The title of this essay is in reference to Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 text fundamental to the history of feminism titled The Dialectic of Sex — for a reason. Today, in tandem with its “socialization” in the heart of the capitalist network, there has emerged a crisis within feminism. This crisis is closely related to its co-optation, to its domestication, to its culturalization. This crisis was immanent in many forms of feminism from their emergence as a line of inquiry, but it is neither purely internal nor introduced externally.
The United States is experiencing a backlash to the popularization of feminism — or, rather, particular forms of feminism — in the mid and late 2010s. The roots of this crisis stretch back further, to the feminisms which are the immediate predecessors of today’s line of inquiry. An arch-conservative United States Supreme Court has repealed the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and the right to bodily autonomy and reproductive rights which it guaranteed.¹ Many conservative states have already been moving to more or less abolish the right to choose entirely.² Although the repeal is sold under the slogan of states’ rights, Republicans such as the antediluvian turtle Mitch McConnell have floated a national abortion ban.³
At the exact same time, and directly in tandem, the past few years have seen a wave of anti-transgender legislation in many states.⁴ They, too, attack bodily autonomy, sexual education, and a perceived breakaway of American civil society from a conservative, patriarchal Christianity. In their attempts to mandate “family values” and attack “groomers,” they are seeking to subject children to medical molestation through forcible genital inspections.⁵ Talking head grifters squeal about traditional family values and their conviction that the root of all contemporary social issues lies in the breakdown of the nuclear family unit.
While these reactionaries wield law and the culture industry, some wield weapons. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, intimate partner violence against women has increased severely.⁶ Transgender people, especially transgender women, continue to face severe and disproportionate violence.⁷ Very often, the perpetrators are men. In the constant recurrence of mass shootings in the United States, a pattern emerges of perpetrators being incel or quasi-incel men, typically with misogynistic leanings worn on their sleeves.⁸
Needless to say, the mainstream of American liberalism offers nothing but impotence in the face of this. There is little material backlash against this reactionary wave, but there are certainly some strongly worded verbal takedowns. The national response by liberals and the liberal left has been to admonish people to vote harder — as if the Democratic Party is doing anything meaningful to abate this — or to otherwise blame civilians. There certainly isn’t nearly as much emphasis on, say, building networks of resistance as their ought to be. In fact, it seems the reactionaries have more consciousness, as demonstrated by conservative states aiming their sights at those who go out of state to get an abortion or gender-affirming healthcare.⁹
This is not the main topic of this essay, but it is close to its heart. The response of the co-opted, domesticated form of feminism — leashed closely to the Democratic Party machine — has been largely incompetent and limited to a cultural strategy at best. It has built little in the way of material networks of resistance within these states. Networks aiding those who seek out-of-state abortions and gender-affirming care have certainly emerged, and have begun admirable work — but they are not extensions out of the Democratic Party machine’s liberal feminism. They are largely grassroots efforts reflecting an alternative approach to the purely institutions-and-law approach of the Democrats. This includes unnamed networks, as well as organizations like National Women’s Health Network (NWHN), Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project (WRRAP), and Transgender Health Network (THN).
Thus, this liberal, cultural form of feminism has shown its bankruptcy in its neglect of these material needs and concerns. It is a feminism growing out of individualism, and so has little to offer that doesn’t concern those who can live as individuals. Liberal individualism is a dead end. Either navel-gazing into the self or suffocating in the narrow constrictions of an institutions-and-law approach has failed. The reactionaries control the institutions and make the laws, fundamental laws even, now. Democratic political and cultural politics are a failure.
On the other hand, a form of feminism aiming to claim direct continuity with the old, more combative forms of feminism is contemporary radical feminism. This framework typically rejects individualism in favor of a more quasi-class struggle framework — albeit one which posits a class struggle between two sexes, sometimes to the supersession of other forms of class struggles. It emphasizes the biological body, especially the womb, as the site of patriarchal oppression. It essentially sees this dichotomous struggle as rooted in biology, in one way or another.
There are various views within this tendency, but where they tend to agree is in rejecting transgender people — thus the label Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (TERF) — and to argue that any rhetoric of gender-based oppression which discusses gender as distinct to sex is reactionary or obscurantist. They take influence from TERFs like Janice Raymond and Mary Daly who argue that transgender people or “gender ideology” reify the bases of “sex-based oppression” and reproduce the deceptions of patriarchy. Although TERFs are not always Marxist, the ideology has roots in particular forms of Marxism and has inherited much of its approach. I am interested in developing a Marxist alternative to this that rejects its hegemonic claims.
The other tendency, which is at the mainstream in the United States, is one which does not quite have a self-adopted label. While the TERFs adopt labels to describe themselves like gender critical, materialist feminist, and so on, this group seemingly does not recognize itself as a distinct group. It is the main ideology of the contemporary mainstream of the LGBT movement and most of the domesticated lines of feminism. I will provisionally describe it as gender individualism. It rejects the historicity and sociality of gender and embraces a seemingly atomistic self-definition as a means of liberation. For them, the free exercise of individual desire is what liberation means. Liberation is the activity of the internal self against or apart from the externality of society. While the TERFs emphasize social struggle, this view comes with indiscriminate and uncritical defense of kink, the sex industry, the makeup industry, etc.
