Feminism was never about eliminating gender from the equation. You can’t. It’s impossible. Like it or not, our lives and perceptions are filtered through lenses of experience like gender.
Feminism is about keeping one dominant group from telling the other groups how they get to live their lives. What they’re allowed to do and what they’re not. Who gets to make decisions about their futures and the opportunities they are allowed to access. That sort of thing. It was never about eliminating gender, whatever that’s supposed to mean.
When you say eliminating gender, you’re most likely talking about eliminating the female gender and defaulting back to male gender as the standard rather than leaning into androgyny by embracing a combination of the two or putting gyno-centricity into the position of primacy, this neutering the androgenetic, or even getting rid of them both.
This is the same argument used by people who think racism will end by adopting a philosophy of being color blind and proclaiming proudly that "I don’t see color".
It’s unlikely you’ve thought about what the phrase "eliminating gender" will entail, who will be affected, and how. In the end eliminating gender is just as oppressive a system because it will have to be forced upon an unwilling populace and maintained by brutality. As long as our bodies are different, we are different. We don’t want to eliminate difference. We want to embrace it, honor it, uplift it, and celebrate it. We don’t want to force increasingly narrow definitions on anyone based on someone else’s esoteric ideals, historic or not. We don’t want a person to be subjected to violence because of the body they were born into. We don’t want laws to prevent people from opportunity based on their body.
So... hard think question. Are you willing to erase the self in the name of equality by eliminating gender? Are you ready to force that on the rest of humanity too?
No? Then it’s probably a good thing that equality between the sexes and feminism does not rest on eliminating gender, but rather on eliminating a dominance hierarchy that places one type of person over another for the benefit of a very small few at the top of the structure. I think you referee to that philosophy as “inclusion". Yes, it’s still there.
