Sarahann Kolder is an Iowa City-based artist working primarily with writing, music and video. She works at Prairie Lights.
m (emma) denney is a sound artist, electronic musician, writer, and sometimes lies about being a composer. She makes noise, drone music, and long-form experimental art.
Harry Manaligod (she/her) is a rapper, producer, painter, local fool, and the goat that makes music under the name YXNG RASKAL. She uses a microphone to encourage resistance.
Sarahann: In early February, LV reached out to me interested in a conversation on music and activism between myself, emma denny, and Harry Manaligod. Each of us are playing Mission Creek this year, and we’re also involved in transgender advocacy.
m and Harry were two of the seven trans people arrested in November by University of Iowa Police. What happened?
Harry: In October, the fascist student group YAF (Young Americans for Freedom) invited detransitioner Chloe Cole to speak at the IMU. Cole’s platform centers on taking away trans kid’s right to access healthcare related to transition.
The people came out to protest. There’s a parking garage across from the IMU where those attending this “lecture” were parked. If somebody parks there, they have to pass through the Madison/Jefferson intersection to leave. We occupied this intersection, and those who attended were trapped.
After about 20 minutes, UIPD ordered protesters to get out of the street and onto the sidewalk. Some obeyed this order and some didn’t. A clash between the remaining protesters and UIPD ensued. The police pushed us out of the street. One grabbed a girl’s neck. Eventually, all protesters were removed from the street, the cars left and the protest redirected to University President Barbara Wilson’s mansion.
A month later, in November, seven of the over 150 protesters present were served warrants for arrest, all of us transgender. We turned ourselves into the county jail, and got booked. Most of us were charged with disorderly conduct and interference with official acts, which carries up to 13 months in prison and up to $3,410 in fines. Most of us took a plea deal. One of us is going to trial [Tara McGovern].
I stayed in the streets and disobeyed the orders of the police because I have ADHD and I don’t spend a lot of time making decisions, especially in the kind of environment we were in. I believe that the police and the transphobes are on the same side: the side of fascism. I believe that human rights should be obtained By Any Means Necessary, and if the police are in our way and ordering us to give up the good fight, it is our sacred duty to disobey those orders. I believe that we should never let the police tell us what to do.
Sarahann: It seems like every week there’s a new horrifying anti-trans bill being introduced at the capitol. What is going on?
m: As briefly as I can: Kim Reynolds and other Iowa republicans have introduced dozens of bills that threaten trans people’s basic human dignity, civil rights, access to healthcare, and ability to openly and safely live our lives. The two most notable attempts were HF 2082, Jeff “J-Dog” Shipley’s bill which would strike gender identity from civil rights code, meaning you can discriminate against someone for their gender identity, and HF 2389, Kim Reynolds’s “pink triangles” bill that defines trans people out of legal recognition, imposes cruel and undue requirements for medical legitimation of our gender, bars us from accessing many state and public services as ourselves, and forces us to have special designations on legal documents which would out us as trans to anyone who saw them.
J-Dog’s bill failed after immense public pressure, with 300+ protestors and dozens of speakers coming out against the bill. Kim Reynolds’s bill, despite an even greater response, is awaiting a full vote in the house.
Sarahann: Why is all this happening now?
m: It’s an election year. This has also been a sustained campaign for years, with many versions of these bills previously failing in committee or subcommittee. Project 2025, a national conservative initiative, plans to use the courts to challenge many foundational civil protections. These anti-trans bills exist to create court challenges that will ultimately find themselves in front of conservative judges.
Sarahann: How do [we] sustain our efforts? I’ll start.
We organize. That may sound vague if you’re not already knowledgeable on organizing. Organizing, plainly, is a political term in this context, but, in a wider sense, it’s something many of us already do for different objectives. Organizing means working together to accomplish something you can’t do alone. We all have different capacities and abilities, so activism looks different for everyone.
m: I think our communities are ultimately what sustains us. I know I keep going back to the capitol to protest because these bastards are going after me and people I care about. In that same thought, I make sure that the people I’m close to have the support they need. I give what I can, and I try to link them up with others when there are things I can’t give. That’s really the basis of all of this.
Harry: I am honestly not 100 percent sure on the exact details of how to sustain the movement. The simple answer is that people’s power is unending, and that mutual aid will carry all of us. The more complicated end is getting everyone to do everything they can — and I mean everything they can, not just what is convenient. For our efforts in protesting in the capitol, many people who did not go donated money for gas or food.
