Activist and writer Grace Dunham has called on their Twitter followers to support a new crowd funder designed to help incarcerated members of the LGBTQ+ community.

The site, titled Support.fm, draws attention to a pressing and dangerous issue that is particularly prevalent among trans and gender non-conforming individuals. At present, popular crowdfunding platforms prohibit fundraising which supports anyone who may have been involved in criminal activity, including the funding legal aid. The result is that queer, trans, and gender nonconforming (GNC) people have “no safe platform on which to fundraise for some of the steepest and most common costs they have to pay; namely, the unjust costs of prison, policing, and immigration systems.”

Trans and gender non-conforming people have garnered greater press attention recently, but as the site points out, this does not translate into greater acceptance or understanding – as recent examples of trans women imprisoned in male prisons, in some cases resulting in their suicide, demonstrate. It highlights also the safety threat posed to people of colour within this community. “Incarceration rates for trans and GNC people are four times the national average, and those rates are even higher for trans and GNC people of colour,” the site claims. “Black, Latinx, and indigenous people are more likely to be arrested, more likely to receive longer prison sentences, and more likely to be tried as adults when they are under the age of 18. More than 60 percent of the queer, trans, and GNC youth arrested and detained each year are Black and/or Latinx.”

For more details or to support the campaign, click here.