What is Trans Justice?

In a moment where legal institutions are stripping away trans rights in the US, trans people have started to conceive of trans futures as an alternative way of promoting justice for their communities. Trans futures are a transformative project wherein communities of trans peoples envision different possible realities for bettering their lives. Trans futures happen through visioning in art practices, community activism, and more. Black and Indigenous trans women are experiencing violence and death disproportionately to other members of Canadian and American society. Yet, as the recent controversy surrounding the coverage of trans lives in the New York Times shows, this can no longer be the sole focus on trans life in culture and media.

GUTS interviewed Pierre Cloutier de Repentigny, a board member of JusticeTrans. JusticeTrans aims to provide Two Spirit, trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming peoples tools to combat injustices. Reflecting on our conversation with Cloutier de Repentigny, GUTS conceived of the following five principles of trans justice, defined alongside the essential work of JusticeTrans.

Trans people in Canada have unique experiences, yet focus on American politics within Canadian activism and discourse can overshadow this.

Cloutier de Repentigny discussed the requirement to “prove what we know inside” as trans people engaging with a transphobic society. “Whatever justice system is in place is not working for our communities,” says Cloutier de Repentigny. JusticeTrans will soon publish a report outlining the injustices trans people uniquely experience across Canada. The report centres on the experience of Black, Indigenous, and newcomer trans people, and trans people from diverse geographies across Canada, to better understand how the unique parameters of the Canadian legal system impact them.

Often, as trans activists and thought leaders, we talk about US discourse and politics without fostering a deep understanding of how these politics function within the specifics of Canadian society and law. We need activism supporting trans rights in Canada, in all its changing manifestations, not just cultural criticism about American politics, to foster trans justice. Nonetheless, in focusing on our context, we should not ignore the porous discursive boundaries surrounding trans issues and the impact American, British, and other anti-trans discourses can have on the situation of trans people in Canada.

Trans justice is transformation. However, mitigation is essential to our liberation too.

“[We are not] surprised by the results,” stated Cloutier de Repentigny when reflecting on the soon-to-be-released report completed by JusticeTrans. JusticeTrans, composed of trans people, knew what to expect from the report’s results based on their lived experiences. Housing and poverty emerged as significant policy issues impacting housing-insecure trans people and trans people living in poverty, which “hasn’t been legible to the people in control of the necessities people need,” argues Cloutier de Repentigny. “Trans people have a transformative meaning of what justice means. Things won’t change until there is a major transformation of the Canadian legal system. But we can mobilize and mitigate.”

“The law is a powerful tool because it legitimizes,” says Cloutier de Repentigny. “It can mobilize. We can recognize that the law is immensely oppressive while trying to counteract the negative aspects of the law. There is the legitimizing factor of being able to put things in a legal argument to people in positions of power because of the nature of the law itself.”

JusticeTrans finds strength in identifying with movements addressing similar political goals and believes trans futurity means projecting a promising future for all trans peoples, not just some.

Of course, trans justice aligns with decolonization and abolition for envisioning a just system of living. Equity and diversity initiatives will not make the so-called justice system in Canada just. Yet, trans thought, theory, and studies have emerged as significant fields (within the humanities under academic disciplines such as English literature, for instance) to include trans perspectives in exchange for meaningful forms of justice. Trans authors are being awarded for the “first” time. Trans artists are being collected. Trans people are on television. This is progress, we are told. At the same time, not every trans person benefits from these forms of institutional representation and thought production. For those trans people with pressing concerns such as houselessness and poverty—who are not Twitter talking heads, writers, performers, or actors—mitigation of housing policy, for instance, is a crucial difference between “thought” and “justice” essential for their immediate survival.

Trans justice is Indigenous justice.

Suppose trans peoples are to engage with the Canadian legal system to contend with oppressive facets of Canadian society. In that case, they must also deal with the “messiness” of that, argues Cloutier de Repentigny. Trans justice starts with recognizing that the Constitution has no validity because it has no founding. “The Supreme Court is saying that the doctrine of discovery is invalid,” argues Cloutier de Repentigny. “But the Crown asserted sovereignty, meaning that Canada exists just by its virtue of existing. It’s stolen land and not valid. How can you create a just future based on this state that exists on a lie and an invalid foundation internally to the system? In terms of the treaties, the bad faith of many of the Crown’s negotiators, the context of duress linked to many negotiations, and the continuous violations of the intent behind the treaties from the Indigenous side and of the written version of the treaties make them a poor ground for the legitimacy of the settler state.” Without continued kinship and an honoring of treaty relationships between Indigenous peoples and Canada, “Nothing supports the existence of the state.”

Heteropatriarchy, colonialism, and anti-Black racism are systems of oppression that work in tandem. JusticeTrans recognizes a connection between trans justice and other social issues. JusticeTrans finds strength in identifying with movements addressing similar political goals and believes trans futurity means projecting a promising future for all trans peoples, not just some.

