The Magic Dance of Dissociation: An Autistic Reading of Jim Henson’s Labyrinth

With the lights turned low and a plate of Pillsbury ghost cookies at the ready, my wife and I settled in for a viewing of Jim Henson’s 1986 cult classic fantasy musical, Labyrinth. For the purposes of this essay, I’ll assume that you’re familiar with the movie— if not, go watch it right now. If you’re anything like me, and you weep for the halcyon days of practical effects, you’ll love it as much as I do. There’s a saying that a classic is a work that never finishes saying what it has to say; Labyrinth, which avoids the 21st-century pitfall of over-explaining every aspect of its fantasy world, certainly qualifies. (A modern Labyrinth would likely be accompanied by a prequel miniseries detailing exactly how the by-all-appearances human Jareth became the Goblin King.) Within minutes of starting my most recent watch, the film began saying something new to me, loud and unmistakably clear.

I had related to Labyrinth’s protagonist, Sarah Williams (a teenaged Jennifer Connelly) from my first watch. Now, seeing it for the first time since being diagnosed with autism in my early twenties, I realized why: it’s because Sarah is autistic, too. While I had appreciated the film as an inventive, technically-dazzling adventure, the realization of Sarah’s autism radically altered how I read the film, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.

Sarah demonstrates several traits that remind me of myself as an adolescent. She’s attached to “childish” interests like fairy tales and stuffed animals far past the age that is considered typical. She has no discernible social life, spending her time acting out plays by herself with an audience of her dog— and, as her stepmother teases, never going on dates. It’s implied that she plays out the same scenarios over and over again, repeating the same lines each time— a common pattern in autistic children’s play. Throughout the movie, she struggles to communicate with others, frequently failing to ask follow-up or clarifying questions, and taking what she hears and sees literally (or, as it’s phrased in the movie, “taking things for granted”) without considering that others may be lying, missing information, or may have hidden motivations. Autistic hyperempathy— the assigning of feelings of personhood to inanimate objects or nonhuman beings— may explain why Sarah seems apparently unfazed to find herself in a world where worms, stones, and even doorknockers are sentient. In an early scene where Sarah disagrees with her stepmother about whether to allow their muddy dog in the house, it’s clear that she empathizes with her pet more than the typical 1980s owner did.

Even Jennifer Connelly's often-criticized acting reads to me as the affect of a person who does not know how to modulate her voice or expressions. Not all autistic people sound like the stereotypical flat affect of Mr. Spock; some of us sound like Connelly moaning “It’s not faaaaiiiir!” Speaking of which, Sarah demonstrates another hallmark autistic trait in her constant appeals to fairness. And, despite the common misconception within the autistic community, her actions demonstrate the autistic “strong sense of justice” is more a desire for things to be even than it is a superior sense of morality. It’s morally unjustifiable for Sarah to take out her frustrations with her parents on her baby brother Toby. After all, Toby didn’t ask to be born and has no control over whether or not his mother uses his sister as an unpaid babysitter. He’s, y’know, a defenseless baby. But in her mind, it makes perfect sense that someone who has caused her undue stress, and who her parents seem to favor, should be punished for it. It’s fair that someone who gets in the way of her fantasies should be disappeared into the goblin world. As soon as Jareth (David Bowie in famously tight pants) shows up to fulfil this desire, she recognizes that what is fair and equal is not always what’s right.

I’ve encountered this struggle in my own life. When someone hurts me, my autistic brain  becomes overwhelmed with the desire to make them suffer exactly how I have suffered. It would be fair to do that. But settling accounts in this way usually does little to fix the root problem, and it contradicts my values as a proponent of restorative/transformative justice. Like our heroine, I frequently find that what is fair and what is right may not be the same thing.

Still, it bothers me how Sarah’s concern for fairness is entirely dismissed as childish by the narrative. A key moment of her development comes when she steals Hoggle’s treasures in order to manipulate the dwarf into helping her, since he cannot reach them on his own. Hoggle protests “That’s not fair!” and Sarah verbalizes her realization: “No, it isn’t, but that’s the way it is.” She goes beyond simply accepting the unfairness of the world and instead begins to replicate the unjust structures around her— accepting, for instance, that it’s simply the way of the world for a human to take advantage of a dwarf’s size. The narrative accepts enacting unfairness as a requisite for growing up— a clear sign that the script is written from an allistic perspective.

But Sarah’s most dominant autistic trait is the one that undergirds the entire premise of the movie: her special interest in, and escape into, fantasy.

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I remember the knowing smile of the specialist administering my autism assessment when I told her about my past and current special interests: history, theater, and fantasy stories. She told me that these are textbook special interests of autistics who were socialized as girls, interests that helped us learn the complex social-emotional dynamics that our gender is supposed to intuitively understand.

In my case, rather than being a tool of socialization, fantasy served throughout my childhood and teen years as a wholesale replacement. It was difficult to make friends with my peers, but effortless to befriend Wendy Darling, Frodo Baggins, or Alanna of Trebond. For one thing, there was no frantic guessing at how these friends felt or what they were thinking; I had a narrator to tell me. At age nine, I began filling notebooks with elaborate fantasy worlds of my own, and I entertained myself for hours with the companions I populated them with.

Of course, this kind of imaginative play is normal for a child. What was abnormal was the degree to which I relied on it to get through my day, and the amount of time my fantasies consumed. Many afternoons were spent pacing back and forth through my room, muttering under my breath as a battle scene unfolded in my head, unconscious of the time slipping by or the schoolwork I needed to do. I wouldn’t have been able to do the work, anyways: I had no memory of the classes that bored me, like math, because I spent them in my kingdom. I succeeded in school primarily because my English, history, and art scores compensated for this.

As I got older, rather than outgrowing my habit, I became more consumed by it. I walked through my high school campus with the world misted over, literally bumping into people because I had no sense of my body in space. Anyone forced to play a team sport with me in PE could find me standing stalk still on the field, staring into space while they yelled at me to kick the damn ball. My daydreams became increasingly intrusive and involuntary. By that age, my fugues had evolved past fairytale scenarios; as a burgeoning theatre kid, I was swept away by visions of hanging out with my favorite Broadway stars, walking premiere red carpets, and being interviewed by Playbill Magazine. I lost hours of time to these, even when I didn’t want to.

I remember once going mini-golfing with a pair of church friends and barely being able to keep track of the conversation, because my mind was occupied with directing a scene of my favorite musical down to the minutest detail. I fought to turn off these images and engage with my friends, swimming against the current of my thoughts, but every time I surfaced for a few minutes, something would pull me down again. I felt trapped in my mind, and these periods of captivity were often signaled with physical sensations: racing heart and goose bumped arms, as if I rode a rollercoaster climbing ever higher, the world falling away below me. What had begun as a refuge became a malignant force wrenching me away from my own life.

I’ve come to understand my experience as dissociation. While research on dissociative symptoms among autistics is limited (most research into autism focuses on identifying causes or risk factors in order to discover a “cure”, rather than improving autistic people’s lives) both a growing body of data and anecdotal reports within the autistic community suggest a correlation between the two. In one report, Katherine E. Reuben MPH and Ayden Parish relate:

Reuben et al. (2021) surveyed 687 autistic adults and found that 94% had at least one clinically elevated scale on the multiscale dissociation inventory. Emotional disengagement was the most commonly endorsed symptom, affecting 85% of participants. This was followed by depersonalization (72%), emotional constriction (60%), derealization (59%), and memory-related dissociation (53%). Identity disturbances were least common but still endorsed by 26% of participants. Additionally, 32% of participants scored above 35 on the 20-item somatoform dissociation questionnaire.

As Reuben points out, this correlation is strengthened by the fact that autistics experience heightened rates of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, of which dissociation is a key diagnostic trait. One study found 60% of autistic adult participants to have experienced PTSD symptoms at some point in their lives. So, if somebody is autistic, they more likely than not experience either diagnosable or subclinical trauma symptoms. And while dissociation is not part of the diagnostic criteria for autism, it is very much an autistic experience.

Traumatized or not, in some ways autistic brains feel primed for dissociation because our neurotype gives us access to deeper, longer periods of focus than allistic brains. How easily can the pleasurable flow state of engaging with our favorite story become a dissociative experience? Where is the line between one and the other? An autistic reading of Labyrinth explores these exact questions. I read the film as a story about a young autistic woman battling to regain control over her own dissociative coping mechanism.

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Labyrinth follows a familiar fantasy template of an ordinary girl traveling to a fantasy world— what those in the biz call “portal fantasy”. The portal world usually takes one of two forms: the “it was all a dream” portal world that is entirely a figment of the protagonist’s imagination (e.g. the film version of The Wizard of Oz) and the portal world that exists as its own very real alternate dimension, plane of reality, or secret location (the original Oz books.) The former type, frankly,  is rarely used in an interesting way and in my opinion usually serves as a narrative cop-out that robs the story of wonder.

Labyrinth never clarifies which type of world its portal universe is (or even gives it a proper name), and I want to make it clear that as I describe the story as being about dissociation, I’m not suggesting that Sarah’s adventure must be reduced entirely to a vivid dissociative episode. I think it’s entirely possible that the Goblin Kingdom is its own dimension, while still borne from and serving as a metaphor for dissociation. It could be a portal world that changes to suit the desires of humans that enter it (such as The Neverending Story’s Fantastica) or one that an outside entity tailors to the humans it wants to ensnare there (the carefully-baited trap of Coraline’s Other World.) It could even be that Sarah’s imagination and belief are powerful enough to bring a world into being, the way that Peter Pan’s fairies draw life from children’s belief in them and perish without it. But whatever the case, as I’ll explain, it’s clear that the goblin world is one built directly from the protagonist’s fantasies, interests, and desires.

When we meet Sarah, she’s grappling with a series of dramatic life changes. Her mother is gone for unspecified reasons, meaning she’s endured the trauma of death, divorce, or some other abandonment. Her father has remarried, and assuming that he and his new wife had baby Toby soon after (or even before), this is a fairly recent development. It’s no wonder, then, that Sarah has begun relying heavily on her special interests and the fantasies they bring her. As my therapist often reminds me, dissociation is not an inherently bad thing. It’s an evolutionary tool that allows our brain to create a sense of safety where there is none, so that we can continue to function under threat. But when our brain understands a change to our living situation as a threat– normal for teenagers and further intensified by a routine-loving autistic brain– the brain never gets a chance to escape the threat, and we get locked out of our bodies. By the start of the story, Sarah’s time spent escaping into fantasy has begun to interfere with mundane responsibilities like babysitting Toby, and her relationship with her stepmother is hampered by her struggle to understand social interaction outside of the narrative tropes she’s obsessed with.

After her conflict with her parents, Sarah retreats into her elaborately-decorated room, which is littered with objects foreshadowing elements of the goblin world. It’s from this bit of visual storytelling that we can gather just how much of the portal world uses Sarah’s special interests as a blueprint, from the M.C. Escher drawing replicated in a climactic set piece, to a Jareth-like figurine situated on her desk. By entering Jareth’s kingdom, Sarah fulfills her desire to take the place of the portal fantasy heroines she’s lived vicariously through; her process of collecting traveling companions mirrors Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard of Oz (featured prominently on Sarah’s bookshelf) and several shots of her falling through space mirror the imagery of Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole. Even the film’s structure as a musical is prescribed by her interest in musical theatre, evidenced by the Evita and CATS posters in her room.

