This talk was originally given at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health, at the invitation of the 2SLGBTQ+ Health Hub, in May 2024.

INTRODUCTION

In an August 2023 blog post for Change Elemental, Elissa Sloan Perry asks, “What is your knife and how are you using it?” This question emerges from Perry’s observations on how the work of dismantling white supremacy, building resilient organizations and fomenting revolution asks us to be and act differently, and to tend to those ways of being with intentionality.

As a queer femme who came of age in communities of Leatherdykes, queer perverts and witches, knives have a way of grabbing my attention. In this spirit, I have engaged with Perry’s question as a means of sharpening my thinking on what I have learned about holding power and creating change in LGBTQ+ health.

What is my knife? What is yours? What becomes possible when we wield them together in service of queer and trans survival and liberation?

PART 1: KNIFE

Let’s begin with the thing itself: A knife is an instrument with plenty of uses.

I might use a knife to help me survive under inhospitable conditions, or to nourish myself and others. A knife can cut, slice, chop, dice or peel. It can pare down or pare away, slash, stab or sever. A knife can be a threat or a promise: I might carry a knife for protection, bring it with me into battle or use it to cut through the bullshit. A knife can be a means of focusing my power toward sacred or erotic ends as I cast circles in the air or trace my blade over a lover’s skin, time slowing as I take care to not pierce their flesh. A knife can be a source of entertainment and delight—picture a juggler tossing knives in the air or a carver transforming a piece of wood into something beautiful and unexpected.

Most of us wield knives with our hands but our hands don’t do this work alone. Using a knife is an action that engages our bodies, minds and senses. It demands our focus. We might inadvertently hurt ourselves or someone else when our hand or our attention slips. I am clumsier when I am not careful. I have the scars to prove it.

A knife has its own anatomy: handle, blade, edge, point, spine. I can tell when a knife feels especially good in my hand, the place where our anatomies meet. A knife can be a pleasure to hold or it can be something functional, a means of getting a job done. Some knives must be kept hidden to protect their owners from being targeted. Others are stashed away for emergencies. Some are worn on belts or clipped to pockets. Queers are experts at flagging; a knife can be a semaphore.

A knife is an object we can grasp but it is also an action. When I looked up the root of this word, I found it alongside other expressive words “designating objects and actions that [suggest] knocking, pushing, bending, pressing and so forth” (Liberman 2020). She knifed through a gap in their defenses. Sometimes, the knife is us.

While I was working on this talk, someone wrote to tell me they thought my use of a knife as a metaphor was inherently violent, which they did not like. They explained why this imagery doesn’t align with how they use their power, though they were willing to concede the utility of certain kinds of knives, telling me they suspect my power aligns more with a jackknife than a filet knife.

I felt angry when I read this email, but at first, I couldn’t pinpoint precisely why. It wasn’t that I thought everyone should like or want to use the same metaphor as me to describe their power. A knife isn’t the only form our power can take, and having a knife doesn’t necessarily make us powerful. After sitting with this message for a time and peeling back the layers of my reaction to it, I uncovered several things that are crucial to the argument I am building here:

1. I reject the idea that a knife is inherently violent. There are many kinds of knives, and even more ways to wield them.

2. Don’t tell me what kind of knife I am or how I get to use mine.

3. I reject the idea that only soft tools or tactics are acceptable, or that it is unacceptable to bring weapons into battle with the people, institutions and systems that are hurting and killing our loved ones and communities. The stakes are too high to limit ourselves only to the tools or tactics that feel safe, comfortable or palatable.

As a queer femme, softness is fundamental to who I am and how I move through the world. Yet as my friend and fellow queer femme Hannah McGregor (2022) writes, “softness can also be a way out” when we use it to elide the responsibilities that come along with the unearned power our privilege affords.

Central to McGregor’s queer feminist ethic of care is what she calls “ferocious care,” an inherited lineage she describes as “a way of caring so much about the world that you refuse to stop fighting for it” (McGregor, 2022, p. 33). It is within this ethical frame that McGregor deploys her softness. As she writes, “My own softness is not inherently radical, but I can make it into a weapon if I point it in the right direction” (McGregor, 2022, p. 41).

