#as though Bo Laurent doesn't exist

[sagevalleymusings]

Not to shit all over Canton Winer's extremely small and self-selecting sample of queer asexuals, but

the term agender was coined in 2006

the entire premise of The Second Sex was about how womanhood was defined as what manhood was not

The entire concept of "gender critical" is about how gender doesn't exist and has been integral to separatist feminism for over thirty years

Canton Winer is not the first person to use the term "gender detachment." I searched Google, Google Scholar, and JSTOR, and found a little over 30 results from as early as the mid aughts

Increased rates of non-gender conforming identities in asexual populations is already well established. In order to have non-conforming identities in either you have to have already examined your identity. Canton does admit this latter half with no mention of prior scholarship.

I can't find Canton's Gender Detachment thesis on JSTOR or Google Scholar but no examination of gender and sexuality can draw solid conclusions without discussing age and race, at minimum, since these two things have radical effects on how gender and sexuality are perceived

It's also a well studied phenomenon that cis people do not have a concrete sense of gender identity - much in the same way that white people do not have a concrete sense of racial identity. Their privilege as a cis person means that they do not need to think about their gender. "Gender Detachment" isn't a new concept - it is the default.

I tend to distrust people who say "research on [this topic] is pretty slim" because what it means is that they haven't done their research. Searching for asexuality in JSTOR yields at least 200 results, which is smaller than, for example, women, but the oldest cited source (and again this is just on JSTOR) is from 1973.

At some point Canton says "Almost all of my gender detached respondents were assigned female at birth" which is extremely telling in and of itself because this information is nearly useless without context (because knowing they are afab doesn't tell us if they are cis), and actually useless in context. Given what they've said about their sample here and other places, it looks like only 8 or so of the 77 were men to begin with, which means you actually can't draw any meaningful results about gender detachment among men literally at all. That's too small a sample size by an actual magnitude.

Like yes I do think it's helpful for someone this self-important social media savvy to bring awareness to this concept, but from what I've read so far this sounds... I don't know if there's a better word for it other than mansplaining, which I dislike using on non-binary persons, but this is where we're at. You want to be an allosexual amab *inventing terminology* for asexual afabs then as an asexual afab I get to call that mansplaining.

You run in lesbian circles and you discover immediately that this idea of frustration, apathy, and irresolution towards gender has been explored from a scholarly perspective for decades. Lines like "but that work has been mostly theoretical" and "My findings complicate the (often unstated) assumption that everyone “has” a gender identity" are so unhinged from real experiences of lesbian activists *who have written about this* as to be delusional. This PhD candidate has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

Since when have we been assuming "everyone" has a gender identity? Has that concretely been established? Or is that something this author is assuming is an assumption? Because it hasn't been my experience. I've had to push at every job I've ever worked at to change their forms from asking about a person's sex to asking about a person's gender in an attempt to be more inclusive to those whose gender doesn't match their sex. Does that imply everyone has a gender? No, of fucking course not. It implies that we still don't have good language for talking about this, and maybe never will. It implies that asking about people's sex is outdated and asking about people's gender only makes that obvious. It implies that patriarchy is so embedded into our systems of hierarchy that attempts to make that hierarchy more inclusive will still, inevitably, institute a hierarchy with their solutions.

And I would sincerely hope, though I am not convinced that this was done, that his research doesn't simply drop this term and peace out. Because "inventing" a gender theory term this close to describing gender critical biological essentialism without talking about how close it is to gender critical biological essentialism is irresponsible scholarship. There is an entire movement of women using their "gender detachment" to oppress trans women. If you're going to talk about this, you need to talk about that.

i feel so seen!!

(twitter thread)