In both of these poles, there is a certain identifiable episteme or common sense even in their direct contradictions. Both recognize the body as a primary site of dispute, of autonomy, and of liberation — whether in presentation, reproduction, labor, or sexual desire and pleasure. Both employ a certain authenticity rhetoric, with TERFs positing gender as an external institution as being inauthentic and gender individualists positing gender liberation as the realization of one’s internal, originary essence in an authentic gendered life.
In these stances, both tend to hold to a sex-gender distinction. On the one hand, we have the “objective” category of sex — objective in the sense of literally being present in the object of the body, and in the sense of the categories being assumed to be beyond social-historical influences. On the other hand, there is the “subjective” category of gender, which is understood as variable and a site of change, whether through historical social struggle or through a realization of one’s internal, subjective self-image of authenticity.
Both make a mechanical and dogmatic separation of the unmediated “objective” scientific categories, placed beyond the social in their formation even if recognized as the object of social dispute, and the “subjective” categories, which are rendered either static dichotomies or as pure determinations of the individual. Against this modern view, here we seek to advocate for a position which emphasizes not only the sociality and historicity of gender, but to reject the two-systems approach and emphasize that this extends not only to sex but to all categories. That is because all categories, every single one, are from the perspective of human beings, even as they organize real, concrete, objective things into systems of knowledge. There is no such thing as an unmediated, primary object for a living being.
Rather than taking up either a naive, “objectivist” scientism or a naive, individualist rejection of externality, we ought to take up the living legacy of Marx’s immanent critique. As Marx described it:
“In its rational form it is a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom and its doctrinaire professors, because it includes in its comprehension and affirmative recognition of the existing state of things, at the same time also, the recognition of the negation of that state, of its inevitable breaking up; because it regards every historically developed social form as in fluid movement, and therefore takes into account its transient nature not less than its momentary existence; because it lets nothing impose upon it, and is in its essence critical and revolutionary.”¹⁰
Unlike the individualists, it understands social externality as having a reason for the way it is. Unlike the TERFs, it refuses a naive, static conception of what exists. Even one which posits a bifurcated existence of Men-Oppressors and Women-Oppressed, defined in biology, and advocates struggle. Marx advocated and supported struggle for liberation, but never had any concept of an “objective,” destined dichotomy in this sense.
We shouldn’t merely toss this modern episteme aside as ridiculous, even if it is, but seek to understand the meanings of these ideologies and how they come to appear rational. By working through them in the process of negation, of critique, we take a step towards developing a new way forward for gender liberation.
TERFs and the Old Materialism
Isn’t it ironic how much TERFs echo the insolent maxim of a conservative child like Ben Shapiro, “facts don’t care about your feelings?” Like the self-described “theocratic fascist” Matt Walsh, they believe that “transgenderists” have made it impossible to answer the question “What is a Woman?” Their ideology posits a naive realism, a naive scientistic fixation on biology, which renders them allies with conservatives in emphasizing the sanctity of what is. Take the example of Julia Beck, a TERF who has worked directly with the Republican Party in its anti-transgender policy goals.¹¹ Certainly, not all TERFs do this. But the fact that this occurs demonstrates quite effectively the pitfalls of refusing to recognize the confluence of the attacks on “gender ideology” and “baby murder” by the political bloc now revolving around the Republican Party.
Both TERFs and conservatives agree on some level that there is an objective, scientific, pure bodily definition of “woman.” TERFs have compared transgender women to blackface, have described them as an “Empire” promoted by patriarchy to undermine radical feminism, and have posited a framework of sex-based oppression against that of gender-based oppression, seeing the latter as a distraction.
While TERFs and conservatives disagree on where they think women ought to be headed, socio-historically speaking, they come to a basic agreement in a positivistic affirmation of a solid “what is” in the question of “What is a Woman?” A woman is someone who can reproduce, who has a vagina that she was born with, who has two X chromosomes, who has a certain skeletal and physiological structure, and so on. This ideology of what a woman is has a quite material application in policing the consideration of people as women, whether with Florida’s endorsement of medical molestation in the name of “protecting” kids or the attempt to enforce this based on stereotypes in “appearance” to exclude trans women from women’s shelters. The logic immanent in these practices, and stated directly, implies that “woman” is a given, and one can know a “woman” when they see one based on body or external physiological functions like gait, voice, posture, and so on.
For this ideology, one is “born” a woman, in direct contrast to Simone de Beauvoir’s famous quote that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”¹² Womanhood is in the body-as-an-object, it is simply there. Even if our thinking about womanhood or related categories changes, the “objectivity” of womanhood remains unchanged. In this sense, there is a certain mind-body distinction posed, in the sense of the mind being capable of wandering beyond reality as the way a subject experiences the world and the body remaining in cold, hard objectivity. It is up to human beings to discover pre-given facts in the world, particularly about the object of our bodies.
