The final work(4 pages, 12 points font size, double spaced, 1-inch margin) Global Women’s Fund https://www.globalfundforwomen.org/ Outright Action International https://w

1Volume 12, Number 3 2019

Abstract:

Immigration procedures related to asylum and detention are based on sex/gender binaries. Such binaries frame the bodies of undocumented transgen- der asylum seekers as unintelligible to immigration law and subject them to intense trauma. The experiences of trauma and death of transgender detainees within detention centers is a spatialized experience. The assignment of detention cells based on birth gender, denial of hormones and live saving treatments consti- tute a racialized and gendered torture upon the body of the transgender detainee. The article attends to the narratives of transgender detainees within detention cell by analyzing the script of “Tara’s Crossing,” a play based on the narratives of transgender detainees and asylum seekers. The play was produced by LGBTQ immigrant right activists soon after the attacks on 9/11 and the intensification of detention and deporta- tion as a part of national security procedures. Drawing upon the script of Tara’s Crossing, along with activist archives such as flyers, newsletter articles, and radio interviews of Balmitra Vimal Prasad, the protagonist of the play, the article analyzes the ways in which the sex/gender binary is reiterated within the detention cell, as well as asylum procedures. I turn to the activism around Tara’s Crossing and the present-day activism of transgender immigrants in order to show how trauma experienced by transgender detainees holds potential for creating coalitional oppositional politics.

Keywords: transgender, asylum, detention, sex/ gender binary, trauma, national security, coalitional activism.

Título: La política del asilo y la detención transgénero

Resumen

Los procedimientos de inmigración relacionados con el asilo y la detención se basan en binarios de sexo / género. Tales binarios enmarcan los cuerpos de los solicitantes de asilo transgénero indocumentados como ininteligibles para la ley de inmigración y los someten a un trauma intenso. Las experiencias de trauma y muerte de detenidos transgénero dentro de los centros de detención es una experiencia espacial- izada. La asignación de celdas de detención basadas en el sexo de nacimiento, la negación de hormonas y los tratamientos para salvar vidas constituyen una tortura racializada y de género sobre el cuerpo del detenido transgénero. El artículo atiende a las narraciones de detenidos transgénero dentro de la celda de detención mediante el análisis del guión de Tara’s Crossing, una obra basada en las narrativas de detenidos transgénero y solicitantes de asilo. La obra fue producida por activistas de derechos de inmigrantes LGBTQ poco después de los ataques del 11 de septiembre y la inten- sificación de la detención y deportación como parte de los procedimientos de seguridad nacional. Basándose en el guión de Tara's Crossing, junto con archivos activistas como volantes, artículos de boletines y

DEBANUJ DASGUPTA

The Politics of Transgender Asylum and Detention Debanuj DasGupta Department of Geography and

Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies University of Connecticut

2 Human Geography

entrevistas de radio de Balmitra Vimal Prasad, el protagonista de la obra, el artículo analiza las formas en que el binario de sexo / género se reitera dentro de la detención celular, así como los procedimientos de asilo. Me dirijo al activismo en torno a Tara’s Crossing y al activismo actual de los inmigrantes transgénero para mostrar cómo el trauma experimentado por los detenidos transgénero tiene potencial para crear políticas opositoras de coalición..

Palabras clave: transgénero, asilo, detención, sexo / género binario, trauma, seguridad nacional, activismo de coalición.

Introduction

On May 09, 2018 Roxasna Rodriguez Hernandez, crossed over the US-Mexico border at San Ysidro port of entry between San Diego and Tijuana. After sixteen days of remaining in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, Hernandez died from severe dehydration along with HIV related com- plications. An independent autopsy report showed indications of physical abuse, an acquisition denied by ICE.1 Hernandez’s death is not the first of many trans- gender asylum seekers succumbing to torture in the form of denying HIV or hormone treatments, along with physical abuse while in detention. In May, 2016, the Human Rights Watch released a report on the conditions faced by transgender women in detention.2 Based on interviews with 28 transgender women from El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico, the report highlighted that all the women had survived physical assault, verbal violence, and denial of routine treatments while in detention. According to the report, ICE could not provide a count of how many transgender persons were in detention. However, ICE estimated that at any given night approximately 65 beds out of 30,000 detention beds were occupied by transgender women in the US. Transgender detainees 1 See the NYT report about Hernandez’s death and the independent autopsy at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/us/trans-woman- roxsana-hernandez-ice-autopsy.html?searchResultPosition=5 Acessed on 10/30/2019.

