- 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!
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What an eye opening read that answered a question I've had for years on why sucdem equality discourse driven countries, like the one I live in, have seemingly been so open to giving queer people marital rights and at the same time still heavily marginalizing them.
this essay says a lot of stuff i'm sure we all agree with, so i would challenge people to bring up things it says that you don't fully agree with!
I feel like even though there isn't a whole lot I disagree with, there's a fundamental disagreement in framework that's lurking beneath the surface and despite the disagreement in framework, the text is "lucky" enough that the conclusions aren't something that I disagree with. But there's cracks. I'll use this as an example:
In many cases like this, it’s elucidative to make an analogy. For this, let’s talk about bakers. When someone engages with the capitalist system by baking, they tend to form an identity around this baking. That is, having a career in which you bake creates the identity of baker. Similarly, when you engage with reproductive labor in particular ways, you create particular gender identities, both in the ways you conform with the gender that has been given to you and in the ways in which you reject the gender that has be given to you. In both cases, an element of the base is creating within you an identity. Which is to say, your identity stemming from your social position is superstructural.
But this isn't true. In capitalist society, people actually have weak identities related to their occupation. The identity is stronger for labor aristocrats with stable careers, but for your average prole hopping between different gigs on top of various side hustles, how can an job identity possibly form if you have no job stability? And even with labor aristocrats, there's that dreaded phrase "wears many hats," which further erodes identity. In the end, it's because capitalists see workers as any other factory equipment, tools that are interchangeable. They want workers to be blank slate assembly line products that can be minimally modified to perform various tasks. They don't want specialists, but generalists that can molded for various ends like clay.
The real mode of production that cultivated occupation identities was feudalism. If you came from a shoemaking family, your destiny in life was to make shoes for your feudal liege and teach your kids how to make shoes so your kids will continue the cycle making shoes for the feudal liege's kids. A peasant was supposed to know their place as a peasant and raise kids who will also know their place as peasants. Chinese text written during the Spring and Autumn Period went so far as to recommend quarantining people with similar occupations together so if you came from a shoemaking family, you not only were expected to be shoemaker but couldn't even leave the shoemaking part of town so that you'll pick up shoemaking skills faster.
This is a nitpick that has nothing to do with the text, but the entire section no longer makes any sense since the rest of the section builds on the analogy:
So will we force people to stop identifying with being a baker or being a woman?
But most workers don't identify with their occupation in this way, so the question isn't very relevant.
What happens to my identity as a baker once the capitalist system of careers which produced that identity is abolished? This is much more interesting of a question, anyway. Without the enforcement of labor characterized by capitalism, no longer is someone who bakes bread forced into staying within that career.
Except there are plenty of workers who constantly switch jobs and live in precariously (ie the precariat, a term that I'm iffy about) as well as people who have multiple side gigs and hustles.
Over time, the identity of being a baker will likely fade, tho there are many social factors which could allow it to persist, but it would lose its social and political significance. There is no need to enforce the abandonment of the identity of baker to do away with the career system which has produced it.
I mean, it's already fading under capitalism and it has already lost most of its social and political significance. Having a surname Schumaker doesn't mean you make shoes. Starting a shoe-making business with the surname Schumaker doesn't make people go, "wow, this business definitely knows how to make shoes." I would say that capitalism has eroded real identities with deep roots and has replaced it with completely shallow commodifed pastiches of those identities.
It looks like I'm bashing the work, but if you take out everything related to using baker as an analogy in that section, I don't find that section objectionable at all. This is what I mean when I say that their conclusions are reasonable, but the framework to get to those conclusions is not good imho.
yeah the analogy here should be someone who identifies as "working class", which won't mean anything under communism. except we're trying to increase class consciousness so that the proletariat can win class struggle, so it would be a bad analogy
"We don’t find communism in plans for the future, but, rather, in a worker sabotaging his workplace, a wife who escapes from her abusive husband with her children, Naxalites engaging in guerrilla warfare against the Indian government, rioters rejecting the police to loot and burn their cities, etc. "
This is not what communism means!
