New zine: Gender After Civilization

"This journal is intended to dispel a prominent myth within the wider anarchist community: that of the-so called "forest TERF." That is, the idea that anti-civilization anarchists are exclusionary of those who are trans* or gender non-conforming. This, of course, we know to be a falsehood: because we are queer and we stand against civilization. We believe that this myth is, ironically, detrimental to queer lives for a number of reasons.

  • Indigenous and so-called “primitive” peoples have had complex systems of nonbinary gender long before techno-industrial society. Hence, the implication that trans* lives are somehow endemic to industrial civilization denigrates the real, lived experiences of these queer folx.
  • The charge that trans* people cannot exist in the aftermath of civilization (and thus that the destruction of civilization is necessarily an erasure of trans* people) implies that trans* people have a necessary need to transition medically. Of course, this is not true: trans* lives are valid regardless of whether or not one decides to undergo medically invasive procedures.
  • Further regarding transition, one who subscribes to the “forest TERF” myth fails to recognize that a desire for medical transition
    is produced by cisheteronormativity: that is, the ideology that individuals of a certain gender act or look a certain way necessarily. In this failure, they reproduce the cisheteronormativity they claim to oppose.

The list can go on (and does, throughout the mainmatter of this volume.)"

Download the pdf

Send hatemail to @distroheresy on Twitter.

There are 68 Comments

>calling urself anti-civ wit ur controlled fire erotica

i mean...it’s my kink...but it’s also not not my kink...

could be discussed in next Anarchy Bang about sex

fuck! freudian slip...i was supposed to say it’s not my kink at first

I've read "hypocrite liberal buzzword to cover up for what's really just sexism or sexualization"

Its interesting that you say medical transition comes from a desire for normativity. For that to be true, having an internal sense as a gender would have to come before the desire to change ones body. But for myself and p much every other trans woman ive known, the desire to change our bodies is the root of our transness. Our relationship with our physical bodies is the lowest most essential aspect of our transness. The idea that we medically transition to fit roles of internal sense of gender is a bizare myth. If thats true what about all the non binary people who medically transition?

Its kinda weird to me that someone would express this udea' but say they support us. You dont even know us.

Is this written by people assigned female who use they/them pronouns and dont medically transition? Thats not rhetorical, Id be interested in am actual answer.

Being trans and into anti civ anarchy, I had high hopes for this' but now Im just rolling my eyes.

Im also wondering how Alyson Escalante's writing qualifies as anti civ? The first one advocates for ppl to be androgenous as a way to destroy gender' which is silly and hardly nihilist. I guess it expresses a nice desire for a world without the pain of gender.

Her follow up years is pretty obviously Marxist-Leninist in ideology and filled with regret for having written the first.

Did you actually look through the zine? Look at the Note from the Editor right before Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto.

"But for myself and p much every other trans woman ive known, the desire to change our bodies is the root of our transness. Our relationship with our physical bodies is the lowest most essential aspect of our transness."

We do not believe there is any "norm" for a woman's or a man's body. We do not believe one's body is essentially related to one's gender identity.

"The idea that we medically transition to fit roles of internal sense of gender is a bizare myth."

No one said this. The idea that medical transition is *essential* to the trans* experience is what we are opposed to.

"If thats true what about all the non binary people who medically transition"

Good for them. We're not cops.

"Is this written by people assigned female who use they/them pronouns and dont medically transition? Thats not rhetorical, Id be interested in am actual answer."

Oh, okay, so you're just a random truscum worm. In that case, fuck off. I will not dignify this with an answer: you're essentially asking about our genitals, which is grossly indecent and absolutely irrelevant.

Im far from true scum lol. I never said transition is the esential for transness or that someone needs to share my experience to be trans. That said medical transition is the essence of my own personal experience of transness and that of many others. That doesnt make us true scum.

