Austin, TX! Tomorrow, Saturday March 29th! Come out to Gender Unbound‘s annual Trans Day of Visibility Community Picnic and Artist Market! Our central Texas comrades will be out tabling with our zines and literature, so come through and say, “Howdy!” There will be music, so many amazing vendors, and just a wholesome time out in the sunshine.
Annd…Gender Unbound’s debut publication, The Pink Pages, will also be available in limited quantities!
“Available in print only, grab a free copy of this 40-page Trans Day of Visibility art project, highlighting trans small businesses, artists, professional services, and organizations! Debuting this Saturday at Gender Unbound’s TDOV Community Picnic & Art Market from 1-5pm at Grassroots Leadership!”
In other exciting news, our dear comrade, Karina Hagelin, has launched a kickstarter for their Survivor Affirmation Deck! The Survivor Affirmation Deck (2nd edition) is a collection of 40 rainbow affirmation cards for survivors healing from abuse. Please check out and support this beautiful project, there are only 22 days left to back it and help it become real!
Karina explains and describes the deck: “Each colorful card features an affirmation for self-love, carefully crafted to support you on your healing journey by a fellow survivor who gets how difficult healing can be. This deck is not only uplifting, inspiring, & empowering but beautiful, bright, & bold, because survivors deserve beauty. I created the Survivor Affirmation Deck because many of the self-love resources available for survivors didn’t speak to me: they were boring, black + white, & all “love & light”. These affirmations weren’t actually affirming to me because they weren’t trauma-informed, empathetic, or truly understanding of what I was going through. They weren’t created by someone who gets it: a survivor. The Survivor Affirmation Deck IS. The Survivor Affirmation Deck was created with care & my community in mind: 40 vibrant, colorful, cute AF affirmation cards for supporting self-love on your healing journey. The Survivor Affirmation Deck comes packaged in a pink tuck box, packed with care, solidarity, & lots of love.”
One of our crew, Red, recently joined the Just Practice Collaborative and spoke to their Building Coordinated Crisis Response learning space. From Just Practice, “This monthly virtual peer learning space is for groups and organizations working to collectively intervene in and respond to crises without police. This is an abolitionist collaborative learning space where participants are invited to share knowledge, experience, and expertise, as well as questions, uncertainties, nuance, and disagreements. This is a drop-in space open to anyone committed to building coordinated, non-carceral, non-police crisis response and prevention and to collaborative learning – no one is the expert in this space; we are all learning and growing toward the future we want together.”
We all helped prepare stories, examples and experiences based on our last 10 years of collective organizing, but also pulling from our lives since we’ve all been in the sex trades much longer than that. We spent a lot of time recounting anecdotes from different types of crises we’ve navigated and the hard lessons learned during each of them, Red synthesized and shared–the major takeaways are: don’t feel pressured to scale up your crew’s membership, small numbers can mean greater capacity; sometimes just being physically present, ready to fight or being prepared to flee with essentials is the best plan; harm reduction and risk assessment forever and for all things; and be prepared to move money in creative ways. We’re considering putting a zine together about our “Ho Survival Kit” builds as well–there was lots of interest in these! We’ll share the graphic notes from our talk once they’re finalized, and do not sleep on this beautiful, necessary space. We’d also recommend, Interrupting Criminalization‘s Transformative Justice Help Desk.
Two of our comrades recently created this zine all about the rise of Tech Fascism and The Network State–we’ll be distributing copies at all of our upcoming events in Austin, Chicago, NYC, the Bay Area, and in Portland! Like the cover says, “Arm yourselves with knowledge!”
In less exciting and stressful news, after 10 years we’re now in the market for a new fiscal sponsor. If your 501c3 organization wants to show up for queer and trans sex workers with incarceration experiences and our radical family, please get in touch asap via our Contact Form.