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Our essays reflect only their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.← Back to all essays | Author's essays Sansserifseraphim
by Sansserifseraphim
Published: 2025-11-17 (last update: 2025-11-21)
10-20 minutes
The Real and the Ideal
In discussions about gender, oftentimes people will describe gender as unknowable or unreal, implying that it is completely outside science or materialism. Some go even further, arguing that gender identity is an innate soul or spirit fully separate from the body (and sometimes even society). This division between an unknowable reality and perceived, material reality in the history of philosophy is called the ideal and the real (or material). Materialists argue that reality is made up of matter that exists separate from our perceptions; vulgar materialism rejects the existence of the ideal. Idealists argue that reality is made up of our perceptions and/or ideas external to our perception which shape reality (e.g. Plato’s ‘realm of ideas’). Materialism is the philosophy of Marxism, more precisely, dialectical materialism; Marxists reject both idealism, and vulgar materialism. Dialectics is the method by which Marxists understand (among other things) the relationship between the material and ideal. Dialectical materialism shows that the ideal is a result of real activity, for example the value of money. The value of money exists not as a physical property of paper, or of the numbers in a bank account, but in an ideal form. This is not an unknowable or inaccessible form though, it is given real meaning through the real activity of the economy. In much the same way, gender identity, that seemingly unknowable soul, is given real meaning through social activity.
Sex and Gender
In order to understand gender identity we first have to understand sex and gender. Sex and Gender are both results of the division of labor based on sexual differences (multiple systems of gender and sexual classification existed throughout ancient societies). This division in the economy formed the male monopoly of tools and weapons, and the knowledge to produce and use them; of the most productive sphere of the economy. This ‘male monopoly’ is the economic bedrock of patriarchy and the primary cause of the development out of primary communism and into the first class society built on slavery and the patriarchal family. In early societies the knowledge and treatment of intersex and gender diverse people varied across cultures, transgender identities often took on religious and cultural significance. With the rise of feudalism in Europe came the invention of the Western sex/gender binary. “That pink-blue dogma assumes that biology steers our social destiny. We have been taught that being born female or male will determine how we will dress and walk, whether we will prefer our hair shortly cropped or long and flowing, whether we will be emotionally nurturing or repressed.” (Feinberg ) The strengthening of Catholicism came with gender roles that dominated and erased older European culture and religion and at the same time sex was violently strengthened through the practice of surgeries on intersex infants to conform them to the sex binary. This is the social basis from which Leslie Feinberg makes their discovery “So why do I sometimes describe myself as a masculine female? Isn't each of those concepts very limiting? Yes. But placing the two words together is incendiary, exploding the belief that gender expression is linked to birth sex like horse and carriage. It is the social contradiction missing from Dick-and-Jane textbook education.” Here the foundation of Transgender Marxism is put into words, the social contradiction between sex and gender.
Gender Identity and Expression
We can take our understanding of sex and gender further with the inclusion of gender identity and expression. Feinberg defined gender expression as self expression, they used poetry as an allegory for gender, emphasizing conscious creative activity.
“To me, branding individual self-expression as simply feminine or masculine is like asking poets: Do you write in English or Spanish? The question leaves out the possibilities that the poetry is woven in Cantonese or Ladino, Swahili or Arabic. The question deals only with the system of language that the poet has been taught. It ignores the words each writer hauls up, hand over hand, from a common well. The music words make when finding themselves next to each other for the first time. The silences echoing in the space between ideas. The powerful winds of passion and belief that move the poet to write. That is why I do not hold the view that gender is simply a social construct — one of two languages that we learn by rote from early age. To me, gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught. When I walk through the anthology of the world, I see individuals express their gender in exquisitely complex and ever-changing ways, despite the laws of pentameter.”
Here the relationship between expression and identity is written, but in allegorical form, as poetry. Both gender expression and poetry are creative personal expressions that rely on a social base (gender or language) “haul[ed] up, hand over hand, from a common well.” The strength of Feinberg’s description of gender is in its focus on creative activity and individuality, and its social character. But, we can remove the allegorical ‘shell’ of the description and give it definite form. Soviet Marxist-Leninist Philosopher Evald Ilyenkov described thought as “the ideal component of the real activity of social people transforming both external nature and themselves by their labour.” This form of the relationship between mental and material activity has its roots in the most foundational Marxist analysis (“It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness” [Marx]). Gender identity and expression have the same kind of relationship. I define gender as an aspect of consciousness, one that develops dialectically, it emerges from ignorance. “In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.” (Lenin) Gender identity is a genuine source of knowledge, developed through social practice, which people use to guide their practice in social, medical, aesthetic, and other activities. Gender identity is not alienated from the body or determined by the body, but instead guides conceptions of and practices surrounding the body some of which, such as HRT or exercising, can change the body itself. This directly negates the reactionary viewpoint that the body determines identity. I stress that gender identity results from real practice and contains genuine knowledge, giving guidance in everyday social decisions, because most liberal conceptions of gender focus on things like rules, norms, stereotypes, things that exist outside of us. They view gender identity as merely the individual’s collection of a number of feminine or masculine characteristics, development (difference) in terms of increase and decrease. In Mao’s words “metaphysics.”
