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tl;dr Kai Cheng Thom on consent, healing, & pleasure
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This week it’s me and Kai Cheng Thom. I AM SO EXCITED!
Kai Cheng and I talk about so many things from how easy it is for sex positive educators to default to a mechanized view of sex and why checklists around consent aren’t enough to why sex is always political and why Kai Cheng is so committed to uplifting our humanity.
We dive into healing, trauma, transformative justice, courage, pleasure, and Kai Cheng’s vision for a post-apocalyptic world.
Be sure to check out Kai Cheng’s advise column for some great reading, and of course, grab Kai Cheng’s new book, “I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes From the End of the World” out by AK Press.
Follow Dawn on Instagram.
About Kai Cheng Thom:
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, and community worker based in Toronto. She is the award-winning author four books, all in different genres. Kai Cheng’s work on mental health, relationships, and transformative justice has appeared in many publications internationally.
Stay in touch with Kai Cheng at kaichengthom.com and on Twitter @razorfemme.
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Episode Transcript
Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics, and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing, and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So, welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.
Hey, you. I am very excited for this week’s episode because it’s my chat with Kai Cheng Thom, you are in for a treat. But before we dive into that, I want to let you know I would love to hear from you. Your questions, your confusion, your struggles, your celebrations, your request for resources – what could use some attention, support, or unpacking? Send your emails to me directly at info at sex gets real dot com or by using the contact form at dawnserra.com where the podcast now lives. Send me what you got. I would love to cover that in the coming weeks and months.
Dawn Serra: What a joy it was to be in conversation with Kai Cheng. I have interviewed a lot of people over the years for the podcast and the summit – hundreds of people doing all sorts of important and rad things in the world. And interviews can be tricky to strangers, often, coming together for an hour or so to try and make something fun and powerful happen. Just like being in conversation with any human in any situation, it can be tricky. It can be exhausting or just fall flat, awkward, or just plain not good because not all humans click and that’s okay. But every once in a while, and I’m so lucky that it’s more often than not, but still not every time.
Every once in a while, I get to be in conversation with someone where the conversation feels easy and fun, abundant, and deep just right from the get go; where I feel more resourced and nourished afterwards. This is one of those conversations. I was actually pretty nervous to chat with Kai Cheng because she’s so fierce and thoughtful. She has such incredible ideas about the world and the ways we relate to each other, so much experience in so many fields.
Dawn Serra: As soon as we started talking, I felt this big yes unfold inside of me. It was just so exciting and so fun and easy. And what you are about to hear is a conversation that asks us to be with a lot of nuance. Kai Cheng is asking important questions about things like consent, pleasure, transformative justice, how we do community. We talk a lot about our collective desire to be good as human beings because we’re so terrified of punishment, and why teaching and doing consent from that place may not be the best way for us to move forward.
We talk about why sex is always political. There’s no escaping that even if we’d like it to be true. We explore our capacities as humans to hurt and be hurt, to love and be loved, the trauma of being someone who’s caused harm. And we talked about Kai Cheng’s post-apocalyptic vision for how we might be in community with each other in the future – in a way that centers relationship and intimacy and pleasure as sacred. I can’t wait to hear what you think. Let me tell you a little bit about Kai Cheng and then we’ll just jump into the conversation so you can experience it.
Kai Cheng Thom is a writer, performer, and community worker based in Toronto. She is the award winning author of four books – all in different genres. Kai Cheng work on mental health, relationships, and transformative justice has appeared in many publications internationally. You’re about to hear why. Here is my chat with Kai Cheng Thom.
Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Kai Cheng. I’m really excited to connect with you and to chat with you today. So thank you for being here.
Kai Cheng Thom: Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here. Here being the liminal internet space of video conference podcast recording with you. So nice. Thank you so much for inviting me.
Dawn Serra: Oh, of course. Yeah, it would be awesome if we were physically in the same space. But you know what? Technology makes it seem like we are.
Kai Cheng Thom: Yeah, no one can tell.
Dawn Serra: So here’s what I would love to start. I know lots of listeners are familiar with your incredible work in the world. But there are also some folks who may not be aware of–
Kai Cheng Thom: That’s shocking.
Dawn Serra: I know! Well, doesn’t know. So for people who maybe aren’t familiar with you and your work, I would love it if we could start by just hearing a little bit about you and your perspective, the work that you’re doing these days.
Kai Cheng Thom: Yeah, absolutely. So I am a doer of many different things. They’re all related to me somehow, but I don’t know that people always follow. I am a writer and a performer. And most recently have been doing a lot of writing and publishing about transformative justice and what I’m calling a political ethos of love. I mean, I say I call it that, but I also don’t think I invented it. Really looking at what would a political movement or a radical social movement, transformative movements in general – how would they look? How would they look differently than they do now? If they were based on an ethos of love, which, of course, is something that really happened in the 60s and 70s. And in some great ways, and some not so great ways too. But really in the contemporary time, what would that mean for us, especially as we’re looking at what I interpret to be the end of the world, or at least the end of the world as we know it, right? Climate change but also, the resurgence of global fascism. And also I think the cracks that are showing in global capitalism as well.
