Riding the Gender Bubble

Sustaining the mysticism of Gender Identity relies on making us hyper-invested in the profit (economic, social, political) of the moment to blind us to the catastrophic harms in the future

Ahead of the 2008 financial crisis the market was flush with innovative financial instruments. One flavor, Mortgage Backed Securities, bundled together large collections of individual mortgage debt into securities to be traded by investors. While the debts were tied to real assets, homes that individuals and families lived in, the securities were decoupled from any physical reality. The dining rooms were families ate, the kitchens they cooked in, the nooks and crannies that became favorite spots to play or read, the bedrooms that offered rest and refuge - everything of value that the home offered individuals, families and communities - does not exist in the securitized form. It’s the real melted into a representation whose only function was to make profit through market trade.

The value of a Mortgage Backed Security was unmoored from any use-value, it was purely a speculative instrument. Its value was seeded by marketing and amplified by greed. The financial institutions making the securities worked with supposedly trusted ratings agencies and media to assign fictitious value to garbage. Investors, eager to not miss out on rapidly growing opportunity, had no reason to question the fiction, and once invested, every incentive to participate in perpetuating it for as long as possible. A conspiracy of convenience fueled by greed and conformity gave us a financial bubble built on lies - a bubble which eventually burst.

Gender Identity is to human biology what Mortgage Backed Securities are to homes - the real dissolved into a marketable abstraction whose value is divorced from utility. Our bodies, evolved biological marvels capable of incredibly complex processes, are given to us by the simple fact of our birth - no market transaction required. Like all of our biology, our sexually differentiated nature was a consequence of evolutionary optimizations. The primary function of this differentiation lies in the specialized roles each sex plays in the reproductive process and early rearing. The balance of our dimorphic characteristics are quite variable in impact and significance. What role they play and what value they hold in society being contingent on the specific cultural context one finds themselves in.

American society’s turn away from basic sex towards gender identity suggests that determining the most meaningful aspects of the symbolic abstractions that we refer to as “man” or “woman” is increasingly an exercise in receiving price signals from the market. Given the dominant forces in society, the tendency towards embracing exchange-value for all things shouldn’t be shocking. The bits and pieces of these categories (man/woman) which can be most successfully commodified and present the largest opportunity for profit will, over time, become their most salient properties. What you don’t have to pay money for or doesn’t serve the market, will decrease in perceived value as consumer logic colonizes more of our minds. The things facilitated by the market - makeup, clothes, plastic surgery, diet and fitness programs, hormones, and the instruments needed for social media self-commodification - will become what matters most about what the words “man” and “woman” mean.

Gender Identity can, in this view, be understood as the ultimate synthesis of the most market-facing dimensions of the sex categories into a bundled security. A synthetic form that is largely divorced from the biological utility of our evolved sexual dimorphism. Given the nature of market capitalism, the financialization of this bundled form was an eventuality; the entirety of market-facing “maleness” and “femaleness” is converted into an instrument to be bought and sold in one fell swoop. With this in hand the stage was set for the gender bubble to grow.

In the case of Mortgage Backed Securities, financial institutions, ratings agencies and investors worked together to expand their market and inflate their value. In the case of the Gender Identity product, the psycho-pharma industry innovate the product and provide it with a scientific veneer through its professional associations. “Human rights” NGOs work to seed the value by offering up a moral logic and a fictitious societal horizon for its legitimation. Finally, regular people, a few directly implicated through personal relationships while most invested in the moral righteousness the NGOs promise them, become evangelists in a Moral-Multi-Level-Marketing scheme to keep the bubble growing.

The Gender Identity product isn’t like a hammer or a saw. Most people don’t buy it because of its direct utility to them. Its value - what the buyer believes they are getting for their money (and therefore how much the seller can expect to charge) - lies entirely in other people’s response to it. A synthetically manufactured approximation of secondary sex traits is worthless absent the social recognition of its implied metaphysics and the interpersonal acceptance it can engender in everybody else and the societal institutions where sex matters. To paraphrase the famous thought experiment: If a man cuts his dick off in the forest and nobody is there to see him, did he really become a woman?

Credit agencies promised stable and lucrative investments by giving “AAA rating” for garbage securities, the selling of gender requires a more outlandish promise. The marketing of the Gender Identity product entails convincing its potential customers that the entirety of society, in its interpersonal and institutional forms, will, in perpetuity, show deference to the metaphysical transformation implied in the product that was purchased.