2 See report from HRW at https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/03/23/ do-you-see-how-much-im-suffering-here/abuse-against-transgender- women-us accessed on 10/29/2019

experience militarization of the borders along with heightened detention and deportation through a violent regulation of their bodies while in detention as well as during asylum related procedures (Aizura, 2018; DasGupta, 2018; Shaksari, 2014).

This article, traces the ways in which transgender asylum seekers experience the detention cell through gendered trauma. Secondly, the article argues that the trauma experienced by transgender detainees and asylum seekers hold political potentials for the creation of oppositional transgender subjectivity. The article brings together an archive of cultural and activist texts from the past two decades in order to highlight how transgender detainees experience trauma, disruption in space, time and mobility, and yet mobilize these sensations for disrupting the national security state. The article is divided into three parts. First, the article traces the relationships between the sex/gender binary, asylum, immigrant detention, and national security procedures. This section argues that changes in asylum- related procedures since the 1996 immigration reforms and the conflation between immigration enforcement and anti-terrorism efforts since, 9/11 render transgen- der detainees illegible to immigration law. In discussing the intensification of national security procedures, I will reveal how the sex and gender binary (one that assumes sex is natural, the genitals we are born with and gender is social formed through the biological sex as well as social institutions and norms), is reiterated through detention and asylum related procedures, thereby rendering the transgender asylum seeker and detainee in a state of precarity.

In the second section, the article analyzes how the body of the transgender asylum seeker experiences the detention cell, as well as disruption in time and space as a form of bodily trauma. I will analyze the script of Tara’s Crossing, a play written soon after 9/11 that depicts the struggles of a transgender detainee from Guyana. An analysis of the play and interviews with Balmitra Vimal Prasad (upon whose life the play is loosely based) reveals how the transgender asylum seeker endures bodily trauma within the detention cell. Tara’s Crossing was written and produced by Emmy nominated playwright Jeffrey Solomon in coalition with the Queer Immigrant Rights Projct (QuIR). Solomon interviewed thirty Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and

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Transgender (LGBT) asylum seekers who were held in detention while waiting their asylum decision. The experiences of Balmitra Vimal Prasad, a transgender (ex) detainee and asylee from Guyana were central to the script. In analyzing the script, the article argues that the play offers a glimpse into the space of the detention cell, and how the transgender detainee endures trauma inflicted upon her body in these spaces. I draw upon interviews provided by Balmitra Vimal Prasad, and the playwright, along with activist flyers and media reports about the play, in order to retrace the spatiality of the detention cell and how it impinges upon the body of the transgender detainee.

The final section argues, that the coalitional activism launched around the play as well as present day transgender anti-detention activism gestures toward the political potentials of trauma. The trauma endured by transgender detainees is not necessarily a negative force but rather is a form of creative excess that might offer potentials for launching mobile coali- tions against the national security state. In doing so, the article extends recent geographic scholarship about the role of affect and emotions in immigration politics and social justice (Pain, 2010; Wijendaele, 2011) by showing how transgender immigrant activists are mobilizing trauma toward resisting the brutal force of the national security-state.

Methodology

Methodologically speaking, this article contrib- utes to the cultural turn in geography, and feminist geography by analyzing how transgender persons experience the operations of the national security state at the scale of the body. In order to write about the subjective experiences of trauma and suffering, the article assembles a “tactical archive,” (Puar, 2007; xxiii) by analyzing legal texts, media interviews provided by transgender activists, script of the play Tara’s Crossing, activist flyers, posters, and the media reports about the play in LGBT community magazines. Tactical archives, are brought together in, “a queer method- ological philosophy…and irreverently challenges a linear mode of conduction and transmission,” (Puar,

2007; xxiii). I bring together such an archive in order to contribute to a building of an alternative histori- cal record. One that might offer ways of tracing the body and voice of the transgender detainee within a securitizing, and hyper military national security state. While reading the play, I turn to the stage directions, and images of the play as a way of understanding how the playwright intended to represent the space of the detention cell for theater going audiences. Further, I draw upon an interview provided by Balmitra Vimal Prasad and the playwright, Jeffery Solomon on the occasion of LGBT Pride on OUT FM Radio. I regard the play and its activist ephemera as a way of under- standing how the detention cell impinges upon the body of the transgender detainee, and yet how the transgender detainee attempts to navigate the rupture in space and time produced by the detention cell and asylum procedures.

