About the Series:
Change Matrix has launched a new Podcast Series for 2021, called Equity in Action. Since our inception in 2008, founders Elizabeth Waetzig, Rachele Espiritu, and Suganya Sockalingam have maintained a focus on cultural competence and eliminating disparities. We continue a focus on equity on all of our current projects, continuously look for ways to take action, and look forward to a world where all people get what they need, in ways that work for them, in their communities.
What We Discuss in this Episode:
Nereyda Luna (They/Them/Elle) learned about inequity through their experience as a Latinx trans nonbinary and gender nonconforming individual. Their activism, scholarly work, and art address the inequities and discrimination the LGBTQ+ community faces, as well as the beauty that comes with being. Now as the Youth Fellow at The Alliance for GLBTQ Youth in Miami, Nereyda is helping to develop emerging LGBTQ+ youth leaders. Listen as Change Specialist Chyenne Mallinson talks with Nereyda about transgender and gender nonconforming identities, their lived experience, and equitable futures for the LGBTQ+ community.
Transcript of the Conversation:
Chyenne Mallinson:
I’m Chyenne Mallinson, with Change Matrix and this is the fourth episode in our Equity in Action series. Today I’m joined by Nereyda Luna, a Latinx Caribbean, trans, non-binary, and gender-nonconforming being. Nereyda currently is the Youth Fellow at The Alliance for GLBT Youth in Miami. Nereyda is also a gender liberation activist, organizer, scholar, and artist. Welcome.
Nereyda Luna:
Hi, thank you for having me.
Chyenne Mallinson:
Thank you for being here. Tell me about your work with The Alliance for GLBT Youth in Miami.
Nereyda Luna:
Yeah. I’m currently, as you said, the youth fellow, and essentially what that entails is that I’m leading a group of LGBTQ youth in Miami-Dade County into becoming organizers and activists for their own communities. Essentially, our youth leaders are leading their own group of youth as well, and so we have a total of about 20-ish youth who are participating in this program. We cover different topics that are essential for organizing and activist work.
And so basically what I do is I try to lead them into becoming the best organizers and activists that they can be. And part of that is having foundational information — the first and foremost being protecting and taking care of yourself. And so we start off our program with focusing on mental health and how our youth can access different services on their own or different avenues that they can access them such as the Trevor [Project] hotline, Trans Lifeline, or just accessing the services that we provide at our own organization.
And then we start covering topics such as their rights in Florida — both federally and then also within Miami-Dade — what are their legal rights and protections as LGBTQ youth, and then we also cover topics such as LGBTQ history and also anti-racism and intersectionality just as a way to ground our youth in these core ideas and concepts if they want to be organizers and activists. And these are essential things that they’re going to need to know.
And then following that — this is a year-long program by the way, so we have a lot of time with our youth — we start exposing them to different kinds of activism. And so I organized a panel discussion between a bunch of different organizers in the Miami area that don’t only focus on LGBTQ youth or LGBTQ rights. We worked with Femme Power which is a queer collective of artists. We worked with Dream Defenders Miami, which works on abolitionist work involving incarcerated folk and the abolition of the prison industrial complex. And so our youth get a pretty good grounding and understanding of all the different kinds of activism and organizing that they can take part in.
Chyenne Mallinson:
What kind of campaigns and things that they’re… Or what are they working on right now?
Nereyda Luna:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. Our youth are actually in the midst of creating their own campaign. And so one of the things based on the recent anti-trans legislation that the State of Florida has passed attacking trans youth and specifically trans athletes, our youth have been planning what the best course of action to take would be. And our youth are extremely insightful and very in-tune with the different things that are going on around them. And one of the things that I think is so important is that they didn’t want to create a campaign that was reactionary, and so our campaign actually has almost nothing to do with the anti-trans bills and legislation and we’re not actually talking about that in our campaign. That’s just kind of what lit the fire for our campaign.
