Saving Our Own Lives: A Liberatory Practice of Harm Reduction

by Shira Hassan, forewords by adrienne maree brown and Tourmaline, afterword by Rosario Dawson Haymarket 10/25/2022, paperback SKU: 9781642598414   Liberatory Harm Reduction is one of the most important interventions of the 20th century, and yet a compilation of its critical stories and voices was, until now, seemingly nowhere to be found. Saving Our Own Lives, an anthology of essays from long-time organizer Shira Hassan, fills this gap by telling the stories of how sex workers, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, queer folks, trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit people are - and have been - building systems of change and support outside the societal frameworks of oppression and exploitation. This is a collective story of trans women of color, who were sex workers and radical political organizers, who created shared housing to ensure that young people had safe places to sleep. It is the story of clean syringes, liberated from empathetic doctors' offices by activists who wer