Black Transgender Woman CeCe McDonald to be Housed in Male Prison - COLORLINES
Warning: misgendering
CeCe McDonald, the young black transgender woman who accepted a plea deal and pled guilty to second-degree manslaughter last month will be incarcerated by the state of Minnesota as a male. McDonald was arrested after she stabbed a white male who was part of a group of that physically and verbally attacked her with transgender and racial slurs.
The plea agreement calls for a sentence of three years and five months in prison, according to the Star Tribune.
Upon sentencing, McDonald, 24, will be taken into custody by the state Department of Corrections and housed as a male “because he is being housed as a male with Hennepin County,” corrections spokeswoman Sarah Russell told the Star Tribune on Monday. “We will intake him as a male at St. Cloud prison.”
Russell went on to add the state will make its own determination of McDonald’s gender.
“We will assess him as any other offender would be assessed,” Russell said. “The assessments include, but are not limited to, screening for potential vulnerability to sexual assaults, tendencies to act out with sexually aggressive behavior and any disabilities” as defined by federal law.
I already expected that CeCe was going to be sent to a male prison, having read about this incredible likelihood. Therefore, appalled and angered by it as I am, I wasn’t shocked. So my first reaction was how incredibly disrespectful and oppressive it was that she was being referred to here as a man with male pronouns.
But the thing is that the violence — looking at sexual assault rates in prison, especially those against trans women, I mean “violence” in the most literal sense possible — of sending her to a male prison cannot be justified through the use and display of respect. To refer to CeCe properly would be to show that they don’t really believe she is a man, and they don’t really believe she belongs in a male prison. To call her “she” would be to render this call indefensible and inhumane. It would be an admission of who she really is, and therefore of what they’re really doing.
Which is to say simply that the violence and oppression of the prison industrial complex REQUIRES further violence and oppression in order to justify and perpetuate its existence. It doesn’t just stop with one offense, for further are needed to give it the illusion of acceptability and/or to cover it up.
:*(
fucking fuck.
from Oakland Occupy Patriarchy:
Everyone please spread this as widely as possible and please show out tonight to stand up against transphobic violence!
No news stories yet on the situation but will try and keep this updated with info
jesus this is fucking scary- a night before this a friend and i were out on 17th and some dude started fallowing us and screaming at us cuz he read us as a lez couple then relized i was a trans woman and started threatening rape and that he was going to kill me and just a day before a friend of my barely escaped getting beaten or worse by a group of dudes only cuz they were able to convince them that they were a cis woman and not a trans woman/faggot. It could have been any of us- were all just a moment away from encountering the wrong man/men on the wrong street. Fuck this world, kill men, die cis scum.
A close friend of mine was told “stay the fuck away, I don’t like faggots like you around me” despite keeping 5 feet of distance on the Amtrak platform. Sometimes I have to remind myself that the Bay Area is still part of a larger social fabric — a tainted and moldy social fabric that often responds to queerness with threats and violence :/
Another trans* womyn murdered… right in my neighborhood…
I’m so sick of this… I don’t know why I bother or what the point is… This is the reality of being a trans* womyn… constant violence.
fuck.
(via glitterlion)
Awesome. Cathy (bug) Brennan has decided to start referring to me by my old name
After saying using the wrong name is as bad as misgendering.
This might be.. “fun”. I’m curious what else she wants to drag up.
I’m betting she’s going to try to drag up other pre-transition info.
This is what happens when you stand up to a transphobe. This is what happens when you stand up for another trans woman.
Fuck her.
I’m trans. I’m proud. I know who the fuck I am, and how I treat people. They accuse me of being a creep and running roughshod over women, who I hate(?). I’m not the one attempting to drag out people’s personal info in an attempt to hurt them. It’s not the first time she’s done this either.
I. Will. Not. Go. Away.
Cathy, you should be ashamed of yourself.
Bug needs to die in a fire.
jesus, what is it, Simple Bitch Day?????
this absolutely wrong and fucked up. is there anything we can do?
