🔥 gender
I think the idea with gender as a concept was originally good. I mean gender as a feminist term to describe the phenomenon of socialization, expectations, stereotypes and gender roles associated with a person according to their sex.
I like it as a means to challenge biological determinism/essentialism, to challenge the idea that women behave according to what’s deemed ‘’feminine behaviour’’ or ‘’womanly behaviour’’ comes from our biology, that we are biologically/genetically/naturally and innately driven to be submissive, nurturing, sensitive, volatile and weak.
Gender instead as a way to conceptualize that we are born female and thereafter a social process of conditioning and demands forced us, or ‘trained’ us, to behave and act in certain ways.
This is what I think is the essential misunderstanding of de Beauvoir’s quote, i.e, that one is not born a woman but made into one = female people are conditioned into the female sex role.
Meaning, we are artificially forced into positions of submission, subjugation, perceived inferiority and any attempt we make to act confidently, aggressively or independently is fought against and punished. Essentially, gender is a term to help conceptualize the social act of gender socialization. It could not be separated from the sexed body, because the two depended on each other. Gender was applied to sex. Gender did not come from within, it came from without.
That, I think, is/was a useful concept, but like all social theory and terminology it was then co-opted and reframed and divorced from its context until it not only lost meaning, it changed meaning entirely.
Gender in modern discourse is used to instead mean some sort of innate sense of gender, that woman and man are souls or essences that exist within us, and that this is completely separate to that of the sexed body. That woman and man are somehow socially constructed yet at the same time natural, innate and existing on their own. A contradiction.
I think this reconceptualization and bastardization of ‘gender’ is problematic. It now insinuates that women are oppressed because our internal ‘’woman psyches’’ or ‘’woman minds’’ or ‘’woman souls’’, our ‘’woman essence’’, is … what? Randomly springs forth within us, regardless of our bodies, and that society treats us accordingly to this nebulous and abstract phenomenon?
It denies the fact that gender, socially, is a tool of oppression. It’s a way to enforce oppression. It’s a social process that is applied to women because of our bodies. We are women, socially, gendered such because we are female. Gender and sex cannot be separated for the term to have any meaning. If you do separate gender and sex, you will simply recreate essentialism/determinism, except now it’s some sort of ethereal soul that’s to blame for our crazy woman behaviours.
Instead of gender being something that is made, it becomes something you are, and the flesh that surrounds it is just some kind of random biological accident.
Gender is not a personality type, it’s not an identity, it’s not an essence or a feeling or a soul. It’s a complex social reality that is created, recreated and upheld through our interactions with other people and society at large. Gender is a process. Gender is a harmful weapon that allows male bodied people to be dominant in society, female bodied people to be subjugated, and female and male bodies that do not conform to this either through differences in development or in outward social ‘’gender expression’’ to be harmed.
It is a tool the patriarchy uses to oppress women, trans people and people with intersex conditions.
I think these days, as feminists, we will do best to just drop the term altogether and go back to talking about gender/sex roles, stereotypes and socialization, because those are the things gender was supposed to describe in the first place. The same can be said for the Swedish equivalent ‘’genus’’.
It was simply a way to categorize them in a way that made them easier to speak about and therefore combat, call out and criticize.
I think this new sort of gender essentialism/determinism that ‘gender’ has become, not only harms women’s liberation but also ultimately harms trans people and people with intersex conditions. I think if you have any modicum of knowledge and understanding of actual feminist theory you will realize that, and that the people who claim to be feminists or to be champions of LGBT rights, womens’ rights, intersex people, GNC people etc but still misuse and appropriate gender in this new way need to understand they are only harming each of these causes.
I don’t think this is a controversial opinion among those who actually read and understand various social theories, but on tumblr where the userbase is mainly young people who get their information from infographics it will probably land me in the hot seat. I suppose if your aim with this ask was to cause drama, you will succeed.
Love and peace on planat earth <3
