Playing and Hiding Joyfully in the Rubble: Thinking with Marquis Bey on Black Trans Feminism

Elyx Desloover:Marquis, when asked to define the “work” that emerges as the answer to the call to arms made by your book(s), you rightfully refuse to narrow the scope of this drive. We must rally by a kinship centered on invested work, which supersedes any grouping identity like ethnicity, gender, or sexuality, doing rather than being, since being means arresting the motion of becoming. Your rebuttal of analytical theoretical constraints performs here the radical openness that black trans feminism invites. It is, among other iterations, the practice of rejecting preemptive naming or categorizing, as the aim to maintain a safe(r) space radically open to expressive capaciousness for each individual to arrive freshly into themself at every new occasion.

On a practical level, this kind of ideal abstinence is a difficult one for our minds to uphold, even for the politically queerest of us who, for instance, unless explicitly told otherwise by the individual in question, refer to strangers and young children with gender-neutral pronouns. Do you, Marquis, as I do, attempt to eradicate from your daily speech the use of descriptive terms susceptible of inflicting harm despite our best intentions? Describing events that involve people becomes a fraught enterprise once we realize how much our brains rely on rapid judgments to advance understanding and quicken communication. It is a mighty exercise in presence and in awareness to refrain from saying something that carries or might promote prejudice, for example, “I saw a black man . . . ” to privilege instead neutral descriptors like “I saw a person wearing purple pants . . . ” This rewiring risks conflicting with the prideful defense of identities that are and have been sites of tremendous oppression and consequent advocacy, that is, having a disability or being bipoc, trans, queer, and so on. Black Trans Feminism offers compassion yet states the need for us to abolish these bastions of value and identity to definitively break free from the system. If the act of categorizing must go, so too must all the categories—even the “good” ones that also continue to perpetrate the system's inherent, violent constriction.

Marquis Bey: Thanks so much, Elyx, for this really thoughtful and tough opening question. It's a good one that I think I need to answer. So yes, I am someone who does that thing, you know, where instead of saying, “That guy over there” I say “That person over there.” Absolutely, it is a way to deemphasize gender, to not have gender—which is, as I assert, a regulative regime that circumscribes us from the start, an ontological imposition that does a kind of violence—enter into the interaction nonconsensually. It is a way, at base, to not assume another's gender. But you are right, that gets tricky: in what ways might not saying “That black woman over there” obscure things that are ultimately crucial to note? It can be read as a certain type of “colorblindness” or “postracial”/“postgender” fantasy inanely delinked from reality.

On the one hand, I heed this. I do not want to make more difficult the fight for racialized gender justice, nor do I wish to unduly disrespect people who are quite rightly bringing up their, for example, trans womanhood as a primary vector through which they move through the world and on the basis of which have others interact with them. And I would wager that throughout Black Trans Feminism the aim is clear that it is not, in the main, about some sort of individualistic “I'm just Bob, not Bob who is white/male/cis/whatever.”

On the other hand, to get to the point, I am nonetheless very comfortable insisting on the obliteration of gender—on gender abolition, on radicality—because it seems to me that it is a false presumption to think that pristinely articulating such and such a person as black and transgender and woman is akin to mitigating violence. On the contrary, racialized genders, among other identificatory categorizations, are ontological impositions and thus violences that are not mitigated but expanded in different ways and articulated within certain parameters. Violence does not only happen when, say, the black cis woman is harmed on the grounds of misogynoir; violence also inheres in the naming as black cis woman, in the imposition to be—and to be unable to be something other than—a black cis woman (if, of course, such a gendered alignment is possible when proximate to blackness). Because I am interested in promoting abolition, which is the instantiation of a world in which violent apparatuses are, by definition of the existence of that world, impossible, and because gender, race, sexuality—all these categorizations that exist ahead of us and are unable to not be chosen, for social viability is predicated on being oriented within these categorizations—are, in my understanding, regimes that stanch otherwise possibilities for social emergence, my abolition also requires of me a position of identificatory abolition. And it is because I cannot assume that we reach justice when all races and genders are respected and anyone can be whatever gender they wish. That's cool, I suppose, but to me that is not far-reaching enough. What I desire is a modality of relation wherein one need not emerge onto the scene of sociality through these vectors, wherein one does not have to exist racially, gendered, and so forth, in order to exist at all. These things ultimately foreclose that which we might have been were it not for having to be this particular racialized or gendered subject. Put differently, as I note in “Fugitivity, Un/gendered,” the second chapter of Black Trans Feminism (please forgive the longish block quote),