Reading the portal world as directly patterned from her psyche also makes the adult Goblin King’s romantic interest in her more palatable. He is a construction of Sarah’s mind, and like many a 1980s teenager, she fantasizes about being swept away by the sensual-but-safely-unattainable David Bowie. He is not an independent being with his own will, but is merely following the instructions of his creator. In fact, Jareth admits as much during the final confrontation of the film— more on that later.

Unlike in many portal fantasies, Sarah’s journey has no clear threshold marking her entrance to the other world. There is no wardrobe door to open or rabbit hole to lean into. The camera closes in on her while she speaks to Jareth in her bedroom, and then with a simple pan, she and Jareth are in the wilderness overlooking the Goblin City. For a person to be able to notice the signs that they are beginning to dissociate, and willingly enter or reject that state, takes years of therapy. Sarah’s imperceptible shift into another world mirrors this lack of agency and awareness. Dissociation is not a linear journey, but a collapsing of time and space— a theme Labyrinth continuously plays with. Sarah moves above and below ground, backtracks and takes shortcuts through a geography both she and the audience find impossible to keep track of, all to a ticking clock that varies wildly in its relationship to onscreen time.

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Dissociation offers a mental escape from trauma and perceived danger, but it offers no solution for the bodies still stuck in their current time and place. While it’s not uncommon for dissociated people to spend long periods sitting still, staring into space, eventually that body has to be tended to and has to go through the basic motions of life. Several times in the story, Sarah is offered an opportunity real-life autistics don’t get: the choice to completely, permanently disappear into her portal world.

The first comes when Sarah takes a bite of the enchanted peach offered to her by Hoggle under Jareth’s orders. This brings on an intense hallucination leading to the iconic ballroom scene set to Bowie’s “As The World Falls Down.” It’s a fairytale romance sequence straight out of a young girl’s dreams of adulthood: an opulent ball where our heroine, dressed in an enormous, sparkly, breathtakingly-detailed gown, finds her bedazzled prince Jareth across the dancefloor and waltzes with him to the sound of a synthpop love song. Jareth’s goal in creating this fantasy-within-a-fantasy is to distract Sarah from her quest so that she will run out of time to save Toby. While throughout the movie he has tried to impede her and make the journey as difficult for her as possible, here his tactic is wish fulfillment. He creates a setting and story so luxurious and beautiful that nobody would want to leave it for the challenges of the labyrinth. He’s only thwarted by the dreamer’s growing discomfort with the dream– even in a hallucination, Sarah’s anxieties about maturity break through, and she subconsciously rejects the adult situation and romance he’s placed her in.

Sarah wakes from her enchantment to find herself in her bedroom. When she opens the door and discovers that this is actually a facsimile inside the junkyard outside the Goblin City, a goblin woman forces her back inside and proceeds to physically smother Sarah with her own childhood toys. This sequence is its own wish fulfillment fantasy, an illusion of the one place in the human world where she felt comfortable. If she stays here and accepts the illusion, she will presumably be able to spend the rest of her life in the comfort of her special interests, acting out the stories she loves so much without ever having to return to the mundanities and responsibilities of life outside her bedroom door. It is perhaps the life Sarah assumed she would gain when she asked Jareth to take away her brother, or the life she had before her mother’s disappearance. But just like a romanticized adulthood, this romanticized vision of childhood is incomplete, ill-fitting, and ultimately rejected.

The third and final temptation comes during her final confrontation with Jareth. Having failed to stop Sarah from reaching her goal, he now tries to stop her from leaving with Toby. He pivots from antagonist to seducer, reframing their relationship in a speech that reveals the most we ever learn about the “rules” of the portal world:

Everything that you wanted I have done. You asked that the child be taken. I took him. You cowered before me, I was frightening. I have reordered time. I have turned the world upside down, and I have done it all for you! I am exhausted from living up to your expectations.

Jareth hasn’t been working against Sarah, he’s been working for her, giving her the escape she desperately wanted and needed. Time after time, he has offered her heart’s desire: the chance to forever leave her unhappy home life behind, to sink into her fantasy and never resurface. He understands her more deeply than anyone else, because he is part of her, and just as the state of dissociation plays a protective role in the psyche, he has been trying to help her with her stressful home life in the only way he knows how. The Goblin King makes one last offer: “Just fear me. Love me. Do as I say, and I will be your slave.” Stop being pulled between your brain and body.

One wonders what would happen if Sarah had accepted this offer to rule as Jareth’s queen, or had accepted the fantasies proffered to her along the way. If we accept the goblin world as a physical location, it may have played out like the stage version of Peter Pan, in which the Darling children are gone for so much real-world time that their parents go into mourning. The Williamses would come home to find both of their children vanished, presumed dead, with no explanation to ever be found. If we consider the portal world as a purely psychological experience, the Williamses would come home to find their daughter a dissociated shell. The person they know as Sarah would be gone, and what was left of her would struggle to respond and converse, get locked into place for long periods, struggle to form memories, and over time might be replaced with another personality entirely.

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Watching Sarah confront the Goblin King, I saw myself staring in the face of my own history of dissociation. I found myself mourning the immense amount of time that dissociation has stolen from me, the way it has stolen me from my own body, and the way that all of this has been brought on by my autistic brain’s overwhelm and isolation. I have hated my autism and hated what it has caused me to miss out on. But like Jareth, neither my autism nor the dissociation associated with it were ever meant to be my adversaries. They are part of me as he is part of Sarah. What has come across throughout the film as an uncomfortable, predatory romantic subtext is perhaps a different kind of love entirely: the love of a body-mind for itself, as it tries to keep itself alive.

The White Bear Problem is the psychological principle that the more you try not to think of something, the more prone you are to thinking of it. Accepting and acknowledging the thought, however, allows it to pass. This is counterintuitive, as we typically think of acceptance as submission. We expect that accepting the thought will cause us to be even more bent to its power. But I’ve found this radical acceptance to be instrumental in my own life as I cope with my continuing dissociation. Recently, I found myself minorly dissociating during a service at my synagogue, a practice which is very important to me and that I wanted to be present for. I spent the first half of the service frustrated and disappointed in myself for succumbing, or else angry at my brain for taking away from my experience. But then, as we rose for silent prayer and I had a chance to be alone with my thoughts, a different strategy occurred to me.

Hi there, trauma, I thought to myself. My therapist has been coaching me on this type of self-talk, helping me develop the ability to name the parts of my psyche. I know you’ve been triggered by something in this synagogue, and I know you’re trying to protect me. I want you to know we’re safe right now, and I don’t need the help you’re offering. You can take a break. Thank you so much.

Soon after this conversation with myself, I was back in my body and able to fully experience the rest of the night. Rather than running, fighting, or blaming, it was the offering of love and acceptance that allowed me to break through. Sarah does the same thing to Jareth, the symbol of her dissociation, isolation, and autism.

Sarah’s acceptance of Jareth, and all that he symbolizes, does not come in accepting his offer and surrendering to unreality. Rather, it is in this moment that Sarah realizes that because Jareth is part of her, she has agency over him. Recognizing him for who and what he is, rather than running from him or fighting him as she has throughout the story, puts power over her own mind back into her hands. Sarah finally remembers the play line she’s been trying to recall for the entire movie: “You have no power over me!” And with that declaration, the spell is broken and Sarah finds herself in her room– for real, this time.

Many portal fantasies end with a sense of separation and loss. The Pevensie children can never regain the lives they lived in Narnia, and when they eventually return, everyone they once knew is dead. Wendy Darling grows up. In some cases, such as Spirited Away, the protagonist no longer even remembers their adventure. Labyrinth looks like it’s going to end on this note, with Sarah soberly accepting a disenchanted reality and approaching adulthood. If one reads fantasy as her special interest, it may even be heading towards the toxic message that autistic people must give up their “childish” tendencies and interests in order to function in the neurotypical world.

And then in the last minutes of the film, as Sarah is tearfully saying farewell to her friends from the labyrinth, she says to a disappearing Hoggle, “I don’t know why, but, every now and again in my life, for no reason at all, I need you– all of you.” Hoggle’s response is a simple, “Well, why didn’t you say so?” and immediately Sarah’s room bursts to life with goblins having a party.

For no reason at all is the phrase I find most striking here. Sarah doesn’t need to explain away or justify why she loves fairytales or musicals, why she has trouble associating with other kids, or why she sometimes needs the comfort of her own inner world. After a movie spent presenting the protagonist and her autistic traits as immaturities to be outgrown, and emphasizing the destructive effect that her autistic dissociation has had on her life, the text finally comes to give Sarah– all of her– the same acceptance she has learned to give herself. Finally, Sarah’s autism isn’t an affliction. It’s just another part of her that can help and hurt, that contains both the danger of the labyrinth and its wonder.

I still love escaping into fantasy. I probably always will. My creativity saved me as a kid, even as it consumed me. But I am not the powerless child I was then. I have a diagnosis, a therapist, a thriving support system of autistic adults I relate to. And I have the power to use my creativity not as an alternative to reality, but as a medium for engaging with it. I create art and work on plays with friends and colleagues. I read their writing, and they read mine. I send my work out to publications, to connect with a wide base of readers. When I want the power to speak without the mediation of a publisher, I write this blog. And, I still give myself the time to dream on my own when I need it– though I’ve found I don’t always need it as much, or for the same things. I am finding acceptance for myself, even the parts of my brain that scare or alienate me, and that acceptance opens a portal to a new possible way of being.

The Audre Lorde School of Owning Your Power

I named myself after my zodiac sign. My interest and belief in astrology has waxed and waned through my life, but even during my Evangelical upbringing, when interest in astrology was a one-way path to the Devil, I was deeply drawn to the image of Leo. A lion with a mane of fire like the corona of the sun. A regal wildcat ruled over by the fire that gives life to the entire solar system. What cosmic power to be associated with, just from a birthdate.

Throughout my life, I’ve been told I am a textbook Leo. Creative and theatrical, loyal and generous, self-centered, headstrong, and confident. That last trait has always given me some imposter syndrome: I’ve been told I project confidence, but I rarely feel it inside. I think people mistake my autistic frankness for a self-assuredness that, in actuality, continuously eludes me.

Here’s a secret: there’s one Leo trait I identify with most strongly of all, and it’s also the one I’m most ashamed of. It’s a cluster of ambition, attention-seeking, and self-importance. All these little lions nestle together to form, appropriately, (a) pride.

Of course, growing up in the Evangelical church, pride was the ultimate sin. Pride was what got Lucifer cast out of Heaven and what made sinners harden their hearts against salvation. The path to righteousness required that one understand their abject worthlessness and brokenness. During worship, I sang lines like “I’m so unworthy” and “there’s nothing good in me” and I internalized them. Pride was especially dangerous to me as someone who it was assumed would grow into a woman. The first sin had come from a woman challenging what she had been told and satisfying her desires. The assertive Eve had damned humanity, and the submissive Mary– a teenaged girl who yielded to God and allowed Him to use her body– had saved us. I was told that the greatest fulfillment a woman could experience, God’s ideal plan for my entire sex, was a quiet life of staying home, supporting a godly man, and teaching my children to be good Christians.

