Kathleen Stock: Abolish the dream of gender abolition

[EmbarrassingHadrosaurus]

Exploration of her thoughts on gender and radical feminism and intersections with your human need to create and abide by social norms.

Radfems also understand the limits of choice and consent, and that many women will choose to self-harm in various culturally approved ways. They understand that against the combined forces of economic incentive and societal encouragement, people will go along with things that are bad for them. And they also tend to be concerned with problems affecting ordinary women, focusing on typical or worst-case situations rather than unusually good ones. Their motivation is not protecting the income of the occasional happy hooker, rich porn star, or cheerfully altruistic surrogate, but with financially desperate women pushed into prostitution or into selling their babies. Radfems know that taking money for what your sex organs can provide to others is not a day’s work like any other.

This is all great stuff as far as I’m concerned, and there is much else to admire besides. At the same time though, many radfems simultaneously pursue a goal which undercuts a lot of this. They want to “abolish gender”. I think this is barking. Allow me to explain.
…
No matter how officially scathing about social norms they are in theory, in practice the opponents of women’s interests certainly know how to wield them to get the results they want. Male-dominated movements of every political and religious persuasion have never hesitated to lay down the kind of social law for women that suits them: be chaste, have lots of babies, be silent, be docile, be up for BDSM, don’t criticise prostitution, accept males as “women”, or whatever. It’s always about the attempted production of shame…To repeat my first point: women can’t get rid of sex-specific social norms. All they can do is fight to get the sex-specific norms that work for them.

kathleenstock.substack.com/p/lets-abolish-the-dream-of-gender?s=r

I think that’s basically right. Some gendered norms and behaviours are not only inevitable, they are also unobjectionable. As long as you have female bodies and male bodies, people will behave accordingly. The aim of feminism (IMO) is to mitigate, as far as possible, the inequalities that arise from that. But is there inequality, or harm, in a group of women going for a drink to talk about their experiences? Or a group of men going for a game of golf and not talking very much?

These are norms. But they’re not prescriptive and they’re not hurting anyone.

Commercial surrogacy, gendered pay gaps, the female skew in caring responsibilities - these things hurt women.

Can someone point me to the radfems whose objective is to abolish gender? I'm a radfem in touch with quite a range of other radfems and I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that we can abolish gender.

There's a lot to think about there. I will almost certainly need to read it again.

I agree some societal norms are desirable, even essential but then I'm left wondering which ones are actually inevitable in a patriarchal society? Who decides what societal norms are without female liberation and if women participate in creating social norms then are we already liberated?

I'd be interested in what others think but I'm not convinced liberal individualism is a key theme in radical feminism.

@Pluvia

Can someone point me to the radfems whose objective is to abolish gender? I'm a radfem in touch with quite a range of other radfems and I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that we can abolish gender.

I have seen people post on this board that we need to abolish/get rid of gender.

@Pluvia

Can someone point me to the radfems whose objective is to abolish gender? I'm a radfem in touch with quite a range of other radfems and I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that we can abolish gender.

I was left wondering about a helpful definition of radfems and then realised that I was, perhaps, overlooking that Stock had provided some links via quotations that I haven't followed as yet. I know Echols discussed it.

Echols, A. (1983). Cultural Feminism: Feminist Capitalism and the Anti-Pornography Movement. Social Text, 7, 34–53. doi.org/10.2307/466453

www.jstor.org/stable/466453

It reminded me that I need to revisit Julia Long's writings and various talks and podcasts. And there was a faint feeling that Stock is extending her arguments from Material Girls that were the subject of some criticism.

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/4273673-Extraordinary-essay-by-Julia-Long

I would be happy to abolish gender and I think that is a goal we should be working towards. It may not be possible to reach it, but in my utopia, there would be no gender. People would have male or female bodies, but would dress as they please & hold any job that they are qualified for. there would be no need to fight to encourage girls to go into STEM or boys to train in nursing because there would be no social pressure to do one or another.

