Jamie Grant discusses community-based surveys, intersectional feminism, and the expansiveness of gender and sexuality. Jamie Grant is a lesbian writer and activist, and author of Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey and Great Sex: Mapping your Desire. She is currently working on a LGBTQ+ Women’s community survey that centers anyone who identifies as a woman and those who used to identify as a woman and would like to speak about their experience. Co-hosted by Rhiki Swinton and Paige Chung: audio edited by Gilbert Daniel Bwette.
Transcript:
Rhiki:
Welcome to Radical Futures Now. On this podcast, we connect with social justice leaders around the world to talk about how to organize, how to be in movement and how to build radical futures now. What up y’all, and welcome to another episode of Radical Futures Now. It’s Rhiki here, hey, and I’m so excited to talk with you all about this next topic. So we have Jamie Grant here today, and we’re going to talk about community surveys and feminist methodologies. Whoa! So we’re so excited to talk with you today, Jamie, but before we get started, can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?
Jaime Grant:
Sure. I think relevant background for me as an activist is I grew up during the violent desegregation of the public schools in Boston, which was pretty legendary. And that conflict shaped my life. I’m Irish-American. I was living in a very proud Irish first-generation enclave, and I saw all this massive racism and violence coming out of my community and it really shaped me, so that when I got to college, I was looking for other models of being an Irish-American woman. I was pretty feminist identified, and I came across the work of The Combahee River Collective, which was a black lesbian feminist collective in Boston in the seventies that did all this coalition work. They’re now super famous, but then really not very many people knew about the work. I actually wrote one of the first academic articles about the collective; pretty proud about that.
Jaime Grant:
But I started doing research on collaborations between Irish women and the collective. And I got to meet Barbara Smith, really one of the founders of modern, this incredible wave of feminism. Her work actually is the work that created intersectional feminist work. And so there I am in my twenties and I meet Barbara and it just changes my entire life and trajectory. So I like to talk about that because as an activist it’s your story. And following your story and thinking about the fantastic things and the things you need to resist in your own story, that really is the stuff that’s going to make you as an activist. So, that’s the important thing to know about me.
Paige:
Thank you for your answer. I know you talked a little bit about the desegregation in Boston. I’m wondering if that was part of your politicization process, or if you could talk a little bit about how did you become politicized?
Jaime Grant:
Definitely. What a political education. First of all, we were in the burbs and my cousins were all in the city and some of my cousin’s parents were working in the public schools in major thing. So we had the, what I would say, the relative moral distance at which to critique what was going on of the suburbs rather than being in the midst of it, right? So my parents could be nominally anti-racist and say, this is all terrible, but also not necessarily pro-desegregation. So for me, I grew up in this really big moral quandary. I had that and the Vietnam War going on every night on TV. And my father was a World War II veteran, and he’d been in a war that he thought had a really big moral imperative and my brother was in a college and saying he would go to Canada if he got drafted, and my father was really pissed about that.
Jaime Grant:
So, and then I see all this death every night, right? And all these young people protesting. So it was really just such an incredibly, it was a time like now. Really. It was a time very much like now where you can see really critical interventions and frames; shifting frames and shifting our understanding of what’s moral, what does it mean to live in this country, who are we. So I feel, in a lot of ways, fortunate. The women’s movement was also just exploding. So when I got to college, I got to meet Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich. I got to see all these people who I think of as really forming post-Stonewall, queer resistance. I was already a pretty full-blown alcoholic by college, so I missed a lot of things.
Jaime Grant:
But even as I was struggling with my own, what I think of, as the follow out of the really colonization and my people and that long story, I could start to see there were other possibilities, because I was really taking in all this amazing resistance and reformulation of what was possible. So I felt really lucky to have been on a college campus. Much like [K 00:05:09], I was at Wesleyan, and it was 79 to 83. And this bridge called my back, came out during that time, which is one of, I think, the most important feminist women of color critiques in the last century.
Jaime Grant:
That book came out. I got to meet Cherríe Moraga. So, yeah, my politicization, it was very vibrant. And not really because of Wesleyan, I have to say. They did bring a lot of people. I found being in a really, fancy school, predominantly white, with a lot of rich kids was super oppressive to me. I was a public school kid and it did not help me in a lot of ways, but it did help me learn to read and write and think. And so I’m grateful for that.
Rhiki:
I really appreciate you saying that. I also went to a private liberal predominantly white institution, and it is, like you said, it doesn’t necessarily teach you to be in the movement, and it doesn’t really give you diverse viewpoints, but it does give you the opportunity to have access to different resources that you probably wouldn’t otherwise. And it does give you opportunities to think differently. They always said at the institution I went to, “We encourage you to think outside the box.” And I took that literally, so I really was thinking outside the box in all of my classrooms. And then my professors would be like, you might be too outside the box and I’m like, “Oh, really?” But I do want to ask you, okay, so I really just, I’m curious, what does feminism look like for you? Or, yeah, you personally, how would you describe yourself as a feminist?
