queerramonaflours asked: enforcing a gender binary is enforcing western patriarchal colonist values and you should be ashamed of yourself for undermining other women just because they aren’t who you think they are

*Insert bone-deep, lung-shaking inhale and exhale* I JUST…

You know what? I’m actually going to take some time to bother responding to your critique, because I see this whole “gender is a western colonialist concept” being parroted on this hellsite fairly often. Often enough, in fact, that it’s becoming clear to me that this is a claim which, despite its historical AND intellectual vacuity, well-meaning white liberals have unquestioningly absorbed as an objective truth. In actuality, there are very few things that could be more incorrect than the idea that feminists like me are “enforcing colonialist ideas of a gender binary”, but y’all keep saying it regardless… because it SOUNDS right. You know what? I’ll give you that, it does sound good—plus, it has the side benefit of positioning the person saying it as being the arbiter of what is and isn’t “woke”, and I know that that façade of moral/intellectual superiority is really what appeals to you here.

Here’s the thing though - if you’re saying that radical feminism upholds “colonialist” ideas of gender, you’ve missed the point of how gender, as a concept, actually works. You’re also DEEPLY misunderstanding what radical feminism is, and what its political goals (and beliefs) are. Radical feminists don’t “enforce a gender binary” any more than atheists “enforce the teachings of Christianity”. Radical feminists do not believe in a gender binary. In fact, we don’t believe in gender at all. That’s because gender, unlike biological sex, is socially constructed. Not only that, but radical feminist analyses don’t even need gender as a concept - we focus on biological sex. Radical feminism’s aim is “the liberation of all females from every form of male oppression.”

The concepts that we, as a society, externally enforce onto the sexes in a hierarchical manner, which serve to benefit males at the expense of females (for example, the cultural mandate that men wear pants but women wear skirts, or the belief that “boys are naturally better at mathematics/spatial reasoning/leadership, whereas girls are inherently more skilled at language arts/customer service/childcare”) are collectively referred to as “gender”. Because “gender” is defined as forces are externally opposed based on biological sex, it’s very clear that one cannot “identify” as a certain “gender”. Gender is not an identity and it’s not something we can choose or reject on an individual basis. Similar to the concept of how white privilege works, gendered privileges (and conversely, gendered disadvantages) permeate the very air we breathe in this society. Feeling guilty or regretful of one’s lifelong male privilege/socialization is not the same thing as “never having been socialized as male”.

Now that we’ve settled literally the most BASIC concept of Feminist Theory 101 (aka the difference between “biological sex” and “gender” in an academic context), we can move on to your claim of “colonialism”. First, we should ask ourselves - what is colonialism, at its core? I would say that a good working definition of “colonialism” is “the occupation and domination of a country by a separate, more powerful country, through the use of military and/or political force, with the goal of exploiting the resources, manpower, and wealth of the the occupied country for the gain of the occupying force.” Now, having defined that, I will say that your ideology (neoliberal feminism) is one that depends on concepts like “self-identification” and “empowerment” (in a superficial sense) in lieu of actual class-based analysis or activism. In what way are those neoliberal ideas you’re pushing onto me “anti-colonialist”?

Now that I’ve actually defined some terms and debunked your core claim, I’m going to finish off my response by giving you a few examples of various precolonial societies who were influenced by their invaders in ways that ultimately brought them CLOSER to your brand of “feminism”. From there, you’re free to decide for yourself who, in fact, is the “colonialist” here. It’s commonly stated that prostitution is “the oldest profession” and has been a constant throughout human society. However, in the case of pre-Australian Aboriginal societies, there WAS no such thing. They had no words for the concept of “exchanging sex for material goods or currency”, nor did they understand the ritual exchange of women as a sign of brotherhood between tribes. The earliest concept of anything resembling “prostitution” among the Aboriginal people appeared around the time that the Macassar fishermen first began arriving on the shores of what was to become Australia in the 1670s. In the Brazilian Amazon, the heretofore-uncontacted indigenous Yanomami tribe had existed in a harmonious society that rarely, if ever, experienced epidemics or starvation. In 1991 however, just five years after the tribe was first contacted with white men (garimpeiros had descended on their land in search of gold), researchers discovered diseases like gonorrhea running rampant and women suddenly offering themselves to strangers in exchange for small amounts of food or gifts. The scarcity and oppression imposed by white invaders had created a system of prostitution among the native women in less than a decade.



Now, given all the evidence I’ve just laid out, which branch of feminism sounds more “colonialist” to you? The branch that opposes the institution of prostitution on the basis that it oppresses women, or the one that’s working feverishly to rebrand this sexual oppression of women as “sex work” and enshrine it in our society as a job no different from any other form of work? Which feminists have consistently upheld the concept that biological sex, although it remains a fixed reality (because humans are an observably sexually dimorphic species) shouldn’t dictate anything about a person other than their physiology? Which feminists, on the other hand, believe that a woman is “how you feel inside” or “what you look like to other people”, rather than the aforementioned biological reality—thus creating a definition of “man” or “woman” that depends on some set of stereotypes (either appearance, personality, or both) in order to be true and verifiable? Which feminists have acknowledged—and are working to abolish—the historical sex-based oppression of women across the world based on their reproductive capacity (opposing FGM, menstrual huts, child marriage, breast-ironing, sex-selective feticide/abortion, etc), and which feminists insist that the “only way to tell” whether someone is a man or a woman is by asking them how they “identify”? Yeah. That’s what I thought.

Here’s some more reading for you… not that I think you care about women any more than the extent to which you can show off your “feminism” as making you superior to other women for “woke points”:

https://wlrnmedia.wordpress.com/2017/07/23/in-response-to-erica-wests-the-pitfalls-of-radical-feminism/

https://www.rapereliefshelter.bc.ca/learn/resources/prostitution-indigenous-women-sex-inequality-and-colonization-canadas-first-nations-

https://www.feministcurrent.com/2012/07/04/a-history-of-oppression-canada-colonialism-and-prostitution/