Source of book:
Borrowed from the library
I have wanted
to read this book ever since it came out. Having read it, I am a bit
overwhelmed, and don’t entirely know where to start with this post.
First of all,
the book is excellent, and it truly gets to the heart of the matter, which is
that our current moment of moral panic over gender isn’t a natural phenomenon,
but a deliberately created political stunt intended to focus general
existential dread from genuine issues facing us: climate change, the
concentration of wealth in a few obscenely wealthy and amoral men, increasing
economic precarity for most people, and so on - into a scapegoating of gender
and sexual minorities, blaming the genuine and appropriate emotions many of us
are feeling on a small percentage of humans, justifying violence and “moral
sadism” against minorities.
Butler also
ties this to a global fascist movement that is also targeting racial
minorities, immigrants, women, and the impoverished.
That Butler is
correct about all of this should be obvious, but unfortunately, too many are
more than willing to simmer in rage, hate, and fear of those who do not fit a
narrow (and very culturally determined) binary instead of addressing the very
real threats we face as humans.
That’s kind of
the TL;DR summary, but there is so much more. The book tackles the toxic legacy
of the Catholic Church (which is very real), the complicated issues of
colonialism past and present, the impossibility of fitting the complexity of
nature into rigid human categories, the inherent contradictions of
“transexclusionary feminism,” and the challenge of offering an alternative to
authoritarian fascism - a future in which we preserve the planet and ensure
that everyone has what they need.
Good book.
Highly recommended. A bit traumatic for those of us who have kids on the gender
spectrum who have already in their young lives been targeted by adults who
should be better than this. Including, for just one example, corrupt Texas
politicians who have made anti-transgender rhetoric nearly all of their
campaign.
For those
unaware of Judith Butler, they are a non-binary author and academic who has
written about gender and feminism for decades. I particularly appreciated the
careful, clear thought in this book, and the willingness to tackle tough issues
head-on, rather than doing the mealy-mouthed throwing of transgender people
under the bus we see too often from the left.
I also want to
note that even for us cisgender people, the panic about gender affects us. If
we deviate from the cultural script for gendered roles in society, we are
punished, something my wife and I know all too well from experience.
I took a lot of
notes, so I am just going to dive in and talk about the many passages that I
thought were particularly helpful.
First, Butler
starts off by stating the truth: panic about gender isn’t based in reality. It
is based in what she calls a “phantasm,” a projection of fears onto a
bogeyperson.
Can we even say how many
contemporary fears gather at the site of gender? Or explain how the
demonization of gender deflects from, and covers over, legitimate anxieties
about climate destruction, intensified economic precarity, war, environmental
toxins, and police violence, fears we are surely right to feel and think about?
When the word “gender” absorbs an array of fears and becomes a catchall
phantasm for the contemporary Right, the various conditions that actually give
rise to those fears lose their names. “Gender” both collects and incites those
fears, keeping us from thinking more clearly about what there is to fear, and
how the currently imperiled sense of the world came about in the first
place.
They continue:
Circulating the phantasm of “gender” is
also one way for existing powers - states, churches, political movements - to
frighten people to come back into their ranks, and to externalize their fear
and hatred onto vulnerable communities. Those powers not only appeal to
existing fears that many working people have about the future of their work, or
the sanctity of their family life, but also incite those fears, insisting, as
it were, that people conveniently identify “gender” as the true cause of their
feelings of anxiety and trepidation about the world.
And more,
stating what should be obvious:
The weaponization of this fearsome
phantasm of “gender” is authoritarian at its core. Rolling back progressive
legislation is surely fueled by backlash, but backlash describes only the
reactive moment in this sense. The project of restoring the world to a time
before “gender” promises a return to a patriarchal dream-order that may never
have existed but that occupies the place of “history” or “nature” - an order
that only a strong state can restore.
Yeah, funny how
it always seems to come down to the use of the police state to dictate how
people live their lives. If gender roles were actually “natural,” there would
be no need for some much authoritarian shit to force people to follow
them.
In a theme that
will recur throughout the book, Butler asserts that we progressive and humanist
people need to offer an alternative - one that actually should be
attractive.
It is up to us to produce a compelling
counter-vision, one that would affirm the rights and freedoms of embodied life
that we can, and should, protect. For in the end, defeating this phantasm is a
matter of affirming how one loves, how one lives in one’s body, the right to
exist in the world without fear of violence or discrimination, to breathe, to
move, to live. Why wouldn’t we want all people to have those fundamental
freedoms?
For me, this
seems obvious. But for too many people, my parents included, the idea that
“those people” have fundamental freedoms is terrifying. Indeed, even the idea
of a woman having a career or wearing normal clothing was terrifying enough for
my mom to destroy family relationships.
Butler also
looks at the way that the Right uses DARVO constantly. (If you aren’t familiar
with the term, it is how abusive people maintain what they see as the moral
high ground: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.) For the anti-gender
movement, they paint themselves as the victims even as they destroy the basic
freedoms and safety of others. And they do it most effectively through telling
themselves that harming others is the “moral” thing to do.
What is remarkable and disturbing is the
way that this moral campaign relishes experimenting with various ways of
denying the very existence of others, stripping them of rights, refusing their
reality, restricting basic freedoms, engaging in shameless forms of racial
hatred, and controlling, demeaning, caricaturing, pathologizing, and
criminalizing those lives. Hatred is stoked and rationalized by moral
righteousness, and all those damaged and destroyed by hateful movements are
cast as the truer agents of destruction. These projections and reversals
structure the phantasmatic scene of “gender.” This leaves us with two urgent
questions: Who is out to destroy whom? And how do forms of shared and
escalating moral sadism pass themselves off as a virtuous order?
