Gender Ternary and Subalternization REBUILD

A Materialist Feminist Prototype Technology for the Transfeminist Era

[A text-to-speech voice-over is provided as an accessibility aid.]

A (Brief) Foreword

The reception of the original Gender Ternary article (“Faggotization and the Extant Gender Ternary”) was much larger than I could have ever foreseen. I believed in what I was saying – and I did and do believe it was a critical, if necessarily immature, innovation in the contemporary feminist technologies of analysis. What I did not foresee was how many people would resonate with, and profoundly welcome and appreciate, the ways in which this innovation allowed them to acquire a degree of coherence, a framework to understand their peculiar relationship with gender-power and gendered violence, which the contemporary paradigms of “transfeminism” failed to afford them. This was both heart-warming and heart-rending to me. It became clear to me that there was a definite, urgent need for an innovation of this kind, if even not this particular innovation – and that there was an ongoing human cost to the lack of this analytical technology. 

It is undeniable, and trivially evident, to me at least, that the original article had significant shortcomings, partially borne of the conditions of its creation – while the central concepts and analyses were processes which I had been cultivating for years, the actual explication of them in the article was done rather hastily. I was eager to get out my ideas to an audience, and test the waters to see how they would be received. I did not have the necessary context to understand that these ideas would be as valuable to others as they were to me, and, importantly, I did not have the benefit of the knowledge of what parts of the article desperately needed strengthening, which was elucidated to me by the vibrant and enthusiastic response the original article received. Armed with this knowledge now, I felt that it was due time to make another, hopefully more polished, attempt at discussing my understanding of gender-class. Even if it is still a somewhat immature framework, I hope that this development can help mature it just that little bit more, such that it can afford more use to people who would value it.

While this article is, on some level, a response to, and a continuation of, the original document, I do not think of it as a “sequel” or a “follow-up” to the original Gender Ternary article. Rather, it feels more like a “remake” to me than a direct sequel – a “Rebuild of Evangelion” more than it is an “Iron Man 2.” I will hopefully go over the concepts of the original article both concisely, but with enough depth that the original article is not required reading. I would, however, still encourage reading the original article, if only for context of the development of these ideas, to see the vibrant conversation in the comments section by engaged readers, and to get a sense of the trajectory of this article. That said, I do want to be explicit that, while I broadly stand by what I said in the “Faggotization” article, I specifically felt that the original article had an issue with scope – insufficiently constrained in some parts, wildly insufficiently explicated in others. I hope that, for now, this new iteration can be the authoritative version, and I hope that I can successfully preempt some of the flaws implicit to the original.

Finally, a specific editorial note. While I believe the term “Faggotization” was snappy, concise, and helped clarity for some readers, I do believe that it often functioned to the detriment of the article’s efficacy. For that reason, I have substituted this for the term “Subalternization,” which I believe serves the same mechanical purpose, but with better clarity.

(Desperately Overdue) Acknowledgements

Finally, because of the failure to understand the potential scale of the original article’s impact, I did not really structure it with any kind of conventional form, including lacking a much-needed acknowledgements section. No idea is born from the ether, and recounting the theorists which helped bring this article to realization would be untenably long, or otherwise meaninglessly insufficient. I do want to thank a few people from my life, however, who were critical to the development of these ideas, especially those which developed from between the first draft and this current iteration.

Firstly, my fiancée, Hannah, is without a doubt the primary influence on this work from my life. These articles were born out of years of passionate discussions with her about the nature of gender, which was specifically benefited by her unique experience, and analysis, of her relationship with gender. Hannah, you already know how much esteem I hold you in. You are the light of my life and I will forever be grateful for the person you have been to me.

Uncountable thanks, as well, to Rhiannon, one of my dearest friends, with whom I have also spent years honing this analysis. Your robust and passionate theoretical background paired with your unwavering level of principle have challenged me time and again to reach for better.

Deepest warmth and love and thanks to my friend Lye. You influenced this writing more than you probably imagine, and I am so thankful for your friendship and perspective over the years.

With that, onwards.