It promises heterosexual women that through the magic of the gender product they will become gay men and find a place and meaningful sexual connection within that community. It promises that the customary and legal veil guarding the myriad of women’s spaces from men for reasons of safety and increasing participation in social life, from changing rooms to sports, can be pierced with estrogen injections and cosmetic surgery. It promises that the coercion that largely defines how this product achieves these promises at the current moment - through constant ideological conditioning, surveillance and moral opprobrium - will eventually give way to voluntary acceptance and eventually earnest belief. These promises cannot be kept.

As susceptible as society is to the fiction of gender identity, the ever expanding implications and contradictions being experienced by society at large means that it will eventually burst at the seams. As much power as the institutions of our political-economy has to advance the interests of capital and those that possess it, the system can only sustain the coercion necessary to force people to play along for so long. The edict that people not see what’s in front of their eyes, to speak and act in a way that is incongruous with their basic experience of the world, is unsustainable.

Those inside the bubble cannot see or even contemplate this eventual rupture - the bubble is too fragile and the present benefits too attractive to look beyond the current moment. The future consequences are of no concern for a medical-industrial complex whose horizons optimize for quarterly profit. It isn’t a concern for the NGOs whose success is measured by their annual fundraising. It isn’t a concern for those who extract political utility from the polarization this engenders, whose horizons are the next election cycle. It isn’t of concern for everyday NPR liberals whose social and economic incentives preclude critical analysis of anything that they are taught in corporate HR training.

When the gender bubble bursts, which it eventually will, those who profited will enjoy their wealth unmolested; those who provided legitimation will bury the memory of where they stood as they jump on the next corporate-approved morality train that will get them maximum likes on Instagram. Those who were sold on the inevitability of this novel metaphysics taking hold in society and consequently bet their, or more tragically their children’s, psyches, bodies and future relationships, will be left with a worthless product whose debts no bankruptcy court can discharge. There will be no bailouts.

Living in the Moment

Our relationship with the future - our own, that of those we care about, and of society at large - just like all our relationships, is becoming threadbare. The shrinking horizons of our attention (given the nature of our media consumption) and the intensification of the emotional tenor of the present (given the hyper-polarized nature of our social/political discourse) conspire with a catastrophized vision of the future (end-of-the-world climate destruction) to bury us in an all-consuming presentism.

With a future too dark to contemplate beyond end-times fantasies and a present animated by constant anxiety, we are reduced to reactive beasts. The tiniest grasp we might have on something that looks like free will disappears. We unburden ourselves from exercising our predictive faculties to assess how our current actions will most likely manifest in the future. In doing so we abandon a critical instrument of care, the temporal cost-benefits analysis, whether it be for ourselves, for our children, or for our society. What we have today is a simulacra of care, the constant numbing and erasure of only our most immediate and petty discomforts.

The obscene medical scandal occurring in front of our eyes is thus rendered invisible. Understanding its harms requires some capacity and desire to reflect on how things will unfold beyond the current moment and the narrow scale of individuals detached from a greater societal context. The sickening mantra of “be kind” amounts to nothing more than a demand to abandon one another (even our own children) to the whims of the market without consideration of future consequences for them or society - but to do so with a friendly smile. We are building a world of “safe-injection sites” where immediate and burdensome problems are corralled outside our view and beyond the reach of our collective responsibility, all while we high five each other for our kindness.

The Politics of the Now

No politics that can accomplish meaningful change in the face of entrenched power can emerge from those whose minds are poisoned by presentism. People telling you that they want to challenge the power of capitalism but are in a constant hysterical froth about whatever the current, and always changing, thing is are lying to themselves and lying to you. Building political power is a long term project that requires sustained attention and capacity for prediction.

If you’re looking for a way to evaluate political movements and ideologies, yours and that of others, the question of temporal horizons is a key diagnostic measure. Those incapable or unwilling to engage in a material assessment of how things will develop over time, but instead insist on fighting on the psychic plane of attitudes and sentiments, are embracing politics that can never have power. It ultimately amounts to nothing more than artificial negativity - a performance of emotive radicalism in service of perpetuating the status quo. In this we can see one of our political-economy’s grandest innovation: stripping its subjects of the most basic mental tools to imagine and evaluate the means of challenging its hegemony.