The Trump EO on Sex and Gender
Gender is a power structure. The problem with it on the conservative front is that they believe this power structure is ‘evolved’ or ‘ordained by god.’ The problem with it on the progressive front is that they believe gender is not a power structure.
Fuuuuuuuck. I guess we have to do this again. I don't want Medusa Rising to be a ‘gender’ project, but matters of gender in a feminist understanding are kind of central doing any feminism, and also … That Trump EO is … real. Lots of responses to it frame the struggle over gender activism as if it has only two sides: good, trans affirming progressives and bad, trans denying conservatives.
As usual, feminism is here to tell you your binary (difference plus power) is not one.
The battle over GII (gender identity ideology) and legal rights / social acceptance has three fronts, not two. To use a shorthand:
Gender Studies vs Religious Conservatives
Feminists vs Gender Studies and Religious Conservatives
Feminists vs Gender Studies
And, a rear-guard action of Feminists vs Single Issue Adult Human Females who lean very, very far to the conservative side of this whole thing. That tea is for another party.
How the Trump EO Can Be Good For Feminists, or Making Men Be Kind Is the Revolution
The Trump EO on Gender may just force the deep social change we really need and feminists have wanted for a long time. Most of the EO has to do with definitions of sex and preserves women's spaces (including prison) and women's sports and scholarships for women.
It does not refuse trans or queer folk housing or education. It does not refuse them the vote. It does not that say they can't be actors, or singers, or accountants. It does not affirm them as other than men or women. It is hurtful to people who have been told for a long time that hurting their feelings is murder. I really do fear what will come out of HHS for trans folk. There could be real physical and medical harm lurking in whatever is going on behind the lack of communication there.
And it bugs the fuck out of me that this is coming from MAGA and the Heritage Foundation because fear is justified that this order is the first salvo in an action to roll back rights for … everyone whose gained them in the twentieth century. They are coming for us. We know because even while protecting women, this EO protects a zygote even more:
(d) “Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.
(e) “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.
One way that you can tell both GII and conservatives are iterations of the same patriarchal ideology is that they both think about women in terms of our fertility above all. The left talks about women's rights as if they are all only reproductive autonomy, and the right talks about our rights as if reproductive autonomy is not one of them.
Of course, without that most base, material control of one's own body, all other rights become harder or impossible to access and practice.
But see, these TQ folks and community exist. They're people trying to work out a form of happiness in a world that keeps yanking it away for profit. (I'm not dealing with the abusive/criminal elements in this post, every community has that tea, too, is for another party). And the Trump EO might just accidently force some real gender-fucking.
RadMatFems have long argued that as long as women are the one's being kind and making space for TQ folks, the movement is just more patriarchy, just more using women as resources for (mostly) men's projects of ‘self-realization.’ But, here now we have a change that means men have to accept these ‘different men,’ these ‘feminine’ men into their spaces, sports, concept of manhood &c and that, my friends, is the beginning of the end of gender and its effects as a power structure. MAN and MASCULINITY is supposed be this category and way of being that very, very cleanly distinguished from and cut-off from anything womanly or feminine. If it admits any elements of the feminine it so desires and loathes, then what even is … man?
Why would an adult male human have a sense of care for his community or tenderness toward children or a desire to befriend the women in his life? Would he even be a man then?
Both the right and left say No. (I am not getting into the whole AGP thing here, it's is also a whole other kettle.)
So, given that there are all these visibly gender-fucking people around, maybe segregating us all by sex will hasten the destruction of the gender binary that so divides men and women from parts of their full humanity.
Could it be done? Would the left and the TQ ever join in that effort? Stay tuned.
RadMatFem Understands Gender as a Power-Structure Jammed into Our Heads Like a 5000 Year Old Microchip
RadMatFem begins with ‘live and let live’ vibe. We insist however, that women also get to live (both figuratively and literally). We think ‘gender’ is a power structure trained into boys and girls from the first breath to sever any solidarity or real relation between men and women. This leaves us miserable and vulnerable to the ‘solace’ offered by either/both religion or consumer capitalism.
Men are to become emotionally repressed but explosive while expecting solace and service from women.
Women are to become emotionally available for others and never troubling while fulfilling demands for solace and service.
Muscle vs pretty. Man-spreading vs demure postures. Aggressive vs soft. Rational vs emotional. Honorable vs sly. &c &c &c All this is gender. Gender IS an ideology laid over the realities of sex that justifies the subjugation of women. Humans don't neatly divvy up into these masculine and feminine boxes now called ‘identities’. For us there are two sexes and about 9 billion personalities drawing on all the human traits and edited by local cultures. But patriarchy everywhere socializes men into a myth of their superiority, women into a myth of our subservience, and enforces both myths with incredible social and interpersonal violence.
Gender is a power structure. The problem with it on the conservative front is that they believe this power structure is ‘evolved’ or ‘ordained by god.’ The problem with it on the progressive front is that they believe gender is not a power structure.
Which leaves women, again, working against a power structure no one else wants to confront and trapped in jail cells at night with state dispensed condoms with men who are too special and vulnerable to server their sentences in their own wing of a men's prison in violation of all decency and the Geneva Convention on Human Rights. Those women are experiencing a power structure.
Gender is patriarchal, gender is rape culture, gender is be-kind. Patriarchal gender is men claiming to be lesbians and arguing that lesbians have not experienced the right ‘girl-dick’ to convince them they really want penises in their sexual experience they just don't know it yet. Take out the added layer of ‘girl-’ applied to ‘dick’ and you have the same selfish, ignorant, threatening bullshit straight men have said to lesbians for a very long time indeed. This is our final specific example today. Entire books have been written unpacking all these ‘progressive’ and ‘liberating’ claims.
On gender, The Manifesto for a Radical Materialist Feminism declares:
We believe that the gender system is a hierarchy of power, created within patriarchal societies, and layered over the sexed bodies of people to instill entitlement in men and subservience in women. We affirm that the gender system is a mechanism to enable men’s expropriation of women's bodies and labour as a resource. We believe that the gender system prescribes human potential, personality, and expression of talent in ways that are pathological and traumatic. Thus, we affirm gender non-conformity in our sexed being as a natural and vital practice in the weakening and removal of the gender hierarchy and the violence that defends it.
Women deserve for the infinite, wondrous, complex, and even flawed variety of our personalities to have free expression without pathologizing them as medical disorders or ‘genders’.
Girls (and boys) deserve freedom from sexualization and freedom to develop comfort and confidence inhabiting their own bodies.
Adolescent girls (and boys) deserve informed networks from family to civic institutions to support them in the often disorienting transformations of body and self during their teen years.
Women deserve spaces for our own time, privacy, culture, loves, friendships, experiences in the daily activities of life and for the unfolding of our being and dreaming on our own and the world’s behalf.
We see the present historical phase of patriarchy as one that presses women on two sides with varying intensity across nations. On one side is the left/liberal adoption of gender identity politics, and its collaboration with neoliberal economic interests, that erases women as a social and political class and disenfranchises us economically. On the other side is the right/conservative push for a return to (or maintenance of) patriarchal ‘family values’, the male-led traditional family, a rollback of reproductive rights, a shredding of social safety nets that protect mostly women and our children, and attacks on the rights of same-sex couples across racialized groups. This regressive impulse is often combined with the politics of purity of national identity, sometimes coupled with white supremacy and antisemitism, and an even more robust embrace of neoliberal economics. Both are forms of gender conservatism and have the effect of impinging on women’s sense of self and our agency, lessening our safety in the private and civic spheres.
