Gender Liberation

I do not suggest that gender equality hasn’t been helpful or useful in further the rights and goals of women. I do not suggest that gender equality is inherently bad, immoral, or regrettable. I do not suggest that efforts toward gender equality have not yielded positive tangible results for women, such as access recourses, opportunities, education, and government. I do not suggest that gender equality has been wholly unbeneficial to the queer community.

However, I do suggest that there are some fundamental problems to gender equality that prohibit the liberation of all women, including queer, trans, and intersex women. I am proposing that gender liberation is a more inclusive way to liberate women beyond the constraints of white-supremacist, cis-hetero- patriarchy. Not only that gender liberation could prove to

Though gender equality might be the goal of most feminists, I propose that gender equality is not enough to liberate us. The goal is gender liberation.

The greater sin is not gender roles, gender norms, gender constructs, or even the gender binary. The greater sin is not submissive women nor dominate men. The greater sin is not dominate women nor submissive men. The greater sin is not being transgender or cisgender. The greater sin is not compliance or defiance to one’s gender assignment. The greater sin is not men who love women, nor men who love men. The greater sin is not women who love men, nor women who love women. The greater sin is not those that desire all genders, nor those that desire no genders. There is no more sin in a woman who desire domination than a woman who desire to be dominated. Neither is sinful. The greater sin is not inequality.

The greater sin is removing robust agency by demanding sameness. The greater sin is tyrannical impositions on your desires and potential. The greater sin is to assign you a role based on your morphology and remove your agency to choose or create your own.

As bell hooks taught us, “being oppressed means the absence of choices.” If this is true, it follows that the best way to remove the shackles of oppression is not to demand equality or sameness, but to gift yourself and others the gift of choice. I do not simply mean one or two choices, but a whole banquet of choices. And if the option is not available, we ought to encourage the creation of more choices to satisfy the divine urge to self-actualize according to godly desires.

Not only that, freedom of choice ought to come with an enthusiastic celebration! Too often we are given choices that mean very little when marrying one gender over another comes with communal rejection and social alienation. When the presentation of one gender comes with scorn and the other presentation invokes our finest congratulations, freedom of choice is diluted to a disingenuous platitude. Too many preachers of freedom worship hollow idols of liberation that are secretly filled with oppression. For some, freedom means retaining the right to hurt others if we don’t like their choices. That is not the freedom of choice I’m suggesting.

The freedom of choice I’m suggesting is a true celebration of our divine diversity. Gender liberation means that your body, anatomy, morphology, and gender are not grounds to impinge on your choice to love, live, and create as you desire. Of course, these desires will impinge on each other as competing desires often do, but equality will not liberate. Only the freedom to choose according to your desires can do that.

Fight oppression with liberation, not equality.