I mean, as we speak, there are huge major protest movements going on around the world in Chile and Lebanon and Hong Kong – it’s a few of the many, many places that are having uprising. So, what would it look like to build a new world based on this notion of love, love for the self, and love for the other? In general, I am also a novelist and a poet and a children’s book author. My big claim to fame is that I wrote a novel that Emma Watson from the Harry Potter movie series – I mean she’s done other things but let’s be real, we think of her as Hermione. Sorry, Emma – chose that book for her book club. So I get to ride in on Hermione’s glory just a little bit. I have been, in a past life, a social worker and psychotherapist, and all of that experience really informs what I do, as well, in terms of really trying to understand where people are coming from psychologically and somatically and that is in their bodies – In our bodies, how do we experience the world and how does it then shape what we believe in and what we do politically? I don’t know. I’m also like a body worker, and I’m studying sex education, and all this stuff. I’m doing a lot of things and I love most of them most of the time.
Dawn Serra: I love it. It sounds like the laundry list of things I often trot out. And, I think one of the things that’s so incredible about everything that you just mentioned, from writing and performing to a former social worker and therapist, to really diving into this transformative justice place, and then bodywork and sex education. I mean, all of that really encapsulates this beautiful vision of how we can relate to each other, how we can be in our bodies with each other, how we can experience pleasure – all while being so aware of the political climate in this world we live in – acknowledging that we’re not in a vacuum.
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, absolutely. I think you’re so right about that. I mean, really, I think embodiment – living in our bodies and acknowledging the living bodies of everything around us is basically it, right? We’re doing all these things, you’re doing so much amazing stuff, everyone in the world is running and doing things. But what it comes down to is, we have bodies. Everyone else around us has bodies. We are living beings and the forces of oppression and trauma are things that make us forget that. And it’s coming back into the body around sex, around human rights, around healing trauma and justice, healing the planet that is hopefully where we’re all working toward in some form or other. So really, that’s where I want to go.
Dawn Serra: God, it’s so rich and so nourishing. And I just – yes! I struggle sometimes with… I’ve lost a lot of listeners over the years with people who really want to ask questions about sex, and talk about sex, and talk about relationships, but without it getting political. Without talking about capitalism, without talking about social justice. And for me, they’re just so deeply woven together that I can’t imagine not doing that.
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, gosh. You’re so right about that. I mean, not possible.
Dawn Serra: Not possible! And, I think one of the things that I love so much about your perspective and the work that you do is, there’s this warmth and this humanity in the ways you talk about some of these really big ideas. Even when they’re really tender or when they’re kind of scary for people, I just feel like everything you do is about validating our humanity, even if it’s hard and scary.
Kai Cheng Thom: Well, you see me, so thank you. Oh my god, yeah. Really, all that ties it together. You were talking about how sometimes people are like, “I just want to hear about how to have amazing sex.” And, of course, that is political, even if we don’t always think about how its political. I mean, the huge thing about sex education, of course, is – well, for one thing, there’s misogyny and transphobia that’s wrapped into all of the sex we have and homophobia too. There is no way that we can have sex and not be impacted by those forces, whether or not we know it or acknowledge it.
As a trans woman of color, every single one of my sexual experiences – every single one. No matter like from the teensiest little flirtation to being harassed on the street, to having sex with someone is inflicted by how my body is deeply fetishized. And that’s just a political fact. It’s not going to change, no matter how nice or not nice, the person I’m interacting with or how nice or not nice I am. It’s political. Everything we do, everything about our bodies is political in a broad sense. And it would be really nice if we could step outside of that, which I don’t think we can. We don’t always have to go real deep and serious. We could be sweet and gentle too. But it’s there and I think that’s the thing about humanity, and recognizing and seeing people in their humanity. It’s that embodiment thing again. To really, I think, be able to grasp the politics of the personal, to grasp the politics of sex or love or intimacy, which, when it comes down to it, most things are about sex love intimacy, right?
Kai Cheng Thom: We need to really recognize that we have such a fragile, vulnerable, complicated – resilient, yes – but also, wounded humanity. And so do the people that we are in love with or that are hating us or hurting us. We don’t always have to feel sympathy or empathy or we have to have we have to love ourselves and have boundaries too. But right now, and for so much of my life, I’ve been deeply interested in this notion of the embodied monster, which is just to say, looking at humanity in its wholeness.