We must come to know, as [Hortense] Spillers knows, that gender is not to be doubled down on, yet it cannot be flippantly dispensed with; she acknowledges the double bind, and thus the double gesture that must be made. Hence why she remarks in a conversation about her famed 1987 essay, “The refusal of certain gender privileges to black women historically was a part of the problem. At the same time, that you have to sort of see that and get beyond it and get to something else, because you are trying to go through gender to get to something wider.” The phenomenological gendered experiences of black “cis” women, or of people of trans experience, is not to be discarded, and other multiply marginalized identities are not to be forgotten. It is not to be forgotten not because I wish to capitulate to those who so badly want to hold on to these remnants—I do not, though I sympathize tremendously—but because there are resources working through the epidermalization and anatomized gendering that will ultimately be in service of the antiepidermalization and antigendering that is the radical alternative: what I would deem abolition and gender radicality. . . . This is precisely the move of going through nonnormative gendered corporeality's fractures of the binary to get to something wider. Black trans feminism is that “something wider.” (74)

Thank you, Marquis, for taking so graciously the challenge I offered you to begin our conversation. This opening provides such a perfect performative entrance into your thought. As an accomplice fugitive, I wish not to circumscribe with definitions or trap the endless possibilities harbored by this imperative (to) work. I would like instead to ponder with you some tactics already engaged in and by your unruly writing and beyond.

I am interested in the life of language and of its textual laying into reality: its performative power. As you attempt—and succeed, I believe—to shift expectations, to be/come undisciplined, your words misplace or displace these expectations, your language is outlawish and outlandish. I am interested in addressing what becomes of your words as they mix registers and toy with our senses, taunting everyone by giving and taking back the bits and pieces of what we expect from opening the pages of your mind. Your preference for prefixes that actively move and work away from what we (think we) know is striking and crucial: in every “de-,” “dis-,” “un-,” “non-,” I hear a great big “Nah, that ain't it” in response to what is going on. In thus negating concepts that we all too often take for solidified and certain,²you actively choose not to be reined in by a positive description of the work of black trans feminism: radical openness maintained for imagination, collaboration, evolution.

Marquis, you've told me that you wrote most of Black Trans Feminism in the dark, embracing the undefined, deciding not to “shed light” or even shedding like shackles—or an old skin impeding growth—the light that is usually imposed, the legible black writing on white pages, that assumption of an unmediated access to some certainty. Knowledge might be power, or it might be the illusion of it. Seeking to determine once and for all a series of truths by tucking away things and people and thoughts in neat compartments represents a vast and problematic colonialist gesture. It is attempting, and inevitably failing, to conquer reality and impose the structures of our understanding onto something that is much too complex, beautiful, and shifting for it to make sense.

I love that, the “nah, that ain't it,” because I think that is very much what is happening in these prefixal gestures—each one is a sly, somewhat muted “not quite.” And it's because what is being written is some sort of discovery in excess of what is supposedly extant. We are told it's this or it's that, that these are the things that are real, that matter, that exist, and so much of me—and all those who have gifted me the ideas and thoughts and feelings moving through the work—says I'm not so sure about that. And crucially, that is decidedly not to say that I am sure it is some other particular way. I recall Kate Bornstein, somewhere in A Queer and Pleasant Danger, saying this thing about their understanding of their gender. Having been assigned male at birth, Bornstein's transness, their queerness, their perhaps gender radicality, manifested not as knowing full well that they are “a woman trapped in a man's body” but as having been deemed one thing and knowing that they were not that thing, without needing to lay claim, decidedly and definitively, to the nature of this other (binaristic) thing. “I don't know if I'm a woman, but I know I'm not what they've said I am,” my imperfect memory tells me of the quote, though I know that is not exactly it.³

So we kind of embrace the nonsense, the things that elude sense, precisely because “sense” or sensicality is not transparent; it is forged and structured and constructed. What “makes sense” is that which adheres to the grammars of power, so refuge might be taken in the nonsense of the “not male, not female” (one of the many reasons I have a deep, steadfast understanding of myself as nonbinary, which I would imagine you might be able to relate to). There is refuge in eluding the things that have automatic meaning and a place in this world. There is refuge, yes, in eluding the light in favor of the darkness.

