I’ve just had the pleasure of reading three interesting pieces of discourse.
First up, Alyson Escalante’s 2016 piece “Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto”. There is very little about this I have to disagree with.
Then, her own 2018 response to that work, “Beyond Negativity: What Comes After Gender Nihilism?”. On the one hand, pushing for a more material analysis is excellent, though I feel like all the work is actually done here by Wittig and this merely restates it
On the other hand, what on earth is this ending? It reads just like any other wishy-washy proclamation, missing only a communism,-now!.88x31.gif to slap on your homepage in solidarity. This anti-anti-manifesto is decidedly a manifesto.
The comments, however, conceal a banger which I nearly missed. “blister” (@destroysound) starts, and then wow, they continue. I don’t trust Medium to continue existing for that much longer — or even the Wayback machine (which Medium very carefully tries to break :) love it) — so I’m reproducing it here in its entirety.
There is very little about this I have to disagree with.
blister (Jul 9, 2018 (edited))
nihilism is infinitely preferable to simplistic, contrived explanations and lack of intellectual rigor. nihilism is eminitely useful and practical for critique, for attack, for demonstrating what cannot be known or said. let me preface by saying this — i don’t disagree with your thesis, but your conclusion. the struggle for gender abolition may well be linked to the struggle for communism, in fact, i think that this is extremely likely to be true. it is altogether probable that establishing communism will improve material conditions for everyone (except the bourgeoisie), especially marginalized people such as those who are gender variant. but you haven’t done any of the due diligence to show that that establishing communism and gender abolition are equivalent (other than to quote someone who simply tells us they are and provides no evidence to back up this claim).
to begin with, you claim that butler’s construction of gender is not comprehensive. but your new conception is exponentially less so — it relies on a naive sex binary and assumes that there are no more complicated forces at play than a simple narrative of class struggle. you’re replacing a complex, subtle, well thought out, researched conception of gender with many points of actuation with, literally, “girls are oppressed and boys are oppressors”. you apparently expect nobody to notice the shell game you are playing here. your new conception of gender would be considered incomplete and dishonest by anyone who had taken a single undergraduate womens studies class, as they would all recognize that patriarchy harms men as well, for example, by strictly limiting their societally acceptable roles and behavior. not to mention there is no conception here of intersex conditions, trans individuals, nonbinary individuals, third/fourth genders. all of which are conditions for which we have historical evidence of dating back to paleolithic times in some cases, all of which we have observed in native societies, all of which appear to be normal, naturally occurring phenomena, with much evidence pointing at a neurological source for some of these conditions. surely you don’t expect us to believe that the construction of third or fourth genders in many native societies the world over was shaped by class struggle. if that really is your thesis, you should be able to find evidence of such in those societies — for example, what kind of economic and political forces cause a society to develop 3 genders instead of 2? is there any pattern to the nature of societies that express 3 genders? for example, if third genders are all systematically oppressed, why? if not, what causes their formation, since your position is that it is the oppression that precedes the identity? this is all being very lenient with your theory of gender as it doesn’t even conceptualize any of this at all.
and of course, you haven’t done any of this ground work that i just described. we are expected to just accept this stale, offensive binarist narrative that makes oppression the very core of the female identity, indeed, we are meant to believe that there is no female identity other than being the oppressed. if that is true, why would any trans woman who understands this choose to transition? are trans feminine people simply absurd masochists who choose or are compulsed to put themselves into a role which is defined by being oppressed? are we just (slightly) more socially acceptable rachel dolezal clones once more? or is it a simple (and self-destructive) aesthetic fetish — an invocation to buffalo bill, perhaps? if gender is only a material relationship, and nothing else, then trans feminine people seem to be headed suspiciously in the direction of our old friend, the ‘mentally ill’ evaluation again, or at least, to be looked at with a nervous eye, like someone who enjoys flinging themselves down stairwells for fun. hi, i’m blister, welcome to jackass.
you remark that gender nihilism, “due to its grounding in a faulty and misapplied foucauldian notion of displaced and dispersed power, never asks whose power is being enacted and whose interest this all serves” as if this is not a question which could be cleanly answered by a post-structualist analysis and which might, there as well, lead into a discussion of market and political forces as well as many other forces which are exerted on particular gendered identities. so, if the original argument never asked the question, then maybe the logical start might be asking the question, instead of re-contextualizing the entire argument? since you chose to throw out the whole argument instead, this was obviously pretense. you might as well have just written “i’m a marxist-leninist now, so i have to recant all of this horrible postmodern stuff” and had done with this article.
