Trans People and the Dialectics of Sex and Gender - alyx.

io file:///D:/Books/Trans People and the Dialectics of Sex and Gender/Tran...

Update: I don't really like this anymore, for a few reasons. I wrote it very early on in my ideological
development, but it got very popular for some reason. Check out some of my other posts instead: "Is
Gender Inherently Oppressive? Should we Abolish Gender? (http://alyx.io/feminism/2015/06
/14/is-gender-inherently-oppressive/)" or "The Eroticisation of Gender (http://alyx.io/feminism
/2014/12/17/the-eroticisation-of-gender/)".

The Basis of Sexism

Modern radical feminist thought can be summed up as arising from this basic premise:[1
(http://alyx.io/feminism/2014/05/24/trans-people-and-dialectics-of-sex-and-gender/#fn:radfeminism)

Patriarchy is a caste system which takes humans who are born biologically male or
female and turns them into the social classes called men and women.
— Deep Green Resistance (http://www.deepgreenresistance.org/en/who-we-are/radical-feminism-faqs)

Instead, sex and gender exist in a dialectical relationship. Although he made no conceptual
distinction between sex and gender, Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and
the State summed up the development of patriarchy roughly as follows:

1. Agriculture was invented,

2. which lead to the development of a surplus,
3. enabling some to live off the labour of others,
4. leading to the development of class society.
5. Class society necessitates that lines of inheritance be identified and secured,
6. leading to sexual control of those capable of pregnancy.

I would add a seventh point onto this:

7. this necessitated a socially constructed category ("sex") to arise, seperating:

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those who were able to become pregnant

from those who couldn't become pregnant

Some may object to Engels’ conclusion, stating that “even in pre-class societies gender
[roles] still existed”, but this argument makes the mistake of falsely projecting current social
relations into the past. There was a fuzzy and inexact “division of labour” (in the
hunting/gathering sense) based on physical fitness and capability, and so it follows that the
share of work would have fallen very roughly and haphazardly along the lines of what we’d
now call “gender” in our current social context, but this was nothing like gender roles or
gendered oppression, and didn’t constitute a category of domination or exploitation. Pre-
class societies, having no surplus, required that everyone work exactly or near-exactly
according to their physical capabilities because there simply wasn’t the productive capacity
to allow for the inefficiency of gender roles caused by sex classifications.

What of gender, then? Where does it fit into these seven points?

There was a qualitative shift in the development of sex relations; patriarchy transcended and
shifted from its original solely sex-based form into a sex and gender-based one. Class
society caused sex, and sex in turn caused gender. “Gender” is when sexism, oppression
and exploitation based on reproduction (and ultimately relations of production), is
institutionalized and divorced from each individual person’s reproductive capacity and
general biology.

Without sex, sexism wouldn’t have ever arisen, but an individual person’s “sex”, as decided
by society, doesn’t completely determine their relationship to sexism. Designation at birth
isn’t some metaphysical essence that’s imparted on someone for life, entirely and necessarily
coloring all further social interactions. Designation at birth is of course an incredibly powerful
predictor of the ensuing privileges, socialization, and sex education society places upon
someone, and this absolutely cannot be denied. But as ever, as with all generalisations, it
isn’t correct in every case.

Confusion of the conditions for the creation and development of oppressor and oppressed
groups with the conditions for oppression in a mostly individual context is one of the most
infuriating aspects of radical feminism. The categories of “DFAB (Designated Female At
Birth)” and “DMAB (Designated Male At Birth)” developed in tandem with the development of
the gender hierarchy, but that doesn’t mean that each individual person’s place in the gender
hierarchy is necessarily what one would traditionally expect for a person of their birth

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designation. To think otherwise is a classic misunderstanding of the relationship between the

aggregate and the particular.

Whether you’re a trans woman or a cis woman – at least on the surface – doesn’t matter to
those enforcing patriarchy. Even those trans women gendered as “freaks” or “gender traitor
men” and not “cis woman” still receive womanhood, maybe not always as a label, but
certainly on the end of male violence.

