Tuesday, April 13, 2010

THIS IS NOT A JOKE: What Do You Call Someone Who Was Arrested, Indigenous, and Trans, named Veronica Baxter? Answer: Deceased



[image is from here]

What follows is an excerpt of a recent post from The Curvature blog. Thank you, Cara!


Demand for Open Investigation Into Death of Aboriginal Trans Woman in Custody

Filed Under Australia, International, LGBTQ, bigotry, discrimination, race and racism, trans, transphobia and trans misogyny, violence against women and girls  | Posted by Cara |

One year ago, Veronica Baxter, an Australian woman who was both Aboriginal and trans, was arrested on drug charges. Less than one week after her arrest, she died in custody.
On March 10, 2009, three days after Mardi Gras, 34-year-old Veronica Baxter was arrested by Redfern police. She was charged with six counts of supplying a prohibited drug and held on remand at the all-male NSW Silverwater Metropolitan Reception and Remand Centre.
An attractive transgender woman, she was placed in the maximum security, male jail.
Six days later, after a 14-hour break between checking her cell, she was found dead, hanging in her single cell.Veronica Baxter was an Aboriginal woman from the Cunnamulla country, south- west of Queensland. She dressed, appeared, and had identified as a woman for 15 years and was known by family and friends as a woman.
Yet she was placed in a male jail against NSW government policy, which states that transgender people be placed in the jail of their choosing.
Of course, it’s important to note that it doesn’t matter how attractive Baxter was, whether or not her family accepted her true identity, and whether she had publicly identified and lived as a woman for 6 decades or one month. What was done to her was wrong, period. Suggesting that her manner of dress, personal appearance, and familial relations have any bearing on whether or not her identity should have been recognized and treated as seriously as any cis person’s is to further marginalize those trans* people who are among the most vulnerable.

The article also goes on to explain at length that while trans* inmates are supposed to be placed in the gendered facility of their choosing, the enforcement of this rule is transphobic, frequently dangerous, and otherwise discriminatory:
Ray Jackson, president of the Indigenous Social Justice Association and elder of the Wiradguri nation, and has been fighting black deaths in custody for decades and campaigning around the Baxter case for a year.
He explained: “If trans people are post-operative transgender women, they are considered real women, and are placed within the women’s jail. If they are pre-operative transgender women, they are considered ‘male’ and are normally processed in a male jail.”
Transgender people face a disproportionate amount of abuse, rape, and murder in jail. Consequently, in Australia, strict guidelines exist, requiring protective segregation of transgender people from mainstream prisoners.
The Crimes (Administration of Sentences) Act 1999 states “any person received into the custody of the NSW Department of Corrective Services (DCS) who self-identifies as transgender has the right to be housed in a correctional facility appropriate to their gender or identification”. It says: “Transgender inmates are to be managed according to their chosen gender of identification.” Transgender women normally request to get placed in women jails.
“After processing in the male jail, pre-operative transgender women are then given an opportunity to go to a women’s jail, but have to stay in solitary confinement because they are still considered ‘male’”, Jackson told Green Left Weekly.
“Pre-operative transgender women won’t be in solitary confinement in a male jail, but they will suffer more harassment, assault and abuse.”
This policy discriminates against poor transgender people. In Australia it costs up to $20,000 for a male to female operation and up to $14,000 for a female to male operation. Baxter was allowed to move about Silverwater, among other male prisoners, and had not been checked on for 14 hours before she was found hanging from her cell hook. This contravenes another Department of Corrective Service (DCS) policy of regular cell check-ups.
Why Baxter was not moved to a women’s jail is currently unclear, because over one year after her death, and despite both requests and demands from Indigenous leaders like Jackson and LGBT groups like Community Action Against Homophobia, an investigation into her death has still not been conducted, and paperwork on her case has not been publicly released.

It’s impossible to adequately and accurately look at this case without considering both institutionalized transphobia and the legacy of colonization and atrocities committed against Aboriginal Australians. [...]

[Please click *here* or the link at top to read the rest of this blog post.]

10 comments:

  1. I find it odd that you would post this while you have such openly transphobic bloggers on your blogroll

    ReplyDelete
  2. What would you recommend I do, loveisnotafeeling?

    Would you have me remove all the white racist bloggers from my blogroll as well? And the heterosexist straight bloggers? And the eurocentric ones? And the ones who don't even seem to realise that Indigenous people exist? And the anti-radicallesbianfeminist ones? And the not-necessarily-anticapitalist ones? And the ones who are pro-civilisation?

    Because all those are, in some form, anti-women and anti-trans. And this is a pro-woman and not anti-trans blog.

    If there is a "pure" list of blogs, I'd love to know what it is!

    As it is, most blogs I link to are either misogynistic, transphobic, racist, heterosexist, or pro-civilisation/ecocidal.

    Which would you have me remove... first?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Or, and some are sometimes anti-Semitic too. So what to do?

    ReplyDelete
  4. actually I think you should remove anyone who is any of those things and when called on it refuses to change or educate themselves on the issues

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hi loveisnotafeeling,

    I like your name, btw. :)

    I speak for myself here on my blog, as others do on their own blogs.

    One of the bloggers you link to has shown themselves to be repeatedly misogynistic toward a Black lesbian woman blogger, even after some of her own supporters have called her out on it. Why would you link to that blog? Shall I assume you are anti-Black lesbians, because you do?

    ReplyDelete
  6. which blogger is that? i wasnt aware of that. also can you link me to where this happened?

    ReplyDelete
  7. I'm email you the info. My point, though, is that there is no such world you seem to be describing, of people all respecting each other in every way; it doesn't work that way in racist, capitalist, genocidal, misogynist, anti-trans, anti-queer societies. That's what I'm trying to get across here.

    So even if you de-link to that one person, I can go on and on about other blogs you link to. Do you get what I mean?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Actually, I'm not comfortable doing that. I don't think it is appropriate for me to "out" tensions among people I structurally oppress.

    I did a quick review of your blog roll again. There's another racist blog you've linked to also.

    I can keep going. How many of the blogs you link to are overtly pro-Indigenist and anti-civilisation?

    ReplyDelete
  9. there's not actually anything i can do about it if i don't know who the racist bloggers are. If I knew who they were I would take them off my blog roll.

    My point was that there are people who are deliberately and obviously transphobic on your blog roll, not in a privilege blind way but in an active way.

    Also the diference between my blog and your blog is that I'm not nailing my political identity to the mast. I work (and live, and think) within a broadly intersectional feminist framework, and I write about anti adoption, family preservation and repro justice issues within that framework but I'm not claiming that I'm challenging white heterosexual male supremacy as an institutionalized ideology and a systematized set of practices which are misogynistic, heterosexist, genocidal, and ecocidal. while I think that is an admirable thing to be doing it is one hell of a claim to say you are actualy doing it, and I for one am not going to belive that if you consort with people who you know are activley and overtly transphobic

    ReplyDelete
  10. Hi loveisnotafeeling,

    My blog's posts are consistent with the stated objectives. I don't "consort" with transphobic people. I find the blogs you list as both misogynistic and racist, and that's a problem for me. You have a problem with some of the blogs I link to.

    My blog is what it is. Visit it or don't.

    ReplyDelete