Author: sabotmedia

Mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.

And You’ve been there at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for you that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create weird, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Sariel. I’m 15 years old and I’m the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog, Debate Me, Bro, and a trans liberationist organizer in the Great Lakes region and beyond.

With me today is author and organizer Vicky Osterweil.

Vicky: Hi hi everybody. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Vicky. My pronouns are she and her. Just so folks, get a sense of me, I do a lot of organizing around trans healthcare and trans health access at the moment, particularly around access to estrogen and HRT.

And getting that to people for free. I’ve also done in the past and ongoingly a lot of work on abolition, policing prisons and housing justice here in Philadelphia, a so called Philadelphia where I operate at it. And we’re doing a lot of work with unhoused people out here which has been a big part of the movement over the last six or seven I also write books and essays.

I have a blog called All Cats Are Beautiful and I spend most of my days doing data entry for a lot of authors.

Mk: That is all so cool about your organizing. Trans health and liberating our queer bodies is so necessary for youth liberation, especially given that systematically teens are deprived of our bodily autonomy and often really struggle to access trans healthcare, so the work that you do to make it accessible is so meaningful.

When we scheduled this interview, you shared with me that you are working on a book about childhood and ownership and also Disney. Can you share a bit more about this project?

Vicky: Yeah. Thanks for asking. Yeah the book is called The Extended Universe. And it just, I just got edits back on the manuscript now.

So I’m in the very final sort of push for writing of it. It sets out to show how the two questions, why are all superhero movies the same? And why did Disney lobby the Biden administration to keep them from sharing the coronavirus vaccine with the third world? Why did those questions have the same answer?

And that answer is intellectual property protection. So what I argue in the book is that Disney in particular has innovated the use and management of IP franchise and just corporate and corporate image management in general to become the world’s largest entertainment monopoly, which they’ve been for almost a decade now.

And in the process As I’m sure everyone who’s listening knows, I don’t know, they’ve completely transformed the kind of like TV shows, movies, games, and like culture and music that we enjoy. And the book doesn’t focus exclusively on this with childhood. But obviously like when you talk about Disney, you’re talking about, you it’s innately connected to childhood and media targeted at children particularly.

And I think Disney Corporation has really colonized the American and even the global image of childhood, like the movies and the TV shows and the theme parks and the products, like they’ve become associated so deeply with the concept of childhood magic and wonder but that image of childhood that’s put forth by Disney is structured around like a really patriarchal and reactionary concept of childhood innocence, like Disney movies and it’s the magic kingdom.

They’re always talking about magic. But that magic is always like sparkly fairy dust and like giggling animals, not, death metal and blood sacrifice and which is insurrection. The magic they’re talking about is always sweet is always, the stuff that was like parody and power, right?

So Tiffany offers products to children that commodify control and define play and imagination. And obviously they’re hardly alone in this. Lots of companies do this. This is how capitalism controls. Smart. One of the ways culture under capitalism controls children but none of them have done it so well and so consistently or on such a global scale as Disney, right?

I think, like, when you say Disney, people think child. Even though at this point, Disney also means, right? Fox it means Marvel. It means, all these different things that are very much not Marvel’s kind of games. Anyway, getting off topic, the more specific to Disney I think than some of these other companies that sell products to children is the way that Disney has defined childhood itself.

It markets like a particular idea of childhood to adults. And it sells it back to them, and it sells it to them as children, then sells it to them as adults again. Excuse me. Like the Disney theme parks, the cruises, the conventions, the like, IRL experiences, the ice skating shows. All of this stuff are just as often designed around getting adults to relive their childhoods.

Which, of course, they can only do by buying Disney products or taking place in Disney experiences. One example of this is in Disneyland. The 1st theme park that Disney built you come in, done this thing called Main Street USA for folks who’ve been there. It’s like an old, it’s an old timey vision of a 19th turn of the century, small American town and the architects and the designers actually.

made all of the second stories of the buildings at five eighths scale. So everything’s a little smaller on the second floor, which creates a forced perspective so that you feel, even if you’re a six foot tall adult, like you’re like lower to the ground. And it’s very subtle, but I can’t notice it.

But it like has this effect of producing nostalgia in both adults and wondering children. So like Disney, that’s a really good example or simple example of Disney, the way Disney. Maintains really intense control over their images, right over their products and their characters.

So they stay consistent over time. That, Donald Duck, Donald Duck has been around. Mickey Mouse has been around for a century, right? Officially a century this year. I’m like, so how do you keep that fresh while also keeping it consistent and also changing?

To meet market demands, right? So they, one of the ways they do this is by being really litigious. They do a lot of copyright lawsuits. They do a lot of control of intellectual property through the law. Through the government and through the state, basically.

Mk: This idea that childhood innocence can be weaponized is so resonant.

That’s so often hence the target question. You’re a youth whose innocence supposedly depends on our assimilated straightness. And to be forced into the concept of childhood, rather than simply being a person who happens to have a certain chronological age, is to never have the freedom to exist outside the heteropatriarchy of innocence.

If you’ve ever read Lee Edelman’s No Future, this political construct of the child is often directly at odds with the lived experiences and needs of people who are actually chronologically children. Because this is this figure that is used to uphold straightness, and oh, think of the children, don’t be gay, when in fact most of the children are gay.

Yay. On that note how would you say that linear time and imposed development tie into capitalism and the way childhood is commodified?

Vicky: Oh man, that’s such a good question. That’s a great question. I think, yeah, In all the ways, but but I guess I’ll start by going with Disney and try to move a little more broad.

I think that one of the ways that like Disney does this is by having offerings for like lots of different age groups. And so they have different products targeted specifically for like toddlers, kids, preteens, teenagers, like adults. But then within adults, it’s like new parents, old parents, like people who were into Disney as kids and are now Disney adults, grandparents.

They’re one of the corporations that’s best. Having a super wide diversity of products that people age into and age out of, right? And that, and like wherever you are, Disney’s there to catch you and sell you something expensive. A great example of this are the live action remakes. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of these.

There’s no reason you would have unless you I don’t know unless you had a curiosity about them, but they’ve been coming out over the last 10 years and they allow parents who grew up on cartoons in the 90s to bring kids they’re raising to the theater to watch their favorite movies.

For example, they’ve been remaking Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid was, like, last year, move on. It’s not very well or widely known, even among terrible film nerds like myself, but The Lion King remake, which was released in 2019. Was the 7th most successful film in history when it came out.

It earned 2 billion dollars. Now, like other films like that, we’re talking like, The Avengers trilogy, or the new Avatar. Those are movies that you’ve heard of, you’ve heard discourse about, but People didn’t really talk about The Lion King, maybe. But it just quietly went on to be one of the most successful films of all time.

This is because Disney plays a really effective game of Sort of generational capture. That builds on that linear time question, right? They get you when you’re a kid through aggressive marketing, and through like general cultural dominance. Then they get you again when you’re nostalgic for childhood like in your teens or 20s.

And then again when you raise children of your own. At this point, we have four or five generations of people who grew up with Disney movies, Disney TV shows, and with Disney World as the best possible vacation destination anywhere. And increasingly, that’s not just in the US, right? It hasn’t been for decades the whole world is full of people for whom Mickey Mouse and Disney means childhood.

That’s so incredibly valuable. And in order for that to work, they have to do a lot of nostalgia, right? They have to use nostalgia as a selling point. And nostalgia, obviously, requires you to yearn for going back to this chronological time you can’t return to, right? It’s very much built on this, the conflicted feelings and the sadness and the melancholy of like the way that we experience time.

And so for sales to get, to keep expanding they need to get people nostalgic earlier and earlier. You and a lot of your audience I know are like, like early teens, like if you think about the Toy Story franchise, right? The whole plot, and those are from the 90s, these are ancient movies now the first ones, but the whole plot is about Andy, rather than Simplisty who’s the kid.

He gets too old for his toys, right? And he like abandons them and then he looks back nostalgically at them and they have these lives of their own. They have to prove that they’re still valuable to him. Disney movies are so often about journeying for the past that they’re about that even when the protagonists are still children chronologically, and I think this isn’t just purely like Disney’s invention. I think it’s an experience I remember. I think it’s an experience many of us have. across our teenage years. Like one fact, one part of being a teenager, like for me, it was realizing that I wasn’t a little kid anymore, that I didn’t have that sort of, I had a different level of awareness of what was around me.

And that could be melancholy. But I think like Disney commodifies accelerates and romanticizes this precise nostalgia, the better to keep people locked in his fans for their entire lives. So in terms of this question of this timeline this linearity, they want to keep childhood as a sort of concept preserved in a past.

That you can never reach, that you’re always moving further and further away from. And the only way you can re engage with it is by a Disney product, right? And I think that this is what culture and capitalism does at large. And they do that with, high school movies or for older folks stuff about college.

Oh, those were the good old days, best days of my life. There’s this constant refrain about reaching backwards for a youth that when you’re present in it, you’re not allowed to experience. And then as soon as you leave it, you’re told that you can never have it back. You can never have those good feelings back.

And then, they take that real yearning, that I think is real, that there’s some genuine yearning there, and they really cheapen it by making it associated forever with Princess Elsa, or Nemo the fish,

Mk: I think in the anarchist scene, we often really critique statists for being into an idealized future that we sacrifice our lives and our queerness for.

But you’re so right that an idealized past can be just as harmful. Because while statists are often like, oh, if we are in the closet, usually in the present, then our future will be idealized in whatever way. But it always is. There’s this desire to go back to 50s gender roles or whatever, really harmful stuff that was in the past that worked for usually a few white cis people yet is romanticized.

And honestly, atemporality works so much in both directions. Thank you for bringing that up. And the nostalgia for childhood as a construct, especially. seems to center this idealization of being cared for by a nuclear family, and not only does that erase all the other forms of care that ideally exist in our lives, but erases every queer person with maybe adult privilege who does have experiences of anti child ageism and might not be at all nostalgic for that.

In fact there’s this undertone of age drama that exists in almost all of the nostalgia that Disney pushes. On that topic how does this all intersect with gender and queerness and transness? Because even among the more generalized progressive crowd rather than anarchists, the biggest critique of Disney is that it’s anti feminist and it pushes very retrograde gender roles.

And I wonder how you feel that’s involved in its commodification of childhood.

Vicky: Yeah, exactly. I think, yeah, to speak to the gender stuff I think we’ll take a detour sort of via obviously nostalgia has been really powerful recently with Make America Great Again, right? MAGA, this sort of nostalgia has become a really potent fascist force in a way that I think if you were really MK to to dichotomize with the kind of reactionary left, Looking forward and a sort of far right looking backward and how similar those are as statist, a statist ideals, both of which obliterate the concept.

