[Revisit] Embodying Existence with Kai Cheng Thom

This episode was originally aired on July 1st 2024.

Kai Cheng Thom - MSW, Qualified Mediator, Somatic Sex Educator, performance artist, community healer, award-winning writer, and author of Falling Back in Love with Being Human joins us for this episode. A consummate dreamer and believer in revolutionary potential, Kai brings radical love to her work and this conversation. Join us while Kai and Prentis geek out about exciting and dangerous things like monster-making, harm and revenge, + queerness and love.

Read the full transcript of this conversation here.

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• Trans Pride Toronto
• Maggie’s Toronto
• Red Canary Song

Transcript

0:06

Hi everybody, welcome to Becoming the People. I wonder if this is true for other people, but there are certain people whose work I read, I listen to them on podcasts when I can, I follow them on social media, and I have kind of a running conversation with them happening only in my mind. Kai Cheng Tom is one of those people for me. She often shares things or writes pieces that I find deeply evocative, really challenging often for me. They kind of challenge the edges or things that I've come to understand. And she also writes with such a beauty and a tenderness that I feel compelled and somehow capable of interrogating those edges or those limits I had before. We also have a lot in common. We're both somatic practitioners, we are both authors. We also work on issues of transformative justice, we work with groups in conflict, we work with organizations. And so I think about her as a peer and teacher to me. And this is the first time that we've ever had a conversation, so you'll probably hear me being pretty geeked out about being able to share some space with her, um, to witness her, experience her, and I'm really, really grateful that I had this time to just ask even a a fraction of the questions that I have for her. If you're not yet familiar with Kai Cheng Tom, as I said, she's a somatic practitioner, she's a performance artist, she's a community healer, and a lot of her work is about the revolutionary potential of radical love, and she focuses on the intersection of social justice, pleasure activism, and transformative approaches to healing conflict. She has a new book out called Falling Back in Love with Being Human. It's a national bestseller in Canada, and it's really, really a gorgeous book that I would encourage you to pick up, spend time with, make friends with. It's deeply intimate and beautiful. In this conversation today, we explore all kinds of exciting and maybe dangerous themes around monster making, harm and revenge, queerness and love. And I found it to be a really sweet and exciting conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. Okay, so this is one of those moments where I realized that part of the reason why I've started doing podcasting in the first place was just to be able to talk to people that I really want to talk to. What a great idea. It's amazing. I should start a podcast for that reason, but then I don't want to put the podcast out. Like I But this is this is that for me. I I have and maybe it's also revealing some of my own social awkwardness because maybe I could have just reached out and been like, hey, can we talk to each other? But probably I have this podcast as an excuse to reach out to you and say, Kai Cheng Tom, I would like to talk to you. I feel really inspired by you, and I feel excited to talk to you right now and to get to meet you right now. So thank you. Thanks for saying so. I mean, let me just say, you totally reach out at any time. And there was such delight for me in getting your invitation to this podcast, because I was like, I don't know, I felt like Cinderella or something, and I got my invitation to the ball. I'm like, really? You want to talk to me? Like, oh my god. Made me very, very happy. Oh my gosh. Yeah, I've been wanting to talk to you for for years. So I want to start with just a question to kind of ground us. Can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing and something about it that kind of situates you here in this moment that brings you here right now? Wow, nobody's ever asked me that on a podcast before. Thank you. Uh my upbringing. I grew up on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Slawatooth, and Salish peoples in colonially known Vancouver in a Chinese family where the family as a whole was very working class, but my parents were class ascendant. So my mom was working on med school around the time that I was born, and then like made this like amazing, shocking, incredible like leap into like being a doctor. And it transformed all of us, you know, and it was amazing in terms of class access and like material privilege, I think, in terms of like where my parents started and and then where they were when when I was born. And also like the trappings of like working classness and poverty and intergenerational trauma were like still living in my parents' bodies. And so that kind of juxtaposition of like I had a relatively like high access to things like educational privilege and material needs like food and stuff, but that was like kind of mixed with this the behaviors and like the experiences of my parents around like acting like food was scarce, even though it actually wasn't for our family, right? And like the confusion of that. Um, and then I guess I don't know, and also the last thing