I particularly
love the term “moral sadism,” which is the perfect description of how the
Religious Right abuses those they see as lower than them. It is what I have
experienced all too much in my birth family, unfortunately, as well. Those who
speak out against mistreatment are the real threat…
Later, Butler
expands a bit on the “patriarchal dream-order” - that fantasy of what life
supposedly used to be like, when women “knew their place.” Or, as I often note,
the belief that 1950s sitcoms were real. I cannot state strongly enough how
this ideology was at the heart of the destruction of my relationship with my
parents.
Although interpreted as a backlash against
progressive movements, anti-gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish,
namely, the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a
father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at
birth,” resume their natural and “moral” positions within the household; and
white people hold uncontested racial supremacy.
And oh hell
yes, the white supremacy is key to the whole belief system.
The project is fragile, however, since the
patriarchal order it seeks to restore never quite existed in the form they seek
to actualize it in the present.
Again, this
requires government force stripping people of rights.
The opposition to “gender” as a demonic
social construct culminates in policies that seek to deprive people of their
legal and social rights, that is, to exist within the terms that they have
rightfully established for themselves. Stripping people of rights in the name
of morality or the nation or a patriarchal wet dream belongs to the broader
logic amplified by authoritarian nationalism to, say, deny migrants rights of
asylum, to displace the Indigenous from their lands, to push Black people into
the prison system where rights of citizenship are systematically denied and
abuse and violence are justified as “legitimate” security measures.
It really is
all connected. The Trump Era really solidified for me my growing suspicion that
anti-LGBTQ bigotry was just another manifestation of the same disease of the
soul that we see expressed as racism and misogyny.
Butler
continues to insist that this all is a denial of reality.
But no matter how intently authoritarian
forces attempt to restrict freedoms, the fact that the categories of women and
men shift historically and contextually is undeniable. New gender formations
are part of history and reality. Ignoring them or trying to outlaw them is a
futile effort to negate a living complexity that will certainly not go away in
the years to come.
I’ll link here
to Hermaphrodites
and the Medical Invention of Sex for a deeper dive into some of this
history, just in the modern Western world.
The thing is,
the patriarchists actually are not opposed to the idea of gender at all: they
just want the power to define it and what it means for individual lives.
Those who claim to know what place women
should occupy in social and political life are adhering to a very specific
theory of gender. They are not opposed to gender - they have a precise gender
order in mind that they want to impose on the world. They seek to restore and
consolidate a patriarchal dream of settled and hierarchical gender binaries, an
order that can be achieved only by destroying the lives of others - or trying
to.
If you listen
even a tiny bit to the anti-gender crowd, it becomes obvious that this idea of
men ruling over women is at the core of their belief system. Hey, I
pointed that out in a post a few years ago!
I won’t quote
extensively from the passage on why anti-gender ideology is inherently
anti-intellectual and terrified of opposing ideas other than to say that Butler
makes the connection between fear of “gender” and fear of learning about
systemic racism and misogyny as well. It is all connected. They also point out
that the fear-mongering about “gender ideology” is all projection - it is right
wingers asserting that their theopolitical ideology of gender should be
accepted without question, and all opposing viewpoints shut down.
This
theopolitical ideology, of course, is threatened by reality itself, so it
becomes an exercise in denialism. (Again, something I have far too much
experience with in my birth family.)
Let us be clear: for the right-wing
opponents, the facts as they present them support the exclusively heterosexual
character of marriage; the general denial of the reality of trans, intersex,
and non-binary people as well as a dismissal of their basic rights; the refusal
of the racial and colonial history of gender dimorphism; and the assertion of
the state as rightfully exercising constraint on the reproductive freedoms of
all potentially childbearing people. Do the facts support the political
positions? Or is the political position rallying some facts at the expense of
others - a selective positivism where what remains hidden is the principle used
to select the facts at hand.
There is an
excellent passage on the nature of modern fascism, and how anti-gender ideology
is a fascist movement. Again, too much to quote, but worth reading. Here is one
bit, though, that I do want to quote:
Fascism was an ideology because it sought
to reestablish nationalism and racist hierarchies, drawing on older social
orders to detain and forcibly subjugate, attack, kill, and expel communists,
Jews, the Roma, the physically challenged, gay and lesbian people, and the
ill.
Moving on to a
different topic, I think the book is helpful in understanding that sex
assignment isn’t as “simple” as the right would have you believe.
Of course, many people refer to “sex” as
if it is an obvious fact, based on observation, and worry that academics have
needlessly obfuscated plain matters. Consider, however, that sex assignment is
not simply an announcement of the sex that an infant is perceived to be; it
also communicates a set of adult desires and expectations. The infant’s future
is often being imagined or desired through the act of sex assignment, so sex
assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining
what they will mean, or should mean. That imagining comes from elsewhere, and
it does not exactly stop after sex has been legally or medically determined at
birth. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; and
these practices of girling and boying are repeated not just by parents but also
by a range of institutions that greet the child with boxes to be checked and
norms to be embedded. In a sense, sex assignment does not happen just once. It
is an iterative process, repeated by different actors and institutions, and
depending on where one lives, it can be reiterated in ways that are not always
in conformity with one another.