One of my greatest teachers, Caffyn Jesse, talks about the soma as the living body and its wholeness. And if we were to look at that, then we have to see the body for its capacity to hurt and be hurt, as well as its capacity to love and be loved. And, I don’t think we will ever, ever be able to get to the bottom of why people hurt each other or how, even, we can stop hurting each other, until we recognize that we are so full of the power to do both: to hurt and to love, to be hurt and to be loved. And that’s something that’s quite frightening. It’s really scary to know that we can hurt others or that we are vulnerable to being hurt, which is, essentially what love is. It’s like we open ourselves.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Kai Cheng Thom: And sex and intimacy, right? So, I want to go there and I want to know that deeply about others and about myself, in myself, and in others. Now I’m just ranting incoherently but that’s where we are. I’m so, so fascinated by our humanity. And it’s not just because I’m this altruistic angel who was like, “Oh, I want to see everyone for who they are, no matter what they’ve done,” obviously, or hopefully, obviously, it’s because I’m such a flawed person. And, that’s become known to me in some very painful ways. I want to be understood, right? So when I try to see the humanity in everyone, it’s because of my deep longing for others to see the humanity in me.
Dawn Serra: The thing that bubbles up as I listened to you talk about that is one of my most favorite things to explore and to talk about. But, it’s also one of the things that’s the most difficult to actually be with, which is just the messiness of what it means to be human. And how so often we try to sanitize experiences and we’re also in a world that teaches us to perform a very sanitized version of humanity in ourselves. And, I love how everything you’re talking about – this capacity to hurt and be hurt, to love and be loved and that it’s all part of this wholeness of being human is messy and uncertain. It’s one thing to say, “Being human is messy,” but it’s another thing to be in the mess and to be able to stay there.
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, yeah. Well, I think you’re so right about and I love that we’re going to talk about this on a sex podcast, right?
Dawn Serra: Heck yes.
Kai Cheng Thom: Because I think that the sex positive world that’s sort of developed out of the third wave of feminism in the past 10 to 15-ish, 20-ish years – Internet era sex positivism. Some often does the sanitized version of sex, which is then a sanitized form of humanity like, “Oh, we love sex. Sex is awesome. We can just do this great sex and use a lot of lube. And as long as we do that and have consent, and everyone is a consenting adult consenting appropriately, then we’ll have amazing sex. Hooray.” And then doesn’t come into play with all these huge other questions that you’re bringing in so thoughtfully and wonderfully and into your work. I just think we’re not that.
Having done different forms of sex education, especially with teenagers… Thinking about how deep down we know. I use youth work as the example because I think youth are some of the best bullshit detectors in our communities, right? Youth are like, “Ah, that’s fucked up.” When we talk about sex, as sex educators going into youth classrooms or youth groups or whatever – and we present this sanitized version of like, “Oh, well. Just be safe and get consent and make sure everyone’s enthusiastic and everything will be ticketyboo.” Actually, youth being the bullshit detectors that they are, call that. And they’re like, “Well, no. Sometimes you can consent to something and have it feel terrible. And sometimes you can consent to something while a part of you is kind of not consenting.” Actually, it’s really terrifying. We don’t always know when we’re into something or not, and just because we use a lot of lube and condoms doesn’t mean things are going to be safer or feel nice or you go for the way we expected.
Kai Cheng Thom: Sex is this microcosm of that thing you’re talking about. It’s impossible – I mean, how could you possibly sanitize sex? It’s very often fluid-based exchange of intimacy where people do get hurt. And I think the whole poetic humanity of intimacy is that we open ourselves to wounding, and when things were work right, we instead receive this beautiful gift of connection. And, there’s no way to do one without the other, to get intimacy without vulnerability. We must have both.
Dawn Serra: Yes, yes. And I really appreciate – well, one, just the magic that is teenagers saying, “No.” But also just the truth that is, we can consent to something and then it doesn’t feel good or it’s actively bad, or we can not really consent to something and still experience pleasure, or there’s all these grey spaces. We may not know how to recognize the power in the room and then afterwards, it feels icky, but we don’t have the language for it. And then, just literally the messiness of sex with the sweat and the tears and the spit – and who knows what else is going all over the place. Those are the kinds of conversations I’m so interested in us, maybe not necessarily having the answers for, but being able to ask and then just be in together and to feel into that discomfort of like, “Yeah, that’s real.”
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, you’re so right. I love the relational approach to sex education and sex navigation, tools are really important. And I love the strategies and tools that come out of the sex education world or out of feminist approaches to sex education. But also, when we create tools and strategies, and little resource lists and cute zines about which lube to buy or how to apply it, we run the risk of falling into a mechanistic view of sex and sexual consent, and desire and intimacy; which is like if you do all the right things, create the right formula, push all the right buttons on the body then you’re going to have amazing sex. When the truth is, that’s just not ever possible. And I think the more important thing when it comes to safe or intimacy or healing intimacy is building relationship. Having that trying to create trust, trying to create vulnerability, trying to create truth and authenticity. And the rest will follow. We obviously need facts and tools and strategies too. But I think relationship is the most important thing when it comes to creating a world that is truly affirmative of sex and pleasure when we want it.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, just hearing you talk about how easy it is to slip into this mechanized view of sex, where if we tick all the boxes then good things happen. I find that when we’re trying to shortcut the relationship stuff, we’re trying to bypass the awkward, get around the uncertainty, not have to say the thing that’s kind of scary – we kind of fall back into that, ticked all the boxes. There’s this very slippery slope of, one, being able to kind of say, “Well, I did all the things you told me to so I don’t have to take responsibility for what came next.” But also this potential for victim blaming, right? “We did all the things you said we needed to. And so, it’s your fault that this happened or it’s not my fault that this happened.”
