PODCAST: Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds

Episode Transcript:

Chris Browne:

Nat, Mijke, thank you both so much for taking the time to do this episode of Radicals in Conversation.

It’s a real pleasure to have you here. I mean, as we were just talking about a minute ago, we were hoping to record this conversation a couple of months ago. So I’m really pleased that we’re doing this now and I’ve had a chance to properly read and finish and enjoy your new book, Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds.

It’s a real accomplishment. I loved reading it, and the book just came out in November, so it still is hot off the press, relatively speaking. So hopefully listeners today will get a chance to engage with it and then maybe they can go away and read more for themselves. But yeah, I guess we might as well start with some basic stuff. Maybe you could both introduce yourselves briefly for our listeners. Tell us a little bit about yourselves and what your journeys have been that led up to writing this book together.

Nat Raha:

Hey, so my name is Nat Raha. My pronouns are she/her. I guess this book emerges out of a long political, intellectual and collective, organizational journey that I’ve been taking with Mijke. We started working together about ten years ago. I think at the time we started working together, I was kind of, you know, I was in the middle of my Ph.D. I did a long Ph.D. on queer Marxism and contemporary poetics.

I’m also a writer. I’m a poet. And there’s always been these kind of political questions that have just been around us. The questions for our queer and trans communities, both like the kind of ‘Political’ questions around LGBT rights and how both on the one hand, it sounded like things are progressing, but we all kind of knew on the ground that it wasn’t because of how, you know, the austerity program, the austerity regime is affecting our lives, is affecting our communities, affecting the people around us, and also how like gentrification and… I was living in London at the time, that’s where I met Mijke, and we were really watching like how our spaces got destroyed around us. So that’s kind of like the beginning of my intellectual journey, right? So there’s those questions of like, what does it mean to be thinking through transfeminism, be thinking through queer life, queer politics in that context of being like, Oh, you watch the social infrastructure around you fall apart or get dismantled systematically by the state.

You know, we think about organized abandonment as one of these terms as well. And next to that, I think this kind of challenge, which I think is actually the challenge Mijke really kind of gave me as a thinker in terms of that’s emerged through our collaboration, which is you can’t just be oppositional to what’s happening. You can’t just remain critical because criticality kind of has its own limit.

And through practices of collective organizing, you know, you can try and create a small degree of change doing particular things. You know, we were thinking about we were involved in a housing collective, cooperative at the time. We both got involved in various kinds of mutual aid organizing in different ways, especially around trans healthcare in the last like seven to now years.

And there are intellectual questions around what it means to be organizing, how we make our worlds together, how we kind of both challenge ourselves, challenge each other, how do we live an abolitionist life? Also in a moment where on the one hand, like we’re relatively free, you know, we’re not incarcerated or not in jail, we’re not struggling with the asylum system, although some of our friends are, right?

And then next to that is but we’re also kind of in this situation of like there’s not a lot else and there’s really nothing more than the communities or the worlds around us. So trying to navigate that in the long term, I feel like that’s maybe how we get to the book or something or at least how I get to it from my angle of trying to think through these questions. And I was trying to hold them and seeing what emerges also through an intellectual practice of writing. Yeah.

Chris Browne:

Mm hmm. Yeah. Mijke, anything to add?

Mijke van der Drift:

Yeah. Yeah, we met because we were living across a corridor in a huge queer co-op from each other, and that’s how we met. And indeed, I remember that we started to get together because there was the London Conference for Critical Thought, and we were like, Oh, we’re going to just organize a stream on radical transfeminism. And we went out to curate it we really went out, reached out to a lot of people, mostly non academics.

There were a few people in academia like us. I came to the UK because I was fired from my PhD in the Netherlands and I needed to finish that somewhere, so I went here to Goldsmiths. So I ended up in south east London, which is where I met Nat. And one of the things that we wanted to do, like I came of age in a time where you had to choose between Marxism and anarchism and I clearly chose anarchism, but anarchism only exists once you start to do it right, it doesn’t just exist…

So as a critical theory approach, which is having emerged from the squat movement in the Netherlands, through the years, where then when normalization was demanded, which was, by the time that I came to the UK and gentrification started to hit us slowly. And I think what trans people quite often they, they feel things earlier and they feel things earlier than mainstream because there’s more pressure on your body.

So and we started to think through this like, well, rights are not going to get us anywhere, so how do we want to live? And I think being in a co-op with all the struggles that it gave, it was also a very interesting moment to rethink that, especially because the squat movement now is definitely not what it used to be back in the ‘90s, when I was was busy with it, and then we did, for many years, we did a lot of like workshops, activities, things. We went out, we made international networks and at some point we started to do other things and Nat had moved up north to Scotland and we found out like, wow, all that work we’ve been doing is also a bit disappearing because this kind of work on the ground, you need to keep you warm.

And if you start to do other things, then it just fades away. And then the pandemic hit and Nat gave me a call and was like, It’s getting a bit lonely in this pandemic situation. It was April or something, you know, we were a month in. “Shall we write this book? We can probably do it in a year.” And so four years later, we finished the book.

This is kind of how it happens. And it was good because I think I have a feeling always that I like slow cooking and I like also slow thinking together. And that is because I do a lot of my thinking while cycling, so you have to repeat a lot of the arguments, otherwise they don’t stay in your body. And I think working together this four years, what we have been doing is just letting arguments sink down.

We could have popped out the book in one and a half years. I’m convinced of that. But it would have been a very different book and it would not have this gut work that it did for us.

Chris Browne:

I think that’s really interesting. Like there’s a bit in the book where you’re talking about solidarity and you say solidarity has a longer breath, right, than maybe the right, which is very good at kind of galvanizing anger in the moment as a sort of reaction. But there’s this kind of longer train that we’re kind of… we’ve got to see ourselves as operating on, I suppose.

And that’s a vulnerability as well as a strength. But yeah, that’s really interesting. I’m glad you took the time to give the book the time it needed because it’s really excellent. I mean, there’s a few things we could also start with, without being too prescriptive, because that would be kind of contrary to the spirit of it.

Maybe it would be useful to define some of our terms a little bit. You know, you’ve got ‘trans’, ‘femme’, ‘futures’ in the title, so these are clearly very important aspects to the book. Could you maybe say a little bit more about Femme? You know, this part of the book’s title. What is expressed for you through this word?

