Essay:Gender Abolitionism is Inherently Transphobic

I've been noticing a trend with certain comrades, where such comrades (particularly those who are cisgender) are supportive of transgender people, yet their analysis of the woman question didn't change since the 1960s.

Gender studies; the separation of sex and gender; Gender Identity and Expression; these are all terms coined by liberal theorists, yet I use them all the time. Am I a postmodernist, since I abstract gender away from sex? Are they synonyms? And if they are, why do they need to be? These questions ponder my mind, as I try to reconcile that women's oppression exists while understanding that I am still assigned male at birth. Maybe I am one who oppresses women after all, since I am not "born" a woman.

These are all thoughts I have within myself, and within the current of society I am in, which oppresses trans people, both trans women and trans men. A common thought within marxists (and radical feminists too) is that not only gender and sex are synonyms, but the abolition of sex is necessary, and consequently the abolition of gender too. Gender abolitionists believe that gender oppression is the root of cause of oppression. That the sexual/gendered division of labour made the formation of exploitation and thus the formation of class society. This sentiment is shared by radical feminists as well as some marxists, despite their antagonistic nature between each other. This is not only a sentiment shared within cisgender people, but transgender people too, making this question harder to analyse.

I will consider this 'gender abolition', see how they interpret gender, sex, and postmodernist terms, to see if whether or not it is indeed transphobic.

Understanding the Roots of Gender Abolitionism

Gender Abolitionism, like many other ideologies, has not came from nowhere. To understand Gender Abolitionism, it's more important to understand its roots so that we can understand what it advocates for. Some people in this section may not describe themselves as Gender Abolitionists. However it's important to see how it comes to fruition.

Let's start with Friedrich Engels, a Marxist which in circa 1884 wrote the "Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State". This book was revolutionary as it shows the roots of private property, family, state, and oppression as a whole. However what this book writes is not perfect, in fact, it is most definitely outdated today. I bring this book up, precisely it is because most Marxists don't change their views on Feminism, and cling to it dogmatically.

Engels, being a man of his time, clearly views gender and sex as being synonymous with one another. There is no doubt about this. In his book, he denotes that there had always been a natural division of labour between a man and a woman.

To procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he produced and owned the means of doing so.

This meant that this lead to an overly mechanistic overview of how oppression had lead. Engels was the very first person to denote that the sexual division of labour was the first form of oppression. In other words, 'biological sex' is the cause of women's oppression. Reading on, it shows that it is the case:

All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man; the woman shared in its enjoyment, but had no part in its ownership... The division of labor within the family had regulated the division of property between the man and the woman. That division of labor had remained the same; and yet it now turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house – that her activity was confined to domestic labor – this same cause now ensured the man's supremacy in the house: the domestic labor of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra.

So at once, Engels believes that this division of labour in the first place was oppression, even if it did not say so. Interesting to note that in an earlier section, Engels noted that if women went into the workplace, the oppression in a proletarian household would be gone,

And now that large-scale industry has taken the wife out of the home onto the labor market and into the factory, and made her often the bread-winner of the family, no basis for any kind of male supremacy is left in the proletarian household – except, perhaps, for something of the brutality towards women that has spread since the introduction of monogamy.

This kind of thinking is dangerous, especially if taken dogmatically. This implies that women's oppression disappears if the woman goes to work. We have seen women working, however this form of work means they are exploited in the sense of domestic labour, and performing labour at their workplace.

So now we think: Why is it bad that Engels states the cause of women's oppression is biological sex? Well, Engels and Marx still remain foundational that the cause of women's oppression is class, not the sexual division of labour. Despite this, there are marxists and radical feminists who argue that biological sex is the primary contradiction of women's oppression.

Yet this thought continue to prevail. In 1970, Kate Millet, a Radical Feminist who wrote a book titled 'Sexual Politics', could be considered one of the first gender abolitionists. An Indian Maoist Anuradha Ghandy who wrote on the situation stated:

Here [Kate Millet] made the claim that the personal was political, which became a popular slogan of the feminist movement. By the personal is political what she meant was that the discontent individual women feel in their lives is not due to individual failings but due to the social system, which has kept women in subordination and oppresses her in so many ways. Her personal feelings are therefore political.

In fact she reversed the historical materialist understanding by asserting that the male female relationship is a framework for all power relationships in society. According to her, this ”social caste” (dominant men and subordinated women) supersedes all other forms of inequality, whether racial, political or economic. This is the primary human situation. These other systems of oppression will continue because they get both logical and emotional legitimacy from oppression in this primary situation. Patriarchy according to her was male control over the private and public world. According to her to eliminate patriarchy men and women must eliminate gender, i.e. sexual status, role and temperament, as they have been constructed under patriarchy.

She also talked about Shulamith Firestone who made the book known as the "Dialectics of Sex".

