iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 12/10/2026

October 20, 7pm at Estelitas Library in Beacon Hill, Ashanti Alston in conversation with @dnbrgr.bsky.social about Ashanti’s new book from @akpress.org, Anarchist Panther. 2901 17th Ave S, Seattle. Wear a mask! Grateful to Masc Block Seattle for providing masks.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

In this episode, Morgan Bassichis and I talk about the stuck places we can find when we are trying to be right in a conflict, or when we’re trying to avoid finding out about the impact of our actions because it brings up shame. Listen to the whole episode wherever you get podcasts.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

To kick off Season 2, @jessicalanyadoo.bsky.social joins me to answer listener questions about confidentiality, self care, and building and maintaining community when friends couple off or make choices that don't align with your values. Join us at Patreon.com/deanspade.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Here's a clip from a conversation I had with Annie Spencer at Casino for Social Medicine about her book How to Break an Addiction (Common Notions Press). You can listen to the whole conversation at patreon.com/deanspade for free.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 13/07/2026

We’re tired, wired, fried from all that is happening, the losses, the hard work in our communities, the overwhelm. How do we relax? Find more conversations about how to sustain ourselves & our participation in resistance struggles on the Love in a F*cked Up World podcast & at patreon.com/deanspade

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

This is an excerpt from a longer conversation that Elias Lowe and I had about jealousy, including about when people have gender-based jealousy, meaning they feel more jealousy if their partner is with someone with a particular gender. You can find the whole thing on patreon.com/deanspade

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 12/06/2026

A little clip from the recent book launch event for the second edition of Mutual Aid. Check out the whole conversation with Jessica Rosenberg and Autumn Meghan Brown. Grateful to @versobooks.bsky.social for organizing this event!

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

This episode features conversations with friends inside prison, people who have been released, and people who have been doing direct support to prisoners for decades, about the barriers to connection that prisons create and the ways people stay connected despite them.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Prisons are designed to isolate, break social ties, and destroy communities. Yet, people fight hard to keep relationships going across prison walls, and through all the crises that prisons manufacture. Episode 26 is Part One of a multi-episode series on relating across prison walls.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

When our friends are venting about what is frustrating them it’s easy to go into autopilot responses. It can help to notice what our go-to responses are so we can choose to do more value-aligned things. Find more conversations about building relationships and movements at patreon.com/deanspade.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

Resentment can poison our enjoyment of the things, it can be toxic for groups, it is a reasonable response to the conditions we live under, and we must work through it so we can stay connected. Listen to some new tools and explore how we can work with this difficult mental and emotional tangle.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

I love hearing Vicky Osterweil talk about anything, but most especially about how she understands the gorgeous threat that trans people constitute to the fascist ecocidal monsters who currently run most things in our lives. The latest podcast episode is out now!

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 03/04/2026

I had the great pleasure of talking to my friend Eli Clare about his new book, Unfurl, and the long arc of his exquisite work shaping trans politics and disability justice over the last many decades.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 01/04/2026

The second edition of Mutual Aid came out this week! The Free Society People’s Library is hosting a meetup to read and discuss the new edition on April 18th at Sumner-Albina Park in Portland, OR. The meetup is a fundraiser for Be Loved Bloc and Common Fire, supporting families impacted by ICE.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

In the latest episode of the podcast, I got to speak with Benji Hart, who has years of experience facilitating transformative justice processes. In this clip, I’m telling him about this experience, and why I think we should reframe what counts as success in transformative justice.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 20/03/2026

Loved this conversation with Benji Hart about their work facilitating trnasformative justice processes, how they got involved in work to oppose US military imperialism, and so much more.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

In this episode, Morgan Bassichis and I discuss a listener’s question about when self-improvement work is too rigorous and/or driven by shame. We went deep with this one, thinking together about the really painful beliefs about ourselves that sometimes come up and how to move through them.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

What a treat to have my book Mutual Aid read by @margaret.bsky.social on her podcast Cool Zone Media Book Club. Check out both episodes anywhere you get your podcasts! An updated version of Mutual Aid is coming out March 31st from Verso Books.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

Waterstones is offering a 25% off pre-orders of the new edition of Mutual Aid from February 17th to February 20th. To buy the book for 25% off, you can go to the Waterstones website and use the code FEB26.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

