Trans Migrant & Refugee Women
WHAT IS THIS PROGRAMME?
Trans migrant women are facing erasure within the medical industrial complex, which is leading to maltreatment and further trauma. This programme is stewarded by a Trans community health expert, who is practicing whole body healing practices that are rooted in their Ancestral Knowledges.
This is significant as the western understanding/framing of gender does not match many other cultures, leaving many Trans Migrant Peoples with healthcare practices that are not culturally fitting, discriminating, and violent. In turn this creates further trauma and social alienation.
This programme helps fill the gap between needed life-saving biomedical medicine and healing that can only come from being in community, accessing Ancestral Knowledges, and being in safe space.
About the Programme
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The programme is centred on working closely with a handful of peers supporting their health justice journeys.
The role that Centric Lab plays is one of resource and infrastructure, where we provide finance, solidarity and camaraderie (as this work can be emotionally difficult and at times lonely), tools, and methods/practices. The type and depth of resourcing and infrastructure is also decided by the grantee, hopefully creating an environment that supports autonomy and Kinship.
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Justice cannot ever be top down or gate kept, therefore, we are prototyping methods that provide opportunities for people to enact their justice pathways without paternalistic intervention and without intellectual limitations.
“The trans community taught us that it is possible to effectively challenge that which is considered the very foundation of our sense of normalcy. So if it is possible to challenge the gender binary, then we can certainly effectively resist prisons and jails and police.”
Trans Peoples have opened up our minds to another way of imagining our personhood, to have mental and spiritual autonomy over our beingness. Imagination and autonomy are significant and essential elements in our liberation which is rooted in our healing. They are also two elements that can be perceived as a threat to a system whose survival depends on heteronormative gendered norms continuing. Without heteronormativity, a key support system for white supremacy, there is no supremacy capitalist system. This is a system and worldview that established itself since the feudal era, making it almost inconceivable to imagine anything else. Therefore, it feels like normal or a universal truth, and dismantling this makes people and governance very fearful. This fear is what exposes Trans Peoples to constant social ostracisation and violence, which has direct impacts on their health.
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Create a safe and communal space for Trans Migrant and Refugee women to create their own pathways for healing.]
Provide space for health practices that are culturally relevant to emerge.
Provide relevant and supportive scientific knowledge to make the emerging healing practices more deliberate and expansive.
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We are looking to partner with funders that have an interest in supporting this community and work. We are also looking for collaborators, who might be provide additional health support, such as mental health, bereavement counselling, PTSD experts, and other trauma centred health practices.
LATEST OUPUT
Health Justice Grants: Trans Migrant People of Colour Health Justice Report
From our Migrant Trans POC Justice programme we bring forward this piece of working on providing micro-grants designed to give autonomy and dignity to individuals and communities.
This report will show how they have emerged as an innovative approach for Centric Lab to support holistic healing pathways. We are using these grants to start shaping new methods and imaginations around community health practices.
Nina Rivera, the project lead, initially planned to use this opportunity to conduct interviews with migrant trans people of colour (MTPOCs) that started to address serious research gaps in this community.
After some reflection, Nina decided that a useful practice of healing to explore for the community would be facilitating a small event titled, Healing Circle: Immigration and Trans Healthcare Decolonisation in Precarity. The focus of this grant was primarily on psychological healing, though physical and financial were incorporated.
What Participants Are Saying
“This allowance for agency to heal however I wanted; the agency to create my unique pathway to and definition of healing is hugely important; especially for a Trans person like myself for whom agency and self-determination is always a contentious issue in a society that demands me to fit into the production line.”
“Introducing micro healing grants to health justice movements is a very considered and necessary decision that should remain a staple in it because we live in a society where burnout is often the norm and rest often overlooked.”
Programme Outputs
A selection of works from this area of work.
If you want to read more, go to the Research Library.
Partner With Us
We work ecosystemically. We recognise that the pathway to the abolition of systems that create health injustices cannot be done alone. We always welcome approaches for partnerships with like-minded organisations to help drive our collective missions forward.
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