Gender Subversion Today

From CrimethInc.

A Reprint and a Remix of Our Classic Poster

We’ve reprinted our classic gender subversion poster, “For Every Girl/For Every Boy.” To mark the occasion, we’ve also printed a new poster in homage to the original, celebrating collective resistance to the forms of gender fascism threatening us today. Here, we offer a deep dive into the legacy of the original poster, exploring the tension between gender abolition and gender self-determination.


Our classic gender subversion poster. Click on the image to order the poster.



Our new poster celebrating gender self-determination. Click on the image to order the poster.



Twenty years ago, we published the gender subversion poster, drawing on the creative work of Nancy R. Smith, Jacinta Bunnell, Laura Ann Newburn, Irit Reinheimer, and others. Over the following decades, we distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of the poster.

These posters have made their way around the world, into classrooms, libraries, clinics, guidance counselor’s offices, pride marches, dorm rooms, shelters, punk houses, teenage bedrooms, and colleges… I regularly receive texts from friends who spot this poster in all manner of places, sometimes even on a wall in a TV show. Recently, my friend Neko Case sent me a photo of the poster from the green room of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

-Jacinta Bunnell

Comrades printed the poster in Spanish, German, Ukrainian, and various other languages.

In September 2021, we let the poster go out of print. At the time, it seemed that our society was progressing towards more expansive ways of understanding gender. Since then, unfortunately, a reactionary offensive led by bigots and far-right politicians has gained ground, using the state to intensify the subjugation of women and to impose new forms of violence on trans, queer, and nonbinary people and those who support them. At the same time, we continued to receive requests for us to reprint the original poster. In the end, we decided to put another run of them in circulation, while also producing a new version that speaks to the terrain of struggles over gender that we face in 2023.

As before, we are distributing both versions for the costs of printing and postage alone. We have never sought to make money off this project, only to do our part to create a world in which all of us can make the most of our potential on our own terms, however that looks for each of us—a more welcoming and supportive world, without imposed gender norms or bigotry.


The artwork from the Portuguese version of our gender poster sighted at the Vaca Louca Café in Maringá, Brazil.


Struggles Over Gender Today

Twenty years ago, our poster had the audacity to ask: “What would the world look like without gender?” Since then, this question has become even more urgent—and even more challenging to answer.

On the one hand, we’ve witnessed major shifts in cultural understandings of gender. As Jacinta Bunnell explains, when the original poster appeared,

“There was not a culturally unified language for talking about gender fluidity at this point; so much of how we spoke of gender was still either/or.”

Today, nonbinary identities and gender-neutral pronouns have emerged from trans/queer subcultures and online communities into workplaces, schools, and public debates. Trans communities have received unprecedented visibility.

On the other hand, what had been a rising wave of conservative backlash has grown into a tsunami. It is no exaggeration to describe the reactionary program as gender fascism. As the popular saying goes, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” The struggle for gender self-determination has reached the “then they fight you” stage. Today, access to abortion care has been severely restricted in large regions of the US, while hundreds of proposed laws target trans people, especially youth, with restrictions on medical care, participation in sports, bathroom access, legal documentation, entertainment and culture, and more. At the same time, heads of state are citing the preservation of gender roles among their chief justifications for full-scale wars.

Yet at the same time that reactionaries are attempting to use state power to crush gender non-conformity and eliminate reproductive autonomy, the identity politics that emerged from 20th century liberation struggles are experiencing a crisis.


An illustration from the back of our classic gender poster.


We saw evidence of this on the second day of Donald Trump’s administration in 2017. The Women’s March protests in Washington, DC and around the US were among the most widely attended protests in a decade or more. But anarchists and other radicals largely focused on other priorities, and the massive energy of the mobilization dissipated quickly—in part because the category of “woman” does not suffice to describe all those who suffer as a consequence of gender oppression.

