In a moment marked by intensifying legal and political hostility toward trans lives—from recent rulings in the United Kingdom narrowing the legal recognition of gender, to escalating legislative rollbacks of trans rights across the United States—transfeminist thought acquires a renewed urgency. These sweeping changes (and in many case regressions) have formed a broader consolidation of state, medical, and cultural authority over gendered bodies. It is within this tightening field of constraint that Trans Femme Futures intervenes with exactly the intellectual teeth that discourse needs to recalibrate.
In Trans Femme Futures, Nat Raha and Mijke van der sketch the rough architecture of a world that could be built between us, in the shared space between bodies. “Trans liberation is between us”1, they write, and the preposition matters: liberation is a tensile, sensuous medium, one we breathe into and alter with every act of care, desire, or refusal. More urgently, as the authors remind us, it is not a fixed location or a future destination.
The book’s subtitle—‘Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds’—telegraphs its scope. Raha and van der Drift take the abolitionist refusal of cages, borders, and carceral logics and weld it to a transfeminist commitment to collective flourishing. The result is an ethics that does not look to “inclusion” as a balm, but to a remaking of the conditions under which any life can thrive. They reject the bureaucratic seduction of “the singular, unified, and identifiable ‘trans community’”2, exposing how such constructs flatten lived differences under the banner of representation. Instead, they argue for collectivity as a tapestry that is made with special care and specific acts: feeding one another, tending wounds, swapping hormones, conspiring in kitchens. This is not an abstract identity category, nor an abstract people.
The urgency here is palpable. The authors write from within a moment of escalating transphobia, rising fascism, and neoliberal “austerity chic,” where public life is narrowed and collective spaces are shuttered. “Rampant urban gentrification deprives us of collective social spaces for the exploration of possibility”3, they note. Against this backdrop, theory itself becomes an act of survival. They insist that theory is not an academic ornament but “a tool to work upon the imagination,” capable of undoing the epistemic austerity that flattens our capacity to dream.
One of the book’s most generative moves is its embrace of complicity as an ethical stance. Rather than seeking the purifying distance of innocence, Raha and van der Drift take up Fred Moten’s longing for “complicity… not to stand out from the general complicity as if I were a bell.”4 In their hands, complicity is neither passive nor self-indulgent. Instead, it is an acknowledgment that we are all embedded in systems we wish to dismantle, and that transformation begins by grappling with this embeddedness rather than denying it. To accept and embrace is to begin to walk the path of liberation. You are not already mobile—that is what we march for. This is a radical inversion of the liberal politics of guilt, which too often stalls in self-flagellation or the search for the right rules. For Raha and van der Drift, complicity is generative. It demands attentiveness to the ways our own desires, pleasures, and survival strategies are entangled with oppressive structures, and invites us to reshape those entanglements in the company of others. In Trans Femme Futures, you are allowed to err, to partake in the system you hope to collapse.
There is no cross to bear. The first chapter, aptly titled ‘They would plant the rose garden themselves’, sets the tone by centring femmeness as both anti-institutional practice and sensuous world-making. Here, femmeness is not a decorative flourish but “a source of power and agency”5 that refuses domestication by patriarchal, racial capitalism. It is “dispossessed femininity”6 stripped of its role in servicing the norm, and instead retooled for collective survival and pleasure. Pleasure is an important currency in the intervention by Raha and van der Drift. The authors are unsparing about the ways white feminism and queer politics have often misread femme expression as regressive or complicit with patriarchy. In response, they turn that accusation on its head, proposing that the real radicality lies in claiming complicity openly, using it to unlearn and uproot the demands that reproduce oppression.
I suspect here Raha and van der Drift might be referring to the everyday act of reclaiming—inhabiting, living, unsettling, and skewing—norms differently, such that their regulatory force is weakened from within. This framing allows them to sidestep the stale binary between conformity and resistance. A femme might strategically “play the norm… for safety, for money, for a roof or for fun”7, and the point is not to moralise these tactics but to read them as part of the ongoing negotiation of agency. Theirs is a political ethics attuned to the improvisations of survival: sewing a dress in a squat kitchen, slipping hormones to a friend, reclaiming shame as a site of erotic possibility. In these acts, femme life “embraces curiosity and generosity”8 creating worlds that hold difference without collapsing into sameness. Worlds that do not subordinate experience for identity but dilute the two.
