Developing BIPOC TrOutings
The Southern Arizona Gender Alliance (SAGA) will be engaging the TGNC BIPOC community of Southern Arizona. As TGNC BIPOC, it is scary to go outside because of the intersecting points of discrimination and violence we face. We need safer spaces to be able to leave our homes and build community with other TGNC BIPOC folks. As TGNC BIPOC, we recognize that the intersections of white supremacy and transphobia materialize in the false binaries of what is (un)natural, what is (un)developed, and what is sophisticated vs. beastly. Concrete examples of these oppressive intersections that target our community are police, ICE, and cis men who fetishize and kill us. Therefore, our community asks, how may we reflect on our TGNC bodies and experiences to identify the falsities of what’s (un)natural and thus unearth new worlds of imagination, that build relationships with nature to sustain our lives and heal ancestral wounds? When we are able to meet outside we can ask the tough questions because the earth holds us and we hold us. We ask: How may the socio-political and historical analysis of the concepts of nature lead us to tearing down the harmful veil of what’s (un)natural and bring us closer to loving ourselves? How may simply playing in and listening to nature bring us closer to loving ourselves? And lastly, how can we heal the historical trauma of nature being weaponized against us?
TrOutings History
In the summer of 2021, SAGA launched a TrOutings program to connect all TGNC folks to the outdoors and provide safer spaces for TGNC folks to connect with one another. In our initial team meetings (composed of 3 white TGNC volunteers and AJ), AJ expressed the desire for a BIPOC-only branch of TrOutings. However, we recognized that this would require more funding to bring more facilitation support from BIPOC with environmental/outdoor experience. The workshops we hold would like to uncover, break down, and bridge the many borders and binaries within our lives that may distance us from and even pin us against the land we are on. Therefore, we wish to address our location on the Mexico/U.S. borderlands - a militarized border zone - where the desert is weaponized against BIPOC folks through forceful exposure to the powerful heat, sand, and plant/animal life, as well as used as a scapegoat for the state-sanctioned violence BIPOC folks disproportionately face. To work through this painful history and present, we will facilitate workshops that approach the outdoors with softness and gratitude, learning how it nurtures us through food, medicine, play, and shelter and how we may nurture and steward it back.
Some of our programming and the outdoor spaces we used:
Trans Day of Visibility Festival - Tucson Hop Shop’s beer garden
BIPOC centered and led
No Hay Orgullo en Detención / No Pride in Detention Protest - The street
BIPOC centered and led
Hike - Painted Hills Trailhead
BIPOC Only
Projection of “Sort Of” and Grill Pt 1 - Splinter Collective’s courtyard
BIPOC Only
Projection of “Sort Of” and Grill Pt 2 - Splinter Collective’s courtyard
BIPOC Only
6 sessions of Yoga with Meela - Mansfield Park and Movement Culture
BIPOC Only