Training Date: Oct. 7, 2020
Julián Cancino: Alright, so welcome so much to our second Lunch n Learn Ally training series for faculty and staff. I am Julián Cancino and I am the director of the Gender and Sexuality Center here at Brandeis University. For those of you who don't know, the GSC is a branch of the Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, that means that we are responsible for creating high quality educational opportunities for faculty staff and students across the institution on matters related to gender, sexuality or as I like to think of it, LGBTQ lives and women's lives. Okay. So, today's lunch and learn series is meant to provide up to date and best practices for creating inclusive classrooms and campus community. In honor of the national Domestic Violence Awareness Month today's training is hosted in partnership with PARC, hi Sarah.
Julián Cancino: So and is also sponsored by the Department of Anthropology to the Department of Sociology Latin American and Latino Studies Program and the Woman's Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. So, a before we get started, it looks like we have 18 participants. People will like if you can please introduce yourself on the chat. Share your name, your title. And I think that will help us to start creating more collaboration across departments, which I think now that we're into virtual worlds were more siloed into our own offices. So, if you will, like, introduce yourself name pronounce email if you would like to, you know, stay in the loop. I will go ahead and introduce our partner. Sarah Berg who many of you already down. She is the Director of PARC- the Prevention, Advocacy and Resource Center here at Brandeis University. Which is a confidential and a student-centered resource for students and community members of the Brandeis community who have been impacted by violence and those who want to contribute to the anti-violence movement. Since 2013 Sarah has been in the victim and advocacy and violence prevention field, specifically in higher education. Her master's thesis explores the social construction of the victim and survival roles for women who have experienced domestic violence. So, Sarah will talk a little bit about her work at Brandeis and give some context for our conversation today. Thank you very much, Sarah.
Sarah J. Berg (she/her/hers): Thank you, Julián. Yes. Again, I'm Sarah, she, her hers, with PARC. I'm very excited to be here and to be one of the co-sponsors on this event. I offer just a very brief history of the domestic violence movement in the United States. And wanted to highlight specifically that Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which is October has been observed here in the US, since 1987. And this movement came out of activism. Really starting back – documented starting back in the 50s and 60s growing out of the Civil Rights, anti-war and black liberation movements which led to the feminist movement which led to what was then referred to as the battered women's movement. We more often use the words domestic violence or intimate partner violence, these days. The first domestic violence shelter opened in the US in 1967. So, for context, this really isn't that old of a movement and these conversations haven't been happening that long. Thinking about Brandeis, in particular, and the work that PARC does we have only existed at Brandeis for six years now and our office was founded out of student activism. And I think it's really important to keep that in mind as we as we think about when we talk about domestic violence if we're even talking about it, who are leaving, including in those conversations, who are we talking about?
Sarah J. Berg (she/her/hers): I really appreciate Julián in my introduction that you talked about the research I did as a graduate student, because I think it's really important to know in connection with today's conversation that so much research around domestic violence focuses only on women. And when we say women mean cisgender women. My research included that I only looked at women living in a shelter, because until 2012 most domestic violence shelters only allowed cisgender women in. That changed after 2012 when the federal government required that shelters not discriminate based on gender, but as recently as this year in July that guidance was revoked. And now, domestic violence shelters are again allowed to discriminate against folks by gender identity.
Sarah J. Berg (she/her/hers): So, this conversation is incredibly timely and incredibly important. And I'm really looking forward to what I learned today and what I can bring back to our work at PARC. These, these experiences are real at Brandeis, just like they are anywhere else. And for context— in 2019 from our campus climate survey: of undergrads, 13% of men 14% of women and 34% of gender nonconforming students said that they had been in a relationship that was abusive. Or a relationship with an abuser. So, this is unfortunately very, very real issue and an issue that hits close to home for so many of us and I so appreciate our speaker and this great work that he has done and look forward to this presentation. Thanks everyone for coming.
