Imagining Life After Patriarchy

This article was previously published as part of The Reconstruction Papers. The entire book is available in print and as a PDF.

From the moment we are born, gender-marginalized people do not own our bodies. We are born into patriarchy—the smallest and most intimate form of dictatorship, in which every (cis) man is promised the total, violent control over “his” wife and “his” children that other men exercise over nations. Because patriarchy assigns power and human value based on gender, our gender must always be legible and under state control.

It is—oh, how it is. From birth or before, we are assigned genders based on limited and often misleading information, which will determine everything about our place in society: How we are allowed to behave, how we are supposed to look, who we are permitted to associate with, what sorts of sexual or romantic relationships we are meant to have, what sort of work we are allowed to do.

Our bodies are public property. They are controlled by parents, who tell us whether we can transition; by the state, which tells us whether we can abort; by rapists, who do not consider our consent necessary; by husbands, boyfriends, or the world at large, where the mere fact of being feminine or female means that our sexuality, our childbearing, our dress, and our physical appearance are presumed to be matters of public concern.

The whole world gets a vote on our bodies. We are only one voice in that crowd, and we are outnumbered. This cannot possibly be freedom.

All of this was true before Donald Trump was ever conceived and spat forth into the world. It may well continue to be true once he is dead. But the Trump project is openly aligned with patriarchy, in ways that even other Republicans have tended to play coy about. As of November 2024, one in three of Trump’s Cabinet picks¹ had been accused of sexual assault and misconduct. These men have gone on to exercise violent control over the bodies of women and other gender-marginalized people with the power of the state, just as they did with the power of their fists: The appointment of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed despite sexual-assault allegations leveled by Christine Blasey Ford,² made it possible for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022.³

Trump himself has, of course, been accused of rape or sexual assault so many times that it’s hard to keep count—E. Jean Carroll won a civil suit against him in May 2023⁴—and is currently implicated in a conspiracy that allowed the world’s most powerful men to rape countless young girls, due to the leak of the Epstein emails, in which his name, as per the Wall Street Journal, comes up in 1,670 of 2,324 email threads.⁵

Throughout all this, the patriarchy’s anxious, sweaty need to control and ascertain gender has been on display, as trans people have been rhetorically spun from a tiny and relatively powerless minority into the ogres threatening to devour the nation’s children. Kamala is for they/them, Trump is for you: The attacks on youth gender medicine, on trans girls on sports teams, on queer books and school bathrooms and pronouns in email signatures have all been carried forth in the name of restoring a “natural” gender order that never existed, and often, incredibly, in the name of “protecting” women and girls.

Undoing Trump will mean undoing all of the above—but preventing another Trump, keeping the culture from backsliding into fascism the next time a sufficiently charismatic monster arises, means undertaking a far deeper transformation. We must, insofar as we possibly can, work to eradicate patriarchy as the basis of our cultural and legal arrangements. It will require a profound shift, one that stretches from the highest seats of power into the most intimate parts of our lives.

Having said that, of course, I’m now expected to provide a solution. I’m not sure any one person or essay can do that: The change is too profound to be summed up in a few words, or even a few thousand. What I do know, though, is that this change has been deeply desired, and even planned for, by many many people, for a long, long time. I benefit from decades, or centuries, of their work.

Bodily autonomy, as an organizing principle, tends to cut across liberal-leftist border lines—some of the solutions I’m proposing here, including “wages for housework,” were first demanded by socialist feminists like Silvia Federici. Others, such as twenty-four-hour state-run childcare centers, were demanded by liberal feminist organizations like NOW. This may be frustrating for those who view politics as a factional game. What it suggests to me, however, is that there is a rare and promising consensus on this issue; everyone has a body, nearly everyone has a family, and by focusing on them, we uphold both the basic liberal principles of equality and individual freedom and the more classically leftist goal of a society that provides for all its citizens.

If we want to progress beyond posturing or arguing and actually help some people, this is one very promising place to begin. We deserve to start imagining life after Trump, and after patriarchy. Here, then, are a few first steps.

