Gender Binaries, Complicity & Resistance

Is transition consistent with transfeminist opposition to gendered power? Also, too, perhaps the world would be a better place if all humans were blobs.

Illustrating the gender binary, by The Noun Project.

Just yesterday I ran across a comment on BlueSky. I would like to quote it for you in full, but it has since been deleted by the author. Still, I wrote something up at the time, and I’m going to extend it here, as a meditation for you on a subject that trans people wrestle with frequently, and that anti-trans trolls use as a weapon. Fortunately Evan Urquhart of Assigned Media quoted one important bit in his replies, and I quoted another. Let’s put them together to reproduce as much as possible:

Does transitioning not require a certain level of certainty in arbitrary identity paradigms and categorization?

Gender either it matters or it doesn't. If it does then we play the cards we're dealt. If it doesn't, we should be abolishing gender norms, not commandeering them.

Also in there somewhere was something about how it seems like “cherry picking” to select the parts of gender one likes while decrying the rest of the gender system.

This is a somewhat softer version of an essential transfeminist struggle. The harder version of the question asks directly, “Is it possible to transition without supporting the gender binary and the oppression it inflicts?” The harder version is often used by gender critical trolls, but the softer version nags at every trans person who cares about gender justice, gender liberation, and we will even confront ourselves with the harder version at times.

Evan wrote an interesting and thoughtful reflection on the usefulness of current language to capture the variety and detail of trans experience. I think people should read that piece - just a few posts on BlueSky. But I wrote something else. Both of us presumed that the original questioner (“das”) was asking in good faith. Both of us were wrong as it later turned out. But even so, let’s talk about gender, categorization, stereotypes, oppression, complicity, and moral responsibility with respect to trans and non-binary people.

A good starting place in examining these questions is the simple statement that it is possible to oppose gendered dress codes without opposing clothing. That is, I think, a point on which we can all agree.

Consider, then, that gender expression is different from the social forces requiring conformity to specific norms.

Enforced conformity is bad.

It is not “cherry picking” to say that wearing frilly aprons is fine, actually, but murdering people for wearing or not wearing frilly aprons is kind of not okay. Wearing frilly aprons is a fundamentally different activity from assault or murder (or even harassment or scolding).

In making this argument, das is confusing the enforcement of conformity with gender itself. Even further, there’s confusion of more aspects of the gender system. Gender identification is one thing, expression another. Gender attribution (categorizing someone else within a gender based on your experiences of them or what you learn about them) is yet another thing. Gender roles and the gender socialization into those roles are also aspects of the gender system. Gender morés and punishments are sometimes considered part of socialization, sometimes considered separate. All told, that’s a lot of complication to load into the single word gender.

So confusion - of das or anyone else - is perfectly okay in one sense. Everyone confuses and conflates aspects of the gender system at first. It takes time to tease out the important details, and society doesn't make this easy. But this isn't cherry picking. This is careful analysis, of a type that would benefit the TERFs and das.

Coercion through conditioning, threats and violence is always bad. To say that it’s bad even in the context of gender is not singling out aspects of gender. It is consistently condemning things that are also bad in other contexts. In fact, to suggest that conditioning, threats, and violence are good only in a gendered context would be more akin to cherry picking.

Next let's take, "Gender either matters or it doesn't." das's approach here is to ignore the fact that everyone makes compromises with society. EVERYONE. Including das. To say that if gender matters, it must always control how we approach a situation is wrong. This elevates gender to a moral mandate and frames any deviation from societies’ stereotypes and expectations as something contemptible, sinful, or criminal.

But worse, in the context of the original question it singles out trans people as responsible (or at least more responsible) for gendered systems of oppression by virtue of incompletely resisting them.

Asking for an exemption from a gendered dress code, being denied, looking at it closely and then asking again, "Well can you at least let me choose which code applies to me?" doesn't make trans folks responsible for gender’s coercive normativity.

That's bullshit victim blaming and is far too common.

In the formulation of das' post, if we trans people don't blow up the system and damn the consequences, then we are the abusive fucks creating and maintaining Manichaean gender norms. Any practical compromise makes trans persons morally accountable for the whole system.

