Part 1: Gender - Gender - Life: Gender is not a naturalized ‘feature’ of life, but rather a violent structure that was established as the a-priori way in which bodies are understood during settler colonialism. Specifically, the understanding that Gender constraints bodies into two diametrically opposed gender identities was one that was exclusive to European colonial powers and was forced upon indigenous nations as both a way to destroy their culture, and in its globalization through its claim to naturalism, naturalize the violence of settler colonialism. - Sex and Gender: Additionally, the myth that there is the division between gender and sex, where there is coherent sexes of male and female, is merely another extension of the way in which Gender seeks to codify bodies into its coffers. The idea of sex traits seeks to stabilize the vast expression of genital life under the two signifiers of penis and vagina. - Intersexism: This is also intersexist, it collapses the vast expression of genital life down to the signifers of ‘penis’ and ‘vagina’ as a way to eradicate any other genital expression that troubles such referents. This is the logic that is used in justifying coercive reassignment surgeries on intersex folks. - Capital G Gender: Gender, in the abstract, is distinct from gender identity, in that Gender refers to a particular hegemonic way of sorting bodies into preordained gender identities, whereas gender identity is a question of specific life’s affective connections to their body, the assemblages they are connected to, and thus those that they are situated within their ecologies. Thus, a call to abolish Gender would not destroy the idea of gender identity, but rather the structure of Gender as the only way in which gender identity can manifest. - Facialization: Gender operates through the faciality machine, in which it signifies particular body parts, injects them with gendered subjectivity, and then applies that subjectivity to that body who has been signified as such. This then operates to coercively assign bodies the logics for which Gender necessitates for its operational logic, and thus its violence. This then codes the world and specifically space according to Gender’s subjectivities. Penis and Vagina: For example, the way in which vagina is signified, and thus injected with the subjectivity as woman and penis is done the same with man. This then codes space for which those particular genders are captured within, for example how bathrooms, stores, and products are coded as male or female. - Topic Stuff#### Part 2: Impacts- Transmisogyny- Violence: Cross apply part 2 point 2A, Gender necessitates violence against trans women, and trans folks writ large, by marking their bodies in such a way that perpetually invokes the eradication of their subjectivity. - Base: This forms the basis for which all transmisogynistic violence operates on, not only creating a frame of womanhood that looks to directly enact violence against the existence of transness but to enact constant violence on trans women’s body’s by camab.- This o/w for two reasons- Otherization: This is a form of otherization which outweighs on timeframe and magnitude, because it is constantly going on under ecologies of fascism and once people become disposable then any atrocity can be justified against them. - Overkill: Transmisogyny seeks not to marginalize trans women but rather to eradicate them from history entirely, to create a project of modernity in which trans women are non-existent in our readings of life processes and organization. This is due to the fact that Gender does not require the other, trans folks, to sustain its power, but rather is a project of disappearance. Marginalization is just one step in the process of complete and total necropolitical overkill. #### It is painful to exist here, to even desire to compete in a space as violent as this**Every minute of every round we have to look up and see the faces of those who want us dead, drowned, and beaten
*But like the Four horsemen or Frankenstein’s Monster we come to destroy your world. Through that destruction will be joy, joy not for you or your machines of death. Joy only for ourselves and our sisters. *
Part 3: Advocacy: Vote Aff to reject Gender and endorse the performance of the 1AC as an instantiation of the Transfeminist Kill/joy#### Thesis: The transfeminist killjoy refers to a transwoman embodiment that elucidates the collection of affects that exist by being a disruptive body. By being a figure that seeks to destroy and rebel against the structures of Gender that have labeled you as ‘monster’ in the first place. These are affects of pain, violence, and hurt, but also of joy and power that come from the trans kinship formed by destroying the performative normal that cis folks are used to. We perform an endorsement of this embodiment as a critical weapon against Gender. #### Solvency: - TFKJ solves- Iteration: Cross apply part 2-point 3D, one of the primary ways in which Gender is able to incessantly expand its project is through the complete control of Molecular politics and thus systems of desire and semiotics. This then means that the advocacy is uniquely able to solve, anything that does not destroy the Molecular politics of gender vis-à-vis desire and semiotics merely allows for Gender to reassert its violence.