Gender Ternary and Subalternization REBUILD – A Materialist Feminist Prototype Technology for the Transfeminist Era

The Sizhen System

There is a rot at the core of contemporary feminism. A hole at the bottom of transfeminism. Many believe feminism to have gone the way of Marxism-Leninism – a defunct technology of a bygone era, which serves a vestigial function, with little urgency. I fear the reality is far more desperate – we need feminism now more than ever, just as we need Marxism-Leninism now, more than ever. Feminism is a technology which we need, but, like every technology, it is critical that we correctly innovate upon it for the material conditions of the moment in which we live.

Contemporary popular discourses have successfully eaten a number of feminisms, including “transfeminism.” Popular media peddles in petty, trite pseudo-feminist aphorisms, which are allowed to proliferate specifically because they have been defanged. Popular “feminisms” have become analytical frameworks rife with idealist errors, which eviscerate their explanatory power. In-so-doing, they have lost their revolutionary potential – the salt has lost its saltiness. These feminisms no longer challenge gender hegemony – they are no longer historically progressive analyses, because they are incapable of correctly understanding gender-class. Without correct analysis, we are as blind as liberals, groping around in the dark, trying to make sense of things by the twinkling, disparate lights of “lived experience,” without the unifying structure of theory. We make errors, and these errors have human costs. As responsible political agents, it is critical that we prioritize correct analysis – one which is not rooted in idealisms and aphorisms, but which understands gender as class structure, embodied in material structures of social and political organization.

I contend that there are three genders: Power, Not-Power, and Subaltern.

1 – Gender Ternary

As with a mathematical proof, let us begin by setting a few postulates – givens which we can understand intuitively as true.

1. “Identity Categories” which are relevant to a dialectical materialist analysis are those which are class systems. We can understand this as race-class, political-economic-class, or, relevant to our analysis, gender-class.

2. Classes contained within a given class structure are trivially and intrinsically legible to those given class structures. An underclass must be legible to the class structure to be an underclass.

3. Class inclusion is not a choice. It is not a matter of will, preference, desire, emotion, expression, spiritual or ontological category, or any other such thing. While decisions a person makes can affect where they will be forcibly classed, inclusion within a class is a result of a confluence of material and historical forces which move a given society, which then impose a class upon an individual.

4. Classes exist in contradiction with each other. When the contradictions which animate their class antagonisms are resolved, the classes cease to exist, trivially, as they are themselves denotations of a relationship with power.

5. It is evident that there are people within society who are gendered as a class distinct from the Legitimate Genders, but rather occupy a subaltern class position.

With these as understood as true, we can derive a few things. Firstly, those which are gendered as subaltern, occupy a political gender underclass. Secondly, this must mean that these gender subalterns, as we will understand them, are trivially legible to gender power. Thirdly, that gender-relation is just that, a relation, a class relation, which arises from the political context and its implicit material conditions – gender exists in the sinew of social relation, between an individual and their society – it does not exist in the “soul,” nor does it exist as some kind of “essential” characteristic of a person, “biological” or otherwise. You do not “have” a gender. You did not “discover” your gender, at least from the perspective of gender class. What happened was that you were gendered. You were made subject to gender. Gender was inscribed into you through violence, carved into your flesh and made physicalized in the ways in which you have clipped your nails, cut your hair, tied your clothes, lilted or gruffed your voice, grown or shaved your face or your legs, in the way that you have access to material resources, how you relate to your labor, how you move through the world, and what further violences you are – or are not – subjected to.

Gender happens to you, the way a hurricane happens to a coastal city – without choice or autonomy, not as an act of agency, but as a phenomenon of blind, chaotic circumstance, a confluence of tiny eddies and butterfly flappings, of minute fluctuations of heat and moisture, that eventually coalesce into a power-through-violence, and to incomprehensible destructive consequences. Or perhaps, it is more like the way a mob happens to a trampled victim – crushed by the immense weight of social history and political momentum. No individual person has the power to stop it on their own – yet every individual moves it – a force of emergent, collective violence. Gender is not a feeling, or a state of existence, or an innate, irrevocable quality. It is a process, which is constantly and forcefully applied to a person by a society, like a factory where weapons are laser-cut out of stamped pieces of sheet metal. It is the process by which Gender Hegemony attempts to continue replicating its existence. A great, steaming factory of blood and cruelty which continuously prints droids encoded with the single instruction of CONTINUE THE WAR.

