Welcome to Resist Persist, Gender Climate Colonialism. My name is Shria Chatterjee and I'm head of research and learning at the Paul Mellon Center. Thank you all for being here. I think you've all now seen the show at the Barbican and our hope in creating space for this gathering is really to think of the exhibition as a catalyst, a springboard for broader probing ways to understand the intersections of ongoing colonial histories and feminist and queer ecologies. Women, gender, non-conforming and marginalized communities are often placed at the forefront of advocating and caring for the planet. Their work, whether it's artistic, environmental, domestic or outward facing, cannot be separated from the politics of race, class, caste and other structural inequalities. We hope that many of our conversations over today and tomorrow will make us think and think again about the roles we play, the tools we can build and the histories we must disentangle. I want to say a big thank you to Estrida Neimanis, who is a visiting fellow as a part of the Climate and Colonialism Project that I run at the Paul Mellon Center. And I was through early conversations with Estrida, their work and the curators of the Resisters show Alona Pardo and Colom Goulin-Pierre that the symposium came together. But Estrida and I will say more tomorrow by way of introduction to some of the ideas and broader themes we want to think with. But for now, a very warm welcome to all of you. And a big thank you to the events and tech teams at both the Barbican and the Paul Mellon Center, Ella Fleming, Kathleen Ward and Vania Gonzalez for making all this possible. We've had quite a few last-minute changes to the program and some positive COVID tests to keep us well on our feet. So the first panel today is on ways of knowing and sensing. And Greta LaFleur, who's our first speaker, is unable to join us in person because of positive tests. We're very, very sorry not to have Greta here with us in the room, but they have very graciously agreed to join us via Zoom, and so you will see Greta here in a moment. So after Greta's talk, gender, colonial, and decolonial, there'll be a brief Q&A, and after that we'll turn our attention back into the room and be joined by Shelley Rosenblum and Susanna Wintelling. So first up, Greta LaFleur. If you could get Greta on the screen, that would be great. Greta LaFleur is an associate professor of American Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University in the US. They're the author of The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America and the co-editor of Two Volumes of Essays, Transhistorical, Gender Plurality Before the Modern, and American Literature and Transition, 1770 to 1828. So without further ado, welcome. So hi everyone. I wanted to thank all of you for coming and special thanks to Ella Fleming, Vanya Gonzales, Kathleen Ward, Sreya Chatterjee, Alana Parco, and Colin for inviting me to participate in both this conference in particular and to be involved in the creation of the catalog for the Resisters Exhibit at Barbican Center. I was supposed to fly to London from New York yesterday, but tested positive for COVID yesterday morning, so I am relatively still on the left side of the Atlantic. So I wanted to thank the conference organizers for making it possible for me to zoom in. It was a situation where I had the paper like fully done and locked down and I was like, oh man, I'll be really pumped if I can't give this. So yeah, in a former, I just want to thank everybody for that. In a former time, I would have opened any talk with a land acknowledgement, but following the lead of a number of Native American Indigenous Studies scholars who have criticized land acknowledgments as Mayor Lip Service, as Yves Tuck and Wayne Young remind us decolonization is neither a metaphor nor a two-sentence banality. I just want to ask all of us to assume or maintain a posture of vigilance towards the institutions we participate in as almost all of them from the continued exploitation of both Indigenous and otherwise marginalized people all over the world. My home institution, for example, both of 40 billion, sorry, billion would it be, dollar endowment earned from investments in private prisons and military weapons productions. And it's also both things that are known to have significant environmental consequences for people who are in the sort of vicinity of their production, among many other problematic investments. It's incumbent upon all of us to demand that our communities, employers and representatives be accountable to us and the world around us as well. So the talk today that I'm giving is, I mean, I don't know if I'm even going to call it new work. I mean, even though I did write it for this, but it's also kind of a synthetic sort of account of how I'm thinking about the moment that we're currently in. So it's called gender, colonial and decolonial, or quote, you can't be trans in Gaza. Over the past two decades or so, a growing conversation has emerged in both scholarly fora as well as in more popular media and on social media in particular on what Maria Lagones among others have called the coloniality of gender. This conversation builds on a couple of decades of changing response, of a changing response to the problem, while acknowledged in queer and trans communities in particular that gender itself, whatever it may be, has some sort of relationship to oppression. In a previous moment in queer and trans communities, gender was understood at least by some as a sort of create, a source of creativity or experiment, a foundation that provided the basis for the refusal of normative practices thereof. This earlier moment, and I'm thinking about queer communities over that I was sort of circulating in in the 1990s, 2000s and early 2010s, in many ways drew from both a readerly and a vernacular sense of what Judith Butler meant when they