Heather Berg (2023) articulates a sex worker ethics of care she calls “militant care” in “Today Solidarity Means, Fight Back,” an article whose title pays tribute to a line by sex worker collective Other Weapons. Militant care insists that “love requires a willingness to fight back” (Berg, 2023, p. 32). Berg points to how, for sex workers, “care and violence are necessarily linked—mutual care will not be possible without doing some violence (symbolic or otherwise) to those who make the flourishing of those we care for impossible” (p. 34). She points to examples like the Hookers Army of Los Angeles, a sex worker-led peer support group whose mission is to “to provide real-world, self-defense training for sex workers” (Carlisle, 2021). Through their militant care, Berg writes, “sex workers confront a feminist line that is wary of the sharp edge of care” (Berg, 2022, p. 32).

If a blade is too soft, it won’t hold an edge. Dull blades require more force, which increases the likelihood of injury. Do you know what too soft feels like in your body? My edges become porous. I say “yes” too much. I go out of my way to make other people feel comfortable. I hold my tongue. I collapse under the weight of my responsibilities.

If a blade is too hard, it will be prone to breaking. Do you know what too hard feels like in your body? My thinking becomes rigid. I hold myself tightly, refusing to bend. My horizon of possibilities narrows. I crash into others, our edges colliding. I talk more than I listen. I feel an outsized sense of responsibility. I want to be the hero, but I also resent it.

Like wielding a knife, the work of creating change and holding power is somatic. That means it happens in our bodies and with the bodies of others. How do hardness and softness move in you as you discern which blade to use? If you are lucky, you will have more than one knife to choose from, though in terms of our survival, any blade is better than none.

PART 2: CHANGE

A knife is rarely the only tool we have at our disposal, yet I am curious about who among us feels the need to carry a knife, or become one? This might be where object and metaphor begin to collapse. The stakes of carrying what some will perceive as a weapon can be far higher—and more lethal for the carrier, especially if they are Black, Indigenous and/or disabled—than the act of sharpening ourselves into instruments capable of confronting institutional violence.

When I imagined who I was writing this talk for, I thought of the researchers, clinicians, activists and non-profit or public sector workers I know who have dedicated their careers to ameliorating LGBTQ+ health. Some of you are at the beginning of this journey, others have been at it for years or even decades. This work is personal. All of you have stories to tell about how the systems or institutions you are part of, and working to transform, have harmed you and your communities. Words and phrases like “LGBTQ+ health disparities,” “stigma” or “minority stress” are inadequate containers for what our bodies know and remember, and for that which is held in the bodies of our loved ones and communities.

Like me, you might be instinctively wary when someone is too quick to celebrate your resilience. As Brianna Suslovic and Elle Lett (2023) write, “resilience functions as the result of exposure to traumatic stimuli” (p. 340). Suslovic and Lett call resilience an “adverse event” and advocate that it is better conceptualized as a form of “scar tissue” (p. 340). They point to the necessity of shifting our focus to the “individual and collective mechanisms by which harm is mitigated and prevented, rather than focusing on the aftereffects of harm” (p. 341).

I believe many of us do this work because we are hungry for change. We want something—maybe everything—to be different. We want our communities to suffer less harm. We want more people to stay alive long enough to grow old. Sometimes, we let ourselves want even more for them: ease, pleasure, flourishing, freedom. The systems and institutions we are working to change will try to shrink the scale of our dreaming. It is an act of resistance to want more than they tell us is possible.

To do this work is to fight for the living and those yet to be born while carrying the memories of those we have lost. Whose names do you speak aloud as a reminder of why you do this work and where you come from? Who is in a place of honour on your altar or in your prayers? Who inspired the memorial tattoo etched into your skin? As Hil Malatino writes in Trans Care, “To love the dead is for them to remain with you, introjected, present. Haunting and love are very close, indeed” (2020, p. 57).

Our work for change can be an outlet for our grief. I wonder how much grief you are holding for our communities now and what might happen if you were to let it flow freely. I am picturing a vast river with many tributaries that moves with awe-inspiring force and power, reshaping the terrain around it. It, too, can be a knife.

Our work for change can be an act of love. We might be pressured to set our love aside in the name of professionalism, or feel the need to smuggle our love in under our coats. Love is sometimes positioned as too sentimental—too saccharine, too messy, too feminine—to have a place in our work. Yet the love I feel for queer and trans people is integral to my work. It is a source of power, especially when anchored in a clear understanding of where my accountabilities lie.

