Vanquishing Violence Against Transfemininity

We are shaping lived realities, rather than just living in subjugation according to another’s image of us, yet the projections we live through remain steady. The bitter experiences our lives include having been subject to violence, rape, sexual harassment, and a transgression of human rights (whatever you think about rights, this is still indicative of a significant violence) – and yet in the mainstream press (not just the conservative papers) trans people are still depicted as a threat and perpetrators of violence. Still, resentment will keep us estranged from collectivity. Anti-trans discourses work to reaffirm and reproduce affective economies of separability – the dehumanisation, villainisation, objectification, and othering of trans women, and trans and non-binary people more broadly, in order to exile or outlaw us from society. We don’t find it surprising that anti-trans discourses focus on prisons and toilets: enclosed spaces that isolate us from the ways we live. The imagery of isolation in the ways anti-trans activists write about us shows what they want with us: to isolate people from each other, which makes us controllable, and to keep us outside of spaces where encounters are possible, interrupting as much connection as possible. This is why anti-trans activists do not mind trans toilets: as long as we are kept apart, we can be locked out. Our doing time, inside and outside prisons (currently there are six trans women in women’s prisons in the UK¹) means that many of us are isolated in our rooms, houses, and homes, because of this violent atmosphere and interrupted socialities.

We have discussed how the practice of transformation is not without risk. Violence and duress are the dominant modes of ‘putting people back in their place’. Sometimes this means people are bullied out of public spheres. In resistance movements we find rape culture, which is a way of signalling that the feminist revolution is not welcome here. And yet, knowing those risks and sticking together while practising community safety by broadening our connections to each other is the way to make a future. Because of the violence and duress that we have seen, experienced, and heard, we propose a transfeminist ethics that refuses institutionalised powers that create punishment. Instead, we risk ourselves by being vulnerable and keeping each other safe. The risks of vulnerability come in another register, as some of us might not be used to sharing our fears and worries, and are afraid of judgement. The intimate connection between risk, vulnerability, and transformation is sometimes used against collectives, but allows for our collective strengths to come out.

Trans femme lives face the institutionalised demotion of transness, accompanied by femmephobia, misogyny, and further intersecting forms of duress. This means that there is no ‘it gets better (and more toxic too)’ that is bestowed by hegemonic structures. However, women can also be agents of violence, which is often overlooked in feminist theory. Such violence has received some attention in recent years, for instance, through the figure of the ‘Karen’ – the white woman who calls the police.² The experience in trans lives of women attacking trans existence calls into question automatic solidarity through gender. The harassment of (bourgeois, poor, Black, Brown, white, queer, lesbian) women by (bourgeois, poor, Black, Brown, white, queer, lesbian) women has forever taken the form of doubting someone’s womanhood – and thus transmisogyny is misogyny.³ It is not the enforcement of the gender binary that creates connection. When people are willing to pause their intuitions and be open to listening, sharing, and affirming events, perspectives, and actions in people’s lives, what is found are overlaps, the excitement of understanding the world in a new manner, and a willingness to create new forms of living together. Feminism remains necessary, but it needs to overcome its harassment of sex workers, trans people, queers, the poor, single mothers, immigrants, people of colour, working classes, and so on, with claims that marginalised people undermine the position of the complainant.⁴ Some people refuse to take on the term feminist as a result (one of us used to be one of them). And yet, the term helpfully reminds us of lineages that have attempted to make new intimate relations from which new worlds can emerge.

