‘Homelessness is a queer experience.’: utopianism and mutual aid as survival strategies for homeless trans people

Abstract

Trans people are at considerably elevated risk of homelessness, yet services poorly meet their needs. I explore how community support, anchored in queer praxis and concrete utopian thinking enables trans people to survive homelessness. Drawing upon interviews with 35 trans people who have recently experienced homelessness in Wales, I explore how queer practices of mutual aid, contextualized by utopian possibility, engender community support for trans people experiencing homelessness. I argue that trans and queer communities provide extensive, often exhausting, practical, material and emotional support which counters well-established queer exclusion within statutory services. I show that community support is critical to the survival of homeless trans people within a complex and unwelcoming system, and that informal crisis alternatives are enabled by idealism, hope and pragmatism. These findings are important in visibilising how shared precarity produces practices of care, in offering strategies to address inequitable service failures, and in demonstrating the relevance of queer theoretical approaches to housing justice.