I find those accountabilities in my relationships and in my values, which include care and solidarity. It can be tricky to enact our relational accountabilities when working in organizational contexts that ask us to place our allegiance with institutions instead of people and communities. I think of what a university research ethics review board might deem ethical, for example, in contrast to what situated ethical practices look like in communities, or when organizations insist we stay silent on matters of grave importance to our communities, like rising fascism and anti-trans hatred. I am also thinking of how universities across North America are violently repressing student, staff and faculty organizing in protest of Israel’s genocide against Palestinians.

Experience has taught me that the institution will always protect itself. As Sarah Ahmed writes in The Feminist Killjoy Handbook, “Institutions are reproduced by stabilizing the requirements for what you need in order to survive or thrive within them” (2023, p. 152). Her 2021 book, Complaint!, is a study of how universities discipline, punish or drive out those who go against their interests by speaking out against abuse and harm. Silence and compliance are rewarded. Ahmed points out that the word “reward derives from warder, to guard…You are rewarded for watching what you say or do or watching what others say or do” (2021, p. 100). Be wary when someone in power offers to trade you something better in exchange for your knife, or when they attempt to confiscate your weapons or dull your edges.

In the acknowledgements of their book, Atmospheres of Violence, Eric A. Stanley offers the following description of their mentor, Angela Davis: “She exemplifies the almost impossible position of inhabiting an institution without becoming its terrible logic” (2021, p. xii). How might we engage in similar practices from where we are? Our work for change will inevitably transform us. What shapes do we hope to embody? What safeguards will keep the institution from worming its way under our skins? In her 2016 book, Living a Feminist Life, Sarah Ahmed identifies how “institutions are built on promises of happiness; promises that often hide in the violence of these institutions” (p. 257). In this spirit, she invites us to join her in embracing a willingness to cause unhappiness. Ahmed writes, “Killing joy is a world-making project. We make a world out of the shattered pieces even when we shatter the pieces or even when we are the shattered pieces” (Ahmed, 2016, p. 261).

The work we do is world-making work, and we must take care to not let our imaginations be constrained by the limitations of the systems that exist. My training as a health services researcher taught me to think in systems, but it also reinforced a tendency to look comparatively at health systems without sufficient critical inquiry into their origins and underlying assumptions. It wasn’t until I began engaging more deeply with disability justice and prison-industrial complex abolition that I came to understand the extent to which our health systems are shaped by settler colonialism, white supremacy, ableism and eugenics. Thinking with disability justice and prison-industrial complex abolition helped me understand that these systems aren’t broken, they are working as designed.

In her book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, abolitionist organizer and educator Mariame Kaba invites us to begin from boundless possibilities by asking, “What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?” rather than starting from “What do we have now, and how can we make it better?” While there is value in both lines of inquiry, too much of our work in LGBTQ+ health—including some of my own—gets stuck at “What do we have now, and how can we make it better?” When we stop at this level of inquiry, we set too low a threshold for the changes we deem necessary or possible, dulling our knives.

Accepting that the system isn’t broken, it’s working as designed sharpened my analysis by helping me situate the roots of LGBTQ+ health inequities outside our bodies. It helped me grasp just how vast and deep those roots are. It cut through the limits I had unconsciously placed on my imagination, challenging me to take a broader and more daring view of how we might create systems of care that enable all LGBTQ+ people and communities to flourish.

As Jules Gill-Peterson says in a 2022 interview with Beatrice Adler-Bolton, “These feelings of want, which we have been commanded to see in the language and in the economy of deprivation and scarcity: let them overflow. Imagine what we'll build for one another.” It can be painful to let ourselves want what we don’t have, but our desires can also be a force of creation and transformation. May they overflow.

PART 3: POWER

Our efforts to create change often involve working with and against power. We do this at many levels: within ourselves, in our relationships and communities, and in the groups, organizations and institutions we are part of and working to transform. There is much that can be said about what happens when power is wielded in authoritarian, harmful and carceral ways. There are examples of this everywhere, including within each of us. Yet for our purposes I am more curious about how we might wield our power in service of liberation, transformation and healing.

