Research as Resistance: Scholar-Activism, Transgender Safety, and Everyday Survival

In recent years, there has been a disturbing rise in anti-transgender legislation and violence. Under the second Trump Administration, these threats have become even more aggressive, turning into direct attacks on transgender rights. For instance, in some states, like Texas, lawmakers have sought to criminalize transgender people’s everyday lives. Now, more than ever, researching transgender people’s safety is more than an academic pursuit–it is an act of resistance. Grounded in queer criminology and scholar-activist praxis, this article centers the experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming people in Southeastern Virginia, exploring how they navigate harm, assess threats, and rely on community when traditional systems fail them. Participant narratives reveal that these strategies are not merely survival mechanisms but forms of everyday resistance against a system that refuses to protect them. Reflexively, this article also argues that conducting this research as a queer, transgender, non-binary scholar navigating institutional erasure alongside participants is itself a praxis of resistance. From IRB protocols that reproduce cisnormative assumptions to federal funding restrictions that target gender-affirming scholarship, the conditions of this research mirror the conditions it documents. From a queer criminological perspective, researching transgender safety is not just about understanding risk; it is about actively challenging the systems that put transgender lives at risk in the first place. This article calls for a criminology that prioritizes lived experience, amplifies community knowledge, and refuses neutrality in the face of injustice.