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Who is the Gender Abolitionist?

L. T.

Dear friend,

I was surprised to hear from you today given how busy we both have become, but I am grateful for your letter. I have no doubt you’ve heard me mention the person you are inquiring after from across the room or have seen their text on occasion across the various social media platforms. I openly acknowledge the enigma surrounding the person you’re looking for. It seems they are too-often explained in only the fuzziest usages of language, and so this begs your question: who is the gender abolitionist?

It is probably best to begin by pointing out who the gender abolitionist cannot be. They are not a feminist, for what they strive for is neither the equality of gendered bodies nor the liberation of women from men. This latter point is important, because while the gender abolitionist admits openly that the millennia-old subjugation of women’s bodies is the root of immense and ongoing global catastrophe, they do not see the continuing existence of these bodies as possible after that patriarchy has been truly dissolved. The culmination of a global, years-long campaign to eliminate all misogynistic practices only arrives for the gender abolitionist when women and men have been rendered so materially indifferent to one another that the distinction between the two is decided to be eliminated. I will return to this point later.

The gender abolitionist is, similarly, not one who tolerates the crux of performative accounts of gender such as those advanced by scholars such as Judith Butler. Certainly, transgressions against norms of gendered practices are punished, but this does not reduce the vast structural forces that enforce those norms to the role of policing one’s appearance alone. It is true that trans women faces misogyny in-so-far as they attempt integrating into what is conceived as a normative womanhood, and that trans men may, conversely, reap social and political benefits. Yet we should not forget that it is equally true violence against a trans woman stems from their body’s challenges to a coercive and mandatory practice of strictly gendered sexuality; a body may be altered or disguised, but so long as these two methods by which one pursues performance lies strictly within the structure of gendered discourses, the gender abolitionist must reject them.

If the preceding two approaches do not set out satisfactory practices for the gender abolitionist, what does? I am not sure I can answer this question on every gender abolitionist’s behalf, but I will try my best to at least elucidate what I consider the most important points.

First, to return to a previous point: the gender abolitionist sees patriarchy, and not gender binarism, as the root of the gendered conundrum humanity has found itself in. This is a not unimportant distinction. To decry gender binarism as too limited a model for the possibilities of gendered expression is entirely anti-ethical to the understanding that it is the oppression of one class (women) by another (men) that gives rise to gender in the first instance. By shifting rhetoric from patriarchy to gender binarism, the critics of gender abolitionism immediately give up the ghost of any potential for revolutionary change, and instead embrace a comfort-oriented politics aimed at a mere expansion of terms for those beings men will ultimately, and usually already do, work to subjugate. As I’m sure you are already aware, the historical struggles of black anti-racists have shown us there is no room for the inaction of moderates who prioritize their personal comforts over substantive change during revolutionary struggle.

This is not to say that those who feel as if they to need to step outside of gendered terms in order to describe their way-of-being are at any fault for recent rhetorical shifts. Obviously, the constraints of gender have been felt by much of humanity for many thousands of years, and those who protest these limitations to their desires have always existed. Yet the ways in which this problem has been addressed have been historically unsatisfactory, often leading (if they lead anywhere at all) to the creation of new social roles which are still uniformly constrained but can function as a release valve for the pressures of ongoing, patriarchal oppression. For the gender abolitionist, the various alternatives to what is merely gender binarism, and not gender itself, are not satisfactory in a post-colonial world.

More contemporarily, an increasing number of people now describe themselves as non-binary, genderqueer, or some other variation of an essentially anti-gender impulse. For the gender abolitionist, this is an encouraging development, but it is also a potentially dangerous one. These anti-gender identities are not themselves revolutionary in content; this is all the more apparent to the gender abolitionist who, as I have already pointed out, rejects performativity as an accurate accounting of gender. On one hand, this allows the gender abolitionist to correctly locate the root of anti-gender identities and acknowledge them in their friends as something not based within performativity-based practices such as “passing”; on the other hand, the gender abolitionist recognizes that anti-gender identified friends who fall short of practicing a politics that centers the destruction of patriarchy are not yet themselves gender abolitionists. The non-binary person who still reproduces patriarchy by refusing women dialogue, by not acting in direct opposition to legislation targeting women, and by not even disputing gender directly outside their own self-affirmation cannot be recognized by the gender abolitionist as a comrade in pursuit of gender’s systematic destruction.

All of this to say: representation is dreadfully incapable of telling the gender abolitionist who can be called a friend.

As you know, it is not enough, nor has it ever been enough, for white people (myself especially) to simply call ourselves “not racist.” We long ago agreed that every white person worth their salt in a fight carries out anti-racist practices in order to not just abolish race, but specifically their own whiteness. The gender abolitionist would, I think, hold that this logic extends to gender, ham-fisted of an analogy though it may be. It is not enough for those who refuse the constraints of gender to be not men or neither woman nor man. Those who go about their lives being systematically recognized as a part of manhood must seek to be anti-men; not just among their fellow radicals, but everywhere they go. This is not a process that can leave any stragglers: trans men and non-binary people cannot abdicate their practical complicities in the subjugation of women due to a misguided belief that it is only the binary or the binary’s lack of inner mobility which is the fundamental problem. Such a belief reeks of all the mistaken judgements that characterize the white person who is racially “moderate” and believes the simple construction of a black middle class will soothe all the ills of society.