I think it is dangerous to give up on the idea of reducing the impact of gender because it plays into the right-wing idea that gender should define your career / life choices (like 50s women raising babies) and one of the main aims of feminism is surely to get away from that and to get rid of gender.

Again, I agree this may not be possible to achieve this in my lifetime, but I still firmly believe that it should be the goal of feminism.

It depends on the interpretation of the rad fem idea of "abolishing gender".

Sex stereotypes, yes.

I think most rad fems unite in agreement with abolishing sex stereotypes. What is gender without sex stereotypes though?

Sex roles exist because we're sexually dimorphic beings, and those things can't be undone but so much of female oppression stems from beliefs imposed by patriarchy that the female sex role is less worthy.

Value judgements underpin "gender" which is a hierarchy with feminine gender at the bottom, so of course rad fems often talk about abolishing gender. Which in effect is the act of "making sex roles work for you" that KS is arguing.

Ah, it's another pop at Julia Long, is it? So not that many radfems, really.

Agree entirely that we should aim for it, but I'm old enough to remember all the initiatives of the 90s and noughties — courses for female plasterers and programmers and loads of girls into the sciences — and look at us, we're having to fight to retain the word 'woman' and protect boys who like pink from being chemically castrated.

I hadn't read that particular Julia Long essay before but I think it's helped me to clarify some of my reservations about Kathleen Stocks position on gender. I think KS views patriarchy as inevitable and unchangeable and that limits what she thinks it's possible for women to achieve in terms of altering the power dynamic. I think she sees gender as a something women can use to bargain with men for better terms, I see it as restrictive.

We may be a long way from abolishing gender norms but that does not mean we have to accept they are inevitable.

We may be a long way from abolishing gender norms but that does not mean we have to accept they are inevitable.

I have lived in enough different places to know that those norms are not necessarily the same and I have also seen them change over time in one place.

It's probably true that certain norms would always remain, given the sex differences, but we should challenge all the wrong beliefs and badly sexist stereotypes and also question all norms because not questioning them will not allow us to learn the ones which can be changed.

In that context it's interesting how wars can rapidly change many of those norms.

The reverse cases are also interesting. For example, coding used to be a female-coded job until home computers made it interesting for boys and in a very short time IT became a male-dominated field. There was nothing inherent in that change.

Then there's the pink and blue for baby girls and boys and after that age, too. Originally the proposal was to have blue for girls and pink for boys as pink was viewed as more vivacious and stronger, but the final outcome was reversed. So even that belief is culturally created, but children will learn it because they are gender detectives at an early age and want to know how they can be counted in their gender.

@Pluvia

Can someone point me to the radfems whose objective is to abolish gender? I'm a radfem in touch with quite a range of other radfems and I don't know anyone who seriously thinks that we can abolish gender.

Ummm it's a fairly common and regular statement by many posters here - that the end goal of 'proper' feminism or rad feminism is to abolish gender.

I think Stock is right. It's not only impossible, if you managed to do it you would create a horrific dystopia and the attempt would have to involve significant oppression of normal human behaviours and thoughts.

In order to justify keeping "good" gender (maternity customs, say,) you end up having to make pretty arbitrary distinctions that say those things are not gender, unlike a custom which is seen as detrimental. When in fact they are both functining through the same mechanisms. Some may even have been beneficial at one time and then due to cultural, environmental, or technological change become detrimental.

Similarly the idea of abolishing sex stereotypes means either doing the impossible and creating a situation where people do not notice differences between things men do and things women do - the type of categorization that underpins rational thought - or arbitrarily decide that if the stereotypes seem to have negative effects they should be somehow abolished (even if they are true, presumably) but other ones are ok.

The whole project seems to depend on the idea that you can change men and women into people who have only a passing interest in sex differences, which seems extremely naive, it's difficult to imagine much that human beings are more interested in.