you unfairly equate nihilism with bleakness — despair and lack of hope, and then ironically place all of your precious newborn hope in a project that is essentially just a contrived vessel for these hopes, with no clear plan on how we will actually get there or what will happen to gender when we do. will gender disappear? why does gender demonstrably exist in the historical record and in native societies and before the formation of capitalism then? as a matter of fact, what happened to gender in various implementation of communism? any historical basis for your argument.. at all? you summarily list “patriarchy”, “white supremacy”, “colonialism”, “the nuclear family” and “capitalism” as the factors that lead to the construction of gender and very neatly, they are exactly what your panacea aims to address. you haven’t provided even a tiny sliver of insight into how building communism will naturally lead to gender abolition — only shown that it will lead to better material conditions for women and queer folks, which should have been obvious to any lukewarm brain in the first place. how does this naturally lead to gender abolition?
do you surmise that the gay identity will also vanish under communism? there seems to be no historical basis for that sort of claim in actual communism in the wild, and quite a bit of evidence that actually, homophobia doesn’t just go away under communism either, so it seems unlikely that this was intended. is the gay identity somehow fundamentally different than the trans identity? than other gender identities? how could there even be a gay identity without gender, anyway? what about other identity politics? what force or program will cause this? how will it operate? can this trick be shown to have been performed successfully historically? is this also a kind of alchemy of hope? will gender disappear if you stop believing in fairies?
what happens to non-binary gender identities in any interim period? are they still afforded special rights until their identity somehow vanishes? or are they ignored and become victims of inevitable hate crimes due to their visibility? do we make temporary hate crime laws? that measure seems like it contradicts your thesis quite a bit. does the revolution suddenly make people who hate gender nonconforming folks stop? or do we just kill every last one of them? (i’m on board with that last suggestion) do we create a concept of thoughtcrime? is tom cruise involved? do we just ask gender nonconforming people nicely to stop making and using identities, there’s too many of them, thank you, as soon as we get done storming the white house and executing the POTUS? how will building communism stop the proliferation of gender identities? what will stop LGBT people from continuing to desire to map out our differences using identity? will people have sexual preferences for other people who have particular types of genitals under communism? will people have sexual preferences for particular types of bodies? will hormonal differences be dealt with via medical intervention as a child in order to eliminate visibly transgender people? will visibly trans people be considered ‘third gender’ during any interim period, or at any time at all? what’s to stop this? and again — what is the class character of a third gender anyway? will people be able to get sex reassignment surgery? how will those people identify themselves? will transgender people be required to identify themselves to lovers under law? what if doing so would make them unsafe or subject to misapplied homophobia? and if trans people can be subject to homophobia, then how can material conditions be the only component to a conception of gender at all? should a man be legally allowed to shoot a transgender woman if he takes her home and then realizes she has a dick? in general, will homophobia ever be used to justify violence against people whose genitals are atypical for their gender presentation (trans panic)? how do we stop this during any transitional period? how do we stop homophobia in general? just be communists for a while? how long until bigots stop passing bigotry on to others? 100 years? 200? how many trans people are gonna get killed during that time while we figure out how to create this cold fusion generator? how will the system prevent prejudices like homophobia from re-establishing a conception of gender identity through common fear (see also — bathroom panic, trans panic). how will people designate their sexual preferences to others? will this reference gender identity? gender presentation? sex? something else? could any of these things reify gender identity once it has been abolished?
what mechanisms will stop the ‘outsider effect’ towards those who have an atypical gender presentation? in case you are unaware, the outsider effect is a proven and testable bias against people who are not recognized as having a shared identity with the subject (this effect can occur even when the ingroups and outgroups are determined randomly: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/how-politics-breaks-our-brains-and-how-we-can-put-them-back-together/453315/). perhaps this, too, is a symptom of the us-vs-them narrative of capitalism — but it seems too pervasive to be likely. if it is, what could be the cause? if this is, instead, an evolutionary feature, what steps will society take to negate it? will you institute programs to build a common sense of identity with people of various gender presentation? will we generate propaganda informing people of the existence of others whose bodies are not like their own, but assurethem they are nevertheless our comrades, we promise. how is this any different than what we do right now? will the housing project expose everyone to a rare phenotype of somehow still undifferentiated, identity-less human so that people become more tolerant to differences? what if people with that gender presentation or sexual characteristics are VERY rare, say, 1/1000 or less (ie: persons with an intersex condition, for example, 5α-reductase deficiency)? maybe there can be meet and greet sessions, or mandatory viewing of educational renditions of ru-paul’s “female or sh*m*le” segment. again — how would any of these techniques, loosely categorized as ‘visible gender diversity’, be different than how we already raise awareness for such concerns right this moment under capitalism?