Gender and Gender identity
The term gender originally meant type or class and came to be used in the modern sense around the mid 20th century when western sexologists (such as John Money) created a term to describe how an intersex child should be raised in the cases of ‘indeterminate’ birth sex where they needed to differentiate between the child’s biology and their social group. Doctors decided whether to raise the child as if they were male or female and used the term gender to describe the social aspect that would be (in their view) determined by sex. This view of gender, as the social aspect of sex, is the popular view among most people; sex is biological, gender is social. Marxists analysis demystifies this common sense understanding of gender. We understand sex and gender to be a dialectic, a unity of opposites. Sex originated in the system by which labor was divided among early people, based on their bodies. Gender is the social result of such a system. Culture, rules, and customs dictate not only the categories of sexes and their social roles but also the changing from one role to another and the invention of roles that do not follow from the body but exist independently of it. The assigning of social roles by sex always leads to a social contradiction even when transition between social identities and the invention of new ones is a possibility. The earlier more expansive sex/gender systems were reduced in Europe through the rise of feudal power and in much of the rest of the world through European colonialism. The result of this is the emergence of the modern western sex/gender binary alongside capitalism and the intensified contradiction between a ruling class who benefits from the sex/gender binary and those that are oppressed by it. Gender identity is the ideal form of conscious, individual, gender expression. That is, real engagement with the gender system whether in the form of reproduction or negation. Gender expression (activity) augments the formal bounds of any society’s given sex/gender system and causes its development, and gender identity exists in contradiction with the sex/gender system it exists under. It can exist inside that system or outside it, as an “outlaw,” in Feinberg’s words
“Trans people are still literally social outlaws. And that's why I am willing at times, publicly, to reduce the totality of my self-expression to descriptions like masculine female, butch, bulldagger, drag king, cross-dresser. These terms describe outlaw status. And I hold my head up proudly in that police lineup. The word outlaw is not hyperbolic. I have been locked up in jail by cops because I was wearing a suit and tie. Was my clothing really a crime? Is it a ‘man's’ suit if I am wearing it? At what point — from field to rack — is fiber assigned a sex? The reality of why I was arrested was as cold as the cell's cement floor: I am considered a masculine female. That's a gender violation… even where the laws are not written down, police, judges, and prison guards are empowered to carry out merciless punishment for sex and gender ‘difference.’”
The Problem of Applying Knowledge to Life
Returning to Ilyenkov much of his work (or at least what is available on the Marxist Internet Archive) is about an issue in the Soviet-founded science of teaching, pedagogy, ‘The Problem of Applying Knowledge to Life.’ To explain it briefly, the problem is that when one teaches someone about an object they gain not the knowledge of the object itself but knowledge of the rules, systems, etc. describing the object. Therefore knowledge of the object and the object itself are presented to us as two separate things. The problem then seems to become how to apply knowledge of the object to the object itself correctly. Ilyenkov, however, explains why this is a false solution.
“And the question arises: can this special skill be learned and taught? If this special skill can be taught, this means that a special kind of activity exists (or should exist)—the activity of correlating knowledge with its object (of bringing them into mutual relation). This means that special ‘rules’ should exist, in accordance with which this activity is performed. And so people start to seek out and formulate rules for correlating knowledge with its object—or, more precisely, for correlating general theoretical formulas with direct object-related situations. They start to classify typical mistakes made in the course of this activity for the purpose of warning against these typical mistakes. They do not notice that the problem they are trying to solve is insoluble in principle, in its very essence, and that the only solution to it may be to make the problem itself impossible, so that it does not and cannot arise. In other words, the only way to solve this problem is to eliminate the conditions that give rise to it. The point is that the ‘knowledge’ that still has to be specially correlated with its object is by no means knowledge as such, but only an illusion, only a surrogate for knowledge.”
If this is the case how do we gain real knowledge? Through practice, Ilyenkov puts it in complex terms.
“In one case the student finds before him, as it were, two objects that he is forced somehow to relate to one another while remaining separate from both. In the other case he finds before him only one single object, because from the very start he merges with the other object (with knowledge). This occurs because he emerges as the subject of action with the object, as personified knowledge, as knowledge that has direct mutual relation with things, as knowledge of things. And not knowledge of the phrases that other people have used in reference to these things.”
Mao, in simpler terms.
“Where do correct ideas come from? Do they drop from the skies? No. Are they innate in the mind? No. They come from social practice, and from it alone; they come from three kinds of social practice, the struggle for production, the class struggle and scientific experiment.”
The point is the same though. Real activity results in real knowledge.
How We Learn Gender
What is the relevance of Soviet pedagogy to gender? Well, Ilyenkov’s work reveals to us another set of contradictions. That is, between the popular form of the sex/gender system (“knowledge of the phrases that other people have used in reference to these things.”) and its real form discovered in practice, and the contradiction between the assigned sex/gender identities and gender identity in its real form developed through gender expression. Ilyenkov shows us that “Dick-and-Jane textbook education” is neither the cause of a correct understanding of the sex/gender system nor the cause of the system itself. Instead it (along with media, family, religion, etc.) is the cause of a great deal of confusion and the development of reactionary ideology (how often is the phrase ‘basic biology’ used against trans people?). In the absence of real revolutionary education, people fail to understand the sex/gender system and look for other answers in liberal and reactionary politics (e.g. liberal feminism, the liberal queer movement, anti-trans fascism, patriarchal ideology). The education we receive in school and the media has become obsolete even for cis, heterosexual people because social contradictions are intensifying and the western sex/gender binary system is falling apart the progressive elements of society continually clash with reaction over reformation or conservation of the system. Recent years have seen increased public scrutiny and debate over the questions raised by the transgender, feminist, and queer struggles, the answer to them is in revolution; in a new socialist society.
Work Cite
On the Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State – Engels
Lavender and Red – Feinberg
Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink and Blue – Feinberg
Transgender Liberation: A Marxist View – Feinberg
The Concept of the Ideal – Ilyenkov
A Contribution on the Question of the Concept of “Activity” and Its Significance for Pedagogy -
Ilyenkov
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism – Lenin
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy – Marx
On Contradiction - Mao
Where do Correct Ideas Come From? - Mao
Hands, Tools, Weapons – Tabet