Julián Cancino: Is a scary sad statistic, right, not just in in our nation, but on our own campus. And you know sometimes when I hear things like this is like, gosh, where do we start right and one place to start is to start having these conversations. So, my hope is that you know you are engaged by our presentation today, but you stick around for the Q and A, which I think a lot of us get to think together of all we can do as as creators of knowledge, as communicators of knowledge. But also, as administrators that we have a role in creating many of these policies, right, that govern our campus. So, without much further ado, please allow me to introduce our guest speaker, Dr. Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz is an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Framingham State University. His research and teaching specialization include sociological criminology, victimization, gender and sexuality, and applied sociology. Dr. Guadalupe-Diaz is the author of Transgressed: Intimate Partner Violence in Transgender Lives, which was published by the NYU Press last year in October 2019. I think obviously this is a an extremely important topic of research and teaching. So, I would like to read actually a quote from the persons who reviewed that book. Well Transgressed is a brave book. Guadalupe-Diaz takes the necessary, critically important first step in bringing intimate partner violence against transgender people into the research spotlight. But braver still are the trans men and trans woman who there to share their stories and whose voices will resonate with readers long after they have finished the book. And this was Claire M. Renzetti, author of Feminist Criminology. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Guadalupe-Diaz.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: Hi, everyone. Thank you. Julián for that introduction. And thank you, Sarah, and thank everyone who helped make this happen and for inviting me to speak with you all this afternoon. I appreciate your time. I know Zoom fatigue is real these days, but it's still nice to be able to connect with community and with local folks in any way that we can. So, I'm going to share my screen so we can see some slides. Alright, can folks see this? Great, great. So, thanks again.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: I'm here to talk really about a couple of different things related to transgender intimate partner violence. Some of the process, the context to the project Transgressed is at the center, but really it kind of dovetails with a lot of other work and a lot of other ongoing research from folks all around the world as well so I know that we're in a room with wide range of expertise we have gender and sexuality experts, but we also have allies, folks who are learning lots of new language terminology and approaches, but just a quick kind of recap, or at least a clarification of how I use this language. There's lots of nuance with these concepts and sometimes disagreement, but I'll clarify what I mean when I use some of these words throughout the talk today. So, when I'm using the word to transgender, or trans for short, I'm talking about folks whose gender identities don't align with their assigned sex at birth. So fairly broad umbrella category capturing a wide range of gender diverse identities, ranging from gender queer nonbinary all of those folks were considered trans from my perspective. And cisgender folks, folks whose assigned sex at birth aligns with their current and ongoing gender identity. And when I talk about genderism. I think more folks are familiar with the term cis-normative. But I'm talking about a social and cultural system of two and only two genders, a binary. A cultural system that not only just limits gender to two or legitimizes and acknowledges only two genders, but that even within that binary that there is a hierarchy of which masculinity is centered preferred and femininity is marginalized and subordinated. So, I think that the context that Sarah gave with the data locally at Brandeis. It really echoes some of what we know about transgender partner violence really nationally. Right now, while there's lots of non-generalizable samples that include trans folks and IPV research, we kind of go to the US Transgender Survey. To get the largest, most generalizable most nationally representative kind of prevalence rate of transgender IPV.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: What we see in that just basic descriptive finding is that regularly studies show that trans folks report higher rates of IPV. Then their cisgender counterparts and it has been mentioned. This is particularly crucial and important because our national global conversation really on IPV has been rather cis-normative, genderist, and heteronormative. As I started to do this work now over a decade ago, you would see same gender scholarship sort of tried to push the boundaries and queer IPV theory and research by including experiences of same gender victimization. In Sexual Violence Research and IPV research and beyond. And what you kind of regularly see in the literature is some of what I'm showing you here is folks would do this gay and lesbian research on cisgender queer folks and they would cite this fact that there was a complete lack of research on trans IPV or more recently that little work had been done. And this was more in the scholarly formal sense. Trans folks, queer and trans folks, activists and advocates have been studying and advocating for trans lives and IPV and sexual violence service provision policy, but the literature was really behind— ah, the scholarly literature anyway.