Fall 2020 is not a season any of us are likely to forget, but that is especially true for Laurel Westbrook of Sociology who is going up for full professor and just took delivery of their new book Unlivable Lives: Violence and Identity in Transgender Activism (Univ. of California Press, 2021).

Though they have worked on this book for some time, its release seems especially topical as the country and the world grapples with the complexity of social justice, the practices of activism, and the roots of violence. Laurel's book asks the reader to look at the evidence and release assumptions about the nature of movements.

Laurel wants to address the puzzle of anti-violence activism that is undertaken through the lens of identity politics, such as movements specifically calling out violence against women, people of color, or gay men and lesbians. As their particular case study, Laurel examines transgender rights activism. Activism on behalf of trans people has a long history, including fights for access to body modification and the right to change documents. From the 1990s on, the movement organized under the umbrella term transgender and included an anti-violence focus.

Unlivable Lives traces this anti-violence work from 1990 to the present. Over time, as people of color have also experienced, there has been a shifting from characterization of transgender folks as villains. This has given way to seeing them as valuable people. This is, after all the main goal of all anti-violence groups: to have people acknowledged as valuable and not deserving of attack.

Laurel noted that there is a hitch, however, "Although they are no longer seen as villains, they get stuck as 'victims' and seen as vulnerable. This vulnerable subjecthood is an unintended consequence. Activists are trying to get the public to care, but in the process they terrify the people they are trying to protect. It is not just trans activism that has done this. This happens to women, too. Women are afraid of moving through public spaces because of the long focus on 'stranger danger' when actually attacks tend to come from someone they know."

A deep dive into the data has shown this again and again.

Laurel explains, "For example, cisgender women are incredibly afraid of violence and structure their lives to safeguard themselves (checking the back seat of their cars, etc.).  In reality, they are much less likely to experience violence than men. Cis men are 75% of homicide victims in the United States and so are three times more likely to be murdered than women."

"Historically, the women’s anti-violence movement has focused on sexual assault from strangers and, as a result, that is what women fear. Women do an enormous amount of labor to protect themselves from strangers. However, the focus on stranger danger to the exclusion of statistically more likely scenarios is misplaced because strangers are not the main perpetrators."

Returning to trans activism, Laurel addresses the point highlighted in the book's title. "Identity groups do anti-violence activism because the threat and experience of violence makes their lives unlivable. However, doing identity-based anti-violence activism constructs a vulnerable subjecthood, which also creates unlivable lives filled with fear. The anti-violence movement portrays all cisgender people as potential threats. There are a lot of cis people, so that produces a lot of fear."

"Because of the identity lens, the whole group seems at equal risk for violence, and although this creates care for the cause, the down side is that it keeps you from seeing patterns and doesn’t lead to good solutions. By portraying trans people as a homogeneous group, the patterns are missed."

A more nuanced look at the data with intersectional awareness addresses this problem. For instance, one begins to see that trans women of color are at highest risk and perpetrators often had a sexual relationship with the victim.

"With homogeneous subjecthood, you don’t see patterns, and so you don’t come up with good solutions."

This is important because “solutions”, such as hate crime legislation, have not been shown to reduce violence and have become a band aid obscuring deep structural problems. Hate crime legislation lays the blame on transphobic individuals, not structures. Laurel notes that it is systematic problems that push trans people into poverty-- and poverty increases the risk of experiencing violence. And there are other side effects. For instance, after hate crime legislation was enacted in 2009, there was a drop in activism, but not a drop in violence.

Laurel’s book focuses on the height of anti-violence activism from 1990 to 2009 and then compares that period to more recent activism.

“I wanted to look at what has changed and what hasn’t. Trans people were still portrayed as highly vulnerable to murder even though that is not accurate. Most violence is actually not fatal. You hear false stats—that trans people have 1 in 12 chance of being murdered in their lifetime. In reality, there are about 24 murders per year and almost 2 million trans people in the U.S. so it is not 1 in 12. This all got started as a misunderstanding of a researcher’s guestimate that the Human Rights Campaign[1] picked up.”