I'll say is like I grew up in the 90s and like the X-Men cartoon was on TV, and um the word gaylord was like in high fashion among the six-year-olds of the day, and that shaping is like deep in me, that kind of like superheroes larger than life. I love like sugary cereals, like all of that. I don't know. I just I feel so informed by the 90s. Yeah. Well, thank you for that. I I want to talk a little bit about a kind of shared background that I see with us, and we can figure out how shared it is. But I know that you you were trained as a therapist. Yeah, yeah. Social worker. And you've also arrived to somatics and embodiment work, and I'm just wondering about that journey. I'm also a former therapist. That's sort of how I identified. Recovering therapy. Yeah, exactly. And so I'm curious what got you there to doing therapy work and what got you out? So I'm a middle child, and I feel like there's like research that shows there's a disproportionate number of middle children in the therapy world. But uh, like I said, my my family had a lot of like intergenerational trauma shaping, like what what family doesn't, mine certainly did. And I was the queer kid in the family in that kind of weird space of like I wasn't doing masculinity properly, so I, you know, received negative feedback about that. But I was good at listening to people talk about hard things, and that became the way that I like acquired connection in in my family. Like, I would listen to my dad talk about like all the bad things that happened in his childhood, which probably now wasn't that appropriate now that I think about it. I would listen to my mom do the same thing. And then I was like, okay, when I grow up, this is my calling. This is how I'm gonna be a person of of worth and meaning and lovability in the world. And I went into social work first in my undergrad years because there was still enough working classness in my family where I was like a practical degree that will lead to a job, you know, and it's values aligned. How great is that? Uh and then I, of course, you know, got into social work and was like, oh, this is not as values aligned as I thought it was. Uh so then I went back to school, trained as a therapist, and at the time, you know, I was in my early 20s. It was I was on a mission to rescue queer and trans kids, which, you know, again, this is the fatal mistake of the people who go into therapy, is we probably shouldn't be on a miscu to rescue, but there it is. And uh I very quickly became promoted to like full like clinical status, working with tons and tons of queer and trans kids and families, because like you, I was a family therapist too. I did a lot of family system stuff, and it was too much for me. I was like 25 and seeing youth, some of whom were 25 or 26, their families, and um many came close to dying or died, and uh can hear my own voice changing as I'm talking about it. I'm like and I could feel the system killing me as it was killing them. And uh I heard from a colleague about this thing called somatics, and it was actually very funny because she was like, you know, in America I'm from Canada. In America, they have this thing called generative somatics, which is the cool political one, but here in Canada we only have somatic experiencing. And I couldn't afford to go to the Bay Area and get into GS, uh, so I I went to a somatic experiencing training. And um, yeah, I mean, that was both good and bad. It's uh you know, somatics in the mainstream are like extremely white and depoliticized, and they were especially at at that time. And uh But yeah, that was the thread. That was the thread of like, oh, maybe like embodiment could be the way. Because I I started to think about like what was happening to the animal of me in relation to like sweet, wonderful, mysterious, powerful animal bodies of of the youth and parents I was working with. And more and more I got tapped into what embodiment could be as like movement rather than like therapeutic practice. Uh yeah, that's more, but I'll just stop there. Yeah, that's that's how I got into it. Yeah. Yeah, I feel so much um synergy there and also a lot of curiosity. I um am a middle child too. Uh yes! I'm saying there's something to it. There's something about it. There's something about it. Yeah, I mean I I I really resonate with a lot of what you shared, because you know, as a middle child, I think there's a lot of making space for others and figuring out how to make space for others, including parents. And I actually uh, you know, I was doing political work before I became a therapist, and I I think I found somatics before I started studying to be a therapist. Because I lived in Oakland, I lived in the Bay. Right, the heart of GS. Yeah, and I actually I worked at um the an organization called Generation Five that some folks may know that was working on how to end childhood sexual abuse in in five generations, and the founder of Generation Five went on to found generative somatics, Stacey Haynes. And so when I started working at Gen 5, I was offered and encouraged to start studying somatics, and I was actually very resistant in the beginning. Really? I I think for a lot of people that knew me before, I think I was I think I was a similar age as you. I think a lot of people are sh shocked that this is the time I ended. Are you shocked? Sometimes, sometimes. I was not a feelings person back then. I wasn't at all. I was like, ew, feelings, no. You know. Sometimes I still feel that way. I mean, I feel that way, I think, daily, but I have other ways of blending with that feeling. But yeah, so I I kind of reluctantly started setting somatics and then it opened up my whole world. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. I also think this thing is interesting. You know, when you talked about somatic experiencing and and how white it was at the time, and in a way, it it's you and other folks that are changing that landscape of what somatics is. You're changing the way that it's understood, practiced, and who is in those rooms. And so I think when I started doing somatics, people were like, Well, how can you do somatics? Because there's an assumed wrongness about our relationships to our bodies. So I wonder if you've ever encountered that even inside of yourself. Like, how do I do embodiment from this body that has so much projection and so much there's so much projection onto non-binary and trans bodies about what we mean and where we are allowed. So I'm I'm just curious if that sparks anything for you. Mmm. Yeah, I felt like a swirl of sparks, like like surrounded by fireflies right now. Yeah, totally. Yeah, I I think the piece that really resonates with like some grief is that assumed wrongness of the body and how many people still in in in the somatics world and the world assume that a trans woman of color like myself, or like black trans non-binary people, like that they assume a wrongness and assume I think even like a monstrosity, like um vileness, repulsiveness, aggression, uh sneakiness, like all these like terrible things that get attached to our bodies, the stories that weave their way in. Um and like even just like things like the way that there's supposedly like a masculine inside like a particular body and a feminine inside a particular body. And if you haven't got that right, then you must be confused or something like that. But here's like the piece that I like, there's like this like rebellious little flame in me that's like, but I never felt wrong about my body. Like I never felt that. Like I was like, I knew. And in fact, I have this whole little mythology that I like to say. I'm gonna make it very short, where I just I think that queer and trans people, particularly racialized queer and trans people, are actually like deeper and like have like often more capacity for this thing we call somatics than regular Joe, whatever whoever regular Joe is. Um, like because what it means to be queer or trans is to feel a deep knowing inside the body, a calling that is often beyond culture, like is not something we've been taught could exist, but we follow that call into embodying existence. I am a trans woman, not because anyone said trans women exist and you could be one. It was we're very much the opposite, right? Um I am because my body knew. And that is so much more profound as a somatic experience than anything I could learn from, with respect, anything I could learn from Peter Levine or Pat Ogden or whatever white cis somatics people. I am the beginning. And and that is what I want all the queer and trans somatics practitioners to know, they are the beginning. Wow. You just really touched something really deep in me, and I want to thank you for that. I feel really moved by what you just shared. I'm the beginning. Yeah, you are. You are your apprentice hep hell! You're the beginning! That's that's such an offering, though, I think, for so many, for so many people, because yeah, my gender experience is the experience of my body. It's my body in relationship to the world and other people, and there is a a knowing kind of embedded in that the way that we are subverting the binary of it all. But the it it originates in a knowing, and I just love that. I want to just hang out a minute here on you mentioned the word monstrosity. And I I hear you talk about this word a lot, monstrosity, and sometimes I hear you talk about the villain, villainous, and the the things that get projected onto our bodies. And you know, in your most recent book, I think there's a point at which in the book you talk about like, okay, this is put on us. And you're talking specifically to trans women, and I think trans women of color, but this is put on to us. So how do we take what's inside the image of the monster and make it both useful and and shine? It's like the shining, the visible, all of these pieces of the monster, the monstrosity. Let's use that. And I um I'm just curious about how you think about monstrosity and the monsters that we make and how we navigate our power inside of these projections. Oh you're asking my favorite question. Yes. Okay, can I be super annoying and answer by starting with a question? You can do whatever you want, honestly. Okay, great. Yes, okay. Uh do you have a favorite monster, like, you know, from myth or TV or story or something, like a like a favorite one? Wow, that's really fun. That's a fun question. Do I have a favorite monster? I am, I will just say, I'm kind of notoriously a scaredy cat. As a kid, I was always like, monsters. I think okay, here's one. I love I love uh I love Ursula from the animated Little Mermaid. Yes! I love Ursula too. She's just so glamorous and yeah, she's incredible. She's in her body in a way that no one else in the film is. I love Ursula. Yeah. Thank you. I love Ursula too. Thank you. Oh my god, thanks for playing. I love it. I mean, if we just like that's the thing. So Ursula is this like tentacled, huge. I I read her as racialized, though, you know, she's