This ignores all the cis people happy with the status quo. Why does a trans person's unsuccessful challenge or partial challenge or even meek request and acceptance of the response make them more evil and more responsible for the enforcement of gendered dress codes than cis people showing up to work every day who don't challenge the gender code at all?

If trans people don't compromise, we can be socially isolated, fired, and lose the resources we need for secure housing and food and medical care. Even so, many of us accept those consequences. But all of us make some compromises at some point. For job or family or friends or sex partner.

Yet the many occasions when we choose resistance over compromise earn us no credit in the das formulation. That formulation is as much a forced dichotomy as gender itself:

"Gender either it matters or it doesn't. If it does then we play the cards we're dealt. If it doesn't, we should be abolishing gender norms, not commandeering them."

There's simply no room in there for the flexibility necessary to live a human life. Worse, there's a long history of using this line of attack to demonize trans folks. If we seek health care or accept a standard gender label or even a standard pronoun, we're to blame for sexism - or so the attack goes.

Cis people justify demonizing trans people without demonizing themselves because we trans folk (supposedly) knowingly embrace whatever the fuck is the gendered topic of the day instead of passively not knowing any better, which — in this particularly vile formulation — is excusable. But why is a powerless minority resisting but also compromising in a human bid to improve the world while remaining alive more blameworthy than the majority creating the system in the first place? Or simply doing nothing at all?

Worse, this formulation holds trans people responsible not just for sexism, but for our own oppression. By equating compromising with the compulsory system to avoid certain negatives, making any choice that fits within a stereotype becomes the knowing support of a tyrannical stereotype. Of course, the stereotypes have long been explained by feminism to be impossible to uphold completely. No one person can be the madonna and the whore. While this is familiar to most, few consider that with so many opposing and contradictory requirements of the gender roles for men and women, it is just as impossible to be neither the madonna nor the whore. To never do anything feminine and also never do anything masculine. Our lives are too relentlessly categorized to escape the boxes entirely.

The result is catastrophic and would be ironic if it wasn’t intended by the anti-trans movement that set the trap. Without the gender binary, there's no trans oppression. Yet some trans people act in ways approved by the binary or accept or even identify with binary categories when they wish to drive or travel overseas. Given that, aren't we trans folk really to blame for everything related to gender, including trans oppression itself? Now the gender binary is entirely the fault of Alice if she happened to wear a ribbon in her hair on Tuesday.

This trap reminds me of the 1980s and 90s when every time a gay man was bashed or murdered, belligerent fuckers were quick to blame it on a "closet case" who couldn't handle being gay and so lashed out at other gay men. (The anti-gay version of Alex Jones’ "false flag" anti-Democratic rants.)

Of course the natural consequence of this myth being accepted as true is that straight people had no responsibility for anti-gay violence. The very act of attacking someone gay is proof of gayness, so there are never any straights involved! It's victim blaming as a tactic to escape accountability. DARVO, by another name.

The dishonesty of it all is easy to prove. If people actually believed that trans folk are blameworthy if they accept a particular letter on a driver's license because acceptance of the binary reinforces the binary and everything — including violence and coercion — that goes with it, then they'd have to blame the 330 million non-trans USians and 8 billion non-trans humans for all the same behaviours. But they don't demonize passport-seeking cis people because they don’t want to change.

And of course resisting change is the point of this argument. Though many, many trans and non-binary folks go through a phase where they believe the argument has some validity and struggle to decide what gender compromises are ethical to make, the argument itself was invented by anti-trans activists. If it wasn’t first proposed by Janice Raymond, then her book The Transsexual Empire was certainly the most prominent early proponent of it.

TTE argued out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand, the gender clinics were abusive tools of patriarchy that forced trans people to submit to the most sexist and caricatured stereotypes in order to receive treatment. On the other, the supposed victims of the clinics were ultimately to blame for seeking treatment in the first place, and doubly damned for refusing to call out the bad behaviour of the clinics who forced them to walk the scalpel’s edge to continue receiving medical care.

Raymond is too intelligent not to know that it’s nonsensical to portray the clinics as exerting monstrous control (which she did) and also that its most direct victims were more morally responsible for their own abuses than the cis people who controlled their lives. Raymond did not want a world in which trans people gained social agency, and so she set the trap by pretending that trans people were the only ones with moral agency. With trans people responsible for their own oppression and abuse, and for millennia of sexism as well, any critique of the treatment of trans people becomes irrelevant: if cis people are not responsible, there is no moral imperative for cis people to change their behaviour or their society, and certainly no reason cis people should face accountability for the treatment of trans people. If trans people don’t want to be murdered, they should simply stop causing their own murders.

