Sammie Ablaza Wills and Yuan Wang discuss trans-centered organizing, community based participatory research, and solidarity. APIENC is a grassroots organization building transgender, non-binary and queer API power in the Bay Area. APIENC recently conducted a community based participatory research called Up to Us that was conducted by and centered transgender API community members.
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’s up y’all thank you for tuning in. So today we have special guests Sammie and Yuan joining us today. And I’m going to let y’all introduce yourselves. So how about we start with Sammie.
Sammie:
Cool, thanks Rhiki. Hi everyone, my name is Sammie Ablaza Wills and I’m the current director at APIENC. I come to this work as a young trans Philippine X person who grew up working class. And I first came to APIENC as a summer intern in 2013, expecting to learn how to organize a rally and be a part of an organization. But what ended up happening is that I found a political home and I found a lot of people that would challenge me to live within values of abundance and interdependence. And from that time I stuck around. So thanks for having me.
Yuan:
Hey everybody, this is Yuan, my pronouns are she and they I’m calling in from Mulholland in Oakland, and I’m one of the community organizers at APIENC along with Sammie and our wonderful friend Jasmine. I’m a young Chinese American non-binary person who was born in the Bay Area, grew up in New Jersey. And I came into APIENC a couple of years ago as a young person. And Paige one of our amazing podcast hosts was a friend and one of the first people I met as well as Sammie, so I’m so excited to be in conversation with y’all today.
Paige:
Oh, what a lovely introduction you guys are so good at this. Hey, everyone, I’m Paige, today is a very special episode for me. I love a APIENC with all my heart. It is also my political home. It is where I do most of my community building and I’ve been coming back ever since my very first internship in 2017. And then again in 2018 with UN. So I speak really biasly when I say, APIENC works intentionally to build and cultivate better relations, which is obviously reflected in the programming workshops on asking for help to conflict resolution and introducing youth and elders to one another in the Dragon Fruit Network. So my first question to you all today is what is possible when love is abundant and central in our relationships?
Yuan:
Wow! That is an amazing question. And totally not surprised that you asked that, I’m really thinking about this from a place of organizing and also my own experiences, really with APIENC, because I think in my life, APIENC was one of the first places that encouraged me to think about building abundant care and trust and relationships in my life. When I first came into APIENC, a couple of years ago in the summer organizer program, as an intern, as a fellow with Paige, it really came into my life at a place where I felt really isolated, where I didn’t know a lot of other queer or trans or definitely not queer trans API people. And I often felt really afraid honestly, and really alone. I think I just felt a really big absence of folks in my life whose experiences and identities really reflect mine.
Yuan:
And I think that at that time, I was really just thinking about my life, and one day at a time, just getting to the next day to the next week. And in a lot of ways, I was just really stretching and overworking myself because of that mindset and I didn’t really know what to expect when I came into APIENC and came into like this first community of grand trans API folks in my life. But that summer I met people like Vince, who’s some folks on this call know elders in our community. I met people like Paige and also other young trans API people. And I think even getting to hear stories of how our elders made it through the HIV/AIDS crisis and grieved and organize and build community for decades through it.
Yuan:
And meeting other young people and people who are younger than me, I think really having these kinds of relationships and care in my life. It helps me get to a place where I can now think about not just like a day into the future or a long time into the future and many generations. Something that we talk about a lot is that the relationships that we build at APIENC make it possible to think seven generations into the future. And that’s not only something that becomes possible, but that it’s really necessary for our work of building care and connections and organizing.
Sammie:
I really feel that Yuan, I think all of that really resonates with me and my own experience coming into APIENC. As I mentioned, I started when I was just fresh out of my first year of college and I was very politicized, excited to be in spaces like so ready to take all of this learning that I had from the world and create social change. I was very enthusiastic. And I think what was hard is that I came into a lot of social justice spaces and realize that, even in those spaces I could not be my full self or even in those spaces, what they wanted to prioritize most was getting a thing done, the productivity, the end result, without thinking a lot about the process, thinking about how us people who are doing the work might be impacted by the process itself.
Sammie:
And I think that, that experience and the contrast to that I experienced in APIENC, which was a community of so much love and challenge and rigorous care for one another transformed what I thought was possible. And now I understand that holding care and abundance, it’s not just important in our one-on-one relationships for the sake of that, holding care and abundance is important because relationships are central and core to our organizing work. Organizing is hard and heavy work. And at the same time, like it doesn’t need to be extractive in the same way that our systems of oppression that we’re fighting against are.
