Kirby: And then my other legible gender that I have is like, I don't know, like nonbinary butch. I wear keys on my belt loop, you know? You know.
Tuck: [laughs] I do. As a fellow key belt looper.
Kirby: Yeah, it's really important—it's an important part of my gender to just have a lot of pockets and then just have a lot of shit in them, and be useful in those ways.
- Conversation between Tuck Woodstock and Kirby Conrod on the Gender Reveal podcast, episode 94. (transcript)
if there's one thing that 2020 taught me it's that when I'm alone I don't have a gender and honestly it's kind of nice.
- Margaret Killjoy, host of Live Like The World is Dying podcast, on Twitter
If I ask you to think of a prepper, you probably think of a man. There’s a reason that Margaret Killjoy’s excellent essay We’re All Preppers Now describes two types of guy, Bunker Guy and Frontier Guy - the “guy” part is not coincidental. The ideologies often bound up with prepping - right wing libertarianism, individualism, and the settler colonialism of the “rugged frontiersman” that Killjoy describes - all dovetail perfectly with patriarchal masculinity. It’s like the stereotype of men at a barbecue, but post-apocalyptic: the idea of providing for the family on steroids. Forget buying the family a house and funding the kids’ education, the true Alpha Male also needs some prime real estate for the end of days. (Fuck the neighbours, they can get their own). This is extremely obvious in the aesthetic of most prepping #content online, as shown by a random YouTube search for “prepping” I did just now:
There is a lot of gendered fantasy at work here. As Killjoy writes,
On one side, [there’s the] the prepper who dreams of isolation, of making himself safe and free at the expense of his own connections to community. On the other side, there’s the prepper who dreams of a post-apocalyptic landscape because he sees it as a return to wildness—a wildness that he and his AR-15 and his night-vision goggles can tame.
Before I encountered Margaret Killjoy’s work (via her podcast Live Like the World is Dying), I thought that this was all there was to prepping, and steered well clear of it. But Killjoy provides an antithesis to aggressively masculinist prepping - and not simply by talking about it while not being a man. She makes a case for a prepping which “maximises community agency” (ep.1). It’s an anarchist vision which offers an antithesis to all the ideologies we just talked about - anti-individualist, anti-extractive, and anti-patriarchal. It highlights the absurdity of hyper-masculine prepping culture, when many types of feminised labour - childcare, cooking, maintaining proper hygiene, everyday healthcare and first aid, sewing and darning, quilting, endless others - will be extremely useful for survival in any post-apocalyptic commune, likely far more so than being able to spear a trout (or whatever it is right-wing preppers like to do).
This is not to make an essentialist case that any prepping done or talked about by someone who isn’t a man is necessarily caring, gentle and community-spirited. You can find plenty of videos like the ones shown above fronted by women, usually women who look like they’ve come straight from presenting Fox News. The power of Killjoy’s anarchafeminist prepping, then, is not in some intrinsic womanly wisdom, but in the stance it takes against masculinist individualism and hierarchy.
Margaret Killjoy is also trans, but I haven’t seen her talk about this much in relation to prepping, apart from some useful reminders that the concept of ‘blending in’ for survival can be skewed towards cis white people. I’m very in favour of trans people’s right to talk about stuff that isn’t being trans, so I’m not going to try to read her work for connections or associations between prepping and transness that may not be there. But there certainly is a connection for me. Prepping gave me a motive, means and opportunity to think about my own gender, and started a process of ?transition? which is still in progress. I’m going to try and explain how it started.
When I first listened to Live Like the World is Dying in early 2021, it was a view of prepping I could get behind. It linked up with things that I was already trying to do, like building connections with my community through mutual aid, and trying to chip away at my dependence on just-in-time retail supply chains. I had always loved camping, and in 2020 a camping staycation had been the only holiday it felt safe or practical to take, so I’d already started on a sort of later-in-life DIY Duke of Edinburgh award, enthusiastically making coffee on a trangia while my girlfriend sat sceptically inside our tent. We joked at the time that we were the stereotypical camping family, but with the genders “reversed” - because at the time we thought she was a boy, and I was a girl.
