The Death of Gender

Western society is deeply imbued with stories and tales of gender, a lore of masculinity and femininity commanding all aspects of society, often language itself. It tells us myths of men and women, how to dress and behave accordingly, what our jobs can be and our future duties in the family. Nature’s sex is many things, a bimodal system of reproduction, a genetic chromosome material, a hormonal predisposition; “man” and “woman” as such are not a product of nature, our hormonal balances can dispose some to beards and others to breasts but nothing prevents bearded women and breasted men, many are born to exclusive reproductive organs yet as many women and men are unable to have children or outside these exclusions. Gender is a culture which acts upon sex, the social attitude around perceived sex, a performance put on by individuals in a society. A play taught young: from the moment a doctor proclaims “It’s a boy!”, “It’s a girl!” we’re given a gendered name (obligatory by law in certain countries like Finland), dressed in pink or blue, given toy trucks or dolls, taught to work or to care for the household. Yet it happens that boys pick up a Barbie or girls pick up a football. Our performance is merely that, an act given to us, one that can be taken up by any party to any role and which attaches itself to more roles in the development of classed society. If gender were not, there would be no need of institutions of ideology to decree division, sex would simply exist as it already does and silently overcome in the progress of technology. When referring to a cat no less than a human nothing prevents us from calling em an it, he, she or they; occasionally guardians will assign their pet’s gender before they know of their sex. After that, gendered language is nothing but a way to be easily understood in its game.

These myths are long prevalent and developing in all societies, but not in their modern form. The modern gender is fundamentally a colonialist ideology, asserted by musket and settlement from Europe, self-reinforcing as it expands. Western predominance in colonialism is relatively new in our past four centuries: Indian communities told stories of a third gender, natives in America told of a complex relationship with many genders and particularities; and these myths have brought different connotations as they evolved, it only takes to imagine that a century ago a strong pink would have been seen as masculine and a light blue as feminine. Where these myths existed there were those who, voluntarily or by their circumstances, challenged its superstitions. Ancient Rome knew of Sporus castrated and married to the Emperor (keeping their male-gendered name while being treated as an Empress), Mediaeval Europe knew of Kalonymus lamenting his sex, the Norse insultingly referred to the ergi for those seen as effeminate. The study of these beliefs is the study of the ideology of gender through human society, as it arose from a meagre animal division for reproduction to a detailed, mythologically believed biological, overpowering lore.

Origin of Gender

When humanity emancipated itself from the animal world into the possibilities of artificial conscious production, it lived in a most primitive division of proto-gender. In this beginning transition the tribe felt no duties to a job in the division of labour beyond the necessities of birthing and breastfeeding, with common care for children in the impossibility of the family. Gender as a proper social phenomenon, one of duty and culture of gender where the sexes are divided and commanded to their specialised job, begins not with this division, present in any animal, but for many societies in the division of labour between childcare and hunt. A culture and duty surrounds women caring for children, foraging and cooking or sewing clothes in their spare time, against men hunting, fishing and going to war, with the birth of third genders in certain works and cultural attitudes. The development of gender reflects the development of its society in the formation of antagonisms, in the necessity of descendants and a bloodline, forming the tendencies to the dominance of men and the creation of the family, a patriarchal clan, evolving and changing throughout history into the modern nuclear family. In these tribes what one could even consider their family, too a social ideology (there are no immanent social relations in our blood, bastards and inheritors), is a blurred line and the scarce population made these differentiations irrelevant. As it progressively came to being, the social ideology of the family had little of the moralising restrictions of today, group marriage with no conception of modern social ideals of relationship. Their development saw the requirement of all classed societies: legitimate children. The division of labour saw men gain greater and greater importance, in war, fishing and hunting, now the discovery of agriculture. In the development of legitimate inheritance the monogamous marriage, the assertion of man and wife, gained centre stage. What culture could control in attitude and labour became the means of inheritance and domination in the practical society, where those whose roles were not only expected but enforced, those seen as effeminate refused from soldiering and those manly refused from nursing. It’s worth to note in other societies the division of labour and their specialisation developed very differently, to the requirements of cold environments to sew clothes before hunt and tropical environments in their difficulty of hunt for multigendered parties, but division often finds itself a foundation for gender.