Arguably, the play is fraught with the playwrights’ positionality as a white male US citizen, and the coalitional activist politics of QuIR. I (as the author of this article, acknowledge serving as the board member of QuIR). As a board member for QuIR, the author played a key role in the launching of the play. In my analysis of the play, I will suggest potential limits to reading the play as representing the experi- ences of all transgender detainees, but never the less, the play offers an important theatrical representation of the detention cell. I offer the reading of the play, and analysis of activist materials as a way of doing “spectro-geographies” (Maddern and Aday, 2008) of the detention cell. The spectral turn in geography attends to that which is “barely there, the nagging presence of the absence” (Maddern and Aday, 2008: 292). In doing so, I desperately turn to the intimate, ephemeral remains of Balmitra’s body, the activist flyer that seeks to make visible the insides of the detention cell, in order to construct periscoping as a feminist method (Hiemstra, 2017) to make visible spaces that which is often hidden from public. Each document, interview, the haunting memory of organizing as an immigrant soon after 9/11 is used to refract the relationship between embodiment and spaces of the national security state.

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Such a methodology stems from a commitment to the “intimate turn in feminist geography” (Moss and Donovan, 2017) that values the role of intimate experiences in geographic writing. The narratives of transgender people in detention are very difficult to obtain owing to legal barriers to entering detention cells. Transgender detainees (like most detainees) are also often moved from one holding facility to another depending on availability of beds per detention center, a spatial tactic deployed by homeland security that breaks down the body of the detainee. There are ethical issues related to speaking with detainees within detention centers, such as rendering bodies that are under surveillance to further surveillance (Maillet, Mountz, and Williams, 2017). In order to fully com- prehend how the trans/migrant body moves through the detention cell, and the subjective experience of the transgender detainee while held in isolation in a single cell, I turn to the flyers, community media reports, interviews provided by board members of QuIR, and recent transgender activist narratives as a way of writing about that which has been deemed out of place. In doing so, this article argues for further exploration of cultural productions and activist archives as sites for

understanding difficult to reach spaces in cultural and feminist geographic scholarship. I now turn toward showing how the sex/gender binary remains entangled with national security practices in the US. I will trace a brief history of how gender has been understood through the sex/gender binary within asylum law and detention procedures. Secondly, this section will highlight how the conflation of asylum and detention procedures with anti-terrorism efforts since 1996, frames transgender asylum seekers and detainees in a state of precarity in the US.

Asylum Law, National Security and Transgender Detention

Asylum claims based upon gender persecution are difficult to arrange (Aizura, 2012; Gorman, 2016; McKinnon, 2016; Rosenblum, 2000; Spade, 2007; Solomon, 2005). Gender in asylum law is framed through a strict binary, and oftentimes, cases based upon transgender claims are rejected if the person is unable to prove persecution in her country of origin (Rosenblum, 2000; Solomon, 2005). The social

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categories made available for framing asylum cases include race, religion, membership in a particular social group (PSG), or political opinion. Sex/gender is not an explicit category, but nonetheless influences the asylum process. The sex/gender binary system refers to how either male or female status is assigned on the basis of genitalia and reproductive organs. The assignment of either male or female sex is assumed to align with our gender presentations, such as being masculine or feminine.

The way such a binary is coded into asylum law is twofold. Firstly, sex-based discrimination was removed from the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees during deliberations in 1951, since equality between the sexes was considered a matter of national legislation and could create conflicts between the Convention and state legislation (Grahl-Madsen, 1997). In this way, the Convention has always been mired in conversations about sex/gender-based inequality and whether or not to include such inequality as a category for valid asylum claims. In the United States, most asylum and refugee procedures are modeled upon the UN Convention, and began to address gender-based discrimination faced by women in the 1990s (McKinnon, 2016). However, these cases had to meet strict understandings of gender- based persecution, such as persecution for breeching social mores or for having allegedly brought shame upon families and communities (McKinnon, 2016: 10). These conditions were part of a 1995 document titled Considerations for Asylum Officers Adjudicating Asylum Claims from Women that appeared after the US started to receive asylum claims from women surviving rape, sexual assault, and bodily harm from military forces in Latin America. This document indicates both a very limited understanding of what might put a female body in danger and that gender- based claims to asylum in the US is related to US foreign policy and geopolitics. The US first began to provide asylum to those escaping Communist regimes or areas of the world that were of strategic interest to the US (Gorman, 2016; McKinnon, 2016). Since the 1980s, the US government has made changes to the Migration and Refugee Assistance Act of 1962 in order to accommodate refugees and asylum seekers from the South-East Asian conflicts in which the United

States was involved. The geopolitical interests of the US state inform its asylum and refugee procedures along with a narrow understanding of gender-based persecution (Cantu, Naples & Vidal-Ortiz, ). This narrow understanding ultimately reiterates both a sex/ gender binary wherein the category “women” entails cisgender women and very specific kinds of oppres- sion, ones that rely on imagining women as property of men (patriarchal families) or defying sex roles (such as wearing lipstick or having extra-marital affairs). In this way, the category of “woman,” comes to stand for cis gender women, and only understood through cases of domestic violence, surviving rape during genocide or war, or military occupation (McKinnon, 2016).

