Yaffa (they/she) is a queer and trans, autistic, displaced Indigenous Palestinian who has lived widely. In a geographic sense, they have lived in 10 countries across [thirty-two] years of life, and are currently residing in Xučyun (Huichin) occupied land, in what’s known as Oakland, California. In her many roles as an organiser, activist, author, artist and entrepreneur, Yaffa considers herself at the intersection of culture and organising.

In July, she wrapped up a cross-continental book tour for Sage, her latest poetry collection about the balance between systemic and interpersonal violence and navigating to a collectively liberated world, focusing on their experience as a trans person. Having just transitioned out of the executive director role at the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, they’ll still be keeping busy with two more books coming out this year, including a series of speculative fiction letters (Letters from a Living Utopia), and an essay collection (Be Better Broken), a follow-up to the personal narrative and organising guidebook Whispers Beneath the Orange Grove. She also recently launched a training program for organisers and a paired podcast called Be Cute, Stay Dangerous.

While Yaffa was enjoying a sunny day in their Oakland home, we talked about the interconnectedness of grief and joy, using transness and autism as an organising framework, why some organising spaces self-destruct, and how to build utopia into today’s world.

Content warning: This interview discusses genocide, violence, murder, abduction, the Boston bombing, PTSD, Islamophobia, transphobia, death threats and grief.

Anna Hu: Hey Yaffa! It’s so exciting that you’ve been doing so much writing and publishing, and now travelling the world for your book tour. You’ve talked about how you started writing at a young age, especially science fiction stories and novels.

Do you feel like you’ve found that fire to write and publish more within the universe of ‘Yaffa’s utopia’ within the last two years?

Yaffa: I love that question. For me, writing has always been a way of moving things through me. It’s always been my space. It’s my solace; it’s where I can run away and escape every kind of reality.

One of the things that has recently shifted for me is that the need to write has become so large and so stark. I’ve been writing novels since I was 13. Since I was 19, I’ve been writing a lot more nonfiction, organising-related blog posts and things like that. But in terms of publishing an entire collection or an entire book, that wasn’t a large priority because it didn’t feel necessary.

But given what’s happened over the last couple of years, it’s become like, Oh, this isn’t my choice. It was really spurred by knowing that my people’s genocide was about to be televised, and I didn’t know a single queer trans Palestinian writing about it. There was a lot of sorrow and heartbreak within that realisation – that I was somehow the most equipped to be doing this.

Publishing also has unique impacts on trans people in particular, because a lot of us change our names. If we choose to do so, especially within writing or the arts, everything under the deadname is erased, right? It just disappears. People don’t necessarily have access to what I was writing when I was 19, because they wouldn’t really know how to find it. It almost seems as if trans people just show up out of nowhere, as if we haven’t been doing this work for decades.

Similarly, I recognise that the vast majority of movement spaces are queer-led, right? We’re kind of everywhere, but because of the dynamics of larger groups, the queer individuals at the forefront often aren’t talking about using queerness as a methodology for organising, or transness as a methodology for organising. I think that does our communities a disservice.

I don’t just organise as a trans person; my organising is trans. And there’s such a huge difference there. But I think because of internal politics and identity politics, we don’t really get to centre that in the necessary ways. To me, though, this is such a powerful thing that we can utilise to really transform the world and build a collectively liberated world.

Prior to 7 October 2023, and still to this day, I’ve always been hesitant of people reading my writing. It’s such an intimate thing. Throughout my life, I’ve published out of necessity. I published when I was 19 because nobody else wanted to talk about Islamophobia. I was hosting an Islamophobia conference – and it really shouldn’t have been me – but nobody else wanted to put themselves at risk.

Every step of the way it’s kind of been like that. And I’m grateful, as it’s really shown me that I can be severely uncomfortable with folks reading my writing or witnessing my art, but it’s not about me.

I don’t think of it as like you’re reading my work. It’s something that moves through me from the universe; it’s not really mine. I don’t really believe in original thought anymore. After all these generations – thousands and thousands and thousands of years of humans – am I really that special? Honestly, bell hooks has already said everything. Everything has been said countless times, right? What we get to do, though, is make it accessible in a different way, and through different language.

