Sharing an essay from user Nodrada on Medium that I thought was an insightful Marxist perspective on gender. I am very curious what my trans/nonbinary friends think about this. I'm cisgender and still learning about these issues.
The gist of the essay is that certain forms of radical feminism are flawed and even damaging. The first, obvious form is the trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF) whose flaws speak for itself. The second form is the "liberal" form, which takes gender as pure and absolute, an essence which merely needs expressing. What this second form leads to is hyper-personalized genders, in the last resort a unique gender for each individual, as each individual would have their own essence needing expressing. The author finds this to be an empty liberation, since the gender-sex contradiction is never resolved. (This has striking resemblance of Marx's critique of the anti-theists in the famous "opiate of the people" in the Critique of the Philosophy of Right.)
My take-away is that gender cannot simply be abolished outright as the TERFs would like, but neither is recognition of new identities in itself liberating. Of course recognition of new identities, e.g. pronouns, is a necessary step on the road toward actual liberation from gender, which has become an oppressive institution if it ever was anything but. "Being" trans is not an absolute condition, it is a mode of being in an absolute world which demands gender. (Sorry if this comes across as too edgy, happy to hear critique on that last thought.)
excerpt:
In both of these poles [individualists and TERFs], there is a certain identifiable episteme or common sense even in their direct contradictions. Both recognize the body as a primary site of dispute, of autonomy, and of liberation — whether in presentation, reproduction, labor, or sexual desire and pleasure. Both employ a certain authenticity rhetoric, with TERFs positing gender as an external institution as being inauthentic and gender individualists positing gender liberation as the realization of one’s internal, originary essence in an authentic gendered life.
In these stances, both tend to hold to a sex-gender distinction. On the one hand, we have the “objective” category of sex — objective in the sense of literally being present in the object of the body, and in the sense of the categories being assumed to be beyond social-historical influences. On the other hand, there is the “subjective” category of gender, which is understood as variable and a site of change, whether through historical social struggle or through a realization of one’s internal, subjective self-image of authenticity.
Both make a mechanical and dogmatic separation of the unmediated “objective” scientific categories, placed beyond the social in their formation even if recognized as the object of social dispute, and the “subjective” categories, which are rendered either static dichotomies or as pure determinations of the individual. Against this modern view, here we seek to advocate for a position which emphasizes not only the sociality and historicity of gender, but to reject the two-systems approach and emphasize that this extends not only to sex but to all categories. That is because all categories, every single one, are from the perspective of human beings, even as they organize real, concrete, objective things into systems of knowledge. There is no such thing as an unmediated, primary object for a living being.___
You know, I'm a dude, and have never really had any issues with gender in my own life, and yet I feel like I have spent a lot of time examining the concept in the back of my brain for years, both subconsciously and in writing. Once it became something that I saw that people were willing to suffer and even die for, it felt like my responsibility to better understand it. My own experience with being a dude was very uninteresting really, I never thought of myself as anything else, and I consciously rejected attempts from stuff like ads to tell me what a "man" was. I was a man, and that's that, I felt. Nobody gets to tell me what that means, I said. It was obviously easy for me as a man to do this but it took me a while to realize that.
I do think of myself as having been generous through the whole process, but the place I kept landing in was "who cares about gender, you be you, be whatever you want." It was a pretty privileged place to be, I'll admit, but I have maintained that fundamental drive to accept people's presentations however they want to offer them to me. But ironically I was ignoring dialectics--I should have realized that once these categories got historical context, with oppression being done along that line, (arbitrary as it seemed to me then) it was ignorant and callous of me to keep that "gender is whatever" mindset. I was acting like people can just alter these things to fit the societal slot they'd been given, and that isn't how it works, I know now.
I hope I'm not as ignorant as I used to be is all. But I kinda do still secretly hope we someday escape the binary and get to be whatever the fuck we wanna be. I imagine not everyone feels that way, but I DEFINITELY reject the idea of like gender essentialism stuff, the whole "universal masculine/feminine" yin-and-yang idea. Step outside of the human species and life organizes itself into every imaginable shape, so why the fuck we gotta stick with two sides am I right?
Edit: I missed a sentence at the start about OP also being cis and now I feel a bit silly for such a long post. It would be very appreciated if someone with some actual experience and expertise with this could tell me if I'm way off or not.
