Beyond Resilience

Trans Coalitional Activism as Radical Self-Care

Elijah Adiv Edelman

Studies of queer and trans suffering, resilience, care, and vitalities are
invariably also investigations into the difficult and painful articulations
of lives that feel worth living along with deaths that feel okay dying. The
notion of resiliency, referring to a conditional state of overcoming dif-
ficult situations, neglects to fully encompass our understandings of risk,
vulnerability, and life making.1 Specifically, in this article I explore the
ways in which Washington, DC – based trans activists discuss that which
renders viable life as being constituted by shared coalitional labor in a
contemporary moment that is violently anti-Black, xenophobic, misogy-
nist, and distinctly antitrans. While health researchers have long noted the
beneficial role a coalition serves in better representing needs in research, 2
I focus here on how individuals meet their needs not through solitary and
normative resilience strategies but within and through spaces of coali-
tional action. This approach to radical care encourages us to rethink what
constitutes livable life. The necropolitics of trans lives — those that get
marked as morally suspect and intrinsically disposable, representing “the
condition for the acceptability of putting to death”3 — coexists with what I
frame here as trans vitalities, or that which makes lives worth living.
This article, in its exploration of trans activism, coalitional labor,
and radical care, is also an exploration of how the production of the
“transnormative subject” articulates with notions of resilience as well as
spatiality and place.4 As I discuss here, the ideologies that underlie the
notion of trans resilience value a simple “universal trajectory of coming
out/transition, visibility, recognition, protection, and self- actualization.”
However, lived experience does not follow a linear path. The focus on
and celebration of the few trans lives that might reproduce this model of

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 resilience “remains uninterrogated in [their] complicities and convergen-
ces with biomedical, neoliberal, racist, and imperialist projects.”5 In other
words, what constitutes valued trans embodiment and practice becomes
the template through which resilience imagines both life making and how
care is found.

Looking at Life through Death

Barbara, a white trans woman in her early sixties and lifetime local to the
Washington, DC, metropolitan area, got involved in trans activism after
being told by her therapist that she needed to find a trans support group.
Having visited several regional groups and feeling disappointed by what
she described as “complaining” by attendees, she found the DC Trans
Coalition (DCTC), a trans activist group of which I was also a member.
In an e-mail, she explained to me in greater detail what brought her to
trans activist work:

When my therapist told me that I was done, or finished (done makes it sound
like I’m a muffin and the timer just went off, time to get out of the oven!)
I should seek out a support group. . . . I found out way back then, TEGA
was for the crossdressers. Not me. MAGIC was a lot of people who were
unhappy that their wives didn’t understand them. Umm, not my problem,
so I went to the [DCTC] town hall. I was impressed. Here were people who
were actually doing something about making life better for everyone. Sure
it’s about the T, but others benefit also, sort of an ancillary benefit. So I went
to my first meeting. . . . My involvement with DCTC has opened doors that
I thought were closed to me. Because of the encouragement of its members,
I’m in college now. I have met some truly awesome people and have grown
so much. I can’t imagine my [life] without it.

Barbara was dead several years after getting involved in trans activism and
not long after she shared this e-mail with me. Barbara wasn’t murdered.
She did not commit suicide. She did not die as a result of complications
related to living with HIV. She was not homeless or without a source of
income when she died. Her funeral, which we did not need to fundraise
to hold, was well attended by surviving members of her natal family and
of the trans activist communities she was a member of. And members
of her birth and trans activist family carried her body to her grave. In
many ways, in death just as in life, she provided us with an opportunity
to engage in forms of shared radical care. I position the kind of radical
care underlying Barbara’s activist work, and even within the space carved
out by her death, as constituting “vital but underappreciated strategies
for enduring precarious worlds,” as Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani
Hobart and Tamara Kneese describe in their introduction to this special

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 issue of Social Text. Indeed, while the circumstances surrounding Barba-
ra’s life, and death, contrast with that experienced by most trans activists,
our coalitional labor, in life and even in death, provided a kind of care that
defies conventional descriptions. Our shared labor, as Barbara noted, was
not simply about supportive care but, echoing Hobart and Kneese, was
constituted by “autonomous direct action and nonhierarchical collective
work.”
Importantly, the ways in which Barbara’s death created desperately
needed spaces of radical care and closure does not, in fact, resemble how
other activists we worked with died — the murders, the suicides, the pre-
mature and likely preventable deaths, the unclaimed bodies, the funerals
that never happened because there were no funds to hold them, the natal
families that were never involved, and the chosen families that were never
invited. Barbara is an outlier. However, I begin this article with her not
because her death exemplifies or directly contrasts with trans lives and
deaths but because it is often through the messy and frequently traumatic
incoherence of death and loss that we experience the full potential of radi-
cal care. Moreover, we can striate these forms of radical care with what
Sara Ahmed refers to as “desire lines.” In thinking about resistance and
willfullness, Ahmed reminds us, “when you stray from the official paths,
you create desire lines, faint marks on the earth, as traces of where you or
others have been. A willfulness archive is premised on hope: the hope that
those who wander away from the paths they are supposed to follow leave
their footprints behind.”6 When we situate Barbara’s life, activist work,
and even death within the broader context of what constitutes resilience,
radical care, or vitalities, we can imagine those desire lines — the social,
political, and personal legacies of our lives — that she both followed and
left for others to move over, across, and through. In this article, I explore
how radical care and those desire lines structure frameworks of “trans
vitalities” as necessary shifts toward disrupting normative expectations
of care, resilience, and, ultimately, that which is understood to constitute
a life worth living.

