The Phantasmagoric World of Judith Butler - "One chapter of Judith Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, is called “TERFs and British matters of sex.” (“TERF” is an acronym for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist.) The book has not landed well on TERF Island. “Butler flatters herself if she thinks there’s anything to be afraid of in her work,” writes Sarah Ditum in the Times. Jane O’Grady’s review in the Telegraph is titled “Is this the most incoherent book about gender yet?” (One star out of five.) Kathleen Stock (who is mentioned in the book) is also underwhelmed: “The chapter on British so-called TERFs is a compendium of smears culled from online teenagers about their gender-critical mums.” On the other side of the Atlantic, the reception has been somewhat warmer... you might suspect that Butler, who became legally non-binary a few years ago, is “she” to her detractors and “they” to her supporters. Although a “they/them” review of her book might be positive or negative, a “she/her” review is an infallible sign of thumbs down. Of course, I have now given the game away. In short: Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not just poorly argued. Butler also persistently misdescribes the people and views she attempts to criticize, and her carelessness with citations would be unacceptable in an undergraduate essay. And, as if this mess wasn’t bad enough, it comes with a dollop of plagiarism on top. “Why would anyone be afraid of gender?” is the opening of the book’s lengthy introduction. Afraid of what, though? The expectation that Butler will explain what “gender” means is briefly raised only to be dashed at the end of the first paragraph... She is certainly right that “gender” is used in a bewildering variety of ways, but some of her examples in the first paragraph are baffling. Allegedly, some “presume that the word is synonymous with ‘women.’” Others take “gender” to be a “covert way of referring to ‘homosexuality.’” Who are these lunatics? Butler gives no citations. On one use of “gender” in the book, gender is everything anti-progressives, reactionaries, and fascists are afraid of... This assortment has no internal coherence, as Butler admits... However, the incoherence is an artifact of Butler’s own making. As she recognizes, her targets—for instance Pope Francis and the UK organization Sex Matters—have very different concerns. Francis pronounces on the family, the blessing of same-sex couples, and the role of women in the Church, not to mention climate change and the war in Ukraine. Sex Matters is a single-issue organization, campaigning for clarity about sex in law and policy. It is extremely misleading to bundle the anxieties of the Pope and Sex Matters together, and say they are both afraid of gender. Fortunately, for the most part Butler uses “gender” more conventionally throughout the book, as when she tells us in the introduction that “gender has been part of feminism for many decades” (17). Unfortunately, as in a lot of the gender studies literature, she uses the word inconsistently and with maddening imprecision. From Butler’s perspective, this is a good thing: “Gender has to remain relatively wild in relation to all those who claim to possess its correct definition” (243). On the other hand, this makes no sense whatsoever of her expressed hope to “demonstrate the value of gender as a category” (24)... Maybe Butler finally skewers Rufo when she says that he “refuses to read or study the academic field against which he has waged a culture war” (22)? No. Rufo’s 2023 book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, has chapters on Herbert Marcuse, Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derrick Bell. Because Butler’s disinformation is so easy to expose, it simply provides Rufo with free ammunition. If he had paid Butler to run PSYOPs for right-wing culture warriors, she could hardly have done a better job... Despite urging the virtues of careful textual analysis, Butler is not very good at it... Butler’s understanding of the medical literature is as tenuous as her grasp of Catholic theology... She’s fairly clear that there are sexes beyond male and female—the alleged “fact that there are two sexes” (213) has been “effectively contested” (212). She’s even clearer that people can literally change their sex. Trans women are not only women, they are also female: “when one is called male when one is a woman… the calling is an effacement of what one is” (184)... Butler thinks science is on her side, particularly that done by “feminist scholars” (176). Some scientists, she reports, have argued that sex is “a spectrum or a mosaic” (190), citing a book by the neuroscientist Daphna Joel, Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain (co-authored with a science journalist, Luba Vikhanski). Since that book argues nothing of the sort, presumably Butler never bothered to open it. Joel, incidentally, recently co-authored a paper with the psychologist Cordelia Fine in which they say that “sex categories” (male, female) are “binary.”... Plagiarism has been in the news recently, and it’s ironic to find Butler joining in, since her idiosyncratic prose style should make that impossible. I should emphasize that Butler’s plagiarism was obviously inadvertent. But it does indicate the level of quality to be found in Who’s Afraid of Gender?... She reminds us that “the killing of women and trans, queer, bisexual and intersex people is an actual form of destruction taking place in the world,” strangely forgetting to mention the demographic most likely by far to die from homicide... In Butler’s phantasmagoric world, the oceans are boiling, bisexuals lie dying in the streets, and the empty shelves of school libraries gather dust. On a hillside, J. K. Rowling stands between Vladimir Putin and the Pope, the papal cassock flapping in the breeze. The trio gaze with grim satisfaction at the devastation below, under a glowering sky. Plagiarism aside, there are many reasons to be irritated with Who’s Afraid of Gender?. One is Butler’s delusional insinuation that gender-critical feminists have engaged in “bullying” and “censorship campaigns” (135), when they and their sympathizers have so plainly been on the receiving end. (Butler signed the censorious 2017 open letter denouncing the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia for publishing Rebecca Tuvel’s paper on transracialism.) Another is Butler’s claim that her opponents “refuse to read the material under dispute” (18). In serving up this dog’s breakfast of a book, Butler shows that she is the one who has not done the reading."