Sammie:
And as we work towards this like bigger long-term liberation for everybody, it is possible to still enact liberation every day in the way that we are with one another. We can hold each other close by holding each other accountable to the values we want to live by, through our relationships we can heal intergenerational traumas. We can return to our full humanity. We don’t have to fight for something, and burn ourselves out and feel worse by the end of it, we can fight for something with a lot of love, with a lot of tenderness, with a lot of challenge, while still holding each other close. And I think that’s the way that I think we’re going to get free.
Paige:
Yuan can I return back to something that you said earlier? You said something about planning seven generations ahead, and how in APIENC this work allows for that. I was wondering if you could say more about why that’s important.
Yuan:
Thanks for asking that Paige. So to share a little more context about where that comes from, the seven generations concept and mindset really comes from a group of folks at the work that reconnects and was brought to us through the Wildfire Project group of movement facilitators and movement workers. And I remember really clearly the first time we did that activity together within APIENC, or at least the first time that I was a part of it, it was with our core member leadership team at one of our annual retreats and without spoiling too much of the activity in case folks are listening get to do it. We took some time to speak to our descendants seven generations in the future and for the folks who were descendants in the room to speak to our ancestors seven generations in the past.
Yuan:
And I think that on a really personal level, getting to do that and speaking to descendants who we were imagining were living in a world where white supremacy is not a challenge that they are working to overcome every single day. And where they get to be in relationships that are abundant and fulfilling and safe and where water and resources are clean and available for everyone who needs to have them. I think I have realized in that moment that there were many times where that was not the future that I was imagining. And that was a really heavy realization for me as was made clear by the many tears I shed in that moment. But it was also just such a deep reminder that from there is so much that asks and demands of us to move very quickly and respond to so many immediate needs in our own lives and the needs of our members.
Yuan:
It is really important for us as organizers and as people, and not just the folks who are paid organizers, but all the folks who are leaders in our communities and members to really keep in mind the future that we want to be building towards. And speaking to what Sammie said, if these are the kinds of relationships we want to have seven generations from now, what are we doing today? And in this very moment to practice those kinds of relationships and make those values feel real to ourselves and more and more people. So those are some of the reasons I think, thinking in that seven generations mindset is really important to me.
Sammie:
Can I add on to that a little bit?
Paige:
Definitely.
Sammie:
Cool. I think the seven generations activity that we do at APIENC is also part of our larger work and larger understanding to build solidarity with other communities. Although we were first introduced to it through the Wildfire Project and the work that reconnects, I think it’s also important for us to just name that this idea, like even this framework of thinking seven generations in the past, seven generations in the future is a way of being and doing that indigenous peoples across Turtle Island have done for years. And actually that, that foresight, that attention towards the future is the reason why indigenous folks are so skilled at stewarding the land because they’re not just thinking about extraction in the moment.
Sammie:
And us learning from that and having reverence for that also gives us the opportunity to understand how colonialism and genocide and war, impact our work and our mindsets. And we can start to free ourselves of those limiting beliefs to not only advance ourselves, but to be in a deeper solidarity with indigenous people, the black folks on this land, with other migrant people and with the other communities that we have an interconnected history with.
Paige:
I love how you framed that. It actually brings me to my next question, but I loved how you framed that it is this interconnectedness that we have with one another and in our struggles. I was actually rereading Leanne Simpson’s, As We Have Always Done. And she talks about constellations of co-resistance that it not only matters how you achieve liberation, but with whom you do it with. And I was wondering like, you talked a little bit about this, but you know, how does solidarity show up in APIENC work? What does it take to have that solidarity with other communities?
Sammie:
I think this is a critical question for any organization to think about all the time or any person to think about all the time. But solidarity is part of APIENC’s values inherently, I think in some ways, because our values are things like abundance and interdependence and honoring our histories. And for me solidarity is not just a thing you do. It’s not just something that happens once. Solidarity is an action that needs to continuously be a part of work and learning and growth, just like allyship cannot be a static identity that you just like do one thing and you’re an ally forever. It has to be an active verb. So for me, working in solidarity means that we need to understand that our oppressions and our liberations are connected, we like need one another. And history I think, is a place that teaches us this lesson time and time again, when I look at my history of trans folks of color of queer people in the Bay of Filipino people in the US and overseas.