We do not think that trans people are immune from being implicated in violence. They can be for different reasons – sometimes due to trauma and incorporated violence, and sometimes because learning and healing still needs to happen. However, debates become lopsided, as prejudices, like every prejudice, are targeted to perpetuate hegemonic forms of harm. Ana-Maurine Lara writes that ‘healing from our own personal experiences is not just a matter of personal health, healing is also a matter of social change’.⁵ Healing from personal experiences of being harmed is hindered by ongoing perpetuations of violence to us and around us. As evident as that rephrase may sound, it is also informative for questions about how we want to live now, and what this asks from us while residing in a world where our membership is in question. It asks us to question, in Lara’s words, ‘how prepared we are to deal with the fallout from our personal experience with violence’.⁶ Resentment is harming myself and the communities I am in, and it will also hinder seeing how I perpetuate violence and have perpetrated harm in the past. Still, the feeling of resentment isn’t just in imaginations. Misrecognition is harm, it is a form of erasure, and it is invisibilising and in that sense painful. However, trying to stage a change in public debate based on resentment leads to a victim-led plea that will hinder the work of community-making and personal healing. Resentment makes people judgemental and closed off, which is how hierarchy and hegemony wants us to be. It takes effort to rise above the alarmist announcements in media and public spaces, and to keep reaching out to people who are open to reworking public understanding and to vanquishing (in Rebecca Subar’s words) a certain form of patriarchal and transphobic debate. My healing of resentment is for myself, for the people around me, and hopefully something that in my communities is dealt with, with care. In the future we want to live already, it requires dealing with these sentiments to build something in which we can thrive. At the same time, facing this resentment is part of facing our own contributions to harm and the actions it makes us do, both societal, personal, and interpersonal, which is an ongoing reality in our communities. It requires facing the energy drain that is imposed on us, in trying to deal with this, but also facing when we are lashing out at people close to us.

Abolition guides us through dealing with resentment, to understanding our needs to have a place, as well as a voice in our communities, worlds and collectives. Demanding subjection to our views is not a way to get to transformative justice. The everyday intentions, relations and commitments that abolitionist feminists adopt are not designed to be taken up in a monolithic fashion – they are actions infused with the belief that we can live in manners that negate and reduce the impact of injustice. If we focus on outcomes and effects of structural dynamics of violence, and the unwillingness to give up power, we may work to intervene in the sources of harm, to intervene in the relations that cause harm, while orienting collectively towards reparative new practices. To open up helps to stage the developing ground for abolitionist ethics. We build together and fight outside. Justice is reached by the means of coming together, but not by the defeat of our ‘enemies’. The win (in case you are looking for such a term) is that people become more open and active in abolitionist practices. Alisa Bierria offers ‘Abolitionist strategy that aspires to teach requires rigour in two things: its truth and its capacity to produce an opening for others to meaningfully connect with that truth’.⁷ When those that we need to fight are to become active in abolition, it invites people to change their ways. The less time we have to spend in the way we want, the more the anti-trans movement gains. The far-right – and people with institutional power – have to deny our truths because, to them, they are unbearable. Practices, however, are less easily denied (requiring surveillance and criminalisation). New practices become forms of justice.

Concretely, one of the ways to orient our collective endeavours around anti-violence is centring community safety. In recent years (especially since 2017), anti-transphobic and anti-fascist feminist organising has coalesced around challenging TERF platforms and spaces. While these interventions are important, practices change when prioritising the safety needs of marginalised trans people, including trans sex workers, migrants, Black and Brown folks, trans femmes and women, gender non-conforming people, and queers and women more broadly. Prioritising safety needs is a direct and action-oriented challenge to our dehumanisation and counters the dismissal of our exclusion from social life and its attendant affective economies. It challenges climates that enable transfemicide⁸ and the conditions in which direct and indirect transmisogynist and transphobic harm manifest. It also challenges the use of policing in a manner that can support people who have experienced incarceration and people on the inside. Community safety, and collective defence as a form of self-defence, are practices which may range from physical training, providing safety supplies, moving through the world or travelling together, etc. It is work that builds and maintains a qualitative and direct understanding of issues, problems or situations that may arise in the particularities of the work we do and the lives we lead, or may wish to lead.

Truth and trust are necessary in a struggle, as Ana-Maurine Lara highlights in a discussion dedicated specifically to partner abuse in queer (of colour) communities, truthfulness and trust as helping us grow stronger. Here it needs to be noted that such truthfulness and trust have limited use in fighting against oppression, but it needs to be worked on in communities that carry the fight. Lara offers that ‘truthfulness with each other can lay the foundations for revolutionary consciousness, and for resolving the effects of abuse’.⁹ Truthfulness is the driver for learning how to do this, where the term learning is of key importance – both in our work to deal with ourselves and the effects of violence; the violence of which we have been perpetrators as well as having been the harmed person. This means that hopes for a hasty resolution where there’s a discursive driver of change (the way we talk about what should have been) is not necessarily the best emphasis, because the embodied driver for change requires a different pace: one with more generosity, kindness, and also truthful accountability.