Radical Care as Trans Vitalities

Multiple studies of trans health discursively or literally mark particular

trans persons or bodies as at risk or as engaging in high-risk activities.7
While resilience frameworks help us identify structural inequities, partic-
ularly among trans women of color, I consider here how we might rethink
concepts like risk and care. Specifically, rather than approach risk as
something we do, we can view risk as applied to bodies or practices viewed
as morally or ethically suspect. Specifically, I focus here on how risk and
resilience are constituted and constrained by one’s agency or structural

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 limitations. Importantly, situating risk, or the overcoming of risk through
resilience, as active behaviors or passive vulnerability erases our complex
intertextual subjectivities, as well as the structural and symbolic violence
that often results in negative health outcomes for trans persons. 8 As such,
a framework of radical care allows us to explore alternative models of
trans vitalities for reconfiguring the risk/resilience binary toward mod-
els employed by both informal trans social networks and harm reduction
agencies in Washington, DC. By focusing on how life making in trans
coalitional spaces may very well coexist within spaces heavily marked
by death and loss, I document here how these vitalities articulate within
and across social justice movements, which ultimately provide alternative
models of stability that do not require the kind of normativity a resil-
ience framework demands. In short, I discuss here how the personal and
political transformative power of coalition-based trans social justice work
functions as a form of radical care and productive life force for many of
the participants of the projects explored in this text.
In recent years models of resilience have emerged as a trope within
academic fields and activist and social media circles, with calls for self-
care and adaptation as a means of resistance. While human and bioecolog-
ical resilience is certainly advantageous, this article considers implications
of resilience as a force that obscures and diverts attention away from rela-
tional and structural forms of violence and how directing attention toward
self- determined viabilities and vitalities illuminates how communities
identify and fill fissures or ruptures in the continuity of oppressive struc-
tures, pedagogies, policies, spaces, places, and laws. Indeed, resilience is
broadly appealing in that it offers individuals and groups the opportunity
to celebrate ingenuity and survival. Yet, resilience is also implicated in the
reproduction of one’s own subjectification. Rarely is group resiliency pri-
oritized against more individualized forms of adaptation or forms of radi-
cal care offered through activist work. However, as discussed here, group
resilience is far more “powerful as a buffer for transgender individuals
when they are faced with overwhelmingly bleak social and environmental
circumstances.” 9 Importantly, the fetishization of resilience results in a
failure to identify and call for an end to systems that produce the very
inequities that some are expected to overcome. In other words, resiliency
is an option only for those who are capable of individually overcoming
systemic inequity and structures of power.
Trans vitalities, in contrast to concepts like resilience, center an eth-
ics of radical care. I argue that trans vitalities function in three distinct
ways: (a) to disrupt and rethink what valuable, viable, or quantifiable qual-
ity of life looks like; (b) to shift our understandings of community toward
coalition; and (c) to offer a methodological, theoretical, and application-
based set of tools that integrates a radical trans politics and a community-

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 based approach to addressing trans lives. Finally, I position trans vitalities
as following Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” as an “analytic lever”
toward an “incitement to inhabit and to track the affective attachment to
what we call ‘the good life,’ which is for so many a bad life that wears out
the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions
of possibility within it.”10 Rather, in defining the potential transgression
of radical care, this “negates the dictates of the norm and yet paradoxi-
cally reinforces the norm’s effects (by not simply refusing the norm, but
rather negating it, transcending it and completing it). It exceeds a limit
but, in its excess, verifies the limit itself.”11 In other words, radical care can
be defined as radical only through explaining how it differs from normal
care. In effect, definitions of normal care also create the limits for how
to define radical care. When applied to normative expectations of viable
trans life, as articulated by the capacity to seamlessly integrate oneself
into hetero- and cis-normative life worlds, we see that normativity is that
which creates — rather than promises relief from — suffering. Barbara, like
many of those discussed in this article, was understood to be resilient only
as a result of the transformative power of transgressive activist work.
In focusing on trans vitalities, as well as our understandings of stan-
dard versus radical care, I find it useful to highlight the ways in which
marked and unmarked standards of care provide insight into the limits
of the concept of trans community. There is no single, unilateral form
of trans experience that can be meaningfully called upon to define all
those classified within this community without erasing difference. Rather,
those who may identify with or be placed in the trans community range
in age and reflect vastly disparate racial, classed, linguistic, sexualized,
and educational backgrounds. It is through practices of elision that such
issues of inequality, systemic abuse, and violence become invisible. With
these concerns of inequity in mind, I identify community here to represent
a “symbolic totality as well as a practical multiplicity.”12 That is, while
there is no singular trans community, the experiences of the participants
explored here index the symbolic totality of the phrase and the partici-
pants refer to themselves as belonging to a trans community.
Additionally, as noted by scholars engaged in trans- specific aca-
demic work, the notion of a cohesive trans community fails to acknowl-
edge that there is no singular kind of trans person.13 While I continue to
utilize the term trans here as a gloss for a diverse and complex multitude
of expressions and identities, I have chosen to shift away from the artificial
boundedness of the term community. Instead, I focus here on coalitions
as a frame of reference when (re)considering ethnographic depictions of
trans lives. As anthropologist Vered Amit cautions, community, as an
analytical category, “always require[s] skeptical investigation rather than
providing a ready-made social unit upon which to hang analysis”14 As