#1: Stop assigning genders

It’s a point as simple as it is obvious: No one would have to go through the hassle of “legally” changing their sex if no one had a legal sex. Removing gender markers from birth certificates, passports, driver’s licenses, and other forms of legal documentation would make it possible for people to change their gender presentation and/or come out as trans without going through a costly and exhausting bureaucratic process, and without being exposed to outing and harassment when their documentation doesn’t match their looks.

That’s the practical argument. The moral one is, if we truly believe that all genders are created equal, and that “women” and “men” can do the same sorts of work and occupy the same positions in the public sphere, then someone’s gender simply shouldn’t be relevant in the vast majority of contexts, and the state has no reason to track it. Gender has its private benefits, and I enjoy them, but it should never be a state concern. And though I’m hesitant to buy any argument that labels gender an “ideology,” it is undeniably true that there are several competing beliefs about gender in American society; the liberal principle of free exercise prohibits the state from giving preference to any one belief system (say, the belief that gender is connected to body type and determined by chromosomes).

Finally, slapping a gender assignment on someone at birth is an outdated practice that doesn’t align with our 21st-century understanding of gender as a process. All it can do is encourage stereotyping and make it harder for a child to develop an independent sense of self, and this is true whether the child is cis or trans. Most parents will still know what kind of genitalia their baby has—if you’re changing diapers, it’s hard not to—and some will still assign meaning to that. But that, again, is a private choice, based on a personally held belief system, and as such, it does not require the state to back it up.

People deserve to enter this world without the weight of several thousand years of calcified gender expectations on their backs. This isn’t about helping anyone cross a line. It’s about removing a line that should never have existed, because it never indicated any truth.

#2: Comprehensive gender education

Fuck it: Let’s trans some kids.

“Gender education” is something we all receive from birth, even if it’s largely unspoken: Girls have long hair; boys have short hair. Girls wear dresses; boys wear pants. Girls can be teachers; boys can be presidents. But leaving a child to pick up their idea of gender from a stew of unexamined stereotypes and unequal labor arrangements tends to perpetuate those inequalities—and says nothing about the spectrum of genders that exists beyond the binary of (cis) “mommies” and (cis) “daddies” that still dominates mainstream culture.

That broader spectrum should and must be taught, in age-appropriate ways, from pre-K on up. Kids deserve to know that people of all genders are equally human and equally worthy of respect and dignity; they deserve to be taught how to distinguish realities from gender stereotypes; they deserve to know that trans and nonbinary people exist. This education isn’t something we should half-abashedly “defend”; it is a positive good that we should endorse, embrace, and pursue. Yes, this education probably will help some children realize that they’re trans, and that in itself will be lifesaving. But it will also set cis children up to successfully navigate a complex world full of people unlike themselves.

The more we talk about gender, the less frightening it will be, and that sunlight will help disintegrate the misogyny and transphobia that still lurk in the subtext of our culture. But gender is not the only taboo subject we need to be teaching, which brings us to:

#3: Comprehensive sex education

Since the second Bush administration, sex-education programs for adolescents have been gutted across the country,⁶ leaving kids struggling to piece together their knowledge of sex from bad porn, worse podcasts, and whatever toxic sludge the algorithm serves up. The health costs are well-documented: States with “abstinence-only” education have the highest rates of gonorrhea and chlamydia,⁷ as well as higher rates of teen pregnancy than states that teach about contraception.

Depriving young people of information about sex does not stop them from having sex. But it does make them more likely to have sex in ways that hurt them, or in ways that hurt and traumatize their partners. Accordingly, we need science-based, queer-inclusive, feminist education on consent and good sex—meaning safe, meaning pleasurable, meaning consensual—across the board.

Sexuality enters most people’s lives much later than gender does, and education about sexuality can likewise wait until kids are developmentally ready to learn. Still, the basics of consent and bodily autonomy can and should be taught from the time children can talk. Every child has the right to know accurate terminology for their body parts—which will help them report abuse if, God forbid, it does happen—and every child has the right to know that no one is allowed to touch them without their permission, just as they should never touch other people against their will.