And so we are focusing on trans youth, but we’re focusing on the realm of education and how administrators, principals, superintendents, teachers, counselors, can create gender-conscious spaces for our youth. One of the most common things that a lot of our trans youth will hear is, “I don’t care what you are. You could be a unicorn and I’ll still accept you.” And that isn’t validating. That’s not humanizing our trans youth, that’s just putting their gender, their gender expression in the back when this is something that affects them so strongly on their day-to-day as they move through the world all the time, not just in school.
And so it’s imperative that we have our counselors, teachers, and other administrators in these spaces being aware of how they can make these spaces more safe for our youth. You can’t really have safe spaces but you can have spaces that are more safe, you can have spaces that center our youth, and it’s really just a shift in how we talk about different things. And so one of those things being showing our youth or having readily-accessible the different rules and regulations around bathroom usage for our youth, introducing yourself as a teacher.
If you’re going to introduce yourself introduce your name and then your pronouns, you don’t necessarily have to ask all your students for their pronouns because then that can put trans youth who aren’t out yet in a predicament where they either have to misgender themselves or they feel like they have to come out in that space and it’s not necessarily a safe thing to do. But by a teacher giving their name and their pronouns it sends almost a dog whistle to our trans youth and they’re like, “Oh, you’re someone who I can approach if I need anything,” or, “You’re someone who is at least aware of these topics and so I feel a little bit more comfortable here.” And that’s really what we’re trying to do.
Chyenne Mallinson:
That sounds amazing. So not only are you working with these youth to create change, you’re also helping to develop them as future leaders in the community?
Nereyda Luna:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I think one of the biggest things that I talk about with my youth that is so difficult to do as well is to really create a space that is their own. And so I constantly tell them, “This is your campaign, this is your program, I’m just the messenger. Whatever y’all want is what I am going to use my position to help get that.” But it’s really hard because youth are taught in our society the idea of their not being autonomous beings is so ingrained in our society and ingrained in them that it’s difficult for them to go into a space and understand that space completely as their own, and really see that they have the ability to make the changes that they want to see. So often our youth are told that they can’t do anything or there’s no outlet for them, there’s no way to actually systemically change anything and that’s the furthest thing from the truth.
Chyenne Mallinson:
I’m curious, what pushed you towards this work?
Nereyda Luna:
Yeah. Well, that’s interesting. I actually started out my thought process into a career and stuff like that by thinking I wanted to become a doctor. And so I went into college being pre-med, but I was majoring in anthropology and I just realized through my studies and through talking with other folks, just being in community with people that what I really loved was community. I loved community and working with patients, not necessarily the biomedical aspect of medicine and I enjoyed people, I enjoyed talking with them.
And so through studying anthropology I started engaging more and more with different communities and realizing, okay, this is what I want to do. And with that I would engage a lot with student organizations that I would run. I created a student organization in my college called QTPOC, or Queer and Trans People of Color. And my activist work and my scholarly were meshed in together and they just really coincided very well, and that ended up with me working on an honors thesis in my senior year for my anthropology major where I went to the Dominican Republic to conduct field research.
And I conducted my own field research in the Dominican Republic and I was working with trans folk there. They were predominantly transfeminine individuals and one of the things that we focused on was the violence that they would face. And one of the things that became so apparent to me through my studies and my research was that so many people come into different spaces not being of the predominant community that’s there. So for example, we would have cis, which means cisgender. Which by the way, just to clarify the definition of certain terms, cisgender is when you identify with the gender and the sex that have been placed on you at birth and transgender is people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth. And so people who cross over the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain that gender.
And so why I really like that definition is because it’s not necessarily making claim to a gender binary, it’s just stating any shift away from that initial sense of gender that has been placed on you at birth is transgender. And so that includes non-binary people, that includes anybody who feels that they just aren’t encapsulated by being cisgender. And so going back to what I was saying, as I was working with these trans folk and conducting this research what became apparent to me was that it’s actually predominantly a lot of cis people working in these communities with trans people. And what would oftentimes happen is the trans individuals would say, “We are experiencing incredible amounts of violence, harassment, assault, murder, and please focus on that because that’s our most pressing issues, the violence that we face.”
