvenile justice facilities, county jails, military jails, holding rooms, court rooms, sherifFs offices, psychiatric institutes, along with other spaces build the vastness of the PIC's architecture. Along with these more recognizable spaces, understanding the PIC as a set of relations rnakes visible the connections among capitalism, globalization, and corporations. From prison labor, privatized prisons, prison guard unions, food suppliers, telephone companies, commissary suppliers, uniform producers, and beyond, the carceral landscape overwhelms. Other than the facilities themselves and the economic and geopolitical connections, the PIC also helps us to think about the practices of surveillance, policing, screening, profiling, and other technologies to partition people and produce "populations" that often occur far beyond the walls of the prison.8 This book suggests that anti-trans/queer violence and the reproduction of gender normativity are important ways in which PIC logics proliferate, dangerously unnamed. Gender normativity, understood as a series of cultural, political, legal, and religious assumptions that attempt to divide our bodies into two categories (men/women), is both a product of and a producer of the PIC. In this we mean to suggest that we must pay attention to the ways that the PIC harms trans/gender-non-conforming and queer people and also to how the PIC produces the gender binary and heteronormativity itself. We also acknowledge that trans/queer folks, especially those of color and/or low income, experience overwhelming amounts of personal violence that must be attended to. Here we are not attempting to discredit the severity of this personal violence, but we are suggesting that relying on the PIC as a remedy actually produces more harm and offers little. What, then, might a world look like in which harm is met with healing and support, rather than the displacement and reviolation produced by the PIC?9

Outlawed Life i i ii Ml/i'.rnder-non-conforming and queer people, along with many others, ' air lioi'ii into webs of surveillance. The gendering sean of other children MI iin carly age ("Are you a boy or a girl?") places many in the panopticon liiMp, helo re they enter a prison. For those who do trespass the gender } hlii.uy or heteronormativity, physical violence, isolation, detention, or , |iiiinii;il disappointment become some of the first punishments. As has lii'cn well documented, many trans and queer youth are routinely haimsnl at school and kicked out of home at young ages, while others leave In liopes of escaping the mental and physical violence that they experit'iu r ni schools and in their houses. Many trans/queer youth learn how to survive in a hostile world. Oftrn ihe informal economy becomes the only option for them to make nioncy. Selling drugs, sex work, shoplifting, and scamming are among 11 ir lew avenues that might ensure they have something to eat and a place lu slcep at night. Routinely turned away from shelters because of their pender presentation, abused in residential living situations or foster care, ti i id even harassed in "gay neighborhoods" (as they are assumed to drive tlown property vales or scare pff business), they are reminded that they tire 1 alone. Habitually picked up for truancy, loitering, or soliciting, many I [tns/queer people spend their youth shuttling between the anonymity of llic streets and the hyper-surveillance of the juvenile justice system. With i'ase mahgers too verloaded to care, or too transphobic to want to care, ihey slip through the holes left by others. Picked uplocked upplaced lli a homeescapesurvivepicked up again. The cycle builds a cage, und the hope for anything else disappears with the crushing reality that llieir identities form the parameters of possibility.10 With few options and aging-out of what little resources there are \r "youth," many trans/queer adul ployers routinely don't hire "queeny" gay men, trans women who "cannot pass," burches who seem "too hard," or anyone else who is read to be "bad j For tmsiness." Along with the barriers to employment, most Jobs that are; open to folks who have been homeless or incarcerated are minimum-wage and thus provide little more than continuing poverty and fleeting stability. Back to where they beganon the streets, hustling to make it, now olderthey are often given even longer sentences. While this cycle of poverty and incarceration spealcs to more current experiences, the discursive drives building their motors are nothing new. Inheriting a long history of being made suspect, trans/queer people, via
7

Captive Genders

Introduction

the medicalization of trans identities and homosexuality, have been and continu to be institutionalized, forcibly medicated, sterilized, operated on, shocked, and made into objects of study and experimentation. Similarly, the histrica! illegality of gender trespassing and of queerness have taught many trans/queer folks that their lives will be intimately bound with the legal system. More recently, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has turned the surveillance technologies inward. One's blood and RNA replication became another site of susceptibility that contines to imprison people through charges of bio-terrorism, under AIDS-phobic laws.

'I lie Stonewall uprising itself must be remembered and celebrated as i nmincnt of a radical trans/queer abolitionist politic that built, in those llucr nights, the materiality of this visin. As both a dream of the future .mil ,i practicc of history, we strategize for a world without the mltiple Wtiy.s that our bodies, genders, and sexualities are disciplined. Captive (iiilcrs is also a telling of a rich history of trans/queer struggle against the I'K ',, still in the making. This is an invitation to remember these radical li'p,.n es of abolition and to continu the struggle to make this dream of llir liiture, lived today.
Ibis plece has benefited from the crtical attention of Angela Y. Davis, Toshio Meronek, andAdam Reed. I am also indebtedto The Institute for Anarchist Studies who provided support for the completion ofthis introduction.
NOTES

I, .

3.