But there i have no sense of gender that Im changing my body to meet. There is just how my hody used to be and how I want it to be. Gender and identity and roles and aesthetic comes second to that physical relationship. So abolishing gender or identity as a whole would not change me or trans people like from altering our bodies.

If gender collapsed tomorrow, Id still need to suplement some form of hormone to avoid hot flashes and exhaustion. And even without civilization, Id still want tiddies.

So maybe for those who transness is rooted in identity and social recognition of that identity, then transition is a tool towards that recognition and without gender would be unnessecary. But for others that recognition is a byproduct.

Why is it only trans-w that go around calling eachother scum and screaming at women that they'r being exclusive, etc. in the @ space? Don't you see this as a bit of a problem?

Why is it only trans-w that go around calling eachother scum and screaming at women that they'r being exclusive, etc. in the @ space? Don't you see this as a bit of a problem?

because misogyny

just to be clear, "truescum" exists first as a label of self-identification, used by trans women who are pro essentialism.

by my read, that's how the word found its way into this thread.

see also the SCUM manifesto.

finally, your question has an embedded claim that only trans women call other women exclusive in anarchist spaces, which in my experience is not true. in my experience there are tons of allies doing this in anarchist spaces.

in the end, your comment comes off weirdly. maybe you should say what you really mean.

Gender is a form of governance which ultimately projects governance upon other bodies. Destroy Governance. Destroy Gender.

"Further regarding transition, one who subscribes to the “forest TERF” myth fails to recognize that a desire for medical transition is produced by cisheteronormativity: that is, the ideology that individuals of a certain gender act or look a certain way necessarily. In this failure, they reproduce the cisheteronormativity they claim to oppose."

This is spot the fuck on!

just out of curiosity, why do the pieces in this zine not include the author names who created them?

Transgenderism IS a product of civilization. Queers have always been with us, in a tiny minority, but this idea of gender choice and transgender is definitely from an industrial culture. Only industrialism "frees" the individual to think about such things, to ponder one's "gender identity," which is a recent phenomenon. Sexual identity politics, queer politics, etc are all products of the late 20th Century activist culture, which comes about through quicker communication, ie the computer age, etc. Mostly since the personal computer age has there been such activism and "philosophy." With the advent of DNA research, genetics, etc. humans came up with the notion of drilling down into one's "core being" and thus pretending (all science is pretense and wish fulfillment, just look at the recent "photo" of a "black hole") to "map" human genetics via philosophy. One man's Bell Curve is another's Final Solution. Science is inherently fascistic and culturally based (they still use Latin names for everything, right), but queers and trans have no problem appropriating science when they want to and creating a while "culture" and sex identity politics based on the government-funded work of lab coat-wearing Nazis. Science is industry, industry is civilization, transgenderism (and its politics) is a product of the government/corporate industrial system.

All you trans activists and transgender identity politicians are children of industrialism.

How can "queers have always been with us" if pondering gender identity is a "recent phenomenon"?

"How can 'queers have always been with us' if pondering gender identity is a 'recent phenomenon'?"

the appropriate analogy would be "how can anarchists have always existed if anarchism is the creation of 19th century europeans?"
longstanding resistance to the excesses of arbitrary/coercive authority is a lot older than the publication of Proudhon's "What Is Property?" or Godwin's "Inquiry Concerning Political Justice."

nothing is real until white europeans published on the subject within the last few centuries boles, it is KNOWN

Correct me if I am wrong, but the argument I am hearing from you is: Civilization BAD, transgender is civilization, therefore transgender BAD!

"All you trans activists and transgender identity politicians are children of industrialism."
-Person posting a comment by means of a US Dept of Defense, computer age, military project

Yes nearly all of the human population alive today has grown up in indistrial civilization. You aren't saying much. Your connecting of the dots to single out transpeople has me cracking up. Have you ever used a pharmaceutical or been vaccinated? How about the hormones in your industrialized food system? Or the water you drink held by dams by ARMY corps of engineers projects?! Seriously this reads like against the fascist creep of transgender identity. Science is fascist! Labcoat nazis!