Ultimately, the gender abolitionist is the one who asks everyone to take up the practices of leveling gender just as readily as they would ask them to be anti-capitalist and anti-racist, because it is only via this leveling that gender’s horrors will be forced to exit from our collective history. Forcing some to give up their real or desired power over others will never be a peaceful or comfortable process, but it is a necessary one.

My friend, I am sincerely sorry for the length of this reply; I do hope it goes some way in prompting even more questions about this topic that we can discuss next time we sit down over a meal.

Yrs.,
L. T.

***

Filler is a DIY media platform, recording studio & anarchist zine distro affiliated with Pittsburgh’s autonomous student network and the Steel City Autonomous Movement (SCAM).

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Statement from the Nightshade Collective

We are queer and trans. Our existence clashes against the gender binary, and its crushing grip which polices our bodies and threatens our safety. The ways that we live—relate to one another, dress, gesture, and dream—are all in inherent subversion to that binary, which seeks to classify, erase, separate, and homogenize us. In turn, we fight for spaces free from gendered expectations, places where we can function and thrive in peace.

These demands are no different than what any person or creature desires: We wish to be ourselves without falling victim to demonization, violence, or death.

Our discussion with the IGDcast was originally posted to It’s Going Down

CLICK HERE to listen to the podcast.

Detractors on the Right claims that they are the only ones opposed to identity politics, but time and time again, we have seen that they are simply promoting another reactionary flavor. On the Left, many people instead push for a diversity of identities to be represented within capitalism. For those that want the destruction of all forms of domination, we must ask if there is an alternative. But what would that look like, and is it possible to push towards something that conceivably we cannot have a blueprint for? What does this mean for our day to day lives as well as how we struggle, organize, and build collective power?

In this episode, we caught up with several people involved in the Filler Collective, to talk about the concept of Gender Nihilism. In short, we ask if it is possible to understand gender and overcome it in a way that goes beyond liberal notions of inclusion within the dominant system. Is a genderless world possible, and what does fighting for one mean for those living in one where gender norms and roles define all aspects of our lives?

CLICK HERE to listen to the podcast.

Music: Harum Scarum

More Info: Filler Collective, Beyond Another Gender Binary, Destroy Gender.

Submitted to Filler by –ave
Cover image from Chris Burden’s Through the Night Softly

Against All Odds (imposed) – print-ready format

“No act of rebellion is useless; no act of rebellion is harmful.”
Luigi Galleani

The poets themselves misplace poetry. We insist on assimilation into a literary society that flatly discards and disregards our work. Why? Because we believe that the best way to remain relevant is to persist through a tokenizing and domesticated milieu of writers. Lord knows, I do not wish for relevancy…so much anxiety in the poetic world is the anxiety of being the unknown. The outcast, the disaffected and the naysayer. Why is this so terrible? I am interested in poetic autonomy…I am interested in being lazy and ending this gross professional poetic development. Wing tips be damned! Burn your cardigans! FUCK Ezra Pound.

The removal of our work from the institutions of poetry is the way to complete poetic autonomy. We must not build our own institutions but decimate institution altogether. Institution locks us in that attic and keeps the beautiful garden outside all to itself. Enough…

Because of our misplaced desire to find ourselves within societies society, poets become absurdly competitive. Invoking abstract concepts of authenticity to either validate or invalidate writing. There is no valid or authentic poetics because the individual levies themselves against the poem every time a new poem is written or read. Everything is relational…stemming from the individual as the original point of relation. It is through individuality that poetry must be practiced, not through institution. But we also must recognize that our understanding of ourselves is produced within the context of a complicated network of power relations. To properly read we should reject self and poetry as simply “too relational.” My queerness does not make queer poems or queer readers. My identity does not create poems. I create poems. Quite plainly put, the attempt to compartmentalize the author into a palatable and packable product which the institutions of poetry can sell, does a disservice to the understanding of self and of poetry. Self in relation to poetry. Self about poetry.

For decades—at least since the early 20^th century—poets have been questioning what material tools they use to produce poems. What medium do we work with? We work with no mediums. Poets should stand against the physical to flourish in the emotional and spiritual. What is tactile is facile. To write poetry is to actively practice and participate in futility, why not recognize that poetry ought to die? Recognize that poetry is dead. Good. Goodbye. We had fun while you were still around…why are we so interested in assimilating into the greater literary world? Our key distinction—from other writers—is our inability to produce, as it should be. Millions of pages of writing will always fail to sell as a novel does, because novels and poems are not the same. The poem is not a novel. It is not a vignette or a short story. It is a poem. But who cares what it is? We must be resolute in our productions, while also rejecting them as commodity. The only thing that holds poetry together is a shoddily amassed group of relational writings—poetry is this, poetry isn’t that. No. poetry is not. Poetry should not. We are incomplete and hard to commodify. Good. Our work as poets already stands at odds with capital. We must force the issue further. Abolish writerlyness to begin writing.