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 such, I employ the language of trans coalitions in this text as a means to
highlight the critical racial, classed, and gendered implications of US his-
torical renderings of trans and queer(ed) bodies in space.

Assessing Trans Needs in Washington, DC

In this article I draw from two distinct but overlapping research proj-
ects: (a) a series of community roundtables and mapmaking conducted
among trans-identifying persons in Washington, DC, and (b) the design
and implementation of a large scale DC-focused trans community needs
assessment (DCTNA) survey. Importantly, while I make a point here to
critique the use of metrics to inform our understandings of livable life, I
include the survey data to highlight the double bind of presenting research
on trans communities. Specifically, the impetus behind conducting a sur-
vey emerged from a historical pattern of policy makers, governmental
official, researchers, and even gender- and sexuality-based community
organizations viewing first-hand accounts provided by trans activists in
DC as too anecdotal to support legal or structural changes.15 In many
respects the data collected during the community roundtables is both
replicated and supported in the DCTNA data and analysis. Moreover,
following traditional academic models, the replication of data outcomes in
additional studies functions as a validity check, allowing the researcher to
emphasize the veracity of the findings. However, as I argue here, metrics
overly simplify the enormous complexity of lived experience and, in the
absence of the kind of overlapping data sets utilized in this article, often
stand in for, rather than support, first-person accounts.16 Thus, my goal
here is not to argue for entirely replacing quantitatively anchored data col-
lection but, rather, to emphasize the danger of overly relying on numbers
to measure life. Finally, it is important to note that both the community
roundtables and mapmaking research project, along with the subsequent
DCTNA, were reviewed and approved by the institutional review board
at American University in Washington, DC, where I completed my doc-
toral work.17 While institutional review board approval does not inherently
translate to degrees of safety for participants, the kinds of information
shared in both of these research projects, including providing permissions
to reproduce the visual medium of community- centered maps, demand a
level of care that requires a system of checks and balances. Additionally,
while I functioned as the principal investigator in title, the research pro-
cess and outcome were guided by a consensus-based coalition of commu-
nity activists involved in the DCTC, an informal and nonhierarchal trans
activist group based in DC, as well as other informal and formal groups.
In early 2010, members of the DCTC, including myself, began what
would become a three- stage process to produce the largest US-city-based,

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 trans-specific, community-produced trans needs assessment project. Dur-
ing what would eventually function as the first stage of the project, we held
a series of community roundtables. At these roundtables we asked partici-
pants to draw a map Washington, DC, as a “trans city.” We followed this
activity with a discussion about these maps. We closed each roundtable
by collecting questions participants wished to see addressed in a larger-
format research project. At the close of this phase, occurring in 2010 and
2011, we reached a total of 108 trans-identifying persons.
Importantly, the data collected during the roundtable discussions
and mapmaking reflect lived experience — and the centrality of radical
care — in ways that neither just interviews nor a survey can capture. This
kind of mapping moves away from normative cartographic methods of
GIS and objective scientific means and instead utilizes conceptualizations
of space and place in which to visualize the city as lived.18 The act of map
production encouraged participants to consider how they fit in within the
city, both physically and metaphorically. Additionally, we utilized this
notion of “radical cartography” as a means by which to “actively promote
social change” with the resulting research.19 We drew heavily from the
central concepts in community-based research, which shifts the goals of
traditional research “with the purpose of solving a pressing community
problem or effecting social change.”20
In response to a consistently articulated desire during the round-
tables for a larger DC-based, trans-focused project, we chose to imple-
ment a large- scale needs assessment in the form of a survey. We based the
language of the DCTNA on issues raised during the roundtables, as well
as those in nationally used LGBT- specific surveys, such as the joint 2011
survey produced by the National Center for Transgender Equality and
the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, as well as federal census ques-
tions and community-produced surveys used in local needs assessment
projects, such as the 2007 Virginia Transgender Health Initiative Study
and the 2000 Washington Transgender Needs Assessment Survey. After
two rounds of internal testing, the survey in both English and Spanish was
released in both electronic and paper form in May 2012 and was closed in
May 2013. Upon closing, 624 surveys were completed, with a total of 521
surveys qualifying for inclusion in the data analysis. In November 2015
we released Access Denied, a 104-page executive summary examining the
survey data. 21
The results from the DCTNA reflected a large cross-section of
what trans might look like and provided data that we now had docu-
mented in a form more readily acknowledged as valid by policy makers,
researchers, and other direct service providers. Approximately 63 percent
of survey respondents identified as trans or gender-nonconforming and
were assigned male at birth, and approximately 37 percent identified as

