An Affinity of Hammers
SA R A A H M E D

Abstract This article offers a critique of the claim made by trans-exclusionary radical feminists thattransphobia is being misused as a way of silencing or censoring critical feminist speech. The article
suggests that transphobia works as a rebuttal system, one that, in demanding trans people provide
evidence of their existence, is experienced as a hammering, a constant chipping away at transexistence. The article suggests that transphobia within feminism needs to be understood in relation
to cis privilege: not having to come into contact with this hammering. It offers a model of politicalhope resting on “an affinity of hammers”; that is, affinity can be acquired through the work ofchipping away at the system.
Keywords: affinity, censorship, harassment, transphobiaWe learn about worlds when they do not accommodate us. Not being
accommodated can be pedagogy. We generate ideas through the struggles
we have to be in the world; we come to question worlds when we are in question.
When a question becomes a place you reside in, everything can be thrown into
question: explanations you might have handy that allow you to make sense or
navigate your way through unfamiliar as well as familiar landscapes no longer
work. To be thrown by a question is to be thrown into a world that can be hostile
as well as startling. Another way of saying this: when we are not at home, when weare asked where we are from or who we are, or even what we are, we experience achip, chip, chip, a hammering away at our being. To experience that hammering is
to be given a hammer, a tool through which we, too, can chip away at the surfacesof what is, or who is, including the very categories through which personhood is
made meaningful—categories of sex and gender, for instance, that have chippedaway at us.
This reciprocal hammering can be thought of as an affinity. I want to
explore my relationship to transfeminism as an affinity of hammers. Why use theterm affinity here? Let’s assume that transfeminisms are built from or out of transexperiences in all their complexity and diversity. I write then of “affinity” as a wayof recognizing that I write from a position of cis privilege. I am writing of how I

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 3, Numbers 1–2 * May 2016
DOI 10.1215/23289252-3334151 ª 2016 Duke University Press

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came into contact with a hammering I did not directly experience because of thatprivilege. The question of how we can account for that privilege is one that I willkeep live throughout this piece.
A starting point is the point from which we proceed, from where a world
unfolds (Ahmed 2006). We have many starting points. I write this contribution asa cis lesbian who has experienced gender norms as alienating insofar as gendernorms are so often heteronorms: rules of conduct that direct girls toward boys
and that render heterosexuality the right or best or happiest destination. I write
this contribution as a woman of color who finds that gender norms so often
remain predicated on an unremarkable whiteness: the evocation of a fragile
female body who needs to be defended from various racialized as well as sexualized others. Intersectionality is this. It is about ups and downs, stopping andstarting; how we pass through at one moment while being stopped at another,
depending on who is receiving us, depending on what is being received throughus. An affinity of hammers does not assume we will automatically be attuned toothers who are stopped by what allows us to pass through, even when we ourselves
have the experience of being stopped. We have to acquire that affinity. It is what
we work toward.
The Letter

I want to account for the problem of trans-exclusionary radical feminism, theproblem of how it is within some feminist spaces, that this hammering is happening. I will start with a letter, even though the letter in question is not thestarting point of a certain kind of feminism that has long been chipping away attrans lives. On Sunday, February 1, 2015, a letter denouncing the tactics used bytrans and sex-worker activists to contest speech they perceived as violent toward
them was published in the Guardian under the headline, “We Cannot Allow
Censorship and the Silencing of Individuals,” followed by a subheading, “Universities Have a Particular Responsibility to Resist This Kind of Bullying”(Campbell et al. 2015). It was signed by 130 prominent feminists, academics, andactivists and became the most recent flash point of a long-running conflictregarding the relationship of transgender issues to feminism. Four examples are
mentioned as evidence of this worrying trend: the cancellation of Kate
Smurthwaite’s comedy show at Goldsmiths, University of London; the calls for
the Cambridge Union to withdraw its speaking invitation to Germaine Greer; thepressure on the Green Party to “repudiate” Rupert Read after he “questioned thearguments put forward by some trans-activists”; and the “no platforming” of the“feminist activist and writer” Julie Bindel by the National Union of Students.
I will not rehearse some of the wider problems with this letter that I havediscussed elsewhere (Ahmed 2015). I want to focus instead on how trans comes up.

