For Gender Abolition, against Gender Abolitionists
I am a gender abolitionist. I’m also transgender. There has been a rapidly growing interest in gender abolition in recent years running alongside the wider “Anti-Gender movement”, and it is at odds with much of the core of my politics as a transfeminist, and the politics of most transgender liberationists. I’m going to talk about that here a little.
Gender has Descriptive and Prescriptive meanings. When I talk about myself as a gender abolitionist, I am choosing to make a conscious distinction between gender as a system of role enforcement and compliance on the one hand, and on the other, gender as used to describe self expression and identity. These can be seen as “prescriptive” gender and “descriptive” gender. They both draw on observations of the existing sex-role class dichotomy we live under. One creates and polices norms of behaviour and expression based on genitals (or presumed sexual organs) and the other describes the individual by analogy to those prescriptions. These definitions are not fully separable, but they’re not the same either.
It is the “prescriptive” aspects of gender which curtail people’s rights to live free and happy lives that suit their own needs and desires. I normally wouldn’t, but if I were to use a heavily stereotyped gender-descriptive catchphrase, I could say “I’m a man trapped in a woman’s body”, and it doesn’t actually hurt anyone the same way that, for example, bullying a gender non conforming child into expected “gender appropriate” behaviour patterns might. So in any case, that’s “gender” and specifically singling out coercion.
Abolition can only be systemic. The second key idea I want to pick out is the idea of abolition. Abolition is a word that has no meaning on the individual scale. Abolition does not simply mean putting an end to a thing, but specifically refers to putting an end to particular systems, practices and institutions.
We have all sorts of words for other cases: Finish, Complete, Stop, Cease, Terminate. These are words that indicate what we’re talking about, and the degree of formality involved. Abolition is a useful word specifically because of it’s long history in talking specifically about oppressive systems, structures, social procedures. And consequently, it’s only useful for talking about the aspects of gender which are coerced.
Gender Identity is a relationship with society. None can abolish my gender identity or your gender identity or either of our personal habits of self-expression because a personal relationship to the world is not a system or an institution. A gender identity is a reflexive understanding of how you relate to the wider sex role system. I say it’s reflexive because relating yourself to others in this way and potentially having feelings about the gendered dimension of that thought and experience happens as part of our thinking even without deliberately thinking about it.
In my case I identify with women. Consciously I try not to think about gender too much and also feel pretty conflicted about the system as a wider whole which I find a drag, but if someone includes me with men I flinch inside. If they include me with women I feel recognised, like my internalised world is synchronised with the social one.
I won’t get too far into the debate of whether it is innate or socialised or both. Society tried very hard to socialise manhood into me because of the genitals I was born with and it was profoundly ineffective at it. Equally I wouldn’t know how to live in this society as a woman, I may never have learned to hate the idea of growing up to be a man, without living in a society which has men and women in it to begin with. How trans children would behave if left feral is the sort of impossible thought experiment that should be left to philosophers and social services.
So, basic ideas and definitions out of the way now.
As a gender abolitionist, I believe the system of sex-role surveillance and coercion often known as “Gender” needs abolition and in doing so this will transform our relationships with each other. Our individual gendered relations to each other would likely (ideally, in my opinion) be radically changed by this. There is something really anti-human about the majority of self-described gender abolitionists, and I appreciate I’ve created an uphill struggle adopting a term already occupied by people who see Gender as an individual failing, a fall from the grace of cisgender purity.
As Agnieszka Graff, the Polish feminist and writer on the Anti-Gender Movement, asks: “Why is Gender a man in a dress”?
My hope is by occupying the space and being (in my opinion) just really obviously right about the nature of gender as a violent institution, I erode both the invisibility cloak their pseudoradical rhetoric gives their cis supremacist politics, and gender as an institution itself. Taking a feminist analysis, it’s pretty easy to look at those fake gender abolitionists and reveal countless instances of them just looking for opportunities to police and enforce gender on people, or to surveil and stigmatise gender dissidence as a warning to others.
It’s beyond funny at this point that for so many “gender abolitionists”, the only abolitionist praxis available is to point at people with unusual gender expression or identity and say “this is not normal” mockingly, or liken them to totalitarians (ruling through what state?) for having made usually fairly impotent demands of basic human respect. Understanding Gender as an institutional and coercive structure, which is a baseline requirement for understanding Gender as something which needs to be abolished at all, this is incoherent.
To clarify my side of the proposal here. When I talk about Abolition, I am not talking about vaguely suggesting we go out and try to destroy stereotypes. First and foremost gender abolition needs to be delivered against the concrete practices and policies enforced by our most powerful institutions. As an obvious example, the sex markers on government forms and identification documents which form the basis for so much institutional gender policing need to go. For many cis people who’ve always taken sexed documentation for granted, this probably seems silly, but as a trans person this system is more fraught. I’ve refused to acquire a Gender Recognition Certificate in the United Kingdom despite starting medical transition in 2003, largely because of a conscientious political objection to the state regulating my legal sex or gender identity.