CW: SA
Marriage is an economic contract between a man and a woman. Men and women are supposed to sign an agreement to be faithful and to stay together and violation of that is seen as a breach of contract and therefore bad.
I think it's quite a bit more than a neutral economic contract - it's also often as a sexual contract, which is reflected in the long history of maritalremoved being lawful and a number of states still having special provisions around martialremoved. The breach of contract description is probably more accurate for men, but when you look at the different responses to women cheating (or the justification of men cheating, see above for bodily ownership of the woman dimensions), it's worse than that.
In marriage, the man is expected to make money to support the woman and the woman is expected to clean up the home, take care of the children, cook, and shop.
Increasing there is an expectation that women will continue to work and their professional careers (without a reduction in domestic labour)
no gender (asexual people)
Think they meant agender here, surely?
Didn't finish it, will return and post again later
Comment with small things:
This new system has a few characteristics which define it. Not all of them developed at once, but they’ve been imposed upon the whole world. They are as follows:
[...]
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Marriage is an economic contract between a man and a woman. Men and women are supposed to sign an agreement to be faithful and to stay together and violation of that is seen as a breach of contract and therefore bad.
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Marriage is a personal choice done for love rather than a social choice done for necessity. Gone are marriages for alliances or arranged marriages, for the most part. Marriage is only a choice for the two who are getting married.
Obviously there is some conflict between the ideas of economic marriage and love marriage. The system is in motion; the superstructure shifts focus from 3 to 4 as women become proletarianized. I would have liked to see some exploration.
Since this third class is defined by its difference from those of the first two classes, it is named queer. Queer people are all those who relate differently to the division of reproductive labor assigned to them by patriarchy. Because of the different relations, queer people are inherently subversive to the class system as a whole and constitute the revolutionary class under patriarchy.
if women are the oppressed class, doing reproductive labor without any control over it, why wouldn't women be the revolutionary class? this is like axiomatically saying that lumpens, not proles, will be the revolutionary class that brings about the abolition of the proletariat. some people think so but without an argument I'm not convinced
People whose gender doesn’t match with the gendering of their biological features aren’t exactly new. Many previous systems had explicit classes for people like this, such as the Bugi gender system. These are multigendered systems and they have a space for those who aren’t willing to accept the gender assigned to their biology.
Nitpick: we opened the piece by saying that gender is a superstructure and reproductive labor divisions are the base, and by explicitly repudiating people who think that sex is the material base of gender. So gender isn't "assigned to biology" in these multigendered systems, it's assigned to labor roles.
Gender isn’t inherent, but it spreads by assigning us to a class and forcing us to say yes to that class. “Yes, I am a man. It is who I am and who I always have been. I cannot escape it or deny it. I am a man.” This is nothing but a lie we are forced to repeat. But by repeating it enough, we come to believe it. Gender becomes natural, inescapable, eternal. It ceases to be an imposed identity and becomes an eternal part of who we are.
I don't think this is consistent with the idea of labor role as base and gender as superstructure. Gender can't spread via people internalizing the superstructure and identifying as a man or woman. In this framework gender must spread (or rather maintain itself) by people carrying out the role of gender. I think this section is inconsistent with the one on baking, which is better. People identify as "bakers" not because they think of themselves as a baker and then seek out jobs at a bakery, but because they are economically coerced into wage labor and they end up at a bakery. As the authors write, the superstructural identity of "baker" will wither away once baking is not a job. People really do think of themselves as having a gender. But some Brits think of themselves as "upper crust" and some Indians think of themselves as "Brahmins", and the way to class abolition is not people deciding not to identify as working-class anymore. It's a basal change caused by oppressed people engaging in class struggle and winning. The authors say things like "If everyone says “no” to gender, everyone ceases to accept it, then gender is lost. We find similar strategies among resistance to other class systems." We must be clear that saying "no" to gender has to mean more than just refusing to perform cisgender identity, it has to mean tearing down gendered division of reproductive labor. And if the authors agree, I wish they'd have written more about the specifics of what reproductive labor actually is and how the masses can fight male control of it.
