Your Identity Doesn't Matter

Against the Liberal Ontology of Gender

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By Tara Knight

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There are two ontologies fighting underneath nearly every contemporary argument about gender, and most people are already standing inside one of them before the argument even begins.

The liberal ontology begins with the individual. It treats the person as a self-contained subject who possesses an identity, desires, preferences, and an interior truth that society is then supposed to recognize. Gender becomes something the individual knows about herself and communicates outward, while society appears afterward as the thing that affirms, denies, or misclassifies her. This is why liberal gender politics keeps returning to recognition, authenticity, choice, and self-definition. Its political subject is the sovereign individual, and its idea of freedom is allowing that individual to describe herself without interference.

INTRODUCTION

I. The Individual Has Become a Dead End

Your identity does not matter enough to explain gender, and trans politics has wasted far too much time pretending that it does.

That sentence will inevitably be screenshotted by somebody who has never read anything longer than a carousel and presented as evidence that I have finally completed my transformation into Phyllis Schlafly with injectable estrogen. I can live with that. The problem I am describing has become too large to keep padding every sentence with assurances that everybody's feelings remain valid before saying anything politically useful.

For years we have built an enormous language around the individual's description of herself while losing the language required to describe the society that produced the categories she is using. Contemporary gender discourse begins with somebody announcing what she is, treats that announcement as the final authority on the category, and then attempts to build a theory of gender outward from the declaration. The personal account becomes the political foundation. Gender is whatever an individual identifies as because the individual's consciousness has been granted sovereignty over the meaning of gender itself.

This sounds radical because the individual has been given more freedom. Its structure is painfully liberal.

The liberal individual already exists before society enters the picture. She owns herself. She possesses desires that belong to her because she experiences them. She chooses between available possibilities and enters relations with other individuals who are assumed to possess themselves in the same way. Society then appears as the external environment that either respects her choices or obstructs them. Her freedom is measured through the range of decisions she is permitted to make.

Trans politics inherited this person almost intact.

We changed what she could select from the form.

The form stayed.

This is why so much contemporary gender politics feels simultaneously expansive and claustrophobic. We have more words than ever for describing an individual's relationship to gender and fewer ways of explaining why gender organizes anything outside the individual. We can describe somebody's personal distance from womanhood to four decimal places while becoming strangely evasive about why women continue doing most of the domestic labor. We can spend hours distinguishing between identities whose practical differences are invisible to everybody except the people discussing them and then treat an analysis of reproductive labor as suspiciously reductive because some individual somewhere does not experience herself through the category being analyzed.

The taxonomy expands while the structure disappears.

This is what liberalism does when it reaches gender. It converts political relations into properties of the individual and then presents the expansion of individual choice as the horizon of freedom.

Marx's critique of bourgeois society begins by refusing precisely this kind of illusion. The individual who appears in liberal thought as independent and self-possessing is already a historical creature. She eats food produced by relations she did not invent, speaks a language she did not create, works inside an economic order inherited from previous generations, and develops desires through a social world that entered her life before she could name any of it. Consciousness develops inside the activity through which people reproduce their lives. It does not descend from somewhere cleaner.

The same thing is true of gender.

Nobody begins outside it.

Before you developed a gender identity, somebody had already classified your body. Before you understood the difference between femininity and masculinity, adults were already responding to you through that difference. Long before you knew what sexuality was, heterosexuality was arranging families, advertisements, stories, clothes, expectations, and the future adults imagined for you. The labor required to raise you was already gendered. Medicine already possessed categories for interpreting your body. The state already had administrative boxes ready for you. Beauty had an economy. Reproduction had law built around it. Violence followed patterns older than anyone involved.

Then, somewhere inside all of this, you developed an account of yourself.

That account did not create the world that made the account intelligible.

This is the first point that has to be restored to gender politics because everything else depends upon it. Identity is an account somebody gives of herself from inside social relations that exceed her. It can be sincere. It can be important to her. It can organize how she understands her own life. None of that gives it explanatory priority over the relations through which she became a person capable of producing the account.

We have spent years repeating that gender is socially constructed while quietly removing society from the construction.

The phrase has become another way of saying gender is flexible. Sometimes it means gender varies between cultures. Sometimes it means people can relate to gender however they want. Increasingly it means that because the categories were historically produced, every individual possesses authority to determine what they mean in her particular case.

That is a spectacularly strange conclusion to draw from social construction.

Money is socially constructed. I remain unable to declare my rent fictitious.

Citizenship is socially constructed. I learned this one very personally after discovering that border regimes remain stubbornly unimpressed by philosophical arguments about the contingency of the nation-state.

Race is socially constructed. Nobody serious concludes from this that racialization is therefore whatever any individual personally says it is.

The social construction of something means that human beings collectively reproduce it through institutions, practices, classifications, habits, coercion, law, language, labor, and history. Social construction makes the individual less sovereign over the category because the category derives its force precisely from existing beyond any individual consciousness.

Gender has force because it is social.

If womanhood existed only as an internal identity, misogyny would become difficult to explain. The misogynist would apparently need to ask for pronouns before proceeding. Employers would have to await disclosure before discriminating. Families would need consent before distributing domestic labor. Sexual violence would become a bizarre case of perpetrators being unusually attentive to personal ontology.

The world is less polite.

People are acted upon through classifications they reject all the time.

That fact is the beginning of material analysis.

Wittig's famous insistence that women are not a natural group remains useful because she refused the comforting assumption that politics merely happens to an already existing biological population called women. The category itself is organized socially. The political division produces the apparent naturalness of the groups it separates. What looks like an obvious description of bodies contains a history of labor, heterosexuality, reproduction, and power. The social relation disappears into nature after becoming old enough to look inevitable.

