Let’s stop claiming that certain genders and sexualities “reinforce the gender binary.” In the past, that tactic has been used to dismiss butches and femmes, bisexuals, trans folks and our partners, and feminine people of every persuasion. Gender isn’t some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let’s stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.

This [fraternal] discourse posits a social relation between rational and autonomous subjects, who are ‘free’ subjects possessing equality in relation to other subjects. It constructs the universal citizen subject. Yet, as discussed earlier, the fraternal social bond is a relation between masculine subjects. The universal citizen subject is in fact a masculine subject that claims universality. Fraternity only recognizes a relation to other masculine subjects, that is, to those who are bourgeois, white, male. For example. that construction of the universal citizen can be seen in battles for universal suffrage; in France, the home of the Rights of Man, women did not gain the right to vote until 1944. Judith Butler points out that ‘“universality”, “equality”, “the subject of rights” have been constructed through unmarked gender and racial exclusions’. Paradoxically, the fraternal order produces an emancipatory discourse that a refusal of universal emancipation founds. In effect. the fraternal discourse is a universal that a non-universal founds.