Places Queers Leave

I told friends that my first post for this newsletter was going to be on the Barbie movie, but it's a struggle to sit up long enough make it through it. This Barbie has chronic fatigue and is typing from his phone in bed.

About 6 months ago, I moved from my home in Brooklyn to Fresno, CA, so my parents could help with my disability care. This meant isolation from my irl community, and from the trans and queer institutions I'd come to take for granted.

I knew that I could build community in Fresno, because trans people are everywhere. And even in conservative central CA, we make up a solid constituency of comrades and fellow travelers. I met trans communists on gay bar patios, in mosh pits of touring pop punk bands, at the only synagogue in the city, and (one time) at a square dancing event put on by the local LGBT studies department. Almost all of them were younger than me, newly transitioned, and new to the left: most were radicalized online.

Until a few years ago, I was used to always being one of the youngest people in my friend group. But when I emerged from my COVID cocoon, I realized this dynamic had shifted some: in Fresno, a city that queer and trans people tend to move away from, the difference was even more stark. So I tried my best imitation of my mentors in Frederick, the city nearest to my hometown, where I encountered my first irl anarchist crew.

Frederick, like Fresno, is a place people leave. It's a city that feels like a suburb, triangulated between Baltimore, DC, and West Virginia. Teenagers in wealthier, closer-to-DC suburbs call it "Fredneck". But I remember it as a haven in the mountains, a magical place where we could stay up all night arguing about Dworkin and Tiqqun, where my friends would use my pronouns even if my parents wouldn't. My friend Dakota*, a mid-twenties queer anarchist I'd met on OkCupid, became a surrogate older brother to me— they taught me how to facilitate a meeting, about the limits of allyship politics, and why and how never to talk to cops.

I'd later move into a punk house with Dakota and four other queer anarchists, including two from Tumblr who I'd lured over with Frederick's cheap rent. (That's a story for another time.) The front porch conversations there were a DIY oral history of 21st century anarchism, much of it passed on secondhand from my friends' older friends and mentors. I'm pretty sure the only reason I have good politics is because I found older anarchist and communist queers to learn from.

So, I found trans people in Fresno. I threw out communist buzzwords and noticed who took the bait. I weighed in on takes from Breadtube, debated the merits of non/violence, and talked about starting a reading group. And I really did intend to do it, but in making these plans I had overlooked one minor issue: I was still sick, and deeply, miserably depressed. I probably could have mustered the physical energy to put together a reading group, but if I'm being honest, I didn't believe it mattered. My sense of agency, personal and political, was so wiped.

Revolutionary action requires both solidarity with our comrades and the will to fight for a way out of our own oppression. I'm still working on mustering up the latter. It's always been easier for me to gather up rage against bosses and the state when they aren't actively grinding me to dust. For most of my time in Fresno, I was fighting to keep my job, a public health data analysis position that I was far too sick to do. It made me feel like shit to fail at the work, and it made me feel even worse to fill out accommodations paperwork delineating exactly why I was failing. I spent hours of my days worrying if my boss was mad at me. So, I was in no position to tell anyone how to start a union, commit workplace sabotage, or quit their job and start a band.

It turns out that while I do know how to build community, what I really needed was to find community. I wanted the warmth and certainty of knowing I'll always have a place to go where I can see my people: a punk house porch, a trans rave, a socialist reading group that I didn't have to start. I'm in Oakland now, where we have all those things. It's nice here. Piero likes that we share a yard with two other dogs.

I used to look down on anarchists who left their hometowns for Brooklyn or Oakland, and I swore that would never be me. I think it was 30% moral scrupulosity nonsense around gentrification, 50% cope for being stuck, and a 20% core of something real. The fight is everywhere, and we need revolutionaries everywhere, not just the big cities. We need people out there teaching the next generation, even in the places where that's a lonely task. But that person's just not me. I'll just tell my commie war stories over drinks at T-Slur Thursdays**. I'm sure I can get into some trouble here too.

* names changed because I didn't ask anyone's permission to write about them. Sorry!

** yes, that's the real name of the event

I'm Reading

Chronic Pain, BDSM, and Crip Time by Emma Sheppard

I've been stuck in bed lately, and when I just physically can't get myself up, it's hard to think about anything but the experience of how stuck I feel. Reading theory, and trying to make meaning out of my stuck state, helps make the stuckness more livable [see also: my pre-transition relationship to feminism]. And I think my attraction to this specific book speaks for itself.

On My Mind

If I'm being uncharacteristically avoidant of the phrase "social reproduction", it's because I've been thinking more critically lately about social reproductive labor vs. what we might consider play, jouissance, and other joys outside the value-form. Like, what makes unpaid work work? How do we know when care is work and care is play? Or when sex is work and sex is play, for that matter? (It's not just the exchange of cash). I think queer SRT complicates this binary in a necessary & fun way, but I want to spell out the spectrum a little more, try to understand the lines that we're blurring. I'll probably write about this for some more formal outlet eventually, but I need to read and think about it a lot more. I'm overdue to reread Vogel.

I Just Think It's Neat

Subscribe to Thalia's Patreon to get a copy & support trans internationalism.

The translator for this project is an incredible trans anarchist, Thalia Daburon, who's been DMing me over the course of a year to make sure they accurately conveyed the meaning of my Transgender Marxism chapter. I have so much respect for the work that goes into translation, and the result is so cool! Plus I like that they included a little drawing of me.