– or maybe a tangent into ways to fight back against Anti-Trans legislation.
I kinda sorta started writing about this as a random social media post, but it is something I have been thinking about all day and I want to try to delve into the idea a little deeper, so I am going to try to write a blog post about it. The overall premise of this post is going to be that, in the mid 2000s, it used to be fairly common for people to identify as “gender fucked” as a gender identity, specifically meaning that social constructions of gender have left them “fucked” as far a feeling like they were excluded from a society that had such rigidly enforced expectations for the performance of gender. I want to kind of reminisce a little about what that was like, talk about why it kind of went out of favor, and then talk about my concerns about current conversations about gender identity.
Before I dive into this though, I think it is a good idea to get my confessions out of the way:
1. I did strongly identify with the idea of being “Gender Fucked” for many years, so that is something I will talk about from a first person perspective.
2. I still think of gender as an authoritarian social construct and am very worried that all the work trans folks have done to achieve political acceptance, and to reject much of the authoritarianism of gender as it was, is getting burnt to the ground under the current Trump administration.
3. I have a lot of Trans and Non-binary friends for whom battle lines of Trans-inclusion and the right to exist are very personal, very intimate, very embodied battles. Each of them have had very different experiences, many of which, I have only observed from a pretty great distance, so I am going to try very hard not to make a complete ass out of myself by pretending to know or understand exactly what “the trans community” thinks about all of this, or about how it intersects or maybe even crashes into non-binary experiences. I am, in all likelihood, going to fail to be as respectful, thoughtful and understanding as I want to be around all of this, and it might even be the case that this entire post turns into a very sloppy mistake on my part. If you read this post and feel this way, you are only doing me a favor if you call me out on something that feels off or offensive, or ignorant, and if you don’t want to waste your time calling me into conversation about it, I totally understand that too.
Ok, so let’s fuck with gender. Gender is a social construct. There are a lot of places I could go to with this statement as far as sources for why I don’t just think it is true, but consider it to be the position of scholarly consensus, but instead of going that route, I will just share this link to the World Health Organization’s explanation of gender and how it relates to health. I choose this one because it states it plainly and it establishes this as the most international perspective on the topic. The US right, especially authoritarian Trumpism, tends to heavily reject the idea that anything is actually socially constructed and not based upon some other trait that is more innate and likely determined by god, but that is mostly because they are trying to stoke and feed malevolent ignorance, and refuse to acknowledge that many things are socially constructed, but that doesn’t make them less real than things that are not. Like money, language, forms of government, even lower stakes things like the rules of sports…these are not things that inherently exist or have been given to us by divine sources, they come to exist because a very large number of people invest their own personal power and resources (mental, physical and even spiritual) into making these social constructs have collective meaning. Tradition, and generational story telling play an absolutely massive role in repeating the generative ideas (memes really, in the academic sense) that give these social constructs power. Some nations and organizations attempt to enforce the “rules” or expectations of some of these constructs more directly and rigidly than others, but influencing or changing any of these social constructs often requires a lot of social and cultural (and often economic) capital to even start to move the needle on, and even then, most of them are too big for any one person to just instantly or intentionally change or control.
Gender, being a social construct, is not inherently a positive or negative thing, by itself. In a society where people share political and social power, it is entirely possible to imagine genders existing as categories that simply exist to provide a loose and flexible collection of traits that might help some people find a sense of shared identity and purpose. While I am personally skeptical that this idealized version of positive constructions of gender is ever achievable in the real world, I recognize that that positive ideal is incredibly powerful and motivating for very many people. I would even argue that authoritarian gender essentialist (people who believe that gender is a direct projection of biological sex into the social realm) are as invested in the positive idea that gender can help people find a shared sense of identity and purpose, and that is why they are so alarmed and sensitive to anyone questioning traditional constructions of gender, even ones that are pretty obviously harmful to enforce. Gender essentialists are absolutely terrified of losing the power and convenience of being able to divide all of humanity into something as simple as 2 categories that can be used to define purpose, motive, and expected behaviors and abilities within society.
I think a lot of Gender scholarship over the last 20 to 30 years has been driven by people trying to hold on to the idea that gender can be a positive social force in the world. Even on the radically left, I think it is common to uphold this idea, as long as gender categories can be blown up beyond just a male/female binary and that association with any of these categories can be voluntary and mutable as necessary, according to the needs of the individual. This has been a powerful idea that has largely gained a lot of traction in a relatively short period of time, especially amongst youth in the United States, as it fits in very nicely to a liberal (as in libertarian) world view that each person’s ability to define who they are for themselves is the most fundamental freedom a person can have. It is a beautiful idea, and one very much worth fighting for. It is also one that is going to inherently butt heads with the reality of everything that is socially constructed:
Things that are socially constructed can never actually be defined by an individual. That is why they are social constructs and not simply classified as expressions of the self, or individual. Now, a lot of leftists do understand this, and what they are really talking about with things like “preferred pronouns” is not that every individual gets to just make up their gender on the spot in a way that makes that gender immediately functional as a social category that everyone will understand (which is kind of how the right/“anti-woke” crowd tries to spin it), but that it is possible for society to be compassionate and understanding enough that immediate assessments of other people’s gender identities don’t actually need to be made without giving the person being assessed for “gender” the time and ability to be an active participant in that process. In other words, gender doesn’t have to be an essential category that needs to be authoritarianly applied and instantly identifiable. This is where the real cultural war battle about “pronouns” and “gender ideology” is being fought, because authoritarians absolutely want every social category that might define one’s power and prestige within that society to be as immediately recognizable and enforceable as possible. Otherwise, the risk of people gaining access to power that is not meant for them becomes to difficult to police and control.
