Pretty much sums up my whole thought regarding Gender Anarchy

Truly a fantastic comment - thank you for sharing!

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u/trans_catdad • 3y ago

TERFs are attempting to appropriate the term to mean something else -- their idea of "gender abolition" is to make sex and gender synonyms, despite it not making any sense.

Real gender abolition is a distant and almost sci-fi ambition, and it's hard to imagine what it would look like. But the hope is that folks wouldn't be bound to follow social concepts that are tied to their sex assigned at birth. There wouldn't be social concepts tied to sex. There wouldn't be men and women and nonbinary people, there would just be people. Some of them might love dresses and pained nails and makeup, but it doesn't make them a different category of person, and it doesn't come along with expectations about their genitals.

If someone desired to change their expression, their name or their body, there wouldn't be a problem because no serious importance would be attached to these ideas.

Think of it this way: we don't call people with blue eyes "bleebs" and refer to them with "ble/bler" pronouns. That genetic trait is pretty irrelevant and doesn't tell you anything about them, so why would we categorize people by their eye color? If the metaphor wasn't clear, that's what we're doing with sex-based genders right now. Society at large conflates sex and gender and those who do not conform are punished.

A post-gender society doesn't mean that everyone is expected to appear or present androgynous. It means you can do whatever the fuck you want and you wouldn't experience discrimination or harassment for it because no one would care. I've heard some people call it "gender anarchy" instead of gender abolition, because the gender system we have now is definitely hierarchical, and gender abolition would necessitate the abolition of the current gender hierarchy.

2 comments

Truly a fantastic comment - thank you for sharing!
Pasting here for those who don’t want to follow a Reddit link:
u/trans_catdad • 3y ago
TERFs are attempting to appropriate the term to mean something else -- their idea of "gender abolition" is to make sex and gender synonyms, despite it not making any sense.
Real gender abolition is a distant and almost sci-fi ambition, and it's hard to imagine what it would look like. But the hope is that folks wouldn't be bound to follow social concepts that are tied to their sex assigned at birth. There wouldn't be social concepts tied to sex. There wouldn't be men and women and nonbinary people, there would just be people. Some of them might love dresses and pained nails and makeup, but it doesn't make them a different category of person, and it doesn't come along with expectations about their genitals.
If someone desired to change their expression, their name or their body, there wouldn't be a problem because no serious importance would be attached to these ideas.
Think of it this way: we don't call people with blue eyes "bleebs" and refer to them with "ble/bler" pronouns. That genetic trait is pretty irrelevant and doesn't tell you anything about them, so why would we categorize people by their eye color? If the metaphor wasn't clear, that's what we're doing with sex-based genders right now. Society at large conflates sex and gender and those who do not conform are punished.
A post-gender society doesn't mean that everyone is expected to appear or present androgynous. It means you can do whatever the fuck you want and you wouldn't experience discrimination or harassment for it because no one would care. I've heard some people call it "gender anarchy" instead of gender abolition, because the gender system we have now is definitely hierarchical, and gender abolition would necessitate the abolition of the current gender hierarchy.
- hell yeah!!
  I'm reading a really great sci fi book right now called Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell and it gets pretty close to this in the futuristic setting. It still has he/she/they pronouns but everyone just picks what they want to be and uses gender markers on their clothing to let folks know how to refer to them.
  It would be neat to see what it's like pushed even further. I know i like being a she/her but i imagine that's just because of the gendered world i spent my whole life in.