AH: Wow, there was so much in your answer that I feel like we could dig into. You’re translating ideas that have been around for a while, but you’re bringing them onto social media, or talking directly to people and translating those ideas into the current moment. That’s so necessary, and I do also want to acknowledge that it’s scary putting yourself out there. You’re putting out ideas that a lot of people are going to disagree with and, in some ways, painting a target on your back.

Y: It’s kind of fascinating, the life that I’ve lived between 10 different countries and various states in what’s known as the USA. I was in Arizona prior to 9/11 and a little bit post-9/11. I was in Canada, in Jordan, and then in Syria before the revolution, and right as it began.

I’ve learned – and I’m so grateful to my autism for this – that systems aren’t real, right? There’s this idea that if you do more, you’re going to be attacked more. I’ve learned throughout my life that, actually, there are no rules. It’s not as if I publish Sage today that I’m going to get more hate the day after. It doesn’t really work like that because it’s systemic oppression – it’s not meant to make sense.

What these systems hold is the perception of violence at all times. And so, the vast majority of people will think, If I do ‘X’, I will be targeted, and that’s by design. That keeps the system in power, because most people are living their lives in fear and are not willing to overcome that fear.

But from my experience, I didn’t receive more death threats after becoming more visible recently – 2018, 2019 was probably the peak of death threats for me, and I wasn’t that visible.

From 2020 to 2023, I completely left social media and took a step back, moved to Ireland, worked a lot more on the ground. That was the one time in my life that I wasn’t receiving death threats, mostly because no one had anywhere to send them. They didn’t know where I lived, and they didn’t have an email. But before that was when I received the largest amounts of death threats. I would get them mailed to me, and I would get in-person death threats, where people would infiltrate classrooms where I was teaching. And it’s fascinating to me, because I was doing way less, and was way less visible than I am now.

The thing that we don’t talk about as often is that the risk is also dependent on power. In my early twenties and late teens, I was a really easy target. I was a random person that nobody else knew, that no one’s going to show up for. I see why a lot of people end up leaving movements. The lesson that so many of us learn is that, unfortunately, very few people will show up for you. In many spaces, we’ve just accepted it as a reality of like, Oh, no, this is fine. This is a Tuesday. It’s cool, it’s cute.

Fortunately, in my case, I’ve lived my entire life without anyone, so I was used to that experience. It was just like, Okay, cute. I had no support last year anyways, so I’m not devastated now.

AH: This is really just another Tuesday.

Y: This is literally just another Tuesday. Like, It’s cute that you think that you want to kill me, but be creative.

And also, with living in 10 different countries, being so far away from my family and close friends, it also meant the things that they could target were different. For example, if you have children, you’re really mindful about the death threats you’re receiving for their sake, not necessarily your own sake.

The thing that influences a lot of this is power. I’m now the most visible I’ve ever been publicly, and I actually get a fraction of death threats and hate messages. These days, if someone threatens me publicly, there are enough people to notice that it becomes a thing.

AH: There’s safety in having eyes on you.

Y: Exactly. If I just disappear overnight for the next six months, some people are going to notice. But within a lot of my work, the people that I work with might be so invisible that when they’re kidnapped, no one even knows that they existed in the first place. I have so many layers of protection that to me, so it’s my responsibility to do things right and show up.

AH: I wanted to go back to something you said about being grateful to your autism for basically seeing through the bullshit. Can you talk a bit more about how being autistic has influenced your organising?

Y: Yeah, it’s a great question. It’s kind of similar to what I was saying with transness, that you can organise as a trans person, or you can organise through transness as a foundational methodology. I think it’s similar with autism, same with neurodivergence, same with disability.

All of my organising is not just me as an autistic person, but the organising itself is autistic – in the sense of how it moves in the world, how it makes sense of different things, how it looks at possibilities, how it likes some types of structures but hates others.

