Is Gender Only a Construct, Hierarchy, or Political Condition?
A Few Thoughts After Last Week’s Kerfuffle
Last week, I was involved in a kerfuffle on Bluesky that got kind of heated (as kerfuffles often do). After it was over, my initial impulse was to just let it pass. But people are still talking about it online. And over the weekend, when I attended a trans-themed event, multiple people were asking me about it. Of course, some people are curious about the personal drama, which I hope to largely avoid here. Some may be inclined to dismiss all this as “infighting” during a time (an incoming GOP trifecta here in the U.S.) when we should all be banding together.
But at the heart of the argument is an important question regarding the best framework for feminism and trans people’s position within the movement. This is something that I’ve written about at great length, especially in my second book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive (which people tend to be less familiar with). So here, I will revisit my thoughts on this matter.
But first, with regards to the kerfuffle, here’s what happened to the best of my recollection: Moira Donegan—a cis feminist writer who I don’t know personally, but I’ve followed on social media and have read her writings on occasion—penned a Bluesky post reacting to a screenshot of someone calling her a “TERF” or “transphobe” or something to that effect (it’s deleted now, so I cannot verify). Donegan rejected the premise that she was anti-trans, but her response led some trans people to ask her follow up questions. This is when my name came up. The pertinent posts are now deleted, but prior to that I copied Donegan’s text as I planned to respond. The posts read:
I actually do think that womanhood is a political condition defined by its place on a hierarchy of violence and domination. That vision isn’t popular with some trans feminists in the vein of, say, Julia Serrano, who understand womanhood as a cite of authenticity and joy. That’s a sincere difference!
But a) the Serrano approach is not the whole of trans feminism and b) defining womanhood as a condition of being subject to violence does not in fact exclude trans women, who are subject to gendered violence and indignity all the time, in ways that look *a lot* like cis women’s same vulnerabilities.
I’m only sharing these posts now to address a couple points that came up in subsequent debates. First, multiple people brought up the misspelling of my last name. Personally, this is not a big deal to me, as the two-“R” version is way more common—even people who appreciate my work often misspell it that way.
Second, I was initially miffed at Donegan for characterizing my work as equating womanhood with “joy” and “authenticity.” In Whipping Girl (the book of mine that people are most likely to have read), I talk at great length about how shittily people treated me upon transitioning (both when they knew I was a trans woman and when they presumed I was a cis woman) and analyzed numerous intersecting forms of sexism that contributed to this (oppositional and traditional sexism, cissexism and transmisogyny, gendering and ungendering, etc.). See also my most recent book, Sexed Up, which examines the varied ways in which women and minorities tend to be sexualized by men and other dominant/majority groups. In other words, I am very concerned about challenging hierarchies and oppression.
While I most certainly do not imagine womanhood as being primarily centered on “joy,” this is a recurring misrepresentation of my work—as but one example, the way that a line from Whipping Girl about “empowering femininity” has been repeatedly twisted to make it sound like I am promoting a superficial form of feminism (see link for my rebuttal). In my experience, the feminists who mischaracterize my work as “lightweight” or “frivolous” are almost always gender artifactualists (or in today’s parlance, “gender abolitionists”), a subset of whom are TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). While I have no reason to believe that Donegan is a TERF, it seems likely that she is a gender artifactualist/abolitionist given her aforementioned claim that “womanhood is a political condition defined by its place on a hierarchy of violence and domination.”
At this point, I want to step away from discussing Donegan, as I do not fully know all her positions and I’d rather not base this piece on speculation. But I do want to talk about how this incident seemed to split trans feminists on my Bluesky timeline, as this is the most relevant aspect of the story from my perspective.
I follow numerous trans feminists on the trans female/feminine (TF) spectrum who have embraced some aspects of gender artifactualism/abolitionism (I promise I will explain what these terms mean shortly). They tended to take Donegan’s side in this debate and took issue with insinuations that she might be a TERF. This last point was likely exacerbated by the fact that there is a very small but vocal contingent of trans male/masculine (TM) people online who routinely smear TF people who discuss feminism and transmisogyny as “TERFs”—I won’t go into the convoluted reasoning that leads them to this conclusion, but I discuss some of those dynamics here.