The right-wing culture war offensive on the terrain of gender seeks to take advantage of this crisis. While the breadth of support for abortion rights worries Republican strategists who are concerned with their electoral prospects, the right is gambling that it can target trans people with impunity, seeing them as a small and politically less powerful demographic ripe for scapegoating. By framing their attacks as defenses against existential threats to children, the family, and the gender order itself, they have inflamed their base with a sense of mission that identity-based coalitions have not been able to overcome.

The same social changes that have uprooted fixed notions of gender and enabled more expansive ways of being have also destabilized models of organizing that relied on coherent notions of identity. We need new ways of understanding ourselves to fight the forces that divide and oppress us, new ways to conceptualize who we are and what we can become. As a Brazilian comrade put it,

It is no longer possible to organize a collective action that still holds on to any fiction about “being a woman”; it is not possible to ignore the complicities of white/bourgeois feminism with colonial/racial power. The crisis of feminism is the vanguard of the revolutionary political crisis: there is no longer a subject of history; the demand for recognition/representativeness was swallowed up by neoliberal devices; there is no identity politics that can unite us; really, we don’t want to be part of the same story, we no longer want to organize our desires for a good and dignified life into a state grammar that can govern our lives. The beauty of feminism’s implosion is that it lets us see the hundreds of sharp shards we still have left. Feminism becomes a shattered place, but a place of investigation into what political action can be within life, with life and not outside it; what can make us dangerous again; how are we going to escape all these gender and identity traps?”

-Alana Moraes

These “gender and identity traps” loom all around us, and the stakes are urgent. How do we resist the rising tide of gender fascism without reverting to models of identity that no longer serve us?


The poster in German, hanging on a classroom wall.


Abolition and Self-Determination

One way to imagine our way towards the original poster’s provocation—“What would the world look like without gender?”—is to propose gender abolition. Inspired by the movements against the prison industrial complex that propose not more comfortable cages but an end to caging altogether, we could propose that gender itself is an oppressive system that cannot be reformed. This is not the same as saying that “gender isn’t real”—if it weren’t, there would be no need to abolish it!—but rather to insist that just as it has been constructed, it can be deconstructed.

What is gender, after all? As we know it, gender divides a wide range of human qualities and capabilities into mutually exclusive categories, such as “masculine” and “feminine.” This artificial division requires a wide range of forces—social pressures, policing, assorted mythologies, and a variety of technologies from laser hair removal to steroids and Viagra—to uphold the illusion that people come in two standard models rather than a wide spectrum of possibilities. To abolish gender would mean dismantling these varied systems of coercion that force us into one of two narrow boxes while hierarchically ranking them and punishing anyone who pushes their limits.

Unfortunately, some trans-exclusionary “radical feminists” have attempted to appropriate the language of “gender abolition” to describe their own hateful project. As contradictory as this may seem—given their efforts to gatekeep who counts as a woman and their alliances with the anti-feminist extreme right—they insist that gender, as a system of patriarchal social norms, perpetuates harm against people of the female sex. By itself, this assertion sounds reasonable—until they continue that, therefore, trans people are somehow uniquely responsible for upholding gender and thus causing harm to “women.” This cruel argument pits some victims of gender oppression against others, blaming trans people for their efforts to survive in a system they didn’t create. The supposed “abolition” that these transphobic activists pay lip service to only reinforces the rigid essentialism of sex, further stigmatizing efforts to shape our bodies and lives on our own terms. In fact, it can only perpetuate gender as we know it, not abolish it.

Confronting this context, we need to be clear about precisely what gender abolition in the service of liberation could mean today.

As an alternate framework, we propose gender self-determination, insisting on our autonomy to shape our bodies, presentations, and identities according to our own needs and desires. As we argued last year,

By shifting the discussion from the limits of rights to the horizon of self-determination, we propose a radically different world, in which no authorities—neither governments, religions, nuclear families, nor anything else—can confine us within their narrow visions of who we should be and who we can become.

What could this look like in practice? We’ve seen an explosion of creative new forms of gender identification in recent years, with new language and pronouns expanding far beyond binaries of male/female and cis/trans. These are encouraging, but they may not suffice to dislodge the power of imposed gender norms to shape the material circumstances of our everyday lives. Self-determination must mean more than choice in a consumer framework, a maximum of individual options for constructing our online profiles and Amazon wish-lists. In an alienated consumer society in which we are constantly being appraised and compelled to sell ourselves, defining ourselves with ever more precise categories and hashtags will not be enough to get us free.