Yet, this naively biologistic view is far from the critical approach TERFs posit it as being. To take biological categories as something objective or immediate, something one must discover as in-itself, is merely to reify and naturalize the manner of thinking we adopt about the body and our place in the world. Any thinking about the world as objects, or about ourselves as objects, involves a thinking with and through concepts, an organization of sensory data according to what one might describe as a philosophy. Certainly, the objects of contemplation exist, but we learn as much about ourselves as thinking subjects in how we think about them and arrange them in knowledge as we do about these objects.
To acknowledge that we don’t know the world immediately, without the mediation of conceptual thinking or the perspective of a subject living within that world, is to avoid naive reification. It enables one to understand how scientific knowledge can change, and change quite radically. Biological categories in particular are subject to challenges and change in history, not only with new consciousness of the objects of contemplation, but in the way we approach them as social and historical human subjects. This critical approach to systems of categories, even those which claim the approach and status of science, is quite foundational to the Marxism and feminism which TERFs tend to claim the legacy of.
Karl Marx certainly didn’t spend as much time in his career concerning himself with feminism as he ought have. There is a reason, however, that his methods have appealed to feminists working to critique the state of the patriarchal world. In his 1845 Theses on Feuerbach, for instance, Marx said:
The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question.¹³
For Marx, the fact that human beings are thinking and acting subjects in the world they seek to know means that they approach the world from a specific perspective. They cannot approach the world, being here a homogenous and static object, from the perspective of a disembodied subject. They approach the world from a perspective as part of the world, and a part which actively changes it and is changed as it exists. To think of it otherwise, from a purely scholastic or contemplative position, is to engage in the naturalization of historically specific phenomena for Marx. This way of thinking also lay behind Marx’s interests in early theories of evolution, ecology, and geology.¹⁴
Marx’s emphasis on perspective in living in the world is also quite important, as it demonstrates the role of human mediation in the concepts and categories we use to engage with our world:
[…]man stands in relation to the things of the external world as means for the satisfaction of his needs. But on no account do men begin by ‘standing in that theoretical relation to the things of the external world’. They. begin, like every animal, by eating, drinking, etc., hence not by ‘standing’ in a relation, but by relating themselves actively, taking hold of certain things in the external world through action, and thus satisfying their need[s]. (Therefore they begin with production.) Through the repetition of this process, the property of those things, their property to ‘satisfy needs’, is impressed upon their brains; men, like animals, also learn to distinguish ‘theoretically’ from all other things the external things which serve for the satisfaction of their needs.
At a certain stage of this evolution, after their needs, and the activities by which they are satisfied, have, in the meantime, increased and developed further, they will christen these things linguistically as a whole class, distinguished empirically from the rest of the external world. This happens necessarily, since they stand continually in the production process — i.e. the process of appropriating these things — in active association among themselves and with these things, and soon have to engage in a battle with others over these things. But this linguistic designation only expresses an idea what repeated corroboration in experience has accomplished, namely, that certain external things serve men already living in a certain social connection (this is a necessary presupposition on account of language) for the satisfaction of their needs.
Men assign to these things only a particular (generic) name, because they already know that they serve for the satisfaction of their needs, because they get hold of them through activity which is repeated more or less often, and they also seek to retain [them] in their possession; perhaps they all them ‘goods’ or something else which expresses the fact that they need these things practically, that these things are useful to them, and they believe that this useful character is possessed by the thing, although it would scarcely appear to a sheep as one of its ‘useful’ properties that it is edible by man.”¹⁵
Any system of scientific categorization, biology being no exception, involves a linguistic and thus conceptual denoting of objects in the world. Marx emphasizes the role of needs and their historical development as foundational to all human systems of categories. Thus, he emphasizes a human-centered perspective in human engagements with the world — “it would scarcely appear to a sheep as one of its ‘useful’ qualities that it is edible by man.”
Needs are historically produced, and informed by long struggles to establish what ought to be considered norms. Humans are not machines, but thinking beings with varying priorities rather than following some ahistorical, mechanical reason of biological nature. That is, humans are both made by history and make history. Thus, they are both made by biology and make biology, in both a practical and conceptual sense.
Later, the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács emphasized this attack on naive realism or the “old materialism,” which separated itself from sociality and historicity, even more aggressively. In 1919, he inveighed:
“The historical character of the ‘facts’ which science seems to have grasped with such ‘purity’ makes itself felt in an even more devastating manner. As the products of historical evolution, they are involved in continuous change. But in addition they are also precisely in their objective structure the products of a definite historical epoch, namely capitalism. Thus when ‘science’ maintains that the manner in which data immediately present themselves is an adequate foundation of scientific conceptualization and that the actual form of these data is the appropriate starting-point for the formation of scientific concepts, it thereby takes its stand simply and dogmatically on the basis of capitalist society. It uncritically accepts the nature of the object as it is given and the laws of that society as the unalterable foundation of ‘science.’”¹⁶
Lukács’s critique here, on the social and historical specificity of conceiving of seemingly objective information, is not alien to the legacy of feminism either. The feminisms of the 20th century made central a critique of biological determinism or biological essentialism as a means of attacking the naturalization of patriarchy. They attacked the psychological diagnosis of hysteria as individualizing and internalizing the agony of a woman in patriarchal society into her own unreasonable insanity. They tore into the doctrine of the vaginal orgasm, arguing for alternative means of women experiencing pleasure that did not rely on the penetration of penises. In the field of biology itself, they demonstrated the role of masculine bias in positing natural female passivity in primate societies.