I've shared with you, as you've noted, that I wrote Black Trans Feminism largely in the dark. That is not an exaggeration. I tend not to have lights on in my home if I am not in that room, and more often than not the rooms I occupy don't have lights on either—all that illuminates the abode is the light from a TV screen or my laptop. Much of the revisions for Black Trans Feminism were written in the fall and winter months, when it gets dark around 4:30 p.m. And there I am, writing, with only the pulsation of the cursor and backlit screen to illuminate the space. I choose to believe that is no accident; this book, written in the dark, perhaps could only be written in the dark, its ideas too evasive for the brightness of the day, too obscure and obscuring to be housed in the shine of the sun.

First, I simultaneously want to express gratitude to you for that pressing planet-caring reflex of turning off lights that are no longer useful—interpret this to the degree(s) that you would like—and to check in that you are caring for yourself and guarding your eyes from the famed evils of blue screen light! This kind of urge reminds me that care and protection play a foundational part in the radical openness we discussed earlier in inviting, maintaining, and fostering a space of freedom to continually arrive and de/redefine.

I wonder, Marquis, how else do we bridge the seemingly impossible gap between where we stand now and the dramatic abolition that needs to happen? Small but pervasive and subversive tactics like the gesture exemplified above, surely, which come down to how radical abolition happens at the level of a micro, quotidian reframing and slipping away, spilling out, out of reach or grasp. “The world-making of fugitive hope, occurs in the mundane places of our subjectivity, or the minutiae of our living.”⁴How, indeed, do we begin tearing down the illusionary solidity of construction like the gender binary, or any other limitedly numbered set of categories into which humans try to cram existence? We might, for one, add or build on top of it until it tips and falls on its own, and then joyfully play and hide in the rubble. Both of your last responses bring me to the question of labels as tools to take on this task of destabilizing meaning through proliferation.

Your book Black Trans Feminism manifests both excess and fleetingness, as it refuses to let itself get categorized—captured—due to its multiple registers, tones, and genres. Its reading is likely to strike one as de/structured by inevitable repetition. You yourself caution that, given their deep connections, any arbitrary analytical separation of black, trans, and feminist in the name of definition will cause many a retelling from yet another connected perspective. The conclusion of Black Trans Feminism especially utilizes proliferation in elevating through direct citation numerous black, queer, and trans voices. Leaning heavily into intentional multiplication of categories like those erupting outside the binary—nonbinary, genderqueer, agender, and so on—might enable, through a proliferation of possible meanings, a crumbling of the very grounds of meaning. This shift from countable, “point out-able” to excess seems to direct us toward radical (gender) openness and the new worlds Black Trans Feminism dreams of.

Take, for instance, labels. As a trans, nonbinary person, I often get asked why it's so important to name our various oppressed identities when the aim is to “just be human” and drop all of those differential words that hardly describe our complexity anyway. When confronted by those who disagree with the use of a variety of gendered and sexual labels,⁵I like to give a two-step answer (read: plan of attack). Yes, it would be wonderful to simply go ahead and abandon labels entirely, to jump heads and hearts first into referring to one another—and understanding ourselves—as “humans” and not caring in the least who is and likes what or how or who. Yet are we there or anywhere near ready to get there? Evidently no, apart from a small number who cultivate this radical imperative and are willing to embrace the grief that will come along with letting go entirely of the identities we so know and hold dear for survival's if not pride's sake.

In the meantime, on the route to abolition, I believe labels are productive insofar as we continue to multiply them and expand the reach of their intricacies into subterranean understanding and creation of self. Once we are able to put on/hold/perform a gendered label relative to the trees, the wind, or the bees as effortlessly and gleefully as we often decide to wear a certain color and shape of garment to signify our gendered expression on a given day, we will be closer to ditching the long list of descriptive terms as insufficient. Might identity hence become something to celebrate with the help of ever-changing poetic choices and words that are as numerous or more than the sum of all languages? Then, only, does it appear possible to detach our/selves from stern label systems corralling us into restrictive, oppressive categories.

I need to say that I genuinely appreciate your concern for my eyes! But unfortunately, they've had it out for me since I was a preteen; my vision has not been the best for nearly two decades. Nevertheless, my eyes thank you for your care and concern. That care is deeply a part of what we do, what we ought to do, and one of the joys of my career is becoming more privy to the small, quiet ways that care is expressed—a gesture, a passing comment, a touch, a caution about blue light. I love it.

