Any time I try and talk online about male violence, reproductive justice, or gender abolition, one of the most common replies I get is NONE OF THIS IS TRUE BECAUSE GENDER/SEX/WHATEVER ISN’T A BINARY. And yes, it usually is in caps.

Gender is a binary, of course, because you can’t wring more than two roles out of Who gets to hit and Who gets to bruise. But even if that weren’t the case, some radical feminists have already pointed out how making gender less “binary” doesn’t actually make it any less problematic. After all, race isn’t a binary, but that’s probably small comfort to the indigenous woman raped by a white man or the biracial Afrikan shot dead by a white man or the Latino man worked in slave conditions by a white man. When it comes to gender, feel free to pack as many netrois genderfluids or pansexual demiqueers in the hierarchy as you want; it’s still gonna be Man at the top and Woman at the bottom.

As for the sex binary, it seems pretty clear that the vast majority of biologists, anatomists, doctors, nurses, kindergarteners, and humans in general throughout time recognize the idea of male and female as discreet biological sets — just check out this incredibly transphobic page from the World Health Organization.

This, of course, upsets many in the transgender community. After all, it commits the cardinal sin of queerness: Defining someone by something other than an internal identification. To say that biological sex exists as a real fact about the world is to say that I can’t have individual, personalized control over every single aspect of who I am, and that simply won’t do! So abolishing the sex binary — and with it, the reality of females as a specific class with a specific oppression — has become the project du jour for the queer community lately.

Their most sophisticated argument against the ideology of human sexual dimorphism (besides I just don’t like it) is pulling the “intersex card” — male and female can’t be distinct, binary biological types, they’ll say, because intersex people exist! Gotcha! Intersex people, it seems, have joined the illustrious family of Oppressed Groups that Genderists Pretend to Care About Only to Discard Immediately After They Aren’t Useful as Weapons Against Radical Feminist Critique. Hey, while you’re there, say hi to lesbians, prostituted women, and indigenous people!

All intellectual dishonesty from the queer community aside, the argument itself is absolutely absurd. Far from shattering the narrow-minded bigotry of those nasty radical feminists, the existence of intersex people goes a long way towards confirming sexual dimorphism. After all, the prefix inter- means between or across. Intersex, broken down, would translate to between or across sexes. It’s hard to understand how this could be a meaningful concept without the existence of two discreet, recognizable things to be between or across.What could intersex mean if there weren’t two sexes as a point of reference? How could we understand international without the concept of distinct nations? Or intersectional, that holy incantation of the genderist, if we said that there were not separate types of oppression?

The universal recognition among both radical feminists and queer theorists of intersex individuals demonstrates clearly that male and female are understood by all of us to be discrete categories; If biological sex was a nebulous, ill-defined cornucopia of genital shapes and hormone profiles, there would be no such thing as intersex because the ontologically privileged position of male and female would not exist as reference points for a biology that was ambiguous in relation to them. So while both queer and radical analysis (at least implicitly) acknowledge that male and female are meaningful ways to organize biological type, only the latter is capable of making any kind of meaningful room in its worldview for intersex people. Queer theory simply cannot do this without temporary (and clandestinely) borrowing the terminology and theory of the people it claims to oppose. There simply isn’t room in a non-binary understanding of biological sex for intersex people to exist as intersex people.

To illustrate this point, look at this image (ignore the red outline, it’s just so you can see clearly):

Here is a case of two distinct colors, white and black, and a small grey area in between. This dichromatic palate and the grey area in between is a fairly accurate representation of the radical feminist (and, generally, the scientific) understanding of biological sex: Two categories comprising the vast majority of space with a small overlap between them.

Now look at this image (again, ignore the outline):

In this image, there is a significant number of colors that interact in many different ways. This multichromatic palate is (I would argue) an accurate representation of the queer and trans understanding of biological sex: Multiple categories along a spectrum with considerable overlap.

Now ask yourself, in which image would the concept of interchromatic make sense?

It seems fairly straightforward under the first image; interchromatic refers to the area that depict a color between or across the two other colors — in this case, grey. Likewise, the radical feminist position of sex has perfect room for intersex people as those (relatively rare) individuals whose bodies manifest biological traits between or across the categories of male and female.

