Judith Butler is still troubling gender
In February, Arizona’s State Senate put forward SB 1628, termed the “Arizona Women’s Bill of Rights.” Offering no women’s rights, it “aims to clarify and standardize the use of sexbased terms in Arizona laws, rules and policies.” It supposedly “provides specific definitions for terms such as ‘boy,’ ‘father,’ ‘female,’ ‘girl,’ ‘male,’ ‘man,’ ‘mother,’ and ‘sex,’ emphasizing biological sex at birth and excluding gender identity from the definition of sex.”
The first words of philosopher Judith Butler’s most recent book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” are, “Why would anyone be afraid of gender?” This philosophical work explains how this “ordinary” word came to roil global public discourse, couched in principles of freedom while attacking them.
Butler’s analysis has deepened since “Gender Trouble” (1990) pushed back against feminisms relying on essentialized concepts of femaleness. The current project responds to a global “weaponization” of the antigender ideology movement and how it organizes “the world wrought by the fear of a destruction for which gender is held responsible.”
Fears are understandable: a failing planet and nuclear annihilation are two. However, Butler’s book exposes that coalescing fears around the “phantasm” of gender is misplaced, lacks evidence, and will not solve the actual problems.
Applying the “phantasmatic scene” theory of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to anti-gender ideology, Butler includes global examples of religious, national, and authoritarian influence in organizing anti-gender campaigns that stoke hatred while invoking moral righteousness. Legislative restrictions on people’s freedoms in the United States and elsewhere occur with significant coordination.
Anti-gender ideology argues that family exists “in a single, acceptable form” stemming from monogamous heterosexual marriage. Alternatives to a nuclear “family” and binary sex categories are false, no matter biological and historical realities.
Chapters address “Censorship and Rights-Stripping” in the United States, Trump’s influential presidency and Supreme Court choices, and the (originally) British Trans Exclusionary (Radical) Feminists (TERFs) and their opposition to what they term “gender identity ideology.” Butler breaks down TERF statements that consistently function without evidence, such as Kathleen Stock’s that “the perception of two sexes is something that the brain simply does.”
Later chapters increase attention to scientific and historical examples undermining anti-gender ideology that deems binary sex categories accurate, consistent, and the foundation of human societies.
A false binary
Butler reminds us that the narrowing of sex categories to a binary has a predetermined purpose, neither objective nor descriptive. “Sex assigned at birth,” routinely referenced by the anti-gender camp, does not necessarily align with genitalia, chromosomes, historical variations or — perhaps especially — one’s bodily experience.
Butler summarizes, “the binary is not to be called into question by any of the evidence that we find . . . it forecloses that evidence . . . a compulsory phantasm rather than good science.” Butler describes a history of modern surgery dedicated to “matching” a body to the binary. The book’s arguments offer evidence that these surgeries mean the binary is false.
Historically, extensive global examples of wide-ranging gender roles, presentations, and self-identification exist. Butler references a few, such as research on North American Two-Spirit People and Ifi Amadiume’s Nigerian history, “Male Daughters, Female Husbands.” As Butler’s work repeatedly demonstrates, adherents of anti-gender ideology purposefully disengage from such evidence.
The strongest chapters address racial and colonial legacies and related terminology accompanying anti-gender efforts to distort history and language to suit. The “dimorphic idealism of gender” is deeply rooted in whiteness and its colonization and enslavement of bodies deemed other-than-white. Butler’s history of the gender binary exposes not its historical universalism or that gender diversity is a Western imposition, but why and how a binary was imposed and enforced.
Though not overlooked, Butler might more fully integrate the bodily experience of racialized sex and gender. Age/aging, however, is effectively omitted. Given the author’s longstanding arguments about the significance of the body’s material presence, its absence stands out even as scholars regularly reference Butler as they grapple with related subjects.
Dedicated to “the young people who still teach me,” “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” concludes with a call to imagine a future different from one that anti-gender adherents demand. Legislative attempts to quash “gender ideology” confirm the timeliness of Butler’s arguments and the book’s dedication exposes a faith in generations who may yet see the fruits of fights for freedom and equality.