I think that’s really great. But, I think if if you talk to like liberals now, a lot of people are laughing because Ron DeSantis or whatever have been saying that Disney is so woke. It’s like turning kids trans, or whatever. And The Daily Wire has been getting in on that, like the Daily Wire has been on this really anti Disney crusade because they’re trying to sell their own children’s TV product, which is so dark and horrifying, imagine Ben Shapiro programming for children anyway, or I mean for anyone, in fact, making any content of any kind but those parents getting rid of Disney Plus to get them the Daily Wire for kids, ugh but anyway it’s pretty clear that much like Daily Wire is in direct competition with Disney, like DeSantis He started the fight with Disney when they refused to enforce his Don’t Say Gay Bill in exactly the way he wanted.

But even that’s a bit of a smokescreen because Disney actually has incredible, like basically sovereign power over a 50 square mile section of central Florida around Orlando called the Reedy Creek District. They have an incredible amount of power around. People have heard of Celebration Florida, which is like the little town that Disney runs, their company town.

They have a lot of like literal state power in Florida. And obviously a petty fascist like Ron DeSantis. So picking a fight with Disney for him, it doesn’t really have to do with the movies, which are themselves like, quite reactionary because he wants control of Florida. And it’s quite ironic, actually, obviously, and hilarious, because Disney is one of the most consistently queerphobic culture producers in America.

If you go back to the very, very beginning, like to the 20s like when, so in the 20s, during the silent era of film, this is like really early there were these huge scandals, there were these huge sex scandals like Fatty Arbuckle is the most famous, but these big silent stars would get caught having wild orgies, and there was a sort of morality crisis, and that morality crisis was very connected to the fact that a lot of that Studio heads and actors were Jewish, right?

There’s also anti Semitism. And so Walt Disney, like from the twenties. He was held up as a moral good. Whenever Hollywood faced sex scandals he was making these upstanding moral goyish products. They were free of sex and violence. He was incredibly homophobic himself. And he exercised like really strict control over his employees sexual expression.

And in his studio women and men worked in fully separated gender and. Always salary segregated areas. So that’s like the very beginning of Disney. Up through the present, all the cartoons up through the 2000s, even the 2010s, you have a lot of very clearly queer coded villains, right?

In the movies, queers are a threat. They’re a menace. And today they’re a little less actively queerphobic. But that’s mostly because queerphobia just doesn’t sell as well anymore. Not because Disney has learned their lesson. Because Disney remains, even if they’re not actively queerphobic, they remain a family company.

They’re all about family. As we know, the traditional nuclear family structure, the one that Disney always markets and encourages, as you’re pointing to, Emkin it’s built around the total power of parents over children. The total objectification and political domination of the kids. And this is also true in schools, right?

Which is another place where Disney has a really big economic interest. They have a foothold through marketing. They’ve been running education programming in American schools since the 50s. TV, obviously, is huge. And like families families are where the vast majority of gendered and queerphobic violence occurs in society.

As one of the most pro family ideological organizations in the whole world that would be more than enough to be like, Disney is clearly action oriented in gender, right? But they also have this long tradition of supporting traditional gender roles. This more direct sort of transphobia and gender essentialism.

Most famously through the Disney princesses, right? Where they’re highly divided in marketing between boys and girls. Nowadays Disney also owns Marvel, it owns Fox, it owns Star Wars so they often also actively resist queer representation in the biggest film franchises in the world.

There was some drama around, cutting out any queer content from the Star Wars movies back in the 2010s although, in my opinion, and Marvel has no gay characters whatsoever despite, 80 films at this point but in my opinion, this, that has as much to do with global film markets and avoiding queerphobic censorship regimes internationally.

Like there’s a big push on a lot of markets, especially China. You can’t have gay representation, so since so much of box office is now made abroad, that makes a big part of it too, but it actually segues really nicely. It’s really comfortable for Disney to have these sort of traditional, conservative, sex phobic, Protestant values in the movies, it’s really easy for them to adapt that to the modern era, where other companies, like for example, Sony Pictures, who had a long run of doing films for adults, really struggled with the current era, because They want to make more adults for specific things.

God it’s bleak. I thought this would be a more fun project, but it’s anyway, Walt Disney and the corporation he founded they’ve been defining what it means to be a little boy and a little girl in America and across the world for almost a century. I think in many ways, the sexual politics of America are like reflected, shaped and refined by Disney and its image of childhood.

More perhaps than any other single cultural force. And

Mk: then maybe the church, obviously. the discourse due to their straightness and assimilation and lack of culture, et cetera. So as a child, even though I wasn’t super exposed to Disney, I still recall never seeing queer representation in any book or any work of media outside this idea that gay people were to be pitied and depressed.

And this was by no fault of my family. It was really due to an anti queer media scene, especially for youth, and this erasure can lead to so much internalized hate because we get our values and our identities from media. On a personal note, how would you say you experienced this dynamic as a kid and teen?

Vicky: Yeah I’m it always makes me sad to, to learn that I’m going because even though obviously I studied so hard to get it. I was like, deeply closet as a kid. And I was, I came up, I came, I was a teenager in the mid 2000s when it was a really dark and reactionary time, like post 9 11, and like gay was the most common insult people used.

And I was in a liberal town, like a liberal area, so we knew that was bad, but we still used it. And there was still some sort of, freedom feeling in even using that. Obviously I grew up in the closet and as a result, experiencing a lot of that violence without recognizing I was experiencing it.

But the legacy of Disney can be pretty complicated when it’s done. Cause they form such important images in our youth. They have a really heavy and important psychic role. I know that I loved Jasmine, who’s like the princess from Aladdin. And I had a doll of her and I fantasized about being her.

But I was like really ashamed of it, and I hid it, and I eventually hid it even from myself, because I was also like, I was a trans lesbian, so I also was like, attracted to her, and I couldn’t tell what was going on, and I just assumed I was really confused, and eventually I just repressed all that memory.

As you might know Ursula in the Little Mermaid was based on the drag queen Form of Divine. And Ursula had a strange sort of pull and attraction for a lot of queer folks, even if she was the villain who was, nobly defeated at the end. And I know for a lot of transmasc folks Mulan was a real root experience with her journey of becoming a real man.

In order to save her father and her village. Although if you watch Mulan now there’s some real problems. It’s real the orientalism is horrible but even if, I wouldn’t recommend watching the original Mulan cartoon now for those reasons, I find it very hard to watch. It doesn’t cancel out the effects it has had for queer, for trans masks, for queer inspiration.

And I think that’s what’s interesting about culture and about movies. It’s not just to attack them and call them reactionary, although they certainly are. And that, that shapes how many people respond to it. But I think what’s interesting about culture is that, especially movies and popular culture, it’s made by so many people at once.

And it’s used by so many people at once. It’s enjoyed by so many people. that it doesn’t ultimately have perfect ideological control. People use culture how they want to. And so I think it’s like really important to learn how to criticize and see the ideological stuff and the reactionary stuff in order to figure out what kind of art and creativity we would rather see in the world to get in touch with our desires more directly.

And I think for me, Like that means that being honest, both about the reactionary stuff, right? Being honest about it being like, Mulan’s kind of messed up, but also to so recognize when stuff moves us, when we enjoy it. Like when I, I loved Aladdin, like I talk about that in the book, like openly, I think it’s important too, that we shouldn’t try and be like perfect, perfect revolutionaries who weren’t moved by this stuff.

We’re made by it too. And it builds our self experiences in our community. And we basically We just need to use we just need to use that self knowledge that we can steal, that we’re stealing, basically. We’re stealing it from Disney, right? They don’t want to give that to us queers. They want to give it to good boys and girls who are going to buy their products, and get their parents to buy their products, and become parents to buy their products in the future.

But we can steal that knowledge, that desire from Disney and use it and share it to build a better cultural world outside of and against Hollywood product and Hollywood.

Mk: That experience of finding some level of queer belonging in highly problematic media seems so common in our community. I absolutely had that experience with Mulan as a child, as did so many transmasculine people I know.

Because no one sees what might be termed female masculinity or bookishness in media outside of that. Which is mostly because lesbian culture gets erased, and so does transness. But, yeah. And, yeah. I was also drawn to masculine presenting historical figures and those involved in social justice movements.

And it is very trans to only be offered an idealized past or future as a way to understand our transness, and thus to have to find belonging in that. Even though there is an assumption there that everyone self discovers in this time bound and statist way. Art, were you into organizing as a teen, and did you like to write or engage with theory then, and how did the media you were exposed to shape that?

Vicky: Oh, yeah. I was really grateful for this question. I’m really grateful for this question because thinking about it, I actually did do some organizing as a teen, but because it was, because I was sort Whatever closet and because things were weird, I didn’t really think of it as that.

And also because in the 2000s, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. I guess I worked with a group to get our school to stop using sweatshops for uniforms and athletic gear. And I think we actually won on that one. And that was the echoes of the alter globalization movement.

I did a protest against the standardized testing regime that they introduced at the time. And a little before that stuff I went to demonstrations against the Iraq war. 2003, 2004, when I was like really a little teen I guess I don’t know, I was younger at that point, but at the time I was like, I was writing a lot of I was writing a lot of fiction I wanted to write novels but I like, so I wasn’t writing theory or engaging with theory in my book.

But I read a lot. I read all the time. I played a lot of video games. So I engaged with a lot of like different stuff, but again, it was mostly fiction, but I discovered I had a real taste for like historical fiction and for history books. So I would read a lot of history books. Like I read a, I remember reading like a doorstop history of modern China, which I probably forgot all of.

But like when I was 13, so I really like history. But I think I didn’t really discover radical politics, like really I’m certainly nothing like anarchists until I started getting into punk and the punk scene which I did late, like I did it when I was 18.

So I think that was when I started really encountering.

Mk: Love this so much for you. First of all, I think Yeah, the same special interest, because starting when I was 13, I did that with critical theory I spent an entire summer just reading the completed works of Emma Goldman, which is maybe why I’m gay.

Yeah but the resistance to the injustices of compulsory education is so important, especially this dehumanization of being gay. tested and thus expected to spit out information on command rather than learning it organically by hyperfixating queerly and it brings me so much joy to hear about queer and trans teens doing that work.

So what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for you when you were younger?

Vicky: Yeah, I think when I was young, there just weren’t, there just weren’t that many of them. The 2000s was like, as I already said, a real low point for social movement in the US. There was like a really intense right wing shift after 9 11.

And so radical politics was really confined to small subcultures as a result. And because I wasn’t really participating in those subcultures I didn’t always have access to those politics. I remember being very frustrated when I radicalized and started calling myself an anarchist that the only real organizing spaces that opened to me were like socialist parties, like the ISO, which was big on like the, on college campuses at the time.

