Abolishing the category would not remove the differences it organises

The argument

A second argument concerns what would actually change. Opponents argue that the social category of gender is not free standing: it organises facts about bodies, reproduction, physical difference and the division of care work that would persist whatever vocabulary a society used. On this account abolishing the category would leave those facts in place with no agreed way of talking about them, and opponents argue that societies do not respond to the absence of a word by ceasing to notice the thing. The mechanism opponents describe is informal reconstruction. Where an official category is removed and the underlying differences remain salient, people improvise replacements, and opponents argue that improvised classifications are typically worse than explicit ones: they are unwritten, locally variable, unaccountable and impossible to legislate against. A pregnancy protection, a provision for care responsibilities, a measure against harassment or a rule about pay comparison all require naming the group they protect, and opponents argue that a society without the category would retain the disadvantages while losing the instruments. Opponents argue that this makes the abolitionist position self undermining in practice rather than wrong in aspiration. They accept that a world in which gender carried no obligations would be better than the present one, and argue that such a world is reached by stripping the obligations away while keeping the category available for protection and self description. On this account the question is not whether gender should constrain anyone, which opponents agree it should not, but whether removing the word removes the constraint. Opponents argue that it does not, and would cost the people it is meant to help the means of redress.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those favouring abolition reply that the premises conflate describing a circumstance with maintaining a category. Pregnancy, caring responsibility and harassment can each be named and protected directly, as conditions a person is in rather than as the property of a class, and such protections are arguably better drafted that way since they then cover everyone in the circumstance. They add that the appeal to informal reconstruction assumes the differences would remain as salient once nothing social depended on them, which is precisely what the abolitionist position denies.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Facts about bodies and reproduction can be described directly as circumstances a person is in, without a category that also assigns social roles. [Rejecting P2] The salience that drives informal reconstruction is itself produced by the social category, so it is not clear it would persist once nothing depended on it. [Rejecting P3] Protections drafted around a circumstance rather than a class cover everyone in that circumstance, which is arguably better law than protections tied to a group. [Rejecting C] The premises argue that abolition is impractical, which is distinct from the claim that the world would not be better without gender.