Note: like any good essay on gender, this post contains discussion of rape, transphobia, and racism.
What Is Gender
Gender a position within a system of power and oppression, like class. Unlike class, which is one's relation to production and labour, what gender fundamentally is is much less clear. Is it another form of division of labour? A feeling? An essential and fixed aspect of one's soul that is determined by God? I think gender is fundamentally about one's position within/relative to the household. This is what makes it different from class: you can easily talk about the class of a household [1] (e.g. rich family, low-income household) but talking about the gender of a household is nonsensical - the gender is contained inside of it.
When we view gender as arising from the conditions of the household, we can begin doing actual analysis. In this analysis, I will say things like "women are meek and obedient," which obviously sounds very bad, so let me clarify what I mean. I am not saying everyone who uses the label of "woman" is meek and obedient, or that they should be, or that they're not women if they're assertive and oppositional. I'm not really trying to talk about people at all - I'm talking about the cultural archetype of womanhood, about Woman and not actual women. I do, however, mean to imply that differing from that archetype does make one less of a woman. There's no single aspect of deviation from Woman that disqualifies one from womanhood, but it all adds up - if you're loud and assertive and tall and don't wear makeup and have stubble, you are not really going to be treated as a woman in public. As someone who's been a freshly-out transfem in that position, I think we do a disservice to people in that spot by insisting that womanhood is just about whether or not you identify with it - you know that you're being seen and treated as a man. Gender is something like a social role, a social position, a performance - and as such it cannot be done alone. Other people need to be willing to go along with your gender in order for you to be able to do it (and vice-versa can try to impose a gender onto you). If your friends don't treat you as you ask to be treated then they're shitty friends, but for strangers you will need to align yourself to these archetypes. Going off of this, I want to define a narrative-ish structure, with 4 roles, that I think gives a clearer understanding of gender in the US than the traditional 2-gender model. Also, like the 2-gender model, changing your role or escaping entirely is possible.
The Genders
I want to frame the genders through a storybook metaphor. The first three are familiar (and taken loosely from the Karpman drama triangle): the Prince, the Princess, and the Monster. Monsters are a threat to Princesses, who therefore need a brave and strong Prince to protect them. In return, the Princess tends to the Prince's wounds, does his housework, raises his children, etc. In general, Princesses trade their autonomy for protection. You've seen this structure a million times: it's the damsel in distress; it's Link, Zelda, and Ganon; it's every Disney princess movie before 1995; it's The Birth of a Nation. My addition to this is the fourth gender, the Treasure (also sometimes referred to as Trash). The Prince gets the Treasure as his reward for slaying the Monster. Princesses are rescued, Treasure is merely taken. Treasure is to be defended only to the extent it's convient, the Prince has no moral duties to the Treasure like he does to the Princess. Treasure is something to be used (mostly by the Prince but sometimes also by the Princess) and then discarded when it has outlived its usefulness. The name is somewhat ironic: Treasure is not in fact treasured.
So how does this fairytale relate to the household? In Hortense Spillers' absolutely excellent essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," she presents an analysis of the gender that enslaved black women experienced. Although slave communities certainly developed kinship groups, i.e. households, these did not resemble the white households with the Mother and Father - and these black women certainly did not receive the "benefits of a patriarchilized female gender." Spillers describes this as a "degendering" of black women, but I wanted to interpret it differently, as the assignment and not the removal of a gender. So these four genders represent, roughly, the white man who owns the plantation, his white wife, the male slaves he fears an uprising from, and the female slaves he both works and rapes. In 2024 these relations have decreased in intensity, but are absolutely still there, and I hope this model captures the essence of that relation that has managed to survive until present day. However, I think this model is also applicable outside just white-black gender relations, and I'll give examples as I go over the genders in individual detail.
The Prince
The Prince is very close to the 2-gender notion of "man," and is usually a "he." The Prince is sort of the default, the "unmarked" category, the protagonist and therefore the least interesting. The expectations on Princes are just to slay Monsters and protect Princesses, and even then the Prince is allowed a certain kind of nonconformity - being a bad husband/protector does not disqualify one from Princehood. However, the choice of Prince defines which household it is we're talking about. Since we're defining gender relative to households, different households in different cultures can assign the different genders to the same individual (more on this when we get to Monsters). The clearest examples of Princes in a given society are going to be the high-class men. The ideal Prince is the Family Man, the Gentleman, etc.
