Abstract
This chapter sheds light on the resilient, imaginative, and creative labor of trans lives by narrating intimate accounts of friendship and family and kin making. It demonstrates how trans people reinvent everyday conditions of violence, familial abandonment, and death, transforming them into relations and currencies of intimacy. Trans people deploy the family as a form of intimacy but strategically rework it through queer alignments and ties. Through an intertwined network of care, labor, love, joy, and affect, they consistently invest in their friendships, contest the primacy given to blood families, and survive a violent urban geography. This way the trans everyday offers us a creative angle to negotiate and contest, as well as blur, the intimate boundaries among family, kinship, and friendship and hence theorize the constitutive relationship between violence and intimacy through an embodied process of family and kin work.