Butler will
explore this a lot more later in the book.
For certain
reasons, the book focuses more on the history of Roman Catholic views on gender
than on the Evangelical ones. Maybe this is related to the fact that the
Catholic Church has lately been slightly more progressive on racial and
environmental issues than it had been, while Evangelicalism has been little
more than a wing of the Ku Klux Klan. It might also be that Catholic thought
has a broader global reach than the insular American
Religion.
That said, I
must say that the Catholic Church does not come off well in the book - even the
late Pope Francis. (And god, was Ratzinger horrible.)
Not being a
Catholic (and unlikely to ever be one), I wasn’t as familiar with much of this
as I am with the moral cesspit of Evangelical thought on gender roles and
hierarchies. So some of this was unfamiliar but really not that surprising. I
want to note a few lines, for sure.
First is
Ratzinger’s warning about how “gender” supposedly threatened the family. Guess
what? It’s just a bunch of blither about power and gender roles!
[Ratzinger] warned that gender theorists
were imperiling the family by challenging the proposition that Christian family
roles could and should be derived from biological sex. According to the
Vatican, the sexual division of labor is to be found in the nature of sex:
women are to do domestic work and men are to undertake action in paid
employment and public life.
Sigh. Yep,
women are to be relegated to unpaid domestic drudgery. I am reminded of a
terrible AI meme circulating online from a right-wing idiot. I won’t repost it
because I hate AI and also don’t want to give this guy press, but I will
describe it: It has the “this is what liberals want” caption, and shows a male
cooking dinner while holding a baby and washing clothes on an old-fashioned
washboard. While the woman watches TV.
That’s really
what this is about. Women should be cooking and cleaning and doing childcare so
that males can relax with the TV, amirite???
Of all the
hogwash about gender, the idea that specific tasks derive from biological sex
is the most stupid. I am fully capable of washing my own clothes (using a
washer, because this is the 21st Century), and cooking (everyone in our
household cooks at least once a week), and I cared for babies by myself just
fine, thank you, despite apparently having the enormous handicap of having a
pen!s.
Unfortunately,
the Catholic Church, like most religious organizations, has decided that
preserving this gendered division of labor justifies the demonization of those
who reject their views.
Devils and demons can only be expelled or
banished, burned in effigy, which is why censorship, bullying, and
pathologization become the key strategies for the anti-gender movement.
Butler also
notes that religion in general has not taken kindly to the idea of separation
of church and state, insisting the right to use the power of the state to
impose religious beliefs and practices on everyone else.
In this case, “gender” threatens to
inaugurate a time when religious intervention in state affairs will no longer
exist, and the Church will be firmly severed from the state.
In exploring
the global political connections between church, state, and anti-gender
ideology, Butler again notes the key connections.
The opposition to “gender,” which
threatens the “natural family,” is often linked to the threat of migrants, the
prospect of miscegenation, and its apparently dangerous effect on the natural
family. The “natural” family is not just heteronormative; it also serves to
reproduce the nation along lines of racial and ethnic purity.
Hungary under
Orban gets a long look here, including Orban’s express condemnation of “race
mixing.” If this sounds Nazi to you, you are paying attention.
In country after country, the connection
between anti-gender ideology and racism is unmistakable. Gender minorities and
racial minorities are a threat to the “purity” of the nation.
These chains of association don’t just
rail off; they condense into an identifiable site of danger, one that can be
warded off, according to these schemes, only by imperiling trans and queer
people, feminists, gay and lesbian people, and migrant communities. Such a
discourse, in claiming to ward off harm, does enormous harm, but it can call
the harm it does a defense against harm.
Another passage
worth mentioning is one that explores the way that Western nations use LGBTQ
rights as proxy wars of colonialism - all while ignoring the ongoing economic
exploitation of the third world. This, as Butler points out, tends to harm
LGBTQ people. I won’t get into all of it, but if you want to understand how the
World Bank essentially charges third world countries for the privilege of
having their resources extracted to benefit Western corporations, Jonathan
Kwitny’s book, Endless
Enemies, is a great place to start.
I’ll also
mention this bit, which may be true for the third world, but it also works
pretty darn well here in the USA: right wingers are nothing if not completely
inconsistent in their conspiracy-mongering.
[A]s we will see, the anti-gender position
takes several forms that are not necessarily consistent with one another. Nor
do they require consistency to be effective. Depending on the anxieties
circulating in a particular region, gender can be figured as Marxist or
capitalist, tyranny or libertarianism, fascism or totalitarianism, a colonizing
force or an unwanted migrant. Again: the more contradictory the movement, the
more influential its discourse has proven to be.
Just as in the
US, gender roles were never really the 1950s sitcoms, in the third world,
patriarchy was never as total as many claim. In many cases, the patriarchal
binary was a bit of a colonial export, as the book briefly examines. Perhaps
the most amusing is the former president of South Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol (removed
from office after trying to overthrow democracy…), making the claim that before
Western influence, women were never unhappy in their subordination - indeed,
they were fine with harassment, gendered violence, and unequal pay, before
those nefarious “outside influences” taught them to be unhappy.
Suuuuuure.
