[Blog/Commentary] [USA] Infrastructure (long read)

[Stephanie Stevens]

Dyssonance, USA


Infrastructure (long read)

June 29th, 2012 by Dyssonance


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For a very long time, one of the things the site here had was a photo
of me with a quickie statement about me under it. In that statement,
it noted that I am an infrastructure nut.

This is because I am. Truly, really, and in ways that often leaves me
feeling a bit alone out there in the world when I talk about stuff.

Infrastructure is, for the most part, invisible and taken for granted.
At least, once it is there. When it isn’t there, however, s0metimes
it is also not seen very well because people are way too focused on
the things they have to do because that infrastructure isn’t there —
sorta like going after trimming the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle
independently instead of putting the whole thing together.

My personal favorite posts here, and the stuff of which I am most
proud, are all ultimately about infrastructure of one sort or another.
My daily work is really all about infrastructure, as well — but I
also do a large amount of pushing and pulling of pieces.

I’m an unabashed supporter of Us taking care of Us. There are things
that we really can do if we can all get past, at least just a little,
some of the more ugly parts of our community, and so today I’m going
to talk about some of the concrete things we can do in terms of
infrastructure and to a small amount why they matter.

So here you are, The Trans Person in your community. Maybe you are
open and out and Loud and Proud. Maybe you are aren’t, but you feel
that people just know anyway.

Hell, maybe you are totally stealth.

You can do stuff in your local community that makes a difference, in a
way that is substantial and enduring and the only trick to it, of
course, is that you have to work really fucking hard to make it
happen.

You do not have to go out and start up a non profit to do it. You do
not have to be a charity. You can be a business — sole, partnership,
cooperative, corporation, doesn’t matter. You do not need some sort of
special skills or a particular outlook or a degree or massive
education. All of those things help, mind you, but they don’t matter
that much, and if you think they do, then you need to sit down and
stop and think a good long time.

What you need is pretty much a high school education, the ability to
learn, a focus on the bigger picture (whatever that means), a strong
sense of self, and the ability to search for answers to your problems.

That’s pretty much it. Because a big part of the key to doing all of
this stuff is that you never, ever want to be the one that does
everything yourself. Some of you may be familiar with the old saw “if
you want something done right, you have to do it yourself”.

That’s pretty true, but right and well are not mutually complementary
and occasionally are pretty oppositional. THis is because to do
somethng right means you have to make a judgment call about that the
inevitably lies on a moral or ethical ground, and your morals and
ethics might not be suitable for the task at hand.

Blogging

I’m not going to say that blogging is a waste of time and energy. Not
just because I blog, but really because it is a matter of what you
blog about. Too often, we get into a mode where we blog about the
latest thing the latest idiot said. We spend a lot of energy
complaining and bitching and sharing the news about who said what and
who did what to whom that was so terrible.

Sure, take for example the Cathy Brennan or Ashley Love situations
that popped up recently. Yeah, they said things that were terrible
and all that. Big fucking deal. Those people have been doing that
stuff for years.

What can you *really* do to stop them from doing that?

Yes, seriously — what can you, personally, do to stop them from saying
those kinds of things?

Ok, if you answered *anything* other than “nothing”, then you fucked
up. Sorry, let us revisit that statement.

If you answered anything other than “nothing”, then you are forgetting
that they have a legal and social right to say those things, no matter
how hurtful and harmful they may be. You are also forgetting that you
do not have the legal and social right to cause them harm or coerce
them into shutting up. You *can* do it, but the consequence are going
to be costly to you personally — fines, Jail time, and perhaps even
you losing your ability to vote or speak out against them.

The same applies to the rest of the conservative corps of people who
spend their time saying terrible things about us. Not all
conservatives do that, though — and you would be wrong to say that all
of them do.

The above functions on the basis that there is a larger picture out
there, that involves more people than just you, or just Trans folk, or
just idiots. People are allowed to act like idiots. People are
allowed to say that people are acting like idiots, as well.

But what does fighting with those two actually accomplish? It gets
people angry. It inevitably gives them something else to bitch about.
It stops us from doing real and substantive change that does genuinely
make a difference. It occasionally makes us feel better, but usually
it just gives us stomach upset and ulcers.