But yes, how do we bridge that gap between where we are now and where we'd like to be? How to live on multiple terrains, terrains that are seemingly incompatible—indeed, antagonistic? I don't really have a good answer to this, for which I am always so sorry. My hope, however, is that what I offer as an insistence, as a sincerity, as a yearning will suffice.

So with that, I might say two things. First, we are living it, that tense inhabitation of alternative terrain, to others’ chagrin and frustration (and our own). One of the things about nonbinariness, if I may, is that I've encountered a few situations in which I—not to mention a plethora of others—am constantly forced back into the normative constraints of this terrain. That is, I understand myself through nonbinariness, which is a phrasing that delinks nonbinary from a certifiable, possessed, templated identity and imbues in it an unrelation to gender and gender normativity in all its many facets, with “embodiment” only one of those facets; I have also, however, encountered many—even in purportedly radical and social justice spaces—who tell me that I have “male” privilege. So when I show up to meetings for social justice doers with the ways my body presents itself, despite my nonbinariness and refusal of gender normativity's hold over me, there is a discourse present that demands I not only reckon with but accept and reiterate male/masculine privilege as an ethical gesture. They say that someone who looks like I do must acknowledge the reality of how my body accrues benefits bestowed by patriarchy. And if I do not acknowledge this, I wrongly try to rebuke the privileges I undoubtedly, unceasingly, always and forever have. I fail to check my privilege. I know, I think, what they mean, and I know the kinds of politics and discourses from which they draw. It seems too often, though, that the requisite to acknowledge and check is in fact a requisite to content myself with the existing order as if it is natural, as if nothing can—or should—be done about it. It seems often that they want me to be a man. And how cruel is that, how violent, to me and others. In a sly undermining of the political valence and intention of nonbinariness (e.g., to subvert, interrogate, and displace the assumption that a body means something a priori and that gender can be assumed by making recourse to the corporeal surface), I am called to deem and make myself, over and over, a legible man in a perverse commitment to gendered ethics.

This is me living on another terrain, fiercely and committedly, yet others demanding that I live on their terrain. I just want to live elsewhere, right here.

So this also makes me think of something that Hortense Spillers has said. Now, Spillers is all the rage in black studies and black feminist theory, and I quite honestly am exhausted with the ways her work—which is in fact not her “work,” in its entirety, but one essay from 1987—has been taken up. But I find her incredibly prescient in a number of ways. One of those ways is from a 2007 conversation she had about that 1987 essay. And I meditate on this at length in chapter 2 of Black Trans Feminism. So, Spillers says: “The refusal of certain gender privileges to black women historically was a part of the problem. At the same time, . . . you have to sort of see that and get beyond it and get to something else, because you are trying to go through gender to get to something wider.”⁶ To get more directly to your wonderful point, a kind of plea, which I receive so humbly: yes, absolutely, identities of those who are queer or trans or black or nonbinary are and can be very useful, can be affirming in so many ways. Yes, these identities can be used in service of combating cis-heteropatriarchy and white supremacy, as history has shown. That is not, and can never be, disputed. For me, I am simply not interested in stopping there, as it seems many are. I wish, as Spillers seems to suggest, to go through those identities to get to that something wider. Perhaps—and I'll admit this—I rush too zealously to the wider, bypassing things that others do not think are settled yet. But I am zealous only because I am giddy about all those other things we might be and might have been were it not for these clunky colonial bestowals we have come to call our skins and bodies. I want to get to those wider things, because that to me is what we deserve, and that to me is the onset of abolitionist life.

My philosophical background must resurface here to express deep appreciation for this childlike giddiness, zeal, and marvel at the worlds to come. Nietzsche's insistence on the Heraclitean child at play continues to prove itself apt in deconstructive enterprises and celebrates the joy of playing in and with the rubble.⁷I am here to break it all down sooner with you and our kin.

In firmly claiming nonbinariness, you express a yearning to live elsewhere, to run from their terrain, that imposed cis-heteronormative patriarchal identity of “man.” Your experience of this violent imposition caused by supposed activists that forcefully sit you right back down into the location you've eclipsed yourself from is deeply valuable though complex to situate within discourses of identificatory oppressive states. And how can one argue that their experience of oppression is just as real and important to recognize when faced with another whose oppression seems much “worse”?⁸

