Masahiro Tabuki, from JCA Annual 5 (1984)
Shigeo Okamoto, 1985
This is a very brief thought bc I have to go to class but I’ve seen an increasing number of people online say that “sex is different from gender” was a narrative that was forcibly imposed on trans discourse and never had any productive value, and I understand where they’re coming from, but that’s just not the case, either historically or theoretically. When a terf, for instance, says “sex and gender are the same thing,” what they mean by that is not what a trans person means by “sex and gender are the same thing,” and it is in fact only possible to get to the latter meaning of it through an analysis of the two individually, at a certain stage of which it becomes clear that they are articulations of the same concept but in the opposite way, that gender grounds sex instead of sex grounding gender.
if you ever get the time can you clarify what you mean by your last line here, that “they are articulations off the same concept” and “gender grounds sex instead of [vice versa]”?
yeah!
So by “the same concept” in that sentence, what I just meant was the proposition that when we speak of gender and sex we are speaking of one system structuring both “social” and “biological,” and not two separate ones.
The contention of the terf position is that there is one system, which is premised in the biological fact of “sex” and to which the social manifestation (”gender”) is subsequent and directly related to. “Gender” becomes nothing more than the fact of being sexed as a social subject. Recent terf rhetoric has identified itself as “gender-critical,” which does not dispute this but instead shows just how direct the relationship between biology and sociality is to them: the word “gender” can be discarded as conceptually extraneous because “sex” to them already does all the work which “gender” might do. It’s a reduction of both of them into one system, that of “sex.”
The intermediate step, to assert that “gender” and “sex” are separate things, one referring strictly to the “fact” of the body and the other referring to the way the social subject navigates the world, is motivated by the desire to rescue “gender” from a deterministic “sex.” By severing the mind and body, “sex and gender are different” discourse sought to make transgender existence defensible and theoretically possible by conceding the body, by granting that I might be biologically male, yes, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not a woman. This understanding of the relationship of “sex” and “gender” is still wrong, but it’s wrong in a better and more productive direction than the previous position, and is I think a necessary stage in the theoretical journey to the next one.
The third stage is to look again at the relationship between “gender” and “sex” after having removed the former from a directly subsequent position with regard to the latter, at which point it can be discovered that there is in fact an inextricable connection, that “gender” and “sex” are manifestations of the same regime, but that that regime is social in origin and not biological. “Biological sex” is not a natural category that gives rise to the social category of “gender,” it is in fact gender’s manufactured ground and is strictly regulated so as to appear to be a natural category; naturalized into the perception of the body so thoroughly that a great number of disparate individual traits which generally (but by no means universally) correlate are popularly imagined to be one totality. So while the systems of “gender” and “sex” are in truth one, it is “sex” that is produced by “gender” and not “gender” that is produced by “sex.”
If you look at the world and say “Yes, there are enough homes for people, yes, there is enough food for people, but if we give it away for free they won’t have earned it and the economy will collapse.” Then you have chosen money (a constructed medium of exchange) over living beings who only want to continue living in peace and safety.
And I have no qualms telling you, that is the wrong choice, and you have been brainwashed by this destructive, exploitative system.
ahhhh, I’m happy this one came back.
at the end of the day, when you’re on the floor with your head between your knees pulled to your chest, remember the comfort of the human body. a heart the goes over the lub and dub. skin turns gold in the evening sun. atlas palms. balloon lungs. eyelash kisses every time i blink. jointed arms reaching out, to hold a hand or pet a dog.
