I am unfortunately not at a point yet where I can write my own additions to this piece but I wanted to start venturing into gender and gender roles because there are a lot of marxists who repeat, no doubt because it seems to make sense on the surface, that gender is a social construct or that it should be abolished. A lot of it is Butlerian in nature and I highly recommend Leslie Feinberg who was positioned against the butlerian view of gender.
The sense of self is completely omitted in the Butlerian view of gender (as a performance), in that as a (cis) man if I acted (performed) like a woman and put on women’s clothes, then that theory states I would be a woman. But I would not feel like one, because I know I’m not a woman. And if I lived in a false reality that forced me act like a man all my life from childhood to the point that I also believed I was a man (say in the same way you can make someone believe the sky is red if you berate them enough), then what explains that trans people specifically are able to “break out” of this mold? A lot of common (in marxist circles) feminist theory is unfortunately completely dismissive of trans people, trans men especially - if gender is a construct to pit oppressors and oppressed then why would anyone “choose” to be part of the oppressed group? Everyone ought to perform as men if that were the case. As for gender abolitionism, the author makes the case in their essay :)
I don’t mean to put words in anyone’s mouth but my understanding through experience is that gender abolitionists promote the withering away view - I take this from the various vetting tickets I handle on marxist spaces such as this one or discords. They’re not quite out there actively trying to abolish gender, but see it as something that will cease to exist eventually, in one way or another.
So in that way (again not saying every gender abolitionist/withering away is transphobic!) I have come to understand that gender abolitionism and the view that gender will wither away (whether it actually will is another question) are one and the same. Some people might put more urgency on it than others. Like I said in possibly another comment a lot of it seems to come from seeming like a common sense conclusion.
I don’t remember meeting strict ‘withering away’ theorists so I can’t speak as to what they think if they exist!
I think I’m in the ‘withering away’ camp and don’t think abolition is a useful framework. Gender contradictions aren’t antagonisitc, or at least, they don’t have to be. Non-antagonistic contradictions can simply be managed until the contradictions achieve a higher unity in synthesis (and then produce new contradictions that we probably can’t even imagine in our current gender paradigm).
I also don’t think gender withers away simply because we get rid of family, private property, and the state. I think those are some of the material foundations for gender as we know it and they are much of the foundation for gender roles, but gender itself can’t be resolved without addressing the technological limitations of gender affirming care. I know in my case I will probably never get bottom surgery, because even though I might be interested in it conceptually I don’t think the technology can give me exactly what I want. Gender can never wither away as long as we are so limited by our own bodies and gender affirming technology.
But eventually we will surpass these limitations. I envision a day that “transition” won’t even exist as a concept because we can just change ourselves at will, there will be so many genders and so many gender expressions and gender will be so fluid and dynamic that people today wouldn’t even recognize it as gender anymore.
I think we’re going to have gender for a long time, even after we defeat capitalism, but I also think there is a horizon where we’ll leave it behind because it isn’t useful anymore.