Trans Ultraviolence

(Shuli translated this communiqué from a French trans anarchist group about an action last October.)

French text is here: https://paris-luttes.info/trans-ultra-violence-18736?lang=fr

October 14 2024

A look back at the October 5 action against Stern and Moutot, and an update on the use of violence.

 Let’s be explicit: We are criminal queer anarchists and this world is not and can never be enough for us. We want to annihilate bourgeois morality and make ruins of this world. We’re here to destroy what is destroying us.

  - Mary Nardini Gang, Criminal Intimacy 

On Saturday October 5, a whole media frenzy arose around an action initiated by the AG Antifa Paname (Antifascist General Assembly of Paris) to disrupt a day of book signings by Stern and Moutot and all their fascist friends. Intercepted by a massive deployment of the BRAV-M [Motorized Brigade for the Suppression of Violent Action, a mobile force created after the Yellow Vests] before being able to approach the boat where the transphobic shindig was taking place, sixty-three people were arrested and about fifty taken into custody by the cops—one person is currently sleeping in jail following pre-trial detention ordered by a piece of shit judge, while another will have to report to the police station as part of judicial supervision.

The police prefect and the public prosecutor’s office immediately went all in on the best story to tell the reporters: 64 masked Antifa were arrested in possession of blades and explosives! Legalese exaggerations are routine and expected, but indeed, some people arrived equipped with collapsable batons, smoke bombs, mortars, fireworks, paint bombs, and knives (whether they were lying at the bottom of a bag or aimed at the fash, we will never know…). Obviously, everyone was masked up or in balaclavas, but we avoided the dramatic black bloc dress code, since anti-fascism seems to be the post-vacation fashion trend. These bandit outfits brought the weekend’s transphobes to tears: both Stern and Moutot did not stop whining in countless tweets about the (valid and legitimate) death threats and attacks on their lives, or the recent cancellation of their event at Versailles.

And if that wasn’t nasty enough to hear, they were quickly joined in the loud chatter of their victimhood by all the professionals disconnected from the militant LGBT+ scene, especially the “innocentists.” We can see the Great Useless Organizations at work—like Bread and Roses, whose only action has been to put up their ugly stickers instead of sharing autonomous calls for rallies in front of the police stations, or to spout their usual rhetoric of victimhood about the repression of the poor “protestors against transphobia.” Like they always do, the professional vultures turn “unjust” repression into an action’s main topic, with pigs being the only ones to possess any agency; they turn a confrontational action aiming at preventing fascists from existing in public spaces (or at all) into a simple “peaceful” protest against vague, abstract transphobia. No doubt the typical peace-police would have preferred that we took inspiration from them to organize a useless rally, permitted by the police prefect and held far away from the fascist celebration. No matter how much they don’t like it, some of us prefer mortars and batons to holding up banners ten kilometers away, all for the pretty photos. In any case, we are not surprised that none of these organizations joined or reposted this action before it was repressed—just as they ignored the arson attacks against Stern and Moutot’s meeting in Lyon, they did nothing on their part to counter this event in Paris. After all, many of them had already dissociated themselves during the counterprotest at Stern and Moutot’s meeting in Assas last May, rejecting the use of the “extreme political violence” in the slogan, “a bullet for a TERF, social justice is served” [“Une TERF, une balle, justice sociale”] or the idea of giving TERFs in question “visibility” by confronting them directly.

The biggest vulture of them all, the snitch journalists at Streetpress (reprinted by Mediapart and company), rushed to gather the most innocentist testimonies they could find from people on release from police custody. More talk of victimhood appeared in the form of “a bunch of cuddly trans people and tenderqueers” who would have “curled up and cried”  if there was a “brawl with the fash,” and who claimed there had been “no damage, nor violence, nor call to insurrection.” Putting aside this disgusting attempt to dissociate themselves, we obviously feel insulted by the ridiculousness of this last point: there certainly was a call to insurrection, and there always will be. No matter the dissociations, the supposed absence of damage or violence is not explained by an absence of the desire to bring either about, but by the early interception by the pigs. Let the tenderqueers behave if they want, some of us would have sunk the boat and all of the fash along with it if we had the chance. Let the Streetpress hacks keep their rags to themselves, some of us were willing to fight.

We don’t oppose transphobes and fascists in the merry world of debating ideas, nor for the media attention: we oppose their entire existence physically and violently, just as they oppose ours. There is no possible reconciliation with fascists, and one of these days we will have to battle it out. For their deadly ideas to disappear, we need to instill a lasting fear on their side and in their heads. This can only happen through force and violence—by smashing those very heads. With this in mind, a collapsable baton seems to be a step in the right direction.

Innocentist discourse and dissociations from all sides comes as no surprise: we’re used to it. Trade unions, parties, and political organizations make dissociation from any autonomous action or initiative the basis of all their modes of communicating and organizing—it’s essential business for every social movement. LGBTI+ movements and communities have long been penetrated and plagued by assimilationist and innocentist approaches. Within LGBTI+ militancy—even among those who appropriate and misappropriate terms and concepts like TransFagDyke or Pink Bloc—pacificism, non-violence, and victimization prevail. We are used to it, and many among us, trans anarchists and autonomists, have deserted most of the LGBTI+ organizing spaces for these reasons. The recent movement, Riposte Trans, against the Republicans’ despicable transphobic law, has shown us yet again: there is nothing interesting or relevant happening in these ultra-pacified spaces—we have nothing to do or find there.

