Happy Int’l Sex/Gender Binary Day!

A quick quibble:  “International Women’s Day”, or what I like to refer to as “International Sex/Gender Binary Day”.

I understand that historically women have been privy to a fair amount of discrimination based on their gender, however, I question whether “International Women’s Day” is one of many tools used to maintain and reproduce notions of sex/gender binaries, binaries that historically reinforce gender inequalities that have effected women and trans people in particularly pervasive ways and further maintained male patriarchy through the reproduction of sex/gender binaries.

In celebrating ‘woman’ as a distinctive category I would argue we are effectively reinforcing ideas of gender dichotomies as strictly male/female and stabilizing these binaries as the norm.

Furthermore I question how “International Women’s Day” erases the racial and class distinction among women and trans people.

“International Women’s Day”, in addition to asserting a global sisterhood among women, further maintains gender binaries as stable categories that have historically have functioned to maintain inequalities between men and women, and additionally complicate issue of trans identity.