All too often I see poets falling into terrible lines of questioning about their work and how it fits into civilization. Questioning what poetry can do in such political and social turmoil. It can do nothing. Poetry should not be leveraged to win recognition in this neo-liberal hellscape. 

Poetry should stand at odds with the fail(ed)ing project of civilization. In today’s world it is fashionable to question how writing works within our society. How do poets write in political turmoil? What can poets do to change society? Plainly, we can reject. We must not write but reject. Our issue is within our desire to fit in. Our issue is within our willingness to settle for less when there is no more to be had. True sadness is discussing professional development with a group of poets. We are at the fringe of the literary world and should work within our reality, not within our wishes. I don’t want a world to operate within. As our queerness should not be questioned so too should our poetry be. Every year there is a new aesthetic obsession…every year, a new commodity to be celebrated as unique. I am sick of the cycles. They’re exhausting. The sheen of a new book of poems, exhausting. The lectures about rejecting punctuation, exhausting. It is overwhelming; honesty is our best policy, I honestly don’t want to wear eyeliner to be seen as queer. I want my relation to queerness to change every second and I want poetry to change with it.

Makeup is expensive, anyway. 

Shockingly, recognizing the change of the everyday is less isolating than existing in academia.

Doubtful and Dauntless

In the skin of society we will find no warm welcome. Poets bend over backward to perform for the literary world. Why? Capitalism compels us to lodge ourselves in a niche which works against our interests. The interest of authenticity. I’ll start by rejecting: there is no authentic writing—I don’t care to even question what that is. We should talk about why everyone wants that authenticity, though. The larger literary world will always try to authenticate a poet based on their poems rather than their presentations. Authenticity is in the individual not the poem. The poems which appear in most poetry journals make up a modicum of the works produced. Remove the edifice of amelioration presented by academy and their journals. In this edifice we find our enemy: validation. This is where doubt flourishes and poems die. The literary world does not celebrate us; poets celebrate poetry as an act of survival. All too often do I find myself needing a space in which to express poems, not because I care about my poetry, but because I need the space to flourish; simply as human. Simply as queer. The literary seeks to domesticate us and package queerness, to make a spectacle of identity within a poem. Around a poem. Identity does not exist within poems but within people, and so we cannot be contained within our art but within ourselves. Bound, not by the capacity of the page, but by the representation of voice.

Doubt is built into poets by the bourgeoisie notion of correct writing; there are no correct ways to write, to society, but to the individual there are a myriad of tactics for approaching the page. THERE AREN’T CORRECT WAYS TO WRITE BUT THERE ARE CORRECT WAYS. FUCK. Doubt is built into us by continual assertions from perceived authority figures. Our professors and community leaders have no bearing on our writing, only if you choose to allow their words in relation to your aesthetic…how many people influence your writing? What are their names? Why are they there…the assertion of the individual poet is the most powerful tool for navigating the world of poetry as it is a construction of voice, voice is where we will distinguish ourselves from society. Voice should be unconstrained and unafraid. Voice is the implication of the individual on the page. Silence too.

Unrepentant and directionless, the poems of insurrection will be ridiculous and beyond prediction. Not because of their form but because of the way in which they were produced: earnestly and without consideration for the abolition of social structures hanging about somewhere on the page…the reader is within this social structure. The reader should not dictate what is written before it is written. The reader has constructed the idea of the Poet. The Poet allows society to compartmentalize writing and take our collective work and place the onus on the celebrity…the popular become poetics…an awful representation…the uncelebrated celebrity of the writing world. The Poet will always be on the margin because poetry, at its core, represents a collective of radical ideas and writings. These radical works are largely ignored. Because we cannot SEE them. The Poet is celebrated because they often represent a more tame version of an intense identity expressed in the underbelly of poetry. A palatable packaged version of the radical union of individuals. Instead we should express and overwhelm. Thousands of us exist and so thousands should stand against production. All too often poets believe their greatest potential lies with producing poetry, no. Our greatest ability, time and time again, is our ability to organize community through and around art.

Poetic forms are rarely insurrectionary. People are insurrectionary.

Against the Current State

“…poetry is dead. Let it be dead; let us write as if we are already dead. If poetry is dying, then let’s write a poetry pronounced D.O.A.”
—From Deadism by Kevin Young

Poets do not question why they write poetry. What I mean to say is that our genre selection is the only key distinction between poets and, well, other writers. All too often I see, or hear, poets distancing themselves from the hard work of poetry by not discussing their decision to produce poems. How to we reintroduce ourselves to the world of writing?

Quite simply, by recognizing that that world is silly and that we really don’t want to have much to do with it. Genre selection is important because it is where we build our garden. Poets lodge themselves, shoddily, in a confusing amalgamation of doubt and anti-poetics. No convictions! Why? A centrist poetics is one that is smooth and makes no determinations about what it is. What do your poems do? Why do they do that?

A friend has an obsession with “dead hot queer boys” I think poets should too. Bring back the bolo tie and primitivism. Maybe our own absurd world will make us better writers and abolitionists. I like our world, except when I don’t. I don’t like our world when it is based on assumptions. Whose assumptions? Mine, usually.

