On the Lack of Dialectics in Queer Scholarship, Part 1: Intro, & GENDER OUTLAW
Toward a Critical Survey of Several Contemporary LGBTQ+ Books
Ever since I read Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States, which I critiqued for focusing mostly on gay and lesbian history as opposed to queer, I made it my mission to read more about the often overlooked members of the queer coalition: bi/pansexuals, asexuals, intersex people, trans/nonbinary peoples, and so on.
I’ve read several over the last year. The three I want to discuss in the upcoming posts are Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us, Revised Edition (2016), Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality (2023), and Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (2020) because all three represent a trend I find in queer nonfiction. I don’t hate any of these texts, and I can recommend each of them because they give valuable insights into the personal and political lives of nonbinary, bisexual, and asexual people, respectively. Rather, they are just the three that stick out the most in my head at the time of writing.
My issue with most of these works is that they lack dialectics. Dialectics, in this instance, can be defined as viewing separate things as components in a larger system in which contradictions and conflicts between these components continually shape and reshape the whole. To summarize philosopher Friedrich Engels’s overview of dialectics in the second chapter of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific: everything both is and is not, for everything is fluid, constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away. For those lacking in dialectics, things are rigid, separate, independent, and happen in a linear order. Their world is of binary positive or negative, never both or neither.
At first, the world of those who lack dialectics appears as common sense, but common sense is the logic of the ruling class. Feudal common sense differed from capitalist, and both differed from ancient, etc., etc. Those lacking in dialectics forget how things are connected, aren’t static, and aren’t motionless. Just as death is not a moment but a process, so is everything in the world. Positive and negative may be opposed, but they are inseparable; they are mutually interdependent. They exist in unity. Dialectics acknowledges all this. Nature is proof of dialectics. Nature does not simply move from one eternal oneness to another. It goes through real historical evolution.
The problem with works that deal with specific topics but lack the dialectics to understand how they fit into the bigger picture is that they look at things one-dimensionally. In his essay “On Contradiction,” Chinese communist revolutionary Mao Zedong defines the difference between the principal contradiction and secondary contradictions:
Hence, if in any process there are a number of contradictions, one of them must be the principal contradiction playing the leading and decisive role, while the rest occupy a secondary and subordinate position. Therefore, in studying any complex process in which there are two or more contradictions, we must devote every effort to finding its principal contradiction. Once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.1
In other words, while there are many contradictions within a single system or totality, one contradiction is the singular driving force in the transformation of said system or totality. The others “are all determined or influenced by this principal contradiction.”2 Mao uses capitalist society as an example:
…the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction. The other contradictions, such as those between the remnant feudal class and the bourgeoisie, between the peasant petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie, between the proletariat and the peasant petty bourgeoisie, between the non-monopoly capitalists and the monopoly capitalists, between bourgeois democracy and bourgeois fascism, among the capitalist countries and between imperialism and the colonies, are all determined or influenced by this principal contradiction.
[…]
But whatever happens, there is no doubt at all that at every stage in the development of a process, there is only one principal contradiction which plays the leading role.3
The issue with many of these works is that they treat their topic as the primary contradiction. There’s nothing wrong with centering work on a specific subject or topic or having a scope for a work. But ignoring how the mechanics of said oppression—whether it be transphobia, biphobia, or acephobia—are a part of the greater system often only gets at the form of said oppression and not the function.
This leads to subjective, one-sided, and superficial analysis. It fails to look at problems objectively. One-sided analysis doesn’t understand both sides of a contradiction; thus, it sees incomplete parts and not the whole, missing the forest for the trees. This makes resolving contradictions impossible. Superficiality fails to consider not just the aspects of a contradiction in its totality but even the characteristics of each of its aspects. It denies study, analysis, and concrete inquiry. It means squinting at a problem and giving up shortly thereafter.
This criticism is necessary because criticism is to “…learn from past mistakes to avoid future ones” and “cure the sickness to save the patient.”4 Criticism is not antagonism. Even without antagonism, contradictions will remain because contradiction is the law of nature. The real problem is antagonistic contradictions. Thus, the struggle for the sake of unity or correcting mistaken ideas is not the same as the struggle between worker and capitalist, capitalist and aristocracy, slave and master, i.e. antagonistic contradictions.
It is essential that we define what is and isn’t an antagonistic contradiction, and we must solve non-antagonistic contradictions through criticism and self-criticism to prevent them from turning into antagonistic ones. Since antagonistic and non-antagonistic contradictions are essentially different, they must be resolved by different methods. In other words, antagonistic contradictions are a matter of drawing a clear distinction between us and the antagonists, and non-antagonistic contradictions are a matter of making a clear distinction between right and wrong.5
I come into conversations about gender and sexuality with my influences on my sleeve. I’ve made it no secret that I approach things from a dialectical materialist epistemology and metaphysic, and I borrow heavily from trans-, intersectional, and proletarian feminist schools of thought. However, these incoming critiques are not because these books fail to adhere to my point of view or school of thought. I never expect books to perfectly adhere to my viewpoint to begin with. I’d like to think my criticisms aren’t so narrow-minded.
