Of the various slogans emanating from those who reject the trans paradigm, one of the least satisfactory is the claim that its underlying ideas are “regressive”. The argument is that the paradigm reduces the essence of man and woman to a series of “gender stereotypes”, involving dress, appearance and affect, whereas modern progress in our understanding of male and female has meant precisely falsifying such stereotypes.
Even leaving aside the question of how much of the last two centuries’ changes in this field constitute progress, there is clearly something faulty in an understanding of the trans movement as simply an attempt to return, to regress to an earlier understanding of gender. At best, such an analysis is entirely etic, since participants in the movement see themselves as having found a new liberatory stage in modernity’s liquefaction of the male-female divide. And they are certainly correct that the movement emerges from this liquefaction, rather than being an attempt to side-step it.
There is something faulty in an understanding of the trans movement as an attempt to regress to an earlier understanding of gender.
As Marx was perhaps among the first to observe, a characteristic project of industrial modernity has been the abolition of gender. Anti-trans advocates who insist on the primacy of “biological reality” are themselves celebrating this abolition. They seek to reduce the difference between the sexes to a matter of gametes, bone structure, “reproductive function”: they employ the language of the clinic and laboratory. Of course, all pre-modern societies vigorously differentiated between men and women with little or no knowledge of the biological sciences. Indeed all such societies reposed on the creation of separate, but overlapping, social spheres for men and women, spheres with their own rites and structures. What feminists tend to see as contingent accretions were here fundamental building blocks of reality.
In effect, the abolition of gender has largely meant the abolition of women. House-husbands and David Bowie notwithstanding, the (largely explicit) aim has been the integration of women into the male sphere, and the concomitant destruction of any separate female sphere. It is women who are invited to dress like men, work like men, enjoy what men enjoy. Contraception and abortion on demand invite women towards a more male-inflected eros. The unique potency and pathos of motherhood is watered down into the job-like activity of “childcare”.
The abolition of gender has largely meant the abolition of women
To be sure, there has also been a neutering of men. But this has come later and been less pronounced, because the industrial and post-industrial age is that of the “workplace”: it is the more female domestic sphere that has been pushed towards annihilation.
The ideal human in this model is a gender-free worker, consumer and reproducer, whose sex is indeed no more than a “biological” reality. However there is a persistent tension between this model and what we can actually do and be. Despite all the revolutionary changes to our social structures, men and women are still different, and still manifest this in dress, manner, social habits, consumption, job choices, and so forth.
These manifestations create a contradiction with the received article of faith that all differences above the level of biology are merely contingent, and probably bad. This contradiction can then be resolved by conceiving of the lingering traces of the two gendered spheres as accessories. Stripped down to their bare essence, men and women are quite the same sort of creatures. Whatever differences they manifest have little more weight than preferences in fashion or leisure.
If gender is a mere matter of accessorizing, then it follows that one can indeed pick one’s gender, just as one can pick one’s wardrobe. Ghoulish medical practices have reconfigured even parts of our bodies as removeable or modifiable accessories. Barbie can be turned into Ken, or vice versa, by melting and re-shaping the plastic, and then switching out the wardrobe.
In this respect, the claim that the trans paradigm re-affirms a “regressive” model of gender essentialism is the opposite of the truth. It is the the reduction of gender to a non-essential suite of options from a drop-down menu which makes it possible to affirm that one can, at will, switch genders or even live without any gender at all.