Another
interesting thing this book reminded me of was that much of this idea of
“complementarity” is a modern affectation. The idea of the “stay-at-home-mom”
is a
historical aberration, mostly a thing of American white middle class people
of the 1950s. Likewise, this emphasis on rigid gender roles and hierarchy as an
obsession of religion seems to have originated not that long ago. (Related: the
Southern Baptists used to have female pastors, until the fundamentalist
takeover a half century ago.)
Theologians have questioned whether this
doctrine of complementarity even has a basis in history, and some have
persuasively argued that “complementarity” emerges in Church doctrine only in
the second half of the twentieth century in response to feminist and lesbian
and gay movements.
I certainly
have confirmation that a lot fewer of my grandparents’ generation were opposed
to women working than my parents’ generation. Even in my childhood, it wasn’t
the big deal it is now, where specific gendered duties are alleged to be
sacrosanct.
Perhaps most
persuasive assertion in the chapter on the Catholic Church, however, is that
the church’s false claims that LGBTQ people are “groomers” is a projection of
the Catholic Church’s (and indeed literally every conservative religious
tradition’s) sordid history of child abuse.
It hardly matters that the lesbian and gay
movement is opposed to the sexual abuse of children, and that it is in fact the
Catholic Church that is at risk of bankruptcy after paying reparations to all
the children it has abused over decades. Haunted by its own abuse of children,
the Church externalizes the origin of child abuse, attributing it to sexual and
gender minorities who have for the most part thought carefully about matters of
consent, defended the actions of consenting adults within the law, and fought
for social freedoms on the street. The Church thus ignores the fact that it has
lost all standing to articulate this objection. It commits a moral error of
gross proportion by projecting and externalizing the specter of its own abusive
history onto sexual and gender minorities as a way of making others responsible
for its own crimes.
I will also add
that this applies a million times over to MAGA, who likewise scapegoats sexual
and gender minorities, while it is their own orange leader who co-ran the
largest child sex trafficking ring of our time along with Jeffrey
Epstein.
In contrast, it
is the liberal movements and specifically feminism and LGBTQ rights that
has argued most strongly for consent-based sexual ethics and the protection of
children from abuse.
Yet if feminist and LGBTQIA+ movements and
movements against racism and colonialism all share the conviction that violence
and exploitation have gone unacknowledged and unrepaired for centuries with the
full complicity of state and religious authorities, then surely such movements
maintain strong normative commitments and make strong moral judgments all the
time. This should be obvious to anyone who pays attention to such movements,
but it is not. Among the norms these movements share: rights to inhabit a habitable
world; to love and live and breathe; to have access to health care, shelter,
and food; and to be free of threats of violence, incarceration, and
dispossession, to name but a few.
Yeah, I want to
live in that world, not the MAGA fundamentalist hellscape.
The book also
addresses the book bans and the endless cultural wars over whether children
should be prevented from understanding the reality of the existence of LGBTQ
people. I grew up in a subculture paranoid about this, convinced that knowing
gay people exist would “turn kids gay.”
If an educational program encourages a
complex view of human sexuality, and even teaches that gay and lesbian lives
are worthy of respect and dignity, that such lives are there to be recognized
and affirmed, it does not follow that children are being taught to be gay. It
means only that they are offered a way of thinking about ways of living a
sexual life and, yes, are encouraged to try to find their own desire. To be
able to think about gay and lesbian life is at a minimum to know and appreciate
that other people in society are living lives rightly described by those terms.
It may well lead to dignifying those lives, which is not the same as becoming
gay or lesbian, or being taught that it is right to follow a single sexual
trajectory. Think of all the lives we consider to be dignified without actually
living those lives ourselves. If we were not capable of such a distinction,
then the only dignified lives would be those that mirrored our own - an
assertion of narcissism, supremacy, and cultural arrogance that refuses the
ethical encounter with difference.
A few comments
on this brilliant passage. First, the belief that the only dignified lives are
those exactly like one’s own is precisely what MAGA believes. And what
white Evangelicals believe. And what my parents believe. Of course it is
narcissist, supremacist, and arrogant as all fuck. But here we are.
I also love the
line about “ethical encounter with difference.” This is my issue with cultural
fundamentalism and all it entails. It is deeply unethical, responding to
difference with fear, hate, and ultimately violence. I instead want my children
to learn to respond to difference in an ethical way, recognizing the
dignity of other lives.
Related: I have
believed in the dignity of LGBTQ lives for a long time. Still not gay or
transgender.
In the chapter
on the American flavor of anti-gender panic, there is another line that ties in
with this.
The idea that being exposed to an idea is
enough to be indoctrinated by it assumes a seamless and quick passage from
thought to conviction, bypassing all judgment and evaluation. The youthful mind
is tacitly figured in these instances as fully porous or helplessly responsive
to a penetrative power, as if to be exposed to a word or a thought is to be
penetrated against one’s will. In this way, the allegations of indoctrination
and pedophilia blend into a potent phantasm of harm to children. Of course, we
could respond patiently and show that education does not work like that. One
learns about an idea, considers what it means, and is then asked to come up
with ideas of one’s own about whether it is right, or how best to interpret it.
That is called thinking within the classroom. To be deprived of knowledge, and
of the occasion to think for oneself in the classroom is a significant harm,
one that young people suffer when they are refused the right to know about
themselves and their world.
By the way,
proof positive of this is that despite the fact that I was heavily indoctrinated
(in the true sense) during my childhood, I nevertheless ended up rejecting much
of what I had crammed down my throat. Even as a child, I knew some things my
parents said was bullshit. And the older I got, the more I was able to
recognize that. It wasn’t mere exposure to other ideas that changed me, but
careful thought and comparison of the competing ideas to my experience of
reality.