It creates cynicism. It feeds a sense of hopelessness instead of fights it.

All things to all people

There is something better, and it is the reason that a lot of things get done.

If nothing else, you can be a “gadfly”, and talk about the absences of
things. One of the Trans women I admire (and have fought with) is very
good at pointing out facts people tend to gloss over in their
breathless excitement.

You can speak the truth. Speaking the Truth is not the same as
calling someone a douchebag and telling the to diaf. you can do that,
but you have to do it with a light hand and preferably a more refined
sense of how to insult. But you *must* speak the Truth — that is, you
have to go down the line and show how it is that what they say is
wrong. With diagrams and circles and lines and X’s all piinting back
to facts and figures in neat little charts replete with the ever
annoying footnotes.

You can tell your story. If you do, focus on your story., It is
harder to do than it sounds — for your story to have meaning and
value, you must be laid bare, you must be open, and honest, and you
cannot avoid things just because you are shy or embarrassed or scared
or you think it is bad, and that means a kind of brutal honesty that I
can tell you sucks at times.

Guess why I can tell you that.

This blog, of course, is a combination of thsoe things — and I’ve
slowly tried my best to move away from the unproductive parts. Not
always successful (because I am human and I have feeling and I express
them and sometimes I shouldn’t).

But then there are the Builders. THe people who spend their time and
energy in building things. You can do that online. You can build a
community (though, really, we sure have a lot of those today), you can
build a serve, you can just build. tsroadmap is this kind of thing.
The support groups and forums online are this kind of thing.

ANd no, everyone isn’t going to like what you do when you do that kind
of stuff, and someone is always going to knock it and here’s the
thing: it doens’t matter.

You start a charity to help kids, people are going to say shitty
things about you. No matter who you are. You run a charity that
helps adults, people are going to say shitty things about you no
matter who you are.

I know trans people who say horrible things about every single effort
ever taken on behalf of trans people. I know some who argue that
Stonewall was a disaster and hurt us.

Yes, really. ANd they mean it, they aren’t just joking around.

You literally cannot be all things to all people.

Beneath It All

This is important to keep in mind, though, when you start building
infrastructure.

Infrastructure is deep stuff. It supports things, it enables things,
it makes things possible. To be successful and of great value, it
must be something that everyone can use — but also something that
people can choose not to use. For *any* reason.

This is the key aspect to infrastructure: it rests at a level that is
broad based, that doesn’t care about internal or external politics,
and that people love to have when they can.

Infrastructure can be social or physical. As it grows, a community
finds that it has a solid footing and that means that the voices
within can stand on something more firmly embedded in the society in
which they live. Infrastructure also allows for massive changes to a
society in ways that are often unanticipated.

Take, for example, the amount of infrastructure that you use on a
daily basis. It comes from the collective efforts of people all
around yuo — most of whom you do not know. If you have live in a
building, that was built within the systems and structures that lie
beneath all the stuff that comes together to enable that — even if you
built the physical structure yourself.

Most people tend to forget this incredibly complex web of
interdependency we have on each other because we are usually focused
on just taking care of ourselves.

The road you drive or ride or walk on. The stoplights. The schools,
the police, the fire, the hospitals, the phone system, the cable
system, the radio and television, the plumbing, the electricity, the
storm drains, the sewers, the whole panoply of things which you know
are there but we often don’t have more than a vague idea of the fact
that someone realized we needed these things and made it happen.

Not just for Cities and Towns

Infrastructure, however, is not just for cities and towns.

Any time you have a group of people with a set of needs in common, you
have the infrastructure needs. Businesses use them all the time —
contracts, bylaws, organizational stuff, how people’s jobs are laid
out and what those jobs involve and who needs to work with whom on
what and all the rest.

All of which is stuff that one person can do. But the ability of one
person to do stuff is limited by time and by resources. One person
can make a change, but that change is always small and slowly grows,
and most of the time it grows because they get help along the way.

Infrastructure facilitates the production of goods and services, and
also the distribution of finished products to markets, as well as
basic social services. IT is the stuff that makes other stuff
possible. One hundred years ago, there were very few paved roads in
the US. Cross Country travel was a challenge that took weeks. There
was the train, which everyone who could used and enjoyed, and that was
one piece of the larger puzzle as the infrastructure developed from
local system into a national one.

