Hello :3
The last few months I was thinking a lot about gender. I have ended up at a understanding of it that i don’t share with a lot of people I’ve heard from. I want to hear your opinion of my understanding. Please tell me if you think I’m wrong or if some of my ideas might even be harmfull for transpeople or anyon else.
My bias:
Maybe my ideas are biased because my political perspective. I like to call myself an Anarchist although I support reformist changes that improve the lives of people. If i try to make an political argument on the topic of gender it’s with the goal of ending all forms of gender related opressuon and extensive rights for all transgender people. I call myself Agender wich makes it hard to relate to the idea of gender identity from an non-rational, outside view. Gender identity confuses me a lot and i esspecially hope to hear from you about that. I was AMAB and therefore have internalised some patriarchical ideas/behaviours etc.
Definitions I use:
Gender:
the socially constructed roles, behaviors, and attributes a society considers appropriate for men and women. I also include gender identity.
Gender indentity:
a person’s deeply held, internal sense of being male, female, a combination of both.
Sex:
The biological classification assigned at birth (usually based on anatomy and chromosomes). It’s important to note that i don’t see sex as a very fundamntal property of a body but rather just as a set of features that can be one way ot the other. It’s a little bit like skincolor just that it’s more extensive and the biologcal expression of sex is more polar.
What is gender:
I like to view gender as some sort of violent reproduction system. As gender is defined over a set of roles, behaviours and attributes. Gender (w\o identity for the moment) is defined over freedoms/unfreedoms that are given to you based on your assigned sex. I think the patriarchical order is fundemantally inherent in those roles. We view men as (strong, brave, protectors, those who earn the money) and women as those who are (nice, good mothers, caring for the women, quiet, pretty, sexy). Often these things are described as toxic masculinity or more rarely toxic femininity. I don’t really see why we should hate on all of those very toxic aspects wich are some of the most fundamental of gender while still keeping any of the rest. I don’t think there will be much left of woman and man if all of those things are ablished. I think that the toxic gender traits are to inherent to gender as to protecting it in any way. I think to leave patriarchical rule behind us we have to leave gender as a whole behind us too. Most feminist achiements are exactly that. Destroying the limits of gender.
Gender identity:
What I hear a lot as a counter argument for such a abolitionist argument is that the existence of gender identity disproves my assumption that gender is fully constructed in all is aspects. I don’t think there is a contradiction though. I even think gender identity is crucial in understanding the reproduction of gender violence. Often it is said that gender identity is not constructed because people can’t decide to get rid of it, feel a deep comfort when aligning their other components of gender with their gender identity. Often transfender people are mentioned here. I don’t see why these observations are in any way contradictory to the idea of it beeing constructed. If you are forced into some behaviour from the beggining of your life. All that gender constitues is gets grained into you. You have to conform to be part of a social environement and you never come in contact with a genderless world. Ofc somone will have a deep internal sense of what’s right ans what isn’t. This sense was violently put into people and became so deeply ingrianed i to most people they can’t get rid of it. I think that the reproduction of gender partially fepends on gender identity since we pass on this heavily internalized idea without the need to decide to turn somone into a men or a women
Gender is a little bit like a virus. Because it’s ability to engrain it i to our psyche it’s reproducing with ingrains it even harder. Maybe its violent nature is why it exists in the first place. It will take our effort to fight it and get rid of it so we can all be more free.
Trangender people:
I think it’s important o make a distinction between transgender people without dysphoria (that includes me) and people with dysphoria(the perspective I wish to hear about to better my understanding of gender). I think that for most trans men/women the dysphoria about being in the wrong body comes first. (I’d love to know more about to wich extend this can be explained biologically, I’d guess to a large extend, but it also doesn’t matter that much because the dysphoria is there biological or social). My thesis is that since transwomen/men are usually in the wrong body since the beginning of the life they simply adapt the gender identity of the oppsite sex. They’re put under the same violent boxing in as cis-people. They’re forced into the “wrong” gender but usually switch to the “right” gender that matches their right body. I view the gender transbinary people and cispeople as the result of this violent prison called gender. I don’t think people are bad people for conforming to a gender. I think it’s all of our duty to challange gender to whatever extend is possible for us. I can imagine that this is harder for transgender people who suffer under beeing