As people of political consciousness, it is necessary that we understand correctly where the enemy lies. The enemy is not in “gender roles,” or their constraints on “how people can express their genders,” which are themselves “innately neutral,” or even “good.” The enemy is gender itself – the system of power in its totality – which must be overturned. A revolutionary politic is necessary to create the requisite conditions for the successful dismantling of the class system. The goal of feminism is not “equality between men and women.” The goal of feminism, when it understands “men” and “women” as approximate words reaching for the description of the extant power classes, is a world where “men” and “women” cease to exist altogether. Liberté, égalité, sororité. A classless society is the eternal promise of Marxism-Leninism. In service of this, we must advance this cause for all political class systems. And so, we move forth.

Likewise, it is trivial for us to know that there are members of the gender-class system who are themselves oppressed, but not made subaltern – the “Not-Powers,” who are subject to the “Powers.” These can be somewhat analogously read to the relationship that the proletarians of the imperial core, who are themselves not made subaltern, have with the bourgeois of the imperial core.

Finally, there exists a dominant power class – a gender-class who stands to benefit most from this class-rule, whose class interests confer the class character of the system as it stands, the Dictatorship-Of-Gender-Power. These, we will here call the “Powers.”

Thus, we have our three genders: Power, Not-Power, and Subaltern.

1A – Identifying Contradictions

Broadly, the system can be understood as containing nested contradictions, which interlock and interfere with each other. Firstly is the contradiction between the Powers and the Not-Powers+Subalterns – the contradiction between the ruling class, and the ruled classes. We can call this the primary contradiction of this system. But there are also secondary contradictions – among these: 

• The contradiction between the Powers+Not-Powers against the Subalterns, the Legitimate Genders vs the Punitive Gender; 

• More granularly, the contradiction between the Powers and the Not-Powers alone 

• Again, with granularity, the contradiction between the Not-Powers alone and the Subalterns; 

• Finally, the contradiction between the Powers and the Subalterns. 

There are peculiarities to each contradiction, and there are peculiarities to the character of each class.

1B – Class Permeability

Of course, we understand that the value of a given framework of analysis – a given perspective through which we view our world – is rooted in its functional utility, which is tied to its explanatory power. We will hopefully soon see the broader utility of this particular framework for understanding gender, and the specific phenomena it has the capacity for explanatory power for – however, for now, let us discuss the most basic elements of this system which distinguish it from The Gender Binary* as a framework of analysis.

Firstly, the Gender Ternary does NOT draw the lines as “Man, Woman, Other,” nor is it an analogue for “Cis Man, Cis Woman, Transgender.” It is critical to understand this. The problem with revisionist and liberal feminisms is this understanding of the Gender Binary. Both because it draws the lines in the wrong places, and because it presupposes that these boundaries are primarily impermeable.

The utility of the P, NP, SA model is specifically that of not using the words “Man” or “Woman.” This allows us to describe a different relationship between these genders. Further, these genders are permeable, as classes frequently are. Just as in enormously difficult circumstances, a Proletarian can acquire Capital and become a member of the Bourgeoisie, and, far more common, a member of the Bourgeoisie can lose their capital and be forcibly proletarianized, so can members of the P, NP, and SA genders move from one gender class to another. Gender-class inclusion is provisional. It is a consequence of factors which are directly and causally linked to a given individual’s relationship with power within the broader gender-class system within which they are embedded.

1C – The Peculiar Character of the Subaltern Class

A prevailing understanding within contemporary frameworks of gender is that Transgender Identity is an aberration of patriarchal society – Patriarchal Society, so the aphorism goes, seeks the eradication and extermination of the Tranny, because of her Transgression Of The Boundaries. The Tranny, in this paradigm, is some form of failure of the policing power of gender hegemony, and something inherently transgressive in her existence.