Judith Butler, the intellectual behind the trans movement, bites her feminist critics - "The last time I had to read Judith Butler it was as an undergraduate, and the experience affected me so profoundly that I left my university (Manchester) and moved to a new one (Sheffield) in the hope of never doing it again. A pointless gesture, because 20-odd years on, while Butler remains a professor at Berkeley, her theories have thoroughly escaped it. Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an elaboration on her big idea, as laid out in the 1990 book Gender Trouble, that gender is “performative”... This is the intellectual ballast in the now-common claim that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. (Butler identifies as nonbinary, but generously tolerates being called “she”.) The insight that men and women’s behaviour is at least partly socially constructed wasn’t new, but Butler pushed it further. Not only gendered behaviour but sex itself was socially constructed. Female, she wrote in Gender Trouble, “no longer appears to be a stable notion”. The proper job of feminism, therefore, was to ask “what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity”. You might complain that Butler reduced sexual politics to wordplay: not long after I first read her I got pregnant, which is the female body equivalent of Samuel Johnson kicking the stone (his way of refuting the claim that matter did not exist). But her airy abstraction is her appeal. Most humanities academics deal principally in language, and the more power language is supposed to have, the more powerful they get to feel... She does not differentiate between the authoritarian bigotry of a Viktor Orban and the rights-balancing concerns of a left-wing feminist. All critics of gender ideology, according to Butler, desire “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”. That is a very windy way of saying that if you disagree with Butler you must be racist. Butler might be all about troubling the gender binary, but morally hers is a simple world of goodies and baddies. There is no effort to persuade the sceptical reader, because Butler’s presumption is that her opponents don’t read. “It is nearly impossible to bridge this epistemic divide with good arguments, because of the fear that reading will introduce confusion into the reader’s mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil.” Actually, I’m not sure even Butler’s own editors have read this text with much care. She repeats herself, and when she occasionally lowers herself to deal in vulgar material fact there are worrying errors. For example, she claims the Gender Recognition Act applies only to individuals “covered by the National Health Service”, but there is no mention of the NHS in the act. In any case she’s true to her word about not bothering to make good arguments. Instead, Butler is out to pathologise those who disagree with her. Either they’re under the influence of a vaguely sketched conspiracy beginning with the Catholic Church (we are treated to two chapters establishing that the Pope is a touch on the socially conservative side) or in the case of feminists who perversely “insist on the biological differences between two sexes”, they are gulled by their own trauma. In all the verbosity you could almost miss how insulting Butler is to female victims of male violence. But it’s there. After a section on JK Rowling, Butler writes: “Living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality.” In other words, women who have been abused (which includes Rowling) cannot be trusted. No wonder Butler doesn’t want to identify as a woman: she doesn’t seem to like them very much... It is not damning of feminists that they are on the same page as Vladimir Putin about there being two sexes. That is just how many sexes there are. Butler condemns feminists for being fellow travellers with the politically unspeakable, but never questions who she might be aligned with. In her world there are no homophobic parents turning their effeminate sons into acceptable little girls; there are no men declaring themselves women simply to commit violence. (Or if there are, Butler will only concede to a “few instances”, and what’s a rape or two?) It is insulting to have to treat a book like this seriously, when it treats its own subject as a game. Butler flatters herself if she thinks there’s anything to be afraid of in her work. The only terror is that anyone would find it impressive."
