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I think we're on the same page but I just want to gently remind you that for some people, gender is really really important. Like, critical to their survival and something they have fought upstream against society for over many years of suffering and hardship.
I'm enbie and to me, on a personal level, gender is genuinely unimportant to my own identity but when I talk about the abolition of gender I try to frame it in terms of something like abolishing enforced gender or abolishing gender norms because I don't want to unintentionally signal to anyone, least of all to certain trans comrades, that I'm coming to steal their gender from them. All I want is for gender to be optional and based on exactly how the individual feels at that particular moment; you can look how you want, you can act how you prefer, and you can be the gender(s) that you feel and none of these things have to "align" and anybody who tries to tell you that you aren't permitted to do something/that you have to do something/that you're doing it wrong can go straight to hell because unless they abolish that attitude immediately then they're gonna get their dental record abolished.
I get how it feels because for myself, my experience of my own gender is summed up by one big fucking meh. But I can't univeralise my own experience of being gender's distant acquaintance and I absolutely do not want to replace gender normativity with agender normativity since that's just gonna be the same shit, different texture for plenty of people, especially trans people, for whom gender really does matter. I'm coming for the normativity; I'm not coming for your gender.
I don't want to get into the weeds on the ontology of the social construct of gender here however one thing that's important to me is drawing upon Foucault's concept of reverse discourse, especially to do with the term queer; without cishet-normativity, the label queer would not exist. However the original discourse of the label has been subverted and it has been thoroughly reclaimed as a symbol of pride, of unity, and ultimately of power across the queer community. With this in mind, I think the reclamation of the term queer has been even more radical than it would have been if we simply managed to abolish its use from our culture.
So, for the people who are engaging in a parallel sort of reclamation of gender on a personal level, because for most/all of their upbringing they had faced a constant barrage of proscriptive gender norms from all angles, they bore down against that great and terrible dragon of gender normativity whose scales glittered with the accretion of a thousand years' of gender normative values—each scale being inscribed with a gendered "Thou shalt!"—and they managed to fucking slay that dragon with a resounding and triumphant "I am!"... I have to ask myself, are these not the people who embody the very same spirit of revolutionary reclamation that I described above?
In my opinion, if you slay that dragon then you get to do whatever you want with the dragon's spoils. You are the hero in this story; I'm not going to deny you the glory that is by rights yours.
Absolutely. That's why I don't want to step on the toes of people who are in that camp. Their gender identity is as important to me as it is to them. Something that stuck out with that gender accelerationist manifesto is that just because we may strive for gender abolition, doesn't mean gender identity will go away, it just means it will not longer be a tool to be used by the ruling class(of course ideally the ruling class will be gone) in order to put us in arbitrary boxes. My genderness is gonna be completely different to the next person's genderness. I don't wanna seem like I'm coming as if I'm saying someone's else's genderness is pointless or anything. Apologies to anyone that might have read it that way.
Ok it does sound we are on the same page :)
I have Foucault on my list to read but it probably won't be for a year or 2 because of how backlogged I am but now I'm eager. And you dragon analogy is powerful. I guess at the end of the day, just because my genderness isn't that important to me(I'm probably 60% AGAB and 40% meh, for comparison) doesn't mean others' gender identity should be invalidated.
Yeah, we're on the same page. In that case, excuse my yapping.
I'm conflicted about Foucault tbh. But at the end of the day his thought is very influential and there are some useful tools to add to the toolkit which his work provides so even if you don't agree with everything or you take issue with certain things, it's still very useful to read Foucault.
I have to confess that's really just me regurgitating Niezsche from memory and adapting it to gender normativity. I'm sure he'd hate that, which makes it all the better.
I think the Foucault thing got my galaxy brain pinging off of Niezsche so it kinda just came pouring out. Also don't read Niezsche unless you really, really have the burning desire to. There are two types of people who read Niezsche: young, mostly white, men who are edgelords that want a philosophical justification for why they are better than everyone else and dusty old philosophy academics who are sequestered away in some university office building. You aren't either of those two key demographics, thankfully.
I have some Nietzsche but it's so low on my list it might as well not be there. I have Thus Spake Zarathustra and maybe some other stuff by him. I'm conflicted on reading him for the same way I am about reading Heidegger since they both have a history with fascism. I do wanna read Being and Time and Heidegger's essay on technology and those are probably first before Nietzsche for sure. But that's all lumped in with my next bout of philosophy. I have this anarchist theory kick I'm on, then revisit Marxist works, then possibly gender and queer theory(not sure what is gonna be in that yet), and I have a neurdivergent block I wanna get to some time in the future so philosophy might be after that? Lol. I need to read more.
Also, this is praxis lol.
For Foucault, I have Disipline and Punish, recommended by a friend. And I grabbed his History of Sexuality vol 1 and 2 because it caught my interest.
Is a minor point, but it reads (to me) like enby = gender is unimportant
An important point. I didn't mean to imply that so I've frontloaded the qualifying term and made it so it's very clear that I'm talking about my personal relationship to my own gender with:
Does that read better?
E: There was also another sentence that I wrote poorly and that didn't notice the implications of so I've rewritten it to be very explicit about me talking only about my own experience.
Yup.
Thanks for having my back!
I'm terrible with proofreading my writing lol. I try, I genuinely do try, but goddamn does my mind wander often. I swear every second comment I write on here is edited after I post it because I've made some silly mistake with spelling or grammar along the way. I'm especially bad with changing my phrasing halfway through a sentence and leaving the first half's grammar going one direction and the second half's going in a completely different direction. Good thing it's Hexbear and not an English exam.
Oh I know that. Both the editing after and the rewriting sentences (somehow always leaving an extra word in the middle of the sentence??)
Also I decided that enbie is a much cuter spelling so I'm using that when I refer to myself as enby.
Shhh, no don't - you're gonna embarrass me. I do this so, so often it's not even funny.
I meant I also do those things, if you think I meant I had seen you do them.
It's okay, I was just being silly. I wasn't really feeling embarrassed.
To be honest, I can't recall seeing a single error in any of your comments. There's probably something in there about us having a tendency to be our own worst critics.