So I really love how you’re talking about this relationship and these were relational opportunities of valuing other people’s humanity and yes, the tools and the strategies. But, that that messiness is just a part of us being able to see these human beings for who they are, which is imperfect, changing, not sure. And if we can meet in that space, then I think there’s so much more potential.
Kai Cheng Thom: Absolutely. And I mean, of course, think that the desire to fall quickly into, “Oh well, this is the strategy or the formula or the button,” or whatever, “Then we’ll have everything right if we just do those things.” That is an anxiety, right? That’s us wanting to be good and free of blame. So we’re like, “Well, this is the way to be good.” And humans love that thing. It’s not just about sex, right? Well, I really think sex is a microcosm of the entire social world, right? Moral goodness, intense religious doctrines have that, too. So does intense social justice doctrine, feminist doctrines, all this kind of stuff. And it makes me think of interactions in my own life.
For example, where I’ve had sexual partners who were really anxious about consent, so anxious and they would check in a million times, and email me with these hundred words long of emails about making sure that I was consenting. And I was like, “This doesn’t even really feel about me. This just feels like you having some anxieties about your own being or capacity to harm, and actually projecting it onto me. And that’s actually the opposite of what you want, which is for me to be free to give you my truth and vice versa” Of course, right? That fear is, again, to expand our conversation to the transformative justice piece is, I think it really comes from our fear of punishment in a society that is extremely punitive about not being good. And by good I mean like pure, perfect, sinless whatever.
Kai Cheng Thom: Having spoken a lot with with youth as a former youth worker, I think it came up many, many times, particularly with masculine identified folks – but not everyone – is this fear of being the abuser or fear of being a perpetrator. Because, I think something that we have not done well as the millennial generation of sex educators or third wave feminist sex educators is we have maybe inadvertently created a really prohibitionist understanding of consent like, “Don’t do anything that you don’t have enthusiastic consent for because then you will be a rapist,” is basically the the bottom line which is on the one hand a very important truth and also when we teach it to–
Again, coming back to the young people, it’s quite scary and doesn’t actually empower young people to know what consent is. We know what it is not. But we don’t know how to acquire it outside of this, “lt must be check – enthusiastic. Check – ongoing. Check – informed. Check within the appropriate power dynamic.” And does not leave room for, “Well actually, consent is a moving target and I can check all those boxes and not produce a perfect consent.” And that doesn’t mean, I’m going to be take a risk here and say, “That doesn’t mean that everyone who kind of slips through a boundary around that is a horrible monster who needs to be rejected from society forever,” which is, by the way, the mainstream conception of sexual predation and it’s something that most feminist thought traditions have carried on. But actually, there’s a human there who might want to be better or making better decisions. And, of course, there’s a spectrum of boundary violation insects and in life and obviously there are different consequences to different extremes. But I’m really curious about, how much better would we be at consent, or worse – this is an open inquiry – how much better or worse would we be at consent, at giving each other pleasure, at treating each other well, if we did not live in such a punishment based society? What if the motivation for pursuing consent was truly and freely, “I want to be good for others,” as opposed to, “I don’t want to be bad. So I’m just going to follow all the rules.”
Dawn Serra: Yeah.
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Dawn Serra: I love the generosity that’s inherent in that question. How can we show up for each other? How can we make this something that’s about creating, whether it’s this one time hookup or a lifetime of relationship? Rather than, “I’m doing all of the things to avoid something and/or because I’m terrified of asking, I’m just going to take,” which is the two places, I think, that sometimes people go.
I love this invitation around, what if we weren’t all so terrified of being ostracized and kicked out, and not having belonging and never getting to come back to the event if we make a mistake? And, what becomes possible when I know I’m going to be supported when I fuck up? And I will fuck up multiple times.
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, totally, totally. And which is not to say that fucking up is okay, right? Depending on the fuck up, it might be more or less okay. That we could do it. I mean, also I just think on a practical level, we’d be much more open to, coping to or opening up about mistakes we have made – admitting them if we were the punishment wasn’t this blanket like, “You’re banned for life or scarred for life” kind of situation.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. So many things would have to change to allow for more nuance.
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, yeah.
Dawn Serra: It’s fundamentally de-stabilizing to the world, as it is, to start approaching interactions and community in that way.
Kai Cheng Thom: Yes, I think so. I mean, we live in a society where the notion of punishment as the best teaching tool for goodness is deeply embedded. Whenever someone commits a crime, what do we hear teachers say, what do we hear judges say, what do we hear doctors say, “There must be consequences. What like okay, what do we heard someone who will be harmed someone there already are consequences.” Okay, when we hurt someone or when we harm someone, there already are consequences. The first being, someone is harmed, right? And then the second being like, “Oh, well. There’s a social fallout to that.” There are natural consequences to harming people. But that’s not what we mean. We mean, someone must be punished.