Another friend says making poems is like making kids—we obsess over our own deaths so we produce little bits and pieces to leave behind. I like my bits and pieces. My bits and pieces are not children. They are poems. Being afraid of dying is something I haven’t noticed in the queer community; we are all afraid of living. Living simply, as queer. I am afraid to do so…

Has anyone ever questioned why there are so many queer poets? Maybe because poetry is fantastically anti-social. As is being queer. Being queer is an affront to society, so too is being pithy and loving yourself. Poets love themselves. Poets should love themselves, grotesquely.

IT IS INTERESTING THAT THE SOCIAL GROUPS THAT RECEED FROM SOCIAL OPERATIONS ARE ALWAYS PERCEIVED AS A THREAT—MAYBE IT’S BECAUSE WE ARE A THREAT—MAYBE THAT’S A GOOD THING. Be threatening. Have threatening poems.

Let’s make a decision to be realistic; the only way for us to be marketable again is to sell poems in gas stations and go on Fox and Friends to talk about our books. I hate the smell of gas stations and I hate Fox News. Let’s build anti-books. Let’s make them angry and strictly against civilization. LET’S RECOGNIZE THAT CAPITALISM DOES NOT HELP QUEER PEOPLE IT ACTIVELY PERSECUTES THEM™. Poets are so obsessed with building portfolios that we forgot to be the disaffected along the way. I don’t feel welcome in the world of poetics because of the same mechanizations that exclude and bind queer folk from existing both in queer spaces and in society at large. These mechanisms operate in the poetry world as well…it is the MFA program that “welcomes” queer folk but expressions of queerness are frowned upon (WHERE ARE ALL THE POEMS ABOUT LATEX??). It is the university that has an LGBTQ center but doesn’t fill it with, well, much of anything. It is gatekeeping and gatekeeping the gatekeeping. Want not for isolationism but for inexpensive books, or the abolition of currency altogether. Why not.

If poets are to succeed at poetry, at producing poems, we must recognize our unsuccessful succession. We have failed to carry the principles of radical literature into radical poetics, we have caved to a bland, liberal poetics; which allows for a vertical success of literature instead of the horizontal success of poets. BUT SUCCESS IS ALSO PART OF THE PROBLEM. Or maybe, what is around successful. Maybe when we are within a safe and inoffensive poetics we are playing a little too close to the center…

Abolishing the dual body of the individual to propel the poem is my chief concern. I do not want a public presentation, a professional presentation, a personal presentation, a queer presentation, a poetic presentation…our modern obsession with the author as the object of literature ignores the reality of how poems are produced; they are translations of the world. The world is beautiful only because we translate it so. SOMETIMES IT ISN’T ALL THAT BEAUTIFUL. This projection of the mundane is lost is the superficial nuances of civilization. Our search of a queer poetics must chiefly recognize that the project of poetry, just as the project of civilization, is failing. The project of poetics is failing because its emphasis is on (P)poetry, not poems.

Language is a system of categorization. It wraps around everything and allows us to apply ourselves to the world—poets often believe they are interacting with language. No. Language interacts with us. A friend once wrote “power does not care how you interact with it…” yes. Yes. It is a never ending system of relation…great poems exploit the failure of this relational existence. The break down and make concise…poets are guilty of trying to compartmentalize individuality and consume culture as a kind of intellectual delicacy. In poetry we find categorization into its most distilled form. This is what makes poetry amazing. It is the concision of beauty. It is the concision of the individual. Do not mistake the poem for the individual. The poem is a poem. Not much else. Poetry being labeled as inaccessible to the uninitiated is a product of the colonization of the art form. The death of poetry began with the decline of the art form as an oral tradition…it became a commodity, a product…not a state of being. Very few people do poetry nowadays. Poetry is the common tongue, it is the peoples voice. This is why academia rejects “spoken word” so vehemently but loves their gross caricatures of queer people. They are easy to consume and barbless. The poets I know are vicious and loud spoken. The poets I know are animalistic and untamed in their pursuit of the art. They are queer. They are angry. Against the current state of things means to reject both our ideas of being untamed and our ideas of tameness. Create a poetics that is pure insurrection and strictly against novelty. MANY TIMES POETS WILL WRITE THAT IDENTITY IS CRUCIAL TO BEING KNOWN TO THE WORLD. I do not wish to be known to the world or for the world to know me. Queer without qualifications. Queer without adjectives. Gender and genre nihilism now…I do not wish to be a queer poet but simply to write poetry that is around queerness.

Genre and Gender

Genre is our enemy. It is our enemy because it exists to further compartmentalize writing; genre exists to compress writing into something much more tame. Genre rips writing from ideology and allows it to become a relational point among and against other pieces of writing.

“This is a poem because it acts like other poems.”

“This is a queer person because they act like other queer people.”

Within genre we find another system of categorization and simplification, it is a way of recognizing and taming. Poets have an unfortunate habit of not recognizing and deescalating our initiation into academics. I’d argue for a more fluid understanding of poetry not as a relational pursuit of writing but as an interpersonal conversation about place and witness. About convention and contention. All poems are about poetry. All queer people are about queerness.