On the other hand, it’s hard to argue that one could represent any particular area of the second image in such a way without creating criteria that would be met by the entire whole; in other words, using the idea of inter-[category] in a system where those categories are not defined as discrete parts runs the risk of labeling the entire collection equally inter in regards to everything else. You could label the whole image interchromatic, of course, and you’d be technically accurate — but your ability to use that term as a meaningful descriptor of a specific characteristic would be lost.

Queer theory’s conception of biological sex — one that considers multiple, non-binary sexes to exist along a spectrum — fails to make room for intersex people. On queer theory, what we now describe as intersex is no more inter- than anything else, the privileged position of male and female as reference points having long ago been tossed out as archaic and oppressive.

The result of this, of course, is that queer theorists can either decide to continue describing intersex people in a sensible manner by pillaging the ideology of sex dimorphism, or they can completely erase the reality of intersex people’s bodies and lives by collapsing the concept into a larger amorphous stew of uncategorized biologies. Unfortunately, while they sometimes choose the former, the latter seems more common. As is the case with many vulnerable populations that come in contact with queer theory, the ability of intersex people to name their material reality openly and honestly is sacrificed to prop up shoddy, male-centric philosophy.

Despite this obvious fact, genderists have been able to position themselves as somehow on the side of intersex individuals while casting radical feminists as aggressors. It’s not too hard to understand why: Radical feminists are so often painted as being unfriendly or unaccommodating towards intersex people because radical feminists are the ones consistently naming the social and political structures that actually do oppress intersex people, and liberals have a nasty habit of confusing someone naming the reality of an oppression with someone propagating that oppression.

They seem to think that saying Hey folks, our violent gender system currently separates people into two absurd and inhuman classes based on genital shape means the same thing as Hey folks, wouldn’t it be great if a violent gender system separated people into two absurd and inhuman classes based on genital shape? And thus, radical feminists and gender abolitionists more broadly are pegged as the reason for intersex people’s oppression, when in reality that oppression is being propagated by the very system that radical feminists and gender abolitionists oppose — you know, gender.

Gender abolitionists work to (surprise) abolish gender and, with it, any society that determines its social arrangement around genital shape. In a post-patriarchal, gender-free society, male, female, and intersex people would exist quite a bit like blue-, brown-, and green-eyed folks do now; one might be comparatively rarer than the other two, but no system would exist to put massive social value on one biology over the other.

Male and female (and intersex) people would still be recognized as distinct categories, and sex-specific medical care — as well as sex-specific spaces to deal with things like pregnancy and menstruation — would still obviously exist, but only in the way that we currently treat different blood types or left- and right-handedness. The current pressures on intersex people to “pick” manhood or womanhood would not exist, and the coercive genital surgeries and hormone treatments given to intersex children would be considered a barbaric cruelty of the past.

Isn’t that what we’re all looking for? A world where individuals can live, male, female, or otherwise, as human beings first and foremost, pursuing their dreams and desires in a way that isn’t constrained by two artificial gender boxes? Where your genitals matter when they actually matter (reproductive health and other sex-specific considerations) and not when they don’t (99% of every human being’s life ever)? That world is possible, and it doesn’t require closing our eyes and pretending that male and female don’t exist as discreet categories. In fact, rejecting male and female as discreet categories smacks a little of admitting defeat.

After all, if you met someone who had the bizarre belief that the only solution to white supremacy would be dyeing everyone’s skin purple at birth, you would assume that they have adopted this strategy because they can’t imagine a world where people could have different skin colors and still be equals. And when I see queer theorists saying that the sex binary is inherently oppressive, I can’t help but think it’s because they can’t imagine a world where male and female could exist and not dominate each other. Radicals see the material reality of biological sex and reject a system that uses those facts to organize its oppression of females; queer theorists, on the other hand, can’t separate the two — the non-oppressive reality and the oppressive fiction constructed in relation to that reality — so their only option to avoid the resultant abuse is to deny the facts.

Queer theorists see the intimate connection between biological sex and oppression, and they react by dismantling the notion of biological sex; feminists see the intimate connection between biological sex and oppression, and they react by dismantling oppression. That’s the fundamental difference between liberals and radicals; one sacrifices truth to avoid confronting power, and one confronts power to avoid sacrificing truth.