So now we know what sex is, what about gender? Just as there’s been confusion over the word sex, there’s been a lot of fuzzy thinking about gender. This essay shows gender for what it is - very bad...
Just this morning I filled out a form that asked me my gender and gave me many options, including other. I chose "other" and wrote in "I don't have a gender; my sex is female." I do that whenever I have that option.
My hospital installed E kiosks at appointment desks. Three out of five people in line were confused about the gender questions. After two weeks, they ditched the kiosks and went back to real people. The personnel at my clinic are covered in rainbow lanyards and literal virtue badges. It's disgusting. When I complained, I was given a referral to psychiatry. I don't agree with a lot of the stuff this woman recommends although I get it. I like wearing skirts sometimes and overalls other times. I always reject all gender questions.
I was at a demo yesterday, had a great time seeing old friends and had ongoing conversation with woman [SIC] standing next to me. Then she starts talking about transgender rights. I said transwomen are men. She got very hostile. I couldn't really understand why she was mad but then the younger woman next to her said intersex are 2% of the population. (Which I found out is not true--it's more like 0.018% or one out of every 5500 births but I guess the schools don't teach math anymore either.) I said I think transwomen are gay men with fetishes about women's clothing. Then she said, apropos of nothing (I thought), "Do you want to see my penis?" So, always up for a new experience, I said, "Sure!" She jumped about six feet and got the younger one between us and started shouting about me being a bigot and that I wanted to see her dick. It really soured the whole demo for me. What I wanted was for her to watch Jennifer Bilek's discussion about the money behind the trans movement since we were out in the street complaining about the billionaire bros. Seemed relevant to me. But her mind was shut tight. I am so over this. I tried to explain to her that women were rendered non-existent if transwomen are considered women but she went into full-blown drama queen territory. I despair of normal people being able to fight back against what is happening in our governments and societies right now. I hesitate to call it authoritarianism because I think it's something worse and much bigger. There are so many issues that divide us. It feels hopeless.
Are intersex considered trans? They all are unique and completely different from each other. What the hey? And they actually have gonadal and hormonal and chromosomal issues which transwomen do not. I believe they all have both X and Y chromosomes. It's probably politically incorrect but in private I just refer to them as hermaphrodites.
I resent taxpayers paying for all these hormonal treatments and surgeries, but I'm entirely open to free APPROPRIATE healthcare for intersex people. But true intersex are incredibly rare. At 0.018% that's slightly over 6,000 people in the entire United States and far less in the U.K.
As for gender, fuck it. It's always been used against me. I just see it as academic jargon and I reject all academic and professional jargon. That's a tool to establish who is inside and who is outside. We don't need more dividers that determine who has a right to an opinion and who does not. (Although if you don't have a vagina and uterus your opinion about abortion is likely beside the point,) I always seem to be outside. As for socialization for my sex, that's the reason my house is a mess. I spent my childhood doing housework (against my will) and sewing women's clothing for myself (against my will) and buying bras (against my will) instead of creating things I wanted to create with peers that I do as little housework as is possible, which is very little since my only roommates have four legs and like things to stink.
Not sure this is a real response to your question but I just had to get it off my (hairless) chest.
Thanks! the demo looked quite scary. It must have been funny tho when you said yes to seeing the penis. I’m looking forward to how this Supreme Court ruling plays out…
So-called intersex individuals do NOT all have both an X and a Y chromosome, nor are they hermaphrodites, which has long been a myth about them.
This is a good source of information about sex, gender and Disorders of Sexual Development (DSDs), which is the medical term for several dozen disorders that used to be lumped together as “intersex”:
Although there are hermaphrodites among some non-mammalian species, no human or other mammal can be a hermaphrodite, which is defined as an individual capable of producing both small gametes (sperm) and large gametes (ova or eggs).
Individuals with Disorders of Sexual Development are either male or female.