Our own self-organization within autonomous and anarchist spaces—inside and against these terribly cis and shitty hetero spaces—will give us even more possibilities to meet accomplices and friends with whom we share desires, methods of organization and of action. Only this way can we confront transphobia and imagine a world free of it and anyone who spreads it. Only this way can we rid ourselves of the grip of gender, sex, and all the other gender nonsense that categorizes, hierarchizes, and represses our bodies and our lives.

However, even these spaces are neither consistent nor always necessarily relevant. If it finally seems obvious, it is only after years of isolated, sometimes ultra-minority struggles, that antifascist circles have now taken up the fight against transphobic fascists—and only after they fully consummated their marriage with the vilest openly fascists fringe groups. The makeup of organizing spaces like AG Antifa Paname remain diverse and includes numerous diverging positions. If it was obvious we needed to mobilize against Stern and Moutot’s shindig on October 5, the methods of organization and action were far from obvious or shared. They still aren’t, and never will be—just listen to the pacifying lines currently being expressed everywhere, but above all especially in the comments on social networks. Ridiculous and deplorable debates about “violence” or “confrontations” took place in the same AG that preceded and organized last weekend’s action.  

The timeless essentialist party line is never far behind when defenders of non-violence come to express their views on some of us using violence. Whether it’s from cis-feminists or trans pacifists, our so-called masculine socialization will always be brought up to prevent us from acting violently: either to prove that, since we are violent, we are really guys; or to protect our poor demonized trans girls, who must behave in order to prove that we are really harmless little girls. This double talk is also applied to trans guys: either they show their true colors by embracing nonviolence in order to prove that they are really safe and not like other guys; or they demonstrate that violence is really an intrinsically macho masculine act, and, when you want to push this stupidity even further, their violence obviously just validates that. Of course, these are the “safest,” most “pro-trans” feminists, including a good number of trans people from all of the useless pacifying organizations, who then misgender us or reassign us as men as soon as we put on a simple hoodie [un k-way, or a windbreaker]. They aren’t waiting for the most transphobic TERFs to erase our experiences as trannies and chicks before protecting their essentialist pacifying party line. We will never find “sisterhood” or “adelphité [woke non-gendered togetherness to replace fraternité in the French motto liberté, égalité, fraternité] among these women or trans people.

They can all go fuck themselves! We are violent because we are trans. We are violent because we are girls. We are violent because we are anarchists.

We are violent and dangerous because this world is violent and dangerous. We are violent and dangerous because we experience the violence of transphobia, sexism, heterosexuality, and capitalism deep in our flesh. We are violent and dangerous because it is the only language the ruling class can understand. We are violent and dangerous because it is necessary and imperative to be. We are violent and dangerous because we think that it is the only viable revolutionary strategy. We are violent and dangerous because we desire revenge. We are violent and dangerous because we desire it in the depths of our being. We are violent and dangerous because we love it that way. We are violent and dangerous because we love and desire the sensations and feelings that using violence brings out in us. The only complicity we seek is insurrectional complicity, and we will always find it more in the black bloc, riots, squats, and clandestine actions than in their sanitized spaces.

We are the girls who formed a black bloc last May 6th in front of Assas, to disrupt Stern and Moutot’s talk and fight their fascists friends.

We are the girls who fried the electric meter and broke the windows at Marion Le Pen’s school, to counter Stern and Moutot’s appearance at the September 19 conference, and we wouldn’t have hesitated to go toe-to-toe with their fascist friends.

We are the girls who came to fight with “knives,” “explosives,” and also nothing in our pockets, at the barge where Stern, Moutot, and their fash friends were gathering.

They want us dead, and we want them dead.

Above all, we desire and demand the use of political violence. We advocate all calls for insurrection since we try to move towards it every day. We desire it more than anything and we will never stop trying—our lives are at stake and it is the only acceptable choice we can make in order to live. We will never be satisfied with peaceful marches in circles, symbolic rallies, pointless far-off demonstrations. We refuse to confine ourselves to acceptable modes of militant organizing, to participate in the endless race of recruitment by all the organizations tainted by transphobia and sexual violence, to fit in the “militant” and “activist” framework that would make respecting its frameworks and traditions just another job.

We don’t see any point in it: firstly because of the chronic uselessness and ineffectiveness of this method of organizing and, above all, because it bores us to death. We want to live and not just survive—therefore we will never be satisfied with the reformist or assimilationist approaches that want to integrate us into heterosexual society. We want to live fully, and this is why we reject this world and everything in it. And so we conspire every day for its total destruction. We want to live fully, and the only way to live is through insurrection.

