greenjudy:

allsortsoflicorice:

greenjudy:

anaisnein:

funereal-disease:

funereal-disease:

starting to feel more and more like my gender is “autism”

to expound on this (it’s okay to reblog the expanded version):

I like living in a female body. I like my sexed characteristics. I like presenting femininely. I like being referred to as “she”. I have always been uncomplicatedly cis by pretty much every measure, and I don’t think that has changed. What’s changed, I think, is what all those things *mean* to the world around me.

“It doesn’t feel good when people say ‘everyone’ and they don’t mean you.” I heard that the other day, and I haven’t been able to let it go. It crystallizes what I’ve been feeling over the past year: that autistic women, or at least high-systemizing-low-empathizing women, are being increasingly defined out of womanhood itself. I’m seeing a return to frankly disturbing essentialism among women of my generation. It’s of a piece with that “feminist astrology” post I wrote a while back, but it’s more than that. It’s a creeping woo-ishness in the gender discourse that’s beginning to make me nauseous.

It seems, to my admittedly untrained eye, that despite constant pretenses at breaking down the gender binary, millennial and Gen Z women are not just enforcing it – they’re widening the gulf. The general mood is that there are things women know that men just can’t understand or even truly empathize with. On the more overtly woo-ish end of things, there’s astrology and “feminine energy” and literal goddess worship. But the essentialized dichotomy shows up in more mainstream media, too. It underlies every thinkpiece on “how women feel” about X, Y, or Z. It’s there when women of my cohort make fun of STEMlords and “well actually"s and hyperlogical white dudes and expect me to laugh along with it. It’s not even subtle in posts like “women’s atheism is fundamentally different from men’s” and “women don’t say what they mean and that’s okay”. It’s present in every piece of emotional manipulation disguised as activism that women, being The Nurturing Ones, are supposed to fall for.

Obviously the stereotype itself is nothing new – what’s new is the enthusiasm with which my generation has seemingly decided to lean into it. I fear that by the time we’re fully in control of the media and the public narrative, women like me might be defined out of womanhood altogether. And I fear that responses to this concern will run along the lines of “it’s okay, just admit you’re non-binary”. I’m *not* non-binary! You fucks just moved the goalposts! Narrowing what counts as “woman” isn’t okay just because claiming non-binary genders is becoming more of an option. It’s still defining people out against their will.

tl;dr my gender is “too femme to count as male but too high-systemizing for The Sisterhood”

as someone much less comfortable in and with femininity for whom the late-encountered concept of ‘nonbinary’ does pack a lot of liberatory resonance, I feel very much as you do about the new gender essentialism, fwiw. (at least, “new,” there’s been a strain of this in feminism all along, I ran into plenty of Carol Gilligan and Starhawk back in the 90s. but it does seem ascendant at the moment and in a very sour iteration.)

I feel like

gender roles and norms hurt both women and men, it’s bad for those who fail at it and, in some respects, bad for those who succeed. but it’s ubiquitous, we’re all embedded in it. so most people who are having a bad time with it in one way or another don’t perceive any escape strategy. their practical choices are one or more of the following:

1. some people double down on the norms and try harder (parts of the manosphere, various flavors of essentialist feminists, the “makeup is empowering” crowd, trads). this is ultimately an authoritarian strategy, right or left

2. some people aggressively redefine or dial down the authority of their assignment in the direction of improved livability-for-them (people who are various degrees of gnc, egalitarian feminists, men could really use better defined specific strategies in this space, but basically the whole post sexual revolution wave of norm relaxation fits here). this is a liberal humanist strategy, and I don’t use those words as pejoratives. I temperamentally live here. but they connote an inadequacy that’s probably appropriate. and it’s notable that strategies 1 and 2 are easily disguised as one another for better aesthetic palatability, borrowing each other’s tropes, etc. cough neoliberalism cough.

3. some people use a different non-assigned gender as a kind of lifeline with which which to climb out of the part of the gender dystopia to which they were assigned into a different and less-toxic-for-them part (a subset of nonbinary and binary trans people? right now I want to say: those for whom social dysphoria is a primary or co-primary driver. but this is a very fuzzy-edged, badly defined subset. there are other and often more fundamental drivers in play. half-baked thought warning, etc). this is an anarchic strategy, conscious of its own incoherency and intentionally trying to harness its own contradictions to smash the category structure

and the thing, the fucking problem, is in principle, it should be fairly comfortably adjacent to the second one (you know, the radical vs reformist left infighting thing, where coalition-for-the-time-being is possible and imnsfho highly desirable but takes good faith and work). but to the degree that the second one has already developed a comfort zone and, like, free trade agreements, with the first one – for pragmatic, survival-in-the-real-world reasons – it will tend to shy away from the third one.