The liberal theory of gender performs a similar disappearance from the opposite direction. Instead of allowing politics to vanish into biology, it allows politics to vanish into identity.

The result is still the disappearance of politics.

The person says she is a woman, and political analysis is expected to stop at the declaration. The category becomes something she possesses because liberalism understands possession much more easily than relation. Every human problem eventually gets converted into a property dispute between sovereign individuals. Apparently we dragged John Locke through transition with us.

A materialist feminism has to be more demanding.

Womanhood has to be studied as a location produced through social relations. Sex has to be studied as the process through which bodily differences become organized into political distinctions. Gender has to be studied through labor, reproduction, sexuality, race, class, medicine, family, law, and the state because those are among the places where its meaning becomes material.

Identity arrives afterward as consciousness trying to describe where it has found itself.

That does not make consciousness worthless. It simply puts consciousness back inside history.

This matters especially for transsexuals because our existence has repeatedly been forced into an argument between two equally miserable ontologies. Reactionaries insist that the body contains an immutable sexual truth which determines the person forever. Liberal trans politics answers by locating an equally immutable gender truth inside the individual. One side finds the essence in anatomy. The other relocates it into the soul and updates the terminology.

I refuse both.

I do not need an immortal female essence to justify my transition.

I do not need to convince you that the exact woman writing this existed completely formed inside a small child waiting twenty years for estrogen and a Substack account.

I became this woman.

That is stronger.

My body changed because I changed it. Hormones altered how my body developed and functioned. Surgery altered it further. The responses of other people changed. The assumptions made about me changed. My relationship to public space changed. My relationship to medicine changed. Sexuality changed. The social expectations imposed upon me changed. I acted deliberately throughout that process, while the meaning of every one of those actions remained connected to a world I did not create.

Transition did not reveal me from underneath society.

Transition was one of the ways I acted upon what society had already made possible.

There is no humiliation in admitting this. Human beings do not become less free when we acknowledge that we are historical. We finally gain a useful theory of freedom.

Freedom cannot mean having no causes.

That would make the freest person on earth a rock.

Freedom is our capacity to act upon conditions that acted upon us.

A transsexual body makes this almost embarrassingly obvious. The human body is material and transformable. Social classification is material in its consequences and transformable in practice. The boundary between sex and gender becomes much more interesting once you stop pretending one belongs purely to nature and the other purely to consciousness.

This should have produced an explosive trans materialism.

Instead we got an increasingly elaborate philosophy of individual authenticity.

So I want to start over.

I want gender returned to the world.

I want womanhood removed from the private museum of the self and put back into kitchens, hospitals, workplaces, bedrooms, schools, prisons, welfare offices, beauty salons, maternity wards, dating markets, courtrooms, and the entire economic machinery that makes some forms of embodiment expensive and others compulsory.

I want sex returned to history.

I want transition understood as material transformation rather than metaphysical revelation.

I want identity demoted from the throne it never deserved.

The individual has become a dead end.

The rest of this essay is about breaking out.

BODY

II. Sex Was Never Sitting There Innocently

The easiest mistake in gender politics is imagining that society encounters biological sex as a finished natural fact and later piles gender onto it.

That story is comfortable because everybody gets a territory.

Conservatives get sex.

Liberals get gender.

Everybody goes home before dinner.

Materialism ruins the arrangement by noticing that bodies only become politically meaningful through social interpretation.

Human bodies differ. Obviously. People have different reproductive organs, endocrine systems, secondary sex characteristics, capacities for pregnancy, body shapes, hormone profiles, and medical needs. A politics frightened of saying this has already lost contact with the material world and probably should not call itself materialist.

The relevant issue is what society does with those differences.

A person being capable of pregnancy does not contain within itself the institution of motherhood. Ovaries did not write family law. Estrogen did not invent unpaid housework. A cervix has never independently developed an opinion about inheritance.

Bodies become sexed politically when differences between them are selected, classified, organized, and made consequential.

This is where Guillaumin becomes indispensable because her analysis refuses the familiar trick where social domination is explained through the natural characteristics of the people being dominated. Women appear to possess qualities making them suited for particular forms of labor only after those forms of labor have already been assigned to them. The appropriation of women's bodies and time is then explained through supposedly natural feminine capacities, which conveniently resemble the work society already requires from women. Nature shows up suspiciously late to explain an arrangement that benefits somebody.

Women care for children because women are naturally caring.

Women maintain households because women are naturally domestic.

Women absorb emotional strain because women are naturally empathetic.

Women organize social life because women are simply better at remembering birthdays.

By the time somebody gets to "women mature faster," I can practically hear history filing a workers' compensation claim.

What appears as sexual difference is already carrying a division of labor.

Delphy's analysis of domestic production matters because she refuses to treat the household as politically private simply because the relationships inside it are intimate. Somebody cooks. Somebody cleans. Somebody raises children. Somebody maintains the conditions under which other people can leave the household and sell their labor elsewhere. The intimacy of the relationship does not make the labor disappear. Neither does love. Delphy's domestic mode of production names the economic structure hiding inside the supposedly private household, where the person performing the work can be maintained rather than paid and where consumption and production remain tied together in ways the wage relation obscures.

This is where the liberal ontology becomes completely useless.

Liberalism wants to know whether the woman chose the arrangement.

Materialism wants to know how the arrangement reproduces itself as a gendered pattern.

Those are different levels of analysis, and the second cannot be reduced to the first.

