Cahoots began as a mobile queer tradie collective driven by Jade Musther. Now, she’s on the cusp of opening a workshop to further share her skills with other women and the trans community.
Behind a roller door in Wellington’s Mount Cook – one of the queerest suburbs in Aotearoa’s queerest city – handy ma’am Jade Musther has spent weeks building the makerspace of her dreams. She’s two months out from opening what would be the first workshop for women and gender diverse people in Aotearoa, and though the space is still in progress, you can catch the queer touches everywhere – like the pink and purple spraypaint all over her tools, or the pride flag hanging above a workbench.
First an e-bike led trailer in 2021, Musther’s not-for-profit Cahoots – created to serve as a queer tradie collective – has already come a long way from being cycled around the capital’s hills. Earlier in life, Musther worked as an engineer, in construction and other trades, before spending “a chunk” of time away from the industry post-transition. “I came back to it in this new role … and obviously I knew there was gender inequity in this space, but I didn’t realise how much it annoyed me until I started working again,” she says.
Ahead of a July opening, Musther has been crowdfunding $50,000 to be able to fit out her makerspace and provide all the necessary tools. Her Hopper Street garage formerly belonged to a different trades business, so the workshop already has a few leftover tools and workbenches, and Musther and her volunteers have been busy building within the space; an office room for admin work, and a wall to separate the entryway from the workshop itself (the “terf wall” as Musther affectionately calls it).
Her volunteers include friends, family, supporters and a lowly Spinoff reporter who knows nothing about being on the tools, but how are you supposed to learn something new if you don’t throw yourself in the deep end? On an old cable spool table, she places a blueprint for the walls which will enclose the workshop’s office area, looks at me, and asks: “So, what are you thinking, looking at this?”
Terrified and confused is my immediate answer, with a sprinkling of shame for feeling that way in the first place. As well as the figures, the paper is filled with numbers, and I can’t tell which blocks on the page represent the frames, or the gaps in between, or how the wall in print is supposed to turn into a wall in real life. But three hours later, I’m almost convinced I could build a pretty fine cabin with my own bare hands.
“When you’re empowered in that way, when we can look at the world around you and have influence on it, that rolls over into other aspects of your life,” Musther tells me. “It rolls over into shaping how the world behaves around you, and how you interact with it and the spaces that you’re in.
“In a way, you can shape your destiny, right?”
It’s obvious from the outset that I’m one of the many ladies Musther refers to when she speaks of the inherent unease and lack of self-belief she’s observed in many women who are carpentry curious, but never felt like they fit into the trades space. With transphobia and misogyny going hand-in-hand, Musther says, the level of anxiety felt around being in these spaces is shared by the gender diverse community, too.
The idea to expand Cahoots into a workshop came after Musther hosted classes at the Newtown Community Centre, sharing the basics of her carpentry skills with women and the queer community. By the end of the sessions, her mentees were able to share their skills with each other, and engage in passionate discussions about the work they had done. When a man would enter the space, no matter how well-meaning, the comfortability shifted.
“Our community has been so separated from practical skills and tool use and building the environment around us for so long, for generations,” Musther says. “It’s become a habit that we have internalised, and so when we’re in spaces like that, we check ourselves and start to make ourselves smaller.”
There will be the naysayers who question why a space should even be specific to certain people in the first place but, as Musther points out, the trades industry already operates this way – only 3% of those who work in construction are female, while in plumbing this figure drops to 1%. “I don’t think there’s a way I can explain it except for that we are already segregated, disadvantaged, prejudiced against, assaulted and insulted, and that generates multigenerational fear and disadvantage,” Musther says.
“I can’t exactly prove to you that every woman who goes into Bunnings feels excluded, but I can lean on the statistics.”
Sometimes, the unease looks like second guessing everything you’re doing, or throwing in the towel before you’ve started. I can’t help but keep looking to Musther for her approval as she shows me how to measure a length of timber to get the cut you want. I wasn’t sure if I’d lined up the square ruler in the right place (I hadn’t, and all I could hear was my nervous laughter filling the room, but she was very nice about it). “There’s so many ways you can go wrong [with creating something],” she smiles. “But if you don’t talk about it or understand it, then you just stumble into it.”
There are also so many ways in which sexism seeps into the trades. Such as the design of women’s coveralls – typically cinched, embroidered with flowers and/or coloured pink – or being able to find virtually no stock images of women working in a trade so Musther can advertise her business.
As she shows me how to grip a drop saw handle, more evidence of the industry’s women-problem reveals itself – my hands are too small to fully grasp it so they snag another trigger, which actually gets the saw whirring and cutting. Musther says these tools usually have a one-size-fits-all consumer in mind: a big, burly man, which is why she also recommends buying Japanese brands.
The saw whirrs into action, I slice a small end off a length of timber to square it up, and with our cutting markers in place we get to cutting six pieces to the right length needed for our frame. When the first piece is nicely chopped, it’s placed on top of the next length of timber and marked so that we don’t need to bring out the measuring tape again, and the practice becomes meditative: square, mark, cut, move on. The smell of the sawdust burning off the wood is somehow sweet and homely.
The timber we use was donated by Mitre 10, the tools from various donors (and Musther’s own garage) and while we build, Musther is waiting for a well-wisher to drop off a used TV which will come in handy for teaching classes. The construction of Cahoots has been an entirely grassroots effort, with Musther and mates hitting their contact books, social media and trying to get media bites in the hopes of being able to spread the word.
Cahoots’s $50,000 crowdfunding campaign ends on May 16, and from there, Musther says the workshop will sustain itself through regular member donations and ticketed classes (with options for low income mentees) which will have “broad appeal”. “In an unjust, biased system where there isn’t enough funding for these kinds of things, an imperfect solution can be the answer for an imperfect system,” she says.
All of a sudden, the hours have passed in Musther’s workshop. I’m trying to keep a drill in line with my timber, but the tool is kind of heavy, and my shaky hands are wobbling the bit which holds the screw. Pressing the button gives me a bit of fright, and my immediate reaction is to giggle at myself.
I make a mental note that maybe my nervous laughter is a subconscious way for my apprehension to sneak through. Really, I was feeling more and more confident as we spent more time together, but I’d already warned Musther that I’m my own worst critic – that damned intergenerational unease is just peaking out again. With a little more practice, I think I probably could totally get over myself.
After a few more wobbles, the screw slides in – sometimes just a few millimeters at a time – and suddenly, the timber we’d spent the afternoon cutting is attached, and forming a shape. It looks like a frame and it’s a strange rush to see the blueprint plans come to fruition. Even if it isn’t even fully done, I can’t help but feel quite chuffed with myself. And Musthere, a great cheerleader, indulges in my visions of grandeur: “maybe you could even build a cabin one day!”
Hypothetically, if you made three more of those and fashioned a ceiling, you’d have a house. Wait, I have the ability to build a house now? It feels almost strange to be in possession of a knowledge that is so old, practical and, honestly, kind of life-changing and now not too difficult to grasp (once you’ve got the basics down). It’s a skill that typically gets passed down from fathers to sons, while the daughters are left to hope that the husbands they marry one day might have shared the same paternal familial ties.
On one side of this dream house, I’d keep the tools that helped build my home. On the other wall, I’d get to work on learning how to add in a window, and make glass cutting my next venture. And I also won’t have to let in any man (unless I really want to).
