Last night in #Amsterdam we sat with Robin and listened to a life that reads like both a confession and a history lesson.
We first met him after offering some healing — and what started as a simple encounter turned into an invitation we’ll never forget. Over dinner, Robin walked us through decades of reinvention, conviction, and compromise: a life lived in the trenches of politics, identity, and personal transformation.
He traced his path from youthful idealism — fighting for justice and imagining a world remade — to a harder, stranger wisdom: stop waiting for revolution in the streets, start changing the institutions that shape thought. Gramsci’s “long march” wasn’t theory for him; it was lived reality. He’d seen activists capture classrooms, journalists shape narratives, and judges bend the lines of what becomes “normal.” Hearing that strategy explained by someone who’s watched it work — and fail — was sobering.
He spoke with blunt clarity about revolutions that devoured themselves. Movements promising equality that ended in secret bank accounts and privileges for the few. The irony that freer markets sometimes delivered more real gains — factories, cars, wages, breathing space — than utopian manifestos ever did.
And then there was the deeply personal. Robin spoke of his transgender years not as spectacle but as lived truth. He shared painful experiments in belonging, desire, and identity; times when ideology softened him, and times when it hardened him. He told of loving people who hated what he worked to dismantle, betraying organizations that trusted him, and carrying both scars and gifts from those choices.
Yet through all the strategy and scars, there was tenderness. The small, stubborn acts of care. The kindness that shows up in the middle of a fiasco. The way he risked so much not for power, but to shield someone he loved when bigger plans fell apart.
If it sounds messy, that’s because it is. Robin’s life is a study in the grey: brilliant strategy and ugly compromise, fierce tenderness and ruthless pragmatism, experiments in identity that left both wounds and wisdom. Listening to him was like being handed a map — honest, incomplete, uncomfortable, and necessary.
Thank you, Robin, for the stories, the warnings, and the hope. We feel incredibly lucky to have shared that table with you. If anyone wants to hear more, come with an open mind and a strong cup of tea — Robin has plenty more to tell.
— Shankar &
@Antréa Ferguson
