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How LGBTQIA communities manage risk, safety, care, and build collective support

Queer and trans people have always devised unique ways of protecting themselves and each other. Institutions such as police, the healthcare system, and social services treat these populations as deviant, illegible, and/or disposable, failing to provide needed resources while frequently causing further harm. Faced with the ongoing threats of organized abandonment and administrative violence, queer and trans communities use a variety of adaptive strategies to manage personal risk and build collective support.

In Queer and Trans Risk and Resistance, Max Osborn shows how queer and transgender people adapt their personal presentations in response to safety and risk, openly expressing their identities in some environments while downplaying them in others. Managing risk can also mean forming support networks outside the bounds of institutions altogether, allowing community members to offer each other resources, information, and help more directly. Drawing on interviews with LGBTQIA community members and service providers, Osborn illustrates how experiences of oppression and exclusion by institutions can facilitate creative problem-solving, complicating oversimplified narratives of queer and trans people as perpetual victims and offering insight into marginalized communities' solidarity, resistance, and collective care practices.

As queer and trans communities face renewed threats of criminalization and restricted service access, Queer and Trans Risk and Resistance offers a much needed examination of how these communities navigate interactions with institutions that harm and exclude them.