Do you struggle to say no without over-explaining? Do you feel hurt when people you love set boundaries that disappoint you? Are you looking for ways to stop apologizing and to start taking up more space? Well, Take Up Space, my online boundaries workshop, is now available on demand. Grab your spot today. 

Radical love, resilient community, and never being discarded with Andy Izenson

I am so excited by this week’s chat with Andy Izenson. I first saw Andy speak several years ago at a closing panel for Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit, and I was in awe. You’ll see why when you tune into our rich conversation.

After reaching out to Andy, asking if they’d like to talk about restorative and transformative justice as well as building resilient communities on the show, Andy also said they were thinking a lot about:

RIGHT?!?!

So, on this week’s show, we talk about alternative justice, healing, building resilient relationships and communities, letting go of the fantasy of safety and why there are no good people, plus, we explore the power of anger, question what even is masculinity, and feel moved that the kids really will be alright.

Patreon supporters – If you support the show at the $3 level and above, Andy and I recorded a bonus chat all about polyamory and how capitalism infuses so much of how folks approach polyamory (especially lots of cis dudes). We talk about generosity and hierarchy and abundance, and why polyamory needs to be much more than just where you’re getting your dick (or other bits) wet, as fun as that might be. Listen and support the show at patreon.com/sgrpodcast

Follow Sex Gets Real on Twitter and Facebook. It’s true. Oh! And Dawn is on Instagram.

This episode is generously brought to you by:

In this episode, Andy and I talk about:

• Andy’s take on restorative and transformative justice and how finding factors where the whole community can come together to heal is a form of radical love.
• The ways we’ve been taught to believe in good versus bad, heroes versus villains, and why that feeds our hunger for punishment and violence. But punishment doesn’t heal wounds or create strong communities, so what’s the alternative?
• The fantasy we have to let go of around punishment and banishment when someone does something harmful, and how safety is an illusion.
• Why we can banish all the “abusers” from the island if we expect to have community.
• Andy’s definition for community and how we can start building that kind of fierce support in a tiny way.
• The power of our anger, and what happens when the people in our life can hold that anger with us. We also talk about how damn resilient relationships become when we’re can fuck up and know we won’t be abandoned or discarded.
• Cultivating resilience in interpersonal relationships and communities.
• Knowing how you want your community to be/look like and how it should be a space where you feel safe and supported.
• The hard work around radical love and that it’s not always rainbows and butterflies. It’s actually really hard work
• Masculinity: What it would be like if it was not toxic and infused with violent misogyny? What even is masculinity?
• Imagining a world that just accepts us as who we are and who we want to be, opens the question of whether or not we’ll have a different language for what we have now?
• The excitement and the honest truth that the kids are alright. They will be. Period.

About Andy Izenson:

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Episode Transcript

Dawn Serra: This episode is brought to you by Take Up Space, an online on demand workshop all about boundaries. What if boundaries were more than just the things you didn’t want? The things that you were tolerating? And all about the things you wanted to bring into the world, the things you wanted to say yes to – your pleasure, your desire, connection, joy. Well, that’s exactly what we explore in Take Up Space. It’s an online workshop with 10 lessons all about taking up more space, finding your edges, communicating those, and most importantly, dealing with the feelings and the responses from the people around us when we make those requests. So don’t miss it. Join us. It’s a fun, interesting lesson that will serve you through all of your relationships. Head to the show notes or to dawnserra.com/ep221 for a link to check it out.

Dawn Serra: You’re listening to Sex Gets Real with Dawn Serra, that’s me. This is a place where we explore sex, bodies, and relationships, from a place of curiosity and inclusion. Tying the personal to the cultural where you’re just as likely to hear tender questions about shame and the complexities of love, as you are to hear experts challenging the dominant stories around pleasure, body politics, and liberation. This is about the big and the small, about sex and everything surrounding it we don’t usually name. The funny, the awkward, the imperfect happen here in service to joy, connection, healing, and creating healthier relationships with ourselves and each other. So, welcome to Sex Gets Real. Don’t forget to hit subscribe.

Welcome to this week’s episode. Are you ready to hear all about transformative and restorative justice? Healing. How trauma drives so much of what we determined about our communities, creating resilient relationships that have space for anger and disappointment? How we can do something other than a punishment model. Why radical politics are so crucial if we’re kinky or poly or in any way queer? Oh, this conversation is so great. So Andy Izenson is joining the show this week. I have heard Andy speak a couple of times over the years and every time I am so deeply impressed and stretched. And recently, Andy spoke at Amy Jo Goddard’s conference with their colleague and boss, Diana Adams, all about resilient communities and transformative restorative justice. And so I reached out to Andy, and we decided to talk about it on this week’s show. 

Dawn Serra: So, Andy also sent me a list of some of the things that they’ve been thinking about lately. And I’m going to read this list to you because it’s just such a great gateway into Andy’s brain and this really rich conversation that we have. So Andy said, in addition to transformative and restorative justice and community building, they’ve been thinking about the way orthodoxies of capitalism and scarcity and fuse polyamorous community, and that polyamory should be inherently anti-capitalist. The way the state is conspiring with your trauma, disposability, and anxiety, and the fiction of moral purity, resilience and bravery and sex and relationships. And what even is masculinity anyway? So we cover a lot of this ground, and I think you’re going to find the conversation ridiculously rich.

So let me tell you a little bit about Andy. Andy Izenson is an attorney with Diana Adams’ Law and Mediation PLLC, and is a collaborative practitioner, mediator, and passionate advocate, working to reframe conflict through a compassionate and transformative lens. As a member of the National LGBT bar associations Family Law Institute, and the National Lawyers Guild NYC Chapter Executive Committee, Andy is tirelessly committed to support for queer community and families, as well as to a radical anti-assimilationist politic. 

