Reading: Gender Outlaw (Kate Bornstein) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Chapter 12 related tags: #HNvPtS
Or is “equality of the genders” oxymoronic, making any fight for the equality of the genders self-defeating? Gender implies class, and class presupposes inequality. Fight rather for the deconstruction of gender—it would get to the same place much faster.
I find Bornstein somewhat amusing in that, at one point, they say they're not for the destruction of gender because that would be boring... but then they repeatedly say things that are definitely gender abolitionist.
Doing away with gender is key to the doing away with the patriarchy, as well as ending the many injustices perpetrated in the name of gender inequity. There is no gender inequity that doesn’t first assume there is gender—and only two genders at that. Gender inequities include sexism, homophobia, and misogyny.
I don't even think I see that many people making this connection today.
So, look for the oppression, and name it—give it some trouble; its name may well be gender. Please—don’t call it “biological sex,” or “social gender.” Don’t call it “sex” at all—sex is fucking, gender is everything else. Gender hides behind a great number of false names, and these names are all “types” of gender. But types of gender don’t reveal anything about gender. Types of gender only reveal the paranoias of the societies that construct the types. Gender becomes typed in an attempt to hold together the boundaries of a given group. We can start doing away with gender by calling it gender.
Sometimes it's wild to remember how old certain arguments are, like this shit about biological sex or social gender.
I’m called “gender dysphoric.” That means I have a sickness: a limited understanding of gender. I don’t think it’s that. I like to look at it that I was gender dysphoric for my whole life before, and for some time after my gender change—blindly buying into the gender system. As soon as I came to some understanding about the constructed nature of gender, and my relationship to that system, I ceased being gender dysphoric.
And this is a whole fucking mood, to be honest.
In defining the left and right wings of the gender discourse, one need only look at who has an investment in the bi-polar gender system for the sake of their identity. Any revolution in deconstructing gender should look for no support among communities of people whose identities depend on the existence of this bi-polar gender system. This would include, but most certainly is not limited to, the fundamentalist right wing, purists in the lesbian and gay male communities who believe in the ultimate goal of assimilation into the dominant culture, and some cultural or radical feminists. Non-supporters of any movement to deconstruct gender would also, unfortunately, include those transgendered people who subscribe fully to the culture’s definitions of gender, and seek to embody those definitions within themselves. It’s the agreement with the dominant culture that keeps people believing in this gender system: straight or gay has nothing to do with it.
Weird that this part received no updates, following the pattern of the rest. But I do think that it would be helpful to add a little around the part about trans people by adding that it would definitely be those who insist upon coercing passing as a concept. No one should have to pass, especially if they don't want to.
Judeo-Christian fundamentalists, radical lesbian separatists, and the more vocal transgender activists all seem to be united against the theory that you don’t have to be a man or a woman. I wanted to find out what they have in common. When I looked deeper than their common need for a fixed gender, it hit me that we’re talking an old, old philosophical conflict here: we’re talking order versus chaos—some people need one or the other. In our postmodern global village, order and chaos could very well be used to define the real right wing (order) and left wing (chaos) of any discourse.
I don't agree. I don't see any 'order' in what the right-wing has done. I also don't see order or chaos as useful signifiers (much like “right” or “left”). I use “right-wing” and “left-wing” because they are colloquialisms that are mostly understood, but they still fail to encompass many people (such as anarchists), especially as anarchists are more likely to question aspects of the world and support a direction that allows for total liberation.
But using these dichotomies, it also doesn't make sense because the left is never seeking chaos (especially the liberal wing of the “left”). Also, the right creates excessive amounts of chaos in their attempts to supposedly “create order.”
And if you go farther, what's more orderly than throwing things away and getting rid of them entirely? While it's pretty chaotic to continue enforcing them upon people.
In order to reinforce their newly-included position within the dominant ideology, assimilationist lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered people must accept the rules and the boundaries of the straight culture. They need to cast as outsiders those who would threaten the integrity of their membership. They need to disown their own.
On a list of things I've been saying for a while.
It’s frightening to be genderless.
Nah. It's more annoying than anything else because of other people. If other people would stop gendering everything, it'd make for a relaxing world.