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TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

The word trans is mentioned both as a description of activists and as a style ofaccusation: the letter refers to “a worrying pattern of intimidation and silencing of individuals whose views are deemed ‘transphobic’ or ‘whorephobic.’” The
statement then says, “Today [no platforming] is being used to prevent theexpression of feminist arguments critical of the sex industry and of somedemands made by trans activists.” Put the sentences together and you have thepicture: feminists who are critical of some of the demands of trans activists(which demands? one wonders1) are accused of transphobia, which is how they
are silenced. A summary: the accusation of transphobia is a means by which
critical feminist voices have been silenced.
The sentences in the letter work to create a figure of the trans activist who
is making unreasonable demands and arguments, and who is using the accusationof transphobia as a means to silence feminists. Indeed, if words like silencing,bullying, and intimidation cluster around the figure of the trans activist, thenwords like critical, questioning, and democratic cluster around the figure of the cis
feminist.2 The letter does not have to make an argument explicit: it works tocreate an impression that is sticky; trans activists are bullying the feminists, anduniversities are allowing this bullying to happen. The letter does not have to say
explicitly that critical feminists and trans activists are distinct camps, one ofwhom is silenced and intimated by the other, to carry the point.
The letter uses the language of free speech; in a way it both insists on freespeech while announcing that free speech is under threat. In the United Kingdom,
all speech is understood as free speech, with the exception of speech that is an“incitement to violence.” Free speech is increasingly mobilized as an ideologicalweapon by the creation of a clear distinction between offensive statements and“incitements to violence.” Let me offer an example. On March 15, 2015, a leading
Black public figure, Trevor Phillips, the former head of the Commission for Racial
Equality, released a documentary, Things We Won’t Say about Race That Are True
(Cooper 2015), which ends up defending racism as a form of free speech. The
claims made are familiar, though they are more usually articulated in the rightwing press. Antiracism or political correctness is inflated as if it is a hegemonic
discourse that has prevented “us” from being able to speak the truths (things wecannot say). The story goes something like this: we cannot ask legitimate questions about immigration because will be branded “racist.” The very accusation ofracism is understood as what stops us from asking legitimate questions. Paradoxically, then, racism is now incited by being understood as prohibited orminority speech. In such an account the very act of being offensive or causing
offense (often through articulating stereotypes about others) speaks to how weassert our national character (as being tolerant of different views) as well as our
freedom.3 In such a schema, dominant views become rearticulated as if they are

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minority views that we have to struggle to express. Racism is enacted by the claimthat we are not free to be racist.
Let’s return to our letter. I do not think the letter justifies the freedom to be“critical of . . . some demands made by trans activists” as the freedom to be
offensive; rather, what is being implied is that trans activists, by labeling criticalfeminist speech as offensive (through the liberal use of the illiberal word transphobia), are intending to impose a restriction on feminist speech. In other words,
being offended is registered as an imposition on the freedom of others. The real
offense is caused by those who are offended. This is how the very use of the wordtransphobia is heard as an attempt at censorship. We might note that the claim tobe censored can be generative of speech. The example of Germaine Greer mentioned by the letter is a case in point: she was not stopped from speaking at all. She
did speak: as did transfeminist activists at another event organized by the LGBTI
Society and the Women’s Society (speakers included Roz Kaveney and Sarah
Brown).4 If anything, the evidence here points to the opposite of what the letter
claims: protests about who is speaking have led to the proliferation rather thanprevention of discourse.
When the letter says that critical feminists are being silenced, it is implyingthat “being critical” of the “demands of trans activists” is a legitimate form of
feminist speech. In other words, the letter relies on the assumption that we candistinguish “critical feminist speech” from “incitement to violence,” and that
there is censorship because others have failed to make that distinction. Behind theletter I can hear these sentences uttered in unison: “It is not racist to ask criticalquestions about immigration; it is not transphobic to ask critical questions about
the demands of trans activists.” But this distinction between critical speech andincitement to violence breaks down, which is how an incitement to violence isjustified as freedom of speech.
Let me give an example of how this distinction breaks down. At a Reclaim
the Night march that took place in London in November 2014, a pamphlet entitled“Not Our Sisters” was distributed by trans-exclusionary radical feminists.5 On
one side of the pamphlet is written text. It begins by describing Reclaim the Night
as “protesting male violence against women.” It then describes trans women as“male transgenders” and suggests that “male transgenders” commit violenceagainst women “at exactly the same rate as non-transgender males.” This violent
misgendering enables trans women to be positioned as imposters within a feminist march, as perpetrators rather than victims of male violence. On the otherside of the pamphlet are four photographs of trans women who are given a story
that is not theirs: they have committed violence against women; they have tried tohide that violence by describing themselves as trans or not men. The photographs
are used to retell a story, to abbreviate and condense the associations made by thewritten text: trans women are “male transgenders,” trans women are men; as men