We posit instead that this is putting the cart before the horse, that actually, the dynamic is inverted. The Subaltern Gender Class is a necessary, intrinsic element of the gender hegemony – the gender hegemony needs Subalterns. This is because the gender subaltern class serves a purpose – it is the punitive gender. It is the gender you are sent to, upon failure to comply. Subaltern Gender is a prison – Gender Hell – Gehenna and Tartarus – it serves as the eternally standing threat implicit to the system. If ye should so sufficiently transgress the bounds of gender, woe be upon ye, for so shall ye be stricken with The Mark of tranny, and be driven from the lands. Specifically, we understand as thus: Gender Subalterns must exist, because being made Subaltern is the embodied act of punishment for gender transgression, the mechanism by which the classes are kept in line.

The Subaltern Gender exists as the Punitive Gender: in service of the need to keep the Not-Powers in check, should they start to “get ideas” in the sense of political consciousness, in their eternal dialectical contradiction with the Power gender; and in service of the need, broadly, to curtail class traitorism by reifying the superstructural elements of the Gender-Class Ruling Ideology, by maintaining the integrity of the boundaries between these gender-classes, and to act as one of the mechanisms by which gender-class mobility is controlled and mitigated.

Gender is a class system. Gendered violence exists to control the movement within and between those classes. The Subaltern Gender Class is one peculiar form of gender violence, which exists to be a punitive class in which one is thrust upon sufficient transgression of gender-class ideology or correct protocol.

2 - Material Base

Gender-class and gendered oppression have existed for a long, long time in human society. They certainly predate the dawn of the age of Capitalism. But the reality is that gendered violence and gender-class continue to exist because of their utility for Capital at this juncture – gender-class is a social technology which exists not in direct contradiction to Capital and its custodianship, but rather in service of this. In this way, the Gender Class Rule and the Bourgeois Class Rule work together to replicate each other and support each other, strengthening them both. For this reason, any sufficiently Marxist politic should also understand the necessity of addressing the contradiction of Gender (among others), and any sufficiently Feminist politic must understand the world through a Marxist framework, which understands the loci of power within Bourgeois Class Rule. Gender-class as a social technology precedes Capital – but now exists in service of it, on both a material base, and on a superstructural level. Indeed, these things are heavily intertwined.

It is a well-understood and established feminist understanding of how gender-class organizes reproductive and domestic labor in service of the needs of Capital – in this era, primarily through the social technology of the nuclear family. It allows for control and the maintenance of the means of reproduction of the labor force. Further, it allows for the production of the conditions of children’s subservience to, and oppression by, adults, which in turn is required for the successful ideological replication of the current class rule, and in producing the conditions for the maintenance of the material basis of their political economy. Gender, Heterosexuality, and the Nuclear Family, are all interrelated and, truly, cohesive social technologies which exist to maintain the conditions of the replication of Capitalism. Heterosexuality and the Nuclear Family exist as technologies which utilize the classes generated by Gender Hegemony to omnipresently police society, maintaining the conditions of both their self-replication and the replication of Capitalism.

At the risk of being a bit brusque, I believe that this is both important and necessary to discuss in an essay like this, but also not the primary novelty of the analysis – as far better minds than mine have discussed reproductive labor and political economy in volumes upon volumes. As such, we will move on to discuss potentially more relevant and novel junctures of analysis.

3 - Ideological Gender and Mechanisms of Control

You Are Not How You Identify. You are not what clothes you wear, how you talk, how you act, which bathroom you piss in, what designation you mark on your documents, or your favorite drink. You are gendered without consent, against your will, as an act of violence – yes, frequently as a result of many of these factors – but not through them. Gender is Done to you, and you have no choice in the matter. It does not live inside of you, but rather, it lives in the world, in the social sinew and how they entangle and ensnare you.