Thank you for this, I think. I did not have the presence of mind to ask what kind of gamete she produced. She obliquely referred to hormone therapy to make an already small penis smaller. I'm not going to argue about the statement that no human or other human can be a hermaphrodite but I did once know a rather troublesome goat named Ruby whom the vets decided was exactly that. I don't know if she had either small or large gametes. She acted like a palace eunuch who wouldn't allow a clearly biological male around her "girls". She did not appear to go into rut although at breeding time her testosterone spiked. She was far more dangerous to be around than any buck I ever knew and I've known a lot in 30 years breeding goats. She never bred any of the females in her herd--unsurprisingly as she did not have a penis. But she never went into heat either. I babysat her and she was a hyperactive pain in the butt. Her behavior was way beyond the normal range of either male or female. And I've spent way too many hours unravelling this issue to want to spend more on it. Most of my life it seems we are focusing on males. Enough already. And enough with taxpayers paying for ridiculous and damaging surgeries and hormonal treatments. And enough with our social institutions being taken over by people who claim privilege available to neither "men" nor "women" (but with suspicious backgrounds in the State Department).
My point was that this gender theory (or gender theology--I like that term) is yet another way to divide the population that is being attacked from the current inhabitants of the West Wing of the White House.
All human beings, whether "standard issue" women and men or those with a DSD, have at least one X chromosome, as a YY or Y0 configuration is incompatible with human (and I think all mammalian) life.
Look up Helen Joyce explaining intersex (I watched on YouTube), it’s the clearest explanation I’ve heard. Unfortunately some groups include any abnormalities under intersex in order to get to 2%, for example including PCOS which many women have but which is not an intersex condition. So you are right, it is much, much lower as a percentage.
Thank you for making the important point that a figure of 2% for intersex people is a wild overestimate based on (deliberately?) “casting your net” as wide as possible so as to include those with minor hormonal irregularities in addition to those with unusual chromosomal configurations.
I am a “standard” XY male who was over-exposed to (probably artificial) oestrogen during my mother's pregnancy, resulting in partial bodily feminization, some of which was immediately apparent (hypospadias, a deformation of the penis which required surgical intervention in early childhood), and other aspects of which did not emerge until puberty (breast growth, ambiguous body shape, relatively high-pitched voice, lack of visible Adam's apple...)
“Two-percenters” rely on (ludicrously) including men like myself in their statistics, along with women analogously overexposed to androgens in the womb – hitherto a rarer situation, though perhaps on the increase now that some trans-”men” are embarking on pregnancy while simulaneously refusing to pause or adequately diminish their testosterone regime.
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (primarily women).
Others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
Finally, it's past time for the LGB community to separate themselves from the trans activists who are trying to take away the rights of women to fairness in sports and to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. They also advocate for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children many of whom would grow up gay.
Their actions are evil and the
understandable negative reaction to the harm they are causing is spilling over to innocent people who are just going about their business, marrying and leading their lives.
My go-to comments when confronted with 'cis' in person or online are:
1) I'm a woman. No qualifier needed.
2) I'm not cis. I'm a woman, the OG.
OG ("Original Gangster") came from rap culture but is now more broadly used to describe someone who is the Original, the greatest in whatever group or endeavor. It implies respect and righteousness. It's got swagger. And it annoys TRAs because women are, indeed, the OG.
Thank you for this thought provoking essay. I agree that there has been a very damaging conflation of female sex and the performance of femininity. However it is not clear that you are offering a way out of gender performance, rather you seem to be saying we need to perform masculinity, or some sort of anti-femininity which necessarily defines itself against feminine norms. Perhaps this is an inability to unmoor my own thinking from gender constructs! I am also not convinced that we need to destroy gender as much as relegate it to its proper place, but you’ve really got me thinking what that is.
I do get what you're saying, and I liked the article, but I think we need to be careful not to blame women for the effects of patriarchy. We are socialised all our lives to 'like' make up and dresses and it can be really difficult to decide what is me and what is the years of messaging I've absorbed. We are all in a different place and going at a different speed (I have a complicated relationship with shaving, for instance).
Many of the high profile GC campaigners are working in the theatres of law , policy and media. They will not get taken seriously if they don't look 'businesslike'. That's not their fault. I'd rather they got the job done while wearing lipstick than dress like they don't care and fail to be taken seriously (it's crap that as women we have to make that decision, but men are also judged on their assistance, and are unlikely to be taken seriously if eg covered in tattoos and piercings).