Jaime Grant:
Yeah. Well, you can see it in your work. You can see it in my work. But my life and my work and my family, it’s all the same. You know what I mean? I don’t see separations. My resistance, my work output, how I form my family, everything to me is a exercise in gender revolution, which is what I’m interested in. I am interested in absolutely, and I have been since I was young, since before I got out of Boston, that I could see that all the shit that my mother was trying to survive and all the other Irish women around me was just ridiculous. And I wanted no part of it. And I got targeted as a young person for it.
Jaime Grant:
I got targeted for it in college. I got assaulted multiple times in college. And it’s just really shaped my work, but I have to say, meeting Barbara and understanding that women of color feminisms are really central feminisms. One of the reasons I don’t like it when people say intersectional feminism is because feminism is inherently intersectional or it isn’t feminism. So it centers a white supremacist feminism as feminism. So I always say, feminism is intersectional, right? But saying intersectional feminism means there’s like another kind of feminism and there just isn’t.
Jaime Grant:
Yeah. I feel really grateful that I discovered the work of the collective in my twenties. And then basically from there, all of my work has been come out of women of color determined projects, women of color theoretical frameworks, my whole network, everything I’ve done since then. So, and I came to D.C, which was a black majority city. I feel really lucky about that in the nineties. And everybody was like, “Oh my God, you’re living in downtown D.C.” And I was like, yes, baby, it’s a black majority city, and I fucking love it, right?
Jaime Grant:
People think of D.C as like the white feds, and that was not my D.C. I came into recovery in D.C in the early nineties, and I had this unbelievable community to hold me and support me through that. So, that’s all my feminism. And I feel, watching my kids grow up, and trying to think about how to help position them, so that they also have those early formative things so that things are not attached on from the outside. You know what I mean? That it’s an organic way of thinking about resistance, feminism, revolution, although they give me shit. They’re not exactly revolutionaries yet, but I still have hope for that.
Paige:
Yeah, that’s so funny. I came up in ethnic studies and the English literature department at Kalamazoo College is actually pretty radical. And, yeah, all the people that you’re talking about, like shoutout to The Combahee River collective, Cherríe Moraga, Audre Lorde, those are all the people we still study now. And when you think about ethnic studies, that’s really the core of it is intersectional feminism. The way that you defined it is redundant, right?
Jaime Grant:
Yes. And the Arcus Center brought you all that because [inaudible 00:10:31] studies and there was no… The faculty was completely different before the center came in. You know what I mean? If you could have a radical experience in case English department is really about this center. So, yeah, did our work there. That’s really good to know.
Paige:
You talked a little bit about how your politicization and your upbringing informed your current work. You did the injustice at every turn, a report on the National Transgender Discrimination Survey. Can you talk about the importance of data in the nonprofit world and in organizing and some of the highlights of this report?
Jaime Grant:
Yeah. So, this is a revolutionary report. Before we did it, the only data that existed in the US about trans people was a handful of small samples out of HIV testing out of cities that just framed trans people as disease vectors, problems, sex workers. There was no humanity in any of it. It was a complete problematization. So we realized in the early 200s that the community itself was so anti-trans that we needed to do something around making visible the realities of trans people, both within the queer community and without. So, we decided to launch this national study when I was at the national LGBTQ task force. We got no money for it. The powers that be, the queer academics, or I want to say, the lesbian and gay academics in charge laughed at us. Somebody told me who was running a major LGBT academic center at the time, that nobody would ever care about this report or this community, and I was wasting my time.
Jaime Grant:
So that just gives you a sense of what the report helped change, because I think you probably think that’s unfathomable now, but this was 2008 and that’s where we were at. So, I came into the report and I’d already been living in trans communities for, I don’t know, 20 years. I had a trans partner. I had many, many trans people in my world of beloveds, and many, many gender queer people, and many, many people… One of my people is one of the people that really formed the campaign to use they, right?
Jaime Grant:
They’ve been using it for 25 years. So, I feel really lucky that… And I wasn’t living with all activist trans people. I’m living in downtown D.C in a neighborhood, there are trans people all over our neighborhoods, and they’re in their neighborhoods, they’re living with their mothers. The ideas that people have about how trans people are in communities of color, totally wrong, in my view. There were just so many things that people really didn’t know, and I watched so many people die through the AIDS crisis, through dealing with their addictions just like me, but I got treatment, they got jail.
Jaime Grant:
I got treatment at a good hospital they got treated like shit, and sitting in the emergency room all night and have nobody take them. I sat with trans people in the nineties several nights in ERs in D.C, and never got behind the window. We would just sit out there and wait for our names to be called. So, again, I think the best research is done by the people who are living this experience and living in the communities. So I firmly believe that that’s a Combahee River Collective technology, that’s a feminist technology. It’s really just feminist methods.
