If there is one living figure who can be credited with popularizing the worldview according to which Hamas and Hezbollah are “social movements that are progressive,” while J. K. Rowling is “in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism,” it’s Judith Butler.
The notion that the outré ideas promulgated in America’s universities would stay in those institutions, like an ivory-tower Las Vegas, is no longer tenable. In a cover story for New York magazine this month, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer makes “the moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies” irrespective of age or psychiatric history. Meanwhile, a shockingly large number of Americans showed support for Hamas in the immediate aftermath of its brutal massacre of 1,200 Israelis last October. If, as Andrew Sullivan memorably put it several years ago, “we all live on campus now,” Judith Butler is the queen of the quad.
Butler, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, burst onto the scene in 1990 with her book Gender Trouble, in which she argued that gender is a “performance” distinct from biological sex. This was hardly a groundbreaking insight; Plato posited a similar idea, as did John Stuart Mill and, more recently, the feminist theorists Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Butler went further, however, arguing that sex, too, was a social construction, biology itself being a “medico-legal alliance emerging in nineteenth century Europe [that] has spawned categorical fictions.”
In her new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler takes this argument to its logical conclusion, advocating for the supremacy of gender over sex in all areas of life. For Butler and other disciples of French post-structuralist thought, categories are by their nature a form of “structural oppression” and must everywhere be subverted. If the category of “woman” once implied humans with two X chromosomes, Butler believes it should now include anyone who identifies as female.
If the proliferation of young people opting to undergo irreversible medical procedures in order to align their still-developing bodies with a gender identity that no scientific instrument can detect strikes you as worrisome, or the ability of natal men to declare themselves female and thereby gain access to female-only spaces seems potentially problematic, then, to Butler and her camp followers, you are a bigot, and stupid to boot.
If, as Andrew Sullivan memorably put it several years ago, “we all live on campus now,” Judith Butler is the queen of the quad.
“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, in what is perhaps the book’s most laughable example of projection, considering the infamous incoherence of her own writing. Feminists who voice concerns about our new, sexless future are, in Butler’s view, the moral equivalent of those who supported racial segregation.
“Feminism has always insisted that what a woman is is an open-ended question,” Butler writes, “a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex.” Here, Butler artfully inverts the arguments of feminists who expanded the possibilities of what it means to be a woman to claim that the definition of a woman itself must be dismantled.
Elsewhere she argues that since premising womanhood on reproductive capacity unfairly excludes women who are infertile, so too would it be wrong to exclude natal males. According to this feat of illogic, Lia Thomas, the middling collegiate male swimmer who suddenly became a champion after joining the women’s team, is a courageous trailblazer akin to Susan B. Anthony and Betty Friedan.
On every page of this migraine-inducing volume, Butler lives up to her reputation as the winner of the 1998 Bad Writing Contest. Though it is apparently her first book to be published by a mainstream press, Who’s Afraid of Gender? has all the hallmarks of bad academic prose: phenomena and physical objects described as “sites” and “scenes”; perfunctory appeals to the authority of obscure academics (“according to Liao,” “as the Argentinian political theorists Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago have shown,” “as Wendy Brown [who happens to be Butler’s partner] has shown” ); the tarring of one’s intellectual adversaries as fascists. That capitalism is Bad and socialism is Good is of course taken for granted.
While Butler rightly condemns discrimination against transgender people, she sees the involvement of institutions such as the World Bank and European Union in the promotion of L.G.B.T. equality as a problem because “gender no longer belongs to a left struggle to criticize and dismantle financial powers and their modes of exploitation and extractivism.” Practical, real-world gains, such as the Supreme Court’s 2019 Bostock v. Clayton County ruling protecting transgender people from most forms of discrimination, get scant mention. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum once observed, Butler is far more interested in the politics of performance than she is in politics itself.
Feminists who voice concerns about our new, sexless future are, in Butler’s view, the moral equivalent of those who supported racial segregation.
There were many moments when I wondered if Butler actually believes the nonsense she peddles. Consider her response to the “phantasmatic” concerns about the housing of transgender women in women’s prisons. In Butler’s view, not only is prohibiting “penis-bearing” trans women from women’s prisons discriminatory; it also serves as “an alibi for forms of discrimination that can end up in fascist forms of targeting.”
“Calling for segregation and discrimination can only seem ‘reasonable,’” Butler argues, “when this phantasmatic construal of the penis as weapon is organizing reality.” (I lost count of the number of times Butler uses the word “phantasmatic” to describe the anxieties of her ideological opponents, which, in this case, include rape survivors.) I can think of a few reasons beyond their possession of a phallus that men pose a danger to women—physical strength and testosterone come to mind—but as these factors relate to material reality, Butler has no time for them.