The Princess
The Princess is, correspondingly, close to the 2-gender "woman," and is usually "she." However, if we view the autonomy-for-protection trade as the essence of Princesshood, then children are also Princesses in our culture. And like for Princes, the clearest examples of Princesses are high-class women - in the US in the 60s, for example, housewives are "more Princess" than working women. Princesses are proper victims - they are the people who have claim to "innocence", and any wrong against them must be punished. The ideal Princess is the Proper Lady, the Good Wife and the Good Mother.
The Monster
The Monster is the dangerous Other. I like "Monster" as a term specifically because of its gender ambiguity - there's many male monsters in fiction, but also the notion of (and theory about) the "monstrous feminine," e.g. witches. Monsters can be aiming to kill, or kidnap, or rape, or more nebulously "corrupt" Princesses - they're Monsters all the same. Monsters can also pose a threat to the Prince or not, but it's not particularly relevant either way.
Monsters are different from the other three genders because they are not actually in the household. They are outside of it, but their absence is felt within - they're the reason for the lock on the front door of the house and the gun in the Prince's nightstand. The Monster is frequently distant, and unlike Princes and Princesses, the people designated as Monsters will rarely see themselves as such - "Monster" is more of a fictional character, an accusation hurled at the enemy, than it is a social role that people act out. Monsters are punished, not rewarded, for living up to the expectations of their gender, so being a gender-conforming Monster makes little sense. The people one society calls Monsters normally live in a completely different society, one where they are Princes or something else (although "Monster subcultures" like organized crime are an interesting exception). The rare people who are in fact Monsters everywhere are socially dead - nobody would let a Monster into their home and so someone who is a Monster everywhere has no home, and is driven away at every turn.
"Monstering" is classically done along race lines - Black "superpredators," Latin American immigrants "bringing crime," Yellow Peril, or the recent false accusation against Hamas of mass rape. However, it works with any type of foreign-ness/Other-ness/outside threat even without race, as in the poster above. Monstering is also used at home, e.g. against queerness - the constant accusations of pedophilia against queer people of all stripes, the "predatory lesbian," and the gay and trans panic legal defenses (which are some of the most revealing examples of what Monstering really is - an accusation in order to justify unlimited violence). The Monstrous feminine is understood in this framework as women who refuse to be Princesses or Treasure, and are therefore called witches, baby-killers, etc. Finally, I feel like I'm seeing an increase in placing mad people as Monsters - we know racism and homophobia are bad now, so tiktok instead embraces the dark triad and the view that there are certain types of people - narcissists, psychopaths, BPDemons, etc. - who are inherently dangerous and evil, who are Monsters. There are no longer any visual markers of Monstrosity - it could be anyone, so watch out, stay scared, and keep doing all that shit about marking your car so human traffickers don't target you.
The Treasure
The Treasure is the Other defanged and brought into the household to be used - a human with no rights, who others owe no duties to. The pronoun for Treasure is "it." I get the alternate name "Trash" from Porpentine Charity Heartscape's Hot Allostatic Load. She describes Trash as "the hyper-marginalized among the marginalized, the Omelas kids, the marked for death." Morphodyke on tumblr (screenshot for non-tumblrinas) describes the Trashing of transfems as "a systematic pattern of abuse applied to a small sacrificial portion of the population to create a class of women with no claim to community or personhood, who will never be defended or avenged, who can be safely sunk into the attrition of patriarchy's darker desires." Trash is the most materially straightforward gender - it is made up of people who are so marginalized - so close to social death or so unable to independently get the physical resources needed for survival - that they have no choice but to do whatever more-privileged people (i.e. Princes and Princesses) ask of them.
Unlike Monster, Treasure is an actual role people play, and generally with some level of awareness that that's what they are. The Treasure is part of the household - as a slave, a servant, a whore. Nobody is afraid of Treasure. A Treasure can never be considered a "victim" either - it was not innocent to begin with; when something bad happens to it, it had no right to expect better. The gendered expectation of Treasure is complete, unconditional meekness and obedience, and any deviation is harshly punished. This punishment includes both straightforward social & physical violence, but also, in the extreme, Monstering the Treasure, i.e. turning them into the type of Monster who is a Monster everywhere. This is the only place a Treasure "has left to fall," but it's quite a long fall, and so the Treasure endures its harsh role in order to avoid that fall.
