Gender Abolition: A Modular Essay

This essay is meant to be readable in any order. Feel free to jump around, because all of the ideas are connected, inseparable, even. Also worth noting that I speak authoritatively due to the essay format, but please know I am very open to the possibility that some of the things I have taken for granted, or the things I claim, are simply incorrect. Please let me know if you find anything you disagree with in this way.

Module 1: Gender is bad

Gender is not a force for good. It was originally an evolutionarily helpful tool for organising social structures that helped us to get to where we are now [see Module 3 and 5]. But, like wisdom teeth, which are present because we needed a larger jaw size prior to consuming softer cooked foods, it has become an obsolete, even problematic and harmful, remnant of evolution.

Gender (the division of people into man/woman/nonbinary categories) is harmful [see Module 8].

For example, gender-biased laws and regulations that differentiate between men and women almost always have the effect of perpetuating oppression of women. One clear case of this is that maternity and paternity leave entitlements in almost every country entitle mothers to more leave than fathers. While this may look like it is in favour of women on the surface, it means that in a heterosexual relationship 1. a mother is more likely to “put her career on hold” than a father, resulting in more dependence on their partner, and 2. companies will subtly and subconsciously discriminate against hiring and promoting women, due to seeing them as a liability. (Caroline Criado Perez, 2019, Invisible Women)

Module 2: Attempts to abolish gender would fail

Some people really strongly identify with their gender [see Module 8]. As long as there are people with attachments to their gender, there will be gender, no matter how much a legislative or socially organised attempt at abolishing gender tries to suppress the idea of it.

It would mean nothing for the government to say “No more concept of man and woman. Just male, female, intersex, and transitioning. All laws have been amended to be completely gender neutral, and any sex specific medicine/laws/regulations have been changed to reference the relevant biological trait (not sex, the specific trait) rather than the gender.” Such a thing would not abolish gender. We would naturally start using the sex terms to group people socially [see Module 4 and 5]. We would simply reinvent gender under a new name [see Module 3]. “Abolishing” gender in this way would only undo a lot of great work and research into the sociological, psychological, philosophical distinction between sex and gender.

Humans cannot be rid of normative attachments - it would be impossible to “abolish gender” [see Module 5].

Module 3: The universality of gender

Gender, like language, seemingly exists as a social construct in every human society. Either it emerged independently multiple times across the world, or it emerged once at the dawn of humanity and has stayed a constant presence in every human civilisation since then, throughout thousands of years of new cultures as humans spread across the planet.

This means that, like the mechanics for language acquisition, it seems likely to me that the mechanics for mentally categorising people into social roles that are initially based on biological differences of sexual dimorphism exist as a preprogrammed part of the human brain structure.

Module 4: “Gender is prior to sex”

When Laplanche says “gender is prior to sex” in his Gender, Sex, and the Sexual, I believe he means that humans conceive of their own gender, the difference between their own gender and the gender of others, and the concept of gender, prior to them conceiving of their own sex, the difference between their own sex and the sex of others, and the concept of sex. Obviously, a penis or vulva comes “first” in that it is tied to the physical body, but sex the social construct is not primary in the mind of a human - that primacy belongs to gender.

To elaborate, there are multiple aspects to this.

To its parents and to wider society, a baby’s gender (what kind of boy/girl they are imagined to grow up to be) is more important than their sex.
To its parents and to wider society, a baby’s gender is conceived of before their sex is. When someone asks “is it a boy or a girl?” they’re not primarily asking “does it have a penis or vulva?” but instead attempting to grasp the as-yet-unformed personhood of the infant. [see Module 5]
A child will understand what their gender means before they understand what their sex means.
A child will understand what their gender is before they understand what their sex is.

Module 5: The importance of gender to the socialisation interface and theory of mind

Conceptualising others’ mental states is very difficult, so humans subconsciously use shortcuts and tricks to make it easier. One major trick we use is stereotyping and profiling. By mentally marking someone as a particular type of person (or part of a particular group of people), we can make assumptions based on our existing understanding of that particular type/group of people, without trying to conceive of this person’s mind from scratch.

Gender is one of the most, if not the most, fundamental profiling group we use as humans. As anyone who’s played Guess Who would know, the most efficient grouping tool is one that divides all possible options into two halves. In fact, the evolution of an innate brain-blueprint of gender may have come about because of this efficiency of grouping [see Module 3]. Because of this, gender is the first thing we notice about a person. Freud writes “When you meet a human being, the first distinction that you make is ‘male or female?’ and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty” (Freud 1933, “Lecture 33. Femininity.” New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. Standard Edition, 22).

Obviously, stereotyping based on gender (especially perceived gender based on a cursory glance) is problematic, but unfortunately, the efficiency of this profiling group on theory of mind, and its deep roots in the functioning of the human brain, mean that, I believe, it is essentially impossible to prevent our brains from doing this automatically - like the Stroop effect forces us to automatically read text in languages we have acquired.

Module 6: Gender as Identity. Gender as Label.

Gender is not a force for good [see Module 8] - yet taking up a label is helpful, especially for queer people who can use that to then find their community and contextualise themselves within a social order previously unknown to them.

As we can see from the MOGAI phenomenon, from queer communities’ fights for X gender markers on drivers licenses, from the emphasis on linguistic rather than active allyship, reinforcement and validation of identity is important to a lot of queer people, especially young ones, or ones with less self-confidence or education on queer issues. I think some of this importance placed on identity is due to the conflation of linguistic terms with reality, and believing that if something can’t be expressed linguistically, it isn’t real [see Module 7]. I think this is why MOGAI came into being, where hundreds of obscure gender terms were created by a community of tumblr teenagers, in order to, as I see it, create a linguistic term for their specific gender experience. However, gender is experienced differently by everyone, so of course it’s not useful to come up with a gender category for every possible gender experience because you’d have 8.2 billion. So, although a label can be helpful, I think queer people should deemphasise the importance of labels and instead focus on understanding themselves from first principles, rather than comparing their experience against a general or expected idea of a label.

Module 7: The Blobfish and the Mythosymbolic

See this post.

Module 8: Gender is deep and psychological, but it’s also institutional

There are two sides to gender, and you can describe the dichotomy in several ways depending on your perspective. Personal vs social. Positive vs negative. Freedom vs oppression. Basically, gender is deep and psychological, but it’s also institutional. The deep psychological aspect is identity, forming attachments to social norms, self expression. It’s internal, and if allowed to flourish, a positive thing. “Let people enjoy things.”

The institutional aspect is oppression. Masculinity inherently comes with some power to oppress, femininity with the potential to be oppressed. It’s societal, and a negative force in the world [see Module 1].

The fucked up thing is that you couldn’t have the positive without the negative. You can’t have attachments to these social norms without the (often oppressive) institutional social norms in the first place!

The silver lining to this is that we don’t have the option to choose both or neither, so at least we don’t have to waste time agonising over the choice between revolution or status quo. We can’t get away from gender as humans [see Module 5] so it ties our hands and forces us to deal with what we have. As Alexander Avila says, “We live in a society where people are really attached to these norms and they form a fundamental part of our understanding of who we are. And like, we couldn’t even be coherent individuals without them at this point” link to video. In which case, we should do our best to allow the positive personal aspects of gender to have as much freedom as possible, while minimising the damage caused by the institutional social aspects of gender (through laws, etc).