Community Cultural Wealth in the LGBTQ Community
I remember standing in front of that Jack in the Box when I made the decision to go into the alley and slam the rest of the heroin that I had, hoping I wouldn’t wake up. I was prepared to become another statistic. Just another transgender woman who has taken her own life after feeling like she had run out of options. I was homeless, addicted to drugs, a prostitute, and the colostomy bag on my stomach was leaking again. My brain was screaming, so I voiced my plan out loud, hoping that someone would care enough to talk me out of it. No one did.
I went into that alley to fulfill my agenda. I took my shoes off and mixed up a shot of heroin that was twice as big as any I had ever done, this time without any methamphetamine;that way it wouldn’t assist in keeping my heart beating. I found the vein that was to be my escape from everything and stabbed it. I woke up six hours later still in the alley. My colostomy bag had come off, so I was covered in my own feces, and I was laughing at how pathetic I was. Most likely the drugs that I had injected were not that good, but I was convinced that I was still alive because God was punishing me. Forcing me to stay alive in this hell-on-earth existence.
Suicide attempts made by the cisgender population average out to be 4.6% overall, but for the transgender population it’s 41% (Ungar 2015). I am not trying to discuss the alarming statistics of suicide attempts in the transgender community, but to address a statistic that shows how stressful it is to be transgender and a part of the LGBTQ+ community. How can we conceptualize the drastic difference of being a part of the LGBTQ+ community from those that are not? Tara Yosso is known for her theory of Community Cultural Wealth which is traditionally accepted as an explanation of capital gained through racial and ethnic groups that are not in the social majority (upper middle class white Americans). Since the publication of Yosso’s community cultural wealth concept, it has been extended to other situations and contexts. Summer Melody Pennell from the University of North Carolina even expands upon the original five categories of community cultural wealth (aspirational, linguistic, familial, navigational, and resistant capital) to include a sixth, transgressive capital. This world is also not designed for people identifying within the LGBTQ+ community, so the theory of Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth applies here as well.
I am now off the streets and in college studying for a degree in Public Health. Some may ask how a person gets to, and then comes from, the depths of homelessness, drug addiction, and a failed attempt at suicide? How does a person go from that to maintaining a 4.0 GPA in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in four short years? I want to share with you my journey and highlight the benefits of possessing Community Cultural Wealth as a part of the LGBTQ+ community. I will personally address what it has been like to be transgender and exhibit resistance capital, navigational capital, and aspirational capital and how they have been indispensable on my journey, as well as discuss the concept of transgressive capital.
Lisa Lipsey is a case manager for the North County LGBTQ Resource Center located in Oceanside, California, and as a lesbian she is also a member of the LGBTQ+ community. “A lot of the folks I deal with are homeless and/or in need of pretty intense case management,” she says when I ask her to describe what she does for the LGBTQ+ community. “I have two main focus areas, one is adults age 26+, then I also am working through a grant, funding from the Sierra Health Foundation, that is specifically looking to help combat substance use in the two-spirit and LGBTQ+ community. The goal of that is to help get people referred to treatment, rehab, and/or sober living”. Lipsey sees firsthand the struggles and hardships that our community faces while trying to make it in a world that is not made for our community.
I never thought that I would ever do anything about my issues involving my gender (it is diagnosed as “Gender Dysphoria”) because of the fear of losing all connection with my friends, family, and community in my hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. I ask Lipsey her opinion on why people from our community suffer hardships like homelessness. “In our community specifically, it has to do often times with family rejection or lack of acceptance within ourselves as we are figuring out who we are. Of course, we deal with high stigma in the community as a whole.”
When I was thirteen, Brandon Teena was killed in Humboldt, Nebraska. Brandon was assigned female at birth but identified as a male (a transgender man), and he used to live in my neighborhood before he started living openly as a man and moving to the town of Humboldt. When living there, two men raped and beat him to death out of their own intolerance and hate. When I found out the news about Brandon, I became saturated with fear because for me it sent a powerful message, the same message that is sent every time there is hate acted out against the LGBTQ+ community. It says, “You are not welcome here!” For us just the act of being alive and out in the open is defying the system that is in place. This idea is captured within Tara Yosso’s concept of resistance capital. Resistant capital is the reason queer people live more comfortably in their larger community, whether their resistance is overt or covert (Pennell 2016). This is a perfect explanation of how resistance capital applies to the queer community.
My life has been riddled with moments of resistance before I came out as transgender. I guess I was preparing to break the rules at any cost because I knew that I could never live by normal social standards. Lipsey points out, “Getting approved within systems that have too many human opinions in them systematically is harder typically. If they have any biases, whether they recognize it or not, it really impacts people.” I finally realized when I was thirty-five years old that, if I didn’t make a change in my life, I was going to drink myself to death in Nebraska. I moved to California with nothing and soon found myself homeless with no resources. For the first time in my life, I felt at ease in my own skin and all I had to do was leave my entire life behind me.