That answer might be fluid and multifaceted and have more of an emphasis on relations or ways of doing and being rather than having like a dictionary style definition. But yeah, what do you think of as the word femme and how have you brought that to this book, I guess?

Mijke van der Drift:

Yeah. I think we started to play around with Femme also back in 2013, 2014, maybe a bit earlier for me, it was before I met Nat, when I was very active in the queer scene in Amsterdam and TranScreen Amsterdam Film Festival, where we started to rethink through Femme because at that moment we were, yeah, in the rapidly shifting genders that the Trans umbrella is rich. Femme was a good way to look at how we come together. And femme is, I think, in tension with normative femininity, where femme is a departure from the norm, where womanhood or femininity is there to support patriarchy by controlling how the norm operates. And I think, well, me for sure, and I guess Nat too, one of two ways where you feel that very strongly is when you come into the gender clinic – and this comes to my mind where you are actually taught very immediately about this normative violence coming from women. In the Netherlands it’s psychologists, here it’s psychiatrists running the gender clinics. But in the Netherlands, it’s psychologists, often women, who are really aggressively policing how the norm is supposed to operate.

And yet we also don’t want to give up the joy of femmeness, of ornamentation, of embellishment, of relationality, of a relational generosity, that networking. What in patriarchy always happens because the patriarchy says we’re going to do this. And then it’s the job of the women to make sure that all the noses get into the right direction.

And you cannot sort of like throw all that knowledge of how to relate to groups of people away. But because what we saw in queer movements and in squat movements and also in trans movements is that a lot of trans femmes or femmes in these movements do that work that slightly under the surface work of getting people together, making sure that all the different opinions are heard, making sure that all the different feelings get a space, even if it not necessarily has to lead to one direction.

Right? What everybody’s going to do, but what it does, it nurtures and holds the differences and possibility for disagreement and differentiation in these larger movements. Because if you don’t do that, then you come to this old school like labor, where everybody has to agree with a single party line. And that’s clearly, coming from these kind of movements, definitely not where we want to go. We want the opposite. We want to have the possibility to spread out because people bring their different experience and their different beautiful things. And it doesn’t mean that we have to reduce that to a single line. I think that sells our movement short and femme politics has the possibility to hold it together.

Nat Raha:

Yeah. So not even just a single line. It’s also like a single way of doing things and a single form of labor, of if you’re talking about political labor or world making, whatever it looks like. And this is useful because we’re kind of always between this like defining the term and then the kind of refusal to define the term, which is actually because we want to do the elaboration of the things that constitute the term.

And so it’s this mix of thinking about, on the one hand, kind of thinking about this old school definition of femmeness as having emerged through primarily working class queer kind of like community practices, a mode of self-expression that’s always situated, it’s always kind of communal or it only kind of makes sense in relation – either in a social context or a communal context, maybe in a relationship context.

And then next to that, also having this moment where like a reclaimed femininity that’s kind of punk, that’s kind of DIY, that is about all the kind of words you want to put a self- prefix but don’t really kind of work. So it’s kind of like this form of like it’s empowerment, but it’s because it’s stepping into power, right? Like as a space that you can kind of like have expression or do the collective world making or build something with the people around you, which is also about how you express yourself, right?

Also kind of having this moment where the whole idea of queer femininity is now a little bit removed from this polarity with ‘butch’, which is also to say like, we don’t have to think about femininity in relationship to masculinity anymore. And so there’s something about just trying to focus on like what emerges out of femininity when it’s on the one hand kind of you’re trying to divorce it from patriarchal expectations and gender norms, which is also partly what trans does, and we’ll talk about trans in a second, and on the other, you’re always kind of getting reinterpolated into that, right? Because there’s a logic of understanding femininity, which – people can only really see femininity as the norm unless you’re kind of clued into what queerness is doing or what transness is doing. And by default, queer femininity is always going to be a faulty, bad or excessive, oversexualized, hypersexualized version of that normative femininity.

Or it’s going to be too weird, too messed up, too fake, you know? And it’s like, no, it’s none of those things. It’s it’s interested in itself. And we’re trying to also think about it in those kind of terms and be like, actually, yeah, like, sure, we’re in a struggle against patriarchy, but it doesn’t define… it’s not in relation to what we do, you know? Which is also so much of the transphobic critique of trans femininity is based on that. So it’s like, no, actually it’s got nothing to do with that. It’s a refusal of that to a degree.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, well, maybe we’ll move on to trans in just a second. I mean, I think there’s a bit in the book where you talk about, yeah, how ‘femme practices don’t lean on a single order of being in the world. They’re not singly logical, sensorial or affective. Different connections are made and grow into new practices.’ And yeah, you can use the words, the language of kind of luxuriousness and opulence and abundance and an openness to meaning and connection, which I thought was, yeah, really nice. Maybe let’s move on to thinking about trans in this context as well.

Nat Raha:

I mean, this is like one of the starting points. It’s nice that Mijke was like, Oh yeah, I’ve been thinking about femme since, you know… I remember Mijke giving a paper on this in 2015. Right. And we’re also kind of working with these like core conceptions of what trans can kind of do or be, which is this, you know, this is like Susan Stryker, like a refusal of an unchosen starting point moving towards something else.

And so trans is already formulated as like either movement or something that is really framed in relation to refusal. And I think we’re trying to think through both of those terms, but then also be like, it’s not just movement, it’s a practice and that practice is, you know, on the one hand there are certain kinds of ways of practicing trans that are familiar, but it’s also kind of open to creative exploration, experimentation.

I think there’s like some commitment to – I don’t want to say commitment to avant gardeism, but like a promise of experimentation. Mijke and I both have a long ball view on this where we’re like, actually after while nobody really cares about how you’re gendered, how you define yourself, right? Like nobody stops to ask you how you identify.

I can definitely remember like a seven year period where nobody asked me that question and like, but actually these modes of expression, all these modes of like being together or, you know, like reworking one’s body, reworking one’s comportment, changing how you meet the world, you know, both The World (Capital T, capital W) and then also how we meet each other in the spaces that we actually want to be in, and we actually want to create, you know, that we choose to be in. And so there’s something about this like so transness as this on the one hand to move towards something else, but then to be a practice that we’re basically all continually involved in. And pretty much if you stop ‘transing’ you kind of fall back into the norm, right?