3A - What Then, Of The Theyfab

An evergreen question that has tortured me (and perhaps you), has been the question “What even is socialization, anyways?” Many “transfeminist” discourses would contend with the question of “gendered socialization” on its own terms, seeking to articulate the precise sciences of why and how transgender women are able to claim the title of Female Socialized and therefore gain the right to have an opinion on gendered violence. I contend that the reality is orthogonal: there is no spoon! Socialization is not a process which is unique and specific to each given gender – rather, there is one socialization – “The Human Socialization” – a general process of gender inscription and violence which produces the countless unique experiences of gendered violence all members of humanity are subject to. It is the “DNA” of gendered violence – able to express any countless number of ways in different given contexts, but the same “code” on a fundamental level. How it responds and manifests is unique in each case, and is determined by a number of factors – but the reality is that it is one single, unified force – the force of Gender Violence. This is why people are not “male socialized” or “female socialized.” We are gender socialized, and this gender socialization does violence to all of us – the violence mutates given a particular context, and some of that violence is the violence which is requisite for indoctrination and enlistment into the gender-class of Power, which, as we have established, has everything to gain from the gender class-rule.

What, then, of the Theyfab? The reality that must be understood – the articulation which will ruffle feathers in all directions, and which has been the locus of a significant amount of controversy in “transfeminist spaces” – is suitably encapsulated by the infamous spectre of the “theyfab.” The reality is that “theyfab,” and “transgender,” are themselves incoherent political classes as they are tautologically defined. The assertion “I am transgender because I identify as transgender” is circular, if applied to an analysis of power. The reality is, of course, that it is trivially true that everybody who identifies as transgender is transgender, if we are using the definition of transgender to be “anyone who identifies as such.” The reality is much simpler, unfortunately – you are the gender you are forcibly gendered as by gender class. Gender is distinct, fundamentally, from “gender identity” as we understand it. Gender class does not care what you think or say you are. Your gender is “assigned” not by document or by pronouncement or creed, but by the violent application of hegemonic force. It can be a consequence which is affected by your choices, feelings, and expressions, but these things do not determine your gender. Let me be clear – not all those who “identify” as something will align neatly within these categories. Just as not all who “identify” as “nonbinary” are intrinsically Subaltern in gender, likewise, not all who “identify” as “transmasculine” or even “transfeminine” are intrinsically politically underclassed. Rather, this is itself a mechanism of how much one transgresses or complies with punitive gender force. Further, there are people who are, by all means within the contemporary discourses, “cisgender,” who are meaningfully subalternized by gender hegemony. There have been valiant, halting attempts to be able to encapsulate these nuances, which trouble and entangle the coherence of the transfeminist structure – patch updates which sought to make the overall engine usable through a terminal quagmire of glitches. I think of social technologies like the category of “nonbinary lesbian,” “transmasc butch,” “transmascfem,” etc. Identities which, and I say this without derision, seek to pull coherence from a system which will not give them it.

To derive gender-class from “identity,” which is to say “how one Identifies,” is itself an idealist error, which locates the origin of gender class as a manifestation of a spiritual ritual of identification, and which retroactively creates a past experience of gender class after identity is achieved. This is necessarily incoherent. Gender is never a choice. To say “Trans men are men” is as much of a tautology as to say “I am a transgender woman because I Identify as such.” It is a liberal analytical concession to the prevailing discursive technologies of the Transgender Tipping Point-era, which were strategic decisions which prioritized the legitimization of “validity” rather than a correct, materialist analysis of gender. 

From a personal conjecture, I believe this was due to a desire to align the Transgender Rights Movement as a corollary to the (relative, conditional) success of the Gay Rights movement, which had hitched itself to the cart of the institution of Marriage through the Gay Marriage movement. It appealed to a sensibility of broadening the categories of legitimacy – incrementally, to be utterly clear – to vye for conditional class ascension. The gambit was essentially thus: “I’m gay, but I’m not a Faggot. I was Born This Way, I did not Choose This, and I am Just Like You, I am a Straight Couple But Gay. We just want to get Married and Raise A Family like the rest of you!” The implicit corollary to this, of course, is “unlike those hairy dykes/weird trannies/polyamorous freaks, etc.” The point was how it did not transgress the hegemonic system of power, but could rather slot in as an additional technology – not an overhaul or a rework, but an integrative modification which maintained the integrity and coherence of the underlying power structure.