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 trans or gender-nonconforming and assigned female at birth. The racial
demographic breakdown for the survey was approximately 59 percent
respondents of color and 41 percent white respondents. Over 46 percent
of respondents reported earning less than $10,000 a year, compared with
only 11 percent of Washington, DC, residents as a whole.22 Trans persons
of color, particularly trans women of color, reflected the greatest eco-
nomic hardships among those we surveyed, with 57 percent making less
than $10,000 a year. White trans persons were six times more likely than
trans persons of color to have secured a higher education degree. Sixteen
percent of white participants reported experiencing financial hardship in
higher education, whereas 25 percent of Black participants and 70 percent
of Latinx participants reported similar hardships. Seventy- one percent
of trans masculine persons reported attaining a higher education degree,
compared to only 29 percent of trans feminine individuals.
The survey also reflected disturbingly high rates of assault and
harassment. Of those surveyed, 74 percent had been verbally assaulted, 42
percent had been physically assaulted, and 35 percent had been sexually
assaulted; 57 percent of trans feminine individuals had been assaulted,
compared to 17 percent of trans masculine individuals; and 47 percent of
trans feminine individuals had been sexually assaulted, compared to 14
percent of trans masculine individuals. Experiences of assault were more
common among trans persons of color compared to white trans persons:
54 percent of Black and 60 percent of Latinx trans persons had been phys-
ically assaulted compared to 21 percent of whites; 47 percent of Black and
56 percent of Latinx trans persons had been sexually assaulted compared
to 14 percent of whites. Among Black trans persons, 62 percent of trans
feminine individuals had been physically assaulted compared to 14 per-
cent of Black trans masculine individuals. Among Latinx trans persons,
70 percent of trans feminine individuals had been physically assaulted
compared to 27 percent of trans masculine individuals.
Finally, the survey documented an ongoing health crisis for trans
persons living in DC. While 8 percent of the general population of Wash-
ington, DC was uninsured in 2012, twice as many trans persons were
uninsured during the survey period, and more than one out of every four
with insurance relied on public sources, such as Medicare and Medicaid.
Although many respondents reported “good to excellent” general health,
reporting “poor to fair” health was associated with high rates of poverty
and past discrimination. Discrimination from health care providers is
particularly important when considering trans health concerns. Among
those who had seen a doctor, 19 percent had been denied medical care
at least once due to being perceived as transgender. Unlike many other
categories of experience, there were no statistically significant differences
in denial of medical care based on gender identity or race/ethnicity. How-

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 ever, a significant association was found between medical discrimination
and perceived quality of health. Among those who had been medically
discriminated against, 24 percent rated their health as poor to fair, com-
pared to 13 percent of those who had not been medically discriminated
against.
Importantly, of those surveyed, 65 percent have undergone hormone
treatment or body enhancement for the purpose of transitioning. Another
23 percent have not yet had a procedure but wanted to, and 12 percent did
not wish to have any procedures. As such, given many of the barriers to
accessing treatment through licensed providers, the use of unlicensed care
is particularly important when considering trans health needs. Among
those who have undergone treatment, 30 percent reported getting pro-
cedures from an unlicensed practitioner or source (e.g., internet). Use
of unlicensed sources differed significantly by gender identity and race/
ethnicity. Trans feminine individuals and persons of color were more
likely to use at least one unlicensed source or provider compared with
trans masculine individuals and whites.
In addition to physical health, the mental health status of trans pop-
ulations is often ignored beyond official diagnostic concerns outlined in
the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders. Suicide remains the tenth most common cause of death
in the United States, with roughly 3.7 percent of the general population
reporting suicidal ideation in the past year and 0.6 percent having made
an actual suicide attempt. In contrast, 60 percent of surveyed individu-
als report having seriously considered suicide at least once in their lives,
and 34 percent had attempted suicide in the past, with 10 percent having
attempted within the twelve months prior to the survey — twenty times
that of the general population.

Mapping, Big Data, and Coalitional Meaning Making

The community-produced maps collected in the first phase of this project

elucidate lived experience in ways that metrics collected from the survey
cannot. It should be stressed that, while I make use of data here, I do so
while simultaneously critiquing the use of big data to measure a livable
life. Indeed, were one to analyze the data collected in this survey in the
absence of the roundtable discussions and mapmaking activity, it would
seem that, with few exceptions, the trans persons that participated in this
survey have a dismal quality of life. However, variables such as yearly
income and HIV status are factors that researchers and academics, such
as myself, latch on to as a means of providing evidence that all is not equal.
This is a point that cannot be emphasized enough: the metrics that are
used to define resilience are the same metrics used to define suffering.

