Introduction
Dear MG Fam,
As we write this, we are witnessing the escalations of ICE raids in Los Angeles, a flagrant attempt by an authoritarian federal administration to sow chaos in California communities. But the people of LA are strategically coming together to defend the most vulnerable through community organizing, mass mobilizations, direct action, legal defense networks, mutual aid, and more.
Interconnected social movements work to keep families together; to ensure that every human from Oakland to Gaza has access to food, health care, and land in order to live dignified lives; to protect the sacredness of all life, from our queer, trans, and femme relatives to our plant and animal kin who share this home with us. Because our social movement agenda and demands are visionary, popular, and rooted in love, the opposition uses force to squash our powerful
peoples’ movements for justice and liberation.
We win when we sow community as a response to the ongoing violence waged against us. We won’t stop at outrage as we resist, we must continue to advance our work by organizing, taking bold action together, and deepening relationships with our peoples. There is an opening now for us to shift what’s politically realistic away from the false promises of the right, toward real solutions that advance justice and ecological and social well being.
This summer newsletter is an ode to the work of choosing cooperation over chaos, solidarity over silos, building power over panic. We hope you find a sense of revolutionary optimism in these pages. Peace!
Love, Movement Generation
In May, a multigenerational delegation of Movement Generation family traveled to Sheet’ká (Sitka), Alaska at the invitation of the Herring Protectors, Native Movement, and the Tlingit people.
The Herring Protectors “is a grassroots movement led by Indigenous women [who] use the original teachings of the Kiks.ádi women—ceremony and collective organizing to stand up to the unjust legacies of colonization and genocide that have led to the devastation of the yaaw (herring).”
The yaaw have been at the center of Tlingit spirituality, cultural life, food ways, and ecosystems since time immemorial. Now, with many fisheries in collapse, the last remaining herring population is being overfished by behemoth commercial trawlers, enabled by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.
“The extraction of the female roe as a capitalist resource parallels the genocide of our matrilineal structures and knowledge,” says the Herring Protectors. “We fight for the
Photos by Abbas Khalid and Brooke Anderson
yaaw because their survival is paramount to our own fight for sovereignty.”
In response, the Herring Protectors have harnessed the power of their peoples’ traditional koo.éex’ a sacred ceremony to honor the dead and grieving, reaffirm relationships, and redistribute wealth to witness the suffering of the herring and recommit to their duty to care for the yaaw. MG was honored to be invited to participate in the 15-hour yaaw koo.éex’ ceremony and feast, and to offer our solidarity.
While in Sheet’ka, the MG delegation also had the opportunity to learn about local medicinal plants and honorable harvesting, receive a cedar steam bath, watch migrating gray whales breach, and meet with Native organizers from across Alaska.
Gunalchéesh (thanks) to our Tlingit comrades for inviting us, especially Naawéiyaa Tagaban and Louise Brady. We humbly thank them for the generosity of their time,
wisdom, and gifts. We honor their sacred bond with the herring. We commit to stand with them and with the yaaw.
As MG collective member Carla said in her statement of solidarity at the yaaw koo.éex’, “We see you, Tlingit relatives, and we stand beside you in your dedication to continuing your relationship to these lands and nonhuman relatives to the fullest degree possible, for another 10,000 years. ”
Stay tuned for an upcoming podcast miniseries on the koo.éex’, produced by our friends at We Rise Production, as well some more in-depth stories from MG.
Gratitude to the Surdna Foundation, the Kataly Foundation, and the General Service Foundation for providing funds to support this exchange.
Guest speaking and attending Critical Ecology Lab’s (CEL) 2nd annual Eco-Afro Futures event in Oakland was the highlight of my Black History/ Futures Month. According to CEL, “Eco-Afro Futures is an initiative designed to gather, inform, inspire, and mobilize Black, Indigenous, and other communities of the global majority around local and global environmental realities and liberatory worldbuilding.”
