1 min read

Relinquish the dream of gender.

Gender is the exercise of collective imagination. Like how we agree on the shared imagination that places value onto a paper called money, gender is dreamt up by the ubiquity of language use. Our Western-centric world just happens (by accident) to dress girls in pink and boys in blue. There is no inherent femaleness to wearing lipsticks or maleness to competing in sports.

Through the repeated scoping of behaviors ("stop swearing, that's not lady-like", "boys don't sit cross legs like that"), we arrive at a somewhat homogenous costumes and customs for ease of social interaction. All genders are thus unnatural. They are made by human civilization and unity of thoughts.

But unlike the inorganic money, any organic being is fluid and have emotional autonomy. Thus when a strict social script is prescribed onto the human being, we develop illnesses. (Read Gender and Health by WHO for a brief explanation to the problem of gender.)

Unless we "relinquish identity politics and embrace a broader project of identity destabilization (Schotten, 2)", we would still be disciplining ourself through the repeated stylization of our body in some ways. No matter how much mobility women, disabled people, marginalized tribes have achieved, operating within our identity markers requires obsessive maintenance to be inside the identity scripts while excluding those who are outside them.

Further readings: