Three years later, we return to the question of gender. We are dwelling within the great epoch of the culture war, where the reactionary right, with all their Christian nationalist and racialist zeal, is on the advance, and the limited freedoms of transgender people are in their sights. The transphobic feminists, the progressive left wing of this anti-trans campaign, have largely collapsed into this right wing bloc, and are increasingly politically irrelevant. Despite a clarification in the terms of the political debate, there are still many confusions, obfuscations, and mis-theorisations of the gender question. In many ways, the radical queer today is just as politically confused as they were three years ago (despite the positive developments – the slow eclipse of identity politics and the re-emergence of Freudo-Marxist analysis).
For republication, I present a second edition of the Theses on the Gender Question.
1) Neither sex-essentialism nor gender-identitarianism offers a constructive path for a revolutionary account of gender.
On the question of gender, society is today divided into two camps. In one camp, we find the sex-essentialists, who argue that the social category of woman is fundamentally tied to the existence of a biologically constituted female sex. There are left and right versions of this argument. The latter is a classical reactionary position – that women are defined by membership to a particular sex-role, biologically and at times divinely inscribed upon the human body at conception. The former is “critical” of gender-roles, and insists on a purely biological definition of womanhood for self-proclaimed feminist reasons. In the eyes of this camp, trans identity is an attempt to undermine the essential bio-social community of womanhood, which is the basis of all feminist politics and women’s political and cultural rights. These two camps, once separate but allied, have now collapsed into one another.
The official ideology of the bourgeois liberal state, however, is a form of liberal gender-identitarianism, which argues that transgender identity is legitimate and should be recognised within the legal and social institutions of bourgeois civilisation. These claims hinge on a notion of “gender identity” – the idea that one’s gender is ultimately determined by an inner identification with a set of social signifiers or gender archetypes. What proceeds is a liberal democratic argument, that ultimately transgender people harm no-one by existing, and should be respected on the basis of formal legal, and even social, equality. The problem though, is that the gender identitarians deny a systematic or structural view of gender, seeing gender as a purely aesthetic or cultural identity, and lacking in all systematic accounts of patriarchy, womanhood, and sex.
Ultimately, for revolutionaries, neither of these positions offer satisfying answers. The sex-essentialist position, which has been embraced by some social chauvinists in the workers movement, reinforces and upholds gender roles, regardless of how feminist one proclaims itself to be. On the other hand, trans identitarianism is a hollow theoretical framework upon which to base one’s ontology of gender. The gender-critical position easily points out that many mainstream transgender discourses (often created and promoted by heteronormative institutions) reify notions of sex-difference and gender roles – the notion of “being born a woman in a man’s body” certainly implies a lot of about gender, sex, and the human mind. So too does the dependence on an artificial
separation between gender, sex, and sexuality, a view which is promoted by liberal sexology. We need an alternative theoretical system for understanding gender.
2) The question of gender is ultimately that of a social division of labour.
A materialist theory of gendered society, and thus of gender, must begin with labour. Gender is a set of social roles which reflect a social division of labour – specifically the social division of reproductive labour. With the emergence of the familial mode of social organisation, and thus patriarchy, reproduction and production are systematically disconnected, with this connection reaching its apex in capitalist societies. This produces interrelated but separate modes of production, and modes of reproduction. Gender, fundamentally, as a social relationship pertains primarily to the mode of reproduction, and secondarily to the mode of production.
This phenomenon can be seen across all class societies, as gender roles are organised and re-organised to fit changes in the relations and forces of production. We can clearly observe this phenomenon in societies where some third gender-role emerges, neither male nor female in its coding. This is often denoted by a third gender (officially or not) that is selected from among members of certain social groups. Take for example the eunuch in imperial China – the administrator class that performs neither the male nor female social role, and is modified as such. It should be noted that in the case of the eunuch, as in many other cases, the sexed body is modified in order to reflect the transformation of one’s gender role. Other examples can be found in traditional religious, or spiritual roles, in which members of a religious caste or community are expected to abandon certain gendered responsibilities in order to achieve spiritual purity. In the patriarchal agrarian societies of ancient Judea, religious texts record the existence of third sexed individuals, who were obliged to fulfil certain social obligations (see Anne Fausto-Sterling’s article ‘The Five Sexes’).
