Moving to Green
Tai Lee: resisting systemic oppression through agency and consent
Sharpening knives was just a skill that I learned growing up in my family. Actually, my mom hated that I sharpened knives. She said that they were too scary. When I would come home from school in college and sharpen them, she just complained to me for months afterwards until they were finally dull.
So goes the tale about how Tai Lee got their start in sharpening knives. Today, Tai organizes a BIPOC and queer knife sharpening collective, an apprenticeship program that helps people build flexible and self-controlled access to wealth. But I’m getting excited and jumping ahead. For Tai, sharpening knives is cathartic.
The way that I describe it is that it’s the pursuit of a theoretical null. You’re trying to find the edge — the smallest possible point. And you’re trying to pursue that. For me, it’s a very Zen thing to do.
I picked it up again in 2020 because I needed something to do to release the energy from my mind and body. I had been in a bike accident in late 2019; I couldn’t rely on getting out for a bike ride as my release, which I used to have consistently. I needed something else, and knife sharpening became that. It became something I could do to put myself into that restorative state.
I was asking friends, “Hey, do you have some knives you want me to sharpen for you? I’ve already sharpened all mine and I need more.”
And then I realized that people actually pay really good money to sharpen their knives — it was like $2 an inch, back when I started doing it.
Tai recently finished grad school to earn a LMFTA license and become a therapist. Before that, they had been a real estate agent and an active volunteer with social justice advocacy groups.
But after starting school, they no longer had the mental bandwidth to continue volunteering. They realized they could monetize knife sharpening — a form of relaxation — to support the social justice causes important to them.
I came up with this idea — I’ll turn it into a fundraiser. It was kind of this hair-brained thing where we printed out this little flyer and my kids and I walked around our neighborhood and put flyers on doors. I also needed to get them out of the house. So I said, “Hey, if we go out for one hour of walking, you can have one hour of screen time.” They’d run up and down a lot of stairs and put flyers on doors.
At the beginning, it was specifically targeted for the ACLU, where I had been volunteering, and King County Equity Now. They had really moved the local conversation forward around equity, so I wanted to support that. Within the first few months, it took off. There was a lot of demand for it in the area — the local professional had a four-week backlog. People needed their knives sharpened, and for them to hear that they could donate that money to a cause was an interesting proposition.
For many, it was really their first time looking at something along the lines of the ACLU or even hearing about King County Equity Now. It became an invitation for people, and we started having conversations.
Tai shares a story about a woman who moved into the neighborhood and brought over a bunch of gardening tools for sharpening. Tai requested $40 as the suggested donation amount.
When she showed me her donation receipt, it was for $600. What she said was that [after] the invitation we extended her, to think about her recent purchase of a home, she learned about redlining. She learned about how our neighborhood here previously excluded black people and she felt that it was a privilege for her to be in this neighborhood, and she wanted to convert that into something meaningful. The knife sharpening and the value of it becomes not even the point anymore. It’s just the ask of getting to connect with people and have this conversation.
We started this thing in October of 2020. Anytime anything would happen — the two murders in Columbus, OH in December, the shootings in Atlanta — I just felt so much grief. And the way that I channeled that grief while still being in grad school was to go out and put up more flyers. On the flyer it says if there’s an organization you’d like to donate to or you want a suggestion, let us know. That was an opportunity to direct people towards ACLU of Ohio specifically, or the Victims Family Fund in Atlanta. And it was all because of a little piece of paper that someone brought into their house because they needed their knife sharp.
Once Tai started seeing clients for therapy near the end of grad school, they found that their clients kept running into financial barriers. Clients would ask for a reduced rate or pro bono care to continue their therapeutic journey.
I was working with people who have these compounding identity factors of being in queer communities, BIPOC, trans, having issues related to neurodivergence, having disabilities.
The things that are critical are housing, food, car payments, and things like that. It's just capitalism. You need money.
Tai recognized that these compounding factors, in the context of oppressive system forces, was limiting for folks.
And here I was sharpening my knives. People [are] dropping off knives on my porch every day. I don’t go anywhere. I don’t need to do anything. I don’t even see people. There’s nobody to fire me, nobody to yell at me or get angry with me.
I was like, You know what I need to; I need to take my skill set and I need to teach people how to do this so they have a stable source of income for themselves.
