Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift on Trans Femme Futures

Last month, it was reported that Edinburgh's Chalmers Centre, which provides gender affirming care to trans people in the area, has paused all surgical referrals for patients under 25. Following the widely condemned Cass Review, which makes the transphobic case against gender affirming care for trans children and youth, this fascistic move to suppress the public lives of trans people falls at a grimly apt time for the release of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds, a groundbreaking new book by Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift. 

The book is a breathtaking exploration for today's trans abolitionists. With roots in activism and labour organising, Raha and van der Drift each bring a tremendous amount of care, attention and imagination to the intersection of transfeminism and abolitionism. Trans Femme Futures opens the door to a vital route away from 'rights-based' trans liberalism.

Trans liberalism, which is fed by the ever-escalating but never-transgressing 'demand' for 'trans rights now', never seems to get the goods. "In the call for trans rights, you hear: 'We've been asking for rights, and now we're gonna demand them,'" van der Drift says. "The language of demanding, which you do always to a higher power feels sort of like a poverty… in how we think about getting together and how we can make social change together."

"It leaves the agency with the political powers," Raha adds. "[Trans liberal] politics is articulating our demands, and then we're waiting for the political system to deliver them." Watching our access to life-saving care erode before our eyes, trans people in Scotland are under a rights-based microscope. Meanwhile, Trans Femme Futures imagines a different sort of struggle, one that stretches beyond the confines of legislative reform. Raha calls it a "postmortem for trans liberalism."

The book, however, does not take up the vocabulary of rejection. Rather, the book feels bound together by radical imagination: Trans Femme Futures imagines a model of care and labour that does not preclude or exclude. Raha and van der Drift manage to articulate the inarticulable, constructing a framework based on what they term "trans femme socialities", which "draw impurely from the possibilities of non-normativity." The chapters that follow are sexy, galvanising and challenging. It's a world-changing book – not in a weighty, global sense, but in a personal one – which, I hope, will come to define key questions in trans/abolitionist theory.

It feels so appropriate that a book dedicated to the infinitely creative worlds held within transfeminism should spawn another world in its readers. Pragmatically, the book defines thorough frameworks for care and complicity. It unmoors care and harm from 'identity', moving away from the fixity of positionality toward a farther-reaching ethic. 

Raha and van der Drift weave an ethic of care – especially related to food and cooking – through structures of labour, by which our interaction with and performance of gender is informed by our relationship to class and labour (and vice versa). Informed by the work of Black feminists and other abolitionists, Raha and van der Drift's work centres on the kitchen as a site of co-creation. Van der Drift says that the kitchen is "where life happens," Raha says: "The kitchen table is the beginning."

This reclamation of the kitchen and the labour within it is just one thread of this expansive work. For me, one of the most important thoughts from Trans Femme Futures is freedom from prescribed affect, which constrains how femmes should look and act, how victims of harm should behave, and what form an 'academic' text should take. Affective freedom means that the radical imaginings of trans abolitionism are not limited to the lives of trans abolitionists. As Raha says: "Anyone can trans." Anyone can cook; anyone can organise; anyone can liberate.

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Trans Femme Futures is out with Pluto Press on 20 Nov
Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift will be at Edinburgh's Radical Book Fair, Assembly Roxy, 22 Nov, 5:30pm, and Glasgow Women's Library, 23 Nov, 2pm