Jake Starr

“The gender nihilist, the gender abolitionist, looks at the system of gender itself and see’s the violence at its core. We say no to a positive embrace of gender. We want to see it gone. All the previous attempts at positive and expansionist gender politics have failed us. We know appealing to the current formulations of power is always a trap. We refuse to legitimize ourselves. We are daily being attacked by a process of normalization that codes us as deviant. Gender must punish deviance, thus gender must go. If what we are is a product of discourses of power, and we seek to abolish and destroy those discourses, we are taking the greatest risk possible. The very terms, symbols, ideas, and realities by which we have been shaped and created will burn in flames, and we cannot know or predict what we will be when we come out the other side. Yet in plunging into the unknown, we enter the waters of unintelligibility. These waters are not without their dangers; and there is a real possibility for a radical loss of self. The very terms by which we recognize each other may be dissolved. But there is no other way out of this dilemma. If we lose ourselves in the process, we have merely suffered the same fate we would have otherwise. If we do not lose ourselves in the movement of negativity, we will be destroyed by the status quo. We have only one option. A rejection of meaning, a rejection of known possibility, a rejection of being itself. That is our stance and method.”

- Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto, Alyson Escalante