The forms of labour ascribed to each gender in contemporary capitalist societies are well documented (men dig, women weave, men build, women clean, men philosophise, women admire), but the core of the problem is not simply a division – it is a hierarchy. The labour of women is systematically undervalued and marginalised, reflecting its position as part of the secondary, “domestic” sphere that is removed from public life. This exploitation is the underlying drive of the patriarchal social form in general, and what makes it so persistent in the face of changes in mode of production. It is this very condition of exploitation that gender roles conceal beneath appeals to feminine nature and the proper division between sexes.
Gender (or gender-roles, for the two ultimately share an identity) is then a manifestation on the level of culture and law of what is repressed deep within the underlying strata of the social order, movements of labour and reproduction (society’s id, or in Marxist terms the infrastructure or base). In reflecting these relations back at society, gender does so in a distorted way, obscuring the real dynamics while presenting a strange view to the society as a whole. In a very real sense then, gender is an ideology (that is, an imaginary relationship to one’s real conditions of life). An ideology that reflects not biological sex, but a social division of labour that is distributed according to sexed social roles.
All that is attached to the gender categories on the level of culture is a reflection of this exploitative relationship. The woman is robbed of her productive contribution to society by the fact that her share of the social product is hidden behind closed doors, in the home, in private. This relegates her to the lesser social position that is described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex – and in turn produces her cultural marginalisation. In all spaces, the centrality of men to human life, in politics, in culture, in interpersonal relationships, is reflective of and reinforces that deeper gendered division of labour. Man is the first sex, standing in for all humanity, embodying agency and protagonism. Woman is the other, constructed as separate, demeaned, weak and marginal. Even when women leave the home and enter into the market economy as wage labourers, they find themselves funnelled into roles that reflect their domestic status – cleaners, sex workers, teachers, nurses, waitresses. These industries are subject to intense exploitation by capital, a dynamic which is justified by claims that the work is easy for women – it is just part of their nature, after all.
It should be noted that the only time womanhood is given positive content is when it is part of the heterosexual dyad – that is, when it stands apart from the non-heterosexual, degenerate sexual deviant. Women and men form a unity, expressed in heterosexuality, that is counterposed to the figure of the sexual invert.
3) Gender is more than just identity, but identity plays a decisive role in its construction.
How then, does one become gendered? This question is important, and also relatively simple (at least at first). One’s gender is assigned at birth, in reference to their perceived physical sex (intersex conditions will be discussed later in this piece). What follows is a prolonged period of socialisation into the gender system. Importantly, both genders are socialised into the gender system as a whole – one is informed both about the nature and behaviour of one’s own gender, and of your counterpart. The core of this process is the formation of an ego-ideal, that is, an internalised notion of the self that is constructed during the mirror-stage in psychosocial development. From a very young age, children begin to recognise themselves as separate beings, composed of a unity of seemingly disconnected elements. This unity is understood to be “us” and exists as an ideal to which we constantly refer. This ego-ideal is not free of ideology, indeed, as Althusser argues, it is the site of the first ideological interpellation.
Part of this process is instilling a strong sense of identity with the gender role that is assigned. Boys are disciplined if they behave girlishly, and told that they are boys, and should act like it. Girls experience many of the same processes. Children are of course subjects, and often resist or rebel against this socialisation process (indeed, this is perhaps the origin of gender non-conformance and transgender existence – though that is beyond the scope of this piece). However, an extensive amount of work is dedicated to making sure that at least most of this socialisation process sticks. As such, identity is a part of gender – every person on earth is aware of the gender that they are meant to be.
However, identity is not enough. It is only one part of the gendered experience – ultimately people live as gendered agents, being gendered by society and their peers, and their condition is internalised through that process. We are all in the process of becoming-gendered through our lives – transgender people just as much as anyone else.
4) It is not possible to define gender in unitary terms, because it has no singular point of origin
When defining a chair, it is often difficult to create a definition that includes all chairs, and excludes all other types of furniture. This is because the “chair” is an abstraction – in every instance of the chair, we learn a little of chairs as a whole – but the total category always eludes us. This is the relationship between the abstract and the concrete – something Marxists should be very familiar with.