Sammie:
When I know all of those things and I can identify where I come from, what my people have fought for, what mistakes they’ve made? It allows me to understand how I can make new mistakes, or it allows me to understand the powerful moments throughout history in which solidarity work has been absolutely necessary and has been a jumping off point for some of the biggest wins that our communities have ever encountered. At the same time, I think knowing my history also encourages me to understand that solidarity can not be the only way that I am enacting change. I think that one of the things I’ve noticed and come up against in social justice work, especially in the past six years or so, is that there are a lot of young Asian American people really, really dedicated and wanting to move on critical issues like the movement for black lives.
Sammie:
And I saw this a lot as someone who’s been around and been part of the Bay Area Asians for Black Lives since its start, a lot of people wanting to come to us and having the solidarity work as their only political home. But I think what that has done is that it’s also made it so that those folks are not accessing any of their histories. They’re not accessing why they may be connected to these issues or to these fights or to these struggles. And I think the impact of that is like a weird martyrdom or even worse, like a savior complex.
Sammie:
We need to do this because it’s the right thing and that no, we’re not affected by this at all. So we got to go save those people, which that’s like really not it. But instead when we work in a framework of a history based solidarity, we can see the ways that our oppressions, although different and distinct are interconnected and our personal experience, allows us to be more active, more present and more grounded, so that we actually do not need to center ourselves in any way and can just show up and be effective.
Sammie:
I think that there’s a trap of this martyrdom based solidarity is that it doesn’t also acknowledge the ways that solidarity needs to happen within our own communities. I think a lot of people think of solidarity is external work, something you do with people who are unlike you. But even in our own communities, there is a need to build solidarity, build understanding because we’re always creating margins and mainstreams as we organize. And I actually want to ask Yuan to talk a little bit more about that.
Yuan:
Thanks so much for speaking to that Sammie, I really resonate with a lot of the stuff you spoke to around our solidarity with movement for black lives. And like Sammie said, I think when this question comes up, I think a lot about how solidarity also needs to be something that we practice all the time, even within what we consider our community to be. And for APIENC that’s like a lot of different kinds of communities. I think a lot about our work building solidarity and practicing our organizing with trends and trans BIPOC groups across California. I think about APIENC, being a trans centered and trans led organization and the work that we have done to call other LGBQ API allies to really center and support the leadership of young trans API people. I think also about how even being queer and trans and API or using that term, that’s the formation of solidarity because even though to an outsider of our community, we may look the same, our cultures may look similar.
Yuan:
We know that there are so, so many important differences that we have to navigate, understand and be curious about. And I think over the past two years, Sammie and I and other folks at APIENC, have been working a lot with trans groups around California in a coalition called Transform California. And we’ve also been working with groups led by the TransLatina Coalition to establish the first statewide trans wellness fund in California. And I think, such a big part of that work is that even when folks look at a large group of trans folks of color and are like, “Yeah, you’re similar.” It’s like, nope, actually we may share some identities, but we also so many important different histories and experiences. So it’s really been a lesson in how do we build genuine relationships across our difference that are transactional, but are rooted in trust?
Yuan:
How do we get really curious about each other’s experiences, whether it’s the region of California that we’re organizing in or the experiences that our folks have? And how do we speak to our own specific needs for example, as trans API people in the Bay Area, to really build multi-racial coalition that’s genuine and accounts for all of us. So I think really, we’re trying to build the kind of relationships and solidarity in all of these ways that can push back when we’re presented with a scarcity of grant funding or a scarcity of support that asks us to compete with each other and relationships that can help us prioritize each other’s wellbeing when we work together. And that makes room for a really big multitude of ways of being, I think that’s a lot of our practice of internal solidarity as an organization.
Paige:
I was just talking about this with someone else about how there’s sort of this Asian American, arc about organizing. There’s like, Oh my gosh, I don’t know a lot about my history. Oh my gosh, so much oppression happens to so many other people in the US, Oh my gosh, I want to do lots of solidarity work. And then it goes into that. Some people get stuck there that you were saying like the martyrdom Sammie. And it’s really cool to hear you talk about it, because I don’t know if people know about that kind of Asian American arc or when people are learning how to organize and it’s something that we should talk about for sure.
Sammie:
I think a lot of it is like guilt. It’s like guilt and shame driven work and I’m going to be honest that, that’s not helpful. That’s like not helpful to the people we’re trying to be in solidarity with. That’s not helpful for our own longevity or our own sustainability guilt and shame can not be the driving factor of our organizing. It takes real work to confront the relative privileges that we have. It takes real work to understand the ways that we have not been oppressed and to also understand the ways that our histories are rife with violence and harm. And to be able to hold those multitudes is a skill and needs to be developed. So that we’re acting from that grounded place rather than like, oops, I feel bad I guess I’m going to go do something about it. That’s not going to work in the long-term.