And so what these researchers would do is they would compile a ton of research, incredible research that is extremely important, yes. But it would primarily just talk about… It would just literally relay that violence just in words and it would just speak to what are these literal physical things that are happening to trans people, and that’s not really what trans people are asking for. A lot of us are very aware of the different kinds of violence that we might be susceptible to or are actually experiencing on a day-to-day. And I got tired of only reading things about the violence but not really interrogating why we’re experiencing that violence. And so that’s what my honors thesis set out to do, was understand where does transphobia come from? Why are trans people actually experiencing the violence that they experience beyond just saying, “Oh, well, it’s transphobia.”
Chyenne Mallinson:
And why did you choose to work with communities in the Dominican Republic?
Nereyda Luna:
Well, to be honest with you, I had the opportunity to study abroad and I am improving in Cuban and I wanted to go to the Spanish-speaking Caribbean for one of my semesters abroad and I was not allowed to go to Cuba. And so I ended up going to the Dominican Republic and I really enjoyed my time there. While I was there I was able to connect with several other queer and trans folk. It was not very easy to connect with them. Queer and trans culture is oftentimes very underground in the Dominican Republic, or at least in Santiago where I was staying. And yeah, it felt right to go back and share their stories, share their experiences, and the experiences that we shared together as queer, trans, and gender non-conforming individuals just living our day-to-day lives.
Chyenne Mallinson:
I’m hearing, uplifting these voices is something that’s really important to you and equity being at the forefront of your work. I’m wondering, when did you first learn about equity growing up?
Nereyda Luna:
Yeah. Thinking about that question I don’t actually think I’ve learned about equity until I was maybe in college. I grew up understanding oppression and oppressive forces and seeing inequality and inequity all around me. And I always had this sense and this feeling of this isn’t right. Why am I and other people around me being treated less than, or being undervalued underappreciated? And that is what set me into doing the work that I do, was understanding the various layers of oppression that me, my friends, my community were experiencing.
And I honestly didn’t really learn about equity until I heard the word probably in college, to be honest with you, maybe high school, but it was more so just seeing that there is something wrong and seeing that other people are not being uplifted in the ways that they should be. And so my work was always just to humanize other people, humanize people who are so often de-humanized and undervalued due to our society and the different structures like the cisheteropatriarchy that we exist in that is constantly devaluing so many people in our society.
Chyenne Mallinson:
You’ve mentioned oppression really being what you learned about and living that experience. And I want to tap into that if you’re open to it, talking about the oppression that you experienced growing up.
Nereyda Luna:
Yeah. Growing up, it was an interesting experience because for so much of my time being a youth and just being a child, I was either questioning my gender or sexual orientation or I just didn’t have the space to even question those things. And it wasn’t until I left for college that I was given the liberty to explore myself in a safe manner and with a community that was safer than at home. Being Latinx, our communities are usually quite religious and can oftentimes either Catholic, Christian, Evangelical. My family is Catholic but they’re honestly not that religious, they are just very conservative. They’re very conservative.
And, yeah. I just, I always knew that it was never safe for me to fully explore myself, to fully be myself. I give presentations and talks and one of them that I give is called, These Are My TRANSgressions: A Confession Against the Binary. And in that talk, I talk a lot about how my existence as a non-binary, gender non-conforming, transfeminine person completely goes against what it even means to be Latinx or uphold “Latinidad” because Latinidad that is a white project and gender comes from whiteness, gender is also a white colonial project.
And one story that I share, I think it’s how I start my presentation off, is by sharing a story where I’m dancing on the couch. And I was using my older sister’s Barbie CD player and I was just being a joyful little child as children are and listening to music. And my mother was taking photos of me just dancing and being her beautiful little kid. And then my uncle came in, and he comes in and he sees me dancing and I completely shift, the vibration in the air shifted. And I felt, oh, okay, I’m not supposed to be doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And this is very young, this is when I was maybe four or five.
And he comes up to me and he was like, “Are you a boy or are you a girl?” And I just stare at him very quietly for a moment trying to assess what the correct answer would be. And so I tell him, “I’m a boy.” And that was essentially him policing me and my expression. And I say, in that talk, I say that he is Latinidad, he is what polices me. He is that whiteness, he is all of these different constructs that are meant to limit us rather than uphold us and love us and enjoy us for our fullest potential, for our full being and personhood. And that’s not necessarily to just say in an individualistic aspect, I truly mean that in a communal sense, a lot of these different forces of oppression restrict us from actually being able to flourish as a beautiful society that we could be.
