"Transcending" analysis/anything goes? : response to review symposium on "queer post-gender ethics"

In my work, my main intentions were to question whether it is possible for humyns to understand themselves, others and societies, without the notion of humyns as being one of two discrete sexed species of male and female. In particular, I was concerned with whether and how this may be possible with a feminist ethos, that is in a way that is mindful of a patriarchal context premised on the assumed realness of dimorphism and its gendered implications. In part this was motivated by my witnessing people and communities who are already feeling this way, attempting to live this way, treat others in this way, and to communicate these ideas more widely. And who are also staunchly, correspondingly feminist. Aside from those rather subcultural examples that I cited in the book, which I am aware are always open to 'bubble world' logic (as in McCulloch's critique) or 'PC gone mad' charges of lunacy (Campbell 2016), there is now growing mainstream awareness of the multiplicity of ways of understanding sex, gender, sexuality and identity more widely. This is indicative of massive shifts in young people's understandings of gender. Indeed, research by the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (Smith et al. 2014) denotes a trend away from what Moore here called the 'wrong body narrative' of trans* towards far less binary modes of understanding the self. I use 'understanding the self' and resist the term 'identity' here because I think that a post-hoc application of the simple notion of 'identity' idea to what young people are doing is to dishonour its unshakeably queer intentions, a post-identity idea that is core to my work and which I will return to at the end of this piece. According to this report, 'young people increasingly identify as "other" to man/woman models of "sexed" identity, positioning themselves as "queer", "genderqueer", and/or "gender questioning"' (Smith et al. 2014: 17). In their sample, over 50% of respondents identified not with trans*, but with the more destabalising, less identitarian 'gender queer.' It is this phenomenon to which I am responding, which I am attempting to honour and take seriously.