Xenogender Accelerationism

The concept of a gender accelerationism is powerful and worth exploring; however, the movement that has appropriated that name and theoretical line fails to adequately live up to the promise of the idea of thinking gender and acceleration together. The Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper, which many modern unconditional accelerationists seem to view it as a fellow traveler, a very important paper, and possibly correct—a significant jumping-off point, is the primary entry point to g/acc and as such serves as the primary source of my belief that g/acc as it exists has failed. While my detailed, point-by-point response notes, written as I read through the blackpaper, are available elsewhere, I think it’s worth going through my general, holistic problem with it in the abstract, because reading through my notes is a longer endeavor, and it also may lead my major points of criticism to be less clear.

The paper’s argument rests on two interlocking theses. The first is that transfemininity is the future of gender, thanks to the development of technocapital. This is supposedly for two reasons. The first is that modern technological society and its material conditions are, in a sense, feminizing us through everything from microplastics and the corresponding decreases in testosterone and sperm count, to the decreased need for rough skin and physical strength. This equalization between the genders, coupled with the fact that women are performing much better in most careers, in college, and in all of the other things that really indicate modern society than men are, leads to the idea that the masculine will not only become superfluous and unnecessary, but also harder and harder just materially to maintain. The second thesis is that the transfeminine is better integrated with technocapital and thus will be favored by it in some sense. Because we require constant hormones, surgeries, and often retreat from the world due to dysphoria to communicate and have our identities online instead, all of these desires and necessities for existence for trans women are deeply interlocked with technocapital. I think there are problems with both of these theses.

Let's start with the idea of masculinity becoming obsolete. If we're going to be operating in an accelerationist theoretical space, we must acknowledge that humanity has always been in love with Bataille’s general economy: this needless, often symbolic wastage in grand, unnecessary gestures and overbuilding things, from religious ceremonies to the pyramids to fast fashion to plastic surgery. And so, the fact of masculinity becoming unnecessary will not erase it or normatively make it obsolete. I don't think it will be naturally erased, and I don't think it will become normatively obsolete, either of those. It will persist as a sort of aesthetic expenditure.

Furthermore, if it becomes more difficult to maintain masculinity in this future—requiring T-supplements, diets, and going to the gym artificially—then it’s arguable that in order to maintain their masculinity, men will be required to plug their desires, existence, and needs into technocapital just as much as the transfeminine would be. The argument is that because transfeminine people are resisting their biology, they need technocapital. Well, if biology is tending towards the extinction of masculinity, then wouldn't that be also true of masculinity? This argument seems unclear to me.

The paper’s second thesis, that deeper integration with technocapital translates to being favored by it, is equally flawed, precisely due to what has been previously established. As I understand it, the argument is that, since the transfeminine subject's desires and needs are more deeply plugged into technocapital, such subjectivity will be encouraged and reproduced by it, as profitable to it, just like how other subjectivities which require people to desire more things technocapital can provide for them are reproduced, through advertisements and other cultural means. The thing is, if in the future becoming masculine will, since it is resisting what is naturally preduced/required by everyday life, and the processes of how technocapital is changing our biology, require more maintenance, more plugging in, then surely technocapital will reproduce those subjectivities just as much? And indeed, isn't this what we already see — the construction through culture and especially advertisement a particular kind of masculine subject that must reaffirm its masculinity, in the absence of natural ways to affirm it, through purchases that display and enhance that performance, such as big trucks, masculine beauty care products, etc?

Moreover, the entire framework is undermined by its omissions, most notably the forgetting of trans men. If we want to say that men by and large are just kind of going to go with the flow and feminize — not do a Bataillian general economy-like expenditure in order to maintain their masculinity — because everything under capitalism is subjected to utility and the restricted economy, then we still have to confront the existence of trans men. There are just as many trans men, if not more, than trans women, and for trans men, there is the same inherent motivation towards masculinity as trans women have towards femininity. They're not just going to give up on masculinity simply because it's not strictly economically necessary or carries an extra economic burden; and by the paper’s own logic regarding physical transition, trans men are equally as plugged into technocapital — yet they are ignored.