Yet, paradoxically, I was taught that I had a special, God-ordained destiny, and that Jesus was going to use me to transform the world. I was raised on stories of martyrs and missionaries and theologians, people whose names echoed through history as Great Men of God– and the rare exceptional Great Woman, whose presence in “male” spheres we would never unpack in any depth. Despite my church’s staunch belief that men and women had separate roles, I was exposed to these stories of adventure and accomplishment right alongside the boys, and my youth pastors preached about “godly leadership” to mixed congregations. I even took part in a summer leadership intensive with my youth group. Perhaps I was supposed to understand these leadership talks as preparation for running a Sunday School or a Single Women’s Ministry focused on helping nineteen-year-olds find husbands. The effect, however, was just confusion. I was nothing, I was worthless, my body carried damnation in it, and simultaneously, I was supposed to do something exceptional to show God’s love to the entire world. It was a lot to put on a twelve-year-old.

I don’t know if it’s indoctrination that’s still lodged in my system, or if it's early-2000s self-esteem “You Can Do Anything!” campaigns, or if it’s the sign I was born under, but from my earliest memories, I can identify a drive within me to do something and be something Great. I recall being eight years old, watching the Biography channel, and despairing at the possibility that nobody might remember me after I’m dead. And, for whatever the reason may be, I still carry this expectation with me. It’s what pushes me to work as hard as I do at my art, to spend hundreds of dollars on paid manuscript submissions and contests, to jump at any opportunity for an interview. I don’t know why, but I need people to know that I was here.

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The buzzword du jure in progressive circles at this moment– that is, the theoretical concept that’s being latched onto, tossed around flippantly, used as a panacea for all problems– is to criticize things as “individualistic”. Individualism is one of the fourteen principles of white supremacy culture, as articulated by anti-racist educator Tema Okun. It has a cyclical relationship with capitalism, both creating and being created by this system. As activists, we are increasingly encouraged to think of ourselves not as individuals, but as parts of an interdependent collective. We ought to put our individual needs, wants, and feelings aside for the good of the collective. We are made, as social animals, to live, learn, eat, work, and strive for justice together. As prison abolitionist mariame kaba writes, “Anything worthwhile is done with other people.”

I agree with this basic premise– in fact, I’ve written on this blog about the importance of developing interdependence and interrupting the isolation that capitalism both breeds and is fueled by. But I also deeply struggle with it, if I’m being honest. In Evangelicalism, I was supposed to submit all of my needs, wants, feelings, and in fact my entire sense of identity, to God. I was supposed to let God do what He wanted with my life, for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven– even if that meant trying to evangelize uncontacted peoples and being killed for my efforts, or living an extremely ascetic existence like Catholic saints, or quietly submitting to an abusive husband in the name of being a godly wife.

Jesus was the world-changing Movement I was part of, and I was supposed to give everything of myself to it. Some nights as a teen, I would lay awake imagining what it would feel like to be fully surrendered to God, free of any individual will or pride. I imagined my body becoming a robotic suit powered by the Holy Spirit, who would make all my decisions for me. My own consciousness would be a powerless, dissociated observer. This fantasy would summon feelings of terror, and then an immediate wave of shame for being terrified of what God wanted.

I can’t help feeling the same mixture of fear and shame at kaba’s words. Really, mariame, I want to ask, anything worthwhile is done with other people? I think a warm shower is one of the simple luxuries of life, well worth having– does that need to be done with other people? Haven’t you ever appreciated a solitary walk in nature, or gotten lost in journaling, or masturbated? Are those endeavors not worthwhile because they only involve the individual? If I take kaba’s words literally– which, to be fair, I don’t think she intended me to– I imagine a person with no sense of self, terrified to be alone. I imagine someone lost in The Movement as I was trying to lose myself in God.

The rejection of individual identity is even reflective in the way kaba writes her name. For much of her career, kaba refused to put her name on anything she’d written, and still refuses to be photographed. In eschewing capital letters in her name, she follows a tradition set by groundbreaking feminist author bell hooks, who wanted to direct focus to her ideas rather than herself as an individual. The message in kaba’s name, in hooks’ name, in adrienne maree brown’s name, is that the collective movement should take center stage over any single figurehead. Again, it’s a sentiment that I agree with, but not uncomplicatedly so.

I’m not the first to point out the fact that these activists’ attempts to deflect attention haven't worked. hooks, kaba, and brown are renowned writers who are known, studied, and quoted the world over. hooks’ words especially can be found on coffee mugs and tote bags at any progressive bookstore. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing. These brilliant women have changed countless lives with their work. They deserve to be celebrated. In the interview linked above, kaba explains how she came to start putting her name– even a lowercase one– on her work. The shift was prompted by a comment from a white colleague and friend:

I just think it’s funny how you’re willing to erase yourself from history when you’re always recapturing histories of all these black women in your multiple projects, and you’re always talking about how you had to find them in the archives, right? And you’re literally erasing yourself at the moment. Also, it’s interesting that the younger people are seeing you do that.

kaba came to realize that, well-intended as it may have been, in going unattributed she was doing exactly what structural racism had done to generations of Black women before. She was robbing generations of young people of a role model. It doesn’t escape my notice that the people most often shifting focus away from themselves in activist spaces are Black, often queer, women: people who already experience a startling lack of representation and recognition in both life and death. By and large, the people in need of the lesson of focusing on the collective are not the ones practicing it, and the people in need of individual recognition are the ones refusing it. This raises the question: for people who have been systemically devalued, who does it liberate for us to devalue ourselves?

*

Enter poet-activist Audre Lorde. On September 17th, I and a group of friends attended an author talk on the new Audre Lorde biography Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, by Dr. Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Dr. Gumbs, a small woman with an enormous smile, understands Lorde as a force of personality that transcends the bounds of a single lifetime. In her talk, she described the palpability of Lorde’s presence in both her life and that of previous Lorde biographer Dr. Alexis de Veaux. When Dr. de Veaux got distracted from her writing, Gumbs stated, the ghost of Audre Lorde would shake books off of de Veaux’s shelf in protest.

As a Black lesbian born to immigrant parents in the era of Jim Crow, Lorde lived in a world that profoundly and purposely disempowered her. Her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name recounts formative experiences of racism at school, in public spaces, and even in the lesbian bars where many white queer women found vital community. As she writes in The Cancer Journals: “Growing up Fat Black Female and almost blind in america requires so much surviving that you have to learn from it or die.” From this furnace, Lorde gifted the world revolutionary insights on feminist power.

Though the word was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, Lorde’s writings on the interaction between her oppressions as woman, a lesbian, a Black person, and a first-generation american (sic, Lorde’s capitalization of choice) are a clear and early articulation of intersectional theory. During the era of lesbian separatism, a movement which called on lesbians to divest themselves as much as possible from interaction with men, Lorde wrote about how her struggle was inescapably tied to the struggle of Black men, how she could not separate or choose between the parts of her identity, and on the necessity of solidarity and coalition-building. She profoundly understood the interconnectedness of all struggles for liberation.

Dr. Gumbs described how Lorde constantly corresponded with friends all over the world, seeking first-hand accounts of current events because she did not trust the american media’s spin. At the same time, she devoured these less-than-trustworthy newspapers late into the night, and called her friends before dawn to inform them on world events. In this practice, the biographer sees Lorde’s enormous capacity and desire for connection. And this connection extended to the more-than-human world as well. Gumbs called attention to Lorde’s deep-seated but often-forgotten environmentalism. As Lorde wrote, “Earth is a relationship.” Indeed, even as her body battled against breast cancer, Gumbs says that Lorde “came to see [this struggle] as connected to every other struggle in the world.”

Certainly, Lorde was devoted to the collective. But what struck me in Dr. Gumb’s talk was Lorde’s devotion to herself. Throughout her talk, Gumbs described her own work as a sacred effort to preserve Lorde’s life and legacy, and to transmit her transformational energy to the next generation. Towards the end, the author made a comment to the effect of, “Audre Lorde wanted people to be talking about her, and here we are.” In researching for this essay, I found the quote, featured in Survival is a Promise, where Lorde states this explicitly. A fourteen-year-old Lorde wrote in her diary: “I want to have the knowledge that when my life on Earth is done / that I have left something behind / for others to carry on.”

I see myself in the words of young Audre Lorde– my eight-year-old self watching the Biography channel, my fourteen-year-old self on the leadership retreat, my current twenty-six-year-old self submitting to every litmag I can find. Lorde, too, believed she had something uniquely powerful to share with the world. Audre Lorde found connection and collectivism in every aspect of her life, but she was also a person who believed in owning her personal power. The word “power” recurs in her writing over and over again: the power of emotion, the power of intuition, the power of anger. She wanted women to lay claim to these powers, and she started with herself. She made herself large and loud, so that her value could never be denied or dismissed again. She did not lose herself in the collective, but found herself there.

Audre Lorde is the source of another buzzword du jure, the concept of “self-care”. Self-care has been co-opted by the mainstream to sell facial masks and drape laser hair removal treatments in feminist language– certainly not what a Marxist like Lorde was advocating for. But I find this term also misunderstood on the left as well. I’ve heard the concept explained as “the maintenance you do on yourself so you can take care of others.” In this dehumanizing model, the individual is a mere tool that needs to be sharpened periodically in order to do its job. The only value of the tool is the job it can do for others, and there is no reason to maintain it unless it will be used. So every night you go to bed early, you had better be doing it so that you can wake up early for a protest. You give to yourself only so that others can take. Under this model, self-care becomes a site of guilt and shame– constantly wondering, have I done enough with and for others to deserve my warm shower and my solitary walk in nature? It is not unlike the guilt and shame of a sinner in the hand of an angry God.

I don’t think this is what Audre Lorde meant when she coined the term. Her writing does not bear the signs of the self-loathing this mindset creates. While Lorde was certainly intentional in her connections to others, there is a difference between intentional cultivation of community and endless striving to be giving “enough”. Lorde saw herself as part of the vast ecosystem of the universe, and the universe does not have to try to be interconnected. It simply is. Whether we try to or not, our lives are already interacting with every other life on the planet. Simply by existing, we are already in community. Our task– a task Lorde accomplished and stewarded in others– is simply to recognize it.

As Dr. Gumbs says, Lorde “committed to her survival by nurturing the survival of all Black women.” The love and strength she gave to others was not at the expense of herself. It was part of her self-care. She was not a mere battery who needed to be recharged in order to keep giving others light. She was a node of a vast mycelial network in which all parties exchanged resources. She received nurturance by giving it, and she gave love to others by cultivating love for herself.  She recognized others as extensions of herself, and loved and empowered them as an expression of self-love and self-empowerment.

*

When I named myself Leo, I was in a place of profound fear and powerlessness. I was transitioning against most of my family’s wishes, against my own fears of what it would mean for my relationships, under a rising tide of fascism. I was surrendering to a current thundering inside me for years, because I realized swimming against it would kill me. I chose my name as a talisman of strength. The mystical power of the zodiac, the life-giving radiance of the sun, the strength and confidence of a lion, were things I found lacking in my life, which I wanted to lay claim to. I still live in that fear and powerlessness a lot of the time.