Gender is an abstraction in this same way. It plays a vital social role, but its individual instantiations are not uniform – women are very different from each other, as are men. Instead, when we are presented with the man, we are presented with a cluster of properties – a set of physical
characteristics onto which are ascribed certain social significance, a certain personality, a certain social role, a certain approach to the larger world. Not all men will possess all of these traits, but they must possess at least some. And the line where quantitative transforms into qualitative is largely elusive.
5) The cult of “Biological Sex” is itself a manifestation of gender ideology.
Today there is much talk of biology – the rallying cry for those opposed to transgender rights is their fidelity to their ninth grade science textbook. This bears some thought, because the physical body – and its sexed characteristics – are indeed an important part of gendered existence. It is the yardstick used by straight society to determine our initial assignment.
However, what the defenders of biological reductionism fail to understand is that in the relationship between sex and gender (the sex-gender dyad) it is gender that overdetermines sex. For sex (meaning the sexed body) is regularly intervened in in order to maintain a gendered world. Intersex conditions are “treated” and the children that have them are “restored to normal”. Women around the world shave their legs and armpits, remove facial hair, and otherwise practice merciless beauty standards on themselves and others in order to perform to a standard of femininity necessary to be treated as proper women. Men modify their bodies, often with hormonal treatments, to better embody a masculine ideal. These interventions – leaving aside trans experiences – are clearly attempts to make the body conform to the ideal of gender – the body is sexed by gender, not the other way around. Indeed, this is the source of “gender dysphoria” – the ego-ideal understands itself through gendered ideology, and the body consistently fails to reach its exacting standards. The men who punish themselves physically for their perceived physical inadequacies, the women who exact strict beauty regimens, are themselves dysphoric.
Those feminists who hold closely to a notion of womanhood that is centred on biological sex are operating off the false belief that in order for a feminist politics to emerge, one must have a fixed and defensible definition of womanhood. This seems to be mis-identifying the problem – it is patriarchy that seeks the strictest maintenance of the link between biological sex and gender identification. It is the most fervent patriarchs, be they religious or secular, that advocate for women and men to separate and act according to their specific sexed roles, that wish for women to be limited to nothing more than birthing sows for their perverse society. Not to mention the fact that exalting and delimiting womanhood has long been tied to reactionary projects. Traditional notions of femininity and womanhood, defined against trans and gender nonconforming people today find their strictest defenders in traditionalist fascist and progressive feminist circles.
The aim of the feminist revolution is not to reify and defend womanhood as a concept, or to uphold “females” as a caste – just as it is not the role of the proletarian revolution to maintain and uplight the social category of “worker”. It is the role of the feminist revolution to break the chain of signification between the sexed body and the gender system, between certain genitals and certain kinds of work, between certain relations and certain ways of dressing, or living. That revolution is against biological sex as ideology, not in its defence.
6) Women are the null-space within which resistance to gender germinates.
As Simone de Beauvoir famously argued, women represent a null-space, a non-human form. Men are the primary, the protagonist, the subject, the point around which all philosophy, and law, and medicine is referenced. Women are always seen as a deficient other half, the lesser category – the second sex. It is in this that we can find a revolutionary potential – for it is in this absence that we can hope to uncover new possibilities of a world without gendered relations. The key is not to “preserve” the category of woman – that is the task of patriarchy, not of feminists. We do not come to save “womanhood” – we are its annihilators.
Notably, as mentioned above, womanhood is given positive content, only in relation to manhood as part of the heterosexual dyad. As such, the revolutionary feminist project which seeks to germinate resistance to the gender system – and thus to patriarchy – must challenge heterosexuality itself, along with marriage, the couple-form, and the family – for these are chains that bind women to men, not only economically but politically.
7) Gender-rebels negate gender’s hierarchy.