What the right
wing ultimately fears, although they won’t admit it, is that their ideologies
don’t hold up to even a cursory comparison to reality, and that they will be
recognized as the bullshit artists they are if kids are allowed to see any
reasonable alternative.
Those making allegations about
indoctrination do not simply refuse to see what actually happens in educational
environments. They know that developing autonomous judgment is an educational
goal, and they fear that potential, that freedom to think, more than they fear
indoctrination. Those who defend censorship, who make allegations of ideology
under the rubric of “woke,” are interested in maintaining doctrinal control in
education, very often allying with parental rights over public education. The
allegation of indoctrination carries a fugitive form of confession. They want
to quash critical thought in the name of doctrine, and, by way of an
inadvertently confessional projection, assume that their adversaries want the
same.
As I have been
saying for the entire Trump Era, literally everything the right wing says about
the left is a confession, a projection of their own evil desires.
When no mention of gender or sexual
orientation is allowed in primary schools, the aim is not just to stop the
acceptance of the diversity of gender and sexuality, but to make those thoughts
unsayable, unreadable, and unthinkable. To say that that diversity exists is,
thus, according to this logic, already to enact a harm.
This leads into
one of the best explanations of why a fully accurate sex education curriculum
is needed, one which acknowledges diversity.
Sex education generally includes
discussions about sexual ethics and conditions of consent, learning when and
why to say “yes” and “no.” It also generally includes an explanation of human
sexuality that ideally helps young people understand what is happening with
their bodies, and allows them to consider forms of desire and pleasure that do
no harm and that ought never to be shamed. In considering what it means to be
gendered, and what possibilities exist for being gendered otherwise, sex
education curricula ideally encourage informed judgment, ethical
decision-making, and a sense of bodily autonomy. The prospect of unwanted
penetration is terrifying for anyone, and penetration, if it happens, should
happen only on the condition of being wanted and agreed to. It is feminism that
has most clearly opposed rape and assault, and it is LGBTQIA+ movements that
have opposed bullying and violence. And yet, in this phantasmatic
transfiguration, the body is penetrated by these “ideologies” as if those who
have taught us most about sexual consent and autonomy are the ones who are
violating both principles with their teaching.
It is no
accident, of course, that the same people most opposed to LGBTQ rights are also
the ones teaching that women owe sex on demand to their husbands. And obedience
in general to males.
Butler also
points out that denying children access to accurate and complete information
about their bodies and the spectrum of how we experience bodies in fact leads
to bullying and violence.
One argument that the Trevor Project has
rightly put forth is that denying children access to materials that allow them
to understand the gender spectrum, or how homophobic bullying takes place on
the playground, or, indeed, in the classroom, produces isolation and
stigmatization for queer and trans kids, a condition historically associated
with depression and suicide. It deprives them of knowledge and skills they need
to navigate this world. In this situation, censoring the discussion of
sexuality, gender, and the myriad ways of living works as a form of
destruction, throttling the life and voice of kids who need to know that they
can live and be well, that they can speak and be heard.
On a personal
note, I can confirm that there is plenty of bullying in the classroom, and that
includes by teachers. My eldest child experienced a lot of this at a public
school. On the most egregious stuff, I sent a letter to the principal, and it
helped partly. What makes me happiest, though, is that this teacher got her ass
fired a couple years later after referring to a black student as a monkey. It
really does all go together. And did I mention she graduated from false teacher
and white supremacist John
MacArthur’s seminary? Maybe the legacy of a nasty bigot is turning out
other nasty bigots?
Butler
continues:
Queer, gay, lesbian, and trans kids who
are deprived of an education on sex, gender, and sexuality that would recognize
and affirm their lives are, in a homophobic and transphobic world, left only
with a heteronormative education, and a compulsory one at that. Boys and girls
alike need to understand that gender roles assigned are not necessarily the
ones that they will take up or will prove sustainable in their lives. That can
mean a sex change, but it can also be a way of redefining what it means to be a
boy or a girl, or finding vocabularies that move outside the binary.
As a cishet man
married to a cishet woman, I actually think that kids like me were in
fact deprived of something we needed: the understanding that assigned gender
roles are not in fact the only way to live. As my wife and I have
discovered (to the horror and fury of my mother) that we just work better when
she has a career that provides our health insurance and more than half our
household income, and I have less pressure to make money and more time to spend
with the kids and doing things that benefit the community (teaching, music)
that don’t pay as well.
Why should that
be considered a failure for me as a man, or a refusal to do her “true” job for
my wife? Why is it bad that I spent a lot of time with the kids when they were
young, and am now working to educate the next generation of lawyers? Why is it
bad that my wife is an excellent nurse and manager and genuinely saves
lives?
Again, in this
passage, Butler notes that there is a direct connection between anti-gender
ideology, and anti-diversity ideology. That systemic racism persists in the
United States shouldn’t even be doubted. A quick look at the disparities that
exist from cradle to grave would lead an outside observer to the obvious
conclusion that a caste system exists in the United States, based on skin
color. (I regularly post this
summary from a friend of mine, whose large collections of writing on CRT
were highly influential on my thinking, and helped me understand what CRT
actually is.) Butler has a good quote here:
If racism in the United States is
systemic, or the history of empire in the United Kingdom is at once a history
of racism, and if racism continues in both contexts in immigration policies
that give preferential treatment to white people and regularly refuse people of
color, then racism has certainly changed forms, but it was there from the
start, and it has not ended.