As a transmasculine person, it’s somewhat dangerous for me to admit that I want to feel powerful. I fear that in doing so, I am validating transphobic stereotypes of transmasculine people as power-hungry gender traitors who, tired of being oppressed as women, decide to become oppressors themselves. Power, we are taught in progressive circles, is inherently corrosive, oppressive, and dangerous. And it is especially dangerous when attached to masculinity, which can only ever result in violent power over others.

Power-over is a false power, one based in the constant fear that someone stronger will come along and destroy you. I have no interest in it. I want the power of the sun, an uncontainable brightness that fuels all of life on Earth. I don’t want power that destroys, but power that is generative. What I desire to embody of lion-ness is not the status of apex predator, but that elusive self-possession: a comfort in myself that radiates outward and inspires the same confidence in others.

The facilitator for the book talk, an older gentleman with round glasses and a head of grey locs, began the night with a question: who here had learned something from Audre Lorde about being in their power? A flurry of hands, mine included, rose. When Dr. Gumbs began speaking about her work, her eyes sparkled. I felt a confidence and self-love wafting off of her that I knew Lorde had helped her to develop. I saw that same light within many faces in the audience. That solar power, lion power, that I want to possess, is what Audre Lorde has and inspires. It’s the power that continues to rattle through history and shake books off of shelves. It's the power I believe she wants for everyone.

Audre Lorde was a first-gen Black disabled lesbian. She learned to love and care for herself, to trust in her own wisdom, in a world dead-set on withholding her basic human dignity. She learned to see a possible future for herself far greater than the meager reality of oppression she had been given. In doing so, she opened the capacity to extend that love and power to others. In her refusal to make herself small and lesser, thousands of others have begun to unlearn the dehumanizing lies that systemic oppression tells us about ourselves. We would have lost all of that if Lorde had been afraid of her own ego. In elevating this individual, remembering her by name rather than erasing her, the collective prospers.

I am an autistic Jewish trans lesbian. I have, throughout my life, been made to feel less than human for all these reasons. And on my worst days, I believe it’s true. On my darkest days, I believe the best thing I can do for the world is stop taking up space, stop making noise, shrink myself back into the quiet Christian wife I was raised to be. And increasingly, those beliefs come to me in the voices of activists I follow, demanding I surrender my identity and ambition to the greater cause.

But if I truly believe that every human being, every individual life, is precious and valuable, I simply can’t do that. Living my life proudly may unlock the doors to other people’s lives in the way that disappearing never could. When I claim my power– a power based in love and generosity towards myself, rather than a fear of dominate-or-be-dominated– then by virtue of existing in the universal ecosystem, that power radiates to others. I believe that Audre Lorde’s spirit is teaching me not to be afraid of my ambition, my power, my pride. I believe she is teaching me not to be afraid of myself.

“I am

the sun and moon and forever hungry

the sharpened edge

where day and night shall meet

and not be

one.

from “From the House of Yemanjá,”

― Audre Lorde,The Black Unicorn: Poems

My Body Requires No Explanation: Transmedicalism, Extinction Phobia, and Bodily Autonomy

If you are trans, you are afraid. It’s entirely uncontroversial to state this. The transphobic right wing is rising in power, most noticeably in the US and UK, threatening every aspect of trans life from the ability for trans children to use their preferred names and pronouns at school, to the ability to update legal gender markers. In June, when the Supreme Court ruled in United States v. Skrmetti that gender affirming care (GAC) bans do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, I felt it in my body as if I’d been physically attacked. After all, it was an attack on something as essential to my survival as food or water.

With the existential threat of transphobia surrounding us each day, I’ve been thinking a lot about the term “extinction phobia”. Originally coined by Lynne Stahl, I first encountered the term in C. Heike Schotten’s Trans Studies Quarterly article “TERFism, Zionism, and Right-Wing Annihilationism: Toward an Internationalist Genealogy of Extinction Phobia.” Extinction phobias, to quote Schotten, “are existential beleaguerment narratives that cast political opponents as threats to survival…” In the article, Schotten identifies both TERFism and Zionism as beliefs based in extinction phobia, and locates the origins of the former ideology within the latter, as expressed by Zionist lesbian feminists. Schotten looks at figures like Andrea Dworkin, who called for an establishment of a separatist (cis) women’s homeland in parallel to the Zionist separatist homeland, to demonstrate this lineage.

While I disagree with many of the conclusions Schotten comes to, I’ve been lingering on extinction phobia as the origin of most, if not all, extremist positions– that is, ideologies which rely on binarism, that reject nuance, that split the world into Us and Them. The fear of death is what propels the most basic and intense psychological and physiological responses in the human body, and so it’s no surprise that it fuels some of the most meteorically powerful and destructive ideologies in the world.

Extinction phobias are often but not always founded in traumatic experiences, which is why the ideologies Schotten focuses on originate within historically marginalized communities– women/lesbians in the former case and Jews in the latter. I’ll be setting aside discussion of Judaism for the remainder of this essay, as I want to focus on trans issues, but it’s sufficient to say that we Jews certainly have both lived and ancestral experience on which to base a fear of extinction.

The TERF has a well-founded fear of men (which she generalizes to mean all people with penises) as annihilators of women– physically, psychologically, spiritually, and politically– due to centuries of misogynistic violence and abuse, and patriarchal religious and political suppression. Having been traumatized by patriarchy and misogynistic violence, she believes that she must destroy or be destroyed. Trans women, in her view, are simply another group of men attempting to brutalize her (as well as appropriate and thus eliminate the concept of womanhood), while trans men are traitorous women who have allied themselves with patriarchy and surgically destroy their own womanhood. Ultimately, of course, in her manic quest to eliminate everyone and everything that could pose a threat to women, the TERF’s definition of “non-threat” becomes narrower and narrower. We’ve seen this clearly in the evolution of everyone’s favorite disgraced children’s author. As she has spiraled into mold-induced paranoia, the subjects of her wrath have shifted from trans women to all trans people to cis women of color to cis LGBQIA people, her world becoming smaller and smaller until everybody but her fellow TERFs is an enemy— and maybe not even them.

It’s been noted both by Schotten and others that TERFism, even as demonstrated by otherwise left-leaning figures like Dworkin, ultimately reinforces narrow sexist and gender essentialist narratives about gender. As I face down the well-founded fear of extinction every day, I’m prompted to wonder if extinction phobia is having the same corrosive effect on trans people. In the midst of political opponents who do concretely pose a threat to our survival, it stands to reason to me that if patriarchal trauma can give birth to the ultimately reactionary ideology of TERFism, then the same thing can happen to us.

I want to note before continuing that there is a practical difference between the power wielded by TERFs, and the power wielded by trans people I believe to be proffering extinction phobia-based beliefs. In the UK especially, TERF political organizations like For Women Scotland and A Woman’s Place UK have been major players in the stripping away of legislative rights for trans people. The strains of thought within the trans community that I’ve identified as harmful, while they do negatively impact people’s lives, do not have the same concrete influence and I am not attempting to conflate them. Rather, I write this as a call for self-examination on how we replicate the forces that oppress us, and course-correct away from those tendencies. I write this as an opportunity for us to re-focus on the things that will make our movement successful and help us all, collectively, to survive.

*

I see the roots of extinction phobia extremism playing out most clearly in transmedicalist ideology. Transmedicalists hold that transness is a medical issue with a biological origin, defined by body dysphoria and “solveable” through GAC– and, more importantly, that any deviation from this definition makes one not genuinely transgender. Militant transmedicalism has waxed and waned throughout the history of the trans movement, and is currently undergoing a resurgence. It’s no coincidence, and perhaps no surprise, that this resurgence is occurring at a time of unprecedented attacks on GAC.

Those of us who need GAC to survive are scared for our lives, and to many, it may seem that those who reject the medical model, or who emphasize gender euphoria over gender dysphoria, aren’t taking that threat seriously enough. While I reject the transmedicalist movement’s conclusions, I understand and sympathize with their concern; I sometimes find myself wondering, if the cis find out that you don’t need to medically transition to be trans, will they simply hijack that slogan to justify GAC bans? In the recent Baffler article “Reject Transgender Liberalism”, historian Jules Gill-Peterson argues that exactly this led to the downfall United States v Skrmetti:

Justice Roberts cleverly adopts the liberal definition of “transgender” as describing people for whom “their gender identity does not align with their sex,” and relies on the liberal truism that only “some transgender individuals suffer from gender dysphoria” to uphold Tennessee’s right to restrict medical care without it technically discriminating against all transgender people. Justice Barrett’s concurrence goes even further, citing the extremely broad “umbrella” definitions of being transgender used by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and the American Psychological Association as evidence that transgender people are not discrete enough to be a suspect class that has faced discrimination. These adoptions of liberal definitions, which stress the sovereignty of personal identity over social reality, and which the court pins on expert organizations, made the plaintiffs’ case vulnerable.

According to Gill-Peterson, it was the ideas of the non-medicalist wings of the trans community themselves which led to such a massive blow to trans rights. Jules Gill-Peterson’s perspective on transness, as expressed elsewhere in her writing, can broadly be understood as transmedicalist. Throughout her work, she bemoans the shift in trans politics and identity from centering around medical procedures to expansive, non-bioessentialist expressions of gender identity. In “The Un-importance of Wearing Clothes,” Gill-Peterson goes as far as to rewrite trans history in order to further this point:

Indeed, “transgender” was a term invented by crossdressers to conserve their wealth and legal rights by shrinking transition down to the scale of the private individual’s “lifestyle.”...Over time, the crossdresser’s middle-class philosophy has become the dominant current of US queer and transgender culture, which strategically draped itself in the language of 1970s radicalism to certify its good political taste.

While I’m not a historian, I am very much a student of queer history, and am particularly well-read on the era Gill-Peterson is discussing in which the term “transgender” became common queer parlance. It is well-documented that one of the fiercest proponents of this terminology, who is largely responsible for its broad usage today, was activist Leslie Feinberg.

Feinberg, a devoted Communist who spent much of hir life in blue-collar factory labor, struggling to access healthcare, is about as far as one can get from the middle-class liberals Gill-Peterson credits with coining the term. Zie, as well as frequent collaborators like Kate Bornstein, promoted “transgender” as an alternative to the then-popular dichotomy between "transsexuals" and “transvestites”. While “TS/TV” created divisions and hierarchies within the community based on who desired and had access to medical procedures, “transgender” was intended as a broader identity encompassing the vast range of transgressive gender expressions. In Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, and Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue, as well as Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, the expansiveness of “transgender” is highlighted as a tool with which to build broad coalitions.

For Gill-Peterson to so boldly defy documented trans history without any citation gives me considerable pause. While I want to trust her expertise as an academic, I can’t help but suspect that she is purposefully misrepresenting activists like Feinberg in order to discredit them and present her own position as the more radical and “correct” one. Transmedicalists like Gill-Peterson feel the threat of annihilation emanating not just from the cis establishment, but from their own community, who they feel are minimizing the necessity of what is, for them, a life-saving resource.

