What the hell is Gender?
With so much confusion over what gender is, and with the idea that outdated sex stereotypes might make you transgender rapidly gaining traction in popular culture, it’s important to add clarification to lend some balance to the debate.
So what is gender?
Put simply, gender is a social construct that fundamentally disadvantages women. Gender’s like a caste system, and in patriarchy, women are assigned lower caste status. Stereotypes ascribed to the lower caste in patriarchy, typically include traits that limit, restrict, or encourage servile behaviour and obedience.
Women are expected to be passive, feminine, and nurturing because these traits enable maximum labour extraction, and maximum compliance with minimal complaint. Anyone questioning this orthodoxy is typically met with outrage, to challenge the status quo is a blasphemy dangerous to the prescribed social order.
Yet, there is no denying the losers in all of this are predominantly, and overwhelmingly female. Though some men can, and do, find gender oppressive and restricting, it’s women who are disproportionately harmed by it.
This fact is borne out by the reams of data attesting to women’s excessively high self-harm rates, low self-esteem, and poor body image. Not to mention the staggeringly high numbers of sexual assaults and rapes predominantly committed upon female bodies, the soaring rates of domestic violence, forced marriage, and honour crime, and the still-relatively low percentage of women who hold positions of power within the workplace.
The rape prosecution rate remains dire at approximately 6%, while cases of anorexia, bulimia, and other eating disorders are skyrocketing among the female population.
Still, many insist that gender itself is not a problem. That gender is innate, that somehow, women are naturally subordinate and submissive, and that if they are not, well they must be men.
This is how we have arrived at current transgender orthodoxy, and it’s precisely why thousands of teenage girls are now diagnosing themselves as transgender. No wonder, when to be female means a life spent performing hyper-femininity or suffering the consequences of social ostracization those who refuse to perform it must suffer.
Who wants to live a whole existence spent watching your weight, or where you walk, less you provoke a predatory male and then get blamed for doing so?
It shouldn’t surprise anyone much that young girls today don’t want to an existence as a second-class citizen, particularly, when they have little other choice than to transition. After all, radical feminists have been insisting that gender is oppressive for years but have been consistently told to shut up, as apparently, they are trying to defeminize perfectly happy women.
This, however, is fundamentally flawed logic. Women, and girls, as statistics demonstrate, are far from perfectly happy. And many of them don’t want to continue to perform femininity either. Yet because society still refuses to accept that gender is at the root of much of this female misery, they are now being forced to undergo transition, to escape the constricting straitjacket patriarchy insists on encumbering them with.
If teenage girls feel that in order to be confident, ambitious, and carefree they must be men, it means mainstream feminism (aka liberal feminism) is failing in its primary duty, to enfranchise the female sex class. It also means society, as a whole, is failing one half of the population. We must all begin to address our awkwardness with female “masculinity”, or, really, our uncomfortability with any female who refuses to comply with the limiting box of traits labelled feminine.
For as long as we continue to balk at the butch, condemn confident women, and stymy female success, women and girls who are desperate to escape limitation, will continue to transgender. Even though transitioning does not solve their problems, and adds new, potentially fatal ones, such as early death through cardiac incident due to testosterone’s toxic effect on female biology, many girls and women who transition, still enjoy a freedom they would never receive if they had continued to be seen as female.
In a report for Time magazine, that interviewed trans identified natal females, women who had taken the decision to transgender reported gaining a new respect in their workplaces and an improved social status that they had never previously experienced. This feeling is echoed in the thousands of You Tube videos made by females who transgender, who, high on their new-found male privilege, display a confidence that would mark them for targets in their actual, female identities.
The logic of transgender lunacy has now reached the point where we cannot even accept the most visually superficial versions of patriarchal non-compliance. Forget butch acceptance, even soft tomboys like actor Ruby Rose, are now forced to declare themselves non-binary. Sickeningly, many male bodied trans activists become instantly outraged at any suggestion that woman doesn’t necessarily equal hyper-feminine, claiming that lipstick, mascara, passivity, and the willingness to please a man are natural, inborn traits possessed by all those identifying as female.
This is where the insistence upon the dreaded word “cis” stems from, and is why the word is so hated in the radical, aka actual feminist community.
By asking women to adopt the term “cis”, trans activists ask women to embrace their own oppression. To say it is a choice, that femininity is natural and not oppressive.
This silences the voices of women who eschew femininity, by insidiously suggesting that if they are not feminine they are not a woman. That if they don’t like what being a woman means, they should fuck off and identify as something else. If women don’t like having to remove all their body hair, if they don’t like taking up less space, and if they don’t want to be groped at work, the message is clear — put up or shut up, or, lately, transition.
The false equivalence of woman equals feminine is also where the bogus logic that trans “women” are more woman than actual women comes from, since femininity, and how well one performs it, is used as the yardstick by which to measure womanhood, not biology.
Is it too much to ask that women be allowed to express and live in the world as they are in all their glorious diversity? According to patriarchy it is, the gains made by the Second Wave feminist revolution are already being slowly eroded by those keen to reduce women to the construct known as femininity once more.
Gender is quite simply, a prison, for women. For some men, it may be oppressive too, but largely, men benefit from women’s subjugation. It’s a shame but no wonder too many men are against destroying the gender caste system, since they stand to lose the privilege that comes with being part of the male sex caste in a patriarchal culture.
Yet as a society, and as feminists, we must resist gender, the word “cis”, and all the other horrors of transgender orthodoxy if we truly want to achieve liberation for women. Much lip service is paid today by mainstream feminism, politicians, and social justice warriors alike about “empowerment” and “equality” for women, yet no true equality can ever be gained until we cast off the oppressive caste system that is gender.