Dawn Serra: So in the main episode, Andy and I definitely talk about justice and punishment, and how we tend to define our kinky communities and poly communities by who we’re kicking out, and the abusers we don’t want on our island, and how that’s actually setting us all up to hurt, and the fantasies that our trauma tells us, and the power of anger and so, so, so much more. And, if you’re a Patreon supporter, you are in for a treat. Because if you support at $3 and above at patreon.com/sgrpodcast, Andy and I did a bonus chat that is about capitalism and scarcity, and polyamorous community. And also how a lot of cis dudes, specifically, tend to get just far enough into questioning some of the models that we have to be like, “I’m polyamorous and doing all the sex,” but not far enough in that they’re not perpetuating a lot of the violence and misogyny. 

It’s a really, really interesting tip of the iceberg chat about polyamory and some of the ways that we need to really be thinking about anti-capitalist perspectives of abundance and showing up for each other; and not only requiring a certain gendered person to do all of the labor for us. Because you know what, it’s not very radical if you’re a polyamorous dude, and you have all these women in your life and you don’t also have men and queer folks and non-binary folks being a part of the community that supports you. So Andy and I go there and if you want to hear it patreon.com/sgrpodcast. So let’s dive into this really, really yummy chat with Andy.

Dawn Serra: Welcome to Sex Gets Real, Andy. I – well, listeners will hear in my voice how fucking excited I am to talk to you today. So welcome to the show.

Andy Izenson: Thank you and I’m glad you started off with swearing because I forgot to ask you if it’s okay to swear.

Dawn Serra: Yes. Be yourself. Do whatever you need to do. We’re just going to have fun and go down the rabbit hole of community and justice and trauma. Wow, all the things that I think so many people are really grappling with right now. So thank you for bringing your experiences and your wisdom and sharing them with us today

Andy Izenson: Thank you for inviting me. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, I have had the immense pleasure of seeing you speak a couple of times. You were on this fantastic closing panel at Woodhull a couple of years ago. And I was just, “Holy shit.” You spoke at a live workshop with Diana Adams at the Sex, Power, and Leadership conference that Amy Jo Goddard put on. And you were talking about justice and community. That’s something that’s been coming up with listener questions and listener feels lately, and so I would love it if we would just open for people who are new to thinking about these things. Can you just talk a little bit about how you are exploring the concept of justice, and specifically some work you’re doing around alternative justice? Because I know a lot of people are hearing transformative justice and restorative justice, but I think a lot of people aren’t quite sure what does that mean.

Andy Izenson: Totally. Yeah, I think for a lot of people it can feel – if they get a little bit of information but not a lot of information, it can feel like the same old, same old. Because it feels like saying, “Oh, you shouldn’t be angry about what happened to you and you should just forgive people and prioritize community bonds and not dealing with bad thing.” Because that’s what a lot of people say. That was the landscape into which I stepped when I first started doing this work. And, there’s not a lot of room for nuance there. But more importantly, there’s not a lot of room for prioritizing the needs of people who have experienced harm and trauma.

So, if it feels like alternative justice systems as they’re being discussed don’t have a room for someone to say, “But I was hurt and I’m angry about it,” and it feels like the only way of having that anger heard and held is to use a punishment based model – it can be really scary because that’s an antagonistic and a violent and painful model. And it’s one that is hard to act on. So the distinction that I want to make here is between a model that’s based in punishment and a model that’s based in transformation. But I want to be clear that the idea which I’ve seen is really pervasive, that the only way to have your anger and your needs and your boundaries heard and held is to use punishment is a misunderstanding of both systems.

Andy Izenson: So when we think about punishment, we think about the stories that we’re told all our lives, the stories that we marinate in for as long and with as much certainty as we’re taught that you have to wear pants when you go outside. And it’s these stories of good guys and bad guys, of heroes and villains. In the end, the hero triumphs over the villain and what that means is that the villain suffers, and by the fact of the villains suffering, the people harmed by the villains actions are inherently healed. That if someone hurts you, the only way you can feel better is if they suffer in turn. That they are punished. They are identified as valueless and punished and thrown away. And so, we play that out in our lives as adults. 

Now I will say, these narratives don’t come from nowhere, right? Our society – American society specifically really needs us to believe that and really needs us to tolerate this categorization of people into good and therefore worthy of protection and a good life, and innocent and having never committed any harm, and bad and worthless and deserving only of punishment. We need to believe this. We need to accept this in order to tolerate living in our society. Because if we started to question it, we would start to question the structure of our criminal justice system, because that’s the machine that runs our criminal justice system. And if we question that, well, then we start questioning the prison industrial complex, and if we start questioning the prison industrial complex, then our entire economy which runs on slave labor comes tumbling down and then where would we be?

Andy Izenson: So our society really needs us to buy into this and so it teaches us this really strongly. And in so doing, it guarantees that if we’re not careful, we’re going to replicate it in the communities that we build, even when we want to try to escape it. Especially for queer folks, for polyamorous folks, for kinky folks – for people who are otherwise questioning the things that they’ve been taught about how they’re supposed to live. This is a thing that’s so deeply rooted that a lot of people don’t notice that they have to get rid of it. And so, it’s really deeply stuck in there and it’s deeply political. So when people’s interaction with, say, queerness or polyamory or kink isn’t inherently political, when being a prison abolitionist isn’t bound up in what it means to be polyamory for you, which it’s not for everybody. It is for some of us. But if it’s not for you, then you don’t notice always that you have to shoehorn out these logics in order to compassionately interact with your community.