Of course, misdirected trauma is not the only element at play in the rise of transmedicalism. It is also a movement borne of respectability politics, the reflex within the oppressed to seek approval from the dominant group by proving themselves as “one of the good ones”, worthy of protection, while “those people” are not. While we most often associate respectability politics with minority Republicans like Candace Owens or establishment Democrats like Pete Buttigieg, its influence can still crop up in otherwise-leftist individuals, whenever they give into the instinct to validate their identities by delegitimizing the identities of others. Transmedicalists attempt to police other trans people into being the “right kind” of woman or man: namely, a woman or man indistinguishable from a cishet person (nonbinary identities are verboten in these circles.)

Throughout the 2010s, YouTuber Kalvin Garrah made a career out of publicly shaming other transmasculine people for not looking, dressing, or behaving masculinely enough, and for not demonstrating “enough” dysphoria. In 2018, Garrah made a video attacking fellow YouTuber Brennan Beckwith for all of these supposed crimes. Garrah picked apart not only Beckwith’s testimonials of his own experience as a trans person, but his personal character, fashion sense, and weight. Like Gill-Peterson blames trans people for the downfall of Skrmetti, Garrah claimed that “trans trenders” like Beckwith were “the reason Republicans fucking hate us.” Galvanized by this, Garrah’s fanbase flocked to Beckwith’s social media profiles with death threats and suggestions that Beckwith starve and kill himself. Beckwith is only one of many trans men to whom Garrah and his fans caused immense psychological harm.

While lacking a recognizable figurehead like Garrah, over in the transfeminine corners of the internet, many heterosexual, passing, traditionally-feminine trans women still use the language of Ray Blanchard’s discredited typology of transsexualism to distinguish themselves from “autogynephiles”, “transvestites”, and “crossies”— that is, trans women who have not medically transitioned, do not pass, and/or are attracted to other women. For the purpose of transparency, and since I criticized Gill-Peterson for not citing sources, I want to note that when I encounter people expressing these views, I block them, and I’m not interested in poisoning my social media algorithm by hunting down examples at this time.

From Garrah’s insistence that “real” men reject all femininity, to Blanchard’s implication that attraction to men is an essential part of “legitimate” female identity, it’s clear that transmedicalist spaces routinely rely on heteropatriarchal definitions of what makes someone a man or woman. Thus, however radical a transmedicalist’s views on economics or foreign affairs may be, they reinforce a conservative worldview regarding gender. And, because gender-affirming care is expensive and Western gender norms are constructed within the confines of racist and fatphobic notions of the “ideal” white body, these spaces are rife not only with misogyny and homophobia, but with classism, white supremacy, and fatphobia. To the transmedicalist, the problem is not that society controls people’s bodies and lives through assigning and reinforcing the gender/sex binary; it’s simply that they had the wrong side forced onto them.

*

With all this discussion of how transmedicalism reinforces heteropatriarchy, I think it’s important to acknowledge the ways in which medical transition, and transness in general, is demonized within certain progressive circles– and how these circles fall into the same ideological pitfalls as transmedicalism. All of these ideologies traffic in extinction phobia to one degree or another.

For what Schotten identifies as the “Marxist- or socialist-minded TERF”, the idea of gender identity simply reinforces gender roles, by assuming that anyone who deviates from the norms assigned to their sex must not “really” belong to it; they believe that “trans ideology” wants to force masculine women into becoming men and feminine men into becoming women rather than face the reality of gender-nonconformity.

This viewpoint is typified by leftist detransition influencer Bebe Montoya, who formerly identified as nonbinary and now views nonbinary identity as (to paraphrase, as again, I have blocked her) the creation of a third box to force people into if they cannot sufficiently perform one role or the other. Marxist TERFs like Montoya prop up sex-based (bioessentialist) definitions of “man” and “woman” as a more inclusive alternative to gender identity. Since no amount of gender labels will ever perfectly encapsulate the range of human existence, Montoya argues, we should define people by something concrete that impacts their daily lives: their genitals. If we could simply accept that there are many ways to be a woman/man, or if we rejected the construct of gender entirely, there would be no trans identity.

Trans anti-medicalists, on the other hand, oppose bioessentialism and conceive trans people who medically transition as complicit in perpetuating it. By seeking to surgically change our bodies, they argue, we are reinforcing the idea that gender is reducible to a body type: a trans man seeks out a penis because he believes that a penis is what makes somebody a man, and vice versa for trans women. We contort our bodies to conform them to regressive notions of what a “male” or “female” body is. To the anti-medicalist, we are tools of the state’s and medical-industrial complex’s hunger to control gender. If we could simply transcend the idea that biology has any relationship to gender or identity, there would be no need for gender-affirming care.

Both of these viewpoints position trans people, or at the very least those who transition medically, as regressive. They paint us as instruments of our own, and everyone else’s, oppression. They ignore the lived experience of those of us with body dysphoria, and don’t account for our ideological complexities.

Here is my lived experience: I know very well that there are butch women in this world, and that they deserve to be recognized and respected as women. I’m just not one of them. My existence does nothing to infringe on theirs, because I am not interested in replicating coercive systems. On the other hand, I want to someday get a hysterectomy, but my desire has nothing to do with any belief that a uterus equals womanhood. Many trans men keep their uteruses, and many even carry children, and I can respect their choices without taking them as a prescription for my own relationship with my body.

I have modified my body in the ways I have, because I personally needed to. I can’t logically explain why having breasts felt like a foreign object growing on my body, or why, after removing them, a debilitating buzz in my mind was finally silenced. I have no theoretical basis for why my brain operates optimally and my body feels like mine at a higher level of testosterone. These biological needs of mine simply exist. They cannot be reasoned or theorized away, and I know that because I’ve tried. My trans body simply exists, and I no longer feel a need to confine my gender or its vessel with a definition.

*

The trans anti-medicalists, the Marxist TERFS, and the transmedicalists all demonstrate some degree of extinction phobia, because all of them position themselves as the “radical” antidote to systems of oppression bent on annihilating us. The implication of each is that if trans and gender-nonconforming people could simply get with the program and choose the “correct” identity in the “correct” body, we could free ourselves from the forces plotting our destruction. And, if we’re not able to alter our identities to suit this “better, more radical” alternative, then we are complicit in the extinction awaiting our communities.

But why should “correctness” be the goal? I, for one, do not identify as nonbinary in some attempt to one-up people with binary identities; I simply am nonbinary, and I embraced this identity because I needed to in order to survive. Even if my identity were somehow regressive, declaring it regressive would not change my internal sense of self, and I hardly see how forcing myself into a role that isn’t authentic could possibly be liberatory. I am not interested in winning some hypothetical competition for the most radical, most queer form of existence. I simply want to be my authentic self and build a liveable life for that person. 

The point of activism is supposed to be to make life more enjoyable, not to create an endless gauntlet of rules in which nobody is ever good enough. We as queer people, and leftists in general, would save a lot of valuable time and energy if the people constantly starting discourses about who is “most radical” were honest about the real purpose of those discourses: to quiet their own fears that who they are is not enough, and that they are responsible for and deserving of their suffering.

If only it were that simple! If ending oppression were a matter of picking out the “bad eggs” of our communities and reforming or excising them, we probably would have accomplished it by now. But not only is this an impossible task due to the flawed nature of every human being, it’s ultimately a pointless one that ignores the real roots of our problem. The antidote to threats of extinction is not the elimination of anyone and anything we perceive as part of that threat. Rather, it is the expansive recognition of everyone and everything that could potentially play a role in our freedom.

Which brings me back to a point from earlier in this essay: the dissonance between us members of the trans community who need gender affirming care, and those who don’t. I’ll be honest, I can’t imagine being trans without body dysphoria. I don’t even know how I would have discovered my transness without it. But just as my body requires no explanation, neither does yours. If you are reading this and have no desire to medically transition, have no gender dysphoria, but know that you are trans, you are part of my community. Not only will I respect and affirm your identity, but I will fight for it. Both of us are comrades in the same fight: the battle for bodily autonomy. And every body gets freed together.

*

In the chapter “Racism, Birth Control, and Reproductive Rights” from Women, Race, and Class, Angela Y. Davis discusses resistance to the pro-choice movement among Black women. Women of color, particularly Black and Indigenous women, have endured generations of forced sterilization, child-stealing by slavers and colonizers, and other genocidal acts designed to prevent the survival of families and kinship networks. Enslaved Black women induced abortions and even practiced infanticide to spare their children from the horror of slavery, and Black and Latina women continue to seek abortions at far higher rates than white women, to this day. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the rise of birth control and abortion access as central feminist issues created a dissonance between Black and white feminists. White feminists touted these treatments as “stepping stone[s] toward freedom”, while many Black women, Davis writes, viewed theirs as acts of desperation forced upon them by the oppressive system.

As Davis says, “the campaign often failed to provide a voice for women who wanted the right to legal abortions while deploring the social conditions that prohibited them from bearing more children.” In many ways, Black women had been struggling for the right to bear and raise healthy, prospering children. They felt threatened and unheard by a “liberation” movement that seemed at best indifferent to that struggle. Moreover, the abortion rights movement carried its own white supremacist and eugenicist history, typified by figures like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. All of this being the case, Black women had good reason to be suspicious of abortion rights activism.

Davis’ writing called for the abortion rights movement to honestly grapple with the concerns of women of color, as well as white supremacy within its own ranks. She emphasized that the strength of a diverse reproductive rights movement depended on recognizing forced sterilization as an injustice just as horrific as forced pregnancy, and advocating for broad bodily autonomy rather than a simple rejection of motherhood.

The idea that the reproductive rights movement is anti-child persists, and it’s one reason why the anti-choice movement has become such a powerful force. While the image of abortion activists as “baby killers” is frequently a straw man or a smokescreen for conservative politicians who don’t care about children once they’ve been born, I have first-hand experience with people who genuinely believe that this is what we promote. I spent the summer of 2022 canvassing for Planned Parenthood, encouraging constituents to vote for politicians who would support the Pro Act. When women opened the door, visibly pregnant or holding a small child, it was astounding how frequently and how quickly reading the logo on my shirt filled them with visible fear. They held their children tighter or tucked them away, or placed a protective hand on their stomachs, as if I had shown up to personally drag their baby away and bash its head against a rock. These women really believed that I hated infants on principle, and while it’s a myth without factual basis, it’s one that understandably holds great emotional power over people.

I explained, over and over again, that Planned Parenthood, and the movement in general, have no interest in forcing people who don’t want abortions into having them; we simply want the option available to those who want or need it. While I have no way of knowing how these women voted in the end, I watched many of them physically relax and reconsider over the course of our conversation, and these encounters often ended on positive notes.

In recent years, there has been a shift of rhetoric within the movement from “abortion rights” or even “pro-choice” to “reproductive rights” and “bodily autonomy”. More reproductive rights advocates have joined Davis’ condemnation of forced sterilization and family separation, and many of the same people who decried the fall of Roe V Wade have rallied around protecting IVF. While naming and therefore de-stigmatizing abortion as a right is important, I think widening the tent of bodily autonomy and demonstrating the interconnectedness of these issues is a crucial step in building this movement. We need people who would never have an abortion, who even believe abortion is morally wrong, to understand that their freedom to choose a pregnancy is contingent upon other people’s freedom to end one.