I did the math of it. I was able to raise $41,000 in one year doing probably about 6-7 hours of work a week. That was, of course, with a lot of folks rounding up and being generous. Let's just call it 75% of that, $30,000. Even for a side gig of doing 6-7 hours of work a week, 30K is good money.
Tai is currently focused on building out a community of support for knife sharpening apprentices and accepts people that society de-centers or people willing to help subsidize the program for fellow learners.
The program’s first cohort has 11 apprentices. The network has both knife sharpeners and knife runners (who pick up the knives from a patron and deliver them to the knife sharpener) spread across Seattle, and sharpeners and runners split the income 50-50.
Whenever a patron contacts the alliance, they are referred to the nearest sharpener or runner. You can contact them online through their Facebook page, "Seattle Queer & BIPOC Knife Sharpening Alliance."
So now you have two people that get to make an extra $250 a week. That takes care of groceries, chips away at rent. It makes living a lot easier. That's the evolution of this whole thing.
Challenging the System
Tai has long been a community builder. I met Tai in a Relationship Anarchy space — a supportive community for people with non-traditional relationships. This was before the pandemic, and I remember Tai’s presence in the community. They were someone who held a lot of space for others and organized community events, such as a weekend-long Relationship Anarchy Retreat.
Tai went to therapy school thinking they could level up their supportive capacity for the community. But that's not what they found when they started a $60,000 program.
I'm going to school to become a therapist, and the theories that we're learning are all centered on things that white males from the 1950s and 60s taught.
And what's really surprising to especially my community members in queer, polyamorous, [and] kink communities is that there's not a single time that the word agency and consent is brought up in relational therapy theories and foundational relationship therapy theories. Not a single time.
And for me, coming into school from that community, where I was doing peer support and emotional support, my central lens is agency. My central understanding of relational distress is a matter of agency and consent. So I go to school because I think, I’ll level up.
No. School wasn’t leveling up. School was learning [about] all the academic gatekeepers I needed [to know about] to get a couple of letters behind my name. 85 percent of the credits that I paid for would install me as a perpetuator of systemic oppression. And it's infuriating. It's infuriating to pay that money to go sit in those classes.
Tai says that they see coercion as the main issue. They define intergenerational trauma as the perpetuation of a failure to recognize agency.
Overreaching in terms of having no boundaries is the norm. There is no agency. Hence, it’s not even taught in school.
So the work that I've been doing in grad school is actually creating a new theory: agency centered relational therapy, which is a combination of somatic work, structural work with the integration of agency, and narrative work.
I think for so many people, the norm is a very anxious, fight-or-flight, performative, obligatory state — at minimum. If a person lives so much of their life in that state, they could very easily confuse that for their normal. They could confuse that for the best that they can get.
When I think about somatics, I'll just use green, yellow, and red. And I think about moving towards green. I think about how we can move towards green at several different layers: there's the socio-ecological model, there's the intrapersonal, and our internal spaces. How do I move towards green?
The narrative work is the exploration of the ways we are acculturated that may cause a person to do something like not respect boundaries. Why does a person not see a boundary [that's] so obviously [there]? We can feel in our bodies that doesn’t work, so why do we still follow this narrative? They didn’t have it; that’s not how they grew up.
It's been interesting. I spent the last four quarters of school writing a master's paper. I had to write about all the theories that I've learned and which ones I've chosen as my primary modalities and how I’m applying them.
And most people are like, "Yes, I'm a structural therapist,” or “I am leaning into CBT,” or “I really like emotionally focused therapy,” or “I really like Gottman's work." And they talk about how they apply that from what they've learned.
And my paper is... "This is all bullshit.
“And here's the theory that poor little me, who has no letters behind my name, is creating to address this.”
It has taken a lot of courage for Tai to challenge the system in this way. And they would not have been able to do so without the support of their instructors — especially BIPOC instructors — who told them they were on the right track.
The response has been fantastic. My instructors have said, "Please challenge the system. Keep going." If it weren't for my instructors, I would feel much more scared and not want to do that.
To say, "Here's why what you're teaching me is actually harmful. And here is what I propose, in contrast. Here is how I, in the last 12 months of my education in my clinical internship, have applied it to my clients. And here is how well it has worked. And here's a video of my recorded sessions (which I have to do a lot; it's a much higher level of academic rigor because I'm critical of academia)."
