Judith Butler wants TERFs to wake up

When Gender Trouble came out in 1990, Judith Butler wasn’t expecting it to become a cult hit, let alone star-making. “I didn’t expect anyone to read it,” they tell Dazed. But Gender Trouble struck a chord because it seized on an anxiety – the anxiety that questioning what ‘man’ and ‘woman’ mean might destroy much of what we assume to be true – and concluded: yes.

Butler has made many friends and enemies by arguing against sex and gender as stable, simple, or pre-cultural, and arguing that we don’t need those safety nets to make sense of ourselves or to practise feminism. Now, almost 35 years later, Butler is back in similar territory, facing off against ‘anti-gender ideology’ movements that believe that ‘gender’ is going to destroy civilisation – and which often cite garbled understandings of Butler’s own work.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? is Butler’s first book on gender in a decade, and serves as both a clarifying exploration of how we got here and a clarion call for different, less fearful, less cramped ways of thinking about the world. With their signature critical focus on what we think of as ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’, Butler pins down the history behind the contemporary cultural battle over gender, exploring how gender fear markets itself as protection, crusade, and panacea – and why it won’t cure anything.

Butler spoke to Dazed about right-wing fantasies, men’s gymnastics, and becoming a gender studies student again in their 60s. 

In this book you focus on the idea of gender as a global ‘phantasm’ – this charged, overdetermined, anxiety- and fear-inducing cluster of fantasies that is being weaponised by the right. How did you go about starting to investigate that?

Judith Butler: When I was burned in effigy in Brazil in 2017, I could see people screaming about gender, and they understood ‘gender’ to mean ‘paedophilia.’ And then I heard people in France describing gender as a Jewish intellectual movement imported from the US. This book started because I had to figure out what gender had become. I was naïve. I was stupid. I had no idea that it had become this flash point for right-wing movements throughout the world. So I started doing the work to reconstruct why I was being called a paedophile, and why that woman in the airport wanted to kill me with the trolley.

I’m not offering a new theory of gender here; I’m tracking this phantasm’s formation and circulation and how it’s linked to emerging authoritarianism, how it stokes fear to expand state powers. Luckily, I was able to contact a lot of people who translated Gender Trouble in different parts of the world, who were often gender activists and scholars in their own right. They told me about what’s happening in Serbia, what’s happening in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Russia. So I became a student of gender again. I’ve been out of the field for a while. I stay relatively literate, of course, but I’ve written on war, on ethics, on violence, on nonviolence, on the pandemic… I’m not in gender studies all the time. I had to do a lot of reading. 

There’s a lot of focus in the book on how the anti-gender movement has moved across the world in the past few decades, and how it’s inextricable from Catholic doctrine. It was clarifying for me; domestic anti-trans movements in the UK mostly self-identify as secular. 

Judith Butler: In the UK, and even in the US, people don’t realise that this anti-gender ideology movement has been going on for some time in the Americas, in central Europe, to a certain degree in Africa, and that it’s arrived in the US by different routes, but it’s arrived without announcing its history. It became clear to me that a lot of the trans-exclusionary feminists didn’t realise where their discourse was coming from. Some of them do; some people who call themselves feminists are aligned with right-wing positions, and it’s confusing, but there it is.

There’s an uncomfortable history of fascist feminism in movements like British suffragism, for instance.

Judith Butler: Yes, and of racism. But when Putin made clear that he agreed with JK Rowling, she was probably surprised, and she rightly said, ‘no, I don’t want your alliance’, but it was an occasion for her to think about who she’s allying herself with, unwittingly or not. The anti-gender movement was first and foremost a defence of Biblical scripture, and of the idea that God created man and woman, and that the human form exists only in this duality and that without it, the human is destroyed – God’s creation is destroyed. So that morphed, as the Vatican’s doctrine moved into Latin America, into the idea that people who advocate ‘gender’ are forces of destruction who seek to destroy man, woman, the human, civilisation and culture. 

Which is a good claim to make when you want any amount of violence you do against a population to seem like justified self-defence.