Chyenne Mallinson:
How are you now able to navigate these spaces? How did you overcome or, not necessarily overcome because I don’t know if that’s possible, but work through that policing and balancing being Latinx and being who you are, how do you deal with the two?
Nereyda Luna:
I have been actually thinking about this recently, just myself, I’m an introspective person and I’m very critical of the things that I say and do, maybe that’s just my anxiety speaking. But I have been thinking about where I became myself and when that exactly happened, because baby Nereyda was hidden for so long and I was like, “When did they even become in the first place?” And I would truly have to say I became, with community and within community, I became myself when I saw other queer and trans people being able to exist as themselves and have love for themselves and their community loved them back.
And that was something that I was so fortunate of receiving when I went away to college. I made some of the greatest connections and friendships that I think I’ll maybe ever experience in this lifetime where there is no question about anything, it’s show up as you are and for that reason alone you are going to be celebrated. I can walk into a space with these people and they will uplift me always no matter how I’m feeling, whether I am anxious, or depressed, or super prideful in myself, whatever it may be they are always there to hold me even when I’m confused. Traversing the world as a non-binary person in our very, very binary world, and I’m talking about gender in this instance, can be so difficult.
There are so many people who tell me, “Oh, I have to choose one of the two options.” And my thing is, there are only two options and those two options are also completely fabricated. If we really want to get into it y’all should read Judith Butler, Undoing Gender. I think it’s literally in the introductory chapter, she just discusses what does it mean to be man? What does it mean to be woman other than just being you? Your gender becomes when you perform certain tasks over and over and over again, and truly there is no tangible thing that makes anybody anything. So gender is a failed concept at the end of the day. That’s not to invalidate anybody else’s gender or say everybody has to be non-binary or anything like that, but it is to say that anybody has access to any gender and that shouldn’t be limited to our bodies, our anatomy, our physical appearance, our outward expression or anything like that.
Chyenne Mallinson:
It seems like finding spaces that have people that think that way and are able to step outside of that construct and outside of the idea of the binary is so important to growth and feeling like yourself, but it’s so hard to find these spaces. And we talk about inclusivity a lot but oftentimes I feel like it’s a blanket statement without any intentionality behind it and I think a lot of the times the LGBTQ community is left out of these conversations on inclusivity.
And when we think about diversity a lot the first thing that pops in your head is race and ethnicity, but we’re also forgetting that there are racially and ethnically-diverse people that identify as gay, as trans, as non-binary. And I’m wondering from someone who’s working so deeply in these communities, what can people who are cisgender or people who are in positions of power or heteronormative, what can people do to push that conversation forward and include these communities in the equity conversation?
Nereyda Luna:
I’ve done a lot of work at my undergraduate institution around diversity, equity, and inclusion. And what’s funny is that so many people who champion these different departments need to almost check themselves sometimes and sit back and say, “Am I being equitable? Am I applying an equity lens?” And this isn’t to say that you have to hire every single person, meet every single racial or ethnic identity in your hiring team, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is, are we through the work that we’re doing centering those who are most vulnerable and centering those who are most marginalized?
And especially when it comes to the LGBTQ community, oftentimes the people who are gaining the most out of the work that is oftentimes spearheaded by transfeminine Black folk are the gay white men. The cis gay white men are the ones profiting the most off of the labor of predominantly women, Black women who are struggling for their livelihoods. And I think I would just like to see more folks centering the words, the knowledge, and the magic that Black and Brown trans women, transfeminine folk are providing to the world and really truly listen to them.
One of the things that is so incredible about trans folk is that we create new worlds. We are not just trying to deconstruct the world that we are currently in and deconstruct these oppressive forces but we are also simultaneously showcasing different modes of being, different worlds that could exist that too many people say are idealistic forms of existing and living. But the thing is you have to practice. You cannot know if something is going to work out if you never try it. And a lot of what I’m talking about also falls into abolitionist work and abolitionist theory, which is heavily based on imagining a world without violence, without carceral, punitive conditions. A world full of empathy, care, and love for everyone. It’s understanding that we all have worth simply because we exist.