purple, but I read her as racialized and I read her as trans, actually. And she has this sensuality, and she wants to overthrow the mermaid monarchy, and she is like this witch who pursues what she wants, even though she's in exile. And like, I feel like anytime we tap into like a favorite monster, like something that we are, you know, and I'm a I'm a notorious scaredy cat too, but like something that like calls to us, even though like it's kind of horrifying, we find a part of ourselves that has the power or like resonates with the power. And I think this is the thing about monsters. And you know, I'm just I'm grateful to I'm thinking now about the lineage of trans women thinkers who write about the monster. Susan Stryker, I think, is like a like a big one, but monsters are this isn't my idea either. I read it somewhere, like monsters are harbingers of change, they show us the fault lines in society, like they show us the parts of ourselves that like we don't want to look at, and I just know that's what I actually am. Like when I walk on the street, like I'm noticeably trans, my voice like tips people off or whatever it is. And I don't know. I mean, I walk into a room and the cis straight men are afraid. They feel fear. And although that's kind of bad because sometimes it turns into violence, what they're afraid of is their desire, their longing, their own femininity. And like inside of that, first it is like my power to like to remind the cisgender, like patriarchal, like like Imperium that they are vulnerable to fear. They feel something around me, and then also I remind them that something else is possible, and I frickin' love that wow. It's almost like I'm imagining what arises in your wake, like when you enter a room and the kind of quivering that can happen. Yeah. And the power of that, it's really yeah. That's incredible to think about. And I mean it's this it's uh lonely too, right? Like because sometimes we we want our wake to leave uh sweetness and fond feelings and not terror and like accusations of being inherently evil or predatory. But we are given the embodiment that we are given and if the power is there then I suppose we might as well own it. Well, thank you. I I love that. I feel excited by that. I resonate with that. I think there's I'm just gonna thread this in here and we can go in any direction you want. But I I think another thing, a place where we share practice is transformative justice. And you do this really cool thing where you make like um visuals, like infographics. It's like so cool that you do that. And that you think in infographics. I'm just like, oh yeah, that's so helpful to see how that connects, what that's opposite of. And I think in this, you know, terrain of our emotions, our emotional lives, a lot of us don't think about the power that the visualization can give us and the choice it can offer us to do that. So, anyways, I just wanted to nerd out for a minute and say cool thing that you do. I'm sweating because you think that's cool. I was like, oh my god, really? Because I I think of it as this like slightly shameful, nerdy thing that I do. I'm like truly touched. Oh no, it's so delightful. And I think there's a lot of people that feel that way, I'm sure. And the people that are gonna check them out after this episode, um, I think we'll be delighted by that. It's such a it's such an offering and a unique offering to you know, my one of my teachers always says the the map is never the territory, but yet we need a map, you know. And I think you offer the map. You offer maps, maps that are are really useful for us in these moments of um yeah, where it's it's hard to find the kind of path or the ground. So thank you for that. And also, I'm a super nerd about emotions and feelings. Oh great. Oh good, okay. Yeah, let's let's uh let's nerd and make terminology and diagrams forever. Oh my god, can we? I would really love that. Excellent. I would really, really love that. Okay, transformative justice. So I want to know everything about your your practice of it, but but one, I'm just curious what what it means to you at this point and your kind of facilitation and practice. Like, what do you think is really happening inside of what we might call transformative justice? And I'm I'm also really curious about the kind of edges of the practice and the framework or the places where you are in question curiosity or feeling limits if there are some. So, yeah. Yeah, okay, let's see. Succinct catching, succinct. Um, no, no, no, no. You don't have to. Okay, flowing, open, free. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so I'm on it to TJ. I feel like the way a lot of like urban weirdo queirdos get into transformative justice, which is like something bad happened in my group of friends. And and to be really clear, like I mean like there was like sexualized or intimate harm and violence happening in in my group of friends, and then when we wanted to fix it without calling the police. Um like many people, I picked up a copy of The Revolution Starts at Home, edited by uh yes, but I think mine is in the orange section of my book on the rich. Um I know it's orange, but like the uh yeah, edited of course by the election pamphlet Semra Seinha and Ching and Chen, and probably like a lot of people, the first transformative justice process like process, you were calling them accountability processes at the time, like uh did not work. Like was like an abysmal failure on all counts. Like, you