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1) Why did you become a lawyer?
I was doing a lot of street activist stuff for years, and had always been interested in the legal aspects of civil rights struggles I'd studied. I think I definitely had some misconceptions about what legal training was and what role lawyers have in social movements. I've since learned a lot about how legal work is often not the most radical work, and doing legal work radically is not something that you can learn in law school. For the most part, a lot of legal work is very professionalized, hierarchical and either reformist or based on social service models that create problematic dynamics of hierarchy between the client and the lawyer (particularly because problematic class and race power dynamics are frequently at play since lawyers are disproportionately people with a lot of privilege, and people entangled in punitive legal systems are disproportionately low-income people and people of color). I am really interested in developing models for legal services and legal organizations that address these dynamics. The organization I founded, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, is developing a collective structure that I'm really excited about. We researched successful and unsuccessful collective organizations all over the country. We'll have our collective handbook and employee handbook up on our website soon so hopefully other people can get inspired by some of the ideas and try new, non-hierarchical structures in their work.
2) Are the various Mental health systems of NYC
involved or intertwined with the legal work you do
there? If so, would you please share some of your
experiences.
Having relationships with mental health providers is very central to my work. There are two big reasons: 1) because of the severe harassment, discrimination, and violence that trans people face day-to-day, many of us experience mental and emotional distress and after effects of trauma, so connecting people in our community with effective mental health services is essential, and 2) because trans and gender variant people are still viewed primarily through a medicalized lens (and because "Gender Identity Disorder" is still viewed as a psychiatric disorder), medical evidence is frequently central in legal struggles for trans rights. This is particularly difficult given that most mental health professionals are still severely under-educated about gender identity issues, and often hold problematic views of trans people that understand strict binary gender as the only "healthful" expression of gender. We still face uphill battles as we struggle to convince courts, medical professionals, schools, hospitals, jails, and other institutions to understand gender variance, to end coercive practices that try to force people to express traditional gender characteristics associated with the gender assigned to them at birth, and to recognize the self-understood gender identities and expressions of all people.
3)What are your thoughts about the U.S.'s mental
health systems and how do you think they impact the
lives of queer/trans/low income people?
I think that good mental health care can be a wonderful resource for people, but coercive and punitive mental health care is still the norm for low income people, especially those caught up in institutions like shelters, schools, jails and prisons, group homes, and the like, and especially for people who transgress gender norms. While health insurance and Medicaid/medicare programs still fail to fully cover the mental health care people seek voluntarily, and while proving psychiatric disability for purposes of getting SSI/SSD benefits or Americans with Disability Act coverage is made more and more difficult, at the same time mental health 'care' is still being used punitively and involuntarily against low-income people and people who transgress gender norms extensively. Young people, especially, are still being hospitalized for gender variance, trans youth are being forced in to "sex offender" therapy even when they have committed no sex offense in juvenile justice systems, and poor people all over are told that if they are 'non-compliant' and don't take medications that professionals have determined they need they will be kicked out of shelters or other housing. Notions of 'compliance' and 'rehabilitation' are continually being used, in these contexts, to put low-income people under a microscope, and maintain control over their bodies and minds, and people who transgress gender norms often experience these circumstances disproportionately.
4) What do you think the term "mental health" means to activists?
I think that activists really need to prioritize our mental health, especially if we are working day to day with people in crisis, and especially if we ourselves are also targets of violence and discrimination. I have seen that the mental effects of burnout and lack of self care can include territoriality, self-sabotage, disconnection with the work or with clients/co-workers/members, disrespect for people confronting oppressions, ranking of oppressions, and competitiveness. Our work needs to be actively driven by compassion, love, a sense of abundance. I think that as people are over-stressed and over-worked we often manifest in our activism internalized capitalist approaches to work, based on a model of scarcity, and this makes it impossible to build good coalitions, be ready to reevaluation our tactics and change them, move past internalized racism, sexism, xenophobia, and classism, etc. We get over ego-identified with our work or with a particular organization or idea and forget how to change, how to honor multiple strategies and multiple qualities in ourselves and others. I think activists really need hobbies (which I define as skilled activities that you're not trying to be perfect at) to remember to value various parts of ourselves and honor a diversity of tactics.
Now for the obligatory zine questions:
5) Do you consider yourself revolutionary? Why or why not?
I consider myself to be resisting, and also to continually be complicit in a lot more systems of oppression than I can recognize, and to be hoping to keep seeing that complicity and working on it, and to keep resisting.
6) What's in your music player right now?
the postal service, the mean corner, destiny's child, the coup, the smiths, and lately I'm secretly addicted to the light music station.
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