Intro & History
Foreword
We started building our sauna in November 2021. Covid forced our regular transfem community dinners outside into the back yard, where we froze our asses off and dreamt of a woodfire and nudity. Most of us had never been to a sauna, the rest not able to since transitioning. What a good opportunity to alter our material realities! we thought, and what an inviting task for us, grown weary of cisfeminist organising.
Our transfeminist collective has been organising dinner events at Streikhaus, the local feminist center, since 2019. They have done a lot to weave a loose but rapidly growing community out of isolated trans women like me. We have used these dinners to find friends, get laid, and acquire hormones when cis people wouldn’t put out. Many of us found their way into feminist activism here, or made their first steps as a freshly out trans girl. Some of us even learned that helping with the dishes is part of being an adult in the Streikhaus kitchen.
Streikhaus is also place of hypocrisy though, a catalyst for ineffective and performative activism, and a cesspool of transmisogyny. Cis female and tme trans feminists don’t handle penises well, which means we suffer a lot of biossentialist bullshit at their hands. A transfem sauna, where everyone is naked, but on our terms and our invitation, seemed like the most honest and productive weapon.
So my friend Sofia and I drove to the lumber yard, bought a stack of reclaimed, profiled larch boards (lucky us!) and set about constructing. A dozen more trans women were around to help or lend tools. It still took us a year, because we had little carpentry knowledge and high expectations: We wanted matching rived larch shakes for a roof and a wood fired stove on the inside. And it had to be presentable, because everything trans women do inevitably takes on a representative function. Convincing a lumberjack to sell us a section of a larch tree, locating a good Sauna oven that wasn’t stuck in Finland, and getting our hands on a proper froe took months and help from friends. But then: Splitting logs! Nailing shakes! Drilling holes! Installing the flue!
We had our first firing on Nov. 18th, 2022. Mainly to dry out all the waterlogged parts, but Sofia and I had a good sauna session after as a reward. By the end I was sitting in the rain happy, naked, and covered in resin.