These were very potent and effective means of quite practically realizing the critiques of “old materialism” that Marx and Lukács took up but did not extend very far into this direction. The famous feminist biologist, Ruth Hubbard, said of those who fixate on women’s biology to explain a “natural” basis for women’s conditions:
“No one has suggested that men are just walking testicles, but again and again women have been looked at as though they were walking ovaries and wombs[…] our concept of ourselves is socially constructed and political because our society’s interpretation of what is and what is not normal and natural affects what we do. It therefore affects our biological structure and functioning because[…] what we do and how our bodies and minds function are connected dialectically. Thus norms are self-fulfilling prophecies that do not merely describe how we are but prescribe how we should be.”¹⁷
For these reasons, we cannot speak merely of sex-based oppression or the real sex versus the delusion of gender. Gender is real in the sense that it is embedded in social practices, it becomes an active category in everyday life just as much as do biologistic categories. To make a category like sex an unmediated scientific reality refuses history and social contingency, naturalizing what is. This was the criticism of so many feminists, who both focused on their body as sites of oppression and refused to be rendered purely their bodies. The rejection of biological determinism is a red thread within feminism which must be picked up again.
Any attempt to determine a foundational principle in answering the question of “What is a Woman?” merely leads to a positing of an abstract Woman. It is a contemplative approach that tells us more about the positer than the posited. Think of the history of criticisms of abstract, homogenous Woman from within revolutionary feminism. Sojourner Truth, Eleanor Marx, Clara Zetkin, Emma Goldman, Alexandra Kollontai, and Claudia Jones all reserved particularly strong criticism for white and/or bourgeois feminists who projected their own concrete existences into the foundational answer to what womanhood is. The fact that these contemplative approaches lead merely to a projection or naturalization of specific experiences and relations demonstrates the historicity of these categories in that they have been formed in the fires of bourgeois society and its colonialism.
This approach once it reaches the realm of policy tends to directly harm women who are different from the posited Woman. The confluence of transphobia and misogynoir, or misogyny specifically targeting Black women, makes this quite clear. The 2022 Olympics, for instance, barred two cisgender Black women from participating due to “abnormally” high testosterone levels.¹⁸ This comes in the context of obsessive debates about the supposed dangers of transgender women having an unfair advantage in women’s sports. If one posits women as frail, thin, fair, one does not posit this outside of history or get to some fundamental, metaphysical truth of Woman. One merely codifies historically informed norms.
Any foundationalist approach to the issue of “sex-based oppression” is merely contemplative. All contemplative knowledge falls apart into internal contradiction and incoherence, for its own inability to recognize itself as a human system of knowledge and attempt to reach at the Absolute.
The claim of sex as defined by reproductive organs falls apart in light of sterile people, or of intersex people. The claim of sex as defined by chromosomes falls apart in light of the variability in correspondence between chromosomes and gonads or hormones.¹⁹ The claim of sex as defined by hormones falls apart in light of the radical variability of hormonal balances regardless of genitalia — hormones operate more in terms of person-specific metabolisms than some simple dichotomous logic.²⁰ The claim of sex as defined by athleticism falls apart in light of the sociality of it.²¹ The claim of sex as defined by skeletal structure falls apart in light of the unreliability of this approach in reliably “sexing” skeletons in archaeology.²²
It is often pointed out that there are statistically traceable distinctions along such lines as physiology, labor, psychology and so on between men and women. This is certainly true, but can tell us nothing about anything originary or foundationalist. Our very bodies are social, both as a unity and in what goes into them — how can one separate that from the social logic of what a woman is or should be? Of what the everyday lives of those in this posited category of “woman” look like? If one says that a “woman” is one who does not engage in rough sports, and enforces this norm, then one will come to a circular logic of “proving” this truth about women by the fact that they lack the physiology typical of rough sports.
In essence, these foundationalist approaches tell us more about the logic of the categorizer than the categorized. To make reproductive organs the foundational logic is to posit the basic principle of womanhood as being a womb, to make it appearance is to posit womanhood as a certain standard of beauty, to make it a certain athleticism is to posit womanhood as a certain division of labor, and so on. Thus, contemplative knowledge, in trying to be only outward-facing, becomes purely inward-facing.
Contrast this contemplative approach to one which takes people as they are in everyday life, with all their contingencies and concreteness, and works from there to understand their experiences. This is what the most revolutionary of feminists, such as the women I previously mentioned, advocated doing. Rather than trying to jump to a fundamental principle of Woman, one engages with what is given and works from there. That is a dialectical approach, and that is an approach of practical knowledge rather than contemplative knowledge.