Paige:
You and Yuan said too, we have to build solidarity within our own work, as our community is so like vastly large, that Yuan one was mentioning, it’s API, which is huge within itself. And then it’s like LGBTQ and then it’s like all these letters. And we’re trying to figure out ways to center trans people and the most marginalized within Asian people. Actually, the other thing I was thinking about too is, when we were working on LEX, the Leadership Exchange this past summer, I had this realization that there’s like South Asian folks here. And that doesn’t just happen. And I remember you telling me how that happens. I mean, literally like how the organizing happens behind that. And it takes years of work and intention and relationship building.
Sammie:
I can start and I think Yuan should also definitely jump in, Yuan mentioned that under the Asian and Pacific Islander umbrella, that is such a broad and not helpful term so often. And so when we use that term Asian and Pacific Islander, it’s not meant to flatten us. It’s meant to be a call to action. If we say it, we are trying our best to actually enact that. And one of the groups, one of the populations of people within the community, that’s often underrepresented is South Asian folks for multiple reasons. And I think it’s been very important for us to interrogate internally, who’s showing up and who’s not, and why not? Where are they? Do they want to be here? We don’t have to force anyone to be here, but what could we do to center those people, depending on what population we’re talking about.
Sammie:
And so we’ve worked over the past many years to cultivate deep reciprocal relationships with many organizations that do have primarily South Asian basis, to see what true interdependence and reciprocity looks like in our relationships. And so we’ve been able build with groups like the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action Parivar, which is a trans and queer South Asian organization and Queer Crescent, which serves queer and trans muslim folks in the Bay Area and invite those people to build skills in our leadership exchange, not for the sake of building APIENC, but for the sake of building a more healthy and robust movement.
Sammie:
And I think through the years of relationship building, whether that looked like just showing up on the streets and holding a banner together, or back in the time when we could meet up in-person, like just kicking it at a restaurant and hearing what they have to say, building the authentic relationship allows us to be in deeper service to one another in a way that is true and rooted in our deepest humanity, not just in any assumptions, one may have about someone’s experience based on their identity. And that’s how we work to consistently invite people into our space, who may in other spaces be put on the margins.
Yuan:
Yeah. Thanks for naming that Sammie, I don’t have too much to add. I feel like that speaks to our mindset and our approach really accurately. I think I would just underline something that you said around, like for folks who we notice may often be on the margins of a category like Asian and Pacific Islander. I think it’s been really important for us to ask ourselves as staff as core leaders, where are folks already organizing and building leadership and building power together and building connections? And how can we support them in doing that? And I think that was an important part of LEX and I think a lot of our work. So I think I’m holding those two things at the same time like one, how are we shifting, who’s at the margins and at the centers within APIENC? And also how are we supporting folks who are building power outside of this organization, but within our broader movement ecosystem. So that we’re all more able to confront the forces that are harming us.
Paige:
But before we transition into the next part of the conversation, I really just want to thank you both for being so intentional about talking about what solidarity work looks like and how there is a lot of work that goes into it because the authentic relationship piece is so important. I was in a webinar maybe two weeks ago, hosted by Race Four shout out to them. And in the webinar, they talked about the difference between allyship and friendship and how allyship is more transactional, which is like, you do something for my movement, I’ll do something for your movement. And then the friendship piece, these are people that you do life with. So there’s more of an intentionality behind wanting to be there and wanting to show up for this other group of people. So I just, thank you both for talking about that. So let’s get into this next part. So APIENC recently conducted a community led community centered survey caught up to us. Can you tell us a little bit more about the purpose of that survey? And can you also touch on some of the key findings of the survey?
Yuan:
Yes. Thank you so much for asking. So this research report up to us was a two year long project, two years, very long, that was led by members and APIENC Trans Justice committee. And it was the first of its kind, a community based research project specifically about the needs of trans and gender nonconforming API folks in the Bay Area. It really came out of a place where two years ago, folks and leaders in our trans justice committee were working to set goals that were grounded in the needs of our people here. And as folks were doing research and thinking through their lived experience, they were just realizing and naming how little research, organizations, services and resources that are being provided are specifically naming the needs of trans API people.