Where the book shines is in its refusal to compartmentalise the sensuous from the political. Desire, for Raha and van der Drift, is not a private indulgence but “profoundly materialist”9, shaped by labour conditions, racialised desirability economies, and the violence of medical gatekeeping. Their discussion of sexuality is refreshingly unsanitised; they critique the way both trans liberalism and mainstream queer politics have sidelined sexuality in the pursuit of respectability, leaving those who “wear our sexualities upon our sleeves”10 exposed to stigma and hypersexualisation. They remind us that sex, like care, is a collective practice, one that requires the cultivation of trust, reciprocity, and the willingness to hold each other’s vulnerabilities. Increasingly, however—and this is a fever that infects the whole argument of the book—there is a deterioration in our engagement with sex and sexed bodies that no one seems to know how to address.
This insistence on the erotic as a site of political knowledge threads through their account of t4t (trans-for-trans) relationships, which they cast as opportunities to “undo the norms which mark certain trans bodies as undesirable.”11 These relationships, they suggest, open new grammars of beauty and pleasure, decoupled from cisnormative standards, and invite a kind of temporal disruption: life trajectories that refuse bourgeois sequences of growth and reproduction.
The sensuous also becomes a method for navigating the fractures within collectives. The authors are clear-eyed about the frictions that arise when people with different histories, positionalities, and needs come together. There is no romanticism here: “We might find ourselves in situations where we are part of a problem”12. But instead of smoothing over these tensions in the name of unity, they advocate for leaning into them as “building blocks of new forms”13. This is solidarity without the anesthetic of false harmony, solidarity as a practice of remaining in relation even when relations are difficult.
If Trans Femme Futures has a central wager, it’s that liberation will not arrive through purity or perfect coherence. It will arrive, if it does, through the messy, sensuous work of building and maintaining “the worlds and ways of living that enable our existences and our thriving”14. And in that sense, the book is less a static text than an invitation, a call to plant the rose garden ourselves, to cultivate opulence in the ruins of austerity, to take theory off the shelf and into the street.
If the first half of Trans Femme Futures builds its world through the textures of femme life, the later chapters widen the frame to examine care, institutional entanglement, and the horizon of abolition. In Chapter 2, Raha and van der Drift refuse to romanticise community as an unqualified good. Community, they remind us, can replicate the very exclusions and hierarchies it claims to resist; care work, too, is not immune to the logics of disposability. By shifting the focus to collectivity–defined as direct, intentional relations—they insist on care as a political practice, not merely a sentimental one. Care here is “about supporting each other’s survival, towards flourishing”15, a mutual relation that rejects the servitude historically demanded of feminised bodies.
This refusal resonates sharply in the context of austerity politics and the erosion of public services. Where neoliberal regimes turn care into a commodity (managed by NGOs, stripped of reciprocity) Trans Femme Futures insists on care as commons, a collectively maintained infrastructure of survival. The authors’ attentiveness to the small-scale (checking in on a friend’s hormone schedule, cooking for someone recovering from surgery) reframes care as a form of political resistance, an abolitionist practice aimed at dismantling the structures that make such care necessary in the first place. It is also a place of dissent and assent—put differently, a place where care is unconditional to the opinion. They write,
When in collectives the possibility to say ‘no’ is ignored, the people who need to say no most often end up isolated. Pluralist movements nurture the conditions of saying ‘no’, together with ‘yes and …’, in action.16
The institutional critique deepens in Chapter 3, where they confront the seductive trap of inclusion. Institutions, from the family to the Gender Clinic, offer conditional belonging while preserving the very hierarchies that produce trans marginalisation. They continue: “Refusal of institutional norms leads to a refusal of institutional oversight, and this refusal can be structured around the commitment to abolition”17. The authors are clear though: abolitionist transfeminism is not about better access to broken systems, but about building alternatives robust enough to make those systems obsolete. This requires a frank reckoning with complicity—how even within our most radical collectives, the dynamics of exclusion and harm can creep in. Here, the book’s earlier insistence on facing frictions becomes crucial. Rather than denying our implication in oppressive systems, Raha and van der Drift urge us to ask: How do we use our complicity as a lever for transformation? This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of their ethics: the demand to inhabit discomfort. In a political culture increasingly shaped by purity logics–where the “right” language or posture can substitute for structural change—Trans Femme Futures offers no refuge in innocence. Instead, innocence transforms in a space “for becoming, emergence, and change.”18
Chapter 4 turns to medical institutions, where the stakes of institutional entanglement are literalised in the politics of bodily autonomy. The authors indict the racialised, gendered violence of trans healthcare, where psychiatric gatekeeping and bureaucratic cruelty ration access to hormones and surgeries. They speak of one of the four pillars of medical intervention: “[I]n trans care, informed consent has often meant compliance with the clinician’s pathology, rather than agency about what one actually wants.”19
Against the neoliberal myth of individual autonomy, they propose Liberatory Harm Reduction—a collective, relational approach to navigating medical systems that refuses to abandon those who cannot or do not wish to conform to institutional scripts. This is care, not as triage but as a shared project of survival.
The book’s final chapter gestures toward the future without painting it as a deferred utopia. “We end the book by proposing ways to bring futures into the present,”20 they write, grounding their vision in solidarity as ‘an ethics of generosity’21 that prioritises collectivity over being right. This is cosmopolitanism-from-below in practice. Such a practice continues without pause and refuses to linger in lament over error. It can actually help jolt one out of their political-action paralysis.
As writing, Trans Femme Futures is polyphonic—and deliberately so. The register shifts back and forth between the theoretical and the personal. From analysis of colonial epistemologies to sensual descriptions of queer dance floors, the text takes it all in stride. But this multiplicity also enacts the very ethic the book argues for. A single voice cannot speak the whole truth of collective life, so the text refuses to be singular. The result is a book that feels less like a monograph than an extended conversation–sometimes analytic, sometimes intimate, always in motion.
For readers attuned to experimental poetics, the stylistic choices here seem far too familiar in the best way possible. There is the repetition of key terms as incantation (“complicity,” “flourishing,” “abolition”), the refusal of neat closure, and the marriage of theory with anecdote. But for those steeped in more traditional academic prose, the shifts in register may feel disorienting. That disorientation is part of the point. In a world where, as the authors note, “capitalism and nation-states co-opt social movement struggles,”22 form itself becomes a terrain of resistance. The authors should know.
The book’s contribution is not only limited to trans studies or queer theory though—and this is important to the text. It belongs equally to abolitionist thought, feminist ethics, and anti-colonial cultural work. By linking transfeminist flourishing to the dismantling of empire, militarism, and borders, Raha and van der Drift refuse the parochialism that can trap identity-based politics.
If there is a risk in the book’s breadth, it is that its conceptual density may overwhelm readers looking for a “how-to” manual of transfeminist organising. But that, too, seems intentional. The authors are not offering a toolkit, they are offering a set of sensibilities, a way of moving through the world. What they contribute to this contemporary line of flight is world-building quite literally. Theory here is not about mastering concepts but about “building and maintaining the worlds and ways of living that enable our existences and our thriving.”23
In an urgent sense, then, Trans Femme Futures occupies a rare space between a manifesto and a love letter. It speaks to those already entangled in the work of building collective life under siege. It offers language for what we know in our bodies but struggle to articulate. And it challenges us to think beyond the immediacies of our own contexts, to constellate insights “across different localities”24 without collapsing them into sameness. I find the book to be equally concerned with the dominance of representation. Much as poetry suffers from excessive contrition, life-worlds suffer when abstraction displaces the messy, embodied work of living together.
The closing notes are not triumphant but resolute. There is no illusion that abolitionist transfeminist worlds will arrive fully formed. No—they will be made in fragments, in the florid abundance of femme aesthetics, in the friction of imperfect collectives, in the refusal to abandon pleasure even in times of crisis. In a political landscape where so much is organised around the deferral of joy, this insistence on the present tense is itself revolutionary. For readers of experimental poetics and radical cultural criticism, this book will give you a rhythm, a mood, an ethic. It asks us to imagine theory not as a map to a distant shore but as a companion on the road we are already walking, together. As such, to read Trans Femme Futures is to be reminded that the work of liberation is neither solitary nor deferred. It happens in the shared meal, the late-night plotting, the collective decision to plant the rose garden ourselves. And if the garden blooms unevenly, with thorns among the blossoms, so be it. The point is not perfection, the point is to keep planting.
Notes
- Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, Trans Femme Futures (London: Pluto Press, 2024), p. 1. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 2. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 5. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 8. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 10. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 12. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 20. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 11 ⮭
- Ibid., p. 13. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 23 ⮭
- Ibid., p. 24. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 28. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 33. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 2. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 20. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 69. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 88. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 199. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 146. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 7. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 157. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 5. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 2. ⮭
- Ibid., p. 4. ⮭
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.
Bibliography
Raha, Nat, and van. 2024. Trans Femme Futures (Pluto Books)