And I tell my clients, “Just so you know, you’re not going to be getting CBT or Gottman. You’re going to be getting something very different from me. If you came into this experience wanting a specific modality, I’m going to tell you that upfront so you can choose someone else.”
Even in the recruitment of clients, Tai has centered agency — they want their clients to know what therapy will entail and consent to that approach.
Trauma as a Lack of Agency
Throughout our conversation, Tai referenced several examples of how dynamics of agency (or lack thereof) and trauma play out in day-to-day life. You see it in high conflict couples when the plane of agency is broken, in the challenge of parenting, and in the forced binary of gender.
A lack of agency shows up in high-conflict couples, Tai says. Institutionally recommended solutions don’t honor a person’s autonomy over their own body.
In the first quarter of class, this book talks about how when couples are fighting and they're not getting along, they should keep having sex. You should just keep having sex, to work through it.
I also finished my certification as a sex therapist. I see clients all day long who've done that for years and years and years and they get into... [a space where] sex has become coerced. They've only known sex in that elevated somatic state of fight or flight. They've not experienced it in a joyful place.
One of my clients has come to therapy because they are having painful sex. Sex is so painful, so tense. It’s always been a fight or flight, and now a scary red experience. That’s how far people have gone without agency.
Even the most recent theory, that actually notes or mentions that word agency, is from 2013. It's called social emotional relational therapy. One of the creators of this theory says, “Yes, we really need to think about agency. We really need to think about power and relationships.”
Tai was excited to see a theory mention agency, but they were soon disappointed.
And then, what they prescribe [as] the right relational approach is that a man and a woman — because it's a very hetero-normative theory — should have equality in relationship. And on paper equality sounds great, especially if women haven’t had equality. But if the provider still has to prescribe the power dynamic, that’s not agency.
What is agency is for them to actually be able to understand how their body responds to a threat of agency. It's for them to actually — for possibly the first time in their life — recognize that they have never thought about agency, yet their body has an evolutionary response to a threat to see and to teach them to listen to what that threat is.
You can hear it when someone says the word "Fine." Fine [means] yes, but the obligation and the resignation behind that says, I didn't actually agree to this. And that has a correlating body sensation to it.
Tai helps people learn to recognize and listen to that somatic messaging.
Maintaining agency for both people in a relationship can be a complex objective. Tai works with clients to help them move to green, to approach their relationships with agency and communicate clearly. But in doing so, Tai also teaches clients to respect others’ agency.
How do I set my expectations so that it doesn’t adjust your behavior? How do I not leverage our relational status so that I can threaten the dropping of that relational status, I can threaten abandonment, to coerce how much emotional access you grant me and how you behave? All that is breaking the plane of agency.
There’s a somatic sensation with that. People feel it before they realize it. That didn’t feel right. So that’s the work with clients.
Tai has also encountered guidance on parenting during their schooling. Unsurprisingly, Tai was underwhelmed.
One of the theories is called structural theory. What it says is that the hierarchy of the family (it has to be a hierarchy) and the power has to be with the executive subsystem, the parents.
Well, as a parent myself, the question I would ask is [this]: so I get to have all the power until when, until the day they turn 18? At which point in time, [I say], “See you later; have a nice life”? That doesn’t sound like it works.
For me, agency [means] looking at what is age appropriate for them and letting them experiment with that and make mistakes so that it’s a gradual transition. By the time they turn 18 [and] they leave the house, they should be well-versed in their agency because it’s been handed to them and cultivated in practice.
That’s the opposite of what I’ve been taught — that I get all the power until when I decide I don’t want it anymore.
Tai says that finding the joy and modeling that stance is especially important as a parent.
You have to live it. As a parent raising two children, I have to teach my children how to [live with joy].
They’re coming into a very difficult world. How do they move through this world without being so pushed down by all the environmental issues, all the social justice issues? That’s very depressing stuff for a kid. How do I bring them into a space where they can have distress tolerance for hearing all these things without being disenchanted to hopelessness and to not act?
Tai shares that a partner just had a baby; this partner was very attuned to their own somatic experiences during the pregnancy and that the kiddo will be raised with attunement to agency.
I fantasize about what it’s like to be that child. It’s not what I grew up with. I grew up with a lot of trauma and abuse and whatnot. I’ve had to learn later in life how to figure that stuff out.
