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Vox apartments tallahassee11/4/2023 Sex workers, particularly trans sex workers of color, face a disproportionately high risk of violence, including murder. With astronomically high costs for transition-related surgeries added to an economic system stacked against them, many trans women end up turning to sex work in order to survive. Overall, transgender workers are more likely to be unemployed compared to their cisgender counterparts, and 34 percent of Black trans women face housing insecurity compared to just 9 percent of non-Black trans people. According to a 2017 survey by New York City’s Anti-Violence Project, transgender New Yorkers were more likely to have a college degree than the general population, but just 45 percent of them have full-time jobs. “That’s why this system doesn’t work and it is not meant to produce safety.”Ī lack of employment and housing protections throughout most of the country contributes to financial insecurity for BIPOC trans women. “It really was like a culmination of a million different factors,” Mateo de la Torre, director of policy and advocacy at Black and Pink, which offers aid and support to LGBTQ prisoners of color, told Vox. Sex work can be a vital mode of economic survival for trans women. She was arrested because she missed court dates as part of an alternative-to-incarceration program after a previous arrest for sex work. She was in jail because she wasn’t able to make her $500 bail. This threat exists because trans women are often housed in men’s jails. To understand why this happens, though, you have to know how she ended up in solitary at Rikers in the first place.Īccording to the NBC News report, Polanco was placed in punitive confinement for assaulting an officer, but solitary is also frequently used as a way to protect trans women from the threat of male prisoners. Hers is a story of how the criminal justice system ensnares trans people and ultimately enacts violence against them. “It’s the last bit of indifference to her life that we saw and recklessness to a person who obviously needed help.”īut Polanco’s death is not just a story about the prison system’s neglect of trans people, especially trans women of color. “The video is the last piece of the puzzle,” David Shanies, an attorney for Polanco’s family in a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of New York and several Rikers staff members, told NBC News. Staff told investigators that they thought she was sleeping.Įarlier this month, an investigation by the Bronx District Attorney’s office cleared prison staff of any wrongdoing in Polanco’s death, even though the DA report also indicated that correctional officers had left her alone for up to 47 minutes, contravening jail regulations. She had just had an epileptic seizure, but prison staff had failed to conduct the 15-minute-interval health check-ins that are required for prisoners held in solitary confinement. When 27-year-old trans woman Layleen Xtravaganza Cubilette-Polanco lay lifeless in her cell last June, correctional officers at New York City’s Rikers Island stood outside her cell laughing, according to recently released security footage.
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