Episode 25 - Practices that Do the Unchoosing with Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift

In this episode, I speak with two beautiful trans writers, artists, thinkers, Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift. They recently published Trans Femme Futures with Pluto Books. Their book describes an expansive ethics of collectivity, care, and complicity from the perspective of trans femme knowledge and experience. Nat and Mijke developed the book over the last number of years through different iterations as a zine and a conference, but also as an offering from many years of organizing, not just for trans liberation, but for all people.

In reading the book, I found, you take on a slight altering in language as they inflect words we have used and think we know with a different tone, which creates a web of understanding that helps us find our position in the world. One throughline that I found incredibly important was their thinking of complicity, as this attends to the leftist piety of purity, as well as the guilt of enforced participation in the state and capital. For them complicity just means, as Mijke says in our conversation, we start from "what you do with your body in this world." From this place, we can then figure out the dynamics of making collectives. It's a way to address our entanglements with power from all the different positions of vulnerability with an aim of untangling hierarchical power for everyone. But beyond complicity, trans shows us we don't have to remain stuck in a world or a body not of our choosing. They tell us that trans "does the unchosing," and, as Nat says, femme "opens up worlds."

We have a really in depth conversations—Nat and Mijke were very generous with their time. We weave together concepts and analysis from their book with Nat and Mijke's own personal histories of involvement in movements and community. I highly recommend reading Trans Femme Futures—they find a beautiful way of articulating what transness and femmeness can teach us about how to live. You can find it at Pluto Books, or wherever else you get your reading materials.

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