What then of our brave gender rebels? Often, those of us who seek to transition, or to live as the gender we were not assigned, or to deny our gendered lives entirely are treated at best as idealists working to undo the world by changing our mannerisms or dress. While trans identity is not itself revolutionary – the weapon of critique will never replace the critique by weapons – we should encourage everyone to rebel in their own ways against the gender hierarchies that are thrust upon us. Would it not be beneficial to have all kinds of people resisting gender norms, breaking the symbolic link between sex characteristics and gender roles, living in bold and unconventional ways? Surely the process of abolishing gender will at first present as an explosion of different modes of living.
8) Trans identitarianism is an obstacle to the abolition of gender.
The worst product of TERFism is anti-TERFism, and this is nowhere clearer than amongst the transgender identitarians. The project of constructing a fixed, politically palatable transgender identity, which is at best ignorant of, and at worst hostile to gender abolition, revolutionary feminism, and psychoanalytic Marxism, is a project of liberal integration with the existing order. Today, it is often in the name of the trans community that the traditional slogans of the popular front are upheld – defend liberal democracy from fascism, defend capitalist civilisation from barbarism. It is this exact politics which poses a limit for our revolutionary activity. The task is not to defend a static set of queer identities. The task is to fuse the struggle of gender and sex deviants (be they transsexuals, genderqueers, butch lesbians, or revolutionary feminists) with the struggle for the emancipation of humanity – that is, for sexual liberation, and socialism.
9) The meaningful existence of transgender people is self-evident.
Are transgender identities legitimate? Surely this is the question we have all come here to answer. However, as Marxists we must hold to the principle expressed by the old man himself – “Nothing human is alien to me.”
Transgender people, gender non-conforming people from across the spectrum of possible self-understanding, have always existed. As long as rigid gender hierarchies have dominated society, people have wanted to break free, to live differently, and be loved and accepted as such. This fact, which has long been documented at the margins of society, is all the evidence we need that it is a persistent phenomenon – part of our daily struggle to survive under the patriarchal mode of living.
Transgender identity then, is as “valid” (a largely useless concept) as any gender identity – it is part of the gender system, another dynamic in the way we live our lives. It is just as valid as the identification with womanhood or manhood possessed by any woman or man. The fact that this identity is contingent and tied to systems of power is something we all have in common.
10) Transfeminist Marxism does not seek to overturn women’s liberation, but to complete it.
The gender question is simply an extension of the women’s question. It is taking the fundamental revolutionary insights of the Marxist-Feminist tradition, and applying them systematically, in a revolutionary critique of every institution of gendered society. Our revolutionary struggle must be total, to overturn every stone of gendered society, every patriarchal social mores and institution, to smash apart and render broken the chains that have bound women for millennia. Holding on to an ahistorical and transcendental notion of a community of womanhood, is in itself a reflection of that old order.
Today it is highly fashionable in certain circles to talk about anti-capitalist and even socialist feminisms, to be critical of radical feminists, and to pour heat onto the bearers of cultish liberal feminism. These targets, be they trans-hating feminists or liberal corporate feminists are well warranted. However, it is necessary to turn the cold gaze of critique onto the social milieus that produce these criticisms. For today one cannot turn around without running into a liberal who proclaims themselves a radical, an anti-capitalist, an intersectionalist. Using these terms, they weave a tale in which women and queer people can be liberated simply through some academic discourse, or perhaps through a session of privilege-checking, or maybe through some vague intonation towards mutual aid. This radical liberalism is the long shadow of despair cast by liberalism proper – while it resents liberalism’s lack of “intersectionality”, it ultimately cannot critique its fundamental premises. Liberal democracy, the centrality of the individual, the fear of collective action, the inability to perceive a genuine alternative to capitalist democracy and market economies – this is the currency that radical liberals trade in. The truth is that no amount of academic discourses or self-conscious navel-gazing can undo the fact that the emancipation of women and queer people will come only when the proletariat can organise as a class to seize power and establish its class dictatorship so as to ensure the transition to a classless society – a society that must, by definition, be free of gendered hierarchies too.
For a revolutionary transfeminist Marxism, the abolition of gender itself is the only goal that makes sense. In such a revolutionary struggle, all old identities and categories will be broken apart, and new, emancipated humanity will take its place. The twilight of the patriarchs will be the triumph of queer liberation, and herald the coming of communism.