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: So, part of that context as for me as a some as previously it early career scholar and a grad student seeing the literature really marginalized trans folks and kind of not catching up with the mainstream dialogue that was happening around trans lives and really kind of contextualize what pushed me to do this work. In particular, for me and for anyone getting to understand IPV and trans lives. I think it's important to really locate violence at the intersections of multiple forms of overlapping violence. And what that means is that this trans antagonistic social and cultural context that exists in the US and beyond. Is what I understand to be and what others understand to be is fostering a greater likelihood or susceptibility to violence of trans people, and that this is particularly heightened for trans black indigenous people of color. So, when you think about overlapping violence, this is the context in which IPV happens. There's interpersonal violence- we talked a lot about trans homicide, sexual assault. But beyond that, the institutional instructional forces of violence that include the carceral state, the education system, violence and public accommodations.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: And the real structural violence that we see trans people, in particular, especially trans people of color experiencing disproportionate rates of economic marginalization experiencing homelessness. And so all of that really has to be in the foreground, as you're thinking about addressing trans IPV. I have an image here of Tracy Williams, A 22-year-old, black trans woman who was murdered a couple of years ago by her boyfriend. I think while increasingly we're talking about trans homicide. What's missing is just how much of that trans homicide is actually related to partner violence, like in Tracy's case. Her boyfriend for some time had been abusing her and eventually murdered her. And so, as I'm moving forward a little bit with our talk, you might expect, of course, that I'm going to share some stories and I'm going to share sometimes unpleasant things. And so, if you're here, you're probably aware that that might happen, but I'd like to put it out there as I kind of move forward here.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: So, part of what I was asked to do was talk about the process of researching trans IPV. And that story goes back to grad school days I mentioned earlier about just really kind of seeing the glaring gap of trans voices as I was studying same gender IPV, IPV and the LGBTQ community. And so, part of the initial challenge was that I was being trained in a pretty mainstream criminological sociology department with a major professor who was great supportive, but also came from mainstream feminist approach and so did everybody else on my committee. And so, the initial you know push was, a little bit of disrupting some of these normative binary kinds of conceptions of IPV not necessarily flipping feminism in any kind of way, but really acknowledging how feminism speaks to queering and queering speaks to feminism as well. And so, part of that process involved a little bit of challenging a structural, ah, a rigid power based structural analysis in which theoretically, some people had all of the power and some people had none of the power. And so, part of that process was really pushing against, that introducing a little bit more nuanced and really expanding gender as we understood it in IPV work. So that's all happening in the background. But importantly, you know, you can imagine being a PhD student and proposing doing work that's severely under researched and really hard to do, and the one barrier initially was how, how is it that you'll be able to do this work, especially reaching trans folks but not just reaching trans folks but folks who have survived IPV and are willing to share their stories with total stranger for the purpose of research.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: And so, part of it involved this convincing process of really connecting back to community networks and collaboration that had been doing with anti-violence and social justice orgs in queer and POC groups and so being able to really rely on community in a way that allowed me to not only make a convincing argument that this could be done, not only because of these networks, but also because at the time. There was such little work on trans IPV that you'd often see high quality scholarly articles on trans IPV being published on samples as small as five and six people. And so, I made this argument that if they can do it, I can do it, and I can get more than six people. And really kind of anchoring it within my own community and reaching out beyond my own community. So, part of that that really involved a couple of different points like moving beyond just the traditional scholarly way of asking, of conceptualization and how to ask questions and what questions to ask.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: But so much of it involved me going directly to trans activists and advocates and organizations who lent their time. I’m eternally grateful for their time. A lot of some of them are friends, some of them just decided to meet me to talk about how to ask these questions what to ask. And that really helped kind of merge the scholarly points, but also have more of this kind of organic, community-based flow to it. And doing that also helped me reach folks. And I felt like at the time, I had a pretty solid network, but as you'll see soon even having some of these resources there were still a lot of challenges along the way. And then the last part here about researching the process we can maybe have a conversation about this Q and A. Was I did, I felt like I underestimated my own secondary or vicarious trauma. In terms of receiving stories or hearing stories. Stories that were recorded and I manually transcribed, which means that I not only had the conversations but then I heard the conversations over and over again repeatedly. Sometimes, always slowed down so extra-long and typing out everyone's words and then from those words rereading the transcripts several times. And I think that that's something important to keep in mind as we do this work, taking care of ourselves and each other and our participants.