q: does forgiveness intersect with anarchy?
a: well…yes but also no.
under statism, forgiveness as a concept doesn’t lead to resolution so much as an undertone of anxiety; people who cause harm sometimes ask forgiveness rather than actively repairing the harm. using apology and social ritual around forgiveness can even be a tactic of abuse and emotional control, and in movement spaces it has a tendency to disrupt calling-in. how? well…one can probably guess based on personal experience.
as queer and trans people we’ve all had the awkward experience of explaining to folx with straight privilege that something they said or did was (perhaps unintentionally) anti-queer; maybe they slipped up on someone’s name or pronoun, used “gay rights” rhetoric without grasping the anti-statism of queerness, were weird about someone’s labels / identities / lack thereof, supported a homophobic content creator without knowing it, or simply didn’t self-educate. the list goes on, but the common thread is that so many straight people, rather than realizing that they caused harm and can grow from it, self-liberate, and possibly even transition…they instead get to moralizing. are they a bad person? are they a bigot? will we possibly forgive them?
and as as result, there isn’t any growth. the fixation on forgiveness means that our (absolutely well-intentioned) friends with straight privilege don’t end up learning pronouns and names, educating themselves on queer anarchism, accepting labels and identities they may not have heard of before, researching the products they buy and artists they support, or learning to google. perhaps more harmfully, they continue to seem themselves in the role of the helpful ally rather than the active participant. they “support gay people.” they donate. they talk about donating. they vote, maybe, we hope. but they don’t see themselves as a part of queer liberation, because in their insistence that they “benefit from homophobia” they fail to see how it harms them too. they don’t want to be liberated from hate, but rather forgiven for their participation.
what happens when we broaden it out? even more harm and assimilation. talk of “forgiving” the state or capitalism for its harms would be ludicrous, yet centrists often move toward this when arguing that it is not oppression, but a population that lacks inherent trust for government, that is the problem. “bipartisanship” discourse implies that neofascism does not cause harm, but somehow, the failure of marginalized people to see where fascists are coming from does—in other words, the fact that we do not forgive. forgiveness when applied politicly gaslights everyone who is harmed by control and order and bigotry and state power, declaring that we should all get along while anti-trans bills pass state legislatures and old-growth forests in Atlanta are denuded for statist purposes and people of marginalized genders are denied abortions and communities of color are targeted by armed police and state repression traumatizes and harms anarchist organizers.
so as a result, forgiveness does not add to anarchy, nor is it even a part of anarchy inherently—instead it is a red herring that divides people. transformative justice, on the other hand, is a more active alternative. a straight-privileged person engaged in transformative justice would not ask to be “forgiven” for misgendering someone, but would instead apologize, move on, and work to learn their friend’s pronouns. rather than wanting to be forgiven for their implicit participation in bigotry, they would instead cast it off, knowing that straightness is projected onto them but does not define them. the same is true of all acts of interpersonal harm; rather than forgiving one another, we can work to repair the harm instead of seeking to anull it. to repair rather than forgive could even be the definition of anarchist worldmaking.