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TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

they use trans as a mask to commit and conceal violence; trans women as men
injure, rape, and murder women.
To abbreviate and condense an association in the form of an equation:
Trans = violence and death.
I was on Facebook when someone’s status update caught my attention. The
person spoke of how, sadly, a peaceful feminist march was interrupted by “transactivists.” Outrage about violence becomes the cause of a disturbance and not theviolence itself. In the next section, I will return to the issue of how disruption is
located and narrated. When I wrote in response to that update of my own outrage
about the pamphlet, one of the people named in the letter referred to above
responded, “So are you saying it is as bad as the Holocaust.” By “it” I think she wasreferring both to the pamphlet that I had described as hate speech and to the moregeneral domain of antitrans feminist speech. It would take us a long time tounpack what is wrong with this statement. But just note the implication that
violence against trans people is “relatively” minor, a footnote in a much more
horrifying history of human hatred. And it is this very implication that was
carried by the letter: “‘No platforming’ used to be a tactic used against selfproclaimed fascists and Holocaust-deniers. But today it is being used to preventthe expression of feminist arguments critical of the sex industry and of somedemands made by trans activists.” So this comparison (“it” is not like the
Holocaust) is already in use not only to present feminists critical of “somedemands made by trans activists” as unjustly censored but also to recast thatcritical speech as not as violent or offensive as other kinds of speech. I make thispoint just to make clear that even if those who signed up to the letter might argue
that critical feminist speech can or should be separated from the kind of speech
represented by the pamphlet, the terms of the letter point to such speech: it isexactly this kind of speech that becomes justifiable as a relatively minor form ofoffense, or even, as no offense at all.
How often: some forms of violence are understood as trivial, or not as
violence at all. How often: violence is reproduced by not being understood asviolence. So much violence directed against groups (that is, directed against thoseperceived as members of a group) works by locating that violence as coming fromwithin those groups. Thus minorities are often deemed as being violent, or as
causing violence, or even as causing the violence directed against them. To give an
account of trans people as causing violence (by virtue of being trans) is to cause
violence against trans people. We are most certainly talking about lives and deaths
here; and we are most certainly talking about incitement to violence.
The letter tells a tale: that to take offense at “critical feminist speech” is a
wrong (the offense taken is heard as antifeminism) that leads to more wrongs. To
take offense at the letter would thus be judged as enacting the very problem

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described by the letter. Those who protested against the letter were indeed
understood not as expressing their freedom of speech but as displaying their
desire to restrict freedom of speech in the very act of “being offended” by it. Thereis an economy of speech at work here. Some protests are judged as stifling freespeech while other protests (such as the letter itself) become expressions of freespeech. We learn that free speech has become a political technology that is used toredefine freedom around the right of some to occupy time and space. Wheneverpeople keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or wheneverpeople speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative
contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.
A Rebuttal System