I think of Davis’ work to bring forced sterilization into the reproductive rights conversation as parallel to Feinberg’s work of uniting transitioning and non-transitioning trans people. Both built a wide tent of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy that encompasses people with vastly varying needs and concerns. Nobody should be coerced into changing their body, and nobody should be forced to live in a body that feels foreign or threatening. This seems so simple when put in writing, but the rigid binaries that we are conditioned to think within can make it difficult to truly believe. And in times of danger and oppression, we want to retreat to the safety of extremes. We want to protect ourselves with high walls and narrow gates. But if our movement is to survive, we need to practice mental flexibility and the holding of multiple truths. In the face of extinction, we must spread our tent of protection wide.

My comrades who have no need for gender affirming care: I need you to fight for it as if you did, and to honor the alchemy that those of us who transition perform on our bodies. My comrades who have transitioned: we need to honor the gift of those who do not, because their existence testifies that transness cannot be legislated away. We need to say these things out loud, in the same breath, and not let them be separated. Because they aren’t separate. As Leslie Feinberg, whose memory blesses me daily, wrote: my right to be me is tied to your right to be you by a thousand strings.

After No Kings: A Conflicted Response (Part 2)

For Part 1, see my previous post.

The program ended soon after Guante finished, or at least it felt like it. People had already started leaving in droves while the speeches were going, but considering the ongoing manhunt, I couldn’t blame them. Past protests had often been followed up by radicals splitting off to light fireworks and sparklers, lead more aggressive chants, or organize future civil disobedience. I dragged my feet on the way to the bus stop, hoping to encounter a group like this, but found mostly clumps of families taking group photos with their signs, or phone cameras being indiscriminately waved to capture the crowd, which I had to duck to keep my face out of. About a block from the Capitol, I ran into a friend distributing literature for Socialist Alternative. I asked if they were aware of any other actions happening that day, but they hadn’t heard of any. It was humid,  we had marched through lunchtime, my phone was nearly dead, and I had an hour-long bus ride to look forward to. My new friends had left early, and I was beginning to think that the protest had accomplished nothing but getting me very sweaty.

I gained a new perspective, however, as I caught up with social media on my ride home. Images flowed in from city after city of seas of people who had shown up. 200,000 in LA. 50,000 in NYC. 10,000 in Dallas. Even towns embedded in deeply red states brought small but proud contingents to an estimated 5 million total protesters. This, compared to Trump’s reported 250,000 spectators– a number which, being supplied by the egotist himself, is likely inflated. A relative posted that, “for the first time in a long time,” she felt a sense of hope about the country. I felt a glimmer of it, too.

There is an efficacy to peaceful protests. Their uses are different from, and cannot be a replacement for, the uses of direct action. On Tuesday, my neighbors had actively prevented ICE from doing their job of disappearing vulnerable people without due process. On Saturday, we had created a visual representation of just where the will of the people lay, and that is vital to morale. If an undocumented person hiding in their home saw these enormous crowds on TV and felt less alone in their fear, felt reassured that there really are people on their side, dayenu. If the child of conservatives saw these protests and was emboldened for the first time to speak against how they were raised, dayenu. If a political apathetic wondered what all the fuss was about and finally began to ask questions, dayenu. Hope, joy, consolation and inspiration are as essential to life as food and water, and they are certainly scarce these days. This is the “feeling good” that I will always be in support of. Anger, fear, and grief can propel us for a time, but they are not a sustaining, renewing force. It is the right kind of “feeling good” that allows us to keep living through and fighting against the horrors.

A second use of peaceful protest is that it serves as an entry point into further action. Peaceful protests are where activists link up, form connection and community through shared experience, and get plugged in. The presence of DSA, FRSO, and Socialist Alternative at the march gave me hope that this goal had been achieved. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from leftist micropolitics, it’s that there is certainly drama and discourse surrounding some or all of the organizations I’ve named, and I am not well-informed enough to weigh in on it here. What’s relevant to me is how many Americans, particularly of the older crowd, are terrified of the word “socialism”. It’s possible that this rally was their first encounter with socialists outside of propaganda. For people invested in the mythology of America and capitalism, seeing radical politics represented alongside causes they already support could be an important inroad.

In this way, the political hodgepodge that I recognized at the march was a double-edged sword, and it reflects a larger tension currently facing the left. I have been wrestling for the past several months with June Jordan’s statement in On Call: Political Essays, that “only evil will collaborate with evil,” and how it coexists with the necessity of coalition building. On the one hand, the presence of Gadsden flags, anarchist flags, and American flags side by side betrayed the fact that the march stood for very little besides a shared opposition to Trump. And because there was no unifying political vision, no demands could be made, no goals could be set, and no strong statements could be made. It fell very much in line with the Democratic Party’s strategy of trying to play both sides. A major criticism of Kamala Harris’ campaign was its insistent attempts to court centrists and Never-Trump Conservatives, going as far as to partner with Liz Cheney and sing the praises of the U.S. military. This alienated leftists, who felt insulted that the Democratic Party was, to put it crassly, serving them shit and expecting them to eat it out of desperation. Leftists predicted that wealthy liberals and centrists left to their ignorant bliss would get Harris elected and then disappear to brunch for the next four years, leaving any systemic change completely unaddressed.

On the other hand, numbers matter. A conservative at an anti-Trump rally is one less conservative hanging on the dictator’s words. I don’t generally believe in expending much energy trying to move federal-level conservatives/centrists/liberals left, but that kind of political shift happens on the level of ordinary citizens every day. I should know, having grown up conservative. And it would happen a whole lot more if leftists didn’t belittle people for not being theory experts, lash out at good-faith questions, or excommunicate individuals and entire organizations for not meeting a standard of perfection.

As novelist Sarah Thankam Mathews writes in the thot pudding article “every day is all there is,” the way political spaces make people feel matters a whole lot in determining whether people will join them. Conservatives continue to be a vast and united force because their spaces make people feel smart and virtuous and important. Leftists, meanwhile, struggle to recruit because not only is our rhetoric inaccessible to anyone who hasn’t taken a college-level course on Marxist theory, but— like the droves of leftists who sat out the presidential election entirely, and like so many organizations absent from the No Kings rally— many will simply refuse to show up and be associated with the politically “impure”. The same woman who warned against collaborating with evil also preached against creating narrow definitions of who is “evil” and who is not.

In an Instagram reel responding to Saturday’s protests, trauma educator Jemarc Axinto asked a simple and pointed question to leftists who painted the No Kings rallies as pointless: where were you? What were you doing to confront the rolling of Trump’s tanks? I asked the same thing as I lingered at the rally, waiting for leftists to offer me something, anything. If the liberal impulse is towards ineffectual performance art, then a common radical leftist impulse is towards doing nothing out of fear of imperfection— and then complaining that nobody is doing anything. But this doesn’t always have to be the case. The organizers of Minneapolis People’s Pride and the Taking Back Pride march don’t just post critiques of the corporatization of Pride; they organize workable alternatives that make people want to keep being in community with them. But in instances when leftists complain from the stands while refusing to offer a practical alternative, what right do they have to shame the people who actually stepped into the arena?

—

Another sign that the protests mattered is, bitterly, the violence that conservatives met them with. The assassinations/attempted assassinations in my city are the most obvious examples. At Nashville’s rally, Elijah Millar, a young man reportedly fascinated with Nazis, was arrested for brandishing a gun at protesters. In Northern Virginia, an SUV intentionally drove into the crowd. I have seen at least one Minneapolis activist theorize that Boelter’s killings were a false flag operation coordinated by the police, and while that certainly aligns cover-ups the police have perpetrated in the past, there is as of now no actual evidence to substantiate it. I find it irresponsible to disseminate unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, because, while theories like this exist because of well-founded distrust of police, they also exist because people don’t want certain events to have actually happened. Accepting false flag narratives apropos of nothing but vibes creates a situation in which anything that fits the speaker’s preferred narrative is real, and anything the speaker doesn’t want to acknowledge the implications of is a hoax. To me, the implications of this violence are clear. Trump supporters did not dismiss a mass demonstration of opposition to their leader. They met it with armed force, and that indicates that they felt threatened.

Of course, it would be remiss of me to mention violence in connection to the No Kings protests, or false media narratives, and not bring up the killing of Arthur Folasa Ah Loo in Salt Lake City. He is the exact sort of person that warrants a “Say His Name” chant. The story I read on my ride home, distributed by several news outlets, had been that Arturo Gamboa had been seen aiming his rifle into the crowd, and that a “peacekeeper” had fired at him in an attempt to prevent a mass shooting, accidentally striking Ah Loo in the process. But reports from the ground, as valiantly collected by Marisa Kabas and Bryan Schott of The Handbasket, tell a radically different story:

[Video] clearly shows Arturo in full black dress casually walking towards the protest with his rifle pointed down towards the ground and one hand on the barrel,” a friend of Gamboa, whose name isn’t being shared to ensure his safety, said after watching the video many times over. “The security team approach him from the side and rear, almost across the street, with weapons out.”

He continued: “You can hear in the audio that they fire on Arturo, at which point he leans forward, which causes the rifle and his hand to come up, but not in a ready position, in a fleeing position. The security team continues to fire twice more, and Arturo runs away as the video ends.”

It was this sudden repositioning in response to the volunteer shooting his gun that may have made it appear as though Gamboa was aiming his weapon at the crowd. But no video shared so far bears out that version.

The referenced footage has since been picked up by mainstream sources such as NBC. Gamboa, the son of Venezuelan immigrants, is described in the Handbasket article as a punk musician and a regular attender of left-wing protests, a man quoted describing America as “a steam train that’s always been fueled by Black and brown bodies and by the emotional, physical, and spiritual pain of poor people.” He was at the protest in support of its aims, not as a violent infiltrator, and his rifle– on display in an open-carry state, I should add– was part of that support. The safety volunteer, a military veteran who Utah 50501 stated they enlisted because of his military experience, took the presence of a militant Latino protester as a threat, retaliated without asking questions, and in the process killed an unarmed Samoan man. Now Gamboa is taking the fall for a tragedy created by 50501’s insistence that violence be the sole prerogative of the authorities.

There is much to be said about the shooting, which deserves an essay of its own and which I cannot attempt to do justice here. My primary conclusions are twofold: first, this situation is a perfect illustration of one of many reasons why so many activists are adamant to never collaborate with the police or military. When organizers cooperate with these institutions, they automatically render their spaces unsafe for Black and brown attendants. It’s no wonder, then, that in a place as diverse as the Twin Cities, the turnout for No Kings was overwhelmingly white: 50501 had already made it clear that people of color would not be prioritized and therefore were not fully welcome.

Second, 50501’s complete mishandling of the situation and refusal to take any responsibility for their role in Ah Loo’s death validates the accusations that these organizers are not for the people. When push came to horrifying shove, they protected the image of military “peacekeepers” and laid blame on a protester who kept his gun to the ground and never fired a shot. Framing Gamboa as to blame for their own volunteer’s misreading of the situation creates a narrative that militancy is suspect and pacifism is the only valid mode of resistance.

So I want to make it clear that any optimism and positivity I’ve expressed towards the No Kings rally is not because of, but in spite of, its organizers. I don’t trust these organizers as far as I can throw any of them. And their investment in framing police-sanctioned gatherings as the only acceptable channel for opposition flies in the face of my hope for this rally: that it would be many people’s first step towards more. I’m not saying that everybody needs to chain themselves to trees or light cars on fire in order to make a difference— I certainly have not lived up to that standard myself. But we need more than brunch, and 50501 seem entirely opposed to that.