Indeed, science is a nuisance to Butler, as it has the annoying tendency to complicate or contradict her theories. Nowhere does Butler address the basis of what makes human beings a sexually dimorphic species: their chromosomal structure. While decrying the denial of “health care rights” to “trans youth” as if children were being deprived of appendectomies and vaccinations, she studiously ignores the numerous European countries with socialized medicine—the United Kingdom, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark among them—that have drastically restricted or even banned the provision of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to gender-dysphoric children after decades of rigorous research revealed their risks.
Practical, real-world gains, such as the Supreme Court’s 2019 Bostock v. Clayton County ruling protecting transgender people from most forms of discrimination, get scant mention.
Nor does she address the growing ranks of “detransitioners,” people who underwent gender transitions at a young age which they now regret. Butler condemns the controversial sexologist John Money, whose “surgeries on intersex kids left them without the capacity for sexual pleasure or orgasm,” seemingly oblivious to the fact that such outcomes are frequently the result of the elective surgeries she euphemistically describes as “trans health care.”
With no apparent irony, in a chapter entitled “Trump, Sex, and the Supreme Court,” Butler contests the notion that “sex is an immutable biological trait,” positing instead that “trans identity” is “an individual truth”—the postmodern progressive version of an “alternative fact.”
For Butler, the very concept of a “fact” is a social construction, used to undergird various “structures” of “oppression.” “Sexual dimorphism is neither a simple fact nor an innocent hypothesis,” she asserts. “The facts are gathered and presented according to a frame that is clearly soaked in power, biological determinism, and normativity,” Butler writes, listing three bugbears of postmodern critical theory that she and her acolytes have spent the past few decades trying to “deconstruct.”
Five years ago, in what appeared to some like a bid for continued relevance among the progressive avant-garde, Butler adopted the identity “non-binary,” a novel term essentially describing the ancient phenomena of androgyny. (Butler goes by both “she” and “they”; rather than compound the confusion, I have chosen to use the former.)
But in other, more consequential ways, Butler follows in a long line of leftist intellectuals who lecture from on high to do as they say, not as they do. This critic of “carceral powers” was a generous donor to the Senate and presidential campaigns of Kamala Harris, who once proudly touted herself as California’s “top cop.” And though Butler calls for deconstructing the nuclear family and once backed an initiative endorsing legal recognition of polyamorous relationships, she has for 35 years lived the bourgeois life of the prototypical “U-Haul lesbian,” cohabitating with the same woman, with whom she has raised a son.
A major reason why Butler’s ideas about gender have gained traction outside the academy is that they have been embraced by well-intentioned but credulous liberals. Cognizant of the speed with which the campaign for gay rights achieved its goals, and fearful of being on “the wrong side of history,” they have acceded unquestioningly to a set of ever more radical claims and demands. Butler exploits this goodwill, repeatedly conflating the wholly different phenomena of homosexuality and transgender identity throughout the book.
Butler contests the notion that “sex is an immutable biological trait,” positing instead that “trans identity” is “an individual truth”—the postmodern progressive version of an “alternative fact.”
She condemns “trans conversion therapy”—a term designed to invoke the cruel practices that psychiatrists once deployed to “convert” gay people into heterosexuals—as “a paradigmatic instance of moral sadism.” What’s lambasted as “trans conversion therapy,” however, often involves gender-dysphoric children undergoing talk therapy in which they are encouraged to accept that they may be gay, not trans. Indeed, studies show that most gender-dysphoric children grow up to be gay.
Believing that gay and straight people ought to be treated equally is not the same as accepting the pseudo-scientific notion that sex exists on a spectrum, or that an individual can change the sex they were “assigned at birth,” or that “man” and “woman” are not stable categories. Unlike the proponents of gender ideology, the gay-rights movement never asked the public to accept such a set of obvious fictions.
It is surely true that a significant faction of the anti–gender ideology movement is driven by a desire to, in Butler’s words, restore “a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father” and women “resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household.” Pope Francis, one of the most liberal pontiffs in the 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church, has compared gender ideology to nuclear weapons and Nazism. And so when Butler argues that gender ideology serves as a convenient distraction from larger problems such as “ecological and economic destruction,” she has a point.
But for many, this writer included, it is gender ideology’s willful denial of reality that generates unease. The question “Who’s afraid of gender?” is a dodge, as it’s not only the tenets of gender ideology that unsettle people, but what gender ideology ultimately represents: the postmodern assault on truth. And it’s on this score where Butler appears less a parodical figure than a malevolent one. The same week that the United Nations confirmed reports of sexual violence against Israeli women on October 7, Butler appeared on a French Internet show to deny that the pogrom of October 7 was anti-Semitic or an act of terrorism, preferring the anodyne term “armed resistance” to describe the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
On the surface, the debate over gender ideology and the Israel-Palestine conflict might seem completely unrelated. But in a world where “lived reality” trumps objective reality and truth is “individual,” it should come as little surprise that a self-proclaimed feminist has defined women out of existence, an apostle of nonviolence prevaricates in defense of terrorism, and a political philosopher deems the creator of Harry Potter a Fascist.
James Kirchick is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and the author of Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington