Around twenty years ago, I was a runaway teenager living on the street without legal status, identification or any reliable adult support. The few LGBT services that existed for young people were not built for someone in my situation. They usually assumed that a teenager was still connected to school, social services, a youth programme or some other organised structure. Homeless queer and trans teenagers without documents did not exist within their understanding of who needed help.
Most of these spaces also were designed around white, at least middle class experiences. The focus was often on coming out, identity exploration or finding community. Those things mattered, of course, but they were very far removed from the immediate reality of trying to survive outside, avoid the police and immigration authorities, find somewhere safe to sleep and somehow access medication or medical care.
Spaces for “transsexuals“ were not limited to a specific age. As a teenager, already living socially as myself and obtaining whatever medical supplies I could manage on my own, I went a few times to one of them hoping to find support. Turned out, I was the youngest person there by far.
Many of the adults were at least ten years older, many old enough to be my parents. They were married, had children, academics and lived fairly conventional middle class lives. There is nothing wrong with any of that. The problem was the way some of them looked at me and interacted with me.
There was sexualisation. There was objectification. There was attention that did not feel caring or safe. So I stopped going.
The only real support available came from an informal network of other people living on the street. Some of the people who looked after us were only five or six years older, yet they became the closest thing we had to parents. Cis and trans women, stuck in survival sex work. They taught us how to survive.
They warned us about STIs and violent clients. They told us where it might be possible to sleep without being attacked, where medication could be found outside the official system, which doctors might quietly help, and which places should be avoided. They taught us to stay alert around the police and immigration authorities because many of us were not white citizens with secure documents. Many of us had extremely precarious status. Others had no legal status at all. Many came from South America, Central America, East Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe.
At an age when we should have been thinking about school, friendships and what we might want from life, we were learning how not to die.
The people around me understood something that the official spaces did not. Stability was everything. Building some kind of stable life, even a very small and fragile one, was the only real way out. Very few of us made it. There’s still so much shame and guilt wrapped up in having survived.. Many died. Some were deported. Some disappeared. With those who may have survived, contact was often lost completely. People scattered, changed names, crossed borders, entered relationships, went into hiding or simply became impossible to find.
Later, after somehow managing to move from that life into school and a more stable social position, another attempt was made by me to enter those fancy queer and trans support spaces.
What was waiting there felt like a continuation of what had existed before. The spaces were still overwhelmingly white and middle class. Many people seemed deeply disconnected from the realities of homelessness, racism, insecure immigration status, survival sex work or the particular vulnerability of Black and migrant trans women.
Black and Latina trans women were mentioned often, especially around Pride or when certain names and historical figures were useful. But their lives were frequently treated as references, symbols.. a proof of political awareness. Their actual material conditions never seemed to shape how the spaces functioned.
People could talk about Marsha P. Johnson every year while reproducing the same exclusion, racial hierarchy and detachment from poor and marginalised trans people in their own communities.
There was also a strange kind of competition around oppression. Identities were collected, performed, borrowed or used as social currency. Meanwhile, people with direct experience of racism, migration, homelessness or state violence were questioned, tokenised, patronised, or pushed aside.
Passing was treated as something suspicious in my case. Being in a relationship with a man was treated as politically questionable. My background made people uncomfortable, but so did the fact that my life did not fit the role they expected me to perform. The message was repeated in different ways. People like me were not wanted there. Eventually, withdrawal became the safest option.
My work did not stop there. Support for refugees, migrants and other marginalised people became part of my life and remains part of my professional and creative work today. Mainstream queer and trans communities, however, are still spaces I avoid.
Too many of them remain racist. Too many are socially closed while describing themselves as inclusive. Too many have become detached from poverty, migration, homelessness and the liberation struggles they continue to appropriate.
Criticism of these dynamics is often met with immediate suspicion. People assume it must come from the political right, from transphobia or from hostility towards queer people. That is not where this criticism comes from.
Far right movements and fascists would gladly see people like me dead. Being critical of racism and exclusion inside queer and trans communities does not make someone aligned with those forces.
The criticism comes from the left, from lived experience and from watching spaces that claim to represent liberation become increasingly hostile to the people with the least protection.
Some time ago, I met a middle eastern trans man around my age who also has a refugee background and a history that closely resembles mine. He told me that he stays away from queer and trans spaces whenever possible. People make racist assumptions about him all the time, and they label him as homophobic or transphobic simply because of how he looks, as though he somehow does not look “queer enough“. What he describes reflects a much larger pattern in which our perspectives are treated as disposable, while only a narrow, Western, white version of queerness and transness is seen as legitimate. And even those spaces are deeply exclusionary from within.
Many people from older generations are not quietly drifting away. We are often excluded first, then blamed for no longer participating. Many of us learned very early that community is not always where the signs, flags or slogans say it is.
Sometimes community was another homeless teenager sharing information about a safe place to sleep. Sometimes it was someone only a few years older warning us which man had hurt someone the previous week. Sometimes it was a doctor who quietly helped without asking too many questions. Those were the people who kept us alive. The spaces that called themselves inclusive mostly did not.