[W]hen I claim “genderlessness,” I indicate a politic not of variance within an existing gender spectrum but a defect/ion from it. My goal, then, is not merely to publicly identify myself as different-from-cis, but to generate a political and intellectual project aiming to undo the hierarchical, taxonomizing, and, indeed, medical violence of gender itself: to carve alternative modes of being in the world. Alongside other radical a-spec terminologies, loveless and genderless are designed for worlds beyond allocishet perception.
To be -less, to me, is to be stark: it is to euphemize an absence that, for me, the comparatively-friendly “nonbinary” or even “agender” signify, though both also carry immense meaning and utility in trans lives and communities The ideology of “-less” need not even be expressed by the suffix itself; it is expressed, rather, in a social architecture of refusal in which other intimacies and relationalities might form. Here, absence is not a problem to be fixed nor a misperception of presence. Absence, shared absence, is willful and deliberate. Absence makes vital (sp)ace for new things to grow. Absence is stark, leaving abrasions on the unsuspecting onlooker; this is what I indicate in my choice of -less. The ideology of -less does not merely expand the limits of acceptable discourse on love, sex, and gender, it jars the ideological containers in which we store them. It reaches the end of the hall of possibility and it opens a window.
[sarah] Cavar, in praise of -less: transMad shouts from absent (pl)aces.
