Gender Nihilism

An Anti-Manifesto

Alyson Escalante

2015
Contents

Introduction
Antihumanism
Gender Abolition
Radical Negativity
Introduction

We are at an impasse. The current politics of trans liberation
have staked their claims on a redemptive understanding of identity.
Whether through a doctor or psychologist's diagnosis, or through
personal self affirmation in the form of a social utterance, we have
come to believe that there is some internal truth to gender that we
must divine,

An endless set of positive political projects have marked the road
we currently travel; an infinite set of pronouns, pride flags, and
labels. The current movement within trans politics has sought to
try to broaden gender categories, in the hope that we can alleviate
their harm. This is naive.

Judith Butler refers to gender as, “the apparatus by which the
production and normalization of masculine and feminine take
place along with the interstitial forms of hormonal, chromosomal,
psychic, and performative that gender assumes” If the current lib-
eral politics of our trans comrades and siblings are rooted in try-
ing to expand the social dimensions created by this apparatus, our
work is a demand to see it burned to the ground.

We are radicals who have had enough with attempts to salvage
gender. We do not believe we can make it work for us. We look at
the transmisogyny we have faced in our own lives, the gendered
violence that our comrades, both trans and cis have faced, and we
realize that the apparatus itself makes such violence inevitable. We
have had enough

We are not looking to create a better system, for we are not in-
terested in positive politics at all. All we demand in the present is
a relentless attack on gender and the modes of social meaning and
intelligibility it creates.

At the core of this Gender Nihilism lies several principles that
will be explored in detail here: Antihumanism as foundation and
comerstone, gender abolition as a demand, and radical negativity
as method.
Antihumanism

Antihumanism is a cornerstone which holds gender nihilist anal-
ysis together. It is the point from which we begin to understand
our present situation; it is crucial. By antihumanism, we mean a
rejection of essentialism. There is no essential human. There is no
human nature. There is no transcendent self. To be a subject is not
to share in common a metaphysical state of being (ontology) with
other subjects.

‘The self, the subject is a product of power. The I" in “I am a man”
or “lam a woman is not an ‘I" which transcends those statements.
Those statements do not reveal a truth about the *I7 rather they
constitute the “I" Man and Woman do not exist as labels for cer-
tain metaphysical or essential categories of being, they are rather
discursive, social, and linguistic symbols which are historic
tingent. They evolve and change over time; their implications have
always been determined by power.

Who we are, the very core of our being, might perhaps not be
found in the categorical realm of being at all. The self is a con-
vergence of power and discourses. Every word you use to define
yourself, every category of identity within which you find your-
self place, is the result of a historical development of power. Gen-
der, race, sexuality, and every other normative category is not ref-
erencing a truth about the body of the subject or about the soul
of the subject. These categories construct the subject and the self.
‘There is no static self, no consistent °I', no history transcending
subject. We can only refer to a self with the language given to us,
and that language has radically fluctuated throughout history, and
continues to fluctuate in our day to day life

We are nothing but the convergence of many different dis-
courses and languages which are utterly beyond our control, yet we
experience the sensation of agency. We navigate these discourses,
occasionally subverting, always surviving. The ability to navigate
does not indicate a metaphysical self which acts upon a sense of

y con-

6
agency, it only indicates that there is symbolic and discursive loose-
ness surrounding our constitution.

‘We thus understand gender through these terms. We see gender
as a specific set of discourses embodied in medicine, psychiatry,
the social sciences, religion, and our daily interactions with others.
We do not see gender as a feature of our “true selves” but as a
‘whole order of meaning and intelligibility which we find ourselves
operating in. We do not look at gender as a thing which a stable self
can be said to possess. On the contrary we say that gender is done
and participated in, and that this doing is a creative act by which
the self is constructed and given social significance and meaning.

Our radicalism cannot stop here, we further state that historical
evidence can be provided to show that gender operates in such a
manner. The work of many decolonial feminists has been influen-
tial in demonstrating the ways that western gender categories were
violently forced onto indigenous societies, and how this required a
complete linguistic and discursive shift. Colonialism produced new
gender categories, and with

them new violent means of reinforcing a certain set of gendered
norms. The visual and cultural aspects of masculinity and feminin-
ity have changed over the centuries. There is no static gender.

‘There is a practical component to all of this. The question of hu-
manism vs antihumanism is the question upon which the debate
between liberal feminism and nihilist gender abolitionism will be
based

‘The liberal feminist says “I am a woman” and by that means that
they are spiritually, ontologically, metaphysically, genetically, or
any other modes of “essentially” a woman.