Recently, I’ve been worried about relation. I’ve been thinking so much about how I relate to this world. How does my writing relate to other writing? Talk to a poet for long enough and you’ll realize that we don’t say much of anything at all; we are experts at relating this to that. X = Y. Stein is to Pound as a fresh orange is to a literal piece of shit.

I’m uncomfortable in this literary tradition of relational aesthetics. I’m uncomfortable on this trash fire of bourgeoisie writing and H&M sweaters. I’m trying to distance myself from what is local but also from the poets who distance themselves from distancing. The distanceers. They make me anxious. They like to question and recognize…I don’t want to do much of anything. If we are being honest…poetry is my greatest excuse to violate my sacred secrets…to out-queer myself with each piece. I don’t want Kenyon breathing down my neck when I’m writing a manifesto about latex and air conditioners. Why is Kenyon there? Who invited Kenyon?

I believe that to be boundless…we should be mindful of what we think is binding…we must be violent with ourselves to dig out whatever latent piece of civilization is in there…kicking at the end of our lines. Blunting them. Pride™ / Poetics™.

Until suddenly, serenity, in our own—beautiful—selfishness.

CLICK HERE for a print-ready PDF of the Destroy Gender series.

My use of the terms patriarchy and gender are interchangeable, as I understand gender to be an apparatus of oppression and domination that overlaps with, and is inseparable from,  the apparatus of patriarchy. For more on this, I suggest the Gender Nihilist Anti-Manifesto, and Destroy Gender.

Against Femme, Against Gender, Against All Binaries

There has been a trend among the radical milieux over the last couple years to start using the term femme in place of woman. The reasons for this shift in language have varied depending on who you ask in the milieux, but the general reason behind the shift is to make ‘our’ understanding of patriarchy more inclusive to anyone who doesn’t strictly identify as a woman. Taken from the Wikipedia page for Femme,

Femme is an identity used by women (including trans women) and nonbinary people in relation to their femininity. As a gender identity, it usually denotes an individual who is “non-binary or queer femme gender specifically and inherently addresses femmephobia and the systematic devaluation of femininity as part of their politics”. The term is used exclusively for queer people regardless of whether they identify as female.

This replacement isn’t just semantics, it has been a change from seeing woman as the oppressed subject of patriarchy to seeing anyone femme, or feminine, as an oppressed subject of patriarchy. It’s also a shift from seeing oppression as one’s relationship to gendered violence to one’s relationship to aesthetic, femininity, behaviour, and social norms.

Before, ‘our’ understanding of patriarchy was that only women could be oppressed by patriarchy and gender(ed violence). That is, if our understanding of patriarchy never dug deep enough to understand that there are a multitude of experiences and subjectivities that cannot be fit neatly into one of two categories (oppressed and oppressor, male or female, etc). For anyone who held such ideas, moving from that crass analysis of patriarchy and the apparatus of gender toward an interpretation that includes more experiences than before is a positive shift. But, like all interpretations and theory, it falls short in its goals and in its analysis. The shift to the term femme does little, if nothing, to challenge patriarchal categorization/identification/normalization, binaries, the reproduction of patriarchy, or its economic basis, and it does not truly create a theory of oppression that is inclusive of all subjectivities/experiences.

What Does It Mean to be Femme?

Who gets to be femme? Who is actually oppressed? Who is femme enough to be considered oppressed? Are all women femme?

As with all theories of oppression, if there is an oppressed subject/class then there is a corresponding oppressor subject/class (such as whites oppressing non-whites and the rich/bourgeoisie oppressing the poor/proletariat). Under the previous understanding of patriarchy where women are the only class oppressed by gender, men were considered the oppressor class.  With the contemporary understanding of patriarchy, femmes are the oppressed class and mascs are the oppressors. All identities are defined by who is deemed an other.

According to everydayfeminism.com, femme “is an explicitly queer title, it is a gender expression that encompasses a wide rage of identities. Gay and queer cis-men, trans-men, and gender-queer folx often identify as Femme. Saying that femmes are always only women perpetuates a gendered binary that excludes lots of people.” Besides the questionable use of queer as an umbrella term, this definition of femme attempts to include the experiences of many who don’t identify as women. While it does include some femme gay/trans men and non-binary people, it does so by abandoning women who aren’t femme. Women who aren’t femme, such as butch women and closeted trans women, are cast aside, either to be ignored completely or to be labeled as ‘masculine’ and oppressors. As if butch women are to blame for the strife of femmes, as if being a femme gay man means you cannot be a proponent of patriarchal control, as if our real experiences with gender and violence are secondary to our personal style.

Neither Masc, Nor Femme, But Unique

This line of thought doesn’t stop perpetuating a “gendered binary” but reinforces it by dividing people along the lines of oppressed/femme vs. oppressor/masc, except this division isn’t based so strictly on gender and biology like the previous (and still dominant) gender binary. It divides people based upon aesthetics and behaviour instead of by biology or by self-identification. Almost anything is an improvement from biological determinism, but this shift doesn’t go far enough to stop binary thinking. Before someone in the milieux asks me what my name and pronouns are, I am assumed to be “masc” because of my facial hair and the way I dress. My personal experiences with gendered violence are only taken seriously in light of revealing myself as a trans woman. Our theories should start from the ways we have experienced gender violence in our daily lives, not identity. Our relationships to each other should be based upon our affinities and similarities with each other, rather than based upon the categories of lowest-common-denominator politics. Daily life is far too complicated to be reduced into two categories.