The categories of “womanhood” and “manhood” weren’t created specifically with some sort
of supernatural intent to oppress the supposedly “pre-social, biological” categories of
“female” and “male”, as some propose. Those concepts weren’t brought into existence by
anything sentient, there’s no real mystical “purpose” to them. Manhood is imposed (or
granted) on the oppressor group, and womanhood (or “genderfreakhood
(https://radtransfem.wordpress.com/2011/12/12/genderternary-transmisogyny/)” for trans
women sometimes) imposed on the oppressed group. That’s really all there is to it.

Taking the above radical feminist quote and expanding and adapting it in light of our
proletarian feminist understanding, we get the following:

Patriarchy is a caste system arising from class society. Class society created the social
construct of “sex”, which in turn paved way for the social construct of “gender”. Gender turns
humans, broadly, into the social groups “woman” and “man”, these groups are structurally
(not individually) dependent on the social groups “female” and “male”.

The sex categories of today and of past class societies would not exist outside of their
respective relations of production. Ultimately, women’s role in society stems from class
society, not biology. It is only when biology enters into a social relationship with class society
and the social construct of “sex” arises that women are controlled. Without women, there
would be no heirs, and without heirs no inherited property or lines of class succession. The
category of sex is the product of class society in which men colonize as property the
reproduction of women, just as animals, peoples, nations, lands, and natural resources were
colonized.

Gender Identity

There are three sites of contradiction within the concept of “gender identity” for trans people:

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self↔body: private feelings about body – “this body shape feels personally wrong to
me.”
self↔society: social feelings about gendered relationships – “this gender role feels
wrong to me.”, “people gendering me this way feels wrong to me.”
society↔body: social feelings about body – “this body makes people think I’m
$gender.”, “I’m uncomfortable with the social meaning attached to this body”

These three relationships are, in turn, dialectically related to one another. Development and
change happens through internal quantitative change in some combination of:

the attitudes of society,

the morphology of the body,
or the personality or personal circumstances of the trans person,

And this quantative change drives an external, qualitative, change in a relationship, and is
characterized by temporary bouts of self-doubt or dysphoria. This moves in a spiral pattern,
with the contradictions getting ever sharper, until the person comes out. No one will
experience this process exactly alike, and the principle contradictions will be different for
everyone.

The prevailing notion – at least in liberal feminism – that dysphoria causes transness is
wholly wrong. An equally wrong idea, popular for radical feminists, is the view that transness
causes dysphoria. There’s no one-way causal relationship; instead, they co-emerge. They’re
in a feedback loop, forever remaking, reforging, and reshaping each other. Utterly
inseparable, yet distinct at the same time. The spiral metaphor applies very aptly here as
well.

HRT and surgery can generally resolve the self↔body contradiction, and this is also true,
though maybe to a lesser degree (and also depending on luck), for the society↔body
contradiction. Activism or revolution can resolve society↔body, and self↔society. These
three points, self, body, society, are all intimately interconnected, changing one changes the
other, and none can be considered static or immalleable.

The common line from trans activists that trans people’s gender is entirely uninfluenced by
gender roles is just as a ridiculous proposition as the converse line from radical feminists,
that trans people’s gender is entirely influenced by gender roles. In actuality, gender roles are
going to have a differing effect based on the social, historical, and individual context of the
person in question.

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We should staunchly combat the reactionary subsections of the trans population overtly
influenced by gender roles in their decision to transition as this only serves to reinforce
gender roles and provide a smaller space in which “womanhood” or “manhood” can reside.
Radical feminists rightly criticize this to some degree but draw the wrong conclusions, and
liberal feminists fail to engage with this at all. We must be very careful in our own criticisms
here, however, as some people take any trans woman’s display of femininity – regardless of
the reasons – as automatically illegitimate, as a sign that they’re “faking” or “appropriating”
womanhood, or that they’re some sort of drag queen.

We should wholly reject the biological-essentialist “brain sex” framework that liberal feminists
cozy up to, but radical feminists rightly oppose.