- Interruption: Endorsing a politic of uncompromising interruption of the way in which Gender is able to crystallize cis as the normal, the performance of 1AC ruptures the habitual reproduction of a semiotic attachment to Gender. The performance of the 1AC is key because it both illuminates the fundamental transmisogynistic violence of the res, but revels in the trans joy in co-embodiment resistance to said violence. This is not only able to collapse the way in which Gender is able to constantly re-justify itself, but also destroy the systems that create a desiring incentive to invest within the systems of Gender that cause violence against trans women in the first place. Instead of allowing ‘good radicals’ to perpetually coercively assign children gender at birth we are there screaming at them. Creating a counter force that illuminates this violence and kills the joy and pleasure from perpetuating such violence. The method of the 1AC is uniquely key because without an embodiment that uniquely centers trans women we will always be left on the sidelines, always replaced with the narrative of trans men and enby’s as universal narrators of trans women’s experience. - Trans Refrains of Joy- Refrains: A refrain refers to a particular semiotic system that is repeated over and over again with the particular purpose of creating a specific conception of time that collapses back into the specific system that the refrain seeks to forward. This is not to say that refrains are always good, but rather that they are inherent to all established semiotic systems and can use be used for reactionary or revolutionary purposes. - Joy: The performance of the 1AC creates a refrain of pure trans rage and joy, a refrain which recodes the semiotic systems of the room to one in which transness exists in violent opposition to modernity, and can freely exist in the flows of desires that bring it pleasure. The performance of the 1AC is key because it refuses to freeze trans women into being fully joyous or pained. Neither unaffected subject or pained body, rather a subject that is constantly raging against Gender and finding pleasure in places where they can. This is key to solvency for two reasons: - Semiotic Slippage: First, this is able to causes the slippage of the semiotics that have been pre-layered on all the bodies and space within the world, that being the semiotics of Gender. This is key to resolve the way in which Gender is able to constantly reinforce itself. This means even if the 1AC is not able to solve 100% it creates zones of survival for trans folks which is key. - Revolutionary Semiotics: Second, the refrain of the 1AC is able to create a revolutionary field of desire, one that instead of embracing the fascist project of Gender, allows for the flourishing of bodies independent of the way in which they have been signified and subjectified by Gender. This is key to resolve Gender because it allows for subjects to plug into this field of desire and thus key to long term solvency. #### Part 4: FW- Semiotics are a methodological prior question- Distinct from Epist: Semiotics refer to the particular systems of signs, symbols, language, sonic, and affective that generate meaning. In essence, semiotics refers to the ways in which meaning comes to be, how we understand the meaning of particular subjects, objects, etc and how that meaning came to be. This is distinct from epistemology, because epistemology is a question of how we come to knowledge, whereas semiotics refers to how that knowledge becomes known as knowledge as such. Apples: For example, epistemology might ask the question of how we come to learn about apples growing on trees, whereas semiotics would seek to understand how the meaning that is understood when one utters ‘apple’ comes to be, and systems that come to generate said meaning. - Prior to Onto: This justifies why semiotics are a prior question to epistemology, i.e we can’t understand how we come to know things if we don’t know what things are in the first place. Semiotics are also a prior question to ontology, if we understand ontology as the question of being, or particular conceptions of being, that is predicated on being meaning something in the first place. Anti-blackness: For example, if we take an ontological question like the creation of whiteness and blackness under anti-blackness, that regime of ontology becomes impossible if there is no semiotic system that constructs particular meanings about being as human or an understanding of what is meant when the human is uttered. - Prior to Subjectivity: Additionally, semiotics is a prior question to subjectivity, the process for which bodies are strained through processes of subjectification happens vis a vis the attachment of particular subjectivities to constitute the entirety of meaning of a particular thing. I.e the project of Gender’s subjectification is incoherent without the semiotic system that imbues penis as only ever meaning man and vagina as only ever meaning woman. - Prior to politics: Semiotics is also a prior question to politics. Politics refers to the molar level arrangement of bodies, deployment of particular policies and actions that engage with said arrangements. This cannot happen if we do not understand the semiotic systems that come to imbue bodies, organizations, and molar politics with particular meaning. - Prior to rules: This also means that semiotics are a prior question to the rules of debate, understanding the rules of debate and which ones we ought enforce becomes incoherent if we do not understand what debate or rules mean, or how they come to mean these things. Even if the 1AC is not a prior question to T or theory, this means that we get to weigh it against theory and T because they are both semiological investigations. - **ROB: **Vote for the team that best semiologically abolishes Gender