‘Homelessness is a queer experience.’: Utopianism and mutual aid as survival strategies for homeless trans people

 Trans  people  are  at  considerably  elevated  risk  of  homelessness,  yet  services  poorly  meet  their  needs.  I  explore  how  community  support,  anchored  in  queer  praxis  and  concrete  utopian  thinking  enables  trans  people  to  survive  homelessness.  Drawing  upon  inter-views  with  35  trans  people  who  have  recently  experienced  home-lessness  in  Wales,  I  explore  how  queer  practices  of  mutual  aid,  contextualized  by  utopian  possibility,  engender  community  support  for  trans  people  experiencing  homelessness.  I  argue  that  trans  and  queer  communities  provide  extensive,  often  exhausting,  practical,  material  and  emotional  support  which  counters  well-established  queer  exclusion  within  statutory  services.  I  show  that  community  support  is  critical  to  the  survival  of  homeless  trans  people  within  a  complex  and  unwelcoming  system,  and  that  informal  crisis  alter-natives  are  enabled  by  idealism,  hope  and  pragmatism.  These  findings  are  important  in  visibilising  how  shared  precarity  produces  practices  of  care,  in  offering  strategies  to  address  inequitable  ser-vice  failures,  and  in  demonstrating  the  relevance  of  queer  theo-retical  approaches  to  housing  justice.