"We need to show them that you can get out of sex role stereotypes," I agree 100%. I do not agree, however, with the advice of "never wearing dresses". That only preserves female stereotypes (feminity) by perpetuating the idea that it's gotta be one or the other. If we really want to bust the notion of girly things, we should wear whatever we damned well want and never feel pressured to wear anything for anyone's ideological cause. Personally, I wear clothing and sport ball caps that get me continually told "excuse me, sir, that's the ladies room!" But then I occasionally surprise everyone by wearing a house dress. Why? All of this is because it's what I want to wear. To me, it is a patriarchal holdover to urge anyone to wear certain clothing or, more generally, to do anything illogical. Instead of urging women to wear clothing found in the "men's department". Let's urge stores to limit the men's department to "nut cups" and the women's department to "ABCD-cups". Meanwhile, let's encourage BOTH men and women to be capricious. Let's all wear anything we want to wear. Let's do it without care for what others think. Let's do or say anything without even CONSIDERING gendered labels that might be attached to our choices. Let's get gender so purged that it would not even occur to us to politicize or virtue signal about our daily wardrobe choices.
I'm confused. This: "Given the lack of fixed definition, I suggest we stop using the term altogether and just use sex, sex role stereotypes and identity." seems different from using the term to mean a prison of sex stereotypes. If we want to abolish gender, which we do, we have to use the term. So, scrap the term entirely? Or criticize gender as a prison?
I'm not sure. We can certainly criticise it as a prison, and we also have to criticise it as not being a synonym with for sex. I think it's worth trying out on TRAs we know and finding out what works best.
Criticize gender as a prison, for sure. We have no power to disappear the word through our own scrapping of it, so we must attack the concept and what it's come to mis/represent. And you do a mighty good job, Kara!
I wish everyone would stop telling women what to wear and what to look like. Just stop. That includes radfems who believe they are doing so for noble political motives. If my women friends wear a gold or silver necklace or chain, it's likely because they like it, it looks lovely against their skin or with their outfit, not because they are modeling subservience. What a dreary ideological assumption. Likewise with make-up. Julia no doubt must wear make-up for her media job. Other women use make-up because they (goddess forbid!) like it. Some like to play with different looks. No doubt make-up and body markings have been used to indicate ownership or oppression in some cultures and historical eras. But make-up and body painting have also been used quite gloriously to express tribal, ethnic, racial and sexual pride. Not every damn choice of adornment and accoutrement is reflective of the sado-ritual syndrome. If you are serious about seeking alliances, you need to be less judgemental of women's individual choices of appearance. I've seen this kind of criticism and contempt alienate so many women over the years. Please, just stop.
I get what you are saying, but what if performing femininity is one of the key reasons why patriarchy keeps going? And what if by stopping we could undermine it? Smoking is bad for health and lots of people hated being advised to stop. What if femininity is bad for women's health, just because some women are addicted to it, or choose it, doesn't mean we should stop questioning it.
If an addiction model is how you frame it and what informs your tactics, that's great. I agree we need to chip away at all aspects of patriarchal structures, and you provided practical tips through the bullet points. Non-compliance has always been an important aspect of resistance.
I have very mixed feelings about this advice. Have you read about "the great renunciation"? This is a phrase for the historical shift in which men gave up decorating themselves. One of the reasons we find the way the Pope dresses sort of silly is because he wears what all powerful men used to wear: very sparkly frilly gorgeous outfits. Think of Henry VIII in gold and ermine, or any dynastic Chinese emperor.
The anthropological explanation for this is that political power used to be more fragile: you had to demonstrate to the people you were better than they were in part by how you looked. Very glamorous compared to their homespun garb.
Nowadays, someone like Bill Gates or Jack Ma goes out of his way to wear dowdy nerd outfits. They don't need to prove anything to you, they can crush you with the push of a button. Ditto our leaders: they wear dark suits and if you give them any guff similarly dressed men in dark suits will turn up at your door and throw you in a cell, no questions asked.
In many traditional societies, women were mostly pretty drably dressed and were not for looking at: this wasn't a mark of power, of course. The power of dress-up for women is a fragile power, the feminists are right about that -- it depends on persuasion, and it always risks failure (men and other women are DELIGHTED to announce when it fails, who are you fooling trying to do prettiness, etc). But I think women are not wrong to think it's a step up from a burka.
Finally, if we think about the politics of dress up in the contemporary world, I think women are right to be angry when feminists who are comfortably placed in the class hierarchy say "oh you should do what I do which is like what Bill Gates and Jack Ma do: dress down, don't make an effort". It's not actually clear that is "rebellious" in our social universe. In our social universe, wearing button down shirts and sweater vests is a kind of upper class power move: I'm so powerful I don't need to prove anything to you.
