Volume 12, Number 1, 2025 Spring/ Summer 2025: Fighting Anti-Blackness and Colonial Racisms/Struggling for Queer, Trans, and Reproductive Justice

EN:

In light of the recent political attacks against trans and Black people worldwide, scholarship has increasingly taken an interest in Black trans critique. However, centering Black trans people in scholarship or activism may expose them to further violence, particularly when the focus is on the death of Black trans women. Shifting the focus away from Black trans death, this article examines how living activists in the present abolish interlinking white supremacy and transphobia. Through case studies of Black trans abolitionists Miss Major and CeCe McDonald, I argue that Black trans love and rage are central to living a revolutionary life that is constantly threatened by the Prison Industrial Complex and other white supremacist transphobic structures. Black trans rage is the fire to live life unbound. It is committed to the abolition of structures that imprison bodies according to gendered and racialized codes, often embracing violence to do so. Black trans rage works in tandem with Black trans love that heals the self and others from the injuries inflicted by white supremacy and transphobia so that one might continue raging. It cultivates community that will sustain the fight for freedom through different forms of love: self-love, agape, philia, storge, and eros. Each of these forms of love are tools for living well under oppression while remaining committed to abolition. Centering Black trans rage and love recognizes the affective resources that Black trans activists offer to revolutionary struggle that will destabilize the capitalist and colonial structures around us.

EN:

Despite documented histories of medical violence against Black women—including harmful interventions, exploitative research, and systemic mistreatment—and the persistent pathologization of Black women in popular narratives of motherhood, there remains a paucity of research on the perinatal experiences of Black women in Canada. This article examines the shared yet distinct perinatal experiences of Black women, drawing on birth stories from the Greater Toronto Area of women who sought care between January 2020 and May 2023. Through their birth stories, we explore the reproduction of race by medical staff, focusing on the stereotype of Black women as inherently resilient and the racial contempt they encounter in perinatal care. Birth stories reveal key strategies that Black women are forced to use to resist obstetric racism and the pathologization of Black motherhood, including prioritizing clear communication, seeking representation among healthcare providers, and choosing midwives as primary caregivers. These experiences provide valuable insights for shaping healthcare policies that centre Black women and birthing people while advancing reproductive justice and dismantling medical violence.

EN:

This article investigates the historical and contemporary exclusions embedded in Canadian reproductive rights discourse through an institutional ethnographic analysis of scholarly literature and state policies on reproduction. We critically engage with the liberal feminist framing of “choice” and “responsible parenthood,” showing how these concepts have historically operated through settler colonial, racial, and cisnormative logics. Drawing on scholarship in Indigenous feminism, Black feminist thought, and trans and queer theory, we trace how reproductive policies in Canada—from eugenics and family planning to abortion access and legal recognition—have systematically marginalized Indigenous, Black, disabled, Two-Spirit, queer and trans people. We argue for a queer, decolonial reproductive justice framework that centers bodily autonomy, community care, and relational accountability beyond liberal legal rights. Informed by institutional ethnography, this article maps how texts, policies, and professional discourses coordinate systemic reproductive oppression while also illuminating activist knowledge and resistance practices that chart a transformative path forward.

EN:

In this work, I intertwine my own reflections on community with two recent queer Canadian autobiographical works: Kai Cheng Thom’s I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World (2019) and Mx. Sly’s Transland: Consent, Kink, & Pleasure (2023). I explore challenges to community accountability within queer spaces and position autoethnography as a site for community intervention. I ask how we identify and address harm within our communities when the very existence of these spaces seems precarious. Subsequently, I illustrate how the intersections of desire, harm, and accountability have been narrativized in our community spaces, and how the stories we tell and respond to actively shape the conversation that is community.