6th annual Valentine's Day webinar with Fireweed Collective, Feb 15 at 1pm ET! The theme this year is "too much, or not enough?" You can watch the videos of the prior 5 at the link in my bio. Registration: givebutter.com/deanspade6

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

From my conversation on the Green Dreamer Podcast. Listen to the whole conversation wherever you get your podcasts. Solidarity not charity! You can find much more about this in my book Mutual Aid which is free on the Anarchist Library. I just wrote an updated edition that is coming out March 31.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

This is an excerpt from a conversation about how I’ve never had a cell phone and how that has impacted my boundaries with work and collaborations. In this clip, I discuss how the idea that everyone should be reachable at all times is unrealistic and sometimes less efficient.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 31/01/2026

My friend Holiday Simmons and I will be doing a livestream conversation on my Patreon this Monday (Feb 2) at 1PM EST. Holiday is a Black Cherokee, genderqueer, two-spirit social worker and the host of the Trans Cookout Podcast. Please join us live or catch the video after. patreon.com/deanspade

Picture of Holiday, a Black person in a pink shirt, glasses, and beige cowboy hat with a goatee and pink braids, against a dynamic blue background. Text reads, livestream conversation with Holiday Simmons Monday 2/2 - 1pm EST www.patreon.com/deanspade

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 30/01/2026

In this clip, I discuss the idea that cell phones are important because it helps people reach you in an emergency, and because cell phones make us safer. I’ve heard this a lot, but I don’t buy it. You can watch our whole conversation at patreon.com/deanspade for free!

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 26/01/2026

I sat down with Peter Gelderloos to talk about his decades of work exposing the damaging impact that pacifist discourse has in resistance movements, stigmatizing people who fight back boldly. You can hear the whole interview wherever you listen to podcasts or watch the video on YouTube.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

For Episode 17 I got to sit down with Peter Gelderloos, someone whose writing has been central to my political development since I first encountered his book, How Nonviolence Protects the State, in the early 2000’s.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 08/01/2026

Excited to share my interview with Holly Whitaker, author of Quit Like a Woman and host of the Co-Regulation podcast. I have been very inspired by Holly’s critical feminist analysis of how the alcohol industry and the ubiquity of 12-step impact how we perceive drinking and sobriety.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 29/12/2025

Wrote about what happens when conflict appears in our movement spaces and how to move through it instead of abandoning our work in @npquarterly.bsky.social ! nonprofitquarterly.org/navigating-c...

Disappointment, Conflict, and Burnout in Care and Resistance Work

People often experience a special kind of disappointment in resistance work. We join groups to do something that we really care about. Often, we are relieved to finally find people who see things the way we do, excited to be understood and have accompaniment and solidarity. We have high expectations for each other. And then we find out that we're all very human and imperfect.

I have found that burnout is not usually just a result of being tired. Most people I've talked to who feel burned out and leave movement work, during the laset 28 years that I have been in these movements, are actually in pain because of unresolved conflict. They joined work they really cared about, something went wrong that made them feel betrayed or left out or disappointed, and that is the pain of the burnout. It wasn't just the hard work; it was the loss of trust, the feeling of being blamed or stigmatized, or not being listened to.

Abolitionism and Transformative Justice

I've spent the last decades in the movement for police, prison, and border abolition. I believe we shouldn't have of those structures. Abolitionists use a concept called "transformative justice" to describe the work we do to address conflict without using police. There is a lot of conflict, harm, and violence in our communities, we know the police don't help and only make it worse. Transformative justice practices do three things:

1. Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who have been harmed need to heal and participate in community, to not be isolated by what happened to them, and to be listened to, even though we can't undo what happened.
2. Work to figure out and provide what the person or people who did the harm need to stop doing it.
3. Work to figure out what the community surrounding the harm could do to make it less likely--how did we all set up a situation that made this more likely?

When Big Reactions Happen

One thing that is surprising and challenging about the emotional dynamics of conflict is that we do the most harm to others when we are feeling aggrieved, victimized, left out, and/or resentful. It's counterintuitive because these are the moments when we are focused on what others did wrong and how we are hurting. But those are the times we are most likely to do something harmful, like go and write the really messed up email to somebody, treat somebody with the cold shoulder, gossip negatively about people in our group or about another group in town, post a bunch of stuff on Instagram that's really inflammatory, or violate someone's privacy.

