Guest Feature by Dani Murano-Kinney
Dani Murano-Kinney is a trans/non-binary comics critic, artist, and writer (publishing pending). Outside of comics they also work as a volunteer patient advocate working with trans individuals, and trans & intersex sensitivity reader, and a coordinator of a nationally recognized trans wellness conference. They also are already aware that they take this all way too seriously.
Ann Nocenti, Steve Lightle, Marianne Lightle, Ul Higgins
Content Warning: This essay contains discussion on the following topics – homelessness, transphobia & transphobic attacks, abuse of trans youth.
Marginal/Liminal
I think a lot about Jessie Drake. Many who don’t know me might see my commitment to Drake’s story as some form of extended meme or performative disruption. Those who know me well enough may suspect something deeper. Jessie Drake teaches us hard learned lessons about marginality in liminal spaces. She teaches us about boxes, naming, and transgression. You see, Jessie’s gender and particularly her transgressive navigation of it, don’t arise until evoked. What this says is that gender is only relevant when applied and its norms only observed or transgressed accordingly.
I suspect some folks imagine there is “nothing left to say” about Jessie’s story, after she is only in two issues of comics and one short story in the recent anthology. The idea that works of art have fixed meanings that yield fixed and finite assessments reduces works of art to the fodder of hermeneutics, asserting that once absorbed and interpreted once, there is no longer a need to mine the earth.
But we don’t go to a well once to forever quench our thirst, and stories, like the people who read and absorb them, change, shift and grow, even in a position of apparent stasis, and we only stop learning from a work when we naively tell ourselves we’re finished learning from it.
Having had the opportunity to speak with Anne Nocenti about these stories and to see first hand her neoliberal failings to get to the heart of a more sober understanding of critical trans politics, I approach this story knowing that even today, the author fails to properly comprehend the identities, experiences and struggles of the trans community, specifically trans youth. It is my hope to be able to suture together aspects of Nocenti’s inert political object and neoliberal view of trans politics, to recreate a more transformative reading of the text at hand. I’m a person who has been Jessie Drake and who believes in the potential of this character, perhaps more than I believe in the minimal and problematic texts that contain her.
What liberates her from her confines is what can be done to rearrange and parse the text.
‘…this is the position from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though I would emphasize not like any pre-existing whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
Most recently I think about the liminality of Jessie’s story and its many facets. I take particular interest in how Jessie’s liminality creates and is informed by the invocation of her marginality. Jessie’s vulnerability is not inherent to her body or to her identity, but the systems that police them. Jessie’s trauma is generated not because she is trans but because of her exposure to liminal spaces and institutions where gendered violence and policing is enacted.
It’s only when gender is mapped onto an oppressive state apparatus that bodies, behaviors, and identity become socially organized and codified. It’s only when we assign and attribute values to particular manifestations and configurations of the stuff of gender, that outlier experiences and navigations of gender become transgressive, and policed. When we say gender is a construct, it does not evade the material forms of oppression enacted on those whose navigation of the constructed system is deemed a threat to the values that the system underpins.
When you are visible in the world as a trans person you experience a particular set of vectors of vulnerability due to gender policing of bodies and identities that has become all pervasive in the US since it’s settler-genocidal inception. Gender-variance itself is a threat to the puritanical and white supremacist ideology that dominates the US. This vulnerability is what Dean Spade refers to as a “reduction of life chances” in his book “Normal Life”, meaning your ability to access and navigate spaces/services/institutions is at best impeded by the gendered policing at work, and at worst (and far too often) it become a threat to the individual’s safety & wellbeing.
“The use of gender as a category of data for sorting populations–something that is taken as neutral and obvious to most administrators–operates as a potential vector of vulnerability.” ( Dean Spade’s Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Page 83 , chap 4)
For Jessie, her identity manifests as a social category specifically when Typhoid Mary is directed to scrutinize & police Jessie’s navigation of this constructed system at the urging of bigoted housing shelter worker. This is the moment where something constructed and abstract shifts into a lived experience. Yes, gender is constructed, but yes, there are constructed norms that become the criteria of policing.