A million individual women can sincerely prefer domestic labor and the sexual division of labor would remain available for analysis because a social structure is not disproved by participants liking it.

People routinely enjoy activities produced through history.

Human beings are adaptable little freaks.

We become attached to the worlds we inherit because those worlds give us the materials through which attachment becomes possible.

The ideological power of gender lies partly in its ability to make political arrangements feel personal. A division of labor becomes personality. Dependence becomes romance. Beauty discipline becomes self-expression. Sexual hierarchy becomes preference. Reproductive expectation becomes fulfillment.

None of these experiences need to be fake for the structure to remain visible.

That is one of the crucial things contemporary discourse cannot tolerate because it has become addicted to the idea that social production invalidates personal feeling.

It doesn't.

Something being produced historically does not make it unreal.

English is socially produced. I am still writing in it.

The dollar is socially produced. My landlord remains distressingly committed to the concept.

Femininity is socially produced. I can still enjoy putting on makeup.

Materialism does not require pretending nobody enjoys anything under capitalism or patriarchy. It requires refusing to use enjoyment as an explanation for why the institution exists.

This becomes even more important when we move into sexuality.

MacKinnon's work is valuable here because she treats sexuality as one of the places where gender hierarchy becomes embodied and made pleasurable. Gender does not form somewhere else and then enter sex as an innocent participant. Sexual expectations contribute to producing masculinity and femininity themselves. The social meaning of dominance and submission, pursuit and availability, penetration and receptivity does not develop outside a gender system and then coincidentally align with it.

This is uncomfortable because sexuality feels private.

That is precisely why it carries so much ideological force.

Power becomes considerably easier to reproduce when people experience its arrangements as spontaneous desire.

No central committee needs to order everybody into heterosexual gender roles each morning. A society can reproduce those roles through family formation, beauty, romance, pornography, peer pressure, economic dependence, and the distribution of sexual desirability. People then experience the resulting desires as intensely personal because they are personal. History works through people. It does not hover above them issuing citations.

The liberal answer is to declare desire private and therefore politically untouchable.

That gives us a magnificent feminist politics in which everything shaping women's lives can be analyzed until somebody gets horny.

Then apparently materialism clocks out.

The same retreat happens around identity.

Identity feels internal, therefore social analysis is treated as intrusion.

The problem is that the interior is full of history.

Nobody develops a sense of being feminine without encountering femininity. Nobody understands herself as masculine without encountering masculinity. Nobody becomes dysphoric about sexed characteristics in a world where those characteristics are socially meaningless because such a world does not exist.

Dysphoria itself reveals the material character of gender because it is experienced through the body and through the social meaning attached to the body.

My breasts matter to me because bodies matter.

My face mattered enough that I let surgeons rearrange pieces of it.

That was not discourse floating in a cloud somewhere.

Bone is infamously material.

The reasons certain changes make a transsexual body more socially legible are also material because perception is social practice. People learn what women and men look like through repeated exposure to sexed bodies shaped by hormones, clothing, grooming, race, age, class, and medicine. Transition deliberately intervenes in this system of legibility.

That is one reason passing carries such enormous emotional and political weight for many trans people.

Passing is treated awkwardly in liberal trans politics because it makes external classification impossible to ignore.

The individual can know herself perfectly and still care desperately about how strangers read her.

This is usually explained as unfortunate social pressure layered on top of an otherwise complete internal identity.

I think that explanation misses half the phenomenon.

Humans are social animals. Recognition by others is part of social existence. Being spontaneously perceived as a woman produces a different relation than having to explain your womanhood to everyone you meet. The first changes how social interaction begins. The second makes gender an ongoing negotiation.

Passing therefore exposes the limits of identity as the center of gender.

If gender were primarily internal, passing would be politically trivial.

It isn't.

Bodies are interpreted.

Those interpretations have consequences.

Transsexuality becomes much easier to understand once we stop forcing it into the liberal distinction between a biological sex and an internal gender identity.

Transition transforms sexed characteristics. It alters social legibility. It changes the person's location within gendered relations without erasing history.

That last part matters.

Transition does not place somebody outside everything that happened before transition. History remains inside the person. Socialization is neither destiny nor imaginary. A person's early relationships, race, class, family, sexuality, embodiment, and prior social position continue affecting her even after enormous changes.

Human beings do not respawn.

The liberal ontology struggles with this because it wants identity to establish continuity while transition visibly demonstrates change.

Materialism has no reason to be frightened of contradiction.

A trans woman can have a history of being treated differently from a cis woman while now occupying many of the same social relations.

She can experience misogyny without having experienced every form of misogyny from birth.

She can possess a changed body whose medical history remains relevant.

She can be a woman without requiring womanhood to be timeless.

This is considerably more descriptive of actual transsexual life than the demand that we choose between "always completely female" and "forever essentially male."

Both positions turn history into an inconvenience.

I prefer history.

History is where transition becomes revolutionary.

A human being looked at the material she inherited and altered it.

That is much more interesting than discovering a secret label.

III. The World Does Not Wait for Your Identification

There is a fantasy hiding inside identity-centered politics that society waits for the individual to describe herself before acting.

It does not.

Society moves first all the time.

An employer reads a name, a face, a voice, clothing, age, race, mannerisms, and body before any employee presents a complete theory of herself. A doctor sees a chart and body before hearing somebody's relationship to femininity. A stranger in public classifies people almost instantly. Families build expectations around children long before children possess the vocabulary necessary to accept or reject them.

Gender is happening during all of this.

The person does not control the classification simply because contemporary etiquette says she should control the label.

This is why social position has to return to feminist analysis.