As CRT and
“woke” and all the other dog whistles for anti-racist activism are demonized,
it is all too easy to be distracted from the central issue: the protection of
white supremacy from all challenges.
A theory, a methodology, devoted to
achieving racial equality is transfigured into an attack machine that must be
destroyed if white people - or their claims to supremacy - are to be protected
against challenge. Is the problem that white people are made to feel bad about
their whiteness, suffering from deflated self-esteem, or is it more likely that
white people are being asked to join the effort to confront and dismantle white
supremacy? It is the loss of that taken-for-granted supremacy that the white
resistance to CRT refuses to mourn. Though mourn it must, and hopefully
soon.
Sigh. Yeah,
this is one of my frustrations. My parents raised me with anti-racist values,
then completely
abandoned those values over the years, and are now furious with me for
calling them out on their increasing racism. (And yes, I have been accused by
them of being “woke,” “virtue signaling,” and all the rest.)
White supremacy
hurts everyone (except the rich fucks at the top), and I for one am beyond
ready for it to be dismantled. Enough of the mediocre (or worse) white males in
power, fucking things up for everyone else.
“Woke ideology” now contains both “CRT”
and “gender ideology,” and the attack on “woke” is animated by a psychosocial
fantasy that the loss of patriarchal, heteronormative, and white supremacist
social orders is an unbearable one, tantamount to social death and, at times
physical danger.
As a lawyer, I
thought the discussion of the legal issues were excellent. Here is an example,
written regarding the Trump Misadministration’s attempt to essentially remove
anti-LGBTQ discrimination from legal protection.
Their entire effort to redefine gender as
sex, and to secure the meaning of sex through recourse to genitals and plain
speaking, was supposed to keep whole classes of people from seeking protection
against homophobia or transphobia…The Trump administration gave license to
bigots, affirming not only that homophobic and transphobic practices should
thrive without intervention by the law, and that those who were the targets of
such practices should remain unprotected from those who act against them, often
violently, but also that the government would henceforth abandon them to
discrimination.
This next
passage is wonderful, and really encapsulates what discrimination on
the basis of sex truly is.
Very few people who discriminate on the
basis of sex see or know the anatomy, the hormonal or genetic composition of
the person against whom they discriminate. They may have ideas about it, and
when those ideas enter into their decisions about how to treat that person in a
discriminatory manner, then sex surely matters. But which version of sex?
Against ordinary expectations and plain language, the sex of a person cannot
always be discerned from the surface appearance. Surface appearances, what some
call gender presentation, have a history; they are perceived within frameworks
that actively anticipate the structure and form of what we see.
“That person
looks like a man” has very little to do with any of the supposed underlying
markers of sex - genitals, hormones, chromosomes - as can easily be seen by the
persecution of cisgender athletes that “look male” according to some (usually
white) standard of gender presentation.
That is the
point of anti-discrimination law, of course. When you discriminate because of
what sex you perceive a person to be, it is irrelevant what they have
under their skin.
As I keep
pointing out, all of these issues are connected.
The arguments against abortion, however,
can be used against any number of decisions that assume that new rights emerge
from new social conditions pertaining to sexuality, gender, intimate
association, and reproductive freedom. The point is not that the Right will go
after abortion first, gay marriage second, and contraception third. No, the
legal framework that is emerging targets the very idea of new historical
formations of freedom (and equality) and seeks to restrict freedom in the
service of restoring patriarchal order backed by federal law, but also in the
service of corporate finance and religion.
The chapter on
TERFs - or what Elaine Castillo more accurately calls “Trans-exclusionary
Non-Feminists) - is also well written. There is far too much to summarize here,
but I do want to hit a few highlights.
Generally
speaking, any binary regarding the reality of nature will of necessity be
arbitrary. The lines are drawn for human convenience, not the actual existence
of beings within the spectrum of nature.
I appreciate
that Butler both allows the claim of “feminism” while showing that transphobia
ultimately undermines the basis of feminism.
To act as if feminism and gender are
opposed is to accept the terms proposed by trans-exclusionary feminists. They
want their own view to stand for all of feminism, but it cannot do that, and
rightly so. It is a form of feminism that actively supports the derealization
of trans people and engages in forms of discrimination that arguably go against
the commitment to equality for which feminism has stood. One could thus more
reasonably conclude that transphobic feminism is not feminism. But the truth
is: it should not be.
I also found
fascinating Butler’s use of the works of other feminist writers to show that
TERFs, like white Evangelicals, have a disturbing tendency to claim that
writers are saying the opposite of their actual views.
One example
here is Andrea
Dworkin, who is rightfully considered a “radical feminist,” although the
meaning of that isn’t the right-wing caricature. The TERF claim that Dworkin
was trans-exclusionary is utter balderdash. Here is the money quote:
“We are, clearly, a multisexed species
which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called
male and female are not discrete.”
Um, yeah. That
doesn’t sound at all like a claim of a sex binary. But don’t let facts get in
the way of your opinion…
This chapter
also notes that the definition of sex has been surprisingly slippery over time
and place, shifting significantly with beliefs about gender roles and
hierarchies.