I’m always thinking: what is the world built by a trans person, or what is the world built by an autistic person? I can’t necessarily always separate those two identities. I feel like almost every single trans person I know is disabled in one way or another, and most are neurodiverse.

My autism has really allowed me to understand how the world functions and where the contradictions live. I think when you’re organising, recognising contradiction means that you’re organising while understanding power. We rarely ever talk about contradictions in this way, but contradictions are actually where power lives. When things are straightforward, they’re easily destroyed.

Systemic oppression is fully contradictory. I can’t speak on behalf of all autistic people, but for me, as an autistic child, I was often like, Wait, girl, you don’t make sense. You’re saying I have to be ‘X’, but I’m going to be punished for ‘X’, and I can’t be ‘Y’. But I’m going to be punished for ‘Y’, anyway. Why would I still do ‘X’?

This was my relationship with gender and so many other things. People were like, “You have to be this gender.” And I was like, “But why?” And they’re like, “Oh, we don’t really know. But you have to be.”

And I’m like, Girl, you’re a mess. Anyways, I’m just gonna be my fabulous self, and you’re gonna be angry regardless. So, you go over there, be mad, and I’m gonna be a four-year-old.

For me, organising as an autistic person allows me to build from a place of really understanding power, which allows me to be so effective in the work that I do.

You know, a lot of people will look at the work that I do, and they’re like, “Oh, my God! I don’t know how you sleep.” And I’m like, “Girl, I sleep nine to 10 hours a night.”

AH: Okay, that’s really impressive.

Y: I’ve been sleeping properly since 2013. We’re never going back to a world where I don’t sleep my nine hours. I am so rested in comparison to many people. I’m not okay – nobody’s okay, right? We’re all a mess. It seems as if I do more work than the majority of people, but I also do more to take care of myself than most people doing this work.

And I think a huge part of that is because I know how to move through power. I know how to be really effective and efficient, and I don’t waste energy and time. It’s also a very intentional decision in my prioritisation.

I’m grateful for everything I’ve ever gone through, but 2013 is when my PTSD was triggered for the very first time. It was a brutal time – just a lot going on, including the Boston bombing. So, I was in a tech school that was incredibly apolitical, and did not understand any of this stuff. I was already dealing with death threats. Then, the Boston bombing happened. Then PTSD, due to childhood trauma. All these things were coming together.

At the end of that period – and I do attribute part of this to my autism, which makes things really black-and-white sometimes – I was literally like, Okay, girl, you could either die, which we’re okay with – we can do that. Or you need to change all of it. That’s also cute. And we can do that.

So, it was very clear at that point – this whole bullshit of not sleeping, we don’t do that anymore. Like, if we’re gonna be alive, we’re just not doing that.

AH: We’re going to be well-rested.

Y: We’re gonna be rested. We’re taking breaks. We’re taking days off. Fuck school, fuck everything, it’s fine. You’ve been unhoused before. Lose your scholarship? Who cares? Be deported? Not the first time.

There is no middle ground; this is not a spectrum. I’m grateful for that experience in 2013, because literally almost overnight, or within just a few days, I was sleeping nine hours a day. It taught me that actually taking days off, sleeping, eating better and taking care of myself meant that I was so much more effective and efficient in everything I did. I ended up doing more versus less, and I’ve just carried that forward.

I’m now like, What are you gonna do? Send me death threats? Please. I’m gonna be asleep.

AH: I love that energy.

This is an aside, but I saw that in Whispers Beneath the Orange Grove, you mentioned that you went to college in Boston – what school was that?

Y: Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

AH: Oh, no way. I’ve definitely driven past it.

Y: When people find out about that school, it makes a little bit more sense. But most people don’t really see me as an engineer, and so they’re like, None of you makes sense. Again, this where I’m like, contradiction = power.

AH: Do you still do engineering?

Y: I don’t do engineering in the typical way that most people think of engineering. But for me, engineering is just problem-solving. It’s literally an entire skillset about how you identify problems, and how you solve them.

I refuse to waste anything, so every single experience in my life becomes part of my methodologies. So, doing the work that I do within organising, it’s all problems, right? We’re all trying to solve these problems. And with engineering, your expertise is in identifying root causes so that you don’t waste time on everything above the root causes. That’s so necessary within movement spaces, too.

