We Were Never Meant to Survive

Sisters Affirming Sisterhood Project was built on the knowledge that many of us were never supposed to make it. Not because we lacked vision, brilliance, or power. But because this country’s systems were never designed to protect us. 

We are responding to the impossible demand that we survive a system that never planned for our futures.

For Black trans people, for disabled people, for those who are undocumented or criminalized, the message is clear: your survival must be earned, your story must be palatable, your pain must be proven. If you fail to meet these terms, you are ignored or discarded.

We do not accept these terms and we do not ask for permission to live with dignity.

We reject the frameworks that mistake gatekeeping for care.

Our initiative isn’t here to reform broken systems. We are here to build separate models that center autonomy, material access, and affirmation.

This system will not save us.

We are saving each other.

What We Do: Redistribution as Strategy

SAS Project redistributes affirming clothing, hygiene items, and fashion resources to trans and queer people navigating poverty, houselessness, displacement, domestic violence, or incarceration. We do not operate from a model of charity. We operate from the understanding that need is not a failure, and that access must be unconditional.

We do not ask for identification. We do not ask for proof of income. We do not require people to explain their trauma. If someone asks for what we offer, that is enough.

Our work includes:

• Permanent community closets in shelters, housing programs, and health spaces

• Pop-up closets at mutual aid events, clinics, and community venues

• A mobile boutique in development to reach underresourced areas

• Free distribution of garments that support gender affirmation, functionality, and seasonal safety

• Styling support and clothing education rooted in care, not conformity

• Redistribution of unsold or donated goods

• Job training, stipended internships, and workforce opportunities for trans, queer, and disabled people in fashion and mutual aid roles

We work with emerging queer designers, trans stylists, and models to ensure that affirming fashion is not only accessible, but also created and distributed by people who understand its stakes. We believe that labor in fashion, at every level, should be valued, visible, and paid.

This is fashion as a tool for safety, identity, and survival.

We do not sort people by need level. We do not perform intake rituals that mirror state surveillance. We move materials that move people—toward stability, toward visibility, toward authenticity.

We serve people who have been told too many times that their needs are a frivolous burden, or worse, unjustified.

We know we can create systems that say otherwise.

Why Clothing Is Political

Clothing is not neutral. It shapes how we are perceived, policed, and protected—or not. For people navigating trans identity, public visibility, poverty, and disability, clothing can determine whether you are seen as real, as dangerous, or as deserving of basic care and decency.

In healthcare, housing, job interviews, and shelters, appearance is often the first test. It shapes how others respond to you, whether you are misgendered, ignored, arrested, or believed. Clothing can be the difference between being offered a chance and being thrown away.

These are not hypotheticals, they are documented patterns. In the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 27 percent of trans respondents reported being denied a job due to gender identity. Nearly one-third were living in poverty, and 15 percent had experienced homelessness in the past year. A 2023 CDC report found that over 30 percent of trans women had been explicitly turned away from employment for how they present.

At SAS Project, we do not view clothing as accessory or luxury, it is fundamental. It is often the first tool people use to claim who they are in a world that constantly requires us to validate our existence.

When we provide someone with a garment that affirms their body, we offer more than cloth. We offer mobility, choice, and protection. We make it possible for people to show up in court, clinics, job sites, or public spaces without having to compromise their dignity or safety.

Fashion is political. Always has been.

The question is whether it will continue to serve power, or whether it will be reclaimed as a tool for liberation.

The Politics of Fashion Labor

Fashion is a global machine of exploitation. It is built on the underpaid, invisible labor of Black and Brown women and girls, undocumented workers, disabled workers, and those excluded from formal economies. Garment workers are routinely underpaid, abused, and silenced. Designers and stylists are hired without credit, asked to donate their visions in exchange for exposure. Models are expected to sell liberation while enduring racist, fatphobic, ableist, and transphobic working conditions.

According to the 2023 Clean Clothes Campaign, fewer than 2 percent of global garment workers earn a living wage. Most work in dangerous conditions, in countries targeted for cheap labor and weak regulations. Fast fashion thrives by cycling through workers the way it cycles through collections—quickly and with no accountability. The harm does not end there. In the United States, many major fashion brands rely on unpaid interns and underpaid freelancers. Queer, trans, and disabled people are used as marketing tools, but excluded from leadership roles. When our communities are invited into the industry, it is often on temporary, extractive terms.

The same companies that profit off “inclusion” still refuse to pay people equitably for the labor that makes their image possible.Luxury fashion markets liberation while depending on exploitation. The same brands that build Pride campaigns do not hire Black trans stylists. The same retailers that feature disabled models do not produce accessible garments.

Raw goods—cotton, dyes, leather, synthetics—are extracted from the Global South, processed under harmful conditions, and exported to the Global North where they are stitched into goods most of their original producers could never afford. The artists and communities who create style are rarely acknowledged. Their contributions are co-opted, renamed, and resold without recognition or return. Their intellectual property becomes someone else’s campaign, someone else’s profit.

This is not care. This is colonialism in a cute top. 

The general public as consumers are not exempt. The fashion industry relies on our complicity. It depends on people buying faster than they can understand, discarding faster than they can repair, and absorbing campaigns without asking who got paid and who is left behind.

