Legal Assistance that Prioritizes Community Care.
TJLP consists of a group of folks who believe in the power of communal care over systemic oppression. We are radical activists, legal workers, and organizers who provide support, advocacy, and free, holistic legal services to poor and street-based transgender people in Illinois.
We use our legal access and our privilege as people on the outside to further the prison abolition movement. We work in three project areas: legal services, support community survival, and educational resources and trainings.
We Prioritize Systems that Work.
In our work, we consistently see the ways in which complex legal, medical, social and state systems restrict self-determination and gender expression, and privilege some genders over others. Our long-term goal is to eliminate the root causes of inequality, violence, and oppression in our communities so that prisons become obsolete so that all communities can thrive.
OUR CORE VALUES
As a client-centered organization, we focus on meeting the needs of our clients as a priority over broad policy or reform work. We build long-term relationships and investments in our clients and meet them where they are at with flexibility in our structure and priorities. Throughout our work, we center our values on care-based principles that work to dismantle the oppressive structures of the state. These values can be summed up into three different commitments that guide every aspect of our work: prison abolition, gender self-determination, and transformative justice.
PRISON ABOLITION.
Prison abolition is a movement to create lasting alternatives to punishment-based institutions such as prisons, jails, juvenile, immigrant, and military detention centers to actualize community safety. Instead of consenting to this false and fear-based need for prisons, we as abolitionists invest our energy in community empowerment, community-led education, radical activism, transformative justice, and liberation as necessary alternatives to the prison system and as methods to make prisons obsolete.
GENDER SELF-DETERMINATION.
We prioritize the needs of transgender people because we believe that transphobia is inherent in almost all legal and social services available in the Chicago area and throughout Illinois, especially the criminal legal system itself. Gender self-determination necessarily includes access to and control over healthcare, holistic mental and emotional support, fashion and self-expression, gender-affirming housing, education, bathrooms, and social services, freedom from violence, harassment, and incarceration, and all the tools we need to be fabulous, empowered and safe in how we live in our genders.
TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE.
Through community-based movements, transformative justice seeks to resist state- run responses to violence (such as the police state and systems of punishment, detention, and incarceration) and instead promotes support, compassion, dialogue and community building. In this way, reliance on violent and oppressive State level systems is transformed and replaced with community empowerment.
Let’s Work Together.
Legal Services
We provide free, life and gender-affirming legal services to everyone on the gender spectrum regardless of financial status. We especially prioritize folks who are low-income and street-based transgender and gender-nonconforming people targeted by the criminal legal system.
Workshops & Curricula
We create and distribute information, resources, and training curriculum for trans and gender non-conforming community members. We also provide workshops for organizations and groups looking to learn more about allyship for trans and gender expansive communities.