When kids are older, teaching them about contraception and sexually transmitted diseases will be important, but it is only part of the picture. Consent and pleasure should form the backbone of sexual education—people with vulvas, in particular, deserve to see their bodies as sites of potential pleasure and joy, not just as pregnancies waiting to happen. Kids also deserve to know that sexual attraction, like gender, does not look only one way; there is a broad spectrum of attractions as well as many acts that fall under the general heading of “sex,” and none are intrinsically wrong as long as they’re done safely and with consent.

Again: Teenagers will find out about sex one way or another. In the age of Pornhub, it’s hard to stop them. But accurate information about sex, and how they can keep themselves and their partners safe, healthy, and happy, is much harder to come by. For the sake of public health, all kids—including queer and trans kids—should get accurate, nonjudgmental information about sexuality. You cannot exercise bodily autonomy if you do not know how your body works.

#4: Comprehensive education. For everyone.

Careful readers will note that both of the above recommendations rely on a functioning and well-funded public education system. If I may, I’d like to deliver a spicy take: Not only should we have such a system, we should not have anything else.

School integration is a good thing, which is why bigots have been looking for ways to roll it back for more than half a century, and equal education has been a core liberal value since the days of Mary Wollstonecraft and Frederick Douglass. People cannot contribute equally to society unless they are given equal preparation to do so; they cannot make free choices unless they are aware of what those choices are. They also cannot maintain an egalitarian society unless they learn how to successfully navigate a world full of people unlike themselves.

Private schooling—whether we’re talking about Evangelical homeschooling or elite prep schools—stands in contradiction to all of those values. These schools function primarily as a means to stratify children, depriving some of much-needed information while giving others unjust advantages in the form of peer networks and educational pedigrees. It is especially important to level the playing field early, as kids are growing up, because inequalities introduced at this time will linger for the rest of their lives. Even something as simple as which pre-K a child attends—if their parents can afford to send them, since most school districts still don’t provide universal pre-K education—significantly affects their educational outcome⁸ in adulthood.

Private schools also make children’s social worlds smaller and more homogenous, teaching them to socialize with peers of their own class and culture while fearing or simply overlooking others. (Yes, this includes your darling little Montessori school. The world is not solely stocked with darling little Montessori children, after all, and your kid will have to learn to deal with the rest of us eventually.) Worse: These choices are typically made for children, by their parents, overriding the kids’ autonomy by giving the parents control of them in ways that stand to significantly affect the direction of their adult lives.

Children, as individuals, are as deserving of individual freedom as anyone else, but they cannot exercise it if they are selectively limited and blinkered from the time they are toddlers. We need to give them all the same good start, the same access to information, and the same opportunity to interact with peers from many cultures, income levels, and walks of life.

A public education can provide all that, particularly if it is well-funded across the board, so that your ability to learn isn’t dependent on which neighborhood you grow up in.

#5: Family beyond family

Many of the suggestions so far have hinged on childhood, and on what we as a society owe to children in terms of support and education. This is not an accident: The unseen labor of raising children is, in fact, where much gender inequality arises. Correcting that means changing the way we assign and think about care.

Feminists, notably, do not agree on everything (we don’t even agree on much), but from Betty Friedan to Shulamith Firestone to Silvia Federici, feminism’s second wave hinged on one crucial insight: The “nuclear family,” as a model, just does not work. Offloading all the work of raising children onto one woman, or onto whatever exploited and marginalized workforce that woman can afford to pay, does not benefit anyone, except (maybe, dubiously) the man who can work more hours for his boss, after being exempted from having a relationship with his own family.

