I am interested in identity and fairness. So it's worth highlighting Judith Butler's latest work, Who's Afraid of Gender? released earlier this year.
Maybe this particular highlight comes a little late, but we did just have an election, and at this point, no one can deny that we are in for a rapid escalation of politics and contentious cultural discourse around gender issues in 2025 and beyond.
Butler is many things, among them extremely eloquent in describing the social and cultural zeitgeist around gender identity, namely the struggle for gender based rights, particularly those of transgender and gender queer groups in the western world (and beyond), and helping us recognize a strong regression toward "traditional" values emblematic of fascist or authoritarian societies.
Butler contends, and I think they are right, that the modern era is marked by a clear and powerful "anti-gender" movement, aka. those who are trying to reverse trends of free-thought around what we have traditionally understood as "biological truths" in sex and identity. The movement does this by constructing a ghost, or "phantasm," out of the concept of "gender."
"…The anti-gender movement is guided by an inflammatory syntax, that is, a way of ordering the world that absorbs and reproduces anxieties and fears about permeability, precarity, displacement and replacement, loss of patriarchal power in both the family and state, and the loss of white supremacy and national purity. In the process of reproducing the fear of destruction, the source of destruction is externalized as 'gender.' "
"Constructed" being the key word here. "Ghost stories" are just that: they are stories, oftentimes used to evoke fear of some fictitious entity intent on harming you. And this might piss some people off, but Butler is essentially saying that that anxieties against more freer understandings of sex and gender, is well, a delusion. And that delusion fuels their defensive posture against something that is entirely of their own making.
"One could say that the attack on the “family,” that the right imagines taking place, warrants their own attack on policies and laws that oppose gender-based violence, gender studies, reproductive rights, gay marriage, and trans rights. If the attack is coming at them, then they are defending themselves, their values, their sense of what family, nation, man, woman, and civilization, should be. But it may be that the attack they see as coming at them, seeping into their cultural world, is already a projection, carrying and reflecting back to them the aggravated trace of their own aggression."
In the US in 2025 and beyond, there are bound to be aggressive measures against education and free discussion on gender in the name of "protecting the children." The irony here, Butler argues, that restricting free thought and open discussion of gender does more to corrupt young minds (especially trans gender or gender queer youth), than any one book with racy themes.
"a state-backed form of thought police is increasingly on offer, pitted against gender ideology which is conceived of as a form of forced conversion. If it seems difficult to distinguish between” an alleged ideology characterized as indoctrinating”, and a way of restricting what students can read and think about, and the kind of healthcare they can receive, on which side we find indoctrination?
Is the problem that children are too free to think and imagine? Is the assumption that if children read about something they will become that thing? What strange powers are attributed to reading and to books? Censorship thus belies its belief in the inordinate transitive powers of the words it fears. They are apparently too exciting and transformative to come anywhere near a child. The words themselves are tacitly figured as recruiters and molesters, which is why they must be removed from the classroom to thwart their apparently enormous and destructive effect. "
The other major issue tackled in the book is the modern struggle on transgender rights, especially those of transgender youth, will be denied recognition of their identity and or access to gender affirming care. These outcomes are visible on the horizon in countries like the US and the UK, where anti-gender figures such as JK Rowling enjoy massive reach, for example, to influence the public opinion on impending legislation against trans rights.
Butler's grapples with this philosophically, asking the question toward "gender-critical" and "trans-exclusionary" feminists ("TERFs"), like Rowling, who believe they are in a righteous battle on behalf of women. Simply put: why should you care?
"Trans exclusionary feminists claim that trans women cannot be women or that they may belong to a second-class order of woman, otherwise they would take something away from women assigned female at birth. When TERFs claim that their gender is appropriated, they concede in effect that they think of their sex as property, something stolen from them. But they still exist within the genders they have. So what precisely has changed? Has anything truly been lost or taken away? Self-definition is an age-old feminist prerogative, so why forfeit that now in the name of an authority both paternalistic and proprietary?
…
No one owns their own gender. We are born into genders through sex assignment and its attendant social expectations. If one accepts that as a true claim, then one accepts the idea of gender. Of course some of us claim the genders we are given, and in that sense become the gender we have been assigned. Others try to expand the category or qualify it in some way to make it work for their lives, yet others elect for a different assignment that allows for the kind of flourishing the ssigned gender foreclosed. One can claim a gender for oneself,but it already inherently exceeds one's grasp. In saying, “ I am a woman” one yields to a category not of one’s own making, yet we try to make it our own at the same time that all of this happens beyond the logic of property."