That’s the trouble. And then also to be like, it’s a shift of thinking about trans just as something that one identifies as because we kind of really don’t believe in binaries, right? So why should we be maintaining a trans cis binary? And if it’s practice based, it kind of means it’s open to anyone working their body or their bodymind or their self or their world kind of in this way.

Mijke van der Drift:

Yeah, I think – thanks Nat – the only thing I actually can add at this stage is that, back to the critical theory part, like critical theory emerges from these German traditions where knowledge is ultimately important, right? Because Kant borrowed that from Machiavelli and Machiavelli doesn’t mind all the scheming bit as long as you don’t make factual errors. Right? This is why he doesn’t mind scheming, because we at least have to share a single world.

So that is the basis upon we can scheme and Kant borrowed that. And so a lot of what critical theory does, it fronts knowledge before practice. And I think when we started to think with ethics and how do we do something else, we say like, hold on, it is our experience as trans people. We have patches where not only we don’t know who we are, as Nat said.

Or the question doesn’t get asked or it’s irrelevant to us, but we actually don’t really know what we’re doing. But we’re going there anyway and what we’re doing and going there. What the ‘thereness’ becomes is what we build together in these moments. And this can come with micro identifications where we can jokingly say to each other, oh yeah, I’m a ‘diesel femme’ because the power I step into is the power drill because I grew up on a farm and I know how to operate that machinery.

And so I think it is that stepping back from consistently emphasizing this academic perspective, knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, knowledge to say like actually how we live, it’s always body first and body makes theory. And I think it is this gentrification that happens from the sixties, late sixties onwards where the working classes could sort of, were ushered into the middle classes through academic study, where this whole knowledge production, this working class physical knowledge production just got lost or ignored by a very, very pervasive middle class academic approach.

And I think that is what we step up… We say like, Oh, well, we can return to some of that older cultures that we always shared.

Chris Browne:

Hmm. I had written a question, and it’s interesting hearing you say the body makes theory because the book does seem very you know, it’s kind of unapologetically theoretical. I mean, it’s a really compelling case for the value of theory. You know, in a time of, like fabricated scarcity, both economic and epistemic, I think you say, and that you write in the book how ‘theory can build bridges across provincialised thought, and function as a tool to work upon the imagination itself.’ It’s interesting that it’s a rejection of that sort of emphasis on knowledge and being correct and acquiring the most knowledge. And then, you know, so it deviates, I guess, from a lot of the Western like intellectual tradition, but it is nevertheless a theoretical work. If there’s anything more to say on that, then you could.

Mijke van der Drift:

Yeah, definitely. I love theory, but I’m also like, I came from a farm and after that I was a dancer for a long time before I started to go for philosophy. And I think this is also where my love of theory comes from, but also my rejection of large part of canonical methodology. I find to situate it as ‘Western’ is always a bit cheap at some point because there’s so many nuanced versions. And who is western nowadays? And you know all the Marxists – yeah, there are surely Western, but surely there’s also a lot of helpful stuff coming out of there? So away from the canonical thoughts, you can find ways where theory becomes helpful abstraction rather than imperial generalization, where imperial generalizations reduce the world to a single order, where positionality and subjectivity becomes the placement of you in the imperial order. Well, if we look actually at practice, how do we do things?

And then how do we look at patterns? That is literally pattern recognition, the abstraction of that; theory is extremely helpful because one of the things we don’t need to do is collapse in this purification of provincial patriarchy where it is, Oh, but this is the right thing here. Or because we are trans, we know how to do this like this.

It’s just not true. And it is just not honest and fair. So while we can see those patterns and see like, oh, if we follow those patterns, we actually launch ourselves into liberalism, which is not where we want to be because we need to be reflective on that. Pattern recognition as theory is helping us to see which parts of ourselves, and also in a collective we can address in certain moments because we link the pattern to the surroundings that we’re operating in.

And if I do things here in Britain, I see on the one hand, like completely different possibilities and exciting, oh, nice, (because I’m a union organizer as well), but if I go back to the Netherlands, I cannot sort of take that same UK union organizing and just pour it out there in the same context. I need to rejig everything so that it fits and certain tactics and strategies and ways of thinking fit that context so that it can become alive there.

And it’s only possible if you work with abstractions that you learn to translate up and down. And if you work with generalizations, this is, that’s… forget it. It’s just not going to work. It becomes just imposition. And the paratroopers of the left that come to impose upon different environments.

Nat Raha:

Yeah. And I’ll just add that there’s something in the broader feminist intellectual project, right? There is still work and thinking that does kind of matter to understand the micro levels of our everyday and the role of abstraction in understanding that is kind of key and I think, yeah, I think as we’re both kind of like committed in different ways to this, what does it mean to theorize from where you are, to theorize the everyday?

There’s something about the value of trying to write through the everyday and to build ideas out of it. And I think so much of the exciting feminist writing, both by like people we’ve been reading over the years, is like, also thinking about people who are close to us as intellectual friends. You know, just because theory can come from everywhere, including from the so-called bottom, you know, of the material, social order, whatever, and there’s so much value in thinking through those nuances and thinking through those micro dynamics, because that’s also how we get the kind of structural critique to land in our lives and be like, Oh, this thing is taking place and it’s an effect of X, Y, and Z material, political decisions that have happened, you know, miles away from us or above us in these terms. But actually how it’s lived and felt in one’s body or in one’s world or in one’s community or, you know, wherever, theory can kind of have a role of being able to grasp that and see that.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, I think when you’re talking about trans as well, this kind of rejection of the fixity of one’s positionality or like trans just kind of congealing into like another identity category. I mean, even the book itself is written in a few different styles or registers, like, that was quite interesting. It’s not such a dramatic shift in voice, but it’s definitely there and it probably enriches the book as well.

You know, even within this single project, you’ve got like a multiplicity of different ways of approaching the material, which enhances the overall. It’s an interesting choice, and I think yeah, probably touches on some of what we’re saying there. So there’s a lot of big ideas in the book that either I hadn’t encountered before or hadn’t really thought about so much before.

