I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World by Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019)
★★★★★
A collection of essays about fracture, harm, and healing in queer and trans community.
I bumped this title up on my list after coming across the author’s thoughtful article about disposability culture in Everyday Feminism, and I’m glad I did, because I needed this. Thom’s writing style is warm and accessible, inviting the reader in even as Thom shares about incredibly vulnerable experiences. I teared up within the first few pages, where she describes a set of terrifying crises she experienced at twenty-five, then goes on to say:
All around me, the people I loved were also in crisis—psychological, financial, medical, interpersonal. When you live in a community of queers, anarchists, and activists, crisis is the baseline and stability an outlier. Among trans women, a life expectancy of thirty-five is the norm.
I lost my faith in community. I lost hope—in social justice, in revolution, in the world.
At time of reading, I was coming off the tail end of my own crisis: I had recently joined a collective of leftist housing activists, and had been through a set of exhausting experiences where I’d learned that—even in as radical a community as this—deep hurts still happen, and healing can seem impossibly far away. Hearing my experience reflected in Thom’s words touched me deeply.
The rest of the collection is no less thought-provoking, but in this review/thoughtdump I want to focus on two in particular:
“I Hope We Choose Love: Notes on the Application of Justice.” The central essay examines the ways that punishment narratives are embedded in social justice culture. Thom highlights the focus in leftist circles on “accountability,” which, she astutely notes, can sometimes mean “the ability and willingness to follow a script for the proper way to apologize.” She argues that accountability requires great skill to be transformative in practice:
We cannot be forced into immediate personal and spiritual growth—we must come to it willingly, or else we only end up disappointed at best and retraumatized at worst. This takes time, resources, and compassion on all sides. It takes compromise and is not immediately gratifying (or even gratifying in the medium term, frankly).
She then focuses on public shaming, shunning, and the social media dogpile more generally, in which “the human dignity of someone who has done something ‘problematic’ becomes deprioritized at best and outright trampled at worst.” (In an earlier essay, she specifically notes that call-out culture is particularly devastating for poor and marginalized TPOC activists/artists/speakers whose survival depends on their visibility: “This makes true accountability elusive, as it is based on personal integrity and genuine willingness to learn, which is hard to achieve when a person’s livelihood is under threat.”)
Thoughts:
I appreciate the nuance Thom brought to this discourse. The right-wing weaponization of terms like “cancel culture” and “wokeism” means conversation about actual issues with social justice accountability culture can be difficult.
Thom is talking about rupture within the queer and trans community, so I don’t take this as a call not to ratio awful tweets (or at least I wouldn’t, if I were still active on Twitter).
At the same time, something I wrote last year: “As a budding police and prison abolitionist, I believe strongly in the need to have and co-create ways to hold individuals accountable in community that don't involve the state.” In a world without prisons or punishment, there will still be harm to heal. And justice in that world means extending love and compassion to all those who make mistakes—even those we consider reprehensible. Even “problematic” people.
I’m once again thinking about the person I know who committed grievous harm, and how—after he ignored calls to step down from his business—the community responded by pretending it, and he, didn’t exist. With the perspective granted me by Thom’s book, I can see that not only did (1) the endangerment of this person’s livelihood ensure he would never willingly change, but (2) the community’s actions, taken in haste and urgency to protect the survivors, have ultimately done nothing to resolve the social conditions that enabled the harm in the first place—which Thom names as “unchecked capitalism, misogyny, a policing system that profiles and fails to protect communities of colour, [and] inadequate social services.”
“The Ties That Bind, the Family You Find: Or, Why I Hate Babies.” The second essay I want to highlight concerns how queer community culture is all about chosen family—friends, lovers, and mentors who “fill the void” “where the bonds of blood have failed us”—until it isn’t. Thom describes with some bitterness how many of her queer cohort settled down, got married, and/or had babies, deserting their shared dreams of Revolution, of “queer urban housing collectives, gay land shares in partnership with Indigenous nations, trans-inclusive lesbian nature communes run by consensus.”
Backtracking, Thom raises a more general question about the ways in which child-bearing and child-rearing reconfigure queer relationships. She acknowledges that marriage and child-rearing are privileges that “people marched and fought and died” for, and that “especially for queers, whose bodies and right to reproduction are always called into question, childbirth and child-rearing take on an especially deep significance.” But with the advent of several babies into her queer cohort, and the changing priorities of those adults responsible for their care, Thom is preoccupied with how the kinships she relied on will change:
Who is going to share my life with me? Who is going to fight with me, take care of me, grow old and die with me? Who will I take care of? Who would I die for?
In many ways, Thom’s essay collection is hopeful, but here it read to me as hurting, stung, grieving. It made me feel sad and lonely: disconnected from (Thom’s described experience of) queer community, and discouraged from trying to find or build the queer community I’m wanting if it’s all doomed to fracture anyway. As a childfree person, I also wondered to what extent I actually agreed with Thom that “a new life coming into the world is a joyful thing” that we should “rightfully celebrate”—even as I hold the tension of still wanting, like Thom, to show up for and “to do right by” my friends who have children.