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Gender abolitionism is a movement that advocates for the eventual elimination of gender, and by extension, gender roles, gender identity, and gender expression, and even sexual orientation. Originating within the radical feminist framework, the belief has also been embraced by certain Marxist theorists who believe gender differentiation to be the basis of class. Proponents of gender abolitionism argue that gender, rather than class, constitutes the primary contradiction in society contributing to the oppression of women.
Criticism
In their book Transgender Warriors, which offers "a fresh look at sex and gender in history and the interrelationships of class, nationality, race, and sexuality", Leslie Feinberg responds to the gender abolitionist position, noting how proponents tend to believe LGBT+ are a product of oppression and they will cease to exist once society is liberated. Feinberg finds this idea unhelpful to LGBT+, as it "renders all our trans identities meaningless", and argues instead that passing is a product of oppression,[1] which was imposed by the Catholic Church as part of the rise of capitalism and settler colonialism, and served to erase diverse gender expression in order to weaken communal ties and subdue communities to the private property interests of the Church.[2][3]
Feinberg also says that gender expression cannot be caused exclusively by biology nor by culture.[4] Feinberg documents many examples of cultures around the world recognizing more than two genders unrelated to physical sex and that these genders are not a product of gendered divisions of labor,[5] and the notion of only two genders founded on two biological sexes is a historically recent one even in northwestern Europe where in the 18th century there were still third and fourth genders.[6]
The documented existence of more than two gender roles existing fluidly (for example, based on dreams) in primitive communism also challenges the notion of gender roles as a cause of oppression and class society (instead of their forcedness based on two sexes assigned at birth).[7]
Since gender identity and gender expression are unrelated to a sexual division of labor, and the gendered divisions of labor have not been based on two sexes for most of human existence until the dominance of class society, abolishing the sexual division of labor cannot result in the abolition of gender identity, nor of divisions of labor in general, but only the division of labor based on two sexes assigned at birth. Since more than two genders have been a part of human existence since the beginning, abolishing gender cannot result in liberation, nor the end of class society. Essentially, the evidence shows how a gender abolitionist position assumes false causality and is ahistorical. Feinberg's research demonstrates the importance of not forcing passing onto trans people.
See also
- Gender Abolitionism is Inherently Transphobic, essay by Prolewiki editor, Annamarx
References
- ↑ “Today, although the authentic stories of their lives have been lost to us, many people speculate about those individuals, and why they chose to pass. My life is subject to the same conjecture.
"No wonder you've passed as a man! This is such an anti-woman society," a lesbian friend told me. To her, females passing as males are simply trying to escape women's oppression—period. She believes that once true equality is achieved in society, humankind will be genderless. I don't have a crystal ball, so I can't predict human behavior in a distant future. But I know what she's thinking—if we can build a more just society, people like me will cease to exist. She assumes that I am simply a product of oppression. Gee, thanks so much.
[...]
I have lived as a man because I could not survive openly as a transgendered person. Yes, I am oppressed in this society, but I am not merely a product of oppression. That is a phrase that renders all our trans identities meaningless. Passing means having to hide your identity in fear, in order to live. Being forced to pass is a recent historical development.
It is passing that is a product of oppression.”
Leslie Feinberg (1996). Transgender Warriors. [LG] - ↑ “Several of these saints paid dearly for their renunciation of their birth sex, and all of them had to keep their change of sex secret. In cooperative societies, transgender, transsexual, and intersexual people lived openly, with honor. But in a class-divided society like medieval Western Europe, the Church's legends of the female-to-male saints introduced the concept of "passing"—being forced to hide a trans identity.”
Leslie Feinberg (1996). Transgender Warriors. [LG] - ↑ “Up until the fifteenth century, a great majority of the world's population lived in communal, matrilineal societies. This was true throughout Africa, large parts of Asia, the Pacific islands, Australia, and the Americas. If all of human history were shrunk to the scale of one year, over 360 days of historical time belong to cooperative, matrilineal societies.”
Leslie Feinberg (1996). Transgender Warriors. [LG] - ↑ “I don't take a view that an individual's gender expression is exclusively a product of either biology or culture. If gender is solely biologically determined, why do rural women, for example, tend to be more "masculine" than urban women? On the other hand, if gender expression is simply something we are taught, why has such a huge trans segment of the population not learned it? If two sexes are an immutable biological fact, why have so many societies recognized more than two? Yet while biology is not destiny, there are some biological markers on the human anatomical spectrum. So is sex a social construct, or is the rigid categorization of sexes the cultural component? Clearly there must be a complex interaction between individuals and their societies.”
Leslie Feinberg (1996). Transgender Warriors. [LG] - ↑ “What stunned me was that such ancient and diverse cultures allowed people to choose more sex/gender paths, and this diversity of human expression was honored as sacred. I had to chart the complex geography of sex and gender with a compass needle that only pointed to north or south.
So I combed through books, periodicals, and news clippings devoted to the history of Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. I searched for the earliest written records of any forms of trans expression. Much to my surprise, I found a lot of information.
[...]
But did these cooperative societies only have room for two sexes, fixed at birth? It has become common for social scientists to conclude that the earliest human division of labor between women and men in communal societies formed the basis for modern sex and gender boundaries. But the more I studied, the more I believed that the assumption that every society, in every corner of the world, in every period of human history, recognized only men and women as two immutable social categories is a modern Western conclusion. It's time to take another look at what we've long believed was an ancient division of labor between only two sexes.
Our earliest ancestors do not appear to have been biological determinists. There are societies all over the world that allowed for more than two sexes, as well as respecting the right of individuals to reassign their sex. And transsexuality, transgender, intersexuality, and bigender appear as themes in creation stories, legends, parables, and oral history.”
Leslie Feinberg (1996). Transgender Warriors. [LG] - ↑ “When I try to discuss sex and gender, people can only imagine woman or man, feminine or masculine. We've been taught that nothing else exists in nature. Yet, as I've shown, this has not been true in all cultures or in all historical periods. In fact, Western law took centuries to neatly partition the sexes into only two categories and mandate two corresponding gender expressions.
"The paradigm that there are two genders founded on two biological sexes began to predominate in western culture only in the early eighteenth century," historian Randolph Trumbach notes in his essay, "London's Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four Genders in the Making ofModern Culture."1 Trumbach explains that as late as the eighteenth century, in northwestern Europe, feminine men and masculine women—known as mollies and tommies respectively—were thought of as third and fourth genders.”
Leslie Feinberg (1996). Transgender Warriors. [LG] - ↑ “Two historic developments helped me to hear the voices of modern Native warriors who lived the sacred Two-Spirit tradition: the founding of Gav American Indians in 1975 by Randy Burns (Northern Paiute) and Barbara Cameron (Lakota Sioux), and the publication in 1988 of Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Randy Burns noted that the History Project of Gay American Indians "has documented these alternative gender roles in over 135 North American tribes."
[...]
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. Does being Two-Spirit determine your sexuality? I asked Chrystos. "In traditional life a Two-Spirit person can be heterosexual or what we would call homosexual," she replied. "You could also be a person who doesn't have sex with anyone and lives with the spirits. The gender fluidity is part of a larger concept, which I guess the most accurate English word for is 'tolerance.' It's a whole different way of conceiving how to be in the world with other people. We think about the world in terms of relationship, so each person is always in a matrix, rather than being seen only as an individual—which is a very different way of looking at things."”
Leslie Feinberg (1996). Transgender Warriors. [LG]