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‘I always felt like gender is mostly a way to control people,’ Ithaca College professor says

A transgender professor at Ithaca College writes about “undoing” the concept of “gender” in a new book about French literature.

Professor Mat Fournier’s book, “Dysphoric Modernism: Undoing Gender in French Literature,” makes the argument that “gender binaries control society” and “dysphoria is relevant to anyone regardless of gender and sexual orientation,” The Ithacan reports.

“By undoing gender, I knew that I’m looking at the period of time where gender — that is the gender binary, male or female as we know it now — started to exist,” Fournier told the newspaper.

Along with teaching French, the professor is an affiliate member of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the private, New York college. Fournier also identifies as a transgender male.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Fournier said the “idea of femininity and masculinity” began to “crystalize … as heterosexual.”

“In the book, I’m looking at explaining how gender and those modern gender definitions prevent freedom and individual difference,” the professor said.

Dysphoria is not just something that transgender people experience either, Fournier said.

“So what I’m arguing in the book is that dysphoria is relevant to everyone, not only those of us who actually feel dysphoria. Everyone can feel the limitations of gender,” the professor said.

“I always felt like gender is mostly a way to control people,” Fournier told the newspaper.

While exploring gender in 20th century French literature, Fournier said, “I also saw how the definition of the critique of gender is often also sexist and racist. I saw how these people are not seeing colonialism and how they are not seeing the French and European structural racism, because they’re busy creating gender and creating hegemonic masculinity for their own sake.”

Columbia University Press described the book as a “groundbreaking transgender analysis of French modernist literature.”

But the book comes at a time when the modern gender ideology is facing growing pushback.

Recently, President Donald Trump signed an executive order making it “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” It also recognizes that “[t]hese sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

Some noted scientists also have spoken out on the issue, stating that sex is binary and cannot be changed.

MORE: Ithaca College ‘feminist’ class teaches how to ‘resist abortion bans’

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