We need engineering at the forefront of everything, because the social sciences understand problems, but engineers know how to solve them.

AH: And just thinking about, you know, the state of the world today… there are certainly problems. I’m thinking about some of the news this month in the USA, with the Supreme Court ruling against gender-affirming care in Tennessee and allowing parents to pull their children out of lessons that feature queer content in Maryland.

In the midst of all this, have you been able to find moments of joy? Is that something you’ve been able to intentionally cultivate?

Y: I love that question. So, the work that I do – and have been doing since I was 17, so for about 15 years now – has always been looking at different forms of oppression, and really trying to understand: Where are the gaps? Who’s not here?

When work with the most marginalised of the most marginalised, you realise that – given the way systemic oppression exists – in legal terms, certain people have rights, but a lot of invisible people do not. And this is where visibility politics comes in. The power that exists when you are visible versus invisible, and how powerful you can be when you’re invisible versus visible.

That last part is a little bit harder to talk about, because then we get into underground organising, and potentially sharing trade secrets. An example of that, just on a high level, is that in places where transness is not politicised, you might not have any actual trans rights. You’re not politicised; you’re just invisible. And in some cases, you may be able to get gender-affirming surgery and live your life fully. Technically, you have no legal rights, but you’re invisible, and there’s freedom within that.

When these US Supreme Court rulings happen, they’re taking rights away from people who have had “rights”. They don’t influence any of the people I work with in any way, shape or form – as I don’t usually work with people who have ever had rights. Working in the margins for the last 15 years, I don’t have the space to wait for States or even communities to be the source of joy for me and the people that I work with. And so, we build joy into everything.

Literally, it’s the end of the world. We’re also having the greatest of times, because, to me, it’s not just grief or joy, right? There’s joy in grieving, and there’s grief in having unadulterated joy. I work with a lot of people in genocide zones that people will never talk about. Unfortunately, when they die – in the majority of cases – no one else is going to know.

Just a couple of days ago, for example, I was at Trans March out in what’s known as San Francisco. It was beautiful. I spoke, I laid in the sun and hung out with other global majority trans people. We had a really lovely day. We went and got hot chocolate afterwards, and then I found out that one of the people that I worked with had been killed. Their partner is still alive.

And so, it’s a day full of joy, and now I’m also shifting gears. But it’s not as if everything needs to end – I’ve learned I can provide that support as I’m still having hot chocolate, as I’m surrounded by other people, love and warmth. No one’s going to know the story. No one’s going to know about the love story that these two had, no one’s going to know about the grief of the surviving partner. No one’s going to know any of the details. I’m the only person who knows, and I’m not going to share that kind of private information.

I’ve learned it has to be all at once. For me, liberation work is the most joyful of work. The work to build a collectively liberated world is always going to be easier than living in this current – really oppressive – fascistic world.

If we can carry the universe someday, we hold the weight of oppression, and we can hold joy in relation to that. I get to witness that with my people: with Palestinians, with trans people, with autistic people. No one else is going to give us joy. And we can’t wait until the day after genocide to celebrate, because we don’t know who’s going to be there the day after. I don’t know if I’m going to be there the day after. And so, you celebrate every step of the way.

Circling back to the Supreme Court rulings and things like that, I would love for people to get to a place where the foundation that they’re organising from understands that we can mourn that now ‘X’ people don’t have rights, but we must acknowledge that ‘Y’ people have never had rights.

The only way that we move forward is when we’re actually on the same page. Because if people who are recently targeted assume that this is brand new, they don’t know what to do. They don’t have the toolkit. They haven’t built the practices to be able to build alternative systems and a liberated world. And this is where I talk about centring the most marginalised of the most marginalised, because they know what to do.

I’ll give an example of that. I edited an anthology called Inara: Light of Utopia, by 19 queer and trans Palestinians from around the world, entirely envisioning a free Falasteen. Every story in it, every poem, is set in a free Falasteen. The entire process from start to finish – from announcing it to receiving drafts to editing to publication – was three months, which is unheard of in publishing.

