The Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project
**CONTENT WARNING**
As the title suggests, everything on this blog concerns violence against trans women.
The Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project is a trans feminist project addressing issues of systematic, institutional and interpersonal violence and oppression experienced by trans women (those who were coercively assigned male at birth and identify or are identified as women/female) across multiple identities (e.g., race, class, dis/ability, citizen-status, nationality, sexuality, age, HIV status, and form, status, or age of transition, etc.)
Ida Hammer is a writer and social justice communicator. She organizes the Trans Women's Anti-Violence Project. She presents workshops and trainings on cis privilege and being a trans ally. She's also involved in organizing against sexualized violence. She's a proud dyke-identified trans woman and an organizer of the New York City Dyke March.
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Model/Drag Queen/Transgender Woman Carmen Carrera
TLC’s Cake Boss found a horrible way to boost ratings and prank an employee while insulting the transgender community by their behavior towards a transgender woman.
Model/Drag Queen, Carmen Carrera from RuPaul’s Drag Race, appeared on the show, Cake Boss, in a prank to lure one of the employees, Anthony, into flirting with her. She spoke with producers about the terminology she wanted to be used and how to use her appearance to further transgender awareness. This was all ignored according to her and she wrote on her Facebook page last night:
Carrera prepping
LET ME MAKE THIS VERY CLEAR! LISTEN UP PEOPLE! I signed on to do this episode of “Cake Boss” to promote EQUALITY. Transgender women are just as beautiful as biological woman and should be respected for that. The “reveal” was never meant to be a “Jerry Springer, ‘THATS A MAN’…” kind of thing. I was promised that it wasn’t going to be that way. I was lied to. I dont promote misleading someone or putting down the trans community. I am a beautiful transgendered woman and if a guy hits on me at a bar, ITS OK! That was the message. Hearing things like “You’ll never be a real woman” or “I hope you burn in hell for changing your gender” or “You will always be a man” is the EXACT TYPE OF IGNORANCE THAT THIS SHOW HELPED TO PROMOTE. This is why Im so upset. If men find me attractive and treat me as lady, why do some of you people think its wrong??? Why are some of you trying to take that away from me like I dont deserve to be treated with respect and admiration? Ignorance, thats why. STOP THE HATE AND PASS THIS ON.
Anthony Bellifemine from Cake Boss
For their part some of the sensitive, sensitive souls at Cake Boss then thought it would be funny to continue to shame Carmen after the episode aired. When someone mocked Anthony, for kissing a man, Anthony had this to say: “hahaha nah I didn’t. It give me a kiss on the cheek.”
“It” gave him a kiss on the cheek. What an amazing guy that Anthony must be.
Carmen’s fans (and fans of treating people like human beings) jumped into action last night, creating a Change.org petition demanding TLC and Cake Boss publicly apologize to the transgender community.
(J. Wolffe, Lez Get Real)
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Post reblogged from The Spirit Was...
hey NYC area friends!
i’m doing another event at the New Museum this coming Thursday and I would love for you to be there! it will feature two amazing artists, Chris Vargas & Eric A Stanley, who will screen their prison break film, CRIMINAL QUEERS!
Jeannine Tang & I will moderate the conversation, it should be great.
did i mention its free? it is *free!*
here’s the full description, i hope to see you there!
Thursday June 7, 2012, 7:30 pm
New Museum Theater
Free
http://www.newmuseum.org/events/645
As transgender issues, artists, and theory have received greater recognition in contemporary art discourses and institutions since the 2000s, activist Reina Gossett, art historian Jeannine Tang will discuss the role of art and artists in recent movement building, and how contemporary art figures in critical trans politics today.
This will feature a screening of the film “Criminal Queers,” followed by a conversation with filmmakers Eric A. Stanley and Chris Vargas. ”Criminal Queers” visualizes a radical trans/queer struggle against the prison industrial complex and toward a world without walls.
Remembering that prison breaks are both a theoretical and material practice of freedom, this film imagines what spaces might be opened up if crowbars, wigs, and metal files become tools for transformation.
By expropriating the “prison break” genre the question of form and content collapse into a rhythm of affective histories as images of possibility materializes even after possibility itself is foreclosed.
Follow Yoshi, Joy, Susan and Lucy as they fiercely read everything from the Human Rights Campaign and hate crimes legislation to the non-profitization of social movements. Criminal Queers grows our collective liberation by working to abolish the multiple ways our hearts, genders, and desires are confined.
This event is supported by the New Museum, Sylvia Rivera Law Project, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. A parallel conversation on recent organizing and movement building will be hosted by Sylvia Rivera Law Project on Friday, June 8 at 6pm. ** Reina Gossett is a trans activist working at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project as Director of Membership and was formerly director of the Welfare Organizing Project at Queers for Economic Justice as well as a Soros Justice Fellow on staff at Critical Resistance.