We tend to think less about the didactic nature of stories as adults. We don’t often expect, consciously at least, to “learn lessons” in the stories we consume in the same ways we expect this sort of edifying to take place in the stories consumed by children & youths. Maybe we think, as adults, that we no longer need the media we consume to teach us lessons because of the broader realms of information we have access to. But stories are always demonstrating a set of values at work, even if it’s taking place on a subconscious level. There’s also something to be said about the space we give stories in our minds. In fact, the entirety of my work as a critic can be boiled down to an attempt to use comics, primarily those focussing on mutants, as a didactic map to explore the politics, history, and philosophies of the trans community.
A comics fan may not be inclined to do extensive research on liminality and housing instability for trans youth, but if you’ve read the story of Jessie Drake, you’ve already been given somewhat of a primer of the harrowing experiences that trans youth in the US face.
Ann Nocenti, Steve Lightle, Marianne Lightle, Ul Higgins
Jessie’s first appearance on the page is her introduction to “The Fortress”, a black-ops facility, first introduced in Marvel Presents vol 1 #112. She’s being led through the facility, where we catch an oblique glimpse at their “New Genix” project, where presumably kidnapped children are raised and groomed within parts of the facility designed to sell the lie/illusion that they are living in a futuristic civilization of 3065 A.D. In this fictitious timeline it is believed that mutants were wiped-out during an event called the “Horizon Wars” , aspects of which we see some of the children remark upon as Jessie is led through the facility. She’s taken, presumably against her will, to the leader of the Fortress, Dr. Zachary Hoffner, who looks like a rejected character design for a straight to video Dungeons & Dragon movie.
Despite the outlandish nature of the facility and Hoffner’s character design, the facility and its mission is a sinister project. In reality, these children, all presumably kidnapped from their homes or kidnapped runaways like Jessie, are test subjects of the Fortress, subjected to genetic and surgical experimentation. We’ll see some members of New Genix’s team a little further down the line like Blue Shark, Allegra, Bombardier, and Munchkin in Marvel Presents #175. It’s reasonable to extrapolate that this process of grooming and gaslighting would be in her future, were it not for Mary Walker & Blood Mary’s intervention.
But how did Jessie Drake get here? Like much of Jessie’s story before and after her time in the Fortress, we can only speculate for now. We can also extrapolate from a very particular line of dialogue, where upon arriving at a Women’s Shelter for survivors of abuse/assault, Mary remarks that it was Jessie who led them there. Jessie may very well have just made an educated guess about where to go, but I think there’s a more productive reading/misreading of this line.
A 2014 survey of 138 youth homelessness human service agency providers conducted by The Williams institute, True Colors United, & The Palette Fund, found that “ estimates of the percent of LGBTQ youth accessing their services indicate overrepresentation of sexual and gender minority youth among those experiencing homelessness.” So knowing Jessie is trans, it’s increasingly more likely than otherwise, that Jessie liminality is actually the result of or better defined as housing instability. The same study goes on to say “ agency staff reported average increases in the proportion of LGBTQ youth they served over the past 10 years, and this change is higher for transgender youth.” Regarding how she was picked up by Steel Raven, then answer may lie further into the survey, which states “LGBTQ youth accessing these homelessness services were reported to have been homeless longer and have more mental and physical health problems than nonLGBTQ youth.”
If Jessie were to walk into a clinic, a shelter, have been picked up for loitering, squatting, or sleeping on public property, whichever medical or penal facility she was taken too may have identified the X-Gene in routine blood-work or her abilities may have manifested in some way due to the stress of the situation. It’s easy to imagine the Fortress’s agents would be more than capable of tapping into these sorts of reporting systems, identifying Jessie, and then kidnapping her. As far as where Jessie’s housing instability began, it’s harder to say, but given that she’s a trans child living on the streets in the late 1980s we can make a few educated guesses.
The survey in question states “The most prevalent reason for homelessness among LGBTQ youth was being forced out of home or running away from home because of their sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. Transgender youth were estimated to have experienced bullying, family rejection,and physical and sexual abuse at higher rates than LGBQ youth.”
