This interview was conducted by Katharine Blair between August 20th and 29th, 2023 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their (mostly, some names/pronouns were updated) unedited form.

I would say that someday I'll pick a book to talk about that doesn't require me to unearth/rehash/my therapist might say catastrophize some core part of my identity/history/sense of self but we'd both see the lie. My copy of CO/NOTATIONS is dog-eared and underlined and has spent more than one 'I can't deal with you right now' night on the floor. Having published 'a complete family / hstry,' read a good deal of your writing, even writing against it (as I have at length with Bug Butter), I had a good sense that this one would hit home. And still. and still.
It's revealing to me how many trans writers push back against conventional notions of poetry and prose. We sneak asides into everything, drop caps & leave readers uneasy. We are forever wringing meaning out of every blank space. From the first CO/NOTATIONS reads as a clearly trans space and yet I can feel you, can read you, reaching out to the non-trans and bridging that gap. We are, forever, bridging that gap. I'm curious how much of that bridge building is, for you, about being understandable and how much a desire to be understood. 

I answered the last question first, and here I am, answering the first question last. katharine, I’m ENDLESSLY grateful for your care and tenderness, and the way you bring such gentle and unceasing curiosity to my work and others’. 

Despite my love of opacity and illegibility, I maintain an intense desire to be understood. Ideally, I’d want to be understood while remaining illegible; having other like-minded trans(///)Mad people in my life, you included, has been a decent way of scratching that itch. I don’t think that this is the reason for all of my annotations, though, because I do the same things to the works I doubt I will ever share, including my own journal! 

I annotate because I know I am many people, and that I’ll keep iterating forever, even after I die, because new readers and interlocutors will continue contacting various versions of me and passing their own judgements. For as long as I’m known, I’ll keep multiplying. Annotations are a way of engaging myselves in conversation. Sometimes, annotations are my way of fighting with other me’s for the last word. It’s a relentless, fast-paced, exciting form of relentless self-critique that leaves me flushed and invigorated. I enjoy making it visible to others in the works I do publish, just like I like those YK computers that were translucent, and you could see “under the hood” and even (gasp) repair them yourself! Maybe this offering will allow readers to understand me better, or at least, think that they do. Maybe (hopefully) it will allow them to do the same with their own writing, whether by giving permission or just providing an example.

If nothing else, I hope that this kind of constant conversation in my published work helps readers understand the kinds of persons bringing [sarah] Cavar’s writing to them. I hope it excites them in the way that it excites me, or at least, makes them think. 

"Trans-butchness is a body in motion"

Trans-butchness is a body in flux. The trans of trans itself needs so much ex-ploration/planation. Trans not -portation, more -literation. The insistence on a fixed destination and so much of what makes us lost in the gap. To be trans is, for so many of us, to be constantly shifting, uneasy. To need footnotes and asides and revisions to everything lived, done, and said. This is, in essence what you've done here with CO/NOTATIONS. Let us hide in the text for a moment. Will this work ever be finished? In your mind is there a final form for these essays or will they live as a never ending series of nexts?

The very short answer is: No! As long as I’m alive, I’ll be working (on it). As I mention in the book, both of the anchor essays were written years ago, temporally proximate, respectively, to my mastectomy and then to my hysterectomy. I consider these surgeries to have freed up other organs that had hitherto been hidden; top surgery in particular led to a wellspring of creativity and critical thought that I had never been capable of before. It was at that time that the independent study that turned into my undergraduate honors thesis that birthed the materials that comprise this book breached my horizon (I’m thinking here about José Esteban Muñoz’s ideas of queerness as horizon, as not-quite, as lingering (im)possibility that calls us from the prison of compulsory (cis)heterosexuality. Getting top surgery, and “bottom surgery” of this particular variety, cleared some horizon-blocking elements from my view and allowed me to write forward.

This process of writing and rewriting and rethinking everything about myself continued throughout this project, which lasted in its thesis form from ~ages 19-21. By the time I submitted the thing, I was already having doubts about some of my assertions, and wishing I could go back and edit it. I considered publishing a book of fragments/outtakes (some of which are part of CO/NOTATIONS), immediately after graduating, but my thesis advisor and mentor, Jacquelyne Luce, advised me against immediate publication. She predicted, correctly, that I would begin disagreeing with myself far too soon to make publication a smart move. I’m glad I listened to her, and let the fragments languish in my drafts for several years (during which I began my current PhD program and rethought my [un]gender a couple times and learned significantly more about writing well). 