In How to Hold Power, queer, trans and non-binary somatic leadership coach Pavini Moray defines power as our “ability to choose [our] response to situations,” “direct or influence the behaviour of others” and our “internal and external access to the resources [we] require to meet [our] needs.” They emphasize the connections between growing our capacity to feel our power in somatic or embodied ways and becoming more adept at intentionally using it.

Moray distinguishes between formal power—as tied to our title or position in an organizational hierarchy, for example—and informal power, which derives from our identities, relationships and experiences. Power might be earned or unearned. Privilege and oppression mediate our ability to access different forms of power. Unearned power derives most directly from privilege.

For example, I accrue unearned power in many contexts simply by being a non-disabled thin white cis person. These facets of my identity have given me access to education, training and opportunities. Through them, I gain knowledge, experience and relationships that buttress my status and credibility as an expert. When I’m consciously aware of the presence of my unearned power, it might feel outsized, like I’m taking up more than my fair share of space. It might feel shameful, like I’m compromising my values or getting away with something unfair. It’s also true that unearned power can feel good for how it creates ease and smooths the pathways between me and what I want. It’s seductive that way, so I need to keep practicing using it wisely and with intention.

My earned power comes from decades of learning and practice and being committed to my own ongoing process of transformation. It comes from staying open to new possibilities and knowing there is much I don’t know or can’t know. My earned power derives from interdependence and from making repair when I inevitably fuck up or cause harm. My earned power comes from developing relationships with my ancestors and learning our histories. It feels grounded, present and right-sized. My senses are awake without being vigilant. I am curious and open to learning. I feel sure of myself without being cocky. I feel more connected and able to honour the dignity of others. My earned power helps me make hard decisions from a place of integrity.

Informed by their learnings from Starhawk’s analysis of power, Moray delineates several different ways of using our power: power-over, based on domination, control and coercion; power-under, or acting in covert resistance to power structures (which we could also think of as topping from the bottom); power-with, the power we share and build with others; and power-within, our personal power. While we may not use the same words to describe them, I am sure we have each experienced manifestations of these forms of power in our personal and professional lives.

The work we do within institutional contexts can harm us and feel profoundly disempowering because of how power operates in these environments. When we try to create change, we can become targets for institutional violence—the institution wielding its power against us. Power is not equitably distributed, nor are the risks inherent in wielding it.

Yet it is also true that we each hold power, individually and collectively, and we can make choices about how to use and embody it. Given who I am speaking to, I am interested in the positional power that comes with our roles as researchers, clinicians, activists and non-profit or public sector workers. There is power in defining a research question or generating evidence, or in applying diagnostic criteria to a patient. There is power in designing and administering programs or determining how resources are allocated. There is power in being affiliated with an institution or part of a profession. There is power in having credentials and being perceived as an expert. There is power in having a platform to teach others and share your knowledge.

Part of the work of acknowledging and learning to wield the different forms of power we hold is resisting the urge to deny our power or pretend it isn’t there. We are living in times that call on us to be purposeful and courageous in discerning how to use our power, not as heroes or saviours but as people committed to building collective power in service of liberation. To wield our power more intentionally, we need to get to know it.

How does your power feel in your body today? Can you easily locate it, or is it hidden or pushed to the edges? Does it feel right-sized, constricted or does it take up too much space? Where does your power feel alive and flowing and where does it feel stagnant or stuck? Our answers to these questions will vary by context and from moment-to-moment, because power isn’t static.

I am attracted to the image of a knife as a way of thinking about how to embody and use our power because I came of age in communities of Leatherdykes, queer perverts and witches. It was they who taught me about holding power as a whole-body experience and showed me the kinds of magic we can generate when we wield our power together. It was these communities who showed me how knives can be a tool for focusing our intentions toward transformation, connection, pleasure and healing.

It is in this spirit that I will offer some thoughts on what we might learn from the knife itself as a way of thinking about holding power in service of creating change, with thanks to my friend Carly Boyce for helping me unpack this idea.

Recall the anatomy of a knife: handle, blade, edge, point, spine.

HANDLE: The handle is the part of the knife that we hold. A knife can be a shared tool; the handle might be touched by many hands. When we pass a knife to someone, we do so by the handle to ensure no one gets cut. Here, in this gesture, is an act of care and solidarity. To pass a knife from hand-to-hand is an act of trust. Some knives are a gift or an inheritance.

