How the debate on gender masks other societal issues
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 a minimum of 20 years in prison for the brutal murder of 16-year-old Brianna Ghey. Their 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 self-identification 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 academic and philosopher Judith Butler was timely, there you have it.
When Butler, who is nonbinary, and a professor at Berkeley, the University of California, published their most infamous book – Gender Trouble – in 1990, there was hardly a consolidated chorus of agreement. Gender Trouble put forward the idea that unlike sex, 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. What Butler absolutely did not say is that biological sex does not matter, nor that it does not exist.
In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler zooms out and assesses the international furore surrounding gender identification from the US to Britain.
They examine the reasons behind what appears to be an unlikely intellectual overlap between the Christian right, some left-wing feminists and populist politicians such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. Butler says these all believe not only that “a sexed identity never changes”, but also 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.
The academic links the haunting spectre of gender and the threat it supposedly poses to other contemporary fears and their scapegoats: race and migration.
As Butler sees it, the right’s intense “focus” on gender is a deliberate attempt to deflect attention from “the various social and political forces” that are “destroying the world as we know it”.
Among those “forces” they list: “climate destruction, war, capitalist exploitation and social and economic inequality, intensifying precarity and economic abandonment, global slums, homelessness, detention camps, systemic forms of racism”.
When the Prime Minister of Britain chooses to make jibes about gender identity at a time when income inequality and homelessness are rising, and when a young trans woman has been murdered, Butler makes a valid point, and makes it well.