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 In other words, lived experience is not measurable by rates of poverty
alone, nor is having class mobility evidence of living a good life. Yet, at
the same time, we cannot ignore the materiality of how resources are
allocated according to need or how lacking housing, sustainable income,
or medical resources is a quality- of-life issue. Rather, data such as those
collected in the DCTNA, placed in the context of community-produced
maps, would suggest that life is not measured by just income or health
but, rather, is marked by where one experiences belonging and where one
accesses care and support. Importantly, this is not to suggest that feeling
belonging replaces housing, or that experiencing care is static in time or
place. Just as space is not inherently safe, care does not exist based solely
on the space. In short, my use of these data and mapping in this text is to
provide multiple platforms and contrasts toward elucidating livable life
and, in multiple contexts, forms of radical care.
Historically, maps have served as a way to silence and erase deval-
ued experience and notions of space.23 In many ways, mapmaking serves
as a way to make visible the felt experiences of negotiating the world as
an embodied subject. As Brown and Knopp highlight, Henri Lefebvre —
known for his innovations around social space — focuses on the dialectic
between space and the body and notes that “the capacity of bodies that
defy visual and behavioral expectation to disrupt the shared meaning of
public space” reflects the multidirectionality of meaning making. 24 Bod-
ies do not move through vacuums of space but, rather, are always already
engaged in and through discourses of power. Here participants were not
asked merely to produce a map of the city but, rather, to produce a map
from their perspectives as persons with trans identities or subjectivities.
Trinh T. Minh-ha situates this kind of “territorialized knowledge” as one
that “secures for a speaker a position of mastery: I am in the midst of a
knowing, acquiring, deploying world — I appropriate, own and demarcate
my sovereign territory as I advance.”25 To claim space, however margin-
alized or ignored, as one’s own is a claim to territorialized and embod-
ied knowledge. Specifically, the maps produced during this project made
clear that many spaces of care were measured in terms of trans coalitional
labor rather than officially designated spaces of biomedical, psychosocial,
or community care.
Moreover, rather than see the map as a “mirror of the world,” I
situate maps here as forms of power, as well as texts that index somatic
and affective experience. 26 Chris Perkins also reminds us that “a focus
for cultural research into map use might shift towards participation and
observation of real uses, as well as interviews, focus groups and read
aloud protocols” in the process of mapmaking and map evaluation.27 The
maps in this project were produced in community roundtable settings,
where participants created their own maps and came together at the end

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 of each roundtable to discuss core features of importance. This kind of
community mapping represents a “democratized mapping” that “offers
new possibilities for articulating social, economic political or aesthetic
claims” through shifting knowledge production from the individual to
the community. 28
Building on John Brian Harley’s discussion of maps as social texts,
I want to stress the utility of community-produced maps as valid data
sources.29 Indeed, maps “actively construct knowledge, . . . exercise power
and . . . can be a powerful means of promoting social change”30 To this
I would add that social change can be promoted in the (re)situating of
maps and narratives as mutually constitutive of each other. This project
attends to space and place as similarly constructed, as real or imagined
sites of social interaction. These “spatial forms” that link individuals to
“the social world, providing the basis of a stable identity,” serve as a basis
for understanding lived trans experience in a dynamic fashion. 31
Finally, while the maps collected here no doubt reflect a prompt to
articulate DC through the lens of what constitutes trans experience, these
maps nonetheless still confer meaning not only about space and place
but also about experience, affect, the body, and power. In this project,
these maps serve as visual forms of text as well. Rather than understand-
ing maps simply as forms of direct representation, I consider maps as
texts that serve a multitude of projects and purposes, such as giving us
visual, textual representations of lived experience.32 That is, maps provide
insight into personal experience but also represent broader sociopolitical
discourses of where trans people should or should not go. In many ways
we can situate maps as both visual forms of knowledge and experience
and as depictions of temporalized embodied movement through space.
This depiction then provides us with a dynamic dimension to otherwise
relatively static narratives about space and place.
Following the work of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, I posit trans coali-
tional labor as a form of radical care as foregrounded by the knowledge
that “collaborations create new interests and identities, but not to every-
one’s benefit.”33 Rather than solely employing the term community to
capture the relationships between and across trans- spectrum-identifying
persons, I instead use coalition here while remaining aware of how even
radical forms of care may reproduce inherent inequities across and among
different lived experiences. I use coalition intentionally as a referent to
the relationships between trans experiences or identities of, specifically,
those who participated in this project. My use of this term builds from
a basic definition provided by Ronda C. Zakocs and Erika M. Edwards,
wherein a coalition is composed of people of varied backgrounds, such as
“local government officials, non-profit agency and business leaders, and
interested citizens who align in formal, organized ways to address issues

