Patrick Hopkins – ‘Gender Treachery: Homophobia, Masculinity, and Threatened Identities’

Patrick Hopkins made his conclusion clear when he said that the basis of homophobia is binary gender systems and heterosexism, and that “the only way to ensure that heterosexism and its virulent manifestation homophobia are genuinely eliminated is to eliminate the binary itself – challenge the assumption that one must be sexed or gendered to be a person (p. 431).”
The idea of challenging the assumption that an individual needs to be gendered in order to achieve true “personhood” is a good one that I am in full support of. As a matter of fact, there is already a growing movement, primarily within the transgender community, to honor the notion that there are more than simply two genders and/or to take some pride in not classifying themselves as any particular gender at all. That said, I see living a gender-neutral life as being a personal life choice as opposed to a viable solution to eliminate homophobia and heterosexism.

Assuming that I am correct in agreeing that Hopkins’ conclusion is to dismantle the categories of male and female, I don’t think that I can fully agree with his proposal because I’m still not 100% clear if he is proposing that we do away with binary gender by no longer defining ourselves in terms of masculine and feminine. On the one hand, he states that his proposal doesn’t mean that we will all have to become androgynous, but that his conclusion “simply means that identities would no longer be distributed according to automatically based “sexes”” (p. 431). On the other hand, he states on the next page that he wants to be “unmanned altogether.” I feel like I must be missing something crucial, or that maybe I’m overanalyzing this essay.

Moving on to question #2, being a “woman” does imply heterosexuality in the same way that being a “man” does. In terms of biology, the human sex organs are often seen as solely existing for reproductive purposes, and it takes one man and one woman to reproduce.


All quotes taken from:
‘Free Spirits: Feminist Philosophers on Culture’. Edited by Kate Mehuron and Gary J. Percesepe. Prentice Hall: October 29, 1994.