Our affirmative is not an identity politic, the continual capture of black life by the self-preserving arm of the state demands a disruption of those orientations that allow the formation of communities to be coopted. The Black and trans feminist werk to be done lies not in who we allegedly are but in how we mobilize ourselves and our politics through militant preservation.

KMG: One of my favorite quotations is from D.L. Smith’s essay, “What is Black Cul- ture?” where he writes, “Perhaps in losing ourselves, we will find ourselves.”11 We are made into subjects through processes of imprint upon bodies, identity; race, gender, class, and/or sexual orientations. Without these identities, we fear that we will lose some sense of ourselves that is bound to history, so we carry it (history), sometimes by choice and other times, identities are placed upon us from the world around us and we have no real choice in how others choose to perceive us or our embodied histories. The fact of the matter is that we know that just because you are poor doesn’t mean that you will have radical anti-capitalist politics. Just because you are Black doesn’t mean that you will somehow have an affinity towards or with other Black people. These identities are scripts and the people who carry these scripts in their body, or rather those who embody evidence of particular identities, constantly prove how categorical labels are always already, they be, incapable of articulating the fullness of we (subjects) who endure, challenge, reinforce, despise, love, and sometimes encourage the naming. This limit does not exist simply because of a failure to acknowledge intersectional identities that many people carry, that is, a Black transgender working class woman—we could continue to add on here bisexual, college educated, Latinx, Republican—all of these identity claims start to help you understand the fullness of a subject, but none of these give you the full subject even if we keep listing out all of the identities we hold, we will only ever be approaching the fullness of a being or subject as said being changes in and over time. So I think the fear that we will lose ourselves without these categories is a trap that keeps us holding on to categories that we know fail us. There is a bind though because these identity categories prove useful in garnering state recognition, and also in creating a sense of community or group affinity. Think of the notion of a “protected class” that describes persons who are supposedly protected by the law because of their identity, but these anti-discrimination laws don’t always work to protect the people they set out to protect. While most hate crimes are still committed on Black bodies, it is LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender] (white) folk who are most evoked when thinking of hate crimes and we are usually thinking about white queer bodies.12 For example, a recent episode of Law and Order SVU, “Transgender Bridge,”13 centers on the story of a white transgender teenage girl who is taunted by high schoolers from another school, a Black school, and an altercation ensues on the bridge after school. The Black boy pushes the girl and she falls over the bridge. She survives the initial fall, but later dies because of complications from the fall. Over the course of the episode, the Black boy keeps being reminded that he didn’t just hurt anyone, but someone from a “pro- tected class.” The viewer isn’t supposed to be able to see or hold that the Black boy is also a part of a class that needs protecting. This kind of nuance would disrupt and make unstable the position of the white transgender girl as the proper “protected class.” The Black boy is sentenced to 7 years, 3 years in a juvenile facility, and upon his 18th birthday he’ll be transferred to an adult prison to serve the remainder. In order to be able to view the nuance of the above situation it requires what I call a trans* positionality or lens. For me, there is a difference between trans and transgender. Transgender people are all very different so there isn’t one thing that I can say about Black transgender people. Being Black and transgender doesn’t give a person the ability to redeploy strategies of feminism. There are Black transgender people who do that work, but there are others who do not. I think what is more useful is to think about the ways in which trans*, like blackness, can be embodied, but it actually marks a certain kind of orientation in the world, it is not fixed though always precarious. It is important to make this distinction between transgender and trans because many transgender people do not identify as transgender, but rather identify as man or woman, not asking to remake or add a new gender category, but rather fit into one that already exists. In this case, I would not say that transgender people are actually undoing the categories that produce the boundaries of a gender binary, though changing one’s location on the binary does challenge the notion that gender is fixed, because some people are able to change genders. I think what might be more useful in this conversation is to think about gender non- conforming bodies, bodies that do not fit and actively refute a binary legibility. Not because these people are necessarily more radical, but their existence often poses