Idk if this is the place to post this but it seems better than anywhere else on the internet. So I learned about gender abolitionism recently and I am not sure what to think about it. It seems very utopian to me (note I am cis) perhaps because gender is so ingrained in our psyches. I guess my main problems with it are:
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What is going to happen to people who are fine with keeping their identities? You can’t force people to change their gender identity, we are already doing that to trans people and the results are disastrous.
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Ditto but for sexuality. Monosexual people make up the vast majority of the population and I dont see this changing that much. Monosexual people generally are attracted to the traits of one gender but find the traits of others to be unattractive or even sexually repulsive. If you abolish gender then the distinction between gendered traits will go away and you will be left with an inability to distinguish if someone is attractive or repulsive to you, sexually speaking. You are already seeing the beginnings of this problem with trans and nb people in hetero/gay/lesbian spaces with people being worried about their sexualities being undermined by the introduction of people who do not conform to the expectations of that sexuality. Also you can’t get people to change their sexuality to make them pansexual, all the available evidence shows that attempts to change someone’s sexuality (i.e. conversion therapy) don’t work.
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How will people relate to each other? Already it is difficult as everyone has differing interpretations of gender and what various traits mean, but disposing with it entirely would leave us with fewer ways to understand each other. I agree that labels and identities can be restrictive and even oppressive but I don’t think this is always the case. If you abolish gender but then some other type of identity arises to fill the void, because people need some way of understanding each other, then haven’t you kind of not succeeded?
This post ended up being a lot longer than I originally thought and if this is the wrong place for it I will happily delete it. Am interested to see what people think.
You’re braver than me. I’m terrified to ask about a lot of things of this nature, especially in leftist spaces. Labels often get perverted and exploited in capitalist systems, but man are they useful.