Examples of Treasure include survival sex workers, trans women, and black women, although for the latter two their position has improved considerably and they are no longer uniformly Treasure. Any class of women who cannot/will not become the mothers of a Prince's children - e.g. trans women, intersex women, lesbians, enslaved women (their children with the master are "his" only genetically and as property, not as family) - are likely to be Treasure because they cannot be Princesses. In general, the more axes someone is marginalized along, the more likely they are to be Treasure - a poor disabled black trans lesbian is almost certainly going to be Treasure, even if none of those categories on their own are more than 50% Treasure. Another factor is the degree to which someone is the odd one out, the potential outcast, within their community - the only person of color or gay kid in a small town (or highschool). Also, as Monsters are associated with madness, so is Treasure with "mental illness" - the "broken" person who directs it all inward, who has no self-worth [2], who accepts whatever their partner does because they've been told nobody else could ever love them.
Pairs
I think terms in a system are best defined by their contrast with other terms, so here's a rundown through all the pairs and their differences and relations.
Prince-Princess
This relationship is the most well-tread ground. Most white cis feminist theory and praxis is focused on the dynamics between Princes and Princesses, and trying to improve the lot of Princesses. This has worked to the extent that the dramatic protector-protected dynamic I described above seems hyperbolic when compared to real relationships in 2024. Still, I focus on that specific aspect, protector-protected, because I think it is still the narrative used to justify the "contract" of heterosexual relationships (although the contract in practice is more about unevenly distributing household labor). The idea of a strong woman who can protect herself is getting more and more popular, but nothing has yet replaced the notion of gendered victimhood and protection as the central narrative of heterosexuality.
One aspect of this protection that I want to stress is that it is specifically protection from Monsters. While we now (hopefully) think of the wifebeater as a type of Monster disguised as a Prince, that is a very recent change brought about by feminist activism, and it still remains a fact that abusers are not social outcasts or psychopaths, but perfectly normal and well-adjusted Princes. The historical definition of rape provides the clearest example of this: the notion that a husband can rape his wife, i.e. that marital rape is rape, is very new. When your grandparents got married, your grandfather having sex with your grandmother against her will would not have been considered "rape" or any other type of legal or social crime[3]. Rape has been considered a crime historically not because it is nonconsensual sex - that is allowed for the Prince! - but because it is a Monster taking what should belong to the Prince. Rape is something exclusively done by Monsters to Princesses.
Prince-Monster
Although most examples of Monsters are oppressed or marginalized people, I think the difference between Monsters and Princes are best explained in the more symmetric context of conflict between two countries which are on par with each other military and economically. Think the Trojan war, the Three Kingdoms, or the average land war in western Europe - almost anything other than a war of colonial conquest or popular uprising.
In the types of wars, the narrative that "the enemy is coming to take our gold and rape our Princesses" was often quite true, as wartime sexual violence was quite common historically (the word "rape" was originally a synonym for "pillage"). However, this narrative would be true on both sides of the war. In Greek society, the Greeks would be Princes and the Trojans were Monsters, and vice versa in Troy. And both sides would be using rape as a weapon of war, but from e.g. the Greek standpoint, the Trojan women were Treasure, and so nothing a Greek/Prince did to them would demean his Princely honor in any way. However, the same behavior from the Trojans/Monsters towards the Princesses of Greece was exactly what justified calling them Monsters. The difference between Princes and Monsters is not in what acts of violence they commit, but who they are violent towards[4].
Prince-Treasure
As we have established, Princes may do whatever they want to Treasure, and suffer no consequences for it. The only thing I have to add is how it can make a Treasure come to function as a sort of "laboratory." Treasure has a body like that of a Prince or Princess, but it doesn't have the rights they do, it isn't owed any dignity. Therefore, questions/experiments which would be too rude or violative for a Prince to ask/do to a Princess may be answered on Treasure. This applies to both adolescents learning about sexuality and to adults working in biology labs. For the latter, think of Josef Mengele or Henrietta Lacks.