During this time, everyone had access to community care funds. So not only were people paid, but when people lost their jobs, it was less of me being like, “Hey, I still need this by Friday,” when they’re like, “I just lost my job.” Instead, I could say, “Okay, I can pay your rent. Will you still have this by Friday?”

And they’d say yes, because it’s amazing what we can do when we’re not just trying to survive capitalism. The anthology was released about six months after 7 October 2023, and to this day, two years later, there’s no cis straight version of it. Not to say that cis Palestinians aren’t capable or anything like that, but just that they haven’t had to develop those skillsets in the same way that we largely have within the margins of marginalisation.

So right now, with all the Supreme Court rulings, I think larger organisations will always send the message that this is the end of the world, and that this is brand new. For a lot of us who have been doing this work underground, supporting people who have never had these rights, we’re like, No, actually, it’s a Tuesday.

As I train people in the organising space, and they go and read bell hooks, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, they come to understand that just because it’s new to me, doesn’t mean it’s new. In fact, it will always be here, whether I see it or whether I don’t. It’s always gonna be here unless we get rid of it, and we get to be a part of that.

AH: That’s really beautiful, thank you. This question is sparked by what you were saying about holding both grief and joy – do you feel that those emotions are interconnected?

Y: I think they always are. This is my autism again, but I can’t process a world where those types of emotions aren’t fully interconnected. I don’t trust or understand singular emotions. Even rage, for example. To me, there’s joy in rage, there’s grief in rage, there’s sorrow in rage, and there’s all kinds of things tangled up together.

Complex emotions, such as rage and grief, are powerful and transformative because they’re not just on their own. The joy within those emotions exists in the reality that I’m human, and grief is a reminder. I would always rather grieve than not grieve when it comes to something like, if I’m working with someone and they get killed. And so, joy even exists in breaking down and being human. This means something, this feels like something, and I have a call to action to do something different in the future. There’s joy across the whole thing, from start to finish.

When I think of things like the Supreme Court rulings, and how the State targets us, there’s grief in that. When people are activated by these rulings, it’s not the same as being radicalised to build collective liberation. A lot of people will lose rights, and they’re activated to fight this very specific thing. But they’re not coming in with an assessment of these systems, recognising that these systems are built to keep people occupied with their own lives and their loved ones’ lives – which is hyper-individualistic versus collectivist.

Collectivism is like, there are the people I will never meet, and I’m connected to those people. I’m connected to land, to spirit, to stars, to everything. Whereas if I’m just fighting for my loved ones, that’s an extension of individualism, because it’s still about me. It’s asking: who do I like?

If no trans person ever had rights – if there was no distinction if you’re white and rich – if every single trans person didn’t have rights, we would overthrow the system. But when you give certain people certain privileges, you’re automatically disrupting any possible mass organising that could happen. Most people don’t recognise that.

And I think again, really grateful to autism because my autism was like, No, girl. If we don’t organise, we’re leaving. We’re gonna be done.

AH: I have a question about organising. So, when I went to see you in person, you talked about how in a lot of community organising groups, you’re seeing lower or more basic levels of organising. And it’s scary to try to move past it to higher levels, because it’s a complete unknown. We don’t know what a liberated future will look like.

Can you expand on that? What are you seeing now, and where do you hope to see in the future?

Y: Yeah, that’s a great question.

I think of those earlier, lower levels of organising as something lacking a foundation, and lacking the tools and infrastructure to move through the major challenges that will always come up in every single organising space.

Certain challenges are always going to occur because they are built into us through systemic oppression. So, things like conflict will show up 100 per cent of the time. There is no space that will be devoid of conflict. And actually, it would be terrifying if it was devoid of conflict, because conflict is what supports us in growing, right? Conflict is literally what allows us to go to the next levels. We can’t go from level one to two without conflict. We can’t go to level two to five without conflict.

But most of our spaces don’t even know how to move through that, and this is why I say that most of our spaces are at that level one. We can’t actually move to those higher levels because literally, if conflict destroys the entire space, it’s not sustainable in any way, shape or form. It self-destructs.