When I first read the letter, I remember thinking that one of the worst consequences of it would be the new legitimacy it would give to antitrans and transexclusionary feminism. I thought at first I was indeed witnessing an increase ofsuch speech. But once I began to work through the networks that supported that
letter, mostly on social media, I began to realize that what I first heard as a turning
up of the volume was just more of the same thing that had been going on all along
for many trans people: that volume switch was already stuck on full blast. My cis
privilege was, until then, not having had to notice that harassment or not having
had to hear the sound of that blast.
In order to explain how this letter was taken up, we need an account of
how privilege is affective as well as effective. When I think of affectivity I think ofskin: a border that feels. Privilege could be thought of as rather like contact
dermatitis: we are inflamed by something when or because we come into contact
with it. Privilege is also thus: being able to avoid contact with the cause of an
inflammation. We could contrast contact dermatitis with eczema, which is often
called a “basket category,” used to describe skin conditions in which the cause of
the inflammation is not known. With eczema it can feel as if you are the cause ofyour own inflammation, whether or not you are the cause, because there is no safe
externality; nothing that can be eliminated to heal the skin or the situation.
Like all analogies, this one is imperfect, but I want to use it to dramatize
how causality becomes a contact zone in everyday social experience. Let’s think ofan inflammation as a conversation. Let’s say when you enter the room, things
become inflamed. If this keeps happening, then you can feel like the cause of that
inflammation, whether or not you are. You learn that you cannot stop an
inflammation even if you begin to try to “tone things down.” So much racism feels
like this: the volume turns up when race is mentioned, or the volume turns up
when you turn up as a person of color. Racism is precisely how a body of color
becomes the cause of tension. I always learn from bell hooks’s description of how

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TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly“the atmosphere will noticeably change when a woman of color enters the room”(2000: 56). A joyful atmosphere, an atmosphere of warm solidarity is lost. It
becomes tense. Given that wherever you go, your body goes with you, it can end
up feeling like you cause the loss of a good atmosphere. You become tense.
Privilege can be what does not come up when we turn up. This letter was
signed by many academics and activists who I do not think would endorse thekind of pamphlet I described in the previous section. So why did they sign such a
letter? How could they sign it? I suspect they did not hear the “point” of the letter.
Many of those who supported that letter have not been in contact with therelentless nature of the harassment against trans people. They do not have tocome into contact with harassment; this is what makes privilege a privilege.
Privilege is what can allow a world to recede. When someone brings somethingup, it can then seem they are bringing something into existence that would
otherwise not have been there.
Something I have learned from my work on my blog Feministkilljoys is
how people witness a reaction as the beginning of something because they do notnotice what people are reacting to. Think of a twig that snaps under pressure. A
snap sounds loud, and it seems like a sudden movement. But the snap would only
seem the start of something, or as the beginning of violence, if you did not notice
the pressure on the twig. Pressure is hard to notice unless you are under pressure.
A system can put some bodies under pressure without that pressure being
experienced, let alone witnessed by others who are not under that pressure.
A snap is not the starting point even if a snap is a start of something.
Violence does not originate with the one who snaps. But so often: the exposure ofviolence is perceived by the privileged as the origin of violence. But so often: whenthe exposure of violence is perceived as the origin of violence, the origin of theviolence that is exposed is not revealed. The figure of the bullying trans activist
circulates because of what is not being revealed: that everyday relentless hammering at the house of trans being. Following T. L. Cowan (2014), we could thinkof this figure of the bullying trans activist as the transfeminist killjoy. The killjoy is
without doubt a violent figure: to point out harassment is to be viewed as theharasser; to point out oppression is to be viewed as oppressive. Part of the work of
the killjoy is to keep pointing out violence. In making these points, killjoys aretreated as people who originate violence. This is the hard work of killjoys. They
are up against it!
Transfeminist killjoys expose hammering as a system of violence directedagainst trans people, including from some of those who identify as radical
feminists. Some of the hammering might seem on the surface quite mild because
it appears as an instance: a joke here, a joke there. And jokiness allows a constanttrivializing: as if by joking someone is suspending judgment on what is being said.