I should point out, as well, that the argument that extra economic burden and social and material unnecessariness being the reason for masculinity's future extinction would, in a sense, undercut transfemininity too, in favor of a sort of agender sex-defaultism, since there are strong economic pressures against all forms of transition or maintenence of the physical performance of gender.

More than that, ultimately, the paper’s focus on the physical aspects of masculinity is myopic. If we're operating within the rubric of the stereotypical feminine-masculine matrix, instead of acknowleding family resemblance, gender-in-dialectic-with-stereotype, and any of the other complexities that allow transfeminine (and female more generally) masculinity and jagged/partial/non-normative expressions of femininity and masculinity that are still recognizable as such, perhaps the physical strength and hardiness aspects of masculinity will no longer be necessary in the future. But if we're talking about the sort of deeply horrifying, alienated, social-safety-net-less future that technocapital has in store for us, I think the sort of stoicism, self-reliance, and ability to be aggressive in one's own favor that is stereotypically masculine would actually become more and more necessary, even if the physical aspects become less necessary. After all, part of the reason for the difference in promotions between women and men is assertiveness, which is a stereotypically masculine trait.

In the end, I find the paper very disappointing because it’s just the standard transfeminine supremacist/isolationist line; it's not really anything new or particularly interesting. It comes down to a sort of unjustified, very argumentatively inconsistent belief that, "Cthulhu will eat me first" — that "I'm more aligned with this inhuman, terrifying, alien god, and so it will favor me, and I'm happy about that, and it means that my group is superior," when there's just no evidence of that. Even the paper itself says that ultimately, we're going to be tending towards sort of genderless slime intelligence. And perhaps that's true, but in the meantime, if we extend and make consistent the paper's interal logic, the technocapital will make gender increasingly aesthetically pleasing, increasingly artificial, increasingly dependent on it, but it will not favor one over the other in that process.

Beyond the internal flaws of the Blackpaper, there is a broader issue with it and similar theories, which connects the Blackpaper's Gender Accelerationism with Gender Nihilism and Communist Gender Acceleration and, through this connection, can lead us to a truer acceleration of gender that lives up to the promise of the idea.

While their methods are starkly different — Gender Nihilism approaches this directly by calling for its destruction; Communist Gender Acceleration/Gender Communism says that, once the material basis of gender, the specific exploitation of reproductive labor, is erased, gender will naturally fade away; Gender Accelerationism does so more subtly, by fantasizing a future where the conflict ends because one gender 'wins' through the abolition of the very desire and possibility of other genders before everything dissolves into a homogenous slime — all three philosophies seem motivated by a desire for the "problem" of gender to be over and done with, out of the way.

In all cases, the conclusion is the sort of retreat from semiotic production and rejection of desire that Mark Fisher talks about in his post-capitalist desire essay: instead of leaning into the desires that produce these things called gender, in order to accelerate us beyond the current feedback loop of gender, as well as leaning into the work of semiotic production, aesthetics, and marketing to aid that, it's instead a rejection of these desires for gendering and a desire to flee from that production of gender entirely, in order to undo, instead of move beyond, the exploitative aspects. That is, after all, the undercurrent even of the Blackpaper — that femininity, especially trans femininity, is exploited and constructed as part of a matrix of exploitation, "but thanks to our alien god, we'll get our revenge!"

But I don't think that's actually a correct accelerationist throughline, though. If we map out an accelerationist history of gender, we see a different pattern to accelerate instead of just pure "feminization," a pattern that can take us beyond the bind the gender nihilists find themselves in when they say "there is a real possibility for a radical loss self. The very terms by which we recognize each other may be dissolved."

First, we have these cultural constructs—gender—which the patriarchy constructs as a superstructure on top of the brute facts of material, bodily, and reproductive reality in order to justify and aid exploitation of certain bodies, especially for reproduction but, as the social concepts metastasize, also for household labor, emotional labor, and so on.

These constructs, however, then begin to gain their own complex associations, aesthetics, and histories, and as such become socially more important in most circumstances, than the biological brute facts which they were initially created to "refer" to, and more importantly, become meaningful and worth identifying with in their own right. In response to this possibility of gender achieving escape velocity from the body and reproductive labor, however, the patriarchy doubles down and creates a crucial feedback loop occurs: these now-complex cultural systems are read back into the biological conditions from which they sprang, treated as if they were an inherent and immutable truth, allowing the entire system becomes reified.

