No Pride in Genocides

May 11

By Micaela Kaibni Raen

We are queer/trans Palestinians,

whether living in Palestine or in exile, our love transcends empire. If celebrating pride in 2026, it is crucial that we do not stop our activism and continue building our collective community movements. We must continue our work…resisting mainstream narratives, eliminating pinkwashing, and demanding justice.

While our queer/trans communities celebrate, we need to remember that there are many people in our communities who are grieving the loss of homes, countries, and loved ones. There are also many living in fear…facing threats of abduction, deportation, and sanctioned state violence. With so much of our planet facing brutal genocides and health catastrophes, we need to remember our call to action. The protest chant “from the river to the sea” is a cultural call for equity, human rights, land justice, and Indigenous sovereignty. It is a call for collective resistance, pushing back against pink washing and the enforced economic systems legislating our bodies and censoring expression. It is a call to reclaim organic ways of knowing so we can re-engage with our personal/political/spiritual power…a coming together to protect each other and sustain our planet. Even more than that, it is a call to action that centers Indigenous knowledge, intuitive autonomy, and inherited ancestral wisdom so we can once again breathe free and in sync with our earthmother…reconnecting with her ecosystems, waterways, and skyways.

Queer Tatreez strives to connect queer/trans communities across heritage so we can share our sorrows and celebrate our lives. Together resisting oppressive regimes and imagining new futures based on sacred Palestinian Indigenous teachings rooted in land, Rematriation, human rights, and gender and sexual freedoms.

Micaela Kaibni Raen @queertatreez is a Palestinian American creator, cultural worker, queer femme-dyke, mother, and global human rights activist. Recognized by the Lesbian Herstory Archives for activism, she is the creator of Queer Tatreez, a style of visual art and poetics inspired by Indigenous Palestinian embroidery. A Tin House Alum and winner of the Yalda Award, her work appears in Mizna, Sinister Wisdom, The Dodge, Yellow Medicine Review, The Poetry of Arab Women, Heaven Looks Like Us, and Homosexual Intifada.

Support SWANA Creators **FREE**

Click on my work at the following links. Then click on new work by other creators in the same issue.

Return to Roots: Writing Toward Land

The Dodge: A Special Teaching Issue on Palestine and  the Global Indigenous Struggle

https://thedodgemag.com/return-to-roots/rafah-queer-tatreez/

The Rauch Review

Visual poetics dedicated to queer/trans Palestinians.

https://josephrauch.com/therauchreview/poetry/slit-light/

Radical Catalyst Issue 1.1 Page 12

https://radicalcatalystjournal.org/archive.html

Tendrils Journal

https://www.tendrilsjournal.com/issue1-trauma-and-the-body#whispers