It is not because we grew up as boys that we seek and use violence. We are violent because we are women, and this experience fully justifies any violence that we may exert. It is because we have chosen to become women over the course of our lives that we could never understand the attraction to non-violence in all of its forms for so-called radical cis feminism. The whole experience of the patriarchy spurs revolt, so let’s take it on and embrace it. We never have to feel like the weak little things that men want to make us into: it’s the rapists who should be afraid to go home every night at the threat of being stabbed; it’s the incels who should be afraid to go home every night at the threat of being beaten with batons; it’s the cops who should be afraid to go home every night at the threat of being set on fire.

Only in insurrectional violence do we feel the patriarchy trembling and return all the blows that we take every day. Only through riotous violence crashing down on the cops, the banks, and the state do we enable ourselves to light the flames that will engulf the entire patriarchy. Only through violence in armed gangs do we enable ourselves to strike back at fascists and rapists. Only through violence that breaks down doors and cracks locks do we give enable ourselves to live and to meet in spaces free of landlords. Nothing and no one will save us but our own self-organizing as women, and this organizing must be insurrectional if it wants the means to bring the end of the patriarchy.

There is nothing scandalous about the fact that the cops defend transphobes and fascists: these two supposedly opposing camps are one and the same. Every cop is a transphobe and a fascist, just by being a cop. No state will ever exist that won’t accommodate fascists and transphobes: the state itself will always be transphobic and fascist no matter how it dresses itself up or what it calls itself, and we will always aim for its total destruction. We didn’t have to be “unjustly” taken into police custody despite being “innocent” to discover the transphobic violence of the state and its cops. We have lived it with every identity check, every search, every stop and arrest, every trial, every incarceration, every chase and clash with the cops. Every interaction with the cops and the state in all of its forms drips with transphobia. The whole existence of the police, the law, prison, and the state is transphobia. No amount of victimization or media denunciation has done us any good—and it never will. There is only one way to put an end to the transphobic violence perpetrated by the cops every time we interact with them: insurrectional trans violence. Since we all know that the only good fash is a dead one, and we also know that the only good cop is a dead one, there is only one conclusion we can draw. We will say it again: we only want to see the fash running away, afraid of what we will do when we catch up with them; we only want to see cops running away, afraid of what will happen if a Molotov or mortar hits them or if they get stuck in the middle of the bloc. We desire this violence because we are trans. We mask up because we are trans, and we’ve never felt more affirmed in our experience as trans girls than with a balaclava on.

Striking back at transphobes of any gender is just as much a part of our transition as taking hormones, wearing new clothes, changing pronouns, surgeries, access to trans social spaces . . . Putting on a balaclava and a hoodie is the only thing that has a real impact on dysphoria and all of this world’s shit. My body is never truly mine except during the brief moment when, hammer in hand, adrenalin mixing with estrogen, I smash the windows of a bank or yet another accomplice to colonial genocide. Our bodies can only be affirmed and liberated from heterosexist capitalist alienation by emancipating ourselves from their norms and laws. Our transitions have always been criminalized one way or another, and it is only in crime that we can gain full control over them and our desires.

Our transitions will never be complete while we live in a world where transhobia exists, and it will continue to exist until fear changes sides and transphobes are afraid of passing us on the street. But no matter what, we will continue to chase Stern and Moutout everywhere they go until they don’t dare leave their homes—and not just tweet about it!

Fuck the peacekeepers.

Death to the cops, transphobes, and fash.

For a total insurrection against gender and the state! Be dangerous!

Power to our girls in their trials, especially the comrade who is sleeping the night in jail.

We are thinking of you, and we will give back every blow.

Fire to the prisons! May the judges and the screws die.

- An armed band of trannies looking for a fight

—

Any possible escape from gendered constraint will likely involve both the explosive and clandestine tactics, but also methods which make these forms indistinguishable. When I don the black mask, I participate in the unfolding of a riot, but also withdraw from the apparatuses which would locate and identify me in this or that gender. I obscure my facial features, hair, body—anything which could be engendered; revealing instead my violence. The State, Media, and feminist Left endlessly insist that the violence belongs to men alone; this insistence itself forms another apparatus to capture and engender. My violence, taken from me by so many representations and politics of victimhood, returns and emanates from the inside outward. The black mask forms the fabric which stitches together the refusals of internal submission and external representation. Above all else, the following attacks destroy the barriers and separations within and without. I become a microcosms of the chaos around me, suspending the regulatory practices of identity. 

-  Baedan, Against the Gendered Nightmare

We queers and other insurgents have developed what good folks might call a criminal intimacy. We are exploring the material and affective solidarity fostered between outlaws and rebels. In our obstruction of law, we’ve illegally discovered the beauty in one another. In revealing our desire to our partners in crime, we’ve come to know each other more intimately than legality could ever allow. In desire, we produce conflict. And in conflict with capital, we may have found an escape route from the deadening of our lives. Our gang’s discourse is conflict. 

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We do not offer ‘criminal’ or ‘queer’ as identities, nor as categories. Criminality. Queerness. These are tools for revolt against identity and category. These are our lines of flight out of all restraint. We are in conflict with all that restricts every and each desire. We are becoming whatever. Our sole commonality is our hatred for everything that exists. Held in common, such a revolt of desire can never be assimilated into the state-form.

- The Mary Nardini Gang, “Criminal Intimacy”