I didn’t come to these books looking to bring the hammer down on their lack of dialectics. These are all issues I had while reading them that, when thinking about it cumulatively, made me realize the recurring element was subjective, one-sided, and superficial analysis created by the lack of dialectics. None of these issues are due to differences in thought or framework. They would have been issues regardless.
GENDER OUTLAW by Kate Bornstein
The first book I want to look at is the oldest. Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein was originally published in 1994; however, it was revised and updated by the author in 2016, which is the edition I’ve read and will be critiquing.
In the new introduction for this edition, “Gender Is a Wooly Worm,” Bornstein discusses many of the changes they made between this one and the original. It updated and clarified many of their thoughts from the original edition. Likewise, Bornstein also looks at how the trans movement has changed from the early-90s to the mid-2010s, which is insightful.
Because of its age and the fact that it is a hodgepodge of new and old material, as well as the work itself being an experimental mix of memoir, history, theory, poetry, and theatre, it’s the most out-there piece we’ll be discussing. With that being said, and despite any critiques I give, I do recommend Gender Outlaw because it does have a lot to offer as trans art and history, even if I criticize its theory or politics.
The first section that had me leaving a sticking note in my book to return to later is when Bornstein begins discussing Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male and the trend of second-wave radical and cultural feminists excluding and purging trans women from queer and feminist spaces. Bornstein writes:
…women inhabit “women-only” spaces to heal from the oppression of their number by the larger culture, by men in particular, and because they don’t see us as women, we’re perceived as the other side of the binary: men. Perceived as men, we get in the way of their healing, and so we’re excluded.6
As I’ve written in the past, I don’t believe the exclusion of transfems and trans women from “women-only” spaces is the result of good-natured but hurt and ignorant cis women who just don’t “get” trans women. Rather, the often violent and public exclusion of trans women from “women-only,” feminist, and lesbian spaces is usually caused by transmisogynists who don’t view us as Actaeon peeking in on a bathing Artemis but as grotesque gorgons who poison the well of womanhood simply by claiming any access to it.
Many famous examples of trans women being purged from feminist, lesbian, and even just queer spaces were not done so democratically but through violent and antagonistic threats by a vocal minority. Famous examples include Beth Elliot from both the Daughters of Bilitis and the West Coast Lesbian Conference,7 Sylvia Rivera from the 1973 Pride Rally in New York City,8 Sandy Stone from the all-woman feminist record label Olivia Records,9 and the countless transfem attendants of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival.10
Bornstein frames these purges as interpersonal disagreements coming from a place of ignorance that leads to getting kicked out of, like, a book club and not the systemic exclusion of trans women from feminist, queer, and political spaces, communities, and resources that they are.
Likewise, it’s puzzling to claim that cis women just need a space from men to heal when trans women also suffer the “oppression of their number by the larger culture, by men in particular.” Trans women are more likely to suffer physical and sexual violence from men than their cis counterparts. It maintains the myth that trans women are both more privileged than cis women and have little in common with them.11
Bornstein argues that lesbian separatists excluding trans women from feminist, queer, and political spaces isn’t oppression. They write, “Lesbian oppression at the hands of the dominant ideology is not the same as the exclusion experienced by trans women at the hands of the lesbian separatists. Most lesbian activists just don’t have the same economic and social resources with which to oppress trans women.”12
They make the error of assuming the contradiction is between lesbians and trans women. Indeed, lesbians cannot wield lesbianism as a weapon against trans women in the same way straight women can with their sexuality against marginalized sexualities, but these lesbian separatists weren’t wielding their lesbianism but their cisgender status against trans women. Intersectional feminism is about acknowledging all dimensions of identity, not flattening it down to the most oppressed of their identities and foregoing the rest.
Bornstein’s analysis of the issue also assumes lesbian separatism and trans womanhood are mutually exclusive identities, which is weird considering Bornstein identified as a transfem lesbian for a portion of their life. Yes, being a lesbian isn’t the same as lesbian separatism, but Bornstein contrasts lesbians, lesbian separatists, and lesbian activists all with trans women in this passage. Thus, it portrays both identities as mutually exclusive and in opposition.
The origin of Bornstein’s theoretical errors can be seen in the first passage I quoted. The line, “...and because they don’t see us as women, we’re perceived as the other side of the binary: men. Perceived as men, we get in the way of their healing, and so we’re excluded,” reveals what Bornstein sees at the center of transphobia: the gender binary, or “binary gender system” as they call it.
