Roxy Hall makes an intervention into debates around transgender issues, critiquing both trans liberalism and anti-trans radical feminism to stake out a position that seeks the abolition of gender. Reading: Annie Rose.
There is perhaps no question that has become more contentious within the broad “progressive” left than that of the rights of transgender people. The questions that surround this debate go beyond the normal discourses on rights in a liberal democracy, and cross over into the realm of ontology and theories of consciousness. Transgender people are caught in the middle of this debate, drawn inexorably into a partisan defense of their rights and social being. Despite the importance of this debate, gender remains under-theorized from a materialist perspective, and an adequate theory of gender has remained elusive. In its place, inadequate theorizations and half-truths have proliferated. This piece, composed of 10 theses, is an intervention into these debates.
1) Neither gender-critical sex reductionism nor queer liberalism can provide an adequate framework to theorize gender.
The contemporary discourse on the gender question falls largely into two camps, whose conflict now defines the scope of debate around transgender issues in the English-speaking world. On one hand is the “gender-critical” sex-reductionists, who argue that the social category of woman is fundamentally tied to the existence of a biologically constituted female sex. At best they argue that transgender existence is a misguided attempt to shift the “superstructural” elements of gendered society without touching its base. At worst, they argue that transgender experiences are a subversion of the community of women that forms the basis of feminist politics. While a minority in the broad “progressive” left, this belief system has found significant staying power with a generation of older feminists and the women that follow them.
The alternative that is most widely offered is a form of trans liberalism, which argues that transgender identity is legitimate and should be recognized within the institutions of bourgeois society. These claims hinge on a notion of “gender identity” – the idea that one’s gender is ultimately determined by an inner identification with a set of social signifiers or a gender archetype. What proceeds is a liberal democratic argument: that ultimately transgender people harm no one by existing, and should be respected on the basis of formal legal, and even social, equality.
Ultimately, both these views pose their own problems. The sex-reductionists, while critical of gender relations in theory, in practice, ultimately reify these gender relations in attempts to weed out perceived transgender infiltration. Indeed, they have often made common ground with the conservative right, and often their views seem to cover for what is clearly a deep antipathy towards transgender (and other queer) people. On the other hand, trans liberalism is a hollow theoretical framework upon which to base one’s ontology of gender. The gender-critical position easily points out that many mainstream transgender discourses (often created and promoted by heteronormative institutions) reify notions of sex-difference and gender roles – the notion of “being born a woman in a man’s body” certainly implies a lot of about gender, sex, and the human mind. Another example is the dependence on an artificial separation between gender, sex, and sexuality, a view that is promoted by liberal sexology. It is clear then that we need an alternative theoretical framework that can underpin an alternative politics.
2) The question of gender is ultimately that of a social division of labor.
A materialist theory of gendered society, and thus of gender, must begin with labor. Gender is simply a set of social roles which reflect a division of labor within society. This can be seen across all class societies, as gender roles are organized and re-organized to fit changes in the relations and forces of production. This can be seen clearly in societies where some third gender-role emerges, neither male nor female in its coding. This is often denoted by a third gender (officially or not) that is selected from among members of certain social groups. Take for example the eunuch in imperial China – the administrator class that performs neither the male nor female social role, and is modified as such. It should be noted that in the case of Eunuch, as in many other cases, the sexed body is modified in order to reflect the transformation of one’s gender role.
The forms of labor ascribed to each gender in contemporary capitalist societies are well documented (men dig, women weave, men build, women clean, men philosophize, women admire), but the core of the problem is not simply a division – it is a hierarchy. The labor of women is systematically undervalued and marginalized, reflecting its position as part of the secondary, “domestic” sphere that is removed from public life. This exploitation is the underlying drive of the patriarchal social form, and what makes it so persistent in the face of other changes in mode of production. It is this very condition of exploitation that gender roles conceal beneath appeals to feminine nature and the proper division between sexes. Gender (or gender-roles, for the two ultimately share an identity) is then a manifestation on the level of culture and law of what is repressed deep within the underlying strata of the social order, movements of labor and reproduction (society’s id, or in Marxist terms the infrastructure or base). In reflecting these relations back at society, gender does so in a distorted way, obscuring the real dynamics while presenting a strange view to the society as a whole. In a very real sense then, Gender is an ideology. An ideology that reflects not biological sex, but a social division of labor that is distributed around assigned sex.
All that is attached to the gender categories on the level of culture is a reflection of this exploitative relationship. The woman is robbed of her productive contribution to society by the fact that her share of the social product is hidden behind closed doors, in the home, in private. This relegates her to the lesser social position that is described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex – and in turn produces her cultural marginalisation. In all spaces, the centrality of men to human life, in politics, in culture, in interpersonal relationships, is reflective of and reinforces that deeper gendered division of labor. Man is the primary, standing in for all humanity, embodying agency and protagonism in all things. Woman is the other, constructed as separate, demeaned, weak, and marginal. Even when women leave the home and enter into the market economy as wage labourers, they find themselves funnelled into roles that reflect their domestic status – cleaners, sex workers, teachers, nurses, waitresses. These industries are subject to intense exploitation by capital, a dynamic which is justified by claims that the work is easy for women – it is just part of their nature, after all.
