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Title: What is Gender?
Author: sub.media
Date: 2020
Language: en
Topics: gender, primer, video transcription, Breadtube
Source: https://sub.media/video/what-is-gender/

sub.media

What is Gender?

Gender is one of the most fundamental stories humans have created. It is

a story about each one of us that begins being told even before we are

born. It is told over and over again throughout our lives sometimes in

ways that resonate with how we feel inside and other times not at all.

Our gender story intersects with the other aspects of our personal

experiences and social position, our physical and mental abilities,

whether we're rich or broke, what racial categories we are perceived to

be, our geographical location, and so on – all together these things

hugely influence the opportunities we will have and the abuses we will

suffer.

Gender is a means for society to categorize people along a masculine and

feminine binary, reserving different forms of treatment on that basis.

Being labeled as male or female is meant to dictate everything, from how

you look and behave to who you find attractive, to the roles you take in

family and society. The stories reinforcing the gender binary are

socialized through institutions such as family, work, religion, law and

healthcare as well as the constant barrage of visual messaging through

various forms of media. They get in the way of understanding and

engaging with the diverse spectrum of gender identities as we become

completely caught up in trying to conform.

But gender is not just about an individual’s expression, it’s not simply

a “choose your own adventure” kind of human experience. For individuals

and communities who've been attacked by slavery and colonization, the

project of reclaiming healthy gender traditions can also supersede

questioning them altogether. And this goes hand in hand with reclaiming

non-binary genders, such as two-spirited, which were almost erased by

settler colonialism. In other instances, intentionally conforming to

binary gender norms allows us to fund our projects through sex work or

physically survive periods of incarceration.

These are also survival mechanisms against the relentless onslaught of

patriarchal and colonial-capitalist violence. Within this system,

anarchists have found a variety of ways to respond. For some of us the

abolition of gender is a central project. Queerness is seen as a

negation of not only the gender binary but of all gender categories.

This perspective is especially important to combat the tendency of

Liberal reformists to recuperate new identities into the status quo

without fighting against or even acknowledging its fundamentally violent

underpinnings. It is sickening to find our long traditions of queer and

feminist struggle being twisted in to hiring campaigns for gay police or

women CEOs. Therefore anarchist approaches to gender must also maintain

an analysis of race, class, colonialism and power, and it must reject

inclusion or representation in the mainstream. For other anarchists

however, queerness is not a negation but a valid and true expression of

our inner selves. Creation and experimentation with gender is meaningful

and beautiful and even masculinity and femininity are an important

aspects of this. Gender can be a way we build solidarity, create

community, and celebrate our ways of being in the world.

Under Patriarchy the gender binary gets weaponized and gender becomes a

system for categorizing the world and distributing power. It’s a set of

practices that we do with our bodies through capitalism, patriarchy and

white supremacy. Toxic masculinity, perpetrated primarily by Cis-Men

serves the purpose of inflicting violence on gender transgressors in the

form of domestic abuse and queer bashing. Those men in turn are kept in

line by the threat of having male violence turned against them inside

prison. This constant flow of threatened and actualized violence keeps

people serving their various productive and reproductive functions and

the flow of work and babies keeps capitalism alive. And just to be

clear, although Anarchist scenes have always been places that allowed

people some space from gender norms, we also reproduce

hetero-normativity and sexism, often in ways that are depressingly

familiar to what is seen anywhere else. When this happens we employ a

number of responses, from survivor retaliation to accountability

processes, to women and trans only organizing.

But whatever we choose, our dealings with patriarchal behaviour are

oriented towards doing it ourselves, without the police or courts. The

intention is to learn ways of distributing care so that intervention

into toxic gender dynamics happen before any harm ever gets done. So

regardless of who you are, find comrades and accomplices, people you can

trust and be vulnerable with. Learn to care for others in the ways you

need to be cared for and share in all the different kinds of labour that

keeps you alive. The fight to reclaim the telling of your own gender

story will be a struggle that may last your entire life. Don't do it

alone.