"I believe that everyone has a life worth saving."
November 3, 2015 1:01 PM   Subscribe

Last year, Laverne Cox read a letter written by a trans woman in involuntary protective custody for a video released by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. Cox would later ask the SRLP to take the video down, citing concerns about the inmate's convictions. This is an interview with the woman who wrote the letter, Synthia China Blast.
posted by The Devil Tesla (16 comments total) 8 users marked this as a favorite
 
Fucking TERFS.

This reply by SRLP is the reason this is so important ...

"“Supporting any individual person is not about pardoning their crime,” they wrote, “but about protecting the rights of all incarcerated people and ending the use of systematic torture as ‘punishment.’”"

This isn't somehow saying Sylvia was justified (if she did, in fact, do those things -- seriously?) but about HUMAN RIGHTS. But TERFS only give a shit about middle-class white women and fear tactics. They are the ultimate expression of conservatism in the feminist movement.

This prime example, more than any other, indicates that they aren't particularly concerned with human rights, but only about making marks for their side. What crime, pray tell, SHOULD we be defending the rights of prisoners for, pray tell, O Cathy Brennan? You can use any smear of "THEY DID A HORRIBLE CRIME!" to demand that we ignore the plights they face. Transgender or not.

And what a great way to turn this issue away from Trans rights specifically. Because now we've diverted the issue from Sylvia as a Trans woman to "The rights of all prisoners" (which I do agree IS important), but the fact is, in this particular case, the injustice has only one thing to do with, and that is of her being Trans. "Protective Custody" - not isolation - as a feature. All under the guise of "protection" and "safety" by a system who refuses to protect them in any meaningful way, and yet pursues these policies that are fucking KNOWN by psychiatrists to damage people. It's not a protective measure, it's torture and it's meant as such, whether consciously or not, by the system itself and by its enforcers.

But Cathy O'Brennan wants to use the straw-issue here and make it about "deserving inmates" vs "undeserving" and I wonder, if there were a Trans woman, what exactly would be the line for Cathy O'Brennan to consider deserving of protection?

Cathy O'Brennan is a danger to human rights. Radical Feminism that opposes Trans-Rights because of some archaic notion of biological determinism is reactionary and just as proto-fascist as any other movement that demands to determine the rights of others based upon who they are.

I'm sorry Laverne Cox bowed to the pressure from the RadFems, and that's sad. But that's her choice to do so, just as it's Brennan's to be a vocal hatemonger towards Trans people.
posted by symbioid at 1:28 PM on November 3, 2015 [38 favorites]


Mod note: Several comments deleted. Coming in here with criminals-deserve-it rhetoric or gosh-trans-stuff-is-confusing just sucks and will tank any possibility of conversation in here. Serious warning to all, don't do that, just skip the thread. Other folks please flag and don't respond.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 2:00 PM on November 3, 2015 [25 favorites]


This is a very difficult read, And yes, it was a hideous and despicable crime, but this line:

"No [forensic] evidence. No murder weapon. No fingerprints. No eyewitnesses [to the crime]. No human connection other than being called to this house and now three years later I’m convicted of killing this child."

Christ, that she has been in jail for this long, let alone suffered 20 odd years of solitary is shocking. How many times have I read about a case with similar failings, and usually, even on here, it's labelled a miscarriage of justice. Brennan just went for the low hanging fruit, and is using this to further her own agenda, with no regard for the life of the woman involved.

Respect to Jezebel for publishing this, they are putting themselves out there on this one.

Peace and Love to any trans people reading this, whatever their life situation.
posted by marienbad at 2:37 PM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


I wonder if Cathy Brennan advocates against female sex offenders being locked up with other female prisoners, or against sexually violent men being locked up with other men and putting them at risk of assault? Because the latter in particular happens all the time. Something tells me this isn't something she thinks about and is solely TERF bullshit.
posted by thetortoise at 2:57 PM on November 3, 2015 [10 favorites]


Christ, that she has been in jail for this long, let alone suffered 20 odd years of solitary is shocking.

She was in jail for two years as a minor, subject to abuse by other prisoners - and then found not guilty. Has she been white & middle class, she would have been out of bail the entire time. Instead she paid for a crime she didn't commit -- and was pulled into a gang which led her to being involved in the body clean up.