Y’all, this room was full of nerds passionate about a variety of topics: CEL’s research on the impacts of centuries of plantation monocultures on soil and plant ecologies; Dr. Tiana Bruno’s research on the biophysical afterlife of slavery and toxic refineries; and Dr. Laura Lewis’ research on the social worlds of our closest ShapingandChanging ScientificCommunication
ByDesi
cousins, bonobos and chimpanzees and what we can learn from them. Preach on it. On top of these amazing presentations, there were interactive demos on ocean acidification and storm water resilient systems led by BIPOC scientists, as well as hella free books and materials to take home!
Currently we are seeing archaic agendas rapidly advancing, making it illegal for educators in any discipline to teach curriculum that involves telling the truth about the role of extractive economic systems and racialized violence, or even to teach visions of the future that call for social and ecological justice. It was refreshing to be in a space of scientific communicators committed to holding complexity in the way we do at Movement Generation in our education and strategy work.
QueeringandDecolonizing GoHandinHand
In the spirit of the event’s theme of ancestral environmental wisdom, my presentation focused on Queer Ecologies. Since cofounding the Queer EcoJustice Project in 2016, I’ve been proud to be part of a network of naturalists, farmers, organizers, and scholars creating actiongroups, workshops, curriculum, and cultural productions that explore the intersections of Queerness and Ecology. Many Western conceptions of gender, sexuality, and what constitutes queer behavior are colonial legacies. Many of the pathways we come to learn about the natural world are also colonial legacies.
My favorite way to get people to fall in love with ecology at MG retreats and workshops is with a Queer Ecology Quiz. The quiz highlights the expansive diversity of not just gender and sexuality in the more-than-human world, but also diverse forms of kinship, embodiment, and care systems that don’t fit into neat categories and that hold lessons for us about adapting,
surviving, and cooperation. It’s a fun journey through examples like gender-shifting fish, flowers, and amphibians; all the gay animals; male dayak fruit bats who produce milk; the thousands of genders of fungi; the complex breeding and communal systems of acorn woodpeckers; and one of our closest relatives, the bonobos, being one of the most peaceseeking, sexually fluid species out there.
As a black queer nerd with Louisiana roots, I see queering and decolonizing as deeply entwined processes. These are not just metaphors, but deep rooted visions for a radical restructuring of the world—how we create community and relationships to place. How many of us come to learn about nature, gender, sexuality, as well as our cultural identities, lands, and practices is scrambled in imperial/colonial legacies. Unraveling the complexities and assumptions in these histories simultaneously is part of the work to remember our way forward into something new.
UBUNTU CLIMATE INITIATIVE
In March, MG collective members Abbas and Desi traveled to the historic Penn Center on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, as part of the Ubuntu Climate Initiative a powerful gathering of organizers, artists, and cultural workers from across the country.
Founded in 1862 as one of the first schools in the South for formerly enslaved Africans, the Penn Center served as a powerful and symbolic location for our work. Its legacy as a hub for Black education, civil rights organizing, and cultural preservation made it the perfect setting to imagine what we want the world to look like 150 years from now grounded in ancestral wisdom and community resilience.
As our introduction to the region’s history and the
generational impacts of colonialism across the world, a trip to the International African American Museum in Charleston gave us a space to feel connected and reflective.
Coming out of this gathering, MG will support the Ubuntu Climate Initiative in their regional pods that will engage communities through art, music, nature walks, and cultural practices—moving our people toward climate awareness and action in ways that feel joyful, rooted, and resonant. One of the most moving parts of the experience was connecting with members of the Gullah/ Geechee Nation in the Carolinas sharing stories, food, and spirit in ways that reminded us how deeply our culture, land, and future are intertwined.
CLIMATEJUSTICEALLIANCE ASSEMBLY
Photos by Brooke Anderson
One hundred climate warriors convening in Oakland, CA the birthplace and political home of so many grassroots racial, environmental, and economic justice movements is a beautiful thing. This spring, Movement Generation was proud to be a part of the Climate Justice Alliance assembly right here in the East Bay where we call home.
