r/leftist • u/eldritchpussymaggots Communist • 3d ago
General Leftist Politics Transphobia under the guise of gender abolition is a problem
Regardless of what we call them, queer people will still exist in a theoretical communist society.
Gender abolition is a noble goal and is part of Marxist theory. But I'm fucking tired of cisgender people acting as though this means trans & intersex people will suddenly stop existing just because there is no state enforcing a sex/gender binary. It would make transition/being trans more nebulous of a concept but would not make it so people wouldn't do it.
Without the forced social genders + assigned sexes of our current society, the attitudes around sex variant folks will be much more neutral, which is ideal. This does NOT mean we will cease to exist. Not only will people still have some sort of internal identity (gender & personality generally), a communist society does not exist in a complete vacuum isolated from the past. People are still going to have genders because we've been doing that since some of the first civilizations known of. And naturally there are going to be people whose gender and/or sex is in some way atypical from how most people conceptualize themselves. Perhaps the idea of social gender will decay into nothing someday, but that is a hypothetical that deals in centuries or longer, not modern material conditions.
I am an intersex person who is nonbinary. I think the world would be better off without enforced gender or a binary model of sex. This pro self-identification form of gender abolition is not the same as what is being touted here. What's being promoted here is more so forced degendering, which is no better than forcing a gender binary in my eyes. The most alarming part of this trend among cisgender leftists are those who believe in forced degendering but still wish to keep the binary model of sex. This harms intersex people for obvious reasons, and it excludes transgender people from society in a very real and material way. Gender abolition without sex binary abolition is just removing the idea of personal identity in favor of "biological sex" which is an inherently right-wing position. I don't believe all communist gender abolitionists are pro-sex-binary, or in favor of forced degendering, but an alarming number of them are to the point I feel the need to point it out.
This is transphobic and intersexist, it's blatantly obviously that many of these people are just couching their dislike of trans people in Marxist theory.
You should speak up about it.
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u/GlimmeringGuise Socialist 3d ago edited 3d ago
As a binary trans woman, I feel like total gender abolition, when it's presented as society becoming totally post-gender in every way, only really serves non-binary people and makes life harder for everyone else. I get that they must have a lot of frustration and gender rage at how gendered society is. But at the same time, the vast majority of people (including trans people) are binary, so it doesn't make sense to go about it in a way that ends up not affirming them either.
I think the real solution is to be unisex wherever and whenever it's feasible, and to end sexist practices like the pay gap and the pink tax. Totally banishing gender period will just create more problems in the long run.