#just like all the stuff about how as any kind of non-binarily-gendered person (whether that's no gender or many or fluidity etc.)

[razorsadness]

One of the clearest memories that I have of my first relationship is lying in bed with my then-girlfriend, our bodies intertwined and pressed together as closely as possible. In that moment, my most fervent desire was that she and I could somehow be even closer. That we could exist physically together without any boundary or separation. I still feel that familiar pang sometimes: the hunger for impossible intimacy, a desire to be known completely without first having to be seen and scrutinized. As I have come to know myself better, this fantasy of perfect intimacy has revealed itself to be inextricably intertwined with the problem of gender. Gender, among its other applications, is the primary framework through which desire and romantic intimacy are understood. We are gay or straight or bisexual or pansexual or asexual: we desire men, or women, or all genders, or no one at all. But if I am nothing, if I am without gender, how can I ever be desired? Is intimacy possible—that is, is it legible as intimacy—without some kind of interplay between femininity and masculinity?

—Carrow Narby, from “Indescribable” (It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror, The Feminist Press, 2022)