Princess-Monster
The Monster aims to take or corrupt the Princess - Princesses are always victims, and Monsters are always perpetrators. This is the social fiction woven by gender, and has no relation to what people who are Monsters actually do to people who are Princesses. Rather, the justice systems built on the narrative of protecting Princesses from Monsters are social systems enabling Princesses to persecute Monsters. The archetypical example of this is the murder of Emmett Till - a single Princess's accusation of whistling "justified" the torture and murder of a 14-year-old boy. White women's tears - i.e. Princesses' tears - should be considered an offensive and not a defensive weapon (although not one that can be turned against Princes).
Princess-Treasure
The difference between Princesses and Treasure is rather similar to the classic Madonna-whore divide, the good wife vs the whore on the side. This can lead to the Madonna-whore complex when combined with the societal view of sex as "violation" or "dirtying" - Princes are only allowed to inflict violence upon Treasure, not on Princesses, and so if sex is a kind of violence then the Prince will only be able to get it up for Treasure and not for his lovely Princess wife. Even if not to the point of a "complex," the Prince will always have sides of himself that he only shows to Treasure, because he needs to charm the Princess, to be nice to her, to treat her right. Only with a Treasure can he vent his "darker desires," and act without pretense or restraint.
Transitioning from Treasure to Princess is possible, and I think it can be one thing what people can mean when they say they find femininity empowering. In the two-gender model, this makes no sense, as femininity = woman = disempowered gender. But with four genders, Princesses are genuinely more powerful than Treasure - they have rights and powers that Treasure does not. To transition from Treasure to Princess is to assert that you have worth and to demand rights, dignity, and respect. Therefore, if being feminine lets someone move from Treasure to Princess, then their femininity is empowering them. And I think femininity is a part of that Treasure-to-Princess transition, e.g. becoming a "proper lady" instead of a "tramp," or trans women being able to pass.
The relationship between a Princess and a Treasure in the same household is the most interesting and novel part of this entire model. In "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," Spillers analyzes a section from the autobiographical slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs (writing under the pseudonym Linda Brent). During the section in question, Jacobs is regularly being raped by her "master," which arouses the jealousy of his wife. That wife then proceeds to rape Jacobs herself (probably, anything in this book about sex is highly subtextual because it was published in 1861). To quote Spillers' analysis at length (emphasis mine):
If the testimony of Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs is to be believed, the official mistresses of slavery's "masters" constitute a privileged class of the tormented, if such contradiction can be entertained [Brent 29-35]. Linda Brent/Harriet Jacobs recounts in the course of her narrative scenes from a "psychodrama," opposing herself and "Mrs. Flint," in what we have come to consider the classic alignment between captive woman and free. Suspecting that her husband, Dr. Flint, has sexual designs on the young Linda (and the doctor is nearly humorously incompetent at it, according to the story line), Mrs. Flint assumes the role of a perambulatory nightmare who visits the captive woman in the spirit of a veiled seduction.
...
Mrs. Flint enacts a male alibi and prosthetic motion that is mobilized at night, at the material place of the dream work. In both male and female instances, the subject attempts to inculcate his or her will into the vulnerable, supine body. Though this is barely hinted on the surface of the text, we might say that Brent, between the lines of her narrative, demarcates a sexuality that is neuter-bound, inasmuch as it represents an open vulnerability to a gigantic sexualized repertoire that may be alternately expressed as male/female. Since the gendered female exists for the male, we might suggest that the ungendered female—in an amazing stroke of pansexual potential—might be invaded/raided by another woman or man.
In the terminology of this essay, that final line would be "Since the Princess exists for the Prince, we might suggest that the Treasure—in an amazing stroke of pansexual potential—might be invaded/raided by a Princess or Prince." In short, Princesses can and do "use" Treasure like a Prince would: to vent frustrations, to use as a laboratory, to express "darker desires." A lot of things people ascribe to "the weak finding someone weaker to pick on" is Princess-on-Treasure violence. There is also a unique form of violence that only Princesses can do to Treasure - they can turn the Treasure into a Monster. Princess tears can be weaponized against both Monsters and Treasure, and Princesses can gain social capital by doing so: every time a Princess makes an accusation she emphasizes her own perpetual innocence and victimhood. By doing so she is conforming to the expectations of her gender, and is rewarded for that.