One cannot answer what a woman is in any originary sense. To make a ridiculous pun on Marx, let me quote and tweak his Notes on Wagner:
“‘[Wo]Man’? If the category “[wo]man” is meant here, then [s]he has, in general, ‘no’ needs at all; if it is [wo]man who confronts nature as an individual, then [s]he is to be understood as a non-herd animal; if it is [wo]man already situated in any form of society — and Herr Wagner implies this, since for him ‘[wo]man’, even if [s]he does not have a university education, has a language at any rate — then the specific character of this social [wo]man is to be brought forward as the starting point, i.e. the specific character of the existing community in which [s]he lives, since production here, hence [her] process of securing life, already has some kind of social character.²³
Marx refused to say anything foundational about what Man is here, so here we tweak him into refusing to saying anything foundational about what Woman is. Knowledge about what Woman is cannot be answered coherently in any contemplative way, just as it cannot be done for Man. Knowledge is fundamentally paired with the logics immanent in everyday practices, which already engage in forms of categorization through the organization of everyday life. When one remains in one-sided contemplation, one is left with incoherence. In practical knowledge, one recognizes plurality and posited logics instead of searching fruitlessly for foundational truths. One ought to start with concrete immanence instead of immediately imposing some alien dogma into the plurality of concrete life.
Even those TERFs who verbally reject biological determinism but take up some notion of what Alice Echols terms “cultural feminism,” affirming “feminine values” and a mythic originary matriarchy of human existence engage in the same reification.²⁴ This is not entirely different from Proudhon’s good-bad “dialectic,” which calls for the redemption of the good from the bad side. Contrast this to Marx’s critical dialectic, which sees these two sides as inseparable components of one unity. Femininity and masculinity as we know it are those of this patriarchal society. They contain the immanence of their own negation, but they also cannot be merely taken up as is. This represents a mere negative mirror image of what is.
TERF ideology, because it tends to consider men and women to be fundamentally, often biologically, dichotomous and determined to come to a struggle, ironically becomes an apologetic for patriarchal behavior. Misogynists today like Jordan Peterson use this argument to say that patriarchy is natural, since it is how things are and how things are immediately follows from biology. Eleanor Burke Leacock attacked this argument strongly, using examples of matrilocal societies and the historical development of patriarchy to attack any such ahistorical claims and demonstrate that “sex struggles” are in truth contingent and historically variable social struggles.²⁵ They can come in and out of being depending on the organization of social relations and the meanings bound up in them. Thus, patriarchy can be abolished in quite a concrete way, rather than requiring a total transcendence of our bodily existences.
Because TERF ideology leaves this legacy behind, it becomes both fatalistic and Manichaean in positing a naturalized or biologically-based patriarchy. Instead of a grounded, immanent course of revolutionary change, it posits such dead ends as women’s separatism, political lesbianism, or a pathetic alliance with conservatives against “gender ideology.” It can only be either complacent with the powers that be directly such as through this collaboration or indirectly through its dependency on a catastrophe to escape this entirely bad state of being. It implies that there is no potential for immanent transformation, for the negation of what is on its own basis. We must simply wait for some divine, total transformation to come down from outside some day.
The Manichaeanism of biologism means that the stakes are all or nothing. It posits for itself an insurmountable task rather than one with day-to-day struggles of transformations, with steps forwards and backwards, with groundings among people as they are towards a new potential. In “good” times, it leads to a borderline Millenarian perspective. In “bad” times, it leads to a pessimistic fatalism that tends to express itself in collaboration or in separatism.
Yet, this simply biologism is not the only way this fatalism can emerge. Another form of this fatalism sheds light on pitfalls in this critique. There has been a certain thread of this within Marxism itself, a thread which these TERFs are typically inheritors of — with Engels’ theory of a single “world-historic defeat of the female sex.”²⁶ Engels posited this in critique of patriarchy, and in particular against theories of biological determinism. He located the basis of patriarchy in the rise of private property, seeking to demonstrate the necessary links of struggles for women’s liberation with those for socialism.
However, Marxists like Eleanor Burke Leacock have shown the historical inaccuracy of this argument. While it is true there is a direct association of private property with patriarchy, we should not naturalize this as the ultimate defeat of women in history. It is contingent on the arrangement of labor, and associated definition of men and women in the constellations of gender.²⁷ Dichotomization into a particular patriarchal system depends on the specific arrangement of the system it emerges out of. In some contexts, women own property and engage in warfare, while in others they are purely specialized in domestic craft labor which is disempowered by private property. The basic point is that patriarchy has determinate and manifold histories, and these histories are of struggle and contingency. Heather Brown uses the example of Marx’s analysis of the practice of sati in the Indian subcontinent to demonstrate another way of thinking about patriarchy in history. She says, explaining Marx’s reasoning:
“Widow-burning was thus not part of earliest religious law, at least under the Mitakshara, but the Brahmins did have an important reason for encouraging the practice. Marx alludes to it in the above passage with his parenthetical reference to ‘property designated for religious uses’. Here, he is referring to where Maine’s text quotes the Mitakashara on the relationship between men and women, in terms of giving property to the Brahmins upon their death: ‘The wealth of a regenerate man is designed for religious uses, and a woman’s succession to such property is unfit because she is not competent to the performance of religious rites’.38 Thus, upon the death of her husband, a woman could not give property for the religious ceremonies to the Brahmins, because she was unfit according to Hindu doctrine. On the other hand, his male children or other male relatives were competent to perform this task.
