Gender Liberation
Every transgressive gender is a point of pressure and tension on the cissexual system. Living proof of the lie. Which is exactly why that system wants so badly to kill us. In my view, gender liberation has the potential to center the subversive possibilities of transness: bringing specific focus to the ways that trans people have always been and continue to be active combatants against the imposition of patriarchal gendering systems. Rather than framing us as unfortunate recipients of patriarchal gender we have little choice but to react to, it situates us as agents in a struggle against the patriarchal project to impose unity and essentialism over an endless, ever shifting multiplicity of experiences. Patriarchy does not sit at an equilibrium — calmly and authoritatively administering orders — it is, like all forms of hierarchical power, locked forever in a stance of precarious counterinsurgency. Counterinsurgents depend on the illusion of total control and power to maintain their authority: a unified, totalizing narrative intended to suppress resistance before it can even begin. This is apparent in patriarchy’s attempts to suppress and erase trans people from social life. Trans people are key to its downfall, we are on the frontlines of the conflict. We are the insurgents, not passive victims (as if such a thing ever existed).
Core to my approach to gender liberation, however and importantly (I’m absolutely serious about this), is spite and defiance! Patriarchy makes cis men feel easy and comfortable over their private property relation to claiming masculinity and manhood, defining femininity and womanhood, and utterly erasing all other possibilities. I understand and respect the impulse to totally demolish all that they claim as theirs. However, for myself I can say that I have a much stronger impulse towards theft and sacrilege. I’m not interested in validating their original property claim even as I burn that property down. I want to put my dyke hands all over that which they find sacred. I don’t want to simply tear down their empire, I want to reveal it for the farce it has always been. They’ve never had totality! Nothing was ever theirs! Masculinity, femininity, androgyny, and gender, mean whatever we want them to mean, whenever we want them to mean it. Liberated from the coercive gendering system we make gender a site of play, creativity, expression, and transcendence.
What I hope for the future is not a world where gender has been abolished, but a world in which cisness has been abolished. The right-wing’s worst fears are correct: I think everyone should be trans! To clarify: as an anarchist, I understand revolution not as a singular event but a never-ending project. We do not “reach” anarchism, we strive towards anarchism. Incorporating anti-power values into our social systems demands constant maintenance, establishing shared values and practices oriented towards spotting, analyzing, and undermining nodes of centralized power as they crop up. For gender I imagine something similar, that there will likely never be an endpoint at which we have fully “undone” gender to such a degree that coercive gendering systems can never reemerge. Instead, we will do away with the process of coercive gendering (ex: assigning gender at birth, assuming gender, or associating masculinity, femininity, androgyny with specific genders, gender roles, or presentations, etc.), incorporate social practices of actively transgressing gender, constantly interrogate systems of gendering (not just at birth but throughout social life) as they form, and, through this, honor the true multiplicity of human experience.
I love my gender. I love butchness. I love womanhood. I love being trans and nonbinary. I recognize all of these identities as historically, socially, culturally, and materially contingent, and as such I situate them as identities that connect to a rich history of transgressively gendered people creating identity and making meaning that challenges and undermines that patriarchal status quo. I do not claim them as completely unaffected by patriarchy, but rather shaped in active conflict with patriarchy, not simply accidental and passive symptoms of it. This, to me, implies that subversive gender can and does exist, even under patriarchal rule. The project becomes, then, expanding the agency and collective power of transgressively gendered people, encouraging more people to play with gender transgression, and utterly rejecting patriarchy’s private property claim over defining and assigning gender.
It is likely that butchness as I understand it would never have come to be in a world without patriarchy, but it does not follow that butchness, or any gender, could not exist without it. My gender is not a symptom to be corrected, nor a mere response to an overpowering system. My gender is one formed in political conflict. It is not only the shape of my resistance, but an act of prefiguration: of imagining and living out (as much as is possible) a world after patriarchy. It is true that one can only engage in the act of imagining such a world if one has experienced what it is like to be affected by patriarchy, and yet that reality does not stop us from calling it a dream of liberation.
This essay is one of three newly released essays in my first ever zine: A Woman Can Be Any Gender She Wants To Be. You can download the full zine with artwork here: https://ko-fi.com/s/47012fd267
You can access an audio version of this essay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Jk2gbvW98
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