It’s not a wonder to me why “gender identity” is hailed and put on a pedestal by the same people in support of pornography, prostitution, bdsm, all that shit.
The commodification of the human body harms women and children and dehumanizes us all. This isn’t a moralistic preach, it is the observation of what happens when patriarchy and capitalism intersect. Why would anyone committed to the liberation of all oppressed peoples ever be in support of putting a monetary value on the human body? Did we forget about slavery? Are we blind to its continuation within sex trafficking and the prison industrial complex? These things thrive off the notion that human labor and pain and pleasure are to be controlled through money.
First shame is shame of the body. And the liberalism and choice feminism I see all around me indulges this to no end:
Fat positivity is still focused on beauty, as if being fuckable or feeling pretty were something to incorporate into your identity.
Make-up is empowering, who gives a fuck if you feel insecure without it or the only girls who feel comfortable without are conventionally attractive anyway? Who cares that for decades this industry has preyed on girls through racist, sexist, homophobic advertisements and spent billions ensuring you feel more confident with your eyeliner and foundation?
Plastic surgery? Cellulite cream? Botox? Who gives a fuck as long as it’s your choice right? Turn women into walking dolls that don’t look human, that all look the same, that never age. A pornified culture is a free culture, because choice.
We don’t listen to women who have left the faith to expose the sexism and the patriarchal foundation of enforced religious coverings for women, because choice.
Men can call us sluts because they walked a mile while wearing a t-shirt that says feminist and we get topless and rejoice because they’re not shaming us right? Slut definitely isn’t rooted in shame, applied to any and every woman regardless of her sexual encounters because it’s actually just a fucking slur, no no, magic word is choice.
And that hate you feel for your body? Those gendered behaviors and clothes and society that forces you into a box so tiny you want to hack your parts off? Just go for it, cut away. Or bind or tweeze or shave or wear ankle breakers or corsets or any other of the ritualistic time consuming crap you do to feel confident and beautiful.
Get choked by a loved one because pain is pleasure, pleasure is pain and sex and death are one. Your body bleeding and bruised and sore but this is natural, this is innate, this is definitely not a reflection of the beatings women as a class receive daily and it’s definitely not abusive since you gave consent in a rape culture.
I see from some self-identified liberals that talking about our bodies in relation to womanhood is just what misogynists do. They have said that equating the female form with the word woman is bigoted. The idea that placing importance, recognition, words and meaning to our bodies is somehow degrading seems to me a product of the shame we, all of us, have been inundated with since birth. People cannot conceive of a focus on the female body without its objectification. This is why we are told we are “reducing” women to their genitals when we talk about our female bodies, as if my body is something to be reduced to, as if my love of women and my unyielding awe of their bodies’ strength and power is akin to a misogynist thinking I am nothing more than a hole. It is not the same, if that wasn’t clear enough. Acting as if the body is irrelevant, that it cannot be defined, that it does not have a history relevant to the oppression of women over millennia, or that the body enjoys pain, or that we should be bought and sold; none of these prevent or protect from our dehumanization by the oppressors. It allows them to exploit us further, for profit, for sexual pleasure, for power.
You are not born in the wrong body. No one is born in the wrong body. You are just born. You just are. If you’re born with a disability, with a disease, with whatever, you were not born in the wrong body. But it should be the responsibility of society to aim for you to have the least painful interaction with the world as possible, as it should be for everyone. That’s why I respect pronouns, because I understand people are in pain, and they are trying to cope. I understand dysphoria is real and prescriptive gender roles exacerbate this to no end. I understand the importance of not ranting my ideologies at someone trying to exist around me.
This is why I am vehemently against gender. I think it causes pain. I think the more people identify with or inundate themselves with gender or “the meaning of”, the more labels and synonyms you make to see which box is most comfortable, the more pain you experience from the world. No one is going to agree on how we should see gender. No one is going to understand an “innate gender identity” in the same way, and the world is not going to incorporate your individualist ideals and identities to the point you will be perceived how you want to be. The idea of man and woman that you are so hyper focused on doesn’t exist and in order to be “non-binary” there needs to be a binary in the first place.
There is only how you were born, the bodies we were born with, and that’s how you are going to navigate through the world, with the experiences of your body, what your physical form encounters. They should not be prescribed behaviors, clothes, socializations. They should not be shamed and objectified.
We live in a world where women have been oppressed for millennia on the basis of their bodies, and to act as if those bodies cannot be defined now by women themselves, to act like those bodies have not been defined entirely by men for centuries is insulting and nothing but a continuation of the oppression that is ongoing. This is not revolutionary. Telling women they can’t talk about their womanhood in relation to being female is insane. Telling women they don’t know how to describe their own bodies or how to define them, that they cannot celebrate their bodies as an act of resistance without using gender neutral language, that their bodies are irrelevant and meaningless and reductionist, telling women that their bodies are lesser when the focus is on them? You are saying nothing new.
