Gender Anarchism

from Center for a Stateless Society

Gender Anarchism: Tearing Down the Gender Hierarchy (The Anarcha-Genderist Manifesto)

by Chris Cross Chaos

The gender hierarchy is a pervasive system of social control across times and cultures. Like other unjust hierarchies perpetuated by state and nation, this system of social control has dramatically restricted the acceptable range of human expression and behavior. To look around and see the current state of gender relations — places where the state is banning medical care for transgender youth, where transgender people are banned from participating in sport, where men enjoy higher social standing than women by default, where strict gender norms of appearance and behavior are imposed through legal and social means at high cost to individual autonomy — to observe these apparent realities is to observe the destructive effects of the gender hierarchy.

Gender anarchism — also called anarcha-genderism — is the act of disregarding or actively opposing the arbitrarily imposed social regulations of gender hierarchies. A flavor of queer anarchism, gender anarchism is specifically focused on achieving queer, transgender, and feminist liberation by tearing down the gender hierarchy through direct action, resistance, and non-participation. By resisting and disempowering destructive gendered institutions such as transphobia, patriarchy, queerphobia, and the binary conception of gender, anarcha-genderists seek to create radical liberation not only for transgender and non-binary people, but for women, gay men, bisexuals, pansexuals, asexuals, polyamorists, and more.

Enforcement of the gender binary extends into nearly every aspect of society and attempts to exert control over every living human being. Without the ubiquitous acceptance of gender as an unchangeable binary of man or woman, patriarchy would lack the conceptual foundation necessary for its perpetuation. Without the gender binary, many of the notions underpinning and reinforcing homophobia, lesbophobia, and other forms of queerphobia would simply cease to exist. Without assigned binary gender, the pillars supporting cisheteronormativity would inevitably crumble. To render these institutions moot and powerless, the gender anarchist seeks to tear down the gender binary from which they spring.

Anarcha-genderists need not be transgender, nor do we need to directly violate the cishetero gender norms we’re trying to tear down. Anarcha-genderism only requires, at minimum, non-participation in the legal and social enforcement of unjust hierarchies which revolve around the gender binary. Beyond this, gender anarchism can take many forms; one might contribute to mutual aid systems for gender, sexual, and romantic minorities, or engage in “genderfuck” in one’s everyday gender expression. One might act directly to dismantle the oppressive systems the state puts in place around gender, or one might contribute to normalizing body modification and transhumanism. The more radically you reject cisheteronormativity, the more risk you draw to yourself from state actors and the gender police; however, this can also mean chipping away at these unjust structures faster, and the risk-reward analysis is something one must do for oneself.

The gender anarchist’s creed is this: All people are free to wear what they want, to use the mannerisms they want, to inhabit the body they want. Human beings are incredibly diverse in their behavior and expression, and anarcha-genderism seeks to create a world which allows and encourages the full range of human expression to flourish in defiance of the state. So long as human expression is chilled by the existence of gender hierarchies, people will remain oppressed by the state and its enforcers. To borrow a common metaphor in the trans community, your body is like your avatar in a video game, and disregarding gender hierarchies “unlocks the full set of character customization options.” At this pivotal point in history, using the full range of customization options can be socially, legally, and physically costly; the objective of anarcha-genderism is to reduce these costs — unjustly imposed by the state — to zero, so all human beings can express themselves and their gender to the fullest extent possible.

There are 9 Comments

I knew this would be horrid coming from C4SS but this is worse than horrid. So many words to say "do what you want with your body, clothing & comportment".

“Do what you want with your body, clothing and comportment”

Im gonna play devils advocate and say that if you live in North America or Western Europe... then what is actually stopping you from living that way here and now under our modern, permissive hyperliberal capitalist society?

Like, none of this is actually incompatible with the present system but rather simply presents another niche consumer market to be met and profited from by increasingly “woke” state and capitalism. I mean for chrissakes, at this point the military, by far the most violent wing of the state, is getting so woke they’ll offer to pay for the hormone therapy and reassignment surgeries of its service members who are so inclined. I happen to personally know someone who took them up on that offer, so yeah idk. I fail to appreciate how any of this is in any way a threat to the normal functioning of the machine.

The funny think is capital, the US military, and the state in general have been doing this for cis gender expressions since their inception. But they spend a couple years going back and forth about doing it for trans people and even then only conditionally, and cis people come out of the woodwork to point out the obvious like it makes them smart or something.

Yeah except nobody ever made a big deal about cis gender expressions like they were something special or the be all end all of rev politics. Listening to many trans and queer activists you would think that queerness or transness is going to destroy civilization somehow lol. My point is that gender/sexuality is super overrated, like, way out of proportion. If I had a pie chart representing what modern anarchists concern themselves with, lets be real: 80% of that chart is gender identity, gender expression and all the pointless 1st-world consumer navel gazing that comes along with that whereas economy, the state, the leviathan, industrial society and tech BARELY gets a mention even tho these are what make the world as we know it really go round. You are not radical. Your goals are reformist goals and are EASILY recuperable under the current system, in fact, this recuperation is already underway in full force but you act like the state is out to get you and yet you live in NA and not in Ghana or Saudi Arabia where the state actually would kill you over these aesthetic preferences.

I mean, doesn’t it make you raise an eyebrow when virtually all of these politics are being promoted by Walmart, Pepsi, and Amazon; the US military; every university; virtually all of mainstream media and certainly all the major social media platforms; every major bank; Silicon Valley; the neoliberal Biden regime; Netflix and HBO, and so on and so forth?

Does William Gillis publish stuff like this to try and make up for his awful transmisogynistic tweets or does C4SS publish it without his jedi blessing?

You basically want to just use the pure use value that connects to both exchange and gender. The problem is that on complex human level most humans tend to want these mediating standards. Gender abolition is fine as a simplified subsocietal siloed affair but maybe forget about trying to generalize this sort of thing to complex scaled up levels. Psycho-modern Humans like their abstract forms and standards.

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