in general: what’s to keep old concepts of identity from seeping back in to your pristine, identity-less biosphere? how will we shed them in the first place? will ex-men voluntarily give up their male identity? will ex-women consciously stop referring to themselves as women? will we stop gendering others? why would we make the effort to do this? will there be penalties if we do not? will everyone at once choose to forget all of the gender-based signifiers that we learn throughout our lives — pink and blue, dresses and slacks, barbie and gi-joe, jack and jill, link and zelda (these two can even switch gender), football and ballet… will we just all at once forget that this entire language of gender signifiers ever existed and immediately stop judging others based on gender? if not, what process will cause this? how can we be sure that all of our old prejudices are gone? will anyone assume that women are more emotional than men during any transitional period? will anyone look down on a man if he cries during this period? how do we stop these stereotypes from propagating? how are they directly linked to material conditions anyway? aren’t the reasons for these false judgements actually usually attributed to ‘hormones’, something that butler mentions in her definition of gender? is there any basis to that? are there any other reasons? are they really due to market and political forces? if so, how? will the result of this whole process look like a completely uniform set of humans that display no sex characteristics or gender signifiers whatsoever? how would we even get there? and how could such a thing be maintained? what would be the consequences?
you rightly show via sources that establishing communism and relocating queer children to loving homes would increase their quality of life (although, of course, this alone cannot be shown to end homophobia, which seems to be demonstrably present in existent communist societies as mentioned above). but what reason do you have to think that building communism will lead to the complete elimination of the nuclear family when that paradigm has been dominant in europe since the 13th century — during which time not even agrarian capitalism had been developed! will parents be separated from their children at birth? will you maintain diversity quotas in each communal housing block? one trans person, 4 gays, and 3 bis per city block, please. will all children be randomly rotated between private homes to avoid normalization of a particular style of relationship? what will the results of this unprecedented intentional rearrangement of the family unit be? how could we possibly even know? how will this new arrangement avoid replicating the exact structure of the nuclear family without a particular necessity for blood relations via spontaneous formation (exactly what happens right now)? or shall wesimply elect to grow individuals in vats, a truly brave new world. that might be the best option, since via technological handwaving you can be sure that everyone born has the same sex, gender, and sexuality. this would actually be less handwaving than any other method i’ve mentioned because now you just have to figure out a straightforward technical solution rather than an np-impossible lovecraftian social bullet hell with more unsolved question marks than the riddler’s walk-in closet. but again, there are, of course, no details about how this project will be accomplished, or what parts of the nuclear family are of most concern, only that it will be accomplished somehow by a program involving communal housing and rehoming lgbt kids, and that the stated goal is to destroy the nuclear family. as a matter of fact, this is a goal that we both share, but fortunately enough, it seems to me that this odious beast is nearly on its death bed already, and i plan on stabbing it a few times more and desecrating its corpse on my way out, so you might not even bother.
you invite us to perform “daring imaginations of new futures” and develop “a clear set of materialist theoretical principles and praxis to unite around” but you don’t do any of the ground work on any of this yourself or give us any examples or speculation to convince us that this new waypoint that you’ve set on the way to abolishing gender is going to take care of resolving even a significant portion of the goal. i’ve done more honest imagination here of what such a future or program might look like than you did in your article, and i can’t really see it being an instant win in any way. you can’t just tell people to “build communism” and “imagine the results” to avoid having the impetus of doing the hard work of showing how it would actually operate. your proposal is more of a directive and a hope — it’s not that it asks more questions than it answers, it asks ALL of the questions and answers none. and then, to wrap it up, you instruct us to go forth, have hope (which is really the only praxis you are advocating here), and nihil no more. cheer up emo kid, the vanguard of the revolution will be by shortly. if i can speak frankly, i can assure you that this article did not give me hope. my experience of gender is atypical and i often bump up against the absurdity of it in my daily life. the inability of identity to encapsulate my experience is something which troubles me regularly. ironically, the simple acceptance of the unintelligiblity and incoherence of gender identity makes me feel more relieved than the proposition that i am going to need to wait and work for a revolutionary moment and the implementation of communism, as well as coherent, actionable, scientific solutions to many of the questions above (many of which seem very difficult), before i see even a potential improvement to the random and incoherent whims of gender identity. there are trans people out here dying and we need a solution today.