A transformative and restorative justice based response to these things that we have learned is about saying, “No, I reject the idea that some people have value and some people don’t. I reject the idea that there are good people and bad people, and that it’s necessary to categorize everyone around me into one of those two boxes.” And instead, “I want to come at the community that I exist in, the people in it, the way that they treat me and the way that I treat them, and the way that we respond to and heal harm from a place of radical love.” That’s the basis of those ideas. And just as a side note, you will probably see if you go into this – the researching of this field at all, you will probably see some meshugas around restorative justice or transformative justice. Some people say they’re interchangeable. Some people say they don’t overlap at all and fight about it. I think that as long as you’re on the same page about what you mean by those terms with the people that you’re talking to, it doesn’t really matter. The way that I understand the distinction, they can be used together. And the distinction, as I understand it is simply this, that a restorative justice based approach to harm is about healing the specific harm that was committed. It’s about identifying what the practical effects of whatever incidents is at hand are and how they specifically can be mitigated and trying to provide healing in that specific instance. And that transformative justice is about taking a little bit more of a zoomed out lens and saying, “Okay, there are elements – there are factors in all parties involved in the community in which this harm was embedded, in the larger community in which we live, in the society that taught us everything we know about what it is human. There are factors and all of these things that contributed to allowing this harm to happen. Let’s work together as a community to identify those factors and see what we can do to mitigate them.” 

Andy Izenson: When there’s something like sexual violence in community, a purely restorative justice based approach is about, in what ways can the responsible party support the harmed party and make sure that they don’t encounter the responsible party when they don’t want to, maybe pay some therapy bills, and set some particular constraints around their own behavior to make the harmed party feel a little more safe as they move through their community and a little more secure that what happened isn’t going to happen again. And then when you bring in a transformative justice based lens to bear on that same situation, it also says, “Okay, we live in community. We’ve been taught a lot of things about entitlement to the feminine body. We’ve learned a lot of things about what sex is and what consent is, and a lot of them are shitty and toxic. And a lot of them contributed to this pain happening. How can we work together as a community to identify all of those things that we collectively learned that led this harm to be possible and work together to change those as well?” 

I was recently working with someone who throws events in new york city that had some incidents of sexual violence happen at those events. And, as we were talking with their community of people that work on the events and who consider themselves part of the community of the event. We were talking about this particular responsible party and this particular harmed party, and the ways in which their friends are going to support them both in moving forward and letting this be a place of growth instead of just a place of pain. And also, we were talking about, “Okay, what’s the policy at these events around doing certain drugs? What’s the policy at these events around checking in with someone when you can see that they’re having a sexual experience that they don’t look stoked about? What’s the policy around having dungeon monitors – people who are there as security staff? How can we look at all of the things that contributed to this being possible and try to remove those factors to take this opportunity to transform our community and reorient it away from violence and towards liberation?” So that’s the distinction as I see it. And as such, they can totally coexist, right? You use both at once, ideally. But I just want to flag that’s how I use those terms. Different people use them differently. Some people use restorative justice to mean that whole range including what I call transformative justice. Some people say that transformative justice describes that whole range. We’re at a point in history where we’re very focused on terminology and it has gotten negative effects. But that is something that you may see some disagreements around. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Thank you first of all for that. The ideas are so massive and it’s exciting, but it’s really scary. And, I remember the first time I encountered ideas around eliminating a punishment model and moving more towards alternative justice models. As a survivor, I felt a lot of anger. I think that was tied up and there’s still a part of me that wants vengeance, but just really having to grapple with some of the stories that I carried around – what would make me feel better? What are the stories around me that have taught me that I feel better when somebody else suffers?

Andy Izenson: Right, right. The moment the thing that set me on the path of learning about this stuff was the moment that I discovered that a guy that I used to be with that, let’s say hadn’t treated me as well as someone as glorious as me deserves to be treated. I found out years later that he was trying to kill himself. And I was so confused because I didn’t feel better. I had spent so many years assuming that I wanted him to suffer and die, that I didn’t actually think about whether or not I wanted him to suffer and die. And now that I was confronted with the idea of him actually being literally dead and it didn’t help, I realized that there was some assumption I was making in my thinking about it that was wrong. So I went off on a researching spree and found my way to a guy named Hasshan Batts, who’s a coach, a mediator, and an alternative justice systems practitioner. And that was where I started learning about this stuff. 

Dawn Serra: Wow. Yeah, it’s something that you had written that really struck me in the feels that I have felt personally and that I also see reflected in a lot of the reactions that happen in community when bad things happen. Like when there’s a big kerfuffle in a kink community and it’s like, “Abuser, we’ve known you’re an abuser forever! Get out!” And it’s just this reaction is how we tell ourselves this story, that if we can just find the problematic people, then we’ll be safe. And that’s the end of the story. So it’s this quest to find the bad ones to get rid of them so that we can all relax. 

Andy Izenson: Right, right. That was one of the first problems that I saw is that, if we imagine that we have this island and the good people get to stay on this island, and the bad people have to leave, and thereby we will create ourselves a safe Island. The problem with that is that it ends with an empty island. Because there’s actually no such thing as a good person. And there’s no way to exist in the world and interact with humans in the world that doesn’t open you to the possibility of harming someone and being harmed. So it’s a fantasy, and it makes sense. Especially when we’re traumatized. It makes sense that this fantasy feels really, really important to us. Because the only thing that the part of you that’s traumatized wants, and the thing that it will do anything to get is to feel safe. It makes sense that buying into this societal narrative is a really easy tool for it. And that makes it really hard to give it up. 

I do want to circle back to what you said about anger because I think anger is a really crucial part of this conversation. So, I told my therapist – I was talking to my therapist a little while ago, and I said to them, I said, “I don’t think I’m a very angry person.” And my therapist laughed so hard, they cried.

Dawn Serra: That’s a good therapist.

