Gender Abolitionist Shouldn't Mean Anti-Trans + The Value of Sadness

There seems to be a consensus that the transgender movement and the movement to abolish gender are in some way opposed. I support the transgender movement completely and am ambivalent in my feelings about abolishing gender, but I see no contradiction whatsoever. In fact, pro tanto, it seems to me that if you want to abolish gender you’ve got a reason to support the transgender movement. Certainly, this is what many conservatives seem to think! Yet TERFS and transgender advocates still talk about these things as if they were opposed.

Morgan is an anti-work anarchist. She hates work, can’t stand it, and wants to abolish it. So naturally when she finds out that her friend Jesse has changed his job because it didn’t suit him she is furious. “How can you so uphold the system of jobs by changing your job? How can you betray the movement to abolish jobs like this? I suppose now that you have a new job you’ll be wanting me to refer to you as an “economics lecturer” instead of a “ward clerk” What nonsense!”

This makes no sense at all. If it became impossible to change one’s job, that would further entrench, not loosen, the system of jobs. Systems tend to be weaker when the individual can choose their relation to them, and stronger when they are inviolable castes.

Let’s think about what a world without gender might look like. There are no systematic differences in any behavioral features between the sexes and a common pronoun for all humans. If there are concepts of “feminine” and “masculine” at all, they have no systematic relationship with genitalia, chromosomes or anything such as that. What there most certainly would not be is anything like what we call sexism- the assignment of social roles and life chances on the basis of sex.

At its face, it seems like allowing people to swap assigned genders is a step toward shaking off gender, not locking it in. If we want to take a set of behaviors, self-conceptions etc that are currently glued together into two meta-behavioral agglomerates- “genders” then let people swap as they like seems to take us closer to a world where there is only an endless palette of behaviors, not two discrete categories.

Nor is there evidence that transgender people solidify their adopted gender by conforming to gender stereotypes. In my experience transgender people are on average less gender-conforming than average and to the extent that they are not, it’s often because the very anti-trans forces that so many ‘gender critical’ activists have allied themselves with have put transgender people under pressure to ‘pass’ and be accepted.

Nor does allowing for surgeries and medical treatments to change people’s bodies due to dysmorphia have any kind of link to upholding gender that I can see because:

1. If gender can be abolished, there’s no reason to think abolishing it would also abolish preferences regarding your primary and secondary sex characteristics.

2. Even if abolishing gender would abolish such preferences, there is no clear reason why people changing the bodies assigned to them by nature supports gender in the interim.

The value of sadness or: In another life, I would have really liked doing laundry and taxes with my ER doctor

{The idea that pleasure comes in different classes, some better and some worse is well known. I want to extend the idea to suffering and argue that some forms of suffering might be so much better than others that they’re overall good.}

I want to present the best case I can that sadness is not always a bad thing. Sometimes it thickens life. I also want to argue that the current allocation of suffering is especially cruel to the poor, because not only do they have less of it, their suffering is often of a sort that doesn’t enrich life.

My limbs are cold, but my left foot in particular is freezing. There are a lot of very nasty diseases that cause this, I work in a hospital, and I had no intention of dying at my desk and ending my life sorting files and booking in patients. Thus I went to the ER.

I was seen very quickly, which, having worked at an emergency department before and knowing how these things worked was a bit of a worry in itself. Despite being seen quickly, I was there for a long time and my doctor chatted with me many times. Gradually they excluded all the truly frightening things it might be, but then I ended up staying much longer because they found abnormalities on my ECG. In all this time, I felt like I was beginning to understand him.

He was handsome, and kind, with a hidden sense of mischief, and yet a strange, latent, and melancholy sadness, like he was genuinely sad for all the world’s suffering- like he wished he could stop it. He was curious and bright, his consultant was clearly impressed by his thoroughness in my case. Every inch the doctor.

I don’t believe in love at first sight, I think it takes at least fifteen minutes. Quips aside, I was certainly not in love with him, yet I had the sense that I could be, that it is a possible way of things, that there is some world out there, not so far away, where it happened. To refer to the meme:

I didn’t flirt with him, ask him out or do anything improper of course. This was overdetermined, viz:

1. I’m a coward.

2. It wouldn’t have worked, he was clearly a very ethically serious and professional person.

3. If he’d said yes, I’d have immediately lost interest for a very specific reason, viz, I would not be interested in anyone who would so easily discard such an important ethical rule as “don’t sleep with your patients”.

4. It is morally wrong to tempt someone to do the wrong thing.

Thus it was a stillborn pining. A sadness that can only be sadness. Yet doesn’t a wistful moment of contemplation of how things might have been non-instrumentally enrich the colors of my life? Could a person with any poetry in their soul at all wish for a heart that didn’t feel such things? Sadness with its own justice and mercy. Most suffering has a negative value, I’ve felt enough of it to know that. Yet some suffering harms life less than other kinds of suffering, and certain forms of suffering, like the episode I described, are even non-instrumentally positive in moderation.

Sadly, as things are, differences in the moral and aesthetic valence of pain add to the inequity of the world. I’m far from rich, yet I’ve seen enough to think it goes along class lines. The rich avoid the mundane suffering of repetitive, soul-breaking labor, untreated disease, hunger, and financial anxiety and have more time and energy for wistfulness, melancholy, and other not entirely bad- or even overall good, forms of sadness. The rich CEO suffers the uncertainty of large and risky decisions, the shop assistant, warehouse worker, or ward clerk suffers the certainty of doing the same thing again. We should demand not just less suffering for the oppressed (and everyone) but a better class of it as well.