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Essays reflect solely their author's point of view. We ask only that they respect our Principles.← Back to all essays | Author's essays Theses on the Sex/Gender Contradiction
by Sansserifseraphim
Published: 2026-04-25 (last update: 2026-04-25)
5-10 minutes
2. The identity of sex and gender is the contradiction between the sexual traits of human bodies, in their development, their forms and processes, including our theoretical self-understanding. And the process by which this theoretical understanding is socially produced through forms of social practice (scientific study, theology, law, etc.) that are contingent upon and derived from gendered practice.
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1. To understand the sex/gender contradiction we have to understand contradiction in general. In simple terms, contradictions are the opposing tendencies making up things (phenomena) that are essential to their birth, development, and death/transformation into something else (i.e. the opposites are that thing, hence Lenin's definition of contradiction as 'identity'). Most things do not appear to us as contradictory, but through precise study of their historical development, the contradictions responsible for their development emerge.
2. The identity of sex and gender is the contradiction between the expectations of gender put upon us by sex assignment, and our own practice of gender, our gendered consciousness-in-practice. More precisely, it is the sexual and gendered traits of people (their consciousness and bodies), in their development, their forms and processes, including their practical conscious self-understanding, and the ruling class's control over the production of ideology, which forms understanding and expectation. The state produces this ideology through forms of social practice: scientific study, theology, law, etc., that are contingent upon and derived from gendered practice.
3. Sex and gender thus have a dual character; sex as material development of the sexual traits of the body and our understanding of it and sex as administration of the body, gender as the ideological basis of this administration and gender as consciousness-in-practice, both evolving from real daily practice of gender and the activity (development) of human bodies.
4. This antagonism arises from class struggle out of the gender practices of the earlier patriarchal family, the definition of roles assigned through sex progressively becomes embodied in the state’s practice of authority and thus the administrative form of sex alienates itself along with the rest of the state from society. The administrative form of sex is its alienation from both the lived practices of gender and also the scientific study of sex and gender. State sexology is revealed more and more openly as a tool of class rule.
5. There is, then, no pre-social essential gender from which all draw their identity, but a sex/gender system in which sex/gender’s dual character is expressed along class lines both as a tool of bourgeois class rule and a human self-determination, immediately proletarian and colonized peoples' self-determination. The affirmation of the exploited classes’ gender self-determination necessitates the negation of the exploiting classes rule, its state.
6. It is this social and historical character which is the most important in understanding the sex/gender contradiction. In our society the sex/gender contradiction manifests itself most sharply in the lives of Trans people but upon closer study is evident all across society.
7. Lenin described the unity of a contradiction as "conditional" and its tendency towards struggle as absolute. If we apply this maxim to the issue then we result in this basic form of the sex/gender contradiction, that is, the unity of one’s sex and gender is conditional and its tendency to struggle is universal.
8. How can we say that unity is conditional and struggle is universal when it seems the exact opposite, that is, it seems that cis-ness is universal and trans-ness conditional. In fact, it is within the very logic of that belief that we find its own negation.
9. Take a cis man, for example, this person is male and a man a unity of sex and gender, what, upon close inspection, are the conditions for this unity? One, he was born male, or more accurately assigned male. Two, he developed an identity as a man. So if we accept that cis-ness is universal we must accept that being born male, by definition, means one will develop to identify as man.
10. We know in fact that people assigned male at birth sometimes develop feminine, non- binary, or other gender identities. This means we must accept that there is some kind of mechanism that leads to the development of identity that operates outside of the scope of what can be determined through natal sex determination. It is in reality a superstitious act which disguises assigned sex, a social relation, as a quality of the body. Thus, we see that the identity of sex and gender is a social condition not a natural one.
11. The belief in this superstitious act, and the ideologies which follow from its authority, produce false consciousness. This leads working class people to defer their own self-determination as workers in favor of upholding a petty-bourgeois and/or patriarchal practice of gender. We have to understand that sex, in the broadest sense, comes to define gender not mechanically but by playing a key role, in negative and positive terms, in developing self‑understanding. A process which is inseparable from the social conditions resulting from sex assignment. And we have to understand how gender comes to be a part of one's capacity to transform sex, the body, identity, and one's capabilities, and struggle for self-determination.
12. One cannot simply choose out of magic their gender, their self‑perception, their body, or how others perceive and treat them. But in grasping and applying correctly the biological and social laws one develops a gender identity, a consciousness-in-practice capable of expression and the struggle for self-determination.
13. The difference between being able to self-determine within the role one is assigned (as cis) and having a form of consciousness and biology which leads one to gender transition is that the transformation in the second case requires also a political transformation in which one must reject in scientific and political terms the sex/gender binary; and must by definition because it considers you impossible. This impossibility is the intensified form of the same contradiction.
14. Gender transition itself is the act of breaking the social chain connecting sex and gender on the individual level. It is the transformation of the sex/gender binary into its opposites: from sex determining gender to gender determining sex (in the transformation of the body and/or the negation of its socially assigned meaning); from binary into infinite intermediaries; from destiny into self‑determination.
15. We are left with gender and sex, not as it was in its binary form, but transformed into a process of self-determination and the expansion of human knowledge and capacities – understanding freedom not as undefined but as rooted in self‑understanding and the struggle to achieve the material necessities for one's transformation. The dialectic of sex and gender is transformed in every act of gender self‑determination and will face its total social transformation through the movement for liberation and socialist revolution.
Sources
Lenin, V.I. On the Question of Dialectics [Thesis 1, 7]
Engels, Friedrich On the Origin of the Family, The State, and Private Property [Thesis 4]
Leacock, Eleanor Myths of Male Dominance [Thesis 4]