Trans Liberation Is Between Us: Abolitionist Ethics Beyond Identity

Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift
Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds
Pluto Press, London, 2024. ISBN 9780745349404

To read Trans Femme Futures is to find trans politics displaced from the terrain where it is most often made to appear. Rather than beginning by asking what transness is, who counts as trans, or which institutions should certify and protect particular identities, Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift begin elsewhere: with what people are already doing together. Their concern is with the ways lives are made, sustained and transformed through friendship, care, desire, shared knowledge, collective experimentation and struggle. Transness is not primarily treated as a stable identity requiring recognition, but as movement: away from what has been imposed, through relations that make other forms of life possible. As they put it early in the book, “Transness doesn’t strive for a pre-determined outcome, but takes shape along the way – sensually and relationally” (2). That shift in emphasis is the book’s most important contribution. It is also what makes Trans Femme Futures especially valuable in the present conjuncture. Much of the contemporary assault on trans life proceeds precisely through institutions: through courts and legislation, medical administration and schools, prisons and border regimes, bureaucratic classification and the managerial apparatuses of the state. Reactionary and neo-fascist politics have not simply positioned themselves against institutions. They have learned to inhabit and mobilise them, turning procedures of safeguarding, expertise, legal recognition and administrative definition into weapons against trans people. In such conditions, a politics that understands liberation primarily as institutional inclusion finds itself defending ground that can be narrowed, withdrawn or redefined by the very structures from which protection was sought.

Raha and van der Drift do not respond to this by proposing a fantasy of pure exteriority. People need healthcare, housing, income, legal protection and access to resources administered by institutions. The point is not to abandon these struggles. It is to refuse the assumption that institutional recognition constitutes the horizon of liberation. The distinction is crucial. One can fight for access to resources while refusing to let the institutional forms through which those resources are distributed determine what transness means, how trans people should live, or what kinds of collective life become imaginable. The book’s abolitionism begins in this gap between necessary engagement and political capture. The first chapter develops this through femme as a sensuous and anti-institutional practice. Femmeness is not offered as another identity category waiting to be defined correctly. It is something composed through social worlds: through aesthetics, gestures, sex and desire, friendship, parties, zines, collective projects, independent presses, hormone sharing, cooking, sewing, fixing things, organising, dancing and all the small acts through which people make spaces in which they can become otherwise. These practices matter because gender itself becomes possible differently when another social environment has been fabricated around it. Femme is therefore not merely expressive. It is infrastructural. It helps to make the relations through which expression can acquire another meaning.

This is one of the places where Trans Femme Futures moves furthest away from the familiar grammar of identity politics. Identity tends to presume that subjects exist prior to the relations they enter and that politics begins when those subjects seek recognition. Raha and van der Drift reverse the sequence. Subjects emerge through relations; the forms of life in which we participate shape what can be sensed, desired and embodied. Hence their insistence that becoming is always practical and social. One of the loveliest formulations in the book comes when they write, “we don’t become anything that we are not becoming together” (14). It is a deceptively simple sentence, but it contains much of the book’s political ontology. Becoming is not private self-realisation later communicated to others. It is something accomplished with and through them. The emphasis on the sensuous is important here. Raha and van der Drift write of rewiring the senses, of desire and gesture as modes of knowledge, and of the bodymind as something continuously formed through encounters. This makes their account of transness resolutely materialist without reducing it to biology or social structure. Hormones matter, clothing matters, money matters, housing matters, touch matters, the availability of a room or a clinic matters, and so do the affective atmospheres through which bodies are encouraged or discouraged from experimenting with themselves. The material is not opposed to the relational. It is the medium through which relation becomes embodied.