While rejection is the most frequently cited reason LGBTQ youth experience homelessness, it’s not the only one. According to service providers, additional reasons include aging out of the foster care system, poverty, and conflict in the home. Often, it’s not one thing that causes homelessness, but a combination of many. A survey spearheaded by True Colors United in 2015 elucidates and articulates a marked elevation of these traumas for trans & gender-variant youth, stating; “service providers surveyed had indicated that 90% of their transgender clients have experienced family rejection/harassment and/or bullying based on their while they reported 70% of their LGBQ clients had experienced the same abuse.” The study provided multiple data points that demonstrated not only differences between LGBTQ and non-LGBTQ youth, but also some significant differences between LGBQ and transgender youth , who were estimated to have experienced bullying, family rejection, and physical and sexual abuse at higher rates than cisgender queer youth.
A survey of street outreach programs in New York City Youth found that approx 9% of unstably housed youth and young adults surveyed (N = 265) self-identified as transgender or gender-expansive. It’s estimated [conservatively] that between 2014 and 2018, approximately 4,300 unaccompanied youth were sleeping on the streets or in overnight housing shelters. 9% of that is an average of approx 400 trans and gender-variant youth experiencing housing instability in New York alone. When we take into account that these estimates are conservative & this should be an infinitely alarming statistic, as we only continue to see it grow.
Jessie Drake’s story is roughly thirty years old by now, and alarmingly the story still holds as much water now as it did upon release, in depicting the dangers that loom over trans & gender-variant youth. There’s nothing dated about her story aside from some of the cisnormative and transmedicalist language that was in popular use at the time. Trans people are not protected from housing discrimination in the US housing market. This is affirmed by the National Transgender survey of 2015 which found that 30% (27,715) have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives and/or experiencing housing discrimination related to their gender identity.
Ann Nocenti, Steve Lightle, Marianne Lightle, Ul Higgins
The Violence inherent to the system
Before entering the shelter, a seemingly middle or upper-middle class couple stroll through the foreground of the panel and remark, “this used to be a nice neighborhood”. It’s an oblique but potentially scathing and illuminating critique Nocenti places here, which serves as a frame for the scene. Nocenti could have labored the point and held the scene hostage to convey it, but she instead uses the passing of the couple as the curtain-draw or screen-wipe to orient our thinking. We transition from a sleek, high-tech military facility to what is clearly regarded as and represented to be an area that serves and holds-space for low income and marginalized communities. There’s so much to drill down into here but we can at least begin to tackle this by looking at this scene as “paper-window” to borrow from the parlance of Miles Stokes of Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-Men into the ways that social welfare services are framed within capitalist society. For anybody who has ever had to navigate unemployment outside of the pandemic, you quickly learn one of the most poignant critiques of capitalist that is consistent with accessing nearly any and all levels of welfare services: accessing these services is a process designed to be as labor intensive and socially stigmatizing as possible to force people into putting themselves into nearly any conditions/situations to escape them. Having your basic survival needs met through welfare programs, be they state-provided or run by the non-profit sub-state/shadow-state complex, is meant to impose a sense of shame onto the person accessing these services.
Society places a moral value on the act requiring these services by making assumptions that: you must be lazy, you must be uneducated, you must be sick, you must have done something wrong, you must have bad sexualities, you make poor life-choices, and so on. The state realizes the necessity of making these services so stigmatizing because it is part of how you encourage people to allow themselves to be abused by capitalist exploitation, in order to avoid the laborious and demoralizing process of accessing these services. At the same time austerity minded political goons on both sides of the aisle continue to impose deeper and more complex deservingness criteria, such as Clinton’s 96 “welfare reforms’ under which “anyone convicted of a drug-related crime is automatically banned” for life from receiving cash assistance and food stamps. This is just one of many complications that make this service grueling to access and easy to revoke.
Another point of interest here is that the institutions that emerge to provide these services are often under-funded, poorly staffed, and poorly-maintained (with little variance). As a result many of these institutions are pushed out of or prevented access to property in majority white-upper class areas, because of course the people who access them are not only stigmaized but their presence also serves as a constant reminder of the failure of the neoliberal projects that the middle class often support. So, around the scene to come within the shelter, we’re framed by broader systems of capitalist exploitation, which constructs the many pathways each party takes to the next incident.
