Gender abolition is not the goal

Alright, this is something I personally believe in and think would be good for trans people overall, not to mention a few other very important groups. So I'm going to write out an explanation of why I think a world without gender would be good. It's going to be long, so I don't want anyone to freak out and think I've gone mad with rage. I say this here because long walls of text can often seem scary, as if someone has a personal bone to pick with the person they're replying to. I'm actually fine and totally not angry, the point just takes a while to make and I think it's worth making. There will be a Tl:Dr at the bottom that I hope you read if it's too much.

I have to personally disagree with you on this one, because I think that your imagination of what a world without gender looks like vs. that of trans people working in good faith (i.e. not TERFs and those that follow them) figure it to be and the way that it's used. The idea is that capital G Gender (the oppressive society thing) would be abolished while lower case g gender (identities) would not. An example of this would be people being able to say "I like this dress" without that instantly placing them into a position where the dress is gendered as something belonging only to women or they are gendered as a woman if they can wear the dress well enough (or as a monstrous other should they fail to look womanly enough). Another would be being able to say "I don't want my boobs anymore" and that not placing you, your breasts, or the operations you might undergo in any position of being gendered as male or female.

While this is a position coopted by TERFs, their theft is easy to see when you notice that it lacks any sort of change for cis people, which isn't true. A world in which gender doesn't exist means the idea of cis-ness would likely dissipate. The people would obviously remain. This isn't advocating a genocide or elimination of them. Rather pointing out that when people are no longer assigned their gender at birth (a key part of structural Gender), they would have to figure out their connection to their gender identity on their own in much the same way trans people do now. Albeit, it would be a much easier process for everyone as such exploration would be encouraged rather than stifled.

To extend this, I do think that analysis of the way Danica Roem is de-gendered is accurate, because it denies her gender identity. However, I would say that this is a bad example of why Gender abolition is bad because it centers around a single person whereas abolition seeks to remove Gender for an entire society, while still allowing expressions that are currently gendered (like "she/her" pronouns and "congresswoman") to exist.

This links into your idea that an abolition of gender would be an abolition of womanhood and the connections formed there. Rather than cutting out the connections womanhood allows, it would reterritorialize, reorganize, or redefine (whichever one of these words makes the most sense; finding synonyms for academic jargon is hard) them into an entirely new realm wherein they are no longer associated simply with womanhood. This is to say that your connection is most likely not with every woman, but individual women with whom you share similar experiences. Women will still share those experiences, and will still be able to bond by using them. But they won't be considered women for having them and in a lot of cases, they won't be having them because they're considered women (think things like workplace discrimination or harassment that commonly happen with women). This opens up those communities to involving people of other genders that share those experiences as well, which I would consider an overall positive thing.

To summarize the point, you still exist in a world without gender. At least in the one that I'm imagining. The only difference is that you're not immediately assigned one and treated a certain way based on that assignment. Instead, you get to freely choose how to express yourself. Be that through clothes, pronouns, changes to your body, or changes in the language people refer to you with. I think that the freedom you desire is still achievable in a world without gender and that such a world would be liberatory.

To add one final point before the Tl;Dr I promised: We need to consider not just Gender, but the systems that put Gender in place. Gender is not a universal system that all cultures adhere to. If we ask indigenous groups about their traditional relationships with gender, it's found that a lot of them (not all, but a substantial amount) had more social categories than they did before being colonized. Meaning that the system of having two binary genders was and still is almost exclusive to Western colonial empires. Thus, it is not an extreme stretch to say that the imposition of Gender on these cultures is a part of the cultural erasure these people are put through.

But do not construe this as the whole thing. Fixing Gender would not fix the hurt of colonialism, only a portion. That said, it is clearly observable through situations like the DAPL pipeline, the tribes being pushed out of the Amazon rainforest, and simply listening to the words of indigenous folks, that the system of colonialism and the way it dehumanizes them is very much alive and well. As something that erases their culture and places them in a position where clear atrocities are justified against them, it is necessary to resist at every possible turn. Hence, I would extend that it is necessary to resist Gender (as a part of that system) as well.

If you care about indigenous folks, I would ask that you at least consider the ways that our struggles are intertwined. Two essays that helped crystalize this concept are "The Coloniality of Gender" and "From a young Native daughter: Carceral Refusal, Settler Colonialism, and the Roots of an Indigenous Abolition Imaginary." They're both rather dense, so if anyone deigns to read them, I recommend being patient with yourself and the text and know that the point may take a bit to sink in.

Tl;Dr(the promised land of simplicity): Gender is bad for indigenous people and I think an allyship can be formed where both trans and indigenous folk can be helped by fighting this system that was forced on the both of us. Gender (society) and gender (identity) are not the same thing and removing the former does not necessarily remove the latter. A genderless world would still allow us to do all the things we like, it would just lack the aspect of gendering the things we like, and any gendering that takes place would be on an individual scale instead of societal. And any abolition of Gender that does not abolish Gender for all people is exclusionary nonsense and should be ignored in favor of a world where Gender is abolished for everybody.

/r/asktransgender Thread