- cross-posted to:
- menby
- cross-posted to:
- menby
thanks to @iridaniotter@hexbear.net for telling me abt this essay! its been posted on HB before, but not in a while.
read feminist theory you libs! uphold TC69 thought!
thanks to @iridaniotter@hexbear.net for telling me abt this essay! its been posted on HB before, but not in a while.
read feminist theory you libs! uphold TC69 thought!
I support this in many respects, especially it actually reckoning with the withering away of gender,
but [cw discussion of suicide at the end]
it does the thing I can't stand:
Having a trans identity is, contrary to the implications of TERFs, not more of an affirmation of gender than being cis, but it's at best barely less of one. It's still embracing gender norms, whether those on the other side of the binary or recently-coined ones for NBs, it is still reinforcing a gendered ordering of the world. No one embracing man/womanhood turns away from gender; by definition they all are at the same time embracing gender. Embracing NB-ism too is embracing gender, just a different, more-recently-coined system. Both cis and trans people need to reject gender, and it cannot be done in either case by merit of someone's existence. Asserting otherwise puts you in an unfortunate position, ideologically:
What does this really mean? Yes, I get what each statement asserts in a vacuum, but placed together, what is the conclusion?
My main complaint is the theoretical side, on the practical section I agree with nearly every word except for the framing of the second sentence here:
That "leads to" makes it sound like it just mechanically follows from harassment/being unsupported that you commit suicide some of the time. In aggregate, you can describe it like this, but my understanding is that medical professionals oppose the mechanistic framing (also calling gender-affirming care "life-saving", basically the inverse of the same statement) because it effectively normalizes/encourages suicide, as though it's just what happens if you don't get support and then get a bad roll of the dice.
i'm not sure i agree with this framing, being generous it's definitely a broad sweeping statement that's not always true. for me and a lot of other NBs and just a lot of trans folks in general rejecting gender kinda is a key part of it. i think you made a couple of generalisations about trans folks in that paragraph that again, at best are not always true and at worst you're kind of misrepresenting what the trans identity means for a lot of people.
i think you're verging on lumping in all NBs into "just" being a different gender as if it's simply some third gender they all fit into, which is problematic and reductive. if you're NB and your gender is Gremlin Dyke or Indescribable or whatever you're not "embracing gender" at least not in the cisnormative definition of the word. you're evolving what gender can mean in a revolutionary way to the point of being destructive to the cisnormative view of it, rejecting it.
I know that people have identities like agender and things like that, but would you not say that "NB" has become its own set of social identities in a way that is similar to masc and fem? I've certainly seen something like that in the NBs I've known broadly, and I saw it on places like tumblr (yes, I actually had a tumblr account, I'm not dogwhistling). If you say that's not the case for you and a lot of other NBs you've known, I won't contradict you and you've surely known many more than me, but it seems difficult to really cast off a dimension of social identity in a society that retains it and (as the manifesto asserts) aggressively, malignantly fights to shape you into that social identity, on a level more fundamental than demanding your agab, something that can't be abolished by fiat.
"Yeah, it is difficult, motherfucker"
Fair enough, I'll defer. That said, I still really don't get how a similar claim of casting off gender can be applied to binary trans people (with it always needing to be stated that they are doing no worse than cis people, and probably a bit better).
A helpful framing when I've discussed this with other people is to consider rejection of gender as exerting a form of editorial control over your own existence and self-concept. Social pressure made you one way, but the conscious negation of that social control results in something different. If the result of this process maps to an existing current in the gendered order of things, that is not a reinforcement of the correctness of that order; instead, it is evidence that it is illusory. The annihilation of gender is the process of escaping a story put upon you by the world in favor of one you create for yourself.
you put it really well:)
made a quick edit just fwiw. yeah i do think the online perception of NBs is quite pigeonholing and not representative of many of us. i don't think there is a set of signifiers and stuff that makes up "NB style" or whatever despite what picture online paints. like not all of us have undercuts and a lil moustache, obviously. that's just one flavour of a literally infinite number which has gained traction online. if it is becoming a third gender with predictable qualities (and maybe that's an argument that you could make at least that the perception of NBs is taking that shape (but that's probably a cisnormative perception cause online still be like that)), i reject that too. and yea for the last thing i just wanted to be inclusive of trans folks who don't id as NB but something else like agender maybe. but i do think binary trans ppl are kind of destroying gender in their own way too, there's a reason patriarchal gender binary society is so scared of them. i think it was in the afterword of Nevada i was reading recently where the author is like "the cisnormative view of transition is that you are one of The Two Genders, a process occurs, and then you are the other of The Two Genders". i think even for most self-id "binary" trans folks its a bit more complex than that and some deconstruction inevitably occurs. but im super non binary so dont wanna speak on their experiences, it is an assumption. sorry its an unstructured mess its late where i am n just banging out thoughts
this gave me a lot of thoughts, so thank you. i now wanna expand this into how the pigeonholing of NBs into simply a New Third Gender is a symptom of capital and specifically the culture industry absorbing new aspects of queerness into the mainstream, but only the ones that aren't too weird of course. I mean in a cisnormative view NBs still aren't even real, they're just like spicy male and spicy female or whatever. even see some queer people buying into that shit unfortunately:( destroying the binary is gonna be Hard!
I greatly appreciate your thoughts on the matter, thank you
(and I read your edit too)
thanks for saying so comrade
good tidbit thx for posting
There is indeed a subculture of NB-ness on the English speaking internet that isn’t representative of many NB people. I’m one of the people that it badly represents. That said, I think we acknowledge this aesthetic’s existence without making it equivalent in function or in scope to the totalizing system of patriarchy. It’s just not the same thing and I think to put it on the same level is to succumb to the preoccupation with perfect taxonomies that’s also very common in that online NB aesthetic, for lack of a better term.
Having a trans identity is not embracing gender norms in a way that is relevant - that is, gender as a regime. The regime of gender seeks to brand babies born with vulvae with the female sex class and push them into gendered production & reproduction based off of this. That is why even a masculine, binary transgender man still fails to fully embrace gender norms. Yes, a conservative transgender man that otherwise upholds masculine ideals is preferable for the patriarchal regime, but even that cannot hold. See: homosexual Nazis. Since transgender people fundamentally contradict the logic of sexing, they cannot be completely recuperated into our patriarchal system.
cw discussion of suicide
What is the alternative framing that would less normalize/encourage suicide? I’m skeptical that a non-optimal framing of the situation is contributing meaningfully to rates of trans suicide in comparison to the material reality of being trans and unsupported in modern western society.
same
Even just saying "Causes depression, alienation, etc." is both more mechanistically accurate and avoids the issue of normalization. Obviously this is not a substantial factor in suicide rates compared to the big issues, but it's also one that can be changed with extreme ease compared to those bigger problems.
cw discussion of suicide
possibly something like "People enforce gender by continuously and knowingly using the wrong pronouns and names for others. Queer people subject to this violence often self-harm or commit suicide." niche leftist theory isn't gonna meaningfully encourage suicide but we should still try to make sure that our class-level analysis doesn't erase individual agency too much
Saying no to gender means attaining gender consciousness basically, not literally immediately attempting to separate oneself from the social structure entirely. Attaining class consciousness doesn't involve forcefully refusing to identify as proletariat. Quite the opposite actually
In this sense one could view naive TERF "gender abolitionism" as a particularly horrible form of idealistic and harmful gender Utopianism