We should wholly reject the notions of a hard divide between cis and trans people. It’s both
theoretically and experientially unsound. A recent study[2 (http://alyx.io/feminism/2014/05/24/trans-

people-and-dialectics-of-sex-and-gender/#fn:1)
found that:

About 33% of men and 38% of women felt both as a man and as a woman
About 30% of men and 45% of women expressed a dislike of their sexed body
41% of men and 46.8% of women experience themselves to some extent as two
genders
36.6% of the [non-trans] subjects reported that they sometimes feel like the ‘other’
gender
63.7% reported that they sometimes wish to be the ‘other’ gender
41.9% were sometimes discontent with their sexed body

Privilege

The notion that trans women have male privilege is laughable, and oft-times astoundingly
hypocritical. Why do we never hear anything about the “straight privilege” of non-trans
queers? Why is “raised heterosexual” a term never to grace the lips of anyone discussing
non-trans queers? Why are people quick to the draw with “socialized [fe]male” but not
“socialized cis”?

Everyone in the world is presented with ideas about womanhood and manhood, maleness
and femaleness, regardless of – but of course varying in concordance with – their birth
designation. Radical feminists have the direction of causality mixed up, it’s not that your sex

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completely determines your socialization, it’s that socialization is partly determined by sex
designation at birth. People aren’t so much socialized into a gender role, but educated about
gender roles, plural.

Ordered by increasing importance, we can break down the factors needed (in some
combination) for someone to have male privilege:

education about gender roles through the male lens

acting out male gender roles
internalization of male gender roles
being granted the male gender role by others

These four points can be further split into three distinct periods:

pre-everything
post-coming-out to yourself
post-coming-out to the world

A trans woman on coming out to herself soon drops internalized male privilege and starts to
internalize female gender roles. On coming out to the world, she very quickly leaves behind
the last point of the first list, the male role granted by others onto her.

Some trans women may find themselves subconsciously identifying to some degree with
women before they come out to themselves. Once a trans woman comes out to herself she’ll
very quickly feel like an imposter, she’ll be scared that she’ll be found out at any moment,
that she’ll be identified as a gender traitor. Someone thought by others to be something
they’re not is never going to fully exercise the privileges granted onto that group.

Trans women may have experienced limited aspects of male privilege in the past, but once
she starts living life as a trans woman most of the time these quickly become overshadowed
by her new experiences and socialization, leaving in any relevance only the knowledge of
how men talk and act when they think no women are around. Trans women after coming out
face much worse (on average) daily material circumstances and much more extreme
degrees of misogyny than cis women generally receive,[3 (http://alyx.io/feminism/2014/05/24/trans-

people-and-dialectics-of-sex-and-gender/#fn:2)
doing a great job of nullifying past experiences.

Anyone active in the trans community long enough will have heard horror stories about older
transitioners, and if we absolutely must talk about trans women having male privilege, it’s

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probably them. I suspect that older transitioners will have experienced the four points in my
privilege dissection for long enough in the pre-everything period such that – maybe at least
initially – those years stand a much greater chance of overshadowing the post-transition
period.

But what does this simplistic view of socialization and male privilege mean for feminist praxis
in general? A feminist praxis stuck in the rut of socialization mythology is an unscientific and
dogmatic one unable to correctly respond to changing circumstances. There’s no such thing
as a universal female socialization. Female socialization will always be tempered by the ever
different material circumstances. In fact, it’s the patriarchs who’d ideally have us receive
something approaching a universal socialization. If the feminist movement is to accept the
myth of universal female socialization it means, by default, universalizing the socialization of
the most privileged subsections of women, it means ignoring the differing socialization of all
intersectionally oppressed women, not just trans women.

Gender Role Conformity

Some trans people suddenly conforming to gender stereotypes after transition isn’t terribly
surprising given the unavoidable sexism and cissexism in this society. The impossibly
inhuman digitally-manipulated model with a clothing size of “negative-five” isn’t a standard
that trans people are mystically exempt from. Some may start to conform in an attempt to
justify their transness and legitimize or rationalize their gender, not only to themselves but to
others as well. Others, especially trans women and those who also face transmisogyny, may
even consciously choose to conform to some degree.

