Strategies for Helping Black Trans Youth Surmount Structural Violence

All children deserve a fair chance to have a successful future. But for transgender (“trans”) youth, and Black trans youth specifically, structural barriers such as overt anti-trans discriminatory legislation and rampant anti-trans bias in their communities divert their life paths into what Center for Constitutional Rights attorney Chinyere Ezie has called a discrimination-to-incarceration pipeline. The pattern looks like this: Trans children who are mistreated by their families may end up in the foster system. There, they may experience discrimination within their home placements or flee from the system to find a safer community elsewhere. Thirty-four percent of Black trans and nonbinary youth have experienced homelessness, compared to 24 percent of Black cisgender LGBTQ youth and 1 in 30 youth ages 13 to 17. If they become houseless, they seek survival methods, including sex work, which often leads them to encounter the police. When prosecutors press charges against survivors of this pipeline, courts too often do not take the entire life course of the trans person into consideration. The trans person is then sentenced to a juvenile detention center or an adult prison, often to a facility that does not correspond to their gender identity—which we consider a form of conversion therapy in itself. This experience exacerbates the trauma the trans youth has already faced and can lead to a life in and out of the criminal legal system or potentially—and increasingly, as a result of the anti-trans discriminatory legislation—suicide. There are never any actual mental health services provided to the individual throughout this process, so people caught in the pipeline are drawn into a cycle of structural violence and survival.

For coauthor Daniella Carter, this pipeline is all too familiar. Born in New York, Carter entered the foster system in her early childhood but fled from an unsafe placement and found a community on Christopher Street. Her time in the system was defined by educating her foster care agency and her legal advocates about her trans identity, even though she did not always have the language to describe what she was feeling back in 2009. But she slowly was able to access bathrooms and locker rooms that matched her identity as a woman through educating those around her. She thought of herself as her own advocate and understood that her attorneys and service providers were learning with her in the best of times; in the worst cases, however, they didn’t put any effort into learning what it meant to be trans. 

After surviving on the streets, Carter was arrested for soliciting and put into a boy’s detention center. In Carter’s experience, trans girls are more likely to be sent to juvenile detention centers than cisgender girls, who would likely go to a group home. This placement was multiply punitive; besides serving any rehabilitative purpose to help her understand what she did wrong and get her back into society, it felt like the system was trying to teach her how to become a man. She experienced this period as a form of conversion therapy. Putting her into a hypermasculine, aggressive environment was the system’s way of attempting to change her into who the state said she should be.

The discrimination-to-incarceration pipeline can be broken. It requires society to take collective action through a more holistic approach to understanding the trans youth experience. For the attorneys or judges reading this, it starts from the initial review of a case. A trans youth being pushed through the system for soliciting or prostitution should be considered in the full light of their life experience that led them to that courtroom, including whether they were involved in foster care. Over 50 percent of foster children will have an encounter with the juvenile legal system by age 17. And youth in group homes are 2.5 times more likely to be involved in the justice system. When youth from such backgrounds appear in criminal legal proceedings, all parties should understand the history that contributed to their actions, including their socioeconomic background as well as their identities. Trans youth often encounter survival work that society has criminalized after experiencing issues in their homes or foster placements. The focus from those working in the system should be on the root cause of the issue rather than treating only the downstream consequences. 

The political climate has exacerbated the stakes. We need sanctuary cities to protect trans youth’s access to social networks, health care, and gender-congruent accommodations. We need everyone allied with Black trans rights to educate and foster trans-inclusive communities and policies within all pockets of the legal community. The law need not be merely a violent, transphobic environment within which we navigate our daily lives. As the drafters of the Civil Rights Act intended, laws can be used to protect those most marginalized in society from the threat of majoritarian rule that seeks to denigrate us into oppressed states and erase our very being. 

Instead of bringing charges against Black trans youth, prosecutors should use their discretion to redirect them toward accessing alternatives to the life paths that led them to an interaction with the criminal legal system. We need defense attorneys to bring the full life history of Black trans youth and others from marginalized social backgrounds into the holistic defense of those individuals in criminal cases. Those who work within public institutions that serve Black trans youth must step up and lead others to become competent in trans issues because we are in the crosshairs of the majority of the Republican Party. We need nonprofit organizations to foster a genuine community for Black trans youth rather than engaging in performative acts to check a box and receive funding. Foster agencies must enhance and enforce best practices for creating safe spaces and homes for trans youth in the system, which includes educating parents about how to protect the LGBTQ youth homeless population in light of recent legislation.

We encourage each of you to support organizations that are doing right by our community and by Black trans youth, to learn from them, and to build more organizations like them. We see shining beacons of hope in organizations such as the Ali Forney Center, Destination Tomorrow, SMYAL (Supporting and Mentoring Youth Advocates and Leaders), and My Friend’s Place. Find a youth center in your area and learn how you can improve its competence in supporting trans youth. Organizations such as these affirm the identities and experiences of trans youth. They remind trans youth that they deserve to feel safe, respected, and joyful. Regardless of the adversities they have experienced, pure joy is their birthright. It can come from within, and it can be fostered in healthy communities. We need to focus on building and keeping equity within marginalized communities to empower individuals to create better futures. Far too often, Black trans youth are unable to access leadership opportunities or build equity, and they must rely on intermittent donations to survive. 

Carter remembers tying her sheets together to jump out of the window of her foster home to escape a system that was purportedly for her safety but, in fact, put her in dangerous, abusive settings. Carter still thinks about her friends who are still in survival mode. She once felt a sense of hope for so many Black trans youth in the foster care system and in general. But with all that is happening in the world, that hope has diminished. She can’t say she has the same level of optimism for trans resistance because, at every turning point, there is someone or something pushing more forcefully for the eradication of trans existence. 

We truly do not know what to tell Black trans youth today because they are growing up in a society that is intent on erasing our existence from the shelves of school libraries, public spaces, and sports arenas. We are forced to be advocates to end injustice while continuing to experience it ourselves. 

So we weep for our inner child. We are the next generation of our ancestral legacy—one of plight, resistance, and solidarity. We make our work a conduit for our healing. We remember that simply by living our truths out loud, our existence allows another Black trans person to simply exist and continue existing wherever, however they so choose. Through collective empowerment, we create fuel that can manifest as hope for our youth. 

Our legacy is the world we leave behind. We have to get to work to continue building the kinds of communities that we want for our Black trans youth—communities that will rely less on policing and more on sharing resources that suit individuals’ needs. We aspire to find our way back to the possibility of understanding and protecting trans youth, allowing them to seek rest and liberation alike. In such a goal, in this collective work to come for the next four years and counting, we find our hope, mission, purpose, and reason to keep on living.