Reading: Gender Outlaw (Kate Bornstein) To contextualise: How Nonviolence Protects the State / Chapters 4-7 (starting at Section: Sex Without Gender) related tags: #HNvPtS
Despite her vicious attack on transsexuals, Raymond’s book is a worthwhile read, chiefly for its intelligent highlighting of the male-dominated medical profession, and that profession’s control of transsexual surgery.
I wish more of the people who write and use other's work would do this when they have to engage with a bigot. This is actually spot-on.
We talk casually, for example, about trans-gender without ever clearly stating, and rarely if ever asking, what one gender or the other really is. We’re so sure of our ability to categorize people as either men or women that we neglect to ask ourselves some very basic questions: what is a man? and what is a woman? and why do we need to be one or the other?
Honestly, I think more people would find themselves in the area of gender abolition if they genuinely started questioning these things instead of answering them in superficial statements.
I haven’t found any answers. I ask every day of my life what is a man and what is a woman, and those questions beg the next: why? Why do we have to be one or the other? Why do we have to be gendered creatures at all? What keeps the bi-polar gender system in place?
These questions are also good basic ones for people to start with. It'd be nice if people actually sat and considered why they bother to care about the gender of another person and what it is that forces them to do so.
Some people think I want a world without gender, something bland and colorless: that’s so far from how I live!
I don't agree with Bornstein here. I think a world of gender abolition is actually far more colourful and interesting because it means that people can be their true selves whatever it looks like. I think not having to worry about these things makes the world more open to possibilities and without a worry of accidentally boxing ourselves into something.
Perhaps that world can exist without gender abolition, but I honestly don't think it will.