Above all, what needs to happen is that the general population needs to take this seriously. Black people and trans people show up to every single protest they can, but so many white and cis people show up to one protest and convince themselves that they have done their part. It isn’t fair to those of us putting in work at every opportunity. I think I can speak for most of us that are dedicated to the movement when I say I’m becoming burnt out.
We are living in times where the fascism that has always plagued the United States is escalating. This will affect all of us. We all have to seize every opportunity to oppose this increasing fascism or it will swallow us all. And Black people and trans people will be among the first victims.
Sarahann: In working on an interview series with local trans people, I asked about where to direct allies to get involved, but didn’t get many answers outside of visiting the LGBTQ Archives at PS1 and following Instagram accounts like @oneiowaaction. I talked to emma about this the other day, and was reminded that there’s benefit to being decentralized in organizing, particularly when trans organizers are being directly targeted. Preserving their safety can mean obscuring methods. The Black Panthers weren’t publicly posting online how they took care of their community. You don’t give that kind of information away to people who would maliciously interfere with your plans.
As an artist, I am more practiced than the average person at exposing my vulnerabilities. I like writing about “personal” things. You can read or listen to my work and know I have issues. But on the level community organizing, you don’t want your weak spots to be easily found then exploited by people who don’t want you to exist. I think it’s funny, to reflect on the ways I make myself uncomfortable for art, but also take seriously how people have different ideas regarding vulnerability and danger.
Sarahann: I want to talk about despair and fear and hopelessness and sadness and crying. Do y’all cope with music? I definitely do.
m: “Despair” isn’t a word that I tend to use. Certainly fear, sadness, crying — I’ve cried during sets before. I think of music as a place I can go to be present in my feelings and experiences, and that has meant a lot of sadness and a lot of pain.
I think getting into noise and working with sound the way I do is honestly part of how I learned to be vulnerable with who I am at all. I tend to pull my sounds apart in fairly dramatic ways, slowing them down times 100 or resampling them over and over until they’re crushed flat. The way I see it, there is always the potential for all of what happens to the sounds I use, and what I do as a musician is just expose that potential and let it run wild. I code most of my own instruments and tools, other than a drum machine, so everything is really built to feed into that sort of overwhelming “presence.”
I was going to say that I don’t really have overt “politics” in my music; I only have two songs with lyrics. One’s about trying to remember a childhood friend, and the other’s about drowning… but then I realized I used to end my set with “Come Out” [by Steve Reich]-style looping a Kermes sample that says, “you only love us when we’re dying,” then feeding noise into its control signal until it’s just thumping and static.
Harry: I don’t think that political art has any ability to make real change. The real change happens in the streets. It happens in rooms where actions are planned. It happens when the people organize themselves and take concrete, material actions against fascism.
I’ve made political music, but it’s not my goal. When I am making music, the most important thing to me is to be honest. So I make music about whatever I feel like making music about in a moment. The day SF 538 (the bill that took away trans kids access to healthcare) was passed, I was really angry. I was angry at transphobes. I was angry at the police that protect those transphobes. So I put that anger into a song called “Prairieland.” I make political music because the reality of my life is decided by fascist lawmakers. I make political music because it would be dishonest not to.
m: Music doesn’t really do anything, people do. What I think music can do is bring those people together. I can think of several people who I used to see on the fringes at shows who are now really vocally fighting back. Hell, I’m one of those people. This vulnerability and honesty that we’ve been talking about can be sort of a “reaching out,” a hand to pull people into communities they might not have found otherwise. A lyric doesn’t change the world, but a few people who love a song or a sound can come together and start to build something.
Sarahann: Do you plan to stay in Iowa?
Harry: I’m hoping to escape Iowa by the end of this summer, because this state is becoming a living hell for people like me. It is not a place where I can survive. I would come to Iowa to visit my mom. Otherwise, I would not come to Iowa.
m: My Ph.D. program paid me to come. I had some distant personal connections to Iowa City — I was born here but never really lived here — but ultimately I was stuck in a job I hated and I felt like I needed to make a big change in my life. I do really feel like Iowa City is my home now though, even though I’m planning on moving this year. I’ve said “the community” a lot, and I’ve meant half a dozen things by it, but IC is the first place I’ve ever really felt like I had anything like that in my life.
