Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds<\/strong> by Nat Raha <\/strong>and Mijke van der Drift <\/strong>explores how transfeminist methods and practices can build futures that are more equal, free and inclusive<\/em> for all. Clare Hemmings<\/strong> writes<\/em> that the authors\u2019 brilliant, nuanced embrace of community, care and modes of resistance offers radical ways of realising more liveable futures.<\/em><\/p>\n Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds<\/em>. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift. Pluto Press. 2024.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n I was lucky enough to be asked to be a respondent for Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds<\/em> at the book launch<\/a> organised by the Sociology Department at LSE in March 2025. It was that vibrant event that led me to want to write this reflection. Trans Femme Futures<\/em> is a co-authored book by Nata Raha and Mijke van der Drift that emerges out of their shared histories of trans community organising and commitment to progressive Left and anti-racist organising. The work \u2013 and this reflection on it \u2013 is extremely timely, representing the importance of a Trans Femme approach to solidarity and care in the face of increasing transphobia in the UK and transnationally. While the book\u2019s urgency is one that responds positively and creatively \u2013 rather than reactively \u2013 to challenges (such as the recent Supreme Court Judgment<\/a> establishing \u201csex\u201d as \u201cbiological sex\u201d and not \u201clegal sex\u201d for the purposes of the Equality Act<\/a>), the book itself refuses to have the argument about \u2018sex\u2019 and trans dignity in dominant terms. Instead, its authors propose a philosophy of Trans Femme life that intervenes in historical ontology, feminist, queer and decolonial epistemology. It crafts Trans Femme methods for bringing about a liveable future for all starting from the tactics that characterise Trans Femme lives.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift\u2019s intervention is a celebration of the features of Trans Femme life that enable Trans Femme Futures to flourish. At its heart, it is a prefigurative proposal in an anarchist vein, one that starts from the reality of how we live together over the promise of a better life<\/em>. [Note that in line with my desire to \u201cread with\u201d Nat and Mijke, I represent quotations from the book in italics<\/em> rather than quotation marks and page numbers.] Their work begins from the pain of not being able to flourish, but proceeds from a fundamental resistance to dominant understandings of trans subjectivity as ontologically and forever suffering or dying. In a wonderful refusal of dominant ways of rendering Trans Femme possibility, Nat and Mijke start from luxuriousness, opulence, abundance<\/em> to craft understandings of community belonging that refuse dismissal and relish co-dependence as at the core of those futures. Our companions are under no illusions that we face a history of defeats<\/em>, but all the more important, then, is the insistence that we read a long line of rebellions that give us insights, tactics, strategies, outcomes, and ways of maintaining ourselves.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n Attention to ethics is a sweet refrain running through Nat and Mijke\u2019s writing, providing the \u201cred thread\u201d that enables the discussions of care, community and abolition to be earthed and to proliferate. They insist that ideas from a singular actor reproduce their position, and so are devoid of curiosity<\/em>, temporally bound, and reproductive of a sameness that they want to resist at all levels. They conceive of solidarity as a practice infused with an ethics of generosity, one that emphasises collectivity over being right<\/em>, a principle that they weave through the book as a whole. This is a brave move, of course, since it is so tempting, isn\u2019t it, to respond to the horrors of transphobia and racism (the twin concerns of the book) with brittle certainties that are likely to crack?\u00a0<\/p>\n Theirs is an important and courageous proposition in the face of the relentless feminisation of labour, the affective labour that Femme subjects are called upon to do, the ongoing structures of hierarchical social reproduction that exploit gendered caring labour in predictable ways.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Core to an ethics emphasising both complicity and connection is care, which Nat and Mijke frame as about supporting each other\u2019s survival, towards flourishing<\/em>.\u00a0Theirs is an important and courageous proposition in the face of the relentless feminisation of labour, the affective labour that Femme subjects are called upon to do, the ongoing structures of hierarchical social reproduction that exploit gendered caring labour in predictable ways. It would be easy to refuse caring, here, because of its history and present as not only unrecognised labour, but as a set of practices that actively contribute to the racialised, gendered and sexualised subordination of many of the world\u2019s affective workers. And yet, we don\u2019t want to give up care, because care is a mutual relation \u2013 what we give up is servitude<\/em>. This is care without compliance in the gendered systems of labour and representation that a Trans Femme philosophy has no truck with: because it cannot, or else invite death back in.<\/p>\n Trans Femme Futures<\/em>\u00a0is an intersectional project, because of the insistence on coloniality as an ongoing framing of deadening gender and \u2018sex\u2019, but also because of the people Nat and Mijke read with [\u2026] at the heart of their radical imagination<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Theorising a collective ethics based in care-as-refusal of the gendered labour that Trans Femmes have crafted out lives in spite of is a brilliant engagement with history of feminist thinking about \u201csex\u201d as produced through gendered labour. It is a way of opening up the multiple histories of work on refusing that labour that might allow for solidarity across trans and non-binary, queer and anti-racist positions of a range of kinds. I\u2019m reminded of course of Monique Wittig\u2019s insistence<\/a> that \u201clesbians are not women\u201d, not as a question, but as a fact. They are not women because they don\u2019t do the right work \u2013 for men, for straightness, for conventional knowledge or politics. Trans masculine and gender non-conforming subjects also don\u2019t do that work either, and nor do queer femmes, queers of colour, sex workers, or what used to be called spinsters.\u00a0<\/p>\n Trans Femme Futures<\/em> is an intersectional project, because of the insistence on coloniality as an ongoing framing of deadening gender and \u201csex\u201d, but also because of the people Nat and Mijke read with \u2013 trans of colour theorists such as Travis Alabanza<\/a>, decolonial feminists such as Francoise Verges<\/a>, and femmes such as Juana Rodriguez<\/a> \u2013 at the heart of their radical imagination. The citation of an alternative transnational archive refuses the dominant, and reflects the Trans Femme Standpoint their work struggles towards. And I would extend that to include the importance of insisting on feminist epistemology that starts from all gender and \u201csexed\u201d non-conforming struggle as the basis of robust, creative knowledge for our times.\u00a0<\/p>\n My thanks to the authors of this book for reminding me that life is always lived in excess of the limits imposed by authoritarians and cowards.<\/p>\n Note:<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0This article gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.<\/em><\/p>\n Image:<\/em><\/strong> Mar Fernandez<\/a> on Shutterstock<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n Enjoyed this post?\u00a0<\/em>Subscribe to our newsletter<\/em><\/a>\u00a0for a round-up of the latest reviews sent straight to your inbox every other Tuesday.<\/em><\/p>\n
\nBuilding futures through resistance and community<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n
Collectivity, refusal and an ethics of care<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n
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<\/a>That imperfection is the only thing that collectivity can be based in, they insist. And so they propose an ethics that embraces complicity <\/em>as central to that capacity to connect both now and in the future. Indeed Nat and Mijke frame the willingness to face frictions<\/em> as a core proposition, rather than as a temporary state to be resolved. That is important, both to counter fantasies of collectives as frictionless spaces of innocence<\/em>, but also as a principle to underpin a vision of solidarity that already, within Femme worlds, holds out the possibility of rewiring of one\u2019s senses, retuning our intuitions into the frequencies of our complicities<\/em>. It is a technique, not a stumbling block, that allows different flowers [to] come into bloom<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n
Towards decolonial feminist futures<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h2>\n
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