I share that I, too, grew up with traumatic experiences. I can relate to Tai’s system of red, yellow, and green. I just completed a year of intensive work focusing on somatics, finding joy, and working (slowly and carefully) through trauma responses.
Slowly, my body moved from a constant state of red (I remember thinking, This trauma response has been on this whole time, and I didn’t even know.) to yellow (I remember thinking, I feel ok... wow.). And recently, green — I've been feeling happy. A happy feeling is just shocking and surprising when you’ve been living with a different baseline, and you didn’t even realize it.
Hopefully we can all work through some of the trauma we’ve inherited and model a better way for the next generation.
The forced binary of gender is also an example of societal overreach.
Imagine the structural overreach, the violation of agency, needed to coerce somebody into a gender identity.
The narratives that we've been acculturated with are traumatic. It’s the internal difficulty with gender “dysphoria” (that's the DSM term for it) — the lack of authenticity of expression, the coerced nature of gender.
Fighting that coerced gender identity [so clients can] become a more authentic version of themselves is all somatic work; that’s all narrative. I get really excited about it.
I have had the honor of witnessing people close to me explore their gender, and it is very somatic. They do it because it makes them happy. That is truly a path of listening to your body and living based on that internal feeling.
In terms of combatting harmful structural narratives, Tai blends compassion with a commitment to speak to power.
People don't take trauma seriously enough. So then we have post-traumatic issues, and then people don't take that seriously enough. So then we have complex post traumatic issues.
I would love to be able to look in the face of a cis-white-male who has anger, who is angry and fearful, and I would like to be able to say, "You've been traumatized into where you are now.
“The identity that you live with, that you may even be so proud of, is actually your trauma. You were squeezed into that box. And if I work with you, or if you thought about it for a moment, you would remember times when that squeezing, that coercion, that lack of recognition for your agency, felt awful.
“But then, you went ahead and had no choice, and it happened. And that's where you are now. You don't have to do that. You don't have to be there."
The compassion that Tai has for this scenario was so evident. I felt very moved by this stance, which I think Tai truly felt, to hold compassion for someone who is upholding a structure and a narrative that is causing them pain (Tai is non-binary). But it’s not a toothless or unaware stance.
That’s the thing that I keep [doing], to try and speak to power in this work, to find a palatable message to speak to power. To try and find compassion while also being confrontational. That’s the thing that sits heavy with me that I would [want] to get out there.
I don’t know how else we’re going to do it in all the categories of systemic-level issues (environmental justice, social justice, all these things). That's the approach that I think works. Maybe there are other things. But I just haven't seen anything else.
Trauma in Activism Spaces
This compassionate, firm work to address trauma is an approach to activism and change that resonates with me. Tai conceptualizes the work of “moving to green” across different layers of society, starting with internal spaces and moving outwards.
In my internal space, that's me sharpening knives, right?
There's the interpersonal: How do I talk to a neighbor and build a relationship with a neighbor? Let's move both of us towards green.
In the case of this alliance and starting with these apprentices, it's become a community. How do I move the community towards green?
And then, you know, with the funding that we have, how can we generate enough money to facilitate moving society towards green? For example, there's a lot of funding from this last year [in knife sharpening proceeds] that's gone to Fair Fight, [to address] a systemic issue of voter suppression.
Those are the two things that I use for me to get through life: somatics and these layers.
My conceptualization of it is to try and find some way to generate enough critical mass of this green somatic state so that it can be shared. It can be inviting to create a bigger community; it can be inspirational to move itself out into society.
I’m thinking about how much I can do that is joyful. [How can I] share that joy, model that joy, and have that joy creep up into as high of a level as I can get it to go?
Tai believes that joy is often what is missing from activism spaces and what leads to burnout. It’s important to pay attention to that somatic component and the “why” behind what we’re doing.
Are we doing it because there's this oppressive thing, this big oppressive layer thing, and it says, “You need to recycle, you need to do activism, you need to demonstrate, you need to do all these things”? Or are we doing it because we're trying to build up as much joy as possible?
It’s an interesting, meta side of social justice work. Why do you do activism, and how do you do it well and sustainably? Narrative is so dominating, and it drives everything. Even when people have done some work and have started challenging [dominant narratives], it is so sticky and persistent.
