Amina Shareef Ali draws a connection between parkour and being trans through a shared act of refusal:

“We’re looking at a space, be it a large physical environment or one’s body, and being like, we’ve been told this is what this space means and is for, and there’s like a no, I don’t accept that.”

This rejection is powerful. The architect says the handrail is for assisted walking—parkour says no, it’s for balance, for flow, for creative expression. Society says your body assigned male at birth means you’re a man—you say no, I don’t accept that meaning. The liberation comes from refusing the default assignment, from recognizing that spaces and bodies don’t have inherent singular meanings that must be respected.

But here’s where it gets complicated: once you reject the assigned meaning, you still have to decide what it means instead. And who gets to make that decision?

Start with physical space. A parkour practitioner rejects the architect’s intended use—the stairs are for climbing, the wall is a boundary, the plaza is for walking through. Fine. But the plaza doesn’t become meaningless just because you’ve rejected one assignment. If you decide it’s now a training space, a place to practice precisions and wall runs, have you simply replaced one assigned meaning with another? And what about everyone else using that space?

The person who works in the building might experience your redefinition as an imposition. They didn’t assign the plaza meaning as “place to walk through peacefully”—they’re just trying to get to work, and now there are people vaulting over benches in their path. The security guard enforcing “no skateboarding, no parkour” isn’t defending the architect’s vision. They’re defending one group’s assignment of meaning (peaceful passage) against another’s (training ground).

So rejecting assigned meaning doesn’t automatically make your new meaning more valid. It just means you’re in conflict with whoever assigned the previous one. The question becomes: whose assignment wins?

With bodies, this feels different. When Shareef Ali rejects the assigned meaning of her body—the meaning that says “assigned male at birth equals man”—that’s self-determination. She gets to decide what her body means. That’s the point.

But even with bodies, self-assignment doesn’t exist in isolation. Your understanding of your body interacts with how others understand it, with medical frameworks, with social structures. Not all those interactions are oppression to be rejected. Some are navigation between competing meanings that all have some validity.

And with shared spaces, the complication intensifies. Rejecting the assignment “this is not for athletic movement” might be justified—you’re claiming public space for creative use. But if your redefinition as “training ground” means elderly people feel unsafe walking through, or if your rejection of “respect quiet hours” means neighbors can’t sleep, whose meaning should prevail? You’ve rejected one assigned meaning, but you’ve also assigned a new one that affects people who never consented to it.

The complication isn’t that rejecting assigned meaning is wrong. It’s that rejection alone doesn’t resolve who gets to assign new meaning or how to handle competing assignments. Shareef Ali’s framing captures the liberatory potential—you don’t have to accept what you’ve been told spaces or bodies are for. But liberation from one meaning doesn’t automatically provide the right meaning to replace it with, or settle whose new assignment should count when meanings conflict.

What she’s describing isn’t a simple swap of old meaning for new. It’s recognition that you’re allowed to participate in the ongoing conversation about what things mean. The liberation is in refusing to accept that the conversation is already closed. The complication is that opening it back up doesn’t tell you how it should resolve.

This field note references the Movers Mindset podcast episode “Punk with Amina Shareef Ali,” published November 3, 2023.