We mean that almost uncritically without thinking about, does punishment help survivors of harm heal? I would argue mostly no, not always. Everyone has a different experience, but mostly no. And it does punishment prevent future harm? We know for sure with looking at statistics around crime and crime recidivism, and all this kind of stuff – No. Having a punitive approach, having prisons and putting people in prisons, doing the death sentence – none of those things actually reduce rates of crime in America, where there are more prisons per capita than any country in the world, where also is a massive crime rate. And also, I mean, we have to be critical about, what is this crime? Police profiling and folks of color doing things that they need to to survive that don’t really harm anyone except capitalism. But this is a bigger conversation. We have to change everything.
Kai Cheng Thom: I also like to think about how transformative justice and restorative justice and the notions of bringing people back into community after making mistakes, and the notion of redemption, especially, are not new. There are many, many indigenous traditions – indigenous to North America, but also indigenous around the world where folks did not do a type of punishment culture that was like, “Someone has to leave forever. Someone is executed.” There were other solutions, right? I mean, restorative justice has its many of its roots and beginnings in indigenous community in North America. And then, the concept of mercy, forgiveness, repentance, and healing actually are part of the interesting mess that is Christianity.
I hope I could say this because I was raised Christian – that we have this interesting, we are double standard, double bind or something where all we have to do to be forgiven in the eyes of Jesus Christ is to acknowledge what we’ve done and then to want to be better. And that’s actually very beautiful. And then, I don’t know we also weirdly have, in Christianity, the notion of hell. It’s a bit weird, but all this to say, the notion of redemption or being able to come back into community after harm, is ancient. We see this in archetypal stories. It’s not that it’s easy. After we do great harm, we have to go, maybe, do great work. But it’s there it’s possible and knowing that it’s ancient means that, also, it could come again. It could be at the forefront of our world.
Dawn Serra: I love that you said just under your breath, “And that’s not easy,” and what that brings up for me is there’s this seduction in our desire for things to be easy, and to be something that we can just check off a list, especially when we’re inside of a culture that is working us to death – when life is already hard. And so many of us live paycheck to paycheck or worse. When we know we won’t have a lot of social help, when we acquire a disability or as we age, or whatever the things are, and inside of capitalism and neoliberalism where we’re so isolated, and we really feel like we have to do it all on our own. Of course, moving towards easy is going to feel seductive, because so many of us already feel so exhausted and overwhelmed by life.
So I love that, “And it’s not easy,” which begs the question, how much resilience do we have? How much tolerance do we have for being able to be in a place that maybe doesn’t have an immediate resolution? And where maybe the answer is, “We’re not sure. Maybe we have to figure it out together.” There’s so much richness in that but also asks for us to move at a different pace and in a different frame of time.
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, God. This is the best and most difficult comments of question. I really recommend folks who are interested in transformative justice, and particularly around sexual violence or intimate partner violence, to look into the work of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Mia Mingus, adrienne maree brown, and particularly Mariame Kaba. All badass femme of color, I believe – not all of them identify as femmes – all badass people of color. Community workers and writers who have been thinking about this much longer than me.
One of the best kinds of wisdoms that I’ve learned from the work of those folks, is transformative justice takes time. And also, it takes a patience and a willingness to accept the unknown. We don’t know how it’s going to end. We don’t know what the outcome is going to be. We’re not all, certainly probably not all, going to feel yay, happy, amazing afterward. That’s not the kind of idealism that we’re talking about here. We need to be able to understand that change, true change in the heart of a human being or the body of a human being takes time. Something I think we’re just starting to recognize as a culture is that trauma recovery could be a lifelong process. It doesn’t have to be but it certainly isn’t like a cure tomorrow. And if that’s true of those of us who have survived harm, which I would argue is most everyone to some extent, then it makes sense, kind of terrible sense, that the change it takes to shift out of harmful patterns, to recognize the harm that one does, to make amends, if that’s ever possible, which it might not be, well, that too – would take a long time.
Kai Cheng Thom: I mean, now I’m getting into even more dangerous territory. But I would really venture to say that being a hurtful person, which again, I think we all are just to different extents on a spectrum, is a trauma in itself. It’s a process of healing to become better for others. And that does take a lot of time and it takes a lot of support. I don’t know anyone, really, who has made that shift without the support of at least one loving – unconditionally loving person. And man, is that ever a hard reality to mobilize or to accept that in order to offer that kind of possibility of change, we might need to really start to love people who have done harm in an unconditional way. That is very, very challenging.
Dawn Serra: I love that you named Mia, Leah, and adrienne, and Mariame, and so many other people who are doing this amazing work. People who listen to the show definitely heard their names before, ad people that I personally really admire and have been learning from. I know a lot of people actually come to you for learning and for advice. And as we’ve just been massively geeking out for the last half hour, you have such huge, beautiful, nuanced ideas.