Long time readers will know this already: I am a strong believer in
creating our own infrastructure. For the Trans Community.

The Trans Community

To understand what that means, though, one has to understand what I
mean by The Trans Community. A community is not just the people that
like each other and that get along. I often see people who talk about
how there is no trans community because we all do not get along and we
all do not agree on anything.

I also see people who say they are not part of a community because
they do not identify a certain way, or because they are not like those
other people who don’t met their particular idea of what is this kind
of person or that kind of person.

For years, now, I have talked about how “identity” is a zero sum game.
How focusing on Identit and what we identify as is damaging and
harmful to the growth of a the community as a whole, and how it
functions to divide us into ever smaller groups and segments when we
are already an incredibly small group of people.

This is why I do not use identity marks. But let’s take one recent
example of why identity is so limiting — Cathy Brennan was recently
talked to about some of her words and actions. In that talking to,
someone said to her well “we’re both cis people” and she had a
conniption fit talking about how she doens’t identify as a cis person.

Right there, one can see how denial of identity is often used to deny
involvement in a particular group or groups. Even when it is overtly
obvious that they are such.

This is why description is a much more effective way to go. It is also
much, much more powerful, but that’s for another story. I say all of
this for the purpose of pointing out what it is that I mean by The
Trans Community.

It is a loose amalgamation of people with different backgrounds,
experiences, and lives who can be described in the widest possible
meaning as trans folk.

That’s important. It means that this kind of work, this
infrastructure building, means that you have to work for Transsexual
Separatists at the same time you work for the Transgender Borg.
Which, as you may have just realized, means that neither side is going
to like you very much.

But the good news is that both sides will still use what you create,
if you create it well.

And that is the key to infrastructure. The schools, streets,
transportation systems, and so forth that democrats use are the same
ones that republicans use, Conservatives use the same ones that
liberals use. The people who protest the funerals of dead soldiers use
the same infrastructure as the people mourning the deaths of those
soldiers.

This is where infrastructure lives. And yes, it does mean that it has
to provide a voice and a place for the people out there who may
believe and hold dear different things from you.

When I spoke about organizing, in the past, among the things I noted
was that if we were to create a large collective understanding of the
Trans community — build a grassroots system to represent the voices of
those on the street, where they live — then we must include those
trans folk who do not want to be seen as trans folk but that take the
time to speak out within trans spaces about their needs.

We need to stop looking at why they say such horrible stuff and simply
give them the space to do it.

Yes, really. This is a free country, or at least holds on to the
pretense of such.

While I’ve been doing all of this blogging on such stuff, I’ve also
been talking about my personal goals and hopes and stuff. Not just
here online, but out in the physical world (as opposed to the digital
one).

For all the good that online support groups do for us, they are, in
the end, not as good as the offline support groups can be. THey are
not as useful for finding places and people to have fun with locally.
THey are created and designed to limit interactions strictly to
controlled and “safe” spaces. Although anyone who has ever been on
these groups knows that they are not always safe spaces.

That’s a whole separate issue for later, as well.

Creating The Infrastructure

So while all of this has been going on, one of the things that I have
seen and had to deal with is the lack of any sort of infrastructure in
Phoenix for Trans people.

When I started my transition, I noted that what was available to me
was relatively small. Relatively because I was hearing the same thing
elsewhere. Especially in places that had a more “conservative”
reputation than Phoenix.

Recently, I was peripherally involved in getting a key part of the
infrastructure for the locality put together and released. Called the
Phoenix Trans Resource Guide, it lists a wide variety of resources for
trans folk — and compared to what was available when I started, it
represents a 600% increase in possible resources.

Seriously. The number of people involved is growing rapidly, and
getting that knowledge out is an important function. Having the list
but not making it available where people are, in a printed format that
they can use when they don’t have the internet (and remember, MOST
trans people do not have the internet — that means, over half cannot
access internet based sources), means the effort to assemble the list
in the first place is difficult.

The creating of this list was fairly simple. One person started
asking everyone for people they got help from. And started keeping
track of it. My involvement is relatively minor — I took the info and
assembled it into a packet that we legible and then printed it out.