Social position describes where somebody is located within relations that distribute authority, vulnerability, labor, resources, expectation, and violence.

Identity describes consciousness of oneself.

These can interact intensely without becoming the same thing.

A person can reject womanhood while being acted upon through misogyny.

A person can reject masculinity while continuing to receive forms of authority associated with being perceived male.

A trans woman can identify as a woman before anybody else perceives her that way.

Years later, after transition, she may be read as female automatically and encounter forms of treatment that were previously absent.

Her identity may have remained stable throughout.

Her social position did not.

That difference is politically enormous.

I know it from my own life because transition eventually makes social theory stop being abstract.

There is a period where you notice that interactions have started changing before you possess language for all of it.

Some changes are welcome.

Some are funny.

Some are insulting in a way that becomes funny three hours later.

Some reveal how much of ordinary gender is composed of tiny decisions nobody consciously announces.

People interrupt differently.

People offer help differently.

People interpret anger differently.

Men look longer.

Women disclose differently.

Risk reorganizes itself.

None of these interactions individually defines womanhood. Accumulated across millions of people, they help constitute a gendered social world.

This is why oppression cannot be reduced to recognition.

A trans woman can be perfectly recognized as a woman while being sexually harassed.

The man doing it may be more confident in her womanhood than half of queer Twitter.

His recognition does not liberate her.

It inserts her into a relation.

That sounds almost comically obvious when written out, but contemporary politics repeatedly forgets it because recognition has become the dominant grammar through which trans oppression is discussed.

Misgendering matters.

Legal recognition matters.

Medical classification matters.

Names matter.

None of these exhaust the social relation.

Transmisogyny operates through employment, housing, medicine, sexuality, policing, family, race, class, violence, and the contradictory position of a population whose femininity can be desired, mocked, punished, commodified, or treated as evidence against our legitimacy depending on who is looking.

This cannot be explained by saying society fails to recognize our authentic identity.

Sometimes society recognizes us enough to exploit us.

That distinction should have transformed trans politics years ago.

Instead, recognition became increasingly detached from redistribution.

A corporation can update its pronoun policy while paying women less.

A hospital can change intake forms while keeping transition care prohibitively inaccessible.

A university can develop an immaculate vocabulary around gender diversity while its lowest-paid care and service work remains heavily feminized.

A landlord can correctly gender you while raising the rent.

Capitalism is extremely capable of learning terminology.

The ruling class has employed consultants.

The radicalism of vocabulary expires quickly once institutions discover that recognizing identities is cheaper than surrendering power.

This is where liberal identity politics reaches its natural ceiling.

The institution agrees to recognize you as the individual you claim to be.

The institution remains.

The wage relation remains.

The division of labor remains.

Housing remains commodified.

Reproductive labor remains privatized.

Medicine remains distributed through class.

Violence remains patterned.

The identity category can be incorporated because incorporation does not necessarily disturb the underlying relation.

Capitalism has rarely met a demographic it could not eventually sell something to.

Give it enough time and even your abolition will come in several sizes.

The problem grows sharper when race enters the analysis because gender has never been organized independently from racial domination.

Spillers's account of slavery remains devastating precisely because it destroys any easy assumption that gender categories were simply applied to Black people in the same way they were applied to white people. The captive body was stripped of ordinary kinship protections while reproductive capacity could still be exploited. Black women could be made valuable through reproduction while being denied the bourgeois social position associated with protected motherhood. Gender itself was being reorganized through slavery.

This should make any universal account of private gender identity immediately suspicious.

There was never one socially uniform womanhood waiting for different populations to identify with it.

The meaning of womanhood was produced through race.

White femininity could be constructed through delicacy, domesticity, sexual purity, and protection precisely because Black women could be positioned through labor, availability, endurance, and reproductive exploitation.

The social category was internally divided from the beginning.

A Black woman's relationship to femininity therefore develops inside a history where femininity itself has been racially distributed.

That is one reason the liberal ontology of identity feels especially inadequate to me.

It wants to begin from my declaration.

I am considerably more interested in the world that made my declaration mean what it means.

I am a Black transsexual woman.

Every word in that sentence has a history I did not choose.

Black does not simply describe my skin.

Woman does not simply describe an internal state.

Transsexual does not simply describe a medical decision.

These categories locate me inside histories of racialization, sex, medicine, labor, sexuality, migration, family, beauty, policing, and political struggle.

Reducing them to personal identities would make them less political at precisely the moment politics becomes necessary.

Fanon understood something crucial about racialization when he described the body being returned to the subject through the gaze of a racist world. The person does not possess complete sovereignty over her own bodily meaning because other people participate in producing the social significance of the body. His treatment of gender is deeply limited and often sexist, but the basic mechanism remains useful: social classification can invade embodiment itself. Scholarship on Black Skin, White Masks has long noted that Fanon's account of racial subjectivity is also mediated through gendered and sexual relations, even where his male-centered framework handles women badly.

Trans people know this experience intimately.

A body can feel different because its social meaning has changed.

A face is never merely a face when people read sex from it.

Some poor trans girl eventually discovers that strangers apparently have strongly held views about her brow ridge and realizes that phenomenology has become an expensive surgical specialty.

This is not vanity floating above politics.

It is what happens when social classification becomes embodied.

The liberal response is to tell the person that external classification should not matter because her identity belongs to her.

That answer is emotionally appealing and materially useless.

External classification does matter because other people are real.

Institutions are real.

Violence is real.

Desire is social.

Recognition changes behavior.

A politics that cannot discuss this has abandoned transsexuals precisely where our lives become most concrete.