Queer people do not carry out their social existence by leeching off the produced labor of the "prole" equivalent here (women), unlike actual lumpenproletariat. They are fundamentally more 'revolutionary' than the lumpenproletariat because no such option is available, beyond simply adopting the social roles of a man. Most queer people choose to live in entirely different novel family configurations which often still take on the labor of child rearing and sometimes even birth, which shows the fundamental difference between queer people and some sort of "gender lumpenproletariat" which would somehow leech off of women giving childbirth (they would have to be literal baby snatchers, arguably)
My understanding of reproductive labor is limited, but it isn't just birth and childrearing, it's also stuff like housekeeping which enables wage laborers to work. Both expansion and maintenance of labor. Although queer people engage in that sort of thing (we all do to some extent) more than lumpen are economically productive, the reason I made the comparison is numbers. Lumpen are only a small fraction of society and capitalism tends to maintain a constant reserve army of labor, in contrast to the ever-increasing share of proletarians. Artisans would have been a less loaded example, a small class of laborers that doesn't have much power (except that nobody thinks artisans will lead the revolution). My problem is the authors don't really explain why the fraction of queer people might expand until they are doing enough reproductive labor to take the reins. They just handwave "gender's process of decay".
I actually disagree with both you and the article. I think people would still identify as bakers without needing to sell their labor or baking to live. It would just have a different, less desperate social context. Someone who really likes baking may still choose to identify with it, as people have identified with things they've liked since long before capital was a thing.
gender forms its own base/superstructure that is informed by the base/superstructure of society at large. the base/superstructure of labor, gender, race, nationality, ability etc. are all informed by the capital mode of production that forms the base of society. women are part of the revolutionary class, the authors arent excluding them
It seems like the authors directly contradict that. There's the section I quoted, but they also just don't talk about anything that women will do as a gender class to tear down the gender class system. Some antifeminist communists pay lip service to feminism by saying "of course we're feminist, women are part of the revolutionary proletariat". As you pointed out, the "totality" stuff is pretty tacked on and the bulk of the specifics are about how gender accelerationism is going to bring about gender abolition.
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it brushes on intersectionality but not nearly enough. its important to remember that black people and indigenous people will play a role comparable to that of queer people and women in overthrowing capitalism. and that exploited nations will likely have more influence than in 1848 in the coming social upheaval. atp a modern 1848 is unavoidable, the republics of today are not fit to manage information capital in order to stabilize capitalism in the face of declining rates of profit (information capital is one of their big counter-tendencies for the falling rate of profit). capital either finds a new host in the form of a technocracy or corporate bureaucracy (the ultimate dream of fascists) or we overcome capital. the latter is only accomplished with billions of people united in abolishing capitalism. a lot of our effort should be dedicated to weaving together groups of diverse oppressed people
edit: the social upheaval will also be caused by the republics leaning on their traditional methods of slowing the falling rate of profit: reducing wages, increasing unemployment, and expanding finance capital. these methods have been stretched so thin that a breaking point is inevitable. information capital offers capitalists a method for reducing constant capital and automating labor (automation also leads to declining rates of profit tho). info capital also has the benefit of giving capital much more control over the proletarians.
edit 2: and ofc the wage reduction and enforced impoverishment via "unemployment" will be concentrated in the most exploited nations (the DR Congo and Bangladesh). the alternative of BRICS erodes the US imperial soft power; imperial hard power is threatened by China, Russia, and Iran; and the domestic government of the US is slowly caving in on itself. all class systems should be considered in a complete analysis of gender bc the goal of "Queer Power" is only possible through a transitional socialist state. its what has historically gotten us closest to communism. the USSR had a People's Commissariat for Nationalities, China with its gentle approach (especially compared to the US) in addressing gender and nationality, and Cuba adding queer rights to its Constitution. but all of those liberation movements coincide with the movement to end capital's control of labor.
I hope it's not just an 1848 moment, that was famously a failure for the revolutionaries and led to decades of reactionary politics across Europe
im saying it has the same (probably more) potential energy than 1848. but the imperial core prob couldnt form a vanguard party if it happened today.
Comment with broader things:
I liked the piece and thought it was interesting. The section on sexual violence as enforcement mechanism for gender roles, analogous to state enforcement of capitalism, was interesting. I'd like to read more about the process of delegation: the bourgeois state designates a relatively small number of police officers, but a much larger fraction of men enforce patriarchy.
