Aamina Morrison is someone you want to run into in a dark alley. Because Aamina Morrison will help you out of there and into the light.
Morrison is a true and passionate believer — in God, in humanity, in her community. As co-coordinator (along with Naiyimah Sanchez) of the Trans-health Information Project at GALAEI, Morrison is driven: She’s ready to save the world, one scared, lonely, isolated, beaten-down transwoman at a time, and says she will keep doing it until “I’ve got my cane and walker and I’m in my Hoveround.” In short, she’ll be doing this work forever.
When I called Elicia Gonzales, executive director of GALAEI, the queer Latin@ social justice organization, about this series, she said, “You really want to talk to Aamina. She’s been there from the beginning.”
As a transwoman who dealt with serious struggles in her life, she knows what the transwomen sex workers I have spent the past four months talking with have experienced and what it takes to get them off the streets and safe.
The first step, she says, is to bring them to TIP. “You can’t just load them into a caravan,” she says, laughing wryly. “They have to want to come here, they have to make it on their own.”
While getting there is a big part of the struggle, once there, Morrison says, “they’ll see there are transwomen who have survived sex work and rape and violence against them and made it out. They’ll see their gender affirmed. They’ll see they can get to the next place, because other people just like them have gotten to that place. They’ll stop looking at it as a disconnect.”
TIP is all about getting people to that next place — whatever it is, judgment-free. TIP has been operating since March 2003, originally begun by GALAEI and Prevention Point Philadelphia, where Morrison worked previously. It’s a harm-reduction service that provides all things safe for transpeople and is the only peer-led service of its kind in Philadelphia. Located at 1207 Chestnut St. (fifth floor), TIP is open weekdays 9 a.m.-5 p.m., and Morrison says they make an effort to “have a presence” at every LGBT event in the city.
Morrison says transwomen like Mo’Nique, Tiffani and others need empowerment.
“We want them to get their power back,” she says. “Someone told them that all they can do is use their bodies. We know they are more than that.”
Morrison’s compassion seems palpable as we talk about women I have met in North Philly, Kensington, Port Fishmond and Center City. “We need people telling their stories,” she says.
And the women in this series and their peers need Morrison, Sanchez and TIP.
Beyond the health-care services like STD testing, medical monitoring and referrals that TIP provides, either on-site or through other programs like Mazzoni Center, there are the life skills and counseling that at-risk sex workers need to help them find alternatives to the dangerous work they have been forced into.
“Some transwomen are OK with doing sex work, but for those who aren’t, we want to show them their options.”
As with Women in Transition (see part two of this series), TIP builds empowerment through education. Women can learn how to prep for a job interview, from how to write a resume to what to wear to how to answer questions. There are literacy classes starting as well, because Morrison knows the hidden shame for 20 percent of America: Reading is a struggle for them, especially if they had to leave school for whatever reasons.
She wants to help people build inner strength to fight their own demons. “I have so many heartbreaking stories of people who have ended up in prison for life for defending themselves,” she says. Violence, as the women in this series attest, is a daily experience for many transpeople. “We want to do whatever we can to prevent that from happening.”
Morrison, herself African-American, says it’s especially hard to get African-American women to come out. “Someone somewhere told us — especially women of color — that you don’t have power. Someone told them, ‘You can’t.’ I want them to know, you can.”
Blanca* has always lived between two worlds. The child of a Puerto-Rican mother and a black Dominican father, she was raised by her single mother, but her mixed race often made her feel ostracized in her Latino community. When she began to transition, things only became more difficult for her. She dropped out of school, started taking pills.
“All I heard all the time from my abuela was ‘maricon’ and ‘pato,’” she says.
Living in the extended family household in Fairhill, one of the city’s poorest and most dangerous neighborhoods, became unbearable for Blanca by the time she was 17. She wanted to leave, but felt she had to stay to help out with her siblings and mother after her grandmother died.
As Blanca describes her situation, it reflects the disturbing statistics for Latinos in Philadelphia as described by Congreso de Latinos Unidos: a large family led by a single mother chronically out of work, issues of addiction, no one with even a high-school diploma, family members with criminal backgrounds. And overlaying everything: grinding, unbearable, unending poverty.