3) Gender is more than just identity, but identity plays a decisive role in its construction.
How then, does one become gendered? This question is important, and also relatively simple (at least at first). One’s gender is assigned at birth, in reference to their perceived physical sex (intersex conditions will be discussed later in this piece). What follows is a prolonged period of socialization into the gender system. Importantly, both genders are socialised into the gender system as a whole – one is informed both about the nature and behaviour of one’s own gender, and of your counterpart. Part of this process is instilling a strong sense of identity with the gender role that is assigned. Boys are disciplined if they behave girlishly, and told that they are boys, and should act like it. Girls experience many of the same processes. Children are of course subjects, and often resist or rebel against this socialization process (indeed, this is perhaps the origin of gender non-conformity and transgender existence – though that is beyond the scope of this piece). However, an extensive amount of work is dedicated to making sure that at least most of this socialization process sticks. As such, identity is a part of gender – every person on earth is aware of the gender that they are meant to be.
However, identity is not enough. It is only one part of the gendered experience – ultimately people live as gendered agents, and their condition is internalised through that process. We are all in the process of becoming-gendered through our lives – transgender people just as much as anyone else.
4) Gender functions differently from race and class.
Easy analogies to racial or class oppression are easy to come by in discussions of the gender question. However, it should be noted that these categories are not the same. Gender is not inherited from one’s parents in the same way that racial categorization (which relies on a notion of heritable traits) is – two fathers could very easily raise a girl. Indeed, racialization is a process that is very much done to us – a person living in a small community in the Congo may have little knowledge of global racial dynamics – this changes nothing when racial ideology by imperialists is deployed to destroy their community.Â
Gender also functions differently from class. A proletarian can, at least hypothetically, transcend their condition (perhaps by saving up enough money) to become petit-bourgeois, or drop down into the lumpen-proletariat, when they lose the ability to stay within the labour force. A woman, even one who marries into wealth, forgoes having children, and outsources her reproductive labor to maids and servants, is still a woman – the category seems very persistent. Easy analogies are not always good ones.
5) It is not possible to define gender in simple terms, because it has no singular point of origin.
When defining a chair, it is often difficult to create a definition that includes all chairs and excludes all other types of furniture. This is because the “chair” is an abstraction – in every instance of the chair, we learn a little of chairs as a whole – but the total category always eludes us. This is the relationship between the abstract and the concrete – something Marxists should be very familiar with.
Gender is a category in this same way. It clearly plays a vital social role, but its individual instantiations are not uniform – women are very different from each other, as are men. Instead, when we are presented with the man, we are presented with a cluster of properties –Â a set of physical characteristics onto which are ascribed certain social significance, a certain personality, a certain social role, a certain approach to the larger world. Not all men will possess all of these traits, but they must possess at least some. And the line where quantitative transforms into qualitative is largely elusive.
This problem with gender, means we need to keep its social function in mind. The core of its existence is the division of labor – as materialists, we need to hold to that as the center of our understanding, while remembering that the map is not the territory.
6) The cult of “Biological Sex” is itself a manifestation of gender ideology.
Today there is much talk of biology – the rallying cry for those opposed to transgender rights is their fidelity to their ninth-grade science textbook. This bears some thought, because the physical body – and its sexed characteristics – are indeed an important part of gendered existence. It is the yardstick used by the heteronormative society to determine our initial assignment.
However, what the defenders of biological reductionism fail to understand is that in the relationship between sex and gender (the sex-gender dyad) it is gender that overdetermines sex. For sex (meaning the sexed body) is regularly intervened in in order to maintain a gendered world. Intersex conditions are “treated” and the children that have them are “restored to normal”. Women around the world shave their legs and armpits, remove facial hair, and otherwise practice merciless beauty standards on themselves and others in order to perform to a standard of femininity necessary to be treated as proper women. Men modify their bodies, often with hormonal treatments, to better embody a masculine ideal. These interventions – leaving aside trans experiences – are clear attempts to make the body conform to the ideal of gender – the body is sexed by gender, not the other way around.
Those feminists who hold closely to a notion of womanhood that is centred on biological sex are operating off the false belief that in order for a feminist politics to emerge, one must have a fixed and defensible definition of womanhood. This seems to be misidentifying the problem – it is patriarchy that seeks the strictest maintenance of the link between biological sex and gender identification. It is the most fervent patriarchs, be they religious or secular, that advocate for women and men to separate and act according to their specific sexed roles, that wish for women to be limited to nothing more than birthing sows for their perverse society. Not to mention the fact that exalting and delimiting womanhood has long been tied to reactionary projects. Traditional notions of femininity and womanhood, defined against trans and gender-nonconforming people today find their strictest defenders in traditionalist fascist and progressive feminist circles.