Judith Butler: It’s been powerful enough to overcome the traditional tensions between evangelical and Catholic communities: there’s a Christian alliance here of an enormous kind that is seeking to destroy not just gay, lesbian, bi, trans lives and livelihoods, but also feminism too. Those acts of destruction get described as acts of protection – as protecting the nation against destruction from this thing called gender. It’s deeply lamentable to me that some feminists would ally with that.

It feels to me like some of the destruction attributed to progressivism works to block people from noticing that certain constructions are neither natural nor designed to be protective. Take gender in sport, for instance – there are entire competitions that were only split by gender to avoid women defeating men!

Judith Butler: Perhaps I shouldn’t say it’s embarrassing, that sounds disrespectful… but many people expect biology to furnish clear facts, like this is female and that’s male, and they believe that only an idiot would say that matters are more complex. But sex is in fact very complicated; intersex people and the whole intersex spectrum gets dismissed, the overlap between sexes gets dismissed. There are women, assigned female at birth, who have higher testosterone levels than men assigned male at birth who compete at a high level in sport. The Olympic committee and other committees keep trying to find the criteria that would perfectly distinguish between male and female, and it keeps getting more complicated.

And there are all these gendered influences on how sport is practised, as well – for a long time in women’s tennis, most competitors would prefer not to be strong for fear of looking monstrous. They would prioritise other ways of winning, through clever shots, for instance. I know men who compete in women’s gymnastics because they prefer the movements in women’s competition. And they always lose! But they’re happier.

“Sex is in fact very complicated; intersex people and the whole intersex spectrum gets dismissed, the overlap between sexes gets dismissed” – Judith Butler

Do you think there’s a way to get at people who are in the grip of the ‘gender phantasm’, who believe this kind of interrogation means annihilation? It feels like it brings them some form of satisfaction, or strange fulfilment, that they don’t want to give up. Do you have to be at least partly detached from the phantasm in order to be receptive to what you’re talking about in the book?

Judith Butler: There are extremely intense right-wing evangelicals in the US, or right-wing Christians in Brazil, who are not only filled with hatred but are obviously thriving off their hatred, they’re very invested in it, they don’t want to give it up. It gives them a sense of crusade – of representing the Church, or even the Lord – and for the most part when I’ve tried to be in conversation with them, they’ve explained that they can’t possibly be in conversation with me, because I represent a demonic force, or some kind of potential harm to their children. So in that case it’s very hard. But with people who are primarily confused or anxious, I can sit down and ask them: what is your anxiety about, what do you imagine happening, what is your fear? They don’t have committed beliefs, they’re relying upon a received idea, and the received idea seems very frightening or very puzzling.

I’m trying to respond to this rash of hatred, these distortions, and suggest some ways that we can produce a more compelling vision of the world that would counter them. I tried to make the book calm, because I want people to stay with me. 

I feel like that calmness is sometimes important strategically, but it also feels somewhat cruel as a demand. There’s a dramatic asymmetry between how ‘reasonable’ some of us have to act to be allowed to exist in public, compared to how free others are to abuse us. 

Judith Butler: I think people have every right to be angry, but sometimes the calm exposition helps you see more clearly why we need to be angry. But calm exposition isn’t performed in the sense of an act on my part, it’s always been my way. I turned to philosophy as a very young person. It gave me a calm discourse. Let’s read about the passions of Spinoza, then maybe I’ll understand my passions! Philosophy for me has always been a way of ordering things. That’s my self-soothing, or my way of slowing things down, making things less dramatic so that I can see. And especially with feminists, and people on the left – we need to be in an alliance here. Screaming at someone and then telling them they need to be in an alliance with me, that’s probably not so effective. And I want them to change. I want them to wake up.

And there has to be a belief that that’s possible. 

Judith Butler: People in the middle, who are confused – the book is written for them. It’s not an echo chamber. I’m not writing for my friends who know a lot of this stuff better than me. I’ve just been around for a while, I’ve survived some attacks. I have a name. I have a platform. People attacked me and therefore gave me a platform, which was very nice of them. I’m not fighting back, I’m not throwing bombs, but I am responding.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler is published by Penguin on March 19.