Yuan:
And I think it was really clear to that group, as it is really clear to us now that we have needs that are often dire and are often being unmet and unseen right now. Folks are struggling with housing security in the Bay, folks are struggling with safety in their relationships and in public spaces with workplace insecurity, mental health, and so, so much more. But there was really little out there that was recognizing it and even less that was meeting that. And I think it’s also really clear to us as a group that, that’s not a coincidence. For myself I know for Sammie and other folks in our group growing up, we were just told time and time again, either directly or just by our absence that trans API people don’t insist that we’re new somehow. Like we popped up in the 21st century, which is not true, and that we don’t experience harm or violence.
Yuan:
And it was essential to us through this project to really assert that not only do we exist, not only are we abundant in our presence, but we’ve existed for centuries. And right now, we are experiencing dire needs. We’re living at the intersections of racism of centuries of colonialism, of xenophobia and war that makes our needs imperceptible and much harder to meet. And I think it’s also been really important for us to recognize that we have the ability to shift those things. Even though we heard so many hard statistics and findings, we also heard that the place where people felt most seen and held as trans API people was community spaces. And so it was just really for us an affirmation that the work that we do as APIENC to build community and relationships between our folks and to grow our skills, it’s not a luxury it’s life-saving and it’s really necessary. And I’m wondering Sammie, do you want to speak to some of the stuff that we’ve found and that we learned?
Sammie:
Yeah. Thanks Yuan. I think that through the process of doing this research, we found a lot of things that were not surprising to us as a team of trans and non-binary API researchers, but that we’re still like deeply saddening and deeply disheartening because they put numbers, they put quotes, they put research to these experiences that we’ve known through our own stories or anecdotally there was numbers to put down what we had all been experiencing and in different ways and at different times. And I also just want to give a shout out to all of the organizations that supported us to actually reach all the people that we reached because by the end of our year of outreach and mobilizing people to take the survey, we had just about 200 responses from trans and gender nonconforming API people across the Bay.
Sammie:
And that’s more people than I think a lot of us even knew existed ever before. We didn’t know the depths at which our community was here and present and actually going through some really, really important and deep things in our lives. So for the purpose of this podcast, I’m only going to give a little taste as to what our findings were. And I hope that people go and check it out a little bit more. You can just visit our website at APIENC.org/uptous. But on that website, you’ll find the full report with all of our findings and you can download it. There’s a one pager, it’s a beautiful website whole thing. But I’ll start by just talking about housing. We know that we need safe and sustainable housing, 20% of our respondents have experienced homelessness.
Sammie:
And almost half of the people that live in San Francisco have experienced homelessness to get even more specific. Our folks are facing gender based harassment by landlords. They are not being able to stay in homes with their given families. And they don’t have a lot of housing stability, which is a really hard thing, especially in the Bay Area where rent is so high. If we look at work and employment, our folks do not have supportive and affirming workplaces and all the resources that come with having stable work, almost a quarter of our participants were fired from a job or treated unfairly because of their gender identity. And as many folks are aware, our ability to have work affects our ability to have things like housing, feel safe and secure, access health care, get our basic needs met. So it’s a big problem that our folks are being discriminated against because of their gender identity or straight up not even getting hired in the first place.
Sammie:
One of the hardest things that I think we found during the survey was some of our statistics around mental health. And I want to pause and give people a moment if they don’t want to engage in this statistic, very difficult to hear. But what we’ve found is that a large portion of our respondents, 70% of our folks have considered suicide, that is almost three fourths of all the people in our community have considered something so deep and so hard. And we have to hold on to that, as much as that is the case. Our folks also do not have access to mental health care. Almost half of our respondents reported that the mental health care that they’ve been able to access or that they’ve tried to access, is generally culturally inaccessible. Which is completely unacceptable considering how deep of a need this is in our community.
Sammie:
Moving on, talking about violence. A lot of our folks, two thirds of people have experienced verbal harassment and one in six have been physically attacked. Unsurprisingly with all of this in mind, more than 80% of people have altered their appearance regularly to avoid harassment. But despite all of this violence that folks are experiencing literally out of our entire survey, only one person reported that they feel very safe talking to the police. Which I think actually goes back on a lot of the narratives that we’ve heard around policing and APIENC communities. It is striking that in a population that is experiencing so much violence and harassment, the majority of people still feel incredibly unsafe talking to the police. The last thing that I’ll say when it comes to our findings before passing it back to Yuan is that all of this stuff that we’ve talked about in terms of housing, healthcare, violence are also being experienced in different ways, along lines of ethnicity, gender, ability and many other factors.