Eric A. Stanley works at the intersections of radical trans/queer aesthetics, theories of state violence, and visual culture. While completing a PhD in the History of Consciousness department at UCSC, Eric along with Chris Vargas, directed the films Homotopia (2006) and Criminal Queers (2012) which have been screened at Palais de Tokyo, LACE, Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow and SF Cameraworks among numerous other venues. Eric is also the editor of Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011) which was recenlty selected as a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award.
Jeannine Tang is an art historian teaching as Academic Advisor at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, while completing her doctoral work at the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Chris E. Vargas is a film and video maker based in Oakland, CA, whose thematic interests include queer radicalism, transgender hirstory, and imperfect role models. He earned his MFA in Art Practice from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. Since 2008, he has been making, in collaboration with Greg Youmans, the web-based trans/cisgender sitcom Falling In Love…with Chris and Greg. Episodes of the series have screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including MIX NYC, SF Camerawork, and the Tate Modern. With Eric Stanley, Vargas co-directed the movie Homotopia (2006) and its feature-length sequel Criminal Queers (2012). His solo video projects include Extraordinary Pregnancies (2010), Liberaceón (2011), and ONE for all… (2012).
** During the run of the exhibition “Museum as Hub: Carlos Motta: We Who Feel Differently,” Motta invites local queer artists, activists, and academics to hold public events on select Thursday evenings in the Museum as Hub. Events include a conversation about transgender issues in contemporary art, a lecture on queer and feminist theologies, a workshop on HIV/AIDS activism today, a “cruising” walk, a presentation of a book about queer responses to gay inclusion in the military, and a collective reading of queer texts, all of which address critical issues of contemporary queer culture in the United States.
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House Republicans determined to show women voters that they have their interests at heart on Wednesday announced plans to renew the Violence Against Women Act, the federal government’s main domestic violence program.
The GOP proposal set up a possible showdown with a somewhat different version that Senate Democrats have advanced and which has been pending in the Senate for several weeks.
VAWA, first enacted in 1994, has a history of being bipartisan and noncontroversial, but that’s changed this election year. Democrats have accused Republicans of waging a war on women, and Republicans, led by presumptive presidential nominee Mitt Romney, have responded by emphasizing their sensitivity to women’s issues.
The Senate bill has 61 sponsors, including eight Republicans, but parts of it have met resistance from others in the GOP.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, joined by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is preparing an alternative that would eliminate several Democratic provisions, including those to set aside visas for illegal immigrants who are victims of domestic abuse, specify that violence against gays, lesbians and transgender
s[people] are part of the act and expand the authority of Native American officials in cases of abuse of Indian women by nonIndians. [Full article]This is what the white supremacist capitalist cissexist heteropatriarchal US government at work looks like. Silly immigrant, lesbian, trans and Native American women, government supported anti-violence programs are for worthy affluent, White, straight, cis-women only.
There is an ongoing history of class-privileged, White, straight, cis men targeting vulnerable women who are immigrants, queer, trans and/or Native American with impunity. By refusing to specifically protect these women, the government is giving its endorsement to violence against certain groups of women. This is a continuation of the racist, Orientalist, heterosexist, cissexist, settler colonialist policies that this very country was founded on.
Rape and other forms of physical, sexual and psycho-emotional violence have long been the hallmarks of maintaining and perpetuating these oppressive social structures. Not only do they frame citizen, White, straight women as the appropriate subjects of (over)protective control by the paternalistic patriarchal state, they also frame immigrants, people of color and LGBT people as the appropriate subjects of systematic criminalizing control with this sort of legislation.
I expect the same people who want to take out provisions to protect immigrant, queer, trans and Native American women to show that they “care” by increasing support for law enforcement and criminalizing measure that won’t actually support or protect women but will further the mass incarceration of people of color, poor, immigrant, queer and trans people.
That is, the US government seems perfectly fine with the mass imprisonment of trans women (especially those who are immigrants, American Indians or other people of color) in men’s jails/prisons where they’re pretty much guaranteed to experience harassment as well as physical and sexual violence from their cis male inmates as well as staff. This is opposed to actually taking a sincere interest in supporting these same trans women having equitable access to vital women’s survivor and anti-violence services.
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Early in the morning of April 24th a group of angry queers smashed out the windows of Mars Hill Church in Southeast Portland. Mars Hill is notoriously anti-gay and anti-woman. Mark Driscoll, Mars Hill’s head pastor, has said that women need to be subservient to their husbands and that gay people are a cancer. His personal brand of Christianity crusades against the “feminization” of Jesus - we angry queers are not fans of Jesus, but we have a problem with anyone who has a problem with femmes.
This action was taken in memory of Mark Aguhar, a fierce queer/trans femme of color and artist from Chicago who killed herself a little over a month ago. We also hold in our hearts Paige Clay, a trans woman of color who was found murdered in Chicago on April 16th; Duanna Johnson, a black trans woman who was in all likelihood murdered by the police in 2008; Agnes Torres Sulca, Deoni Jones, and all other trans women who have been murdered by this cissexist, femmephobic, racist, and transmisogynistic society.
Churches are a major contributor to the culture that deems trans women of color to be disposable, as not worth keeping alive. …