Homelessness led to more substance use which then led to heavy addiction. “Unfortunately, our community is nine times more likely to use substances than our straight counterparts, and homelessness goes along with that,” Lipsey tells me. Drugs and sex are intertwined in the LGBTQ+ community. For a drug-addicted transwoman, prostitution is the only business that is taking applications, and I fell right into it as a means of survival but also for the acceptance of being treated like a woman, even if it meant I was being mistreated. As a result of living this lifestyle, I would eventually test positive for HIV which is also a common theme for many in LGBTQ+ community.
During the 1980s HIV/AIDS was considered the “gay disease,” and the government sat on their hands while thousands of people died. It wasn’t until the disease started spreading to straight people (and with the help of vigilant activism) that money started to flow into research to battle the disease. Today there are a variety of treatment options available for people who are HIV positive that make living a full life with the disease possible with limited side effects. Not only that, but it prevents the spread of the disease by reducing the presence of the virus so that transmission is nearly impossible. The catch is that you have to take the medication for it to work. Drug addicts aren’t particularly good at taking medication as prescribed. Today, approximately thirteen thousand people die of AIDS each year in the United States in spite of there being adequate treatment options available (NCHHSTP Newsroom 2023).
I lost half my colon to an infection in my intestines, so my life entered a time of more desperation. A girl had to eat so I began stealing food from grocery stores when I was hungry, and I eventually got arrested. I found myself in a drug treatment program after being convicted of robbery and serving a six-month sentence. My sentence was what is known as a “Joint Suspension” in which I spent a fraction of the time in jail and then the rest of the time I was on probation. Getting arrested probably saved my life, and my life consisted of new challenges now. I had to navigate through programs and medical protocol in order to retain my freedom and address my health issues. Upon completion of residential drug treatment, I was taken in by Fraternity House Inc, and that was when I was first introduced to Lisa Lipsey who also happens to be on the organization’s board of directors. Fraternity House takes in people who suffer from HIV and have other qualifying needs.
Social institutions were not created with queer people in mind, so queer people have to navigate schooling, legal, familial, and other institutionalized systems in creative ways (Pennell 2016). This is where the queer community displays the concept of navigational capital within the community cultural wealth. “We take care of our own, we have kind of always had to do that because it used to be you didn’t have government services and other things,” Lipsey explains. I began to find ways to work the system that in turn worked for me. I took advantage of programs that are available, looking for the right doors or at least the right keys to open those doors where I could find the best support.
The LGBTQ+ community also finds wealth in its resilience: ‘The ability to hold onto hope in the face of structured inequality and often without the means to make dreams a reality’ (Pennell 2016). The ability to not lose sight of our dreams is a display of aspirational capital within the community cultural wealth concept. With all that the LGBTQ+ community has had to go through and still persevere it is no wonder that we flaunt it lavishly. We are still able to achieve even when the world is stacked against us. “We talk about LGBTQ+ people as being really resilient but resilient isn’t just that I get up every day and keep going. It’s actually developing tools and coping skills.” Lipsey elaborates, “it’s further developing healthy hobbies that when you have a hard day, you have something to turn to that is a healthy form of escape for yourself.”
Lipsey would say that “success lies in the tenacity,” and it’s that tenacity that anyone in the LGBTQ+ community can access but you have to access it and use it to your advantage. As I said before, I am in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree, and I have been able to maintain a 4.0 GPA, but I just didn’t show up and get there without work.
There is talk of a sixth cultural wealth, an expansion on what Yosso had theorized that comes from Summer Melody Pennell, and that is transgressive capital (2016). To transgress is to go beyond a boundary or limit which is more than just being resistant. Any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social and political (Pennell 2016).
Transgression capital most definitely applies to my story after where I have come from, to put myself into college during a worldwide pandemic, and getting off the streets for only a short amount of time. I can speak for myself; I am not letting boundaries or limits stop me from where I need to go, and I see many in the LGBTQ+ community employ this school of thought. The only way to gain acceptance is if you show them that you are not going anywhere, even when you’re not welcome. This is why the LGBTQ+ community continues to push for higher and higher limits no matter what intolerance we face. Resistance, aspiration, navigation, and even transgression are definitely skills that have aided me on my journey. It has not been easy but nothing worth doing ever is.
References
“NCHHSTP Newsroom.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 20 Feb. 2023, https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/newsroom/default.html.
Pennell, Summer M. “Queer Cultural Capital: Implications for Education.” Taylor & Francis, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 26 Jan. 2016, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13613324.2015.1013462.
Ungar, Laura. “Transgender People Face Alarmingly High Risk of Suicide.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 16 Aug. 2015, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/08/16/transgender-individuals-face-high-rates–suicide-attempts/31626633/.
Author Statement: Hi, my name is Myshell, I identify as a transgender woman. My pronouns are she, her, hers. When I was thirty-four I made up my mind to move and make a new start in San Diego. I am currently studying to get my degree in Public Health.