They were like a trust based organization. We’re since it’s solved, but so I guess I would just say I wish more of them had existed. Oh, sorry. This is a bit of a tangent, but I remember I went to an ISO meeting, like, when I was a freshman in college, and I remember the 1st half of that meeting.

And then this is like 2006 2007. The first half of that meeting, they talk about they’re talking about how the revolution is like imminent. And the second half of that meeting, they’re talking about how best to sell newspapers. And I was like I’m never going back in there again. That is wildly difficult, different from how I’m looking at the world,

Mk: that sounds like every ML group.

Vicky: Yeah. I wouldn’t know. It was the last, first and last time I went to any of their meetings. But anyway, I like, I guess I just wish more of them had existed, and I wish, I think another thing I wish I had known was that I didn’t have to wait for someone else to do it.

That I could just start them wherever I was. So I think if folks are like, Thinking about getting moving the thing is to look for changes in your immediate life or in your community that would happen and that would make things better and then get together with friends or like people who share that idea and try to fix it.

And I think as I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten less and less interested in query answering. My stuff has gotten more simple. I obviously write it now and I think I read it a lot, but I think in a way, we don’t need a perfect solution, we don’t need a total critique.

Oh, it can be really fun to try and make one, we just we can just, we just get started. And most of the learning that we do comes in the process of getting started. And in the process of moving. That’s how we learn and develop tactics and strategies and features.

Mk: I so agree with that.

I think Starting with the community’s needs can be really valuable. And in my experience, also just starting with what actions feel intrinsically meaningful, like really either approach works, but what’s so important is to move away from debates about theory and debates about, what age people can start organizing at, that’s a big one, and start by legitimately organizing.

Like I’ve been in so many affinity groups where like the age limit has been a conversation and it’s like, what if we. We rejected linear time and then we did something. On this topic what would you have for, what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to get more into critical theory and anarchy?

Vicky: Yeah so one thing that I think is really important that I think people don’t have a lot of space for these days is that you don’t have to understand everything to enjoy a text or to have it radicalize you. One of the books that radicalized me was Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

He’s like a French, ultra left Marxist from 68. He was part of a situationist who were anarchist, anarcho communist group from the 60s, sort of art and organizing group. I read his book at 18 and like a huge amount of it made very little sense to me at the time. Like huge sections of it are critiques of the way that the official communist party in France is behaving in the 60s.

I didn’t know anything, like I didn’t understand any of that. Not to mention there’s like a lot of like intense metaphysics, I didn’t get it. But I but reading it. Just gave me this energy and this inspiration that like, I couldn’t deny. And that led me to find other stuff that I understood more.

And now when I revisit that book. There’s lots that I still don’t understand exactly perfectly, but it’s very different than it was then but I still can get that feeling from it. Similarly a book I tell people that I love all the time which is like a famously difficult book, is Anti Oedipus by two French radical French psychoanalysts from the 70s Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.

And that book is like really poetic and I love it. And it’s about how, it’s about Using schizophrenia and madness to think against Freud and Marx, and develop like a revolutionary anti fascism. At least that’s what I think it’s about, because I say it’s one of my favorite books, it’s really important to me, and I never understand it.

I read it, and I’m like, wow, this is so cool, and I feel like I understand this exactly, and I don’t know. And that’s a really important experience for me. I think that that experience of poetics and confusion and curiosity and pleasure is so much more important than accessibility.

I don’t think you have to get hung up on if things are difficult or if they aren’t clicking for you. I know when I was a kid, I thought it was really hard. Even into my twenties and thirties, like even, for a long time, I thought if I started a book, I had to finish it, but there’s nothing wrong with putting a book or a work down.

If it’s not working for you, you can always come back to it. You can always come back later or read a summary from someone else or listen to a podcast about it. But there’s also nothing wrong with wrestling and struggling with a difficult text. If you don’t understand it fully, but you’re, you want to keep going.

That’s also great. I think we get just really hung up on things being accessible or clear. And that can be really valuable, but we can also get a lot of enjoyment and pleasure and education out of things that are intimidating or confusing. Which I think is what so much of art is, right?

Especially abstract or conceptual art or poetry. A lot of that is confusing, but that said, the stuff that I think now when I think back on what really taught me about the world, I actually think it’s novels and movies more than theory. I think the theory is cool, and, but novels and movies and videos, games, like whatever it is you’re into, there is no one right way to learn about the world.

We can always do well by paying attention to our world and paying attention to our desire and our pleasure. What do you enjoy? Instead of asking yourself, what should I read? Ask yourself, what do I like? What am I curious about? Trust yourself. That’s the biggest thing in teaching yourself and learning in a liberatory way.

Trust yourself or your friends, obviously, but trust yourself that you can distinguish between what works for you and what doesn’t. And don’t get too hung up trying to follow particular methods or ideas or ideologies. And yeah, and if some fucking rando, sorry, I don’t know if we can cast you on here, but it’s all good.

Okay. If some rando tells you like you’re too young or you’re too inexperienced for a book or a piece of like art or culture, tell them to stuff it, like it doesn’t matter. There’s no such thing as too young for something in terms of like cultural experience. That the person who is experiencing it can’t recognize themselves, right?

Someone can certainly look at something and go, Oh, I don’t get this. I’ve had that experience. Oh, maybe this will make more sense to me later, but right now I don’t understand this. That’s a totally valid experience. But no one could ever tell me what that was. Like, for me, horror movies, were really great.

Like when I was like a little kid, I love like slashers. It was really violent, but like I experienced like adult American modernist novels. It’s really impossible to read. And I have to be older. I don’t get this at all. And that’s not, that’s backwards, right? In school, you’re supposed to read those novels, but you’re not supposed to watch horror movies.

So I think yourself at the time, that was just me just being a weirdo, but you know yourself and you know yourself better. By exploring your own path, your own curiosity. And if you can do that with friends, it’s even better. But but I often did it on my own. And it was still incredibly fun.

Mk: This idea of learning about anarchy through art and fiction is so awesome. I really got radicalized towards queer anarchism, not by theory, but by being in theater spaces that gave me the experience of queer collective care. And before I became an anarchist, when I was like 12, I was very into the queer core movement and historical gay liberation, and I would read issues of the Gay Liberation French Magazine for fun, and that And that stuff, while not explicitly anarchist, in fact there were some very problematic ML tendencies there, really laid the groundwork for what does it mean to have a queer liberationist movement, and what can a queer apollo pic be, and you have to start somewhere with theory.

And there are infinite ways to express and learn about and love queer anarchy, just like there are infinite genders. So on that note, any shameless plugs?

Vicky: That was really well put. I completely agree. There’s no right way to get there. We all have to find our paths and push together. But yeah, I do have some shameless plugs.

That’s it. I wrote a book called In Defense of Looting, which came out in 2020. You can find it free on the Anarchist Library or loads of other places on the internet. Or you can buy it online. If you’ve got a friend, or if you’ve got some extra money, just want to read it. If you want to read more regular stuff from me, I have a blog called All Cats Are Beautiful.

It’s on ghost. io, which is like a blogging website. And yeah, keep an eye out for the Extended Universe, which is the book about Disney, which will be out next year with Hangar.

Mk: Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on Disney and your youth liberation journey. I’m MK Zariel, this has been Vicky Asmuriel, and you’re listening to The Child and its Enemies.

MK: Hello and welcome to the Child and its Enemies of podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer bodies.

And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create queer, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, M. K. Zariel, I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at The Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Me, Bro, and organizer of some all ages queer spaces in my city and online.

I’ve organized with Anarchist Archives, all ages Punk venues, feminist mutual aid collectives, zine distros, neurodivergent art spaces, trans media projects, teenage anarchist support groups, the occasional political campaign, and oh so many trans meetups. With me today is Jenny Baskin, abolitionist artist and founder of Communication Madison.

Jennie: Hi, thanks for having me. My pronouns are she, her. I have organized formally and informally with other artists and artist groups, such as Equity for Artists, as well as under the umbrella of communication. I have generally stayed away from organizing in any formal way with any political parties. I don’t feel any of them fully represent me.

In my art practice and my parenting, I believe in centering the most vulnerable and sharing power to achieve equity and connection. I am a mom to a five year old.

MK: So you founded the All Ages Sober Punk Venue Local Artspace Communication in Madison, Wisconsin, right? Yes,

Jennie: I co founded Communication in spring of 2018 with three other people, two were musicians and one an artist and vintage seller and then me.

MK: Oh, I love that so much the idea that art and radical spaces and youth liberation can intersect with one another that is That has been the theme on this podcast But I believe you’re the first person i’ve chatted with who’s not only made that a part of their anarchism But centered it in this way So yeah, super cool.

What led you to make this an all ages space? Were you into art and punk music or vintage stuff or other stuff like that as a kid in teen?

Jennie: I was fortunate to attend Milwaukee High School of the Arts in the 1990s, which was an incredible place to learn at that time. It was before arts funding, as well as educational funding, was gutted in Wisconsin during the Scott Walker years.

I told my parents I wanted to be an artist when I was about three years old. Three years old, and that really hasn’t changed. I got a camera when I was 12 and it’s still my primary mode of making. I was interested in zines and Riot Grrrl culture, trading mixtapes, thrifting, and dressing kind of the opposite way of most of the cool teens at my school.

MK: Oh, Riot Grrrl means the world to me too, especially as a queer liberationist movement and like the idea that feminism can be about gender liberation rather than, and yeah, this idea that we can find a creative practice and thus get radicalized when we’re teens and even know who we are when we’re three is so powerful, like that kind of reminds me of people’s coming out experiences at really young ages and how even though a lot of society might not believe us, that’s still something that sticks with us our whole life.

So how do you think that whole genre and subculture of being punk and riot girl and the like if it affected your views on youth liberation?

Jennie: First, I just want to say I’ve been like shaking my head up and down. Yes, to everything you’re saying. I don’t think I understood myself as being a part of a liberation movement in my youth, since that wasn’t really a conversation I was allowed to have in my home or that was, just even open space, there was an open space for it.

But having exposure to zines and subcultures at a young age, as well as attending integrated schools and learning how difference can be challenging and positive, set me up to be very receptive to youth liberation once I spied it. It felt really obvious to me that young people should have power and freedom.

MK: Did you have access to all ages and queer inclusive spaces for your interests in art and music, or were you even aware of other teenagers who were involved in that stuff?

Jennie: I didn’t actually have access to spaces like that often since I lived in the rural suburbs and was bused into the city for school, but I knew about a lot of spaces where friends of mine went to see music and hang out.

I didn’t know about a lot of spaces that were sober, though. And that is honestly why I didn’t try harder to go. I’ve never liked feeling like something weird could happen and I might not feel safe. I really like having control for my surroundings. Raves weren’t my thing because of all the drugs and house shows had too much sexual harassment.