know, whatever measure of success that we could have used, I feel like we didn't get there. Um, you know. The heartbreak and and then the second one also an abysmal failure, and the third one that you know, more and more abysmal failures. Um and I think my problem is that when I fail at something, I become obsessed with it. And like I like when I keep doing it, and like it something as as deep as intimate harm, you know, for sure, I became obsessed with with with that and um with like the spiritual crisis I think that came up around watching people behave in ways that I couldn't support or like don't believe in. And I think the mind-bending, edgy part of transformative justice for me is there's all these like kind of values that don't seem to fully cohere in practice. Like we want to always believe and center and give empowerment to survivors, and also sometimes we want to abolish punitive justice systems and make room for second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth chances, and not throw anybody away, and make space for the fact that many perpetrators are survivors, or all perpetrators are survivors, or some of something, right? And sometimes the survivor of a harm calls for vengeance. Sometimes the community calls for blood. And how are we to make these truths cohere in reality? This is the deep edge. And so I think the practice for me is two things. One is like whatever vestiges of like working classness, like bachelor level social worker are still in me or like in practice, applied. There are people in front of me who are saying they need something, and I believe them. So I'm gonna try and like what what is the the practice is like? How do you support somebody who has survived a harm and support somebody who's done a harm? And maybe everybody's saying everybody harmed everybody else. And so, like, how do you slow things down and get people to a little bit more safety and kind of untangle the stories and and then and then maybe there's some kind of redress or a healing or a something, right? Those are like that's like the practical steps of practice and like really the holding the frame of like everybody gets what they need, everybody gets to live, everybody gets to be heard, like holding, holding, holding. And then deep inside the spiritual practice, the mission is like, my heart breaks every time. Like, you know, like I'm like, oh no, like my community is falling apart, my interior is falling apart. I have to believe that we can do better this time. Yeah, it's a gift and it's um it takes a toll to kind of hold that space of I don't know if it's quite hope, but maybe something akin to it that we can revisit this and yeah. I'm curious, just out of curiosity for myself, is something I've been thinking about a lot. What do you think vengeance is in us? Like, what is it doing? Echey, itchy! I think about this a lot. It's like, you know, your questions about or sorry, you're you're thinking about the monstrous, you know, and how when we take back, I mean, I think one of the things I hear when you talk about monstrosity is I'm like, oh, you're willing to take in the monster. And I think a lot of people are not willing to take in the monster doesn't mean that there's not that. And when I think about vengeance, I'm like, I know that feeling. I know that feeling. And I don't want to pretend like good people don't have the feeling of vengeance, whatever that is, it's like we can suppress this feeling. So I've been thinking a lot about what is vengeance trying to do and how does that get cared for, expressed, where might it need to be acted out in some way? What is vengeance doing? Because I think it has a message, so I'm just curious if you have any any feelings there or thoughts. Oh, so many. Yeah. Uh I I also I want to echo this. Like, it's not that good people don't have longings for vengeance, or if they don't, I'm not a good people because I long for vengeance daily! Daily. And not even in a abstract way. There's this is the thing, this is a situation I'm even working on right now where I felt quite betrayed and harmed by somebody I was dating last year. And I kid you not, Prentice, like at least once a week, I have this thought of like, this man did that to me? Does he know who I am? Why I could launch an internet campaign that would end his life, you know? And I want to. I really, really want to. And if I just think about that inside myself, like, what is that wanting trying to do? I don't know what vengeance is doing for other people necessarily, though I have some guesses. You know, the fight response deep in the tissues, restoring our power, I don't know, like our mobility. But like, honestly, on a petty level, which I think is uh somewhat profound, is like, I want that guy to know that I'm mattered. He can't just treat me like garbage and throw me away like garbage. I'm mattered. Hmm. And then I think like I'm trying to tell myself that, you know? I matter, I have power. People can't do that to me. Except, um, he did. And um my vengeance wouldn't change that. And it would make me more of the monster than I would like to be. Yeah. You know what you're saying of like, you know, whatever people choose to do around a harm or how they address it, there's so many different conditions that dictate what's the move to make. And I'm interested in this question of how does that sense of I matter get restored. You know. And in any process or in relationships with other people, how does that get reinforced? And how