Meet the New Binary, Same as the Old Binary

A few years ago among the radical milieux, before femme was the go-to inclusive term for people oppressed by patriarchy, the term not-men was used. The theoretical failings of not-men are similar to that of the term femme. Baedan, an anti-civilization, nihilist, and anarchist journal which explores questions of gender, queerness, and domestication, elaborate on those theoretical failings. They critique the term not-men for failing to be the inclusive term it aimed to be, not going beyond binary categories, and for continuing the policing of categorization.

(tw rape)
One recent answer to these critiques has been the introduction of the concept not-men. Most attempts at defining this category are extremely clumsy. At times it is used to mean not-cismen, or to explicitly say that faggots are not welcome at certain meetings. At others it simply means women plus trans people. Some feminists have even said that the category at times includes ‘emasculated men of color.’ Usually it is just postmodern shorthand for women. As with any other categories, it only functions if it has a firm border, and this border will always be policed. At every step of the way, it is ceaselessly problematic. The least problematic definitions of it […] are so vague as to not have any practical application. And it is always in the practical applications that these theories enact their violences. The prospect of a political body of largely cisgendered women determining which genderqueer or transfeminine individuals are not-men enough to participate in their groups is quite nauseating. This categorical policing mirrors all the others. Meet the new binary, same as the old binary. A way out of this dilemma may be to start from experience rather than identity. To seek out conspirators based on a shared experience of a range of gender violence. Some proponents of not-men have defined it similarly (‘those who are raped,’ ‘those who do caring labor’) but none of these experiences are limited by identity, and to accept a phenomenological or experiential framework would dispense with the utility of the category at all. If the concept is either problematic or useless then why has there been so much fancy footwork put into an attempt to save the concept? What we’re really seeing is a desperate attempt to save binary categories, in a world where they’ve long been decomposing.
–Against the Gendered Nightmare, Baedan 2: A Queer Journal of Heresy

Whether it’s man/woman, male/female, afab/amab, not-men/men, or femme/masc, all binaries require policing and exclusion to be maintained and defined. Binary categorization is just one method the apparatus of gender uses to govern. Binary categories require policing, exclusion, regulation, normalization, and hierarchy.

Not A Third Way

“Insurrection calls upon us to no longer let ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and set no glittering hopes on institutions.”
-The Ego and Its Own, Max Stirner

The problems behind the femme/masc binary did not start with its introduction to the milieux, nor will they stop after some other terms are adopted in its place. I do not suggest alternatives or expansions for these categories, only their total abandonment. This can only be achieved through an insurrectional break against gender. Insurrection would be the total undermining of governance: to abandon and destroy the apparatuses of governance, to take our affairs into our own hands.  

In more real terms, it means that we have communities and spaces that aren’t just safe, but dangerous to those who oppose our desires and our spaces.  Not just a reading group safe space, but reclaimed territories capable of providing for the needs of the working class/women/the excluded (free from gender/gendered violence). These spaces can’t simply be given to us by a higher power.  Through occupations of the borderlands and sites of production, or less formal territories of resistance, such as friends who have each other’s backs, we will make or take the commons back.
–Destroy Gender

Lena Kafka

Inspirations:
The Gender Nihlilist Anti-Manifesto
Destroy Gender
Baedan: A Journal of Queer Nihilism
Baedan 2: A Queer Journal of Heresy
Lies: A Journal of Materialist Feminism

Endnotes:
1) Progressive, radical, feminist, anarchist, etc

CLICK HERE for a print-ready PDF of the complete Destroy Gender series.

It’s been a few months since I published Destroy Gender, during the rise of gender nihilism discourse in radical circles (I remember having Baedan 1 and the Anti-Manifesto in mind while writing).  What I would like to add to Destroy Gender has been covered in Baedan 2’s Against the Gendered Nightmare (which I unfortunately read after publishing Destroy Gender); I don’t claim any idea in Destroy Gender, or this piece, as original. I would like to respond to critiques and to clarify positions.

The two main critiques I received can be summarized as 1) lacking in discussion on colonizations role in gender / why not frame it as ‘colonized gender’ and not just ‘gender’? and 2) why destroy gender instead of gender roles, the gender binary, or patriarchy?

In response to the first critique, I must admit I failed to include a discussion on colonialism for various personal excuses, which is still a mistake and leaves a major gap in Destroy Gender. I must also admit ideological failings on my part for not including a discussion on colonialism, at the time of Destroy Gender’s publishing I saw gender (and patriarchy) as a domestication process that could be separated from colonialism because indigenous cultures were capable of developing patriarchy and gendered division of labor without colonial violence [1]. I also saw patriarchy and gender as interchangeable terms, both just different names for the same domestication process (division of labor, violence, separation, etc), and as one of many roots of civilization.