And as far as accepting that they are not inevitable - my first thought here is, what about motherhood?

The image of woman in the collective consciousnesses is always closely tied up with motherhood, and it's difficult to see how it could be otherwise. If we think of the history of art, right back to the earliest carvings of people living in caves, we see certain images associated with that again and again.

Human beings are social and cultural. We create cultural meaning through our experiences. We structure our societies through customs and norms. Our most fundamental shared human experiences are the ones that are the most biological - being a child with parents, puberty and becoming an adult, sexual relationships, becoming a parent. Even if nothing else about our behaviour is rooted in biology, which is doubtful, those experiences are going to produce cultural content "stereotype" or archetypes we might say, patterns in societies.

Thanks for sharing this article. I haven't read Kathleen Stock's 'Material Girls', but this article of hers very eloquently describes my own position these days on 'gender' or sex stereotypes and norms.
When I was younger, a lot of the lib fem ideological views appealed to me, and some of the rad fem ideological views also were appealing, but the more time I've spent thinking about it all, the more I find myself drawn to a pragmatic approach - one that acknowledges and accepts humans as the products of evolution that they are.

I find much of the lib fem / queer theory ideology rejects evolution completely. Rad fem ideology, on the other hand, does accept evolution but only up to a point - there is an acknowledgement of evolution 'below the neck' such as in terms of sexed bodies, but like lib fem an aversion to acknowledgment of evolution 'above the neck' such as the impact sexual dimorphism has on behaviour, psychology and social interactions both on individual and group levels.

"....to think that as a species we could voluntarily stop the spontaneous production of sex-specific social norms around such fundamental events and experiences - let alone stop the infusion of these events with sex-associated meanings of any kind - is to fantasise a version of ourselves with far more conscious control than humans actually have. It’s inconceivable that such a scenario could ever be implemented without massive and organised coercion by the state, and even then I don’t think it’s possible.

It would only have to involve deep oppression of behaviour and thought if the men don't do what we say when we say it and pretend to be happy about it..
Which is exactly what women have been doing for millennia.
I would hope we can abolish gender, but judging by the amount if women I know who change their name on marriage, work part time and dress thier daughters in hidious outfits they can't move in, I'd be surprised if feminist isn't an endangered species around here.

Ummm it's a fairly common and regular statement by many posters here - that the end goal of 'proper' feminism or rad feminism is to abolish gender.

Is it really? Maybe as a passing expression of hope, mentioned as something we could be working towards. But after lurking and posting on FWR for years I can't think of a poster or a thread that focussed firmly on this and set out a pathway and an image of what a gender-free world would look like. Of course although I'm here most days I don't read every thread, so perhaps the conversation is going on and I'm just not seeing it.

Personally I think sex differences make it impossible for us ever to be completely gender-free, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't focus on making the world as gender-free as possible.

Surely it's difficult if not impossible to abolish something that has no objective existence? But can gender evolve like a meme I wonder.

@parietal

I would be happy to abolish gender and I think that is a goal we should be working towards. It may not be possible to reach it, but in my utopia, there would be no gender. People would have male or female bodies, but would dress as they please & hold any job that they are qualified for. there would be no need to fight to encourage girls to go into STEM or boys to train in nursing because there would be no social pressure to do one or another.

I think it is dangerous to give up on the idea of reducing the impact of gender because it plays into the right-wing idea that gender should define your career / life choices (like 50s women raising babies) and one of the main aims of feminism is surely to get away from that and to get rid of gender.

Again, I agree this may not be possible to achieve this in my lifetime, but I still firmly believe that it should be the goal of feminism.

Agreed.

Just because something is difficult and had a lot of opposition doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

I see it like racism. In an ideal world racism and gender expectations/gender roles would be a weird archaic thing that we look back on and wonder how anyone ever thought it made any kind of sense. We're currently a long way off, and there's always a backlash to any improvements but maybe eventually we'll get there. If not for our generation, then maybe our children's children's children. It's worth striving for.

