We are future ancestors: on authoritarian politics and the deepening of our radical roots

ABSTRACT

Written in a conversational exchange, this essay charts urgent connections among queer/trans/disability frameworks of environmental, climate, and reproductive justice centered around community planning and county level democratic politics. We reflect on the lessons learned in our local context of Iowa between 2023–2024, during unprecedented legislative control of queer and trans lives and reproductive politics. In our conversation, we argue anti-trans legislation is a form of authoritarianism and political violence, a frame which shifts how organizers might draw connections among issues and energize future struggles. We reflect on the organizing strategies and advocacy work in our community and connect this labor as crucial care work necessary for queer and trans life.

KEYWORDS:

• Care
• authoritarianism
• reproductive justice
• environmental justice
• transgender

Acknowledgment

We thank QJS editor Stacey Sowards for her support of this forum and her editing of our essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Robin Opsahl, “Governor Signs Transgender Medical Care, Bathroom Use Bills into Law,” Capital Dispatch, March 22, 2023, https://iowacapitaldispatch.com/briefs/governor-signs-transgender-medical-care-bathroom-use-bills-into-law/.

2 Madison Pauly, “Inside the Secret Working Group that Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws across the Country,” Mother Jones, March 8, 2023, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/03/anti-trans-transgender-health-care-ban-legislation-bill-minors-children-lgbtq/.

3 The influences here are vast, intellectually and in our own worlds where we do care work of all sorts because it is, above all, feminist praxis. In particular, we think of Asha Bhandary, Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2020); Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018); Hil Malatino, Trans Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020); Ethel Tungohan, Care Activism: Migrant Domestic Workers, Movement Building, and Communities of Care (University of Illinois Press, 2023); Margaret Price, Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2024); Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2023); adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (AK Press, 2019); Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams, Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016); Michelle Cassandra Johnson Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief (Shambhala Press, 2021); and Gail Parker, Restorative Yoga for Ethnic and Race-Based Stress and Trauma (Singing Dragon, 2020). Our care mentors also transcend the written page, and we use informal citation to acknowledge those tributaries: with gratitude to Constance Gordon, Tiara R. Na’puti, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, Aimi Hamraie, V. Jo Hsu, Jessie Waggoner, Max Mowitz and gender doulas of the world, Iowa Trans Mutual Aid, Sins Invalid, Kelly Palmer, Lina-Maria Murillo, Shui-yin Sharon Yam, Naomi Greyser, Rachel McLaren, Jiyeon Kang, Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, Jamie Brooks Robertson, Talia Meidlinger, M. J. Meidlinger, Michelle Bowman, Tim and Carson Fixmer, and all of the social justice therapists who are teaching us to heal broken hearts and light fires in the right places of the world.

4 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 29.

5 E. Cram, Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022).

6 Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Homeland Maternity: US Security Culture and the New Reproductive Regime (Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

7 Amy Howe, “Supreme Court to Hear Case on Criminal Penalties for Homelessness,” Scotusblog, April 19, 2024, https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/04/supreme-court-to-hear-case-on-criminal-penalties-for-homelessness/.

8 Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

9 This term runs throughout her work, but is developed in Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

10 Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery Publishing, 2020).

11 V Fixmer-Oraiz, “There Is Nothing Wrong with Us,” The Gazette, March 30, 2023, https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/there-is-nothing-wrong-with-us/.

12 Laura Bergus and V. Fixmer-Oraiz, “It's Time We Talked about Authoritarianism in Iowa,” Little Village, January 18, 2024, https://littlevillagemag.com/letter-from-laura-bergus-and-v-fixmer-oraiz-its-time-we-talked-about-authoritarianism-in-iowa/.

13 Shui-yin Sharon Yam and Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Doing Gender Justice: Queering Reproduction, Kin, and Care (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).

14 E Cram, “A Disturbing Abuse of State Power,” The Gazette, March 28, 2023, https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/a-disturbing-abuse-of-state-power/.

15 We highly recommend checking out Professor Murillo’s book: Lina-Maria Murillo. Fighting for Control: Power, Reproductive Care, and Race in the US–Mexico Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2024).