The history of queer and trans politics is often told through the history of bars, cafes, and restaurants. Whether it’s the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 in New York City, the Compton Cafeteria Riots of 1966 in San Francisco, or the Cooper’s Do-nuts Riot of 1959 in Los Angeles, these establishments were flashpoints for queer and trans resistance against oppressive state power and seeded the gay liberation movement of the 1970s. Bars and cafes continue to operate as centers for LGBTQ+ communities and they continue to face violence as seen in the Pulse Nightclub shooting in 2016 in Orlando or the Club Q shooting in 2022 in Colorado. These establishments are also places of labor, where queer and trans service workers spend their days toiling, often under the threat of violence. Policymakers must come to understand anti-LGBTQ violence as a labor issue.
Criminalization and over-policing of LGBTQ+ communities and lack of legal recourse create unsafe labor conditions for queer and trans people of color, who often work in the formal and informal service sector. And yet, these threats to LGBTQ+ people’s safety are generally not understood as labor issues. As Robin Gibson, a trans woman working in the sex trades of San Francisco, explained in 1983, “Most of the people I associate with take prostitution as a business–and it’s more of a business than one would think”. Decades later, we have yet to take her proposition seriously.
When policymakers express support for LGBT+ victims of violence, it is rarely in the context of queer and trans people working on the clock or during a transaction. To properly address anti-LGBTQ violence, we must first understand how and why their labor became a racialized and gendered site of conflict.
Policing Gender and Sexual Normativity
Policing has long been a tool for shoring up white, heterosexual, middle-class norms through determining who can occupy the public sphere. As Anne Gray Fischer documents in The Streets Belong to Us, misdemeanor charges for loitering, vagrancy, or public disorder have disproportionately targeted poor, queer and trans, and Black women. These statutes, along with local laws banning cross-dressing that were passed in the 19th century, gave police forces broad discretion to criminalize queer forms of dress and conduct. Angela Lyn Douglas, trans activist and singer, recalled that in the 1970s, police arrested trans women for simply “obstructing the sidewalk.” At the same time, queer and trans people, particularly trans women of color, were often forced to participate in the sex trades as their only means of work. In this way, the criminalization of dress and conduct enforced an informalized sex economy predicated on sexual violence, wage theft, and economic precarity. The history of policing sexuality and gender directly contributes to the income and wealth disparities faced by many LGBTQ people today.
When LGBT+ people experience violence, they cannot rely on law enforcement to respond fairly. LGBT+ people, particularly queer and trans people of color, are less likely to call the police compared to their straight counterparts. If police do get involved, the way that hate crime statistics are collected compounds racial biases against people of color. As Siobhan Brooks explains, data on LGBT+ hate crimes overestimates Black Americans as perpetrators of hate crimes and underreports instances of violence against queer and trans people of color. The combined erasure of violence against and over-policing of Black queer and trans people create conditions where they are more likely to be arrested and less likely to report violent crimes committed against them. Racism in law enforcement means that queer people of color, especially trans women of color working in the criminalized sex trades, can be threatened or harassed by bosses, clients, and customers with impunity.
While many political commentators and LGBT organizations have decried the epidemic of violence against trans women of color, few have been willing to explicitly connect these hate crimes to labor conditions or state violence, including widespread employment discrimination and criminalization.
Gun Violence Against LGBTQ+ Communities
As cases like the Pulse nightclub shooting or the shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs demonstrate, queer and trans people are victimized while working and consuming, by members of the general public as well as their intimate partners. The methods of violence matter here too. LGBT+ people are more likely to be assaulted or threatened with a weapon, despite the fact they are less likely to own a gun themselves. These statistics are particularly harrowing for trans people of color, the overwhelming victims of homophobic and transphobic violence, as three out of four murders of trans people in 2020 occurred with a gun. Furthermore, these cases are rarely brought to justice, as court defendants continue to use the gay/trans panic defense to decrease the severity of the murder charges. Though 20 states now have bans against the use of this argument in court, the idea that trans women trick men into sexual encounters is also fueled by the long history of depicting this false narrative in film. The criminalization of sex work, sensationalizing media narratives, and the recent barrage of transphobic legislation render trans women hypersexual, disposable, and deserving of the violence inflicted upon them.
As anti-LGBT+ legislation escalates, we are seeing a parallel rise in hate crimes against queer and trans people. LGBT+ people, particularly queer and trans people of color are dealing with high rates of assault, due in part to a globalized right-wing movement to eradicate queer and trans life. One way to create greater safety for LGBTQ+ people is through creating safer workplaces and labor movements that recognize sex work as part of the service industry. LGBTQ+ labor movements might coalesce around a vision in which queer and trans people are entitled to safety and dignity in their workplaces, public and commercial spaces, and domestic lives. A labor-informed, anti-violence LGBTQ policy agenda could include:
Protecting queer and trans people from violence is a popular rallying point for progressive politicians, but rarely is it addressed as a condition that arises from a precarious work environment or economic inequality. We have witnessed horrific forms of homophobic and transphobic violence in the form of mass shootings. But we learn less of the day-to-day quotidian stresses in the form of lost wages and tips, chaotic schedules, unstable work, and the mental toll of the disappearance of communal spaces for leisure. Labor and legal conditions are fundamentally linked to how LGBT+ people are exposed to violence; understanding this link provides the grounds to imagine a program of economic justice for queer and trans people of color.