So I’ll just kind of bring us to one of them, which is complicity, right? This is something that comes throughout, and we’re talking about complicity, our complicity with the system that we’re entangled with, right? That we want to be rid of as well. You put forward this idea of complicity, not as something we should be striving to work ourselves free from, in the sense that we need to endeavor to be morally pure or innocent or something, but rather that we need to be able to sit with and even embrace our complicity.

So, yeah, this is like a big strand. I think, that runs throughout the book. So I’d really love to hear a little bit more about this idea.

Mijke van der Drift:

Yeah, complicity. It starts, I think, before the book and it starts with Jackie Wang, ‘Against Innocence’? What’s it called? Against Innocence, Nat?

Nat Raha:

Yeah, Against Innocence, Yeah.

Mijke van der Drift:

And then Gloria Wekker’s ‘White Innocence’ is also a foundational book in that sense that we were like, So what is this innocence? And I think what critical theory does, it points to limits and limitations, but in doing so, it’s often invisiblizes itself. And what you then get is that there is a certain striving for innocence at the heart of critical theory because it actually cannot address itself, or it can only do that with the help of positionality, which is the imperial category, which we already said we don’t really want to think foundationally with that category, even though you have to deal with it in the everyday.

So we started to sit with complicity as a way to say we can never evade the issue. We are part of it. Sometimes it is great because we built a book together. We built a book together with other thinkers, like when we’re talking about the book we had many people present who were part of our discussions over this four years, and it was really lovely to see their presence in the complicity of this book coming in the world.

But it also means that when we have a job, like I have a job in the Royal College of Art, where I teach partly a community engagement course. I cannot say, Oh, I am not part of the college because I will always be part of the college and I will always work with my students through how to engage with people that are so clearly not you, namely people that are not in the college versus people that are in the college.

We have to work on getting these two situations together and we can only do that by feeling how we operate within our environment and just taking responsibility for that, even though we cannot completely disavow it and don’t want to disavow it, maybe, because we still want to be part of an educational environment, but we can also not roll our educational needs out of a community group because then it becomes completely extractive.

So at the same time that we are aware of where we are and how we are operating and asked to operate, we also have to open ourselves in such a way with curiosity and generosity, that the people that we meet are just people that we meet ,and that we are also people that they meet, so that we come into a mutual meeting where we cannot or we don’t need to ever say, Oh, we need to be innocent and free from an institution that might be extractive, right?

Because then we consistently have to disavow how we live in this world. And rather than having this run-through innocence and it’s Oh, don’t touch this because it might be a problem, we can say, no, we actually stay with it even if it is a problem, so that when we are working in an environment, it might be an issue or we are part of a community group where there are issues, where there is internal violence, that rather than running away from the group, we stay with it and say we’re going to work through it together.

And I think that is really foundational for that idea of complicity where we started to sit with it, and it is curious because we have been working through the idea and thinking and at some point we saw it popping up in Moten and Harney, where we sort of have developed these ideas simultaneously! We found like, oh, wow, we came to meet each other.

Nat Raha:

I was going to say, I think there’s something useful about thinking about complicity in relation to abolition and kind of this core thing of abolition being like refusing disposability, refusing to, you know, have any aspect that’s like you can be discarded or we can be removed from a situation and then from that that’s like, okay, so we can think about this a little bit more in relation to separability as well, maybe we’ll get into that.

But so if we’re trying to like refuse the premise of social divisions that emerge, which then means that on the one hand there’s recognition of power dynamics, especially in an institutional context, which I think is what Mijke’s starting to talk about. But on the other is like, Oh, actually we have to also practice and exist in a way that doesn’t reinforce these forms of division that we’re encouraged to practice in our everyday lives.

And so then it’s like, okay, we’re trying to stay with the trouble and we’re simultaneously trying to be like we can’t absent ourselves from the dynamics that we’re amidst, you know, especially if we’re thinking about material relation with an institution or in a community setting or even, you know, we think about institutions often it comes back to some kind of formal organization in terms of the thinking.

But the reason we used institution as kind of a like more generalized conception in the book is because we do also see it in other things. We do also see it in the family form, you do also see it in religious forms, say. So it becomes about if you’re situated within a context, that also means there’s an opportunity to respond and you’re not just being othered or abjected by it, you know, excluded from it.

Obviously, so much of the language around LGBT rights or queer and trans life as well, not just rights, is about forms of social exclusion, you know. And then, yeah, when I’m saying these top down kind of pressures, we’re talking about attempts to exclude certain groups of people from society, right? But we all want to try and practice a world where those divisions don’t exist anymore.

So that’s the abolitionist principle. So then it’s like, okay, so we’re all, on the one hand, none of us are exceptional, and on the other we all have a role to try and either like challenge or create tensions or, you know, we think about the language of friction as a way to think through this. But there is always a role that we all kind of have, even in a time where it sometimes feels like we’re powerless.

You know? I think in just in that continual moment of like refusing the abjection, refusing being rendered powerless, complicity kind of becomes a tool of being like, no, we’re actually all here. It’s all of our responsibility. And I think especially when we start thinking about these questions around blame, around violence – I’m thinking a bit about climate crisis. Obviously, we’re recording this the week after the L.A. wildfires.

Or whilst they’re still burning. And yeah, it’s like we all kind of do have something to do in relation to what’s happening. And the trouble is that capitalist division of labor is, you know, that racial and gendered division of labor is that we can be absolved from being responsible and leave it to the politicians, which is obviously going fantastically for everyone on the whole globe.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, I mean, you’ve already touched on friction, which I guess is a related word, which yeah, again, maybe a bit like complicity has negative connotations on the surface because, you know, you want to avoid friction and conflict, right? But like complicity, friction is inevitable, necessary and desirable. I think that’s something that comes through in the book and particularly in collectives and movements, because we don’t have this external authority figure that we’re trying to appeal to to sort everything out for us, which I guess is the difference between like entering into like the state and like citizenship, and, you know, this kind of liberal idea of a frictionless space. So yeah, could you maybe say a little bit about friction and frictionlessness? What are we trying to do differently to the way that the society is organized through hegemonic institutions and that liberal framework, I guess.