wrote in 1990 that gender was performative. The vernacular sense here would instruct us all that gender is a performance in the sense that there is no necessary relationship to authentic self or inner truth, which are themselves formations that Butler also calls into account in their work. The readerly interpretation of Butler's landmark argument in gender trouble recognized that the performativity of gender is less about one's own physical comportment as a person with a body and one's own accordance with or the flouting of gender norms, and more about how language itself materializes gender or lends gender a sense of materiality that an actuality does not have. I'm not arguing, of course, that everyone read Butler and then went out and participated in various forms of genderfuckery. It was, of course, the other way around. Butler saw what was happening in the queer culture around them and abstracted it into a theory. But the point is in this earlier cultural vision of queer and transgender politics, which was understood to be potentially oppressive about what was understood to be potentially oppressive about gender, was also the source of its potential for radical reinterpretation and refusal. It was the question, problem, and potential of normativity. So many years later, that understanding has changed. Now, I want to be clear that I'm speaking in general terms about queer and trans communities I belong to or live adjacently with. I in no way intend what I'm saying here to sound totalizing. Well, I'm also a university professor who teaches at a gender and sexuality studies program, and I've been teaching trans studies within that program for nine years now. So I've also been able to watch the discourse around what constitutes the oppressiveness of gender change over time. Admittedly, within the context of a very rarefied cross-section of the population of, you know, in the country I have it. So one of the things I've been thinking about consistently over the past seven or eight years or so is about how social and cultural understandings surrounding where the violence of gender derives from has changed. Over the last decade then, I watched that the problem of gender went from being understood to be its capacity to reify and shore up no-ordinative senses of masculinity or femininity, manhood or womanhood to a more narrow definition of the problem of gender. Binary forms thereof. So as a solidly middle-aged person, the first student who told me in 2014 or so, that they identified as non-binary through me, that my first thought was a critical one to be quite honest, and I remember very clearly thinking to myself why are we conceding that gender is organized into a binary? Over time, of course, the conversation around non-binary status and the gender binary more generally congealed in product, and despite the fact that I do not in any way think that the experience of gender has any organic relationship to a binary configuration, I do agree that there's been a highly normative or regulatory effort to organize or understand gender in this way in settler science and other contexts for at least a few centuries. There's also been an explosion of scholarship that's explored the historicity of the categorical welding of ideas, such as male and female, such as work by my fantastic former student, Beans Bolochi, who argues that a sense of binary gender was manufactured by research of the human and animal sciences in the mid-19th through mid-20th centuries, and my fantastic friend and colleague, and also an artist, Lea Devon, who traces the concept of non-binary itself back to the medieval period, as it was attributed to people and cultures who lived in a great distance from Europe. I would never, of course, argue that gender is not colonial, so I'm not saying that here. Regulation, prohibition, enforcement, or reinforcement of gender behavior in social organization is one of the hallmarks of settler legal structures all over the world. I am, after all, a colonial Americanist by training, and without even trying, I can think of dozens of examples of examples wherein what I would term metropolitan gender norms were weaponized in the service of various colonial projects, large and small. Deborah Miranda, for example, has written about what she terms gender-side perpetrated by Spanish colonizers in California and the extermination of the Hoyas, a third or middle gender in Chumash cultures of the era in particular. Jennifer Spears wrote a fantastic book called Race, Sex, and Social Order in Colonial New Orleans, which explores, among other things, how French colonial administrators seeking to control the Mississippi Delta in the area of what is now or is today called New Orleans by settlers, incentivized French traders to marry women from the many surrounding native communities, including the Choctaw, Huma, Chinamacha, Biloxi, and other nations, in order to secure the control of territory. Marriage, these colonial administrators thought, would force traders a different, definitially itinerant form of 17th and 18th century worker to lay down roots and farm instead. This may have been one of the many moments in which colonialism made the organizational transition into settler colonialism. Scott Morgensen has explored how members of the British colonial administration perpetrated their settler interventions in the role of socio-sexual organization, insisting across six nations lands, among others, that the division of labor were in women farmed and men hunted was perverse, insisting on their particular bourgeois vision of the gender division of labor in which women worked in the domicile and men worked outside of it. For enslaved people forcibly brought to North America in bondage, the same colonial hierarchies saw a sharp distinction between men and women as evidence of their weaponized against black men and women too, as Horton Spillers has argued, on gender black