Gender and Class

As class divisions come to the forefront of history relations out of wedlock begin to be characterised with its typical moral condemnation, by religion and often law, for the accused woman to be put to death; less linearly consanguineous marriage is forbidden in the same manner. Pederasty and homosexuality remain strictly outside the scope of marriage to the prevailing of feudalism. And with feudalism, we see the complete hegemony of gender. Gender occupies all, everything is manly or womanly (or, in their respective cultures, third gendered). No job lies outside the scope of a predisposed Godly role. No jobs, but those where nascent economic artisan and merchant activity in the city may allow for freedoms. For many churches God himself and his angels become man, and his disciples can only be men. Ladies are to be condemned by their vassals unless married to their betters. Lords are to rule in their legitimately inherited contract. Nothing lies anymore outside of marriage, and marriage has become the institution of gender. Even more, marriage is now an institution of the Church and state. As Christianity asserted itself through Europe and eventually the world it meant creating new states, therefore old institutions of marriage and gender, new lords, married to their noble ladies, and all who fell outside an abomination, savages. The male peasantry was strictly to work the fields, their counterparts to work the home. Male nobles to learn and female nobles to marry. But we mustn’t forget the countless ladies who did learn, write and paint or those who fell outside the binary order in their time with great condemnation. Particular attention is given here to feudalism in Europe, as the ideology of modern gender is reliant on it. To be sure, China and Kemet had very different cultures in their unique classes, Aztecs and Incans saw their development differently, but it has come to be that colonisation and imperialism saw Europe predominate and crush by gunpowder all this uniqueness. The growing burgher class fell under this ideology too in the discovery of the New World. Their preconceptions of gender formed the basis of the new bourgeois states as the flood of new markets concentrated to England and France in the industrial revolution, but in this gender saw its greatest downfall. Who was to man a factory? The first machines were in homes, manned by women, yet the factory saw a concentration of machines outside it. It was no home or farm. The development of industry destroyed gendered division and equalised one and all to a commodity. Even children were to occupy their undifferentiated place in the labour force.

Gender and Capital

Capital has assured, heralded by the progressive bourgeoisie and decried by its reactionary opposition, profit will take the helm and all will be dedicated to the maximisation of profit. Slowly marginalisation and division is reincorporated to civilization, and gender tends to its opposite. Freedom of trade slowly and irregularly becomes freedom from gender. The revolutionary conquests of the women’s rights movements could only find success under its order. The vote is conquered by women and women are reduced to judicial and civil citizens. Female nurses and male doctors, female secretaries and male bosses, become a thing of the past, and men can become nurses or secretaries, women can become doctors or executive officers. Specialisation takes priority from an ever increasing production and children are allowed to become more efficient machines through education. The biological limitations of sex are overcome equally in industry and its technological advances, hormones allow anyone to lactate and milk comes prepackaged on a shelf, anyone can change their sex characteristics under treatment and surgery, and humanity progresses closer to the day anyone could be on either side of the equation for birthing children. But the modern institutions of gender are equally the old institutions of marriage, the institutions of the state. The modern state has stripped gender of its basis and kept it alive on critical care, the bourgeoisie could not do without inheritance, legitimate children, and all its progress towards its abolition is countered. Where do we find the real basis of modern gender? Marriage, the heteronormative family, culture (its ideology, language). In short, the relics of class.

Death of Gender

With the fall of class the abolition of gender is the death of practical gender, when childcare loses its division, when wife and husband no longer exist, when all can partake in free labour. When gender loses its special quality and culture becomes little more than a conversation piece, we know of the death of gender. People may still call themselves “man”, “woman” or any third identifier, like we may call ourselves by an identifier of old forgotten cultures, yet its meaningless value brings about its own dissolution, until it is an active fight to preserve gender.

What is free labour to gender? The end of a need for division, the innovations of automation and the generalisation of toil. Distinct specialisation loses its particular quality, the end of capital’s division between labour and hobby where labour is life’s prime want. Who could partition and divide humanity in its social strive and struggle against nature then? A dedicated smith, librarian or mathematician no longer exist with their gendered connotations, and any person, irrelevant of gender, may pick up a hammer, book and pencil.

What is the abolition of wife and husband to gender? The abolition of marriage, the end of the state, the abolition of inheritance. Everyone will be born from, and in death their legacy inherited by, one great productive community. Institutions will no longer keep its struggling ideology and marriage will cease to be a necessity. Kinship and affinity will develop from the forms of the primitive proletarian free love we see today, and the bourgeois system of marriage finds its death.

What is the end of sex’s necessities to gender? The indistinct ability for anyone to have children through adoption and technological progress, the availability of childcare for all and by all, the possibility of changing one’s style and body as one pleases without the expectation of a certain identifier in a society which does not shun those made uncomfortable by their bodies. Sexual and romantic needs and wants too overcome gender and one’s preferences can no longer be labelled by it. The “irregular”, “degenerate” and “perverse” of today simply become part of the unique preferences we all have and those known as “straight” are no longer distinguishable from the “queer”.

In these advances and developments, a new generation will make their considerations and identities, form their own opinion on these practices and their future, a free morality from class and gender, without the arrogance of a state to enforce an imagined absolute immortality for their moral values, acting freely accordingly “— and that will be the end of it.” They will be liberated from the constraints of an imposed gender and choose whether its derived identity can still keep a personal meaning after its death.