One of my favorite things that I did while I was prepping for talking with you is getting to read through the Ask Kai advice for the apocalypse column that you do, where you really talk about so many of these things. You’ve answered questions about community accountability, about harm and micro-aggressions, about resilience and feeling left out in polyamorous relationships, and so many things. And I would love to know as someone who’s on the receiving end of people saying, “Can you help me with these big, messy nuanced questions?” What are some of the things that you’ve really enjoyed getting to answer? What have you been learning? What are you still hungry to explore? What’s that been like?
Kai Cheng Thom: I love this question. I mean, I adore writing my column. Thank you so much for reading it. It’s been such a gift and I really have to thank Xtra, really historically, very significant and also just wonderful, queer LGBT newspaper here in Canada. Xtra has such a long history, many controversies too, but that’s like good newspaper. I’m going to shout out the newspaper and my editors, that is just giving me this opportunity and helping me really shape the column into what it is.
I felt so grateful that people have felt like they could just write to me , a random stranger, with some very sensitive and important questions. I mean, I’ve really loved how far people are willing to go with their questions like, as you’ve mentioned, there have been questions about what do you do when your best friend has been named as a perpetrator of harm? What do you do when it feels like call out culture is tearing apart our communities? Really being brave with those questions. Because it would be brave to be asking oneself alone in private or with a therapist or something, but it’s especially brave to ask them in public. And I know those letters are anonymous, but the anonymous writers stil, I imagine, see them being put out in public and see the online responses. So, I think that’s really generous and brave.
Kai Cheng Thom: Partly what I’ve enjoyed is being able to lean into my own project of being braver and more generous as a practice in life, which, I talk a good game at but also, I experienced my own shortcomings in that area, for sure. So really, if someone is asking me what to do when their friend has been named as a perpetrator, then I get to really lean in and be authentic about like, “Well, what do I think about that? How has my experience of community accountability really differed from the ideals that we talked about all the time? Really exposing, myself and my own narratives of how it is messy. To be honest, that is quite scary sometimes. And the payoff of that or the gift of that is that I get to live in greater integrity, I guess I would call it.
I think that’s something about the relationship between me and those folks who are writing questions is – there’s something really special about that, that we get to lean into our integrity together for this brief moment in the column space, so that’s amazing. I also love how thoughtful questions are. I mean, what do I want to write more about? I want to write more about all this stuff. Well I just assumed that you know, but maybe I shouldn’t, like living in queer community, in a radical movement culture, I came up in a very intense radical Montreal anarchist community. And I still have roots in that and all this kind of stuff. We would often have conversations in private that we would never have in public. And I think that’s really true right now with the entire world. Post, the initial wave of the MeToo movement, and I think we’re still in a MeToo moment and hopefully, we are still in one –
Kai Cheng Thom: In this moment of revolution general, there’s the politics that are acceptable to talk about in public and then there’s the questions about our politics that we only have in private. And if we keep them in private, then, I think that we will never be able to have the public conversation that we need to be having. So I just want more of that, what are those questions people are talking about with their friends, that they’re like, “Oh, we would never put this on Facebook. Certainly never on Twitter.” I want those questions in my column. And another great thing is that it is anonymous, right? So, the direct consequences can be alleviated for the writers, not for me, but I’m cool with it.
Dawn Serra: Well, there have to be folks who are willing to be courageous enough to be visible.
Kai Cheng Thom: I think so, I think so. I don’t know how I chose to try and be that person. It happens.
Dawn Serra: And thank goodness it did, because I’m telling everyone listening, please go check out this column. I will have a link in the show notes because there’s just such beautiful conversations happening and I can’t wait to see what else comes next.
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, yeah. And send in their question.
Dawn Serra: Yeah, send in questions.
Kai Cheng Thom: All the questions.
Dawn Serra: Heck yes. One of the things that I think is so beautiful about your writing, your poetry, your perspective, is around, one, focusing on trans brilliance and resilience, but also, humanity. And as you mentioned, this ethos of love. And I know there’s lots of listeners of the show who are trans, non-binary, gender queer, and disabled and all sorts of wonderful, beautiful humans moving through the world in a way that’s often experienced very violent or in a way that where they’re very marginalized and have not a lot of access to resources. I get a lot of emails from people that are feeling really isolated and alone in a grander sense, but also just around sex and relationships. And, as someone who’s a dreamer, I would love to know, what kind of a world are you dreaming? Where might we end up?
Kai Cheng Thom: Like in an ideal kind of fantasy?
Dawn Serra: Yes. I mean, you can share like a shorter more practical, but when you dream about the future that you hope we all live into, what does that look like?
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, yeah. Forget the practical, who cares? I mean, we need some practical but what is exciting to me is the fantastic. I’ve always been, really always been, a lover of speculative fiction and fantasy sci-fi stuff. Octavia Butler is experiencing a resurgence of popularity right now, as well as many black and racialized fantasy and spec-fic authors. And I think this is because, more than ever, we are in a time where folks are looking for important, powerful, inspiring fantasies of what the world could look like. So, all that to say, I am super dreaming of a new world that is also an older world, right? One, that some of the pieces of the world that existed before: colonization and capitalism clenched us in this awful ironfist that we live in, where everything is always scarce, and we always have to answer a million emails.