‘The gender nihilist says “I am a woman” and means that they
are located within a certain position in a matrix of power which
constitutes them as such.

‘The liberal feminist is not aware of the ways power creates gen-
der, and thus clings to gender as a means of legitimizing themselves
in the eyes of power. They rely on trying to use various systems of

7
Knowledge (genetic sciences, metaphysical claims about the soul,
Kantian ontology) in order to prove to power they can operate
within it

‘The gender nihilist, the gender abolitionist, looks at the system
of gender itself and see’s the violence at its core. We say no to a
positive embrace of gender. We want to see it gone. We know ap-
pealing to the current formulations of power is always a liberal
trap. We refuse to legitimize ourselves.

Itis imperative that this be understood. Antihumanism does not
deny the lived experience of many of our trans siblings who have
had an experience of gender since a young age. Rather we acknowl-
edge that such an experience of gender was always already deter-
‘mined through the terms of power. We look to our own childhood
experiences. We see that even in the transgressive statement of
“We are women” wherein we deny the category power has imposed
onto our bodies, we speak the language of gender. We reference an
idea of “woman” which does not exist within us as a stable truth,
but references the discourses by which we are constituted.

‘Thus we affirm that there is no true self that can be divined prior
to discourse, prior to encounters with others, prior to the mediation
of the symbolic. We are products of power, so what are we to do?
S0 we end our exploration of antihumanism with a return to the
words of Butler:

<quote="My agency does not consist in denying this condition
of my constitution. If I have any agency, it is opened up by the
fact that I am constituted by a social world I never chose. That
my agency is riven with paradox does not mean it is impossible.
It means only that paradox is the condition of its possibility”<;
quote>

8
Gender Abolition

If we accept that gender is not to be found within ourselves as a
transcendent truth, but rather exists outside us in the realm of dis-
course, what are we to strive for? To say gender is discursive is to
say that gender occurs not as a metaphysical truth within the sub-
ject, but occurs as a means of mediating social interaction. Gender
is a frame, a subset of language, and set of symbols and signs, com-
municated between us, constructing us and being reconstructed by
us constantly.

‘Thus the apparatus of gender operates cyclically; as we are con-
stituted through it, so too do our daily actions, rituals, norms, and
performances reconstitute it. It is this realization which allows for
a movement against the cycle itself to manifest. Such a movement
must understand the deeply penetrative and pervasive nature of
the apparatus. Normalization has an insidious way of naturalizing,
accounting for, and subsuming resistance.

Atthis point it becomes tempting to embrace a certain liberal pol-
itics of expansion. Countless theorists and activists have laid stake
to the claim that our experience of transgender embodiment might
be able to pose a threat to the process of normalization that is gen-
der. We have heard the suggestion that non-binary identity, trans
identity, and queer identity might be able to create a subversion of
gender. This cannot be the case.

In staking our claim on identity labels of non-binary, we find
ourselves always again caught back in the realm of gender. To
take on identity in a rejection of the gender binary is still to ac-
cept the binary as a point of reference. In the resistance to it, one
only reconstructs the normative status of the binary. Norms have
already accounted for dissent; they lay the frameworks and lan-
guages through which dissent can be expressed. It is not merely
that our verbal dissent oceurs in the language of gender, but that
the actions we take to subvert gender in dress and affect are them-
selves only subversive through their reference to the norm.
If an identity politics of non-binary identity cannot liberate us,
is is also true that a queer o trans identity politics offers us no
hope. Both fall into the same trap of referencing the norm by try-
ing to “do” gender differently. The very basis of such politics is
grounded in the logic of identity, which is itself a product of mod-
ern and contemporary discourses of power. As we have already
shown quite thoroughly, there can be no stable identity which we
can reference. Thus any appeal to a revolutionary or emancipatory
identity is only an appeal to certain discourses. In this case, that
discourse is gender.

“This is not to say that those who identify as trans, queer, or
non-binary are at fault for gender. This is the mistake of the tra-
ditional radical feminist approach. We repudiate such claims, as
they merely attack those most hurt by gender. Even if deviation
from the norm s always accounted for and neutralized, it sure as
hell s still punished. The queer, the trans, the non-binary body s
stillthe site of massive violence. Our siblings and comrades still are
‘murdered all around us, still live in poverty, stll live in the shad-
ows. We do not denounce them, for that would be to denounce
ourselves. Instead we call for an honest discussion about the limits
of our politics and a demand for a new way forward.