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She didn’t mean anything by it; lighten up. A killjoy knows from experience: whenpeople keep making light of something, something heavy is going on.
Something heavy is going on. Many of these instances might be justified as
banter or humorous (the kind of violent humor that feminists should be familiar
with because feminists are often at the receiving end). So much of this material
makes trans women in particular the butt of a joke. Following Julia Serano (2007),
I would describe much of this material as trans misogyny: what is evoked is thefigure of the hyper-feminine trans woman as a monstrous parody of an alreadymonstrous femininity. In January 2013, for example, British feminist journalist
Suzanne Moore published a piece on women’s anger that makes casual reference
to the figure of the “Brazilian transsexual” as the “ideal body shape” that most
women are angry about because they do not have it (Moore 2013). This statement
could be understood as a form of casual racism as well as trans misogyny: theother over there is a means by which a subject here is given contour and definition, a “we” takes shape from what we are not. Another journalist, Julie Burchill,then writes a piece defending Moore against trans activists (quickly described as
the “trans lobby”—another inflationary mechanism) whose protests against
Moore’s statement are called “bullying,” a piece that deploys as weapons such
violent phrases as a “bunch of dicks in chick’s clothing.”6 These two pieces, onemuch more extreme than the other, are not simply related through a citational
chain; they are both part of what I would call a “rebuttal system.”
A rebuttal is a form of evidence that is presented to contradict or nullify
other evidence that has been presented by an adverse party. A rebuttal is a form ofevidence that is directed against evidence that has already been presented. What if
you are required to provide evidence of your own existence? When an existence isunderstood as needing evidence, then a rebuttal is directed not only against
evidence but against an existence. An existence can be nullified by the requirement that an existence be evidenced. The very requirement to testify to yourexistence can end up being the very point of your existence.
To be treated as a being who needs to provide evidence of being is also to
be treated as an adverse party. The word adverse implies opposing. But it is often
used to create a stronger impression, to convey a sense of hostility or harmfulness.
To present evidence that nullifies that presented by an adverse party might be how
a party is treated as adverse in the first place: you direct evidence to the one who isdeemed to be opposing something in the very manner of their existence. Words
can be teachers. The word rebuttal derives from butt and is often used in the senseof a target or aim, as in the butt of a joke. Trans women are made into the butts ofjokes. When materials such as those described above make trans women into
butts, they are functioning as a rebuttal system, which is to say, they are working
together to target an existence. Jokey comments and exchanges have become a

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TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

significant part of this system. And other, more qualified forms of speech mightuse of other kinds of “buts” to create a softer impression: I am not saying transwomen are not women, but. What follows this “but” can contradict what precedes
this “but.” To qualify an argument can be how an argument is made. We learn tohear the “but,” how it is pointed at someone because it has been repeated, over
and over again.
Words do not always do what they say. The expression “gender critical” is
now used by trans-exclusionary radical feminists to describe their own commitments. (“Trans-exclusionary radical feminism” [TERF] is regarded by thisgroup as an antifeminist and even misogynist slur.) Of course, the implication ofthis expression is that trans activism (or trans existence) requires being genderuncritical, thus nullifying the long and varied critiques of the category of gender(including as a diagnostic category) made within trans communities.7 Putting the
problem of this expression to one side, I think we need to treat these arguments
about gender as techniques of rebuttal, different ways of rebutting an existence,different ways of saying, for instance, that trans women are not women, that transwomen are imposters in women’s spaces and the feminist movement.
Different ways of saying: how something keeps being said. This is why thecriteria being used to exclude trans women from “women” keep changing. When
content (a woman is x) is being used as an end (you are not x), ideas have alreadybecome weapons. At the present moment, “biology” has become weaponized infeminism. This is quite odd and actually rather striking: there are some who holdonto rigid ideas of biological sex, but I do not expect feminists to be among them.
When I hear people refer in code to “biology 101,” meaning the scientific basis offemale and male sex difference, to claim that trans women are not “biologicallywomen,” I want to offer in rebuke, “Biology 101? Patriarchy wrote that textbook!”
and pass them a copy of Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating, a radical feminist textthat supports transsexuals having access to surgery and hormones and challenges
what she calls “the traditional biology of sexual difference” based on “two discrete
biological sexes” (1972: 181, 186). To be so-called gender critical while leaving
traditional biology intact tightens rather than loosens the hold of a gender systemon our bodies. But if we start engaging with arguments on these terms, the target
will move. Trans women will become not women because they were socialized asboys and men, or for some other reason that has yet to be invented.
When people use such criteria to decide who counts, that criterion has
already become a technique for exclusion because it is not a criterion that will beshared by others. Criteria have become points: they are pointed at someone; they
are aiming to do something; they are sharpening an edge. The criteria will change
if the rebuttal is rebutted because the criteria have become the basis of exclusion.
The target is thus a moving target: the policing of the boundaries of woman will