Andy Izenson: So I like, “Okay, maybe, actually, what I mean to say is that I am a very angry person, but the way that I was taught to deal with anger means that it turns into a feedback loop and twists itself back around and turns into being angry at myself.” That’s not actually productive. Because when anger – anger has a job. When it’s just swirling around making you feel bad and making you want to knock down cities, it’s not doing its job because what its job is is to be a fuel source for setting effective boundaries. What anger is supposed to be doing when it’s doing its job is saying, “I know that I deserve to be okay and something happened to me that wasn’t okay.” And, it is often misdirected, because it feels like it should be about other people. Because its narrative is about other people. But really, it’s about you. It’s about putting up defenses for yourself and having them strengthened by the power inherent in that anger. 

I think a lot of the time, it feels like punishment. And often, the punishment wrapped up in the criminal justice system, specifically, is the only meaningful or effective expression of anger that, “I’m angry and the only way I will not be angry anymore is if the person that hurt me goes to jail.” And it’s really interesting because actually, playing out the things that anger tells you at once, doesn’t actually address the feeling of anger in the same way as like – you ever have anxiety ?

Dawn Serra: Oh, I live. I live in anxiety. 

Andy Izenson: So sometimes, I have what could be termed anxiety attacks. I don’t know if you’re familiar with this phenomenon. But when I’m having anxiety, the narrative of that anxiety is like – it says to me, “Okay, Andy. You’re bad and everything you do is bad. And you should just hide under the bed until you die and that will prevent anything else bad from happening.” It’s got this whole story for me about what the problem is and what I should do. And, if I listen to it and take what it’s telling me at face value, the solution for me is to hide under the bed until I am dead. I have learned that that’s not actually a good solution, that taking it at face value and obeying that emotion doesn’t actually solve the problem. And that a better way of interacting with that narrative is to say, “Okay, anxiety, I hear you. And I think what you’re trying to say is ‘I forgot to take my pills this morning.’” Or, “I think what you’re trying to say is ‘I’m overwhelmed and I need to take 10 minutes and walk around the block.’” 

So similarly, when anger comes and says, “I want this person to be dead. They are bad. They’re a villain. While they are okay and living in the world, I can never be okay. They need to be destroyed. They need to die.” The trick is not to say, “Okay, got it. Got my marching orders, anger. Thank you.” But rather to say, “Okay, I hear you. And I think what you’re trying to say is, ‘I’m hurt.’” And I believe if you are the sort of person who likes to call things, the word mindfulness, I think this practice of saying, “Okay, I hear you. And I think what you’re trying to say,” to your emotions could be termed mindfulness.

Andy Izenson: Through transformative justice lens, we’re talking about giving space to that anger and having it not just be you telling it that you hear it. And so it’s about having your whole community come together and say,” Okay, I hear you,” to that anger into that pain. And in a lot of cases, being expressed and held and shown love and care in that way, can obviate this instinctive need for it to be played out through punishment. That’s what actually helps with being angry – not punishment.

Dawn Serra: And I think that’s something that culturally we are so uncomfortable with, is being able to sit with someone’s anger and hurt, and being able to witness it without either taking it on as being directed at us or without taking it on as something we’ve got to fix which feels very burdensome and also is impossible. But it’s not something a lot of us are terribly skilled at and practicing that also means you’re going to get it wrong and it’s going to feel bad. That’s something else I think that we’re not really great at is practicing and making mistakes, especially when we’re talking about relationships, boundaries, consent, community. Because we take this all or nothing approach, we don’t really get a chance to practice and repair. I think that’s a big miss for us and one of the reasons why we keep perpetuating so many of these harmful things. 

Andy Izenson: This is what we talk about when we talk about resilience is the idea that like the valuable work here is not about working super duper hard to make sure you never ever, ever hurt anyone. But rather, cultivating relationships that are resilient enough to hold things like

oops, and ouch and no, and not break. Cultivating resilient interpersonal relationships is also the practice of cultivating resilient communities. Because if you have interpersonal relationships with that basis of trust, where it’s possible to say, “Hey, that thing that you did, I feel really not okay about and actually I’m really angry at you,” and have that be something that strengthens a relationship instead of that destroys it. That’s how you end up with a community that can hold those things as well. 

Dawn Serra: Oh, my God, that would be such an incredible world to live in.

Andy Izenson: Right. How do we get there? 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, that’s a question that I ask myself a lot. And I’m not sure that I know. But I know there’s a lot of people in the world, like you, who are working on trying to find ways. And I think it starts with us being able to hold that deep discomfort and uncertainty. I mean, being able to say, “I am really angry. That hurt a lot and I’m not feeling particularly okay about it right now.” And to have the response be like, “Wow, I receive that and here we are. Let’s dive in and let me tell you in this.” I mean that’s a hard thing for both sides to do. And I’m hungry for more of it. 

Andy Izenson: Yeah. You know what, I think it’s like how you get to Carnegie Hall. How do we get to a new world? It’s like how you get to Carnegie Hall – Practice, young man. If we start with little ouches and start exercising that muscle of holding that sort of thing and say, “Hey, I actually feel like that thing you said was like a little bit racist. Can we talk about it?” Or just, “Hey, you. You stepped on my foot and I would prefer that you not.” Or, “When you went to that party without me, it kind of hurt my feelings because I wanted to go to that party.” Small things that build up into the ability to have that kind of conversation in a way that’s practiced and grown from a soil of trust. Because you have to know that your relationship is strong enough to hold that before you can trust to do it. And the way to learn that is by practicing.

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Dawn Serra: I get a lot of people who are kind of new to sex positivity and they’re kind of new to finding their kinks or to polyamory or whatever the case may be, and there’s this resistance to diving into the politics that surround all of the things. I think this is such a beautiful example of, at a personal level and a communal level, if we’re starting to practice really being able to say, “Oops, that hurt. Wow, I really fucked that up”. And to have people say, “Yeah, you do and I’m staying.” We also at the same time have to be questioning the stories that are constantly coming in about perfectionism, about efficiency, about who gets to be loved and what bodies are valuable. And as soon as you start recognizing those things that ties us then to these massive systems that are at play, and I think a lot of people really want to resist the politics of that, but it’s crucial. They’re deeply, intimately intertwined. 