Ranking people based on how civilized they are is idiotic moralism. It isn't as though one has a lot of choice in the matter.

Judging people for undergoing surgery or taking hormones as a way to survive this world in a way that makes sense for them in their own body's is not something I want to do, nor is invalidating their experience as transpeople, queer, or non-binary because some on the internet are obnoxious politicians or activists.

I am against civilization too though.

For one thing its trans activism which reinforces gender stereotypes. It's the radfems and so called TERFS who advocate for gender non-conformity.

Difficult-to-categorize individuals have always been among us, that's how nature works, its all about gradations away from clear groupings, but categories like cis, queer, trans, even non-binary, etc., are just boxes created by academia, ideologues and politicians. They are mostly truncated versions of genuine permutations resulting from the nefarious powers of capitalism, consumerism, activist culture, identity politics and liberalism and are impediments to creating cultures of resistance or freeing individuals to lead passionate, self-fulfilling lives that might threaten bourgeois civilization or disrupt any sort of normalcy...

I just read an article by an indigenous historian asking trans activists to stop claiming that two-spirit meant trans in the sense used today. Historically people might have been two-spirit while they were young and then not at all later on or vice versa. The concept had little to nothing to do with 'feeling like you are in the wrong body' or ' i am literally a female in a male body' sort of thinking which leads to a medicalising and pathologizing of what is a normal exploration/rejection of culturally given expectations of behaviour. Two-spirit according to this historian was meant as an opportunity to be freely self-creating throughout one's life, not permanently altering your body to fit a stereotype of what a woman or man is supposed to be.

Industrial drug companies, high tech labs, universities and research centers by definition wouldn't be around post-civ. This means looking at social rather than technological ways/means to address our needs and desires. So if you believe that a 'woman' can live in a 'male' body (or that there are no male and female bodies but there are 'woman souls/brains and man souls/brains that live in these sexless bodies) and want to speculate about what a green anarchist future might hold for them, then you should wonder what 'trans' might look like in a world without cities, hospitals, labs, big pharma, universities, i.e, without the ability to medically transition.

"I just read an article by an indigenous historian asking trans activists to stop claiming that two-spirit meant trans in the sense used today. Historically people might have been two-spirit while they were young and then not at all later on or vice versa. The concept had little to nothing to do with 'feeling like you are in the wrong body' or ' i am literally a female in a male body' sort of thinking which leads to a medicalising and pathologizing of what is a normal exploration/rejection of culturally given expectations of behaviour. Two-spirit according to this historian was meant as an opportunity to be freely self-creating throughout one's life, not permanently altering your body to fit a stereotype of what a woman or man is supposed to be."

Holy shit that was powerful. Please write an essay on this? Please?

There’s a piece in the gender nihilism reader that talks about non indigenous folks using two spirit and why they shouldn’t. Its worth a read but it’s not useful to use as an example to dunk on trans advocates in support of terd ideology. While second wave feminism talks extensively on gender abolition that hasn’t meant terfs haven’t been staunch guardians of gender. They are literally biological essentialists.

elizabeth says: "its [sic] trans activism which reinforces gender stereotypes."

this is a despicable blame-the-victim inversion of an authentically radical analysis, an embrace of the idpol activist's wagging fingers. it's always amazing to me when people whose vocabulary indicate that they should know better repeat the authoritarian lies of the protectors and gatekeepers of the status quo. "trans activism" doesn't reinforce anything -- the industrial hetero/cis-normative patriarchal civilization we are forced to inhabit that creates, maintains, enforces, and reinforces gender stereotypes. but that monster is just too big to fight effectively with your puny wagging fingers, so you and the rest of your cadre of heresy-hunters find it easier and much more smugly satisfying to police the so-called micro-aggressions of people who are working on wresting away tiny slices of personal autonomy and agency inside a system of interlocking and overlapping institutions that collaborate to wreak havoc on anyone whose personality and preferred outward presentation takes them -- voluntarily and therefore vulnerably -- outside the rigid expectations of hierarchical social powers.

I call boleshit. Transwomen aren’t wresting tiny slices of personal autonomy - unless males colonizing female spaces, bullying women, using children as guinea pigs for ideology, punching old women in the face, gloating over the closure of rape crisis centres, embracing capitalism/big Pharma, forcing lesbians to accept/center the phallus in their relationships or be labeled bigots, rewriting gay and lesbian history, controlling language at the expense of women’s visibility and thus safety- like forcing institutions to replace “ pregnant women” with “pregnant persons”, erasing effeminate gays and butch lesbians through puberty blockers, attacking and silencing dissidents, promoting the idea of pink souls, threatening feminists and lesbians with sexualized violence like making them “choke on their lady dicks” ( a widespread and widely accepted expression in trans milieus) and generally accepting that too many of them behave like the shock troops of the patriarchy constitutes such a thing. The whole tension between TERFS and trans activists to my mind simply boils down to the mantra that “transwomen are literally women”.

Allowing meaningful and open debate around this question/claim would go a long way toward relieving some of that tension...Transwomen might be surprised how many TERFS would “get it” if they were allowed the space and time to consider the arguments. A lot of transactivists have to get off their high horse and stop the bullying and policing of social debate around one of the most difficult to grasp concepts ever put forward. Everyone needs to understand and debate the claims being made. I truly believe that both sides have much to learn. What is the science behind this claim? What aspect of trans addresses liberation from gender norms and expectations? Why are children being given puberty blockers which are irreversible- again what is the science and radical appraisal of that extreme intervention? Etc...

I mean .. its not that I disagree with your point but isn't this post basically just an appeal to the internet to stop being a sewer?

Elizabeth, i am truly sorry that you've been exposed to what can only be described as hyper-authoritarian bullying -- and which has precious little to do with anarchist (anti)politics. clearly your experiences and mine are worlds apart; i have never seen nor heard about any of these activities you describe (in England?), nor have any of my friends or associates. my experiences are limited to a couple dozen local trans* activists (some relationships being more intimate and longstanding than others). as far as i am aware (as if it were any of my business in the first place), only a minority of these folks use medical interventions, and i can't imagine any of them being happy at the idea of, for example, a rape crisis center being closed down (unless it were run by the cops or courts). none of these people is interested in propping up patriarchy or otherwise reinforcing gender stereotypes.

ultimately, though, what makes me wary of your narrative is your invocation of "the science" (of what? endocrinology? biology? gender?) as if science were some sort of neutral pursuit of truth and not a fully ideological construction of privileged knowledge in the service of (patriarchal) power.

Stop playing dumb boles, it's absoloutely despicable... It's impossible not to see the trans-activist community constantly, constnatly, constantly, attack women inside and outside of the @ space as TERFS, spouting blatient lies by telling everyone they are 'gender determinists', claiming to be the soul owners of the truth of gender-nonconformity., As well as attacking gays for not watching to be fucked by them and generally acting like the same old toxic af men in anything but aesthetic.

It's disgusting that you try to hand wave this very very evident stuff away with 'but i didn't see it!'.
Grow a spine.

Who’s doing the hand waving here? The person who says “it’s not been my experience or that of any of my friends” or the one who insists that these just-so stories and apocryphal rumors are beyond questioning? Looks to me like one is a skeptic while the other is a True Believer; whose perspective contributes to a more relevant anarchist analysis?

Nah mate, sorry, no dice. If you're in teh @ scene or at least paying half attention to it with one eye open then you know this stuff is happening. If you don't it is willful ignorance at best, calculated dishonesty at worst.