Any consumer choice we make is bound to hurt someone or something, right? We live in this horrible trap where just going out to get food at the grocery store, we have to think about, who’s being exploited by all these companies? What about the animals? And what about the Earth? All these stuff – it’s this awful mess where we don’t have real agency, except over what we choose to buy. And we don’t really have agency over that either. It’s like a desperate kind of world where rent is always rising and everyone has a million jobs.
Kai Cheng Thom: I’m dreaming of a world where, honestly, where we overthrow the government. The government just gets overthrown. And so do the major corporations. I dream of an anarchist world, not an anarchic world, but an anarchist one where people form self government out of mutual agreement about what we want our world to look like, where small community matters. And, we’re free to make the choices we want to make in our lives, to move freely across the planet in a sustainable way. If I really think about the shape of this fantastical world, actually what I think about all the time is this – I do thought experiments with this imaginary city state in my mind, like that’s the kind of scale I can think of. In the post apocalyptic world where, yes, probably things have been ravaged by fire and terrible weather stuff and other horrors – out of that, maybe there’s a beautiful community arises that is local and really has learned to build stuff in a sustainable way, to use nuclear waste – all the stuff that is the apocalyptic aftermath – to form sustainable housing and infrastructure and all this kind of stuff. Where we remember the old ways of connecting with spirit and animism, the world.
It’s based on an ethic of love. We’ve been forced to think about sustainability so much that we’ve learned that nothing is disposable – not the food we eat or the elements, the materials we use, and certainly not the people we live with. Every single person is precious, and that doesn’t mean they don’t always need to be- that they don’t sometimes need to be confronted or stopped from doing hard things, but that we really take the time to do things in a loving way. I’m imagining all of that and I’m imagining it would also be very hard. I think about all the time like, how would that work and what would it look like? What would the economy be? And yeah, it always changes because I don’t have the answers.
Dawn Serra: When you think about this future post-apocalyptic, sustainable, local, beautiful community, what role do you see pleasure playing?
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh, wow. What a great question. No one asks about pleasure. Everyone should ask about pleasure.
Dawn Serra: I agree.
Kai Cheng Thom: Well, I think that pleasure would be sacred, truly sacred, in this post-apocalyptic community. I think, in my mind, it’s like fictional community would recognize how deeply suffering has been ingrained in – it had been ingrained in the cultures and societies of the past. Like we have to punish in order to teach and all of life has to be suffering. How does capitalism incentivize people through deprivation, right? You have to get a job otherwise will starve – that kind of suffering.
I’d like to know that, of course, life in general is full of suffering. And that pleasure is this beautiful thing, this fleeting moment that we have to treasure and cultivate, where we can get it and where we can create it. The greatest possibilities for pleasure often live in intimacy like touch, exchange, interaction and that we would really hold that as a sacred art that we would teach to children and to pass on through elders and hone over our lives. Really teaching pleasure in all of its forms. And as long as we’re kind of going off on beautiful tangents, I think that sex workers and sex educators would be restored to their ancient role as keepers of the sacred – keepers and teachers of pleasure.
Kai Cheng Thom: Ursula K. Le Guin, the famous and now sadly departed specific author talks about in her series – her powers trilogy about humans who have magical gifts. Magical gifts that are used for war. This one character goes, “Maybe we’ve been using the gifts wrong this whole time. Maybe they weren’t meant to hurt, but to heal.” The power to break a bone with your mind, actually, is meant to be this thing like a medical gift, right? I think that about sex and pleasure all the time. We live in this world where mostly we think about sex in its capacity to hurt, even when we’re talking about pleasure. There’s all this terror about how it can hurt. And when we talk about food and pleasure, there’s all this terror about how it might make us fat, which is fat phobia, of course – how it might be unhealthy and how intimacy is a chance for betrayal – all these stuff. You know, maybe we could be doing it differently.
Dawn Serra: Yes, maybe we could be doing it differently and approaching it in ways that help someone nourishing and abundant and such a big yes to that.
Kai Cheng Thom: Me too. I mean, yes. Sign us up for the post-apocalyptic….
Dawn Serra: We are ready. I would also love to know just in your current iteration of life as it is right now – I’m so interested in the ways that we make space for pleasure, both the super tiny ones – the smells and the colors we love, to the more grandiose and luxurious treats that we might give ourselves. But, what are some of the things that bring you pleasure these days?
Kai Cheng Thom: Oh… That’s such a good and complicated question. When I talk about our life where suffering and pain is at the center, I’ll go ahead and say for the record, that I’ve really ignored or struggled with accepting pleasure in my life for many reasons. I was raised in an extremely hard working family where pleasure, I think, was seen as almost like a sinful kind of thing. You’re supposed to work hard and you have to earn tiny pleasures. And even those are indulgences.