Connecting trans justice with other political movements is sometimes critiqued as identity politics. However, the theoretical underpinnings of this argument come from a white masculinist segment of queer theory. In works like Is the Rectum A Grave and The Freudian Body, queer theorist Leo Bersani chipped away at material conditions, advocating instead for renouncing identification as a destructive desire to annihilate the Other. However, purveyors of queer theory fail to acknowledge that Bersani’s thought experiments—which provide much of the basis for the field of queer theory, desire, ruin, and thought as we now know it—were completed by making postmodern objects of entire countries of Black peoples and Asian boys within his arguments. The concepts that define queer theory as a renunciation of recognition overlook the racist and misogynist development of contemporary queer theory that haunts contemporary queer and trans thought. Indigenous peoples, for instance, will never do away with recognition because they view themselves as part of peoples with histories and systems of knowledge that extend well beyond the limits of the imperial logic that colonized our territories and became queer and trans theory. Even then, Indigenous peoples had trans community members long before the colonial project invaded territories now known as Canada. Despite the ways that racialized trans people do not fit within the parameters of queer refusal, ironically, people racialized as Other were the basis of the field of queer theory. This is why a limited notion of “identity politics” extending from 1990s queer theory only hinders our understanding of trans justice.

Trans justice means moving beyond survival and imagining how we can live.

It is disheartening to hear trans Indigenous youth, in the image of the anti-futurist theory and thought of white trans and queer Elders, that they believe they won’t live past 25. Queer theorist Lee Edelman would evolve queer theory into a fetishization of annihilation and renouncement of the future altogether. This fetishization of annihilation in queer and trans theory is perhaps best exemplified in the theory of Jack Halberstam fetishizing urban ruins, which are known to me as the backdrop of communities of houseless people, often paired with queer gentrification disguised as queer becomings.

Refusing to construct our realities around violence actively resists the white masculinism that was encoded into early trans scholarship by daring to be a part of creating a better future for ourselves. It is not unheard of to connect feminist and trans ideologies. Trans feminist scholar Viviane Namaste has extensively discussed the importance of relating material conditions to trans activism and thought. Not all feminism is radical feminism, and trans women have long bolstered a project of trans feminism that seeks to make more just worlds rather than create more critical responses to unjust worlds. The answer isn’t to flatten that difference (a recent trend in trans theory attempting to make sense of the intersections of gender and race in America). Instead, we must acknowledge difference to overcome the discursive challenges queer and feminist theory experienced in the 1990s.

Trans people and our ability to envision transformative forms of justice for our communities can bring about collective liberation. Together, we can construct something else.

“How can we all collectively live well?” asks Cloutier de Repentigny. “We must envision collective justice. Trans justice means everyone should be able to live a good life.” Cloutier de Repentigny’s mention of living a “good life” bears resemblance to miyo-pimâtisiwin, which translates to “the good life” in Cree. miyo-pimâtisiwin is an outcome of living as Cree people in a way that honours Cree laws, fosters wellness, and promotes kinship. Indigenous youth should live miyo-pimâtisiwin on their own territories. The nihilist turn in queer and trans theory denouncing “worlding” is, ironically, a material condition. It is the material condition of writing from a position of having never witnessed ongoing, systemic annihilation such as the genocide of a peoples.

In her book Dear Science and Other Stories, Katherine McKittrick describes anticolonial thought as happening across a network of different sites constantly remaking themselves throughout various worlds. McKittrick draws from anticolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter and her theorizations of story as a method for carving out Black liberation and otherwise worlds, rather than Black objecthood based on colonial notions of time and space. Trans Indigenous peoples should dare to dream their futures. Trans Indigenous peoples should world something other than those that have annihilated their peoples. To imagine trans Indigenous worlding as an innate destruction of other worlds (instead of as a form of collective justice, for example)—because that’s the reality that colonial logic has lived out—is so totally your baggage, not mine, to quote the TikTok comments section.

Trans justice is trans kinship.

“When something bad happens, you don’t call the police,” says Cloutier de Repentigny reflecting on the relationship between trans peoples and the Canadian justice system. “You know you don’t have services. You know you can only rely on your community and kinship. Your chosen family.” While completing the JusticeTrans report, Cloutier de Repentigny reflected on the realities of trans people navigating experiences of violence and injustice. They argue that, even with human rights protections, the support trans people receive when navigating the criminal justice system does not provide the proper reprieve from the violence they have experienced and continue to experience while engaging with the system.

However, Cloutier de Repentigny says that law is just “a system of rules that governs relationships between peoples.” Collective trans justice can mean enacting ways of relating that provide kinship and a care network outside unjust systems. Trans justice could mean seeking ways to function well as support systems for one another. How can we construct healthy relationships between people that have to live together and share space? How can we define guidelines for dealing with any conflict outside criminal justice? Trans people and our ability to envision transformative forms of justice for our communities can bring about collective liberation. Together, we can construct something else. Nihilism is not the answer, says Cloutier de Repentigny. “Start from the point of how do we build this without being tied to the preconceived notion of the state,” says Cloutier de Repentigny. Yes, our current society is oppressive to trans people. What is next?