Blanca is the middle child of five. Her mother is an on-again/off-again addict, her father, also the father of her two older brothers, is absent. Her younger sister and brother have a different father, also absent. The family lives on welfare, and what her older brothers bring in from various illegal activities in the neighborhood. While Blanca was still living at home — she moved out a little over a year ago after a fight with one of her brothers that left her with a black eye — there often was not enough food in the house by the end of the month.
“When I say we have nothing to eat, I mean nothing,” she says, her voice tinged with anger. “Maybe some pinquitos, some rice, but not enough for all of us to really eat. It’s when I starting going with the men.”
Blanca says this matter of factly, as if every 17-year-old in Philadelphia has to turn tricks to help feed her family. She describes an area near the now-closed St. Bonaventure Catholic Church,where she first started “dating” neighborhood men.
It’s impossible to convey the dissonance between the slender, fragile Blanca and the big, ugly neighborhood where she grew up. No one who doesn’t have to be in Fairhill is ever there, especially where she lived, an area also known as the Badlands or, she says, “El Centro de Oro.”
We’re driving near Ninth and Cambria and pass one of those strange city cemeteries, which looks more like a pretty park, then head toward Germantown Avenue. For a few blocks, the storefronts are painted in crayon-bright colors. Later, I discover it’s part of the city’s Mural Arts Program. It’s a grim neighborhood with boarded-up rowhouses and buildings. The places where it’s green are where junk trees and weeds have gone wild in between houses where abandoned buildings were either taken down or fell. It’s there Blanca used to go with the men she met on Germantown Avenue, near Indiana. Just driving through is frightening, and it’s not fully dark yet. I look across the front seat at Blanca. She has medium-brown skin, big eyes outlined with black liner. Her hair is dyed a dark red and cut in a short, stylish, pixie-like look that is hip-ly asymmetrical. She is small and slight and looks far too fragile for this neighborhood, where the streets bustle with a lot of men and too many kinds of danger. She points out places she used to frequent, a club painted red and black, a Chinese take-out place. But none of the memories are good.
Blanca is 23 now. She’s pretty in a waif-like way that I am afraid probably attracts a certain kind of man, but she looks too tired for someone so young. She tells me she’s “a little addicted” to a combination of drugs that she rotates, depending on what she can get and when and for how much. Mostly pills, but she chips heroin if it’s available. She doesn’t do meth. Meth is what her mother does, she says, bristling. Blanca says she doesn’t really care what she takes, “I just like to stay a little high, you know?”
But Blanca is tired of tricking. “I know a lotta girls, they like it. They still like it,” she says, turning to look out the window. “I don’t like it but I need cash. I always need some cash.” She pauses. “And other shit, you know?”
I ask her what she means. “I like them to hold me,” she says. “Not all of them, but some of them. I like that. I like that.”
We reach Broad and Glenwood. It’s a demarcation line of sorts: On one side is the gentrifying Templetown area; on the other, where we just came from, is close enough to hell. The refurbished North Philadelphia station stands across the street, but catty-corner is a big, empty factory with broken windows. There’s a small strip mall near the train station, with a couple of shops and some fast-food restaurants.
I’m not sure what happens next. Maybe Blanca has told me as much as she can — about her family, the fights over her gender, her desire to get out of prostitution and do something else. She tells me she likes to make clothes and for a moment I imagine her on the serene grounds of Philadelphia University, with a group of other young women, designing. She says she doesn’t want to end up in prison, like a cousin and her older brother have.
I pull into the Hess station and ask Blanca if she wants anything from the tiny convenience store, or if she’d rather eat at a nearby restaurant. “I have to go to work soon,” she tells me, as if there’s a boss waiting and a time clock. She looks resigned, her mouth set, her lipstick a little worn.
“Let’s feed you first,” I say and turn toward Temple University, away from the Badlands, toward just a little more time before the worst part of her life starts up again.
*Name changed to protect her safety.
GALAEI and TIP can be reached at 215-851-1822 or 866-222-3871.
Next week, final installment: Kensington, Center City, more from TIP and with Stacey Blahnik’s partner.