does that question I think the question lies kind of dormant in so many of us in a way. And then we have these relationships with people like you're describing, and it activates this question that's just sitting there at the bottom of our stomachs or something. And then I'm curious how that question what we might do as a friend group, as a society, uh, in a process, so that that question is less potent inside of you or me. You know. And that's a big, you know, that's a big question. There should probably be many things, but I'm it's um something I'm often reflecting on. Yeah. Yeah, well, you know, such a good question. I think it's like when people come to me for support around harm and transformative justice, a story I hear over and over from survivors, and these days it's almost everyone who comes to me who is identifies as the survivor. Like nobody really is like, I'm the perpetrator of the situation. Right. Very rarely. Um sometimes there are, but uh yeah. The stor one story I hear over and over again, and I'm curious if this is true for you too, is uh feeling dropped, disappointed, betrayed by the community around them. But that feeling of like I matter is this question really about like maybe I don't matter. And I think the thing about harm is that so many of us experience it, and the person who does the harm for their own reasons, whatever, is like you know, treats us in a dehumanizing way and then like tosses us aside or or something like that. And then society behaves like that doesn't matter. I think about like racialized folks, queer and trans folks, and all the harm that happens to us that society is just like that doesn't matter. And I think the most important thing I can think of is for the community to respond to our experiences of harm and violence in a way that shows us like that we are cared for, cared about, and that this doesn't have to necessarily always include vengeance. Like it's weird to me that like some of the most common demonstrations of solidarity and care around an experience of harm are the call out. I'm confident that if I wanted revenge on this guy who I I'd feel hurt by, I could do a call out and like a maybe like a thousand people would join me in like denouncing him on the internet. But if I put a call out saying, well, my heart was broken and my body was taken advantage of, and will somebody pay my uh rent for a year? I'm not so sure. Not so sure. You need to change that. Are you okay with me asking a follow-up question? Because I know what you're sharing is also. What stops you from doing a call-out? The technical answer is I just don't believe it would help. I I believe it would it would harm. Like, you know, if I think about a specific person, there are many people I've wanted to call out, and I have done call-outs in the past, like when I was earlier on in life and stuff. Um and I think there's a place for call-outs sometimes too, you know. I I I am pretty committed to this personal thing of of not doing the call-out. And I I I think it's because in this situation, these kind of situations, I know it would it would hurt the other person. Like I know that that person would would suffer real material consequences and emotional consequences of a call-out that I don't think would make him a better person. I think it would maybe make him a worse person. And then I don't think it would help me. I think it would harm me, actually. And that's very personal. I think everybody needs to answer that question for themselves if it is a call doing the call out gonna hurt us or harm us. But I think it would hurt me because I need to know in my body that my healing, my empowerment, my restoration is within my power and the power of the people who love me. It is not within the power of the person who harmed me, um, or the power of the randos who would like to get on the train of a call out of a person they do not know. That power is inside me, and I don't want to enact a situation where I give it away. And that's deeply personal. It's for me. You know, not everybody is gonna feel that way about themselves. But I feel that way about me. I think this is you know powerful. I feel similarly that there are contexts where a call out makes perfect sense. Absolutely makes perfect sense. And what I'm hearing from you is uh a kind of felt discernment of is that what will bring healing here to this place. Yeah, exactly. And that's an important question for all of us to ask, and it's kind of an orientation um for us to be in, and it's a hard one when you're hurting. Very hard. It's a hard one when you're in pain and you know what the source of the pain is. Yeah, but you know where that's coming from, and they're like, yeah, yeah. This kind of brings me to another question or two that I've had about your work, and you are, in my perception, I think of you as kind of a provocative thinker. Thank you. It really excites me. I really do admire that in you because I think there are a lot of things that I don't say that I do feel, and then you will say things and I will be like, oh. You know, whether or not I feel aligned, I just feel like a relief that there's something like a dangerous thought being thought. Or didn't thought I feel the echo of uh Adrian Marie Brown in the room. Absolutely. Yeah, it's it's a beautiful thing. You have talked about safety. I think it relates to this transformative justice conversation. You've almost kind of like remixed or reimagined safety, or kind of taken the concept and turned