TW cissexism & transmisogyny
cupcakesnotbombs replied to your post: What do you do when you are in a room of radscum…
that is really gross and really scary. are you organizing with these people? or do you work with them?It was at an event that I staffed/organized for my job (a promo event for a memoir we are publishing)
There were some problematic elements in some of the performances that I felt really sad/nauseous about, and didn’t know how to address because I was photographing the event and I was like, uh, I’m not going to sit here and photograph you while you talk about how much you love MitchFest… and I was like, okay, after the event go talk to that person and tell them they fucking suck. But then there was a roundtable discussion that basically just turned into a white supremacist cissexist and transmisogynist hatefest where people from the audience took the mics and used words like “dispicable” “horrifying” “mutilation” “hidden rapists” “repugnant” “everything i am fighting against” etc etc to talk about trans people. And I was about to do/say something and take the mics and whatever but then this person started going on this rant against hormone therapy and my head started spinning really badly and my heart was pounding out of my chest and I felt like I was going to pass out and my coworker looked at me and said, “you don’t have to be here if you don’t feel safe!” and I said “i can’t do this!” and she said, “go go go go!” and I basically threw my camera at her and ran out and chainsmoked and screamed a lot and tried not to throw up. And then I witnessed a pedestrian get hit by a car, and it was extremely terrible and there were like a million cops and ambulences and I couldn’t leave because my keys were backstage and the event was still happening so I just like, kept sitting and shaking and freaking out and was totally not able to go and talk to any of the people and tell them they are despicable wastes of space.
I feel so fucked up about it that I don’t even know where to start, I feel mostly damaged and fucked up over all the beautiful awesome trans folks who came to our event and sat through that. I had friends who stayed inside the event and said the conversation just continued to get worse. I know that I needed to get up and leave but I wish so badly I had been able to throw down.
The rest of the staff were really angry and upset too but were totally cis about the situation and didn’t cut people off, didn’t stop people from saying anything, didn’t throw down or correct or call out. They came outside to see me and told me they were sorry but the whole thing felt like, “Oh no, we offended our one employee who is transgender! The problem is that Shaun was upset, not that these VIOLENT ASSHOLES said the kind of shit that makes trans people kill themselves”!
And my boss just emailed me asking to talk to me/support me/do something to rectify the situation… which is like okay cool I guess that’s nice? but there were so many trans people in that space who probably went home with the biggest pit in their stomach and pain in their hearts and its like oh cool we deal with this ALL THE FUCKING TIME and our organization just facilitated **yet another** space where we are shat on/devaluated/made to feel like horrible human beings… I feel responsible because I am a staff member of the org that put on the event and I just feel so complicated levels of awful
idk i am going to write an email with all of the feelings and send it to my boss/the executive director and idk be like “y’all need to be held publicly accountable for this shit” HOPE SOMETHING WORKS OUT IDEK
=(
that is so fucked up on so many different levels. it’s so disturbing and disgusting they see it as a problem of a couple of trans folk being offended, rather than a problem of a bunch of cissupremacists going on unchecked and unquestioned hate speeches.
i am so angry, and so sad, and really really sorry. if you decide to send that e-mail, good luck! i mean, i know it definitely won’t take back the seriously traumatizing bullshit that occurred, but hopefully some important conversations will be had?
fuck, though. that is so wrong.
Breast cancer survivor handcuffed and thrown in jail over a mistaken $280 medical bill as ‘debtor’s prisons’ return to the U.S
How did breast cancer survivor Lisa Lindsay end up behind bars? She didn’t pay a medical bill — one the Herrin, Ill., teaching assistant was told she didn’t owe.
“She got a $280 medical bill in error and was told she didn’t have to pay it,” The Associated Press reports. “But the bill was turned over to a collection agency, and eventually state troopers showed up at her home and took her to jail in handcuffs.”
Although the U.S. abolished debtors’ prisons in the 1830s, more than a third of U.S. states allow the police to haul people in who don’t pay all manner of debts, from bills for health care services to credit card and auto loans. In parts of Illinois, debt collectors commonly use publicly funded courts, sheriff’s deputies, and country jails to pressure people who owe even small amounts to pay up, according to the AP.A 2010 report by the American Civil Liberties Union that focused on only five states — Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Washington — found that people were being jailed at “increasingly alarming rates” over legal debts. Cases ranged from a woman who was arrested four separate times for failing to pay $251 in fines and court costs related to a fourth-degree misdemeanor conviction, to a mentally ill juvenile jailed by a judge over a previous conviction for stealing school supplies.
