A category that assigns roles in advance constrains everyone it sorts

The argument

The case that the world would be better without gender begins with what the category does rather than with what it is. Proponents argue that gender functions as a set of expectations attached to people before they have chosen anything: which work is suitable, which emotions may be shown, who is presumed competent to lead and who is presumed to care for others, how a body should look, what a voice should sound like. These expectations are enforced not mainly by law but by the ordinary machinery of approval and ridicule, which proponents argue is the more effective enforcement because it operates everywhere and continuously. The mechanism proponents emphasise is pre assignment. A person sorted into a category at birth inherits a script written before they existed, and proponents argue that every such script is a restriction, including the ones that look flattering. Those expected to be stoic lose permission to grieve; those expected to be nurturing lose standing to be ambitious; those who depart from either are corrected. Proponents argue that the costs fall on everyone the system sorts, which is everyone, and that they fall hardest on those whose sense of themselves does not match the script they were handed. Proponents are careful about what they propose to abolish. The claim is not that bodies, relationships, differences or self understanding should be eliminated, but that the social category which converts a bodily fact into a set of obligations should be. On this account a world without gender would still contain the whole variety of people, their attachments and their ways of presenting themselves; what it would lack is the apparatus that assigns them roles in advance and penalises departures. Proponents conclude that removing that apparatus would leave people freer.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who disagree argue that the proposal removes a resource along with a constraint. Gender is for many people not only an imposition but a way of understanding themselves, a source of belonging and a vocabulary in which identity is claimed and recognised, including by people who have had to fight to have their own gender acknowledged. They argue that the harms described are caused by rigid and hierarchical gender norms rather than by the existence of the category, and that loosening the norms is both achievable and already underway, while abolishing the category would take from people a description of themselves they did not ask to lose.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Expectations attach to many social categories, including age, class and occupation, and the usual remedy is to loosen them rather than to abolish the category. [Rejecting P2] Enforcement through approval and ridicule has demonstrably weakened as norms have changed, which shows the constraint is variable rather than inherent to the category. [Rejecting P3] A pre assigned script is not the whole of what gender offers, since many people take it up, revise it and find meaning in it rather than only suffering it. [Rejecting C] At most the premises show that rigid gender norms are harmful, which supports loosening them rather than eliminating gender itself.