it in a way to see, to kind of ask, what is it that we're trying to do with our practice of safety and what is not possible through how we're practicing safety? And I hope I'm articulating that in a way that resonates with you. Completely. I'm like very amazed that you're following that thread in my work. I'm like, wow, yay, okay, it's amazing. Yeah. I'm paying attention to you for real. Yeah, you are. I'm like, you're really in it. I I'm not kidding about this. So yeah, I just can you pick up that thread from me and maybe just sprinkle some of your wisdom or your questions about about safety that I I find I find you're thinking there exciting. Oh, thank you. I am so glad. You know, I'm just gonna name I love this interview. You are like asking edgy questions, and I love it. I love the edge, it's my favorite place. Thank you, which is this of the forbidden thoughts thing. I think I just feel the relief of like, oh my goodness, at least we could talk about these things. And might be wrong, like you know, might be incorrect about these things, but we sort of have to talk about them to find out. I sort of think this inquiry around safety is very embedded for me in the real-world kind of experience that I have and share with like trans women of color. And it's not only us. I think that's my entryway. There's other people, other lived experience that kind of slide into it. But the memory that comes up a lot for me is I used to work a lot in like kind of queer-oriented social services, you know, universities, community centers, that kind of thing. And there would always be at that time kind of like a feeling of like we need this to be a safe space. And so only certain kinds of behaviors are allowed, and they weren't so unreasonable. Like it was like, don't misgender people, don't attack people, you know, like it was like, yes, those are those are good standards. However, um, there would inevitably be people, a lot of them trans feminine, older, um, marginalized, houseless or homeless um people who would come in and like have a hard time adhering to those uh rules. Like, who hasn't run like a queer community center and then like a queer elder from the street comes in and just is misgendering everybody right and left? Like, it's just a thing that happens, and then you tell them to misgender people and they get mad. They're like, no, I'm gonna say whatever I want. And I'm like, oh. And then the young people are like kick out, and you're like, what do we do? And then often what happens is the you know, street involved queer elder gets kicked out. And this to me is not okay. Like, I'm like, oh, I'm very curious about like how power dynamics and class and um like righteousness like kind of fit into like this idea of like, well, what do we do in the name of safety? What are we are we we're just gonna get rid of the inconvenient people so so we can be safe? And where does that logic take us? Where does that logic come from? Who is getting rid of dangerous or inconvenient people? Who are the people getting rid of being gotten rid of on average? And if we look at the pattern, the fractal of that pattern in society, it is poor, black, indigenous, brown people, it is trans women of color, it is sex workers, and right now it is Palestinians in Gaza. And what is the justification for all of this getting rid of people? It is we are unsafe if they are around. And we find that logic in middle-class white America when they say, get rid of homeless people, get rid of black and brown people, give the police some guns, you know, more guns than they already have. We find it in Palestine, we find it in queer university like centers where they say, you know, we don't want any problematic people around. And this is like deeply, deeply, I think, key to this remixing or uh, you know, this like idea around uh safety that I'm obsessed with is like I cannot abide in in my own body uh a definition of safety that is about getting rid of the dangerous because the dangerous are my people. Wow. Yeah. Gosh, it's such a powerful point in this moment. Often reflect and write about and talk about and everything I can to do about you know, James Baldwin talking about he did a lot of talking and writing about the innocents and monsters. Those that have to be innocent become monsters because of that pursuit. You know, anything they do is justified to this frame of innocence. And the other is always dangerous, is always threat, is always, you know. And you connecting it, I think, to what we're seeing globally, both as who's dangerous in Gaza, who's discardable in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, Haiti. It's we're seeing this myth making about innocence. And I think one thing that is really interesting to me in this moment is how implicated I think many of us in, I will say specifically in the US, because that's where I'm situated, how implicated we are in all of this. And what I hope it does is take away some of that insistence on innocence so that we can actually be among people. Be uh with the rest of the world. To be people, among people. That doesn't mean that all of us individually are some other extreme, but it means that we are actually in here with other life, with other aliveness. I so appreciate you saying that because I think the colonial kind of Christian dominant culture has embedded in it this idea that you must be innocent to be allowed to live. That's right. That's right. But we are we should just be allowed to live. Yeah. We are