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take place on whatever basis can be found. In our collective feminist histories, thepolicing of who are “women” has been about how a specific group of women havesecured their right to determine who belongs within feminism (whiteness being a
key mechanism for policing feminism). The policing of the boundaries of“women” has never not been disastrous for feminism.
It is in this context that we need to think about invitations addressed totrans activists to have a dialogue with trans-exclusionary feminists. Invitations
can function as part of a rebuttal system. A dialogue is not possible when somepeople exercise arguments as weapons by treating others as evidence to be
rebutted. When you are asked to provide evidence for your existence, or when you
are treated as evidence, your existence is negated. Transphobia and antitransstatements should not be treated as just another viewpoint that we should be free
to express at the happy table of diversity. There cannot be a dialogue when some at
the table are in effect (or intent on) arguing for the elimination of others at thetable. When you have “dialogue or debate” with those who wish to eliminate youfrom the conversation (because they do not recognize what is necessary for yoursurvival, or because they don’t even think your existence is possible), then“dialogue and debate” becomes a technique of elimination. A refusal to have some
dialogues and some debates is thus a key tactic for survival.
The very expectation that a conversation with trans-exclusionary radical
feminists is possible is evidence of what people have not yet come into contact
with. It is an expectation that derives from privilege, of not having been worn
down by the relentless questioning of your being. Even that hopeful liberal
question, “can’t we just have a conversation?” can become another kind ofhammering. It makes those who refuse to participate in a conversation into the
problem, the cause of a division: so those “trans activists” who are making
demands, who are not listening, not engaging, who are using “transphobia” toblock feminist critique become those who are getting in the way of the liberalpromise of reconciliation, the promise that we can move forward by getting along.
Conclusion: Hammering away at the System

Survival becomes a project when your existence is the object of a rebuttal. You
have to survive a system that is constantly chipping away at your being. A feminism that participates in that chipping away is not worthy of the name.
Chipping away is something we too can do. Transfeminism is a form of
diversity work. In On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life
(2012), I discuss diversity work in two senses: the work we do when we aim totransform an institution (often by opening it up to those who have been historically excluded), and the work we do when we do not quite inhabit the normsof an institution. These two senses often meet in a body: those who do not quite

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TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