Sammie:
And I think, it’s been incredibly important for us to actually be able to dis-aggregate the data and to allow people, even when they’re responding to the survey, to write in whatever identity names are relevant to them. For example, when we look at verbal harassment, people who identify with a feminine gender identifier, they’re much more likely to experience verbal harassment than people of other genders. Folks from South Asian and Pacific Islander communities are far less likely to be treated with respect by the police than folks from East and Southeast Asian communities. Disabled respondents, as well as people who have been unhoused were much more likely to experience unwanted sexual contact, verbal harassment and domestic violence, sex workers have higher rates of things like housing discrimination, homelessness and police interactions, and none of these things are by accident.
Sammie:
So I think in addition to all of the things in the findings that I’ve named, it’s also important to look at the data even deeper to see for specific communities, what is the true depth of what is occurring for folks at different levels? I would love to actually pass it back to Yuan to talk a little bit more about all of these statistics, all of these findings, what this actually means for us?
Yuan:
Got it. Thanks for sharing that Sammie. I’ve seen those numbers, probably hundreds of times now, and every time I hear it, it still feels heavy and it still feels hard. And I think what has been helpful for me when it does feel hard is thinking about what this means for folks that we’re sharing this with and how we, and folks in our movement ecosystem and our community can respond to make sure that in a few years, in a decade, in a generation, these are not the same challenges we’re up against. And I just want to call out that when we release this project in additions like the 20 organizations who Sammie shouted out and sign on over 150 organizers, service providers, trans API folks came to our release event to learn about our process and our findings.
Yuan:
And it has been, I can’t state this enough, a really unique opportunity to call attention to the lives and the needs and the voices of trans API folks and a starting point to shift the story about our people long-term. And so as an organization, we’re thinking a lot about how we want to respond and we’re going to be putting more emphasis on mental health access, community safety, housing rights, education and organizing. And also building up the storytelling of our folks to both help existing and current members, speak to their own experiences and voices, and also reach more trans API people who may not as many folks responded to the survey said, “Know another person like them in their lives.” But beyond that, we also know that solving the problems that we’ve identified and giving evidence to, it takes way more than just one organization.
Yuan:
And it will take way more than APIENC. So we’re really calling on a lot of our allies to respond, allies who are listening, accomplices who are reading about this. Because we know that achieving this kind of justice and safety, it’s up to all of us. And we really need API organizing spaces to recognize and uplift the specific needs of trans API people, to ask themselves how are you making room for our voices and our leadership? And making our API families, our neighborhoods and communities safer for trans folks. We work a lot with trans people of color organizing spaces, and we want to ask them to challenge the myths that all API people are secure and that trans API people are few and far between. To invite us to speak to our issues and build multi-racial coalitions that lasts with us. It’s really clear, especially from the mental health findings that Sammie named that we need folks who are providing services to invest real time and funding into our healing and our safety and to meet the language and cultural needs that our folks have.
Yuan:
And we really need to call in our funding allies, and accomplices to fund this work abundantly. APIENC is one of the only organizations in this whole country with paid staff to address the needs of queer and trans API folks. And that should not be the case. How can you center relationships in the projects that you fund and support us to choose what success looks like? So those are some of the ways that we’re really thinking about how folks in our movement ecosystem can take action with us. And something that came up really recently is that we heard about a project that some really big institutions are working on. A research project that was supposed to support trans folks.
Yuan:
But we found out actually was interviewing trans people to think about how to find a medical cure for their condition. And I think hearing about that was such a deep reminder that projects like this, where we get to interview and ask questions of our own folks and define our questions and support each other and speak to our own needs are super essential. So yeah, I think those are some really important takeaways that we’d want anyone engaging with the report to walk away with.
Paige:
And I also just want to make sure this is clear, this survey was conducted prior to COVID, right?
Yuan:
Yes. The survey was taken from early 2019 to the very end of 2019 and then research and analysis was done through 2020. So all the information was taken prior to COVID.
Rhiki:
So that’s just blows my mind that the like statistics and the data is what it is prior to COVID. It just makes me think of like what it may be now during COVID. So I really want to challenge people to look into the report. We’ll have a link to the report in the description, so you can check that out on our website. But moving the conversation forward, I want to like touch on something both Yuan and Sammie said, about giving participants the ability to really write in how they identify and include all of their identities. When I was going over the report, the thing that really caught my eye was the. what is it called? Community-based participatory action framework. I just want to talk to you both a little bit more about like the purpose of choosing that framework and how that framework could be beneficial to other organizations or other entities that will want to do something like this in the future?