Chyenne Mallinson:
How does your creative work… We talked about your work with the youth and your scholarly work. How does your creative work lend itself to that and address those things?
Nereyda Luna:
Yeah, that’s really cool. That’s a cool question to dive into. I often try to imagine trans futures. And what I mean by that is creating worlds in my head or on paper or photography, I’m a poet, and a writer, and a photographer. And so I often try to not only depict the absurd, oppressive, weird things that I face on a day-to-day, but I also try to showcase a world that could be, a world that I want to see. A world where trans and gender-nonconforming people can be out in public and literally nobody bats an eye. A world where I can walk outside at nighttime and not be fearful that someone is going to harass me or assault me in some manner simply because I am trans and gender nonconforming.
And so a lot of my artistic work dives into what those potentials could be, what are the potentials for trans folk? What are the potentials for disabled folk? What are the potentials for fat folk, literally just liberated, living liberated, and what does a world like that look like? And it’s so important to hold a radical imagination of our world because once you create that radical imagination it’s you start seeing the world for what it is and how ugly it can truly be and you start shifting yourself and you start creating the world that you want to see. It’s no longer just an imaginative peace in your head, it starts becoming, well, no, I want to fight for this. This is the world that I see, this is how I see people thriving and existing with the most happiness, or maybe not happiness, but in their fullest selves. And you just… I don’t know, you just start fighting for that as opposed to keeping it in your head.
Chyenne Mallinson:
Tell me about what you’re currently working on.
Nereyda Luna:
Right now I have a zine called “Sidewalk Daydreams,” and that is almost a diary piece about my experiences being out in public as a transfeminine individual, and so just from the title of “Sidewalk Daydreams.” And so I tap into exactly that and imagination and my daydreams are imaginative, and I essentially have a body of poetry and prose and photography showcasing what it feels like to be transfeminine and be out in public. What it feels like to walk down the sidewalk, being hypervisible, and also at the same time being so invisible because you have people attacking you and then you also have people invisiblizing you at the same time.
Chyenne Mallinson:
That’s a really powerful way to frame it, being hypervisible but also being invisible at the same time. I’d love if you could elaborate on that a little bit.
Nereyda Luna:
Yeah. That dives more into, I think I would say a transfeminine experience. You are hypervisible because so many people literally see you because it’s being transfeminine. And at least me specifically being gender non-conforming I walk outside and I am constantly stared at, and that’s actually what my honors thesis was about, was the stare and being stared at. And what’s interesting is so many people try to make the claim that I’m asking to be stared at, I’m asking for attention by existing in my truest self and I think that is the furthest thing from the truth.
What I also often hear is that visibility and representation… Not representation, I’ll stick with visibility. Visibility is the most important thing for LGBTQ folk. And I really don’t think that that takes into account what visibility is like on a trans body, what visibility is like on a transfeminine body, more specifically, where we are constantly surveilled and harassed and attacked for the ways in which we disrupt gender norms and patriarchal norms of what it is we should look like within our bodies.
And so I think a lot of the times actually, trans people wish for to be not seen, to not be a spectacle and we’re not asking for invisibility, which is what we get systemically. We’re hypervisible one-on-one on the streets but we become invisiblized by systems. Systems don’t take into account our gender, systems don’t take into account our transfemininity, systems don’t take into account so much of the various forms of violence that we experience, whether it’s sexual violence, violence from police officers, being incarcerated, all of these different kinds of systems that attack us on several different levels and don’t allow us the autonomy to say, “This is who I am.”