Once inside the shelter, the worker they interact with identifies to Mary, and to the reader, that Jessie Drake is trans. The staff member does so through a transphobic and gender-policing assumption that Jessie is a boy, saying: “He’s a pretty little trickster”. The worker goes on, twisting the knife saying “be shaving soon won’t yah”.
Again, let’s drill down into this scene, which depicts a harrowingly common experience of trans & gender-variant youth who seek out solutions to housing instability. In the 2019 True Colors United report we’ve mentioned before, they demonstrate that “ Transgender and gender-expansive young adults experiencing homelessness often face discrimination, rejection, and violence in the systems that are supposed to help them. These difficulties can be magnified for transgender and gender-expansive youth of color, who navigate systems at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities.” A trans child have her body’s presumed gender policed by a shelter’s staff is harrowingly in-step with the leaked Department of Housing and Urban Development memo, which empowers shelter staff to do just that, outlining how they can police the gender of trans people based on: “Factors such as height, the presence (but not the absence) of facial hair, the presence of an Adam’s apple, and other physical characteristics which, when considered together, are indicative of a person’s biological sex.” Given that 1 in 5 trans people will be houseless during their lifetime, the implications of such a rule are devastating.
Trans people’s bodies are always the target of gendered policing. As Dean Spade describes how these practices of policing and violence:
“ Gender classification governs spaces such as bathrooms, homeless shelters, drug treatment programs, mental health services, and spaces of confinement like psychiatric hospitals, juvenile and adult prisons, and immigration prisons. The consequences of misclassification or the inability to fit into the existing classification system are extremely high, particularly in the kinds of institutions and systems that have emerged and grown to target and control poor people and people of color, such as criminal punishment systems, public benefit systems, and immigration systems.
For many the inability to access sex-segregated programs that address addiction and homeslessness results in an increased likelihood of ending up in criminal punishment systems. Trans women in need of shelter ( a disproportionately large population because of the combination of employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and family rejections) often remain on the streets because they are unfairly rejected from-women only domestic violence programs and they know the homeless shelter system will place them in men’s facilities, guaranteeing sexual harassment and possibly assault. Many trans youth become street homeless when they run away from group homes that place them according to their assigned gender at birth, exposing them to violence from residents and staff alike.”
(Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical trans politics, and the limits of law)
And this is exactly what happens to Jessie, who among the 70% of trans youth who stayed in a shelter and “ reported some form of mistreatment, including being harassed, sexually or physically assaulted, or kicked out because of being transgender.” Jessie is violently misgendered by staff member, who holds the power of access over Jessie, and she experiences physical violence as well as misgendering from Mary Walker, who at this point in the story is Jessie’s de facto caretaker, who responds to this revelation by calling Jessie a “filthy liar”, a man, and claiming she “betrayed” Mary while smacking her across the face.
Ann Nocenti, Steve Lightle, Marianne Lightle, Ul Higgins
So…What can you do? How do you mobilize against trans youth homelessness?
We need to build structures of empowerment for trans youth that help them develop the necessary skills & relationships to break/avoid cycles of housing instability as a stop gap. From there we must mobilize more broadly against the systemic racial and gendered policing that makes seeking housing outside of the domestic space a threat to the safety of trans youth. We need to work to end gender policing, and create a locus of community support built upon the principles of mutual aid to ensure, if trans youth are experiencing housing instability, that they are cared for in safe and affirming spaces. This, like all critical trans political projects, requires an immediate intervention, to manage the symptoms, while holistically addressing the structural systems the limit life chances for trans & gender-variant people. Beyond that we also need to reckon with the social determinants and catalysts that drive trans youth into housing instability, by addressing the transphobia in our own community.
Good question, but let’s look first at what is already being done.