In other words, it is language. Sure language has power, but language is not property, and you don't own language.
Speaking of language, Butler goes international, and I'm glad they do, because it is hard to escape the fact that the most popular analytical frames and theories, such as the gender lens, often originate from the West, with many baked in Western cultural assumptions and sensibilities. And this fact needs to be grappled with. If, say an American, becomes involved in a global movement for LGBTQ+ rights, say on the issue of marriage equality in India, they may be met with accusations of cultural "imperialism" or "colonialism."
"In various parts of the world gender is figured not only as a threat to children, national security or heterosexual marriage, and the normative family, but also plot by elites to impose their cultural values on “real people,” asking for colonizing the global South by the urban centers of the global North."
But Butler contends that as soon as you acknowledge that there is no single correct frame or language with which we articulate this notion of "gender" the conundrum becomes fairly moot. Feminist language is a conversation: ever changing and not "monolingual conviction." If these concepts seem foreign or imposing, they are ultimately meant to be translated and reworked, rather than either accepted or rejected wholesale.
"No one language has the exclusive power to define gender or regulate its grammatical usage, and that means that every way of referring to gender has a certain contingency. We may understandably feel disrespected if we are referred to in the wrong way, but why have we ask people to enter into our own frame of reference? Those reactions can be moments of monolingual obstinacy or a failure to see the work of translation as obligatory.
…
If one's sense of self is bound up with the language one uses to describe one's self, and if the insistence on this or that term plunges one more deeply into monolingualism, one closes off the encounters with other languages and with whatever might teach us what some of us call gender."
These topics are clearly linked to Butler's experience with intra-movement infighting, or "internecine warfare" which I actually hoped Butler would spend more of the book on, rather than a baseline diagnosis of anti-genderism.
Okay we know the problem, what do we do about it? Leftist movements have historically fractured over arguably smaller ideological and aesthetic differences rather than acknowledge when those differences need to be subordinated in the face of overarching, existential crises of backsliding toward fascism.
"And if we fall into forms of internecine warfare, when solidarity is most needed, than we fail to sees the opportunity to form new solidarities to meet the challenges of authoritarian structures and fascist Passions. Solidarity requires a staying with antagonisms that cannot always be resolved. Staying, in other words, with the irresolvable. Staying in the fight against those forms of power: capitalist, patriarchal, racist, transphobic, that would deny our lives and fundamental freedoms that would strip us of language desire and the capacity to breathe and move in a single stroke. Even if we cannot put our differences aside we should carry them along, quarreling as we Forge a solidarity for the future, for surely one of the most urgent tasks is to discern and intensify the powers of coalition to secure forms of freedom and equality indispensable to any future democracy worth the name."
I love this excerpt! But also, it needs more detail. I hoped Butler would have highlighted more specific issues of "internecine warfare" especially when movement stakeholders who would ostensibly be in coalition together, instead bicker about proper use of respectful language, or scoff at each other's unsavory relationships even when those maybe necessary steps toward "working within a system" and gaining political power. Just like with feminism, there should be no "monolingual conviction" on the right way to wield power. So while I myself am deeply compelled by Butler's call for coalitional unity with beautiful and flowing prose, the question about what specifically to do still eludes us. Are coalitions representing the rights and interests of women against misogyny ever possible with a JK Rowling? Do we concede that she sides with fascists? Or is it somewhere in between?
One last gaping hole I felt this book left for me was the question of how all of these concepts make sense to broader audiences, not just ones who may be theory literate, class privileged, or well educated.
How does the so-called "other side" come down off of an anti-gender stance?
When Butler says: "Censorship thus belies its belief in the inordinate transitive powers of the words it fears. They are apparently too exciting and transformative to come anywhere near a child." I can't help but agree and applaud, but at the same time anti-gender, racist, and fascist propaganda is also a form of speech.
To some extent the youth are vulnerable to the transitive powers of words when online influencers representing the anti-feminist "manosphere," impress upon millions of youth with misinformation leading to more hostile world view, and unrealistic understandings of sex and gender.
Some form of reconciliation is in order with folks who are indeed "afraid of gender" (if they are willing to realize it), but in the end, how does one become "unafraid?"
