It’s odd how Alok continually speaks about legislation targeting gender non-conforming people when the legislation (as far as I’m aware) is all targeting trans people.
Speaking socially, the beliefs of the powerful become proof, in part because the world actually arranges itself to affirm what the powerful want to see.”ģ. Catharine MacKinnon: "Having power means, among other things, that when someone says, ‘This is how it is,’ it is taken as being that way. I can think negative thoughts about Jeff Bezos all day but something tells me he'll be fine. Simply looking at them and thinking thoughts in my head as an inherent exercise of power? No. Am I a famous writer who can share bigoted rhetoric on a wide platform? Am I a landlord who can deny applicants based on their gender non-conformity? Being able to have that impact on someone’s life, able to define them, deny them rights, deny them services etc is what power is about. And the power that these actions have will be a direct reflection of my power in society. What matters is the actions which follow - do I dismiss, demean, harass, abuse, ignore etc. I can look at someone, make false or negative assumptions as to their life, being etc, and they are not affected by virtue of the thoughts in my head. What people see, and how people see it has everything to do with power.” The use of the word ‘power’ in statements like this makes you think that there is some type of analysis here, but there really isn’t. “The most lethal part of the body is not the fist but the eye. Sometimes prejudice is intentional and calculated.Ģ. It may be true in some cases, but it's certainly not true in all of them. Anyway, this abstracted 'the gender binary exists because people hate creativity' approach leads to Alok's claim that a person being prejudiced against gender non-conforming people is a reflection of that person's own insecurities.
The fact that we find the same issues of sex based oppression, homophobia and transphobia in societies with ‘third gender identities’ (nb: in some cases, these forces were critical to the creation of these identities in the first place), speaks to the fact that simply having more recognized gender identities is not at the root of the problem. Gender is a hierarchy formed to naturalize the sex-based oppression of women, which also has the effect of oppressing gender non-conforming individuals of both sexes. It would be absurd to define racism as “a system of power which exists to create conflict and division, not to celebrate creativity and diversity”, right? One’s immediate response would be, why did you gloss the historical factors? Why did you gloss colonialism and slavery? And yet people (including Alok, though they are far from the only offender) do exactly this re: gender.
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