I was very fastidious about being in control of my surroundings.

MK: Yeah, being a teenager isolated from urban centers can make organizing a challenge, especially because, as you say, the organizing scene can be very adult, often in ways that are even harmful to those with adult privilege, like the amount of disrespect for consent around embodiment, the amount of substance use that may be lax in effective harm reduction.

How would you say you coped with that HSM that is really harmful to the whole public? and movement. And how do you think today’s online organizing might change that?

Jennie: That’s such a good question. I had a lot of friends who had cars, and they were kind enough to give me rides and spend time together, which helped a bit.

I also made a lot of art by myself at home, and I read all the time. I wish I had been able to connect more about why I was making art to help myself feel less alone, but I also think the internet could have been a really challenging place for me at that age. Because it still is now. I also spent more time with nature as a young person, which is a different kind of sense of community.

I think there’s a lot more accessibility in how teens can connect with each other online. And if they’re in the right discord channel or forum, it probably helps them, many of them feel less alone. I’m so glad now teens can choose to learn so much from the internet about queer history, subcultures, art, all of the things that can be hard to find in smaller towns or isolated settings.

MK: You are so right about how it really depends on what scene you’re part of. Honestly, just joining the anarchist movement for the first time and not knowing where to organize, it’s really the luck of the draw with the people. And I’ve known teenagers who have come out, or transitioned, or unmasked, or even gotten radicalized towards anarchy because of supportive online communities.

But I’ve also known so many who have faced cyberbullying and hate and been called slurs, and you’re so right about the need for a more supportive online culture rather than simply more accessible online spaces. So what sorts of differences in use and pattern and meaning generation do you find between adults and younger people when in the online organizing space I feel many more adults fall.

Pray to misinformation that goes around, whereas teens can sometimes have a better sense of media literacy. Can you speak on this?

Jennie: Absolutely. I think many adults trust their governments to make good choices for them, and young people haven’t been indoctrinated into that belief, so they’re more easily able to resist falling under the spell of fear of the other, and can see the patterns of misinformation as they spread.

It also seems to me that there is more likelihood of neurodivergent youth and neurodivergent adults, such as myself, being able to see through the veil of mainstream media and status quo BS, because they literally have stronger pattern recognition.

MK: Exactly. I would say neurodivergence is almost inherently anarchist in this way.

We’re literally wired to be outside of the box and to value what is meaningful over what is socially normative. There is a reason that anarchist spaces are so neurodivergent positive, not just because of an ethic of broader inclusion and support, but because neurodiversity makes us almost neurologically anarchist.

That’s quite literally how I’ve explained my neurodivergence to people before. For our listeners, can you tell me more about communication? What kind of a venue is it?

Jennie: Communication is a volunteer run, non profit, sober, all ages arts and music venue. We have a shop selling the work of around 100 local artists, a stage for local music and other events, a membership based Resigraph print collective, arts program that includes workshops, exhibitions, and extensive partnerships throughout our community.

We’re a safer space and have what we call an ethical booking policy for our performances. It’s a mouthful. There’s a lot.

MK: Can you tell me more about this ethical booking policy? That sounds like such an important way to keep the space safe for people of all ages.

Jennie: We developed the ethical booking policy as a confidential process for community members to bring things to our attention, as well as a way to assure that there’s a safe process for the accused person to have space to share their experience.

We rely on transformative justice tools and facilitation to lead this process. We haven’t had to use it much in the past few years, but it was used several times Two years, we were open which was, they were both very challenging or the multiple experiences were pretty challenging ones to deal with.

But they were really productive and we did come out with positive resolution.

MK: I love that. I definitely see transformative justice as an inherently youth liberationist practice because the alternative punishment is so baked into compulsory education and the nuclear family. And often folks who are perpetuating that are doing so out of age drama, really, and so many adults complain, oh, I’m being treated like an elementary schooler in this space when they’re being held accountable.

But what if we created a transformative justice process that was actually inclusive to people of all ages and, didn’t involve ageism and didn’t parrot things that people had experienced in their childhoods in harmful ways? So on that note, besides the transformative justice, what makes communication such an inclusive space for kids and teens?

Jennie: We want young people to have power in the space being in all ages. Safer space was a core piece of our founding mission as is lifting up any marginalized individual. It’s so common that children and young people in general are not given agency or put in positions where they can have control over their lives or surroundings.

Children truly are an oppressed group.

Communication. Yes. Yeah, , that communication we put as many structures in place as possible to assure that young people are truly safe and contribute as much as any adult to performing arts programming and volunteering. We also encourage teens to sell artwork in our shop. And I have to also say that, most teens, when we say, you can do X in this space, it takes us saying that many times before some young people will actually feel confident doing it, because I think they don’t trust adults, and I really don’t blame them.

MK: That is so real. As teenagers, we’re absolutely socialized to need to ask permission for everything I personally am one of the founders of this Teenage Anarchist Collective, and we have a group chat, and so often I need to remind people that they can post in the group chat without needing to ask permission, and even things as small as that, that in an adult anarchist space, of course you can post in the group chat, that’s not a concern.

But as teenagers, our whole lives are about asking permission to do various things at school and asking our parents, can we do X, Y, and Z? So And as soon as we’re in a space where we can really self determine and self liberate, then that can feel weird and take some type of adjustment and almost, And almost emotionally realizing that’s possible means having to contend with the oppression that we’re facing elsewhere instead of dismissing it as normal or just our age.

Thank you so much for bringing this up. And so what have your experiences with this venue taught you about youth liberation? And more broadly, what would you say that youth liberation means to you?

Jennie: Youth liberation means believing young people when they say what they need and giving it to them whenever possible.

It means that my needs aren’t the only needs I’m thinking about as a parent, and that I don’t always know better than my child what she needs or what is good for her. It means I listen more than I tell, which is hard. And that I have a It also means that I have had to fully reframe my idea of what school, life goals, and any social norms might look like for her and any other child I love and support.

It also means that I support all children in my community. And around the world, especially those more vulnerable than my own. And I teach her how to use her privilege to do the same.

MK: That is such an important point. Parenting can be a huge part of adult accomplishment to youth and teens, not in the hierarchical enforcing of a linear development sense, but just almost as a form of unconditional mutual aid that can be provided to any young person who needs it.

I really appreciate that point of view and the idea that liberatory parenting is a lot about. dismantling any idea of a life path that might have been imposed in the past. So what do you think that liberatory parenting can or should look like on a larger scale?

Jennie: I have thought about this a lot In the past five years since my child was born, I think some parts of liberatory parenting might look small on the outside, like never forcing or bargaining with my child to eat things she doesn’t want to, because I know that can lead to troubling relationships to food and not trusting her own body and mind.

From the outside to many parents, it looks like a small and silly choice, but it feels really important to me that sort of agency over the body. Something bigger that it could look like is giving a child agency in how they spend their time. Is school a priority? Is achievement? Do they have to go to any school?

Kind of traditional school or defer to adults in educational settings. These are questions I’m asking myself regularly, especially as my child’s going into kindergarten in the fall, and I want her to have a part in answering them. And more broadly, it should look like centering the needs, wants and safety of the child rather than the parents and their comfort.

MK: That idea of personal agency and even bodily autonomy in a society that erases that for kids and teens is so important, and I think that’s. Kind of foundational to anarchism as a whole, like that governance of the body that a lot of us face when we’re five years old is also something we face when we’re 15 and get denied gender affirming care or our whole lives in a transphobic society.

So on that note, what would you say your relationship to anarchy is as someone who does queer liberationist and youth liberationist organizing?

Jennie: No, I haven’t Had a strong relationship to anarchy or any organized movement but I’ve discovered over the past 10 years that my values align much more with anarchy than with any other social or political movement.

I think I was taught to align myself with, liberals or progressives. And as I got older the more I connected with my own body and my own community and my own mind and heart I realize anarchy is not a bad word, it’s not a bad word, and the more I think about the place I want to live and how I want my community to be cared for, I’m actually into it.

MK: I love that so much for you, and it’s incredibly valid to not use the label of anarchy because of stigma or any other reason. Like I know so many teenage anarchists who would never use that label sometimes because it’s not safe to at home Sometimes because they feel erased as trans people, whatever it is And at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what labels people use so long as they’re Dismantling all forms of control and creating those queer networks of care that are so vitally important So what advice would you have for youth and teens who want to create art and music or get into their local art scene?

Or what would have been useful for you when you were younger?

Jennie: You know, I thought about this a lot and as an undiagnosed autistic teen, I had a couple of opportunities to have an artist mentor, but I was really too scared and intimidated to actually follow through with it. And I didn’t understand how to make things happen or what kind of Social process it took to achieve closeness in more arts activities.

Now, with the perspective of time, I would encourage teens to number one, trust themselves, their intuition about what adults and spaces are safe to be around and help them reach their goals because not everyone is. Two, don’t be intimidated by achievement. You aren’t any less than anyone, no matter what their age or pedigree.

Going to art school is not any more impressive than making art in your bedroom. I can tell you in, there are many days where I wish I had not gone to art school because those loans are still following me around. I don’t, I didn’t need the education. The schools need you to pay for it. For them, for their bills.

Three, find your people online or in person. If there isn’t a space like communication in your town, there will likely be one online. Now there’s so many more networks you can tap into there.

MK: And actually the child and its enemies has a discord and civil community for teens who want to learn about anarchism and youth liberation and trans stuff and neurodivergence.

So yeah, the child and its enemies dot no blogs dot org. Join us on the internet.

Jennie: That makes me so happy. I should share it on my Instagram and website. Oh, that would be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Number four, don’t subscribe to scarcity mindset. This divides artists and performers and keeps them begging for scraps rather than building coalitions to demand more from the structures that disperse opportunities and compensation.

This is such a huge issue at every age, at every stage of career. And we can’t be divided. This is why coalition building doesn’t work. And then finally. If there’s an adult that you think that has good ideas or makes interesting art or music, reach out to them. See if they have time for mentorship or support.

You might be surprised what they have time for. I have been so excited when people have asked me to either be supportive of them in some way, a mentor, Or just share their work with them, share my work and share, my ideas and reflections on their own work.

MK: I was actually having a great conversation with someone in the organizing space lately about how mentorship is actually a really youth liberationist practice because it means that youth can understand what it is to have relating with adults that is not about hierarchical parenting and is consensual and is basically a friendship just with some element of mutual aid, which really all relationships of care should.

So it isn’t just something that can help teens get better at art. If that’s what you want to do, it’s a way to prefigure what adult solidarity can look like. And I love that. And I love that. That’s something that you want to do for teenagers. Are there any last comments or things you want to cover that we didn’t get to today?

