OTHER FAMILIES, OTHER FARMS by Caitlin Ehlers
OTHER FAMILIES, OTHER FARMS: A TRANSFEMINIST CRITIQUE
by Caitlin Ehlers
I choke a little on this story. I can’t tell if it’s obsolete, or if I make myself ridiculous by talking like some sort of elder. Maybe what follows is obvious, but bear with me for a minute:
I transitioned and came out in 2008, when I was 15 years old. It was more unusual then, at least publicly. Strangers said, “you’re so brave,” as if nobody had ever said that before, because I and every other transsexual was always the first transsexual anyone had ever met. Nobody calls us brave anymore - have you noticed? Of course, we were not especially brave people, nor as uncommon as cis people thought. By 2009, a group of queer teenagers that I was a part of conducted a survey in the public schools. We were trying to prove that homophobia still existed in “liberal” Ann Arbor, and showed exactly how it continued. We also proved that 1% of the student body was trans or questioning their gender identity. That figure is commonplace now - .5% trans, .5% questioning, just like every article in every newspaper says - but was hard to imagine then. Famous doctors still repeated the bogus guess that trans people constituted 1/16,000th of the population, and trans people themselves were used to small worlds and near-invisibility. But we were, in fact, everywhere.
We required a new world, and being everywhere led to some interesting world building. All of us fled from some form of violence - whether hot or cold, familial or institutional - and we all stood on a spectrum of madness and instability. Aside from that, the commonalities ended. My friends included professor’s kids, runaways in group homes, and professor’s kids who slept on park benches. We were multi-racial, though not uncomplicatedly, and convened across great distances of class and space. In downtown parks, teen drop in centers, basements, and the one gay bar that would let us play pool, we trauma bonded, flirted, fought, and did the batshit things that troubled teenagers do. Queer, gay, dyke, and trans were words that made this world available, that jammed its doors open and allowed us in.
So when I say that I am queer or trans, I mean that I am in allegiance to all the messy people with difficult lives brought together by queer and trans needs. I prefer not to “identify as”, and replace it with “identify with.” This was not fashionable in 2008 and I sense that it is less fashionable now, but so be it. I am a trans woman and a dyke, and it means that I have sisters and siblings everywhere. A few of my sisters are professionals - lawyers, professors, computer programmers, and the like - and good for them! A few more of us are scrappy but stable, like me, mixing low-ish wage work with passion projects. But the vast majority of us fall on a spectrum from low wage work to desperate poverty. Trans women in particular are extraordinarily likely to be homeless, to make less than 14,000 a year, and to be excluded from the formal economy entirely. So when I say that I identify with my trans sisters, I mean that I owe solidarity with women who sleep in tents and storage units, who work sex and call centers, who are denied love and fellowship wherever they go. My trans sisters are frequently denied stable jobs, and frequently shunned and thrown away by their families of origin. (And, if we’re being real, shunned by every form of chosen family too, whether marriage or queer co-ops.) This is to say, my bonds of solidarity are with people who are excluded from property, and excluded from the family.
These bonds are a troubling proposition for a farm. We can say what we want about how we believe in queer kinship, or how we believe that we are stewards, not owners, of the land. But colder facts await us. Farms are property, in the most bleak, Euro-settler way. Being a farmer means being implicated in power and property, no matter what we believe. The institutions that define “farming” - whether the USDA or the IRS - can’t see a “farm” without ownership of land or business. Stewardship is a nice idea, but there are no tax breaks or assistance loans given for stewardship alone: just ask any farm worker or landscaper. Nobody is equipped to enforce stewardship; the federal government can’t even enforce its few, weak environmental regulations. But everywhere is equipped to enforce property rights. Every town has plenty of cops, judges, and armed citizens prepared to back up titles and deeds. Titles and deeds which, necessarily, include a right to deny access, and a right to destroy. A cow is yours when you can sell it or kill it, and that’s some heavy shit. The family, too, is a kind of property. Family is an obligation to care and a way of delegating rank and title, enforceable by a racist, misogynistic system of family law. The male breadwinner might be a dead archetype, but titles like “head of household”, “dependent”, and “unfit” are very real, and change our ability to access care and support. A household, parentage, and dependent children are things that people possess, and that many of us are excluded from entirely.
