Butler seeks to reframe the arguments around gender
Judith Butler’s new work examines the furore surrounding gender identification, writes Vicky Spratt
Just a few weeks before the publication of this new book from the doyenne of gender theory, Judith Butler, two teenagers – Scarlett Jenkinson and Eddie Ratcliffe – were each sentenced to more than 20 years in prison for the brutal murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey. Their violent attack was, according to the judge, partly motivated by their victim’s transgender identity.
This did not, however, stop Prime Minister Rishi Sunak from mocking Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer over his position on gender selfidentification while Brianna’s bereaved mother, Esther Ghey, was in the public gallery of the House of Commons.
If you needed proof that a new intervention on the contentious subject of gender from American academic and philosopher Judith Butler was timely, there you have it.
Recently, measured books such as Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue have calmly tried to change the tone, rigorously using facts to reorient the conversation back to those it impacts: people who do not identify with the sex they were assigned at birth. Still, the political and ideological discourse surrounding gender has become more furious, more polarised and less and less compassionate.
And that’s saying something. When Butler published Gender Trouble in 1990, there was hardly a chorus of agreement. As celebrated as it was controversial, Gender Trouble put forward the idea that, unlike sex (which is to do with a
person’s physical body), gender is “performative”. By this Butler meant that gender is not an objective, “natural” or essential thing, but rather a subjective social performance informed by whatever is an acceptable version of woman or manhood at any given point in time.
It was a radical proposal: that gender norms – such as wearing heels or liking football – were not inherent aspects of biological sex but culturally-created illusions of it. Now as infamous as it is misinterpreted, this idea remains crucial in conversations about gender identity.
However, what Butler absolutely did not say is that biological sex doesn’t matter or that it does not exist. In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler, now 68 and still a professor at Berkeley, the University of California, makes this very clear: “What if, in fact, no one has said that sex is not real, even as some people have asked what its reality consists of?”
Reading their new work, it’s impossible not to get the sense that with this book Butler feels
the need to intercede. Not only to stop their own ideas being parsed and used by reactionary politicians and public figures to denigrate trans people’s experiences – recasting them, as populist Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni has, as a threat to everyone’s identity.
Butler assesses the international furore surrounding gender identification from America to Britain. They examine the reasons behind what appears to be an unlikely intellectual overlap between the Christian Right, some left-wing feminists in the UK and populist politicians such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary or Giorgia Meloni in Italy – because all believe not only that “a sexed identity never changes” but that it should not be allowed to.
Butler suggests that all their views are rooted in anxiety about changing social and economic orders around the world, which have destabilised the family unit that had been normalised from the early modern period onwards. They link the haunting spectre of gender and the threat it supposedly poses to other contemporary fears and their scapegoats: race and migration.
But calling a philosopher like Butler impenetrable is a bit like criticising a gym class for being fatiguing for being accessible. If you’re going to read a poststructuralist like Butler, you are likely to be doing so because you want to be challenged in your thinking.
You get the sense with this book Butler feels the need to intercede