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: So, my dissertation work led to transgressed which was the first scholarly book on on transgender intimate partner violence. So, I was very excited to have recruited enough of a sample at the time to get some articles out there. But then I decided that maybe there could be some interest and sharing the full stories. I didn't think I had enough data. As you'll see soon, I only got 18 folks in this study. And I thought that that would not be enough for a book. But it was wrong. There is a lot of demand from university presses and other academic presses. Folks are interested in this work. They want us to do better and I thought the reception was pretty positive overall. So, what I ended up with, as I mentioned, I ended up with 18 folks, these are all pseudonyms here and I'll give you just some brief descriptions. When the study call went out and I of course relied on word of mouth. It was a national search for folks -- I used social media and organizational listservs, events, and it took me almost a year just to get 18 folks. So, this is challenging work, even with being well-resourced. And the data collection happened almost 10 years ago, which I think is relevant and important to note. Because one thing you might notice is just in the last 10 years the number of folks who identify as non-binary as opposed to genderqueer has really changed. You'll see in the sample folks describing themselves as genderqueer, no one saying they're nonbinary language changes and it changes fast. And these gender identities were self-described where it came from the participants themselves, so I asked how you identify and they gave me the language here that you see. And so, a wide range of a gender identities here all fitting under the broader trans umbrella and a relatively diverse sample, about 44% - just under half - identified as either black, Latinx or multiracial, multiethnic. And the sample is young. I don't think that that's a coincidence. I think there are lots of reasons, perhaps, why the average age was 30 including where it was marketed and just the topic itself may have lent itself to a younger crowd.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: So, I want to really really highlight some of the stories that I heard of course for the interest of time, I might not be able to share that much detail, but my approach involved interviews that happened on the phone and written accounts. I let folks opt either to talk to me or to freely type out their stories. I merged those transcripts together and I analyzed the data separately first and then together to see if there were differences. I went forward with analyzing all the transcripts as a whole. And so, it started with this descriptive theme of what kinds of violence, where it was happening, what were folks describing and then it went to -- What did violence mean to you, how did you make sense of your abusers’ motivations, what stood out to you. And then finally, everyone that I talked to and that submitted a story had left their abusive relationship, so I got to hear more about how that happened. So, I'll focus on at least one or two quotes from these and hopefully wrap up for a Q and A conversation. So, in getting to know folks initially I opened it up. After some warmup conversations, I would just say, you know what, what brought you to this conversation with me and what stories that they share. I left it pretty open and that had lots of follow ups in between. And opening that descriptive kind of open way I got to hear patterns and what kinds of abuse stood out to folks the most. And I identified genderist and transphobic attacks as two distinct separate dynamics of abuse that happened. I have a quote here from Anna a trans woman, Latina 30 at the time who was a transwoman immigrant who was undocumented at the time, and who came as a young person here to the U.S. who lived in a pretty tight knit familial migrant community or small neighborhood in an urban setting and who was at a young age thrown out of her home because of her trans identity. And so, Anna like lots of folks that I spoke with, had been experiencing multiple forms of violence. And those previous experiences created further marginalization, that really put them at high risk for more abuse, so…
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: How I differentiated genderism and trans phobic attacks was that the genderist attacks were really about policing the boundaries of femininity and masculinity and appropriate gender presentations and then these other attacks that involve more transphobic attacks which were attacks that degraded trans identity. Interestingly, I think that speaks a little bit further to kind of the importance of clearing IPV work where we don't take such a rigid linear approach to thinking about violence and gender. Six of these abusers were trans themselves. To me that speaks to the fact that regardless of our own positions at times we can— people can— weaponize external cultural hostility, social hostility in the context of intimate relationships. So, Anna had met her abuser out at work, and she developed a relationship That led her moving in to the abuser’s home. And part of what she started to experience early on, where these genderist and transphobic attacks. Here Anna tells me the abuser would say “leave whenever you want, see if anyone is going to give you what I did. You're lucky I'm even here for you.”
