By “scam” I don’t mean that gender does not exist — it certainly does, and paying critical attention to it is essential. By gender being a scam I mean that it is not what people presume it is… my view is that gender functions to stabilize the ontological instability of sex as both a noun (i.e., male, female) and verb (i.e., “sexual intercourse”). Even though there are many empirical examples of sex, I have yet to find any definition of it that does not falsely presume the existence of some kind of biological essence (e.g., men are “essentially” different than women), or exclude a valid sexual experience (e.g., fetishes are part of the sexual and one can have a fetish for anything).

Gender is, in other words, how humans give meaning to sexual difference, and my view is that the meanings given are divisive and ultimately unintelligible because it is not clear what kind of thing sex is to begin with. Gender is a scam because it’s covering up for this deeper scandal (i.e., that we don’t actually know what sex is), which is why gender non-conforming folks like me get targeted for breaking with gender norms — doing so exposes the ultimate contingency of gender norms in their attempt to control what we do with our holes.

I recommend checking out Thomas Lacquer’s Making Sex for an overview of scientific anatomical representations of sex differences (vaginas did not exist for humans until around the 17th century!), and Alenka Zupancic’s What Is Sex? for an overview of what Lacan meant by “There is no sexual relation” (our signifying structures i.e. languages are what attempt to create a stable sexual relation but always fail at some point, so we repeatedly perform gender to remedy this failure).

Thank you for your reply, I appreciate your feedback!