Sophie's Thoughts (big and small)

We've just spent 3 days on the ZAD filming a documentary and I'm really excited. If you don't know, the ZAD is a French term that means Zone a Defence and means somewhere squatted or occupied to resist the state. In particular we were on the Notre Dame des Landes ZAD, a massive area of biodiverse wetland that was squatted by farmers, ecologists, anarchists and communists for over a decade to stop the French state building a new airport near Nantes. Eventually the state gave up and the squatters won, and now they live there outside of modern capitalism taking care each other in a manner that it wouldn't be unreasonable to call real, actual communism that's happening inside the imperial core right now

We stayed at pa Rolandiere, one of many little communes within the ZAD, and home to Jay and Isa, authors of We Are Nature Defending Itself. Like many of the places we saw, there is a central common living area and lots of little cabins and caravans around for sleeping in, but la Rolandiere also has a couple of pretty unique things. They have a lighthouse, and a visitors welcome centre. Jay told me this is because they see conviviality as a certain kind of revolutionary practice. The state paints the people on the ZAD as terrifying violent criminals, so having a welcome centre for visitors to come and learn about the ZAD is a kind of direct resistance to that.

I learned a hell of a lot being there. I talked to farmers, artists, squatters, a medic, a botanist and of course, lots of communists. I also walked miles through forests and fields and got to forage some interesting mushrooms which was very special for me. I'm looking forward to seeing the documentary develop into a real thing, but sitting on the train back from Nantes to Paris right now I'm reflecting on it all and I really feel like I'm coming down off an incredible high. This morning I was weeding a row of carrots!

I keep thinking about our interview with the botanist Jasmine, who told us that on the ZAD it's really hard to be lonely, because even if you aren't around human beings, you feel the presence of all the plants and animals in a way that you don't do anywhere else, and I really think it's true. I'm going yo be thinking about the ZAD for a long, long time. I may not have been a part of their struggle but I hope that my documentary can be. We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself 🌺🍄🦎

We're in the middle of our return stay to finish the documentary finally 💕 every day here is so peaceful and fulfilling. I've been waking up with the first light every morning, this morning I climbed the lighthouse to watch the sunrise 🌄

Yesterday we were preparing raspberry beds for replanting on one of the collective garden farms that provides vegetables for the communes, and one of the farmers gave a little yelp and when we came over to see he was holding this salamander. This salamander is a symbol of the ZAD because it is a rare species native to the area that was crucial in the ecological struggle against the airport development

A storm this winter uprooted a lot of large trees in the forest. Some of them will be left alone, some of them will be turned into lumber by the ZAD's sawmill which generates wood for the collective from their forest

Two nights ago I cooked dinner for everyone at la Rolandiere, which was fantastic because I love to cook, especially for big groups, but this wasn't any kind of special occasion - group meals of 10 or even 20 people are the norm here and happen twice a day with different people taking turns to cook, to clean etc

Given my recent interest in astrophotography I couldn't resist taking some pictures of the sky, which is absolutely breathtaking out here, even so close as it is to Nantes.

There's a lot more to talk about of course, and I will in the documentary, and I'm sure I will in other places as well, because I intend to come back here to stay many times after the doc is finished ✨

idk sometimes i kinda wonder if such a thing as a unified "trans community" even exists. and i *definitely* wonder if such a thing as a unified "queer community" is real.

I think categorically no, this is a misleading concept whenever it is invoked. It's also a very political issue

I think there are trans people who are in community with other trans people local to them and also in contact with people who are far away in other local trans communities, and from my experience it's easy to feel like you're "in the trans community" when this happens, but it's not real, you're just in your local scene or clique

It's also a dangerous concept because when people mistake their particular friendship group for "the trans community" they also mistake not being friends with someone any more for "exiling them from The Community". This inevitably leads to people talking with these vibes about how to resolve relatively minor inter-community conflicts:

It's (I really hope) easier for people to understand how wrong-headed this notion is if I said like "the black community". It's actually othering language that implies a sort of equal-but-separate existence of different communities of different racial identities, or sexual or gender identities, or disability statuses, or mental health diagnoses.

To see this for what it is you have to look at it epistemologically(how knowledge is structured, how we know things, from the greek episteme for "knowledge"): The categories of white, black, asian, etc, or the categories of straight, gay, cis, trans, or the categories that people are put into by mental health diagnosis or body type or age are all taxonomies invented and maintained by people who define themselves into the comfiest category. "the black community" doesn't exist because whiteness (and by extension blackness) was invented by white people to sell more genocides. There are underlying real characteristics, shared cultural histories, affordances and class traumas, but the categories themselves and by extension the idea of monolithic communities for each category are a weapon used to commit epistemic violence.

Men and women, for example, are concepts used to describe and classify the human population into roughly two halves to create foundations ideologically for patriarchy. The class of woman is socially constructed, but misogyny is a shared class trauma among feminised people, access to abortion is a shared struggle among people who can get pregnant, feminist history helps undo the hermeneutic injustice that patriarchy does to us, but feminist history isn't a history of women, it's a history of how patriarchy invented a men-only history and systematically excluded women from it while repressing, killing, raping, persecuting and enslaving us. Definitionally, "women's spaces", the need from which they arise, the legislation and creation of them and the ongoing gatekeeping of them, entirely runs on patriarchal logic even where they exist to protect from patriarchal violence.

