In mid-August, Laverne Cox, arguably the world’s leading trans celebrity, literally lent her voice to a campaign against solitary confinement and for safer housing for trans prisoners, on behalf of Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP). SRLP is a New York-based organisation, founded by the exceptional Dean Spade, which foregrounds the work and experiences of trans individuals who have been affected by the prison industrial complex (PIC) and poverty (the two are often linked). To that end, its board consists of incarcerated trans people, including Synthia China Blast who has, to date, been in prison for twenty-one years and solitary confinement for over a decade. Cox read Blast’s letter in a video, and you can read excerpts from it here.
But you can’t watch the video because, after an outcry from a group of angry and mostly transphobic so-called feminists who said that Blast was once implicated in the rape and murder of a child, Cox cravenly backed away from the project altogether.
Some background: The PIC is a rotten place for anyone, and I don’t find it worthwhile to insist that X category of people are the worst affected of the prison population because doing so sets up a hierarchy of oppression and, ultimately, enables nothing more than a jostling for funds as each group tries to prove how deeply marginalised it is.
That being said, trans prisoners face unique hardships in prison, beginning with the system’s often blatant refusal to place them in gender-specific cells (and the existence of such also ignores the needs of gender-non-conforming people). Once in prison, trans prisoners might find themselves the target of horrific abuses, including beatings and rapes. At a recent Hull House event to commemorate her life and work, the trans activist Miss Major recounted being stripped naked and forced to walk around the prison while fellow inmates and guards humiliated her. Trans prisoners on hormones or HIV medications are usually neglected to the point of death; the case of Victoria Arellano, an illegal trans woman whose health deteriorated after being refused her meds has been well documented.
Trans prisoners still face suspicion and neglect because the reasons why many of them end up in prison in the first place leave them an unsympathetic group. Because trans men and women often face immediate expulsion from their social and professional networks upon coming out or during their period of transition, they have to use various kinds of street economies which include sex work and drug dealing. They may find themselves with people who blackmail them into activities defined as crimes and, in desperation, commit crimes to survive. All or any of these factors could place a trans person in prison.
In the now well-known case of CeCe McDonald, her only alleged crime was walking while trans. For a long while, only a small group of people, including the Minnesota-based Trans Youth Support Network, agitated on her behalf.
And then, slowly, but surely, the tide began to shift as more details began to emerge and the mainstream press started to take notice. It was around this time that Laverne Cox stepped into the picture and began supporting McDonald in public.
Cox had already by then signed on as co-producer of a documentary on McDonald, and this was why I was commissioned to interview her for In These Times. I asked her if she considered herself a prison abolitionist, and she responded, “From talking to CeCe and her supporters, it does seem like abolishing prisons is the way to go.”
Given Cox’s support of such a seemingly intractable case, it was easy to assume that her critique of the PIC, while focused on the treatment of McDonald, was based on a wider understanding that it is a terrible institution that cannot be reformed. She also had high praise for SRLP.
It was, consequently, a shock to many of us when she recanted her support.
Let me stop here and address a few of the most contentious issues before moving on.
If you’re interested in “the facts” about Synthia China Blast and the many contentious discussions about them, you can check out this Tumblr. You can also read Aviva Stahl’s interview with Blast here.
I have no interest in determining Blast’s guilt or innocence. As a prison abolitionist, I believe that if we are to dismantle the PIC, we have to insist that no one, whether guilty or innocent, deserves the crippling dehumanisation that is always the end result of the PIC.
Many of us engaged in this difficult work do so while fully inhabiting and understanding the contradictions; Restorative and Transformative Justice, the systems often deployed as alternatives to the PIC are riven with problems and imperfections (a future piece of mine will argue that White Guilt is one disabling factor in both, as necessary as they are).
Many of us have no choice but to engage the criminal legal system in order to gain restitution simply because we have no other alternative.
But if we believe in justice, we have to believe that it is deserved not only by the innocent but by those we deem guilty as well. If we argue that prisons are bad for any population— women, trans and genderqueer people, children—we have to acknowledge that the conditions which make it unbearable for any of them make it equally so for everyone. If we’re going to go about abolishing prisons, we need to do so for the guilty and the innocent, not plan for a day when the innocent are let free and the guilty are left to rot behind the walls.
This is why I found Cox’s retraction and her withdrawal from her earlier support so abhorrent.
There are, many will argue, extenuating circumstances. The criticism of Cox included a petition to have her dropped from Orange Is the New Black (a show about which I’ve written here and here), a key factor in her presence as a trans celebrity. If the controversy had continued, it would no doubt have vastly affected her marketability as an actor and spokesperson, whether for causes or commercial products (and the two can sometimes be conflated). In short, her entire livelihood was threatened.
But I find it hard to believe that Cox, a celebrity with a well-tuned publicity machine, knew nothing of the politics of SRLP with regard to prisoners and the notion of guilt. It’s also important to note that Cox’s celebrity is based on her playing a trans prisoner, and that her activism in turn has fed off her celebrity. Her betrayal—and it is nothing less than a betrayal —of a truly radical, trans-inclusive abolitionist politics proves a point I’ve made over and over and over again, that shows like Orange simply cannot help move conversations on difficult issues like the PIC. The only conversations that happen around celebrity-driven moments have to do with safe topics, like the incarceration of the innocent or those who, like Cox’s character in Orange, are forced to commit crimes for reasons outside their control (Sophia Burset, the character she plays on Orange, commits financial fraud to fund her surgeries).
We were within our rights to be excited that a mainstream figure seemed to support our most unpopular causes. Cox’s betrayal is a warning sign that we’re best off deploying celebrity faces when we can do so without investing too much, financially or otherwise, in them.
In contrast to Cox’s cowardice, SRLP’s politics are beautifully illustrated in the statement it released with regard to Cox’s retraction:
SRLP will continue to support Synthia’s removal from isolation and her access to educational programming inside prison…Further, we do not believe that exiling community members who inflict harm will do anything to keep our communities safer. We do hope this process pushes forward conversations about transformative justice that do not decide who is deserving and undeserving of gender self-determination and safety.
The situation leaves me, and others, I’m sure, in a difficult position with regard to her documentary, Free CeCe. I support McDonald, but I also support anyone who actually is guilty of crimes. I’m not sure, in all honesty, how to proceed in terms of supporting the film, especially if its narrative focuses on McDonald’s innocence.
My own way of working through this moment is to throw my support behind SRLP, an organisation that has proven that it will do the difficult work of standing behind its principles even when facing challenges as extreme as this one.
Support SRLP as much and as often as you can, whether financially or simply by discussing their work as often as you can (but, really, money is always helpful). We’ve already lost one amazing group, Queers for Economic Justice; let’s not have SRLP fade away or its existence threatened because a celebrity refused to stand up for the people whose lives she claims to speak for but whom she betrays when convenient.
NOTE: Those familiar with this situation will notice that I haven’t discussed the purported battle between TERFs (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) and some trans activists. As a radical feminist whose feminism includes interrogating the economic basis for gender oppression and who believes in gender self-determination, the misogynistic and paranoid TERFS don’t speak for me. Please, people, let’s stop feeding their hatred and just ignore them.
For further reading: See Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, edited by Eric Stanley (which includes an essay by me and an interview with Miss Major) and Conrad Ryan’s interview on the PIC.
With many thanks to Eric Stanley and Kate Sosin for their input.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Blue, and Yellow, 1930