The afterword addresses a key question that animates this project: how do we write the lifeworlds of trans people who are denied basic access to life at every turn? Abolishing cisness is an ongoing project that refuses the endless demands placed on trans people to be both the crisis and site of redemption for contemporary politics. The contributions to this volume reveal the challenges of this project: the failed promises of historical presence in archives built to reinforce structures of gender difference, the nonconsensual demands of confession, the enduring misuse of political speech, and even the inadequacies of seemingly more transphilic genres of the revelatory memoir or autotheory. The proof of the existence of trans people in the past and present is both essential and insufficient to dismantling cisgender economies that traffic in recognition, disclosure, and the perpetual diagnosis of trans people for easy consumption.
Advertisement