In contrast, other trans feminists did interpret Donegan’s stance as being TERF-esque. One of those feminists is Jude Doyle, who has since published a lengthy essay on this entitled TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism. I agree with several of the points Jude makes, although I take issue with his framing this as something that specifically impacts transmasculine people (which may have been a reaction to Donegan drawing parallels between cis and trans women, while not mentioning trans men in the quotes above; more on this toward the end of the piece). I’ve also seen a few TF feminists react to Jude as if he were one of those TM trolls who smear trans women who discuss feminism as “TERFs”—if you do happen to think this, I highly encourage you to read Jude’s essay Trans Masc Misogyny and the Red Six of Spades, which should disabuse you of that notion.
Not every intracommunity dispute stems from the current Trans Masc versus Trans Fem Discourse. And the idea that Jude is somehow “anti-TF” and Donegan “pro-TF” is frankly bizarre to me, given that I am more aligned with Jude on this issue, and he appreciates my trans feminist writings whereas Donegan does not.
From my vantage point, this debate is not about trans mascs or trans fems per se. We are debating whether or not gender artifactualization/abolition provides an accurate account of, and an efficacious framework for challenging, societal sexism. This is a very old debate that has long divided both feminists and trans activists.
Before most of us were even born, radical feminists of the 1960s argued that gender—and specifically, the distinction between woman and man—was merely a social invention that served the sole purpose of enforcing patriarchy. And because gender itself is complicit in women’s oppression, the end goal of feminism shouldn’t be mere “equality” between genders, but rather to bring on the “end of gender.” In recent years, I’ve seen numerous feminists describe themselves as “gender abolitionists”—as best as I can tell from the label and their politics, they seem to be promoting the same general idea.
Back when this radical feminist perspective was first being articulated, a gigantic “nature versus nurture” debate was raging across society, in which people tended to be firmly planted on one side or the other. So the imagined opponent of radical feminism/gender abolition was the “gender essentialist” who believed that gender differences were natural and inevitable to some degree. If true, this might suggest that patriarchy itself is natural and thus women cannot materially change our circumstances or transcend sexist oppression. For these reasons, radical feminists strongly rejected that position and tended to view feminists who made any kind of appeals to nature or biology as “essentialists” who were “reinforcing” women’s oppression.
But here’s the thing: Nobody believes in “nature versus nurture” anymore—that debate is long over. The answer is it’s obviously both. We may have shared biology, but we also exhibit lots of individual biological variation; we may be socialized in similar ways, but we also have highly individualized personal experiences. These various factors all come together in an unfathomably complex manner to help create the gender and sexual diversity that we see all around us. This isn’t simply my conjecture: There is overwhelming evidence to support this, as I originally detailed in Chapter 13 of Excluded, and since updated in my Trans People and Biological Sex: What the Science Says video.
As I explain in that video, the notion that our brains are completely “unsexed” (as envisioned in ye olde sex/gender distinction) has been definitively proven to be incorrect. Furthermore, while biology may influence certain aspects of our sex and gender, it does not do so in an essentialist, or deterministic, or “transmedicalist” manner. In fact, whenever people suggest that any acknowledgement of biology is tantamount to “gender essentialism,” it tells me that they don’t understand how biology actually works, or at least, their view of biology appears stuck in the twentieth century when determinism reigned in the field.
So, rather than pit radical feminism/gender abolition against the straw man of gender essentialism, when writing Excluded, I coined the term gender artifactualism to describe the former view, and contrasted it against the more nuanced social constructionist view that I hold. Here is the passage where I defined these terms:
To have a social constructionist view of gender (by most standard definitions) simply means that one believes that gender does not arise in a direct and unadulterated manner from biology, but rather is shaped to some extent by culture—by socialization, gender norms, and the gender-related ideology, language, and labels that constrain and influence our understanding of the matter. By this definition, I am most certainly a social constructionist. Gender artifactualists, on the other hand, are typically not content to merely discuss the ways in which gender may be socially constructed, but rather they discount or purposefully ignore the possibility that biology and biological variation also play a role in constraining and shaping our genders.