inhabit the norms of an institution are often those who are given the task oftransforming those norms. We can think of gender, too, as an institution. We canthink of gender norms as places in which we dwell: some are more at home thanothers; some are unhoused by how others are at home. When we are talking about
the policing of gender, we are talking about walls, those ways in which someare blocked from entry, from passing through. We might say that all women,
including cis women, have to pass through the category of women: no one is born
woman; we must be assigned to her. An assignment is what is received by others,
how we exist in relation to others. But we don’t all experience ourselves as passing.
If you do not constantly have your legitimacy thrown into question, if you are notasked whether you are a woman, constantly, repeatedly, if you do not have thedoor shut in your face when you try and enter the room, then you do not have topass through “women” in the same way.
We notice norms as palpable things when they block rather than enable anentry. If you do not conform to an idea of woman—of who she is, how she comesto be, how she appears—then you become a diversity worker in both senses. For
to exist as a woman would require chipping away at the walls that demarcate who
resides there, who belongs there. And this is what diversity workers come up
against: walls. An institutional wall is not something that we can simply point to:there it is, look! An institutional wall is not an actual wall that exists in front of
everyone. It is a wall that comes up because of who you are or what you are trying
to do. Walls that are experienced as hard and tangible by some do not even exist
for others. And this is how hammering, however exhausting, can become a tool.
Remember, it is through hammering that these walls become tangible. We candirect our attention toward those institutions that chip away us. We chip away atthose walls, those physical or social barriers that stop us from residing somewhere,
from being somewhere. We chip away at those walls by trying to exist or trying totransform an existence.
We learn from political labor because of the resistance we encounter: walls
come up because of what we are trying to bring about. The effort to transform aworld is hopeful, not only or always because of what we do bring about (we might
fail, we do fail) but also because of what (and who) we come into contact with.
Contact gives us a chance. We don’t have to take that chance. We can retreat. We
can turn away and build fortresses around our own bodies. Feminism too can beturned into a fortress, which is another way of saying that feminism too is where
hammering is happening. This is why when I use the word affinity I am pushingagainst another wall. That word is often used to indicate a natural attraction, anatural tendency. An affinity of hammers is an affinity that is acquired; we
become attracted to those who chip away at the worlds that accommodate ourDownloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/3/1-2/22/485942/22Ahmed.pdf
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AHMED * An Affinity of Hammers

33

bodies. I think of the potential as atomic: an attraction or force between particles
that causes them to combine. We have to take a chance to combine our forces.
There is nothing necessary about a combination. In chipping away, we come into
contact with those who are stopped by what allowed us to pass through. We
happen upon each other. We witness the work each other is doing, and we recognize each other through that work. And we take up arms when we combine ourforces. We speak up; we rise up.
Chip, chip, chip: an affinity of hammers is what we are working toward.

Sara Ahmed is professor of race and cultural studies and director of the Centre for Feminist
Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is concerned with how power is lived,
enacted, and challenged in everyday life as well as institutional cultures. Recent publications
include The Promise of Happiness (2010), On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (2012), and Willful Subjects (2014).

Notes
1.
2.

3.

4.
5.

6.
7.

The example of Rupert Read might allow us to specify the demands: his comments
related to trans women’s use of public toilets.
The use of critical is of special interest to me: I think “critical of ” also evokes “gendercritical,” which as an expression is used to mask antitrans sentiment as feminist argument. See the following section on how arguments become part of a rebuttal system.
The documentary is premised on a misunderstanding of the nature and function ofstereotyping. The point is that some generalizations “stick” because they naturalize an
association between groups and qualities (often but not only negative qualities). Racism
works by rendering some problems into problems of culture. So when Pakistani men arefound guilty of child abuse, that comes to express a quality of Pakistani or Islamic culture(or even immigrant culture), while when white men commit child abuse, that violence isunderstood as individual and idiosyncratic.
See Sarah Brown’s own discussion of the problems in Brown 2015.
You can see the pamphlet itself as well as a discussion of what happened at the march on
GenderTrender, a UK-based, trans-exclusionary radical feminist website. For the pamphlet, see Reclaim the Night 2014a. For the discussion, see Reclaim the Night 2014b.
This piece was originally published by the Observer but was removed and republished in
the Telegraph. See Burchill 2013.
See Tim R. Johnston’s patient review of Sheila Jeffreys’s equation of “transgenderism”
with being uncritical of gender. He writes, “To the contrary, there have been manytransgender people and allies who have used the resources of social constructionism toquestion both the medicalization of transgender identity and the social forces that
constructed the diagnostic criteria for gender identity disorder (GID) and gender dysphoria” (Johnston 2014).

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34

TSQ * Transgender Studies Quarterly

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———. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC: Duke
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