“[…]both the Brahmins and the male relatives of the deceased had a strong material interest in assuring that the property of the deceased husband did not go to his wife, since neither could gain access to it until her death. According to the law, women could not give the property to the Brahmins and the property that she inherited went to all men in her husband’s clan. Thus, the easiest way to gain access to this property, both for the Brahmins and for the close relatives of the deceased husband, was through the death of the widow.”²⁸
Thus, rather than either a direct or indirect givenness of sex-based oppression, we must keep in mind the historicity of gender. Even in relations of oppression which seek to brand the oppressed as purely what they are made by another, history is the history of human self-making within conditions of being-made. Further, societies of oppression like patriarchy already have potentials for critique from within. Marx cited the example of goddesses in Classical Antiquity as a visible and immanent alternative for women to imagine something other than what their patriarchs deemed them as.²⁹ He did not posit any myths of pre-historical matriarchal utopias — an alternative that is outside and apart — but pointed out a potential for change from within, and change which can be a drawn out historical struggle rather than being all or nothing.
In considering Marxist approaches and human agency in history, we must also focus our sights on what Marx and Engels identified as the fundamental force in the mediation of human beings as subjects with imaginations and objective beings in the objective world — labor. On first glance, labor seems to have nothing to do with critiques of “sex determinism.” Yet it is central to it, as labor is fundamentally a metabolism, a creation, self-creation, and being-created. When one labors on something, one changes it from what was physically potential from within the “raw material,” and also changes oneself both physiologically and psychologically.
Often, labor as social activity is directed quite consciously at self-transformation — think of the long history of professional armies engaging in training and bodybuilding. This, thus, extends to how we make our own bodies at the same time as we are made with and within them. We are not merely destined to what we are born with physically. The fact that we can be made and make ourselves physically is a powerful challenge to any notion of natural orders or natural antagonisms. Our bodies themselves are historical — this view can understand procedures altering genitals, body shapes, skeletons, hormones, and so on without positing any more “authentic,” originary existence to contrast with it. There is nothing without or beyond history in the world. To understand this even in the context of “sexual organs” is to challenge all of those who say that things must be this or that way.
Of course, this doesn’t mean to say that Shulamith Firestone was right in her theory of feminism needing to pursue a transcendence of the “natural.” Her naive fetishization of technological development lacks a consciousness of social mediation just as much as contemporary biological determinism. In fact, it posits a dichotomy between the natural-biological and the cultural-human.³⁰
Against this view, one must remember that to change one’s body is not automatically to change the world. In fact, it can be an even more direct embodiment of the world as it is into oneself. It can be a means of extending social relations of being-made into oneself even as one thinks one is liberating oneself from objective destiny. Marxist feminists like Silvia Federici and Selma James have attacked the plastic surgery industries and commodification of reproduction for this reason.³¹ Labor transforms the world and our bodies, but labor moves and thinks with the inheritances of history. Labor on the body is not self-making beyond this baggage.
Marx identified technology as a fundamental unity including an irreconcilable tie of the development of new possibilities and the domination, massification, and brutalization of the working classes. We ought to think of practices of bodily recreation similarly, understanding even our bodies as sites of struggle and autonomy, but not as any “originary” existences. Our bodies are not beyond the bad unity of society, they are social from birth and in our very metabolisms. What we consume, what we breathe, what we see, what we hear, what we feel, what we think — everything is part of the world. This does not call for any naturalistic fatalism, but for a dialectical approach which renews the struggle within and against the world as it exists.
In thinking about contemporary patriarchy, Marx does not only offer us the method of immanent critique as a weapon. He also identified the Roman institution of paterfamilias — father-right — as central to the Western patriarchal systems which have worked to globalize themselves through imperialism.³²
The notion of patriarchal authority as paterfamilias does not posit any dichotomy of men and women, nor does it assume a natural biological struggle. It is, after all, a concept rooted in law and a statist attempt at organizing the home, labor, and identity. Law is a posited codification of society. It is rarely identical with the actuality of society, but it expresses a certain goal or principle. Paterfamilias entails the oppression of the “lesser” — not confined only to women — by the father-authority. In Rome, this included both children, wives, and slaves or servants.
This theme of a masculine authority is echoed in patriarchies across their histories. It is a means of understanding struggles among father-authorities, between Big Men and little men, between the paterfamilias and women, between paterfamilias and children, and so on. It is a conception which pairs quite naturally with an approach which considers the oppression of cis and trans women to be related — as demonstrated in their grouping together by the historical bloc of patriarchal Republicans. The oppression of gender variance, variance from the organizing principles of paterfamilias, extends to all those who challenge these father-authorities and their world-visions. it includes struggle to control biological reproduction and reproductive labor alike, thus not being confined merely to women-as-wombs.
