I’ve read some opinion pieces from the radfem community regarding gender abolition. All gender roles abolished. Unisex everything. The whole ‘good girls’ and ‘real men’ crapola goes into the dustbin of history, never to return. We all play by the same cultural rules, regardless of our biological sex.
Now that gender is off the table, what happens? Would this lead to the collapse of patriarchal rule, thus leading to women’s liberation? Would gender dysphoria still exist? Would we still have gendered pronouns? How about separate bathrooms? Would it be like Starship Troopers, or just a unisex version of what we already have today?
In case you’re wondering, I really am asking. I agree that gender roles are bullshit, designed by the patriarchy to keep women oppressed. I just want to know what you all think about gender abolition and its consequences.
Just to clarify, how does your scenario happen? “Human nature magically gets altered so that we don’t care about sex/gender?” “Society/history is magically altered so that we’ve always been genderless, how does human nature take it from there?” Or is it that people-as-we-know-them just decide to go, “You know what? Let’s abolish gender”? Because if it’s the third one, it’s not going to work. We’re too biologically primed to be aware of sex to not develop gender. And if it’s one of the former two, we need to know which aspect of reality has been altered to make informed comments.
ETA: just saw your post about it being gender roles. I still hold that it is human nature to divide ourselves into Us and Them, and as long as we’re aware of males and females, we’re going to end up with division and gender roles.
Inspired by the most logical race in the galaxy, the Vulcans, breeding will be permitted once every seven years. For many of you, this will mean much less breeding. For me, much, much, more!
How about a definition before this inevitably veers into biology? Sex is your block and tackle. Gender is how society treats you.
Sex is your wee wee standing up and shooting man cream all over the place. Gender is ‘Women should be teachers and nurses. Men should be miners and engineers. Boys don’t cry. Girls wear dresses and v-necks. etc. etc.’
Technically, what you’re calling gender is the narrower category of gender roles. There’s also gender identity, which is not necessarily the same thing as conformity to societal gender roles.
For example, a woman can identify as female while nonetheless adopting male gender roles such as being a miner, not wearing dresses, etc. Or a man can identify as male while nonetheless liking to wear dresses, not refusing to cry, etc.
So abolishing gender roles, even if that were at all a realistic prospect, would still not be the same thing as abolishing gender. People could and probably mostly still would have an instinctive perception of themselves as “male” or “female” even if it didn’t make any practical difference in most of their lives.
Some people have the idea that gender neutrality means that we don’t allow boys to play with cars and we don’t allow girls to play with dolls. No, it means the opposite. We allow girls to play with both dolls and cars, and we allow boys to play with both cars and dolls. And we don’t freak the fuck out if a boy puts on a pink shirt with sparkles or pretends to take care of a baby doll.
Or we could save even more time in dealing with this thread. To quote a favorite movie of mine, “Can we just skip the vibe and go straight to us laughing about this?”
You don’t want to. The OP is referring to TERFS–transgender-exclusionary radical feminists. They believe trans women are yet another patriarchal plot to oppress and rape women, and that trans men are homophobic lesbians.
I really think it needs to be clarified what kind of gender we’re eliminating here.
Women are suddenly allowed to wear pants and the color blue?
Everyone suddenly accepts that sex has no correlation with preference, intelligence, or ability, excepting in cases where it physically does (like sperm donor)?
Everyone suddenly stops being able to tell what gender other people are?
Everyone’s genitalia and other sexual characteristics disappear?
Because when we start talking about there not being separate bathrooms, we’re veering towards the latter options.
It seems to me that certain traits that we would call masculine or feminine are hard-wired into our biology as males and females. Sure, some things are cultural or societal, but I think enough of it is biological that true gender abolition would be impossible.
I find it hard to imagine a world in which “father” and “mother” are strictly biological designations with completely interchangeable roles.