Jennie: Honestly, I’m just so glad that young people are having these conversations and not simply accepting that the world and their lives have to be the way that those in charge say they have to. I think we can see politically right now how much young people are trying to take control and it makes me so happy.

And thank you so much for including me in this conversation.

MK: Yeah thank you so much for being down to talk about communication and queer art and youth liberation and all that good stuff. If people want to get involved with communication or learn about your art or any of that do you have any shameless plugs?

Jennie: Always. For communication, you can go to our website, which is communicationmadison. com. The Instagram account, if you’re on there, is Communication Madison. And we are also on Facebook, if you are into that. For myself, I have a solo exhibition 2025 at Arts and Literature Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin.

And that’s a wonderful gallery and community space. You can see my artwork. at jenniferbastian. com j e n i f e r b a s t i a n. com. And on Instagram, I am at jennie3e, j e n i e t e 3 e s. I will also have an artist residency this fall that will be two years long at the Thurber Park Artist Residency in Madison.

MK: So cool, thank you so much for sharing your youth liberationist journey. I’m MK Zariel, this is Jennie Bastian, and you’re listening to The Child And it’s enemies.

Mk: Hello, and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Here at The Child and Its Enemies, We believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives.

And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression. Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms and inspires us to create queer,

I’m your host, Mk Zariel. I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at The Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Me, Bro, and organizer of some all anarchist peer spaces in my city and online. I’ve organized with anarchist archives, all anarchist punk venues, feminist mutual aid collectives, teen distros, and more.

There are divergent art spaces, trans media projects, teenage anarchist support groups, the occasional political campaign, and oh so many trans meetups. With me today is artist and activist Cate Moses. Can you please tell us who you are, pronouns, name, and where you organize?

Cate: Yes, Cate, she, they. I’m with several groups in my city of Santa Fe, Nuevo Mexico.

I’m still in Tevo, Atlanta. In my city, I work for liberation and justice in Palestine, primarily right now. Also interested in anarchist artists group where I met MK in a group called once a forest, a local group working to stop the forest service from burning up and clear cutting our forests in the name of fire prevention.

The U. S. Forest Service and the U. S. Park Service intentionally started the three worst forest fires in our state’s history. In high winds, as prescribed burns, we seek to end those, and I work with various non human animal rights projects for the liberation of other species as well.

Mk: So you founded a program for unhoused and unstably housed kids and families at a public school in your city that serves mostly Spanish speaking immigrants.

I’m so curious what it’s been like for you to organize for housing and immigration justice within this fundamentally statist education system we live in. Do you view your organizing as changing compulsory education from the inside or as expropriating its resources and resisting it in a more overtly anarchic way?

Cate: Neither, really. I work quietly in the ruptures of the system’s web in a cave beneath the system. Our program, called the CASA program, exists in a space between the state public education system, the non profit NGO structure, and anarchy. I’m literally in a cave, a partially walled off hallway in a public school that many people do not know exists.

Mk: I feel like so many anarchists can relate to that alienation of not being with any in any system, nor being overtly publicly against it and just Existing in spaces that statists have doesn’t touch and I feel like that’s a lot about what being trans is like too how We don’t really fit neatly into any gendered box or statist ideology can you talk a bit more about this program and how youth are involved in supporting one another to access housing?

Cate: Yes, it’s youth centered. Youth need driven. Every public school in the U. S. State is required under McKinney Vento law to provide equity for unhoused and unstably housed youth. I mentioned the law only because you should be aware of it in advocating for equity. However, the public education system is inherently inequitable, rooted as it is in capitalist linear narratives of development.

Gender and success. So we have to support and take care of one another in accessing housing and other needs. Youth bring their needs and their comrades and we work together to make those, to meet those needs. Youth sometimes share housing and I figure out ways to pay for it outside of the state shelter and foster care systems, which we know do not serve the needs of youth.

We work together to identify and remove barriers to equity housing. And transportation. The priority is to put direct material assistance and decision making power in the hands of youth with as few strings attached as possible. Youth decide what will be available in the food bank in our cave. Anyone of any age can access the food bank.

Parents, school employees and community agencies are involved to the degree that youth want that.

Mk: This ethic of mutual aid is so inspiring and exactly what adult solidarity with kids and teens can look like. Rather than a hierarchical parenting dynamic or like a conditional form of care based on obedience, people with adult privilege can provide us material support and emotional care as equals and inspire us to build networks of care with one another that really not only serve youth in terms of our material needs but empower us.

Soaps! Speaking of hierarchy, and lack thereof, you self describe as a recovering former academic. How has that background shaped your journey as an organizer in a society with compulsory education? Do you think there’s any way that academia can be liberationist, or is it inherently ageist?

Cate: Good questions.

I worked as a low wage teacher in public universities for about 10 years, and I was offered tenure in a place I did not want to live in. It felt like a death sentence. So I chose life outside of the system, and eventually, Found my way to serving youth in a 7th through 12th grade school. I attended a radical student centered alternative public high school.

So I knew that the possibility for doing youth centered advocacy might still exist. And. Probably in the back of my mind, that was my model. I was lucky to have had that. Can academia be youth liberationist? That possibility does exist, but student organized mutual education networks that include trades learning probably offer more possibility.

Higher education is about class based exclusion and student debt loan sharking. It’s more about those things. than ageism I think. Roughly 75 percent of college teachers in the U. S. are adjuncts, low wage workers who qualify for food stamps and other public assistance, and are burdened with huge course loads.

They’re generally not young. Students living in poverty and those working to support their immigrant families are largely denied access to higher education or saddled with huge debt. The private, public, and for profit university systems discriminate in different ways. Private academia caters to rich white 19 year olds who actually have some power in that system, where education is a consumer driven product and keeping the customer happy matters.

Poor folk and people of color are largely excluded.

Mk: I was looking at photos from when we were young Your hair is light blue and you’re smiling in one And it’s a strange remembrance brought on by this semblance That we were so serious, shy, and experienced

Cate: in state run public universities, there’s less class based exclusion, but more state control and more possibility for student organizing, I think, and meaningful advocacy. For profit colleges are the worst. They exist solely to defraud students and saddle them with debt. There is anti teacherism on the part of the state, which is also invested in controlling youth.

So we’re in this together to a certain extent. When students and teachers unionize and work together, there are possibilities, I believe, for liberation.

Mk: So I love the emphasis on how issues of labor and capitalism and how teachers are treated really affects teenagers. The school system is full of people facing governance both through ageism and labor alienation.

And often there’s this narrative that workers rights is not a youth issue because teens aren’t facing this, when in fact anyone who lives in a capitalist society should care about how teachers and other people doing feminized care work are being treated. So on another topic, you also mentioned that you’re into creating art.

So how would you say that intersects with your anarchist organizing?

Cate: That’s what I ask myself. I’ve always made art, mostly in a silo. I’m a painter. I like working alone. I’ve moved consistently toward abstract art over the course of my life. How does that lend itself toward social justice and anarchy? My work has always been about animal liberation, water protection, and social justice, but how to make it more overtly so and in collaboration with others.

That’s what I really want to explore now. That’s why I’m leaving my school job this year to find out.

Mk: I love that for you that you’re getting in touch more with like artists, activism, and what it means for media and art to be anarchist praxis. Like I think about this a lot as someone who makes radical media and it always is so meaningful when folks enter that and they’re organizing.

So can you tell us more about the plans for you once you leave? I

Cate: was raised by anti war activist parents. In the summer we went to activist camps and I want to get that vibe back. Just being a feral pack running around unsupervised while the adults were doing their activist thing.

Even now I want to get that back. And in that scenario adults We’re in organizing meetings all day and the youth were in unsupervised feral pack. It was liberating. Much of my work was spent in the woods with a feral pack of kids. Much of my youth, there was not much youth organizing happening. We lived in a high poverty rural area where parents did not helicopter.

Through my parents, I became aware of housing and other social justice issues. So I was lucky that way. And I want, now I’m I found a job, yes, where I can do that, but I want to get back to bringing my art into that. I was frequently involved in street level activists as a kid, as a youth. One of my earliest memories is of ice cream cones melting down our hands while my little brother and I watched cops beat the hell out of our father.

So I learned how to organize. We staged walkouts and protests in middle school over war and gender discrimination. I came to anarchism later, I’m still coming to it, and what I really want to figure out is how to bring that intersection, how to arrive at that intersection between the art I’m making. Make it more in collaboration and have it serve the needs of anarchy and organizing.

Mk: You sound so cool as a kid and I’m so sorry your family faced that repression. Growing up targeted by the state can really radicalize a kid and I see this in queer youth spaces all the time. Like, when me and my friends are facing anti trans legislation and it’s impossible to believe in government after being denied gender affirming care so we almost have no choice but to build.

Anarchic Networks of Care, and I love that you’re still coming to anarchism. It really is this eternal, atemporal, iterative process, not a destination, isn’t it? It is. It is. So when you were a kid, what would have made organizing spaces more accessible for you?

Cate: That’s a great question. At first I wanted to say the notion that was even possible for children and youth and the internet, and to some degree those are true, but we were organizing and enacting mutual aid, even then, without having the words to call it that.

That’s what happens organically when you’re running around the woods for the feral pack of kids.

Mk: I love that vision of youth liberation so much. The autonomous organizing and the ungovernable nature of youth and the inherent response of it all. Thank you so much for voicing this. On that note, what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to get into housing advocacy or art?

Cate: I probably get a lot more good advice from youth than I give, but if I had to give advice, make art. Make art every day. If you can, whenever you can, withhold judgment of it. Read and learn about other youth advocates, strategies, and right now, read David Vojnarovic’s Close to the Knives. That’s what I’d,

Mk: I I love this idea of art as youth liberation and housing advocacy as central to these tendencies and this kind of disruptive queer anarchy is so meaningful.

On that note, any shameless plugs for your organizing or Jess Theory or other people’s organizing that you think is cool?

Cate: I have one timely shameless plug that I think probably listeners are already doing. Get out there and do what you can to stop world war three. That’s happening in the, in Palestine right now.

And all the little side distractions of war that Israel’s enacting. That’s what I’m really, that’s what’s happening right now. And one more shameless. Plug for David Wojnarowicz’s work. Everything you’ve talked about here comes together, and did come together in his life, in his art, in his organizing.

So again, I’ll make a plug for Close to the Knives.

Mk: Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey, and also for recommending Gus Fury. I’m MK Zariel, this has been Cate Moses, and you’re listening to The Child and Its Enemies.

Mk: And welcome to the Child and Its Enemies. A podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation. Gear up the child and its enemies. We believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives, and youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression.

Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control, and inspires us to create queer and trans liberation. ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zariel. I’m 15 years old and I’m a youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of the Books, author of the blog Debate Me Bro, and organizer of some all ages queer spaces in my city and online.

With me is Atlanta based activist Temperance Blick, one of the lockdown activists of the StopCopCity tendency. Hello, Temperance!

Temperance: Hi! Yeah, that’s me, Temperance Blick. My pronouns are he, they, and I. They it, or it’s complicated. And yeah, I’m a forest defender working to stop Cop City.

Mk: As many of our listeners know, you recently locked down at a breast feeding gory construction site in protest of police militarization and the destruction of the Welani forest.

Can you talk a bit more about this action and defend the Atlanta forest tendency?

Temperance: If you haven’t heard the city of Atlanta is right now constructing a 90 million plus tax funded facility to train the police. It’s been named by Atlanta City Council, literally an urban warfare training facility. It resides outside of Atlanta city limits, and the locals have not had the opportunity to agree upon it vote upon it anything.

In fact, the mayor offered the petition method to put it on the ballot. But when the forest offenders gathered over a hundred thousand signatures, twice the amount that he asked for, by the way, he decided he’s allowed to change his mind.

Mk: Wow, that state repression is so terrible and also so undemocratic of him to ignore public opinion whenever it doesn’t suit his political goals.

Trans youth face this kind of hatred too, given all the legislation targeting us and the way our voices are ignored in the name of protecting the children. Which, of course, doesn’t include the lived experiences of actual children. Given the similar oppressions we face, would you say that forest defense is a youth issue?

Or a trans issue?

Temperance: Both. On one hand youth are the ones who have to experience the future, and I don’t need to tell you how environmentalism and preserving the few green lungs we have left on the earth massively impact what that future looks like. Also, the militarization of the police doesn’t look good for people who don’t fit the weird American Gothic status quo.

It doesn’t look good for anybody, to be honest.

Mk: So in terms of tactics to create youth liberationist futures or a temporal youth liberation in the here and now, Do you think civil disobedience is relevant in the same way that actions like yours have been in environmental movements? What role would you say disruptive actions like this one play in youth liberation, if any?

Temperance: I don’t want to be the one to advise youth to act disruptively but, yes, civil disobedience is Very relevant, and I would say necessary, I’m reminded of this book I read in middle school, it’s called Frindle by Andrew Clements. To sum up grown ups have a very strict view on what the world is.

Cause what’s taught to us is hard to unlearn. But young people? Young people get to witness for ourselves, like adults know it and it freaks them out. But the truth is y’all are often right. Youth have advantages, more than you realize.

Mk: Thank you so much for giving voice to that.

Yeah it isn’t that there isn’t a knowledge of what youth can bring to liberationist movements. It’s that it threatens power, which is, of course, the point of anarchism. And I love that art and media were so inspiring for you as a younger person. When I was in middle school, I read it. Emma Goldman’s Anarchism and Other Essays for the first time, and it was my first experience of truly having a purpose and a community in life, and of feeling accepted in my queerness.

It’s so beautiful to find something meaningful in our teens, especially in middle school, when we’re faced with some of the worst social hierarchies. So on that topic, were you into community organizing or anarchism, forest events, youth liberation as a kid and teen? If so, what kind of organizing did you like to do?

Temperance: My schooling was unconventional. I went to an alternative school. But my parents taught me to think for myself. So I broke gender roles and spoke out about liberation from a young age. Also I had the internet, so I got schooled on things like gender and race equity when I, wasn’t a lot younger than you.

Censorship is rough, but it’s also impossible. There’s always a lot that slips through the cracks.

Mk: Alternative schools are so liberatory. I’m glad you got to experience that. As a homeschooled person, I can really relate to self educating and finding meaning in ways that are inherently outside compulsory education.

And yeah, censorship is so oppressive and very often targets queer and trans media. If you’ve heard of the initiative Ban Books Back by Firestorm Books, there are absolutely anarchist initiatives to help queer youth circumvent that kind of governance. But it’s still traumatic to live in a society where even queer thought is policed, where queerness is criminalized.

So speaking of abolishing all control, what would have made organizing more accessible for you at the time? I think if

Temperance: decent education had been accessible, and towns being walkable, I think the things I could do if I had been taught valuable and useful skills as a child, which aren’t often taught in schools.

Mk: That is so real. If youth have skills that can transform society, then again, that means that ageist power dynamics are less of a thing and that youth aren’t as dependent on adult supremacy to survive. And yeah, I wish you’d had access to that too. I’m so sorry that was a struggle. So how would you say that the defend the Atlanta forest tendency does with youth inclusion and how could it be more inclusive to organizers of all ages?

Temperance: Oh my friends and I have made an effort to make child friendly spaces. We have activists of all ages and maybe someday you’ll be able to interview my friend, Dr. Ari’s kid remix. He’s four years old, and he leads our chants at pro I think he’s two, but he Oh my god, that’s amazing!

Mk: I love the image of a two year old getting involved in an environmentalist movement. Like, when I was two, I just didn’t know any other humans yeah, that’s awesome.

Temperance: Yeah, it is. It’s incredible. We love to see young people come around. It’s inspiring. It reminds us what we’re doing this for, and it’s a good reminder to be good,

Mk: it really is, yeah. Adults intentionally making anarchist spaces kid friendly is such a powerful show of solidarity, and makes the community better for everyone. I’m sure that all the adults in that space love having a two year old kid involved. What advice would you have for kids and teens and, toddlers, I didn’t know that was a possibility, but cool. Who want to get into environmentalism and anarchy and defend the Atlanta forest.

Temperance: I would say, learn, talk, volunteer, volunteering is fun and you learn things. Make friends wherever you can, create the cycles you want to see in the world.

Whatever you want the future to look like, Start doing it now, in all the small ways however you can.

Mk: The advice to live out anarchy in those small, doable ways is so important. As kids and teens, how we can organize might sometimes be limited, especially if we’re within the education system, nuclear family, facing state repression, whatever it is.

But there are always ways to resist, and for every form of status depression, there’s always something beautiful that needs care and support. For example, the Weelani Forest. On that note, any shameless plugs relating to your organizing or stuff you think is cool?

Temperance: Yeah, nothing personal, I would say go download the app, no thanks just for fun.

I like the podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff. I think everyone should hear it. And follow StopCopCity and at DefendAtlantaForest on Instagram for updates on the movement to StopCopCity and Defend the Atlanta Forest. Free, Palestine.

Mk: Yes, thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey.

If anyone wants to learn more or join us on Discord and Signal, our website is thechildanditsenemies. noblogs. org. I’m MK Zariel, this has been Temperance Blyck, and you’re listening to Child and Its Enemies.

Episode 2

mk: Hello and welcome to The Child and Its Enemies, a podcast about queer and neurodivergent kids living out anarchy and youth liberation.

Here at The Child and Its Enemies, we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives. And youth and teens are at the center of this form of oppression.

Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for youth that challenges all forms of control. And inspires us to create queer, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zario, I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at The Anarchist Review of Books, author of Debate Me Bro, and organizer of some all ages queer spaces in my city and online.

With me today is Isabel Santin of Chosen Few Software. Hello, Isabel!

Isa: Hello there. My name is Isabel, but you can call me Isa. I go by she, her, and they, them pronouns. and primarily help as a facilitator slash leader of the Madison Area Transgender Association. Within that organizing space, I’ve helped to foster social connections between transgender adults living in the Madison, Wisconsin area, provide technical assistance for projects such as the yearly Holiday Trans Care Package Drive, and more recently aid my teammates with critical decision making for local queer events such as the TransJoy event.

Apart from volunteering for MATA, I am self employed as the HOO of my own software brand, Chosen Few Software, which I hope to eventually convert into a successful business venture and use as a leading example of how the software industry can become an agent of positive change in the real world. So you founded the tech company Chosen Few Software, correct?

mk: And y’all are predominantly youth in team space? Yes.

Isa: Indeed, I founded Chosen Few Software initially as a way for me to self publish my software applications in a way that was recognizable and visible in online spaces I participated in. I created the brand before coming out as a transgender woman in 2022, and I must say, my overall vision for what I want to achieve through the enterprise changed significantly alongside me.

Before coming out, the brand lacked two crucial components of successful branding, mission, and focus. In a way, accepting my own truth and identity helped my brand find an identity of its own. My vision for Chosen Few Software is to not only inspire, but actively cultivate positive change purely through the software engineering process.

This is represented by our motto of changing the world one line of code at a time. Furthermore, as a young expert in my field, I’m using my brand to build a platform for amplifying youth voices. A great example of this is Chosen Few’s very own Voices Audio blog, which releases monthly with a focus on creative writing and sharing the inspiring voices of tomorrow.

All this is to say, yes, Chosen Few software is built different. We strive to create a space where young engineers and creatives, including myself. And not only share those crazy big ideas, but also be given the resources to implement them in a real meaningful way.

mk: What has it been like to be a youth led and trans liberationist organization in tech spaces? Because when I think about the mainstream tech scene, I tend to picture bro y straight men on their computers, as I’m sure a lot of our listeners do, but of course, tech is for everyone. And it seems like what you’ve created with Chosen Few is collective, and queer, and a negation of all that straightness is.

Isa: For all intents and purposes, I have seniority in my field, namely software engineering. However, due to my relatively young age, and because I’m a woman, I’m not taken as seriously as I should be, at least by my older peers. I find myself constantly going against the grain, against the advice of the older generation.

I’ll hear, that’ll never work, or you shouldn’t approach it that way. I use this as my very reason for leading the chosen few. Our method is risky. It’s experimental, always treading into unproven grounds, but always through ingenuity and a shared sense of purpose of taking on big challenges, we define our own successes and achieve our goals.

Now, I do realize that makes my company very unattractive to invest in, but at this stage in the brand’s development, my goal is more to fulfill myself and my team creatively. Rather than be profitable, or even break even at that point. The most important thing to me right now is not the money and logistics, but the vision.

Making our dreams come true. Because the only thing between hopes and dreams and positive change is the willingness to act towards it.

mk: So as a younger person, did you ever get to access tech spaces like this that were so age and gender inclusive? What about community organizing spaces? Were you ever into transhumanism or anything else at the intersection of fairness and anarchy and technology?

Isa: When I was much younger, I was very much a lone wolf. I had a very few close friends through public school and later on online school, but I found it quite difficult to relate to my peers in terms of maturity. In a lot of ways, I was less mature than other kids around me because of my ADHD, but in a lot of other ways, my ability to hyper focus and my talent for mathematical and computational thinking made me unrelatable to my peers.