Overall, my biggest problem is the unanswered question of, OK what do we actually do about gender? The authors say "People fight capitalism through a refusal to work, a general strike against it." But obviously we can't go straight from 0 to general strike. We organize in unions to make strikes possible; workers initially strike because they will win direct material benefits, which also benefit the whole class; we have communist organizations to provide a vanguard to the growing class movement, etc etc. So how do we get from 0 to men and women laying down their genders as lead by the gender abolitionist vanguard, or whatever? What would drive the masses of men and women to fight against basal gender roles and become part of the trans revolutionary class? (The authors provide parallel power of queer institutions, but a dictatorship of the X is so named because the X actually has primary power over society. Mutual aid groups are not a dictatorship of the proletariat.)
OK what do we actually do about gender?
Well, let's look at a couple contradictions.
The manifesto speaks of gender's material base being in the sexed division of reproductive labor. This has been falling apart steadily since the 19th century. Proletarianization and mechanization degenders labor, and the time needed for homemaking has greatly reduced due to industrialization. The two things that remain are birth & childcare. However, birth rates across the developed world are below replacement rate, so it would be accurate to say that patriarchy & capitalism have become a fetter on the continued development of humanity. However, the reproductive technologies necessary for feminism & communism are underdeveloped. Although sex is no longer necessary for reproduction, semen still is, and biology is gendered under patriarchy, so this is a potential issue. Additionally, uterus transplant technology is in its infancy, and people still need to bear children themselves. Of course, these limitations would be less important if humans didn't still die of old age. So, if you're a biologist, you can do your part in abolishing the regime of gender by advancing reproductive technology or curing aging somehow.
The manifesto provides five characteristics of the modern patriarchal system. Number two is:
These two genders are seen as identical to your biology and fixed from birth. While every gender system ties gender to biology, the modern system equates the two. Being a man in this system isn’t tied to having a penis, it is having a penis. And this gender is immutable. You can’t change it. If you’re born as a man, you’re seen as a man no matter what. There are no options or alternatives.
Actually, the Gender Accelerationist Manifesto is a bit lacking in commentary on this aspect compared to Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper. The issue with this conception of gender/sex that many gender accelerationists raise is that it's 1) obsolete 2) increasingly unviable. Really, HRT allows one to change their sex, because no one actually has Superman's X-ray vision. Industrial society has had the means to completely tear apart this biological conception of gender for nearly a century at this point. Simply mandate puberty choice and have teens pick the hormones they want. Of course, patriarchal society is incapable of doing this, but eventually it may be forced to. The Blackpaper states,
Recent studies, most famously one in 2007 and one meta-analysis of 185 studies from a total of almost 43,000 men referenced in a recent GQ article, show two things. There is without a doubt a staggering decline in testosterone, so much so that within a generation humans may become completely infertile.
Human reproduction is becoming a quaint, unnecessary and ultimately purely elective act, and further evidence suggests that sperm is rapidly decreasing not only in quantity but also in quality, positioning the drive towards reproduction, the utility of reproduction, and the ability to reproduce all on a slope of ruthless decline.
There is also the fact that there's a secular decline in the age of puberty. In Denmark, it begins before the age of ten. Maybe people will finally start to be alarmed when the majority of girls are growing breasts at eight?
If patriarchy and capitalism are still around in a couple decades, not only will sex be forcibly assigned at birth, it will have to be forcibly assigned again years later through exogenous sex hormones. Everyone will be on blockers, and the half of a child that each couple will be having will be conceived through reproductive technologies. At this point the whole biological justification will become a clear farce. Advocacy for universal puberty choice would probably become a serious issue rather than a fringe one held by a few hundred communists.
Tech to change the biological basis of the birth component of reproductive labor is all well and good, but there's no (gender) class struggle there. It's like saying that we need Cybersyn planning tech to do communism or that we need green energy to fight climate change: maybe, but that tech will lie fallow unless the working class gets its shit together. If there's nothing the revolutionary queer gender class can actually do to accelerate gender it doesn't make much sense to say they're accelerationists. Rather they are waiting for material conditions to change. No fun.
