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Title: A Philosophical Anti-Essentialism Author: Girl-Debord Date: May 19, 2019 Language: en Topics: Gender Nihilism, Nihilism, Existentialism Source: Retrived on August 15, 2021 from https://girl-debord.tumblr.com/post/185002383122/a-philosophical-anti-essentialism-is-so-central-to
A philosophical anti-essentialism is so central to how I understand
myself in the world as a trans person that it’s mind-boggling to see
other trans folks who aren’t truscum/transmed/whatever who still hold
onto essentialist ideas about gender & identity.
So here’s the basics:
There is no essence, or at least, essence does not, as the classical
philosophers held, precede existence. This means that things exist
before ideas about them or their purpose exist (what Plato calls
“forms”). We find ourselves in a certain set of conditions and we
ascribe meaning to those circumstances, not the other way around.
Gender exists in our world sort of the way that the forms existed for
platonic philosophers: as abstractions that are unattainable yet
supposedly desirable. No one can fully conform to everyone’s
expectations of what it means to be a man or a woman, and no one can
really claim authority on knowing what those categories entail. Even
radfems who fall back on “biology” (as a defense of what is basically
gender, even though they wouldn’t call it that) don’t really have
definitive answers when it comes to, say, intersex people.
If gender can never be fully realized, why do people try to conform to
it? The answer is that gender is a method of imposing behavioral norms
on people based on the role power structures want them to play in things
like reproduction and the institution of family. Presenting people with
established roles, appearances, and activities based on notions of
gender (and punishing them for nonconformity to these things) makes them
easier to control.
The enforcement of near-ubiquitous systems like this will involve just
about every aspect of society. Gender norms are imposed by authority
figures, of course, but also by peers and even by the individual upon
themself. We grow up in a gendered society, and in order to escape the
punishment not only dished out for deviancy, but for the perceived
deviancy of anyone who questions this system, we learn to internalize
gender, both conforming to it and adopting its logic. We police
ourselves, even internally, in how we talk, look, act, and think.
Since there is no essence and gender is just a set of imposed ideas,
being trans is not discovering the essence of a different gender within
yourself. This social system of gender is hostile to the variety of
human experiences because it imposes monolithic ideas about behavior and
appearance upon people. Because of this, many (if not all) people will
have hostile encounters with gender throughout their lives. Transness is
a particular response to these encounters: a way of taking control of
your body and your perceptions of it.
Gender, among many social systems, forces us to understand our bodies as
symbols of a deeper, essential identity. What psychiatric professionals
call dysphoria is a feeling of discontinuity between what the body
symbolizes and what we would like it to symbolize. Part of this, of
course, is the way that we are perceived by others, behaviorally and in
appearance. But it also extends to the way that we perceive our own
bodies and even believe (whether consciously or not) our essence to be.
From a young age in a world of essentialism, we conceive of essence
(with regards to gender) as related to many things: at the most shallow
level, appearance and voice, but at a deeper level, behavior, social
roles, and “biological factors” like hormones can become divining rods
for essence. Transmeds engage in this kind of practice all the time,
establishing standards by which they judge the essential transness of a
person. This is just a microcosm of a larger tendency that dominates a
cis-normative society.
So rather than try and judge whether a person (yourself or someone else)
really is trans, how do we respond to these issues? Understanding that
identities are not a result of essences but rather socially manufactured
categories, how do we navigate a society built upon identity? The answer
is to demand complete control, wresting your autonomy back from everyone
who will try and police you, including yourself. Foucault says (and I’m
paraphrasing) that identity can be a sort of game we play, but that if
we try to place bounds around it, it becomes a prison again. As trans
people, I think it should be easy enough to see the ways that social
demands to conform keep us imprisoned. But I think, for many people, the
trans experience (if you’ll pardon me talking about it as though it were
one monolithic thing) lends itself to new forms of expression, and an
understanding that even as we navigate these social categories, the
categories themselves and the systems that produce them are really just
violent bullshit.