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 of shared concern over time.”34 Importantly, Zakocs and Edwards’s defi-
nition primarily frames difference through one’s relative relationship to
decision-making power. Additionally, this explanation implies a degree of
formality in coalitional structures and goals. In contrast, my use of coali-
tion is not to elaborate on particular striations of difference or to identify
coalitional goals. Following the claim that “in practice, coalition rather
than community is key to understanding contemporary political move-
ments,”35 I utilize coalitional spaces as a way to continually bring attention
to the differences within, as well as collaborative nature of, community
production.
I highlight here three maps collected from the roundtable discus-
sions. 36 Derek, a white trans man in his midtwenties, segregates DC into
three different levels of experience: “Virtual Trans DC,” “Formal Trans
DC,” and “Informal Trans DC.” Derek’s map features many of the orga-
nizations other participants included on their own maps (fig. 1). Among
the virtual elements, he includes organizations that utilize e-mail corre-
spondence and websites as their primary vector of communication (e.g.,
DC Area Transmasculine Society and DCTC). His “Formal Trans DC”
includes “established orgs” such as Whitman Walker, an-LGBT focused
physical and mental health clinic; his personal doctor; HIPS (Helping
Individual Prostitutes Survive), a sex worker empowerment organization
that uses mobile outreach as their primary method of operation and of
which also functions as a place of volunteer work; and a church where the
Transgender Day of Remembrance has been held. He qualifies this as the
formal elements of a trans city, while the informal elements include his
friends’ homes and places where he knows trans persons live. Thus, in
his map a formal trans city is largely governed by spaces that are acces-
sible and applicable to many within trans coalitions of practice, while an
informal trans city is applicable only to him or those within his immediate
circle of trans support networks.
In contrast, Joan, a trans woman in her early twenties, does not dif-
ferentiate between different levels of space in her depictions of community
groups. Instead, she links together community organizations and clinics
with friends’ houses and her home into one seamless web of intercon-
nectivity of “Trans DC safest places” (fig. 2). For Joan, these same com-
munity activist organizations exist within a larger network of support.
Whitman Walker, which she marks as where she can access hormones,
represents a safe place but is located within a web of friends’ homes, her
gym, and her school. Her map reflects the significance of trans activist
work in her trans life as both an embedded element of importance and one
that serves a particular function. That is, the safety provided by Whit-
man Walker may be through the vector of accessible health care, while the
safety offered by her gym may be through accessible facilities to work out

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 Figure 1. Derek’s map. Image of drawn map shared with consent of producer.

in. In turn, these networks function as ways she can gain access to support
and mobility but also where she, as a friend or activist, can also provide
support and empowerment. A friend’s home, in this context, may index
broader structures rather than merely where a friend may reside.
Importantly, many maps resemble Naomi’s (fig. 3), where a short
list of official bars and clubs are provided along with the home of an indi-
vidual where, in this context, Latinx trans persons new to DC are able to
access resources.

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 Figure 2. Joan’s map. Image of drawn map shared with consent of producer.

Contrasted to these mainstream maps, the spatial depictions col-

lected in this project via physical maps and verbal discussion focus pri-
marily on spaces that are commonly organized around broader concerns
of where to access care. Among the maps collected in this project, we
identified ten common organizing themes for the types of space and places
participants included. The spatial element most common to these maps
were depictions of areas I group together as “sex work/er strolls,” which
were featured in a little over half (51.8 percent) of all maps. Strolls in this
framing refers to the particular streets or areas of the city identified by
participants, or by police, as streets or areas where sex workers may con-
nect with potential clients. Importantly, this is not how the participants
of this project solely experienced these areas. Rather, these spaces, while
understood to also be areas of sex work, were defined as multilayered, as
potentially spaces of care, of where to meet up with or support friends, of
police harassment, and of organizational outreach.
The second most common feature that participants included in their
maps was health clinics, direct service organizations, and other commu-
nity organizations, which were featured in roughly a third (36.1 percent)
of all maps; 22.1 percent of participants included bars, clubs, and restau-
rants in their maps, and 15.7 percent included parks and other similar
types of spaces for public recreation, such as malls. The home of a friend

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 Figure 3. Naomi’s map. Image of map shared with consent of producer.

or one’s own home was featured in 11.1 percent and 9.3 percent of maps,
respectively. All remaining themes, while still relatively common features,
were included in less than 10 percent of participants’ maps. I include in
the category of “other” themes common to three or more maps (e.g., one’s
gym or school) but not substantial enough to necessitate its own category
individually.
Importantly, DC, like many major US cities, is home to a number
of LGBT organizations, support groups, and other activist- oriented proj-
ects. But focusing only on the organizations and groups included in these
maps, trans- spectrum-identifying persons identified care as emerging
through spaces with similar social justice, political, or religious practices
(e.g., a food co- op or church group). In other words, LGBT rights orga-
nizations failed to be included as functional spaces of care. Echoing this
sentiment, among those taking the survey, 50 percent who had reported
interacting with an LGBT- specific organization reported having had a