SAS Project is not trying to reform fashion. We are interested in creating a new relationship with clothing. We aim for a future where labor is valued, where inclusion is possible, visible repairs are celebrated, and no one is discarded.

Sustainability as Survival

The fashion industry is a climate crisis. It produces over 100 billion garments each year and contributes more greenhouse gas emissions annually than aviation and maritime shipping combined. It dumps over 92 million tons of textile waste each year, much of which is exported to the Global South where it overwhelms local economies and contaminates ecosystems.

Fast fashion is not designed to clothe people. It is designed to generate capital. That model relies on wasteful overconsumption, poor construction, and the erasure of responsibility. It teaches us to replace instead of repair and to consume rather than care.

Our communities—poor communities, queer communities, immigrant communities,—have always lived differently. We have shared, mended, altered, and passed down. We have reused not because it was trendy, but because it was necessary. That memory is part of our survival.

SAS Project extends the life of garments that would otherwise be thrown away. We teach people how to care for clothes, not just wear them. We redistribute goods in ways that resist overproduction. And we root our work in the belief that care for people and care for the planet are not separate struggles.

Sustainability is not branding. It is a return to what our people have always known:

Nothing should be wasted, including one another.

Redistribution Is Not Charity

SAS Project is not a charity. Charity centers the feelings of those who give. Redistribution centers the needs of those who are consistently denied. Charity asks for proof. Redistribution assumes trust and self-regulation. We do not ask people to explain why they are struggling. We do not expect people to perform gratitude. We do not assign value based on how people arrive.

Our model is rooted in mutual aid and collective memory. Mutual aid has always existed among Black, Indigenous, immigrant, disabled, and queer communities. It is how we kept each other alive under conditions meant to destroy us. It is how people shared food during the Great Migration, how trans people survived the AIDS crisis, how undocumented neighbors support each other in the face of raids and detention.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, mutual aid networks organized faster and more efficiently than state agencies. They fed people, clothed them, moved money, delivered medication, and checked on elders while governments debated who counted as “essential.” That is not accidental. Mutual aid works because it rejects hierarchy and centers relationship.

At SAS Project, we move what needs to be moved—clothing, affirming items, harm reduction, and tools for mobility—because it is our mutual responsibility as humans sharing a planet.

A Future Without Scarcity

Scarcity is not natural. It is designed.

There is enough food, clothing, shelter, and knowledge on this planet to meet everyone’s basic needs. But those resources are hoarded, criminalized, and fenced off by systems that benefit from our lack. Landlords keep buildings empty. Retailers damage then bin unsold stock. Civil servants destroy tents and the belongings of unhoused people.

We do not accept this arrangement.

We imagine warehouses in every city stocked with affirming clothing, hygiene supplies, tailoring stations, and usable household goods. We imagine resource hubs that do not require intake forms. No one is screened or turned away. People show up, take what they need, and leave with a few more tools to get through life.

We dream of mobile distribution units that travel to encampments, rural towns, and isolated neighborhoods. We see networks of tailors, stylists, and garment workers who can teach others to repair and modify clothing as an act of reclamation. We want clothing libraries instead of fast fashion hauls. We envision sustainable circular systems, not linear waste.

We know garment repair and styling can become tools of self-determination and a job creation pipeline rooted in sustainability, autonomy, and skill-sharing. We believe every act of care is a seed toward a more informed collective economy.

We are connecting the closet in the shelter to the sewing workshop in the basement to the style session in the rec center. We are stringing these pieces together into a living network. And we are doing it with intention because nothing about survival of the people has ever been accidental.

Collective Responsibility

This work is not only for trans people.

This work is not only for poor people.

This work is not only for those who have been written off.

This work is for everyone who claims to believe in freedom.

We speak now to cisgender women. You have often been invited into rooms that trans people are kept out of. You are more likely to be believed. You are more likely to be funded. That access is not accidental. It is structural.

The question is not whether you are oppressed. The question is: What you do with your proximity to power?

Feminism that centers only cis experiences is not feminism and alllyship that stays silent when it matters most is not solidarity. Representation that stops at identity and never reaches action is not justice.

If you say you care about gender-based violence, you must care about state-sanctioned violence against trans people.

If you say you care about poverty, you must care about how Black trans people are excluded from housing and work. If you say you care about community, you must show up when community is under attack.

We do not ask for symbolic support. 

We demand equitable redistribution of resources, platforms, and safety.

bell hooks wrote, “Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”

We ask you to act. Not as saviors, but as comrades in something that does not center you, but still demands your participation.

This manifesto will change. It must.

It is rooted in community, and community is not static.

What remains constant is our belief in collective survival, our commitment to redistribution and our refusal of extraction.

We do not serve to be praised. We organize because we are accountable to each other.

We do this work because the conditions demand it, and because our people deserve it.

This document is not just a description of what we do. It is a blueprint. It is a call.

It is a reminder that this system was never designed for us. So we have stopped asking it to care. We are creating new systems instead—ones built on truth, skill, and love.

We are weaving our freedom—one closet, one seam, one act of affirmation at a time.