If you are a woman who is precariously placed in the hierarchy, that kind of power is not actually available to you and so asking you to dress like Bill Gates is asking you to give up the little bit of power you do have in favor of dressing as if you have a power you really don't have. I just think this advice is not pure gender-revolt advice; it's advice that is somewhat class-blind. I don't mean this as one of those smackdowns that is so often directed at radfems (oh you middle class toffs etc.). I think it is good advice on one axis and sort of so-so advice on another axis, I feel genuinely mixed about it.
So -- if we look at this history --- isn't the advice to join the great male renunciation just advice to do what men do instead of doing something truly independent, which could include anything from dressing like Sheila Jeffreys to dressing like a pre-revolutionary French aristocrat?
I think at the moment it's a bit like slut walks - girls might think they are reclaiming public space and being able to show off their bodies, but men and most women see them as sex objects. For the moment I think feminine clothes reek of submission. But interesting to keep thinking about this.
The trouble I see with eliminating “gender” from our vocabularies is mainly historical: The second-wave women’s liberationists explicitly aimed to “abolish all gender.” I’d like to honor that aim and continue it.
How about we continue to use the term, but carefully define it each time as sex stereotypes that compel women (the sex class) to be subservient?
Thank you for this, especially the various definitions of gender. It's purposefully vague, to give it those built-in loopholes, but I don't think everyone realizes that.
Great idea .Thanks so much.Writing and poetry are also ways of putting all this into perspective too.The trouble is it has split the feminist movement and will take a while to heal, witness the demise of The Women's Equality Party in UK.
Just this morning I filled out a form that asked me my gender and gave me many options, including other. I chose "other" and wrote in "I don't have a gender; my sex is female." I do that whenever I have that option.
I correct the form if it's on paper.
My hospital installed E kiosks at appointment desks. Three out of five people in line were confused about the gender questions. After two weeks, they ditched the kiosks and went back to real people. The personnel at my clinic are covered in rainbow lanyards and literal virtue badges. It's disgusting. When I complained, I was given a referral to psychiatry. I don't agree with a lot of the stuff this woman recommends although I get it. I like wearing skirts sometimes and overalls other times. I always reject all gender questions.
I was at a demo yesterday, had a great time seeing old friends and had ongoing conversation with woman [SIC] standing next to me. Then she starts talking about transgender rights. I said transwomen are men. She got very hostile. I couldn't really understand why she was mad but then the younger woman next to her said intersex are 2% of the population. (Which I found out is not true--it's more like 0.018% or one out of every 5500 births but I guess the schools don't teach math anymore either.) I said I think transwomen are gay men with fetishes about women's clothing. Then she said, apropos of nothing (I thought), "Do you want to see my penis?" So, always up for a new experience, I said, "Sure!" She jumped about six feet and got the younger one between us and started shouting about me being a bigot and that I wanted to see her dick. It really soured the whole demo for me. What I wanted was for her to watch Jennifer Bilek's discussion about the money behind the trans movement since we were out in the street complaining about the billionaire bros. Seemed relevant to me. But her mind was shut tight. I am so over this. I tried to explain to her that women were rendered non-existent if transwomen are considered women but she went into full-blown drama queen territory. I despair of normal people being able to fight back against what is happening in our governments and societies right now. I hesitate to call it authoritarianism because I think it's something worse and much bigger. There are so many issues that divide us. It feels hopeless.
Are intersex considered trans? They all are unique and completely different from each other. What the hey? And they actually have gonadal and hormonal and chromosomal issues which transwomen do not. I believe they all have both X and Y chromosomes. It's probably politically incorrect but in private I just refer to them as hermaphrodites.
I resent taxpayers paying for all these hormonal treatments and surgeries, but I'm entirely open to free APPROPRIATE healthcare for intersex people. But true intersex are incredibly rare. At 0.018% that's slightly over 6,000 people in the entire United States and far less in the U.K.
As for gender, fuck it. It's always been used against me. I just see it as academic jargon and I reject all academic and professional jargon. That's a tool to establish who is inside and who is outside. We don't need more dividers that determine who has a right to an opinion and who does not. (Although if you don't have a vagina and uterus your opinion about abortion is likely beside the point,) I always seem to be outside. As for socialization for my sex, that's the reason my house is a mess. I spent my childhood doing housework (against my will) and sewing women's clothing for myself (against my will) and buying bras (against my will) instead of creating things I wanted to create with peers that I do as little housework as is possible, which is very little since my only roommates have four legs and like things to stink.