women and control and discipline the bodies and movement of black men. This too is an example of the portability of settler-colonial gender systems to short prop racism and white supremacy. In a beautiful scholarly essay that draws on her own experiences, Coast Salish scholar Salish Wesley describes how the colonization of First Nations tribes and the international prohibition of their languages would have pushed people of words, epistemologies and ideas that would have preserved cultures of sacred third and generally non-binary genders into the present. For Wesley, the matriarchal tradition in Coast Salish cultures that assign the creation of new words and names to women elders was was excuse me was, sorry I have a mistake in this sentence here was actually one of the things she was able to reconstitute their sort of identity term for them. Her use of twin-spirited to describe her own gender experience derives from the translation of a word that her grandmother gives her. Finally, Hina Wong Kalu and other activists and scholars have illustrated how one of the many tactics used by those who sought to colonize Hawaii was to root out, persecute and criminalize mahu kane and mahu wahine third or middle gender people within native Hawaiian cultures. I could go on to survey more examples uninterrupted for probably about two days, but I think it's fairly obvious that in a general sense gender is indeed colonial, or at least it can be. Performers and scholars such as the luck of Ed Menon tend to attribute this iteration of the coloniality of gender to its binary form. So in this account it's not gender per se that's the problem, but rather the binary forms of gender, rather colonial histories and presences that are the issues demanding redress. But to understand that gender is weaponized in service of colonialism and settler colonialism is not to say that all gender is colonial, or that non-binary genders are decolonial or not colonial, and that is the issue that actually drives my paper today. I've noticed a bit of a celebratory and thus worrisome tendency in global north, I'm in the global north queer and trans circles in which I participate to imagine that being non-binary or identifying as trans or agender embodies a lived refusal to participate in that particular corner settler colonialism or colonization outright. This is problematic for me for a couple of reasons. First, following Kaji Men I really understand identity frameworks themselves as a legacy of colonial knowledge systems. When we look no further than just to use one example, Maria Elena Martinez's chapter on cast of paintings in her incredible book, Genealogical Fictions, for an example of how colonial taxonomic systems, which is the subject of so much of my work too, created the epistemological foundations for identity categories. And of course, like books like Foucault's Order of Things could also do this work for you too. But this is neither mine or even Kaji's ideas. We find critiques of the structural violence that identity categories can affect in women of color feminism, such as Gloria Anzaldo's Borderlands, or the Kamahi River Collective Statements, as well as in later feminist essays such as Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto. Insofar as identity categories themselves have become commercialized and politicized, the basis for algorithm-based advertising and targeted one-issue political campaigns, we would do well to ask why it is that identity categories have been able to be incorporated so seamlessly into systems of capital and state regulation. Identity categories have been used to separate people from each other and to incite ethno-communal violence since the earliest uses, at least in colonial North America. Consider, for example, the 1676 Bacon Rebellion in Virginia, which started as a colonial war between the Doeg people and the British settlers led by Nathaniel Bacon. Ultimately, the rebellion transformed into a local civil war between Bacon and his settler army, who wanted the British colonial administration to expel and eradicate the Doeg people and the administration itself who did not. I mean, they did. They just didn't want to do it then. Importantly, amongst Bacon's followers was a large class, both black and white indentured servants. These were all bonded people, but this was also an era and region immediately prior to the full scale racial codification of slavery. One of the subsidiary effects of the war was, by some historians accounts, a high degree of alarm among reeling class planters and colonial administrators who were concerned to see black and white indentured people working together, granted in service of settler colonial violence. The historians Eric Fodor and William Cooper suggested the rebellion resulted in a coordinated passage of a spate of laws that divided white indentured servants from black indentured servants, promising white freedmen the possibility of future enfranchisement that would eventually accelerate a hardening of racial distinctions that led, in turn, to the race-based codification of chattel slavery. This is all just to say that identity categories have long been codified in the social world in ways that have left them available as tools for state repression. My second concern about the notion that some trends or non-binary genders may be somehow informed about settler colonial ethos or, in some way, a resistant to colonial co-option is that this idea walks closely in step with a form of purity politics that has found a lot of traction in our current moment and draws directly from settler colonial tropes of political innocence which are themselves such a component part of settler claims to violence, and this is really the substance of this talk. During the 18th century, for example, in many parts of the land that had been stolen and claimed for the British Empire in North America, I called homesteads on lands