I want a trans feminism capable of saying that the body matters without giving the body final authority.

I want it capable of saying social perception matters without making perception destiny.

I want it capable of recognizing transformation without pretending history disappears.

That politics needs social position.

Identity cannot replace it.

IV. Identity Became the Perfect Liberal Technology

Identity did not become politically central by accident.

It fits perfectly with the liberal management of conflict.

An identity can be recognized without changing the relations through which people live.

That is an extraordinary advantage for institutions.

A workplace can add categories to a nondiscrimination policy without changing who cleans the bathrooms.

A university can recognize dozens of genders without making tuition affordable.

A hospital can respect pronouns while denying care through insurance bureaucracy.

A company can produce Pride merchandise manufactured by women earning almost nothing somewhere else and still receive praise for representation.

This does not make recognition meaningless.

It makes recognition cheap.

Power prefers reforms that can be administered.

Identity is wonderfully administrable.

There is eventually a limited-edition beverage.

Meanwhile the social relations underneath the interface continue working.

This is one reason liberal gender politics became obsessed with the sovereignty of classification. Classification is something bureaucracies already know how to manage. Institutions love a population that arrives with metadata.

A material politics is far more irritating.

It wants money.

It wants housing.

It wants healthcare.

It wants abortion.

It wants transition care.

It wants childcare.

It wants working conditions changed.

It wants the organization of households changed.

It wants sexual violence confronted institutionally.

It wants reproductive labor redistributed.

It wants somebody to surrender something more substantial than outdated terminology.

This is where politics becomes conflict.

Identity discourse often avoids that conflict by relocating liberation into the self.

The individual discovers herself.

Together they form a politics perfectly adapted to neoliberal society because the burden of surviving structural problems continually returns to the individual.

The institution creates the damage.

The person receives a self-care infographic.

The entire thing would be hilarious if people weren't actually suffering.

This is also why contemporary politics treats criticism of identity as unusually threatening. Identity has become one of the few forms of authority the individual is allowed to possess completely.

You may not control your workplace.

You may not control your rent.

You may not control healthcare.

You may not control the conditions under which your food was produced.

You may not control whether reproductive care remains legal.

You may barely control your schedule.

At least you can control the bio.

The emotional investment makes sense.

The political result is disastrous when the sovereignty of self-description gets promoted into a theory of social structure.

We begin treating categories as though their social meaning could be privately rewritten.

They cannot.

Words change through collective struggle and historical practice.

Individuals participate in that process.

Nobody owns it.

"Woman" has accumulated meanings through centuries of kinship, law, reproduction, sexuality, work, medicine, violence, culture, and resistance.

Declaring an identity establishes a relationship to that history.

It does not erase it.

This is what Wittig's materialism actually makes possible if we refuse to turn her into a bumper sticker about gender being fake. Her assault on naturalized sex categories points toward the political production of the classes themselves. If women and men are produced through a social relation, abolishing the hierarchy requires transforming the relation that produces them.

Adding more identities cannot accomplish that by itself.

It changes the available ways of navigating the structure.

Navigation can matter enormously to the person navigating.

It is still navigation.

The building remains standing.

This is the part where somebody usually insists that categories themselves are subversive because refusing classification destabilizes the binary.

Sometimes refusal can expose the instability of a system.

Exposure is not abolition.

Capitalism has survived people understanding capitalism for quite some time.

Patriarchy is capable of surviving irony.

A social order does not collapse because its categories are revealed as historically contingent. Social orders are maintained through material relations, and those relations can persist long after everybody involved understands that they were invented.

Money remains a useful demonstration.

Most adults know perfectly well that currency receives its value socially.

Nobody goes to the grocery store and triumphantly explains this to the cashier while leaving with free vegetables.

The social fiction is material because institutions organize life through it.

Gender has the same stubbornness.

Once sex classification is bound to reproduction, household organization, sexual expectation, medicine, violence, beauty, and work, revealing that the categories were made does not unmake them.

Abolition has to reach the mechanisms reproducing the relation.

This is where liberal ontology runs out of road.

The sovereign individual can choose among identities.

She cannot individually reorganize reproduction.

She can reject femininity.

She cannot independently abolish the economic conditions making beauty labor valuable.

She can identify outside womanhood.

She cannot make misogyny cease acting upon bodies perceived through womanhood.

She can reject heterosexual expectations.

She cannot privately abolish heterosexuality as a social institution.

The individual can resist.

The individual can defect.

The individual can transform herself.

Collective political action transforms the conditions.

That distinction is what identity politics has obscured.

The result is a trans politics extraordinarily good at describing personal transformation and surprisingly weak at describing collective emancipation.

We know how to transition.

We have become less certain what society should transition into.

That is the crisis.

V. Gender Abolition Has to Abolish Something

Gender abolition has become one of those phrases everybody likes until somebody asks what material condition is supposed to disappear.

The phrase sounds radical because abolition sounds radical.

Then the politics frequently amounts to expanding the range of identities people can hold while maintaining almost every social relation through which gender is reproduced.

That is not abolition.

That is improved customer service.

If gender is a social relation, abolition has to alter the relations producing gendered classes.

The division of reproductive labor has to change.

The organization of households has to change.

Economic dependence attached to sex has to change.

The political regulation of pregnancy has to change.

The social production of heterosexuality has to change.

The institutions translating bodily difference into unequal social positions have to change.

This is why Delphy matters more to gender abolition than most contemporary discourse about abolishing gender. If domestic labor remains organized through relations that disproportionately appropriate women's work, then gender retains one of its material foundations regardless of how sophisticated everybody's identities become.

