Post #1942990

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• @cassey@ottawa.place 2026-03-30 02:13

  @eljojo thanks - the angle you’re going for I think on gender, which I’ve heard labeled as like “gender nihilism” or “gender abolition”, I’m broadly pretty sympathetic to! But I basically don’t talk about it outside of contexts where I can be confident some underlying values are shared among the discussers, and where I have the space to make the nuances of what I think about it clear. Because I’m totally with you - if there were no gender roles at all, that sounds great to me. I want people of any sex assigned at birth to act or dress however they want and that to be .. unremarkable, basically. But I’m also a pragmatist, and no amount of me not wanting to be cast in a gender role (or any other social category) will make it so no one I encounter slots me into one whether they make it explicit or not. I also have heard people say that they have some internal sense of gender that really matters to them when others recognize it & get it right. I believe these people about what feels good to them and support their own autonomy over how they choose to pursue that. Always. With all the anti-trans hate in the world, which goes beyond discrimination or stigma to very serious and life-altering (or ending) violence, even towards genocide and an attempt to eradicate people who live differently than their assigned gender at birth is “supposed to”- I endeavor to be very, very clear when I talk about living beyond gender roles that I’m on the side of people who choose to do so, always, even when they do it differently than I might choose to, or if they ultimately land on being happy to be seen by others as one of a binary gender system I’d personally be fine doing away with. But again I really think this entire aspect of the discussion is really quite tangential to what the essay I shared said- it feels like the cause-and-effect got reversed in your read from what was actually there.

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