I think we’re on the same page but I just want to gently remind you that for some people, gender is really really important. Like, critical to their survival and something they have fought upstream against society for over many years of suffering and hardship.

I’m enbie and to me, on a personal level, gender is genuinely unimportant to my own identity but when I talk about the abolition of gender I try to frame it in terms of something like abolishing enforced gender or abolishing gender norms because I don’t want to unintentionally signal to anyone, least of all to certain trans comrades, that I’m coming to steal their gender from them. All I want is for gender to be optional and based on exactly how the individual feels at that particular moment; you can look how you want, you can act how you prefer, and you can be the gender(s) that you feel and none of these things have to “align” and anybody who tries to tell you that you aren’t permitted to do something/that you have to do something/that you’re doing it wrong can go straight to hell because unless they abolish that attitude immediately then they’re gonna get their dental record abolished.

I get how it feels because for myself, my experience of my own gender is summed up by one big fucking meh. But I can’t univeralise my own experience of being gender’s distant acquaintance and I absolutely do not want to replace gender normativity with agender normativity since that’s just gonna be the same shit, different texture for plenty of people, especially trans people, for whom gender really does matter. I’m coming for the normativity; I’m not coming for your gender.

but like if the patriarchy didn’t exist, social constructs like gender wouldn’t exist

I don’t want to get into the weeds on the ontology of the social construct of gender here however one thing that’s important to me is drawing upon Foucault’s concept of reverse discourse, especially to do with the term queer; without cishet-normativity, the label queer would not exist. However the original discourse of the label has been subverted and it has been thoroughly reclaimed as a symbol of pride, of unity, and ultimately of power across the queer community. With this in mind, I think the reclamation of the term queer has been even more radical than it would have been if we simply managed to abolish its use from our culture.

So, for the people who are engaging in a parallel sort of reclamation of gender on a personal level, because for most/all of their upbringing they had faced a constant barrage of proscriptive gender norms from all angles, they bore down against that great and terrible dragon of gender normativity whose scales glittered with the accretion of a thousand years’ of gender normative values—each scale being inscribed with a gendered “Thou shalt!”—and they managed to fucking slay that dragon with a resounding and triumphant “I am!”… I have to ask myself, are these not the people who embody the very same spirit of revolutionary reclamation that I described above?

In my opinion, if you slay that dragon then you get to do whatever you want with the dragon’s spoils. You are the hero in this story; I’m not going to deny you the glory that is by rights yours.

Fascinating. I feel compelled to espouse my abolitionist views whenever someone makes it sound like they’re seeking a solid place of belonging on an arbitrary spectrum. I’m conscious of our large diversity, but sometimes I forget how many autists are libs. I’d probably end up arguing with those types, but yeah they are can be well intentioned.

To draw a parallel from my special interest: as the Buddha knows most linguistic truths are relative he does not tell everyone there is self or no self. It depends on the person what will be fruitful for their own path. He is wise and knows which relative truth will yield a more functional and productive perspective for those inquiring, and tells them such.