However, birth rates across the developed world are below replacement rate, so it would be accurate to say that patriarchy & capitalism have become a fetter on the continued development of humanity
I think this is actually one of the contradictions between capitalism and patriarchy - the need to redeploy women's labour in capitalism has weakened the impact of patriarchal control to have more children, particularly when the number of births and pregnancy required is so much less than in pre-industrial agricultural economics.
The replacement rate is the number of births required to maintain a birth rate that existed when patriarchy was wholly ascendant and women had no reproductive autonomy.
While it's quite expensive and difficult for single women and couples that can't birth children themselves, I think the falling rate has a lot to do with women not wanting to have kids or as many kids.
Surely there's more than a few hundred posters here that agree with puberty choice.
An alternative (bad) vision for the future is massive increases in surrogacy, exporting reproductive imperialism to developing and often non-White countries (with a premium on "white" poor women as exists today in Ukraine, at least before 2022).
I think this is actually one of the contradictions between capitalism and patriarchy
Yes! Totally.
Surely there's more than a few hundred posters here that agree with puberty choice.
Oh, probably. People just never think about it as a possibility and it's never really brought up. Everyone's on the back foot just trying to defend puberty blockers for trans kids.
More comfy reading
Edit: finished! I especially liked this part:
But sex is a thing and, if it isn’t the basis of gender, what is it? Well, this formulation isn’t wrong, per se, it’s merely backwards. Gender forms the basis of sex. We are not born with sex already within us. We have penises, vaginas, breasts, beards, chromosomes, etc, but these things are not sex on their own. They are features of our biology, but we group them into sexes. When we call penises boy parts we are creating and imposing gender upon the body.
This really reframed my entire understanding of what gender even is, very interesting for me. Good recommendation!
One thing I don't quite understand is how I can "say no to gender" if I'm cis. Just, reject that? That wasn't especially clear. I am pan, but in a hetero relationship, so other than broadcasting that it's easy to present as just a cishet man, plus I've lived as a cishet man for the majority of my life. Just want clarification!
One thing I don't quite understand is how I can "say no to gender" if I'm cis. Just, reject that?
Yeah, you gotta go on estrogen. Just kidding. I'd say a good place to start would be to push back against sexism and transphobia, organize and propagandize against attacks on transgender people, and advocate for things that heighten the contradictions of late stage gender.
this is the best Thursday present I could have asked for, happy to see this work featured, it changed my life
Read this and while most of it was very clear, I was curious if anyone could expand on this one sentence:
At its most basic, gender accelerationism is using gender’s own process of decay to destroy the gender class system.
In particular, what do the authors mean by "gender's own process of decay"? I didn't find this anywhere else and ctrl-f'ing for "decay" gets no other results.
presumably the "cracks in the system" section. authors think gender system produces trans people which will destroy gender
I still need to read the manifesto, but that description kinda reminds me of a movie I once saw
not just trans people, but all women. the manifesto addresses that
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:
Your embrace of manhood or something beyond constitutes a rejection, a turning away, from gender.
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:
Indeed, if enough people reject the gender assigned to them, gender cannot function.
And trans people are those rejecting their gender, saying “no” to gender.
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:
When people continuously and knowingly use the wrong pronouns and names for others, it is a form of violence against them. Doing so frequently leads to self-harm and sometimes suicide by queer.
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.
Embracing NB-ism too is embracing gender, just a different, more-recently-coined system.
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.
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)
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.
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, 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:
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
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.
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
Queer power needs violence to destroy gender. A sustained terror against those who seek to enforce gender and prevent gender’s death, a pink terror, is a necessity in the revolution against gender.
...
This means that the queer organizations and institutions we build for queer power must be militant, armed organizations. It’s not enough to provide a space outside of patriarchy, we must arm ourselves to defend those spaces and to render an assault upon the overarching structures of power that seek to enforce gender upon us. This means that our queer organizations must be, or include, queer militias to fight against the structures of power.Can I be in change of naming the militia squads?
Furry Ferocity
The Baby Bump Boys
Femboy Privates Corps