Not sure this is a real response to your question but I just had to get it off my (hairless) chest.
Thanks! the demo looked quite scary. It must have been funny tho when you said yes to seeing the penis. I’m looking forward to how this Supreme Court ruling plays out…
An exhibitionist suing his victim for voyeurism? I think I heard of such a case (not involving trans); or maybe it was the other way round.
So-called intersex individuals do NOT all have both an X and a Y chromosome, nor are they hermaphrodites, which has long been a myth about them.
This is a good source of information about sex, gender and Disorders of Sexual Development (DSDs), which is the medical term for several dozen disorders that used to be lumped together as “intersex”:
https://theparadoxinstitute.com
Although there are hermaphrodites among some non-mammalian species, no human or other mammal can be a hermaphrodite, which is defined as an individual capable of producing both small gametes (sperm) and large gametes (ova or eggs).
Individuals with Disorders of Sexual Development are either male or female.
Thank you for this, I think. I did not have the presence of mind to ask what kind of gamete she produced. She obliquely referred to hormone therapy to make an already small penis smaller. I'm not going to argue about the statement that no human or other human can be a hermaphrodite but I did once know a rather troublesome goat named Ruby whom the vets decided was exactly that. I don't know if she had either small or large gametes. She acted like a palace eunuch who wouldn't allow a clearly biological male around her "girls". She did not appear to go into rut although at breeding time her testosterone spiked. She was far more dangerous to be around than any buck I ever knew and I've known a lot in 30 years breeding goats. She never bred any of the females in her herd--unsurprisingly as she did not have a penis. But she never went into heat either. I babysat her and she was a hyperactive pain in the butt. Her behavior was way beyond the normal range of either male or female. And I've spent way too many hours unravelling this issue to want to spend more on it. Most of my life it seems we are focusing on males. Enough already. And enough with taxpayers paying for ridiculous and damaging surgeries and hormonal treatments. And enough with our social institutions being taken over by people who claim privilege available to neither "men" nor "women" (but with suspicious backgrounds in the State Department).
My point was that this gender theory (or gender theology--I like that term) is yet another way to divide the population that is being attacked from the current inhabitants of the West Wing of the White House.
No human can be hermaphrodite. Every single human is either female or male. That's just a biological fact.
According to google, goats can. But I suspect that simply means vets don't waste time or money sorting out the DSDs of goats.
All human beings, whether "standard issue" women and men or those with a DSD, have at least one X chromosome, as a YY or Y0 configuration is incompatible with human (and I think all mammalian) life.
Look up Helen Joyce explaining intersex (I watched on YouTube), it’s the clearest explanation I’ve heard. Unfortunately some groups include any abnormalities under intersex in order to get to 2%, for example including PCOS which many women have but which is not an intersex condition. So you are right, it is much, much lower as a percentage.
Thank you for making the important point that a figure of 2% for intersex people is a wild overestimate based on (deliberately?) “casting your net” as wide as possible so as to include those with minor hormonal irregularities in addition to those with unusual chromosomal configurations.
I am a “standard” XY male who was over-exposed to (probably artificial) oestrogen during my mother's pregnancy, resulting in partial bodily feminization, some of which was immediately apparent (hypospadias, a deformation of the penis which required surgical intervention in early childhood), and other aspects of which did not emerge until puberty (breast growth, ambiguous body shape, relatively high-pitched voice, lack of visible Adam's apple...)
“Two-percenters” rely on (ludicrously) including men like myself in their statistics, along with women analogously overexposed to androgens in the womb – hitherto a rarer situation, though perhaps on the increase now that some trans-”men” are embarking on pregnancy while simulaneously refusing to pause or adequately diminish their testosterone regime.
Gender is a linguistics term for words only.
John Money knew that. Its only purpose is to cause confusion.
Just stop using it. There's always a more accurate word to use in its place.
https://kathighsmith.substack.com/p/gender-has-no-application-to-humans
To whom you are attracted sexually is purely subjective and therefore cannot reasonably be contested by an outside observer.
Where you decide to live your life on a spectrum of superficial, stereotypical male to female attributes (and we all do) is also purely subjective and similarly cannot be questioned.
