Opstand – Anarchistische Plek 070

On December 23rd, we are hosting another Relationship Anarchy (RA) meetup. We welcome everyone who is interested in discussing RA principles of living and connecting with others. You don’t need to have any prior knowledge. Curiosity and kindness are enough.

If you practice RA and want to discuss the practical side, if you’re looking for advice or just a chat about common experiences, we hope this meetup feels cozy and helpful.

For this end of the year edition, we’re revisiting our personal histories with practicing RA, and talking from lived experience about what worked and what we are still struggling with. We are also very welcoming of spontaneous discussions. This exploration of RA is co-created with all of you.

📅 Tuesday December 23rd
⏲️ Time: 19h00 – 22h00
📍 De Opstand, The Hague (ask your network, DM, or e-mail for the address at boekenwinkelopstand@riseup.net)

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Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheelchair accessibility. A quiet room is also available. The Opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible via stairs. We encourage everyone to refrain from wearing products containing fragrances, to wear a face mask, to do a self-test and to stay home if you have cold-like symptoms. Face masks and self tests are available on location. Send us a message if your accessibility needs are not covered.

On January 20th, we will discuss chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the book “Trans Femme Futures”, by Nat Raha & Mijke van der Drift.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionize our lives. The authors discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives over institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition. And they show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political, and economic crises.

Anyone is invited, whether you read it or not.

DM for copies and location.

📅 Tuesday January 20th

⏲️ Time: 19h00

📍 De Opstand, The Hague (ask your network, DM, or e-mail for the address at boekenwinkelopstand@riseup.net)

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Accessibility information: the event is on the ground floor. There is a (steep) ramp for wheelchair accessibility. A quiet room is also available. The Opstand library and books are upstairs and only accessible via stairs. We encourage everyone to refrain from wearing products containing fragrances, to wear a face mask, to do a self-test test and to stay home if you have cold-like symptoms. Face masks and self tests are available on location. Send us a message if your accessibility needs are not covered.

A note on radical accessibility for future Opstand events. We recently moved the Opstand to the upstairs of the space, which makes consulting the books and zines less accessible. Although, the events still happen at the lower floor. At the same time, we have slowly moved towards ignoring Covid. There is not much we can do about the first but there is something that can be done about the second.

We will also keep the space ventilated and we encourage everybody to:
• Do a self test if you can (we also have some in the space)
• Wear a mask if you can
• Do not come in you have symptoms

This might come as surprise for some but the pandemic is not over. To give a few numbers, 10% of infected people develop long term symptoms and Japan had the highest death rate since the pandemic began at the start of last year. This post is about promoting mutual aid and taking care of each other. Including also the people that cannot mask. As anarchists, we pride ourselves in making our own decisions instead of just listening to politicians. Yet, in this topic, we seem to just blindly follow the state policy.

For a deeper discussion on the topic, this zine is a good start https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/zines/pandemic-praxis and here is the reference for the 10% of long covid https://www.nature.com/articles/s41577-023-00904-7

As Pride The Hague 2024 approaches, we want to shed light on ongoing discussions De Opstand and fellow collectives have had with the organizing pride team.

This year, cops are official partners of the pride week, and although we have extensively voiced our disappointment and worries about this, our concerns have not been meaningfully listened to.

We hope this open letter brings transparency to the issue, and we, once again, urge the organizing team to take our concerns seriously and reflect on their choices.

A different Pride is possible, and we will keep dreaming of it.

Pride Open Letter

We do not want police at pride

After extensive discussions with COC Haaglanden, regarding the presence of cops at Pride, we still don’t feel heard and our community needs are not respected.

Our position is clear, we do not want police at our pride. Police presence at queer demonstrations have only stood to further instigate violence against us, rather than protect us from it. This has been the case both historically and within the recent past. To our greatest disappointment, the police force will be present at pride walk and at the opening party at Pride The Hague 2024.

Recently, in canal pride Leiden, we have witnessed violence against our community during pride. History keeps repeating itself. We do not want that to happen here at Pride The Hague.

The police and the system of border controls are well documented to be institutionally racist and perpetuate hatred toward queer people of color and queer migrants. Queer and trans people of color and migrants in our community do not feel safe around the police.

It’s possible to not have police force at pride: New York, London have done it!

There is international precedent for ending police presence at Pride: following the spread of the second wave of Black Lives Matter actions in summer 2020, New York City’s Pride, Vancouver Pride, and Toronto Pride ended police presence at the 2021 parade. The same is also true for Trans Pride in London. We urge Pride Den Haag to follow similar principled steps.

We have high hopes for what a Pride march and activities for queer liberation would include. We hope that Pride The Hague’s organizers will move closer to what a shared vision of pride and queer liberation would look like.

This open later is co-signed by QLU (Queer Leiden University) https://www.instagram.com/p/C64R6slIrYt

We have added all the books from our library to the “library thing” website. You can now check out what we have from home. To make sure we haven’t lent the book that you like, send us an email first to confirm that we have in the store at the moment. The link is in the menu above and also here: https://www.librarything.com/catalog/opstand.denhaag