Nat Raha:

I guess, so we kind of got into thinking about this model of friction, friction and frictionlessness. And on the one hand, the critique is of the desire for frictionlessness, and thinking about how management policy-based structuring of the ordering of society through policy, which is obviously kind of governmental in its own way, but obviously happens on local, institutional levels, It basically means that the people who are responsible for intervening in problems are at the top or they’re organized as forms of institutions. You think about the legal system, say, and then we’re kind of like, No, but partly what I think starting from the ground, starting from the bottom is like, okay, so we already are situated within

This like organized abandonment. We already know, like, the feminist abolition movement in the UK has like made it really clear this legal system is not working for like women, especially women of color. Right? We also are like come to this from like queer, queer and trans space and we’re like, we know that the legal system is nowhere to be seen to support us, right?

Or only very occasionally there in relation to, say, migration status. And that means that we’re just kind of left to solve our problems. Right? And that’s really not easy, really difficult. And so we can’t like default to this like idea that somebody else is going to solve all of our problems for us. And it’s going to be easy and there’s going to be a clear protocol of how to deal with a situation because that often ends up being like jobs for management, basically. Let’s just be honest. Also, that is it’s this one size fits all approach to solving problems, which also is like not how our worlds work. It’s like really cultural as well. Like neoliberalism is really into like, let’s make things easy, let’s streamline everything. I remember when I first started seeing this word streamline appear, and it’s like, what is streamlining?

Why do things need to be streamlined? Oh, it’s for efficiency. Oh, it’s, you know, because you got to cut red tape. You know, all of these things just mean the state can work better and it can work better to ruin lives. Right? And next to that is being like, Oh you know, on the one hand, – I’m sure we can get into talking about rights, thinking about it a bit more – We kind of see this like, Oh, things are the things are supposed to be better now and then they kind of really like, maybe they are, but maybe they aren’t? You know, on the one hand, like the material challenges that we see so many people in our community facing, you know, sometimes it’s about housing, sometimes that’s about work, often it’s about benefits and welfare, right? And trying to access healthcare – these things all bad or getting worse and actually, we’re just kind of left with more… you know, it just feeds the fire of things being difficult and challenging. So then, okay, so in facing friction, we’re like, actually, this is about how do we find ways to move through the troubles that we face in our lives and our worlds, because no one else is going to solve those things for us and the less we solve them, the more messed up everything’s going to be in, the more fractures and fissures there are going to be that are ultimately going to undermine the kind of like radical joined up transformation of the world that we believe liberation kind of entails.

Mijke van der Drift:

I think one of the things that I wanted to add here is that social movements, not only create friction, vis-a-vis the norm, but they always consist of internal frictions. And sometimes people really feel a lot of despair. But, oh, why are we not frictionless? And I think what we want to offer is because this is the only way.

The only way is to embrace that friction. And for instance, if you look at movement thinkers, people like Fanon, at the moment that people start to individualize Fanon, as if he’s this sole genius, and they start to bring him close to the to the canon, right? They start to make his links to Hegel and Lacan. And there’s a lot of overemphasis on fight with Aimé Cesaire.

Well, the fight is the point because that shows that Cesaire and Fanon and a host of other thinkers because Fanon was not universally popular within his movement for liberation of Algeria, right? There’s a lot of people in disagreement with each other. And as we said in the point about femme, like, hey, we all come with different viewpoints, ways, doing things, strategies, tactics, hopes and we better learn to embrace and love that difference, including embracing and loving the friction that comes with it.

And then at some point it comes to decide like, Hey, what we’re going to do? Then it’s also important to see, Oh, sometimes we do what you want, sometimes we do what you want, sometimes we do what you want. But we don’t need to reduce each other to a single party line again. Right? And friction is just a part of it.

It helps to go deeper. It helps to actually find your foundation and find where your hopes, feelings, arguments, insights, experiences come from. And if you can combine friction with love, then we have a healthy movement. Because otherwise, I think Nat already said it, you end up in institutions, and then you look at organizations in social movements and they always fall apart and are always seen as if that is negative because they fall apart in arguments sometimes or in differences of opinion.

And I think it’s actually the sign of their success because you see people that have worked together spread that movement, spread those insights to other organizations that come together. And I think we should completely endorse it because if we don’t dare to fall apart, then we become institutions that become more important than the people in it. And then we’re back at the foundation of violence.

And so loving friction and saying like, we’re just going to deal with it and we’re going to make sure we don’t burn out, but we just heat up together is the way forward. The thrill of the fire!

Nat Raha:

I was going to say, there’s something about that, like trying to on the one hand, like we don’t all have to agree because we don’t all have to be right. But we do have to be able to work together, which is obviously the challenge; that the only way we can work together, if we don’t all agree, is to do multiple things, right? That we can’t just have one thing that we do. We have to do a multiplicity of things in different ways.

Mijke van der Drift:

Yeah, or sometimes like we did it in our union. Like sometimes we follow this tactic, sometimes you follow that tactic. And it kept people on their toes. But it also means that you can just honor people’s insights and everybody’s insight. People are often quite true in what they believe and hope. It doesn’t mean that everything will work, but you might as well…

Nat Raha:

And then next to that, I think about, you know, in the organizational mode, you know, if the organization is trying to constitute itself in a more long term sustainable way, I wonder if it’s like, part of the trouble is this desire for everything to be easy, because one of the things that when movement work works, when movements are functional, is because we found the time to sit with the problem and it’s like it’s slow and painful and it’s really not… it doesn’t sound productive, you know, that’s part of the problem.

It’s like it might require like, hey, we might need like 5 hours across two days where we’re just sat there, where everyone is just getting a chance to talk about why they’re frustrated with what’s happening. But actually in sitting with that you get something that can hold all of that or can work from a basis where that’s that’s heard. And it’s not just a outcome oriented process of achievement, like the workplace is often structured.

Mijke van der Drift:

I think you see this very well in Act Up – like the problem that Act Up was facing was larger than the movement itself, namely the AIDS crisis and how it was absolutely wreaking havoc through various communities. And that kept them together in arguments because the frictions within the different Act Up branches are also legendary and they’re fine, but because they faced a problem that was larger than their internal friction, they kept working together.