The household remains one of the places where society reproduces itself.

Food appears.

Laundry gets done.

Children are cared for.

Elderly relatives are managed.

Appointments are remembered.

Emotional crises are absorbed.

Somebody notices the toilet paper is gone before civilization collapses.

The miracle has traditionally been called "women."

Treating this labor as natural feminine capacity disguises its economic character.

Treating participation in it as purely private choice disguises the patterned distribution.

Abolishing gender therefore requires taking the reproduction of everyday life seriously as political economy.

Childcare cannot remain a private emergency solved household by household.

Care work cannot remain structurally devalued.

Pregnancy cannot remain a basis for economic punishment.

Access to housing cannot depend upon remaining inside dangerous relationships.

Healthcare cannot remain tied to employment in ways that deepen dependence.

The ability to leave a relationship has to become materially real rather than theoretically available.

This is what a feminist program begins to look like once we stop treating gender as a private identity problem.

Sexuality has to enter the project too.

The organization of desire cannot remain sacred territory simply because liberals become nervous whenever politics approaches the bedroom.

Nobody needs to establish that individual attraction is fake.

The political issue is that societies produce sexual types, distribute desirability, eroticize hierarchy, stigmatize some bodies, reward others, and teach people scripts through which sex becomes intelligible.

Race is inside this process.

Class is inside this process.

Transsexuality is inside this process.

Pornography is inside this process.

Beauty industries are inside this process.

No individual consciously designed the result.

Millions of individual practices reproduce it.

This is how ideology usually works when it has matured.

It stops feeling ideological.

It becomes taste.

A materialist feminism does not police desire from above.

That would reproduce another authoritarian fantasy.

It studies the conditions under which desire is formed and changes those conditions where they reproduce domination.

That means sexual freedom has to be larger than consent.

Consent is a threshold for legitimate interaction.

It is a miserable theory of sexuality.

Two people can consent inside a world that shaped both of their desires through hierarchy.

The existence of consent tells us that an act was agreed to.

It tells us very little about why that act became desirable, why the roles inside it are gendered in recognizable ways, or how those patterns connect to the broader sexual order.

This is where MacKinnon's insistence on sexuality as a site through which gender is produced remains useful even when one rejects some of her conclusions. Feminism becomes toothless when every sexual practice receives immunity from analysis the moment an individual enjoys it.

Enjoyment is evidence of enjoyment.

It is not a political argument.

I say this as somebody whose life would provide an extremely inconvenient case study for anybody hoping to build a feminist politics around sexual purity.

I am not interested in making everybody respectable.

Respectability has never saved transsexual women anyway.

I am interested in understanding what our desires reveal about the society that helped produce us.

That is far more dangerous.

The same materialism has to transform how we understand sex itself.

Sex cannot be treated as an immutable biological substrate underneath social gender because medical transition demonstrates how many characteristics associated with sex can be altered materially.

Hormones reorganize bodies.

Surgery reorganizes bodies.

Bodies have developmental histories.

The social classification of sex selects from clusters of characteristics whose political importance varies across institutions and contexts.

None of this makes the body imaginary.

It makes sex historical.

That distinction is essential.

Constructivism without matter degenerates into idealism.

Biology without history degenerates into naturalism.

A transsexual materialism has the advantage of living inside the contradiction.

I inject a substance into my body and biological processes change.

The vial is not a metaphor.

The social meaning of those changes is also not contained inside the molecule.

Estradiol did not arrive from the pharmacy carrying a tiny copy of The Second Sex.

The body changes through chemistry while the meaning of those changes develops socially.

Sex and gender are inseparable at precisely this point because both describe different aspects of an embodied social process.

This is why the attempt to rescue feminism by drawing an absolute wall between biological sex and social gender has always been theoretically weak.

The body and society are already entangled.

Reproductive capacities matter because social systems organize reproduction.

Secondary sex characteristics matter partly because people use them to classify bodies.

Hormones matter medically and socially.

Genitals can matter intensely in one context and barely at all in another.

The political importance of a bodily characteristic depends upon relations.

This also destroys the opposite fantasy that identity can simply override material conditions.

The fact that sex is socially constructed does not grant consciousness sovereign control over every sexed relation.

A body capable of pregnancy remains subject to laws regulating pregnancy regardless of the person's identity.

A body perceived as female can become the target of misogynistic treatment regardless of how its owner describes herself.

A transsexual body may require medical care specific to its history regardless of current legal classification.

Materialism refuses to flatten these differences because analysis needs them.

The goal is not to find the one true variable that determines everybody's real sex.

The goal is to understand how bodies become organized politically.

Once you understand that, gender abolition stops looking like an identity project.

It becomes a revolutionary reorganization of social reproduction.

That is considerably harder.

It also has the virtue of meaning something.

ENDING

VI. Against the Liberal Ontology of Gender

The liberal ontology has brought trans politics as far as it can.

It gave us a language through which individuals could demand recognition against institutions that treated our own accounts of ourselves as irrelevant. That language had strategic value. It helped pry medical transition away from some forms of psychiatric gatekeeping. It helped establish that a trans person should not require permission from every stranger to live socially as herself. It provided a simple defense against people obsessed with converting our existence into a public referendum.

Then we mistook the defense for a theory.

That is where things went wrong.

The individual became the center of gender itself.

Her declaration became evidence.

Her self-understanding became ontology.

Her choice became politics.

Her feeling of empowerment became analysis.

The social relation disappeared.

This produced an increasingly strange feminism where describing any durable pattern of gendered life could be treated as an offense against somebody's individual identity.

Woman became difficult to speak about politically because the category had been severed from any stable material relation.