The answer to “what then, of the Theyfab?” is that the Theyfab is not a power-class, and that many different people within these same “identity categories” can have any number of divergent and contradictory and antagonistic locations within gender-class.

3B - “Man” as Ideology – Class Traitorism, Enlistment, and Punitive Ejective Subalternization

To return to an earlier point, the role of the Subaltern is the gender-class into which people are ejected upon sufficient transgression of given gendered protocols – whether that be attempted-and-failed aspiration towards Power by Not-Powers, incorrect behavior and enlistment in Power Ideology by Power-Thus-Subalterns, or others. Tying in another earlier point, that gendered “socialization” is a single unified force, we gain the below understanding: The inverse of “Toxic Masculinity” is the creation of the gender subaltern underclass. This is a manifestation of the same unifying phenomenon of Gender Violence. It is an analytical error to believe that “transmisogyny” is a distinct force from “general” misogyny – rather, it is the same force, which manifests differently when applied to distinct contexts. This is necessary to understand, as what this perspective communicates is that we have both everything to gain from understanding our liberations as tied together, beyond a solidarity perspective, but from a very practical material understanding that these things are one and the same force, and that they cannot be successfully overturned without overturning all parts of the system.

We might ask, “what are the mechanisms / reasons underlying the subalternizing “ejection” from the “legitimate gender classes” (i.e. P and NP) into the subaltern gender class?” In response, we might offer a few preliminary contemplations. In the case of the P class, it protects against specifically Class Traitorism – those who are ejected from P and enter Subaltern Class are those who refuse to – or cannot – sufficiently uphold the necessary ideological project of the P class – and therefore, fail to correctly maintain the conditions for its replication – as such, it is a safety mechanism against an existential threat towards its coherence as a class system, inasmuch as making these boundaries incoherent threatens the potential for the replication of the material conditions of gender. It is a policing of correct ideological compliance, as failure to comply threatens the material base.

In the case of the NP class, it’s very straightforward – the use of subalternization as a mechanism of punitive violence is one which violently suppresses attempts at upward class transgression – it also maintains the integrity of the class categories of “NP and P”, but by keeping the subordinate class subordinate, by punishing those who attempt to achieve upward mobility.

Another question here then becomes: What of “Trans Men?” Anyone who knows and interacts with people who are conventionally understood as being Trans Men understand that they broadly fit into two categories – people who succeed at inclusion within the category of Men, by succeeding at performing Ideological Manhood, and those who fail or refuse to do so, who, by merit of whatever kind of confluence of factors which result in their failure to comply, are forcibly, also, ejected into Subaltern gender. I think this is specifically, also true of some people who fall into the category of cisgender men. In the original article, this mechanism was that which prompted the coining of the term “Faggotization,” as I believe that the process of Subalternization/Faggotization is a process which can be uniquely illustrated by the ways Faggots are not afforded Man as a class.

To be a successful member of the Power class, one must abide by the class interests of the Power class. This means that one must actively choose to continue to enlist in the class of Power. In this way, we understand that inclusion in the class of Power is not a choice everyone is offered – but choosing to stay in this class is always a choice one must accept willingly, as it is an affirmed process of political enlistment in the project of Gender-Class. (We use the word “choice” here as a shorthand – there is a more proper articulation, dialectically, in which we could expound on the ways these social forces respond to the given acts of affirming enlistment in the Power class via acts of gendered violence via the movement of the internal contradictions of Gender Class etc etc etc etc but that would be exhaustingly verbose and I think missing the point).

3C - So Why All The Transphobic Murder?

A legitimate question towards this analysis might be “why, if the existence of the Subaltern is necessary to the service of the class interests of the Powers, and Gender Hegemony broadly, might Powers and Not-Powers alike unite in enacting genuinely exterminatory violence against Subalterns? Does it not contradict their class interests? Are They Just Stupid?”