Who barely grasped a lot of the abstract thinking that computer programming requires. That said, I’m privileged. My parents ensured that I always had access to the technology, software, and edutational resources I needed to fully explore my interests and goals. My dad, who is a senior software developer, has always served as a guide in my explorations.

Always there to steer me in the right direction, but never stifling my unconventional workflows and solutions. In this sense, my parents served to create learning spaces around me, in ways that encouraged the natural progression of my tech related skills. I’ve only ever been involved in queer organizing spaces since I came out in 2022.

And by that point, I was well into what is legally considered adulthood.

mk: I’m so sorry about that lack of inclusion when you were younger. As a fellow ADHD person, I can attest to the many challenges of having an ungovernable mind in a controlling society, especially as a kid. So in terms of inclusion and opportunities to follow your passion, what types of resources or organizing spaces would have been helpful for you?

Isa: I feel that if there were more coding related lessons and clubs in elementary and middle school, I would have thrived. I’m always eager to share my latest software creations, hence the reason why I even created my brand.

A lot of what I do now, I feel like, in a joking sense, stems from that childhood dream of waving at the camera and saying, Look at me, Ma, I’m on TV!

mk: We so need liberatory education, though. I’ve heard about anarchist free schools and other projects that prioritize science and technology, and it should absolutely be centered in radical education spaces for those who are interested. In fact, this could even be an argument for unschooling and homeschooling. Outside compulsory education, kids and teens are more free to follow what brings us queers with us, whether that’s technology or anything else. So about that sharing of software creations and that look at me mime TV kind of moment, can you tell me more about Chosen Few? What kind of software do y’all make? And how can our listeners connect with their software if they want to use it?

Isa: That’s an interesting question. In short, we’re still figuring it out. We have a few open source projects that we maintain for absolutely free. But to support the development of those projects, we have a few very niche software projects that we currently offer via subscription to our Patreon page.

The biggest one at the moment is Save, the software analog video emulator. Think about how many times you’ve seen that cheesy fake VHS filter used in YouTube videos. Now think about what it might be like if that filter that everyone used actually looked good and authentic. That’s the major design goal for Save.

At the moment, the product has made dozens of sales and has a few features that we’ve developed as stepping stones to the bigger goal of the full VHS tape emulation. What makes our product different, however, is the fact that it mathematically models the real electric signals that transform and move through analog video equipment, such as VCRs and tape cameras.

It’s a really unique product, and there’s nothing else out there really quite like it. Also on the horizons is Surge, our custom image format for the web that serves as Chosen Few’s response to the global issue of bandwidth disparities. In a lot of marginalized and developing communities across the globe, people have limited access to rich educational resources such as high quality videos, podcasts, and images.

Surge for the Web is basically a custom image format that we designed to solve this problem. Not by making images smaller, but by creating a way for them to display sooner and in lower resolution. The format allows for dynamic, on demand downloading of just enough image content to keep interactive web pages usable and accessible for people with low bandwidth connections.

Information about both projects is available right now at chosenfew. software, so check it out.

mk: That is all so cool, and I’m sure so many of our listeners will love to check all that out. So what makes Chosen Few so inclusive for youth and teens? Like, in my experience, hacktivist type of spaces tend to be mostly adult professionals, yet they’re supportive of youth who are just getting into tech, or need help with their digital security, or just want to be in anarchist community. Given the increased digital surveillance on trans kids, as well as anyone trying to access reproductive healthcare, and so many other marginalized communities, multi generational spaces that can actually support kids and teens with our tech related concerns have never been more important. I know there are probably some anarchist tech people listening who would love to make their tech spaces actively youth liberationist, and it’s so awesome they all are.

Isa: The answer is simple. We believe that teens and young adults can make a difference. You don’t need a degree, or a diploma, or decades of career experience to have good ideas, and to make them real.

So much of young people’s thinking is pushed towards, When I grow up, I want to do X, Y, Z. But Chosen Few throws that out the window and says, Why wait till then? Let’s scale this down. Let’s make it tangible so you can make that dream real right now. That’s what I’d say is done at the very core of Chosen Few.

Basically, we don’t wait for change. Change waits for us.

mk: I love the atemporality of that. Waiting for adulthood is so often about asking us to change ourselves for some idealized future, and it’s so meaningful to see a youth liberationist base that empowers kids and teens to realize their dreams now. I used to think as a kid that when I grew up I wanted to be an activist, but now I’ve realized that anyone of any age can do community organizing, and the same is really true of tech. So in what concrete ways are teens and youth involved in Chosen Few?

Isa: Teens and youth are involved in every aspect of the Chosen Few software design, engineering, and marketing process. For example, more recently, the Search for the Web project has been thoroughly stress tested on various platforms and kinds of hardware by my online friends.

All of whom are still college aged students without a degree or even a job. Additionally, my younger brother, Eli, is still in his teen years, and he’s had a large influence on critical design choices for our gaming related projects such as Super Patrick, our flagship mobile game. In fact, he was quite literally guiding the early prototyping process over the shoulder as the game began to take shape.

Now, it’s our most popular product ever. Prove that teens and young adults not only have great ideas, but have the power to make them a reality. Furthermore, The Chosen Few hosts a monthly audio blog, Voices, with a focus on lifting up the young, inspiring voices of tomorrow through creative writing. You can also speak to the involvement of teens in The Chosen Few software brand, MK, as you recently starred on The Voices blog for its January 2024 entry.

All of these are concrete examples of how youth involvement in the Chosen Few software brand has had an extremely positive impact on its ability to fulfill its mission and goals.

mk: I love the way y’all platform people who are still in the education system, and the way you’ve worked with your brother on creating mobile games, that is all so wholesome and just brings me joy. And I also love the shameless plug for the interview we did about my sub stack and about youth liberation and about a bunch of other gay things. So on a related note, what would you say your experiences with this company have taught you about youth liberation? And more broadly, what would you say youth liberation means to you?

Isa: To me, youth liberation is central to human survival. At this point, think of how many more years it will take for people of our parents age to actually get seats in political office and be able to influence governmental policies in a hopefully positive way. Meanwhile, our generation has all the talent, all the ideas, all the willingness to do that can make those things happen much sooner.

So why not pursue that? Why not enable younger folks to make real global change? We all know the answer. That gives too much power to too many people. The gatekeepers at the top need to savor the little temporal influence they have left. My company is a reflection of this personal belief of mine. Kids can make a difference, and they can make a difference now.

That’s super important, and it’s what I want to exemplify as I move forward with this brand.

mk: So speaking of making global change, what is your relationship to anarchy like as a trans liberationist and youth liberationist organizer?

Isa: Anarchy is something that I want to do more research on. I want to read more about anarchist theory. I want to see how our societies could really make ways for us to implement more anarchist ways of living and producing. My relationship to these concepts is nebulous. But I’m drawn to anarchist spaces because I have a vested interest in researching and understanding how decentralization can play a role in dismantling harmful structures of control and power in a modern informational age.

mk: So how would you say the tech world intersects with anarchist organizing? I know we talked a bit about what anarchist tech spaces can look like, and I’m so curious to see how you view that overlap.

Isa: Anarchy is the purest form of decentralized control. In my mind, it’s the ideal way to organize a massive network. Whether that network is made out of computers or people, it makes little difference to me. The reality is that the computers we build are just as fallible as us. They just tend to do more and more of our thinking for us as they become more powerful and reliable. I think it’s an important part of the future of human evolution, but we live at a point in time where our societies are beginning to show their scars, show their weak points.

It’s a point of inflection that intersects with our reliance on digital computing and computer networks. We’re all still just trying to figure out how to move forward in a society that is changing too fast. That said, I think that putting effort and energy into decentralized networking technology, especially those designed for social communication, is a really important goal of mine as an anarchist software engineer.

The principles of decentralized trust and control, these have benefits within the realm of computers that are analogous to the same benefits we observe in decentralized societies.

mk: So what advice would you have for kids and teens who want to create their own software and do so in a transpositive and anarchist way, or what did you need to hear when you were younger?

Isa: My advice to young folks wanting to get into software is to start exploring as soon as possible. There’s so many resources out there for varying skill levels. However, it’s important to also go into it, especially as a beginner, knowing that computers are really freaking dumb. You have to tell them how to do every single little thing, and even with the advent of generative AI, that’s not ever going to go away.

So it’s about learning a new model of thinking, restructuring the way you solve problems so that it fits into the mold of what computers are capable of handling. In other words, don’t be afraid to take chances, make mistakes, and get messy. Errors will occur all the time. It’s what makes us human.

mk: That idea of tech as iterative is also so true of anarchy. I love the idea that our imperfections are human and beautiful, and that software can be accessible for anyone. So, speaking of making software, specifically your software, accessible for everyone, do you have any shameless plugs that you’d like to share?

Isa: Totally! Visit our website, type chosenview. software into any browser and you’ll find it. You can also find the CFS brand on Facebook. Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. I refuse to call it by the new name, by the way.

mk: Thank you so much for sharing your youth liberation journey. If you want to learn more or join us on Discord and Signal, our website is thechildanditsenemies. noblox. org I’m MK Zaria.

This has been Isabelle Santin and you’re listening to The Child and Its Enemies Now. A proud member of the Channel Zero Network.

Isa: Bye everyone. Thank you.

Mk: Hello and welcome to The Child And Its Enemies, a podcast for and about. We are a neurodivergent, kids living out anarchy and youth liberation.

Here at the child. We believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives. And kids, teens, and everyone else affected by anti childism are at the center of this form of oppression.

Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for trans liberation. Kids and teens that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create neuroqueer, feral, ageless networks of care. I’m your host, MK Zariel. My pronouns are they, them I’m 15 years old, and I’m the youth correspondent at the anarchist review of books, author of the blog, debate me, bra and organizer of some all ages, queer spaces in my city and online with me today is our first ever guest Skye G Garcia, who is a community organizer.

and freedom fighter. Hello, Skye.

Skye: Hi, I am stoked to be your first guest. As MK said, my name is Skye Gia Garcia and my pronouns are she, her, hers. My business in Madison is primarily centered around my work with Outreach LGBTQ Community Center, along with my personal advocacy work that continues no matter where I live and who I am affiliated with.

Mk: So you work with Dane County Youth Action Board for a project led by queer, trans, and unhoused young people, right?

Skye: I am currently employed by Outreach, LGBTQ community center, and I was hired to work for a program that’s now called EverStrong. And it was one point called YHDP, which stood for Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project.

EverStrong is a program that has been designed and led by Dane County’s Youth Action Board. And the YAB is made up of youth between the ages of 14 to 24 who have a lived experience of housing insecurity and some of them just so happen to be queer. So that has resulted in the program design being inclusive to all people, especially those most marginalized in the LGBTQ community.