This is a class struggle, and it is a worldwide class struggle, as Maria Mies argued.³³ This approach does not render patriarchy one-dimensional or historically invariant, and it does not posit transgender women as agents of some “Transgender Empire” and mere extensions of patriarchal authority. It penetrates deeper into our neocolonial bourgeois patriarchies of today and offers the potential of a new historical bloc. What we need is to take up the task of building a broad historical bloc against the existing state of things from within, rather than merely taking what is and opposing it from within as a negative mirror image. Against the fatalism and Manichaeanism of TERF ideology, we need a real and immanent movement to transcend the paterfamilias from within and out of the arrangement it tries to place us in.
Gender Individualism
In my ire for TERFism, I don’t intend to let gender individualism off the hook. Rather than seeing it as a revolutionary alternative to the approaches of TERFism, I see it as part of the same, complacent episteme of our world.
The very popular argument and ideology today of one being “born this way” shows itself to be a dead end on closer examination. It searches for gender in birth, in the brain, in the chromosomes, anywhere “objective.” It does this as a means of responding to reactionaries who consider gender variant people to be deluded, but it does so on their own ground. Thus, it renders domination invisible and reifies what is into biology. As the feminist neurobiologist Gina Rippon argues, against this naturalization of gender into biology:
“We have seen the difficulties for women associated with an unshakable conviction that their biology determines their interests, aptitudes, personality, occupation and so forth. Perhaps these also extend to those who are questioning their gender identity. The ubiquitous and insistent nudges from gendered marketing, the unrelenting gendered bombardment from social media and entertainment outlets, the constant availability of gendered displays can add up to a much more rigid and prescriptive stereotype of what it means to be male or female then we have encountered before. So if ‘none of the above’ appears to be your answer to the characteristics that are to be expected of you as a boy or as a girl, it may just be that there is a problem with the question of what makes a boy or a girl and not with your answers. Debunking the myth of the male brain or the female brain should have implications for the transgender community which will hopefully be seen as positive.”³⁴
Our categories for ourselves, even those which we feel are more authentic to our lives, are social and historical. We don’t have to depend on some authentic, originary existence outside of our everyday lives to validate ourselves. This leaves us complacent, implicitly refusing a project of change from within everyday life which we take up of our own choice.
The potential for complacency rather than radical transformation is made even clearer in our contemporary discourses of desire. I wrote about this more extensively in two of my articles, “A Critique of the Politics of Desire” and “Are We Sexually Liberated?” I believe the point bears repeating, however. The free reign of individual desire, apparently beyond the restriction of the social others, is not inherently liberatory. Our desires do not come from some authentic, originary existence within ourselves. They are socially and historically given and made. Contemporary trends like the fetishization of housewifeication, bimbo aesthetics, rape fetishes and roleplay etc. are not transformative means of exercising desire. Desire is not inherently repressive, but neither is it inherently liberatory.
This individualism as it manifests in thinking about categorizations comes to different conclusions to TERFism, but with a common episteme. Today, we have a proliferation of microcategorizations seeking to capture individual experiences of gender, sexuality, romance, and so on. These are conceived as attempts to express the authentic truths of an individual’s internality. Yet, to try and capture individuality within abstract, general categories perfectly captures this dialectical tension within this ideology of the one-dimensional Social and the one-dimensional Other in these practices of categorization.
It posits a certain stability in these categories, an objectivity of them even in their being affixed to the individual subject, which echoes TERFisms reification of biological categories. One can understand the current drive for authenticity, for a dependency on something fixed and stable, in our world stricken with crises and losses of stability. But this drive for a stability cannot be satisfied in dying world, and simply represents an attempt to match the gravity of a sinking ship. It is complacency with what is, even if it does not immediately appear to be so.
That these gender individualists come to a complacence with what is does not mean that, as Janice Raymond argued in The Transsexual Empire:
“Transsexualism is a half-truth that highlights the desperate situation of those individuals in our society who have been uniquely body-bound by gender constrictions, but it is not a whole truth. While transsexualism poses the question of so-called gender agony, it fails to give an answer. I hope to show that it amounts to a solution that only reinforces the society and social norms that produced transsexualism to begin with.”³⁵
It is quite insightful to contrast this view regarding medicalization of gender with that of Rippon’s. Despite what Raymond believes, transgender women are not some diabolical, delusional agents making the oppressive cast of femininity tighter around the throats of women. Femininity is more than anything reproduced by the culture industry and its mass production of norms, by the makeup and sex industries, by the patriarchal conventions of marriage, by the law, etc. In short, by the father-authority of paterfamilias. Trans women are overwhelmingly poor and of low social standing, being punished on average for their gender variance.³⁶ Trans and cis women alike subject to the regulating powers of paterfamilias, rather than one fundamentally being a weapon or tool against the other.