These days, I’m more able to accept that I will probably begin disagreeing with what is in CO/NOTATIONS, even the things I annotated and changed very recently, sooner than I want to. I’m able to accept that now in a way I was not able to back when I was writing that thesis, and believed that it was the best and only full-length work I’d ever write, and thus, had to include everything. This isn’t possible. Everything hasn’t even happened yet, nor will it. I’m comfortable with CO/NOTATIONS living in a particular set of times and places, and with the name that hails “me” being associated with it, so long as people understand that the person who wrote(s) (what if we use “wrotes” when we write with ourselves, plural, at different times? This may also work well for plural systems, of which I neither “am” nor “am not,” but that’s a bit outside the scope of this interview) it is not the same person(s) that they consider to be its author. 

Just yesterday my person, also trans and arguably the person who should know me better than anyone else, asked me in a roundabout way about my current alignment and the best I could come up with was a jumbled list of recent thoughts and interactions that had felt bad or nice. There is a twofold gift in the asking. To have someone want to know you as you know you is overwhelming. That they should ask me so gently, that they waited patient until I left the door to be asked just a little bit open, that they asked in a way that told me they were invested in learning me so I could be respectfully loved. What role has trans love and community played in your becoming? Has having safe/safer places to play out and talk out your gender been useful/pivotal/affirming? Do you wish you'd had more?

In short –– and I’m pretty sure you’d agree with this –– t4t is everything to me. t4t is, for me, crip4crip & Mad4Mad, and cannot be extricated from those things. What I read from your experiences and mine is that t4t allows for a kind of epistemic justice that comes hand-in-hand with a level of material and identificatory autonomy usually unavailable to us as gender-noncompliant people. To be asked, for example, about one’s alignment, and to have an illegible or unusual or even hostile answer be accepted and revered, is in my experience a cornerstone of t/Crip/Mad4similar intimacies, regardless of the particular relational form. Our lover-comrades wait until the door is open, and leave it ajar unless we request otherwise. In a world that violently diagnoses us with sexgenders at birth, and continues to demand our compliance, upon pain of exile, torture, and death, until we leave this world, this is radical. It is life-sustaining.

I grew up in a space that was hostile to who I was. My parents’ support for my relationships to gender and sexuality notwithstanding, I existed in a context where the ways my bodymind worked had to be hidden (which I attempted, unsuccessfully). I knew I was queer (in not so many words) from a young age; first “came to terms” (literally) with it when I was, I think, ten or eleven. At eleven, I joined Tumblr, and began my queercrip / transMad education, though I didn’t know it. Online was where I learned I could be loved in these new, startling ways, and that epistemic justice (and, I think, epistemic intimacy, which is a term I’d like to explore more in my dissertation) was a form of love. I began what I would later understand as a t4t relationship (in the literal sense, because I transed them, and in many ways, they complicated and stretched my trans, and also turned me polyamorous…shoutout to Elliot, I love you!). This was in high school.

When I went to Mount Holyoke, everything changed. My friends, colleagues, and lovers were queer and particularly trans. More became trans every year. My mentors were queer and trans, too. I was loved from so many angles. I realized I did not need to love cis, straight people at all. I didn’t need to care about them. The ways they loved were, with only a few exceptions, insufficient and irrelevant to my needs. Meanwhile, in my freshman year, when I was devastated by body-hate and desperate for top surgery, I asked a trans guy I barely knew if he could help me find information on top surgeons and letters and all that bullshit. I was seventeen and so afraid, and he, while only a few years older, seemed so mature and knowledgable. He helped me, even though he didn’t know me, because he did know me. I had never known people to give of themselves that way until I entered into t4t relationalities. 

Years later, I thanked him, and as I was doing so, I realized I had become him. Now, I was the one (especially because people had read my work and knew about my dissertation topic) who baby trans people were coming to, asking for advice. Especially baby trans people who were also Mad/disabled, because I was one of a relatively small number of people on campus who were out and actively talking/writing/organizing about both –– I had edited several issues of a zine on disability/Madness and established myself in that way, and I was writing for the school paper on similar topics, plus publishing essays on my blog. So, I had stepped from the 4t into the t, now making trans a possibility for more people. That’s what community is, I think: stepping into these waxing and waning roles, allowing oneself to help and be helped. Mount Holyoke, a historically women’s college known for its acceptance (literally and figuratively) of trans people relative to other schools, was absolutely pivotal in making me into who I am today, and in giving me the confidence to abandon appeals to cisheterosexuality. That being said, however, it also made me brutally aware of the underside to (trans) community: in this case, the predication of trans culture at MHC on the passive and active exclusion of transfeminine people. I say this because, while MHC was a beautiful space for me, as a transmisogyny-except person, to come into myself, the space was also steeped in transmisogynistic notions of who is permitted at a historically women’s college, and pernicious, largely-unspoken anxieties around, well, penises, at least the kind that aren’t purple and silicone. So, t4t is all of these things: necessary, life-saving, imperfect, exclusionary, cruel, intimate. I’m going to keep fighting for t4t, because I need it and need it to improve forever.