I find much of the lib fem / queer theory ideology rejects evolution completely. Rad fem ideology, on the other hand, does accept evolution but only up to a point - there is an acknowledgement of evolution 'below the neck' such as in terms of sexed bodies, but like lib fem an aversion to acknowledgment of evolution 'above the neck' such as the impact sexual dimorphism has on behaviour, psychology and social interactions both on individual and group levels.

Interesting way of looking at it!

I appreciate both Stock and Long's positions. I think it's a potentially fruitful thing to consider. And more and more I think diversity of view/standpoint/opinion is not a weakness within a movement, but a strength.

• overall, I think that pragmatism and an abandonment of (or questioning of) utopian idealism are perhaps healthier things to aim for.

In the thread that I linked, a fair number of posters reported that they'd initially started nearer to KS and experience shifted their position to JL: Take Stock, Go Long.

My objections, in that thread, were that adopting KS's preferred mode of action is still going to lead to compelled speech, women losing jobs for understanding material reality, and a polluted shared public understanding of intersectional rights.

We need a plurality of voices and continuing discussions. We have had compromises (the false promises of 'it will never happen' with GRA 2004) forced upon us that have been used to harm women and strip us of sex-based rights. I'm apprehensive that some flavours of pragmatism would do the same again and disproportionately harm women and provide loopholes for vulnerable groups. We need power and decision-making presence at every level of politics and policy-making.

@Abhannmor

Surely it's difficult if not impossible to abolish something that has no objective existence? But can gender evolve like a meme I wonder.

Getting rid of gender would involve getting rid of all kinds of social structures that exist to help and protect women. It would involve getting rid of literature that expresses our particular experiences as women as qualitatively different than those of men.

I don't think any of that would be good.

Trying to achieve something that is impossible is not always neutral and aspirational. It can be very destructive, because it doesn't seal with reality and then leaves the consequences of that reality unaddressed, and in this case because it could very easily involve trying to wipe out real differences between men and women because they tend to lead to a gendered culture.

I think this is proving an interesting discussion to have, and just decrying people who don't agree with you as 'barking' doesn't seem helpful. We should at least consider what living in a genderless society might be like, even if we suspect it's impossible. This is making me think.

Thanks for the link to that thread, Embarrassing Hadrosaurus. I think I'm a bit Longer and not quite so Stocky, if you know what I mean. I would rather push for something really positive for women, even if it takes generations, than settle for a poor compromise.

Looking back at this thread, it looks like KS is using the word gender in it's technical, anthropological sense - it is things that are not biological sex in itself but are social or cultural constructs around it.

Feminism tends to make the assumption that these things are all bad, part of the patriarchy, and when I've seen that challenged the response has been, well if it's a good thing, like a custom to help new mums, for example, it's not "gender" and we would keep that. Because gender by definition is bad.

That just ends up arguing in a circle though, and you get these a priori claims that certain things must be bad because they are gender, and they are gender because they are bad.

And it's no help when there is real disagreement about whether certain constructs or customs are bad or good for women. Say, whether parental leave should be totally transferable, required to split is, or all for the mum. Anthropologically those regulations/customs would all be gender constructs, women and feminists disagree which is best for women. So by the feminist definition where gender is negative, are they all bad? Or some? Which ones?

Do people really want ALL customs and cultural understanding related to sex to be removed from society?

@Pluvia

I think this is proving an interesting discussion to have, and just decrying people who don't agree with you as 'barking' doesn't seem helpful. We should at least consider what living in a genderless society might be like, even if we suspect it's impossible. This is making me think.

Thanks for the link to that thread, Embarrassing Hadrosaurus. I think I'm a bit Longer and not quite so Stocky, if you know what I mean. I would rather push for something really positive for women, even if it takes generations, than settle for a poor compromise.

She's not suggesting compromise though. She's suggesting that abolishing gender would be bad.