Firestone focused on reproduction instead of production as the moving force of history. Further, instead of identifying social causes for women’s condition she stressed biological reasons for her condition and made it the moving force in history. She felt that the biological fact that women bear children is the material basis for women’s submission in society and it needs a biological and social revolution to effect human liberation. She too was of the opinion that the sex/gender difference needs to be eliminated and human beings must be androgynous. But she went further than Kate Millett in the solution she advocated to end women’s oppression. She was of the opinion that unless women give up their reproductive role and no longer bear children and the basis of the existing family is changed it is not possible to completely liberate women.

It's interesting how someone like Firestone believes that women must stop bearing children in order to liberate women. We can see how these Radical Feminists can and do plague movements. Even if they don't affect Marxists, the fact Marxists can link with Radical Feminism at all in regards to the cause being biological sex is concerning.

Even nowadays, trotskyist groups like the International Marxist Tendency (IMT, Nowadays rebranded as Revolutionary Communist International) state a question such as: "[W]hat is the point of denying the existence of the male and female sex, with all their anatomic and biological differences?", alongside with their trotskyite nonsense which includes thing such as blaming anti-LGBT notions on "Stalinism".

The Makings of Gender Abolitionism

Finally, we can understand the roots of Gender Abolitionism. The idea has its roots out of biology. Indeed Marxists may argue that women's oppression comes from class, but they may also argue about the biological standpoints (or the sexual dimorphism) in regards to the division of genders, in the same way as Radical Feminists do.

In other words, in the eyes of Gender Abolitionists: Sex and Gender are synonymous; the primary social contradiction of women's oppression is biological sex, not class; therefore to truly liberate women, abolition of gender is a necessary goal. There is more to this. What happens when we abolish gender? Does this mean that everyone must be androgynous? Perhaps lacking any gender? Does this mean that sexual differences can be eliminated by utilising some form of transhumanist philosophy?

It is a bizzare thing to see, where people argue about the sexual division of labour. To see more of this nonsensical worldview, we should consider the concepts which are believed to be postmodernist.

Are sex and gender synonymous?

To consider this question would mean that a man and woman are themselves defined by what standard. What does it mean to be a man and a woman?

We have these conceptions yet we don't know what they are. We could surely define it from the standpoint of reproduction. This would mean that men are those with a penis, and women are those with a vagina. That should be it, right? However defining men and women from the standpoint of reproduction would exclude intersex people. Intersex people are often assigned a particular gender in the modern day, and intersex people don't necessarily have either genitalia (unless if they were mutilated by means of surgery). So if their reproduction capability should take precedent, we can't actually define a man and a woman. What about combining characteristics, such as hormones, sex chromosomes and genitalia? That would be better but it would mean that transgender people wouldn't fit either. Some cis people wouldn't fit either.

We can't define sex in the manner which we do it nowadays. Most marxists consider sex, only in the fact they consider the majority, in other words by excluding trans and intersex people. Leslie Feinberg, a person who made the book "Transgender Warriors", had a conversation with an indigenous person of that societies had more than 2 genders:

Chrystos, a brilliant Two-Spirit poet and writer from the Menominee nation, offered me this understanding:"Life among First Nation people,before first contact, is hard to reconstruct. There's been so much abuse of traditional life by the Christian Church. But certain things have filtered down to us. Most of the nations that I know of traditionally had more than two genders. It varies from tribe to tribe. The concept of Two-Spiritedness is a rather rough translation into English of that idea. I think the English language is rigid, and the thought patterns that form it are rigid, so that gender also becomes rigid.

"The whole concept of gender is more fluid in traditional life. Those paths are not necessarily aligned with your sex, although they may be. People might choose their gender according to their dreams, for example. So even the idea that your gender is something you dream about is not even a concept in Western culture—which posits you are born a certain biological sex and therefore there's a role you must step into and follow pretty rigidly for the rest of your life. That's how we got the concept of queer. Anyone who doesn't follow their assigned gender role is queer; all kinds of people are lumped together under that word."

It's clear that in pre-class societies, there was a conception of more than 2 genders. If people in pre-class societies could abstract gender from sex, we can as well. Therefore we can dismiss the concept that sex and gender are synonyms, refuting one point of the Radical Feminist talking points.

Does there exist a Gender Identity?

Marxists may say 'Gender Identity' is inherently idealist. In fact the IMT thinks so, which I'll elaborate further on the quote given earlier:

[W]hat is the point of denying the existence of the male and female sex, with all their anatomic and biological differences? This has a certain importance if we move, for example, from the world of academic hypotheses to medical therapies, or to pregnancy and breastfeeding. Furthermore, even if I state that my consciousness (and hence the way I perceive my own gender identity) is determined by the social conditions in which I live, does that make it any less real? No, it reflects my real conditions of existence, both natural and social, and will evolve with the evolution of society.