As a founding organization of CJA, we were deeply grateful and energized to see our people come together from the Marshall Islands to Richmond to Puerto Rico in collective governance of the powerful alliance we ’ ve built together. What an honor to share space with the likes of Urban Tilth, Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (t.e.j.a.s.),
Native Movement, Organización Boricuá de Agricultura Ecologica, New Economy Coalition, Micronesia Climate Change Alliance, and many more—all of whom are working for a Just Transition in their respective communities across the globe.
MG and our Creative Wildfire partners at CJA, NEC, and Art.Coop held down the art space, where our friends stopped by for collaging, visioning, block printing, and free art prints, zines, and limpia bundles handcrafted by our Creative Wildfire crew.
The joy and creativity were palpable, y ’all! We even got to wrap up the week with a rooftop party to the tunes of Creative Wildfire alum MADlines and our collective member Mateo’s band Los Nadies. Baile!
As our climate justice movement and alliance face ongoing threats from the current administration, we know that our safety, power, and success is dependent on our deep relationships and solidarity. We thank CJA’s leadership, helmed by executive director KD Chave for keeping us in formation. We can’t stop, won’t stop!
This past January/February, members of MG were honored to reconnect with our homies from BlackOUT Collective and celebrate their 10-year anniversary. Here we are regrounding in the manifesto we developed together as part of the Black Land and Liberation Initiative, launched on Juneteenth of 2017.
REPARATIONSFOR BLACKLANDANDLIBERATION MANIFESTO
(Juneteenth 2017)
We are a people who have been enslaved and dispossessed as a result of the oppressive, exploitative, extractive system of colonialism and white supremacy. In this system, our labor and its products have been forcefully taken from us for generations, for the accumulation of wealth by others. This extraction of wealth - from our labor, and from the land - formed the financial basis of the modern globalized world economy and has led to compounded exploitation and social alienation of Black people to this day. The original harm has not been healed and in fact, the extraction of lives, our work, our culture, our language, our children, our homes, and our dignity continues both here and abroad.
The beneficiaries of the harm done to our people have a moral responsibility to address that wrong. Apologies are not sufficient.
We continue the legacy of those who have fought before us and have sought the return of stolen accumulated wealth. We assert the fundamental right to the resources required to create our own, dignified and sustainable livelihoods through our own labor and selfgovernance. Key among those resources is land. The basis of all wealth is the combination of land and labor, and to be self determining we must liberate both. We know the fight for the liberation of Black people will require us to build thriving movement hubs, to meet our basic needs, and to practice and engage in self governance. Access to land gives us the greatest opportunity to realize those steps towards liberation.
Let us be clear that the value of suffering can never be calculated and the lives lost never returned. However, reparations is about repairing our relations. While it must include amends for past harm, it must also transform our relationships to each other and the living world so that such harm can never happen again.
We call for a return of accumulated wealth to Black people in the US and Black people across the diaspora. We call for a release of stolen land. We vow to work with integrity and build partnership with those whose lands were stolen and with the land itself. We vow to continue the struggle, to build liberated black spaces, institutions, and power until we are returned what is rightfully ours.
These are the collective words of Black farmers, Black healers, Black educators, Black dreamers and Black organizers who are a part of the Black Land and Liberation initiative.
Back onsite at OAEC, we dug in and created a swale together that was filled with water by the following day.
We learned about gully stuffing and acted as little beavers building a beaver dam analog (BDA) in the creek. We learned SPICE (static pile inoculated compost extension) composting and
The spring 2025 Permaculture Design Course at Occidental Arts & Ecology Center was one of the most powerful that Movement Generation has been a part of. MG collective members Dana and Ellen joined a cohort of folks representing amazing land-based organizations and projects: Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, Planting Justice ROOTS North from a c center, t systems into rain g , fescue soccer field and willow play structures to bring intergenerational, communitycentered ways of enjoying land (not to mention more water infiltration!)
vermicomposting. We visited the Cultural Conservancy’s Heron Shadow Farm and did some planting and terrace building with Redbird. We also found time in the evenings for
ceremony in the sauna, games, karaoke, night walks to the pond, and an epic passion show.