Hitler was anti-smoking. Therefore we should all smoke, or we are supporting fascism
How the Irish saved womanhood - "In early March, Ireland held a referendum to amend two provisions of its constitution. The first was to change the definition of the traditional family and instead replace it to recognize “durable relationships.” The second would remove references to “women” and “mothers” and broaden the definition of care in the welfare of a family. Both amendments lost by a wide margin, which dealt the progressives and major political parties supporting the amendments a shocking blow, thwarting their attempts to bring the language of gender into the 21st century while giving victory to those concerned about encroachments on the traditional language. The Irish aren’t immune to reform. In 1995, they approved gay marriage and later allowed for divorce. In 2018, they approved legalized abortions. Ireland is only one of four nations that approve of medical sex-change operations based on self-determination. But the question of eliminating the ancient idea of family and especially the concept of motherhood in a once deeply Catholic country where the cult of the Virgin Mary still lingers was asking too much. This despite the insistence of Ireland’s elite, including the National Women’s Council of Ireland, who fought hard for the changes, even placing the referendum on March 8, International Women’s Day. In the same month, Judith Butler, the American philosopher and arguably the most acclaimed gender studies teacher worldwide, was promoting her new book Who’s Afraid of Gender? The Irish elite who pushed to reform Ireland’s constitution was no doubt influenced by Butler’s work on queer and gender theory. Butler wants to eliminate the very idea of motherhood and women, arguing instead that biological sex, like gender, is nothing but a social deception. Butler, who uses the pronouns they and them, goes further and claims that the body’s genitalia is itself socially constructed. Sex isn’t an obvious fact simply “based on observation.” We are born as a blank slate without the influence of biological connection. That’s why gender studies advocates refer to assigned sexes at birth, meaning that we are not rooted to them in our behaviour if we so choose. What we believe about the differences between men and women isn’t based on any eternal concept of nature but on social power dynamics and customs, is the claim. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum reminds us this is nothing new. John Stuart Mill said the same thing in his The Subjection of Women: “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing.” Where Mill understood that women were kept in subjugation by hierarchies of power, Butler teaches that “nature is not the ground upon which construction of gender happens.” This is an extraordinary admission even though our species, as writer and podcaster Andrew Sullivan says, existed “before we even achieved the intelligence to call it a sex binary.” Butler demands that only an understanding of culture, history, languages, and anthropology can answer the question of what a woman is. We must see the changing nature of women and their roles through time. In other words, the privilege of knowing what a woman is belongs to a select few gender studies scholars. The idea of gender is a continuum with countless definitions of gender behaviour, ever-expanding preferences akin to identifying new chemical elements on a Periodic Table. And the only reason we define women as we do today is through the social demands of the patriarchy, heterosexuality, and, finally, white supremacy. In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler continues the assault on our misguided perception of gender by widening the door that defines what a woman is to the point that any man can claim membership. Transwomen are now allowed membership and the special honour of accessing women’s spaces. Suppose a man wishes to exhibit their preferences to take on feminine attributes. But why can’t the definition of manhood expand rather than intrude on the definition of women and their spaces? Butler’s book wasn’t written to answer questions but to attack critics of the very notion of gender and transwomen... They are accused of “fascism”—a word Butler uses liberally—to attack Evangelicals, Christian Orthodox, Catholics, or any organization in favour of traditional families. The author even accuses defenders of families of using “junk science” to defend their case—a curious claim given that gender studies is hardly a field based on established science. Butler lives in a Manichean world of good and evil where enemies must be destroyed. But who are these enemies when a growing number of liberals and leftists are resisting the move to diminish the rights of girls and young women? Butler claims that attacks on gender are a “phantasm” or an illusion invented by the enemies of gender to hide behind the world’s real problems of capitalism, neoliberalism, destruction of the environment, attacks on immigrants, poverty, Indigenous Peoples, and the oppression of Black and brown people. And any resistance to Butler’s idea of gender is seen as an attack on liberal democracy. The Irish referendum wasn’t only about rights, tolerance, or one’s right to choose a preferred gender identity but about the nature of language"
Our present dark age - "Butler’s followers and critics tend to gravitate more towards what they think Butler says, rather than her real meaning. The reason for this is that all of Butler’s ideas, however trivial or obvious, are expressed in a comically verbose and obscure manner. She will never use one word if ten will suffice, and she has a penchant for Graeco-Latin abstract nouns. “Facticity,” “liberalization,” “hegemony,” “multiplicitous,” and “heteronormativity”—Butler’s writing is a compost heap of such jargon, and the sentences are often far too long... though her writing is generally bad, it is not always unintelligible. Amidst all the pompous obscurity, acolytes and critics will either thank or blame Butler for the mysterious transmutation of sex into gender... Simone de Beauvoir had a dim view of “femaleness,” but she took seriously the idea that biology circumscribed and determined womanhood. In contrast, Butler does not. Her main goal is to dismantle the idea that mankind is by nature divided into only two sexes, and therefore that male and female sexual relations are normal. As contemporary jargon has it, Butler wants to undermine “heteronormativity.” This is the force of Butler’s 2004 book Undoing Gender. Butler followed Michel Foucault into the labyrinth of postmodernism, and discovered at its centre that “power dissimulates as ontology.” In other words, our perception of male and female only seems real because of the power of the authorities who impose them upon us. Accordingly, all norms of gender and sex must be dismantled—even, as it seems, the prohibition against incest, to which Butler devotes an entire chapter of Undoing Gender. She even raises the prospect of removing reproduction from heterosexual relationships by means of technology and warns feminists against resisting it. To do so, she says, would be to “risk naturalizing heterosexual reproduction.” “The doctrine of sexual difference in this case.” she continues, “comes to be in tension with antihomophobic struggles as well as with the intersex movement and the transgender movement’s interest in securing rights to technologies that facilitate sex reassignment.” I for one do not know how we could tell if anything Butler says is right. If the “truth-as-power” doctrine is, er, true, then I cannot think of a good reason to take Butler at her word. This, however, is not the main problem with Butler’s work. The problem is that the near irrelevance of biological sex and the theory of performative gender as either male or female militate against the main assumption of transgenderism. If, as it is said, you can have a “gender identity” that does not accord with your bodily sexual characteristics, then Butler’s most important ideas cannot be true. And if you must change your sexual characteristics to align with those correlated with the other gender, then you are dangerously close to affirming, rather than dismantling, “heteronormativity.” Accordingly, Butler admits that her former work is now “questionable in several ways, especially in light of trans and materialist criticisms.” This is undoubtedly why Butler has once again revisited the topic of gender in her new book Who’s Afraid of Gender, wherein she tries to assimilate her older ideas to present orthodoxy. The task is fundamentally hopeless. And so it is no surprise that Butler is now in grave doubt... But what do all those malign figures have in common? Fascism, says Butler. They are all fascists who use the “phantasm” of gender to stir up fear in order to distract from real problems like “war,” “systemic racism,” and “devastations of capitalism.” The fascists wish to restore “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.” Butler’s enemies are also racists, apparently, and so she also provides a bizarre digression into what she believes to be a misguided opposition to Critical Race Theory... Consider the reaction to British feminist Kathleen Stock whom Butler hates perhaps even more than the Papacy. Stock is wrong—not because of any errors of reasoning, but because “she does not seem to understand the toxicity or cruelty that she herself brings to the table” when insisting that “the designation of ‘woman’ should be tied to the determination of biological femaleness.”... Butler seems to imply that nothing could be worse than failing to affirm a person’s identity or his or her claim of belonging to a particular group. If this is indeed what Butler means, it can only signify his or her disconnection from actual pain and suffering... But that phrase “your own definition of who you are” is almost equally troubling. It places Butler in the same category as the Jesuits of Paraguay and the Pilgrim Fathers imagining a fresh start in a new world of personal and social perfection. Butler is also the almost bankrupt heir to the Marquis de Condorcet for whom “the perfectibility of man is absolutely infinite.” And in the world of anthropology, she is the Trofim Lysenko: the Soviet agronomist who believed that one species of plant could be transformed into another under the right conditions. Such utopian visions may be attractive to some people, but they always lead to disappointment, disaster, and cruelty. The future of gender theory does not appear to be bright, not because it is widely feared, as the title of Butler’s book implies, but because its precepts are false and many of its effects are harmful. In many parts of the West, it seems to be in retreat now, as puberty blockers and surgeries are increasingly restricted. A Pew Research poll from 2022 showed that the number of people who affirm two and only two human sexes and only two genders has been growing since 2017. Perhaps the tide is turning."
