UC Press Blog

By Allyn Walker and Aimee Wodda, co-editors of Abolition and Queer Justice

Of all the absurdity we expected from Donald Trump’s second term in office, we never could have predicted that a non-binary frog would become a symbol of resistance. Yet, here we are in 2025, and ICE protests in Portland, Oregon are beginning to look like parties, featuring whimsical inflatable characters. These costumes serve multiple purposes. They’re a tactic used to ridicule Trump’s characterization of Portland’s protesters as violent extremists—a label which he’s used to justify military action. Plus, inflatable unicorns, dinosaurs, chickens, and frogs bring joy to people in a political climate steeped in fear.

These protests call to mind the joyful defiance of kiss-ins and dance parties that queer activists have staged to protest discrimination and criminalization since the 1970s. In early 2025, podcaster Dan Savage spoke about the importance of joy and hope in queer protest:

 It's remarkable how much fun the gays and lesbians [were having] at those protests in the 1970s that I saw on TV when I was 11…And during the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for…Right now it doesn't feel like we can win, but we can. But only if we fight. And dance.

Since the beginning of Trump’s second term in office, queer and trans people have been reminding each other that our joy is an act of resistance in the face of major legislative changes criminalizing our communities. But our criminalization is not new. Over the last two decades, societal and systemic reforms mostly responded to the desires of white, middle- and upper-class queer and trans activism, resulting in legal marriage rights and the ability to serve in the military, and increased hate crimes legislation and police liaisons for queer and trans communities. Meanwhile, the material infrastructure of our criminalization remained intact: the laws, precedents, militarized police forces, courts, prisons, jails, detention facilities and more have been operating steadily in the background, targeting the most vulnerable, primed for implementation on a much wider scale. Trump didn't have to build a new apparatus to target queer and trans people. We have been building it for him.

Our new book, Abolition and Queer Justice, collaboratively written by 21 queer criminologists, organizers, activists, and dreamers, explores this apparatus and argues for its dissolution. As we completed the final stages of editing, we found ourselves watching a flurry of executive orders characterizing trans people as threats to the rest of society and restricting access to resources and interactions with one another. It’s hard for many of us not to be fantasizing of an alternate reality in which Trump lost the 2024 election. But in such a reality, the components of our violent systems would still exist, waiting to be deployed in the future. 

Trump didn't have to build a new apparatus to target queer and trans people. We have been building it for him.

The future we want to work toward is imagined in the pages of our book. Some of its chapters present narratives reflecting on chapter authors’ pathways toward abolitionist work. Other chapters clarify how our system has harmed, and continues to harm, queer and trans people. The final section of our book explores the kind of liberatory justice that Black, queer, trans women have been working toward for decades—Rest in Power, Miss Major. By engaging with our chapter authors’ work, readers will gain a deeper understanding of the possibilities for queer justice outside of punishment and outside the system, and how abolition is just as much about creating a world where we don’t need police and prisons. 

As we were talking about the necessity of discussions around abolition in our discipline, we wanted to extend the work we had done in a journal article, but we knew our voices alone were not enough. So, we reached out to people in queer criminology who were talking about and doing abolitionist work, most of whom were people of color, students, untenured professors, and people with system experience. As we spoke with these scholars, we realized that this was not a subject many of them felt able to publish about on their own, and with the ethos of abolitionist work in mind, we aimed to engage in this work as a collective. 

These authors’ interest in these issues and their willingness to commit to this volume speaks to their bravery. Their commitment to abolitionist work also shows up in the way our authors voted to send our royalties to an organization working toward our shared vision of queer justice. They selected alQaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian Society, a grassroots organization working at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and the broader struggle for Palestinian liberation. Founded by and for queer Palestinians, alQaws leads community-based initiatives, public advocacy campaigns, and educational programming to challenge social norms, combat gender-based and sexual oppression, and build safe, affirming spaces across historic Palestine. Justice, for us, may be any and all these things, and more. As we say in our book, “queer justice is ours to imagine and build.” 

We are all frogs now.