NONPROFIT SPOTLIGHT: MY SISTAH’S HOUSE
How queer women are leading the future of trans aid in Middle Tennessee BY JUSTIN WAGNER All Illyahnna C. Wattshall needed was a truck. “My thinking was, ‘the main three things that I can't seem to keep — that I need — are an income, a roof over my head, and food to eat,’” Wattshall said of her time as an unhoused person in 2014. “If I drive a truck, I instantly have a place to live ... I’ll have money, because I have a job, and therefore, I'll eat on a regular basis.” There’s a vicious Catch-22 at the heart of involuntary homelessness; without cash or a steady job, landlords will shrug you off. Once you’ve got no place of residence, employers will shut you out. It seemed like a clean solution, at least in the short term. But once she applied for a three-week grant program to gain the skills she needed, there was one last, all-too-familiar obstacle in Wattshall’s way. She’s a Black transgender woman. Opportunities like these are a challenge to cinch in a country where discriminatory attitudes hold an authoritative cultural seat. “They kept stereotyping me,” she said. “They were saying, ‘well, go and do makeup. You look like you’re gonna do makeup.’ … I was like, no, that’s not gonna give me what I need.” This kind of treatment wasn’t new for Wattshall, nor was it even particularly severe. Rather, it was a quiet affirmation of the harsh reality keeping Wattshall and others like her down, she said. “Trans people, we weren’t even getting jobs in places,” she said. “I came out in 2008. There was no Laverne Cox on TV, there was no trans person working at the Circle K, or at Walmart, there were no trans people in my classroom in school … any things that were LGBT-oriented that supposedly included trans people didn't really include trans people at all.” Despite the pushback, she got the position and the truck she needed. But America’s transgender community has always depended on its ability to triumph over the violence it faces outside of common perception, Wattshall said. That’s why she and friend Kayla Gore founded My Sistah’s House. The nonprofit provides emergency housing, resource assistance and advocates for the expansion of solutions for queer and trans people of color in Memphis. Since its founding in 2016, My Sistah’s House has gone from a bare-necessities resource center to a thriving nonprofit with 20 tiny homes providing safe spaces for queer people of color. Around the time of Wattshall’s house-
PHOTO COURTESY OF MY SISTAH'S HOUSE
lessness, there were only 71 beds available in Memphis’ metro area emergency shelters, according to My Sistah’s House’s website. Only a portion of those beds didn’t discriminate against trans people. None of them were trans-specific. “It’s hard to believe it’s come so far,” Illyahnna said. “I can remember nights just sitting in the park at night, because I didn’t have anywhere to go, no job, I was cold, hungry … if you had walked up on me one of those nights and told me that what is now is gonna be, I would not have been able to see it because things were so bleak.” Undeterred by the pain she’s faced, Wattshall loves little more than passing on a sense of hope to whoever she can. “I like to keep people's morale up,” she explained, “And I think right now, the morale is really, really low. Sometimes I feel like an old war survivor, I'm like, ‘sweetie, I've been through some shit. We're gonna get through this, OK? I remember days when I thought it was the end, too. Alright? It wasn't the end.’”
As Wattshall’s personal ambitions evolve to include her own graphic novels, music, and a coffee shop under her own name, she said her intentions remain the same. “It will give me a greater platform to offer that hope. I think that's probably what I have the most of to offer.” Hope and realistic solutions go handin-hand for advocates like Wattshall, and many of the sentiments she shared ring true for others combating Tennessee’s problem of anti-queer discrimination in housing. Samantha Rae MacAlpine is a caseworker for Launch Pad, a resource center and seasonal emergency shelter for Nashville’s queer youth. A trans woman herself, MacAlpine sees the hopelessness Wattshall describes on a daily basis and is well-versed in the pressures which target trans people. “There are a lot of situations that we run into where people have been kicked out of the house and disowned by their families ... that is a story I hear over and over and over again,” she said. “If you're trans, it can also be harder to find gainful employment. The workplace becomes that much more complex to navigate … what legal protections we do have are pretty flimsy, especially in a right-to-work state.”
July 21 - August 4, 2021 | The Contributor | NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE | PAGE 9
These factors are nothing new for the trans community, and at times it can feel like any proposed solution is incomplete. “I have likened this sort of work to trying to bail water out of a sinking ship with a spoon,” she explained. “For every one person that you help, 10 more are going to take their place. The resources aren't out there, and a lot of people are going through a hard time right now; change has to come from ordinary people taking a stand and saying, ‘this is not acceptable anymore.’” But even if caseworkers like Mac-Alpine can’t single-handedly root out the issue at its heart, they can still enact meaningful triumphs. If it ensures a queer couple can put food on the table for a few weeks, affirms a trans person’s sense of self by seeing the pronouns on their identification changed, or provides a bed for someone who’s lost their home, MacAlpine and others at Launch Pad are meeting marginalized people where state solutions fail to account for them. As Wattshall put it, incremental change is how the trans community has gotten as far as it has. “We've been through worse, some of us are going through worse. And somehow, we still manage to crawl forward,” she said. “Somehow, we still live… so let’s not lose hope now.”