As a trans person, we have this really interesting thing in queer community where we spend lots of time talking about trauma. It’s almost like you’re not a real queer trans person if you haven’t experienced the massive trauma. And to talk about pleasures, small or grandiose, feels sort of like, again, indulgent or disrespectful of that. We kind of worship pain in this way as legitimising where like, again, maybe we could be doing it differently. I’m a workaholic for sure. And, I’m just starting to steal back pleasure into my life. I think the pleasure there for me is kind of like being bad. I think of it as being bad, which it’s not. But, it’s kind of fun for me to imagine as bad. It’s like weirdly kind of non-sexually kinky where I’m like, “Oh, I’m being bad.” I’m going to sleep in and read a novel this morning or something nerdy like that. I did that this morning.
Kai Cheng Thom: I’m just getting back into reading for pleasure. I’m just getting back into drinking for pleasure. I have never used to allow myself alcohol except in these weird moments of like a binge. And that’s a kind of compulsive response that we have when we’re deprived. So, I’m trying to learn how to take it slow and take pleasure in that. It’s an ongoing dance of what really – what does pleasure mean to me and how do I steal? I love that notion of stealing back time for my pleasure. And I think again about – I’m studying somatic sex education, which is like a pleasure-based sex education. We’ve been doing a lot of talking about the spiral like how we approach pleasure as sometimes it unfolds into pain because of trauma.
I can sort of steal, for myself, a moment to have a glass of wine in the evening, and that’s pleasure. And then it opens and I’m like, “Oh,” like this pain I felt around feeling guilty about substance consumption or my past experiences with partners who have been addicted. My trauma around that and then stealing time to take care of myself around that if I’m feeling guilty about taking care of it. It’s an ongoing journey and a greater pleasure for me is being on the journey like walking through that spiral and just being like – pleasure, and then trauma, and then pleasure and then trauma. And knowing, learning to trust that there will be pleasure again. There always can be again.
Dawn Serra: Yeah. ‘Cause I know in my experience, and I’m sure people listening can relate, but it’s so easy to feel trapped and/or to get stuck in the hard stuff. And so, I love how you’re saying, “Let’s trust that even when it’s hard, it will become easier. It will return to pleasure and that we get to have this ebb and flow where it’s not all pleasure all the time or all pain all of the time, but they’re related and so we move in and out of them.”
Kai Cheng Thom: That’s going to be…
Dawn Serra: That’s right. Well, I would love to respect your time and everyone else’s time who’s listening. You and I are going to go record a little bonus chat for our Patreon supporters if you still have a couple minutes.
Kai Cheng Thom: Absolutely.
Dawn Serra: Great. And I would love it if you could share with everyone how they can find you online, grab your new book, and find out all the things all about you.
Kai Cheng Thom: Thank you. I love this question and I have this weird answer to it that I’m going to give. Okay, so first of all for those who need to run, you can find me at @razorfemme – razor like a razor shaving blade and femme like the French word for women – @razorfemme on Twitter. That’s pretty much my only super public social media. I have a public Facebook fan page but like updates – sporadic. That’s my social media. I don’t have Instagram. Folks can also find me at my website, kaichengthom.com. Again, updates are sporadic but my general publishing history and some fun links and stuff are there.
Yeah, and then the weird part of this is I would love if folks would check out my new book which is called “I Hope We Choose Love.” We got to plug the title or any of my other books. I don’t know if I want people to find out everything about me. I say as I’m thinking lots about boundaries, which I think you probably talk a lot about on this podcast.
Dawn Serra: Indeed.
Kai Cheng Thom: And there’s a sense, sometimes, I get of people. We live in a public culture now, where everything’s in social media. We think we just have access to anyone, especially if it’s a person like me, who’s chosen in many ways, a public life that just come at me, and find out everything about me and my address and then send me weird stuff in the mail, which has happened before.
Dawn Serra: Oh, my God.
Kai Cheng Thom: Yes, it’s really unfortunate and certainly have gotten a lot of emails that are too intimate. I’m just going to go ahead and say, find me a little bit.
Dawn Serra: Yes.
Kai Cheng Thom: Don’t find me a lot. There’s a part of me that must remain in secret, and I need people to respect it.
Dawn Serra: Yes, listeners. Please do respect that. Grab Kai Cheng’s books from the publishers and your favorite local independent bookstore. Follow on Twitter and attend talks if there’s one in your city, and no creepy emails or gifts sent anyone’s house, please.
Kai Cheng Thom: Yeah don’t send me any gifts to my house, please.
Dawn Serra: Oh, well thank you to everyone who tuned in. And to you Kai Cheng, thank you so much for being here with us and sharing so much beautiful wisdom and yummy food for thought.
Kai Cheng Thom: Thank you so much for just letting me geek at you so hard for an hour.
Dawn Serra: Fuck yes. I am all about this. Awesome. Well, everyone, thank you so much for being here. If you support the show on Patreon, head over there now and you can hear what Kai Cheng and I are about to go record. So, stay tuned. Bye.
Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses.
As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?