I just left my husband alone with our two children for sixteen days. I was not worried about anything regarding the house, their food, or their wellbeing. I put all the appointments in the family calendar and my husband checked it and kept them. I literally did not worry about them. I missed them, and I was sad that they missed me, but I didn’t worry about them AT ALL. I need to impress upon you all that I missed their company, but was not worried for their welfare.
I also did no meal prep. I don’t even think I went shopping right before I left.
This is not about apples and oranges. This isn’t even about my husband. This is about the fact that this is apparently WEIRD.
Another mum at my daughter’s school is leaving for ten days. She’s taking her youngest (who is a very small baby) and leaving her husband with their two girls. She has been cooking for days preparing freezer meals. She’s panicking and deputizing her six year old to remind him how to make school lunches. AND I AM APPALLED.
A) He is definitely not helpless. (He’s a doctor or something.) What gendered bullshit. B) THAT LITTLE GIRL IS NOT OLD ENOUGH TO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR HER AND HER SISTER’S WELLBEING. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK. C) Why is she married to this person and creating children with him if he’s this big of an idiot?
While she was laughingly recounting this, the other mums were nodding and smiling sympathetically, like oh yes, I too have my caveman at home!! Such managing required! I was the only one who was like “Dude, he’ll be fine. Literally. He will be fine.” I said it a lot. She was not convinced. She kept bringing up her older daughter. She’ll be like a little mum!
NO.
NO NO NO NO.
NO.
Straight women, don’t do this shit. It’s gross. Don’t infantilize your husbands and then expect your daughters to pick up the slack. So fucking gross. So. So. GROSS.
The fact that so many adults think a six year old girl is more capable of learning and performing basic domestic tasks than a grown-ass man says it all, really.
This stuff is so toxic and awful. I told a car full of women one time that I refused to be in another relationship until I met a man who was capable of making his own doctors’ appointments and washing the dishes. They told me I was going to die alone.
Fuck this shit. Don’t enable men’s incompetence and label it cute.
Yeah guys, This is ridiculous. Like, if they had a mental disorder in which I knew they would have a hard time with this stuff. sure, I may try to help prep in advance. Hell, I have to do that stuff for myself because I can’t function properly. But Being in the mindset that someone can’t do something because of their gender…? It’s just as bad as saying a woman can’t work for UPS because they’re worse at lifting than men… like what??? The parent should also be in charge of the child, not the other way around. that’s not how it works. Now if the child WANTS to help the parent, that’s cool. Kids like helping their parents do stuff. But the dad CAN take care of things. like literally… idk how people come up with this stuff.
Tag: gender
I’m????
Oh my God this actually explains so much.
So there’s a known thing in the study of human psychology/sociology/what-have-you where men are known to, on average, rely entirely on their female romantic partner for emotional support. Bonding with other men is done at a more superficial level involving fun group activities and conversations about general subjects but rarely involves actually leaning on other men or being really honest about emotional problems. Men use alcohol to be able to lower their inhibitions enough to expose themselves emotionally to other men, but if you can’t get emotional support unless you’re drunk, you have a problem.
So men need to have a woman in their lives to have anyone they can share their emotional needs and vulnerabilities with. However, since women are not socialized to fear sharing these things, women’s friendships with other women are heavily based on emotional support. If you can’t lean on her when you’re weak, she’s not your friend. To women, what friendship is is someone who listens to all your problems and keeps you company.
So this disconnect men are suffering from is that they think that only a person who is having sex with you will share their emotions and expect support. That’s what a romantic partner does. But women think that’s what a friend does. So women do it for their romantic partners and their friends and expect a male friend to do it for them the same as a female friend would. This fools the male friend into thinking there must be something romantic there when there is not.
This here is an example of patriarchy hurting everyone. Women have a much healthier approach to emotional support – they don’t die when widowed at nearly the rate that widowers die and they don’t suffer emotionally from divorce nearly as much even though they suffer much more financially, and this is because women don’t put all their emotional needs on one person. Women have a support network of other women. But men are trained to never share their emotions except with their wife or girlfriend, because that isn’t manly. So when she dies or leaves them, they have no one to turn to to help with the grief, causing higher rates of death, depression, alcoholism and general awfulness upon losing a romantic partner.