While there was lots of landbased learning, what really made this session special was the real-time practice of collective governance that we found ourselves in. As we
navigated the tensions and traumas that often surface when Black, Indigenous, and people of color are deeply present in our relationships to land and colonial legacies, we moved with deep care for one another, emerging transformed with many lessons, and stories that will remain within this
circle of very special people. We have so much gratitude for the OAEC staff for holding space and facilitating our learning, and so much love for our cohort who showed the healing that’s possible when we move with honor and reverence together on the land.
FIREMITIGATIONONTHELAND
MG is thrilled to be in our second year of stewarding Sogorea Te's rematriated East Bay Hills site and practicing being in relationship with sacred ecological fire. Following in the footsteps of Native California peoples, including the Ohlone, Chumash, Miwok, Karuk, Yurok, Hupa and others, we are continuing to observe the forest and tend it towards balance.
Last year we were blessed to bring in multiple crews of fire mitigation workers, as well as the local fire department, to clear woody vegetation around the core area and buildings. We learned so much
Photos by Angela Aguilar
watching them strategize and implement selective pruning, vegetation removal and various methods of removing the fuel from site to reduce the risk of fire.
This year, we are proud to be applying what we learned from these professionals and have been working with a small group of MG collective members who have been training in land stewardship, as well as a new friend, wildland firefighter, arborist, and trail journeyman, Keith Casillas. With Keith’s support, we have conducted multiple rounds of fire ladder removal in the densest parts of the site’s forest area. (Fire ladders occur when woody bushes
grow tall and touch lowest branches of t canopy.) MG Land T members and a cou homies have literally weeded the forest” and spring.
Recently, we had a v land care day and o pile burns with the fi department and a fe members of Sogorea eliminate this fuel an our fire safety throug summer season! By t of publishing this pie hope to have compl planned prescribed the land in June. Wo towards ecological this way is a blessing
MURMURATIONS:ANODETO COLLECTIVEORGANIZING
By Michelle Mascarenhas
This piece was originally published May 6, 2025 in YES! Magazine’s Murmurations column.
In the Kurdish region of Rojava, under the collapsing Syrian state, various forces have been contending for the space to govern culture and economy for decades. ISIS is one such force. Another is the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria
(DAANES), which contends that people’s liberation must center the autonomy of women and ethnic minorities as well as a restoration of ecological balance.
Art by Aisha Shillingford / Intelligent Mischief
While navigating enormous contradictions in a world where power comes from violence and force, the DAANES was able to organize governance of the historically Kurdish region of what is now
Syria. With the fall of the Assad regime and the Trump administration’s recent cuts to U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), change is again creating crises as well as possibilities for a range of futures.
Disorganization creates an opening to reorganize. While
the MAGA right sows fear, anxiety, chaos, and overwhelm to try to reorganize us around an elevated level of fascism, what does the living world teach us about how to respond? Species that have adapted to change show that stressors can be a catalyst for change: For example, salmon populations have begun migrating earlier to align with temperatures warming up earlier in the year.
When we are comfortable, it can be hard to take big actions. And yet, in being complacent, we have become frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water. What we need is a just transition from a “banks and tanks” economy to economies of sacredness and caring. So while those in the White House are disorganizing us to try to reorganize us around heightened fear, isolation, and competition, we must instead use the openings to reorganize around reconnection, rest, joy, and sharing.
When we ’ re alone, it is easy to feel immobilized. Rather than isolating, we need to come together and move together. Looking up at the sky, mesmerized by constantly transforming shapes of starlings murmurating, reminds me that we need to find our way from our hearts and our instincts as much as from our heads.
The ability to feel, read, and respond together is what will keep us safe. The ability to align our actions with our values and intentions together makes us safer. Organizing as collective units in which more and more of us have our antennae up, can contribute our analysis, and can offer ideas on how to respond is much safer than any one or two of us isolated and dissociated in our bubbles.