Last year I shifted into 'culturally female' as a gender designator and I think it speaks to what you are getting at in 'Speak, Unwoman!'..I may not believe myself to be a woman but the world most certainly has and I have lived and fought and loved amongst them too long and too hard and with too much investment in our shared goals of liberation and survival to completely give up the moniker now. So much of us is shaped from the outside. Your writing makes clear that you feel this tension. At this point in your life are you more interested in folding it all in or pushing back?

I’m actually really interested in the connotations (ha) of the term “culturally female,” and find the conflation of “cultural” with a sexed/biologized term really intriguing. I’d love to hear more about this from you, because that term lays bare the swapping of gender as nominal cultural signifier for underlying cultural assumptions made about genitalia. Anyways!

In regard to women: I am not one. I have never been one, though I have been a girl, and it almost killed me. This is true for many girls, whether they are now women or any other (non)gender. But for me, I can’t claim “woman” as my own. I am an accomplice to women, I am a lover of women, I am a supporter of women both writ large and individually. I am a lesbian, too, and –– as I suggest with the term transbutchness –– use historical and contemporary formulations of butch/dykehood as against, around, with-regard-to, but not “exactly” woman as a way of clarifying my relationship to womanhood (and I also take issue with the -hood, as it feels like a way of collapsing a massive range of experiences into a very prescriptive term/box, same with erroneous ideas of universal “female socialization” taken up by TERFs and other reactionaries). 

I think I would likely feel different about the category of woman if I had spent time as one, especially a long period of time. I see many older genderqueer/trans(///)butch people existing in a space in which they are women, and also unwomen, not only in the sense of being offered-forced womanhood and rejecting it wholesale (even as its implications continue to affect/effect them), but also in the sense that they were once women, and have since begun the process of unwomaning. Or, that they tentatively took up the mantle of “womanhood” but failed at it, and continue to fail, and make choices predicated on that (liberatory) failure. This is true for many (un)woman assigned male at birth, too, particularly given the even narrower set of constraints set upon what makes a worthy, “real,” and acceptable trans woman. 

I guess all this is to say that, personally, because I have never been a woman, what I am pushing back on is less an internalization of identity and more of the set of social conditions and abuses that affect everyone marked with a marginalized gender. Everyone who has been “womaned” without their consent, or who takes up “woman” as a “better-than-nothing” term and faces a unique set of abuses related to that decision. Politically, I am interested in gender anarchy toward abolition. I’m interested in an onto-epistemological revolution, in which notions of sexgender are rendered meaningless, and the full spectrum of self-expression is liberated from these carceral terms and their medico-legal backers. To do this, I think we have to be as confusing as possible, including embracing forms of self-description like xenogenders/xenopronouns, as well as contradictory identities (such as people absolutely being women and also absolutely not being women at the same time). This latter practice doesn’t suit me, particularly, but I think it’s very compatible with my work as a writer and scholar and anti-gender dyke. 

Opposite to your experience I have used all of the physical trappings of 'woman' to their most. I have birthed, nursed, and grieved many babies. I gave my breasts back in my forties, their purpose served and my body my own.

I love this, particularly the notion of using breasts and then giving them back. No one needs the exact same tools forever, and change is incredibly healing, as is the sense of internal multiplicity that makes that change possible! 

Semi-related: I’ve long dreamt of having a public conversation with someone who has had to get a mastectomy or hysterectomy and has developed dysphoria, such as it is, because of that. We have a lot to learn from each other.