Of course, we can understand this as a result of ideological reaction left unchecked – we see this countless times over, in all sorts of realms – ideological reaction, which broadly serves the interests of the ruling class(es) in a given context, left unchecked, becomes its own form of power which can no longer be curtailed – the machine eating itself alive by allowing ideological elements to run free, like a cancer. The balance of maintaining the ideological-superstructural elements of the replication of gender ideology is a delicate one, which requires safety valves to redirect political energies which become too “runaway,” too “feedback-loop.”

I contend that certain forms of this kind of “safety valve” include the projects of liberal pop-feminist discourse-disseminators, such as Autostraddle, EverydayFeminism, etc – the same as liberal ideology broadly, to redirect and recapture extant and nascent revolutionary political gender-consciousness and utilize it as fuel for the enforcement and maintenance and balancing of gender-class in service of gender-hegemony.

Like with the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie – where the extermination of the former by the latter may be the ideological desire of the latter, even when it conflicts with their own class interests, and requires the intervention of the state to maintain the integrity of those class interests – so we can see how and why there might be an exterminatory impulse among more violently reactionary Powers and Not-Powers against the Subalterns, even when it threatens their class interests. Again, like with the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie – liberal false consciousness serves as a capture device for nascent revolutionary energies, to redirect them towards the maintenance of the class system overall. EverydayFeminism is Bootstraps Liberalism for gender hegemony.

4 - Human Costs

Why do we care about this? What is the issue with analyzing gender the way we have been, what is at stake with regards to the ways in which transfeminism is an imperfect science?

We care because there is a human cost. We care because being wrong is dangerous, because it leads to idealist and analytical errors, and political excesses and missteps. We care because systems which are wrong and analyses which are wrong chew people up as an inevitable and accepted consequence of their “functioning as normal.” There are countless people whose realities do not reflect the prescriptive designations of what their realities “should be” by “transfeminism.” People whose experiences contradict or conflict with the “party line” of “transfeminist analysis.” These people are not acceptable losses. They are not collateral damage. They are people whose lives are genuinely damaged, or even ruined, by the rudimentary and incomplete nature of contemporary transfeminist analysis. These people live realities which are not afforded coherence under the extant system. It is imperative we innovate new analytical technologies because every moment we don’t, the human costs rack up. A system which cannot confidently answer a question like “Was Kurt Cobain A Transgender Woman?” to the point that the controversy of such a question becomes itself a meme, a joke, is a system which lacks coherence to a dangerous degree. It leads to violence done to innocents. It leads to mistakes.

Conclusion – A Future for Feminism, Non-Paths of Transfeminism, Paths of Trans Non-Feminism

As I said in the original article: I do not feign to have the answers. I do not believe that this analysis is adolescent, let alone mature. I am myself just one woman with a halting understanding of many of the concepts I struggle to articulate – and this framework still needs significant honing and focusing (if it’s useful at all!) But it is clear that there’s a need for an innovation – an innovation which reasserts the reality that Feminism is a social technology we still need, because the contradictions of gender-class have not been resolved. 

Like with anti-imperialism and Marxism-Leninism, there have been halting attempts to innovate alternative analytical technologies to a dialectical materialist feminism – the moribund analyses of incomplete “Transfeminism,” the explicitly reactionary impulses of “radical” (anti) feminism, and the as-of-yet unnamed but burgeoning movement of reactionary transgender political analysis, which begets idealist errors which are themselves paths of trans non-feminism, seeking to fight Transmisogyny without meaningful engagement with analyses of Gender Hegemony broadly. These are all ineffectual at resolving the primary contradiction of gender, just as vulgar anti-imperialist non-Marxists are unable to resolve the actual primary contradictions of imperialism. The alternative framework offered to attempt to address certain contradictions – this is Gender Fascism.

No, it is critical that we understand the utility, the ongoing necessity of the technologies of analysis afforded by feminism. It is critical we understand that the fact that the correct analytical technologies of feminism have not been developed yet does not mean they cannot be. And, indeed, if we are at-all Feminists, at-all Marxists, at-all committed to a future of a classless society, free from the chains of bondage – so must we be committed to a future where Feminism is afforded the chance to innovate.

A classless world is possible. We owe it to each other to build this world.