With this attitude at the forefront, it is not merely certain for-
mulations of identity politics which we seck to combat, but the
need for identity altogether. Our claim is that the ever expanding
list of personal preferred pronouns, the growing and ever more nu-
anced labels for various expressions of sexuality and gender, and
the attempt to construct new identity categories more broadly is
not worth the effort.

If we have shown that identity is not a truth but a social and
discursive construction, we can then realize that the creation of
these new identities is not the sudden discovery of previously un-
known lived experience, but rather the creation of new terms upon
which we can be constituted. All we do when we expand gender
categories is to create new more nuanced channels through which

10
power can operate. We do not liberate ourselves, we ensnare our-
selves in countless and even more nuanced and powerful norms.
Each one a new chain.

To use this terminology is not hyperbolic; the violence of gender
cannot be overestimated. Each trans woman murdered, each inter-
sex infant coercively operated on, each queer kid thrown onto the
streets is a victim of gender. The deviance from the norm is always
punished. Even though gender has accounted for deviation, it still
punishes it. Expansions of norms is an expansion of deviance; it is
an expansion of ways we can fall outside a discursive ideal. Infinite
gender identities create infinite new spaces of deviation which will
be violently punished. Gender must punish deviance, thus gender
must go.

And thus we arrive at the need for the abolition of gender. If
all of our attempts at positive projects of expansion have fallen
short and only snared us in a new set of traps, then there must be
another approach. That the expansion of gender has failed, does not
imply that contraction would serve our purposes. Such an impulse
is purely reactionary and must be done away with.

The reactionary radical feminist sees gender abolition as such
a contraction. For them, we must abolish gender so that sex (the
physical characteristics of the body) can be a stable material basis
upon which we can be grouped. We reject this whole heartedly.
Sex itself is grounded in discursive groupings, given an authority
through medicine, and violently imposed onto the bodies of inter-
sex individuals. We decry this violence.

No, a return to a simpler and smaller understanding of gender
(even if supposedly material conception) will not do. It is the very
normative grouping of bodies in the first place which we push back
against. Neither contraction nor expansion will save us. Our only
path is that of destruction.

1
Radical Negativity

At the heart of our gender abolition is a negativity. We seek not
to abolish gender so that a true self can be returned to; there is no
such self. It is not as though the abolition of gender will free us to
exist as true or genuine selves, freed from certain norms. Such a
conclusion would be at odds with the entirety of our antihumanist
claims. And thus we must take a leap into the void.

A moment of lucid clarity is required here. If what we are is a
product of discourses of power, and we seck to abolish and destroy
those discourses, we are taking the greatest risk possible. We are
diving into an unknown. The very terms, symbols, ideas, and reali-
ties by which we have been shaped and created will burn in flames,
and we cannot know or predict what we will be when we come out
the other side.

“This is why we must embrace an attitude of radical negativity.
All the previous attempts at positive and expansionist gender pol-
ities have failed us. We must cease to presume a knowledge of
whatliberation or emancipation might look like, for those ideas are
themselves grounded upon an idea of the self which cannot stand
up to scrutiny; itis an idea which for the longest time has been used
tolimit our horizons. Only pure rejection, the move away from any
sort of knowable or intelligible future can allow us the possibility
for a future at all.

While this risk is a powerful one, it is necessary. Yet in plunging
into the unknown, we enter the waters of unintelligibility. These
waters are not without their dangers; and there is a real possibil-
ity for a radical loss self. The very terms by which we recognize
each other may be dissolved. But there is no other way out of this
dilemma, We are daily being attacked by a process of normalization
that codes us as deviant. If we do not lose ourselves in the move-
‘ment of negativity, we will be destroyed by the status quo. We have
only one option, risks be damned.

12
‘This powerfully captures the predicament that we are in at this
moment. While the risk of embracing negativity is high, we know
the alternative will destroy us. If we lose ourselves in the process,
we have merely suffered the same fate we would have otherwise.
Thus it is with reckless abandon that we refuse to postulate about
‘what a future might hold, and what we might be within that future.
Arejection of meaning, a rejection of known possibility, a rejection
of being itself. Nihilism. That is our stance and method.

Relentless critique of positive gender politics is thus a starting
point, but one which must occur cautiously. For if we are to criti-
cize their own normative underpinnings in favor of an alternative,
ain to the neutralizing power of normal-
ization. Thus we answer the demand for a clearly stated alterna-

we only fall prey once a

tive and for a program of actions to be taken with a resolute “no’
‘The days of manifestos and platforms are over. The negation of all
things, ourselves included, is the only means through which we
will ever be able to gain anything

13
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Alyson Escalante
Gender Nihilism
An Anti-Manifesto
2015

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