What I’ve seen in these advocacy spaces is that people will bring their idealism in, but their meta level of working remains oppressive, dismissive of others, and contemptuous, and also not sustainable in the ways that they burn themselves out.
It’s trauma. Trauma work is long-term and non-linear and narrative. And that vein doesn’t just disappear overnight once you challenge it.
Straight narrative therapy, as it’s manualized, is looking for the pathological narrative and then looking to replace it with some other narrative. When I use narrative as a modality, I don’t look for solutions in narrative because the replacement narrative keeps people up inside their head. It doesn’t take them into their body.
What I want to do is to look at the narrative and see what the developmental somatic impact was. I want to help the client develop this somatic attunement so that they can listen into their body, and they can answer the question for themselves: What feels green? What feels like a green thing I could do? What feels like a green thing I can do for myself and for my relationships? And eventually their work hopefully carries them into the other layers.
As I reflect on this, the conceptualization is almost like doing activism work is something you graduate into, after you get your own house in order. Tai seems to operate that way as well in being very careful about their asks in the knife sharpening work.
One of the things that I don’t want to do in this neighborhood fundraising thing is to encourage people to volunteer. Because I don’t know if they’re prepared for it. I don’t want them to go into that space bringing in their narrative, bringing in their colonizer mindsets.
I just want their money to go someplace that actually is doing the work and hopefully doing it well.
Hearing that, it struck me that this could be taken as a shallow statement. But really, it’s a healing and somatic gesture. It’s low emotional labor for the person giving the money, and that money goes to fund the work of someone who is trained and who hopefully enjoys doing activism work. And it’s lower emotional labor for that paid activist to be funded and supported and perhaps not onboarding new volunteers all the time. Tai agrees.
Yeah. If you think about it somatically, it’s kind of the greenest outcome. If you think about it from a narrative standpoint, it sounds greedy and awful.
I was working in the police accountability and reform group before George Floyd, before Breonna Taylor. We saw the influx of so many people who wanted to volunteer, but then the group got boggled down catering to those people who brought their trauma into that space. And that was even more burnout.
Being an activist can actually serve as a way to numb out painful emotions and feelings because it keeps you so busy (I’ve shared before how I’ve used activism that way). It’s important to heal your trauma and make sure that your involvement is joyful, that your work doesn’t exceed what you can truly offer.
When I was doing advocacy work for ACLU and People Power Washington, the police reform group, I got burnt out. It was exhausting.
It was so much work putting together legislative guides, trying to reach out to legislative aides and council members and state reps and King County reps and things like that. And just seeing how much work went into that, which really just didn't go anywhere. The system is really quite shot in that sense. And I felt really burnt out.
The thing that I came to realize was [that] the funneling of accountability from these big, humongous layers — racism, climate change and things like that — these are problems this big.
At this point, Tai spreads their arms as wide as they can go, and I get a sense of enormity. And then they bring their hands together as if holding a small cup, to show a very tiny container.
And here we are trying to squeeze that into the accountability of a container this big, this one person. And that, to me, is the hallmark of an oppressive system. [It's] when I feel this big amount of thing and it needs to fit into this tiny little container.
You know, for me, the sustainability in doing social justice work is making sure that I am doing all the work that my container can fit. I'm doing it somatically in that green way. I am doing it in an authentic and joyful way.
When it gets performative, when it gets feeling forced, when I start feeling that resentment, that upset or whatnot, and I start feeling that burnout — that's not sustainable.
So this whole exercise with figuring out this knife sharpening thing has been finding the joyful work. It's joyful work to me to sharpen knives.
It's joyful work to hand a bundle of sharp knives to my neighbor and then for them to text message me later, saying, “Oh my gosh, I just cut my finger because I've never had knives this sharp before!” There's that interpersonal level of joking and laughter and humor and joyfulness.
It's joyful work to teach sharpening to the apprentices.
And then the societal layer: I generated $56,000 and I'm just going to throw it at that layer. I have no expectations for it coming back. There's no measure for me to say, “It didn't meet my expectations.” It is just joyful for me to put it into these causes that I care about, with people who could probably do that work better than I can anyway.
Tai teaches us that we all need agency in our own life paths. Your joy matters. Don’t let society’s narratives convince you otherwise — that’s overreach and coercive.
Tune into the internal messaging. Learn to listen, and let your choices organically transform you from the inside out.
Your joy is revolutionary, and following its voice will change the world.