Andy Izenson: Absolutely. I think that it’s impossible to be – well, I won’t say that. I think that it’s shitty to be in a sexual subculture and imagine that that’s separable from radical politics And I know– God, the discourse, right? There’s all this stuff about should polyamorous straight people be allowed at pride? Should asexuals be allowed at pride? Do you get to call yourself queer if you’re kinky? I feel like it’s barking up the wrong tree because the real question is, are you down to fight? Are you doing the work? I am less invested in the righteousness of a person’s individual identity than I am in what they’re doing. So not so much where are you personally placed in the systems of power and control that infuse our world? Not how do they affect your life? But how much are you working to dismantle that?

Dawn Serra: Yes, yes. And I think the seductive thing is, there is this sense of power and control and of doing something when we focus on those – should you even be at this event? And does your identity qualify you for this? It feels like action and it feels like power. But like in the grand scheme of things, it’s not actually shifting us towards less violence and more access to resources, and changing the way that the world works. It’s just this little spike of like, “Ooh, that felt good.” And then we don’t really have a bigger impact. 

Andy Izenson: I think there are real – there’s real value that comes in only spaces. When I’m in a trans only space, for example, and we can really dig into stuff without having to stop and do 101s for cis people. It’s awesome, and it’s healing, and I love it. But I also recognize that it’s a blunt blade. Because when I say, “Stop and do 101s for cis people,” what I actually mean specifically as stop and do 101s for people who are not prioritizing the needs of the trans people that are there. That haven’t taken the time to educate themselves, that want to make the story and the event about their needs instead of about what it’s supposed to be about. And that doesn’t map on to cis people one to one. Cis people is going to keep out a lot of those people, but it’s a blunt blade. 

And so, I think that’s the other real problem with facing the boundaries of your community around who you’re keeping out rather than who you’re inviting in. And, I think reimagining what we mean when we say community, to think much, much smaller and to use it to mean rather the people with whom you actually have built trust. The people that you know actually have your back and you’ve got theirs. The people that you know as strongly as know anything, that you won’t throw each other away. It’s not about saying, “I won’t hurt you and I trust that you won’t hurt me.” It’s about saying, “I love you and I know that you don’t want to hurt me. And I trust you not to throw me away.” 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. And that’s, to me, such a radically different experience. When I think about being in those groups of friends or chosen family, where we have been able to hold each other through grief and loss, and rage and celebrations, and changing and death – and all the things. That has such a different feel than walking into, say, like a kink community where the reason it’s a community is that these 30 people show up at this munch all the time and sometimes do things together. That has a very different feel. 

Andy Izenson: Right. It’s a totally different thing and using the same word to describe them both is a little goofy. I think to circle this back to shame – I think doing the work in a community, the way that we’re talking about it, in a community that’s made of connections that are resilient and based in trust is the way to move through the shame of having hurt someone when you really don’t want to have hurt someone. This is the whole Brené Brown thing is that shame is so paralyzing. It’s so cold, it’s so chilling that it keeps us from being able to respond in a way that is caring for the person that we hurt. And, it’s just like these other emotions that we’re talking about. It says what it needs and it’s wrong. It says, “I need isolation. I need not to be looked at. I need to hide.” And what it actually needs is to be loved and to be in a space of nonjudgmental witnessing. That’s one of the primary principles of restorative justice talking circles is that when you’ve got someone who’s committed harm sitting in a circle, there needs to be someone sitting next to them that will love them no matter what they did. And having that open and nonjudgmental – I’m not going to say unconditional, because I don’t mean that it’s the kind of love that can never include separation or can never include the ending of a relationship. But unconditional meaning there’s nothing that you can do to remove yourself from the pool of people that I believe deserve to be fundamentally okay. Radical love. 

Radical love is easy when it’s someone that you like and get along with. It’s easy for me to say, “Dawn, I have radical love for you. I believe that I want you to live in a world where you have what you need and you’re safe and you’re cared for. And I believe that you have value as a person.” That’s easy. Doing that towards someone that hurt you or that hurt someone you care about. Or that, you know would hurt you if they could – that’s hard. That’s really hard work and that’s why radical love is work and not hippie bullshit.

Dawn Serra: Right. And I just want to name, as you were talking about, I think just because of online culture being what it is and so many activists spaces these days – there is a big fear that a lot of people I’ve talked to have, myself included, about saying the wrong thing or doing the wrong thing and then the great big massive “Your band forever” kind of thing that happens. When you are talking about someone who’s caused harm sitting in the circle and having someone sitting next to them saying, “I love you and you’re worthy. And I see you and I know this is hard,” it created this feeling of space inside of me of like, “Okay, well maybe if I fuck up, I don’t end up isolated, alone, without resources, dying, starving in the woods. Maybe I’ll still be loved.” So maybe I don’t have to spend so much energy policing myself and I can actually really try and exchange and show up. And know messing up doesn’t mean I die alone forever.

Andy Izenson: I really want that to be true. I mean, that’s especially hard for those of us who make our living on our reputations, right? That it feels like a sort of Damocles all the time. And it lines up really neatly with my anxiety disorder too. Because my anxiety is always telling me that I’m on the brink of being thrown away and also I see around me, people being thrown away in real life all the time. And it’s so scary. I think a lot of us are scared all the time about it. I mean, I’m not going to actually overgeneralize. I’ll just speak for myself – I’m scared all the time. 