However, the emergence of trans people as a social force acts as a space of possibility for creating a rupture in this system: our very existence challenges and ultimately severs that supposed grounding, demonstrating that the link between the material body and the cultural construct was always already a fiction, and that gendering can operate on other lines. That some trans people play heavily into gender stereotypes and roles means that our existence can be recuperated, with the new biological facts gender is read back into simply becoming brains or natal development, or perhaps gender becoming read back into psychological facts instead (such as "liking to cook" or something), which is hardly better; yet, our existence creates a fundamental destabilization which opens up a possibility. In this moment of unmooring, gender constructs can achieve a kind of escape velocity, becoming ends in themselves, freed from the gravity of their material origins.

This process of deterritorialization finally creates/reveals a new underlying engine of gender all along: not biology or patriarchal construction to justify the oppression of certain bodies, but the fundamental human desire to construct a subjectivity, to create a "genre of person" through which one can relate to others. Ultimately, people are going to want to produce associations of aesthetics and social roles and behavior with which to identify with other people and construct their subjectivity.

And of course, all through this process, the movement of the market makes gender increasingly artificial, in terms of physical production and associated aesthetics, across the board — for masculine, feminine, and totally other genders as well.

This is not something that can simply be "rejected" in any meaningful way; it is not something, this desire to genre ourselves, that will fade away when there's no enforced material basis imposed on us by "the Totality"; and it is not something that will be satisfied by a sort of arbitrary universal transfemininity either.

Gender Nihilism: An Anti-Manifesto seems motivated by a desire to retreat from the fact that what we want to and can't help but perform is determined by how our subjectivity is constructed and created by society around us, and that our identities are similarly constructed, not inherent, into a pure negation and rejection of all that, because the current iteration of the symbols we use is tainted by power; this seems to me motivated ultimately by a subaltern concern with authenticity and purity: basically, if gender can't be truly internally motivated and authentic, then we must reject it.

Similarly, the desire for one's own gender to become universal, to "win out" just before the alien god of capital turns us into slime intelligence, seems similarly motivated by a fear of gendering, because if everyone helplessly becomes the same gender, and any other genders they might desire or perform become obsolete, unavailable, or their desire for them erased, and the ultimate goal is genderlessness anyway, then you can retreat into the safety of no gender.

The gender nihilists are correct to point out that there's no ontologically True internal identity within us that links us to whatever gender we choose; our identity is constructed by and in relation to the symbols and matrices we exist within, and gender is constituted by a performance of various actions and aesthetics in certain ways. At the same time, that doesn't change the fact that our desire to construct our identity, the construction of our subjecitivity by that which is around us, and our performance or desire to perform in certain ways, are not voluntary things that we can just cancel out. That gender is a performance, for instance, does not mean that it is volitional, or that we can arbitrarily choose what we perform — that it is performative. The

And if we don't reject these motivations for trafficking in the production of symbols and performances influenced by everything around us, then we'll find that this desire will persist beyond any dialectical-materialist-reductionist "material conditions enforced upon us", pace The Gender Accelerationist Manifesto.

Once this is understood, the path forward becomes clear. It is not to abolish gender, which would be to reject this fundamental desire, but to lean further into the process that has been set in motion since the dawn of time: to create and proliferate new genders, to further deterritorialize them from any single origin, and to allow them to serve the deep human need for self-creation and connection in ever more novel, alien, and perhaps even inhuman ways. All gender will become xenogenders.

And so, if we take gender to be "genre of person"—if we take it to be sort of like a subculture, like metal or punk or whatever, which I think far down the line is what gender would be—the answer is not to retreat from the production of any group identities and not construct a subjectivity. The answer is to produce new and interesting ones. And that, I think, would be the true accelerationist line: to deterritorialize genders from their reproductive conditions, and then begin to see the underlying forces which motivated their creation—the desire for the construction of subjectivity and relation with others—and so then you can begin to actually lean further into the process, produce more of them to serve that underlying desire even more, and so on. This will eventually produce a system where it’s not really gender as we know it, but I think that’s more the goal than just eliminating gender and sort of rejecting subjectivization.