It was one person making a difference, and then being helped by
literally hundreds of other people.

Based on prevalence, there are between 8 thousand and 16 thousand
trans people in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area. We haven’t even begun
to scratch the surface of the possible resources out there, or even
the ways to get that information out there.

But this is the challenge of creating infrastructure.

Solving Big Problems, simply

The key to creating infrastructure is to look at big problems, and
then start solving them a bit at a time, in a way that lets each
solution feed into solving the next problem.

This is tricky, and, in the end, it takes something hard to find and
even harder to get: money.

But one of the fascinating aspects of this is that it can be done with
fairly simple stuff.

Let’s look at a few of the big problems facing Trans people right now,
To do this, we can look at not only news reports, but also hard data —
often difficult to come by, but the key words to use when searching
for that stuff is “needs assessment”.

• Homelessness
• A sense of disconnect from other trans people.
• African Americans face intense discrimination
• Other racial and ethnic minorities face high levels of stigma as well
• Stigma is an enormous challenge, affecting even the way trans
people think and talk about themselves and each other.
• High risk of suicide
• Difficulty finding employment
• Accessing healthcare

Obviously, I’m just touching on the surface of the problems, bit I’m
doing so to look at things much more deeply.

Homelessness is solved by providing homes fro Trans people. There are
a lot of ways to do that, though. So we need to look at some of the
root causes that create a high degree of homelessness among trans
people. Stigma is big — and is in the list above, and in newspapers,
and is talked about by trans people all the time. One small part of
that stigma is discrimination. Difficulty finding employment — which
is often based in stigma — is another.

So in looking there, I see three things right off the bat. Stigma
reduction is a big deal. To reduce stigma, one has to make people more
visible, and be able to explain why it isn’t a bad thing.

Job creation is a big deal, as well as finding ways of making the jobs
that people have less hostile to them — part of the stigma work, but
also something that needs to be created.

Just as key there is finding ways to let people who have jobs that
trans people are welcome at get that information to Trans people.

Thinking on that, and noting that trans people often feel as if they
are alone, and that they have a hard time finding resources, means
that one step is to create a place where this can all happen.

So the development of a community center that is well publicized and
provides all those things is useful.

A community center, as well, also helps people to find ways to connect
with people who share their personal sets of beliefs.

Stop for a moment and think on this: Every major ethnic and racial
group in the country has community centers or their own subset of the
broader community.

There are LGBT community centers, and a few of them are great at
dealing with the trans side of things (usually because they have a lot
of trans people involved), there are some that are just ok, and there
are a lot of them that are really piss poor at it.

But when you reflect on the fact that I have the outlook — the “big
picture” or wider view or perspective from afar — that Trans people
and cisLGB people are in fact Cis Folk and Trans folk, you start to
see that most LGBT centers are Cis Centers that add on doing work for
the Trans folk, as opposed to a Trans Center that adds on doing work
for Cis folk.

This is why it is so difficult for many of them adapt their local
strategies to Trans needs — simply put, while there are between 8 and
16K trans people in the Phoenix Metro area, there are ten times that
number of LGB people.

And a community center needs to serve the broadest needs of their
community, and is going to be dealing with what is most well used and
best attended.

So simply by basic considerations of time, energy, and resources, it
is going to be hard for them to adapt to dealing with trans peoples
needs. THey don’t get them, they have to be convinced to carve out
time for them *at the expense of other groups*, and they need to do it
without stepping on toes or getting involved in the often ugly and
fractious politics that surround all those diverse comunites (because
remember that LGB is actual three commuities that often blend and
interact but also have separate needs and goals).

I know all of this because of my job. AMong the things I do as well
as my job is I serve in a political organization, and I am also on the
Board of Directors of a local community Center.

I also do other things, and those two things above I don’t talk about
much, because my focus is still on the main job.

I inherited an organization that is solving the housing problem a
little bit at a time. It has its ups and downs, and I would be
foollish to say that is solves all the problems there. Some people
don’t like it, some people do, but in the end, it is developed out the
way it is because we’ve tried everything else over several years and
this is the one that works in terms of keeping things going.

But the organization does a lot more, and part of the reason I am
involved with our local community center is that we need space to do
our stuff beyond just the people at the house. The house is a nice
place — and I don’t get there often enough.

