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Postgenderism is a social, political and cultural movement which arose from the eroding of the cultural, psychological, and social role of gender, and an argument for why the erosion of binary gender will be liberatory.
Postgenderists argue that gender is an arbitrary and unnecessary limitation on human potential, and foresee the elimination of involuntary psychological gendering in the human species as a result of social and cultural designations and through the application of neurotechnology, biotechnology, and assistive reproductive technologies.
Advocates of postgenderism argue that the presence of gender roles, social stratification, and gender differences is generally to the detriment of individuals and society. Given the radical potential for advanced assistive reproductive options, postgenderists believe that sex for reproductive purposes will either become obsolete or that all post-gendered humans will have the ability, if they so choose, to both carry a pregnancy to term and impregnate someone, which, postgenderists believe, would have the effect of eliminating the need for definite genders in such a society.
In the 19th century, Russian philosopher Nikolay Chernyshevsky believed that "people will be happy when there will be neither women nor men".
Urania, a feminist journal privately published between 1916 and 1940, advanced the abolishment of gender; each issue was headed with the statement: "There are no 'men' or 'women' in Urania."
One of the earliest expressions of postgenderism was Shulamith Firestone's 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex. It argues,The Dialectic of Sex, publ. The Women's Press, 1979. Chapter 1
The end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality Freud's 'polymorphous perversity'—would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally.
Gayle Rubin expresses in "" (1975) her desire for "an androgynous and genderless (though not sexless) society, in which one's sexual anatomy is irrelevant to who one is, what one does, and with whom one makes love." (2025). 9780822349860, Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822349860
Another important and influential work in this regard was socialist feminist Donna Haraway's essay, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp. 149–181. In this work, Haraway is interpreted as arguing that women would only be freed from their biological restraints when their reproductive obligations were dispensed with. This may be viewed as Haraway expressing a belief that women will only achieve true liberation once they become postbiological organisms, or postgendered. However, Haraway has publicly stated that their use of the word "post-gender" has been grossly misinterpreted.
The term "postgenderism" is also used by George Dvorsky to describe the diverse social, political, and cultural movement that affirms the voluntary elimination of gender in the human species by applying advanced biotechnology and assisted reproductive technologies.
Dvorsky also states that postgenderists maintain that a genderless society does not imply the existence of a species uninterested in sex and sexuality, but rather that sexual relations and interpersonal intimacy can and will exist in a postgendered future in different forms. Regarding potential assistive reproductive technologies, it is believed that reproduction can continue to happen outside of conventional methods, namely intercourse and artificial insemination. Advances such as human cloning, parthenogenesis, and may significantly extend the potential for human reproduction.
These ideas also propose posthuman space will be more virtual than real. Individuals may be uploaded minds living as data patterns on supercomputers or users engaged in immersive Virtual reality. Postgenderists contend that these types of existences are not gender-specific thus allowing individuals to morph their virtual appearances and sexuality at will.
Donna Haraway's "The Cyborg Manifesto" creates a Socialism and posthuman basis for dismantling social hierarchies, namely through "the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender." Haraway discusses how her theoretical figure of the "cyborg" occupies a postgender world that is independent and illegitimate from Western structures of patriarchal domination and how modern technology can make that figure a social reality. For postgender feminists, this involves manipulating forms of technology that shape binary control over gender — like biotechnology, immunology, and communication systems — to restructure or "recode" those narratives. Moreover, Haraway's definitions, like her "informatics of domination," navigate social theories regarding gender, sexual bodies, and reproduction towards the virtual and technological to eliminate "organic" notions of essential social inequalities within gender and sex, which extending towards race and class, addressing intersectionality in postgenderism.
Analysis of postgenderism in science fiction films can emphasize how gender appears through inhuman entities. The realm of "alien feminism" mainly explores how science fiction films use posthuman subjects to critique stereotypical gendered identities in film. Examples include Ex Machina (2014) in how the film presents the feminine-appearing cyborg character Ava (Alicia Vikander) as characterized by stereotypically feminine sexuality but is eventually revealed to be manipulating these traits to her advantage. According to that analysis, Ava's physical progression towards feminine humanity is artificial, allowing her to escape the forms of male dominance. Another example is Under The Skin (2013), where an alien (Scarlett Johansson) takes the form of a human woman to murder men but later begins to experience and struggle with how gender is socially and violently imposed upon human female bodies, even when that body is inherently inhuman. The analysis concludes that these films do not wholly achieve postgender ideas but express postgenderism as a basis to resolve posthuman gender issues within science fiction.
Marge Piercy, an American feminist writer, engages with these themes in her work Woman on the Edge of Time. In her novel a possible future is presented in which either sex can play either role in the childbearing process.
In Feminist Philosophy Quarterly, contributor Matthew J. Cull considers multiple formulations of gender abolitionism from varying perspectives and argues that they are uniformly Transphobia and imperil trans lives.
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