Mk: I would love to learn more about that, but first I’m curious about how you organized as a teenager. Did you have access to spaces like the Youth Action Board, or was there other organizing, or just other ways of experiencing and creating anarchy that were meaningful for you?

Skye: I wish, MK, no, not at all. Uh, there was nothing for me to access like the Youth Action Board in my hometown of Rockford, Illinois.

I believe that every city should have a Youth Action Board, and that we should continue to be led by radical youth. who wish to break the molds that bind us. The best ways that I could think of my presence and existence creating some type of anarchy was by defying gender norms that existed. So, in high school, if there were categories that Were meant to exclude what the gender was that I was based off of.

I didn’t allow that to stop me if I was passionate about, let’s say the dance team, for instance, I ended up auditioning for a dance team that was originally all one gender and made it co ed by just putting myself out there. So I would say that. Due to the support that I had from my peers, we were successful at overthrowing authority that was rooted in heteronormativity and patriarchy.

Mk: I love that for you. Especially given the oppression of compulsory education, it is so beautiful to create anarchic liberated spaces in high school. I say this as someone who founded an anarchist queer collective at my middle school. So, um, on that note, um, can you tell me more about the youth action board?

What kind of cool projects do you get to support these queer kids in?

Skye: I definitely can. I just wanted to say that, especially from my experience working in Rockford for an LGBTQ community center. It was always so inspiring seeing how youth in middle school were starting clubs like a GSA or a queer anarchist club.

I mean, that is mind blowing to me because there’s nothing like that when I was in middle school in my immediate experience. So it’s really inspiring. I just wanted to give you your flowers, MK. That’s super awesome.

Mk: Uh, thanks. I mean, middle school is when social hierarchy really starts to get ingrained, like, I mean, adults always compare the most hierarchical situations to their middle school experiences, so for that reason, I think it’s like the best time to find anarchism, and I’m so grateful that I did.

Skye: Me too, honestly. Uh, so in terms of your question of the types of projects that I get to support the youth in, my favorite way to support the Youth Action Board is by supporting Creating space for their autonomy to flourish respectfully, I have made sure to show up in meetings with other adults who may not understand the importance of their leadership due to their age and indoctrination that says that they should delegitimize these youth because they supposedly don’t have lived experience as an adult, but time and time again, these projects that I’m a part of are proving that the experience that youth do have is just as valuable, should be legitimized as much as possible.

I mean, this program that exists in Dane County is designed to be like no other social service offered in the area. So we were able to provide necessary support in ways that haven’t been possible, all in an effort to end youth homelessness.

Mk: So, what have your experiences with this Youth Action Board taught you about youth liberation as a strand of liberation and as a way of relating?

And more broadly, what would you say youth liberation means to you?

Skye: My experience with the Youth Action Board has reminded me of the success that comes from having no hierarchy of leadership. To me, youth liberation means listening to the voices of the youth and allowing those voices to overpower our own as adults, so long as it’s rooted in expanding consciousness and liberation of all oppressed people.

Mk: I love that vision of accompliceship being about shedding power and doing that in a way that’s deeply anti hierarchical and about not only centering youth But giving you the space to not govern and not be governed and simply exist in care and solidarity and queerness with one another. So on that topic, what would you say your relationship to anarchy is like as a trans and youth liberationist organizer?

Skye: My relationship to anarchy looks like being a part of a multitude of different horizontal collectives and projects. Constantly, I am dedicating myself to sacrificing any type of privilege that I could hold by refusing to stay silent. So, in my eyes, silence buys a lot of people privilege. And by refusing to do so, I’m not only sacrificing that privilege, but I’m putting myself on the front lines and assuring that the institutions who wish to uphold oppression, that they know who I am and that they know who I stand with.

Mk: That idea of silence as buying privilege is so important for liberation and honestly with queer liberation. Like, I think about Audre Lorde’s essay, The Transformation of Silence into, I think, power and action or something. Like, so many people simply default to never speaking on an issue and privately having feelings about it, but not necessarily actually organizing around it.

Like, I see this so much with teenagers who have concerns about compulsory education and the nuclear family. I just lament that they don’t learn at school and feel repressed at home and still haven’t transitioned and paid their life, but still won’t organize around that. And I don’t fault them for that at all.

Like, it’s so hard to get into organizing when you’re a teen and the organizing world is pretty adult dominated, but it’s also. So hard to stay silent as a teenager.

Skye: It blows my mind, MK, actually, because I meet a lot of people who are in that exact predicament. They are aware of it. They will complain to me about it.

And in my eyes, and I can see you were the same way, when I went through that process, I immediately began taking action and organizing. And it’s almost like some of the people who will talk to me about these things, it’s like that thought never, like, pops into their head. And, um, like you said, it’s nothing to fault them for.

Instead, I’ve found that lending support and compassion and a listening ear and planting maybe a seed that will hopefully, like, be watered by the ways that they’re dissatisfied and then sprout and bloom, like, that’s how we, you know, support the revolution, I think.

Mk: Exactly, and also creating spaces that meet teenagers where they are, like, I was giving a workshop on youth liberation once, and it came up that organizing spaces in schools are so important, because, like, if you’re a teenager, it’s intimidating to be functional, but if you organize with your classmates, then that takes that out of the equation, and I’ve known teenagers who have gotten radicalized that way, and we need that accessibility in the world.

So what advice would you have for you? Do you want to get into community organizing at school, or in their communities, or whatever? Or just generally liberate themselves and find more autonomy and care? Or what would have felt useful for you when you were younger? I think

Skye: a really big thing, because I get asked this question quite commonly, so it’s, it’s nice to really get a chance to think about it, and I like to focus on the topic of fear.

I feel that fear is what stops a lot of folks from taking action that can radically change their life for the better, and I feel that fear is weaponized against people and used to stop them from taking those actions. So my advice is that folks, you should just accept whatever fear that you have, and you should work with it.

I always think that accepting the truth and then embracing it is the best way to changing what’s possible. And I think that if you instead allow the fear to guide you in identifying barriers, that it would work more in your favor because, like I said earlier, fear is corrupted and influenced by external factors.

But fear can serve a purpose that is productive and it’s a human experience. I would say the more that I’ve healed my relationship with fear, the more that it has served to protect me because there’s an intuitive aspect to it as well. And if you want to get, if you want to get into community organizing because you recognize the ways that it will liberate you and your community, you should really start your own collective.

Do not allow the fact that you may only start with a few people to deter you. Remember to value the contribution and power that just one person has to offer, even if that one person is just you. Believe in yourself. I believe in you. And if you ever forget, find me because I will remind you.

Mk: That idea of starting your own collective is such a formative thing for so many teenagers I know, because even more than just learning to organize and meeting cool people, it, it can really be a way to prove to yourself that anarchy is possible, and that you’re in a group that isn’t hierarchical with people your age, and that can not only work, but even make people’s lives better and make you feel liberated and human, so.

If you could say anything to a teen out there who’s feeling that fear and is struggling with something going on in their life and looking for community or connection, what would that be?

Skye: So for anyone out there who’s listening, if you find yourself disappointed and uninterested in the status quo of mainstream society, and you want something different for yourself, just please don’t give up.

Listen to my voice when I say this. Please don’t give up. Not only is another world possible, but another world is happening at the exact same time. I see this other world every day. I live this other world with my own eyes and soul. So allow my voice to support you in shattering the illusion that your community isn’t trying to find you, and shatter the illusion that your community doesn’t exist, because we are here, we are looking for you, and we believe that we will win.

Mk: I love that so much. So many teenagers need to hear that. I know I need to hear that as a 13 year old. So, thank you so much for putting that into the world. And finally, in case teenagers, um, want to learn more about your work, um, any shameless plugs?

Skye: Yes. If you would like to follow me on Instagram, you totally can.

That’s a safe place to reach out to me and to follow what I’m up to. My Instagram handle is Skyebinary. That’s S-K-Y-E-B-I-N-A-R-Y. And then you can also find me on Facebook at Skyee Gia Garcia, S-K-Y-E-G-I-A-G-A-R-C-I-A. Thanks so much. Okay.

Mk: Thank you so much. And is there anything you would like to say to close out this podcast?

Skye: MK, I actually do have a question for you. I just visited the National Summit to End Youth Homelessness in D. C., and there was a panel of youth there that were speaking on their experience and speaking of what needs to be done in order for change. One of the youth had a question for Alvi. Adults in the audience and they asked, what are you doing to liberate youth?

What, what are you doing? So I kind of, I would love to ask you, what can adults do? You know, there will be adults who are listening to this as well. What can those adults do or just adults in general to assist in the liberation of youth? Well,

Mk: I’d actually like to turn that question on its head and say that adult accompliceship doesn’t mean liberating youth.

It means empowering youth to liberate one another and create networks of care, because at the end of the day, if they’re in a position where we are supported by adults, but don’t have our own ways of providing care to one another, then adult supremacy stays in place and statism isn’t challenged. So, I would really say, um, supporting teen led organizing.

If you are an adult in a community organizing space, pushing those youth specific events and campaigns, such as even direct obstruction of conversion therapy and other queer youth oppression, um, Obviously treating young organizers as equals, taking on emotional labor and care work in support of teens, letting teens initiate conversation about age rather than making everything about the fact that we’re teenagers.

But more than anything, just Seeing what youth need and what organizing we’re already doing or what organizing we want to be doing and supporting us in that.

Skye: You know, I really couldn’t agree more with you, especially when it comes to that acknowledgement of the ways in which adults supporting youth has actually contributed in the past to youth not being able to be independent.

I really loved that you put an emphasis on that. Uh, because that’s what some of these cycles would do actually, they acknowledged it during the summit on youth homelessness that they were putting youth in positions where they could gain expertise and things like that, but it was really only valuable while they were in that position, and they couldn’t actually take that position to a legitimized standpoint that would get them a job with a living wage or anything like that, because that whole position was dependent on those adults and the operations in which they ran.

So. That was, that was amazing. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were, if I see you being a keynote speaker for one of these summits soon on youth liberation all together.

Mk: That would be cool. But yeah, I agree that a lot of times, um, adult support for youth can really get towards, um, charity rather than mutual aid.

Similarly to how quote unquote straight allyship doesn’t necessarily liberate queer people unless it centers queer people’s actual needs and lived experiences. But I also think that adult accompliceship is so important and stuff like Dane County Youth Action Board that is about building youth autonomy and youth mutual aid and support and so happens to be facilitated and supported by adults really has its place as a youth liberationist basis and is so important and I’m so glad you’re doing it.

Skye: Awesome. Thank you so much. That’s sounds like a good sounds effective. Thanks so much for both of your time

Mk: Thank you so much for coming on this podcast. Yeah.

Skye: Thanks to you MK. We’ll see you guys. Bye. Bye.