Inspiring.
I like some of the signs.
“In my history class, I learnt enough, to recognise a dictatorship. You don’t need to illustrate it - Vik!” read one hand-made banner. “I’m so bored of Fascism,” read another.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231251339382
“Does Everyone Have a Gender? Compulsory Gender, Gender Detachment, and Asexuality” by Canton Winer, full gift article.
Feminist scholars have written for decades about the radical potential, if not the necessity, of ungendering for resisting gender inequality. Yet much of this work has been theoretical, and other scholars have questioned whether ungendering is even possible. Drawing on interviews with 30 asexual individuals, the author presents empirical findings that lend support to the plausibility of ungendering. On the basis of these findings, the author introduces the concept of gender detachment, which refers to individually held notions that gender is irrelevant, unimportant, pointless, and/or overall not a helpful framework for understanding and defining the self. The author argues that the difficulty of navigating these feelings highlights gender, and not merely the gender binary, as a compulsory system of categorization. The author also argues that this finding highlights the need to theorize around compulsory gender. The author concludes by discussing gender detachment’s connections to and differences from the concepts of degendering, ungendering, undoing gender, redoing gender, nonbinary identification, and gender vertigo. The author also considers gender detachment’s potential for radical resistance to gender (and the inequality gender produces) and the potential complications in realizing that potential.
“Ambivalent Detachment” loosely describes how I feel about gender, but I’m not asexual.
I do have some feelings which seem gender-ish to me, it’s just that they’re not aligned with society’s binary system. But “I’m just me” is the main thing. I’m not quite sure I want to take up the “demigender” label either though.
I feel like society puts a weird emphasis on gender in areas where it is irrelevant and ideally should be private information. (Why does a random stranger need to know the gender of every infant they see? That child is NOT a potential sexual partner, weirdo). Or of course, where gender norms prop up capitalism and the patriarchy – it is vitally important for civilization than men use Dude Wipes and women use Bic For Her pens, after all.
But frustratingly, while society holds gender to be super important, it also doesn’t actually respect gender, it just conflates gender with sex-assigned-at-birth while also confusing arbitrary norms with what is “natural.”
Have you read my “Clouds and Boxes” analogy previously? What you are describing is exactly what that is about. The only way to really make it work is to not try to force boxes onto folks who may or may not fit.
Yep, I recall that analogy and it 100% makes sense to me.
I shared this else-Elsewhere but it’s highly germane here.
One fun fact from the video is that apparently passports didn’t include sex markers at all until the 1970s? (I haven’t been able to find independent confirmation of this, though.)
(EDIT: Found corroboration for this in Dehm, Sara. “Passport struggles: Lawful documents and the politics of recognition and refusal.” Law’s Documents. Routledge, 2021. 71-93. The claim itself is not cited there, either, though…)