Judith Butler: Enough Already! - "We have legislated gender in which her main claim in Gender Trouble that sex is “socially constructed” is the heart of the legislation. Not only have we legislated it, but the cultural institutions of this country have adopted it as the new normative order and used their institutional power to enforce it. From the legacy media, to social media, to tech companies, to educational institutions from schools to universities are all now repeating in unison: “sex is socially constructed.” Butler speaks as if what she says is not already endorsed by the state. Perhaps it is terrifying for the subversive professor of the ‘90s to realize she is now in power? She would have to confront the rebellion from the margins, a place that Butler has endowed with virtue and has positioned herself in. If power was everywhere, as Butler, per Foucault, had theorized, and Butler was now in power, then surely rebellion against it is not just what the theory foretold, but the same virtue would have to be attached to it... it is now right-wing populism, the religious Right, and radical feminists (TERFS) who are standing in the way of her subversive claims. This is all nonsense, of course. None of these forces holds power over cultural institutions, especially the elite ones and those which indoctrinate youth to her theories of gender. Perhaps recognizing that her theories are in power will force Butler to look at their impact in the world. Butler, like many celebrity academics of her generation, was an academic of “theory” with no interest in “sociology.” Theory is elite, it is what smart professors do. They deconstruct the reigning order through their theories. Whether ordinary people are interested in deconstructing the gender order or what the impact of enforcing these theories on them via powerful cultural institutions is of no interest. It is demeaning for the theory professor to look at the social lives of others. Considering the plight of lesbian teenagers who went further than “enjoying the world of they”—as Butler refers to herself in the Guardian interview—by moving from taking hormones to undergoing a double mastectomy within a year, is just too messy. To know that these girls lived to regret it and wondered where all the adults were is even messier. To wonder as to the impact of the disappearance of the “dyke” in the lesbian community many of whom have decided they are now transmen, erasing the erotic place of the “dyke” in the lesbian community, is too “sociological.” Goodness: What is the fancy theory for that?... Butler asserts that “queer for me was never an identity, but a way of affiliating with the fight against homophobia.” If this were a critique of the identity-obsessed trans movement, it was so subtle I doubt that her object of critique even noticed it. The trans movement has indeed taken “identity” from its usual liberal legalist articulation and inflated it beyond recognition, and Butler is right to notice that and to distance herself from it. It is identity on steroids in which one's identity changes by the day if not by the hour. A buffet of identities that one serves oneself with daily and screams for the world to recognize it on TikTok. From group identity as liberal entitlement to individualist identity as neoliberal consumerism. But, then again, perhaps daily or hourly identity is the only possible cultural embodiment of academic “anti-identity!” Not only was her critique of the trans movement barely noticeable, indeed, a paragraph later, she withdrew it and endowed the trans movement with the best of intentions, “The right is seeking desperately to reclaim forms of identity that have been rightly challenged. At the same time, they tend to reduce movements for racial justice as identity politics, or to caricature movements for sexual freedom as concerned only with ‘identity.’ In fact, these movements are primarily concerned with redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should be.” A hint of critique that is immediately withdrawn through the usual trick of re-centering the evil Right as the problem. This allows Butler to do two things: on the one hand, deny the state power her ideas have acquired (the new hegemon), a power that has produced horrible distributive consequences across the board: revival of heterosexual norms (dykes becoming trans men who sleep with women); medicalization of children’s bodies; the slippery slope of endowing children with capacity to consent to “gender identity"; thought and language control that attacks the very common sense of people; and the list goes on. On the other hand, it allows Butler to imagine that ‘90s politics go on; a discursive trope familiar among the militant progressives who have become mainstreamed by the post-Trump Democratic Party. Maybe Butler is an anti-identitarian when it comes to gender, but she sure defends her political identity most rigidly, indeed, in an obscurantist way... Far from being apostles of revolution, those academics provide the most articulate apologetics for the contemporary war of the elites on the working class."