What I am left with is a hope that a protest can be more than its organizers (like the LA No Kings protest, where, despite 50501’s best efforts, rocks and bottles were reportedly launched at cops.) That it is not the people at the highest levels of politics that make the earth move, but the people on the ground. That no matter how much those in power try to control us, people remain autonomous. This includes people whose ideology I abhor, but who still often find themselves stumbling into mutual aid and direct action. My hope is in the seeds sown by people like Guante, and his message that a march is a first step, not a destination.

My hope, my disappointment, my conflict, is that this march was not enough, but it was also not nothing. Whatever good feeling— hope, joy, consolation, inspiration— we created that day, it is now everybody’s task, whether they were on the ground that day or not, to ensure that those feelings are not in vain.

May the memory of Arthur Folasa Ah Loo be for a blessing.

After No Kings: A Conflicted Response (Part 1)

On Saturday, June 14th, I attended St Paul’s No Kings rally– but not without serious misgivings. I had learned via activists on social media that 50501, the organizers of the rally, have somewhat suspicious origins, having emerged seemingly out of nowhere with no clear activist lineage or connection to other movements. This, combined with 50501’s cooperation with police, funding by a Walmart heiress, and aspects of their messaging, made me apprehensive as I headed out that bright morning. Yet, I went. I’ve become somewhat skeptical of Instagram activists over the past few months, unable to tell when their admonishments are necessary and when they are simply symptomatic of political puritanism, and I figured the best way to gauge would be to attend and see for myself. Besides, I had the day off, and it was better than doomscrolling through images of Trump’s ego parade.

—

Throughout my hour-long bus ride, my mind wandered to the violent civil unrest going on throughout the country, both in my home turf of LA and in my adopted city, where just that Tuesday protesters had driven away ICE agents by throwing furniture and trash cans. I’m a believer in the necessity of this kind of direct action, and watching it had given me some hope that even as the tide of fascism is rising, the people too are rising to meet it. I wondered what the relationship was between that unrest and the carefully-organized peaceful demonstration I was headed to.

My bus quickly began to fill with other rally attendees, many of them toting American flags. It confused me how any progressives, having studied the genocidal origins of the United States, could still believe in that flag. I had a feeling this was not the place for me. That impression was confirmed when I finally reached the rally and found myself surrounded by older white people with more flags, white street vendors selling mass-manufactured protest merch, and even a few pink pussy hats, a garment that has become synonymous with milquetoast liberal feminism. Where many of the protests I’d attended in the past set the mood by blasting political rap, the speakers at No Kings played what I can best describe as Divorced Mother Pop: “inspirational” songs by Kelly Clarkson, Selena Gomez,  and the like.

I was almost considering turning back when I spotted a pair of masked protesters in black bloc, one of them carrying a trans flag. Other punks. I joined up with them, and we quickly began gathering other visibly trans and visibly radical attendees into our pod.

—

The start of the march was delayed as the organizers frantically adjusted for events unfolding in nearby Brooklyn Park. By that time, the news had broken of Representative Melissa Hortman’s assassination— in fact, some attendees had had time to make signs in tribute to her and her husband. The assassination, and the knowledge that police had found a “No Kings” flyer in killer Vance Boelter’s car, injected tension into the air. We were all worried that gathering in such a huge group had made us sitting ducks.

The program for the day was truncated as a result. One friend who I recognized at the march had mentioned a skit she was participating in onstage— a skit that never happened. I learned later that Governor Tim Walz had been planned to speak once we reached the Capitol, but having found his name on Vance Boelter’s hit list, he was lying low. When the speeches started, an organizer dedicated our march to the Hortmans. She then led us in a “Say Her Name” chant for Melissa Hortman. The “Say Her/His/Their Name” chant was created to honor civilians (originally Black women) murdered by police, who are treated as disposable by the state and whose murders and memories are often obscured by cover-ups. I have no desire to disrespect Hortman or any ill will towards her family, but she simply was not the right person to apply this chant to. As a public figure in a position of relative power, she is not at real risk of having her name forgotten. I would have welcomed a more appropriate way of honoring her, but I felt uncomfortable with this one.

A speaker instructed the crowd to raise their American flags high and wave them proudly. I waved my keffiyeh. She told us that criticizing our government was the most sincere form of patriotism, that we were representative of true democracy, that we were taking back what America stands for. I looked around to see banners bearing “We the People” and quotes from Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. There were protesters dressed as colonial soldiers and even a giant papier-mâché Benjamin Franklin head. Perhaps I should have expected this Revolutionary War imagery, given the name of the event. But I was struck by the cognitive dissonance of it all: using Jefferson and Franklin, who owned slaves, and Hamilton, who assisted in the sale of slaves, as representatives of freedom; reiterating throughout the day that this movement was committed to non-violence and peace, while leveraging the symbols of a war.

Later, after processing, I came to understand the purpose of this symbolism, and in fact the purpose of the entire rally. Trump’s re-election had shaken liberals’ belief in America as a land of freedom and equality, and the main goal of No Kings was to salvage that myth. When leftists had described the march as “existing to make people feel good”, this had not seemed like a particularly strong critique to me. When leftists scoff at “feeling good”, they often scoff at hope, joy, and other emotions that are just as necessary to resistance as anger and grief. But in this case, what they had meant by “feeling good” was preserving blissful ignorance, and they were right to say so. “No Kings” and its patriotism kept the narrative of American specialness comfortably intact.

I want to take a moment, while I’m here, to digress (although it really isn’t a digression) about the visuals of the protest, because even those not entrenched in Americana imagery supported this narrative of comfort. The signs, costumes, and papier-mâché puppets were all quite elaborate and meme-worthy. This is not in and of itself an issue; I love protest art, and there’s nothing wrong with a little humor and levity. But this felt like I had walked into a costume contest. It felt like pageantry.

Much has been written about the intellectual snobbery of the left, whether the bourgeois smugness of liberals or the theory pedantry of radicals (Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Daniel Denvir have a particularly good breakdown of this in Hammer and Hope.)  This elitism alienates working-class and rural Americans from leftist politics and reinforces the idea that conservatism is “for the people” (despite all the evidence that it props up billionaires.) Witnessing the pageantry of retirees with time and money to do arts-and-crafts reminded me of this issue. Creating a fake taco cart to evoke “TACO trade theory”, dressing up as  a clown to call Trump a clown, puns like “No faux king way!” all struck me as wit for the sake of looking witty, rather than effective political messaging. But maybe that was my own leftist elitism shining through.

What troubled me more was how insubstantial the politics of these slogans were. Very few people, it seemed, wanted to represent any ideals or agenda beyond “Trump Bad.” A lot of signs mocked Trump for being orange and having small hands— jokes that got old sometime in early 2017 and have gotten less funny with each passing year. Others, bafflingly, called for his impeachment, which has already happened multiple times and was not effective in stopping him. But one sign that made my blood boil, a sign that I stood behind for most of the speeches at the Capitol, read in pink sparkly letters, “If Kamala Had Won, We Would All Be At Brunch.” Speak for yourself, I thought. If I wondered where these people had been the past five years to have politics that seemed cryogenically frozen in the 2010s, that sign was my answer.

Based on the messaging at this rally, all the ills of American politics could be reduced to one man and a handful of his cronies like Elon Musk. Saving a virtuous, mythic America was as simple as getting that one man out of office again, and hopefully getting another person of color in. There were no systems to dismantle, no founding myths to unlearn, no self-reflection to be done.

—

We finally started our walk to the Capitol building, and we did so in bewildering silence. In almost all of the protests I have been to, we spend the march chanting at the top of our lungs. These chants are embedded with our demands— “Disclose, divest/ We will not stop, we will not rest.” “Hey hey/ Ho ho/ These racist cops have got to go.” But the marshals of this rally were hesitant to start any chants. Those they did start were vague and demand-less, to the point that I cannot fully remember them. The one that caught on most consistently was “No kings!” but this also fizzled out quickly. My pod and I took it upon ourselves to supply our own chants, some of which were enthusiastically answered by the crowd, and some of which quickly died out. I could hear other small scatterings of chants throughout the long, winding crowd, and I wished we could have gotten organized enough to keep something going. The energy of an estimated 30,000 people chanting together would have been electric.

Reaching the Capitol, I found myself behind that goddamn Kamala sign, and a member of the pod pointed out a Gadsden flag to our left. Its bright yellow presence simultaneously felt like an incursion and made perfect sense. To our right, I spotted an anarchist flag, and, to my surprise, tables where Democratic Socialists and Freedom Road Socialist Organization were distributing literature. I was quite literally in the middle of all of this, surrounded by this incongruous march and its precarious, perhaps nonexistent, group identity.

There was a lot of chatter around me, so it’s difficult to give an accurate account of what this second batch of speeches were like. I know that much of the previously-planned material was scrapped in order to pay tribute to Representative Hortman, with one speaker comparing her assassination to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s been widely reported on social media that one of the speakers thanked the police for “keeping us safe.” I didn’t catch this, but I also don't dispute it. Yet, this same block of speakers contained the most genuine and refreshing message of the entire event. When poet-activist Guante (Kyle Tran Myhre) mounted the podium in a lavender “Protect Trans Kids” shirt to recite his poem “No kings, all bricks,” he spoke words I had been dying to hear all day, truth I had been aching to hear breathed into this space:

The ancestor on my shoulder doesn’t tell me to put the brick down, or that the weight isn’t worth it. I’m sure many of you are familiar with that… heaviness, whether guilt, or grief, or just the daily shipwreck of the news, all this information we already know: 

How things are bad. How they’ve always been bad for some of us, and how shining a light on the bad thing doesn’t change it… but can be a first step. How a big march like this can be a first step, but is never a destination. How going “back to normal” is going backwards. And how desperately the cowards in power want you going backwards, want you to put that brick down, want you to focus on your job, make money—focus on your family.

But I don’t have a family without immigrants and refugees. The word family means nothing to me when it doesn’t include trans people. The word community means nothing when it doesn’t include people with disabilities. Words like justice, peace—they are empty when they don’t include Palestinians. There are no billionaires on my block, no kings welcome in my grandmother’s kitchen. Her voice, a beacon: don’t you dare put that brick down. Not yet.

There it was, finally. Recognition that the issues are systemic and bigger than one man, recognition of interlinked struggles against oppression (including that of Palestine, which often goes unaddressed in liberal spaces), specific calls to action, and even, later in the poem, a shoutout to the civil unrest that had protected our neighbors from ICE earlier that week. When I listened to Guante, I felt for the first time like I was actually at a protest. Did anyone around me feel it too?

What a Six-Month Social Media Break Taught Me About Activism (Spoiler: It wasn’t just Cell Phone Bad)

I haven’t been on Instagram since January 20th. I didn’t want to receive real-time updates on the inauguration or read every vile thing that was said during it. And, crucially, I didn’t want to be inundated with the online leftist response to it: the overlapping barrages of doomerism, finger-pointing, futile-feeling action items, and platitudes about togetherness. I was spiraling towards a breakdown, and so I logged off for the day. And then, I didn’t feel much desire to log back on.

