November 2024 Update

ID: “November Monthly Update www.freedomoklahoma.org/news” with our logo and a background image of a hand holding a candle and a trans Pride flag.

We need your vision, your voice, and your practice of hope.

November is a heavy month for so many of us. There’s some sense of despair up and down the ballot as election day nears. There’s Trans Week of Awareness leading up to the annual Trans Day of Remembrance, where we continue to evolve our revolutionary practice of collective grieving and recommitment to safety. And, it can often be a check box of naming violence without any room to actually share that grief or safety building. There’s an annual celebration of genocide, the white-washed narrative of settler colonialism as good in the face of the ongoing impacts and harms of that settler colonization on the many tribal nations and peoples that are still here, still thriving, in the face of genocide, erasure, removal, and occupation. All in the face of a season that should be restful and instead is often a ramping up of capitalist greed as we’re asked to engage in collective exploitation of labor and acquisition of things in the pursuit of having the most things. It’s a time in which hope as a discipline, for me at least, requires a lot more intentionality.

So, as we kick off another November, I want to share with you how I’m working to disrupt the sense of despair that looms heavy this time of year. It starts with what’s at the heart of this work for me, which is community and strategic futurism–I find hope in the things we’re building together, in figuring out how we get closer to the future where we’re all free, where we all have the safety to thrive, as our whole selves in all of the places we call home. Right now, one of the spaces that’s helping give me language for some of that future building is The Dyke Project, a trans, cis and non-binary dyke collective, particularly from their manifesto and the idea that “We want it all! We want it all and we won’t wait!”. I think it lands for me because so often folks expect and ask that we make our hopes small, that we temper our dreams, that we compromise on behalf of the most historically marginalized and excluded members of our communities and call maintaining the power of the status quo progress. But making our futures fit within the framework of a narrative that envisions a continued maintenance of power within systems meant to harm and exclude us does not align with our Freedom Oklahoma values. There’s not hope in that space.

There’s hope in building a future that envisions our collective liberation. There’s hope in radical reimaginings. There’s hope in seeing other folks organizing and putting those words and visions out in the world and collaborating and making them real. There’s hope in saying we want it all and WE WON’T WAIT. We want a free Palestine, a free Congo, a free Sudan, a free Tigray, a free Turtle Island. Where we share our resources, because there’s more than enough for all of us when we share. Where we work for our collective well being. Where we listen to the stewards of the places we have occupied and work to heal our relationships with the land as our first most urgent priorities. Heal our relationships with one another through that work.

It’s November. And I’m holding space for what’s heavy, and I’m not letting it disrupt my practice of hope. I want it all, for all of us, and I want it now.

Read the rest of this newsletter for some of the ways you can plug into that future building space, can practice hope, in community alongside us. We need you. We need your vision, your voice, and your practice of hope.

In solidarity,

Nicole McAfee (they/she) - Executive Director