In the early spring of 2021 I was going out to work every day but could barely socialise, because if you worked in a school you could spend all day in a building with hundreds of people, but you couldn’t have one friend in your living room. The only socialising we could do was outside, but it was still cold and the days were still short, so any gathering had to end when it got dark unless you had a patio heater - or a fire. Determined to avoid spending money on a heater, and inspired by my new interest in preparedness from the podcast, I started learning how to make fires, collecting firewood from the park opposite. I got very excited when our second-hand wooden bed frame finally gave up the ghost, because replacing it would mean I could burn it. Along with my friend T, who had also got into prepping and into the podcast, we talked about making go-bags and community connections and even went to learn bushcraft on a nature reserve in the autumn. Over the course of 2021, I also got involved in local mutual aid organising and food distribution via a community kitchen run from a squatted pub. I would never have thought of this as “prepping” before, but I know now that being connected with people who not only know how to reclaim a building and break a lock, but also want to feed people around them unconditionally, will probably go further than every object in my to-go bag combined when SHTF - shit hits the fan. That’s a prepping acronym for you.
And all this time, I was thinking about gender. I am sort of always thinking about gender, because I did an arts degree and I’m a feminist and all my friends are trans and queer, but I started… you know, thinking… about gender. Before 2021, I was increasingly feeling like womanhood was not a concept that sat easily with me, and feeling myself edging towards some sort of non-binary self-conception, but I struggled to articulate any positive vision of what I wanted to be. I couldn’t put together a style or aesthetic that I really liked: I’d never really felt happy with my appearance, and spending too much time thinking about it made me feel awkward and sad. But as I got into prepping in 2021, a few things happened. I started thinking about my clothes in terms of what they could do, not what they made me look like. I started unapologetically favouring comfort, with the ‘excuse’ that it was better for prep purposes - it’s no good trying to lug firewood around in t-shirts that don’t fit. I had joked for years about being a ‘dad’ - enjoying putting up shelves and getting obsessed with the most efficient way to load the dishwasher - but someone on the Gender Reveal podcast joked “is 'Dad’ a gender?” and something in me lit up.
I started to make clothes, initially motivated by sustainability and escaping exploitative supply chains, but in doing so I was able to make the clothes I’d never been able to buy, in bright cheerful patterns but big enough to actually fit comfortably, as loose as I wanted. I started to realise I didn’t like things to be fitted. At the squat where I helped with the community kitchen, everyone had aliases, and I made one too, one that doesn’t conjure a gender. Letting myself be more comfortable in my clothes led me to cut off all my long, thick, curly hair, because why not have a comfy head too? I felt weird and queer and useful and practical and I loved it. I got a really practical everyday rucksack, and got useful attachments for my keyring (a torch, a compass, a multi-tool) and put the lot on a carabiner. I heard Kirby Conrod say their gender was “I wear keys on my belt loop, you know?” and I thought, yes.
But wait. Didn’t I just argue that prepping should be separated from masculinity? Am I not contradicting myself here, by saying that prepping helped me get away from being a woman? My process of self-understanding certainly involved some concepts of masculinity, of being a ‘dad’ playing with fire and power tools. But this was not a serious pitch at a coherent identity, more just a playful inhabiting, a self-conscious piece of silliness. When patriarchy, and patriarchs themselves, have caused so much pain and violence in this world, there is something powerful about inhabiting the trappings of a family patriarch in their most benign and caring form. For me there is something funny, and maybe a bit wistful, about calling myself a dad because I’ve got some fire tongs, when the rest of me is small, soft, and wearing a Pusheen t-shirt.
But that’s not quite all of it, either. Playing with Dadness was one thing which felt affirming, but the other part was not having to think about gender at all. When I was choosing clothes based on how waterproof they were, when I was collecting firewood, when I was packing up delivery bags at the community kitchen, I could stop thinking about gender, because I could stop thinking about how my appearance was perceived by others. I didn’t have to present myself to the world based on some essential quality inside me, I didn’t have to have a coherent and polished vision of who I was, because what mattered was what I did. I could pick things up and put them down - clothes, shoes, names, knives, pronouns - based on whether they were useful or not. I wear keys on my belt loop, you know? As Margaret Killjoy once tweeted, when I’m alone I don’t have a gender, and I personally realised that when I’m with others I don’t have to have one either. As Kirby said, it’s important to be useful, and I found through my prepping adventures that I have no use for gender. It is not, to use the language of the Bro Preppers for a second, part of my everyday carry.
All this has given me the closest thing to a ‘gender identity’ I’ve been able to come up with so far. Keys on a belt loop. This is my starting point - for gender, for this newsletter. The TERFs say we’re bringing the end of the world, but if that’s true, at least I’ll be prepared.