There’s an organization in NYC that is setting the Gold Standard with their work to bring an end to trans homelessness, FIERCE, “a membership-based organization building the leadership and power of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color in New York City”. FIERCE is an LGBTQ youth of color-led organization working to build leadership, political consciousness, and organizing skills of LGBTQ youth. Through their Education for Liberation Project (ELP), they develop politically conscious and active youth leaders, who are invested in improving themselves and their community through youth peer-led campaigns, leadership & mentoring programs, and through the arts & in the media. While their primary mission is to develop leadership amongst LGBTQ youth, with the express goal of utilizing these strategies of empowerment and development to catalyze a systematic resolution to the unsolved problem of youth homelessness impacting the LGBTQ+ community. They don’t limit themselves to just focussing on ending LGBTQ homeless though, they are also immensely active in other political and activist arenas such as leading and participating in grassroots campaigns to fight police harassment & violence, and to increase access to safe public spaces for LGBTQ youth.
Within FIERCE’s didactic resources there exist a myriad insightful and accessible tools for understanding the systemic cycles that lead trans and gender-variant youth in varied states of housing instability.
Having identified the cycles of mistreatment and marginalization that funnel trans youth and disproportionately trans youth of color, FIERCE takes their analysis beyond demobilizing activities such as writing your state representatives, signing an ACLU petition or crafting op-ed think pieces. FIERCE’s Education for Liberation Project (ELP) allows LGBTQ+ youth of color to build the necessary professional and personal skills, experiences, & relationships to advocate for themselves and break cycles of homelessness. Organizational leadership is driven from within, in contrast to the dominantly white upper-middle class lad non-profit sector. Members go through a range of political ed courses and mentorships, designed to help members right through the institution, and ensuring high turn-over as members cycle out to become leaders in other related and unique movements.A structure such as this centers those most marginalized and allows them to become leaders within the cause, while most non-profits relegate those most impacted by oppression and subjection to low-paying frontline positions. ELP is a model for self-liberation through develop leaders within affected communities and demonstrates the impact of such a strategy over “helicopter relief” provided by donor-funded NGOs.
Such a model should inspire us not to see ending youth homelessness as intangible or far off. It’s not overreaching to set out to end youth homelessness and our resigned passive-acceptance of youth homeless is never going to save a single life. FIERCE’s ELP demonstrates that this is a solvable problem and that its solutions are not immensely complex in nature. What these solutions do require is a deviation from a few largely-unchallenged patterns in organizing work and non-profit aid:
- Faith in large donor funded non-profits
- A history of centering white upper-middle class professionals with advanced degrees in social-justice, legal, or political sciences subjects
- The belief that charity work can liberate us
- Belief that some “are qualified to lead social justice movements while others are not
Historically, organizations such as FIERCE receive much less visibility in the media for their work than organizations whose “solutions” to youth homeless have largely been ineffective. I believe that liberation will never come from a charity, or a petition. Nonprofits and institutions can’t save us. We save us, and organizations such as FIERCE are living proof. In the end, the Jessie Drakes of our world know that the Avengers and the X-Men alike are never going to be the key to liberation, but instead a movement built on mutual-aid, resilience, transformative justice and community-building will.
Jessie Drake will never be liberated by the institutions that peacefully coexist with the status-quo of the 616. We’ve often seen that any time dominant mutant forces push again the permissible status quo, conflict ensues, and so for much of the X-Men’s history, and particularly in Jessie’s moment of continuity, Xavier’s dream of peaceful cohabitation and assimilation prevents the mutant agenda from taking radical steps towards broader mutant liberation. In this way, the mutant agenda becomes controllable. As Dean Spade notes, paraphrasing Dylan Rodriguez: “If you do transformative work that gets to the root causes, you’ll be criminalized, and if you do work that helps maintain the status quo and manage the problems being produced by capitalism and white supremacy, you can get a grant.” The salient point here is, institutions will never be allowed to seek out to directly create change, and if they do, they are vilified and demonized. If we want to defend our community, if we want to be allies, we need to stop looking to the ACLU or the HRC for the next think-piece, or high-profile lawsuit or petitions. We need to invest our faith and our energy in our communities and in each other. We need to build true power, built upon the foundations of trans love and solidarity. We need to begin to see each other as our best chance to get free and stay free, because we are.
Ann Nocenti, Fred Harper, Joe Andreani, Ul Higgins, Jon Babcock