The chapter on care extends this argument by treating care as a kind of collective infrastructure. Raha and van der Drift move through housing co-operatives, mutual aid, squatting, chosen family, collective living, resource sharing, emotional support, community education and informal medical knowledge. None of these appear as supplements to a more properly political struggle. They are the practices through which survival is made possible under conditions of organised neglect, and sometimes through which survival becomes something more: a life with pleasure, rest, curiosity and joy. Care, in this account, is not sentimental benevolence. It is a practical relation to need, capacity and dependency. This is also where the book’s proximity to the undercommons becomes particularly productive. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten appear explicitly, especially in the discussion of complicity, but the resonance extends beyond citation. The undercommons never really names a clean space outside the institution. It names a fugitive sociality already taking place beneath, around, through and despite institutional organisation: study without accreditation, planning without management, mutual indebtedness without the fantasy of sovereign self-possession. Trans Femme Futures describes something similar. Its non-institutional worlds are not hermetically sealed alternatives. They are messy assemblages formed from what people can take, steal, share, repurpose and keep in circulation while refusing the institutional demand that these resources must arrive attached to obedience.

This is why complicity becomes more useful for Raha and van der Drift than innocence. Liberal politics frequently organises itself around establishing who is innocent, who has been wronged, and which institution should adjudicate the claim. Abolitionist politics has to ask a harder question: how are we already implicated in the worlds we are trying to change, and what kinds of relation can be made from inside that implication? Complicity names entanglement without turning it into resignation. It refuses the dream of a morally pure location outside structures of domination, but equally refuses the conclusion that because we are entangled nothing can be transformed. Complicity is instead a way of keeping problems collective. This has clear affinities with Harney and Moten’s insistence on incompleteness. Institutional power individuates. It assigns roles, responsibilities, identities and measures of performance; it asks each subject to become legible as a discrete unit. The undercommons begins from the opposite proposition: that we are never sufficient by ourselves. Raha and van der Drift take this insight into transfeminist ethics. What matters is not the achievement of a perfected political subject, but the cultivation of forms in which people can remain incomplete together. The resulting collectivity is not frictionless. Indeed, the book repeatedly insists that conflict, ambivalence and failure are unavoidable features of social life. Abolition cannot mean escaping relation; it means developing practices through which relation need not default to punishment, exclusion or management.

This is one of the reasons the book is so suspicious of the idea of a singular trans community. A unified community can quickly become another administrative fiction, implying a common experience that obscures differences of race, class, disability, migration status, sexuality and access to resources. What matters more is collectivity: the practices through which differences are held together without being flattened into sameness. Identity gathers people because of what they are assumed already to share. Collectivity is made through what they do together. This distinction does not make structural position irrelevant. On the contrary, the book is attentive throughout to the uneven distribution of vulnerability and resources. But correctly naming one’s location is only a beginning. It does not by itself tell us how to build forms capable of moving. The critique of trans liberalism in the third chapter follows from this. Raha and van der Drift are careful not to dismiss rights. Legal protections can matter enormously, particularly when people are being denied healthcare, employment, housing or bodily safety. But rights translate needs into the language of the state, and the state recognises those needs according to its own categories and procedures. Inclusion therefore remains conditional. As the book puts it in a line that could almost serve as an epigraph for the whole argument, “Rights might protect one from management, but they will not liberate one from it” (75).

That sentence has only become more pointed as reactionary politics increasingly works through administrative and institutional power. If trans liberation is imagined primarily as admission into existing institutions, then the political task becomes securing a place within structures whose more general operations may remain untouched: border regimes continue to deport, prisons continue to incarcerate, workplaces continue to exploit, welfare systems continue to discipline, and medical institutions continue to decide which forms of bodily knowledge are legitimate. Some trans people may gain a more secure position within such arrangements while others remain disposable. For Raha and van der Drift, a transfeminism adequate to liberation cannot treat those divisions as secondary problems to be addressed after recognition has been achieved. Their discussion of managerialism is especially sharp. Institutions can incorporate almost any content while preserving the forms through which power is organised. Diversity can increase while hierarchy remains intact. Representation can improve while collective agency is weakened. A trans activist may gain an institutional position and an amplified individual voice at precisely the moment when a broader movement is translated into consultation, policy, metrics and managed participation. The institution wants the representative subject because the representative subject can be individuated, addressed and made responsible. What is much more difficult to manage is a dense network of relations that does not resolve itself into a spokesperson, a policy demand or a measurable outcome.

