| Gender

Resolving the Gender Abolition Contradiction (Includes Glitter)

The solution to this contradiction is to embrace the fun of expression and nonsense as a temporary form of infinite fun, regardless of if abolition has made its way or not.

By Jennifer Iguana, 02 February, 2022

The last half decade has produced an explosion in understanding, writing, and action to achieve an evermore queer(ed) future. With the massively spread internet, the information from this thought has spread and grown to make what was once highly academic (‘cisheteronormative,’ ‘queer assimilationism,’ maybe even ‘base-superstructure model,’ …) popularly known.

Yet this is never complete. It feels like there is always a missing element to everything. I could point out the obvious in how poorly or rarely materialist tactics are discussed. Alyson Escalante’s response article ‘Beyond Negativity: What Comes After Gender Nihilism’ writes out the primary radical call-to-action people hold:

Rather, what comes after Gender Nihilism must be a materialist struggle against patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism which understands and is attentive to the complex interrelations between these structures and which refuses to reduce any one of them to any other. This require [sic] daring imaginations of new futures, discussion and communication and theoretical development which demands not just abolition but a way to actually achieve it, and a clear set of materialist theoretical principles and praxis to unite around.

This require [sic] daring imaginations of new futures, discussion and communication and theoretical development which demands not just abolition but a way to actually achieve it, and a clear set of materialist theoretical principles and praxis to unite around.

For everyone who has paid attention to radical thought online, this is about where we all are. If you’re lucky, you are both aware of and hopefully acting upon this advice with examples of community support, organizing counter-power, and fighting against oppressive reinforcement.

‘The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto’ is wonderful in its numerous examples of specific action to a largely ideological work, though I’m afraid this is the exception for many works. The painful fact is that there is little propagation of practical action, though you can find it if you search.

But it does take a long time to search for it, usually only found after people who have looked into political thought for a prolonged time can sort out (because learning about Anarchists operating underground abortion clinics against Spanish abortion bans does not come immediately).

But my focus here is on an even deeper absence: The emotional sphere. Writers will go incredibly deep into analyzing identity and intersecting domination through dialectics and materialist rigor, but very little time is put into reflecting upon an individual’s feeling about, what I will focus on here, gender and its existence.

The reason any of this comes up is the contradiction that the same people saying to abolish gender are the same ones who promote new gender expression and rediscovery. We must eventually let gender wither away, but right now, I’m a pretty [trans] girl and that’s super cool and gender!

In addition, there are the folks who, including me, argue that Gender and sex both do not exist, they are not real (albeit they are tangibly reinforced)! And these same people, unless they are agender, live with a gender identity they feel is real. I am not innocent of this. Many of us lefties will acknowledge this contradiction openly, only to maintain it anyways because we simply want to, eventually ignoring or forgetting it to avoid cognitive dissonance.

Again, I do this. Yet when we can’t, or don’t want to practice what we preach, that dooms a movement right then and there; even if the nuts and bolts of material and ideological and even practical intricacies are worked out, the immediate (and most obvious!) emotional sphere needs to be made straightforward.

Part of the way that this could be resolved is pointing out timing. We use gender NOW and forget it LATER. This is literally true. We can’t distance ourselves fully from gender until capitalism and the other tentacles of the hetero-normative order are severed. Yet I think better can be had.

It will likely be a significant amount of time before any liberating revolutionary movement will emerge from the working class, and in the meantime, the painful compression of gender should be curbed as much as possible. And this already happens! Self-reflection and expression is already the primarily promoted action and value held by queer and allied activists.

Besides, if we activists can both save time for future reconciliation of this contradiction that will eventually happen AND set an example for the cishet skeptics, who we eventually have to win over unless we want an unrealistic and problematic queer separatism, who still are confused, we are golden.

So … how does one stop beating around the bush. It is more and more clear the longer I think about this, but it is a statement that most people either don’t think of saying or don’t want to say. I am of the belief that gender doesn’t really exist, and is a socially constructed set of ontologies.

Progressive ideas of gender posit that gender comes from gender identity (or as I will get to, ‘gender inclination,’ a term from Queering Anarchism collaborator ​​stacy aka sallydarity). This being said, there is the contradiction of both acknowledging that personal feelings are often fabricated and artificially constructed, normative ideas of gender, and also that personal feelings define truth.

… The statement is this. If being a ‘man’ or ‘woman’ are just constructed classes, then the following applies: Cis men are not men. Cis women are not women. This is where I bite the bullet: Trans men are not men. Trans women are not women.

… … … … Something is wrong. … … … …

Writing that made my heart drop, and reading it will likely make your hearts drop as well, especially if you have gone through the transphobic world just trying to survive, maybe going for a different name, training your voice, trying to get hormones, everything. Yet this is the rational explanation- This is the rational end to our studies.

Gender is fake, we are fake. But that feels wrong. I do not think any of what I said is wrong, but it feels wrong. Rationality has failed here. We need to dive into a closer shore. It is time to stare into the shimmering constellations on the beachside like we have never had the chance to do.

I don’t want to think about being rational, I want to be a kid, I want to make every essay into poetry and every poem into whatever I feel, though I have a tendency to be direct, but sometimes not! I love flowery writing and I love flowery identity and I love you. I wrote that to no one, I was just urged to write it because that is what I want.

Wow, that was hilarious and sad, I want to be hilarious and sad and hilarious from being sad forever.

The emotional and intimate side of gender is hardly discussed. Even individual interpretations are only sparsely discussed in a direct political sense. ‘The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto’ writes about gender identity under communism, and how taking away the material base would have gender fade (section linked). Still, I feel it is incomplete, and I would like to elaborate very specifically on this point.

How To Love Your Plastic Heart:

Acknowledge that your gender isn’t real

                It’s a lie!!!!!! Identity has to urgently be decoupled from this category.

Make gender your clay

Gender is composed of self-identification, sex characteristics, wardrobe, spoken word, speaking tone, loudness, style, ways to date and fuck people, comforting others, and other aspects. None of these are permanent, but all of these can be put into a desired output, male or female (an example that is done-to-death is the ‘girldick,’ making for a transfeminine reappropriation of genitalia).

Play

This is the most important, and the one I have had in my mind for a while. In the same way that a child playing with dolls is not a princess, we are not the strange melding of terms and feelings we have been raised to associate ourselves with.

Gender is violence, and the violence increases in magnitude the farther you are from being a cishet white man business-owning settler (HORRIFYING COMBINATION). But all of us activists are not agender for a reason.

Gender is also childlike wonder, glitter, the positive feeling of freedom and fresh fields or the calm ocean at night or the moon’s beauty in the day and night or in the way that a selfie would look so fucking cool by that one tree with a binder, or a skirt, maybe nothing at all in private.

At that point, gender is not truth or rationality anymore, and it can go away if wanted. Playtime can end, and we stop being Barbies and go back to our lives.

Yet, sometimes, and only consciously, because this is still highly political and meant to accomplish liberation from an oppressive ontology, we can all have tea parties with laser blasters and dresses and cloaks and skirts and arms covered in bracelets and poorly-thought-out tattoos of gender envy and lightsabers and unrestricted fun. The contradiction is resolved, and as Cyndi Lauper sang, ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’

Jennifer Iguana is an author and frequent contributor for Young Patriots Magazine.