This article discusses a recent argument made by a number of Foucauldian feminists that gender is a problematic concept for feminism. They argue that the self-evident status that gender enjoys in current feminist theory and politics is based on the concealment of its historical emergence as a pathologizing discourse in 1950s American psychiatric-sexology, which targeted intersex and trans populations. Claiming that the feminist redeployments of gender risk reinforcing its normalizing functions, they suggest that feminists should consider discarding it as a conceptual tool. Returning to Judith Butler’s account of gender, which also draws on the Foucauldian legacy, as well as developing the concept of trans livability, the article shows that gender skeptics not only downplay the possibility of a critical rearticulation of gender but also ignore the question of gender self-determination. My critical examination thus centers on the tension between the pathologizing history of gender and the possibilities for feminist redeployments of the concept. The aim of my defense of gender is to provide conceptual tools for feminist theorizing and politics that take seriously the normalizing history of gender but commit strongly to a trans-affirmative conception of feminist critique.

中文翻译：

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性别怀疑论、跨性别宜居性和女权主义批判

本文讨论了一些福柯式女权主义者最近提出的一个论点，即性别是女权主义的一个有问题的概念。他们认为，性别在当前女权主义理论和政治中所享有的不言而喻的地位是基于隐藏其作为 1950 年代美国精神病学-性学中的病态话语的历史出现，该话语针对的是双性人和跨性别人群。声称女权主义者对性别的重新部署可能会加强其正常化功能，他们建议女权主义者应考虑将其作为概念工具丢弃。回到朱迪思·巴特勒对性别的描述，它也借鉴了福柯的遗产，并发展了跨性别宜居性的概念，文章表明，性别怀疑论者不仅淡化了对性别进行批判性重新表述的可能性，而且还忽视了性别自决问题。因此，我的批判性考察集中在性别病态历史与女权主义重新部署这一概念的可能性之间的紧张关系上。我为性别辩护的目的是为女权主义理论和政治提供概念工具，这些工具认真对待性别正常化的历史，但坚定地致力于女权主义批判的跨肯定概念。