Desiring Aboltion Living through these forms of domination are also moments of devastating resistance where people working together are building joy, tearing down the walls of normative culture, and opening space for a more 1 beautiful, more lively, safer place for all. Captive Genders remembers these radical histories and movements as evidence that our legacies are fiercely imaginative and that our collective abilities can, and have, offered freedom even in the most destitute of times.11 In the face of the overwhelming violence of the PIC, abolitionand specifically a trans/queer abolitionis one example of this vital defiance. An abolitionist politic does not believe that the prison system is "broken" and in need of reform; indeed, it is, according to its own logic, working quite well. Abolition necessarily moves us away from attempting to '^fi | the PIC and helps us imagine an entirely different worldone that is not built upon the histrica! and contemporary legacies of the racial and gendered brutalty that maintain the power of the PIC. What this means is that abolition is not a response to the belief that the PIC is so horrible that reform would not be enough. Although we do believe_that_the _PIC I is horrible and that reform is not enough, abolition radically restages our conversations and our ways of living and understanding as to undo our reliance on the PIC and its cultural logics. For us, abolition is not simply a reaction to the PIC but a political commitment that makes the PIC impossible. To this-end, the time of abolition is both yet to come and al/ ready here. In other words, while we hold on to abolition as a politics for doing anti-PIC work, we also acknowledge there are countless ways that abolition has been and contines to be here now. As a project dedicated to radical deconstruction, abolition must also include at its center a rework-f ing of gender and sexuality that displaces both heterosexualiry and gender normativity as measures of worth.12

4.

For a conical history of Stonewall, see Martin B. Duberman, Stonewall (New York: Plume, 1994). For more on the raid, see "Man Injured During Rainbow Lounge Raid in Fort Worth Speaks Out," The Dallas Morning News. Accessed January 8, 2011: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/070709d nmetrainbow.l3aOe378.html Also, during the Stonewall uprising, many gays and lesbians disagreed with the rioters. The Mattachine Society of New York put up a sign that read, "We homosexuals pled with our people to picase help maintain peaceful and quiet conduct on the streets of the village." Thus, I am not suggesting that during the riots all LGBT people understood the relationship between plice repression and queer resistance. However, it seems important to chart how radical resistance gets rewritten under the ame of a more conservative political agenda. Captive Genders focuses mostly on the United States, Canad, and the United Kingdom. A more transnational reading would offer important insights not j always present here. For more on the argument that Stonewall began the "gay rights" movement in the United States, see David Eisenbach, Gay Power: An American Revolution (New York: Carroll and Graf, 200'6). The consumer-driven, anti-political festival of modern Gay Pride celebrations still occurs during the last weekend in June in commemoration of the Stonewall uprising. For more critiques of Gay Pride, see the work of the activist collective Gay Shame.

CaptiveGenders

Introduction

5.

Por a useful reading of gender (as imderstood by non-trans women) in relation to punishment, see Adrin Howe, Punkh and Critique: Towars a Feminist Analysis of Penality (London: Routledge, 1994). It is also important to highlightthat wcmen, trans, and queerpeople (specifically of color) have done much, if not most, of the anti-PIC organizing in the United States. For more on the Compton's Cafetera riots, see Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton's Cafetera [DVD], dir. Vctor Silverman and Susan Stryker (San Francisco: Frameline, 2010). 11

6.

l l i r N|'1 repeatedly refused his verbal harassment. He began shouting louder, II !i knl ,\e towatd one of them, and threatened to "fuck them straight." A h ^ l n linikc out and a number of the NJ4 were physically attacked and the man w.i-i wonnded but fully recovered. Not surprisingly, all four of the women were I I H 11 u I uiiilty and were subsequently sentenced to between three and a half and rlcvrn ycars in prison. As gender-non-conforming Black queers, their offense ,r, MU -vi val, and they were punished harshly for it. I ' I H inore on alternatives to imprisonment, see Instead of Prisons: A Handbook fin Mmlitionists (Oakland, Calif: Critical Resistance, 2005) zndAbolition Now!: li-ii Vfiin ofStrategy and Struggle against the Prison Industrial Complex (Oakland, ( .ilil.: AK Press, 2008). My ni.iny conversations with Angela Y. Davis continu to help me clarify die I u iii n that abolition is not imagined as only in response to the horrors of the

In this introducton, I use "trans" as an umorella term to signal a wide range of gender non-conformity. I also often use "rrans/queer" as a way to mark the connections between gender and sexuality and how they are often conflated via the PIC. Furthermore, if someone dentifies as a "transvestite," "tranny," "queer," or any other identity that is sometimes considered to be derogatory, an ethic of gender self-determination would make space for that identity as equally valid.

7.

9.

See Eve Goldberg and Linda Evans, The Prison Industrial Comflex and the Global Economy (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2003); Angela Y. Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Goleen Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Also, for more on the relationship between globalization and imprisonment, see Julia Chinyere Oparah, Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prson-Industral Complex (New York: Routledge, 2005). Figuring out responses to anti-trans/queer violence that do not reproduce harm needs much more critical attention. Community accountability models are one example, however, when the person that caused harm is "random" it becomes much more difficult to imagine alternatives. This is not to suggest that working in the informal economy is less moral than working in more traditional Jobs. Indeed, at times it is actually safer and more benefcial to remain in these Jobs. I also do not want to suggest that sex workers, in every instance, have no other chotee. Under capitalism, most have little choice in regard to their working conditions. However, I do want to mark the ways that this labor makes one more vulnerable to the PIC. The case of the New Jersey 4 (NJ4) is another shattering example of the ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality make contact through the crushing forc of the PIC. The NJ4 is a group of young, Black, queer/gender-non-conforming people from Newark, NJ, that were hanging out on a summer night in New York's West Village. As they were walking down the street, a man standing on the crner met them with sexual advances. The situation escalated as 10 11

10.