Disavowal and abandonment by the blood family is a common experience among trans people in Turkey. Familial rejection of gender recognition, refusal of financial and emotional support, and at times, denial of funeral rituals and practices at the moment of death frequently intensify the everyday conditions of trans lives that are already and constantly marked by social discrimination, urban displacement, medico-legal regulation and police surveillance. Yet these relations of violence also constitute a social field of creative living within which trans people reform, shape and invent forms of intimacies to inhabit the world. Family and kinship becomes a constant process of renewal, an intimate survival strategy to cope with everyday violence, imaginative practices that push the boundaries of belonging, and claims to a place in life and death through queer belonging and bonding. In this paper, I offer a decolonial approach to the hegemonic institutions of family and kinship in Turkey through trans women’s intimate experiments with daughterhood and motherhood. I argue that family and kinship, both as a practical and discursive repertoire of care, queer belonging and bonding, is a significant currency of intimacy that allows trans people to creatively, productively and resolutely remake the violent conditions of their everyday lives. If one of the many ways to define kinship is the role of substance in consolidating ties between persons, I suggest that maybe trans people’s kin work offers us a novel way to think about substance beyond its definition as objects and bodily fluids or parts. Here I would like to ask what if we approach this substance as violence? How can we theorize violence as the mediator, the creative substance of kin work among trans people? I claim that an immersion into the ordinary of trans lives offers us a creative angle to negotiate, contest, as well as blur the intimate boundaries between family, kinship and friendship.