Sammie:
Thanks for sharing that out. So like Rhiki said, we use this framework called Community-based Participatory Action Research, which that could use a better name probably is not the snappiest name. A lot of love for it though. So just to break it down a little bit, community-based, this was rooted 100% in our trans and gender nonconforming API community. We did not go through some like government entity or a research institution. Every single part of this process was led by community members learning how to become researchers ourselves. Participatory kind of speaks to that. So at every step of the process, we turn to the idea of like, who is being studied and who is doing the studying on its head? Because we were studying our own people were participating in the creation of this survey and then the creation of our solutions.
Sammie:
Moving to action research, we didn’t just do this for the sake of documenting knowledge, which would have been cool. We did this entire research process for the sake of actually improving our lived conditions. And I first learned about community-based participatory action research through a historical organization that’s not around anymore called the Data Center. The Data Center supported a lot of grassroots movement groups to do this very thing, to document our own narratives, to prioritize our people as knowledge creators. Rather than knowledge, just coming out of an ivory tower or out of an institution, our folks are creating multi-modal knowledge all the time. So the data center supported a lot of organizations to actually document that. One of the organizations that they supported was, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, which is a group of domestic workers in the Bay Area that ran an incredible campaign and research project to document their work and their experiences leading to the California domestic workers, bill of rights.
Sammie:
And so inspired by that organization’s work and the work of any other organizations, we wanted to develop a similar research project that was rooted in the experience of our communities rather than extractive research processes. Like the one that Yuan named that wants to “Hear trans people” that’s incredibly messed up. So we looked at a lot of the things that were hard for us in previous research processes. Things like having to check a box about our identity, are you this or that? You can only pick one word for your gender or one word for your race, or one word for your ethnicity. A lot of these past research experiences, we have felt incredibly extractive. They wanted us to share about our deepest instances of violence without any compensation or without even preface to let us know what kind of questions they were going to be asking it just be like, so where do you live?
Sammie:
Next question. Do you feel sad all the time? Just a very insensitive kind of way of doing it very impersonal. So when we were forming our own questions and the order, which we would make the questions we wanted to keep all of our own experiences in mind. So we did things for our questions like, what is your gender identity? What is your ethnicity? We left those as open ended boxes, which made our work a lot harder later because then we had to categorize and tag and clean up that data in some ways. But it also led to our participants naming, I think 26 different ethnicities that they identify with, it allowed mixed folks to speak to the fullness of their experience without limits, under the gender identity box it allowed people to name things that are culturally specific gender identities, like PIPA Phoenix in some Pacific Islander communities.
Sammie:
It gave us the option to be all of who we are and not feel limited by a checkbox. We also did things like give trigger warnings before certain sections on things like violence and mental health. So if people wanted to opt out of that, they could, they didn’t have to subject themselves to something that would be triggering and destabilizing. And actually we found that many people with the preface were able to complete the entire survey and felt really grateful by the end. One of the other things that I want to mention is that, we also provided compensation. We didn’t have like a bunch of funds for this, but we wanted to make sure that if people wanted the small visa gift card that we could offer, that we could give that to them as a thank you.
Sammie:
It’s just a token as an acknowledgement that people are sharing incredibly valuable knowledge with us. And so throughout the survey, as people did all these things, they could also see videos of our team that made the survey so that it was just that much more personal. Ensuring that, this wasn’t just an anonymous thing done by a computer that you never got to interact with a human about, but there are real people behind the survey, real people that maybe mirror your own experience or understand a little bit as to what you may be going through. And I think all of those elements allowed for a survey that was much more community-based that then allowed us to move into action.
Rhiki:
Thank you for that Sammie. So I don’t want to keep you over time. We’re coming up on the end of our episode, but before we let you both go, I really want to ask the question. Yuan I remember you saying earlier that APIENC is one of the only organizations that focuses specifically on Asian Pacific Islander, queer and trans folks. But for our listeners, if there was a person who was like interested on learning more about this type of work and how to get more involved, like who are the people that you tap into, or who are the people or the organizations that you look to get more information?