As Movement Generation always returns to, the root of the word economy is the Greek word “oikos,” or eco, meaning “home.” Economy is
just the care of or management of home. Rather than letting MAGA forces reorganize us around authoritarianism and oligarchy, how can we reclaim our agency to govern and manage home?
If we understand that every being has a purpose, we see that governing our lives is not simply a right, but a responsibility in order to live that out as fully as we can. Here are five ways we can organize block-by-block toward permanently organized communities in these times.
ORGANIZELOCALLY TODIRECTLYMEET OURCOMMUNITIES’ NEEDS
We absolutely need protest and dissent in order to reject fascism. But we also need to organize around what we want and need. Like pandemics, things like loss of employment, loss of health care, ICE raids, mental health crises, and housing insecurity will be felt in our homes, on our block, in our neighborhood
schools, in the bodies that are all around us feeling fear or hunger or need for connection. In doing this organizing, we can normalize the values of honoring all life, cooperation, and people’s needs.
Our program can include going door to door on our block to find out where the needs and offers are. Who needs their utilities shut off and on in case of a wildfire or tornado? Who can do it? Where are the households with elderly or disabled people or small children, and how can we organize to ensure everyone is cared for? How can we prepare to protect people threatened with deportation or violence?
This will look different depending on where we are, who we are, and who our neighbors are. Who can risk going door to door, and who can play other roles? What are conversation openers that build common ground and reach out from a place of care? How do we listen to the needs and take small steps over time?
2
BUILDCOLLECTIVE GOVERNANCE
This is a time to restore our own agency. While the strongmen want us to think they are all powerful, we can still learn from past movements, including the Black Panther Party for SelfDefense. The Black Panther Party created 65 survival programs that transformed material conditions as well as the culture.
Through
to set up similar programs in their own communities. How many volunteers are needed for each role—securing donations, preparing the meals, serving the children, welcoming and seating them? What spaces should they have tables and chairs, a waiting area with seating?
block-by-block
organizing, we can transform the material conditions as well as the culture—from “get mine” to “share ours.”
When the Panthers realized children were going to school hungry and therefore unable to learn, they started a free breakfast program and established a simple set of guidelines members could use
Through block-by-block organizing, we can transform the material conditions as well as the culture from “get mine” to “share ours. ” From isolation and fear to care and cooperation. From slash and burn to mutual aid.
GETPERMANENTLY ORGANIZED
As we practice working together to meet basic needs, we can build our level of organization, which is political power without bosses. We move through different needs, ideas, opinions. We build skills to name what we need, listen to others, and find common ground. We learn about how to regulate our nervous systems. We ask for support.
While we are organizing to meet needs amid a crisis, we must use this organization to codify the material and cultural shifts we make in these moments. Through political education, we can unpack the extractive economic and political systems we live under and how they create trauma and poverty. In this process, we shift hearts and minds so that we can increasingly move together. We begin to cultivate the future rather than just react to oppressive systems.
HONORCAREWORK 4
This is a time to shift more of our labor to mutuality and care and push back on a devaluing of life that has escalated to a frenzied pitch. During the pandemic, my father moved in with my family and became part of the fabric of our community, while also teaching my kids how to see and appreciate their loved ones.
What are the roles aging people can play that call them into their leadership and help them make meaningful contributions in these times? And, as this system continues to collapse around us, how can this care work be increasingly converted from “jobs” to life roles that feel meaningful and fulfilling for people?
Rather than applying our labor to the systems that are harming us, how can we move more of our time, attention, and passion to taking care of each other and the places we depend on?
LOOKFORTHE OPENINGS
I regularly ask those around me: Where do you think we are in Octavia Butler’s Parables? This helps us all reorient to see ourselves as world builders. Our actions today are building the vehicles, the pathways, and the worlds we will inhabit in the future.
While we build forms of organization to meet our community needs, we must also look for the openings. These are the spaces created when a veil is lifted. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, there were major shifts in the reckoning around racial injustice. Over the last 18 months, as there’s been an ongoing genocide in Gaza, the veil has lifted on Zionism, especially for young people.