This understanding of gender/patriarchy falls short. Gender/patriarchy is not a root of civilization, it is civilization, it is domestication, it is one in the same. They are inseparable. To quote Baedan at length:

Within colonialism, new subject categories were created by western Civilization and were racialized and engendered as the foundation of the new colonial state. This creation process is composed of several operations: the introduction and entrenchment of gender roles, the imposition of Male gods, the formation of Patriarchal colonial government, the displacement of people from their traditional means of subsistence and the violent institution of the Family. These operations serve as a revision which recasts and genders tribal life and spirituality. This engendering does more than create the victimized category of women, but also constructs men as collaborators in domestication. Lugones cites the British strategy of bringing indigenous men to English schools where they would be instructed in the ways of civilized gender. These men would work within the colonial state to deprive women of their previous power to declare war, bear arms and determine their own relationships. [Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí in The Invention of Women] also cites the Spanish strategy of criminalizing sodomy among colonized populations, intertwining it with racialized hatred of the Moors and other ‘primitive’ people.

[…]

From this perspective, we can recognize all the incidents of gendered and racial violence in our lives as repetitions of this first capture. Sex work, abusive relationships, body dysmorphia, marriage, sexual abuse, familial constraint, date rape, gang rape, queer bashing, psychiatry, electroshock therapy, eating disorders, domestic labor, unwanted pregnancy, fetishization, emotional labor, street harassment, pornography: each instance is a moment where we are torn from ourselves, taken by another, captured and determined as a brutal repetition of the primary rupture which denied us a life lived by and for ourselves. In this schema, the assimilation and medicalization of queer and transgendered people can be understood as a re-capture of rebellious bodies. Police murder and racist vigilantism can likewise be understood as functions of this capture.

It is worth noting here that to understand gender as domestication is crucially different from understanding patriarchy as a consequence of domestication, in that the former is a break from the trap of essentialism. None of the above is limited to one subject of the gendered world. Rape, for example, is not solely the experience of women (as is often claimed by various regurgitations of second wave feminism), but is a disgustingly widespread experience among people of all genders. The assertion that any form of gender violence is the exclusive property of one category of people would be laughable if it weren’t for the litany of horrors which serve to disprove it. More sinisterly, these type of essentialist assertions obscure and shame those experience an entire range of very real experiences of gender violence.

Situating gender as domestication is a way to understand gender violence outside of an essentialist and white framework. Without this understanding, all theories which attribute some natural dimension to sex/gender (from eco-feminist to Marxist feminist) are structurally unable to account for the violence, capture, and exclusion experienced by anyone who deviates from the gender binary or the heterosexual matrix. These ideologies will expand to pay lip-service to queer and trans people, but they never alter the structure of their theory. This amounts to little more than the liberal politics of inclusion. If, however, we understand gender as something which captures us, rather than something natural to us (or extracted from our biological existence), we can begin to analyze all the methods of domination experienced by queer or transgender people. Brutality and exclusion come to be recognized as the policing methods by which individuals remain captured; assimilation and exploitation represent a more sophisticated capture. From here I can see the line which binds together the boys who called me faggot as a teenager and the gay men who would pay me for sex a few years later. Everything about the refusal of gender follows from this. The criticism of identity, assimilation, medicalization or any technique of the self becomes meaningful once it is placed in this continuum. [2]

In response to the second criticism, I avoided using ‘gender binary’ and ‘gender roles’ in my writing in order to frame my argument as attacking the material base of gender and not its branches. That is to say, gender roles are just the essence of gender and cannot be abolished without the abolition of gender (how can you have men, women, non-binaries, without a knowledge of what a ‘man’/’woman’/’non-binary’/whatever is? You can’t). As for the gender binary, it is not essential to the domestication of gender, since even those who claim to be outside the binary still fulfill their gendered roles (even if they don’t see them as roles // power doesn’t care how you want to interact with it). Civilization can take into account, normalize, categorize, and domesticate any gender so long as it advances Civilization (more commodities to sell, new markets to explore, etc).

They point to a more favorable gender arrangement, but lack the imagination to understand that people may have had relationships to one’s body and sexuality outside of the gendered cages which have been built around us. [3]

This is not to say that the gender binary does not deserve to be abolished, I just did not want to frame my argument in such a way. Back to Against the Gendered Nightmare:

In gender, we see all the ways that the gender binary is naturalized as sex and projected into pre-history as a way of explaining and rationalizing (essentializing) all of these experiences of violence. We are told those assigned female are meant to be mothers, and therefore it is in their nature to endure pain, to be caretakers, to submit to external authority. Those assigned male are virile hunters and warriors, violence and rape are supposedly intrinsic to their nature. Homosexuals are aberrations in nature, and thus they are fated for exile in their short, brutal and diseased lives. [4]

The gender binary, gender roles, and colonialism all deserve their own space for nuanced critique that I don’t feel right to write at this time.  Thanks to everyone who helped me in writing Destroy Gender, and thank you to all my sisters and comrades struggling, fighting back, writing, and plotting against gender.

For more writings on gender nihilism, check out Baedan, What is Gender Nihilism?, and Lies [5].