And that’s the thing that’s been motivating me to narrow my focus and instead of trying to change the character of the wider community that could be better described as affinity group – the group of people who share a trait or share an interest or share a proclivity: the kink community, the poly community, sorry, polyamorous community, the trans community, the queer community. Instead of trying to change the character of those things, I’ve been shifting my focus to build a real community that’s based in mutual trust and mutual radical love where we all know that we don’t want to throw each other away. And that means starting with three people, four people, and building slowly as you build. Rather than saying, “Every person in the state of New York who is interested in these six things counts as my community, even if we’ve never met each other.” That’s nonsensical.

Andy Izenson: So, what I’ve been trying to do as a political matter, but also as a anti-anxiety measure is build my community around me in a way that gives me a little bit of trust that I can say some dumb ass shit or I can fuck up in the sexual realm, or I can make real mistakes and it’s not going to shatter my entire world. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah. Oh my god, it makes me so hungry. More. Yes, please. Can we all start thinking about these things and creating and practicing these places? I mean, it’s not easy but it’s rich.

Andy Izenson: Yeah. And, you know what, actually it feels good. When you use your anger for what it’s for, and you say to someone that you trust to care and hold you, “That thing you did wasn’t okay.” And you trust when you’re saying it that they care that they want you to be okay and that they’re committed to taking care of you – It feels good. It’s like jumping off a zip line. And that first step, you feel like you’re going to die and then it catches you and you’re flying. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, I just had that experience a couple of weeks ago. For the first time in my relationship with my husband, Alex, actually said the words, “I am angry. That behavior is not okay.” And I’ve said dancy versions of that in the past, but I just had this moment of clarity of like, “I’m allowed to be angry right now and I’m allowed to say this makes me angry, and it’s not okay.” I did just that. And then I was like, I need some space and I left. The next day, we had this wonderful conversation of like, “That’s the first time you’ve said that to me. Thank you for saying that to me.” And it created this beautiful sense of, one, I’m not going to die for saying that. And, two, it can be held so now I have this sense of like, “Whoa. Now I don’t have to tell myself stories and hold things in and try and twist things. I can trust that it’s going to be held and received. And now we can do something much deeper with that.” 

Andy Izenson: Absolutely. I think saying no is the same way. You know when a toddler first figures out what no is and they just say no to everything? When I got to the point in my own trauma processing, where, after decades of not being able to I was finally able to say no to things I didn’t want in the realm of sex. I had a toddler moment about it. I was like, “I can just decide that I don’t want to do something and I can say that to my partner, and they will believe me and we won’t do the thing that I don’t want.” This is incredible. And I went on this little spree where every time for a little while – every time they asked me that if I wanted to have sex, I’d be like, “No!” And then I come back 10 minutes later and be like, “I just said that because it felt good. I do.”

Dawn Serra: And I’m allowed to change my mind.

Andy Izenson: Yeah. I just wanted to practice feeling what it feels like to know that it’s safe for me to say no, and that you’ll still love me and that nothing bad will happen. Yeah, but also, I do actually want to have sex right now.

Dawn Serra: What a wonderful thing. Wouldn’t it be incredible if for all of those uncomfortable places, we could just say the thing and to have someone – I think the other thing, too, is if I say, “I’m angry and that behavior is not okay,” if the response on the other side is, “Well, now I feel disappointed and now I feel angry too.” And for that to be okay, now we’re in a really cool place because we can both have our feelings or we can all have our feelings collectively, and it doesn’t mean we’re going anywhere. It doesn’t mean anybody’s being thrown away. It might mean we need some space, it might mean we need to have a couple of conversations that are uncomfortable. But we all get to just show up and be seen and be real. It’s not about manipulating or tricking or coercing or pretending, and then having that resentment come in. I mean, it’s just like – boom! “We’re here. Okay, now let’s figure this out together.” 

Andy Izenson: Right, and the fullness of yourself and your emotions, and all of your emotional reactions, even the ones that don’t make any sense, even the ones that you’re embarrassed about, even the ones that aren’t the types of reactions that you actually want to play out in the world. If you can, instead of letting them overwhelm you and just reacting out of them, actually name them and interact with them as what they are. Then you can share them in the shared space of your relationship instead of having them just be your responsibility to suffer through alone. Well, it’s hard. 

Dawn Serra: Oh my god, I know. It’s like – I don’t know. Everything in me right now is just lit up because I’m like, ‘Oh my god, this is so good.’ But I would love to end with a little bit of a topic change just because it brings me a lot of delight to talk about this stuff. So, your list of things that have been on your mind is – it brought me when I read it last night. But I loved your last one. We talked about this a little bit before we hopped on air, but your last thing that’s been on your mind lately is what even is masculinity anyway? 

I would love to just spend a couple of minutes geeking out with you around that because it’s such a mind fuck when you really start going into it. I’d love to know what has been your process of peeling that onion? 

Andy Izenson: Oh my god. It’s really stressful. Here’s the deal. So I’m – you could say trans masculine if you wanted to use the word. In a professional sense, I move through the world in a vaguely dudely way. And, I am sometimes but not always afforded those benefits that come with other people looking at you and thinking you’re a dude. Sometimes I get that, sometimes they don’t. Usually people look at me and think I’m an alien, which is a whole different thing. But what this means is that I’ve really been grappling with and trying to participate in conversations around masculinity because I know a lot of people who come to masculinity as adults. When the experience of the alleviation or somewhat alleviation of gender dysphoria and the experience of the alleviation of misogyny line up, it can get a little intoxicating.

Because you’re like, “Holy shit, all of a sudden, everyone’s treating me a little bit less like shit.” If they think I’m a cis dude. And also, my gender hurts less and so these two things must be the same thing because they’re happening at the same time. It can be easy to fall into other conflations as well. 

Andy Izenson: I see a lot of people in my neighborhood of gender, who they know that femininity is bad for them – being a woman is bad for them. And they extrapolate from that that femininity and being a woman are just bad. And so, there can be a lot of misogyny there. It’s shitty and you got to tread carefully. So we’re trying to figure out, what is masculinity anyway? And as it plays out in the larger world, a lot of the time masculinity is primarily composed of the rejection of femininity. 