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 negative experience. Forty percent of those with negative experiences
reported an LGBT organization or group to be unwelcoming to trans
persons or to addressing trans issues. Forty-five percent of those report-
ing experiences, both positive and negative, with LGBT organization also
reported the need to educate the organization on trans issues or needs.
Only 32 percent of those reporting experiences with LGBT organizations
also reported that an LGBT organization was both welcoming and pre-
pared to address trans- specific issues or needs. The LGBT community
centers or groups that participants represented in their maps focus almost
entirely on trans- specific activist or advocacy groups or those that primar-
ily serve trans persons (e.g., HIPS).
Safety links these major themes together in ways not featured in
mainstream maps: where one feels safe, where one does not feel safe, and
how, even in areas of potential criminalization, such as the sex work/er
stroll, one might seek and find support. What needs further discussion
are the ways that the concept of safety is differentially understood among
the participants of this project, in contrast to the ways mainstream LGBT
efforts define safety. Safety is a phenomenological experience (i.e., felt and
embodied). However, the dialectic between the felt subject and the ideo-
logically regulated object work in tandem to produce one’s experience of
materiality. This dialectic also emerges as a core organizing subtext bind-
ing together the features included in the maps collected in this project.
The spaces included, and excluded, in the maps collected in this project
represent where project participants experienced safety, even in objectively
unsafe areas, such as along the intense liminality of the strolls. In many
ways, spaces that participants identify as where they have or can access
care stand in direct contrast to the kinds of safety offered by gay bars
and spaces of consumption for LGB persons. Safety, in the context of
mainstream gay and lesbian maps, references spaces and places that are
specifically gay-friendly are thus best understood as catering to predomi-
nantly white and cis-normative consuming classes. That is to say, these
spaces provide support, whether implicitly or explicitly, only to particular
formations of publicly performed LGB subjectivities and practice. In con-
trast, safety for the participants in this project often refers instead to areas
wherein one’s trans history or present is not necessarily at issue, such as
at friends’ homes.
Notions of safe space that circulate in mainstream LGBT discourses
(e.g., the gay bar or the LGBT community center) are often referenced
in the maps collected in this project only for their lack of actual safety.
Indeed, the processes of deeming safe versus unsafe space are not purely
individualistic as much as they are linked to broader discourses and larger
organizational efforts with regard to where safety exists. In short, based
on the maps collected here, there is no singular, static trans space of care

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 or place of safety. Rather, the maps highlight that care is a contextual-
ized experience that relies on broader social and political interrogations
of power rather than simplistic categories of gay space as safe space. As
evidenced in these maps, care and support appear to operate not neces-
sarily as a function of being openly trans but, rather, as measured by the
capacity to occupy space, if even for brief moments.

Spaces of Care within Death Worlds

As these maps reflect, and to return to Barbara’s e-mail, radical care may
exist more in contexts wherein the individual’s needs are subsumed by
the larger project of activism, as transformative and affirmative collabora-
tions redirect support outward. This is not to suggest that activism, or a
dismissal of one’s individual needs over those of others, is the only form
of trans radical care. However, Barbara’s narrative about how and why she
got involved with DCTC underlies a displacement of normative support
models in deference to engaging productively with change to secure a
vitality of self. She disregards pathologizing narratives of trans subjectiv-
ity and locates empowerment through working for not only the T (trans),
as she notes, but also for others. While Barbara never described the work
she does, as an active member of the activist community in DC, as a type
of radical trans politics, her investment in a trickle-up approach to social
organizing articulates a departure from mainstream US LGBT rights
discourses that prioritize assimilation and the individual.
Radical care, in this context, may actually more accurately refer to
forms of care that are often assumed to exist across our social spaces. In
other words, radical care, or the care offered outside, beside, underneath,
and perhaps even above normative outlets, is perhaps also the care that
refuses a logic of cruel optimism. It is a care that follows desire lines.
Barbara’s resiliency, as a subject, was not born from support groups,
traditional LGBT organizational programming, or even that which she
referred to as just the T; instead, the capacity to engage and produce care
for others is what she experienced as care for the self.
Trans vitalities is thus not simply a refusal or disavowal of projects
of normalization or the commodifiability of trans rights but, rather, a vigi-
lance toward the violently homogenizing expectations of the heterogeneity
of lived experience. Trans vitalities calls on those who produce research
or provide services, training, or programming on LGBT issues — or even
trans- specific practices — to be asked and to answer who benefits from
that work. This is not simply a means of identifying lapses in benefits but,
rather, is one of the first of many steps to clarify labor and outcomes. How-
ever, unlike the cruel optimism promised by resilience or normative mod-
els of care, wherein a failure to thrive is the failure of the object of trans

