No Allies, Only Accomplices

Posted: 2026-03-23 | Categories: essays | Tags: anarchism, family, philosophy, trans

Today we’re talking about some hot takes regarding gender that I think should become more talked about positions for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. These opinions are frequently found in conservatives and people who generally don’t like us queers very much. Instead of rejecting some of these claims, I think we should build on them instead. We cannot prove the patriarchs wrong. We will always be an affront to them and appeasing them will never grant us true autonomy.

My music recommendation for today is We’re Still Here by the HIRS Collective

A friend and I discussed why the vehement reaction to the crossing of gender lines are so heated and where the root cause for it lies. This discussion began with a frustration at the prevailing narratives around queer people being “born this way”. This narrative has proven sort of useful in the past to attain some semblance of rights by appealing to the kind cishets in power that it’s not really our fault we were born with these societal defects encoded somewhere deep in our genes and we should therefore not receive any punishment on this basis. Despite the wins this has given us, I think we can do better than that. I’ve already argued that we should never ask for permission to live our lives in such a way that makes them livable for ourselves, but how does not asking permission undermine power and how can this be used politically?

I will try to structure our argument in clear premises:

The family and its ability to produce labor power and uphold strict hierarchical orders is a core component of upholding the power of the state and capital. We can see this in the calls of conservatives and fascists to uphold the nuclear family as a unit that reproduces the conditions of the state.
The nuclear family is constructed primarily through gender relations.
Since (2) is true, we must assume that homophobia is not simply based in hatred of same-sex relationships, but comes from a place of wanting to uphold the gendered order. Homophobia is a form of coercive gendering. It is a policing of gender and reproductive norms. The position of transphobia and especially transmisogyny has the same purpose, but more directly related to the topic of gender.
These coercive factors show us: Gender (and so by extension sexuality) are socially constructed categories, if they weren’t, they wouldn’t need to be upheld.
If these categories are socially constructed, they can change and be affected by a person’s experience. They are non-essential.
If they are not essential, meaning not intrinsically part of a persons baseline identity, but constructed out of myriad of uncontrollable and overlapping social factors and influences, then, while the desire to act in ways and alter ones life in ways that are queer may not be chosen, the social fabric that produces gendered relations can be altered.
If the social fabric for what ways of queer living are possible and visible is changed, people have more agency to act in ways that defy the gender order. We can live in ways that show others that these categories are non-essential.
In this sense, queer liberation politics should work toward a enabling people to CHOOSE to live in ways that put into question these authoritative measures.
If we say that we are fighting for a non-essentialising world where we can actively choose again and again to spit in the face of these coercive norms, we must give conceit to the fact that to a certain degree, being ACTIVELY, OPENLY QUEER is enabled by making these choices possible. And that it is okay to make these choices based on our desires.
Then living queerly (“being” queer) is, in some ways, a choice that is made repeatedly through doing queer acts. The desires that produce the wish to act in this way may not be a choice (6), but the possibility and the decision to act on those desires is.
If queer gender and sexuality call into question patriarchy and the family which exist to reproduce hierarchy and labor power (1 & 3), and the fight for queer liberation is one that broadens the action horizon of people to act against gendered relations (8), this can be potentially actively harmful to the nation and capital.

This premise contains a couple of radical conceits:

Lived Gender and Sexuality are (in part) based on choosing to actively live them.
Ideas around how to live a life outside the heteronormative world can be spread and encouraged.
Queer existence can (if employed in such a way) actually be a threat to the state.

Ideas of how to live a life outside the heteronormative world can be spread and encouraged. Not only that, they cannot be suppressed in any meaningful way. The conditions of gender and being subjected to the system of gender creates these desires. They are auto-generative through the interactions of material given by the body and the restrictive laws of gender. We are all born into the closet, for some of us our desires just make it harder to remain there.

This is a position many queer activists have frequently denied for fear of ceding too much ground to fascists and other conservative forces whose propaganda paints us as a danger to the persistence of a nation. These politics of making ourselves small and insignificant, that we just want normal lives in the current system, can no longer hold. I think it’s time we admit the truth to ourselves and the power we hold in this truth. Our upending of gender and sexual norms, our refusal to participate in the heedless reproduction of labor power, production of soldiers for the war machine, production of domestic work in the nuclear family, IS a danger to the state. We are a contagion, we can spread these fucking ideas, and that is an unabashedly GOOD thing to do.

I am not saying that being queer is by itself a revolutionary praxis or anything. But I think we ought to stop denying the potential for attack that our enemies have already spotted in us and to rebuild our communities in such a way that we move away from the constant clinging to a sense of fixed identity and begin encouraging people to leave the closet of gender and patriarchy behind. To encourage experimentation in people who might not be seeking it out. To give people a taste of how they could live if only they betrayed the institution of gender.

Following from this, if the closet and gender are the conditions we are all born into there can be no allies. If you think you can pull yourself out of the structures and support this fight with “allyship” from the sidelines, you are wrong. Allyship is often performative and happens from a position of demarcation. But you cannot demarcate these borders. The cis and the straights are just as embedded into the gendered world as we trannies and fags are. There are no allies, only accomplices. And in order to be a good accomplice you have to be ready and willing to set those fires with us.

And listen, this is not exclusively a queer thing. Similar principles hold true for many coercive systems we are born into. The key to unlocking the transformative potential that lies in this realization is to begin to actively betray these social orders that want us to identify with them in any way we can. In order to live in a way that is directly in touch with the world we must disidentify and become traitors to so many categories that we may hold on to because we understand them as giving us our shapes. I am writing this around gender because it is the system that I have rubbed up against the most, and I’m definitely not the first person to make this analysis¹.

⚧𐂂 Mycelialisms

No Allies, Only Accomplices

Further Reading