Bornstein articulates this when they write:
In the either/or gender class system that we call male and female, the structure of one up, one down fulfills the requisite for a perpetual power imbalance. It became clear that the reason the binary gender system continues to exist, and is actively and tenaciously held in place, is that the binary gender system is primarily a venue for the playing out of a power game.13
The problem is that they assert gender hierarchy is the result of the current Euro-American gender binary, which doesn’t ring true to me. The current binary is nothing more than a justification for the current Euro-American patriarchy. To borrow a Marxist image, if traditional sexism, i.e. the belief that men/masculinity is superior to women/femininity, is the base of the current patriarchy,14 oppositional sexism, i.e. the belief that female and male are rigid and mutually exclusive categories (and also the source of the gender binary),15 is the superstructure or manifestation of traditional sexism. In other words, traditional sexism created the hierarchy and oppositional sexism maintains it.
Bornstein continues, “Without the structure of the binary gender system, the power dynamic between men and women shatters. People would not have gender to use as a hierarchical framework, and nearly half the members of the binary gender system would probably be at quite a loss.”16 I don’t trust this conclusion because we can see both historically and today that the ways societies allow gender pluralism still maintain a gender hierarchy.
Bornstein themself brought up an example of this earlier in the book. When discussing conflicts between trans women and TERFs, Bornstein writes, “But there’s some historical, cross-cultural precedent for their concern that trans people are bad for feminism: the Navajo nadle. The nadle is a sort of transgender male-to-female person, with a unique social function: the nadle was often called upon to suppress the women’s revolutions.”17
To be honest, I’m skeptical of the authenticity of Bornstein’s claim here. Their source is Wendy O’Flaherty’s Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts, which they liberally quote in the margins of this passage. I’m not too familiar with Navajo culture myself, but I’m not quoting Bornstein here to blindly parrot this information.
I looked into the section Bornstein sourced in Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. The section itself was short, not even a full page. While the section is more or less how it was presented by Bornstein, I looked at O’Flaherty’s sources. Her two main ones were Catholic missionary Pierre-Jean De Smet and United States Army surgeon Washington Matthews; both sources aren’t Navajo themselves and were written before 1900, which raises red flags for me.
I have a hard time trusting regurgitated information about Navajo culture not taken from Navajo sources when O’Flaherty’s book was published as late as 1980. Likewise, even lightly skimming modern scholarship on nadle or nádleehi reveals a much different picture than the one O’Flaherty presented.
Anyway, disregarding the correctness of Bornstein’s information, even internally—within Bornstein’s own book—they themself provide an example of how even within cultures with a sense of gender pluralism, there can still be gender hierarchy (if what they say is true). Thus, I don’t think the binary gender system is the current puppet master of gender-based oppression.
The principal flaw of Gender Outlaws is that it turns oppositional sexism, the driving force behind the gender binary, into the principal contradiction of gender oppression. But oppositional sexism is simply a secondary contradiction of it, a product of traditional sexism, which itself is a “…superstructural product of previous modes of production that lingers well after it was determined by a particular social base.”18
While it is true that in the Marxist theory of economic base and cultural/political superstructure, the “…base might be determinate in the last instance, it is also true that this last instance might never arrive […] and thus we can conceive of instances where the superstructure may determine and/or obstruct the base.”19 So, oppositional sexism may overtake traditional sexism in my image. This is a case of an imperfect metaphor on my part, however. The economic base is a dynamic and fluid system that is always evolving and changing. Traditional sexism is a static and purely ideological product.
After all, the economic base is itself a “contradiction between the social character of production and the private character of ownership.”20 By the nature of contradiction, this produces motion. Traditional sexism, however, is not itself a contradiction; thus, it doesn’t act the same as the economic base in the base-superstructure model.
Next week, I will continue this series of posts by looking at Bi: The Hidden Culture, History, and Science of Bisexuality by Dr. Julia Shaw.
Further Reading
“Theses on Feuerbach” by Karl Marx
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Friedrich Engels
“On Contradiction” by Mao Zedong
Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement by Anuradha Ghandy
“Dialectical Feminism: An Unburial Theory” by May Peterson
Z. Mao, “On Contradiction,” Marxists Internet Archive, 2004, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Z. Mao, “Criticism and Self-Criticism,” Quotations from Mao Tse Tung, ed. Lin Pao, Marxists Internet Archive, 2000, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch27.htm.
Z. Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,” Marxists Internet Archive, 2004, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.htm.
K. Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, Revised ed. (Vintage Books, 2016), 104-5.
S. Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, 2nd ed. (Seal Press, 2017), 129-32.
Ibid. 128-9.
Ibid. 155.
J. Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 2nd ed. (Seal Press, 2016), 49-52.
Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, 105.
Ibid. 139.
Serano, Whipping Girl, 14.
Ibid. 13.
Bornstein, Gender Outlaw, 139.
Ibid. 96.
J. Moufawad-Paul, Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain (Zero Books, 2016), 48n12.
Ibid. 15.
Mao, “On Contradiction.”