So it’s cute that I have a farm, or have a farm business on rented land. And it’s nice to have a stable household with my partner. It’s not much property, but it’s more than most trans women have. My life is fine, but I find myself restless and full of ghosts. My experience of what I am includes two irreconcilable understandings. On one hand, I flourish through things which I possess, and so understand myself as a farmer and a wife. On the other, I am a trans woman, and as a class of people, I know that we require more than any possession can bring. Trans female flourishing requires things like universal healthcare, or socially valuing care that isn’t bound by household and family. I can’t bring myself to believe that everybody will one day have a little homestead, or that one day everybody will have a stable family. Nor does solidarity with my homeless sisters mean imagining that one day my arms will open wide enough, my household will grow so large, that I can welcome all of them into my private bonds of care. The property I have carves away from universal obligations. Time spent managing my little house and my little business is time that I can’t give freely to my community. This life is “mine” because I do not have to share it, and in this way, a culture enforces a very literal command: “Mind your own business.”
Generations of trans women fought and struggled for me to be at this point. It used to be a distant dream that a trans woman (even a corny white one from a middle class family), could have a stable life, could plan to have children that weren’t taken away, could be “out” without incurring violence. People died, and still die, struggling for exactly this kind of comfort. And what they knew isn’t wrong: that property kind of sucks, but being excluded from it is a lot worse than being included. Thinking about trans women and property, we see an antinomy, where two things are both true on their own, but can’t be true at the same time. Being excluded from property and family is something that trans women desperately need to overcome; and at the same time, property and family will always have unacceptable exclusions, inadequate to the needs of the most vulnerable trans women. Antinomies are helpful, because they let us know that we need a better concept or practice, one that reconciles and dissolves the original opposition. So what is it?
My time is limited, so I’ll try to be blunt. We need to change what property is. That means we need to change what family is, and what farms are too. Changing who owns property can be helpful in this task, but it’s not the most important part. Instead, we need to find ways to enforce obligations that the current system of property leaves out. Like this: Every person deserves to eat healthy food that they choose. Every person deserves clean water and air. Everyone owes a great debt to the plants, animals, rivers, and earth that sustains them. Everyone deserves the opportunity to make good on that debt, to become more human by sustaining the non-human world. For these obligations to be honored, everybody needs a home, regardless of what they earn or who they marry. Everybody deserves care - no matter who their family is, or how well liked they are. In the world that we need, property is a voluntary honor and a strict obligation to care for the world, and families are relationships of love, taking place inside of, not apart from, universal systems of care. This is, I think, a very trans vision of the world. Family is who holds your hand at the clinic, not whose land you inherit. Farms are a responsibility to feed people, not a private nest egg.
A tiny vegetable farm can’t just make this world exist. Those rights and obligations need a lot of force behind them, and small farms aren’t very forceful organizations. When I think about the drastic changes our food system needs, I don’t look to small farms like mine, even though we’re cool. I look towards the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty, fighting the settler legal system and its definition of property. Likewise, I look towards the struggles of farm workers, fighting against racist immigration law and fighting for control over how food is produced, against pesticides, herbicides, and homicides caused by unsafe working conditions. The tenant movement, and especially that part of it which fights for unhoused tenants, also inspires me in this direction, with its demand for universal housing. Like Audre Lorde says, “We do not live single issue lives.” Attempting transfeminism on my little vegetable farm means getting on board with Indigenous sovereignty, farm workers rights, and universal housing. Pressing on trans needs, on my identification with the siblings and sisters I find, goes way beyond my little life, and way beyond any narrow definition of “trans.” My farm, like the word “trans” itself, is a way to jam open the door to worldmaking, a way of pointing towards what’s necessary for all of us to thrive.
How we grow food has an essential role to play in any struggle for survival and flourishing. As small food growers, we have only barely begun to find that role. One way or another, we will need to let ourselves be transformed beyond the bounds of our little homes and little homesteads. Those contradictions that separate us from our most vulnerable community members, that separate us from ourselves, will need to be consciously worked through. Transition, queerness, and all that beautiful gay shit, are possibilities to transform ourselves in this way, to become what we need to be. That’s what it was when I was 15, and that part hasn’t changed. I hereby invite all my readers to take up this challenge: to experiment, and transform. Getting free means pursuing necessity, as fearlessly as we can. So what do all us trannies really need?
Author Bio
Caitlin Ehlers
(she/her)
Caitlin Ehlers is a worker-owner of Sweet Hollow Farm, a part time educator, and independent scholar based in the Seattle area.