If a trans woman chooses to wear a dress instead of a t-shirt and jeans so that she might
stand a better chance of appearing normative and gaining conditional cis privilege, can you
really wholly blame her for that instance of conformance? Street harassment, violence,
housing and employment discrimination, sexual assault, rape, and more, are the daily lives of
“non-passing” CAMAB (Coercively Assigned Male At Birth) people.

I can personally attest to this. The fundamentals of my wardrobe haven’t altered, I’m still a
hoodie, jeans, and t-shirt kind of person. The only thing that’s changed since I came out is
the fit and cut of the clothing I choose to wear to avoid getting misgendered or placed as
trans.

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Capitulation with the more “institutional” axis of oppression to save oneself from the more
“individual” axis of oppression is hardly a phenomenon unique to trans people; let’s not forget
that cis people also face pressure to mold themselves into gender stereotypes. Women wear
makeup, black people straighten their hair, autistic people hide their stimming, queer couples
avoid holding hands on the street. These specific examples of conformance aren’t even
generally in the same league as trans people’s, as succumbence doesn’t usually deny them
absolutely vital medical care.

The aim is to help trans people overcome these sorts of pressures, not punish them for it,
and certainly not automatically use it as an excuse to discredit trans people as a whole.
There’s no arduous “real life experience” test from a board-certified “homothesiologist” that
non-trans queers have to go through to get recognition as queer, but every step of the way,
from siblings, parents, friends, doctors, counselors, psychologists, the whole gamut, every
single minutiae of trans people’s lives are scrutinized. There’s an eternal and grueling game
of Spot The Difference, a hopelessly idealized gender role on the left and the trans person on
the right.

Gender

Womanhood and manhood are defined by their existence through each other and their
violent struggle against one another. You can’t have one without the other, a contradiction
(and an antagonistic one at that) in dialectics parlance. One is the struggle of the oppressed
and one the struggle of the oppressor. The call for the abolishment of gender isn’t quite
correct, or at least requires a bit more nuance and elaboration. Women and men are not the
problem, to be abolished on equal terms, it’s men who are the main problem. That’s where
we need to focus our energy. You don’t abolish classes by trying to abolish the proletariat
and the bourgeoisie both together, no, you focus on the bourgeoisie. You focus on the
exploiters and the dominant class in the dialectic – you abolish men first and foremost.

The only progressive way forward for men is for them to strive to end class society – the
conditions which gave rise to gender – and to give up manhood, to abdicate their patriarchal
throne. To consciously decide to fight sexism at every opportunity and to politically, materially,
and ideologically, disassociate as much as possible from their privileged position, masculinity,
and exploitation of women. To try and undermine their own social position at every turn.
Progressive men should stop trying to envision a “better” manhood or a “better” masculinity;
men hurt themselves, other men, women, and non-men when they assert their masculinity,

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and they should stop trying to imagine ways to redeem themselves without fundamental
change.

Just like I strive to give up and end my position and the category of first world labour
aristocrat, my position of whiteness, and my position of physical abledness, I call on men to
strive to give up manhood. It doesn’t mean I shrug off the label “white” or “labour aristocrat”,
just the positioning of those identities as good, or at worst neutral. It means that I recognise
that they are fundamentally oppressive social positions and that the only possible use for
them are as political organizing labels and for the recognition of my own privilege.

When I say “I’m a woman” I’m not saying I innately “feel or identify like a woman” (I don’t
think you can ever construct a non-patriarchal justification for that), I’m instead relating
myself to other women and our somewhat shared experience as a group under patriarchy.
I’m stating that my material interests and experience of the world are mostly aligned with
womanhood, that my liberation is therefore fundamentally and intimately bound up with other
women, and thus as far as I’m concerned, “woman” generally describes me.

I “identify” with womanhood because it describes my political experience. It’s the category, or
near enough (“genderfreakhood” is also pertinent), that is imposed on me. When I’m
gendered woman, I am woman. When I’m not gendered woman, I’m not woman. Like the
other oppressive social constructs – blackness or queerness for example – “identification”
with them for this reason isn’t reification, but a recognition of the political and social reality of
other’s reification of the concept.