Jaime Grant:
I’ve never done a survey project before I did the study. So all these big surveyors in various academic departments of various schools who were LGBT were telling me, I couldn’t do this either, that really I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, which don’t ever tell me I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing when I’m about to do something liberating for my community, because just watch me is how I feel about it. Just watch me. So we crafted this with the national center for transgender equality. We crafted it with a bunch of trans volunteers. We had no money. We had a couple of people situated that had jobs in movement organizations, so we were paid for. Everybody else, we just drew on everybody’s expertise as we went to craft these 70 questions.
Jaime Grant:
And the idea was we would show up the first time a 360 degree portrait of trans life. We’d look at education, employment, family life, how do you get your identity documents, health care, education, everything. And there was nothing. There was literally nothing. So, again, people said 70 questions is too much. Again, one of these people said to me, this community won’t even be able to read this. Again, from inside the community. And 6,500 people read it and finished it and gave us the biggest trans sample in history within a couple of months.
Jaime Grant:
And then when that data came out, it changed everything. Every secretary in the Obama Administration wanted to be briefed on it because they didn’t know. We went all over the world with this data. There’s a project in Kenya happening right now led by trans activists there that’s based on the methodology from this report by trans activists there who we supported and taking it up using the methodology and adapting it locally, which it’s totally adaptable.
Jaime Grant:
So what about it? I would say one of the big fights that I really like explains who I am in this is that, A, I’m really living among trans people and I’m losing people as we’re doing the data, right? So this is not an academic exercise for me. And then the other thing is I have been targeted for my gender my whole life too, right, in a different lane. But to me it’s the same universe, right? So it’s like, I wanted a project that could look at the really big spectrum of gender in the big umbrella of trans, and we had a fight about that, and among people. People wanted first just people who either identified as male to female or female to male, because that experience of identifying transgender in that lane was so not recorded and misunderstood.
Jaime Grant:
And I was like, well, we can get that, but I want to see all the other brothers, sisters, [theysters 00:17:04] alongside that, so we can look at the data across all those different identities and different expressions and see what’s happening. So I would say that was a really big contribution of mine to the project and I’m proud of it. And that data is some of the most important first data on gender queers that we have in the country, and has just fermented hundreds and hundreds of studies along with the organizing. So, for me, academic activist collaborative work has to come from the community. Period!
Jaime Grant:
The architecture has to be from the community. The reason when you have academics going to a community and saying, we want to do this for you because this is our question. It’s in my view extractive and exploitive from the jump. If you are not starting in the community and going and saying, hey, what do you need? I’m a researcher. I have this expertise. That’s the kind of research and work I’ve done my whole life, and that is stuff that has real impact and also has legs. People can actually use it, which we’re still seeing. So very long answer. Sorry. I’m very chatty.
Paige:
No, you’re good. You’re good. It sounds like an amazingly large project as well, like a long answer for all the credits that [inaudible 00:18:27] to this national LGBT project, yeah, for data and research. Especially, I think, you gave really important context to what it was like before this data because for me, I organize with [APink 00:18:41], and I came up with people in my young twenties knowing that this is normal, knowing that people are proud to be trans. And not to say that there aren’t struggles that people still face, but it’s a very different time period than prior to 2008. I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the methodology of this report.
Jaime Grant:
Sure. I just also want to say that my kids often say to me, they’re both bi-identified, queer-identified, and they’re like… One’s 22 and one’s 13 and they’re like, “Mom, just stop. Nobody cares about this in our generation. We’ve got this already.” And I’m like, you’re welcome. You’re welcome you little creep, you brat. Jesus, we did this for you, so shut up. So [inaudible 00:19:28], you know what I’m saying? It’s just like, oh mom, you’re so over the top about this. Shut up. So methodology. I would say, feminist methods for me is about the architecture of any project. Whose idea is it? Who’s sitting around the table in those very first meetings? What’s your accountability structure? A lot of people will, if I may say, put the color in their advisory panel, and have no people of color who are the research directors and the people at the helm of the project.
Jaime Grant:
So for me, that’s just hugely problematic. And if you’re going to have an advisory committee that is really much more representative of the community than you are as the key team, then they have to be an accountability structure, not an advisory structure. They have to have real power to say, yeah, you’re not doing this right. Go back to the drawing board. Yeah, I don’t like this. Yeah. So that’s what I would say. For me, feminist methods is about the architecture. And then in community based work, if you build that architecture correctly, like we’re right now in the LGBTQ women’s survey starting to do, what I call, our [inreach 00:20:49] campaign because it’s not outreach, because we’re reaching into the communities we’re already in, rather than reaching out somewhere that we’re not.
