The 21st century has seen the continued erosion of gender roles and the notion of the gender binary.

Transgender representation has grown more noticeable and more positive. Preferred pronouns are a common icebreaker. “Non-binary” is a term that even your conservative grandparents have heard of (even if they don’t/won’t understand what it means). 

And, in the best indicator of progress, regressive and reactionary conservatives are actively opposing the social change which threatens their status and worldview.

But we seem to have stopped short of calling out the real problem—the reason we need continuous change. It’s time to go all the way and abolish gender.

Why? Because gender harms us.

Neither the patriarchy nor cisnormativity  are the core problem. Those are just aspects of the larger oppressive system: the gender spectrum.

The spectrum isn’t a set of discrete identities arranged in order from masculine to feminine. A transgender person isn’t packing themselves up and assimilating into another identity. But, that’s the perception created when we continue to perpetuate gender. The trans person moves from one restrictive box to another, rather than being allowed to do whatever makes them happy and complete. 

In reality, the spectrum is just a descriptive tool for understanding how people roughly express their sex as gender in relation to traditional norms. The very fact that gender is so fluid is evidence that it doesn’t accurately capture the complexity of human behavior and presentation. It’s just a vague conceptual framework—and one that lacks any real utility to make up for its restrictiveness.

It’s a social structure that divides and assigns people into arbitrary sets. It’s an expectation about how people ought to act, and the damage that does to individuals and to society far outweighs any benefits the system might provide. And so gender must be destroyed.

What would a world without gender even look like? 

The first question might be about what sexuality looks like without gender. How could you be gay or straight without it? Well, you’d no longer describe yourself as being attracted to men, women or the same or different gender. Rather, you’d, for example, simply gravitate toward those with a penis or those with a vagina. Sexuality wouldn’t be about attraction to a rigid group of traits under a label like “man” or “woman” but about attraction to all the stuff in such a group.

How do we get to that genderless utopia?

To start, it’s best to simply acknowledge that, in the present, a person’s gender is not who they are but what they attach themselves to. Think of it as an adjective that modifies the noun that is an individual person. It’s not part of the definition of the person. 

If we can all just do that, we could move toward a genderless world and address the problems that plague the gendered one we actually live in.

You see, the ultimate emptiness of gender as a concept doesn’t mean that it’s meaningless. 

Sexism, transphobia and homophobia all derive from the existence of gender. If we want to cure those societal ailments,  we can’t just wish gender out of existence. But we can position feminism as the liberation of those attached to the term “woman” rather than of “women.” Transgender activism would be the fight for those who attach themselves to the term “man” when society used to, or would like to, attach them to “woman,” or vice versa. 

Relatedly, pride in your gender identity or sexual orientation (or femininity or masculinity) wouldn’t need to be immediately dropped. Just recognize that what you’re proud of is all the things that words like “woman,” “trans” or “gay” stand for, not the words themselves.

And community is about solidarity with similar people, not the preservation of an identity that binds you as much as the system as a whole. You don’t need to box yourself in to effectively fight for your freedom.

Malvina Reynolds wrote and Pete Seeger sang: “Little boxes all the same / There’s a pink one and a green one / and a blue one and a yellow one / and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky / and they all look just the same.”

It’s not about making the little boxes equally sized or painting your box a unique color. It’s about tearing down the walls. It’s about embracing the furniture, not the building it all sits in.

Think of it this way. The revolutionary poor seek to escape the system of capitalism that binds them. Those persecuted by the gender hierarchy should do the same thing, abolish gender and live free.

Matthew Pellittieri is a 19-year-old history and political science sophomore from Ponchatoula.