One hears a great deal these days about the cornucopia of human efforts to resist or escape the hegemony of gender. Some of the chatter is judgmental and disapproving. Some is extolling and affirming. And much of the focus is on what kids these days are doing — declaring themselves noncompliant with heteronormativity, transitioning to another gender identity, living as their authentic selves in ways that prior generations could scarcely imagine, and so on.There’s a long history of people defecting from gender expections, to greater or lesser acceptance by others. The phenomenon is not new. But what’s different today is that there’s a multicultural, multiracial youthquake of it, a trend that shows no sign of slowing and seems exponentially growing.
I am on purpose not giving examples — which you are likely filling in yourself as you read — because I am less interested here in the particulars than I am in the big picture: the increased travel on what I call gender off-ramps. Because if gender hegemony is a highway (headed who knows where), more and more of us are looking to get off it and go someplace else.
I frame my subject this way because I want to emphasize what connects all the dots — all the everyday gender-mandate opt-outs (many advocated by radical feminist agitation) as well as the more unconventional ones (some of which have been deplored by some selfsame radical feminists).
What all these opt-outs have in common is an incipient human rebellion against the hierarchical ontological categories man and woman. Though they are off-ramps that go in disparate directions, and are driven with different degrees of urgency, in vehicles of various dimensions, they are all trying to leave behind the same main drag.
Normative binary gender is a cold roadway. Many people devote their lives to staying in their assigned lane on that supposedly superduper highway, whatever it takes, without really realizing that’s what they’re doing.
There’s been a lot of critique of that heavily trafficked thruway, and its rules of the road. There are those who believe normative binary gender is all a matter of appearances and attributes. There are others, myself included, who interrogate gender as a class hierarchy socially constructed of actions and ethics. But not enough empathic attention has been paid to what makes someone need to take a road less traveled in the first place.
As a society we don’t yet have a working vocabulary, or a listening heart, for the emotional, mental, and physical disjunctions that are symptomatic of what must be acknowledged as near-universal gender discontent.
Instead, folks are shaming and blaming others whose choice of off-ramp they don’t like. Folks are squabbling over whose off-ramp should be allowed and whose should not. They’re focusing on the particular exits and losing sight of the oppressive thoroughfare.
I believe that if there was more honesty and openness about why that highway is hell — why staying in one’s lane was psychically unsustainable — there would emerge a widely shared awareness and language that could eventually help everyone still stuck in traffic.
Everyone who takes a gender off-ramp wants to go someplace else where they can safely be themself. At a certain pivotal, personal point, it’s not the highway, it’s my way.
So where exactly is that someplace else? What could it be like? What would make it well worth the trip for everyone?
Bickering over off-ramps will not create that future.
So let’s speak truth to gender hegemony and share personally and deeply why we each needed to escape it. And then let’s listen carefully and respectfully and see whether our stories — which are, after all, about the same white- and male-supremacist superhighway — have more in common than we know.
Andrea Dworkin modeled such radical empathy back in 1978:
I knew of transsexuals in Europe as a small, vigorously persecuted minority, without any recourse to civil or political protection. They lived in absolute exile, as far as I could see, conjuring up for me the deepest reaches of Jewish experience. They were driven by their ostracization to prostitution, drugs, and suicide, conjuring up for me the deepest reaches of female experience. Their sense of gender dislocatedness was congruent with mine, in that my rage at the cultural and so-called biological definitions of womanhood were absolute. I perceived their suffering as authentic…. Looking back, I can see other, unknown at the time, sources of my own particular empathy. Male-to-female transsexuals were in rebellion against the phallus and so was I. Female-to-male transsexuals were seeking a freedom only possible in patriarchy, and so was I. The means were different, but the impulses were related. I haven’t changed my mind [emphasis added].¹
“The means were different, but the impulses were related.”
Or, put another way: People’s gender off-ramps are necessarily diverse, but the need to get off the hegemonic hierarchic highway is a profoundly shared human experience.
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¹Letter to Jan Raymond, January 15, 1978, quoted by Martin Duberman in Andrea Dworkin: The Feminist as Revolutionary, page 161.
Copyright © 2021 by John Stoltenberg. Reprinted with permission from
Medium.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Stoltenberg, a long-time activist against sexual violence and a radical-feminist philosopher of gender, is the author of Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice, a radical examination of male sexual identity, and The End of Manhood: Parables of Sex and Selfhood, a practical guide to life as a man of conscience. John is also the author of many articles and essays in anthologies including “How Power Makes Men: The Grammar of Gender Identity,” in Men and Power, “Having Sex Outside the Box” in Male Lust, “Healing From Manhood: A Radical Meditation on the Movement from Gender Identity to Moral Identity” in Feminism and Men, and “Top Ten Ways the Campus Movement Against Sexual Violence Is Misunderstood” in Just Sex: Students Rewrite the Rules on Sex, Violence, Equality & Activism. He conceived and creative-directed the acclaimed “My Strength Is Not for Hurting” rape-prevention media campaign. His numerous essays online include “Why Talking About ‘Healthy Masculinity’ Is Like Talking About “Healthy Cancer’,” “Sexual Harassment and #MenToo: The Five Stages of Belief,” and “50 Years of Gender Bending and Sex Changing.” With trans feminist Cristan Williams he contributes to The Conversations Project on topics of radically inclusive radical feminism. He is also a novelist (GONERZ), playwright, communications consultant, and theater reviewer. He lives in Washington, DC, and tweets at @JohnStoltenberg.
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