Dawn Serra: Yes. 

Andy Izenson: Right? It’s a negative trait – negative in the critical theory sense not in the bad like it is defined by that which it is not. It is inherently in that way shaped by living in a world that is infused with violent misogyny. And so, when we consider what would my masculinity be if it had developed in a world that was not infused by violent misogyny, what would it be if it were not made of the fear of being feminine? What would be left? And, maybe there’s something in there and maybe all of the traits, all of the things that answer that question are things that are coded feminine. Maybe femininity is just what we call being our best selves and masculinity is just pushing some of those things away. Or maybe there’s something real in there. 

We’re conflating a lot of things here when we say masculinity and femininity – there’s your internal experience of your own magical landscape of what you understand your gender to be and then there’s how you move through the world and how people treat you. And then there’s your expression, and what you do with your body, and your clothing, and your hair – all of these things. We call them all gender and it’s kind of silly to use the same word for all of them because they’re all different. But, what is masculinity when it’s not toxic? What’s left? If what’s left is just another way of looking at femininity, what does that mean for me as a trans masculine person? I haven’t found any good answers, but I am not stressed about it.

Dawn Serra: Yeah, I keep landing on this weird place that I don’t know is – I didn’t even know if there is a right. But it doesn’t feel like it’s the thing to land on, but it’s kind of where I keep landing right now. So, I know that’ll change but when I just really think, “Okay, if we just exist in a world where, I don’t know, everyone just accepted gender was a spectrum and we didn’t have this rejection of femininity. And from the youngest of ages, we were allowed to just simply express ourselves as we wanted to express ourselves. Would there even be a thing? Would we even have that language anymore?”

I just kind of keep going to, “No.” I don’t even think we would use these words anymore. I think we would have a whole different set of vocabulary or descriptive motions for whatever it was, but it feels like we just utterly be ourselves. And maybe that defies…

Andy Izenson: Do you mean that we wouldn’t have words like trans and cis or that we wouldn’t have words like men and women? 

Dawn Serra: I’m not sure, maybe all of it. I mean, if we were just utterly accepted for however we wanted to express ourselves and how we felt on the inside, I’m sure we would have categories because that’s just how the human mind works. But, I guess, when I just really think radically, like beyond the binaries and beyond kind of the systems of oppression and beyond the violence – I have to imagine that it’s just going to be a completely different paradigm. So maybe the words we have now don’t even get us there. 

Andy Izenson: I think that– Well, two things. Okay, like six things. I think that if we get to a place societally where what children are taught about gender, is that everything that you are is exactly what you’re supposed to be. And that they are loved in the fullness of their understanding of themselves, and the flexibility of that, and how it evolves, and the ways that it hurts, and the ways that it doesn’t. I think that everybody will be trans in the future. Because I think that we will have just a large scale recognition of what trans people already know, which is that nothing about the circumstances of what your body is when you’re born defines who you are as an adult. 

Dawn Serra: Yes.

Andy Izenson: And that the idea that it should is the idea of cis-ness. So, I think cis-ness will become obsolete. And I’m stoked about that. 

Dawn Serra: Yes!

Andy Izenson: Listen, Dawn, have you heard children talk about this stuff?

Dawn Serra: No. 

Andy Izenson: It’s incredible. The kids are alright. There’s this organization that I work with called the Ackerman Institute that does a conference every year called The Gender Conference East, which is for support and advocacy for trans kids and their families. And so, I get to meet and work with and do programming with these children like three, four or five – children, who are – they’re just fine. They’re fine. I met this little trans girl and I think she was five. And she came over to my table. I was helping people do identity document pages, and she came over to my table. And she said, “Your ears are pointy like my ears.” I was like, “Yeah, buddy, do you want to have five about it?” And she came around the back of my table and we high fived about it. And she said, “I want to be an elf.” And I said, “Well, you want to hear the secret about this? The secret is that you can be whatever you want to be.” She was like, “I know.”

These children are incredible. They’re supported, they’re loved, they are resourced. Most importantly, and I think the Internet has a lot to do with this, the time gap between when they started to feel like there was something that needed to shift and when they had access to language, community, identity, and resources has become tiny. For a lot of these kids, it’s days or weeks. They say to their parent, “Something’s not right. I don’t want to wear these boy clothes. I want to wear these girl clothes.” And the child or their parent can go on Google and say, “I think my kid is a girl and not a boy as I previously thought. What do?” And immediately, there’s resources and information and connection. 

Andy Izenson: I look at my trans adult community members – people who are, let’s say, over 25 and everybody I know is traumatized, just from the fact of being trans. From living in a world for 15 to 25 years that wants them to be dead. And specifically, living as a trans person and not knowing that being a trans person is a thing. Because I spent a decade in that place and the only information that I had – the only thing that I knew – I didn’t know the word queer, I didn’t know the word trans. I was small and rural, and there was no internet and there was no community. The only thing I knew was that there was something wrong with me and that no one would ever understand, and that it would never be okay. And that my whole life, I was just going to be broken and I was never going to have anyone to talk to about it. That was just what I knew for 20 years. That’s not good for a person. 

Dawn Serra: No.

Andy Izenson: And these children get to skip all of that and go straight to the good stuff, and I’m so fucking stoked about it. I’m so excited for them.

Dawn Serra: The thing I’m feeling as you talk about that is like, and I’ve talked with other guests about this around other things that have to do with sex and consent, but to be so resourced and supported is to basically eliminate the mental olympics and the anxiety that we as adults have. So often adults ascribe their complicated feelings about this thing that they’re not quite sure of and haven’t learned yet to kids. But as you’re sharing, when kids just have a chance to just be accepted for who they are, there’s not that distress. It’s just like, “Oh, well I’m me and that’s okay. Because these people love me. So, moving on. I like cats.” 

