Faceless

Abstract

To refuse the gender binary is a criminal act, and trans antagonism—a violence that manifests along a spectrum from head-shaking disapproval to death—is at base a vociferous coercion to confess. This chapter’s aim is to consider what happens when one’s body belies what they wish it to be. For those who are read as cis, they have not undergone the alterations potent with gendered signification and are not trans(gender) in a sense that registers with how such an identity is made tentatively legible, so what claim do cis people have to a gendered subjectivity that is in fact a nonconfession, a confessional refusal, a desire for facelessness? And how might someone’s Blackness muddy the already muddy waters of gender alignment, that uneven epidermis indexical of an anoriginal lawlessness lacerative of the “cis” of cisgender, intimate with the “trans” of transgender?