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: “You know men think you're gross and that you're just a man in a dress. No man is going to see you as a woman, and even if you get one, they just want to sleep with you. They don't want to love a circus act like you.” And others echoed some of these put-downs that weaponized external hostilities, but also relied on insecurity, really manipulating insecurity and creating a coercive kind of situation in which folks were denigrated and identities were marginalized. Secondly, when I got to asking about what things meant and what, what motive, what they thought, how they interpreted motivations I heard lots about controlling transition and in particular the discrediting of identity work, which means the subversion of the positive construction of identity. And so, this was interesting because all of these folks— nearly all of them, but one— were out to their partners as trans before getting into this relationship. And they were at various stages and transition and gender affirmation and yet abusers tactfully inserted themselves into ongoing transition, gender affirmation treatments, etc.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: Joe was the youngest person I talked to. A trans male who was white, Latino, only 18 at the time. And unfortunately, this was his first relationship. Joe was in a relationship with someone who regularly inserted himself into medical decisions like gender affirming treatments and surgeries. Here Joe says that he would say, “I can handle you physically modifying for half of your body – “But you change the lower half of your body it's wrong, that you have to keep what you have, you have to use it, you have to get over it and make baby with me.” Joe in this quote at really echoes what some of the other people were saying in the sample about the insertion of control and transition processes, but in particular, you get this kind of also looming sexual violence threat and, in particular, this constant kind of site attack on the body and this reproductive kind of coercion as well.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: So the last theme is on navigating generous resources and because I had the opportunity to talk to folks who had left their abusive relationships. It presented an opportunity then to find out what happened, how they got out and what was helpful and what wasn’t. I'm coming back to Anna here who was among some of the folks who tried to use formal resources and formal resources. I mean like shelters, law enforcement, or some other kind of service provision. And so, Anna who regularly experienced homelessness at first from violence family and rejection from her family, but then subsequently all of the economic marginalization that happens after plus the abuse. Anna’s describing here really the struggle of navigating a genderist service system that as Sarah mentioned earlier previously could discriminate on the basis of gender identity. Then they couldn't and now they can again. And so, we're still on this kind of yo-yo effect going back and forth with the safety of trans lives in service provision. So, Anna says here while I knew that I couldn't go to a homeless shelter, the homeless shelters are mostly full of men, and I learned it wasn't safe for me there. Plus, years ago when I needed it – looked too much like a woman, then the staff was saying I needed to go to a woman's homeless shelter that the men there may threaten me or something. But I remember women's shelter didn't want me either. They said they only allow women there and that they have children there. And then I could cause a scene or something, I don't know. They were just weird about it. I think if I could have pressed, they would have let me in, but because they were so unwelcoming from the start. I just could, but the woman I was living with. As a hint for me to get out she actually said I could go to a woman's domestic violence shelter and at those shelters you don't have to leave during the daytime. You can stay like a couple of months. Anna did eventually avoid going to homeless shelters and instead tried to go to a domestic violence shelter and they attempted to accommodate her.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: But for Anna folks at the shelter while they were trying to accommodate her, they also made her feel like she was a burden. That they needed to move people around, and that she was some kind of distraction or that she was triggering and she also experienced hostility and aggression from folks who were living at the shelter as well. And so, this presents lots of different issues and barriers in terms of not only service provision, but folks who work in service provision and folks who live in shelters and trans people seeking shelter as well. So, across the accounts I heard really kind of struggles with shelter provision, even worse accounts with law enforcement. Not totally surprising, of course, if you know anything about trans issues with the carceral state.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: But I did get to hear about what was helpful and what was helpful was really by these more informal avenues. Friends, and allies, and folks who were able to be there for them when formal resources, a formal structure hub really wasn't there. So, no one that I spoke to at least left just completely independently, but rather had some kind of network that helped them leave. And it's not like they didn't know that they were being abused and it's not like they weren't fighting back and defending themselves. They were, but having folks who were affirming, who open space really helped get folks out of abusive situations. So, Fatima as a trans woman here – Latina, 30 years old at the time. And she says, “I had to do everything like in secret. I didn't have connections to family anymore or that community or at all. I knew that was the only way to call a friend. The bad thing was that I was like, well, damn. I haven't talked to this person and so long, my depression, put me away like from anyone. “I tried to explain everything. And she— the friend— told me to call the police if I needed to and that she's going to tell her husband that I need to stay in the living room, at least for a couple of weeks. If it wasn't for her. I don't know what I would have done.”