that both U.S. and state and federal governments claimed as their own, lands that were often contested and certain, or in many cases, just downright right illegal. In 1755, for example, after decades of land theft and violence by settlers, a lot of pay militia attacked the 26th person community of Penns Creek, which is in what is now in a land now called Pennsylvania, where they killed 11 settlers and took an additional 14 of their land as hostages. The attack since shockwaves throughout the British Imperial Administration at the time, colonial administrators from British West Florida up to lower and upper Canada wrote each other and their superiors about the attack openly threatening about the potential for future violence. I spent a month in the collections of the Clement Library at the University of Michigan this spring working with their Gage Papers collection, so this is Thomas Gage, which is basically all of the correspondence that led up to the day of the attack, many of which contained detailed extensive reports about violence by settlers and traitors against various native polities from Florida to Ohio, Ontario to Massachusetts. Indeed, the British Colonial Administration of the United States and the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of the United States of century and the Southwest through the 19th, that in many ways were the only reason the British were able to maintain their colonial control at all. So what was the shock of the Penns Creek Massacre? From the perspective of 20 years later, 200 years later, it's hard to imagine that these colonial administrators were deprived by the violence, but they certainly did make use of it to paint the let it pay as perpetrators of unprovoked violence against British settlers. Over time, this became a racialized story about a category, a generic settler vision of a menacing Indian that would appear prolifically in American media for 19th century novels to 20th and 21st century Westerns. I don't know how many of you saw the 2017 film Hostels, but I was thinking a lot about that as I was writing this. To begin to conclude, instead of talking about the coloniality of binary gender or the implicit potential decoloniality of non-binary or some transforms of gender, I want to do a thought experiment and reframe the conversation in terms of settler colonial genders. I want to be clear that this is in no way my own work or thinking. What I'm doing here at best is synthesizing the work of a range of other scholars, among them Lewis Cruz, Scott Morgensen, Patrick Wolfe, and Mark Rifkin. By and large, scholars of settler colonial studies, and most of them not native themselves, it should be noted. I'm also very conscious that I've been using historical examples of settler colonialism and other forms of the colonial violence. But as I conclude, I'd like to bring us right up into the here and now. We have all, all of us, been watching a major colonial and anti-colonial war unfold in front of us since the devastating attacks by Hamas, the elected government that controls some of the Gaza Strip, which has itself been under Israeli blockade since 2007 on October 7th, which killed somewhere in the neighborhood of 1200 Israelis and people working and residing in Israel. As a scholar of colonial America, the rhetoric of settler innocence is uncannily similar to 18th and 19th century anti-Indian sentiment disseminated by the colonial and then the United States governments, which encourages us to read indigenous violence as violence and state violence as self-defense. The narrative championed by legacy media outlets also contained multiple thick and obstinate accounts of gender and sexual politics that would seek to justify Israel's 70 year occupation of the Gaza Strip in the West Bank and justify the relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip, which has, as of today, murdered at least 17,000 Palestinians, a huge percentage of them children. I want to be clear before I go on that I'm not even necessarily weighing in on the accuracy of these narratives, but rather examining them for the inverse pink washing that they seem to be doing in the service of curing international favor for the genocide Israel is perpetrating against Palestinians in Gaza. Let me start with the first one. So take this scene, a protest in New York to which I bring a sign that says, quote, Queer and trans people united for a free Palestine. I post a picture of it on social media as I'm making it. I'm not particularly good at making signs or designs. So I was kind of proud of it. And I was immediately barraged by dozens of messages all saying more or less the same thing.  You can't be trans in Gaza. Many of these individuals responding to me are themselves queer, trans, all American or Canadian. My response to all of them was the same, more or less.  The reality to my mind at least is not that homophobia or transphobia is okay, but rather that it's prolific. And it's not just something that people do in some bulbly Orientalist sense over there. It is at least in the United States homegrown, locally manufactured, a component part of our national landscape. What troubles me more about you can't be gay in Gaza or you can't be trans in Gaza is not the idea itself, which I have no interest in weighing in on, but what the idea is used to justify. The implication is queer or trans people waving signs about solidarity with Palestine would be in danger if they wave those signs in the Gaza Strip or the West Bank. The rejoinder that I couldn't be queer or trans in Gaza once again traffics and exactly the kind of logic of innocence that is historically been so central to settler violence. It promises that settler violence is okay because it's justified because we are innocent, but they are guilty. I hope I don't need to explain what the they there is doing either. They almost invariably announces a racial, religious or