Jaime Grant:
So we’re starting or just letting people know what’s happening with it and when it’s going to launch and what it’s about. And we have about 30 people in the structure of the project in the campaign who are all part of the communities that are the least likely to ever be researched as LGBTQ women, right? And also our definition of women is, if you identify or have identified as a women and love women, then you’re in. So it’s a self identification process. Again, that’s a feminist method rather than we create some kind of a line. We’re also inviting trans men who want to report on their experiences of being perceived of as women, or if they identified as women, and partnered with women because we have feedback from trans men on our committee that a lot of them have nowhere in the world to record their experience of being perceived as, or living in lesbian women’s communities, and they want it.
Jaime Grant:
So, and we’ve gotten tons of pushback about it from people who don’t want it. But my thing is, if you don’t identify, survey’s not for you. If you do, survey is for you. And non-binary people who may have identified as girls or women, and partnered with people who identified as girls or women, if this feels like a space you want to record your experience, this space is for you. So, again, architecture, how you formulate your questions and then are you doing outreach or inreach? Our advisory committee is queer, it’s trans, it’s majority people of color. It’s all the people we want to come along.
Jaime Grant:
I can see over years of doing this work is that it’s not difficult to meet white middle-class people with a research project. If you put it out in the ether, they are going to find it. So if you really want a sample that’s representative of your community and is going to show you what’s going on, your architecture has to be really not that. So, that’s what we’ve done with the architecture of this study, and I’m just really interested to see what we do.
Rhiki:
Yeah. Okay, so you’ve doing this survey thing for a while. So now I want to talk about the new LGBTQ+ women’s community survey that you’re working on. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? And some like, basically the purpose behind doing this type of survey and doing it now?
Jaime Grant:
Well, a couple things. One is in the trans survey, we could see that feminine spectrum people in the trans survey had particular burdens, right? And particular things that needed more study. So, put a pin in that. That’s one thing we can see trans women and trans women of color are in the cross hairs of more violence and the murders that we’re constantly enduring and trying to figure out how to address. Number one, there. Number two, as an LGBTQ woman who’s now 60 years old, what I can see in my community and in the work is that the particular stresses and strains of surviving misogyny, racism, ableism, being caregivers of often hostile parents, our kids, our lovers, our ex lovers, our army of ex-lovers, our friends, there’s just enormous burdens in the community that really are shaped so fundamentally by sexism and how LGBTQ women endorse sexism.
Jaime Grant:
Now we have the national trans data and you can roll these figures off your time. 41% of trans people have tried to commit suicide, so what are we going to do about it? 50% of trans people have to teach their health provider how to take care of them. So the American Medical Association’s so ashamed by that, that they’re changing medical school curricula. Trans people are unemployed at two to three times the rate of the general population. So now we know that. There’s all these labor and employment things that now Biden’s doing, right? When we have good administrations, we’ve been doing it at the local level. So we know where we want to fight, and we have the numbers to fight.
Jaime Grant:
We don’t [inaudible 00:25:31] have that with LGBTQ women’s still. We don’t have a big national look. It’s crazy. And a lot of us have felt like God, we’ve been like holding up the Atlas of the world in terms of leadership in the movement and our issues are still really not on the table. So, I’m really excited to get that picture. I want those stats to roll off my tongue, and I want to be able to look… The thing about doing a national survey is A, you get a massive sample, but B, if you do it across all these domains, you can look at how different things are playing off each other. So for instance, in the trans survey, we could see…
Jaime Grant:
One finding that really still hasn’t been explored enough that was a stunner for me was that masculine spectrum people assigned female at birth were experiencing tons of sexual assault in K through 12. A bunch from their teachers, right? And that was a completely hidden thing before the study. You could say, well, lots of people, trans people in the study are experiencing sexual assault. But what I thought I was seeing, which I still really want researchers to take up is that you can see that feminine spectrum people assigned male at birth are being beat up in the hallways by people who are crapping on them for a feminine gender expression, right? They’re policing what they think of as their masculinity. So that’s visible, but the violence that masculine spectrum people assigned female at birth or enduring is invisible. People will say, well, it’s much easier to be a tomboy in elementary school. Really? No, it isn’t. The tomboys are getting sexually assaulted and nobody knows about it, right?
Jaime Grant:
So these are the kinds of things that you can see in a big national survey where A, you’ve done a really good job of identifying people’s gender and gender expression, right? So we could see the nuances of that because we had a really, this is another feminist method that I love, we had a really layered gender instrument. And that methodology’s been copied all over the world, right? Very proud of it. And we’re doing just a spectacular job in the LGBTQ women’s survey. Why don’t you see these lists of things you can identify with? They’re amazing. The thing that I really am excited about the survey is all these things about me that are completely invisible as a lesbian, as a queer woman, as a mother, as a radical, as someone who’s been fired for being queer and fired for being political.