Andy Izenson: The kids are fine and the other amazing thing is – their classmates, their cis classmates, their classmates who just know them and love them as children. They don’t give two tenths of a fuck. They’re like, “This is Nicole. She’s a girl. She uses the girl’s bathroom. What’s your problem?” Every legal case where there’s been a problem with a trans kid in a school bathroom or something like that – it’s not the other kids. It’s someone’s douchebag grandpa getting involved. The kids don’t care. The kids understand the world that we live in so much better than we do. They’re fine, they’re fine. And on consent stuff as well, even kids who are in college now.

I teach consent workshops at colleges, and I was doing one last year at, I think, it was Columbia. And I said – I was in the section of my class where I talked about trauma and how trauma affects our ability to communicate. And, this one kid, this one blonde lacrosse ass looking dude, he says, “I just realized that if I ask someone to have sex with me and they say yes, it might be because they don’t feel okay saying no. How do I make sure that people feel safe saying no to me?” 

Dawn Serra: Wow.

Andy Izenson: And I was like, “I need a minute.” This 18 year old lacrosse bro is asking the right questions. The kids are alright. We’re all fucked but they’re fine.

Dawn Serra: I know. I’ve been feeling lots of despair lately, but that just gives me so much hope of like, “Well, maybe we’re screwed. But, hey, we’ve got these amazing young people that are coming up behind us that are going to be like, ‘Well, they sure got it wrong. Here’s how we can do it better.’”

Andy Izenson: Totally. And thinking as a queer person and thinking about– Do you know Carol Queen?

Dawn Serra: Yes. 

Andy Izenson: She gave the keynote at the Woodhull Summit, which is a very cute conference in DC. She gave the keynote at Woodhall in 2011, I think. And, she started off her talk, coming up to the podium, which she was barely taller than and sort of banging her fist on it and saying, “You know what’s wrong with this day and world? Ahistoricity.” And it’s true. That one line has been, at this point, just echoing around my head for seven years. And I think it’s particularly true for queers, because a lot of us don’t have elders. We were supposed to have a generation of people that were teaching us how to be queers and how to live in the world. And we lost them to AIDS. 

My generation of queers and trans people, a lot of us just don’t have any connections with elders. And so fostering those connections with those elders that are still around is crucial, connecting with our ancestors, and learning about our legacy, and what our community is historically, and building connections with that ancestral line – It’s crucial. And also, we can be the last generation that has to go through that. These kids will have elders and they’re going to be us and that’s why we have to survive.

Dawn Serra: And that’s why we have to ask big questions and get uncomfortable and learn and grow and stretch so that we can have these tools, their sources…

Andy Izenson: So that we can be there for them.

Dawn Serra: Right, exactly.

Andy Izenson: I think we’ve gotten a little bit off the track of masculinity.

Dawn Serra: But it’s important.

Andy Izenson: I’m excited to see what the kids do with gender. It’s going to be stuff that we can’t even imagine. And I’m excited to see what happens when we have a generation of trans adults who are not inherently traumatized by the fact of being trans and can just grow and blossom into the fullness of themselves and their identity and their community – without having to climb all of these mountains of trauma and pain and oppression that we have to scale before we can even consider reaching out to build community. 

Dawn Serra: Yeah, I’m not sure I even know what kind of a world that’s going to feel like or be like but I’m sure excited by the possibility.

Andy Izenson: Yeah, yeah. It’s going to be beautiful. It’s also probably going to be profoundly alienating for us. 

Dawn Serra: Yes. 

Andy Izenson: I’m excited for the trans children to be like, “God, why are you so upset about being trans?”

Dawn Serra: I had to walk uphill both ways.

Andy Izenson: I had to puberty uphill both ways. Get off my back.

Dawn Serra: Oh, what a wonderful, wonderful world that’ll be. Well, I know we have gone over our time just a little bit. And this has been so nourishing for me and I’m sure for everybody listening. I’m wondering, Andy, can you tell people how they can find you online and stay in touch and learn more and follow your amazing adventures? 

Andy Izenson: Totally. So, I have a day job. I don’t just yell all the time. But that’s like 70% of it. My firm is called Diana Adams Law and Mediation and we have a newsletter where we send out emails about what we’re up to and where you can go if you want to listen to us yell. It’s me and my boss whose name is Diana Adams who is a real mentor for me and has taught me so much of what I know about existing fearlessly. So you can sign up for that newsletter. You can also follow me on Twitter @andyeyeballs. And there’s a lot of yelling there and also a lot of lipstick selfies and pictures of dogs that I meet. I am mostly in the New York area, but I teach all over the place. And if you want me to come and yell for your organization, you can email me. I’m at andy.izenson [at] gmail. 

Dawn Serra: Well, I will have links to all those things in the show notes so people can just click through and follow and sign up for all the things. Andy, thank you so much for being here and lending your ideas and your wisdom and your experiences to this conversation. It has been fantastic. 

Andy Izenson: Thank you, Dawn. I really appreciate you emailing me. 

Dawn Serra: Yes. To everybody who tuned in, thank you so much for joining us. If you have questions, comments, stories you want to share, head to dawnserra.com. There’s a contact form there you can submit anonymously. I hope you found this as nourishing as I did and I will, of course, talk to you next week. Thanks. Bye.

Dawn Serra: A huge thanks to The Vocal Few, the married duo behind the music featured in this week’s intro and outro. Find them at vocalfew.com. Head to patreon.com/sgrpodcast to support the show and get awesome weekly bonuses. 

As you look towards the next week, I wonder what will you do differently that rewrites an old story, revitalizes a stuck relationship or helps you to connect more deeply with your pleasure?