The Return of Debtors’ Prisons: THOUSANDS of Americans Jailed For Not Paying Bills (via ThinkProgress.org)
(via so-treu)
“My heart is saddened by the murder of Trayvon Martin-a child. My heart is also saddened at the subsequent media frenzy around his death because I know in every part of my body that when black women and girls are raped and murdered, not a damn thing happens-there is no rally or CNN coverage, but instead an instant blame game or mitigation of the facts. This post is about the inherent value of black women and black girls. If once you read “Trayvon Martin”, you thought this post would be about how white supremacist ideologies define black males as inherently “suspicious” and “dangerous” and, thus, black men and boys need our support- this is not the post for you. Luckily, almost every other blog has posted analyses very similar to this that you can read and comment on. I have no interest in doing so-not because the criminalization of black men and boys doesn’t enrage me but because I believe that the black women and girls are just as valuable. Not to mention that the ways we are inherently criminalized and stigmatized must continue to be unpacked. I write this because NO ONE comes to our defense or sees us as worthy of marching behind, and I will bear witness to this.”
Click on the title for more.
Whenever I see blog posts talking about how much women/nonwhite people are oppressed in America I laugh.
You are not oppressed, not really. Sure, not everything is perfectly equal, but we’re a lot better than 50-100 years ago, and I think that a lot of Tumblr Justice fucktards should put that in perspective.
So, I’d like you imagine an oppressive totalitarian state. You know, evil empire, stormtroopers, etc. Hitler by way of Kafka kind of thing.
Imagine in this state, there are a brutal secret police force empowered by the regime to basically do what the fuck ever they want. They can torture. They can murder. They can rape. They can stop and detain people at any time for any or no reason. They can suspend the basic protection of law. If they assault or kill someone during these stops, they are not answerable to the law as an ordinary citizen is.
This totalitarian police force will shoot unarmed school children in the back. They will unleash noxious chemical agents in the halls of a school. They will cover up the murder of a child by a political ally and informer. They will chase a child into his house and shoot him in front of his family. They will assault a twelve-year-old girl and then come to her school to arrest her later because she fought back. They will break into a house and shoot a little girl as she lies napping in her living room. They will shoot someone twenty-eight times and then charge them with attempted murder. They will shoot unarmed bystanders and then justify it by saying that someone in the crowd had a gun, whether it was true or not. They’ll torture and kill a chronically ill military veteran who annoys them by accidentally calling for help in the middle of the night, they’ll do it laughing and shouting insults.
They will go so far as to hog tie a man and torture him to death in front of his children, drowning him with a garden hose in response to his plea for water.
They fabricate evidence, fabricate crimes, cover-up their own crimes and those of their friends and supporters. Rarely are they forced to answer for their atrocities. Instead, the worst among them are praised for being “tough” and “getting the job done.” Their job, of course, is not to serve nor protect the citizens of this hypothetical state, but to keep them in line… to keep them scared, to keep them quiet, to keep them in their place.
Would you agree that the people living under this purely hypothetical regime are oppressed? I mean, that to me all sounds like textbook oppression. If anything, it sounds a bit over-the-top, right?
But of course, it’s not hypothetical. I’m talking about the United States of America. None of the examples I gave above are hypothetical. Most of them happened in the last 40 days. They all happened to people of color, most of them Black.
What do you want to call that, if not oppression?
what is this?
AE pwning silly heauxs again?
YES
YES IT IS
IT’S SUPER:AE AND HER COMIC IS COMING SOON TO A COMIC STORE NEAR U
commentary is giving me chills
(via bad-dominicana)
Arizona Official Considering Banning Ethnic Studies In Universities Too
Two years ago, Arizona outlawed the teaching of some ethnic studies courses in K-12 schools, and now it may expand the prohibition to universities too.
Just weeks after the state passed its infamous immigration law, it also passed a law aimed at scuttling Tucson’s Mexican-American studies program, which critics claimed taught kids to resent white people. The argument, at the time, was that teaching subjects like critical race theory to kids in high school amounted to indoctrination because they were not old enough to question the teaching critically, like university students.
But now, Arizona’s chief education official sees university-level Mexican-American sudies programs as a danger too:
Arizona’s superintendent of schools, John Huppenthal, says Tucson’s suspended Mexican American studies curricula teaches students to resent Anglos, and that the university program that educated the public school teachers is to blame.
“I think that’s where this toxic thing starts from, the universities,” Arizona Superintendent of Schools John Huppenthal said in an interview with Fox News Latino. “To me, the pervasive problem was the lack of balance going on in these classes,” Huppenthal said.
Not surprisingly, a long list of Latino groups and education activists have protested the move, as they did when the state shut down Tucson’s program, decrying the imposition on free speech. “What we’re trying to do is expose children to a much broader perspective, so that we’re not indoctrinating,” said Augustine Romero, the former director of Tucson’s Mexican American Studies Department.