We are seeing the backlash to the effectiveness of both of these movements. But these openings were seized to win shifts required to move us toward the future we need. Local groups everywhere began digging into how to
defund the police and instead fund care and transformative justice for a future that will be safer.
We must harness the shocks and direct the slides to the shifts we need. Don’t burn out reacting. Look for the openings. It’s impossible to do this as individuals, but as we build up our squads, pods, and teams, we have more of a basis from which to make assessments and move. Together. Across blocks and neighborhoods. Across cities and bioregions.
And be ready to codify the shifts culturally, in custom, and in policy. With the economic downturn, more people will be unable to pay rent not just for a couple of weeks but for months or longer. Can we organize rent/mortgage strikes across class lines? Across a number of places? Can we get some base of people to put land in the commons instead of more speculation? We must organize to win the shifts.
COLLECTIVE GOVERNANCE X SOLIDARITY ECONOMIES LESSONS FROM ROJAVA
About a year ago, some MG collective members and political homies got together in one of our backyards to learn from Emergency Committee for Rojava (ECR) members about Rojava: a pluralistic, multi-ethnic, and multi-faith autonomous region of North and East Syria. Founded on women ’ s liberation, ecological sustainability, and direct democracy, Rojava’s political system provides a dramatic alternative to the status quo values of patriarchy, capitalism, and the nationstate that define the Middle East and much of the world.
We were struck by the parallels between Rojava’s political project and MG’s own values and frameworks. So, in May, we partnered with ECR and New Economy Coalition to offer a virtual collective study on Rojava for our broader community. Hundreds of people tuned in as ECR members shared lessons from their work to build collective governance
and solidarity economies for over a decade now, including organizing strategies for developing local assemblies, regional autonomy, worker coops, and reconciliation councils. Watch the recording of the session in English here and in Spanish here.
As we descend deeper into fascism across the globe, Rojava is one of many examples of communities stopping the bad and building the new, all while navigating the inevitable contradictions in the struggle for ecological justice. We must not only take the lessons but also remain steadfast in our solidarity.
Consider making a donation to defendrojava.org/donate to support ECR’s grassroots work.
A Dream for Trans Belonging A Dream for Trans Belonging
By Tré Vasquez By Tré Vasquez
This piece was originally published March 20, 2025 in YES! Magazine’s Murmurations column.
This piece was originally published March 20, 2025 in YES! Magazine’s Murmurations column.
Here we are in 2025 navigating rising oligarchy. This last month, I kept trying to understand why thoughts were coming to my mind, like, “Why am I even here? Should I be here?” It felt jarring and vulnerable at 40. So I kept it to my real ones.
To myself, I rationalized, “I know this toxic narrative is wrong about us. ”
“My partner and I have a loving, supportive relationship.”
“The kids are alright.”
“Other people have it way worse. ”
“We’ ve been through this before.”
“We know how to survive.”
It’ s true. We do know how to survive…
stripped away on repeat
When the walls keep closing in tighter
When they burn your documents and send
When your rights are them back to you destroyed because they can.
When it feels more possible becomes the primary goal. to disappear than earn a doctorate degree, survival
Illustration: Marcus Rogers
We know how to survive. A lot of us have been surviving our entire lives.
And I’ m not just talking about raw survival against street and institutional violence.
It’ s the way the hypervigilance we carry in our bodies impacts our nervous system.
It’ s the increased prevalence of autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular issues, depression, and PTSD among trans people, particularly those who have also experienced racialized trauma.
It’ s also the economic barriers to health care and discrimination within the medical-industrial complex. Being trans is beautiful, but the world makes it exhausting.
PATH TO LIBERATION
Trans people have saved my life time and time again. I came out in 1998. I was 14 and living in a town along the so-called U.S.–Mexico border. All we had was each other. In a time with few legal protections and next to no resources, we had to organize deep systems of care for ourselves, to stay alive. Over the past two decades, there have been many political and cultural changes, thanks to the labor of advocates (trans and otherwise) who have pushed tirelessly to implement pathways to better protect folks.