I then go on to discuss several problems that arise directly from gender artifactualist thinking—I do this in Chapter 12 of Excluded, most of which can also be found in my Do Trans People Reinforce Gender? video. Specifically, if you think gender is merely a cultural artifact, then there will be a tendency to presume that trans people (or frankly any person whose gender you dislike) must be “reinforcing gender” rather than righteously recognizing it as artificial. Feminists who fall squarely in the TERF camp routinely cite this “reinforcing gender” argument in their efforts to delegitimize us. Other gender artifactualists (such as poststructualists and queer theorists of the 1990s–2000s) tended to divvy up trans people into two camps: the “bad ones” (who in their eyes to “reinforce gender”) and the “good ones” (who they believe “subvert gender”).
After providing many examples of this, I then highlighted how these assessments of what is “in” gender (and therefore bad) and what is “outside” of gender (and therefore neutral or good) are completely arbitrary. For instance, arguing from a gender artifactualist standpoint, some radical feminists of the 1960s claimed that lesbians should be excluded from feminism because they “reinforced the sex class system.” This led lesbian feminists (specifically, the group Radicalesbians) to counter that they were “woman-identified” (i.e., they “subverted” patriarchy), which of course implied that heterosexual feminists were “man-identified” (and presumably “reinforced” patriarchy).
In other words, gender artifactualism is not only factually incorrect as a theory of gender, but it often leads to counterproductive if not outright exclusionary activism. Furthermore, the notion that it is somehow inherently “radical” relative to other feminist or trans activist positions seems to ignore the fact that the gender-conservative theories and practices of Sigmund Freud, John Money, and Ken Zucker were also rooted in gender artifactualism.
Finally, as a practical matter, I do not believe that gender abolition (or as it used to be called, the “end of gender”) is even possible, as I argued in this passage from the chapter/video:
Here is what I want to know: What exactly is the “end of gender”? What does it look like? Are there words to describe male and female bodies at the end of gender? Or do we purge all words that refer to male- or female-specific body parts and reproductive functions for fear that they will reinforce gender distinctions? Do we do away with activities such as sports, sewing, shaving, cooking, fixing cars, taking care of children, and of course, man-on-top-woman-on-bottom penetration sex, because these have been too closely associated with traditional masculine and feminine roles in the past? What clothes do we wear at the end of gender? Do we all wear pants? Or do we all wear skirts? Or do we have to come up with a completely different type of clothing altogether? Or perhaps we must go naked because, after all, clothing has a long and troubled history of conspiring with the gender system. Who gets to make these decisions? Who gets to decide what is gender and what is not? By what criteria does one determine whether any given behavior is a wholesome natural human trait or an abominable social artifact?
I know that many (albeit not all) gender artificualists dismiss my feminism as “lightweight,” “liberal,” or “essentialist” because I believe that people naturally vary in their genders and sexualities (rather than it all being a cultural artifact). But from my standpoint, I think it’s vital that we, as feminists, start from the premise that people are naturally heterogeneous—we’re going to fall all over the map in countless different ways—and then develop strategies to challenge and ultimately eliminate sexism and other forms of marginalization without unnecessarily erasing or policing that diversity. This is truly difficult work. I forward my own proposed strategies and solutions throughout Part 2 of Excluded. I don’t expect everyone to agree with everything I’ve said there or elsewhere—this is feminism after all! But I sincerely wish that people would take my project seriously for what it is (whether you agree with it or not) rather than condescendingly reject it for its failure to live up to gender artifactualist ideals.
Knowing that we will inevitably differ in our perspectives, how can we as feminists reconcile our approaches inasmuch as possible?
In Excluded, I argued that we should avoid “fixed perspectives,” where we are convinced that the way we see the world is how it truly and objectively is. Instead, I’ve come to look at feminist theories as models that may provide good approximations for how the world works in some cases, yet may fail in others. If you are socially situated in a different manner than me (whether it be cis versus trans, other axes of marginalization, differences in culture, personal history, and so on), you may come to embrace different models than me, as they better explain the specific obstacles and oppression that you have faced.
