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The “genderless society” of radfem gender abolitionists is identical to the way society looks right now.
“Man/woman” won’t be genders anymore, because they’ll just be different words to refer to sex assigned at birth. Pronouns will be based on sex assigned at birth, too. Also, a person will have to dress and act in a way that conforms to the patriarchal gendered stereotypes attached to sex they were assigned at birth so everyone knows what pronouns to use, because you have to be able to identify someone’s sex by sight. Society won’t be divided based on gender, but on sex assigned at birth.
Somehow, doing this (aka doing things exactly how we are doing them right now) means gender roles will disappear and females will have as many rights as males and we won’t treat anyone differently.
or
We could be gender liberationists. We could continue to decouple gender from sex. We could continue to decouple pronouns from sex and from gender. We could continue to disrupt gender stereotypes. We could continue to support trans and GNC people. We could actually fight for equality between all people.
That’s my goal.
I mostly agree with what you’ve written here. My only note is that radfems are vehemently against gendered stereotypes, so having to dress and act according to patriarchal gender stereotypes is exactly the opposite of what we advocate for.
You say you’re against gendered stereotypes. You say that –
Except I see radfems constantly rigorously policing how other women look in an attempt to “identify” secret trans women. The biggest way radfems do this is by using “sex markers” of a person’s body. I see radfems say “that woman is too tall” “her hands are too big” “her shoulders are too wide” “she doesn’t have a thin waist” “her jaw is too square” – so therefore she must secretly be a “biological male”. These stereotypes heavily rely on white eurocentric patriarchal ideals of womanhood to “clock” trans women in public. Very often, cis women of color end up being targeted by this hate, especially women athletes who do not have bodies that look like the stereotypical white european cis woman’s body.
And then, if radfems are talking about a known trans woman, they will critique all the ways she is actively “failing” to perform “femininity” properly. They will say all of the above horrible things about her body that she has zero control over, and then they’ll dig into her fashion choices too: “her makeup looks like a child did it” “her dress is so unflattering” “a real woman wouldn’t be caught dead in that outfit”. They’ll say she looks “porned up” or “overly sexual”. All of this again depends on white eurocentric patriarchal beauty standards!
These are all horrible things to say about a person’s appearance. And radfems do this daily to trans women.
If a woman exists in public and her body doesn’t match white eurocentric patriarchal body ideas, she’s fair game for radfems to speculate as to whether or not she’s secretly trans, and if a woman is known to be trans, it’s fair game to police how she dresses, speaks, and behaves, to judge all the ways she’s “failing” to perform femininity the way white eurocentric patriarchal culture expects her to behave.
So I apologize, but I don’t believe you when you say radfems “are vehemently against gendered stereotypes”, when you use those very stereotypes to “clock” trans women and then violently critique them for not performing femininity to your preferred standards.
(And don’t even let me get started on how these standards directly harm cis butch women, much less how radfems refuse point blank to admit butch trans women exist)
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