Usually, when I jump ship on a social media platform, a new addictive app fills its place. But this time was different; I stayed away from Bluesky and whatever other new hot online places there are. I didn’t want a different window to look at the burning world from. I just wanted to not be on fire myself. Only now am I starting to emerge from my digital exile. I spent much of those months— and trust me, I know how pretentious this sounds— reading, journaling, doing crossword puzzles, digging into my spirituality, and overall cultivating more intentionality in my life.

Those of us who have grown up in the internet age have also grown up with periodic reminders that Cell Phone Bad. We all know at this point that social media algorithms reward outrage and disincentivize nuanced discussion. We’ve read about its psychological and social effects, how we are trapped in an illusion of connection while more isolated than ever. I’m not going to belabor any of those points. Instead, I want to reflect on what these last few months have taught me specifically about being in queer/activist/leftist spaces, because I think there are valuable takeaways for anyone, regardless of how you use or don’t use social media.

1.We need pleasure activism fucking yesterday

adrienne maree brown’s anthology Pleasure Activism saved my life several times these past months. Much of online activist culture operates on guilt, shame, and fear: Why aren’t you doing enough? How can you rest/eat/have fun at a time like this? Don’t you know we’re all going to die? We conceptualize activists as ascetic martyrs slogging away at their work. brown’s thesis is simple but revolutionary: that for marginalized people to experience rest, joy, and pleasure is not selfish or frivolous, but is itself resistance to a social order built on our suffering.

To me, pleasure activism means a few different, equally important things. First, that activism can and should be pleasurable, that we should seek out the projects that fill our cup even as we fill others’— growing a pollinator garden, cooking meals for unhoused neighbors, teaching sewing at a skill share, participating in a clothing swap. Second, that the difficult and tedious necessities of activism can and should be made pleasurable through the small kindnesses and supports we give each other. And third, that the pleasure we experience completely outside of activism is important and essential. Play your video games, dance at the club, and explore weird and wonderful thrift shops free of the fear that you are a Bad Activist for taking a break.

2. We can’t fight fascism with a fascist work ethic

As poet/theorist/lesbian icon Audre Lorde famously wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” And the rat-infested basement of the House of White Supremacist Capitalism we find ourselves trapped in is one built of scarcity, urgency, quantity-over-quality, and speed-over-precision. Whether it’s same-day shipping or leaving a hate comment online, this monster is made of instant gratification.

Far too often, we apply these same frameworks to activism. We turn activism to a commodity of which we must produce as much as we can, as fast as we can, at the expense of human needs and dignity. And when these slipshod efforts produce disappointing results, we discard our project and move on to the next cause. Is it any wonder, then, that we’re all so burnt out?

Yes, there is real danger and urgency in the threats we face, and yes, many of us are facing real scarcities. But what I have learned from studying the long-haulers that have done this for decades is that sustainable activism requires us to behave as though we do have the time. Sustainable activism is doing the hard, long work of relationship-building and coalition-building. It’s planting seeds we might not eat the fruit of. It’s facing defeats and partial victories and continuing on. It’s the intentional cultivation of hope.

Part of what enables long-term activists to do this work is focus— that is, limiting the projects they take on, so that they can give those few projects the depth of energy and care required to get them right. Saying no to things, even worthy causes and campaigns, provides us the space to give what brown refers to as our “orgasmic yes.” Capitalist reasoning is wrong: it’s better, and ultimately more useful to the collective, to craft one thing well than to make a thousand breakable little trinkets.

3. You don’t have to perform expertise

Another capitalist value too many of us have internalized is the idea that every individual must be exceptional in order to be valuable. Sometimes it seems like every leftist is a leader or a theorist or a life coach, all clamoring to give their expert advice whether they actually have it or not. It’s not that I don't think young people, uncredentialed people, or people new to movement spaces have valuable insights and experiences to pitch in; I, after all, am all of those things. But I think many of us have rushed into the position of expert, of teacher, without taking seriously what that means. The demand to perform expertise, I believe, does a lot to explain the cutthroat culture of many online leftist spaces: if everyone is assumed to already be an expert, and that expert messes up, it’s a much higher-stakes blunder than if a self-declared student does.

As I dove into my spiritual practice, I learned this story about Rabbi Akiva, one of the most revered of the ancient Jewish scholars: While his colleagues began studying religion almost from birth, Akiva did not begin studying until he was forty years old. He spent forty years as a student before becoming a teacher at the age of eighty, and then taught for another forty years until his death. That this legend gives Akiva a 120-year lifespan is beside the point. The lesson it imparts is more important than its historicity: learning is just as important as teaching, and there should not be shame in being a student, because every great teacher started out knowing nothing. We all deserve the opportunity to ask questions, make mistakes, disagree, and change our minds over time. And the best of us, like Rabbi Akiva, keep doing so even when we become teachers.

4. Nobody online is owed your time, energy, or attention

This is controversial in leftist spaces, but bear with me. When I logged off, I did so with a real sense of failure. Like a lot of people, I got most of my news from social media. By cutting myself off from the news, I worried, wasn’t I looking away from people who needed me? Wasn’t I sticking my head in the sand and becoming complacent? I felt obligated to constantly pay attention, and that obligation of attention kept me trapped in a cycle of doomscrolling. It also sucked away time and mental energy, creating the illusion that I was doing important activist work when I was really isolated in my room feeling anxious.

To make things worse, I also felt obligated to give time, energy, and attention to every piece of discourse that crossed my feed. Inflammatory statements would activate my fight-or-flight response, and the fight instinct would tell me that the post I’d encountered was an imminently dangerous threat that must be eliminated. The angry venting of a total stranger with no real power over my life became, in my mind, a matter of importance affecting the fate of the entire queer community.

So much of what is said on social media is borne out of pain and trauma, which then activates the viewer with their own pain and trauma. The sense of urgency induced by a fight-or-flight response, and the sense of obligation to “stay engaged”, means that we often don’t take the time to breathe deep and ask whether the energy we’re expending on online discourse is worth it. Our intentions are often good: we want to inform and be informed, to hear and be heard, to participate in meaningful discussion. And there is a place for all that. But when we aren’t intentional with how we spend our precious time, energy, and attention– when we believe that we don’t have a choice to log off— it becomes a whole lot of smoke for very little flame, a drain on resources that could be used to do much more meaningful things.

As it turns out, staying informed and engaged is not an all-or-nothing choice, in which we must either constantly consume information or be totally ignorant. I subscribe to local newsletters to keep up with what is literally affecting my friends and neighbors. I have a designated time each morning to engage with national and international news, and I do so in print or through radio/podcasts so that I consume more than just the headline. This keeps me regularly informed without inundating me with information at all hours, and helps me engage more analytically. I read theory, I mull it over in my head and in my journal, I read reviews and responses to the text, and I discuss with friends whose opinions I trust and value. Taking this slower, less-is-more approach has not only improved my mental health, but helped me to develop better-informed, more nuanced opinions that aren’t controlled by social media peer pressure.

5. Real-time community is revolutionary

I had feared that by leaving social media, I would lose connection with my friends. I’m a socially-awkward person with a long history of being the unwanted hanger-on in friend groups, and so the thought of reaching out to people directly often brings up fears that I’ll annoy them. Following people on social media provided a way to keep up on my friends’ lives without the risk of bothering them. But when I logged off, I challenged myself to stay in touch by texting at least two people every day.

To my surprise, instead of being met with cold shoulders and irritation, those texts often led to the in-person connections I had struggled to find before. I was having rich conversations, going to new places and trying new things. I also found myself enriched in other ways. Over the course of our meetups, my friends and I exchanged job leads and connections, information on upcoming events, business recommendations, meals, recipes, and art. My in-person bonds provided much of what I’d relied on the internet for.

As it turns out, building relationships requires us to be just a little pushy. Under capitalism, we are taught to operate in self-contained bubbles and to avoid inconveniencing each other as much as possible– including by not seeking out connection. This works well for capitalism because, after all, you’re less likely to pay a rideshare company if you have friends to carpool with, and you’re less likely to buy a tool that a friend is willing to loan you. But human beings aren’t meant to operate independently; for most of our history we worked, cleaned, ate, worshiped, and accessed entertainment in groups. We are meant to annoy each other a little, and taking the step to be annoying facilitates the development of anticapitalist interdependence.

When we meet new people through mutual friends or the spaces we frequent, those friendships grow into networks of interdependence. The people you have fun with often become the people you march with, and the people that are there for each other in emergencies. If that sounds like the relationship-building work that constitutes much of long-term activism, that’s because it is. An activist community that only comes together when times are tough is difficult to keep strong and vibrant; we need fun times with each other, too. And if we take seriously that joy and pleasure are resistance to our marginalization, then claiming our space by being out in the world and enjoying ourselves matters.

Building both individual bonds and networks of interdependence takes practice. I highly encourage everyone to find a group of people to meet up with regularly in real life (or at least outside of text-based media) and do something soul-nourishing with. For me, that’s weekly attendance at synagogue; for others it’s playing a team sport or taking a cooking class. This can be harder for disabled and/or poor folks, but even corralling a group of friends together for a bi-weekly potluck at your house, or dropping into a book club over Zoom, can make a huge difference.

6. We have to love us more than we hate them

Possibly the biggest reason that I left social media post-inauguration was because I could no longer stomach the endless choruses of Community, community, community– We’re in this together– All we have is each other. After an election season that leftists had spent tearing each other apart, taking each other in bad faith, calling anyone who disagreed on tactics a fascist or a liberal or an op, I couldn’t help thinking,“If all we have is each other, we’re fucked.” For all the talk of community, nobody seemed to actually enjoy being in community.

Hate is easy. Cynicism, doomerism, perfectionism, the witty-but-merciless clapback, are rewarded and glorified on and offline. As leftists, it’s easy for us to identify ourselves by what we are against, what is wrong, what needs to change. It’s much harder to take the time to imagine and articulate what we’re for. But that work of identifying the good is crucial. If our goal is to burn down the old world, but we have no plan for what to build in its stead, then all we are left with is a pile of ash. If our only goal is destruction, we will never be able to create the conditions that give and sustain life. The entire point of activism is to make life better; if we spend our time as activists making ourselves and others miserable, how is the world we’ve created any better than the one we started with?

This is why pleasure and self-care are essential tools in the activist arsenal. If we are not rested, fed, affirmed, and comforted, we get stuck in despair and emotional overwhelm. When we’re in those high-alert states, we’re unable to treat others well and unable to make wise, long-term decisions. The workaholic, ascetic activist culture we’ve created is directly responsible for our inability to get along with each other, and this infighting drives people out of activism and splinters our movements. We are being eaten alive because we have forgotten to love ourselves, and so have forgotten to love each other.

We need to practice living in the world we want to create, and that means practicing leading with love. We must identify and uplift the people and organizations doing things right, not just condemn the ones doing things wrong. We must give credit to those who show up, not just despair about those who stayed home. We must celebrate the partial victories, the imperfect allies, the steps along the long, long path to freedom. We must practice being grateful and satisfiable in a culture that has wired us to be insatiable. We must value each other, honor each other, protect each other. We must assume the best of each other, and give each other room to grow when expectations are not met. We must meet conflict and disagreement with a desire to understand each other. We must imagine better ways of living, and we must believe that they are possible.