your stated goals in this piece are to refactor your earlier work, which is based around a proposed discarding of the entire concept of gender identity, into an actionable and theoretical framework. but other than convince me that gender diverse persons would likely be somewhat better treated under communism, which i would have accepted without question before i even read this article. you haven’t actually generated any framework except one based around binary gender. if that were acceptable, we wouldn’t be in the case where we need recognition and special rights at all, so we would never have to have this tedious discussion in the first place. the whole reason we ARE having this discussion is because trans people exist, we have existed since well before capitalism was pervasive, and we wanted to self-identify so that we could find each other and organize. you are absolutely correct in your original article about the problems that seeking recognition brings. the desire for recognition and the introduction/propagation of labels reifies the violence contained in the binary and focuses transphobia down onto the people most vulnerable. but your new solution is an order of magnitude worse. it’s actively transphobic itself. you went from a theory that affirms all gender expressions by discarding the need to identify at all, to one that reverts to an incomplete, binarist view of gender which actively excludes the same people that the theory was supposed to be serving in the first place. given this, i would like to propose my own alternate solution for gender nihilism, one which can be immediately put into action by any interested party who wants to do something productive instead of ‘daring imaginations of new futures’, which i have been doing pretty much all day now, with less than stellar results, as you can see.
rather than a passive negation, or a wistful hope for an unplanned, and therefore highly improbable future, i propose an immediate, active, destructive gender nihilism, a critique, not a program, centered fully upon this moment, one that transmits itself through propaganda of the deed, deliberate and public acts of gender transgression, constant and relentless confrontation and challenging of norms. a gender terrorism, if you will. a rejection of gender identity and gender roles, but one in active, deliberate motion. these acts incite the viewer to question their own beliefs and preconceptions about gender. these acts are as likely to be performed by gender conforming or gender nonconforming people, they can be permanent or temporary, and they offer a degree of security to the gender nonconforming people who participate in them, as they can’t be readily identified. these acts don’t even need to be conscious — it’s easy enough to identify movements like the metrosexual movement which, although toothless and comical in many ways, represented a significant and, i would argue, more or less permanent refactor to the socially accepted gender presentation of men. these acts are inherently threatening to the bourgeoisie, who, as you very correctly noted, use the concept of binary gender as well as many other constructed identities to divide and attack individuals within their class. they are disrupting to transphobic hate groups as they obscure the identities of trans people by making the ‘definition’ of their gender presentation overlap with other gender identites (for example, consider if wearing dresses was a common act for men. how would people know at a glance who was a non-passing trans woman? more practically, what if non-passing trans women dressed like butch lesbians instead of the stereotype of non-passing trans women as drag queens? would anybody even pick up on that at all? this is a common angle of attack for me, by the way. these are just a few examples. there is a universe of highly transgressive gender shit out there.) i propose that these acts of gender transgression are part of an emergent, decentralized process that is already ongoing and, indeed, this is one of the reasons for the current proliferation of gender identities.
the battle has already been joined, and it started in earnest when time magazine announced the ‘transgender tipping point’, at which point this shit hit the mainstream consciousness like a fat line of fentanyl, sending the entire trans community into distressed spasms and respiratory arrest as we were thrust into the spotlight. months later, caitlyn jenner was the worst possible reminder to cis folks that we exist. the only immediate and logical response to our bad press is to act visibly in ways that cause people to openly question and reject the categories that have been constructed, as well as rethink their preconceptions and stereotypes within those categories. as society loses its ability to differentiate between gender identity, gender presentation, fashion, body modification, improvisation, sex, practical jokes, and so on and so forth, our ability to conceive of any cohesive gender identity will be crippled. as we expand the acceptable presentation for any gender in the mind of average people, the lines that were drawn between once clear categories become more and more blurred. in short, we DDOS gender identity, spamming absurd and unique identities, showing in the process the incoherence of all identities, adopting a thousand masks that might or might not be our own, sabotaging entire categories. show people there is not anything sacred there, that we’re just trying things out to see how we like them, and that this is perfectly fine and good and safe. make people smile instead of making them feel trapped in a prescribed role, make people think about their own identity in the process. the natural conclusion of this process is a negation of gender entirely — beginning with the observation that no label can perfectly describe your unique and mutable self-expression. increased visibility of gender transgression also serves over time to normalize these presentations, which avoids the dehumanizing, us-vs them effects of identity.
as a side note, this sort of conception of gender exists in other places in the world today, such as japan, where gender non-conformity, especially for ‘males’, is significantly more accepted than in the western world. do you reckon this is because of market or political forces?
essentially, i propose we do what the trans community has been doing this whole time. we just trans even harder. find new and dangerous ways to do it. find ways to make it out safe. initiate others. don’t police identity, but make a show of reinventing ourselves so many times and so radically that identity’s true nature is exposed — it is nothing at all.
or, you know, we could just wait for the rev and then revisit the whole growing people in vats idea, or just all forget who we were completely somehow
y’know what, i’m gonna keep doing it my way for now since its getting me results that i can actually quantify. just let me know when you need me to pick up an ak47 or write some software for the people’s army. just dont tell me to pick boy or girl.
-blister