Many speak of the feeling of not being trans enough, a certain iteration of impostor syndrome that has both its merits and its issues. Similar to how equitable discussion spaces now attempt systematically to give the right of speech to those who tend to get less or no turns at expressing themselves (people of color, people with disabilities, women, marginalized folks of all kinds), it is good to be—sometimes painfully, yes—aware of how we present despite ourselves in social spaces and which kinds of privilege these presentations enable. If I am the only white person in the room, and increasingly masc-passing at that, though I may have pronounced thoughts on certain topics, I feel it is my duty to acknowledge the privilege that is socially attributed to me in spite of my best efforts to deconstruct the entire system that generates such privilege. I dedicate myself to calculating more carefully when my input is valid within a conversation that should not center me, even if there is some space for my expression to be heard and weigh in. Many choose not to use the term trans for themselves even if they “qualify”: they fear that claiming it will decenter the experience of those whose life is excruciating due to this identity. They, justly in part, are sensitive to the feeling of taking up “too much” space when they might not “have it that bad.” Oppression does have a certain tendency to pile on layers of intersecting trauma that we must absolutely work to understand. Unfortunately, this quality makes it such that less visible or obvious states of oppression are often glossed over and quieted in the name of tending to the most wounded. The image of an emergency room comes to mind: triage does need to happen to a certain extent in order to focus on the most urgent issues, but having a broken bone with “more tolerable” pain than the person rushed ahead with a heart attack does not mean that you can be sent home to heal without assistance—or bothering anyone! Caring immediately for the most injured in no way means that we should not also care for the others injured “to a lesser degree.” Everyone deserves care, to be heard, valued, and supported in the difficulties (and celebrated in their bloom!).⁹

For these reasons, I would tend to see the acknowledgment of privilege not as a consequent need to embody and perpetuate it—though it certainly feels like this is the imposition in your experience and in too many places that exclude certain people's input since they are relegated to the assumption of profiting from some form of privilege in the larger equation. Rather, I believe accountability, acute sensitivity, and awareness are what these discourses (should) aim for. Every time they effectively discredit and discount a person's oppression for not ranking high enough on the scale of horror, spaces for social justice fail to accomplish what they intend.

I appreciate that you would bring up—uproot—terrain, as I wish to speak about the home and its dispossession. Just as many circumstances and events tend to line up when most needed, my reading of Black Trans Feminism happened or, rather, took place, c'est le cas de le dire,¹⁰as I was traveling. It took place, made space, and constructed a bubble of thought, a dislocation of the grounds and stability I am used to. We are fugitives on other terrains, leaving our given and taken houses to find and build homes elsewhere, in the in-between, in the slippery, the imperceptible. Just as we must stop using the term homeless to describe somebody who is unhoused by the system (but may have one or many homes understood less materially), we must deconstruct the idea of a fixed place, be it a house or an identity, representing the root of our sense of home. Black trans feminism invites us to revel in movement, to continually jump and dance away from common grounds and refuse to close down and close in on a body that defines us. The yogic scriptural tradition teaches, for instance, that the self is located in different layers of (non)bodily experience or sheaths called the Koshas.¹¹The energy body can be bigger or smaller than the physical body, as can all others, and diving inward with awareness can foster a sense of where and how energy flows. I am interested in prompting dialog between your appreciation of flesh as what happily trespasses the bounds of the restrictive material body and these ancient differentiations best understood through elements of consciousness and presence within these distinctive spaces that are the Koshas, which in turn allow for creative and healing movement.

I hear this, and feel this, very deeply. And overall, I have no issue, typically, with folks recognizing and noting the ways history and discourses attribute certain privileges (though this is a term I'm increasingly growing to become exhausted with—it's so often used so loosely and uncritically, though I appreciate and feel your more robust usage of it). I think what I'd say first is that, absolutely, if you are the only white person in the room, sure, deemphasize your voice and presence. I wouldn't quibble with that, and think that's ultimately commendable. But what I'm in part responding to in my frustrations is twofold: how the presumption that the only white person in the room not being permitted to speak (or being restricted from speaking until other voices have had a chance to speak) does not interrogate the very system that bestows privileges in the first place; the bestowal of privileges is left, to me, uncritiqued. And also, there is an assumption present, it seems, in the service to which marginalized voices are put. In other words, okay, a roomful of folks of color and one white person are speaking (about what exactly?)—what are those folks of color trying to say, and from what angle? Are they all, inevitably, saying the same thing? Is a marginalized voice to be heard in whatever it says simply by virtue of it being marginalized? There is an assumption so often of both rightness from marginalized voices and the absence of harm and perpetuation of the very systems that marginalized those voices. I think ultimately I just want a broader, more acute conversation. It is what those voices have to say that I'm interested in, rather than the simple saying of things from marginalized voices.