Jaime Grant:
There are places in the study for me to record all of it, right? And that just isn’t true anywhere. So we really have worked for over a year now on, I hate to say it, 170 question questionnaire. Everybody won’t answer 170 questions because there’s tons of skip patterns, right? Like X doesn’t apply to you, so you’ll move along and miss five questions here, 10 questions there. But we have a sickeningly long survey right now. It’s going to be a little shorter when it comes out. We’re still fighting over questions. That’s really, man, that’s a feminist technology getting to the consensus on those questions.
Jaime Grant:
But the idea that it’s taken till I’m 60 years old to really be able to talk about myself, right, in any research project to really be able to illuminate our experience. I think people of color experience this all the time, queers experience this all the time, women experience this all the time, and so we’ve just got a nexus here in our community that we really want to make visible. How are those things coming together in the lives of different LGBTQ women, and what does it mean for our ability to form our families and live and thrive?
Rhiki:
I really appreciate you lifting that up. I think we are trying to enter into a world where we can use data responsibly, or there’s few people that are trying to do that, but I really love this being able to really have, be able to self-identify in a questionnaire that is going to produce data that will hopefully help you get what you need or being able to talk about all of your experiences. And so I really appreciate that the work you and others are putting into, not taking the shortcut [inaudible 00:30:08] to the survey, but just doing what’s necessary to get all of the things incorporated. And, yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s probably the more complicated route, but it’s the one that’s most worth it in the end.
Jaime Grant:
Yup. And it’s liberating to do it. I remember in the trans study somebody saying, we’re going to have this question about prostitution. And I was like, prostitution. Prostitution is a word that the state uses against us. We’re never going to use that word in a study about trans people. First of all, it’s all anybody thinks about, second of all, no. So it’s like, how are we going to talk about ourselves? So one of the reasons we got 6,500 people to answer 70 questions was because they could recognize themself when they came into the study. They didn’t feel like a rat in a maze, they didn’t feel like some pathologized vector, problematic vector of disease. They could see that someone in the community was speaking with them about themselves. And it gives you the [oomph 00:31:08] to answer all the damn questions.
Jaime Grant:
You know what I mean? All those academics who laughed at me and said, I really, you could have seven questions. And I was just like, a bad word forming on my lips. You know what I’m saying? We are not a seven questions people. Our lives are not a seven questions questionnaire. So, yeah. I love figuring out that language, which changes all the time. I loved the gender instrument in the trans study. And when we did it, I was like, this is a snapshot of 2008. In 2021, we’d have a totally different list. And the question I loved the most in the trans study was, you could write in a gender not listed here, right? We left a blank. If you didn’t identify as male or female or gender-fluid or whatever you could say, a gender not listed here and write your gender in it.
Jaime Grant:
840 people wrote in their own gender and gave us 500 terms for their genders. And so my favorite article I ever wrote is off of that one question; all of the different ways. There was so much resistance in the formation of those terms. It was so funny. Gender pirate, [inaudible 00:32:28]. It was just like, oh my God, I really loved it. So, I did this incredible thing with Jody Herman who’s now at the Williams Institute, who was our [bean 00:32:41] counter, our real data geek for this thing. And they and I did this presentation at the National LGBTQ Task Force: Creating Change Conference. On that question, it was just on the gender queer, or gender spectrum data. And we put all the words around the room as people came in. We hung it up in these big sheets, so people could see all the words.
Jaime Grant:
And people STARTED walking into the workshop and before we’d ever said anything, people were weeping. People were weeping because for the first time in their lives, their gender was in there, was in the room. And they could see it was a place they belonged. And it was just like, that is what I live for. Everything else, all the arguments, all the whatever, I will put up with those because that, in my bucket list of gender revolution, that room, I will remember for the rest of my life. Honestly. A 70 year old gender queer person crying because it’s the first time they’re in a space that actually holds them and is them, and they’re in community. Yes. Hell yes. That’s what I’m doing. That’s what I’m here for. And the LGBTQ women’s survey, our instrument’s really interesting. We’re going to be able to do the same thing. I can’t wait.
Paige:
Right on. Yeah, right on, for sure. I wanted to return to something that you said earlier. I wanted to return to something you said earlier. You spoke about the violence that happens when tomboys or people who are masculine identify who are so born female… Wait, what is it?
Jaime Grant:
Assigned female at birth.
Paige:
Assigned female at birth. Thank you. I was missing the word.
Jaime Grant:
Sure. No problem.
Paige:
Right. And I think that violence does totally gets neglected. And I think when you were talking about how there isn’t a space for trans men to talk about their experiences prior to them becoming trans men as lesbians, and it’s really difficult, that they become invisibilized, and I think that’s really important work I’ve seen too.
