a lot of my disillusionment with the trans "community" comes down to the fact that too many of you take "gender is different from sex" and go "ah ok, so instead of saying women are fragile and men are strong, I should say afabs are fragile and amabs are strong. to be Inclusive"
then you just treat gender like a surface level aesthetic draped over what someone "actually" is. really is indistinguishable from terf rhetoric
you all need to unpack your bioessentialism, but we also need a better theory of gender than "it's just dressup." I will pick my words carefully here, but the word "gender" itself refers to so many different phenomena that have been lumped together, and we need to un-lump them
in a feminist context, "gender" has historically referred to externally imposed categorization and the internalization and performance of said categories. in a paper I wrote on this subject, I called this sense of the word "extrinsic gender"
"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions
but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery
so, "gender" is: a social classing system, a performance, and at least two internal phenomena as well. and I really don't know if it's doing us a service to conflate all of these things!
a lot of people lately seem to be going heavy on the "performance" use of the word, ignoring (intentionally or otherwise) social classing, intrinsic gender, and subconscious sex. this seems to have led to a lot of "progressive" people treating trans women like men "amabs" who wear womanhood as a costume, and nobody understands why that's wrong because they also think gender is just a performance
And I think its relevant that people always misunderstand Judith Butler's intent with casting gender as "performative". They meant it in the philosophical sense, a social concept that can only exist through the actions of a social agent. You "perform gender" the same way you "perform tasks". Gender doesn't just exist, it must be created through actions. Society incentives certain actions to be performed in order to construct the gender binary, and if you do not perform those actions in the correct combination it disrupts the binary cohesion of gender as a social construct. But the gender binary as a social construct that can be dismantled doesn't naturally disprove subconcious sex.
Most people instead have a moralizing definition of it as a performance in the sense of an actor or a liar, something that isn't real because its done to convince someone of something completely false. This ends up rewarding people who treat gender as meaningless and silly like cis people who "dont care" about gender, or GNC TME celebrities and drag performers, or gender abolitionist transphobes, and punishes anyone who has an unacceptable investment in their subconcious sex and the way they are treated by others. Aka trans people. And of course trans women are opened to hyper-scrutiny in this framing since womanhood is treated as the most "performative" gender.