However, your biological sex reflects an objective reality which cannot be changed by your subjective personal view and futile attempts to do so can result in serious health impacts to you as well as harms to members of the sex you are impersonating (primarily women).
Others who are grounded in objective reality should never be forced to accept your subjective version of your actual biological sex.
Finally, it's past time for the LGB community to separate themselves from the trans activists who are trying to take away the rights of women to fairness in sports and to privacy and safety in their restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. They also advocate for the chemical and surgical mutilation of children many of whom would grow up gay.
Their actions are evil and the
understandable negative reaction to the harm they are causing is spilling over to innocent people who are just going about their business, marrying and leading their lives.
My go-to comments when confronted with 'cis' in person or online are:
1) I'm a woman. No qualifier needed.
2) I'm not cis. I'm a woman, the OG.
OG ("Original Gangster") came from rap culture but is now more broadly used to describe someone who is the Original, the greatest in whatever group or endeavor. It implies respect and righteousness. It's got swagger. And it annoys TRAs because women are, indeed, the OG.
Hilarious title, excellent essay. When necessary, such as, “‘gender identity’ is embedded in the Nevada constitution,” I put it in quotes.
Glad you like the title joke. It's lost on the young who don't know the woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle slogan.
Yes. I’ve been explaining it to those who are age-deprived, haha.
Thank you for this thought provoking essay. I agree that there has been a very damaging conflation of female sex and the performance of femininity. However it is not clear that you are offering a way out of gender performance, rather you seem to be saying we need to perform masculinity, or some sort of anti-femininity which necessarily defines itself against feminine norms. Perhaps this is an inability to unmoor my own thinking from gender constructs! I am also not convinced that we need to destroy gender as much as relegate it to its proper place, but you’ve really got me thinking what that is.
I do get what you're saying, and I liked the article, but I think we need to be careful not to blame women for the effects of patriarchy. We are socialised all our lives to 'like' make up and dresses and it can be really difficult to decide what is me and what is the years of messaging I've absorbed. We are all in a different place and going at a different speed (I have a complicated relationship with shaving, for instance).
Many of the high profile GC campaigners are working in the theatres of law , policy and media. They will not get taken seriously if they don't look 'businesslike'. That's not their fault. I'd rather they got the job done while wearing lipstick than dress like they don't care and fail to be taken seriously (it's crap that as women we have to make that decision, but men are also judged on their assistance, and are unlikely to be taken seriously if eg covered in tattoos and piercings).
"We need to show them that you can get out of sex role stereotypes," I agree 100%. I do not agree, however, with the advice of "never wearing dresses". That only preserves female stereotypes (feminity) by perpetuating the idea that it's gotta be one or the other. If we really want to bust the notion of girly things, we should wear whatever we damned well want and never feel pressured to wear anything for anyone's ideological cause. Personally, I wear clothing and sport ball caps that get me continually told "excuse me, sir, that's the ladies room!" But then I occasionally surprise everyone by wearing a house dress. Why? All of this is because it's what I want to wear. To me, it is a patriarchal holdover to urge anyone to wear certain clothing or, more generally, to do anything illogical. Instead of urging women to wear clothing found in the "men's department". Let's urge stores to limit the men's department to "nut cups" and the women's department to "ABCD-cups". Meanwhile, let's encourage BOTH men and women to be capricious. Let's all wear anything we want to wear. Let's do it without care for what others think. Let's do or say anything without even CONSIDERING gendered labels that might be attached to our choices. Let's get gender so purged that it would not even occur to us to politicize or virtue signal about our daily wardrobe choices.
I'm confused. This: "Given the lack of fixed definition, I suggest we stop using the term altogether and just use sex, sex role stereotypes and identity." seems different from using the term to mean a prison of sex stereotypes. If we want to abolish gender, which we do, we have to use the term. So, scrap the term entirely? Or criticize gender as a prison?
I'm not sure. We can certainly criticise it as a prison, and we also have to criticise it as not being a synonym with for sex. I think it's worth trying out on TRAs we know and finding out what works best.
Criticize gender as a prison, for sure. We have no power to disappear the word through our own scrapping of it, so we must attack the concept and what it's come to mis/represent. And you do a mighty good job, Kara!
