this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2024
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Comment with broader things:
I liked the piece and thought it was interesting. The section on sexual violence as enforcement mechanism for gender roles, analogous to state enforcement of capitalism, was interesting. I'd like to read more about the process of delegation: the bourgeois state designates a relatively small number of police officers, but a much larger fraction of men enforce patriarchy.
Overall, my biggest problem is the unanswered question of, OK what do we actually do about gender? The authors say "People fight capitalism through a refusal to work, a general strike against it." But obviously we can't go straight from 0 to general strike. We organize in unions to make strikes possible; workers initially strike because they will win direct material benefits, which also benefit the whole class; we have communist organizations to provide a vanguard to the growing class movement, etc etc. So how do we get from 0 to men and women laying down their genders as lead by the gender abolitionist vanguard, or whatever? What would drive the masses of men and women to fight against basal gender roles and become part of the trans revolutionary class? (The authors provide parallel power of queer institutions, but a dictatorship of the X is so named because the X actually has primary power over society. Mutual aid groups are not a dictatorship of the proletariat.)
Well, let's look at a couple contradictions.
The manifesto speaks of gender's material base being in the sexed division of reproductive labor. This has been falling apart steadily since the 19th century. Proletarianization and mechanization degenders labor, and the time needed for homemaking has greatly reduced due to industrialization. The two things that remain are birth & childcare. However, birth rates across the developed world are below replacement rate, so it would be accurate to say that patriarchy & capitalism have become a fetter on the continued development of humanity. However, the reproductive technologies necessary for feminism & communism are underdeveloped. Although sex is no longer necessary for reproduction, semen still is, and biology is gendered under patriarchy, so this is a potential issue. Additionally, uterus transplant technology is in its infancy, and people still need to bear children themselves. Of course, these limitations would be less important if humans didn't still die of old age. So, if you're a biologist, you can do your part in abolishing the regime of gender by advancing reproductive technology or curing aging somehow.
The manifesto provides five characteristics of the modern patriarchal system. Number two is:
Actually, the Gender Accelerationist Manifesto is a bit lacking in commentary on this aspect compared to Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper. The issue with this conception of gender/sex that many gender accelerationists raise is that it's 1) obsolete 2) increasingly unviable. Really, HRT allows one to change their sex, because no one actually has Superman's X-ray vision. Industrial society has had the means to completely tear apart this biological conception of gender for nearly a century at this point. Simply mandate puberty choice and have teens pick the hormones they want. Of course, patriarchal society is incapable of doing this, but eventually it may be forced to. The Blackpaper states,
There is also the fact that there's a secular decline in the age of puberty. In Denmark, it begins before the age of ten. Maybe people will finally start to be alarmed when the majority of girls are growing breasts at eight?
If patriarchy and capitalism are still around in a couple decades, not only will sex be forcibly assigned at birth, it will have to be forcibly assigned again years later through exogenous sex hormones. Everyone will be on blockers, and the half of a child that each couple will be having will be conceived through reproductive technologies. At this point the whole biological justification will become a clear farce. Advocacy for universal puberty choice would probably become a serious issue rather than a fringe one held by a few hundred communists.
I think this is actually one of the contradictions between capitalism and patriarchy - the need to redeploy women's labour in capitalism has weakened the impact of patriarchal control to have more children, particularly when the number of births and pregnancy required is so much less than in pre-industrial agricultural economics.
The replacement rate is the number of births required to maintain a birth rate that existed when patriarchy was wholly ascendant and women had no reproductive autonomy.
While it's quite expensive and difficult for single women and couples that can't birth children themselves, I think the falling rate has a lot to do with women not wanting to have kids or as many kids.
Surely there's more than a few hundred posters here that agree with puberty choice.
An alternative (bad) vision for the future is massive increases in surrogacy, exporting reproductive imperialism to developing and often non-White countries (with a premium on "white" poor women as exists today in Ukraine, at least before 2022).
Yes! Totally.
Oh, probably. People just never think about it as a possibility and it's never really brought up. Everyone's on the back foot just trying to defend puberty blockers for trans kids.
Tech to change the biological basis of the birth component of reproductive labor is all well and good, but there's no (gender) class struggle there. It's like saying that we need Cybersyn planning tech to do communism or that we need green energy to fight climate change: maybe, but that tech will lie fallow unless the working class gets its shit together. If there's nothing the revolutionary queer gender class can actually do to accelerate gender it doesn't make much sense to say they're accelerationists. Rather they are waiting for material conditions to change. No fun.