The Child and Its Enemies

"We were organizing and enacting mutual aid without having the words to call it that. Again, I credit my parents. They were hella organizers. Their tentacles reached way beyond our backwoods area. Without the internet. So I actually did know at an early age that resistance was not only possible but necessary. When the school told us asinine things like girls can't wear pants or salute the flag or there are different rules for poor and less poor; for different colors, when we figured out that our local volunteer fire dept. was the KKK, I knew what to do. Organize and fight back. Burn the flag, walk out of school, stand up on a desk and yell, sing, take to the woodswith your comrades. The possibilities are more numerous today, with digital media to amplify us, and youth so savvy and informed and using it to organize."

Temperance Blyck organizes to defend old-growth forests by locking down to construction equipment. Temperance Blyck got radicalized as a kid in an alternative school. Temperance Blyck sometimes does community organizing with their friend's three-year-old. Temperance Blyck is really, really cool. And in this podcast, mk zariel chats with them about eco-defense, youth liberation, and tranarchy.

Isabelle and mk discuss Chosen Few Software—the trans-anarchist tech company run by entirely youth and teens—as well as liberatory education, trans identity, and why, in Isabelle's words..."anarchy is the purest form of decentralized control. In my mind, its the ideal way to organize a massive network, whether that network is made out of computers or people, it makes little difference to me. The reality is that the computers we build are just as fallable as us. They just tend to do more and more of our thinking for us, as they become more powerful and reliable. I think its an important part of the future of human evolution, but we live at a point in time where our societies are beginning to show their scars, show their weak points."

Hello and welcome to THE CHILD AND ITS ENEMIES, a podcast for and about queer and neurodivergent kids and teens living out anarchy and youth liberation.Here at THE CHILD AND ITS ENEMIES we believe that youth autonomy is not only crucial to queer and trans liberation, but to anarchy itself. Governance is inherently based on projecting linear narratives of time and Development and gender onto our necessarily asynchronous and atemporal queer lives, and kids, teens, and everyone else affected by anti-child ageism are at the center of this form of oppression.Our goal with the podcast is to create a space by and for kids and teens that challenges all forms of control and inspires us to create neuroqueer, feral, ageless networks of care.I'm your host, mk zariel. My pronouns are they/them, I'm fifteen years old, and I'm the youth correspondent at the Anarchist Review of Books, author of the blog Debate Me Bruh, and organizer of some all-ages queer spaces in my city and online. With me today is our first-ever guest, Skye Gia Garcia, who is a community organizer and freedom fighter! Hello, Skye!