Monster-Treasure
As mentioned above, the boundary between Monsters and Treasure is the most fluid of the six pairs. The type of Trashing abuse described in Hot Allostatic Load (false accusations of rape) is a method of turning a Treasure into a Monster, and therefore justifying any possible violence as punishment (in the case of HAL, the specific punishment is exile). People who are "Monstered" in this manner are not like the Monsters of symmetric warfare, who are Princes in their own realms: they are Monsters everywhere, accepted nowhere, part of no household. This is just about the only position worse than Treasure, and so the threat of being sent there is the ultimate weapon for Princes and Princesses to discipline Treasure with.
As far as the actual relationship between Monsters and Treasure goes, it could be just about anything depending on the particular people or groups in question. It's not really of any concern to Princes or Princesses (except maybe to make some "look how these savages treat their women" anti-Monster propaganda), and so it's not constrained by this model. In the symmetric warfare example, the prisoners of war one side takes as Treasure from the Monsters they slay would be Princesses in the society where those Monsters are Princes. Or in a more "inter-imperialist" type of war, both the Princes and the Monsters could be fighting over who gets to own the same group of people as Treasure. Or there could be no relation at all - there aren't really any social forces constraining what the relationship between a CPC member in Xi'an and a trans woman in Nebraska could be. This is not an exhaustive list, and there's even the possibility that both the Monster and Treasure in question belong to a society which doesn't fit the 4-gender model at all.
Conclusions
Unlike other models of beyond-binary gender, which aim to present something everyone can see themselves in, this is a model that everyone should be trying to get the hell out of. I'm a gender abolitionist - I think that doing something "because I'm a man/woman/Prince/etc." is silly and bad-faith; I think that we should raise all children the same way and that doing so will eliminate gender; I think we should end the practice of sex assignment at birth (or at any time). This model's pessimistic view of genders certainly reflects that, but I hope that you also find it helps explain your experiences a bit better. And of course, abolishing a system requires organizing within its categories (we do not end capitalism by just not identifying as proletarians).
Aiding that organizing was another main goal of this model - specifically, I think it explains the problem where feminism became dominated by rich white women and started catering towards their problems: "women" is not a single coherent gender, and the "women's liberation movement" was in fact a Treasure-Princess alliance. This alliance, like all alliances between distinct groups, fell apart once its parties had finished accomplishing their shared goals, and then the more powerful group turned on the weaker one. Alliances aren't inherently bad, and I think there's still a future for Treasure-Princess alliances, but Treasure organizers must make these alliances consciously, and be aware of the risks.
Finally, a word on escape. Something I've learned after some years of being nonbinary is that it is a hard thing to be. Gender is not just how you view yourself, but how other people view and treat you. Getting them to not treat you as any of the genders - whether a gender from the 2-gender model or the 4-gender one - is very, very difficult. Some people don't even know how to do it! I don't think being nonbinary in the average job - let alone with strangers or customer service workers - is really possible without large-scale social movements (and these movements must be gender abolitionist if we want to avoid just becoming a third/fifth gender). However, the core of gender is the household, and a household is just a few people. If you can find the right people, and you all put in the work together, you can make a household with room for people without gender, or even a household with no genders in it at all. May we all find that happiness <3
footnotes
- This is not to say that class is homogenous within a household. For example, while a feudal lord's manor is certainly a lordly household, the majority of its inhabitants are going to be low-class servants.
- Materialist Antipsychiatry Moment: rather than viewing this lack of self-worth as some internal illness/pathology/lack, we can see that for Treasure it is an accurate assessment of their social reality: they do in fact have no social worth. The Treasure-mental illness relation is cyclical: mental illness further marginalizes the Treasure, and being treated as Treasure makes them more "ill."
- Unless they lived in the USSR, which criminalized marital rape within 5 years of its establishment - common communism W. You can play a ""fun"" game by checking on wikipedia to see when marital rape was criminalized where you live - it's probably shockingly recent
- Of course Monsters are not actually violent in all cases, especially when they're an internal minority. In fact, symmetrical warfare is basically the only case where the accusations happen to be true. Still, the subject of the fabricated violence matters more than the content.
Special thanks to Jez and Nat for helping me think all of this through!