I’ll start this post with a disclaimer: If you’re reading this hoping for a trans man’s manifesto on how women are toxic or how men run things better, goodbye.
Glad we got that out of the way! On to more interesting things.
Only in Fantasy
Like many queer speculative fiction authors, I have often longed to do in fiction what I cannot in the real world: structure a society without some or any of the -isms that plague our real life. Chief among these is misogyny—and why wouldn’t it be? Women vastly outnumber men in most genres of fiction, both as readers and as writers. They also make up half the human population. This makes them a strong candidate for the most widely, consistently discriminated group of human beings on planet earth, and that’s saying something.
Building a more inclusive fictional world from the ground up is an appealing prospect, and many authors will attempt it in their lifetimes. They will dream big, dig deep, and scour our world for inspiration. They will write and rewrite worldbuilding tomes. Scrutinize the genders of their main and major characters. Scrub gendered language from their manuscripts. When the dust settles, many of them will be left with a system just different enough to dream in, but just familiar enough to write: Matriarchy.
Long live the queens
Matriarchy in fiction comes in many flavors, with varying degrees of extremity. In all cases, it strives to reverse gendered power dynamics of the world most of us live in.
These fictional societies typically have women in charge. They are the heads of their households and the rulers of their nations. They command admiration and exercise power. Wealth, names, and property may be inherited through maternal lines. Eldest daughters may be treasured heirs. People with female reproductive systems may be revered as producers of life, or hold a sacred role in their religions and societies. Girls will never question their worth. Women will never battle for job security or healthcare. Men may range from deferential to subservient to their female counterparts, and treat them with the honor and respect they deserve.
This is a fantasy for many people, and with good reason. I won’t list the ways men dominate our patriarchal society to women’s detriment, but if you’re reading this article, you likely already know. If you don’t, Google it. I hope you find it enlightening.
Matriarchal stories and societies serve several roles in our world today. One is catharsis. Another is to open conversation about gender inequality by highlighting it through role reversal. Yet another is representation. When the balance of power between genders is so extreme, it takes an equal and opposite example to even begin to tip the scales. Even if every book in our world today magically transformed to feature a matriarchal society, we wouldn’t see the impact for generations. Even that wouldn’t be enough. Women would continue to struggle in a world that is fundamentally, structurally broken for them, and only a concerted effort by society itself could begin to repair the damage.
Matriarchies in fiction are important. But that’s not what this article is about.
A structural dilemma
Among the authors writing matriarchies into their Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and other genres, there are many whose goal is ultimately gender equality, or a more fair society. Matriarchy (especially the gender-flipped kind) does not accomplish this. The reason is simple. Both matriarchy and patriarchy are built on the same broken structural principle: a power hierarchy founded on biological sex.
But wait, we were talking about gender a moment ago!
Gender and sex are different. If you’re not familiar with this concept, Google it. It can be easy to assume that a fictional matriarchy centers gender; after all, femininity is revered, right? (Unless it’s not, and you have women-as-men touting masculine ideals of power and social influence… but that’s a different problem). To this, I would like to pose a simple question:
How are trans people treated?
Winners and losers
I like to ask this because it quickly breaks down whether sex or gender is at the heart of a fictional matriarchy. If a trans woman gains reverence and a trans man loses it upon transitioning, you have a gender-based system. If they retain the social treatment of their biological sex OR are treated as oddities, outcasts, or second-class citizens, you’re dealing with biology.
In either case, cis women win the lottery, while men, nonbinary people, and binary trans folks of either or both genders lose. In a sex-based system, you (problematically) reduce trans people to their biological sex. In either system, you replicate some or all our own society’s structural transphobia, just with the genders reversed. If you revere all trans people as well as women, you paradoxically “other” those with binary genders from… their genders. There is no fourth option.
Next, ask yourself who holds the decision-making power in this matriarchal society. Is anyone excluded from roles they’d be well-suited for because of their gender? Is violence or mockery against one gender more acceptable than against the other? How seriously are abuse complaints from that gender taken? Does one gender feel like second-class citizens, and either rebel, or shut up and stay in their lane under threat of punishment? No, I’m not talking about women—in a fictional matriarchal society, I’m talking about men.
Fairness or revenge?
Herein lies the crux of the issue: matriarchies are still a sex- or gender-based power structure, and a sex- or gender-based power structure embeds gender-based inequality into a society. It’s the same shit, just in strawberry flavor.
