Language Justice: ICE is Sterilizing People in Concentration Camps.
Content warning.
On Tuesday evening we learned news of mass hysterectomies in an ICE facility in Georgia, after nurse Dawn Wooten came forth with a formal complaint against the facility. Hearing from women that were detained there about a doctor called “The Uterus Collector” whom was performing full or partial hysterectomies without consent or explanation as to why this was happening. In her testimonies, Miss Wooten speaks of mass abuse, unsanitary conditions, having no PPE or protocols for people with COVID-19 within the facility and retaliation for her internal whistle blowing.
There is no need to reiterate the news, the details are traumatic, horrendous, and nothing short of the type of grizzly nightmares you see on American propaganda films that glorify our insignificant role in defeating the Nazis. Make no mistake: we did not steal this model from Nazi Germany, no, Nazi Germany created the horrific conditions in which people were put through by copying the American experiment notes. Family separation, concentration camps for immigrants, medical experiments and eugenics, the Reservation system and the system of slavery and the subsequent system of incarceration and policing all come straight from the US and are all tied to each other.
As someone working immigrant justice, I hear the cries of my people daily, the conditions are just as described and I am not going to detail them here, instead, I encourage you to follow and support the following campaigns: Let Luis Go and Devuelvanme Edwin these campaigns are lead by people from the inside and their loving partners on the outside, their lawyers and allies.
Language justice is important, and I wish the media as well as organizers and we in the every day thought about the way we speak about these atrocities.
Going back to Nazi Germany for a second, we remember that LGBTQA+ were othered by the Nazi as they ascended power, deemed degenerates. Once in power, they were targeted by the Nazi, put into concentration camps and killed, their contributions to and existence in society expunged. Even after the war was won in some places they were kept in concentration camps longer because being LGBTQA+ was still a crime.
Erasure of the LBGTQA+ community within and out of the immigrant community happens everyday and we must combat that.
We know that trans folks are being detained in the wrong facilities and once there, they either experience transphobic violence on top of the horrors of being caged in a concentration camp or they are put into solitary confinement, which is also violence.
Mass hysterectomies are happening to PEOPLE in concentration camps and they have been happening for centuries. Gross abuse of people’s body autonomy especially surrounding sterilization and medical experiments has been a foundation of the capitalist american medical system.
To ignore the fact that trans men, non binary people and Two Spirits are in cages currently and may have experienced this abuse is harmful erasure. Liberation requires care and self crit, it is important that we care enough about the way we speak about other human beings and work within ourselves to decolonize our language and make it inclusive to everyone.
We know that one of the women whom came forward about these procedures being done is facing deportation, we also know that many self identified women have come forward, we must center their voices and support them as survivors, in this instance, we know of specific people that are women that have come forth, but in our language speaking of a larger group, we cannot assume that all folks in these concentration camps separated by gender as it is understood in a colonized, binary type of perspective are women.
Reverend Doctor Leonina Arismendi Zarkovic crowned Mix Trans Latinx DMV 2020 is Tri-Chair of the Virginia’s Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival and Co-Director of Santos en Virginia, they are a language justice expert, award winning writer, poet and artist from Uruguay living in the US South. (www.leoninaarismendi.com) Keep my writing Free: Become a Patreon.
Consider donating $1 to ‘set the captives free’ through Santos en Virginia, the first state-wide immigrant defense and bail fund (www.thesantos.org)