As strange as it might seem, it's when I'm feeling like the victim that I should ask for help from a friend to figure out what the right-sized response is, or to figure out if I'm still too upset to decide how to respond and need more time. It's not that we aren't legitimately sometimes victimized, but the victim narrative in our heads can cause us to skip our value assessment and then do stuff that later we wish we hadn't done. It's not bad to feel this way, but we should consider what to do with these feelings since they are inevitably going to come up in our groups and in ourselves.

Centering Belonging

I was recently talking to somebody who's doing a conflict support process with a group that's had a major difficult conflict. And one of the things the person is doing is individually reaching out to the 40 or 50 people who all were involved in the group over these many years where these hard things were happening.

The people from the group have been telling the conflict support person, who's not even in the group, "It just means so much to me that you're listening to me." We live in societies that minimize our experiences of pain and harm. And so, we join movement groups and we hope we're finally going to be part of something where we're heard and seen. And then we have a bad experience where people don't hear us or see us at some point. And then we wreak havoc. We're like, I have to tear down everybody in this group, and this group itself, because I'm feeling all of my historical cumulative pain of being dismissed.

If we could catch each other in the moment of pain and listen, I think it could be a huge change in the likelihood of those conflicts escalating to the most disorganizing behaviors between us.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 24/12/2025

In this episode, Morgan Bassichis and I talk about giving and receiving feedback directly as a way to build relationships, and prevent conflict from escalating to destructive and disorganizing levels.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Grateful to Ciro for animating this clip from the recent episode where Morgan Bassichis and I talk about how to deescalate a crush. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

The second edition of Mutual Aid is coming out on March 31 from @versobooks.bsky.social

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

Thrilled to share this conversation with Shira Hassan, a brilliant writer, organizer, facilitator, and friend who has influenced harm reduction and transformative justice work, and my own thinking and practice, for decades.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

A new review of LIAFUW is coming out in Daughters! Daughters is a magazine featuring over 35 incarcerated voices speaking to conditions of confinement with interviews, essays, poetry, legal news, legislative updates, and art! To support their work, subscribe here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

"Prisons are designed to keep us isolated. When we connect with our dear ones, every second is precious and the stakes are high. This added pressure means we have to strive to be as intentional as possible to make each moment count." - Endjah S. (SCI Cambridge Springs)

"As a longtime prison abolitionist, Dean Spade is offering all of us insight on how to live, f*ck, be present, and survive with contextualized compassion for ourselves and others." - Endjah S. (SCI Cambridge Springs)

Daughters cover image: beautiful illustration of two Black women on the top and bottom of the page with interconnecting braid hair and daffodils over their chests. They are over top a bright red border which as the words "Daughters" and "#13" and "Fall 2024" and "Let's Get Free's Magazine" over top with a bright yellow border.

"Daughters is a faith-based, political publication founded by Sarita Miller (SCI Muncy) that aims to illuminate issues and perspectives, specifically those of women, pertaining to the crisis of mass incarceration."

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Crushes can be fun and enlivening, but sometimes they are ill-timed or ill-suited, and it can be hard to shake them off. In this episode, Morgan Bassichis and I discuss one of the most popular tools from Love in a F*cked Up World the book: 7 Steps for De-escalating a Crush.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Here are a few thoughts about confidentiality and conflict, and in other news, I'm teaching a class about romcoms, consent, and the romance myth with Mia Schacter (@consent.wizardry) Wednesdays and Sundays, December 3-14, 11am-1pm PT / 2–4pm ET. Sign up at consentwizardry.com/guiltypleasure

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

How do you know if you should leave an organizing group or collaboration you are part of? Morgan Bassichis and I talk this through in this video, and you can watch the whole episode on youtube or listen wherever you get podcasts.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Kelly Hayes’ writing and her Movement Memos Podcast episodes about AI have been immensely useful to me and I recommend them. In this clip from our recent conversation, Kelly talks about how AI is emerging in a context of alienation and dehumanization.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 17/11/2025

In this excerpt from my interview with Mariame Kaba, I talk about how avoidance is a reasonable response to a coercive society, but also can get in our way when it becomes a habit. Watch the whole episode on Youtube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 13/11/2025