Others have argued that we can appropriate pharmaceutical and surgical technologies to experiment with producing gender according to our own preferences. That’s an important start—and necessary, even life-saving, for some—and furious right-wing efforts to restrict our access to these methods indicates the threat they pose to guardians of the gender order. Nonetheless, so long as some gendered qualities and categories are valued while others are not, seizing the biomedical means of production to give us more latitude to construct our bodies and identities still will not serve undermine all the different ways that the prevailing gender roles constrain and oppress people.

How might we approach the task of undoing gender, combining the best elements of gender abolition and gender self-determination? By identifying which aspects of gender need abolishing, we can propose some points of departure:

  • Abolish gender segregation—ensure that people of all genders have access to the same opportunities, resources, social spaces, and forms of agency.

  • Abolish fixed gender roles—break the association between certain traits and certain genders, demonstrating new constellations of the qualities and capabilities that are currently associated with one gender or another. As the original poster suggests, you can be strong without being a boy and sensitive without being a girl; while this sentiment is increasingly accepted today, how much further can we go towards breaking free of the fixed roles and binaries that organize our thinking about human beings?

  • Abolish gender hierarchies—End practices that privilege one gender over another, and those that value some qualities and capabilities over others because of the gender they are associated with. Hillary Clinton becoming president would not have served to qualify our society as feminist—if a person of any gender has to outdo all other contenders in demonstrating traditionally masculine characteristics in order to get a foothold in politics, and if all political institutions continue functioning according to patriarchal priorities and protocols, gender oppression remains in effect even if not everyone in a position of power is a man.

  • Abolish gender gatekeeping—Do away with the boundaries that control who can identify with any gender. Defending trans identity, gender nonconformity, and other departures from fixed binary gender represents a step towards this goal.

Abolishing these dimensions of gender can create the space for the free flourishing of all people outside of oppressive roles and identities. We can affirm both the creative impulses that lead millions of people today to define themselves in gendered terms outside of birth assignments and binaries, while also taking aim at the structural conditions that constrain our lives regardless of how we identify.

As anarchists, we believe that we can only be free when all of us are free, and that everything that expands the horizons of freedom for others will benefit us, too. Nowhere is this plainer than on the terrain of gender.


The classic poster.


Gender Subversion Today—A New Poster on a Classic Theme

This is why we have prepared a remix of our classic gender poster. The front of the new version reads,

For every fascist who plans to attack drag queen story hour, there are three anti-fascists ready to defend it. For every boss who harasses you, there are ten workers who will back you up. For every judge who seeks to ban abortion, there are twenty collectives stockpiling Mifepristone and Misoprostol. For every cop who is paid to enforce transphobic legislation, there are a hundred gender outlaws determined to defy them. For every politician who tries to prohibit talking about gender in school, there are a thousand students charting their own paths beyond the binary. For every bigot who wants to etch their biases in stone, there is a movement that is already changing the world. For every person that takes one step towards freedom, there is another who finds the road to liberation a little easier.

The back of the poster presents a revised excerpt from our text, “The Fight for Gender Self-Determination.”

We hope that both of these posters of ours—both the classic one and the new remix—can play a part in new efforts towards getting free of gender norms. May they continue to hang in grade-school classrooms and collective houses, breaking up old models and assumptions.


The back of our new poster celebrating gender self-determination. Click on the image to order the poster.



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There are 55 Comments

Cool how the comments got all rounded up but you all tossed back this one

you turned a VERY COOL poster into a pretty LAME one.

go back to sleep crimethinc.

I think it's supposed to be for when they go door-hanging and fundraising in the liberal elite metropolitan zones. They'll leave one for free in your lawn! Just tell the TruGreen guys to watch out when the Mexicans are weed-whacking!

for everyone ridin' with biden....we will give this poster.