Sex became dangerous to mention because reactionaries talked about biology badly.

Socialization became impossible to discuss because people heard destiny whenever history was mentioned.

Desire became politically sacred because social analysis was mistaken for personal accusation.

The family became private again under the language of chosen relationships.

The bedroom became private again under the language of consent.

The individual returned triumphantly to the center of the universe wearing a pronoun pin.

We have seen this political subject before.

Liberalism survived the revolution.

A materialist trans feminism has to remove the individual from the center without erasing the individual as a human being.

People remain active.

People make decisions.

People transform themselves.

People develop identities.

People experience desires with enormous emotional force.

People fall in love.

People transition.

People refuse roles.

People create new ways of living.

Every one of these acts takes place through conditions that precede the person acting.

Freedom begins from that entanglement.

The human being is neither a puppet of structure nor a sovereign consciousness floating above it.

She is historical.

She inherits conditions and acts upon them.

Sometimes she reproduces them.

Sometimes she makes them worse.

Sometimes she changes them.

Transition is beautiful to me precisely because it makes this human capacity visible.

I did not choose the existence of gender.

I did not choose what sex meant in the society where I was born.

I did not create the technologies through which transition became possible.

I did not invent estrogen.

Credit where due.

I inherited all of this.

Then I acted.

That is agency.

It does not require pretending I invented myself.

The liberal subject is actually a much smaller creature than the materialist human being.

She must already contain herself before she acts.

Everything important has to originate internally or it becomes contaminated by social influence.

Her authenticity depends upon being able to distinguish what is truly hers from what society put there.

Good luck.

Society got there first.

The materialist subject can survive knowing this.

She can understand that her desires were formed historically and still desire.

She can understand femininity as political and still inhabit it.

She can understand womanhood as a social category and still fight from within it.

She can understand herself as produced and still produce something new.

That is a far more serious theory of human freedom.

It is also the only kind of freedom capable of becoming collective.

If gender is reproduced socially, we can attack the relations reproducing it.

If domestic labor helps reproduce women's subordination, domestic labor can be reorganized.

If reproductive capacity becomes political destiny, reproductive institutions can be transformed.

If racial domination alters the meaning of womanhood, feminism can stop pretending that gender operates identically across racial positions.

If sexuality produces hierarchy, sexuality can be subjected to criticism instead of being declared private property.

If medicine polices trans bodies, medicine can be changed.

If economic dependence traps people inside gendered relationships, freedom can be made material through housing, income, healthcare, and collective forms of care.

This is politics.

It is considerably less glamorous than discovering another identity.

It requires institutions.

It requires organization.

It requires conflict.

It eventually requires somebody to lose power.

That last part is what liberalism has always preferred to avoid.

Liberalism is comfortable expanding the range of people who may possess rights so long as the underlying organization of social life remains recognizable.

A material feminist politics wants to know what those rights are rights to do inside a structure that remains unequal.

The right to leave a husband is thin when leaving means homelessness.

The right to abortion is thin when the nearest provider is hundreds of miles away.

The right to transition is thin when healthcare costs make transition impossible.

The right to identify as anything is politically small when every institution governing survival remains outside your control.

Formal freedom becomes real only through material capacity.

Trans politics should understand this instinctively because transition itself exposes the difference between formal permission and material access.

You can possess the legal freedom to transition while lacking money for treatment.

You can possess the theoretical right to change documents while administrative requirements make doing so miserable.

You can possess nominal protection from discrimination while knowing perfectly well what happens during hiring.

A politics centered on identity sees recognition and believes the central battle has been won.

A politics centered on material relations sees recognition as one front inside a much larger struggle.

That larger struggle is where trans feminism belongs.

We do not need another ontology proving that we possess an internal essence respectable enough to earn freedom.

We need freedom.

We need control over our bodies because bodies are material.

We need healthcare because medicine is material.

We need housing because sleeping indoors remains embarrassingly physical.

We need money because capitalism continues refusing to accept vibes.

We need power over the institutions organizing our lives.

Identity cannot give us this.

Organization can.

VII. Your Identity Doesn't Matter

Your identity does not matter to the structure that needs to be destroyed.

Patriarchy does not derive its power from everybody sincerely believing in their assigned gender.

Capitalism does not require us to love our position in the division of labor.

Racial domination has never waited for racial self-identification.

Heterosexuality as an institution does not disappear when individuals develop more complicated sexual identities.

The social order survives disagreement because its power is material.

That is why the politics opposing it has to become material again.

I am tired of an account of liberation that ends with the individual achieving the correct description of herself.

I am tired of watching gender politics become an administrative exercise in ensuring everybody's personal classification remains conceptually sovereign while the actual organization of gender continues almost untouched.

I am tired of being told that respecting identity requires refusing to describe the relations that act upon us regardless of identity.

I want a feminism capable of naming what happens.

I want it to describe the woman cleaning the house without requiring an affidavit establishing whether she experiences cleaning as gendered.

I want it to describe reproductive exploitation without pretending every person affected understands herself through identical language.

I want it to describe racialized femininity without flattening Black women into a universal category formed around white domesticity.

I want it to describe transsexual life without demanding that I possess a gender soul older than my body.

I want it to describe desire without becoming frightened because somebody enjoys the thing being criticized.

I want politics back.

That means the sovereign individual has to come down from the throne.

There is no pristine self underneath history.

There is no identity untouched by social relations.

There is no private exit from a social structure.

There is no personal label capable of abolishing the conditions that made the label politically meaningful.

We are made through one another.

That fact is dangerous because it means domination can enter deeply into how people understand themselves.

