Kimberley and I were chatting together one lunch time, sitting on opposite sides of the lunch table. She was buoyantly explicating her views on the relationships between gender identity and violence, and I was listening intently, intrigued to hear her latest opinions on the subject. I had the opportunity to work closely with Kim during my time volunteering – assisting her in her work and talking with her regularly in our breaks. She's a young, educated, self-proclaimed ‘urban Māori’ who loves debating with her colleagues, myself included, about gender identity, violence, race, and politics. Our lunchtime conversation today has been about whether or not it is actually possible to end gendered violence. Kim argues that it isn't possible, not with contemporary gender identity dualisms. She tells me that until we can imagine a third possible gender, consistently and coherently, there is always going to be a violent fight for the masculine to be dominant over the feminine. She laughs and summarizes: “Basically, every time I think about gender equality, I just think it's never going to happen.”

Kim then asks me what I’ve been working on recently. I explain that I’ve been doing some reading about violence, particularly thinking about the necessities of violence for forming identities (Bergin and Westwood, 2003) and I’ve been particularly interested in the idea that becoming something involves violently foreclosing the possibilities of other ways of being. Kim is particularly enthusiastic about the idea, linking it to her interests in how making some aspects of violence visible – ‘hypering’ she calls it – invisibilizes other kinds of violence. Hypering the idea that it is possible to end gendered violence invisibilizes the ways that gender inequality perpetuates, she argues. Kim has been interested in the notion of the ‘undertow’ of gendered violence; all the complex and subtle ways that people unconsciously revert back to harmful gendered norms.

My lunchtime conversation with Kim left me, as it usually did, unsettled in my ideas about the relationships between gender and violence, and the relationships between gender identity and the possibilities of achieving social change for victims of gendered violence. I didn't agree with Kim that it was impossible to end gendered violence, but my conversations with her were helping me to expand and challenge my own thoughts on the relationships between gender identity and domestic violence work.