"we can appropriate pharmaceutical and surgical technologies to experiment with producing gender according to our own preferences."

can someone say post-modern

pfft, a crimethinc intern would be too busy making a better world to post on @news

you forgot "for every terf there are thousands of invite only tgirl orgies"

So there aren't nearly as many TERFs as you might think, then.

Also weird flex, dude.

I agree.

Dunno how old that person is, but bragging about sexual experiences is extremely childish and immature.

That person is a valued member thecollective. Age is just a number. How dare you.

agreed, crimethinc has been riding a particularly slimy progressive populism for a long time now, this is just their recent version.

Disagree. CrinethInc. is great and always on point. I like their stuff very much as do ALL the best anarchists that don't only exist in the comments section of Anews.

It's no different then God or society. It's just something that a lot of people believe in, is downstream of human sexual biology, and is a peformative totality of roles and responsibilities that concretize(quite often in a misplaced manner) in peoples minds and lives. You don't abolish this, you simply don't play the game if you have a problem with it. This is the difference between how a Stirnerian views these things vs how a Marxoid does. I'm basically seeing the old Marxist nonsense of it's a construct but it expresses 'real relations' bs.

I myself don't beat my self up over the existence of gender, it's someone like God belief and value albeit more concrete with downstream biological habit and inheritance playing a role. I personally think it has aesthetic value(many of these type of leftists are aesthetically challenged). This type of politics can go down some really retarded roads especially when you come across dotards like Demon Mama.

If you have a problem with gender just don't play the game.

Yeah that's the result of the succession of performative cultural roles which instinctual desires and sexual biology fall into, without the advantage of having a critical view upon personal free will and its expression. When gender becomes a role it loses authenticity and becomes a charade, and this may suffice as a satirical theatrical work, but when it poses as a real quality, aesthetics are revoked and the play becomes a brooding crass protest against something that could otherwise be handled with a graceful internal acceptance.

"with a graceful internal acceptance." = amor fati Been reading Neech brah ;)

Nothing. To be charitable however, something that is not heavily predicated on narrative, and reification. Society is a good example of misplaced concreteness, Dunbar number relations and relationships not so much.

All that nonsense and you still did not answer the question. One more time:

What is something that is "real"?

Still waiting.

Lol, nice, I must go back over some of the classic witticisms that PKD so poetically expressed.

The guy was an under appreciated prophet for the newly emerged space-age of his era. This Musk-Woke liberalism was the nightmare he envisioned.

Nothing is "real", everything is reified; that's the point.

But back to gender, it is not real, and that is only due to the self-evident fact it is a social construct. Both conservatives and (some) trangenderists - I am using the "-ist" to designate what has literally become a cult and its ideology - are admitting to this unwillingly, by reaffirming the biological existence of gender, and how this view is undermined by the 'Wokes' or the 'TERFs". The self-invalidating antinomy makes them both assert a gender, but at the same time deny its reality in how it is something one has to become or transition to.

Ergo, trans is quite the opposite to "gender nihilism" or queer, as it is asserting different means to the same old, binary ends. What we hear usually is "a trans women is a women"... not "a trans person is a non-gendered being". What a gender nihilist would say is "a women doesn't really exist". So make up your minds, liberals... is gender real or not real?

Excellent and concise considering the complexities that reification that has been piled upon the simple fact of having a dick or vag. I have a dick that's not in my ass, just saying!

I lost my dasein to a superficial self-absorbed gender identity crisis !

For every normal person looking to protest against creeps reading to kids in a library, there are 3 "anti-fascists" prepared to defend it.

Nice one, crimethinc.

obviously has released better writing in the past...I try to avoid social media, but yeah I've seen all that reactionary shit against gay books, and yes it's fucking stupid. I don't really understand what anon you are responding to is getting at, but they are making fun of CrimeThinc. which is obviously not a crime.