The victim blaming and accountability avoidance are themselves outrageous. But on top of this it is impossible not to become more outraged by just how bullshit are all the argument’s premises.

Resistance and rulership are not a dichotomy. There are many times when someone not at the top of a system of power nonetheless makes choices that also aren’t resisting. Even worse, the argument presumes not only that there is a dichotomy where non-resistance equals tyranny, but that tyrant and resistor are dichotomous categories into which every life, as a whole, must be slotted. But this is ludicrous. Alice doesn't wear a ribbon in her hair on Tuesday only to instantly be a relentlessly stereotypical woman (or girl) for the rest of her life.

Every trans person I know has spent at least some time and effort flouting gender norms just to send a big fuck you to the system. We resist. Yet we also compromise. Alice might go to her grandpa's funeral in a black suit instead of a dress even though she’s already put in her name change paperwork.

That isn’t a sin. That's just a human navigating complicated relationships in a world that had enforced gender norms before that person was born. It is wanting to change the world but also not wanting Nana to think you cared so little for grandpa that gender activism was worth more than quiet respect at his funeral.

Moreover, the word das uses — "commandeer" — is a horrifying violation of everything trans people fight for. Trans people don't commandeer gender norms. That would mean that we are the ones inflicting them on others.

What we're trying to do is make room for self-determination by ending coercion in gender. And that includes the coercion of arguments that say that one must either never do anything connected to the binary at all or become the morally intolerable binary-gender tyrants ourselves.

Again, humans making up human categories is a different thing from violently or abusively imposing those categories. I don't fucking care if Gladys next door thinks that flowery muumuus are feminine as hell as long as she doesn't evict her tenant for wearing or not wearing one.

Nor do I care if Alice wears a hair ribbon. But if I've known Alice for a long time and she's often talked about wanting to wear a hair ribbon, and if I know that she doesn't because she's afraid Gladys will evict her or shoot her or call the cops on her when using a bathroom, then I might squee at Alice's new ribbon not because it shows a particular gender, but because it shows her bravery.

The ribbon hasn't lost it's gendered meaning, but it should be obvious by the fact that no trans persons squees over every gendered thing everywhere and everywhen that that the squee'ing is not because of the gendered meaning. Trans people squee over the gender expressions of other trans people because we are happy for all our Alices. We’re happy for their bravery and their small acts of gendered self-determination challenging gendered threats and coercion and compulsion.

As a transfeminist, I understand the importance of one formation of the dilemma das raised. It is, in fact, fine to question what makes a person a collaborator with unjust power. Those questions are useful and even necessary. But the exact framing das uses is misleading and anti-trans.

Gender matters because people matter and people are caught up in this complicated, coercive, abusive system we call gender. The system can’t be torn down in a day, and the process of tearing it down threatens incidental harm to people who cling to the system for its false certainties, comfortable not for their truthfulness but for their familiarity. But even though gender matters, it is not and can never be a justification for disrespect, discrimination, harassment, punishment, assault, or murder.

Trans liberation means gender self-determination, not reversing oppression onto cis people or outlawing all items and behaviours presently gendered. The statements "compulsory gender is bad" and "self-determined gender is whatever the fuck you want it to be, have fun with your bad selves," are not in tension.

Abolishing gender norms doesn't mean Alice has to suffer through 25 years of being told she can't wear hair ribbons or she's a sick person who hates god only to come out as trans and spend the next 75 years telling herself she can't wear hair ribbons or she's a sick person who hates freedom. That would be some super fucked up shit even if the entire argument hadn't been invented by cis people to demonize trans people as responsible for our own oppression so that cissies don't have to stop murdering us.

When trans people say we don’t want discrimination based on gender expression, we’re not saying we want to discriminate against people who obey stereotypes while celebrating people who disobey them. It’s not cherry picking. It’s not inconsistent. There is no cognitive dissonance.

We want you to be entirely free of coercion, compulsion, and violence, and we want ourselves to be that free as well.

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