Laurel explains that “Violence goes up in a bad economy, so 2020 has been a very bad year for murder. I’ve already collected transgender homicide data from 1990 to 2015 and I was awarded a grant from CSCE to hire a research assistant to help me collect the murder data from 2016-2020. This data will help me identify patterns of violence which can then be used to craft better violence prevention efforts.”

Though careful to put statistics into perspective, Laurel is not suggesting that some groups, understood with attention to intersectionality, are not in danger.  What they are concerned about is distortions that spring from something said publicly.  “For instance, you will hear that ‘Trans women of color have a life expectancy of 35 years.’ Patricia Arquette said that at the Emmys in 2015. Someone looked at the age of victims honored by the Transgender Day of Remembrance and took the average of their ages. That is not a good way to estimate life expectancy, since murder victims are disproportionately young and most people, including transgender people, do not die by homicide.”

In fact, the existing research on violence has shown that transgender people in the United States do not experience more violence than cisgender people, both in terms of fatal and non-fatal violence. This is partially because cisgender men, particularly Black cisgender men, experience such high rates of violence in the U.S.

One of the unintended consequences of activism as it has been practiced is that some cisgender parents do not want their kids to be trans for fear of their dying and being vulnerable. A trans life becomes a scary life even though this is not supported by the data. Activism has unintentionally terrified the people we are trying to protect.

“This is separate from discrimination,” Laurel explains. “There is plenty of transphobia demonstrated as transgender people go through public spaces; I’m just making the violence point.”

There are other areas where the identity lens, without nuance, is getting in the way of solutions, Laurel contends. “Movements focused on police brutality that are not focused through an identity lens have a better chance of persuading police departments to adopt new policies to reduce brutality.”

In sum, Laurel’s book looks at how to improve anti-violence activism. “Trans people are often in poverty due to discrimination in school and the workplace. When legal jobs are not open to you, you are pushed into illegal employment such as sex work, which is dangerous. So if we want to reduce violence against trans folks, we must reduce discrimination in school and the workplace and legalize sex work. All the places with legalized sex work demonstrate that legalization reduces violence dramatically. Rhode Island accidentally decriminalized sex work between 1980-2009 due to taking a line out of the law that was on the books. Sex work got safer and violence went down. When it is illegal, it is stigmatized and stigma increases violence. Moreover, if sex work is legal, you can do it indoors rather than on the street where clients are hard to filter. Indoors in a brothel you can filter (there is a front desk); you can have security. It is also safer in terms of STDs and sexual assault.  Decriminalization makes it somewhat safer, but legalization makes it more so.”

“What we have been doing doesn’t work,” Laurel observes. “We need to come up with something else.”

How to do that is not necessarily intuitive. “The data show that outlawing discrimination against a group makes employers afraid to hire them out of fear of being sued. Data on people with disabilities and older adults shows this—fewer were hired after anti-discrimination legislation.”
 

Laurel advocates not stick but carrot—incentive programs where companies get bonuses for hiring those discriminated against turn out to be effective, as do programs that educate cisgender people.  

“Transphobia is reduced if you know a trans person,” Laurel notes. “This can be accomplished in a few ways. Trans people are a small population. Mainstream media works. Positive representation works to reduce discrimination. Not portrayals as a murder victims or medical cases on hospital shows. Instead, show trans people as complex individuals with life aspects that have nothing to do with being trans and show trans people as legitimate love interests for cis people.”

Laurel also hopes to see a complete decoupling of identity politics from anti-violence activism. Substitute a focus on reducing poverty, economic inequality, access to guns, and cultural attitudes that problems are solved through violence.

“Identity politics has been naturalized. We are afraid that if we don’t focus on identity we’ll miss the patterns for historically marginalized groups, but now we are still missing those patterns. Looking at the data, we can see that identity-based anti-violence activism both has not sufficiently reduced violence and has increased vulnerable subjecthood and fear. As such, it has not made more lives livable, so we must try another way. I hope that my book can help us do that.”

   

[1] The Human Rights Campaign is the largest LGBTQ advocacy group and political lobbying organization in the United States.