Our collective disavowal of these forms of accountability and justice distract from the inclusive and compassionate world that many marginalized people want to live in. Thom lamented that the search for a space free of persecution or hatred creates an unreachable and unforgiving mentality that punishes even the most minor transgressions.
Later in the talk, Thom read from an essay that discussed the utopian ideal-dubbed “Queerlandia”-that many queer communities seek to obtain. “Our executive functioning shuts down But the desire to be safe is probably what brings a lot of us into activism.” The trauma brain is well developed in many of us,” Thom said. “In times of crisis we turn on each other. During the talk, Thom suggested that this form of peacemaking is often absent in marginalized communities because survival and self-preservation instincts are often inextricable from its members’ identities, which can impede empathy for others. Thom described I Hope We Choose Love not as a prescriptive, technical manifesto on repressing reactionary hostility, but rather as a text that validates the possibility of transformative justice within a community.Īs an alternative to punitive justice, whose emphasis on punishing transgressions Thom believes undermines cancel culture, transformative justice favours open communication and forgiveness between a perpetrator and their victim.
With her book, Thom explores the hostility, both from outside and within marginalized communities, that pervades our lives under the lens of cancel culture and our growing uncertainty about communal integrity. Though Thom often referred to herself throughout the night, with a hint of ironic self-mockery, as “queer famous,” the McGill alumna has been a prominent voice in recent literary discourse on transgender issues and the notion of a queer community. The crowd was eager to hear Kai Cheng Thom speak about her new collection of essays and poetry, I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World. Despite the biting cold of a resurgent Montreal winter, Librairie Drawn & Quarterly saw a packed house on Jan.
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