Jeynce Poindexter was 14 when home stopped feeling like home.
Her mother could not accept that she was transgender, Poindexter said, and staying would have meant negotiating an identity she already knew was not negotiable.
So she left. What came next for Poindexter was survival, then structure.
She found chosen family who embraced her as a Black trans woman. Years later she would become chosen family for other people, building the kind of support she once needed herself.
“Those are the people who have chosen to truly love you without condition,” Poindexter said. “Your chosen and extended family literally fill in those gaps.”
The need for that kind of support has grown as lawmakers across the country have pushed a wave of anti-trans restrictions.
The Williams Institute found that 24 states passed at least one restrictive anti-trans law in 2025, affecting an estimated 329,200 transgender youth ages 13 to 17. By the end of 2025, an estimated 382,800 transgender youth in that age group — 53 percent nationwide — were living in the 29 states with at least one law restricting gender-affirming care, bathroom access, sports participation or pronoun use.
“What LGBTQ+ people are living through now literally feels ripped from the pages of dystopian fiction,” said Chinyere Ezie, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.
For Black trans people, and Black trans women in particular, that lands on top of a crisis that long predates the latest wave of legislation.
Black trans women face disproportionate levels of violence in the United States. Black trans women made up nearly half of the known transgender and gender-expansive people killed between November 2023 and November 2024, according to a report by the Human Rights Campaign. A separate 2024 analysis found that Black trans women accounted for 78 percent of murdered transgender women in the U.S. since 2013. Researchers and advocates have tied that violence to the intersection of anti-Black racism, transphobia, poverty and policy hostility.
Poindexter spoke about that reality in personal terms.
“I see life slipping away, I see people believing the rhetoric, and I see people believing the lies,” Poindexter said. “No one on the face of this earth is going to tell me that just because I happen to be a Black transgender woman that I should be killed, I should be raped, or that I should be disrespected to a level that no one cares about.”
When she left home at 14, Poindexter found guidance in a chosen mother named Torrey, someone she said helped lead her through one of the most vulnerable chapters of her life.
That relationship still shapes the way Poindexter understands what chosen mothering means in Black trans communities.
“I understand the mothering of trans women in our community and the importance of that relationship in those positions are very critical,” she said.
Black mothering is larger than biology. It includes mothers by birth, ballroom mothers, chosen mothers, mentors, friends and the people who step in when family and institutions do not.
“Historically, we’ve not only mothered our own children, but we’ve mothered other people’s children,” said Dr. Briona Simone Jones, the Audre Lorde professor of queer studies at Spelman College.
That kind of care has shaped Poindexter’s life from both sides.
People often talk about chosen family, ballroom mothering, queer care, “community,” or safe havens without naming the grind underneath it — housing help, rides, paperwork, emergency cash, conflict mediation, hormone access, late-night calls, emotional triage, standing in the gap when biological family rejects someone.
Poindexter has spent years doing that day-to-day work that chosen family often requires while helping young people hold onto their sense of self as a case manager with the Ruth Ellis Center, a Detroit nonprofit serving LGBTQ+ youth and young adults; executive director of the Femmes of Color Project, a trans-led advocacy organization; and mother of the House of Mizrahi, a leadership role in Detroit’s ballroom community.
Poindexter has paired direct support with advocacy, including pushing for transgender protections in Michigan’s amended Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination in employment, housing, education and public accommodations. In 2023, lawmakers amended it to explicitly include sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.
She has helped the younger generation find housing, connect to hormone therapy, access services, move through conflict with biological relatives and build what she called “inner strength and self-dignity.”
“I have spent 23 years cultivating talent, seeing young people, and helping young people survive,” Poindexter said.
Being a chosen mother isn’t always easy.
“You’re still questioned, haunted, and threatened sometimes by biological families who still have hostility in their heart,” she said. “It takes a lot to stand in who you are up against all odds especially when you’re standing in the gap for someone else.”
For Poindexter, that care is not secondary to survival. It is survival.
“It is the sole reason that so many people have made it through the community because of those people who were chosen to give themselves to make sure someone else survives.”
Jones places that pressure inside a much older Black tradition of survival, care and kinship.
“It’s not actually about the children that you move through gestation,” she said, “but it’s also about the relationships that we sustain with each other with such care and deep intention that allow us to live longer and do the work that we need to do in the world.”
She pointed to Black lesbian and Black queer traditions of care that have always exceeded bloodline, including the mothering that emerged during the AIDS epidemic, when Black lesbians cared for the abandoned and the sick and treated survival like a collective responsibility rather than a private burden.
“Black queer families teach us how to love within and through the context of difference,” Jones said. “The way that we care for each other becomes an important life-sustaining thing.”
At Spot Lite Detroit, Swan gets a few hours where nobody asks her to shrink. She knows the ritual before the music takes over: the everything shower, the hair, the makeup, the sparkle shadow, the highest of high heels. Then the strut into DOLLS Night, the event series she co-founded with two other trans women, where red and purple strobe lights cut through the dark and Detroit techno vibrates throughout the body.
Inside, the room is organized around care: There are quiet areas, community care liaisons moving through the crowd and harm-reduction kits sitting in the bathrooms. The DJs, vendors and photographers are trans and nonbinary. Swan, who describes herself as “the most hostiest of the group,” keeps watch while she works the room.
“The purpose of the night is just for you to feel free and wear what you want,” she said. “We just want to make sure that everybody is safe.”
Swan is 24, from Detroit, and spent part of her childhood in Indiana growing up with two mothers. For a while, she thought that might make being understood less painful.
“Being that I had two moms in the same household, I thought it would be easier,” she said.
It wasn’t. She came out as trans at 21.
“One of my mothers, my biological mom, reacted really negatively when I first came out as trans,” she said. What followed was “a lot of eggshell walking, misgendering, deadnaming and the wear of trying to hold onto yourself in a home that did not always know how to hold you.”
What held her is held Poindexter decades ago — chosen family.
“I think it’s the most important part of my whole trans story in general,” Swan said. “I would have nothing without community.”
When she was struggling, Swan said, friends helped her find stability.
“My community helped me be able to navigate my emotions more normally,” she said.
DOLLS Night now carries some of that same intention — a room built by trans women where other people can arrive without having to explain or defend themselves first.
At the end of DOLLS Night, after cleanup and photos, she usually leaves tired but certain of the positive support that happened in that room.
“I always feel good after a DOLLS Night,” she said. “Everyone usually walks home with a story.”
Now, as Swan grows into her security and confidence, she considers herself as an “auntie” of the community.
“I’m not quite old enough to be a mother just yet, but I am considered an auntie or big sis,” Swan said.
She follows the news. She knows what lawmakers, executive orders and policy papers are trying to make of lives like hers. She also refuses to let any of them decide whether she belongs here.
“There were trans women before 2024,” she said. “They’ll be trans women after 2024. So, I’m just going to live regardless.”
This is the work Black queer mothering is doing now, in all its forms: holding children and young adults in the truth of who they are while the nation keeps trying to make that truth harder to live inside.