For the record, I do want to live in a world that is compassionate, kind and patient enough to let everyone be part of the process of defining who they are.
However, I think focusing so heavily on that goal, making gender identity as open and participatory as possible, has had a cost in the world of gender politics, in that it has made questioning, critiquing, and even attacking gender as a source of social power and control, look like it is anti-social, hateful behavior towards those who just want to fit into those categories. This is why I have always been lukewarm towards advocating politically for same-sex marriage rights instead of attacking the legal privileges that being married provides, and why I have always identified most strongly with “queer” as a sexual identity instead of something like “bi” or “pan” sexual. When you let bigots turn people’s right to exist into the topic that can be debated, instead of staying on the attack and questioning why we let these socially constructed categories have so much pauthority over people’s lives, the bigots will always choose the path that focuses the light on other people instead of the corrupt basis of their power. They will still try to make radical attacks on sources of hierarchy and authority sound extremist and impossible when necessary, but most of the time they can let the center or moderate leftists make those attacks for them, while they just keep pushing to expand their power and authority. The centrists and moderates then tend to blame the radicals for not fighting hard enough to protect the most basic rights, while the moderate right is pretty much just completely content to let far-right extremists do whatever they want and just deny that “those people belong to us” unless they can receive a reward for doing so.
The right has been incredibly successful in accomplishing this in the last 20+ years in regards to gender, and I deeply question whether that is partially because they have been able to claim that the (incredibly moderate) position of “Gender is not binary and Trans People exist,” is the extreme left position on the issue, because the radical and far left critique of gender within a capitalist society has pretty much been pushed out of the conversation entirely. It is really hard to be critical of masculinity or femininity (or a system that encodes and enforces both of those categories) within a capitalist society when you are trying to hold space for people to have the right to have those categories be accessible to anyone (who can afford the costs of fitting into them). That is a real dilemma, especially because a nuanced critique that says “gender is a social construct that we have to work long term to undermine as a source of social and economic power, but also acknowledge that people living today might have to be able to freely navigate, for their own mental and physical health” is never going to be something that translates effectively into a talking heads sound bite. Also complicating that critique is the fact that people with access to extreme wealth almost always have been able to have more freedom navigating restrictive social constructs ( at least within specific environments) than the general public, and the United States has been a place where the extremely wealthy have been able to very publicly live above the constraints of social and political expectations.
So where does this leave us today, when it feels like more than half the states in the US are attacking Trans People’s fundamental right to exist, attempting to criminalize and demonize Trans folks as perverse predators and pedophiles? Does the need to protect Trans lives require that the whole left unite to adopt the most political expedient methods to create the broadest shield possible? I think that answer can be “Yes!”…“and” also, let’s acknowledge that doesn’t have to mean silencing people who are trying to do more than just lend their own political power over to the the political institutions and organizations that have massively failed thus far to provide that protection. Going soft on social constructs like gender, marriage, family and heterosexuality have paved the way for all of the right’s success in framing basic compassion and decency as far-left ideologies because more radical and leftist ideas are being silenced internally. The right continually makes its greatest strides when it courts and empowers its extremists with as much media attention as possible, while the left keeps acting shocked how effective that has been, even though that same strategy has always worked best for it as well.
In the face of an authoritarian rejection of the science, the sociology, and the appeal to compassion, I don’t really see any room for trying to negotiate meager protections for only the wealthiest people who fall outside of a patriarchal and misogynistic understanding of the social construction of gender. For example, if the rules of college sports are so tied up in definitions of gender that can so easily be rewritten in direct reputation to scientific consensus, then it is time for colleges and state politicians to pull the funding out from their sports programs until either new sports not dependent on gendered classifications can be established, or executive orders signed by the president are incapable of infringing upon universities intellectual and scholarly freedom. If gendered bathrooms are going to sites of the policing of people’s bodies, then we have to demand that bathrooms be de-gendered, no matter how costly a process that becomes. If schools and businesses are going to start enforcing gendered codes for clothing and behavior, then students, faculty, workers, and customers have to actively defy and reject those codes. We pretty much have an obligation to make the enforcement of any gendered based laws and policy so impossible to enforce that Trumpism has to constantly defend the expense of this enforcement. I think even moderate, but consistent disruption to college sports programs that adopt anti-trans measures (not just those specific sports, but the whole college’s athletic programs) alone could scare Trump off from this course of action when the economic and social impact of these ill-thought out choices his administration has made become real and tangible. We have already seen it with his bluster on Tariffs. We know he himself has no spine for confronting actual resistance, especially not on issues that he doesn’t actually care about any more than is inspired by a random talking head on the TV program he was just watching.