The Brooklyn Rail

The old gender certainties are in chaos and the consternation is great fun to watch. I have in mind less the current usual suspects—trans folk, the nonbinary, people demanding bespoke pronouns—but an arguably more radical and world-shaking category upheaval. I’m referring to the increasing number of natal women across the planet ignoring their biological destinies and ticking clocks, casting aside the chance to participate in the great chain of being, and collectively failing to have children.

Consequently, as you’ve no doubt heard, birthrates have dropped below the replacement rate (2.1 children per woman) across the globe, down nearly 20 percent in the US since 2007 and roughly 14 percent worldwide. A number of supposedly tradition-bound countries—South Korea, Taiwan, Japan—are even harder hit, with deaths far exceeding births and terms like “demographic collapse” being thrown around. Schools and playgrounds are closing, baby bonuses and free IVF are under consideration, even subsidized childbearing and daycare costs are being discussed—teensy crumbs compared to the real labor and costs of childbearing/raising, needless to say.

There are multiple causal factors to point to: the end of the family wage propelled women into the workforce and gave them enough financial independence to call some of the shots; the remnants of patriarchal authority meanwhile deteriorated as men’s economic fortunes declined. Basically, capitalism smashes things (the family, social ties) while ushering in all sorts of new personal liberties. Currently, climate change, another of late capitalism’s signature accomplishments, is cited by many, along with unaffordable childcare costs, as good reasons not to procreate. Maybe feminism even had something to do with it.

However we designate the causalities, dropping birthrates will “completely reconfigure the global economy and the international balance of power and will necessitate reorganizing societies,” as one expert quoted in The Guardian put it. The future grows ever more uncertain—another reason not to procreate.

There’s a lot of social attention paid lately to the impact of gender-altering technologies when it comes to trans populations, but far less to voluntary childlessness as another version of gender alteration. Speaking now as a gender theorist: if large swathes of women are rejecting the traditional requirements of womanhood, why not think about transgenderism and maternity resistance—rising gender dysphoria and plummeting birth rates—as part of the same story? Certainly they share a history: advances in endocrinology helped make everyone’s bodies malleable and customizable. Just as synthesized hormones allowed people who want to transition genders to inhabit bodies that feel more authentic, the pill, introduced in the US in 1960, and which suppresses ovulation, allowed natal women their own body-refashioning possibilities, which vast numbers eagerly took up: by 1973, fertility rates had dropped by nearly 50 percent.

The male-female binary may be losing its grip on the human psyche as a social organizing principle, but there’ve always been people who didn’t fit easily into normative categories. Once herded into them by threat and force, many are now increasingly breaking loose; with the old structures debilitated and unable to demand fealty, conformity to their dictates is waning. But perhaps some of our brave new binaries—trans/cis comes to mind—aren’t proving sufficiently encompassing either.

Gender has always been a tragicomic, miserable cage for all involved, and I confess the spectacle of all this female refusal makes me gleeful. Think about it: there are some two hundred million childless women of childbearing age worldwide, two hundred million closet radicals and refuseniks. Even if the majority of them have conventional gender presentations in sartorial or behavioral terms—normal-seeming, skirt-wearing, feminine-appearing, verbally uptalking, largely heterosexual—they’re having a world-shaking impact on, basically, everything. Think what could happen if they ever recognized themselves as a collective social force.

Face it, the childless woman is a massive “fuck off” to every social order that treats those whose lot it’s been to repopulate the planet as unrecompensed laborers. (Yes, that’s every social order on earth, though France, the EU country with the highest birthrate, does fund up to 85 percent of childcare.) The point is that non- or insufficient procreation isn’t a siloed individual choice made by isolated individual women, it’s a collective story. If some 14 percent of women worldwide have concluded that childbearing/raising labor is too costly or undercompensated, too socially disrespected or unrewarding, or some inarticulate but effective cocktail of these and other socio-subjective factors—if 14 percent of the female population is suddenly going, “Hey, I’m not your chump anymore,” then their refusal to fall in line is more than an opportunity for clucking and raised eyebrows from the family values crowd. It’s a general strike in the making. Workers of the world: take a hint.