The System is Binary. Are We?

What do we share?

I ask myself, and ask to my circle: what brings men and women together?
Places? Nature, work, institutions, revolution?
Relationships? Love, friendship, sex, pets, language, parents?
Dreams? Happiness, soul, hope, mystery, religion?
Things we consume? Music, food, culture, education?
And the raw reality: body, pain, birth, death, survival, children, instincts… and the system.

It’s interesting to ask this question in this way, because it’s paradoxical. I ask what we have in common, starting from the concept of gender which is a separating concept. And the answers reveal this paradox: all of these concepts (love, work, the body, dreams) have different meanings and realities for men and women. Male domination is the underlying structure that binds men and women across all spheres of life. And yet, they still live together.

To this question, I heard: men and women are complementary; they share something, love is the proof. But there is violence and power dynamics in relationships. What we have in common is so different in principle. Violence is a mechanism of reproduction between authors and victims: we all are both. Because the system works like that. And private space is the first places of oppression for women and gays; but it’s also first place of power, and change.

The system is built to make people believe life doesn't change; that’s why the model of heterosexual productive families is a systemic model. Distinguishing women and men, feminine and masculine energy, in two separate genders is reductive. It does not reflect a complex reality, naturality. There is differentiation in nature, between male and female; but we lost nature. That’s why Scott writes that gender is built historically, in discordance with reality.

Gender is not just a concept; it’s a political strategy. For example, the Turkish government sent an official letter to Galatasaray University, asking them to ban the use of the term gender. Why? Because they don’t want the concept to be questioned. The current definition of gender serves their power, that’s why they want to silence it.

Feminism, in this way, is a revolution of the mind. It reveals how patriarchy confines us all, regardless of gender. Feminism is not a closed identity or a war between sexes. It is a political project of emancipation. And politics, in our time, functions like a religion: it imposes moral codes, family models, ideas of purity and roles. These are not neutral; they are tools of control. Feminism is a claim for freedom. And in that sense, it concerns us all.

Why Is Being Feminine Still an Insult?

Titou Lecoq, in her book “Why has history forgotten women?” explains history hasn’t. It excluded them, strategically. Women are 50% of the population. And yet they’re treated like a minority. That’s not a mistake; it’s a lie. A system built on exclusion, where gender becomes a prison for everyone.

For men, being associated with anything feminine is often seen as shameful. Sensitivity, vulnerability, care, all devalued. And being gay? Somehow, it’s considered the most feminine thing a man can be. Why? It makes no sense, unless you understand the structure: in a world ruled by masculine domination, femininity is always placed lower. Power (or puissance) is coded as masculine. Weakness is feminized. That’s the real insult.

As Joan Scott wrote, gender is a concept historically constructed. It’s not natural; it’s a political and social invention. And it’s not neutral either. It was built to serve the interests of those already in power: old white men, mostly.

Justice is important. I want to talk about the Pelicot lawsuit in France: Gisele was drugged and raped for years by men her husband invited. This lawsuit is a societal lawsuit, because everyone questioned themselves, like: how can our society make that happen? It shakes foundations. That’s why real justice matters, not only for the verdict, but for the noise it makes. This lawsuit was a gender lawsuit: about the human gender.

Youth, Gender, and the Politics of Resistance

Identity has always been more than the binary differentiation between men and women. It is multiple, fluid, and historically shaped. Gender is about power, and strategies for power are currently destroying the world. It is urgent to define ourselves outside of this frame. The queer community already understands that.

Being a woman, being queer, being young are social, not biological categories. As Stuart Hall, a major theorist of cultural identity, emphasized: identity is not fixed—it evolves, and it is constructed through conflict, memory, and political negotiation. Identities change depending on the historical moment, social class, or cultural context.

Today, youth, especially young women, understand that everything is political. On social media, nothing is taboo anymore. From sexuality to race, the climate crisis to body autonomy, youth voices are rising, questioning systems that once felt untouchable. Even nationalism has been co-opted as a political tool to silence or control youth movements. But as a cinema professor at Galatasaray University reminded us: universities will always bypass censorship. Students and professors exist to ask questions, and no regime can truly control that.

Nothing in nature is binary. Feeling it is already knowing it. The Istanbul Convention is essential because it names the violence: it defines gender-based violence as systemic, and it guarantees rights beyond individual responsibility. The system’s inability to ensure human rights makes it illegitimate. That’s why the Convention was so politically powerful, and why it was withdrawn.

Take the case of Iran: in 2022, Masha Amini was murdered for not wearing her veil "properly." Seventy-six people died during the protests that followed, many of them women and students like Nika Shahkarami, whose body was returned to her family with her skull shattered. In Iran, the regime has invaded the private sphere, so private resistance has become political resistance. Homes, dorms, bodies: all spaces of control are now spaces of defiance.

Just like in Türkiye, the withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention was an attempt to erase voices: young, queer, feminist voices. We, young women, are the future. We will be everything at once: women, thinkers, critics, philosophers. We will take on every role and wear every label, until these labels lose their meaning. No one is “just” a woman; no one is “just” a man. We are people first. And the world moves forward. Change is the foundation of the human soul.

Female solidarity is our strongest political power. We are the other option. If governments no longer protect human rights, people will. Starting with women and LGBTQ+ communities. This is what collective liberation means; to refund what we have as natural.

References

• Agyeman, J., 2005. Toward a Just Sustainability: Continuity and Change in Environmental Justice and Sustainability Discourse.

• Bourdieu, P., 1998. Masculine Domination. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

• Brenner, J. and Ramas, M., n.d. Rethinking Women’s Oppression: A Marxist-Feminist Perspective.

• Lecoq, T., 2021. The Forgotten Ones: Why History Erased Women.

• Poulain de la Barre, F., 1673. On the Equality of the Two Sexes.

• Scott, J.W., n.d. Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.

• Tabet, P., 1998. The Social Construction of the Inequality Between the Sexes: Tools and Bodies.