Taxonomies and the gender class system

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_{“Not even such a state as ‘being’ female, itself a highly complex category constructed in sexual scientific discourses and other social practices. Gender, race, or class consciousness is an achievement focused on us by the terrible historical experience of the contradictory social realities of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism.”.

“A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” *}

_{Donna Harraway, Cyborg Manifesto}

As outlined in The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto*, gender binaries are a hierarchical classification system based on sex characteristics associated with reproduction and enforced through sexual violence. Gender systems have historically and materially existed as class structures. These structures are not based in anatomy or biology or endochrinology but rather in the material relation that sex has to reproduction, and in a capitalist society based in technoscience and pharmacopornism these secondary fields of classication are used to construct and enforce class distinctions and to instill the notion that this is not a class system but rather a function of nature reflected and understood through objective scientific inquiry.

The web of technscientific, religious, academic and pharmaceutical tools used to enforce the domination innate to the gender class system, while having originated in pre-colonial europe, was greatly accelerated and ultimately globalized during Eruope’s global conquest and period of industrialization. The contemporary gender class system is largely a product of the industrial revolution and subsequent periods of global industrial technocracy. The Manifesto’s analysis of the place of trans people within this class structure is that, regardless of whether one’s gender identity exists within the binary, the act of transitioning is rejecting the system, and that occupying a place outside of the system is what constitutes one as trans.

_{“No.” Not everyone says yes to gender. “I reject it.” These people have chosen a different path, a different life. “I am not.” This forms a different identity.}

_{When you get assigned the male class, but you loudly assert the opposite, you have said “no” to gender. Gender gave you what you are, but you turned away in disgust. You are not a man, you are something else. Some find comfort in womanhood, others in something entirely outside, but whichever path you take, you have said no to gender.}

_{Similarly, when you get assigned the female class, but, again, you loudly assert the opposite, you have said “no” to gender. Your embrace of manhood or something beyond constitutes a rejection, a turning away, from gender.}

_{When you sit apart from your assignment, you are transgender.}

_{Vikky Storm and Eme Flores, The Gener Accelrationist Manifesto}

The Transsexual is (in a Harrawayian sense) the essential, overtly cyborgian biopolitical myth of post-industrial society, a rejction of gender/sexual/anatomical somatic taxonomies as well as a convergence of technologies of gender presentation, pharmacology and technoscience with human somatic ontology. The transsexual embodies Harraway’s political mythology of the cyborg in its rejection of western-philosophical / heteronormative / patriarchal classification. Transsexual women are necessarily categorized as women through externalization of internal subjectivity (affinity and intentionality), rather than taxonomic systems that privilege somatic traits.

To be Transsexual, to reject the taxonomies of the gender binary, is a neccesarily political act.

The system’s attempts to account for divergences is to establish new taxonomies of oppression. The category of the Transsexual as it exists in society is a medicalized and indexed one that serves as a form of enforced assimilation that one is tied to if they wish to inhabit cis society, or rather wish to exist “safely” under cis oppression. The consequences of this are that trans people are, at best, forced into medicalization. (however for the most part these medical taxonomies have histroically, and presently, been laregly vehicles for identification and elimination).

The essential irony of Transsexualism is that to a large extent the technologies used to fascilitate this rejection are, just like the contemporary global gender class system, products of industrialization and technoscience.

Transsexuals are cyborgs, their identities are based in a kinship with machines, they are wired into a vast network of biocircuitry, linguistic memetics, industrial production, global pharmaceutical distribution pipelines, staging of performances interpersonally and internationally, they are products of history and the producers of new lexicons. To be transsexual is to inherit a role of defiance, of radical disobedience, of biopolitical body-hacking terrorism, of categorical sublimation and of a dualistic process of becoming. The transsexual myth, like Harraway’s cyborg, is both ironic and blasphemous within the moral / ethical / memetic traditions of more rigid models of feminist resistance; to resist the totalizing effects of patriarchal categorization, the Transsexual will often find herself perpetuating, parodying, elaborating, and invariably to some degree, performing the historically ascribed “feminine” signs of the categorization of Woman. This is the primary irony of Transsexualism as a feminism, its radical techne is one of deliberately inhabiting historically hostile taxonomies (some of the time).
There is also a secondary irony to Transsexualist feminism, that 20th and 21st century Transsexualism is necessarily intertwined with technoscience; surgical procedures, hormonal interventions, etc. are all technologies that developed from within the capitalist-colonialist-patriarchal machine, and yet are also by in large the primary tools of gender defiance against hegemonic sexual taxonomies.

The central question that made me want to start writing about this is how can one reconcile ones transness with the fact that so much of what makes the transsexual process of actualizting ones metaphysical desires with their ontological reality (and in the process rejecting the gender class system) are inantely, materially, and historically intertwined with the technologies that enforce the superstructure of cisheteronormative oppression?