The aim of the feminist revolution is not to reify and defend womanhood as a concept, or to uphold “females” as a caste – just as it is not the role of the proletarian revolution to maintain and uplight the social category of “worker”. It is the role of the feminist revolution to break the chain of signification between the sexed body and the gender system, between certain genitals and certain kinds of work, between certain relations and certain ways of dressing, or living. That revolution is against biological sex as ideology, not in its defense.
7) Women are the null-space within which resistance to gender germinates.
As Simone de Beauvoir famously argued, women represent a null-space, a non-human form. Men are the primary, the protagonist, the subject, the point around which all philosophy, and law, and medicine is referenced. Women are always seen as a deficient other half, the lesser category – the second sex. It is in this that we can find a revolutionary potential – for it is in this absence that we can hope to uncover new possibilities of a world without gendered relations. The key is not to “preserve” the category of woman – that is the task of patriarchy, not of feminists. We do not come to save “womanhood” – we are its annihilators.
8) Gender-rebels negate gender’s hierarchy.
What then of our brave gender rebels? Often, those of us who seek to transition, or to live as the gender we were not assigned, or to deny our gendered lives entirely are treated at best as idealists working to undo the world by changing our mannerisms or dress. This is incorrect. While trans identity is not itself revolutionary – the weapon of critique will never replace the critique by weapons – we should encourage everyone to rebel in their own ways against the gender hierarchies that are thrust upon us. Would it not be beneficial to have all kinds of people resisting gender norms, breaking the symbolic link between sex characteristics and gender roles, living in bold and unconventional ways? Surely the process of abolishing gender will at first present as an explosion of different modes of living.
9) The meaningful existence of transgender people is self-evident.
Are transgender identities legitimate? Surely this is the question we have all come here to answer. However, as Marxists, we must hold to the principle expressed by the old man himself – “Nothing human is alien to me.”
Transgender people, gender non-conforming people from across the spectrum of possible self-understanding, have always existed. As long as rigid gender hierarchies have dominated society, people have wanted to break free, to live differently, and be loved and accepted as such. This fact, which has long been documented at the margins of society, is all the evidence we need that it is a persistent phenomenon – part of our daily struggle to survive under the patriarchal mode of living.
Transgender identity then is as “valid” (a largely useless concept) as any gender identity – it is part of the gender system, another dynamic in the way we live our lives. It is just as valid as the identification with womanhood or manhood possessed by any woman or man. The fact that this identity is contingent and tied to systems of power is something we all have in common.
10) Transfeminist Marxism does not seek to overturn women’s liberation, but to complete it.
The gender question is simply an extension of women’s question. It is taking the fundamental revolutionary insights of the Marxist-Feminist tradition, and applying them systematically, in a revolution critique of every institution of gendered society. Our revolutionary struggle must be total, to overturn every stone of gendered society, every patriarchal social mores, and institution, to smash apart and render broken the chains that have bound women for millennia. Holding on to an ahistorical and transcendental notion of a community of womanhood, is in itself a reflection of that old order.
Today it is highly fashionable in certain circles to talk about anti-capitalist and even socialist feminisms, to be critical of radical feminists, and to pour heat onto the bearers of cultish liberal feminism. These targets, be they trans-hating feminists or liberal corporate feminists are well warranted. However, it is necessary to turn the cold gaze of critique onto the social milieus that produce these criticisms. For today one cannot turn around without running into a liberal who proclaims themselves a radical, an anti-capitalist, an intersectionalist. Using these terms, they weave a tale in which women and queer people can be liberated simply through some academic discourse, or perhaps through a session of privilege-checking, or maybe through some vague intonation towards mutual aid. This radical liberalism is the long shadow of despair cast by liberalism proper – while it resents liberalism’s lack of “intersectionality”, it ultimately cannot critique its fundamental premises. Liberal democracy, the centrality of the individual, the fear of collective action, the inability to perceive a genuine alternative to capitalist democracy and market economies – this is the currency that radical liberals trade in. The truth is that no amount of academic discourses or self-conscious navel-gazing can undo the fact that the emancipation of women and queer people will come only when the proletariat can organize as a class to seize power and establish its class dictatorship so as to ensure the transition to a classless society – a society that must, by definition, be free of gendered hierarchies.
For a revolutionary transfeminist Marxism, the abolition of gender itself is the only goal that makes sense. In such a revolutionary struggle, all old identities and categories will be broken apart, and new, emancipated humanity will take its place. The twilight of the patriarchs will be the triumph of queer liberation and herald the coming of communism.