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 bodies to produce ideologically valued forms of production, the subject of
trans vitalities is trans lives, and the object is those researchers and met-
rics that have been empowered with defining life. Within a framework of
trans vitalities, the failure is with the measurement; it is not with the body
that fails to reify and produce the proper citizen- subject but, rather, with
the researcher, the academic, the social service worker, and the LGBT
rights organization that have sustained systems of inequity.
Rather than appealing to discourses of success or struggle, trans
vitalities and frameworks of radical care call for a rethinking of value and
process. Time, space, bodies, and actions are all variables that cannot be
overlooked or merged to fit scalable rights frameworks. What this means,
logistically, is that projects that seek to attend to trans lived experience
must integrate — if not be overtly supportive of — ways of doing and being
that go beyond the perceived impacts of gender transgression. Rather,
agencies and laws seeking to tend to the imagined trans community and
related resilience must simultaneously integrate bodies and practices that
mainstream civil right groups abandon. In other words, a framework of
trans vitalities, as heavily structured by radical care, that displaces resil-
ience resituates a passive disavowal of bodies that have been marked as
disposable toward an intentionally disturbing recognition that we directly
facilitate which bodies to dispose of. If we are upfront and foreground
the key narratives that guide US sociopolitical discourses of salvage resil-
ience, we will always keep in our analytic that these discourses also pri-
oritize accumulation of capital — social and material — above life. These
discourses prevent, rather than facilitate, a grounded celebration of desire
lines, of explorations of livable life, of the unimaginable possibilities in
approaching all life as sacred. What I am proposing is, instead, a profound
and radical disinvestment of hierarchies of worth toward an approach that
may very well undermine the appearance of innovation of my own work;
however, if my own work can, in some way, render itself useless, I can
think of no better outcome or expression of radical care.

Notes
I extend my immense gratitude to Hi‘ilei Julia Hobart and Tamara Kneese for their
labor, multiple close readings and comments, and extraordinary patience in orga-
nizing this volume centered on radical care; to the reviewers of my manuscript and
their comments and feedback; to Brooke Bocast for reviewing and providing feed-
back on multiple iterations of this text; to Elizabeth Pfeiffer, Audrey Cooper, and
Emelia Orellana for reviewing and commenting on notions of trans vitalities; and to
the organizers and participants of the roundtable discussions and DC-focused trans
community needs assessment survey design, implementation, analysis, and write-
up. Most important, this text, and all of the discussion, data, and analysis within,
is possible only because of the donated labor, time, and shared experiences of trans
persons for whom this text has no benefit. As such, the author requests readers view

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 this article as yet another form of unequal labor extraction from lives and bodies that
are, far more often than not, valued less than the author’s.
1. Harvey, “Ecological Understanding of Resilience,” 9.
2. Lechance et al., “Collaborative Design and Implementation,” 46; McMillan
et al., “Empowerment Praxis in Community Coalitions,” 701; Braithwaite, Bianchi,
and Taylor, “Ethnographic Approach to Community Organization,” 409.
3. Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 17.
4. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 67.
5. Snorton and Haritaworn, “Trans Necropolitics,” 67.
6. Ahmed, Willful Subjects, 21.
7. Garofalo et al., “Overlooked, Misunderstood, and At- Risk”; Operario, Tan,
and Kuo, “HIV/AIDS in Asian and Pacific Islanders,” 375; Poteat et al., “HIV Risk
and Preventive Interventions,” 274; World Health Organization, “Guidance on Oral
Pre- exposure Prophylaxis.”
8. Hamilton, Adolphs and Nerlich, “Meanings of ‘Risk,’ ” 163; Hall, “Intertex-
tual Sexuality,” 125; Milani, “Queering the Matrix,” 59.
9. Breslow et al., “Resilience and Collective Action,” 262.
10. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 27.
11. Overboe, “Vitalism,” 28.
12. Miller and Slater, Internet, 16.
13. Stryker, Transgender History, 24; Valentine, Imagining Transgender, 22.
14. Amit, Trouble with Community; with regard to gender, see Young, “Rawls’s
Political Liberalism,” 189.
15. For a similar rationale guiding their own DC-based, trans-focused research
design and intended outcomes, see Alliance for a Safe and Diverse DC, Move Along;
and Xavier et al., “Needs Assessment of Transgendered People of Color.”
16. My appreciation to reviewer comments in pointing out the contradictory
nature of using metrics in support of the critique of metrics.
17. My appreciation to reviewer comments recognizing the potential harm
either of these projects could enact were they conducted in the absence of institutional
oversight and, importantly, protocols that ensure participants’ anonymity and rights.
18. Geltmaker, “Queer Nation Acts Up,” 234; Bhagat and Mogel, introduc-
tion, 6.
19. Bhagat and Mogel, introduction, 6.
20. Strand et al., Community- Based Research and Higher Education, 3.
21. See Edelman, Access Denied.
22. Edelman, Access Denied.
23. Piper, Cartographic Fictions, 42.
24. Brown and Knopp, “Queer Cultural Geographies,” 315.
25. Minh-ha, “Write Your Body and the Body in Theory,” 260.
26. Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” 522; Roche-
leau, “Maps as Power Tools,” 327 – 28.
27. Perkins, “Cultures of Map Use,” 152.
28. Perkins, “Cultures of Map Use,” 154; see also Bhagat and Mogel,
introduction.
29. Harley, “Deconstructing the Map,” 10.
30. Crampton and Krygier, “Introduction to Critical Cartography,” 15.
31. Zukin, “City as a Landscape of Power,” 223.
32. Cosgrove and Daniels, “Fieldwork as Theatre,” 169.
33. Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 13.

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 34. Zakocs and Edwards, “What Explains Community Coalition Effective-
ness?,” 351.
35. Walby, “From Community to Coalition,”120; emphasis added.
36. All names used are pseudonyms; participants provided consent for their
roundtable maps to be used in analysis and publication of research findings.

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