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: I think this really speaks to how essential it is not only to have this kind of focus on transforming our help seeking avenues that are more informal, unstructured but really, that we all play a large part in being an affirming resource for folks who might need it, especially given how the survivors really echo the central importance of that. So, a little bit about what's kind of going on now and I'm of course happy to talk more about the findings if you have more specific questions. There's lots there, way more detail than just the stuff that I covered here is really the future is looking like focusing on measurement and theory, improving and creating more trans inclusive research and practice. I mentioned earlier, the US Transgender Survey, currently, if you're interested in qualitative work that is the most nationally representative fully transgender sample. it's something that I'm working with now and have been for a couple of years. And pretty soon in the Journal of Homosexuality, there's going to be a study with myself and other co-authors, we looked at what what factors relate to IPV shelter seeking, help-seeking for trans IPV folks. So, I think that's a lot of what’s, some of what's happening in the future. But also, really kind of locating even at the time of this research was before this new movement for black lives, this racial reawakening movement and the defund and reallocate police movement is that we get a renewed attention to alternatives to the criminal legal system and focusing more on not only just improving those systems, if that is going to be a benefit, but also really thinking beyond the constraints of existing carceral logics.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: I shout out in the book some other ideas, but I'm shouting out here Mimi Kim's Creative Interventions. There's lots of queer and trans local work happening. That looks at more transformative survivor-centered work that doesn't involve the carceral state, involves other forms of accountability prioritizing safety over punishment. And then I'm shouting out a second book that just got published by NYU press two months ago. It's co-edited by me co-author Adam Messenger, and it really, this volume brought together over a dozen plus leading scholars and activists in the field and it speaks to just how much has happened just in the last 10 years on trans IPV work. To where we're at a point where we could kind of collect all of that information, all that theory and data and presented in a way that the volume shows one and of course, if you're interested in the book, in Transgressed or this edited volume, I'm plugging here Some 30% off coupon codes you can share this with anybody. It's only available through NYU Press. The book is available in other formats— in stores and on Amazon and other places, but the coupon only works at NYU Press. So that's it for me and I'm excited to hear a little bit more about what you think and any questions you may have.
Sarah J. Berg (she/her/hers): I received a question from someone who had to leave early and promise to ask on their behalf. They wrote: According to the American Psychological Association transgender people of color are 3.69 times more likely to experience IPV in public areas. What are the steps someone could take if we see this happening? Best practices and I'm thinking particularly the comments you were just making around the carceral approach, perhaps not being a great option. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: Yeah, absolutely. I think about it all the time because I think it's incredibly complicated and something that I have experienced out in public, witnessed rather, not for myself. And the first thing that comes to my mind is safety, prioritizing safety. When we decide to intervene in things that we see in public, especially living in this context, in the US, where we have so many firearms and weapons, that's kind of, my mind goes first to analyze the context in the situation and not to do something alone. If you can. I have just witnessed too many interventions in public go horribly wrong. And so now I'm nervous about, you know, telling people intervene, you know, jump in. You know, we don't need multiple victims, we need to prioritize safety and so beyond obviously those situational nuances and it does present this problem was, like, who do I call for help? We don't have a safe accountability structure when folks opt to call law enforcement, you are inviting further violence and it's not a guarantee, but it is a possibility. It's very real that folks will call police, even when they are the victims and they get revictimized by law enforcement or they all get co- or dual-arrested, meaning the perpetrator and the victim get arrested. And so, in situations like that. I would rely on folks around and also really centering the person who's been targeted in a way that prioritizes safety, reduces state violence ideally, but I think that there have been plenty of cases in which a law enforcement call has happened and needed to happen. But it's a lot to consider, especially in a moment of violence in public.