I resonate with your GoodWoman. My mother wifed and mothered in acquiescence to men poorly mothered by women diminished by men. As ever, it is nearly impressive how thoroughly we have been broken. That they are no longer required to lift a finger, that we in our fear build our abusers ourselves. No one has ever once mistaken me for optimistic but there is something like hope in the genderfuckery a trans future brings. Anything to break down the institutions that bind us. Any excuse to get us out from under cis heteronormative patriarchal violence and back into ourselves. Am I still coming to this all backward, trying to destroy a scaffold some people still need? We've a generation between us so tell me, you live in the future, what do you see?

This is a question often on my mind, especially when I talk about anarchism and abolition (of the gender and not-specifically-gender variety). I’ve come to the conclusion that comfort is often not good, if we’re using “good” to mean “meaningfully orienting us toward a future in which our communities can thrive”. Many who have experienced violence and abuse seek out these relational forms again because, however excruciating, they are comforted by the familiarity of it. I seek out my own forms of pain, hurt, and self-hatred because they are familiar to me, and sometimes I feel they are all I have to keep me grounded, especially when I’m unsure and scared. Cisheteronormativity is a kind of sociocultural abuse that untold numbers of people (cishet and not) (re)turn to when unfamiliar horizons are scary; we/they seek the comfort of carceral, prescriptive, violent terminologies and ways of life because, at the very least, the script is there and available, ready to relieve us of figuring out the world we want by ourselves. Changing the world is hard and it hurts. Authoritarian regimes, such as cisheteropatriarchy, seize on this. Give an inch, and the seizure will occur. 

The scaffold, the hackneyed gender-101 that mis-educates well-meaning “allies,” is one kind of “inch” that claims simply liberalizing one’s view of gender is the answer. But reform has its limits, and is especially dangerous in its appeal to complacency. 

It’s couple’s counseling for institutions, ways of straightening and sane-ifying one’s relationship to a transMaddening world. 

I think that, while I’m living “in the future,” I’m also living in the past. Nominal reforms in the area of trans awareness/“conditional” acceptance have resulted in, well, this. This fascist pushback to flimsy LGBTQ social reforms illustrates more than anything that reform is more than worthless, it’s actively counterproductive. It has only solidified my anarchist and abolitionist orientation: it’s not enough to “reform” capitalism, we need to end it by any means necessary. Sexgender, likewise, because pushing for total acceptance of gender-noncompliance within the society that invented that noncompliance is dangerously foolish.

Our goal with kith, Corporeal, and en*gendered—our mandate—has always been to get the right words into right hands. How do you see yourself and your work relative to that mission? Dream a little. Had Cavar read this book at 13 or fourteen what would that have saved them? Where might they be?

In the interest of full disclosure, I am answering this question first, because I have been thinking about it since I first skimmed this email over a week ago. The answer, I think, is paradoxical and frustrating for both of us / all of us. The answer is that young Cavar would have turned away from my advice, because they hated themself too much to receive their own wisdom, whether from a later iteration or from their present form. That being said, I think that, had this book been possible back in 2012-2013 (which I suspect it would not have been, as the premise of this book is that there is enough general awareness of trans(///)butch subjectivity for there to be tropes and assumptions to push back against, both within our micro communities and in the wider world), the conditions under which young Sarah would have grown up would have been different enough that perhaps, maybe, they would not have hated themself quite so much, or quite so f(l)ailingly. 

My interest isn’t really in saving Mad, trans(///)butch people from them(our)selves. It is certainly to eliminate, by any means necessary, forces that aid in our genocide. But it is not to cure the genres of hatred that populate our lives, even the ones that, in my personal experience, erupt into an array of deadly tactics and practices. To be clear, katharine, I am referring chiefly to my now-decade of anorexia, which I say plainly to you because you have spoken plainly of yourself to me. On another level, I’m not (academically) interested in the ontology & etiology of trans(///)butchness, nor the different genres of Madness we tend to engage in. Emotionally, I crave Answers, because of [insert pathologizing adjectives here]. Yet I don’t think that finding out my real Origin Story, determining once and for all how I Got This Way (or what books and relationships would have made my life better, or less traumatic) would necessarily make my life better.

Case in point: I think that, barring some immensely radical change to my personality and interests, I probably would have always been some kind of writer, whether hobbyist or “professional” (I use scare quotes because I still can’t quite believe that this is my life). But would I have the interests I do now? Doubtful. Would I have been capable of writing this text, that young me may or may not have been interested in reading, that may or may not have been capable of changing the lives of people like me? Ultimately, if young Sarah had read this, they would have presumed (incorrectly) that this book, this set of interventions, did not need to be written. The hole I grew up inside made the filling.