To handle something is to manage a situation or problem. This problem might originate from, or result in, people being mishandled. Sometimes, we get a handle on things by becoming the problem. As Sarah Ahmed writes, “To expose a problem is to pose a problem” and “We have to keep saying it because they keep doing it” (2023, p. 240). She calls these killjoy truths, hard won wisdoms that can make us feel less alone.

BLADE: The blade is the part of the knife we cut with. A blade has an edge. To edge forward is to advance by short moves; big changes are often created in small increments. An edge can be a boundary, the line between where something ends and another begins; a boundary can be where we find our “yes” or our “no.” A boundary can be a space of refusal or an invitation. The work of holding power and creating change will help us find our edges; it might challenge them.

When I think of edges, I am reminded of the “Resilient Edge of Resistance,” a concept I learned from sex educator Barbara Carrellas (2012) in her book Ecstasy is Necessary. Carrellas was taught this idea by her late teaching partner, Chester Mainard, who initially coined it to describe a form of touch that perfectly captures someone’s desired balance between too much and too little pressure. Carrellas expands the idea of The Resilient Edge of Resistance to risk-taking more generally. She invites us to reflect on what is needed to create the conditions in which we feel “sufficiently supported to take a risk;” which “occurs at different depths in different situations for each individual” (Carrellas, 2012, p. 68).

To use a blade is to accept at least some degree of risk. In their writing on anarchist responses to the drug poisoning crisis, Zoë Dodd and Alexander McClelland (2017) assert that “rule-breaking and risk-taking are ethical actions in an unjust world.” Here, risk-taking is understood as an ethical practice, grounded in our relational accountabilities. Dodd and McClelland write, “We have to take risks because we are being swallowed up, because we have no choice but to do so, and because we must take care of each other.” The stakes are too high for those of us in positions of power to always prioritize our safety and comfort. What risks are you willing to take in using your power to effect change? How might you become better acquainted with your Resilient Edge of Resistance so as to support you in discerning which risks to take, and how? What will help you hone your edges?

POINT: The point is the end of the knife used for piercing. It can also be a location or destination, or a reason—an end or an object to be achieved. Someone might say to you, “That’s not the point,” and you will know otherwise, a piercing insight. The institution might try to distract you with reasons to score points or offers of bonus points. When we know the point of our work, it can be easier to sniff out a distraction or a bribe. What will aid you in divesting from institutional cultures focused on scoring points?

When asking yourself, “What is my knife and how am I using it?,” it is helpful to remember that a knife is an instrument with many possible uses. What changes are you seeking to create and why? The point has to be more than just scoring points. My community work includes being a death doula and hospice volunteer. To some, this might seem like a total bummer, but to me it is an affirmation of life and an invitation to live each day with my legacy in mind: What do I want to leave in my wake? How do I want to be remembered? Who and what matters most to me? Asking myself these questions helps me find the point. As you wield your knife, consider asking yourself: Why am I here and who am I doing it for? Ask yourself as many times as you need to; keep finding the point.

SPINE: The spine supports the whole knife and facilitates energy transfer between the handle and the cutting edge. Without the spine, the whole structure would collapse. The spine is integral to our anatomy; it is a complex structure made up of many parts that helps us move and be flexible. A spine can be a sharp rigid process on an animal or plant that serves as a defense mechanism. Don’t underestimate the power of such defense mechanisms: The crested porcupine has quills powerful enough to fight off a lion. “Spine” can mean resolution or strength of character. What helps you feel into yours? What can it teach you?

Each morning, before I begin work for the day, I do a somatic centering practice that helps me feel into my length, width, depth and centre. In this practice, which has lineages in the work of generative somatics and the Strozzi Institute, we feel into our length—from our feet rooting into the ground to the tops of our heads. It is a means of anchoring into our dignity and becoming better able to recognize the dignity of everyone around us. How might we use our power in ways that dignify ourselves and others? How might we use our power as an antidote to dehumanization? How might we use our power in service of more aliveness and possibility?

CONCLUSION

I want to wield my knife with ferocious care, grounded in the knowledge that it is by wielding our knives together—as well as the many other tools we have at our disposal— that we will win. I am not naive about what we are up against, and I sometimes feel immobilized by despair. What keeps me going is remembering who I am accountable to and what is at stake. Change is both necessary and possible, and while I may not see the results in my lifetime, I have a knife and I’m damn well going to use it.