If we are against coercion, we are against state, structural and cultural enforcement of gender and gender roles. If we are against exploitation, we are against the devaluation of domestic and reproductive work. If we are for freedom, then we must accept that each person is their own, along with the expression of their gender.
Patriarchy has created two exclusive genders based a western biological reduction of the body, where medical, political, and religious authorities assign ‘sex’ based on physical attributes, while intersex people are pathologised for not fitting in either category. This is how gender hierarchies are justified and reproduced, as part of heterosexism and the nuclear family model.
These institutions and structures of top down power that reduce gender down to sex, that socially and legally enforce gender as obligatory behavioural categories, should be abolished. We recognise that there are more egalitarian Indigenous gender systems and we defend anyone’s right to identify with the roles of their gender under their religion or Indigenous culture, without assuming all traditional gender roles are inherently egalitarian. Basically, Anarchists believe all people should be free to choose the life that suits them, traditional or not, but they should avoid supporting policies or initiatives that force others to be like them.
While patriarchy predates capitalism, today patriarchy is a system rooted in colonial property relations and ownership, where positions of dominance and privilege are primarily held by cisgender and heterosexual men — even though patriarchy can be reproduced by anyone. As Anarchists we are against gender and sexual oppression, and recognise we must confront patriarchy head on in our organisations and social movements. While the state may grant some superficial LGBT rights and push rainbow capitalist initiatives, they also enable the right wing enforcement of violent policies of Trans and Queer exclusion in everyday life, and leave criminalised trans people to face state-sanctioned sexual violence.
We stand in solidarity with people of marginalised genders and sexualities, particularly those who are targeted with transmisogyny at the intersections of race, class, sexuality and disability. Our org seeks to learn from both class struggle feminist movements and revolutionary transfeminism, and to advocate for autonomous organising by working class women, gender and sexuality marginalised people. Gender self-determination requires building a feminist and anti-patriarchal counter power, especially within struggles around gendered labour, housing, childbirth and abortion, daycare, access to hormones and surgery, sexual and domestic violence etc.
We support the decriminalisation of sex work and for sex workers to form unions. We reject any so-called feminists that police what people do with their bodies and view sexual labour as not an equally legitimate livelihood as other jobs, which equally deserves respect, dignity, safety and fair wages. We reject liberal feminism that satisfies itself with the empowerment of the middle class cis woman, her career aspirations and of equalising boardrooms under capitalism — white liberal feminists benefit from having racialised housekeepers fill the role they previously occupied in their own homes. We reject “radical feminism” that relies on arguing a sex-based oppression, which in turn has produced a reactionary anti-trans politics aligned with fascism. Radical feminists discuss abstract harms to cis women and ‘their spaces’ by the inclusion of trans-women, while ignoring real harm felt by the trans community.
Our understanding of patriarchy goes beyond the oppression of women, and includes how it harms cis men, trans men, and other masculine gender-nonconforming folks. As an org, we are committed to unlearning the over-simplistic notions of masc-threat, fem-victim, and other gender and sexuality essentialisms, and seek to address gendered distribution of work to cultivate an org culture where people can meaningfully care for each other without coercion. Our organisation requires members to respect people’s bodily autonomy — boundaries are unique to each person and are meant to communicate how that specific person wants to be related to (or not) by others. No one gets to claim sovereignty over another person’s boundaries. For us, these behavioural agreements are to be lived fully within the org and in our personal lives.