nearing the end of our time, and so gosh, I still have lingering questions that I hope can be asked in relationship definitely. Any time friendship with you. Um but is there anything you want to say or share before we leave? And I have one more question after that, but is there anything that you're like, this needs words here? Yeah, one one one thing, which is just, you know, I think a lot about so we we just kind of looked at like kind of the way that in dominant culture the a safetyism and like kind of preoccupation with innocence directly serves like a colonial genocidal agenda. Um, because it says there are dangerous people you can get rid of, well, and then all the dangerous people you want to get rid of just happen to be, you know, people like us, but and you know, most of the global south. But we replicate this, I think. This is like the connection to transformative justice within um queer and trans communities or within BIPOP communities, is that we are not free from the impulse of protect the innocent and get rid of uh the dangerous. Uh and uh I I just I see this um spreading through our movement spaces, like everybody always needing to be the innocent one, and then the bad people have to be punished. And I think this is a big contributor to this thing I think we all know but are afraid to say, which is like the left is falling apart. The left eats the left. Um it's scary to be in social justice spaces sometimes. And it is, I think, about this thing of we need to be able to let each other live even if we are not innocent. Which, you know, we can get into the complexities of what to do when someone has committed a harm, and we kind of did do that already, but you know, this these are the kind of the questions that I sort of want to connect. Yeah. And then I um I was reading, you know, uh some interviews you did yesterday, and you have this idea of transitional characters from family therapy. And I don't know, I just think that if we have scary things to say, you know, you or I or Adrian Marie Brown or whoever it is, you know, um I I hope that we say them because um or we find a way to say them because uh I think that is embodying the transitional character within the family that is social justice movement. And if we embody that like ready to be edgy but also ready to be wrong, and like, you know, ready to be fierce, but also ready to be loving, then I think that's how we we get to fix the dysfunction in the dynamics of of the movements as we know it. So anyway, that's my that's my plug. Thank you so much. I I love and appreciate that and want to talk to you so much more about that. And I think it's not it's not a coincidence that we're middle children middle children are are out here doing this work, changing the world. Last question I have for you are there any um organizations or projects that you want to lift up in this moment? Trans Praterato is an organization by and for trans folks led by a black indigenous uh trans woman, Monica Forrester, who I just want to give big ups to. I feel like Monica is not like in like um celebrity social justice world, but is a star. Like one of those people has been just doing it for really long time. So just want to uplift her work here in my current home city of Toronto and also Meggy's Toronto, which is like a sex work support organization that I really would love folks to uplift as well. Also, they they just actually lost their office in a fire recently in in America, for those of you who are Americans. Um not that you have to be American to support, but Red Canary Song is an organization that is like very dear to my heart. They do Asian migrant sex worker support. And I think it's like an issue that often like falls off the radar, but is like getting increasingly difficult for people's lives. So if if folks want to look into uh um Red Canary Song, and then basically any local Palestinian organization that is like fighting for uh the end of uh genocide, uh I encourage people to look into. Lovely, thank you so much. We'll make sure that we put that info in the show notes so people can support. And Kai, I just want to thank you as as lovely as I thought it would be to talk to you. And yeah. And yeah, and I'm excited for more. This is this fills me with so much joy to be able to just learn from you and talk with you. And yeah, I'm excited. Oh, me too. Thanks for having me. I I can't wait to chat more in the future. Hi everyone, this is Prentice coming back just to invite you to a very special workshop that we are offering at the Embodiment Institute. Um, on July 24th and 25th from 7 to 9 Eastern, we will be hosting a workshop called Why Feel: Healing Our Lineages and Transforming Our Communities. It's a virtual workshop where we are introducing people, our community to transformational characters and our foundational practices around embodiment. We'd love to have you there, and we can't wait to see you. Becoming the People is produced by Devin Delania. Sound engineered and edited by Michael Main. Bobna Nanchirla is our research assistant. Our theme song was created by Miyata. If you're enjoying these conversations, please subscribe, rate, and especially please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. You can find more clips of the podcast on my Instagram at Prentice Him Pill. And if you'd like to watch the full visual conversations and help us sustain the podcast, please join us on Patreon at Prentice Hempill. Thank you so much for listening to Becoming the People.