I find the fact that it has an impact on my human rights and access to legal justice at all suspect. The system whereby trans people in particular are singled out for surveillance, which was supposedly created to “help” us navigate the absurd fixation of the state on discriminating between men and women is almost a joke when compared against the simplest solution which is simply not attempting to regulate legal gender. A running theme during the debates leading to the Gender Recognition Act which made it possible for some transsexuals to change legal sex was how to square a change of legal sex with the (at the time heterosexual-only) institution of marriage. A continuing issue in the present day is that the powers that be have decided that it would be too offensive for a cisgender partner in a heterosexual marriage to find themselves in what was legally a same-sex marriage. Consequently trans people’s rights to change sex are limited by the so-called “spousal veto”, which enables malicious spouses to effectively harass and abuse their partners through holding their legal change of sex hostage while the trans individual works through the process of getting an annulment or divorce instead. The entire absurdity of the legal battles Freddy McConnell has had to fight is rooted again in the fact that the state assigns people a fixed legal status of Legal Sex, and then won’t budge, leading to fun and games with a judge eventually squaring the ridiculous circle by ruling that the word “Mother” is legally speaking gender-neutral. All of this strife for trans people in the UK is rooted in the fact that the highest political authority for most of us is obsessed with assessing, marking, surveilling, regulating changes within and enforcing legal distinctions based on sex.
Beyond sex markers and legal sex regulation, institutional aspects of state dictated sex role socialisation in schools need to be transformed, active efforts are already underway but they don’t go nearly far enough.
There has been a huge amount of work already by more competent writers than me on prisons as a site for gender violence (see Captive Genders, edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith). Prison abolition is a key demand for gender abolition.
There are also vast areas for health justice reform to be rooted in a gender abolitionist perspective — in the understanding that healthcare provision often acts as a form of sculpting us into desired cisgender heterosexual reproductive units (or failing that the closest facsimile you can get out of a transgender person) oppressing both rather than simply providing patient centred healthcare. The most obvious place for this is the GIC but you could say as much of the obstetrics and gynecology wards, or for that matter of the ways that the available reproductive healthcare support that does exist and is funded by the state tends to discriminate against building families out of same-sex partnerships. This is homophobic, and it is also the enforcement of a gender based regulation of relationships considered fit for parenting.
The pattern that I hope is observable here when I talk about these institutional settings is that I am strictly not talking about the historic liberal feminist project of attempting to individually fix the stereotyped ideas that live in people’s minds. I don’t believe this revolution will come through persuading people that men and women are different that they originally thought they were. This isn’t an individual problem, it’s not an question of personal ideological failing. Stereotypes are, of course, a pervasive ideological problem, but the stereotyping ideology is educated by the status quo.
Stereotypes mostly serve to codify people’s existing expectations for the available roles that play out in society as it is. They are ways of compressing and abstracting knowledge about what to expect from different types of people, and sex stereotyping happens based on experiences of sexed relations in a society where institutional power creates limits and barriers to how people of one gender or another are able to behave and live. I’m a trans woman, and I am able to live as a woman through a mixture of social and physiological adaptations, but this can only really happen by behaving and living within the prescribed limits that mean that others understand me to be a woman, and even then, in doing so, I become subject to the expectations and obligations people tend to put on women. I have my freedom of expression, but I also have a relationship to this system which is not free, and most of the basic definitions under it (which may or may not work for me or anyone else personally) I have no direct personal power to change. I experience punishment when people who understand me as a woman see me behaving unwomanly, the same way as I used to experience punishment for unmasculine conduct before transition.
My view is that stereotypical beliefs will change as a result of a radical shift in power and society, as beliefs about trans people have shifted with growing trans liberation. So the “stereotype” concern is worth shifting over onto overturning the powers educating people in reproducing the social barriers we associate with Gender As Institution. We are occasionally instructed in gender explicitly but the vast majority of disciplinary action and obligation that enforces gender barely recognises it exists at all. Gender is always trying to naturalise itself and make itself just-so.
I know Radical Feminism has a pretty tainted history to it and I think anyone trying to follow it needs to read black and trans feminisms specifically to gain a full appreciation of the harms inherent in unreformed radfem, especially the aspects of it focused mainly on the “Cultural Feminists” (Daly, Raymond, Rich, Jeffreys). But I hope I’ve laid out a reasonable case for taking radical gender-abolitionist politics back for sex and gender dissidents.