Sarah J. Berg (she/her/hers): I have another question. If anyone else have questions, feel free to send them in the chat or raise your hand. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to the process of actually getting this research out there. You know, for covering a topic that there's so little on did you experience any pushback from other academics or from publishers that there just wasn't a place for this work?
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: A little bit mostly I'd say that it was well received. But there was pushback from the beginning, extending a little bit of what I said earlier about can this be done? You know those were hurdles from the beginning and and it also fuels why there's a dearth of research in this area. This fear that it can't happen or that we are especially when scholarly work on a time crunch, tenure and promotion focused, and this work takes a long time, and often involves small samples. And so early on, yeah, there's all those doubts about whether something can happen or not. And I think that that fuels why it's so marginalized is because it is hard to do, but it's increasingly becoming more accessible and the literature is expanding exponentially. I think over the last 10 years. In terms of publishing the book has or came out in a couple of articles first. Some chapters are actually articles in violence against women and in DV behavior and other journals. And the article publication process looked way more data driven or focused on those critiques. The book process was more these presses were eager, but the reviews were very they were obviously, of course, much more intensive, but in particular. I got lots of feedback. From feminist scholars who were afraid that I was erasing or marginalizing the very real gender dynamic that does exist with intimate partner violence and sexual violence. I did get one review. That sounded quite trans exclusionary. And as I was reading the review the person writes in parentheses, by the way, I'm not a TERF so don't call me that. If you've heard this term before, it stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist which there's some controversy of course around marginalizing ciswomen's experiences to accommodate trans inclusion, but one of the ways I address that is that this is the same patriarchy, that is facilitating and fostering hostile cultural environments against women is also perpetrating violence against trans people. And I think really pushing against a rigid, kind of all, as I said earlier, all have one group has all the power and all the other group has none of the power, moving away from that really rigid and gender just kind of approach. But while really accommodating the real gendered patterns that we see environments and we can do books. It's all about how we frame.
Bernadette Brooten she/her/hers: So, one I'd like to ask about religion. I'm wondering whether you asked any questions about that or whether anything came up about that because some religious communities are very forward looking, such as the Episcopal Church and such as Reform Judaism have really gone out of their way to try to open up and make the communities totally trans inclusive. The majority in the country do not. And it's been a major issue for some communities such as, especially the more right-wing evangelical communities. And when you wrote about Anna being thrown out by her family, a question that came to my mind was, if she's Latina she's perhaps either Catholic or Pentecostal or some other kind of Protestant, that have very strongly anti trans teachings. Bernadette Brooten she/her/hers: So, I wonder if you could speak to those issues.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: Absolutely. Thank you for asking that question. I think it's for me personally really relevant. It's not, so religion was not like a central focus in the analysis and stories, but it came up especially in the background, and especially talking about like Anna’s story, but she wasn't alone, there were others who talked a little bit more about conservative religious traditions. And they were essentially marginalized, excluded thrown out of their homes and families, partially because of conservative religious traditions. I know for myself, while I have a great relationship with my parents. Now it looks totally different than what it did initially when I came out as queer. I, as you mentioned, I was raised in a pentecostal, Latinx congregation. We moved around a lot. And somehow, we always found a way to find the Latinx, Pentecostal group. And if you know anything about those perspectives, they're really harsh. I was told that I was possessed that they wished death upon me or ill health. Church members wrote sympathy cards to my parents as if I had died. And this is something that some of my participants also experienced. But what I didn't do, regrettably, I think I didn't actually ask like their denominations, or like, what role the church played necessarily. It just came up because they talked about it. Like they mentioned it as they were telling their story. But it wasn't one of my follow ups like, tell me more about you know that what that religious institution, what that meant to you? Because for me, that was our Latinx community. It was converged all of the folks that we connected with as I was growing up. Who we could speak Spanish with, who we could celebrate things, were part of my daily life. They were all in that church. And no matter where I lived that that kind of manifested. And so I think that's a really important question and something that definitely clicks with me and eventually, at least in my own narrative my parents evolved, and they left a specific congregation went to another. That was the same and they were head pastors or leaders in this Spanish language congregation and my parents after their turnaround being so affirming, they went to my wedding, they were in the wedding. And those pictures were on social media and within a week, the church members had printed my wedding photos and thrown my parents out of the congregation and so I think that and now they don't have that community anymore, which is regrettable, but also tough decisions at the intersections of race and religion and ethnicity and all sorts of things.