(and when the third one tries to play well with the first one it’s the Worst. do you want transition gatekeeping? because this is how you get transition gatekeeping.)

I, a rootless cosmopolitan to my bones, am profoundly wary of strategy 1, and on a personal level see strategy 3 as perhaps theoretically ideal but strategy 2 as pragmatically most feasible and effective. I loathe the ascendancy of strategy 1 because a. it’s hateful to me and 2. what I’d like here is to be able to move incrementally through strategy 2 to strategy 3, and strategy 1 is fucking up the potential for 2/3 solidarity and trying to make the best hope in the whole landscape, the aspirational 3, into an exacerbation of the dystopia.

tl;dr: people are embedded in gender with no recourse and so respond to its toxicities by trying to use various aspects of gender itself to survive and thrive. their interests aren’t that different, but their survival strategies are in conflict. I don’t have answers. this is just the train of thought I’ve been having.

Valuable reading.

For me, essentialism and identity constitute the big nightmare; gender assignment is an important manifestation, an on-the-nose expression of a problem with reified category-thinking. Gender and its miseries teaches us a lot about the problems with categories because it forces us to live them intimately.

I’ll also go out on a limb and say that the proliferation of identities we see today hasn’t given us much respite from the demands of identity per se. 

Even farther out on that limb: Contemporary gender essentialism appears to have been a deliberate survival strategy to prevent the annihilation of difference in fundamentalist regimes, both here and elsewhere. But it is a profoundly double-edged sword, as is all essentialism. 

Somewhere in here is a long meditation on Plato’s Timaeus, specifically the problem of the khôra–that which appears to make our categories possible. 

We could say this another way: phenomenal reality–the world that appears to exist, made up of all the things that populate our categories–is what Longchenpa called a city of Gandharvas: a phantom city, a city in the sky. 

I could listen to you talk about this stuff all day, Judy. I teach philosophy but I really know very little about anything other than western philosophy. I was once able to secure a buddhist professor to come in and talk to my class about Buddhist concepts of identity. That was a good day. 

I would love to see you expand on this further: “Contemporary gender essentialism appears to have been a deliberate survival strategy to prevent the annihilation of difference in fundamentalist regimes, both here and elsewhere.” Because I don’t fully understand it. 

As for me, I probably fail at performing my gender, but I see that as being true to myself. It is a shame to see people stifling parts of their true self in an attempt to more perfectly perform their gender. Failing at performing femininity doesn’t make one any less of a woman, imho.  

I was alluding to the ways we can see gender (and sexualities) protected with language like “I was born this way” and “Stop acting like this is a choice for me; it’s fundamental to who I am.” This is a cousin, of sorts, to “I am not a pervert, not unnatural, not wrong. My way of being is natural and (therefore) correct.”

I am not trying to hurt or undermine people who express themselves this way. I deeply respect and appreciate the presentation of myriad genders, identities, and orientations; “let a thousand genders bloom” is a wonderful kind of praxis in many respects. Philosophy aside, I will always try to treat people in ways that let them feel comfortable, human, and valued, and that includes using the names and labels they prefer.  

But I also think it pays to be cautious about the basis on which these labels are presented.

The idea that gender is a form of performance, and the related idea that sexual behavior is conditioned culturally, are uncomfortable propositions in certain ways, and it seems like fundamentalists of many stripes like to meet these ideas with “stop acting (like a man, like a woman, like a phantom) and get real. Everyone knows what a girl, a man, a person, really is.”

I’m pretty sure that real is the real problem here. We haven’t gotten as far as we could with a careful examination of how real is wielded in discourse to make categories stick.

Because there is so little support for this kind of questioning, many people seem to end up responding to the fundie stuff with: “Don’t erase me! I am real!! My orientation, my gender, are real things!” 

In the face of someone holding a fucking pitchfork and a torch, it is an understandable rhetorical move, but it comes with a price. 

One of the consequences I have both seen and experienced is a disquieting silencing of the ways in which I, we, you (?) fail to fit even the expanded catalogue of categories. 

AKA, “Oh Christ, I don’t super like this label, but I’ve got to support the survival of everyone forced to inhabit marked categories, I have to protect those who can’t perform the norm, who are trying to make real change in our culture.” The shoe pinches, but we feel an obligation to wear it, out of solidarity or out of fear of the (dreadful) alternatives. 

I suspect that identities continue to proliferate in response to this failure of fit. We have very little opportunity (at least in most Western cultures) to examine what I think is the driver–the urgent need to be able to say, without a doubt, “that’s me. That’s who I am.”