Maybe not everybody who hates teachers does so out of trying to enforce "cis het" values? Try asking questions, lumpy!

you "don't understand" and I do. that's why i don't need to ask a question here. that's how curiosity works

the original poster was about breaking down the gender binary and exposing it for bullshit. this one just seems to be about reinforcing the mainstream culture wars

Their versions of bigotry have won since then in many respects. Funny enough: they admit in the article that their anti-fascist strategies do not work in the struggle to suppress normative values.

We Will replace you.
RIP, cis het white mans.
*cries* nOooo bigotry! *cries*

cis het white man. Wow critical thinking here

Lumps is a lost ideological identity, a semi-nihilistic atheist spirit hater who is adverse to the free spirit Of the individualist will.

Lumpy is not lost he obviously is just chillin, rent free, in your thoughts 24/7. This is true will to powah! Neech would be pleased!

Abolish this abolish that... is this some Protestant pamphlet written by a bunch of petty bourgeois puritans? All I'm seeing in here is moral shaming thrown at people for at least partly adhering to "cishet" values. I want anarchy back on the menu, please. Gender turf cultural wars have been all over social media already... but they still never say anything about control systems, the patterns of self-policing and snitching and the overwhelming toxicity of power struggles.

Yup, identity politics is the ultimate red-herring political spin method,,,,it's sickening and boring hearing people getting all worked up about nationality, gender, race, like you said, it's nothing to do with the real toxic power politics, only about using identity as a voting lure to gain power.

are for people without an identity... e.g: "wow! look at me! look at how GAY I am!"

like broh, wtf cares? fuck off

"I have no friends and don't know who I am or what to do with my life." -sad anon without an identity or friends that spends all day trolling anews

bragging rights? I always thought it was more about sexual and fashion tastes.

Anyways, the reason why i don't like CrimeThinc.'s identity politics is its never about having less hierarchy, but always about the narratives pertaining to how hierarchy works. Those narratives are usually not very accurate, and tend to have a conspiracy theory logic to them. Their old poster was helpful for my younger-years confusion, the new poster is basically some very lol worthy chest thumping. Also, they clearly think compulsory schooling and indoctrination are less important issues than commenting on social consensus for drag queen book clubs for kids: wtf is up with that? So you guys have resigned yourselves to a permanent bourgie/academic hell.

Great! Im glad that im not invited, im glad that im not legally mandated to go to school...poor kids. I have talked to some zoomers over the past couple years, and they are miserable.

Hay broOoh, you should cum to the Hobo Club, we identify as obscure, anti-social, grumpy and unwashed individuals with deflated Randian values who wish to acquire an identity, and have chosen an obscure tendency from the 20th century ;)

in days of war nights of love anyways, it makes a few good points but not likely to "destroy capitalism" as its writers were hoping for. It is shocking to me that at least 10% of the comments on here are at least as good as all these articles.

There is a big difference between identifying as something, and using liberalized weaponized "identity politics"

and also there is a lot of difference between what you are and what you identify as

identity politics:

"there is a lot of difference between what you are and what you identify as"

I try to stay away from the political theory with the "weaponization" and "liberalism" etc., because those terms can basically be used to mean anything and everything (kind of like modern "racism"), but outside of cluttered human bullshit, you are nothing. The identity thing is basically just a number you are assigned in a prison. A name should be used as a reference by people who know you.

"The identity thing is basically just a number you are assigned in a prison."

Brow, your "name" is basically a number you are assigned in a prison too.

"A name should be used as a reference by people who know you."

Nobody can know you. You are a complex and unique human being anarch beyond being-knowing!

Excelsior!

agreed! It's all just a matter of perspective, i do think the way that people in politics use the identity-labels ("white", "black" ,"indigenous", "woman", "man", "true scotsman", etc.) is more prison-esque than the usage of a name...because the name is supposed to be what those who know you personally use to identify you.

The prison guard may very well know you and care about you (and maybe a little bit too much, if you get what i'm saying!) but the person in the back office who uses your prisoner number for their job probably doesn't. Identity is a very cold and non-existent thing...names are non-existent, but there's a little bit of loving warmth there, if you get what i'm saying.

YeeEees, only the dasein entity immersed within their own consciousness REALLY knows themselves,,,

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