Until we no longer need identity,
Lena Kafka

1. Links are not a justification of my reasoning, just a reference to gendered division of labor in indigenous societies.
2. Against the Gendered Nightmare, thesis VII
3. Against the Gendered Nightmare, thesis VI
4. Against the Gendered Nightmare, thesis VII
5. Lies journal is not specifically gender nihilism, but has written much that influenced gender nihilism.

CLICK HERE for a print-ready PDF of the Destroy Gender series by Lena Kafka.
CLICK HERE to read part 2 – Beyond Another Gender Binary

Gender as Governance

Gender is a hierarchy, one of the apparatuses of governance, that differentiates and categorizes bodies/people. Bodies are categorized into genders based on one’s appearance, behavior, economic/social/cultural position, and others. The categories are stacked in a hierarchy, where men and men’s labor are more valued than women and women’s labor (domestic work, youth/elderly care, psychological/social work, food service, retail, all jobs based on emotional labor, etc).

Gender uses its categories to play a part in governing the social sphere to maintain social reproduction. It creates a gendered division of labor, between masculine and feminine, “man’s work” and “women’s work”. Women’s work is valued and paid less, and for much domestic work not at all. The valuing women’s labor less than men’s attempts to make working class women reliant upon men economically. The forced reliance on heterosexual relationships is as old as civilization and class society. Women are coerced, structurally and interpersonally, into relationships with men for the sake of survival, and the reproduction of civilization. As “Against the Couple-Form”  puts it, “rather than an essentialist concept, the category of woman stems a gendered mode of exploitation and relegates certain types of labor to a private, unwaged sphere.”  The sphere of reproductive labor.

Economic exploitation is not the only way gender governs us. On a social level, gender sets standards and norms for our bodies and behaviors. Bodies get put into categories based on secondary sex characteristics, voice, behaviors, dress/aesthetic/ethnicity, etc. These expectations vary based upon social/cultural situation and position. Gender regulates bodies into certain norms to be interpreted into certain categories (man/woman, etc). These norms are regulated by stricter interpretation for women, and with harsher punishment for transgression. Gender is what tells women that we are not enough or too much anything and everything. Gender regulates our movements (“it’s not safe at night”) and our capabilities (“that’s not what women do”, “women shouldn’t do this or that”). Gender creates our anxieties/desires to be “manly” and “womanly”, to meet the capitalist ideal of easily identifiable, categorizable, and predictable bodies and actions.  Gender governs the social sphere.

Governance and gender define all aspects to the hierarchy of civilization. Governance is the regulation, normalization, and (re)production of bodies/people and territory. It does so through prisons, police, surveillance, borders, gender, work, evictions, school, racism, debt, xenophobia, etc, creating a class of those who benefit and a class of those who suffer.

Done be to is what?

Everyone in the milieu knows to make total destroy, abolish whatever, to smash this or that. Gender is but another apparatus to be smashed, burned, and scattered. To destroy an apparatus, we must destroy its roots. But first, the soil that covers and protects the roots.  The police, racists, misogynists—patriarchs of all varieties—this is the soil we must dig up.

Easier said than done.  Confronting police requires militancy (vigilance + awareness + tactical knowledge), but militancy demands the kind of commitment and preparation many aren’t ready for.  In most ‘progressive milieus’, going on the offensive is seen as hasty, ill-advised, or at worst, as reactionary. Revolutionaries know that those who wait for the state’s offensive to hit them, who wait for some tragedy to use as leverage and justification for reform, are the real reactionaries. Revolutionaries need to push beyond half-measures, beyond reform, concession and rollback, and push for breaking from the normalcy of daily life. We must push for insurrection against all governance.

The Coming Insurrection states, “The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible.” To be irreversible means the roots are dug up and patriarchy, and all forms of hierarchy, are dismantled. In more real terms, it means that we have communities and spaces that aren’t just safe, but dangerous to those who oppose our desires and our spaces.  Not just a reading group safe space, but reclaimed territories capable of providing for the needs of the working class/women/the excluded (free from gender/gendered violence). These spaces can’t simply be given to us by a higher power.  Through occupations of the borderlands and sites of production, or less formal territories of resistance, such as friends who have each other’s backs, we will make or take the commons back.

No Tucking, No Masters

Our insurrection against gender cannot stop with just gender self-identification, or with a new list of terms for everyone to learn to respect. Insurrection must push beyond these limits to a free-play of actions, behaviors, sexuality, etc. Where doing or enjoying one action or another does not categorize you into a limiting role.

To be free from governance entails being free from gender. Being free from gender entails being free from categorization, normalization, and exploitation of governance.

Endnotes:

[1]  if one can separate the social from the political, private, etc

[2] these are not universal categories, exceptions may exist but we are looking at the structure of it all

[3] Lies: a journal of materialist feminism, Volume 1

[4] Distinct but not separable

[5] Viewing attacks on police as reactionary is a view normally held by those more liberal in our milieu, who still take their morality from the state despite the state being the one who facilitates our murders and misery. While I don’t think we should take their critiques to heart, we should still be aware of their presence in our circles and spaces.

[6]  Pg 130, Semiotext(e)

Lena Kafka

Further Reading/Inspiration
Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto
Whipping Girl
Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
Lies: a journal of materialist feminism
Caliban and the Witch
Feminist Theory: from margin to center