No, I do not live in the house. If I did, it would take away from the
space available, and the rules would be really different, and we
couldn’t hold the events we do hold there with the ease that we do
now.

Now, knowing all of this stuff, I am also aware that we still need to
solve these problems. And so after some thought, I began the process
of figuring our what I would need to do in order to make it possible
for their to be a Phoenix Trans Center.

After several years in this community, Ive seen a lot of needs. I’ve
talked with people from all manner of backgrounds and groups and the
whole nine yards. I’ve listened, mostly, because as most of you can
tell after 4000 words, when I talk I can go on for hours.

And then I’ve sat and thought on them, and every time I tried to solve
a problem, one of the things I ran into was a lack of space to do it.

I was part of a different organization locally at one time, and they
put on an event, and the hardest thing about that event was finding a
space to do it in.

An enormous segment of our local community wants nothing to do with
Churches. In any way, in any form, and yes, that means even just
walking onto the grounds of one. It doesnt matter how affirming it is
or whatever, churches are not the place they will go.

Which means denying people the space and time to be part of something.

It also means that when those events were done, the attendance was low
because they were at a church.

So there was a lesson — don’t do it at a church. But an opportunity
was gained — help churches to overcome that problem.

But if we don’t do it at a chruch, that means we have to look at other
spaces, and those are relatively expensive, even with discounts should
you have a non profit with charitable tax status and all the rest.

That means, for a small community, something else has to happen.
There needs to be a place where the entire trans community — even the
people in it you don’t like or disagree with — can go to do things and
that they can rely on for stuff.

And this is, in part, why I went to the board and pointed out that we
have an unstable system. There are a lot of things that feed into it,
but in the end, I felt that having a space for our own offices, a
place that was unmarked so I could provide training services to people
without getting them upset before I’d even said two words to them, and
more, was critical to the mission of the org I worked for.

And I’m going to tell you that as a peice of infrastructure, it is
absolutely essential if you have a mentality that sys trans people
need help outside of the LGBT community.

To do this is not easy. A space that can house roughly a hundred
folks seated for a dinner event (and that can have a dinner event,
with parking and all the rest), provide multiple breakout rooms, and
still function as a space for other things, is really important and
crucial but also hard to find.

ANd when you do find them, you have to deal with the cost of them.
Here, the average cost for a 1600 square foot space (just about twice
the size of our Residence) is 17 dollars a square foot per year.
That’s almost 2300 dollars a month, and that often doesn’t include
electricity or phones or any of the other stuff — AND you have to put
in your own flooring and paint it and all the rest.

It isn’t a cheap proposition, in other words. Doing it in Los Angeles
or San Francisco or New York is bound to be even more expensive.

But once you’ve gotten a house to house people in, you need a place
for people to meet at, and then you’ve got the ability to do all
manner of things that center on giving people a place togo where they
feel a release from that stigma, and a place where you can bring peopl
eto help reduce that stigma, and, also, it just so happens, a place
where you can help trans people get employed.

I could go to a local organization and organize a job fair at least
twice a year if I had a place to do it that was already pretty much
covered. I can show films, host events, accomplish things that are
otherwise impossible to get done.,

With a location, there can be a hotline to helop with people thinking
about suicide, there is the possibility of offering emergency needs
packs, testing services, education, the works.

Getting a physical space is critical when you do those things, and,
most importantly, it lets the wider community see something that
scares the bejeezus out of them: a minority group with money.

Even if there really isn’t any there. It is one of those appearance
counts things, like dressing well for an interview.

And so it is that after all this writing, I’m thrilled to note that
TIH is indeed going forward with the creation of the next part of our
infrastructure building, and the one that I am most excited about.

Last year we got a house. We’ve had over 50 people go through that
house in the last year. I am proud of all of them.

This year, we want to do the other part of the underneath. We have
the house, now we need to build the street to it and the street beyond
it.

Takes a lot to make it happen, though.

Takes a thousand people, actually. Giving ten bucks a month. That’s
a big deal. That’s a huge deal, actually, lol.

But that’s what I’m seeking.

Because infrastructure means that much to me, and Immtired of seeing
the Trans community not have what it deserves.


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