What happens to the most marginalized inside our institutions reveals who we are as a society and what we must change to become something better.
After Trans Day of Remembrance, communities across the country continue reflecting on the lives taken by violence and neglect. Yet remembrance alone cannot shift the material conditions that shorten the lives of so many. This year, Dr. Christy Perez was honored with the Grand Humanitarian Award by Darlene Wagner and Motha Aalyase of Georgia’s TDOR organization, recognizing her broad and intersectional body of justice work. She was also been nominated for the December 5, 2025 Community Leader of the Year Award by Out Georgia, after receiving nominations earlier this year for the prestigious Ann Snitow Prize for Feminist Intellectuals/Artists & Activists. But for Dr. Perez, the work continues far beyond identity-based observances.
Dr. Perez is a public theologian, historian, award-winning journalist, abolitionist strategist, and the founder of the Dreaming Justice Project. Her scholarship, organizing, and cultural work speak to a much wider landscape than any one community. She writes, teaches, and designs justice frameworks that address policing, democracy, gender, incarceration, faith, poverty, public health, narrative warfare, and global power. Her work does not exist for trans people alone. It exists for the wellbeing and liberation of everyone pushed to the margins of systems that were never built to nurture human life.
“In this country, the people who suffer the most under our systems are not suffering because something is wrong with them,” Dr. Perez says. “They are suffering because something is wrong with the systems. And when you repair systems, you repair life chances for everyone, not just one group.”
The Broader Landscape of Harm
While incarcerated trans people experience acute vulnerability, Dr. Perez insists that their experiences illuminate something deeper about how the criminal legal system functions.
“The violence that trans people face inside prisons is not a trans issue. It is a system issue,” she explains. “It shows us what happens when a society builds institutions that do not know how to care for human beings. If a system cannot keep the most marginalized people safe, then the system is not safe for anyone.”
Dr. Perez’s approach highlights how incarceration amplifies existing inequities, exposing the moral and political bankruptcy of institutions that claim to protect the public while systematically harming the people in their custody. She also emphasizes that any meaningful transformation requires us to confront the distance between what our institutions claim to value and what they actually produce. She teaches that justice cannot rely on aspiration alone because aspiration without accountability becomes performance. “If a system says it exists to protect people, then we must measure it by the lives it actually protects,” she explains. “When the outcomes do not align with the promises, we are obligated to interrogate the system, not the people harmed by it.” Her work calls leaders, policymakers, and communities into a deeper honesty about the gap between rhetoric and reality and urges them to build structures that deliver on what they profess.
Dreaming Justice Project: Best Social Justice Leadership in Georgia of 2025
As of December 6th, 2025, and in further recognition of their excellent work and leadership, the Evergreen Awards proudly announced that the Dreaming Justice Project, led by Dr. Christy Perez, had been named the Best Social Justice Leadership in Georgia of 2025. This prestigious recognition highlights the Dreaming Justice Project’s exceptional contributions to social change, justice reform, and community empowerment, marking them as leaders in the fight for justice and liberation.
A Multi-Dimensional Lens for Justice
Uniquely, Dr. Perez brings together theology, history, journalism, and abolitionist strategy to analyze the roots of injustice.
“When you tell people that cages are normal, punishment becomes a moral value instead of a political decision,” she says. “My work is about disrupting the belief that suffering is justice and building the imagination required to create systems that do not rely on human misery to function.”
She teaches that the harm done to incarcerated trans people is linked to the same forces that shape racial inequity, economic abandonment, gender policing, state violence, restricted healthcare, and the erosion of democracy.
“Our issues are braided together,” she notes. “You cannot heal a society by pretending each wound exists in isolation. Justice is not a single-issue practice. It is a commitment to repairing the whole.”
Isolation, Neglect, and State Violence
Incarcerated people often experience extreme isolation and disregard for their mental health. For trans people, these realities are intensified by misgendering, medical neglect, and exposure to targeted violence. Dr. Perez describes this not only as a psychological crisis but a structural one.
“Isolation is not accidental,” she says. “It is the predictable result of a system that was never designed for connection, healing, or human flourishing. When you remove people from the community and call it justice, you break something sacred.”
Her work emphasizes the urgent need for trauma-informed, gender-aware, and dignity-centered care for all incarcerated individuals.
The Work Institutions Must Do Now
Dr. Perez argues that the criminal legal system cannot be transformed without acknowledging the fundamental ways it fails at its stated goals.
“Institutions must stop confusing control with safety,” she states. “Safety is not created by domination. Safety is created by dignity, stability, access to care, and the presence of community. Accountability requires humanity, not humiliation.”
Through the Dreaming Justice Project, she helps organizations design justice practices that move beyond symbolic change and into structural transformation.
“People ask me what the alternative to incarceration is,” Dr. Perez adds. “The alternative is courage. The alternative is imagination. The alternative is investing in systems that help people thrive instead of systems that manage their despair.”
Systems, Truth, and the Moral Imagination
Dr. Perez often teaches that justice work requires more than fixing policies. It requires repairing the moral imagination of a society that has grown accustomed to disposable people. “One of the greatest dangers we face is the normalization of despair,” she explains. “When people begin to believe that suffering is inevitable, they stop questioning the systems that produce it.” She argues that incarceration is more than a physical structure. It is an idea sustained by narratives about who deserves care, who deserves opportunity, and who deserves punishment.
Changing the way we talk about harm, responsibility, and protection is a key part of transforming the institutions that enforce inequality. Her scholarship highlights how cultural narratives, political agendas, and historical memory converge to shape public consent for practices that degrade human dignity. By challenging these narratives, she invites communities to see justice not as an abstract concept but as an active practice rooted in truth telling, accountability, and compassion.
For Dr. Perez, genuine justice is inseparable from collective responsibility. She teaches that safety is not created by isolating people in cages but by strengthening the social, economic, and communal conditions that allow people to thrive. “Every society chooses what it invests in,” she notes. “If we invest in punishment, we produce more harm. If we invest in people, we produce more possibilities.” Her work through the Dreaming Justice Project pushes institutions and communities to examine where their commitments lie and to build infrastructures of care that extend across neighborhoods, schools, hospitals, faith communities, and civic spaces.
She emphasizes that incarcerated people are not outside the community. They are part of it. Their wellbeing affects the wellbeing of families, cities, and futures. By shifting public understanding toward shared responsibility, Dr. Perez encourages a model of justice that is proactive rather than reactive, rooted in prevention rather than punishment, and committed to the dignity of every person rather than the perpetuation of fear.
Beyond TDoR: A Mandate for the Living
Although Trans Day of Remembrance draws attention to violence against trans communities, Dr. Perez insists that the real measure of justice is how society treats people while they are alive.
“Remembrance matters, but remembrance without responsibility is just ritual,” she says. “We honor the dead by protecting the living. We protect the living by changing the systems that injure us. We change systems by refusing to believe that anyone is disposable.”
Her Grand Humanitarian Award recognizes her leadership, but she is adamant that justice cannot be achieved through individual accolades alone.
“The work does not belong to one person or one community,” she emphasizes. “Liberation is collective. Justice is shared. And dignity is a universal requirement.”
To learn more about Dr. Perez’s transformative work and how Dreaming Justice Project is changing the landscape of justice, visit Dreaming Justice Project. Stay connected with Dr. Perez on her social media platforms at:
- Instagram: @the.djpc
- LinkedIn: Dr. Christy Perez
- MuckRack: Dr. Christy Perez
- Website: Uncaged Critique