Nah yourself, mate. If you have some specific names, dates, places, or anything resembling silly things like actual facts, be so kind as to share them. Otherwise you (and all your mates) are just waving hands and blowing smoke. I did hear about some bizarre dust-up at last year’s London anarchist book fair, but given the contradictory and vague report backs, there’s nothing of substance to go on. Endless repetition of a rumor doesn’t make it more true.

Gonna place you in the 'calculated dishonesty' category then. Thanks for making that clear matey.

I've seen a bit of this crap, heard plenty of substantiated rumours too. It's real but you should probably scale it or risk tunnel vision: the percentage of actual violence is very, very low. So I'd argue there's two very antagonistic, marginalized groups with very little propensity for real violence, which is another way of saying they're very mean to each other online… and that's pretty much it.

There's exceptions to this but if you won't address how rare they are, that would also be dishonest imo.

Is it that rare though? It doesn't come to blows that often but it still does at times? I can think of at least a handful of times in my country where these trans'women' have attacked feminist women for opening there mouths and daring to have opinions.

Besides the times it comes to physical attacks what is more the problem is the countless people who don't feel like being involved or feel safe in anarchist spaces anymore because they've been marginalized and actively silenced by a bunch of machismo in dresses. Chasing women away from our spaces because they will not adhere to the trans-activist line is the real incidious thing here, imho.

"Is it rare though"?

Yes … yes m, it literally is. It's extremely rare that any of this stuff escalates beyond bitter muck slinging and hurt feelings. I'm not saying that the problems you're talking about aren't really shitty, especially the alienating of people who might benefit a lot from support in a wider community so please don't misunderstand me … BUT …

Part of the issue with us all becoming social media cyborgs is this distortion of reality that allows for people to spend a ton of energy on these "conflicts", utterly convinced that they matter a lot more than they really do … in my opinion.

I'm sorry that this 'bitter muck slinging and hurt feelings.' is so normalised around you that you don't see it as an issue but it really is, a huge one. we're seeing our friends and fighters, strong, amazing, intelligent people being pushed away by a bunch of pathetic uppity children.

We're talking about the @ space here, remember. Not normies. Most of these people, the older generation atl east wont be on social media.

I replied to this but some worthless yank prick deleted it. I'll reply to you in IRC when ur around, without these cunty admins. <3

uhhhhhhhhhh, wrong thread entierly.. haha. it was still at you tho, so halfway there! :p

of two-spirit, it is not a historical term. It was invented in 1990 at an Indigenous lesbian and gay gathering in Winnipeg.

As for myself, it has always bothered me how some trans people have embraced the Transhumanist agenda. I do understand there is a certain affinity there but as someone who also is anti-civ, getting beyond the medicalization of trans-ness is necessary. But to say trans people in particular are embedded in civilization because we use medical technologies that are commonplace now just ignores the fact that everyone else is likewise caught up in civilization.

I don't think we can tell how the undoing of civ will impact trans-ness anymore than we can tell how it'll impact anything else.

Winnipeg?!

Yup, Winnipeg.

There is an exhibition currently at OMCA on Queers in California. One installation is about what words Native Californians use to name their queer selves and that is where I first heard about two-spirit being invented at this conference.

http://museumca.org/exhibit/queer-california-untold-stories

Thx Nettle!

Many indigenous societies have a word whch describes a person as being "an opposite" . They did everything backwards mostly for the entertainment value. They were respected individualistic shaman types often.

Also, they had complete autonomy and could break any law or moral without the fear of punishment. In a way they personified the Stirnerian ideal.

All anthropology is encapsulated within a materialistic Western methodology which falls short of comprehending and translating the psychopolitical relationships within indigenous cultures, so unfortunately there are no formal discussions available to my knowledge, only pompous moral indignation and bewilderment on the part of the invaders, Regards.