Even conceiving of “sex” as a fact
rather than a relation, an expression, an inflection, or a category, privileges
one perspective over others. Moreover, women’s lives, globally considered, have
actually depended on the shifting historical meanings of sex, since some of the
earlier ones implied rather significant social restrictions. If not, I have
missed that moment in history, or continue to live in another one with a sense
of uncanny estrangement. Many people locked into these debates understand their
point of view to be incontrovertible truth, and open debate hardly thrives when
everyone contributing simply asserts the truth of what they say and insists
that it is obvious and common sense and that everyone else has somehow lost
their mind after falling prey to an ideological falsehood.
Again, sigh.
This is why I no longer engage in debate with my parents. About anything.
Because they believe their perspective to be incontrovertible truth. Same goes
for pretty much all right wingers, unfortunately. It’s why I just block and
move on.
Before leaving
this chapter, I want to mention a related passage in a later chapter on
Butler’s views of how to find a better feminism that isn’t based on
transphobia.
Why is this feminist group not interested
in all forms of gender discrimination, including the kid suffered by gender
nonconforming, non-binary, trans, and intersex people? In effect, because they
refuse alliances such as these, they wish to restrict themselves to only those
forms of “science” that they fail to document on their website, those that
affirm their position at the expense of objectivity.
The chapter on
gender and sex, and the way that “sex” is assumed to be a binary and easily
recognized is excellent. I have considered writing a whole post on how it is
the Right Wing that cannot define a “woman” other than in terms of their power
and right to decide who is and is not one. (That is beyond the scope of this
post, but maybe if I get time…)
But others claim we just need to return to
“common sense” and debunk speculative theories to confirm the matter of sex.
But how many people feel that the “common sense” idea of how they should live
their assigned sex, or presumed gender, actually does violence to who they are?
It used to be “common sense” for white people to enslave Black people, and
“common sense” for marriage to be understood as an exclusively heterosexual
union.
Heck, I’m a
cishet guy, and I feel that the patriarchal demands for how I live my
assigned sex does violence to who I am.
In addition to
other “common sense” ideas, one could add the belief that women
shouldn’t ride bicycles because it would harm their uteruses. Or that
thinking was bad for women because it diverted blood from the womb. Pretty much
every bigoted idea was once “common sense.”
Another key
point of this chapter is that separating out biology from environment isn’t
really possible. Our “gender” is inseparable from the expectations that are
placed on us before we are even born.
If we shift, for instance, from a
deterministic model to an interactive one, as Anne Fausto-Sterling and other
scholars of science have been doing for some time, it turns out that what we
call our biology is always interacting with social and environmental
forces, and that we cannot really think about biological facts outside of this
interaction. It is not as if biological causes stream in from one source and
through a specific channel whereas social determinants flow from another
location only to meet up at some third site called the body. Biological and
social forces are together interacting in embodied life.
If you recall,
it has been shown recently that trauma shows up biologically over generations,
and that many physical traits have as much or more to do with nutrition than
with genes.
[Side note: my
mother is disproportionately short for her family, and this very likely was
related to malnutrition and neglect from her parents, just like her epilepsy
may have been caused by a traumatic brain injury as a toddler.]
There are some
interesting facts in this discussion. For example, within the “normal” range of
testosterone in men and women, there is actually considerable overlap. Plenty
of women naturally have higher testosterone than plenty of men.
Surprisingly,
athletic performance doesn’t actually correlate all that strongly with
testosterone levels (within the normal range). In fact, access to training
(read: money) correlates a lot more strongly. And yet we do not bar rich
kids from competition.
Instead, women
who do not fit the right-wing idea for femininity (whether transgender,
intersex, or just “manly looking”) are targeted for harmful exclusionary
practices.
Apart from outmoded science that has
supported the exclusion, monitoring, and regulation of intersex and trans
athletes competing in women’s sports, the IOC points to the harm that
surveillance, reporting, and lowering endogenous testosterone levels have on
the bodies of athletes. What drives the exclusion of trans athletes from sport
seems driven by other sorts of passions, ones unsupported by the science at
hand.
[By the way,
this is why even being “assigned female at birth” isn’t enough to satisfy
right-wingers. Anyone wanting to be a “real woman” must meet arbitrary criteria
that just coincidentally happens to privilege white European ideals of
beauty.]
While this book
isn’t as detailed as Hermaphrodites
and the Medical Invention of Sex, it does go into the history of body
mutilation of intersex infants. Which was done, of course, to make humans
conform to the arbitrary sex binary, and thus make adults comfortable, even
though it had profoundly harmful effects on intersex people.
For Money, medical knowledge was expected
to serve the task of social normalization. He and his fellow researchers
presumed something was wrong with the body that had to be fixed or corrected;
they did not question whether something might be wrong with the normative
phantasms suffusing sex assignment practices. The latter were considered
obligatory, if not compulsory norms.
And more:
We can now ask whether these categories
are necessary or exhaustive and then set about to coin or make our own. But
decades ago, and still now in the anti-gender movement, on one was asking how
gender categories could be changed to accommodate and support the life of an
intersex infant. No, the infant had to be “fixed.” That was, and remains, an
ethical failure. The body had to change to support the binary expectation, but
the existence of nonconforming bodies in no way called the binary expectation
into question. Gender assignment thus operated in the service of gender
regulation and the idea of normalcy bound up with heteronormative ideas of the
family and reproduction.