And to be clear, I want to say this in a radically nonaccusatory way. This conversation is full of so much love and kindness, and I want that to come across in what I'm saying here. I just want a different terrain, a different way to move through these thorny questions and topics. It's hard, too, because there are always feelings—which matter a great deal—but I've grown tired. Like, when I used to go to the barbershop—a place I haven't visited in over a decade, and refuse to, for so many reasons¹²—and, even as a person who doesn't care at all about sports, I hear at least a half-dozen times the debate about who's better: Jordan or Lebron. I don't want to keep having the same conversation. There are other things to talk about.

Anyway . . . Maybe this gets at one of your final points, that of trespassing the bounds of the material body. And I love this way of putting it; that's exactly what I'm interested in. If the material body, a materiality that is not transparent and obvious but is always contested, rendering it a question rather than a trump card to which we need simply refer to justify our points, is the site of all these ontologizing forces, what happens if we do not revere it? What happens if we reject its tenets and opt for another modality of living unbeholden to both the material body and its predicates—a proper way of being a racialized, gendered, abled subject? What are the other things we might be able to be and do, these “ancient differentiations” as you call them? I so desperately want to explore those things, and I want to do that radically, unwaveringly. That might mean walking on the plane of this “reality” but not adhering to or abiding by its rules—its rules of privileges and identities and relational propriety. That will be tough for many, and that makes sense. But I can be stubborn sometimes, so I want to see what this other stuff is all about even if others keep demanding that I return to this plane of existence. Just let me stay there a little while longer.

Dear Marquis, you sound here, beautifully so, like the child who refuses to come “home” to the realm of the adult “real world” neatly kept within compartmentalizing walls, the child wishing with their whole being to remain a little longer in their own world, outdoors. There, you, we, have the power we make and take for ourselves to fabricate something new, something barely imagined yet, with each new thought and perception. The child is here not a nostalgic desire for a clean slate but a leap beyond the seriousness and constriction of what sociality claims for stable ground.

You have said many times now that you are tired with the ways in which things move—or don't—as they are, tired with this conventional reality that does not listen to the complex movements of our human hearts. How can we dance fugitively, jump and prance asymptotically away from capture when exhaustion weighs us down into the very system we strive to exit?

I am preoccupied these days with efficiency of energy in terms of a healthy drive or liveliness. As someone with plenty to give and the built-in expectation that I can do absolutely all the things I wish to fill my days with, the mountains of good things I climb often drain me. My current concerns revolve around building my life to better support myself and others in one swift motion as reliably and sustainably as possible. At a time when the moon beckoned me to listen to its energetic rhythm to time my own, Professor Aimi Hamraie (Vanderbilt) happened to introduce me to the idea of slow dwelling. A disabilities studies scholar and permaculture designer, they encourage us to work with the natural world's ebbs and flows to plan our daily, weekly, and monthly routines according to moon time, in order to plant, nurture, and harvest what we hope to manifest.¹³Such a structure might help us conserve valuable liveliness and avoid working pointlessly hard against the grain of what naturally unfolds or moves around us. I see in it efforts to nurture a synergy with energies that feed us and a connection to the broad kin that might best hold us.

In the inspiring introduction to Black Trans Feminism, you express a guiding abolitionist wish for “the reconfiguration of how we hold each other without stopping, without withholding” (5)—holding space for whom- or whatever in care, holding as a healing embrace that does not hold back potential or hold us down in fixating confinement. Our own conversation has been filled with openness and renewed space to think collaboratively and creatively, and I thank you with immense gratitude for these gentle and encouraging intimacies that push back on the harsh holds of academic writing. In words and in reflection we are dancing, providing enough elastic resistance to build movement as well as handy, sneaky footholds to jump over the walls before us together. I cannot yet imagine a better way to live black trans feminism as community in growth.

Never would I have thought that sounding “like a child” could feel so affirming and loving—yes, exactly, a child, not quite stubborn but playful, too playful at times, wanting just a little longer to play and imagine and experiment. I love the levity, yet a seriousness with which one can commit to levity. I do, I really do just want to play and explore cool, weird ideas sometimes; to not respond to emails or go to meetings or what have you; or to not just talk about the “serious” adult world things: antiblackness, transantagonism, patriarchy. And maybe that'll get me, us, in trouble sometimes. And that's fine. Because it's not about that—it's about the play, joyful play, as you so beautifully said, in the rubble.