otherwise ethnic or cultural difference that in turn would revoke any claim to the innocence of the they or the them. This term of phrase is exactly what Foucault is describing in his work on political governance and society must be defended as state racism. In this epistemological framework, which at times almost slides into just pure racial ontology, all political claims made by them, whether it's Palestinians since 1948 or Native North Americans from 1620 or Black Americans since 1619 or any other polity that has been the sustained target of occupation, colonization and slavery. These political claims get transmuted into violence. It's a very effective settler colonial tactic to abrogate a belief in the fundamental guilt of another population and in turn reduce their entire political landscape to the unreasonable, the illegitimate, the terrorist. The Yale University president send out a letter to the community a few days after the attacks expressing solidarity with Israelis and I quote non militant Palestinians. This is how it works, right? And this is also how statements like Black Lives Matter get framed as violence, how statements such as land back get framed as violence, how statements such as from the river to the sea get framed as violence. I'm not conflating the very different politics that each of these claims to justice represents, but rather insisting on how settler colonial innocence has inflected how these claims have been received, especially by those in power. This paper has been somewhat synthetic and has tried to think of some of the ways that highly culturally and regionally specific forms of gender liberation can and have been co-opted into service of both historical and present day forms of colonization and occupation. This is not to offer a gotcha moment or to suggest that there's anything wrong with saying that gender is colonial, but rather that we must be mindful of how what Alexis Shotwell calls purity politics can creep into our frameworks for critique informed practice, even at the level of how we talk about our gender identities and infuse, shore up or weaponize long state standing and latent tropes of settler innocence. Decolonization is not a metaphor, but it certainly can be explored through language, which is often one of our first and most direct ways of materializing political thought. I think that the last two months have actually happily seen a lot of decolonizing work happening at the level of epistemology and representation of the relationship between Israel and Palestine. I mean, even the United States, you know, of all places recently joined the UN Commission on Human Rights to recognize that some forms of settler violence in the West Bank are legal occupation and violation of international law. Given that the situation in Gaza is one of the most pressing questions of political climate, colonialism and gender justice of our current moment, I did not feel that I could present on anything else here today. Thank you. And I welcome questions or discussion. Thank you so much. We have mics in the in the room. So please raise your hands and my colleagues at the back will will wonder. Hello, sorry, I don't actually have a question. I just want to say thank you. That was amazing. I feel angry and inspired and hopeful and joyful. And I wanted to share that. Thank you so much. We loved it. Oh, thank you so much. That makes me feel it's hard to like buy the energy from a zoom a zoom event. So and I'm so sad to not be there. I was so excited to see the exhibit and go to the conference and also just be in London this time of year.  So thank I think while we wait for any more hands in the room, I also just wanted to say thank you Greta and especially for flagging the kind of ongoing nature of the relationship between gender and coloniality, because I think that is something that we're going to return to in the next two days as well and think about what it means. You know, to think historically, but also to think in the present and and evolve in our thinking as well in the present and how we kind of put put two and two together. Thank you so much for this great talk. And if I know it's so hard to get the vibe of the room from zoom, but just so you know, there's a lot of really strong enthusiasm for your talk in the room. So thanks again, Greta. And I guess I also can't think of a question so easily on my tiptoes. But I guess one thing you said in your talk, I would love you to maybe unpack a little bit more. And I think, you know, I'm probably not the only one who would love to hear you say more about it and this idea that like identity itself is maybe what we should be thinking about as colonial. And if you could just riff on that a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. I just want to say that like, you know, there's this tricky thing. I'm saying this from the position of someone who also like really honors the identity of my, you know, my own experiences of sort of identity and the way that we use categories to kind of describe those things. So I'm not like anti identity politics. One of my greatest fears is is someone coming away from this talk and thinking that I'm kind of like parroting the like nightmare, you know, cadre of like Republican Maga monsters who are like trying to destroy the country by saying that it's like going downhill via identity politics. That's not my problem. But no, I'm mostly riffing on work by my colleague Kaji Amin, who's a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, who was who wrote it, who actually has a couple of pieces that came out that were actually fairly controversial. There's one called We Are All Non-Binary. And then there's another one called Queer Taxonomies. And I'm thinking more about the one called Queer Taxonomies. But, you know, as someone who, again, like my first book is, you know, it's called The Naturalist. I was like, I just forgot the title of my first book, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America. But I think a lot about 18th century race science, which was really obsessed with like various taxonomies for trying to make sense of, organize and put into relation different forms of human difference. And they were especially interested in racial difference. Religious difference also kind of meant racial difference in that moment, too. And, you know, there is a way that like the sort of strategic division of, for example, human or yet human types into categories was one of the one of the sort of justifications or even like engines for for the kinds of divisions that would become hierarchies, if that makes sense. And I think that I think that in general categorization and identity systems are functionally works of categorization. And I mean, we're also most of us are not immune to wanting them.  