I want to
emphasize that middle idea. The anti-gender approach to humans who do not
conform to their binary expectation is, at heart, an ethical failure. It
is a willingness to do violence to the existence of other people in order to
preserve one’s own psychic comfort.
Again, it bears repeating: for Money and
many others, the appearance of gender normalcy in the supposed service of
social conformity was more important than the present and future sexual life of
intersex kids. He imagined that to be fulfilled in life meant fulfilling social
expectations without considering the happiness that comes with producing new
ways of doing gender, historical change in the ways gender is lived and named,
or an embodied life that remains uncapturable by every naming practice.
The chapter
ends with an assertion that really resonates for me as a cishet guy who “fails”
to meet patriarchal gender demands.
Genders are not just assigned. They have
to be realized or undertaken, or done, and no single act of doing secures the
deal. Have I finally achieved the gender I have been seeking to become, or is
becoming the name of the game, the temporality of gender itself?
There are a
couple of chapters that explore the legacy of colonialism and how it has
affected how we discuss gender. One, as I already noted, looks at how
colonialism imposed the Western binary in cultures, and brutally punished those
who held to a more expansive way of thinking.
The other
starts off with the problem of language. Our thinking as humans is deeply
rooted in our language, and translation isn’t merely substituting one word for
another. In many languages, the concept of “gender” as we use it in English may
not exist, but there are often other subtleties that do not translate to
English either. To expect to force English language syntax on to other
languages is a colonialist act, as is assuming that English is the normative
way of speaking and thinking about a topic.
On the other
hand, no language is ever “pure.” “Foreign” words have entered every language
since humans have existed. Languages evolve and change and adapt and
borrow.
Those who prize the purity of a language
imagine the expulsion of foreign words, but they would have to redo their
entire histories to achieve the “purity” they imagine.
Language
ultimately is no tame beast, and cannot be controlled, let alone “purified.”
When “gender” moves from English into
another language, it is English that is also entering, and certainly not for
the first time. English has been doubtless entering for a long time. Yet
imperial powers cannot keep control over the words they impose or exclude; they
do not automatically reproduce the imperialism of the language from which they
emerge. The origin of a term in no way predicts all its eventual usages.
This chapter
mentions just a few of the concepts related to gender that cannot be captured
accurately in English. I’ll just mention the hijra, and link to a couple
of books
that involve hijras.
This line
really sums up the complexity, and the difficulty of communication across
translation.
No one language has the exclusive power to
define gender or to regulate its grammatical usage, and that means that every
way of referring to gender has a certain contingency.
It is in this
chapter that Butler most clearly states her own views on gender, and I have to
say, I agree with their formulation.
My own view is that we should seek to
bring about a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that
exist become more livable, and people generally become more open to the ways
that gender can be done and lived without judgment, fear, or hatred.
Not just my
children’s lives, but my own life as well, would have been better in this kind
of a world.
A couple quotes
from the conclusion will finish up this post.
Butler runs
through the litany of legitimate modern fears, from the wars of genocide being
fought in Palestine and Ukraine, to the ongoing displacement of indigenous
peoples in the Amazon, to the gutting of public and social services under
neoliberalism, to climate destruction, to the ever-increasing monetization of
everything, to the point were nearly every facet of existence requires paying
rents (in the academic sense) to the oligarchy. These are legitimate fears and
form an existential dread that, unfortunately, right-wing demagogues have been
able to tap into.
They see the escalating fear and know that
they can make use of it for their own purposes, so they escalate it even
more.
The sickening
result of this is the corruption of morality and ethics itself, debasing it
into a fury-driven tribalism and destructive, violent hatred of difference.
It seems clear that fascist passions or
political trends are those that seek to strip people of the basic rights they
require to live, and to do so either without regard for their probable demise,
or because fascism is an effective mode of annihilating those lives, or
establishing their dispensability. By contrast, authoritarianism is usually
understood as a form of state power, but authoritarians emerge from within
democratic regimes, elected precisely by stoking fascist passions, escalating
the fear of destruction by social movements that converts into a moral alibi to
destroy other people’s lives. The authoritarian who seeks to stoke fascist
passions knows too well that the fear of destruction already courses through
those who have seen the destruction of the climate, the environment, labor
unions, and prospects for financial security.
It is difficult
to know what the way forward is here. Evil has a structural advantage in that
it need not prove anything. It can just tap into primal fears using lies and bullshit.
On the other
hand, ultimately fascism of all sorts leads to death and destruction, and the
enrichment of a handful of (usually white and male) oligarchs. So it seems
destined eventually for collapse.
Butler’s
argument is for solidarity. Ultimately, if the Elongated Muskmelon and the rest
of the AI cult leaders eliminate most good jobs, take a cut of everything
related to thinking, and destroy the environment, we all lose.
The enemy isn’t
transgender people. Or intersex people. Or immigrants. Or brown people. Or
uppity women.
It is those who
would enrich themselves far beyond even their ability to spend at the expense
of the rest of us. And they are the ones pushing this anti-gender (and
anti-immigrant) propaganda, to distract from their destruction of everything
worth loving.
Like Butler, I
envision a better world, and am doing my part to bring it into being. To this
end, I too dream of solidarity between all of us - but particularly those who
exist at the painful end of unjust social structures.
Who’s Afraid
of Gender contains a plethora of information, argument, and vision, and I
believe it is a helpful book for any of us who wish to make the world a place
where all of us can exist in safety. Give it a shot.