People project their values onto the unobtainable other with such gracelessness.

this sounds like it’s describing having a crush

ActualAragorn, identifying as a transwoman, wrote: " The idea that we medically transition to fit roles of internal sense of gender is a bizarre myth." And then " even without civilization, I'd still want tiddies." Wait, what? Then why are you transitioning? Sounds like you see being female as just an identity or a fetish to indulge or a set of stereotypes to play around with?...If so, why would you ever make the claim that you are "literally a woman"? And demand access to women's spaces, their sports leagues, their professional organizations, etc? A female is more than 'tiddies' ...

I see your desires rooted more in transhumanism made possible by industrial capitalism than in any sort of medical condition, gender abolition tactic or liberation from social constraints of any kind.

You can only dissociate from it. I like the idea of being beyond gender simply because it fits with my ideas of neoteny and anarchy which are beyond gestural governance and role reification and standardization. However, this can't be elected into or come from abolition. It has to be a species level thing. Inner regional experimentations if you will.

This claim that medically transitioning is a product of civilization outs you as an uneducated-on-the-topic probably white, definitely cafab person. People with dicks (especially brown ppl) have been castrating themselves and drinking pregnant horse urine for THOUSANDS of years. The first hormone replacement therapy in modern times was synthesized from pregnant mare urine.

Moreover intersex people exist and have always existed. Im intersex and got genital surgery later in life because I didnt like my genitals. It doesnt have shit to do with my gender. Im Persian gala. I didnt even get standard genitals. But oh right im replicating cisheteronormativity and pushing it on other people. People have tattooed and pierced themselves since they stood upright, you dont think they modified their genotals too??

Lol youre terf trash and I would happily do it pre-civilization style and jump you. :)

Which doesn't make them non-existent or pointless to me, it's great that they assert their difference as much as possible. But where is the cause to make them such an important social category all of a sudden?

How about blind or deaf people, or neuroatypical people? Or dwarves? Those people still exist and gotta fight a different level of struggle to accomodate themselves, if you didn't notice. Like blind people are extremely marginalized by a culture fixated on visual media (which includes your social media).

Have you been under a cave all these years as to not noticed the huge social media movement in favor of trans and pan-sexual people? How come this identify is so underground when you got super-mainstream people like Elliot Page, the Wachowkis, and a whole bunch of corporate execs, as well as even White supremacist stars like Milo being trans?

Intersex people are about as prevalent as red heads

Intersex represent from 0,018 to 1,7% of a population, where red-haired people go up to 14% depending on the area. Dwarves are an estimated 2,3% of the global population, which makes them slightly more common than people with intersexual condition.

So, dumb question... why are we not seeing such a huge political momentum through all media and Western academia for red-haired or dwarvish people as we got for trans ID pols? Due to the forever more intense political and social commodity of SEX.

The low % is for visible intersex conditions. The higher % is closer to right because it includes all conditions.

Redheads at 2% is the global estimate which is the more applicable number because the % for intersex conditions is also a global estimate.

Redheads are still up to 14% in some places... I don't see the intersex part of the population having any comparable proportion anywhere on the planet, but maybe there's stuff I should know.

Regardless, you dodged the rest of my point... as to why a part of the population representing less than 2% should be such a big thing, when there's other people with marginalizing conditions that get ZERO social media treatment?

Lotsa blind people, for instance, would benefit from more mainstream recognition, which would mean better community support. How is intersex so much important as to be erasing the importance of these other minority conditions?

One crucial flaw in your logic,
is thinking that social media attention is a desirable thing

As for me,
I think we had it better when we had none at all

Sounds like you need to delete your social media
and do a deep detox

We are born into gender there os no escape, deal with it, be real, not a product of identity dogma.

Probably worth mentioning here that one of the first anarchist projects to promote Stirnerian ideas, the German paper Der Eigene, was also one of the first projects publicly promoting homosexuality.

Would be nice if someone would translate some of their writings into English.

Some, though not all, of the gender nihilist stuff takes a position against society. For me the two are nearly synonymous.

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