Another way the sex/gender binary is written into asylum procedures in the US is the limited under- standing of bodies that do not represent themselves through the sex/gender binary. Asylum claims made by transgender and gender non-conforming people who are escaping persecution from their countries of origin are presently considered under membership in a particular social group (PSG). However, belonging to a PSG is not sufficient in itself, as claimants have to prove that their persecutors have tortured them due to perceived PSG membership (USCIS: RAIO, 2011: 14). The burden of proof for transgender asylum claimants is very high. Gender-variant people not only have to disclose their gender identity, they have to produce proof that the persecution they faced is related to their gender identity and/or sexual orientation. Producing this narrative requires retelling experiences of trauma through categories such as “transgender,” gender reassignment, birth gender, hormone therapy, etc. These key terms might not be applicable in numerous cultures, and becoming legible as transgender often requires to frame the story through gender reassignment surgery, gender dysphoria, and hormones (Aizura, 2012). Recent scholars in asylum law have argued that asylum officers and judges treat “transgender” almost as a biological category based upon hormone transplants and presentation of gender attributes (Rosenblum, 2000; Spade, 2008). Asylum officers require proof of gender transition, such as performance of ideal femi- ninity in cases of male-to-female transgender asylum cases (Aizura, 2014; Solomon 2005). This constitutes

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further writing into law of the sex/gender binary, as specific narratives about gender roles and processes of gender reassignment inform how asylum officers decide whether the persecution faced by the asylum seeker was related to their gender/identity.

Since 9/11, gendered asylum procedures remain entangled with questions of national security. Concerns about threats to national security and the significant tightening of asylum adjudication pro- cedures gesture toward conflicts between sovereign law and internationally accepted treaties such as the United Nations Refugee Convention. While, the UN Refugee Convention was adopted in 1951, and it’s modified version “Protocol related to the status of refugees,” was signed by the US in 1967, the changes made through the REAL ID Act post 9/11, intro- duced several demands upon asylum seekers to prove their persecution. Further, rights of detainees within detention centers were infringed upon as a part of the War on Terror (Sheth, 2007; Hiemstra, 2013).

However, the indefinite detention and deportation of immigrants were instated as early as 1996 by the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsi- bility Act (IRAIRA) and the Anti-Terrorism Death Penalty Act (ADEPA). Both these acts excessively criminalized immigrants. Immigrants with minor (two counts of misdemeanors) or major criminal offenses (felonies) were considered deportable under the IRAIRA Act (Coleman, 2007). This heightened concern for national security was accelerated after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, confounding immigration regulations with national security measures. For instance, the USA PATRIOT Act and the REAL ID Act of 2005, created regulatory standards for the issuance of driver licenses and heightened immigra- tion raids, as well as the detention of immigrants (Beauchamp 2013 & 2019; Gehi 2009; Sheth 2009). Bodily presentations of immigrants are intensely policed through immigration and national security procedures such as regulating access to driver licenses and relegating transgender female detainees to male- detention units and vice versa. Transgender women of color are disproportionately targeted by the state for sex-work-related offenses, marking them criminal and deportable (Gehi 2009). Research by immigration lawyers document that being arrested for sex work is

considered as moral turpitude, making transgender women deportable for such offenses (Gehi 2009). The regulation and racialization of immigrant bodies do not simply occur through discrete categories of race, religion, and national origin. Deviations from the sex/ gender binary operate as a technology for the racializa- tion of bodies.

As Eithne Luibhéid and Margot Canaday have shown, routine examination and exclusion by US immigration officials has long been entangled with non-conforming gender presentations. The routine bodily examination of migrants claiming political asylum based upon persecution due to gender/ sexuality in post-9/11 national security cultures is fur- thermore entwined with fear of terrorists camouflaging themselves and gaining entry to the US (Beauchamp 2009). Thus, gender identity and sexuality is lived and regulated as “contested moral economy that becomes expressed as an imagined geography,” (Browne, Lim, and Brown, 2007; 4). Gender identity, sexuality, and race remains entangled with what Browne, Lim, and Brown call “various scales of spatiality,” and through immigration/asylum restrictions the US nation-state produces normative notions of nation, citizenry, and citizenship (Browne, Lim, and Brown, 2007). Trans- gender studies scholars Toby Beauchamp and Dean Spade point to documents released by the Department of Homeland Security in 2003 that warn i