Postgenderism

The argument

Postgenderism begins from the claim that gender, as a system of roles and expectations, functions as a constraint rather than a description. On this view the categories of masculine and feminine are not neutral labels for how people already are; they are a narrow plane onto which a far wider range of human capacities, temperaments and forms of expression is flattened. Because the plane is narrow, people whose potential lies outside it are barred from attaining it, not by any physical limit but by the social cost of departing from what their assigned category is taken to permit. Proponents argue that the damage of this narrowing is not confined to individuals who chafe against it. A culture organised around a two-point spectrum, they contend, generates predictable pathologies: sexism, which follows from ranking one pole above the other; homophobia, which follows from policing the boundary between them; and body dysmorphia, which follows from holding every body against an archetype almost no body matches. These are presented not as incidental failures of an otherwise workable system but as the system operating as designed. The postgenderist conclusion is therefore dissolution rather than reform. Instead of equalising the treatment of the two categories, the position holds that a future society should remove social stratification on the basis of genitals and gender roles altogether, and with it the weight placed on cogno-physical differences between the biological sexes. Proponents locate the means for this in technology rather than in persuasion alone: developments in neurotechnology, in biomechanics, and in assistive extra-uterine fetal development are cited as the route by which the material asymmetries gender has historically been built upon, in reproduction above all, could cease to organise social life. The claim that unites the argument is that the constraints of gender structures are a detriment to all people, including those the present arrangement appears to favour, and that only their removal frees anyone.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Gender roles are not absolute and have never posed any real social issue until recently. The postgenderist argument is predicated on the existence of technologies and medical breakthroughs known only to science fiction. When misgendering someone can result in lawsuits and the end of careers, it becomes easier to simply have no genders. Ayn Rand’s Anthem characterizes a world without gender and without singular pronouns. Such a pursuit of complete individuality ultimately results in its death.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Gender roles do not inherently cause social problems.