And I think that is very important to acknowledge also. And that brings it back to what Nat put earlier on the table, because you cannot dispose of each other because we are already made disposable, that is holding us together. But if we look at that now, not through a crisis of that nature, but we look at it in general, us organizers, and we say like, Hey, the crisis that we face, the long durée of capitalism is actually the thing that can hold us together if we don’t make each other disposable.

But it also means we sometimes need to step back and say like, okay, this argument went too far or you’re getting burned out or worn out, and how do we care for each other? How do we make sure that our organizers don’t become isolated and not burned out?

Chris Browne:

Hmm. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think maybe this touches on solidarity, which is maybe something we don’t, you know, is a word we use a lot. Don’t necessarily think too much about what we mean by that, but there’s a lot of key ideas in what you’re talking about, in solidarity in the book: generosity, sitting with that sort of an openness to difference without separability, and sort of yes, sitting with conflict.

Could you say a bit more about this idea of separability, and what is meant by that? And therefore, what we’re trying to not reproduce in our ways of doing and being in solidarity with one another?

Nat Raha:

Yeah. So this idea of difference without separability is kind of taken from, or it’s worked out of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work. And Denise is writing very specifically around thinking about the so-called migrant crisis in Europe, right. So called refugee crisis. And there’s been some useful thinking in the political sphere more recently being like, no this isn’t like a migrant crisis, this is a crisis of of hospitality or of welcome, and that Europe literally doesn’t… obviously, it’s like the xenophobic dynamic in Europe that’s leading to fascism, that’s led to fascism. It’s also this refusal, this fear of the unknown, this refusal to welcome in people who might need to be here for whatever reason. And so next to that, I just spent loads of time being like, why is the state so afraid of even really simple, quite basic reforms to legal gender recognition and thinking about like what is the role of legal gender in that context such that it must be defended in this intensely reactionary way?

And so next this is also then these other dynamics of like, okay, so how do forms of social division get reproduced? Who is responsible for reproducing those forms of division? On the one hand, sure, there’s lots of right wing anti-Black, anti-migrant, anti-trans, anti-queer sentiment, anti-welfare, anti-disabled rhetoric. That’s been the whole public discourse in the UK.

We’ve seen this the whole last 15 years. Right. And it’s not just a UK problem by any means. And next to that being like, okay so how much of that do we really internalize in our everyday lives? Because like our social relationships have material implications, you know, and ultimately our vision is that everything is for everyone, right? It’s like, but we’re not going to get there if we can’t unmake the white left. So what’s the deal with that? And yeah, and so that’s like the, maybe the some of the more political implications of like trying to be like, okay, so really though, what is the challenge for us as people involved in social movements in different places and involved in different ways? You know, labor organizing, community organizing, mutual aid, political organizing, like there are all these different elements of like where the social is reconstituted is it’s continually reconstituted in our everyday interactions and who’s in our world and who isn’t.

And yeah, so really just trying to flip this like on the one hand is yeah, that sure, there’s the political challenge, there’s the really obvious right wing politicians that we need to contend at the moment. Obviously there’s no functional, organized left. Let’s not talk about that right now. Unless you’re in France, maybe… And next to that is actually how do these dynamics get reproduced in our world?

You know, how do we work towards… why is sameness familiar and reassuring? And next to that being like, okay, actually there are ways of reaching across difference which ultimately nourish the like, potentially nourishing world-transformative lead to changed understandings of how we understand the world, how we understand ourselves, but also they can never just be self-interested. And I think that’s where kind of solidarity comes in, right?

It’s like, how do we… I think this is one of the questions we were trying to address within the book, something like actually how do our practices of solidarity kind of reproduce certain self-interested positionality that we might find ourselves within? How do we undo that? How do you actually reach across these divides and not just in the metaphor of reaching like in a very practical lived social way?

Mijke van der Drift:

Yeah. Like recently, Robin Kelley gave the yearly Stuart Hall lecture, and in the Q&A after that lecture, there was a conversation about organizing where the question got put on the table: like, why do we organize with people that are like us? And I think that is really key here. Like, this is one of the things we started to think about.

Like, but what happens if we don’t organize with people that are like us? Which again, I go back to the community engagements that I do, it is really where I learnt most things, where I find the most inspiration and joy and surprise and unexpected knowledges. And I find that quite often we are brought back to as if to like us is safe, as if we are, it becomes a kind of a queer nationalism, right?

Oh, as long as we are with the queers, then we’re fine. As long as we’re just with the trans people, then we’re fine because then we don’t get that violence. And again, going back to the refrain of critical theory, it is always seen as limits are general … rather than what we try to propose.

No, the friction is necessary and is not always a limitation of us. It is also sometimes a deepening of us. But you have to learn to tell them apart. You have to tell apart when it is hegemonic, trying to press you down and keep you apart. And when there is the joy of heating up together because you are in different arguments and when solidarity is not over there with you, who are worse off than me.

But solidarity is coming together because we all need to be liberated from capitalism, even though our starting positions are vastly unequal. We have something to gain from each other and we have to get out of that point of us coming to bring something or us just coming to receive something. And that is where this anti-separability work comes from.

You not only have to question the fears that you might feel or the lack of empathy that you might feel or the over empathy that you might feel and the projections that it brings along. But it is also something there where, I think Nat said it in the beginning, like transness, it’s just this movement that you try to situate yourself relationally in your environment to leave a positionality behind, that is always already an imperial positionality, and that is not just trans people that can do that right? We can all do that. So I think this is something that trans offers to the world that everybody who doesn’t identify as trans also can start to do, because all these patriarchal relations that are hierarchizing and purifying, we need to unlearn that stuff because it’s not good for any gender.

You know, it is not just a trans situation and at the same time, I think a lot of the critique we hear from, coming, for instance, out of the Windrush Generation, right? Hey, I am here. I am here for a very long time and I’m always made to be a foreigner. So what does that teach us about connecting to the land and connecting to each other on a piece of land?

Right? And we need to learn these lessons from each other. And we can only do that by not diving into the separabilities, like, Oh, I need to work like the quote unquote like us. There needs to be some general form of liberation and everything else is detail. It’s not. Everything else is fundamental.

