Hi, everyone. My name is Cathy Kapua, and I use she/her pronouns. I’m a Native Hawaiian trans woman. I still live on my family’s land here in Hawai’i. I’m currently the Deputy Director of the Trans Justice Funding Project where we get to move money and resources to grassroots, trans-led, badass advocates and groups fighting for trans justice and social justice everywhere.
I’ve been doing this work since 2003. I started off as an Employment Training Specialist, helping girls get jobs coming out of prison, which relates to my story. Then I worked in outreach, passing out condoms to my sisters and friends who were doing sex work in the streets of Honolulu. Everything that I’ve done, everything that I’ve stood for, has been because I’m a member of the community. I was a sex worker. I still believe in sex work. Sex work is work. Those experiences in my life influenced the programs we’ve developed, the laws and policies we’ve pushed for here in Hawai’i. My friends and I have pushed them through together, we’re a whole bunch of badass advocates.
Now, my official role is Deputy Director of a philanthropic organization, and we’re a non-charitable trust that really moves money. We’re currently accepting applications from any group of trans people or queer people or Two Spirit folks that are mobilizing and doing trans justice work. Go to transjusticefundingproject.org for information.
You mentioned that your own story intersects with this work. Could you say a little bit about that story?
Sure. When I was three or four years old, I already knew that I was in the wrong body. My family didn’t know how to support me. My peers and my school didn’t know how to support me. I was from a Catholic family, and my mother taught me how to pray. And I would always pray to wake up as a girl. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t know what queer or trans was. I just knew I wanted to wake up as a girl. Fast forward, when I was 17-18 years old, I transitioned. I found friends, other trans people like me, trans women. I started performing in the clubs. I was under age. I got snuck in, and I found community there on the stage. I also found community on the streets, I found folks who were engaging in sex work, and I lost my virginity on the streets, trying to figure out who would accept me. Sex work accepted me. That community accepted me, but I couldn’t make the money that I wanted. I wanted surgeries, and nobody, no insurance, was paying for those back then, so I ended up selling drugs. I didn’t do drugs, but I sold cocaine, and I did make money, but within six months I realized I was a bad drug dealer. I got arrested. I was 19 years old, almost turning 20. I went to prison, a men’s prison, sentenced to 105 years in prison without parole. Because I was under age, though, the prosecutors and attorneys made a deal with me under the Youthful Offender Act, which consolidated everything to eight years.
I ended up doing five years in prison. I started college there, got out on parole, went back to college, worked three jobs, ended up paying for my own surgery. Within a year of filing for parole. I ended up winning a pageant crown, finishing my associate’s degree, and getting breast augmentation and facial feminization. All of a sudden, people looked at me and said I was a role model. I was like, Nah, I’m out of prison. I’m 24. I’m just living my life. I ended up volunteering at this agency called Kulia Na Mamo, which became my home, my home of mentors and leaders and trans advocates who taught me what it actually meant to be that role model. I worked there for three years. I got to help over 100 trans folks coming out of prison, got them access to jobs and sustainable employment. I supported people who did sex work. I just said that this is additional income. If you went to work at Starbucks, this would be additional income to your sex work.
I moved on to an HIV/AIDS organization, became a manager there. We ended up changing gender marker laws for our birth certificates. Now, you don’t need to get surgery to change gender on documents. You can use your doctor’s documentation of hormone therapy or gender-affirming treatment to change the gender marker on a Hawai’i birth certificate. For us, that was important, because not all of us need surgery. Surgery is important for some but not for all. We got same-sex marriage laws and protections. We started to feel a really great momentum. We ended up changing laws to insist that insurance companies cover gender-affirming care here in Hawai’i.
I worked for 17 years of advocacy for trans communities. And I realized that it started off when I went to prison selling drugs so I could get surgeries. And by 2017, we had insurance companies paying for our health care and our surgeries. Every employer in the state of Hawai’i must offer insurance that covers gender-affirming care. Now the young girls like me can avoid the challenges I faced. They have a better change of making it.
Prison was no picnic, but I did find a community there. I was punched, I was almost raped. I was thrown into isolation. I was misunderstood on so many levels. And in prison, I learned to speak up. I learned to speak up for other people. So coming out, being a role model, really just looked like me doing what I needed to do to survive. That’s been my driving force for the majority of my career. Now at 44 years old, I feel like I made it. They say, for trans women of color, life expectancy is like 35 years old. I’m like, I made it. I’m an elder now at 44 years old.