Things like communication – like how we acknowledge and understand healing – are foundational. If we don’t have them embedded into the culture of a space, we’re not going to get beyond that.

If a single conflict comes up and it tears an entire organising group apart, we’re not going to advance. If everyone leaves the first time a conflict happens, we’re not going to get to a place where we’re all housing each other, where we’re running beautiful autonomous mutual aid networks, where we’re doing direct actions that are really going to shift things.

A part of it too, is that the spaces that would teach us these things have been severely targeted. You know, most people assume that the book bans are happening because people don’t want gay sex in books in high school. It’s not that – it’s that the visionaries, the world builders, are often the most marginalised people. And so, when you read a book that’s by a trans Black artist, even if that person’s not an organiser, it will automatically have things that move the culture in a certain direction that they don’t want.

We need to kill ego. And I don’t mean let’s just destroy egos. I mean, let’s understand our egos.

Me and my ego have such a beautiful relationship. My ego doesn’t interfere because it gets its time and attention. I have relationships with my inner child. I have relationships with past lives. I have relationships with all kinds of things, because I’m like, Girl, you are not coming up in this meeting. We’re going to go to a trampoline park beforehand, and we’re going to have the time of our lives, and then you’re going to be settled.

I also think a part of why we’re scared of those higher levels of organising is because if conflict can destroy us, then we have an out. It’s an easy way out, but if conflict can never destroy us, then we’re stuck here together. We’re in this; we’re going to be mobilising for the next 20 years together. And that’s terrifying to a lot of people.

So, part of the challenge of organising is ego-related. Part of it is fear of the unknown, of what comes after. Honestly, as a person with a lot of power around this topic, I can say that collective liberation is terrifying. A liberated world is actually terrifying – and not because we don’t want it, but because we don’t know it. Our bodies have never experienced it.

It’s easier to build pathways to move through conflict, healing and communication than to be in organising spaces that don’t have any of those things. Collective liberation is going to happen regardless. I don’t know how. I don’t know where, but collective liberation will happen.

AH: Okay, so my last question for you. In Whispers Beneath the Orange Grove, you talked about how you were criticised for being a dreamer even before coming into your gender queerness and how you’ve always been looking for utopia from a young age.

Can you describe a moment in that utopia? What does that look like, what are you doing, who are you with? What are you feeling in that moment?

Y: This is why I love utopia work. My utopia work is not just a far-off destination – it’s how do we build utopia into day-to-day reality, every moment that we’re in?

For example, on Saturday, it was a friend’s birthday, and we hung out at the beach, and it was lovely. It was just them, their co-parent, their partner, their child and me just sitting on the beach, as the child and the co-parent were surfing. We were just there, in a sliver of a universe that’s magic. I felt one with the land underneath me, I felt one with spirit that connected everyone on that beach. I connected with the water that was coming at me, and these people I’m really invested in. I connected with the sun as it was literally interacting with my skin.

That, to me, is utopic. It’s those moments where we just exist, rather than always being in service to building a better world. I think that’s the difference for me. Within utopia, we exist as humans, not as warriors or soldiers against systemic oppression. That moment was also really intentional, because it’s in those moments that we build up the fuel we need for what comes the moment after, right? What happens after the beach, or what happens during the beach.

I’m a person who is constantly organising. If I’m on the beach with my best friends, I’m not looking at my phone. Within the world that we live in, I’m also offering support to that person who just lost their partner. And within utopia, we could still do that. Grief is still going to be a thing, death is still going to be a thing. But genocide won’t be a thing, so the reason why this person was killed won’t be the same.

I’m here for those moments of utopia. But I’m also here for getting to a place where we’re not political, where we’re not politicised bodies, minds and spirits. We’re just human; we just exist. We get to embody everything that we are as spiritual beings, that are infinitely connected to land, people, spirit, stars and everything else.