Nat Raha:

You know, we write quite a lot about the hostile environment, in particular in the section on separability. Obviously, it’s a really obvious kind of example of a legal framework that has been instituted in Britain by the Tories and obviously like the new management is saying the same thing and maintaining it or upholding, I should say, and that we’re all kind of involved in upholding a hostile environment.

But that’s how it’s structured, right? It’s like anyone working in a public institution is responsible to uphold the hostile environment on a legal basis, depending on what your role is. But yeah, and being like, actually it’s a really good example of like, how do you defeat the hostile environment? On the one hand there’s, sure, you’re trying to get it off the books, but on the other it’s like it’s, it’s about what you do in the world.

It’s about your actions, it’s about how you interact with people. It’s about how you look after people at home. You know, it’s about who’s in your community and how you support each other. And I think that question of the like, okay, so the response to the structural or administrative violence is social organizing, and that only works through multiplicity.

And yeah, and I think Mijke’s example earlier of like in the union, one week we do it like this and next week we do like that; a third week we do it another way. Like, that kind of multiplicity just emerges through an embrace of different kinds of practices, emerging from different cultures, emerging from different spaces. And then simultaneously it’s… but it’s just not multiculturalism. Or it’s not neoliberal multiculturalism as the co-opted form, because that’s like, hey, we can all just be in our box and we can all be on display. So which again is static and categorical.

Chris Browne:

I mean, we’ve been talking for a little while now, so it’s just a question of what we’re going to not talk about and what we do still want to talk about, I suppose, like trans liberation versus trans liberalism. Trans liberation, as I understand it, kind of from what you say in the book, is it’s wrapped up in the liberation of everyone, right?

It’s not just about appealing to the state, demanding, you know, certain rights and yay for trans people. But where does that leave everyone else or what does that even leave trans people? If the best case scenario is entering into the same, you know, neoliberal etc.. So yeah. Is there more to say about your vision of like how trans liberation differs from trans liberalism?

Nat Raha:

Yeah, so thinking about trans liberalism first, and being like, okay, this is this idea that rights and recognition, other forms of enfranchisement that will ultimately lead to transformation in the world and like improving of our lives. You know, we spent a lot of time just being like, what do we even mean when we say “Trans Rights Now?”

Now, you know, what are people asking for? And trying to do that schematically and thinking about the difference between NGO approaches to the trans rights agenda and next to that being like, what about the approaches that activists, including ourselves, have put forward and how they’ve been taken up in especially thinking around health care? And again, like having a look at this in a bit of a long ball game around equality in rights legislation and on the one hand, seeing what has shifted both from like, you know, Equalities Act, gay marriage, same sex marriage, you know, the transphobic version that landed for a while.

And like there are material improvements that have accrued to very small groups of people, especially if you’re willing to make these kind of like either institutional commitments, be that through marriage or be that through work or through mortgages. But if you don’t have access to any of those things, then, you know, you’re still kind of in the shit.

Let’s be honest. And especially given this long durée of austerity that we’re still kind of in. Yeah, I think part of that is also being aware of how the public discourse has shifted, you know, the kinds of critiques, the kinds of thinking that was very familiar ten years ago, you know, especially at this movement even before Mijke and I started working together, a lot of that has receded from view, you know, because it’s just that’s just the way of the world, like, we exist in the austerity time now. And trying to also be like, actually, things could be different. This isn’t the reality that we had to be delivered into and that, yeah, this idea of ‘it gets better’, you know, the classic Dan Savage program, it kind of also didn’t get a lot better in other ways, right? So liberation just being like, oh, the idea of going to the state to demand the things that we want in order to make our lives liveable just seems a bit ridiculous, you know, because the state is continually making our lives less livable.

Mijke van der Drift:

Because I think that is what trans liberalism does, right? Because liberalism is like it asks you to adapt to life, to living inside the institution where the institution is still normative and often class based and white and straight. And trans liberation is more or less the opposite. How can we live together in the world? And what kind of actions make it more vibrant?

Because what we see and I think we see that also not only austerity, but also past austerity, because Starmer doesn’t make things better, is there’s this epistemic scarcity, and this scarcity of possibilities. Things are shutting down and there is less and less and less and less. And I think if we want liberation, we can come into this doing more together, which is also why this friction is necessary and why adapting yourself to life in an institution will never get you there.

But figuring out how we can live together in the world in a way that makes us more vibrant, it also stops us being very human-centric because honestly, if you see sheep in a meadow and the meadow is just grass, you can see the sheep are a bit bored and it’s just not really their way, right? And you see sheep in the more lively meadows flourishing together.

You don’t need to have grown up on a farm to see that. It is evident. It’s evident. And the same is for people, you don’t need to know, quote unquote, what the content of somebody’s life is to see that somebody is doing well or not well. You know, when somebody is dragging themselves through their life or has the time of their life. And that is what liberation is about. We all deserve the time of our lives.

Nat Raha:

We all deserve the time of our lives! Yeah, that’s great. But the grammar of that, I really just wanted to say, like so much of this has been like frustration of a lack of grammar for what trans liberation actually means in practice. And then next to that, kind of, I think in discourse, because you do see that grammar playing out in the world, you do see it in mutual aid projects, you do see it in these moments of pooling resources and transformation and refusing the kinds of consumer structures that trans, especially trans embodiment, is encouraged to go through in order to change your body.

And just being like, actually, there’s something in if we think about on the one hand, if we we actually see what we’re doing in the world together and next to that being like, that’s the thing of liberation. We have to keep building it or doing in different ways or think through the problems that emerge with it.

Mijke van der Drift:

But it’s also like, like I have, for instance, in the squat movement, but friends of mine had it in the Maidan Revolution, and other friends felt it, for instance, in Tahrir Square, that moment of this foundational liberation where boom, the possibilities are endless and it always gets shut down. But once you have lived through a moment of pure possibility, you know that it can happen, it can happen, and it stops being happened because top down is pressing it down.

And that is what liberation is about, that moment of that deep breath. And you feel it all through your body. Something can happen and it can only happen because we do it together.

Chris Browne:

I think the word you said earlier was like vibrance. And another thing that I was thinking that I would say towards the end of this episode and it makes sense to say it now is like that joy and pleasure are two words that don’t really appear as often as they maybe should in works of theory or in like left wing discourse.