So men suffer terribly from being trained in this way. But women suffer in that they can’t reach out to male friends for basic friendship. I am not sure any man can comprehend how heartbreaking it is to realize that a guy you thought was your friend was really just trying to get into your pants. Friendship is real. It’s emotional, it’s important to us. We lean on our friends. Knowing that your friend was secretly seething with resentment when you were opening up to him and sharing your problems because he felt like he shouldn’t have to do that kind of emotional work for anyone not having sex with him, and he felt used by you for that reason, is horrible. And the fact that men can’t share emotional needs with other men means that lots of men who can’t get a girlfriend end up turning into horrible misogynistic people who think the world owes them the love of a woman, like it’s a commodity… because no one will die without sex. Masturbation exists. But people will die or suffer deep emotional trauma from having no one they can lean on emotionally. And men who are suffering deep emotional trauma, and have been trained to channel their personal trauma into rage because they can’t share it, become mass shooters, or rapists, or simply horrible misogynists.
The only way to fix this is to teach boys it’s okay to love your friends. It’s okay to share your needs and your problems with your friends. It’s okay to lean on your friends, to hug your friends, to be weak with your friends. Only if this is okay for boys to do with their male friends can this problem be resolved… so men, this one’s on you. Women can’t fix this for you; you don’t listen to us about matters of what it means to be a man. Fix your own shit and teach your brothers and sons and friends that this is okay, or everyone suffers.
The next time a guy says, “What? You don’t want to be my friend?” I’ll text him this and then ask if he really wants to be friends or just have another potential girlfriend.
y’all I am living for these analyses where the new way to fight the patriarchy is to teach men to love each other and themselves
Im a communication student and can confirm the above is absolutely 100% accurate and it’s called agentic vs communal friendship theorized by Steven McCornack
Why Gender History is Important (Asshole)
historicity-was-already-taken:
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
READ THIS.
The idea that being born with a penis/testicles means that you’re biologically programmed to be an aggressive, domineering, violent, selfish asshole and there’s simply no way to avoid it is patriarchal propaganda meant to excuse men’s violence (especially against women), and to convince women to blame themselves when men are violent against them, and any feminist who tries to repackage this view in their analysis of “biological sex” is what 11/10 experts call a sucker
Not to mention that numerous anthropological accounts have already disproven any kind of ‘natural’ relationship between ‘biological sex’ and cultural behavior. Thinking that ‘biological sex’ has a universal set of behaviors cross-culturally is not only ethnocentric but complicit in reproducing colonialist and imperialist discourses that work to impose a EuroAmericanist worldview, by force, onto others.
ah, the two genders, Girl and Orb
yet another unrealistic body standard for men
I feel like socialization is still relevant in the context of childhood e.g. how little boys are allowed to have one and little girls are not. I think that still has an impact (although I agree it’s not even close to the sole determiner) on how you treat others, especially other women, later in life. And I feel like if you grew up being treated as part of the class that exists solely to oppress women, you need to think about how it impacts your relation to other women.
Loving this implication that I had a happy and carefree childhood lol. Sorry if this response is a bit long.
I am really at this point p tired of arguments around socialization. As I said before, there are a lot of theoretical issues with trying to talk abt this in an individualized way (not all women or men experience the same childhood and socialization, there are numerous other factors at play, general trends are not determinative of individual behavior or beliefs or even upbringings). After all, if trans women have broken probably the number one rule of male socialization (‘be/become a man’), I find it weird to act like they would exhibit all other forms of it.
But regardless of the actual completely untestable and faith based idea (unless they come up w a good measure of ‘male socialization units’) I just think there’s something misguided abt this sort of approach to determining people’s identities. It’s a strange double standard that you are somehow implicitly alright with women who treat other women (including their daughters) in incredibly misogynistic ways, or at the very least they shouldn’t have to be constantly ready to have their experience of misogyny denied for it.