Within utopia, we can really just focus on our actual purpose. In my opinion – and this is more through my Palestinian Islamic traditions and practices – the purpose of humans is to steward land and care for one another. And that will always be the case in a liberated world. In a liberated world, we get to just do that, rather than also trying to think about: How am I moving money into a war zone? How am I evacuating that person?

After this interview, I have to go to the DMV [Department of Motor Vehicles]. I’m going with one of my best friends, and we are going to have an amazing time. Am I dreading it? Absolutely. Is it going to be amazing? Absolutely, because I can hold both.

I want to have the feelings of a utopic DMV. How do I still bring profound joy into these spaces? Because I’m going to be hanging out with my best friend, it’s always going to be magic. It’s going to be a great experience, anyways, because what are they going to do, make our lives a living hell? We’re just gonna make fun of them and laugh about it very loudly.

The world, I think, is constantly trying to make us forget who we are. It’s beautiful when we have people around us who will help us remember, or when we ourselves just claim things. At my event you recently attended, did I talk about my memory with the stars?

AH: I don’t think so. Go ahead if you have the time.

Y: This is my favorite memory, and I’ll end with it. This happened when I was in kindergarten. During this time, I was going through selective mutism. I wasn’t talking at all to anyone.

I was a very dissociative child, so I wasn’t a good student, whatever that means. But one day, I was not dissociative. I woke up and noticed that the kid next to me had a gold star on their workbook. And I obviously did not have a gold star because I had not done anything.

And so, I went home, and I thought, Oh, I only have a pencil. I need to go find a pen because I want the star to be permanent.

I went and found a pen, and I drew the most ridiculous-looking giant stars on a page of my workbook. I’m like, Okay, here’s a giant star that covers the entire page. I remember looking at it, and I’m like, This is so ugly, this is horrendous. So, let me do it on every single page of this workbook.

I got into so much trouble the next day. They were like, “What did you do?”

And I was like, Girl, I did your job for you. Why am I not moving forward to first grade?

It did not make sense to me. I could also hold the contradiction – and this is the part that I don’t always share – that this meant that my parents now had to buy me a new book, and they didn’t have the money to be doing that.

I could understand and honour that like, Okay, cool. You think I did something wrong because the school system thinks I did something wrong. Now you have to go and have a potentially harmful conversation, because I did something that is beautiful and amazing and fantastic. But I can honour both those things, and so I won’t do it tomorrow.

I feel like my brain has always been like an adult brain, because I could hold that as a four-year-old. I could be like, Okay, I see your pain. I’m not doing it again, but not because I was wrong. I am valid. I was perfect.

I fully checked out after. I was like, all right, back to dissociation. Goodbye, everyone.

AH: That’s a great story.

Y: I’m so grateful for it, because it shows me that’s who I was as a four-year-old – that’s who the world tried to break. And that’s who the world taught that, unfortunately, sometimes you have to hide yourself because who you are does harm other people, because of other systems of oppression.

That’s just the reality of it. I want to build a world where that fabulous four-year-old doesn’t even have draw their own stars, because the idea of getting stars whether you’re deemed ‘good’ and ‘bad’ doesn’t exist. I want to move to that world. I also recognise that, actually, we can do a bunch of that now. I see it with some of the kids that my best friends have, and in the unschooling cooperatives I’ve been a part of and supported, where they have moved away from those systems.

To me, we dismantle systems of oppression, not for individuals, but so that everyone has access.

In my world, I get to witness so much liberation, so many liberatory practices in terms of how people move through housing, food, parenting and relationships. I fully cultivated that around me. This is why I say I don’t build things for myself or the people around me, because the people around me are fine.

The people around me are some of the most marginalised people, who have also claimed such beautiful practices and have made systems of oppression irrelevant in our little pockets of time. But I want that for everyone. I want it everywhere, not just for my loved ones. I want it for all the people that I will never meet, and that’s really the foundation of the work that I do.

AH: Thank you for sharing that story. This was such a lovely conversation – I feel a lot of joy having been able to speak with you for so long, and I’m wishing you a utopic DMV experience.

Y: Thank you, I’m so excited now.

Yaffa’s new book, Letters from a Living Utopia, is out now.