"The future is female" - where do nonbinary folk fit in?

What does TSR think? Is the slogan exclusionary? Or is it merely a clumsily worded but ultimately positive statement that nonbinary folks can rally behind too?

https://rewire.news/article/2018/11/27/future-is-not-female-its-nonbinary/

Summarising the article:

“The future is female.”

It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

You can find it in cute, curvy writing on coffee mugs, or written in bold font on trendy T-shirts.

I am a white heterosexual woman who was assigned female at birth and has pushed out two human beings from my vaginal opening. By conventional definitions, I fall very hard within racial, sexual, and gender binaries.

But the more I understand that, the more that I try to raise children to be who they are, the more I’m bothered by “the future is female.”

I know it’s supposed to be a forward-looking slogan that envisions a time where women are given our due.

But the statement reinforces some very backward ideologies. With colonization came the enforcement of sex, gender, and sexuality binaries, and fierce attempts to erase cultures (like many in the Americas and Africa) that recognized gender identities and presentations outside of a binary, something that white people couldn’t fathom. Whiteness, binaries, and oppression go together.

But women who have only one chromosome, a single X, aren’t any less “female” or “woman” than I am. Neither do people with the XY combo have to be “male” or subscribe to any gender.

Are intersex people - who have more or less chromosomes than average - defined solely by their genes or genitalia? There’s more diversity among humanity than what we see on the outside. What about people with less and more chromosomes than "normal"?

The word “female” is still invoked as the "scientific" definition of a biological woman, which incorrectly conflates sex and gender and erases the identities of intersex and nonbinary people. This false definition isn’t just propagated by the far-right. Some self-proclaimed feminist movements, like gender-critical radical feminists (also known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs) or the so-called anti-abortion feminists also use this definition of what it means to be a woman. How either group can call themselves feminists with their narrow ideas of womanhood and stances against reproductive rights, I don’t know.

While we can point the finger at these groups, there’s just as much work to do in feminist circles that believe in real gender justice, circles that should know that genes do not make gender. We can’t embrace a pithy but exclusionary slogan, even one that asserts that we need more nonmen in leadership, especially nonwhite and nonstraight ones.

But women who have only one chromosome, a single X, aren’t any less “female” or “woman” than I am.

People don’t take non binary seriously

Popcorn provided, brother.

"The left" is not, and never has been, a singular ideology.

Or, if we are to accept that there are just two ideologies, right and left, you are surely aligned with the Nazis, by virtue of being right-wing.

They don't.

Thank you for listening to my speech.

They dont, the most basic biology tells us this.

Ah yes, but biology is inherently transphobic.

I mean, it's not, it's more that transphobes know jack all about biology beyond KS3 and use that flawed understanding like a cudgel.


"The future is female" is a snappy but misleading slogan, it's not an actual plan or owt like that - much as some anti-feminists would like to pretend feminism is about the subjugation of men, and use this slogan as proof, modern feminism is fairly clear that gendered structures harm all genders, not just women. That said, it comes from a position of ignoring third genders and the article is quite right that insistence on a binary is a very imperialistic attitude that ignores the richness of cultures around the globe.

you are surely aligned with the Nazis, by virtue of being right-wing.

But the Nazis were self proclaimed socialists.