Myron Rusk 2026 Lecture in Civil Liberties: “Trans Freedom and the Utopian Horizon”

M. E. O’Brien will lecture on the relationship between gender freedom and capitalism. She will begin by identifying the current fascist assault on trans rights across multiple national contexts. After briefly tracing varying current strategies of trans survival, organizing and flourishing, she will turn to the role of trans futures and utopian longings in movement work. Drawing on her work in science fiction, family abolitionism, and her conceptual framework of “insurgent utopianism”, O’Brien will identify the kernel of revolutionary desire evoked in trans life. Trans freedom, she argues, necessarily includes a push against and beyond the private family, state regulation of gender and sexuality, and the generalized market dependency of capitalism.

Bio: M. E. O’Brien is a psychoanalyst and writer in New York City. She has two books, Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care (Pluto, 2023) and the co-authored speculative fiction novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072, with Eman Abdelhadi (Common Notions, 2022). She previously completed a PhD in Sociology, writing on capitalism and NYC queer and trans social movements. She is involved in a number of editing projects, including Pinko, a magazine of gay communism.