I wish everyone would stop telling women what to wear and what to look like. Just stop. That includes radfems who believe they are doing so for noble political motives. If my women friends wear a gold or silver necklace or chain, it's likely because they like it, it looks lovely against their skin or with their outfit, not because they are modeling subservience. What a dreary ideological assumption. Likewise with make-up. Julia no doubt must wear make-up for her media job. Other women use make-up because they (goddess forbid!) like it. Some like to play with different looks. No doubt make-up and body markings have been used to indicate ownership or oppression in some cultures and historical eras. But make-up and body painting have also been used quite gloriously to express tribal, ethnic, racial and sexual pride. Not every damn choice of adornment and accoutrement is reflective of the sado-ritual syndrome. If you are serious about seeking alliances, you need to be less judgemental of women's individual choices of appearance. I've seen this kind of criticism and contempt alienate so many women over the years. Please, just stop.
I get what you are saying, but what if performing femininity is one of the key reasons why patriarchy keeps going? And what if by stopping we could undermine it? Smoking is bad for health and lots of people hated being advised to stop. What if femininity is bad for women's health, just because some women are addicted to it, or choose it, doesn't mean we should stop questioning it.
If an addiction model is how you frame it and what informs your tactics, that's great. I agree we need to chip away at all aspects of patriarchal structures, and you provided practical tips through the bullet points. Non-compliance has always been an important aspect of resistance.
I have very mixed feelings about this advice. Have you read about "the great renunciation"? This is a phrase for the historical shift in which men gave up decorating themselves. One of the reasons we find the way the Pope dresses sort of silly is because he wears what all powerful men used to wear: very sparkly frilly gorgeous outfits. Think of Henry VIII in gold and ermine, or any dynastic Chinese emperor.
The anthropological explanation for this is that political power used to be more fragile: you had to demonstrate to the people you were better than they were in part by how you looked. Very glamorous compared to their homespun garb.
Nowadays, someone like Bill Gates or Jack Ma goes out of his way to wear dowdy nerd outfits. They don't need to prove anything to you, they can crush you with the push of a button. Ditto our leaders: they wear dark suits and if you give them any guff similarly dressed men in dark suits will turn up at your door and throw you in a cell, no questions asked.
In many traditional societies, women were mostly pretty drably dressed and were not for looking at: this wasn't a mark of power, of course. The power of dress-up for women is a fragile power, the feminists are right about that -- it depends on persuasion, and it always risks failure (men and other women are DELIGHTED to announce when it fails, who are you fooling trying to do prettiness, etc). But I think women are not wrong to think it's a step up from a burka.
Finally, if we think about the politics of dress up in the contemporary world, I think women are right to be angry when feminists who are comfortably placed in the class hierarchy say "oh you should do what I do which is like what Bill Gates and Jack Ma do: dress down, don't make an effort". It's not actually clear that is "rebellious" in our social universe. In our social universe, wearing button down shirts and sweater vests is a kind of upper class power move: I'm so powerful I don't need to prove anything to you.
If you are a woman who is precariously placed in the hierarchy, that kind of power is not actually available to you and so asking you to dress like Bill Gates is asking you to give up the little bit of power you do have in favor of dressing as if you have a power you really don't have. I just think this advice is not pure gender-revolt advice; it's advice that is somewhat class-blind. I don't mean this as one of those smackdowns that is so often directed at radfems (oh you middle class toffs etc.). I think it is good advice on one axis and sort of so-so advice on another axis, I feel genuinely mixed about it.
So -- if we look at this history --- isn't the advice to join the great male renunciation just advice to do what men do instead of doing something truly independent, which could include anything from dressing like Sheila Jeffreys to dressing like a pre-revolutionary French aristocrat?
I think at the moment it's a bit like slut walks - girls might think they are reclaiming public space and being able to show off their bodies, but men and most women see them as sex objects. For the moment I think feminine clothes reek of submission. But interesting to keep thinking about this.
The trouble I see with eliminating “gender” from our vocabularies is mainly historical: The second-wave women’s liberationists explicitly aimed to “abolish all gender.” I’d like to honor that aim and continue it.
How about we continue to use the term, but carefully define it each time as sex stereotypes that compel women (the sex class) to be subservient?
Yes, that sounds a good idea.
Thank you for this, especially the various definitions of gender. It's purposefully vague, to give it those built-in loopholes, but I don't think everyone realizes that.
Great idea .Thanks so much.Writing and poetry are also ways of putting all this into perspective too.The trouble is it has split the feminist movement and will take a while to heal, witness the demise of The Women's Equality Party in UK.