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.
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