Gender

Gender is named as a construct with a purpose, and the purpose is in the definition rather than left to interpretation. It exists to impose power relations, and the relations it imposes are the standard two roles applied along the axis of sex, with the male position as endo-ideal and the female position as negative image. Everything the framework says about those roles then applies without modification. Virtue, ownership, victimhood and credit accumulate at the endo-ideal, and vice, guilt and punishment at the negative image, which is why Marsh can say that in a highly gendered culture a good reflector reflects all good onto their endo-ideal and by doing so creates it, and why a failure by a man was historically treated as a failure of the women around him. Because the structure is generic, she reads male endo-idealism as the template rather than as one instance among many. What historically happened in the sublation of women has scaled up to every other transcendental endogroup, and the liberation of women where it exists at all is a symptom of the sublation of some wider group. That is a claim about direction of influence rather than about priority of suffering. Her prescription follows the same logic she applies to feminism and diversity, since the remedy is the removal of endo-idealism rather than the rebalancing of positions within it, and she says plainly that the answer to the dysfunction is not gender balance.

The sex and gender distinction was formalized in the 1970s, with Ann Oakley among those separating the biological from the social, and the field has argued ever since about what the second term names. Materialist and radical feminist traditions, including Catharine MacKinnon and Christine Delphy, define gender as a hierarchy imposed rather than a difference described, which is very close to Marsh's definition. Gerda Lerner traced the historical construction of male authority. Others treat gender as identity, and the disagreement between those positions is live and contested. Marsh sits with the hierarchy account and adds the scaling claim, that this particular hierarchy is the template from which other endogroup structures were built, which is a stronger historical assertion than the feminist literature generally makes.