It makes us or it makes at least some of us. I've got a moon in Capricorn. It makes me feel good. But at the same time, you know, categorization systems, which are basically the epistemological analog of identity categories do sort of require like a kind of consolidated sense of like what those differences are and what constitutes different categories. And so I think that's one of the things that Kaji is trying to argue in that piece is that, you know, the consensus that's being built around different iterations of like gendered status, romantic status, sexual status. And those are the three that he kind of looks at in that piece. They do do the work of kind of like pulling from everything from, you know, turn of the century racial science, sexological sciences, all these other all these other forms of knowledge systems or all these other knowledge systems that were like very, very much invested in things like racial hierarchy and things like shoring up particular forms of socio-sexual organization that would be supported by the state and supporting forms of criminalization of other forms of socio-sexual or sexual organization. So that's kind of what I mean by it. So nothing against identity. And at the end of that piece, Kaji kind of comes to the point, he's like, he's like, I'm not anti-identity. He's like, I just don't think it's liberated. And that's been something that I've really liked to think with in a while. Like what, how might identity frameworks and what they promise and also what they kind of deny us or foreclose for us, how might they like allow us to sort of see some of the ways that knowledge and even things like data are weaponized in ways that kind of are, I don't know, malignant in our own moment. Yeah, thank you for the wonderfully inspiring talk. I just noticed recently that the work called pink washing comes up.  So just wondering if you've got kind of any sort of comment on the word like pink washing and yeah. Yeah, so there's, there's a lot of great stuff to read on pink washing. There's actually a special issue of this journal called GLQ on Israel, Palestine and pink washing in particular that has a lot of or not a lot but has a few pieces in it by queer Palestinian organizations and also scholars. So if anyone wants those and doesn't have access to them, just email me. I'm just Greta.Lifler at yale.le.edu and I can, I can download them and send them to you. They might also be available for free at this point online just because they're, they're getting a little bit old. I want to say they're from like 2009 or so. But, but, you know, pink washing just describes the way that, that will describe a couple of different things. I'm also thinking about just your floor's work here from her, from her book, Terrorist Assemblages, which was I think from 2006. I might have the year wrong. But, but pink washing describes a couple of different things. So one version it describes is kind of like the queer or feminist, like a queer or feminist take on what, what I'm blanking on the name of the scholar. I believe it was, well, actually I'll just, I'll just quote this feedback version of it. Feedback talks about some of the like feminist, you know, policy interventionism by like global North countries being organized around like saving, like saving brown women from brown men, like white, white men saving brown women from brown men.  That's the sort of logic that pink watching describes. And we see a lot of it. Like you can't be queer, trans and Gaza. You know, like the, the, the photo that was sort of circulating online of the IDF soldier who was wearing a trans flag around his soldier, around his shoulders and sort of like overseeing the overseeing like settlements and destruction. Like it's, it's basically the use of, of like queer or trans politics as some sort of shorthand for a kind of freedom that enables interventionism and that justifies interventionism and other sorts of violence, including the violence of occupations, settler colonialism and US militarism. So, so yeah, that's, that's what kind of what, what, what I mean there. And I think we see it in different kinds of ways is and it's used to both vilify certain policies. Like again, we definitely see it used to vilify Hamas and it's also used to shore up and justify thanks to, so much to all of you and thanks for the, to the organizers for putting this together. I'm very happy to be able to sort of be here, even if remotely.


Number two, people will pity you for your openness about being autistic.  Yes, people think that every time that you say that you're autistic or anything, any difference that you have that you're going to them for sympathy.  Whereas if you're being open about being autistic more often than not, you're just saying, I'm autistic. Hello, I'm an autistic person. It may come up in conversation or you may just blurt it out like I have done on some regrettable drunk occasions. When you talk about autism so much, like it's like the only thing that you talk about for like three or four years.