Treading the Treacherous Waters of Our Political Climate

To this day, I still haven’t mastered treading water. While I enjoy swimming and am competent enough to feel safe in pools and in calm, natural bodies of water, I know my limitations. I remain grateful that unlike some of my friends, I never had to take a mandated swimming test to graduate from high school or college. Without question, I would’ve failed because of my inability to stay afloat using my limbs beyond a minute or two. Treading water requires understanding your body, regulating your breathing, and adopting a mindset fixed on buoyancy. It's harder than it may seem. But once mastered, the skill can prove lifesaving.

Since the second inauguration of Donald Trump, many of us in marginalized and minoritized communities as well as accomplices in creating a more just, equitable, and peaceful world have been trying and failing to effectively tread the icy, shark-infested, and murky waters of our political climate. During the first month of his second, nonconsecutive term as president of the United States, he began working feverishly toward a vision of the nation and of the world that denigrates, excludes, and punishes millions of people — especially documented and undocumented immigrants from the Global South and Black, poor and working-class, queer, trans, and/or disabled people. Women, girls, gender-expansive, nonbinary, and agender people fall under all the groups targeted by the Trump administration. Amid a flurry of executive orders aimed at re-segregating the federal government, defunding government programs serving a multitude of communities, intensifying the anti-immigrant efforts of the past 20 years, and violently enforcing a rigid but nonexistent gender binary, it feels nearly impossible to keep our heads above water.

In this moment, our calls for marches, boycotts, action from elected officials, and even legal recourse in a judicial system that routinely defends and upholds injustice may feel ineffectual. But it is important to ground struggles against the tide with a more in-depth understanding of what we are up against, a regulation of our responses to that which is unconscionable, and a full embrace of a consciousness and a set of strategies rooted in liberatory principles. To swim against a ruthless current of repression, authoritarianism, and the swift, systemic dismantling of progress made toward a more just and equitable world requires a ferocious tenacity as well as a resolve to remain undeterred despite the tremendous losses already experienced and yet to come.

In other words, to survive this ruthless current, it’s time to tread water and build our strength to swim toward a new horizon. Treading water allows us to survive the viciousness of what we’re up against and gives us time to build upon our existing networks of care and mobilization and to craft new strategies of resistance. And feminists have a significant role to play in the collective effort to stay afloat undertaken by those further marginalized by Trump’s policies.

It is not merely that women, girls, gender-expansive, nonbinary, and agender people have already been impacted by the torrent of executive orders and the tenor of Trump’s words whenever he addresses us — though that should be enough to incite resistance. Trump’s multifrontal attacks on vulnerable and minoritized communities are meant to destabilize and disorient. The president’s agenda also strives to further divide an already divided nation. He is pitting minoritized communities against one another by attacking all these communities simultaneously and making it more difficult to build sustainable coalitions. When you’re under attack, it can be very hard to focus on your neighbor being attacked as well. Where and how to expend our resistive energy when the assaults on our lives and livelihoods are so plentiful and ongoing?

As we resist, it will be helpful for us to learn from the movements and organizing traditions of vulnerable, multiply marginalized, colonized, dispossessed, surveilled, and criminalized populations across the globe. The first weeks of Trump’s presidency have brought a barrage of efforts to routinize unfreedom and deprivation in the United States. Political and economic power is being consolidated by people who are emboldened by their ability to extract, exploit, loot, pillage, and demonize. Contending with this necessitates resistance from those relegated to the statuses of extracted, exploited, looted, pillaged, and demonized. Simply put, those who bear the brunt of this inestimable onslaught on communities, the planet, and sustainable futures — many of whom warned us about the danger of a second Trump presidency and accurately foresaw the implementation of much of Project 2025 — offer examples for how to tread these treacherous waters.

When feminist scholar and activist Barbara Ransby said, “there’s both a commonality of oppression and a commonality of resistance, and solidarity gets forged across both,” in her 2023 interview with Feminist Futures, she reaffirmed a commitment to becoming “fluent in one another’s struggles.” Fluency in struggles is a strategy for treading hazardous waters. We must learn from one another and unlearn as well. Unlearning is not just discarding misinformation, it is an active commitment to undoing the effects of that misinformation on our relationships to one another. Unlearning is also about reassessing our relationships to each other, to institutions, and to systems with the intent of shifting the way we see and do things. The spaces of rigorous discomfort and humility establish a foundation for radical coalition-building. Surviving in this political climate entails accepting the urgency of deep study, strategic mobilization, and meaningful coalition-building amid a cacophony of cries and chaos.

What can we do? How do we tread water and attempt to swim? For those with financial means, contribute funds to existing organizations challenging the legality of Trump’s executive orders. Join or become more involved with labor organizing occurring across the country to combat the erosion of workers’ rights. Seek out and amplify the work of individuals and organizations in your local communities that oppose the torrent of policies aimed at further marginalizing minoritized communities. Don’t just buy books that help us to make sense of how we got here, read them in community and reinvigorate the spirit of civil rights and feminist consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s. Deep and principled study is an integral part of liberatory movement-building. Social media can be a tool for organizing and mobilizing — AND it is also time to get offline and commit to developing trusting relationships rooted in accountability and challenging the emergent status quo.

For feminists specifically, the movement to dismantle patriarchy and its interconnected forms of oppression entails being unabashed in contempt for and in defiance of a president who lewdly remarks about grabbing women by the “pussy,” habitually engages in sexist attacks, works toward restricting abortion and reproductive rights, and has been credibly accused and found civilly liable for sexual misconduct. This presidency calls for a kind of feminist global solidarity in which we see our fates intimately intertwined with those of others locally, nationally, and globally. It is a capacious undertaking of consciousness-raising and activism rooted in a desire to upend patriarchy, white supremacy, and all forms of oppression. The work of solidarity demands an ongoing self-reflexivity, as well as a listening practice rooted in care and imagination. It also demands the utilization of every tool available: This includes legal challenges within our existing legal system as well as envisioning and creating new ways to refuse to accept subjugating and unjust realities. There’s a lane for everyone interested in resisting in the fight against the policies of Trump and his band of authoritarian supporters and allies.

It's a tall order but one that cannot be ignored. It is time to tread water and find a way to swim — understand the fullness of what we’re up against, breathe and refuse to be immobilized by the barrage of attacks, and remain grounded in a vision of the future that is more equitable, just, and peaceful. Treading water can be hard, BUT it is much easier to do when we are working together, encouraging one another, and reminding ourselves that we can get back to shore.