This thinking is also rarely extended, at least not nearly with so much violent ire, towards cis women who actively choose a life as housewives. Why do some women choose that life? For stability, security, to avoid the insecurity and crisis of meaning, of identity, of needs in everyday life as an independent woman. Trans women, too, tend to focus so much on being as feminine as they can be for security, to escape transphobic violence, to be accepted in society. Rather than ridicule or attack either as stupid or evil, we must ask — why has stability come to mean complacency with what is, with embodying what the paterfamilias reproduces in society?
Gender individualism as a framework is not a a means of liberation — it renders oppression invisible and ignores the historical productive formation of categories and gendered coding of practices. Ironically, in making gender more fluid, it makes gendered coding more rigid than it typically is in everyday practices. By opening the floodgates of categorization, it assumes that a man cannot be feminine and still be a man or that a man cannot engage in homoerotic behavior and still be straight. So it tries to develop new categories to capture these individual experiences. Yet even in everyday metaphors or ways of thinking, it is quite clear that gender constellations are not so fixed. Think of such phrases as “getting fucked” or “wearing the pants in the relationship.” The project of hyper-dichotomization is a project which isn’t really actualized, and it varies historically. This fluidity in the actual points us towards an immanent, collective approach to the transformation of society and its norms rather than an inward approach of authenticity.
Even thinking about sexuality as constitutive to one’s ideology is very much historical, having its modern origins in the 19th century. This was argued by Michel Foucault in his History of Sexuality — the field of “the sexual” as an identified, specified area of scientific inquiry is quite socially and historically specific.³⁷ Any assumption of unmediated, purely individual or purely biological order of categories is pure naiveté and pure reification.
Gender is a collective practice rather than an essence inherent in any individual. Gender is a source of of oppression, of being-made-by-another, but also a source of of commonality and community. Think of the old feminist slogan “Sisterhood is Global.” This slogan has been interpreted, re-interpreted, challenged, attacked, re-affirmed, killed, and resurrected so many times throughout its history. This shaky history, even on its surface, tells us that sisterhood as commonality is neither uniform nor indeterminate. As the feminist movement came to at certain points in its history, we must reject any abstract originary essence of Woman, of being LGBT, of being anything. Instead, we must think in terms of determinate socio-historical blocs and constellations of interests. In this project, we should take on the red threads of critiquing the abstract, homogenous Worker and Woman alike which made up so much of the most revolutionary wings of feminism, socialism, and socialist feminism.³⁸
Transcending Paterfamilias
Our project must be to transcend the oppressive state of things from within and against it. To understand it means to negate it.
Patriarchy is sex-based alone, even if it is concerned with regulating biological reproduction. It is also concerned with reproductive labor and the reproduction of labor, it is concerned with reproducing an entire vision of the order of things. Thus, we see conservative states attacking both reproductive rights and gender variance. Clearly, conservatives are just as much concerned with “gender ideology” as they are with the breakdown of patriarchal family and its consequences — a decline in the “domestic supply of infants.”³⁹
Gender variance is far superior as a framework to understand what our patriarchy considers its enemy than the flat biologism of sex-based oppression, because this gender constellation is an overall web of social relations. It not confined merely to the womb and to breasts but includes sexuality, labor, presentation, ideology, ritual etc. The contemporary reactionary backlash is fixated on the patriarchal family as the basic unit of a well-ordered state as a means of saving a dying empire. It is seen as an antidote, one which is false, to the alienation, insecurity, and unraveling of the modern world.
That these patriarchs do not have the same mere sex-based fixations of TERFs is made quite clear by the contemporary pathology around emasculation. Masculinists from the studios of Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro to Congress are fixated on the notion of a crisis in masculinity and the need to revive masculine tradition for the sake of society. This obsession demonstrates that this reaction is against gender variance and is not limited to confines of the biologistic body and biologistic reproduction. It is a concern with the reproduction of a given form of society or way of living as a whole, the response to which cannot be limited just to a biologistic class struggle.
We are in an age which demands a more inclusive feminism which refuses to confine itself to the dead ends of biology, the culture industry, the bourgeois party system, or some vision of individual authenticity. It must be a feminism which seeks to transcend gender oppression from within the immanence of what gender is.
There is already potential for this in the intersubjectivity and the commonality inherent to any gender constellation which I mentioned. Further, we are living through a crisis of gender, one which conservatives are terrified of. This is an age of fluidity and the chance for change — we must take advantage of it to drive towards a radically new way of life rather than fall into reaction, TERFism, or individualism.
We must oppose those approaches which fix hope for redemption in either external, immutable or internal, spiritual authenticity. Transformative, contingent communality is the vehicle for any transformation. That is, we must form historical blocs around concrete concerns which refuse to become complacent with the world as it is.
There is a need for collective struggles with immediate goals, such as resisting the punishment of gender identity and the restriction of reproductive rights in conservative states. There is also a need for longer term goals and visions of alternatives, of transformations, of organized communities and new ways of relating to each other in autonomy from the attempts by capitalist paterfamilias to make us in its images. There is a need for a revolutionary collectivity of feminism that refuses to make peace with what is in any way, shape, or form. Let us imagine another world and fight for it.
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.⁴⁰
— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
