@janeclarejones #transphobia twitter.com
That doesn't mean we should just to do away with it like we could do away with capital, the financial system, or waged labour. Because denying gender is also denying actual forms of living and embodied human existence,
And here we get to the knotty know a the core of all of this.
Gender is a social construct. What would denying this construct mean? We do not deny that it exists. We think however, it is harmful. You would try to proscribe us critiquing a social system which exists in order to exploit us and undermine our humanity because some people 'identify' with this system, and have built their "forms of living and embodied human existence" on IDENTIFYING WITH THE MECHANISM OF OUR OPPRESSION.
If, as you seem to claim, gender identity is not innate, then why should we not question people who are forging identities by identifying with an oppressive and harmful system?
Why would you not join us in asserting that people can dress and act anyway that their personality
inclines them to, and that they do not need to do so by identifying with and reifying harmful and oppressive social structures, that they do not need to internalise and ossify these structures by making them the entire basis of their 'identities,' and that they do not need to try
and make people who have every political basis for rejecting these structures collude with them in their efforts to reify and ossify them as the basis of their identities?
Patriarchal gender is harmful to the humanity of female people.
We will not identify with it. We will not be defined by it. We will not turn a blind eye to people essentialising it. We will not forget that the way it shapes our subjectivity damages us.
We will not be told that we are privileged because we 'fit it.' We will not be gaslit by men who have no idea how much damage gender conformity does to women, that trans or queer people are the only people who know anything about gender, and that 'cis' women need to STFU, when
you have completely trashed the materialist analysis of why gender exists, have completely forgotten it has anything to do with exploiting female people, and in fact, have no fucking model of gender that makes any explanatory sense whatsoever.