As the example of Judith Butler shows, the boons of intellectual celebrity come at a cost. Yes, your work will command the kind of attention that would be the envy of most scholars; but the substance of that work will get eclipsed by your name, and your name will trigger a reaction in people who have never read a single thing you wrote. Throw some misogyny into the mix, and the most scornful attacks can take a lurid turn — even (or especially) if, like Butler, you identify as nonbinary. In 2017, when Butler visited Brazil for a conference on democracy, far-right protesters burned an effigy of Butler dressed in a pink bra and a witch hat.
Despite its notoriously opaque prose, Butler’s best-known book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), has been both credited and blamed for popularizing a multitude of ideas, including some that Butler doesn’t propound, like the notions that biology is entirely unreal and that everybody experiences gender as a choice.
So Butler set out to clarify a few things with “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” a new book that arrives at a time when gender has “become a matter of extraordinary alarm.” In plain (if occasionally plodding) English, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, repeatedly affirms that facts do exist, that biology does exist, that plenty of people undoubtedly experience their own gender as “immutable.”
What Butler questions instead is how such facts get framed, and how such framing structures our societies and how we live.
Any framework conditions norms and expectations. A binary framework, Butler says, is necessarily complicated by a more expansive view of gender — one that actually takes into account the variety of human experience and expression. “To refuse gender is, sadly, to refuse to encounter that complexity,” Butler writes, “the complexity that one finds in contemporary life across the world.”
Butler, who was trained as a philosopher, finds it curious that their dense, jargon-filled work has been invested with an almost supernatural authority. Conservative Christians have been especially fervent in their insistence that scholars like Butler are corrupting the youth, as if mere exposure to a text amounts to ideological inculcation: “Gender critics imagine that their opponents read gender theory as they themselves read the Bible.”
“Who’s Afraid of Gender?” started with that burned effigy in Brazil, when Butler realized that gender had become a bugaboo — or “phantasm,” as the book puts it — for a “rights-stripping” movement that is gaining traction worldwide and is “authoritarian at its core.” This “anti-gender ideology movement” targets trans and queer people; it also targets reproductive freedoms. It depicts sexed identity as something that is not only natural, obvious and unquestionable, but also zero-sum; it asserts that tolerance means exclusion, not inclusion — that advocates of “gender ideology” want to take rights away from everyone else.
“It is not possible to fully reconstruct the arguments used by the anti-gender ideology movement because they do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence,” Butler writes. Pope Francis, despite being known for some of his progressive views, has compared gender theory to nuclear annihilation and the indoctrination of Hitler Youth.
But incoherence can be powerful. So-called gender ideology has been portrayed as both a licentious force and a totalitarian one — stoking personal liberty and steamrolling it at the same time. The church draws menacing connections between gender theory and pedophilia and harm to children. Butler finds such sanctimony especially rich: “In this standoff between church and feminism and LGBTQIA+ rights, where has the child molestation actually taken place?”
Butler makes ample use of such rhetorical questions. The tone of “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” is mostly calm, the argument methodical, the mockery gentle. A chapter on the incendiary subject of trans-exclusionary feminism focuses on debates in Britain. Butler calls it “stunning and sad” that feminists who consider themselves progressive could find common cause with a “new fascism,” a movement that is bent on imposing the kind of patriarchal hierarchy that feminism has always opposed. Butler asks trans-exclusionary feminists who argue that “gender mutability” amounts to an attack on “womanhood” to notice that their own bodies and genders are still intact: “Has anything truly been lost or taken away?”
Feminists, Butler says, need to keep their eyes on the prize: “a world in which we can move and breathe and love without fear of violence.” Coalitions have always been necessary to feminism, and they have always been difficult. “Coalitions do not require mutual love,” Butler writes. “They require only a shared insight that oppressive forces can be defeated by acting together and moving forward with difficult differences without insisting on their ultimate resolution.”
It’s certainly a hopeful sentiment — one that stands out in a debate in which hopeful sentiments often seem exceedingly rare. Conversations about gender have become so inflamed that the task, Butler says, “is to slow the entire public discussion down.” Indeed, since “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” was published, some critics have faulted Butler for turning the temperature down too low — for making an argument that is “tepid” and “uninspiringly careful”; for stating the obvious by training such mighty brainpower on “the silliest figments of conservative fantasies”; for being so committed to coalition building that the book lands on “a needlessly conciliatory position.”
Yet the same book has also been excoriated for doing the exact opposite: for demonizing opponents and for dismissing them as “fascist-adjacent.” It’s a mark of how charged the subject is that Butler’s book-length intervention, their bid “to slow the entire public discussion down,” has been received as both a tame peace offering and an outrageous insult.
And perhaps there’s a vacuum left by this book precisely because Butler, in a bid to bring people together, generally steers clear of some of the most inflammatory nodes of the debate. They easily challenge red-state directives to investigate parents seeking gender-affirming care for their children, which are patently cruel and controlling; but they don’t really get into the fierce disagreements among people, including those who want to support their children, on what that care should entail and when it should happen.
On a recent episode of the podcast “Why Is This Happening,” Butler was asked how they thought about such questions. “I think gender-affirming care is, broadly speaking, or should be, a commitment to listening to what young people are saying and trying to give them a safe environment in which to explore everything they need to explore,” Butler said. “I don’t think it should be accelerated, in a panicked way. I also am very opposed to it being blocked.” It’s a generous, open-minded answer; but it also sounds like a bit of a cop-out.
Toward the end of the book, Butler makes a few obligatory remarks about the importance of continuing the conversation, about the need to listen to one another, about the dangers of shutting people down. “We cannot censor each other’s positions just because we do not want to hear them,” they declare, somewhat cryptically, issuing this free-speech directive at everyone in general and therefore no one in particular. Still, I appreciated Butler’s commitment to holding open a space for thinking. “In the grip of a phantasm, it is hard to think,” Butler writes. “And yet thinking and imagining have never been more important.”
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