Care work is infrastructure; if no one is watching the kids, or caring for the sick and the elderly, the rest of the world won’t run. Accordingly, we have a responsibility to view that work for what it is—political—and to consciously arrange it in ways that do not compromise the rights and presumed equality of any identity group, whether that group is “women” or “mothers” or the female immigrants of color who still do most paid care work.⁹

This type of work should not be unpaid or underpaid, and it should not fall solely on women, who are expected to do it out of “love” while setting their own goals to the side. In a feminist society, good-quality childcare and elder care would be provided by the state and available to everyone, of every income level. Care workers would be compensated like the skilled experts they are. Universal basic income would fulfill the second-wave demand of “wages for housework,”¹⁰ making at-home care work something that people would choose to do, rather than something that was unhappily thrust upon them.

When people do choose to work outside the home, workplaces must respect the priority that family takes in the lives of their employees, and allow them to do the labor of perpetuating the species in addition to sending all of their no-doubt-vital email. Work-from-home arrangements and flex time should be given freely. There should be plentiful paid time off for new parents or caretakers of disabled and aging relatives. If possible, childcare facilities should be available on the premises of most workplaces—no one should have to scramble to find a safe place for their child during an unexpected shift or a long workday, and long separations from children, particularly very young ones or nursing infants, should not have to be part of anyone’s life.

These solutions are typically proposed in the name of helping working women. Yet none of them will actually affect gender inequality if men don’t also take leave—which they still don’t, even when their employer provides it, either because they can’t afford the time off or because they fear that being an involved parent will hurt their career. Women can’t be fully free to work until men are fully free to stay home; our comprehensive sex and gender education should also therefore include basic information on childcare, for everyone, stressing men’s ability and responsibility to nurture.

Finally: Children, the all-too-often silent parties in this arrangement, are people in their own right. They just happen to be people who require extra care and support. Every member of a community is responsible for the welfare of its children. Childcare centers and schools should provide support to kids who are struggling, free meals to kids who are hungry, and emotional and physical safety to every child who enters, including queer and trans kids—not only because bullying can ruin or end children’s lives but also because many of those kids won’t be getting that support at home.

#6: On demand, without apology

Abortion is a public-health service. Transition is a public-health service. Both, for the people who need them, are lifesaving, and both are essential to living truly free and autonomous lives. A society cannot truly function, let alone claim to be just, if it denies these necessary services to the people who need them.

In order to live freely in your body, you must be allowed to refuse the functions that body is “supposed” to perform. You must be able to resist and contradict cultural stereotypes of what that body is meant to look like, or whom it is meant to be attracted to, or what role it is meant to fulfill. You must have the right to delay pregnancy with contraception and end unwanted pregnancies with abortion. You must have the right to avoid enduring an unwanted puberty, with puberty blockers, or to correct and modify your adult body to bring it in line with your lived gender.

But as important as these forms of healthcare are, it’s just as important to remember that they do not, by themselves, constitute “bodily autonomy.” At present, they are only ways of asking for that autonomy, inflection points where some people resist or refuse the system of gender classification that controls the rest of their lives.

The truth is that everyone deserves to live with bodily integrity, in a society that respects and accommodates their basic bodily needs. On some level, we all know that: It’s why your workplace likely has a bathroom. Yet when we talk about the politics of the body, we almost always wind up talking about gender-marginalized people—cis women, along with transmasculine, transfeminine, and nonbinary people—because, for the most part, the world is designed around cis men’s bodies and no one else’s. Childcare and maternity leave and transition and abortion and basic education about sex and gender are not “special” rights being demanded—they are only the bare minimums required to bring gender-marginalized people up to the same standard of living as everyone else.

Full bodily autonomy, when we have it, will benefit everyone, of all genders. That autonomy will come when every abortion or transition takes place in a context that supports it: where people are not forcibly classified by gender or taught to limit themselves by it, where every gender expression or sexual identity is valued, where sex is about pleasure and connection rather than enforcing hierarchy, where “family” is a support system and not a prison, where people have inherent value from birth until death and are free, at every moment between those points, to choose how to live their own lives.

This world is very far away from ours. But feminism can get us there; a queer-inclusive and trans-positive model of politics can deliver bodily autonomy to us all. The further we veer away from patriarchy, the closer we get to lives of true freedom. The world gets better each time we take that step away.