Jaime Grant:
Thank you.
Paige:
And then I also wanted to ask you another question. You were talking about how this experience is so the opposite of being pathologized. And I was thinking about how a lot of sex education is really pathologizing or abstinence only, or just a very sterile understanding of sex and not relational or joyous or desire. And then I remember when I went to the Arcus Center one day-
Jaime Grant:
No pleasure.
Paige:
No pleasure at all. I went to the Arcus Center and I went to the bookshelf and actually saw your book. I didn’t get to go to your workshop because I was in class. But, yeah, you wrote Great Sex: Mapping Your Desire, and it was like, I was like, whoa! What are these questions? What is this book? And it really was also during a time when I was starting to think about those questions. I was in college. Can you talk about what inspired that work, and-
Jaime Grant:
You’re going to make me cry.
Paige:
Yeah.
Jaime Grant:
Yes! Yes!. Oh my God, yes. Thank you. Oh my God. Well, that just makes me feel so good, that the book was useful to you. Yeah, so I’ll tell you how Mapping and that whole thing came about. Another feminist method, shall we say, which is in the nineties at the height of the AIDS crisis here, one of my dearest friends, Amelie Zurn, who’s a genius, who’s one of my, I wrote the book with her, was the head of lesbian services at Whitman-Walker clinic, the gay clinic. And I think it was one of the first lesbian services programs in the country. Maybe San Francisco had one, maybe New York had one, but we were really early.
Jaime Grant:
And Amelie saw herself as an organizer, right? Not just like you know, it was like, yes, get your pap smear here. But it was also like, who are we? What are we doing? And so we decided to do a lesbian sex day. And this is 1990, everybody’s dying. Right? D.C is in the middle of the crack epidemic, early gentrification and AIDS. So black lesbians are suffering. And so we wanted to have a joy day about pleasure and we thought, how should we start this day? And I was like, why don’t we have people tell their sex biography? We’ll pick five different lesbians and we’ll just go through, like this is how I started, and this is where I am. And it was like, oh my God, what an idea? It was our opening plenary. And one of them was 60, one was 20, I was 29. And people who identify as lesbians have sex with all kinds of people, right? And nobody talks about it.
Jaime Grant:
And so that got put out there, the kinds of sex we had, the kinds of partnerships we’ve had, everything we were doing that everybody knew about and nobody knew about just all on the table. And after we finished the plenary, we had two days of workshops after that. And it was like we exploded this happiness bomb in the middle of the room. People were on fire. People were so liberated and I thought, Oh my God, this is it. This is it. Telling our stories, telling our sex stories, is it. So fast-forward, I do different things. I do workshops. I do different things over the years, but then I get to the task force again in 2007 and the Creating Change Conference is happening and the sex track at the time, which was very vibrant in the nineties during the AIDS crisis was amazing.
Jaime Grant:
All kinds of shit happened in those workshops. In 2007, they’re like, how do we message ourselves to get marriage? And I was like, fuck this. This sucks. This isn’t even a sex track anymore. This is, it’s been hijacked by the white gay money that is running the marriage movement. And I was like, we need to do something else. And the head of the conference who was a close, just a great comrade said, yes, take this over, do something else. So, really. So I just created this workshop based on the idea that if we tell a lot of sex stories in the middle of a room and we hold the space really well, we take care of people and that’s a big feminist methodology, how are we going to set the space up? Because so many of us are trauma survivors, myself included.
Jaime Grant:
So, the Mapping workshops, what I did was, again, do a people of color majority, at least half trans or more, a lot of people living in poverty because everybody thinks people living in poverty can’t have pleasure. And I grew a faculty that is now, I don’t know, 60 or 70 people all over the country. We’re in year 13 now of the workshop. And I would just have us set a really safe container and center ourselves as survivors at the beginning of the workshop, which was so critical because survivors think, oh, everybody’s here to have a great time and I’m broken, and I can’t talk about this, and this is just going to fuck me up. And it’s like, no, we’re all broken. We’re all fucked up. And we’re still going to have our pleasure anyway.
Jaime Grant:
And so starting the workshop from that space, again, feminist technology. I’ve done 13 years of workshops all over the freaking world. I’ve done it in the Middle East. I’ve done it in China with the government shutting the workshop down as we’re putting it on. I’ve done it in Kenya, I’ve done it in South Africa, I’ve done it everywhere. And the tool is to have all your storytellers always be local. Right? I come in with the idea, I come in ahead of time. I did it in Russia. And I sat with these Russian activists in this coffee shop in St. Petersburg and all of them telling their stories and getting ready. And then we did a workshop at 200 people with these big, bruising, KGB-looking guys out in front. It was crazy. But the same thing happens in every single space.