Yuan:
Thanks so much for asking that Rhiki. I’m thinking about a lot of people when you ask that question, because there are so many people. I feel like I, and I know we as an organization learn from all the time, a lot of those folks are our elders. And I know that so many people who have been a part of APIENC’s community way before I was involved, have done so much work to document the history of different organizers, elders and folks in our community. So if people listening right now are really curious and want to hear some of those stories. I know a lot of folks may have never heard a story from an elder trans or queer API person before, you can check out the Dragon Fruit Project website at dragonfruitproject.org. That was a project that was led by Amy Sueyoshi, and supported by APIENC.
Yuan:
And I really recommend checking out, the amazing Vince Crisotomo story, who I spoke to a little bit before Tita Aida, and so many other folks. And if you’re like, Oh my gosh, I want to engage with these stories, but not quite ready to like, read about it right now. You’re in luck because our Dragon Fruit team is launching a podcast later this month. And you should be able to listen to that first episode and hear some of those stories and strung together by their connections. Sammie, do you want to share, some of the organizations are really excited about?
Sammie:
Thanks for asking Yuan. There’s so many incredible organizations in our broader movement ecosystem that APIENC is learning from all the time. Even as we are one of the only organizations with paid staff working on trans and queer Asian and Pacific Islander issues exclusively, there are a whole abundance of organizations that are all grassroots, that don’t have any paid staff that are killing it all across the so-called United States. Movements are built by relationships and connections. And so there’s never going to be just like one organization or one person that’s getting it all. So I wanted to just uplift a few organizations that I think are incredible, and that APIENC has learned a lot from the first of which is Freedom, Inc. an organization based in Madison, Wisconsin that works with the black and Hmong community out there.
Sammie:
They do incredible inside violence work, queer justice work and solidarity work as a kind of core of what they do. And we’ve learned a ton from their slogan, Our community is our campaign, and always centering their people, unapologetically for all of who they are. I also want to shout out PrYSM based in Providence, Rhode Island. PrYSM has spent the past decade doing incredible anti-violence work, anti deportation work, fighting things in Rhode Island like police databases of young Southeast Asian people. Working in solidarity with other Black and Brown communities to ensure that the police don’t have a presence that pride that the police aren’t over incarcerating the young folks in their community, and also doing all of this work with an incredibly strong queer justice lens.
Sammie:
So Freedom, Inc. and PrYSM are also two amazing organizations that I would really encourage people to check out as well as all of the volunteer driven and run trans and queer API groups all across the nation, that are doing incredible multiple mutual aid projects or support groups or documenting their own stories, creating incredible art. It doesn’t have to be a big organization andc staff people to make an impact we’re an organization of three paid staff. There are organizations that have no paid staff that are doing incredible things that folks should definitely check out as well.
Paige:
Rhiki, how did that conversation go for you?
Rhiki:
I thought the conversation was fire. I really enjoyed it and I really enjoy like being a witness to like the relationship that you Sammie and Yuan have. I think that really came through today. I’m just like, Oh, these are Paige’s people.
Paige:
I feel like I always talk about them, but then you don’t really know who I’m talking about. I talk about them, but it’s fun to introduce them to you and have us all in a conversation together.
Rhiki:
So Paige, what are like the points in the conversation that you feel like really impacted you or that you really remember from the conversation that we just had?
Paige:
What stood out to me was when Yuan, was speaking about the seven generations and for me most of my previous ancestral knowledge, is related to the Vietnam War and so much of my family’s narrative is about that. But I don’t really, think about what happened prior to that and what it’s like for my grandparents before the war. So I was thinking a lot about that. What stood out to you in the conversation today?
Rhiki:
Probably there were two points that really struck a chord with me. One of them was when both Yuan and Sammie were talking about the importance of solidarity work, but solidarity work being this thing that doesn’t happen externally, but can be a thing that happens in group. And I was just thinking about blackness. It’s such a vast thing. Like there’s so many groups that can be included in what is blackness, and maybe there is a need for us to do solidarity work in groups. So I was thinking about that a lot. And I was also thinking about when doing community-based research, the importance of giving people the opportunity to self identify and like moving away from the check boxes, I think is really important because I feel like we miss out on valuable information when people’s fullness and all of their identities can be present. That’s kind of where my thinking was with that.
Paige:
The solidarity that you had mentioned reminds me of also thinking about ways that we can stay grounded specifically Asian-American Pacific Islander folks, within our own histories and within our communities and find political homes there as well as doing solidarity work. That felt really important to me.
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 Lolium Jackson for our music and Eliana Ikinones for our graphics. Be sure to follow us on our Instagram @arcuscenter. See you next week.