The oppositional approach here would be to try to tear up all taxonomies and endlessly pursue the declassificaition of everything, "I don't see colour, I never assume anyone's pronouns, nobody is disabled just differently abled" etc. but this ignores the world-as-is and does fuck all to effect change. It also ignores the real needs of people in different groups and ignores that probably human beings like sorting things into different kinds of things and will probably always try to do it in one way or another.

So here's the rub - trans community that is defined around the identity of trans as opposed to the cisgender binary under patriarchy is playing their game by their rules, unless it is based on material solidarity and moving toward total liberation, and if it is an organised community moving toward liberation it must find solidarity with other oppressed groups, and then it isn't just trans any more.

So as for groups of trans people hanging out because they find it easier to relate to other people who have transitioned, yes there are dozens of those in every major city in the US and Europe and plenty elsewhere besides. As for some kind of unified and monolithic "trans community" it can't exist sort of by definition.

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

Begging trans women to understand that not only is solidarity with other trans women everything, but trans women who have no solidarity are a fucking danger to you, and trans women who are part of the officer class are taught from birth not to have solidarity

Oh also if you realize that a trans woman who came from wealth, went to private school etc has absolutely no solidarity with other trans women, what you do about it is offer her solidarity always and forever. Just know. but dollidarity forever

Where There’s Tumblr…….

I think the real beauty of this is that someone managed to take my video and chop transform it into modern Tumblr non sequitur nonsense humor, making it MORE relevant.

Nice.

i think the real beauty of this is that just now i clasped my balls together in such a way that made them slip past each other in my scrotum creating a formation that i like to call “the testicular charleston”

We've just spent 3 days on the ZAD filming a documentary and I'm really excited. If you don't know, the ZAD is a French term that means Zone a Defence and means somewhere squatted or occupied to resist the state. In particular we were on the Notre Dame des Landes ZAD, a massive area of biodiverse wetland that was squatted by farmers, ecologists, anarchists and communists for over a decade to stop the French state building a new airport near Nantes. Eventually the state gave up and the squatters won, and now they live there outside of modern capitalism taking care each other in a manner that it wouldn't be unreasonable to call real, actual communism that's happening inside the imperial core right now

We stayed at pa Rolandiere, one of many little communes within the ZAD, and home to Jay and Isa, authors of We Are Nature Defending Itself. Like many of the places we saw, there is a central common living area and lots of little cabins and caravans around for sleeping in, but la Rolandiere also has a couple of pretty unique things. They have a lighthouse, and a visitors welcome centre. Jay told me this is because they see conviviality as a certain kind of revolutionary practice. The state paints the people on the ZAD as terrifying violent criminals, so having a welcome centre for visitors to come and learn about the ZAD is a kind of direct resistance to that.

I learned a hell of a lot being there. I talked to farmers, artists, squatters, a medic, a botanist and of course, lots of communists. I also walked miles through forests and fields and got to forage some interesting mushrooms which was very special for me. I'm looking forward to seeing the documentary develop into a real thing, but sitting on the train back from Nantes to Paris right now I'm reflecting on it all and I really feel like I'm coming down off an incredible high. This morning I was weeding a row of carrots!

I keep thinking about our interview with the botanist Jasmine, who told us that on the ZAD it's really hard to be lonely, because even if you aren't around human beings, you feel the presence of all the plants and animals in a way that you don't do anywhere else, and I really think it's true. I'm going yo be thinking about the ZAD for a long, long time. I may not have been a part of their struggle but I hope that my documentary can be. We are not defending nature, we are nature defending itself 🌺🍄🦎

We're in the middle of our return stay to finish the documentary finally 💕 every day here is so peaceful and fulfilling. I've been waking up with the first light every morning, this morning I climbed the lighthouse to watch the sunrise 🌄

Yesterday we were preparing raspberry beds for replanting on one of the collective garden farms that provides vegetables for the communes, and one of the farmers gave a little yelp and when we came over to see he was holding this salamander. This salamander is a symbol of the ZAD because it is a rare species native to the area that was crucial in the ecological struggle against the airport development

A storm this winter uprooted a lot of large trees in the forest. Some of them will be left alone, some of them will be turned into lumber by the ZAD's sawmill which generates wood for the collective from their forest

Two nights ago I cooked dinner for everyone at la Rolandiere, which was fantastic because I love to cook, especially for big groups, but this wasn't any kind of special occasion - group meals of 10 or even 20 people are the norm here and happen twice a day with different people taking turns to cook, to clean etc

Given my recent interest in astrophotography I couldn't resist taking some pictures of the sky, which is absolutely breathtaking out here, even so close as it is to Nantes.

There's a lot more to talk about of course, and I will in the documentary, and I'm sure I will in other places as well, because I intend to come back here to stay many times after the doc is finished ✨

No release date and I’m already seated

I just told my mom about this and she was like what if they’re just dating

hello maam. do i have permission to get a stupid idiot boner at your beautiful pictures