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On Gender Abolition

Introduction

A common misconception for most people is that gender is a necessary role in society to distinguish and classify people. Ironically, gender is very much a misconception of how humans operate as well. When removed from capitalism, gender ultimately is an unneeded thing and shows itself as a patriarchal concept. Wherever gender is, “masculinity” trumps “femininity” (if we’re talking strictly so-called male and female traits respectively). This obviously should not be the case; someone’s level of “masculinity” or “femininity” should not be a major part of how they are classified. With “feminine” men and “masculine” women, these labels fall short. So I prefer to use masculinity and femininity in a way that repurposes it from the patriarchal ideals, like in the way Terence McKenna saw. Rhiza Stirning puts it quite well: “I think a lot of people may often misinterpret what Terence means when he says the feminine. He doesn't mean like the gendered idea, but a loose idea of something ungendered, the very opposite for the patriarchy. He doesn't so much as say "the feminine" is the end or goal or anything but that history is going to move past the limits of the concept of "man" and "masculinity" as fixed concepts.”

Non-contradictions

Some people might point out contradictions arise when talking about romantic/sexual orientation under these proposed conditions of femininity being seen as a rebel against masculinity instead of one side of the same coin that is gender expression. For example, most orientation labels would be unnecessary and meaningless without gender labels. So I ask, what’s the enormous deal then? Gender labels are as important to how humans operate as orientation labels. Not at all. You shouldn’t need a label, you should be allowed to have free rein over who you have a desire for, whether it be sexual or romantic. Being gay, lesbian, bisexual, etc is essentially no different from being straight in the sense it just boils down to desiring distinct people even in purely platonic relations. It’s all just different likes and it shouldn’t affect who you are. It’s like flavors of ice cream. You can like one, multiple, or none. There are many types but at the end of the day it’s all an abominable concoction of dairy milk, sugar, and chilly temperatures. Not to say that sexuality is an abominable concoction of dairy milk, sugar, and frigid temperatures unless you find some innuendo in there, of course.

Role removal

A common trend in neurodivergent communities is this realization of a disconnection from the self to perceived gender roles (like the patriarchal masculine and feminine). Of particular interest is a MOGAI born label, namely “autigender”. There are many misconceptions about this label, the most common being that it means autism is your gender. Those misconceptions arise from a mix of truscum/trumed/etc ideology and bad naming, but that’s a whole other rabbit hole that isn’t all that interesting and is more effort than it’s worth. The important thing here is that it really means that someone’s autism distorts their perception of gender. This meaning has some issues. First off, gender itself already is a distortion. Second, perception is by nature distorted. If perception wasn’t distorted, there wouldn’t be entire books made just for the art of optical illusions and the McCollough effect wouldn’t exist. Despite these issues, autigender is a step in the right direction towards abolishing these original definitions of masculine and feminine to a degree. Autigender is essentially a form of non-binary (non-binary is to align your gender with being removed from concepts of male and female). Being autigender means you don’t understand traditional concepts of gender because of your autism. I’d beg to differ that being autigender just means being socially aware of these contradictions in traditional concepts of gender, that is to be neurodivergent is to be aware of problems in societal concepts (though not necessarily vice versa). Gender was defined in the mindset of the neurotypical, and McKenna’s femininity and non-binary identity is ultimately the path to abolishing gender.

Conclusion

Sort of a quick autistic tangent - A good analogy for gender is as a weird math function. We’ll call it G(x). Being non-binary is like being the point at which this function becomes undefined. It aligns well with sin(x)/x, where near 0 it approaches 1 but at 0 it is undefined (0/0 is an indeterminate form). It approaching 0 from the left and right side sort of represents the traditional masculine and feminine, and at 0 it becomes undefinable by notions of traditional masculine and feminine. With that rambling out of the way, I feel gender abolition is reachable through means of the concepts mentioned earlier. Even if it seems impossible, it’s still realistic. In the words of the Situationist International: “Be realistic–demand the impossible”.

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