This helps to shed light on what Jude called the “Two Steves” problem: A gender artifactualist might use the word “gender” to refer to a patriarchal order that we should dismantle, whereas a trans individual might use “gender” to refer to a deeply felt self-understanding of what sex they should be. These views don’t necessarily need to be at odds with one another if we recognize that both people are using the word “gender” in reference to different things, or to describe different aspects of some far greater system.
Of course, there may be occasions in which our models are completely incompatible, as in the case of TERFism (which views transness as a form of false consciousness and wholly illegitimate) versus trans feminism (which views trans people as legitimate and our perspectives as potentially insightful and worthy of serious consideration). Sometimes “agreeing to disagree” is simply not possible, especially when it erases an entire minority group’s subjectivity.
Which brings us to the final question (for this essay, at least): Is gender artifactualism incompatible with trans perspectives? This was a central question in the Donegan kerfuffle, with numerous trans people (on both the TM and TF spectrums) on my timeline suggesting it is. Based on the research I did for Excluded and many subsequent years of reading gender artifactualist/abolitionist accounts, I would say that it’s a bit more complicated than that.
In my experience, gender artifactualists—who view gender solely as a patriarchal system based on male dominance and female subjugation—tend to deal with the existence of trans people in one of four general ways:
TM people are the victims of patriarchal oppression because they are AFAB and experienced female socialization. Whereas TF people are merely “male oppressors” who infiltrate women’s spaces and appropriate women’s identities.
TF people are the victims of patriarchal oppression because we move through the world as women. Whereas TM people have largely escaped male oppression and may have even become “male oppressors” themselves.
All trans people have been corrupted by maleness and patriarchy in one way or another, and thus we should all be lumped into the “male oppressor” category. Some exceptions may be made for trans people who perform their genders in a sufficiently “transgressive” or “subversive” manner (this what I called “compulsory genderqueerness” in my chapter/video).
Some people happen to be trans—this is a taken for granted aspect of the world. As gender minorities, trans people of all stripes are victims of patriarchal oppression and thus have a stake in feminism.
This is why I took issue with Jude referring to gender artifactualism as primarily impacting TM people. In my experience, position #1 has been the most common one I have encountered, with #3 also being fairly common. I’m not saying that position #2 doesn’t happen—I’ve seen it on a few occasions—but I think it is best to recognize that positions #1, 2, and 3 are all interrelated, in that they tend to misgender trans people and/or discount our very real lived experiences moving through the world post-transition (which sometimes involves us being perceived as different genders depending on the context, as Jude describes).
I know a number of trans feminists who are gender artifactualist/abolitionist and, by and large, they typically hold position #4. So I tend to give them the benefit of doubt when reading their work. I may not agree with all of it, but at least I’m not half-expecting to be thrown under the bus when I turn the page or scroll down the screen.
I wish I could say the same was true for their cis counterparts. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve read cis feminists take a gender artifactualist stance immediately followed by their complaints about trans people “reinforcing gender,” or their holding us up as illustrations or metaphors that supposedly reveal how “all gender is constructed” (this is also extremely cissexist, see chapter/video). I try not to jump to conclusions, I really do. But given the long history of cis gender artifactualists undermining trans people and perspectives, I believe that it is perfectly reasonable for me to be suspicious of them until proven otherwise. (If this strikes you as weird, try replacing “cis” with “man” or “straight,” and “trans” with “woman” or “queer,” and perhaps the dynamics at play here may make more sense to you.)
This is why I don’t have any issues with trans people who questioned Donegan during the kerfuffle. I don’t consider it to be a “pile on” if a cis feminist makes a clearly gender artifactualist public statement, and trans people ask basic follow-up questions in an attempt to gauge whether she is espousing positions #1, 2, 3, or 4. I also think that blocking people who ask such basic follow-up questions is only going to lead them to presume that you likely fall somewhere in the #1–3 camps.
I’ve been through too many internet kerfuffles to expect that this essay will solve everything, or even anything. But perhaps it will provide a few insights into our differing vantage points on these issues and how we might better bridge them in the future.
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