Help me settle a bet plz
If I’m a man then man is a meaningless concept.
Yeah, it kinda is. There’s nothing about your biology that assigns you pronouns or clothing styles or behaviour and so on. The division between “man” and “woman” is completely arbitrary.
“Man”, “masculinity”, “gender”, these are just weird social labels. There’s nothing real about them
Ok so if men and women aren’t real and have no definition and no meaning then what is a trans person and why aren’t we just advocating doing away with the concept of gender entirely
Like, currency is arbitrary and “not real” too but if you ask me what a dollar is its not hard to explain: a dollar is an arbitrary numerical unit often represented by a government-regulated piece of paper which I can trade with other people to acquire things.
So what is a man?
Admittedly I’m not an expert, but my understanding of gender is that it is a class hierarchy (possibly the first) that divides a population based on reproductive labor. Patriarchy–through all the usual suspects colonialism, capitalism, etc.–has become the dominant form of gendered relations. So a man is the the gendered class which–in Patriarchy–controls & benefits from reproductive labor while women are subjugated and perform the majority of reproductive labor (child-rearing and such). A queer person is an individual who does not fit this binary.
I’ve been meaning to read more about gender in particular lately, but this is a good resource for getting a breakdown of it imo. https://libcom.org/article/gender-accelerationist-manifesto
So a man is the the gendered class which–in Patriarchy–controls & benefits from reproductive labor
So trans men… aren’t men? Because they dont control or benefit from any partucular structure of this society?
For transparency, I’m trying to find any definition of man which cannot apply to some women and does not exclude some men, or any definition of woman which cannot apply to some men and does not exclude some women. So far, this one doesn’t seem satisfactory.
why aren’t we just advocating doing away with the concept of gender entirely
:I-was-saying: im advocating for doing away with the concept of gender entirely