a critique to the gender-binaried-order of the land. I believe it is necessary to cultivate a politic that is able to view the ways in which certain bodies are made more vulnerable to certain kinds of violence, but to also note that vulnerability changes depending on time, place, and condition. In the latest essay I published I propose trans*: We must listen for the fullness embedded in the silences and gaps, the moments of existence before the name or the category came to do its work upon the body. We must be more attuned to the present absences which calls for a Trans* method. One of the ways in which Black Queer Studies scholars have challenged us to engage black sexuality and gender is through simultaneous black and queer acts of (re)membering. Black Queer Studies staged this work in the gap and in the silence of Queer Studies and Black Studies who articulated themselves as mutually exclusive. Black Queer Studies helped us to call out the missing, the ones who are with us, but neglected. A Trans* method further names the work of charting the present absences in multiple sites of intersection by demanding a moment of criti- cal presence. A Trans* method is a tool that helps us to embark upon the work of listening, understanding, and reading as both intellectual and political practices. It allows us to see certain things that might not normally be seen. It also helps us to understand how that seeing is being shaped. As the T in LGBTQI becomes more apparent in popular culture, it is important that we still hold fast to a Trans* analytic, knowing that representation is not enough. We know that it is not enough, for just as Laverne Cox and Janet Mock have become the popular beautiful women of color representing the transgender movement, there have been countless other unnamed (and named, but names we are not familiar with) transgender women and men who have been harassed, violated, and murdered in the streets. At the heart of black feminist praxis is a push to make the lives of disappeared black women matter.14 In order to make that argument, black feminists showed us how the category of woman failed to account for the unique experience of black women. This critique both challenged and clung to the category itself. I consider the identities that have yet come to cohere as nameable, yet are ever present with us. How do we carry those not as simple additions to an ever growing acronym, LGBTQI, but instead hold them up as future Trans* operations that will come to do work and further open us up to new possibilities. This is the charge of a Black Queer Studies for now; and by now I mean in this current historical moment, but I also use for now to imply the temporariness of this method as one that is unfixed so that we might always be open and ready for a name changing considering what is necessary for now is not necessary for always.15 MB: I like the distinction you’re making between transgender people and gender nonconforming bodies. One can identify and be identified as transgender and yet do little to subvert and disrupt the gender binary. I imagine, maybe, you’d say something similar about those who are epidermally read as Black? That is, one can identify and be identified as Black and do little to undermine white supremacy. We can name a whole host of racially and gender marginalized folks who do not do Black feminist or trans feminist work, as it were: suffragists who said that they’d “cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman”; Hotep dudes pontificating about their “African Queens” and demanding babies, babies, babies because birth control is “genocide”; Southern African American men with swastika tattoos and confederate flags on their pick-ups; far-Right transgender women who buttress the gender binary; African American women who chastised “their” men for not being “manly” enough to defend “the race.” Surely subjectivity is complex and perhaps we all harbor instances of hegemonic practices. I think I want to maintain, though, that the Black/trans/feminist work to be done rests not in what we purportedly are but in how we mobilize ourselves and our politics in subversion of power. The terms at hand, then, come to be tied, for us, to relations to power and a willingness to enact the political forces behind these terms. In other words, we must choose Black and trans and feminism; we must make these things mean and matter in politically liberatory ways. I think I yearn for the thing that flows from the meeting of Black feminism and trans feminism as gendered fugitivity. The Blackness and transness of feminisms are not distinct phenomena to be hierarchized, nor mutually exclusive modes of subjectivity; Blackness and transness both engender animacy, act as analytical sites of disruption, and imbricate one another to the end of excavating the interstices of categorization. And I want to be clear that the political valences of the language I choose to deploy with respect to the Blackness and transness of feminisms must be handled with care. This conversation is testament to the fact that we care a great deal. And it is because we care a great deal that we are asserting these positions. We care about—nay, we love—the deviant, the marginalized, the fugitive, the renegades, the rebels, the gender-benders, the queer. These are the ones with whom I want.