Like, as opposed to using *former* social situations and identities as some sort of rough (and frequently incorrect) social justice heuristic for what you think is going on, wouldn’t it be more efficient to just like… pay attention to when women are mistreating other women? And to think that the directionality here is necessarily that trans women are going to more frequently be misogynistic towards cis women than the other direction is…. not really my experience. At the end of the day, this sort of approach is always imo framing trans women as an inherent threat to the safety of cis women (and some men!), and trying to act from there, which I dont think is going to actually be a helpful way of understanding what place trans women have in women’s spaces.
Because, let’s look at this from a less abstract, perhaps more pastoral perspective when thinking abt groups of people. You are basically saying that trans women have some sort of metaphysical taint of gendered socialization from our childhoods (which are, in this imaginary, always less traumatic or patriarchically harmed than literally every single cis woman). How long are we supposed to have that stain, that original sin? Indefinitely? Or is there some sort of “Actual Woman, Cis Feminist Approved” licensure process that we should have to go through? This way of treating cis women as the arbiters of our experience is… unsatisfactory to me.
And the danger here is that what gets set up in this scenario is basically an underclass of women who have a readily available way to be shut down, isolated, what have you. If the idea is that I should be tolerated within women’s spaces, provided that no one feels like I am exhibiting the sinful Male Socialization, pragmatically that basically comes down to the situation where I am welcome, as long as I don’t disagree with or anger any given cis woman, esp. one with a lot of social power within a group. The idea that I hold some sort of inner hatred or oppressive impulse towards women can be used at any time to dispose of this underclass of women with completely sanitized feminist conscience. I hope you can see how easily this sort of thing could be abused, how it *has* been abused, many times by people who have abused us.
After all, telling women that they are “acting like a man” has always been a method of social control over women when we have gotten too loud, too angry, too demanding or assertive. But with a “system” (because after all, there’s not really a system) you come to a situation where a specifically marginalized and victimized group of women are expected to live up to all of the contradictory demands placed on women as a whole or risk losing their social support. I think it’s just a bad idea to claim a feminist praxis of making sure there’s an underclass of women who are *really* examined to make sure they are submissive, quiet, deferential, agreeable – all because of a ‘participation’ in systems that we were coerced into (many times sexually and physically by both men and women) *as children*!
And really, this results in (imo) a sort of penalization for gender nonconformity away from manhood (and an encouragement of dissociation from womanhood, but that’s another question for another time). Setting trans women as on a sort of eternal probationary status while losing any sort of social supports they would have had as queer men makes it so *less* people can risk doing so. The irony is that the only people with the sort of social buffer who would be able to not just suffer in the closet are the sort of women that many cis women claim as examples of how trans women are privileged/socialized as men (your Jenny Pritzkers, Caitlyn Jenners, Martine Rothblatts). You end up in a world and feminist approach that encourages people to be men, whether thru giving little support and an avenue of exploitation to people disidentifying with manhood, or through treating certain men as inherently feminist and female-socialized. Considering your idea that men only exist to oppress women, I hope you could see the problems here.
But I mean, I know this is a long response, and mostly not an argument regarding the veracity of socialization-castes; I just hope you can see from my perspective why this approach is just so sorely lacking on a practical level when it comes to treating trans women as more than just something to be tolerated (but with cautious suspicion) within women’s communities. I just don’t think it makes sense to address these sorts of situations through the cipher of identity, especially identities that people are rejecting outright, through mechanisms that clearly didn’t work completely on them!
Something about Rebecca Sugar coming out as a nonbinary woman is a huge surprise but it also makes so much sense in retrospect. The Gems aren’t nonbinary because they’re aliens or because she wanted to look Woke or whatever….she was literally just representing her own gender identity this whole time, even if she admittedly did make it subtle (except Stevonnie, she said the fandom knows they’re very obviously nb) but I think making subtle representation for a group you belong to is very very different from a cis creator who just wants to throw the nb community a bone but not quite commit to it, if that makes sense
since this post doesn’t link to it, here’s the interview where she discusses this; that part of the discussion starts at about 10 minutes in.
Transcript of the relevant segment:
Rebecca Sugar: One of the things that’s very important to me about the show is that the Gems are all nonbinary women. […] They’re coded female, which is very important […] I was really excited […] to make a show about a young boy who is looking up to these female-coded characters.
Interviewer: I’m sorry, when you say they’re “coded female” what do you mean by that “coded”?