Jaime Grant:
Yeah. Something specific happens and amazing, but the commonality is that once we start telling each other what we’re actually doing, what matters to us, what meaning we’re making out of our sex and our desire, it is like, fuck yes! It’s like, let’s remember the LGBT movement is a liberation. It’s a sex liberation movement. This is where to start. And this is also how to arm our people and give our people the resilience and the strength to keep going. When you’re targeted for your sex, that’s how they freaking shut you down and disempower you and wear you out. So honestly, it’s taken me about 13 years to convince anybody, God loved the task force.
Jaime Grant:
They’ve given me this space for 15 years, but for a long time, it was like, ha ha, the sex workshops, oh yeah, they’re fun, they’re on the side. But people would say, I’m going to the leading the movement workshop, or the how to win a statewide bill workshop, so I can’t come to your workshops. But over the 15 years, our workshops have been packed. Literally packed. You can’t even get in the room, right? And I now can see 13-
Paige:
Yeah, I actually went to… Oh, sorry.
Jaime Grant:
No, go ahead.
Paige:
I actually went to one of the Creating Change, the one that the LGBT Task force puts on. And I think it was 2018. And my favorite workshop was the kink 101 workshop. And it was like, we were practicing how to slap each other’s ass safely, how to choke safely. It was really fun. Yeah, That was definitely my favorite one.
Jaime Grant:
Yup. We always-
Paige:
It’s so funny because when I talk to the elder lesbians in my community, they’re like, the way you guys do workshops, they’re so boring. We used to have [cunnilingus 00:42:44] workshops and watch each other and teach each other how to eat each other out, and the way you guys do it is so, you guys are such prunes. They’re always making fun of our generation. Yeah. I’m totally on with you, yeah.
Jaime Grant:
That’s so funny. That’s so funny. No, we can’t do that [crosstalk 00:43:05]. You know what I mean? We can’t do actual sex demos [crosstalk 00:43:09]. So we do what we can. But, yeah, I always think the dental stuff is so important to just help people start to think creatively about what this could mean to them or what they even want to do, right? Yeah, so I’m starting to feel like in this movement, and again, it’s no mistake that as people of color start to take over the leadership of this movement in the gay organizations, right? In my view, they’ve been in the leadership of the movement the whole time, but they’ve been marginalized around who’s got the seat at the head of these national organizations. Now that’s changing and I can see that there’s just… Even I’ve been a part of the task force since the nineties.
Jaime Grant:
So, I’ve got a 30 year track record with this organization. I feel like there’s just more respect right now for the sex liberation piece, the sex justice piece, than there has been really since the early days. The AIDS crisis, oddly, as we were just dying and being told, it was because of our sex, we were dying, so therefore, we deserved it or whatever. It was a much more radical and experimental and interesting time around just putting it out there. And I feel like it’s just starting to come back. We’re just over the hump of trying to be long and be the best little gays in the world, so we can get our rights. And I think something new is happening, which is really exciting. And that’s a very long answer. So, and the book is basically based on the workshop. So it takes all the exercises in the workshop and tries to put them somewhere, so that people can use it like a workbook or a journal at home and figure some stuff out. I love it.
Paige:
Yeah, I do too.
Jaime Grant:
I just love having it.
Paige:
Yeah. It’s a great book. If you’re out looking for a new book, if you’re out looking to do some self-discovery, definitely check it out.
Jaime Grant:
Yeah, for five years, I did it all by hand. I printed every book. I mailed every book and it is now finally online. So if you can put maybe a link to that in the thing, that would be good, because you can buy it online now. I’m the worst promoter.
Rhiki:
No, we got you covered. So to wrap up the episode, if there are any other resources that you want to direct our listeners to, or a better way to say this is, when you want to get more information about some of the things that we’ve been talking about, who are the people, or who are the organizations or resources that you tap into?
Jaime Grant:
So who am I reading and who do I go to right now? Yeah, I would say, there’s a hand full of queer women of color who are just killing it right now in their writing and their publishing and their work. One is Ejeris Dixon, who did this book called Beyond Survival with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. That book, I think, is a really revolutionary book. I think the revolution starts at home, which is a south end press book that’s now another kind of book. Has this essay in it that is my favorite essay that transformed my life. I read it when I was at K and it absolutely transformed everything I did from there. It’s called The Secret Joy of Accountability by Shannon Perez-Darby. But there are many, many essays in the revolution which Leah Lakshmi also I think is a co-editor on that as well. I’m pretty sure.
Jaime Grant:
J Delaney is also a co-editor. That book is really about violence in activist communities. And in terms of taboos and things we can’t talk about, there’s so much bullying, shitty behavior, coercive behavior and physical and sexual violence in our LGBT communities, in our activist communities that just goes unaddressed because we’re afraid to discredit our movements. We’re afraid to break up projects that we’re working on. We’re just afraid. And this book just changed my practices around this. It really helped me figure out how to get out from under really oppressive structures that were supposedly doing liberating work, and also to model and create structures that were better. So I love that book. I love Beyond Survival. Mariame Kaba, K-A-B-A, is doing all this great transformative justice work. I think Fumbling Towards Repair is the latest book.
