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Most of our clients are part of the LGBTQ2IA+ community and many are also gender expansive. Our clients have a range of experiences and backgrounds, socioeconomic status, culture, and identities.

Through our programming and research, we serve as a resource for the greater LGBTQ2IA+ community. We collaborate with community organizations and organizers to improve care for gender and sexuality- expansive individuals.

We have two areas of focus for our work:

  • UPLIFT: gender-affirming workshops, advocacy, and storytelling for people who are Gender Expansive and incarcerated

  • Psychedelics and Gender Expansiveness- creating research, visibility and affirmation for gender-expansive individuals in the field of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy

UPLIFT- Workshops for Gender-Expansive People Who Are Incarcerated

The United States currently holds over 2 million people in its jails, prisons, and other “correctional” 1facilities 2. This includes approximately 5,000 known transgender people, who are at up to a 20% overall risk of being incarcerated in their lifetime3. This can go up to nearly 50% for Transgender women of color. These Transgender and Gender Expansive incarcerated individuals are disproportionately BIPOC Transgender Women. In prison, Transgender people are at exceedingly high risk for violence, victimization, and abuse. 78% of transgender individuals reported emotional pain from hiding their gender identity during incarceration. 47% of transgender women who had been incarcerated reported being victimized while being held. 59% of transgender women reported being sexually assaulted -- this is compared to 4% of men held in male facilities4. The burden of this victimization is disproportionally carried by Black Transgender Women.

Transgender and Gender Expansive detainees are typically not permitted access to affirming doctors or supportive community or affinity groups in which to process their lived experience. These individuals rarely receive acknowledgment about the abuses they have experienced in carcel settings, and often their traumas go unrecognized, and unaddressed. Meanwhile, providers within the system who wish to advocate for gender-affirming care are met with barriers to the provision of gender-affirming care to their patients.

These issues are urgent, and in developing this program we hope to equip Transgender and Gender Expansive detainees with skills to support their survival in prisons and jails.

Transgender and Gender Expansive people who are incarcerated are not provided tailored education about gender, gender affirming self-care, and harm reduction while they are incarcerated. With this program, we will implement a weekly workshop for Gender Expansive individuals in the Rose M. Singer Center (RMSC) at Rikers Island.

Each UPLIFT workshop consists of 4 parts: introductions and grounding, collaborative and engaging creative activities, community supported exploration of relevant questions by participants, and emotion regulation skills training.

We have built the UPLIFT workshops based on direct feedback that was provided by Gender-Expansive people in detention to DOC employees regarding their educational needs.

We have several areas of focus for our workshops

  1. Psychoeducation on the meaning of gender-expansiveness. This includes transgender, nonbinary, two-spirit, and other gendered modes of being. This information is integrated into discussions of trauma, heteronormativity, racism, and classism.

  2. A discussion of the surgical and medical approaches to transition, along with what it means to access gender-affirming care in all its forms. We will provide information and resources, answer questions, and dispel misconceptions about what gender-affirming care entails and how there is no “single path” to transition.

  3. Gender-affirming sex education with a focus on the ways that transgender and gender-diverse people can feel affirmed, safe, and healthy in their sexuality. We will provide education about ways to feel more gender-affirmed in sexual relationships, some of the ways that trans people experience changing sexuality, desire, and relationship to body with medical gender and self-affirmation. We will also provide tools to explore ingrained narratives around body hatred and negative self-image.

  4. Dialectical Behavior Therapy skills for coping with distressing experiences and improving interpersonal communication during and after detention. Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) is a useful construct for coping with highly distressing and invalidating environments such as jails and prisons. We will teach DBT skills during our workshops, which can introduce people to strategies that are designed to help them survive crisis situations, take control of their emotions, improve self-advocacy, and self- soothe.

  5. Rikers Island generally operates as a short stay facility and is largely a pipeline to state-run prisons in New York State. We will provide resources and education through our workshops for coping and advocating for gender affirmation when people are transferred to prisons in NY State.

  6. Participation in underground economies is a fact of life for many gender-expansive individuals. We will teach harm reduction skills and strategies that will support individuals navigating sex work and substance use.

The UPLIFT workshops offer the opportunity for individuals to learn skills as well as to have a space for community sharing, bonding, growth, and healing. We will build upon the ideas presented above to create a repertoire of workshops that can be provided based on the individuals’ needs. We understand that places such as Rikers Island have a constantly rotating population, and therefore we may not see the same people twice. Thus, we wish to utilize each of our sessions to support people in custody through education, resources, or skill teaching, with the understanding that one session should be enough to learn useful information to take with them on the next phase of their lives.

We will seek opportunities to provide UPLIFT workshops at New York State Department of Corrections and Community Services (DOCCS) facilities. In discussions with them, they have noted that they have a dire need for people to come to state prisons to offer this type of care. We will build these workshops into a curriculum for providers and community members to use in prisons and jails nationwide.

Opportunity for Funding

We are seeking $80,000 to fund this weekly program at Rikers for one year and to build the curriculum. This will support us in providing weekly groups, will cover transportation, administrative, materials and staffing costs for the program (budget available on request).

UPLIFT- Voices of Lived Experience -Incarceration

In line with our goals of supporting individuals in custody, we will uplift Transgender and Gender Expansive individuals who have been incarcerated in documenting their stories.

We believe in the power of personal narrative to enact change in the world, and the necessity of hearing such stories directly from those impacted by the intersections of identity and power structures. The voices of Transgender and Gender Expansive individuals who have been incarcerated are too often silenced. Their stories are underrepresented, which creates a lack of understanding or the hardships of their experiences in prison and jail, and a lack of representation of their experiences in the world.

We are honored to partner with leader, speaker, and community organizer Ceyenne Doroshow on this project – her firsthand experience in carceral settings and connections to community with lived experience will allow us to create a supportive and understanding environment in which individuals can tell their stories.

We will seek personal essays, peer-to-peer interviews, and creative work to edit into a podcast or edited volume and to host on a website. In terms of contributors, we’re particularly interested in work by those whose voices are regularly silenced and underrepresented within the realm of incarceration and gender expansiveness. We expect our audience to be able to learn from the wisdom and lived experience of our contributors.

We believe that in telling these stories, there is potential for both representation and healing. We believe that when we allow for a space for individuals to come together in healing community and safely share what they have experienced, we allow for an externalization of trauma, as well as the ability to imagine a different future for others.

What we need

We are seeking $30,000 to fund this project. This will support us in paying staff salaries, collecting stories, reimbursing participants, funding travel, editing and collating stories (budget available on request).