Children in this system win or lose based on the bodies they were born in, before they’ve done anything wrong. Those bodies give others permission to deny them rights and freedoms, treat them poorly, and get away with it. In this system, attempts at “equality” are equivalent to most attempts at “gender inclusion” in our patriarchal world today: superficial, often performative band-aid solutions for the structural problem that underpins them. These aren’t real solutions. Most exist so the dominant sex can feel progressive i.e. feel better about themselves without actually giving up power. Sound familiar?
The goal of genuine inclusion is gender equality: the equal sharing of structural power, influence, and respect. That is to say, treating all people as people. We learned this stuff in kindergarten. There may be an equity component involved, to account for the biological risk and burden of childbirth, but the point stands.
“But women are more _____”
Before I go any further, I’m going to take a moment to address the most common critique I see of takes like this one. It runs somewhere along the lines of: But women in charge would act completely differently from men. They won’t default to bigotry or brutality like men do.
If a thought like this has crossed your mind while reading, please take a moment to stop and consider its implications. Do you believe there is something fundamentally, biologically different between men and women? That men are naturally aggressive, and women naturally empathetic? That nature overrides nurture?
This view has a whole host of problems. Besides reducing complex, individual human beings to products of their biology (yikes), it also entirely ignores context. Why are men in our society often angry or aggressive? Why do they commit gender-based violence at staggering rates? Why do so many of them engage in risky behavior?
These are not purely biological questions. In fact, they are mostly not biological at all. Trans men don’t generally start waving guns or punching people just because they’ve started taking testosterone. These behaviors are products of the complex system of socialization and social rewards that kicks in right from infancy, and does not relent for the rest of our lives. Pinning it on hormones or chromosomes isn’t helpful.
Speaking of context, do you believe that power corrupts? Women in our world are often more empathetic because they’re socialized that way, but also because they’ve grown up experiencing oppression and solidarity. If a woman was structurally favored by society for her entire life, what reason would she have to retain those same empathetic traits? If the answer is “biology,” see my point above. Personally, I’d argue there is no answer. Women are capable of just as much brutality as men when placed in similar circumstances. Power is one hell of a drug. And if a fictional matriarchy isn’t about power, why the gender gatekeeping on who’s in charge?
In search of equality
Building gender parity into a fictional world is a great deal harder than simply swapping the gender roles and putting a bunch of women in charge. It requires men and women to be socialized similarly, without putting one above the other. If society remains divided along other lines, it requires different, more creative forms of structural oppression. It requires digging into the many, many factors that go into gender-based violence and cycles of abuse, extricating them one by one, and fixing gendered facets of them. And that’s just the beginning.
True gender parity implicates the healthcare system, to ensure women in particular have access to birth control, safe childbirth, and other determinants of reproductive health.
It implicates norms of inheritance and leadership succession. If biological childbirth is required in order to pass down wealth, title, or legacy, adoption will be seen as inferior to biological childbearing, and women will be forced to choose between pregnancy and their own (or their children’s) social advancement.
It implicates childcare: who looks after children, and how any stay-at-home parent is selected.
It implicates socioeconomics: whether any industries have a gender bias, and how much they’re paid relative to one another if so.
The list goes on.
It’s not easy, but…
All of these are complex to worldbuild. They require thinking outside the box of real-world inspiration, as only a fraction of possible social systems have real-world analogues to study. They require extensive knowledge of systems of oppression, intersectionality, how they interplay, and how gender and sex fit into all of them.
For those who write them, though, these more inclusive systems level the playing field between women and men. They open up a world of queer inclusion, too, by allowing a more equitable and flexible approach to things like family structure, gender norms, and legal lineage. Other groups like adoptees or people with gender-biased disabilities likewise benefit. It’s not a role reversal; it’s a revolution.
As an example of how gender inclusion in our world can be, that’s worth writing for.
About the Author
A.B. Channing is a queer speculative fiction writer and blogger who loves analyzing the writing industry and dislikes speaking about himself in third person. Most of his work is Dark Fantasy or Horror, but he frequently dabbles in Sci-Fi, Paranormal, and Romance. When not at his keyboard, he can most often be found up to his elbows in a pond.
Follow This Blog
Want to be notified of more posts like this? Enter your email below to subscribe to this blog. You won’t be added to A.B. Channing’s regular newsletter.