Jaime Grant:
These are workbooky books. I think it’s a fantastic book looking at the same things. Like how are we creating the revolutionary relationships, projects, ways of being, so that we can actually get to prison abolition? I like what Patrice Culler says, who I met during the first prize meeting at the Arcus prize weekend, before Black Lives Matter jumped off. And Patrice says, getting to abolition is about our daily practices of life. If we’re going to get there, it’s really about how we relate to each other in our communities every single day. And so I think Patrice’s book, When They Call You a Terrorist, is a really critical, fantastic piece of work into that space. What else? I think Leah Lakshmi’s Care Work is another one. Obviously I am fangirling like crazy over Leah, who I think has just had incredible production over the last many, many years.
Jaime Grant:
And that’s really, again, about, that’s a disability justice centered framework about, if we lived in a world where we centered care and the folks that were the most disabled among us were at a level to really live and thrive, all the other systems that would have to be working to make that so, we’d be living in the world we want to be living in. And I think that’s absolutely right. So I think she’s doing a great job in that book. And then in terms of futurism, you can’t go wrong with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who is my absolute favorite. She really thinks of herself as an acolyte of Barbara Smith and The Combahee River Collective. But to me, she’s just out there in a different universe of dreaming the future.
Jaime Grant:
She just did this recent book called Undrowned, about how marine mammals survive. And it’s really, she [inaudible 00:50:11], we’re all going to eventually be marine mammals again, which I think is incredible to think about, possibly that is where we are headed, toward marine mammalship again. And these marine mammals and how they’ve survived being hunted forever classified, basically the colonization of the water. She’s a poet. The way that she looks at this and writes about it. And honestly, she started writing about this on her Facebook page, maybe a couple years ago.
Jaime Grant:
She would just write these daily posts and they would come up and they would just blow my mind. I had to call all my people and say, read Alexis’s thing today. And it is how she works. She finds these spaces to dream and imagine forward. And it just always helps me. I think we should all have people who are way ahead of us in their thinking about what’s coming, what’s next and what’s possible that are totally different. Not organizing or doing stuff in the way that I am, but totally fortifying me for the journey, right? She’s totally fortifying everything that she does. So, yeah, love that work; Undrowned.
Rhiki:
Yeah. So that’s it. Right, that’s-
Jaime Grant:
[inaudible 00:51:39] BTS. I would say the other thing, BTS. I watch BTS videos all day because they’re so beautiful. They love each other so much. They are an intervention against toxic masculinity, and I don’t have to think about anything. I just can enjoy them. My daughter is so pissed because she’s a BTS lover and I’ve destroyed her whole BTS lane because there’s absolutely no fun in having your mother have the same [inaudible 00:52:08] you have in BTS. So I’ve just wrecked that for her. Sorry, Ella. But I also believe in [inaudible 00:52:16]. I believe in, I can’t watch movies with rape and destruction, and I want to watch this Fred Hampton movie so bad, because Fred Hampton’s so important to me. Judas in the Black Messiah, and I just cannot watch any more murder and destruction of our people right now. Maybe I’ll be able to watch that movie in a couple of years, but right now with the burdens I have, BTS. Give me Jin singing, I’m the one I should love all day long.
Paige:
Thank you for sharing all those people that you read and other people who inspire you. So Rhiki, what reflections and thoughts are you having after having the conversation with Jamie Grant today?
Jaime Grant:
I think one of the big things that I took away from this conversation is just the importance of collecting data like this, because when Jamie was talking about how people who were presenting in a tomboyish manner in K through 12, how they were being sexually harassed by their teachers and how that occurrence would have not been brought to light unless a survey like this was happening. So I’m just thinking about all the things that are invisible to us right now that this community needs, but we can’t do anything about it because we can’t prove that this is occurring, if that makes sense.
Paige:
Right. Yeah. I feel like for me, I was thinking a lot about when she was talking about trans men who don’t have a place to talk about all of their gender experiences. And I’m also thinking a lot about the violence against just all people through gender. I think gender can be a really violent thing when it’s imposed on you by other people, and their expectations of you. But I think, also talking about sex and the beauty of all the ways that you could identify on the survey that she worked on also just shows how expansive gender can be too.
Rhiki:
And that’s it for our episode today. The Radical Futures Now podcast is housed under the Arcus Center for social justice leadership at Kalamazoo college. Special thanks to [Trevor Laudium Jackson 00:54:35] for our music and [Ellie Anahi Quinonez 00:54:37] for our graphics. Be sure to follow us on our Instagram @arcuscenter. See you next week.