However, it is risky to become dependent upon incremental policy change. As important as these kinds of wins are, what is granted by colonial law can also be revoked by colonial law. When we become comfortable within the bounds of what is “given” to us (often crumbs), we settle for less than what we know we really need: real solutions to the root causes of the political and ecological crisis we are facing.
False “solutions” and concepts like individual upward mobility or assimilation (when even possible) often distract us with temporary comfort and take us away from building up the collective care and self-governance muscle that will actually protect us. We need permanently organized communities that are rooted in values like radical care, collective governance, and mutuality.
When we are not organized, the impacts of backlashes, such as the one we are experiencing now, are far more detrimental because when they come for us, what and who do we fall back on?
Our autonomy is our power. Our long-built systems of survival and community defense are our power. There is so much to draw from in our collective DNA to guide us through this time. We know how to do this.
Trans people: Brown, Black, Indigenous, working class. So many beautiful stories. So much cultural wealth and lived wisdom rooted in the will to survive like hell against all odds.
From street economies to the people’ s pharmacies
From houses for disowned youth to adopted queer parents
From Stonewall to Compton’ s Cafeteria
From our own designs of family to fierce love and solidarity
From prisons walls to asylum halls
Trans people have navigated a million plot twists— many steeped in violence—based upon a perception of us: How we exist in the eyes of others.
Be it the state, religion, our families of origin, or neighborhoods. And still they have no idea who we really are. Nonetheless, we remain.
Our most prominent hxstorical rebellions powerfully led by Black and Brown trans women.
IT MEANS HOME...
I kept trying to understand why I was questioning my existence last month. It might have had something to do with the right’ s violent campaign to erase us while simultaneously hypervisibilizing us, spending $215 million on anti-trans ads, to create another common enemy and boost votes.
“Take America back from pronouns and immigrants!” Come on, we know they’ re full of….
But it worked. Across our backs. Not even 0.5% of the population posed a supposed threat so big it gave the right (and moveable center) a perfect point of unity: “Protect our kids.”
Protect them from what exactly?
Learning and embracing that all different kinds of people exist?
A culture that teaches to not harm people for being different from yourself?
It is no surprise that those who see our Mother Earth and her life sources as nothing more than a dollar sign would despise a worldview in which we respect and revere life in all of its complex and beautiful intelligence.
We will never understand all there is to this planet, but you don’t have to understand it to respect it.
If we are speaking ecologically: Diversity is our best defense in the face of crisis.
If we are speaking like my old timers: “Everything in its place.”
Eradicating one thread in an ecosystem disrupts the entire ecosystem.
Global traditional knowledge has carried that teaching since time immemorial. Everything is connected.
Humans are but one expression of nature. And yes, we are human.
Never mind the dehumanizing, ableist narrative that we are “imposing mental illness” by advocating for a right to a dignified life and basic respect.
Despite the long-overused weaponization of “nature” against queer and trans people (as they say, “Its not natural!”), sex and gender variance is reflected all across the natural world.
From birthing male seahorses to split-gill mushrooms’ 28,000 different sexes to the female swallowtail butterfly’ s “doublesex” genes that provide wing pattern camouflage from predators— Biodiversity is a part of nature. Adaptation is a part of nature. Trans, gender-expansive, and two-spirit people are a part of nature.
Honor it.
My comrade asked me: “What are your wildest dreams for trans relatives?”
My dream is not just for us to survive, but that we come to know belonging.
That we remember the truth of who we really are in a mess of endless projections and attacks.
I pray that as we endure a war on our right to exist —we hold the deep knowing that we are not alone.
The Earth and so many others, human and nonhuman, are also enduring profoundly violent disruptions.
We struggle in solidarity with all those who persist on the side of justice, the side of life.
Now more than ever, our interconnection mandates us to protect the living world. Yes, we have a right to be here, but more than that, we need to be here.
Artby Micah Bazant
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