Sarahann: I think of Iowa City not only as a college town, but as a resort town. I also wonder if it’s like trying to organize anti-war efforts on a military base. Things aren’t as bad in other places as they are here. Even a weekend trip to Chicago blows my mind. I feel the delusion of racism, and all the subtle or unspoken aggression of it, disappear when I get to Chicago. I’m less of an anomaly there, and I get looked at less in the ways I don’t like, and more in the ways I do like.
Working with Black artists in Iowa City sometimes feels like being part of the Underground Railroad. Why don’t I move? I’m not sure. I’m attached to my hometown, and I have a group of friends that love and support me. I’ve never liked myself and my life so much. Could it better? Maybe, but I would miss what I have here. I like running into people that truly care about me whenever I’m downtown.
Neko Case has this lyric, “I’m not fighting for your freedom, I’m fighting to be wild.” I think it’s embarrassing and uncomfortable to look someone who’s hurting in the eye and not be able to say you’re doing everything you can to alleviate their pain.
Sarahann Kolder
m: When I used to live in L.A., I never could have posted about a small show three weeks out and had 40 people there, or had dozens of people get themselves together in just a few days to go protest in Des Moines. The size and closeness here supports a really different way of moving and being an artist. The network of people might be smaller, but there are so many more threads connecting us all together; the PS1 people know the noise people know the punk people know the DJs know the poets know the folk people know the librarians know the activists and so on.
Sarahann: Why are we involved in political action in this way? Not all minority populations are mobilized like we are. Not trans and queer people, and not all artists.
Harry: I’m involved in political action because I am a communist. I think that most oppressed people have a certain awareness that something is wrong. I think that most oppressed people have a vision of what a just world looks like. The missing link is the question of, “How do we get there?”
History and experience taught me that communism is the only way for oppressed people to truly obtain the just world that we all dream of. Communism liberated the Vietnamese people from the French and the Americans. Communism liberated Cuba and Korea from slavery. The kind of communism that the Black Panthers advocated for is the only reason why we have free breakfast programs in public schools.
I want oppressed people to learn about our histories. I want oppressed people to learn about what liberated us and led our revolutions. I want oppressed people to see that capitalism is the reason why those who want us dead are able to kill us.
Sarahann: Neko Case has this lyric, “I’m not fighting for your freedom, I’m fighting to be wild.” I think it’s embarrassing and uncomfortable to look someone who’s hurting in the eye and not be able to say you’re doing everything you can to alleviate their pain. I have too many friends who are hurting right now to do anything else.
I also think artistic community is meaningless if the people involved are unwilling to be inconvenienced and uncomfortable to ensure people feel safe. I bodily cannot be around people who are dismissive to accessibility work outside of actual art-making or art-enjoying. Even if I was initially interested in someone’s art, if you’re whack, I no longer care.
Sarahann: Why aren’t more people getting involved?
Harry: I think it would be too harsh to say that all those uninvolved don’t care. I think a lot of people aren’t getting involved because they are naïve and believe that we can obtain the world we desire by simply willing it to be, rather than being disciplined and taking real actions to make real change. I think a lot of people aren’t getting involved because they are scared. They are scared of police brutality, jail time, losing their jobs, and not having enough money because they skipped work to go to a protest. To these people, I want to tell you about what happened with my legal case. I make $15.50 an hour. I don’t have thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and to pay legal fees. But my lawyer and legal fees were covered by the donations of ordinary people.
m: I always shy away from saying that people just don’t know, but then every time anything happens — our arrests, the Kinnick Stadium arrests, the marbles arrests, the creek trash protest, the TDOV protests — well-meaning people I know act shocked and appalled. I think many people’s response to the constant violence and grinding horror of the world we live in is to tune out. I’ve definitely been guilty of focusing on “smaller” or “closer” issues that feel understandable in the face of the global crisis we’re constantly in now. Part of mutual aid is giving what you can and trusting your community to do the same. That can start as simply as making sure your friends can eat. Then your neighbors, your community, your city, everyone.
Sarahann: I think working in groups is challenging and can provoke social anxiety at times, but you do it because the benefits outweigh the risks and downsides. It can be intimidating, being accountable to a group of people, which makes isolation attractive, but that’s not a long-term option.
A shorter version of this article was originally in Little Village’s March 2024 issue.