What do you wish that 2SLGBTQ+ people understood about sex work and sex workers that we don’t understand currently?
I think it’s important for folks to see that people who engage in sex work don’t think that “this is all that we can do or all that we are.” This is just one of the things that we can do. It’s not the only thing that we can do. I’ve said sometimes, if the money was right, I think I would re-engage in sex work too. We have better ways of protecting ourselves now with HIV prevention, PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), which can be used for people who are not HIV+ to reduce the chance of them being infected if they’re exposed to HIV. These are tools for us to do our work more safely.
I also want to say with SESTA/FOSTA, those are some really devastating federal policies that damaged the way we do sex work. We can’t use Craigslist or Backpage to find and vet customers anymore, we can’t double check to see if they are who they say they are before we go and meet them. Those policies put us at risk. A lot of us are resorting to meeting people without knowing if they’re a regular date or intend on causing us harm.
I also want to say, we can’t assume that the death rates of our trans women of color, specifically our Black trans women, which are so ridiculously high, are because of sex work. We still have to take care of each other and love each other and find ways to support each other. I come from the old school days, when we did sex work and we looked out for each other. We didn’t have camera phones or live video recording. I would be with my friend, and I’ll be like, I want to go in that car, and my girlfriend would watch what car, take down the license plate number. We took care of each other. If I wasn’t back by a certain time, they knew, Please call the cops.
How does community, throughout your journey, remain an important part of your well-being and your advocacy work?
Since COVID started, we’ve been hosting virtual gatherings for our trans, Native Hawaiian elders. At the last one, there were 60 trans women of color, most of them Native Hawaiian. Mostly above the age of 50. They talked about their feelings, about what they needed, and our advocates took notes, but it didn’t feel like a needs assessment. It felt like a conversation. Someone would say, I went to the doctor, the doctor told me this, and somebody else would say, Well, that same doctor told me this, and our badass activists are listening, thinking, Perfect. This is what’s needed. Let me go write this bill right now. Let me get a bunch of our lawyers to take a look at it.
Community informs what policy should look like, what the laws are. Community also means laughter and happiness. We were dancing and singing with each other. They got a trans woman to do the DJing. We were having fun for a good hour with each other. The other thing I love about Trans Justice Funding Project is when people are working for us, and we have all day meetings, we send them food, as if we were together in a space, eating together. That’s how our community normally gathers, around food, conversation, laughter, and dancing, and though it looks a little different with Zoom, it feels similar.
I’m hearing you describe legal advocacy and community intersecting and complementing each other.
Definitely. I was talking with a friend earlier today, saying, if we’re considered elders, what is the one piece of advice that we would want to give to younger advocates with their brilliant ideas. The tip we settled on was, “Don’t be afraid to fail, because you learn by getting back up. Even back around 2017, when we were having all those successes in Hawai’i we also had moments where we needed to fight harder, gather bigger, mobilize more. That’s how we learned. That’s the key we want to pass on to future generations. Don’t be afraid to fail. Our ancestors are with us every step of the way. Embrace failure, learn from it, and move forward on to success.
I’ll share one of my failures—when we first changed the law for the gender marker change on Hawai’i birth certificates, we enforced the gender binary—male or female. We forgot our non-binary folks, but—this is where community is so important—immediately our nonbinary folks came right around the corner, and they advocated, and we got an X, a non-binary option included on our Hawai’i state ID and driver’s license. My advice is, It doesn’t all sit on your shoulders. When we work together, there’s a lot that we can do. I’m glad that it happened the way that it did, even as I also wish I was more inclusive and intentional of our non-binary family when advocating for policies and laws.
You’ve mentioned the word elder. How do you think of your role now, in the advocacy work?
I don’t know if I’ve reached the point of elder. I’m slowly approaching it. It will be an honor. When people call me Auntie, that’s an honor. I can’t wait until they call me elder, because that will mean there are enough people to continue the work. I can sit down and watch and support and throw support towards other folks’ passion work. I’m looking forward to it, but I think I’ve got at least twenty more years of fight left in me before its time to sit out.
