Queer and Trans Risk and Resistance

Max Osborn is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Criminology at Villanova University.

"Timely and urgent, Osborn offers a compelling account of how queer and trans people navigate a world in which visibility itself can produce risk. Centering the adaptive strategies people use across shifting social environments, the work illuminates how surveillance, policing, and institutional exclusion shape everyday decisions about identity, safety, and care and how queer and trans communities create alternatives through collective support. At a moment of renewed criminalization, this is an essential read for understanding both the failures of our existing institutions and the possibilities for imagining what safety looks like beyond them."-- "Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz, author of Transgressed: Intimate Partner Violence in Transgender Lives" "Queer and Trans Risk and Resistance offers a timely and incisive examination of how queer and trans people navigate the persistent threat of institutional violence and scrutiny in everyday life. Osborn shows how risk is managed, negotiated, and resisted - concluding with a powerful vision of how people build community-based care and collective resource provision when institutions fail them."-- "stef m. shuster, author of Trans Medicine: The Emergence and Practice of Treating Gender" "A must-read for both queer and carceral theorists, Queer and Trans Risk and Resistance uses extensive interviews to explore the carceral consequences of intersectional queer identities in a world that too often views these identities as inherently threatening."-- "Alex S. Vitale, author of The End of Policing" "What do queer and trans people need to be safe from individuals and institutions threatened by those who challenge dominant gender norms? Through in-depth interviews with trans and queer New Yorkers and his own experiences in transitioning, Max Osborn documents the harms queer and trans people experience and the strategies they use to stay safe in a world intent on policing them. Deeply researched, compellingly written, and empathetically told, Queer and Trans Risk and Resistance asks us to recognize the everyday dangers faced by queer and trans people and challenges us to envision what a truly safe world -- a world that didn't link safety to carceral interventions -- could look like."-- "Leigh Goodmark, author of Imperfect Victims: Criminalized Survivors and the Promise of Abolition Feminism"