The ethnic studies law, which bans schools from offering courses designed for a specific ethnicity, had far-ranging consequences, including banning books like Shakespeare’s The Tempest and other seemingly anodyne works of literature.
And while many call the state prohibitions unprecedented, Devon Peña, the former director of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies said, “There is a precedent, and it’s called McCarthyism.” “It’s just a witch hunt of a different color. Now, instead of going after the reds, they’re going after the browns.”
I seriously fucking hate my state. California, please don’t let me down.
(via ancestryinprogress)
“The victims ranged in age from 21 to 40 and were from countries including Korea, Nepal, Nigeria and the Philippines, Jordan said. With the exception of the secretary, all the victims were students. Of those killed, six were women and one was a man, but Jordan said investigators do not know whether Goh was targeting women.
The details of the shooting surfaced early Tuesday as police interviewed Goh. He “does not appear to be remorseful at all,” and would not tell police where the weapon was located, Jordan said. Investigators plan to search for the gun on Tuesday, he said.”
so, this sick womyn of color was arrested for trespassing at a hospital that refused to treat her. she died of blood clots minutes after arriving in her jail cell.
it is like such a trip to know that our lives have literally no value. to have it reiterated every day like this. wow. good night, tumblr.
Like I really fucking hate it when white dudes (or worse, women) start to rap along to like, Weezy or Snoop Dogg (their favorite rappers) really loudly and obnoxiously, especially while people are watching them. Extra bigoted douche points if they say the N word or other not-for-them slurs in the songs
I don’t think “Oh you have a nuanced love, respect, and understanding of black subculture and identity as being espoused in this music and an openess to it! This is a song you really like by an artist you truly dig!”
I think “Hey you’re an exotifying douche who believes it’s comical to ironically display your rapping skills in an overtly jocular manner, making a mockery of blackness because the joke lies within the juxtaposition of your whiteness & the blackness of the music, the idea being that you’re debasing yourself to this level of ghettory that no one would actually voluntarily be at because who lives like this or legit listens to this hahaha thug life hood gurlz lol of course it’s a joke lol ITS SO FUNNY NONE OF THIS IS REAL OR RESPECTABLE”
TE VEO, ASSHOLE
word.
(via holyfuckmeinthemouth)
Oh hey, I wrote this for Global Comment.
yo, y’all pretty much need to go read this shit. especially:
The myths attached to black men in American culture that have left far too many people incapable of remembering that our sons are children. Somehow kids like Trayvon, like my son, like the boys I see at the playground, become grown men out to do harm to everyone once a stranger starts projecting their fears and biases onto them. They don’t see gangly bodies, peach fuzz, a sweet tooth, and a love of music. They see the scary monsters that racist ideologies have helped them create in their minds. It never occurred to George Zimmerman that from Trayvon’s perspective he was being followed by a strange man in a car, or that Zimmerman’s approach would frighten this boy walking home alone. Zimmerman cast himself first as the neighborhood’s protector and later as the victim, despite the fact that he initiated the confrontation and he was the only one with a weapon. Much like the rhetoric used to justify the slaying of Emmet Till in 1955, claims by Zimmerman’s defenders that he was trying to do the right thing ring hollow. Fifty-seven years later–after all the marching, praying, and legislating–another young boy was lynched in the south for the crime of being black.
- Michael Skolnik. (via surruhmac)
Teenage Black americans don’t make good postcards / it was never about justice
(via readnfight)
rest of blog post here: http://globalgrind.com/news/michael-skolnik-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman-race-sanford-florida-photos-pictures
(via holyfuckmeinthemouth)
To those who tell me we live in a post-racial society, take a look at reality.
wtf america
![arewomenhuman:
kiriamaya:
[The system was never broken; it was built this way.]
Always reblog :/](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lye88mfPeW1qdzkt3o1_500.jpg)
[The system was never broken; it was built this way.]
Always reblog :/
(via thehotmessiest)
wassup muthafuckas?my name is tracie and i'm a radical queer black feminist polyglamorous pansexual merqueer. i blog about self-love and mermaids and growing and linkin park and black womyn and love. pronouns: she/he/they/mer
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Why is this nigga texting me good morning when he owes me money?
It would be a better one if you...
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Today was fun.
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This insomnia is all too real :(
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I NEED THIS SHIRT ON MY BODY LIKE LAST YEAR
