One of the passages I was planning to quote is very germane to the latest round of TERF debates, so I am posting it today instead.
Radical feminists who are opposed to trans people repeatedly offer this justification: They are trying to bring on the “end of gender” whereas trans people “reinforce gender.” Throughout Excluded, I eviscerate the “reinforcing trope” and how it is arbitrarily used as a tool within activism to exclude minorities/marginalized subpopulations within movements (including lesbians in the early days of radical feminism).
And in the following passage from the book, I point out how ridiculously vague and arbitrary such “end of gender” claims really are.
I cannot tell you how many times I have read and heard claims that feminists are trying to “move beyond gender,” or to bring on the “end of gender,” invoked in attempts to portray transsexuality and transgenderism as antithetical to feminism. 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?
It seems clear to me that everybody has a somewhat different view of what is “in” gender (and therefore bad) and what is “outside” of gender (and therefore good). I have been in spaces that are predominantly genderqueer where I have heard people claim that anyone who uses male and female pronouns necessarily reinforces the gender system. I have on more than one occasion heard people who identify as bisexual or pansexual suggest that people who are exclusively attracted to one sex or the other reinforce the gender binary. Apparently, reinforcing the gender system, like beauty, is truly in the eye of the beholder.
Toward the end of that same chapter, I make the case that, as feminists, we should be fighting to bring on the *end of sexism*, rather than the “end of gender”:
I would have to be pretty full of myself to believe that I could undo the gender system simply by behaving in one way or another. Such notions may be self-reassuring, but they ignore the fact that acts of sexism occur, not by how we dress, or identify, or have sex, but through the way we see and treat other people. Sexism occurs when we assume that some people are less valid or natural than others because of their sex, gender or sexuality; it occurs when we project our own expectations and assumptions about sex, gender and sexuality onto other people, and police their behaviors accordingly; it occurs when we reduce another person to their sex, gender or sexuality rather than seeing them as a whole, legitimate person. That is sexism. And a person is a legitimate feminist when they have made a commitment to challenging sexist double standards wherever and whenever they arise. An individual’s personal style, mannerisms, identity, consensual sexual partners, and life choices simply shouldn’t matter into it.
More excerpts and reviews from the book can be found on my Excluded webpage.
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