@jessicalanyadoo.bsky.social is back answering more listener questions on Part 2 of this AMA episode! Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch the full episode on YouTube.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 11/11/2025

In this clip from my recent conversation with David Palumbo-Liu, we talk about the difference between identifying behavior in others and identifying it in ourselves. Listen to the whole episode of Speaking Out of Place wherever you get your podcasts.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 22/10/2025

Episode 10 is out! In this episode, I talk to Kelly Hayes, the brilliant journalist and organizer whose writing and podcast so many of us rely on to make sense of the world. Watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

In this clip from Episode 9 of Love in a F*cked Up World, the podcast, the brilliant Weyam Ghadbian talks about whether the prevalence of insecure attachment might stem from the widespread forced displacement generations of people have experience because of colonialism, war, and ecological crisis.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

The Berlin Poly Meetup is hosting me for a discussion of Love in a F*cked-Up World on Oct 26. Please join as at 5pm at Lovelite! ❤️

Pink, red, and yellow diagonal striped background with a cover of Love in a F*cked-Up World and text that reads, "Book Launch + Q&A with Author, October 26 5pm Lovelite, Organized by Berlin Internationals Polyamory Group"

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Morgan Bassichis introduced me to the idea that intentionally generating bad ideas for impossible actions, bad poetry, bad writing can loosen the rigid, critical mind that impedes our creativity. Find more content like this and join the conversation on patreon.com/deanspade.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Shuli Branson recently invited me on The Breakup Theory podcast to talk about a listener letter from someone who had a difficult experience with a community accountability process and was left feeling isolated and defeated. You can listen to the whole episode wherever you get podcasts.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Often times, when we’re having heightened feelings in a group or relationship, on some level it feels like life-or-death, even if we logically know its just the dishes or the money or the jealousy or the disagreement in the meeting.

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 29/09/2025

How can you tell when it's time to leave a relationship with a person, project, job, or group? How can you tell if you have a tendency to walk away too fast or to stay too long in relationships?

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 22/09/2025

I'll be in Manchester on October 3rd at 6:30pm with Wu Tsang at @blackwellsmcr.bsky.social. Thanks to the Centre for the Study of Sexuality and Culture and the Centre for New Writing for co-sponsoring. Tickets: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/love-in-a-...

A picture of me smiling next to a photo of the cover of Love in a Fucked-Up World. Text reads: Blackwell's Manchester presents...Dean Spade in conversation with Wu Tsang, Friday 3rd October at 6:30pm, blackwells.co.uk/events

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Edinburgh!! I’ll be with @lighthousebks.bsky.social at the Great Hall on Wednesday October 1st at 7pm for a discussion on Love in a F*cked-Up World with Wu Tsang and Nat Raha! Come join us ❤️❤️ lighthousebookshop.com/events/love-...

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Dean Spade @deanspade.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

UK book tour at the beginning of October! I’ll be talking about mutual aid, Love in a F*cked-Up World, and how to stick together in increasingly brutal times. Join me ❤️💛💗 Tickets and access info here: www.deanspade.net/2024/11/15/u...

Dean Spade UK Tour

October 1 - Edinburgh, 7pm at Lighthouse
October 2 - Glasgow, 1pm at Kinning Park Complex
October 2 - Glasgow, 7pm at Listen Gallery
October 3 - Manchester, 6:30pm at Blackwell's
October 4 - Nottingham, 4pm at TBD
October 6 - London, 6pm at UCL
October 9 - London, 7pm at Pages of Hackney
October 10 - London, 6pm at Birkbeck

This tour includes in-person and online events. I'm asking people to mask for in-person and asking venues to coordinate with mask blocs and clean air clubs to increase COVID safety. I have asked venues to fill out an access survey with detailed info. You can find the survey results and other details at the "Book Tour Dates and Access Info" link in my linktree in my bio.

There is a giant, unjust gap between how access and COVID safety should be, and how things mostly are. It's hard to bridge. Thank you to @maskblocseattle, @longcovidjustice, and @seattlecleanair for help crafting my approach to this tour.

Special thanks to @bioabundancellc for collaborating with Clean Air Clubs, and for giving me a discount on a UV device to bring to events to help clean the air and increase safety. Please test and mask, and please contact venues, rather than me, with questions about access for specific events.

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