The system fucked up a long time ago, and kept fucking up.
posted by jb at 3:00 PM on November 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


:_:
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:18 PM on November 3, 2015


Sadness and tears because well the stigma contributes to the marginalization which spirals down to worse things and then when bad things happen we say "look, see how terrible they are?" And it feels a bit hopeless. But We keep going. Too many feelings right now to really be useful to this conversation ATM.
posted by Annika Cicada at 3:22 PM on November 3, 2015


I would oppose any torture-as-punishment for anyone responsible for less death and suffering than Dick Cheney.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:23 PM on November 3, 2015


And what a great way to turn this issue away from Trans rights specifically. Because now we've diverted the issue from Sylvia as a Trans woman to "The rights of all prisoners" (which I do agree IS important), but the fact is, in this particular case, the injustice has only one thing to do with, and that is of her being Trans.

I got as far as this part, and realized that we're witnessing another rhetorical causality from the aftermath of #notallmen and #alllivesmatter.

I'm sure that gambit has been around forever, but i certainly feel like i've seen a huge-mongous uptick in it within the past, idk, 5 years? maybe even more time compressed than that.

Not conceptually, but just the framing and the shifting in essentially one paragraph from "but if we're considering this specific issue, what about this nebulous greater issue that is Definitely Bad? How is it fair to focus on this one issue the entire conversation was specifically about?"
posted by emptythought at 4:37 PM on November 3, 2015


I don't think her guilt or innocence is the point though.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 4:42 PM on November 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


I think the Jezebel article is problematic because a significant amount of the interview is dedicated to Blast's declarations of innocence rather than the discrimination she faces as a Trans woman, and some of the material about the discrimination conflicts with previously published information about Blast's incarceration.

For example, the Jezebel article says Factual assertions related to her alleged criminal offenses have been fact-checked whenever possible and then prints Blast's claim that there were No eyewitnesses [to the crime]. No human connection other than being called to this house and now three years later I’m convicted of killing this child. But the decision denying Blast's habeus corpus petition reports that The crux of the State's case against Morales was the testimony of four different eyewitnesses, all of whom identified Morales as one of the murderers and some of whom described how they helped Morales dispose of the body. But as far as I can tell, there's no effort by whoever did the fact-checking to resolve the discrepancy.

Regarding the facts of her incarceration, the headline of the Jezebel article is I Am Isolated in a Cell 23-24 Hours A Day and it's not until an "update" at the end of the long interview that Jezebel reveals that's no longer the case. Typically, such updates are used to report information that's become available since an article was posted to the internet, but in this case it seems to be revealing information that directly conflicts the headline that Jezebel was aware of when the article was initially posted, even though it reflects things that happened after the interview was conducted.

Further, Jezebel reports that Synthia China Blast is a Latina trans woman who, according to her family, has been in involuntary protective custody (IPC), a glorified form of solitary confinement, for almost 20 years. But not all IPC in New York prisons is a form of solitary confinement--for example, Blast's current status, as the article points out--and previous articles about Blast, including one posted in New York magazine suggest that she has not been in solitary confinement for anything approaching 20 years.
posted by layceepee at 6:16 PM on November 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


Here's an article from the April 19, 2004 edition of New York Magazine, titled "Love in Attica" that is about a relationship Synthia had with another prisoner, which makes it sound like she has not been in solitary confinement for her entire prison sentence like the Jezebel interview implies.
posted by colfax at 6:03 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


That New York article is surprisingly charming and romantic, especially compared to the chilly passivity and distance of the Jezebel interview, where you get the creepy feeling that you're being manipulated the whole way through.
posted by mittens at 6:28 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Charming and romantic? Really? You have a very different definition of those terms to me.
posted by marienbad at 7:12 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Oh, c'mon! He's a shy mama's boy, a loner who never kissed a girl, getting in trouble for copying his idol. She's a tattooed girl with a broken past and a taste for bad boys. It's like if Jean Genet wrote a best-selling YA novel!
posted by mittens at 8:41 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


I think that is an incredibly creepy description, considering that you are talking about two people who are in jail because they were both convicted of murder.
posted by colfax at 8:56 AM on November 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


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