There is a temptation to hear this as a romantic celebration of informality, but the book repeatedly refuses that move. Collectives reproduce racism, ableism, transmisogyny and unequal distributions of emotional labour. Chosen families can reproduce the gendered demands of families they were formed to escape. Femmes can be expected to perform endless care work for movements that barely notice the labour on which they depend. Informal spaces can be cruel, exclusionary and exhausting. Raha and van der Drift’s point is not that non-institutional forms are automatically liberatory. It is that they remain open to being remade through practices of accountability, attentiveness, refusal and generosity in ways that bureaucratic structures tend to foreclose. Their fragility is not simply a weakness. It is also what allows form to remain responsive to life. The healthcare chapter makes this argument intensely concrete. Trans people have long shared information about clinicians, treatments, hormones, dosage, blood tests and bodily effects because medical systems have failed to provide adequate and timely care. Raha and van der Drift discuss self-medding not as an ideal solution but as a practice produced by material constraint. When the alternatives are waiting years for treatment, paying inaccessible private costs, moving elsewhere or going without, community knowledge becomes a survival infrastructure. The point is not that expertise is unnecessary. It is that expertise already exists in distributed and collective forms, and that the medical institution’s monopoly on legitimate knowledge can itself become a source of harm.

The book’s formulation of Liberatory Harm Reduction is important here because it does not simply replace institutional authority with an abstract language of individual autonomy. Formal medical ethics can celebrate informed consent while leaving intact the hierarchy that determines which choices are available and whose account of their own body is credible. Liberatory Harm Reduction begins from agency exercised under limiting conditions and stretches outward into collective support for navigating hostile systems. Medical institutions may remain necessary as providers of resources, technologies and skills. They need not therefore become the source of trans legitimacy. At the opening of this chapter Raha and van der Drift make the argument even more directly: “trans genders do not need to be legible and can hover on the edges of understanding” (120). This is not a retreat into ineffability for its own sake. It is a refusal of the demand that a life become administratively comprehensible before it can be supported. Transness appears here as kinetic rather than taxonomic, an ongoing movement in which bodies, chemicals, affects, skills, technologies and social relations are assembled in ways whose meaning may not be settled in advance. The plural is not an afterthought to this account. As they write shortly afterwards, “trans is never singular, transness emerges collectively, and makes collectivity” (120).

There is something especially powerful in this framing when set against the present institutional offensive against trans people. Reactionary forces can pressure a clinic, rewrite guidance, capture an administrative procedure or alter the terms through which a school recognises gender. These are serious forms of power and they have real material effects. But they do not exhaust the terrain on which trans life is made. Friendship networks, shared medical knowledge, mutual aid, collective defence, subcultural spaces, queer households, reading groups, parties, care webs and other improvised infrastructures continue to generate capacities that do not originate in institutional permission. They can be surveilled, criminalised, deprived of resources and broken apart, but they are not reducible to recognition. This is precisely why they matter. The final chapter turns toward solidarity, generosity and love, terms that could easily become sentimental but do not do so here. Generosity is not niceness. It names an openness that cannot be completely codified through law or contract, an orientation toward others that leaves room for experiment, difference and change. Solidarity is likewise not treated as the discovery of a pre-existing sameness. It is the work of making relations across difference while remaining open to being altered by them. One of the strongest formulations in the book is that “Solidarity becomes possible by shifting from affinity to activity” (181).

