Mutual Aid Request & Root Project Call to Action

To be Black and trans is to be a system of care for ourselves even when the world teaches us that we are unworthy of care. We create systems of care by our step, by our word, by our actions. And still, we need food in our mouths, places to live, and places to be. We are not pleading for our right to live. We are here, have been here, and will continue to be here. We are calling forth your care. We are calling forth your action. We are calling forth your compassion, your love.

Kaja (my sibling) and I are seeking to create an intentional community and a home. Right now, we are at risk of homelessness by March 30 and are looking to raise $5,000 to cover our moving fees.

The Situation: TW: Rape

Kaja is currently on disability and legally cannot generate the income needed to support themselves and recently had to leave my Mother’s home due to my Mother’s lack of regard for their autism and sensory disorder. My finances have taken a huge hit after moving 3 times within the past year. I am at the lowest capacity I’ve ever been and have not had the resources, mental health support, or a stable space to recover after being raped by a staff member at the organization that brought me into movement work during an entry-level organizing fellowship in early March of 2022.

My plan, before leaving the DMV last year, was to have Kaja live with me in Baltimore should something like this happen. Due to the events of this past year, this is no longer possible. I cannot do this by myself anymore. We are fundraising to get Kaja to CA and to secure a safe space for us to live.

Kaja and I know that we are not the only folx facing realities like this. We deeply understand the importance of a stable community in healing and the importance of being brought into movement with care, love, and empowerment. This call to support is both a mutual aid effort and a collective call to action to support Black Trans people by creating a system of intentional Black Trans and Queer communities healing toward their freedom.

Currently, housing is frequently unsafe and inaccessible for Black Trans people. What little data there is around our lives shows that 42% of us have experienced homelessness. But we know the stories. We know Black trans people experience violence in homeless shelters, after incarceration, after violence. Legislative chambers work overtime to draft hundreds of bills to try and eradicate trans people. We call you forward because we need you to help us create new systems of care and ways of being. We need to heal and set new foundations, and we can do this by healing our connection to home, safety, and community. Embracing our interdependence is both the key to our survival and to our collective liberation.

What has kept me together this past year has been intentionally seeking out information and training in organizing as both an art and science, pursuing work in movement spaces to enhance my practice, and partaking in training opportunities that would enable me to understand how to hold this work in a way that empowers Black Trans people.

Black Trans people continue to be forgotten in life and death. We are killed and hated for being, whether in our communities or by the state. Our worth is inherent. To stand in our worth as Black Trans people is a dangerous thing, especially without support.

The Underground Rainbow Expiriment’s Root Initiative is an effort to create a system of intentional community houses and spaces for Black Trans people. These houses and spaces will be where we heal our minds, bodies, and spirits, starting with our connection to home. Our ancestors have taught us that to have a community is always to have a home.

In these houses, we will teach and learn from each other using joy-centered creative practices and healing practices such as mindfulness (as taught by the Plum Village Bhoudist Tradition), and generative somatics (as taught by BOLD Nation). Through intention, accountability, and care, we will help each other heal. From this, we will collaborate to educate each other politically and build power by consistently and strategically standing in our worth.

We will create freedom for ourselves individually AND collectively through coordinated and interdependent healing and joy centered practices.

This initiative closely holds Black Trans people but will impact the collective. Black Trans Liberation is Black Liberation, and Black Liberation is liberation for ALL people. When we assess pathways to liberation from a Black Queer Feminist lens, we see that for Black Women and Gender Expansive folx to be free we need:

Abolition: a world without mass incarceration.

We need a solidarity economy and an anti-capitalist framework, a world where profits are not placed over human lives and the planet.

We need decolonization and a world that is free of imperialism. We need to be actively dismantling systems of patriarchy and gender discrimination and gender-based violence.

And to hold Trans folx especially, we collectively need an increased ethos and practice of disability justice. Currently, Transness is identified as a disorder by the medical-industrial complex. As @mercifullymad stated, “These efforts are part of the same nationwide effort to attack bodymind autonomy. Transphobia and sanism are built upon each other, with the idea that being trans is crazy and to be crazy is to be deserving of having your autonomy removed by the state.” Systems created by the state demand the forfeiture of our autonomy and denial of the self.

These systems impact us all, and we are ALL responsible for dismantling them in ourselves and in the world.

Liberation is to be lived and is an embodied practice.

As Black Trans people, we imagine new worlds and possibilities because we have no choice. To live, we cannot accept that it simply must be this way.

We toss out complacency. We toss out accepting a status quo. We must be fully human. A world that can hold us can hold everyone.

So we ask you to create this with us. These worlds already exist in our conversations, in our community spaces, in our breath, and in our roots. Black Trans liberation is Black liberation. And if we can get free, everyone can get free.

Forward ever. Backwards, never.

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