Bernadette Brooten she/her/hers: Thank you.
Sarah J. Berg (she/her/hers): Professor Hunter has a question.
Deirdre Hunter, she/her, WGS: Hey everyone. This was excellent. Thank you so much. And thanks for organizing this. I have to pop off, but I put something in chat that I was asked to maybe read into the minutes. So, I just wanted to make sure everybody had access to: We have an incredible local resource here for queer folks, LGBTQ, SM, polyamorous folks and full disclosure, my partner's one of the executive directors there so if you hate it you can talk to me about it offline. But I think it's a wonderful organization, been around since the 90s, called The Network La Red. It's fully bilingual and English and Spanish. There's a hotline number: 800-832-1901 and basically, we created it in the basement of our home after working with lesbians around battering which was what it was called in the late 1980s. But now it's a, you know, it's been a full standing nonprofit with housing options as well as a lot of advocacy work in terms of policy work on these issues, but also individual work with survivors, so it's a really great resource for survivors in this area. I don't think there's anything else except you know, possibly New York City. There was a program in Hartford for a while. I don't know if they're still going. But I guess it just speaks so much to the fact that this has been such an unrecognized issue and certainly what was brought to light, you know, so well here today was this tremendous research now being done by, you know, these terrific scholars. So, I want to thank you again.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: Thank you. Thank you for plugging those great resources, too.
Julián Cancino: There's actually one more question in the chat. And I know we only have a few more minutes. But I think it's worth keeping either for the rewatch or for the folks are still here with us. And the question is, I appreciate the specific quotes that illustrated how perpetrators weaponize external hostilities to control their victims. Can you say a little bit more about reproductive question?
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: Yeah, absolutely. I think IPV literature has some on reproductive portion centered on trans- I'm sorry, on cis women. I think it's less discussed in that exact frame in that exact conceptualization with trans IPV. But the reproductive coercion that I presented in Joe’s story is certainly not in isolation. And I think while I don't have Like a data necessarily right now to back a backup this idea, but I think I would assume that based on what I know this is a really common thing that could happen, especially because it happens at the intersections of ongoing sexual violence and abuse, but also that very purposeful tactful discrediting of identity. The constant kind of going back to a biological essentialist kind of idea attack is multi-pronged: it is bodily control, it is a way to tear down trans folks and a way to manipulate and bring out insecurities that may not have been there, or maybe are. And so how it manifests in trans lives is really multifaceted and really a source of entrapment overall I think. A lot to think about. I would like to, you know, just highlight the work that you're doing Xavi. And one of the key takeaways for me and not just in your thought process and your research and how you really interpret that information. But what really touched me was your collaboration with community groups. And how you were able to build the bridge between academia and the community really for the benefit of the people who you were studying, right, and for the well-being of all. So, I want to thank you so much for your presentation and want to thank everybody who participated today. It's been nice to see some some new faces and also, some returned faces. So, I hope that you can all join us again next month. Thank you so much.
Xavier Guadalupe-Diaz: Thank you.