But they really kind of go through this book. And I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about how you know this idea of like vibrance, joy, pleasure infuse the trans femme futurism of your book.

Nat Raha:

It’s always the struggle, Chris! We’ve just got it, we’re just committed to the struggle.

Mijke van der Drift:

I think that there is a problem that Marxism emerged from German, quite Protestant theory. So no place for pleasure! I think one of the things that, why we started to write also about joy is because it is literally the stuff that keeps us going, like where we are sort of battery powered in that sense.

And in the same way that in summertime everybody might feel more vibrant but also has more joy because you just get more light. It is also the other way around. The more joy we create by coming together, the better our struggle will be. And this is the one thing that the right wing never has to offer. It can never offer a joy that is about a love of life and living together, and that is absolute unbeatable and unbreakable strength of the left – it’s that we have this because that is what powers our movements and that can never be stolen from us. And so this is the thing that we really need to rest our struggle on, to build each other up. With joy, pleasure and love and generosity. And that allows us to fight management and fight the right. And we’re going to need to.

Nat Raha:

I’m not sure. I’m actually like, Wait, but don’t the right want the white fascist utopia? You know, that is…

Mijke van der Drift:

But it’s not joyful.

Nat Raha:

I’m not sure…

Mijke van der Drift:

They are purifiers and hierarchizing, and so they start to tell people off. We have seen this in action.

Nat Raha:

They, they always…

Mijke van der Drift:

We have seen this many times.

Nat Raha:

They always need the police. You know, that’s how it goes. I think it’s the thing of like you know, because for so many years like trans was always framed as this, like, Oh, whoa, I’m trans! Misery, misery. I’ve got to be so sad, the Gender Clinic’s got to save me. And it’s like, No! Trans is fucking great. Like, we have a great time. We feel like… leaning into trans embodiment. It’s like a blessing. It’s like a form of, you know, it’s a form of bliss. It’s like you really feel those moments, you have those moments where you’re like, Oh, my experience of some kind of weight being lifted from your bodymind. And it’s not just from your body. It’s like psychic as well, always in relation to each other that there are all these things of possibility.

And I think like, I don’t want to say it’s the same as that moment of the revolutionary transformation of the subject that Mijke was just talking about earlier but it’s related. And next to that, being like I think again just like in part of what femmeness or femininity is about is like having all of this all of this life letting all of the life of the world kind of in, and letting it bloom and do its thing.

And I think that’s why these words like embellishment, opulence are kind of useful and as maybe not critical tools, but as like ideas of what we’re trying to work towards in our in our worlding or in our world making and being. You know, it’s like because we do actually need, we need to let the whole world in because actually part of the problem that we face, like in relation to climate crisis, is like, Oh, we’ve just been shutting the world out the whole time.

Right? And that’s the violence, that’s the separation, that’s the division from a connection to the land, that’s the division that’s turning land and water into resource. You know, that’s all of these kind of originiary, the Cartesian Kantian Enlightenment separations. You know, we want all of this together. We want the possibility of existing more for everything. And it’s not just human as well.

Mijke van der Drift:

I think like one of… this is now sitting here in the Holocaust Remembrance Week. My grandfather was three years in a Nazi prison. And I think one of the things that I learned from him is not just how you have to fight the Nazis, which is on a host of different levels. Sometimes it’s with violence and sometimes it’s about keeping people safe.

But also what I learned from him is how to make a lot of joy in your community and protect each other. And that goes together, making joy and protecting each other because it’s the way, and I think that is quite often missed in lefty movements, how important culture is to build trust with each other. And you need this cultural event, whether it’s music or theater or performances or sports.

It can be lots of things because you learn to rely on each other because you can celebrate together. And in that openness, in that happiness, like Dario Fo also said that, if you want to get a political message across, you better make sure that people laugh because then it goes in. And this is the part of the joy, the moment that we meet and we have pleasure, I don’t need to be the same as the person with who I stand shoulder to shoulder in a fight. But we have met each other and we know we can rely on each other.

Chris Browne:

Yeah, I mean, one of the last questions, I think perhaps the very last question you sort of pose for the reader in the book is ‘what sustains our worlds and what do we need to keep them nourished?’ So I guess I thought I’d just put this question to you both. I think we’ve kind of just covered it in the last couple of minutes anyway.

But, you know, on a personal level, what sustains and nourishes you in? Yeah, undeniably sort of very dark times.

Nat Raha:

Like eating together. Is one… Being in that space, actually being in some kind of relation with each other, be that domestic with food or be that Yeah. In something more open, a more public. Just the coming together it feels like is often hard but it’s often the moment of reflection of like, oh yeah, this is why we’re here, you know.

Mijke van der Drift:

It’s also like my voice is a bit rough today because I didn’t prepare well because I did what I love to do and I went with my comrades from the Big Ride for Palestine through London on the one year Big Ride of Return on Saturday. And so were shouting and singing and doing slogans on our bikes all over London with Palestine flags.

And this is one of the moments that you are raising your voice together while being together, that you also make joy, but you also stand up against the genocide that is going on, even though we are not in that sense managerials, that we can’t stick out our hand and fix it, right? The only thing we can do is not let it slip under consciousness, reminding people that this is going on, but it’s coming together and singing together.

That alone brings us together and holds us. It holds us by being there. And so I agree. Eating, but also singing, dancing, laughing.

Nat Raha:

Joining the blockade.

Mijke van der Drift:

Joining the blockade.

Nat Raha:

And hopefully doing all these things on the blockade. That’s what makes a good blockade.

Chris Browne:

Well, I think that’s maybe a really nice place to leave it. There was, as we suspected, quite a lot that we didn’t cover. But, you know, I think that’s fine. There’s a huge amount in the book about healthcare and the Gender Clinic, more stuff to do with the state and mutual aid and care. We don’t really talk that much about like practices of care, but it’s perhaps all been sort of there in some of the other answers.

So, yeah, I think all that’s left is to say thank you to you both. And it’s been a real pleasure to read the book and get to discuss it with you both. So yeah, thank you for coming on the show.

Nat Raha: 

Thanks for having us.

Mijke van der Drift:

Yeah, thanks, Chris.