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9 months agoI think we can distinguish between gender withering away under different material conditions and gender being “abolished”. Abolition is a political project, gender withering away would happen passively as the material conditions that underpin gender cease to exist and the contradictions are resolved. Actively trying to abolish gender is prefigurative idealism, which is why it attracts transphobes.
I think I’m in the ‘withering away’ camp and don’t think abolition is a useful framework. Gender contradictions aren’t antagonisitc, or at least, they don’t have to be. Non-antagonistic contradictions can simply be managed until the contradictions achieve a higher unity in synthesis (and then produce new contradictions that we probably can’t even imagine in our current gender paradigm).
I also don’t think gender withers away simply because we get rid of family, private property, and the state. I think those are some of the material foundations for gender as we know it and they are much of the foundation for gender roles, but gender itself can’t be resolved without addressing the technological limitations of gender affirming care. I know in my case I will probably never get bottom surgery, because even though I might be interested in it conceptually I don’t think the technology can give me exactly what I want. Gender can never wither away as long as we are so limited by our own bodies and gender affirming technology.
But eventually we will surpass these limitations. I envision a day that “transition” won’t even exist as a concept because we can just change ourselves at will, there will be so many genders and so many gender expressions and gender will be so fluid and dynamic that people today wouldn’t even recognize it as gender anymore.
I think we’re going to have gender for a long time, even after we defeat capitalism, but I also think there is a horizon where we’ll leave it behind because it isn’t useful anymore.