For queer and trans people of color, the NYPD is the literal fashion police

Ed. note: This is a guest post from Verónica Bayetti Flores. Verónica is the Assistant Director of the Civil Liberties and Public Policy program (CLPP) at Hampshire College. She has worked to increase access to contraception and abortion, fought for paid sick leave, demanded access to safe public space for queer youth of color, and helped to lead social justice efforts in Wisconsin, New York City, and Texas.

After a couple of weeks of almost all LGBTQ-related news focusing on marriage, I was relieved and pleasantly surprised to read a story in the New York Times about the ways that New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy affects transgender and gender non-conforming people of color:

The elasticity that officers in New York and elsewhere have been given to police quality-of-life violations has had the unfortunate effect of leaving transgender women, especially, susceptible to the charge that they must be engaged in sex work. What we have now, in some sense, is an actual fashion police — an attitude among some law enforcers that attaches criminality to sartorial choice.

Don’t get me wrong, I do hope that DOMA is repealed, and that Prop 8 is found unconstitutional–but I also think that getting stopped and felt up by the cops on the regular is an injustice that deserves some more play than a rich lady who got some extra taxes on her huge inheritance. And the reality is that for gender non-conforming and trans folks, especially people of color, this is every day shit. And it results in disproportionate incarceration and immigration detention–basic violations of humanity in general, but especially so for trans prisoners and detainees. Trans prisoners and immigrant detainees are particularly susceptible to violence on the inside, being denied adequate health care, placed in barracks according to the gender they were assigned at birth regardless of where they may feel safest, and placed in solitary for amounts of time that are tantamount to torture.

The article also highlights the work of grassroots groups Streetwise and Safe and Make the Road New York, two of a few organizations in NYC that are resisting the disproportionate incarceration of queer and trans people of color. Check them out!

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Related:
Quick Hit: The effects of stop + frisk on women
We must end stop and frisk
Condom searches are being used to profile sex workers