And I truly don’t think that there are really many trans folk or trans activists and organizers who are saying visibility is the most important thing for our cause because it’s not, so many trans people want to not be so hyper-visible, we want to not be relegated to the realm of spectacality anymore. We want to just be seen as human, we just want to be humanized, that’s literally all we ask for. And it’s so interesting to think that a lot of my buddies at work sit on that in, in just the realm of being humanized. I know I don’t want to go out to Walmart and be stared at and harassed through the stares by everybody that passes by me, everybody who sees me. I want to be able to walk into Walmart, get whatever it is that I need, and walk out and not feel like that is an anxiety-inducing experience for me.
Chyenne Mallinson:
Yeah. I feel like rather than walking down the street and people coming and saying, “Oh, you’re so brave,” or, “You look amazing,” I feel a lot of times that’s how people feel their allyship should be, is to praise and talk about how brave it is that you’re being yourself and you’re out here. But what I’m hearing from you is not really that, you just want to just navigate the world as a human being and be seen as a human being and not someone who is brave for just living.
Nereyda Luna:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, because also the praise is often falls short, it so often falls short because in the same breath that people praise us they also misgender us. In the same breath that someone praises us they’re also not questioning themselves in how they interact with other trans folk. I would much rather you hold your praise because I already know that I look good. I don’t necessarily need that and I don’t think many other trans people need that either. What I would much rather see is are you monthly sending support over to Black trans women? Are you monthly supporting different causes for the girls, or Trans Lifeline, or the Trevor Project, or are you trying to work with LGBTQ organizations in your community to amplify the voices of our trans youth and support trans youth as they go through all of the school system, medical systems. Are our doctors advocating for LGBTQ health care courses being mandatory in medical school?
And I’m not talking about a one-week thing that just gets added to the syllabus, I mean, literal courses that go over trans health, healthcare for trans people, trans youth specifically as well. There’s so much that that needs to be accomplished. And there are so many people who are doing that work but I think so many more people need to engage in this mindfully and truly start speaking, don’t take up space if you’re not trans, but sit down, question yourself, listen to what trans people are saying, and try to digest it as best as you can and then advocate for those same trans people.
Chyenne Mallinson:
What does an equitable future look like?
Nereyda Luna:
An equitable future looks like dismantling capitalism, looks like dismantling the prison industrial complex, looks like dismantling white cisheteropatriarchy. I truly don’t think that there is equity within the structures that we currently have. I don’t think that we can make an end to oppressive forces if we continue to uphold the current systems that we exist in that are oppressing people. And it’s not a matter of reforming the system, the system has been reformed and it’s constantly reshaping itself. It’s doing that currently as we exist in the tech boom, but as it’s reformed we just see new different ways of experiencing violence.
And I truly think that the fight for equity is strongest when that fight is upheld with a strong disagreement with the oppressive structures and systems that we exist in and move through on a day-to-day. There can’t be equity if we have oppressive forces, and we can’t fight for equity if we are also trying to exist and uphold these oppressive forces. And I think that also goes into a conversation of there is a difference between having to exist in and deal with an oppressive force like capitalism.
I have come to terms with the fact that in my lifetime capitalism probably will not be abolished nor will the prison industrial complex, nor will the gender binary. But there are people like myself and other organizers, and other scholars, and activists, and artists, there are so many people who do uphold visions and imaginaries, and actually practice what it means to exist in a world outside of those oppressive structures and what the world could look like.
Chyenne Mallinson:
So it’s really about challenging the world as we see it and creating what we need it to be?
Nereyda Luna:
Yeah, I would say that’s honestly the most important part about equity, is pushing forward a vision where all of us are free and all of us are liberated on the myriad of ways in which we are oppressed. Just unlocking, destroying those shackles, not just through our imagination but actually in the ways that we maneuver through the world on the day-to-day.
Chyenne Mallinson:
Is there anything you’d like to leave our listeners with?
Nereyda Luna:
I suppose some parting words would be from, Mariame Kaba, who wrote “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us.” And she says, “Hope is a discipline.” And hope truly is a discipline, it’s not necessarily an emotion and it’s not something that we feel but it’s something that we have to constantly strive for and practice on a day-to-day. And I hold that quote with me as I move through the world and try to push forward a more equitable space for our youth and for everyone that’s around me.
Chyenne Mallinson:
Thank you for joining me.
Nereyda Luna:
Thank you so much for having me.