My birth designation doesn’t matter. When I’m walking down the street, people gender me as
“not male”, as a woman, and it makes me uneasy. When people spew biotruths or make
sexist jokes, I know it’s aimed at me. When I see women objectified over and over and over
again, I can’t help but learn to hate myself. When I hear about rampant rape, sexual assault,
and general violence, I wonder, might I become one of those statistics? Even before I
transitioned and started changing my body, the sexism I encountered was still generally
aimed at people of a body type I needed for my health. Whenever I interact with a man
there’s always a nagging in the back of my mind, how are gender relations coloring this
interaction? Again and again, I constantly face misogyny – I face a form of womanhood.

Feminism

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With all you’ve read here, I think it’s fair to say that:

Liberal feminism holds a metaphysical conception of both gender and sex

Radical feminism holds a metaphysical conception of sex and a quasi-materialist and
reductionist view of gender

I use “metaphysical” here to mean an analysis that places gender or sex as “natural and
inevitable truths”, as a prioris. As something essentially static and existing above or outside
history and society. This means regarding sex or gender as anything other than social
constructs.

I use “quasi-materialist and reductionist” here to mean an analysis that considers gender
solely on it’s own terms, largely uninfluenced by other concerns. This means, for radical
feminists, correctly identifying it as a social construct, but failing to properly situate gendered
oppression within the context of class society.

Liberal feminism finds no problem incorporating trans people into its philosophy as there are
no constraints from being fundamentally disengaged with reality. Liberal feminists make an
effort to appear trans-inclusive (and most often only to score points against radical feminism
in a sort of spiteful or superficial inclusion-theater) by erasing and writing off the influence
and role of biology and “sex” in the development and functioning of patriarchy, with obvious
theoretical and practical failures, and thus misogynistic consequences.

Radical feminism is a more interesting case. The combination of metaphysical and quasi-
materialist views of sex and gender respectively produces transmisogyny. There is no saving
or redeeming radical feminism of this as some have tried to do. It’s at the very core, the
chauvinism is inescapable.

At the heart of radical feminist attacks on trans people is the notion of biological determinism.
If the category of “women” is solely based on biology and women are oppressed specifically
because of their reproductive organs, rather than a much deeper interplay between biology
and the social-economic context, then trans women are natural enemies on the same level
as men.

Radical feminists have successfully flipped the script, erasing their own essentialism, instead
making it appear as if they are the ones valiantly battling against another kind of gender
essentialism, one that trans people are automatically and always enforcing. They sing the
same melody to a different tune. When they argue that trans people reinforce biological

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determinism, they avoid the question that if gender is a social construct, why can’t the gender
one receives from society change?

Radical feminists contradict their desire to abolish gender when they claim that trans women
can’t be “legitimate women” because they don’t know what it means to be oppressed as “real
biological women”, essentialising the very category they decry others for essentialising!
Trans women experience the very real pressures of sexism every day of their lives, and no
amount of sophistry can change this.

1. I recognise that this definition of modern radical feminism isn’t correct in all contexts,
but for this specific topic it is the most accurate and to-the-point. ↩ (http://alyx.io
/feminism/2014/05/24/trans-people-and-dialectics-of-sex-and-gender
/#fnref:radfeminism)
2. Queering Gender: Studying Gender Identity in ‘normative’ Individuals
(http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080
/19419899.2013.830640#.Ukw0G7wVwb0). The percentages here are probably on the
low side, given the strength of institutional cisness. ↩ (http://alyx.io/feminism/2014/05
/24/trans-people-and-dialectics-of-sex-and-gender/#fnref:1)
3. Injustice at Every Turn: A Report of the National Transgender Discrimination Survey
(http://www.thetaskforce.org/reports_and_research/ntds) ↩ (http://alyx.io/feminism
/2014/05/24/trans-people-and-dialectics-of-sex-and-gender/#fnref:2)

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