It is also the reason revolution is possible.

If the world made us under particular conditions, changing those conditions changes what kinds of people can exist.

That is the horizon liberalism cannot offer.

Liberalism promises that more kinds of individuals can be recognized inside the existing world.

I want another world producing different relations between people.

I want a society where reproductive capacity no longer decides somebody's economic fate.

I want domestic labor removed from the assumption that women will quietly absorb whatever work remains.

I want transition removed from the market logic that makes bodily freedom dependent upon income.

I want femininity liberated from the economic and sexual disciplines that currently give it meaning.

I want masculinity stripped of the authority attached to it.

I want the category of woman to stop functioning as a location into which labor, vulnerability, reproductive obligation, and sexual availability can be deposited.

That requires more than changing definitions.

The relations have to go.

And this is why your identity, finally, does not matter enough.

It cannot accomplish the political work we keep asking it to do.

It cannot tell us who performs the labor.

It cannot tell us who owns the resources.

It cannot tell us how sex became a classifying system.

It cannot tell us how race reorganizes gender.

It cannot tell us why some bodies become available for violence.

It cannot tell us why care work disappears economically while remaining indispensable socially.

It cannot tell us what material changes would make gender cease functioning as hierarchy.

Those answers live outside the individual.

We have spent too long staring inward.

The century of the gender mood board has reached its theoretical limit.

The next step is considerably less flattering.

We have to look at who cleans.

Who gets paid.

Who reproduces.

Who owns.

Who gets protected.

Who gets used.

Who can leave.

Who cannot afford to.

Who becomes legible as a woman through protection and who becomes legible through exploitation.

Who receives medicine.

Who becomes medicine's object.

Who can alter the body.

Who gets punished for altering it.

Once these relations become visible, identity returns to its proper scale.

It is something people use to describe themselves while history is happening through and around them.

Sometimes those descriptions help us organize.

Sometimes they help us survive.

Sometimes they become obsolete.

Sometimes they change because we change.

None of this should terrify us.

We do not need eternal identities to justify human freedom.

We need enough power to transform the conditions under which human beings become themselves.

That is the distinction the liberal ontology cannot cross.

It can recognize the transsexual.

It cannot explain why transition is distributed through class.

It can recognize the woman.

It cannot abolish the organization of labor that makes womanhood a material position.

It can recognize the Black woman.

It cannot undo the history through which racial domination made her womanhood different from white womanhood.

It can recognize every identity on earth and still leave the earth organized almost exactly as it found it.

That is why recognition is insufficient.

That is why identity is insufficient.

That is why materialism has to return.

I did not transition to become the sovereign consumer of a more accurate gender category.

I changed my body and entered a different social relation to the world.

I became something history had made possible while refusing the position history originally assigned me.

That act contains more revolutionary potential than any theory requiring me to insist I was untouched by society the entire time.

We are touched by society everywhere.

That is the problem.

That is also where we can put our hands around its throat.

The task is no longer to convince the world that everybody possesses an identity worthy of recognition.

The task is to destroy the arrangements that turn sex into hierarchy, reproduction into obligation, femininity into discipline, masculinity into authority, the family into an engine of private dependence, and the body into evidence for somebody else's political order.

After that, people will still have bodies.

They will still have personalities.

They will still fuck.

They will still dress strangely.

They will still invent names for themselves because human beings cannot encounter a mildly interesting difference without eventually creating terminology and starting an argument about it.

I am not worried about our ability to continue being weird.

I am worried about whether we are capable of becoming dangerous again.

Gender abolition begins when we stop treating liberation as the multiplication of identities inside a gendered society and start attacking the material relations that keep producing gender as a hierarchy.

Your identity cannot do that for you. Neither can mine.

Politics can.

References

Christine Delphy. Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women's Oppression. Delphy develops the domestic mode of production as a material basis of women's subordination and analyzes domestic labor as production rather than treating the household as a politically private sphere.

Colette Guillaumin. “Pratique du pouvoir et idée de Nature (1): L'appropriation des femmes” / later translated in Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. Guillaumin's concept of sexage describes women's collective and private appropriation and shows how social relations of domination are subsequently naturalized as characteristics of the dominated group.

Hortense J. Spillers. “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 64–81. Spillers's analysis of slavery, kinship, the captive body, and ungendering is central to the argument here that American sex and gender cannot be theorized independently from racial domination.

Monique Wittig. “One Is Not Born a Woman,” collected in The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Wittig's materialist account of women as a political class rather than a natural group underlies the article's rejection of both biological naturalism and the liberal reconstruction of gender as private identity.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology. The method running through this essay owes to their rejection of explanations that begin from abstract consciousness rather than from human beings producing their lives within definite historical relations.

Karl Marx. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The understanding of human agency used here follows Marx's insistence that people make history under inherited circumstances rather than either freely inventing themselves or mechanically reproducing structure.

Catharine A. MacKinnon. Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. The discussion of sexuality draws on MacKinnon's insistence that sexuality participates in producing gender hierarchy, while departing from any politics that would reduce sexual liberation to prohibition.

Frantz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. Fanon's phenomenology of racial embodiment informs the discussion of how the body becomes socially returned to a subject through other people's perception.

Angela Y. Davis. Women, Race & Class. Davis's historical treatment of slavery, domestic labor, race, and women's work informs the refusal to treat women's material position as racially uniform.

Patricia Hill Collins. Black Feminist Thought. Collins's account of intersecting systems of power and Black women's historically specific social position informs the article's rejection of gender analysis that treats race as an additional variable pasted onto a supposedly universal womanhood