work in progress

Baltic sea

no more gendered dress codes. no more gender markers on passports, driver's licenses, ids. i'm not talking about "adding x" or "adding a third category" i'm talking about no more categories, period. why does the government need to know what my genital situation is? why does the government feel the need to assign me a sex on the basis of genitals? why does the cop who pulled me over need to see an m, or an f, or an x?

no more "gender is a social construct, sex is the thing that's binary." sex is not binary. abolish the idea that it is. normalize conversations about intersex traits. being intersex is natural. the sex binary is a thing imposed by the state.

no more gendered sports. if you really care about equity, sort people into categories based on skill level and athleticism, not gender or sex. the concept that there are only two sexes and that one is inherently weaker than the other is pseudoscience. the male/female hunter/gatherer dichotomy is not based in fact, and is a product of modern sexist cultural biases. one gender is not inherently subservient to the other. people are not inherently different on the basis of sex or gender. it is just more complicated than that.

the concept of multiple genders and sexes beyond the man/woman male/female dichotomy has existed as long as humans have existed. the sex binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. the gender binary only serves to benefit the patriarchy. continuing to impose it just controls (and harms) the people it forcibly categorizes.

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing

And also, this feeling is why queer activists spent so much energy criticising rainbow capitalism. It WAS always an empty gesture, and it WAS always going to vanish the moment companies perceived it as a hinderance to maximized profits, or even just as not a HELP to those profits. It was always going to vanish out from underneath us at the moment we needed it most, which is why the criticism, in queer theory circles, was not "people who are reassured of their safety by this are stupid and wrong" but "companies that do this are still not our friends and cannot be trusted to do the right thing unless we hold them accountable to what tbat is, so we shouldn't let down our guard just because they're doing the right thing at this moment."

I think that, like with a lot of complex theory/praxis ideas, a lot of people just felt ashamed of their emotional response to rainbow capitalism once it was pointed out that rainbow capitalism was more "canary in coal mine" rather than actual advocacy or civil rights protection, and were unable to engage with the real premise of what that might mean for us all as social trends evolved and changed.

I'm not saying that people should change their minds about missing rainbow capitalism on that emotional security level. Not at all, I feel very similarly. But I do think people should reconsider engaging with queer theory critiques of rainbow capitalism because THAT'S where the conversation about how to manage without it now have been happening for decades. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, and reading theory isn't like reading a tumblr post where someone is just using words according to vibes, they're having real and grounded conversations about what to DO about a complicated thing happening.

This article might be a nice place to start, as it shares my perspective that watching rainbow capitalism falter is emotionally devastating, even if it isn't unexpected.

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