That movement from affinity to activity encapsulates the political force of the argument. Affinity remains organised around likeness: we gather because we recognise ourselves in each other. Activity asks something else. What can be made together? What forms of support, refusal, defence and pleasure can be practised? What capacities can be developed that did not exist before the relation? This opens trans liberation outward rather than enclosing it within the defence of a bounded constituency. It is why Raha and van der Drift insist that transfeminism must connect with anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-carceral, disability justice and anti-border struggles. The point is not to add a longer list of identities to an already crowded political coalition. It is to recognise that the structures producing trans disposability are entangled with the structures producing disposability elsewhere. This also informs the book’s discussion of anti-fascist organising and community safety. Opposing TERF platforms and far-right mobilisation remains necessary, but Raha and van der Drift are interested in what happens when the emphasis shifts from contesting the enemy’s speech to building the capacities that allow marginalised people to move through the world with greater safety. Travelling together, sharing safety resources, developing collective defence, creating spaces for recuperation and building trustworthy networks are political because they alter the material conditions in which vulnerability is distributed. The political measure of a practice is not simply whether it wins an argument. It is whether it leaves people more able to live, move, organise and care for one another.

The resonances with Ciara Cremin’s The Spectral Woman are striking. Cremin’s trans negativity refuses the positivisation of identity and treats the trans woman as a spectral figure whose existence reveals the instability of the gendered order that attempts to contain her. Her feminine communism is likewise sensuous, playful, expressive and hostile to the masculine forms of mastery through which capitalist subjectivity is reproduced. In both books trans liberation becomes significant precisely when it ceases to be understood as a special-interest demand made by a defined minority and instead unsettles the organisation of social life more broadly. But the two books move through this problem differently, and the difference is productive. Cremin works through negation, haunting and the refusal to let identity harden into positive substance. Raha and van der Drift are more compositional. Their question is what relations, practices and infrastructures can be assembled when identity no longer provides the primary organising grammar. If Cremin is haunted by what identity cannot contain, Trans Femme Futures attends to what gathers in the spaces identity cannot organise. The answer is not a new stable subject but a changing ecology of care, desire, complicity, knowledge and collective experimentation.

This difference also clarifies what abolition means in Trans Femme Futures. The abolition of gender does not require the abolition of gendered experimentation, pleasure, femme extravagance or bodily transformation. Quite the opposite. Abolition creates the conditions in which such differences might proliferate without being organised into hierarchy, discipline and compulsory legibility. Femmeness matters not because it expresses the authentic content of a subject but because of what can be done with it: how it can rewire perception, reorganise sociality and make other desires available. Abolition is therefore less an end state than an ongoing practice of removing what blocks the emergence of other forms. There is a hopeful quality to this, although Trans Femme Futures offers no reassurance that things will simply turn out well. Its hope is material and practical rather than optimistic. Reactionary movements can capture institutions; governments can rewrite laws; medical systems can close doors; bureaucracies can change definitions. All of this matters and has to be fought. But liberation was never contained in those institutions to begin with. It has also been accumulating elsewhere: in friendships and care networks, in fugitive forms of study, in hormones and shared knowledge, in kitchens and clubs, in improvised collective defence, in books and zines and conversations, in experiments that fail and are begun again.

The title of the introduction, “Trans liberation is between us,” is therefore more than a slogan. The between is not an empty interval linking already constituted identities. It is the social field in which identities become movable, capacities develop, bodies change and other worlds begin to take form. This is where the book is closest to the undercommons, and perhaps where its intervention is most politically urgent. The task is not to wait for the institution to recognise the correct identity and then deliver freedom. It is to defend access to the resources we need while continuing to build the forms of relation through which freedom becomes practicable. Trans liberation is between us because it is something people do to, for and with one another. That is both more fragile and more difficult to administer than recognition. It is also far harder to abolish.

Images:  Moonshadow, Transsexual Action Organization, 1974. Edited by Angela K. Douglas, art by Susan David. Photographed at Chronoplasticity, Raven Row, London, 2024.