Rebecca Sugar: They appear to be female. They’re a little more representative of nonbinary women. They wouldn’t think of themselves as women, but they’re fine with being interpreted that way amongst humans. And I am also a nonbinary woman, which, it’s been really great to express myself through these characters, because it’s very much how I have felt throughout my life.
Wait, nonbinary women?
Is there more content out there somewhere (aside from the interview) by nonbinary women that I could read? About being nonbinary women and what that means to them? And how they decided that this was the right identity/label for themselves, as compared to other identities like “nonbinary” or “demi woman” etc?
Because I’m trying to figure out if this might fit me.
I’m … mostly a woman? Close enough to that identity to feel it’s fair to consider myself … mostly? Cissexual/cisgender? (Not 100 percent perfectly, but close enough that I generally say I have cis privilege in most if not all contexts that count.) But with weak identification with that gender. Or with gender in general. So I’m also kinda a little bit agender? I know “demi woman” is a thing, and could maybe be a fit for me. But would like to also know more about nonbinary women so I can consider where that fits in relation to my identity as well.
Query open to anyone who feels comfortable answering with links you think might be useful. Thanks!
Signal boosting for andreashettle in case any of my friends knows anything.
No binary & non-binary
Them: Binaries like man and woman are wrong, human existence is a lot more diverse than that! There is so much more to who we can be!
Me: YEEEEEEEEES!
Them: We need words for non-binary experiences, we need to describe how we experience unique forms of oppression for existing outside these boundaries.
Me: YEEEEEEEEES!
Them: We need to have clear fixed definitions and boundaries for this third space. You are either inside or outside. You either totally experience this oppression or you totally don’t. You are either one of Us or one of Them and that position is unchanging.
Me: Wait. no. back up. Back to the part where we were creating space for a more complex fluid understanding of the human experience?
Them: Also, let’s divide non-binary experiences into afab and amab as if your birth defines your whole lived experience forever. Let’s get non-binary markers on our passports. Let’s campaign for the state to use they pronouns for non-binary cops and soldiers. Let’s get companies to recognize non-binary consumers. Let’s gets non-binary people into political power …
Me: Ok, fuck this shit, I’m outta here.
One thing that a lot of transmasc people struggle with before they fully realize they’re trans is the question of “do I hate being treated like a woman because women are treated like shit, or do I hate being treated like a woman because I’m not a woman?”
and one method (though not entirely foolproof) to figuring that out is asking “would I be upset if another girl was treated like this?”
like, I’d be just as mad if some dude said “you can’t do math because you’re a girl” to a female classmate as I would if he said it to me
however, I never got uncomfortable at waiters calling my female friends “m’am”, I was only uncomfortable when they called *me* that
and obviously everyone’s feelings are different and there’s tons of variables at play, but if you find that there’s a lot of the second scenario going on with you, there’s a good chance you’re not entirely cis
Where was this post 18 god damn months ago.
I think this is important and can be helpful for many people, and I don’t want this reply to come off as In Conflict but rather complicating/adding to:
I think some people who have deep set trauma around womanhood and misogyny do start to have very visceral and upsetting reactions & dysphoria(s) in reaction to being called “ma’am” or treated like a woman even in “normal” non-misogynistic ways, because being a woman itself has become deeply entrenched with the trauma and discomfort. there are also gnc women who dislike being called “ma’am” and some other “typical woman things” but who do not end up coming to the conclusion that they are not a woman.
this is in no way to say it is less good or “correct” to figure out you are not a woman/don’t want to be a woman, or that people should identify as a woman over other things- I think transmasc experiences are beyond “valid” (to be cliche) and that for many people being transmasculine is right and healthy and healing (and the final verdict on how “right” and healthy and accurate that is ultimately up to no one but the person themself). I just think that for many of us who have struggled between (often gnc) womanhood and transmasculinity and some of the very blurred experiences in between, it’s not as simple as discomfort with overtly misogynistic treatment versus discomfort with “normal women treatment” because for a lot of people across this whole span of identifications and experiences who’ve had traumatic experiences with assigned womanhood, “normal woman treatment” can feel equally out of place, painful and hard to separate.
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.”
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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