(This year’s Transgender Day of Remembrance in Bloomington was full with queer anarchist counter-information, marching, queering of public space, and a noise demonstration at the jail. Two people involved in Indiana Queer Prisoner Solidarity gave speeches at the event, speaking against the police, prisons, capitalism, and the gendered order. The following day, Indiana Daily Student published an article by Matt Bloom, which summarized our speeches as “advocating against violence.” The following is a response.)
We would like to respond to Matt Bloom’s article from November 21, “A life of authenticity.”
The article grossly mischaracterizes the speeches we gave at the event as part of Indiana Queer Prisoner Solidarity. Bloom states that our speeches “advocat[ed] against violence.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Both speeches given by members of Indiana Queer Prisoner Solidarity described, in ways both personal and political, the structural violence done to queer and gender-variant individuals. We, as trans and queer people, know this violence intimately and, yes, we oppose and resist it at every opportunity.
We are not, however, “against violence.” We are against the violence which those in power (the police, the prison authorities, the wealthy) use against oppressed people (poor people, people of color, trans people). We are not opposed to the violence of the oppressed against those who control, exploit, imprison, and murder them. Our speeches made this point very clear. Matt Bloom’s article put our words into a moral framework we oppose. To quote Bernadine Dohrn: “There’s no way to be committed to non-violence in the middle of the most violence society that history has ever created. We’re not committed to non-violence in any way.”