Judith Butler pioneered new approaches to the study of gender, interrogating the relationship between concepts of gender and the social construction of hierarchical relationships and sexual stereotypes in ways that have both enraged and inspired. Gender theory, as a sociolinguistic subversion of Western culture and politics, has shaped approaches to the humanities and become one of the most neuralgic issues for the Far Right.
My research in Catholic theology and gender is indebted to Butler, and I have introduced students to their work to critically evaluate Pope John Paul II’s theology of the body. (Butler is no longer a “she” but a “they,” now identifying as nonbinary. I shall respect that identity in what follows, though it negates an identifiably female lesbian voice.) After reading their new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I realize that I should have paid more attention to how radical they are in seeking to dissolve any significant distinction between sex and gender. Butler argues that these are historical and cultural constructs with no stable material significance. Sex is real but mutable. This has devastating implications for any attempt to defend the sex-based rights of women and girls.
Butler asks: “What kind of phantasm has gender become, and what anxieties, fears, and hatreds does it collect and mobilize?” (The italics are Butler’s.) The core of their argument is that a global “anti-gender ideology movement” is fueled by the phantasm of gender, which has become the psychological repository of all our fears in a world threatened by spiralling economic, environmental, and political crises. Conservative political and religious leaders, whom Butler describes as fascist authoritarians, weaponize these anxieties by displacing the “causes of destruction” onto gender so that it becomes “a phantasm with destructive powers, one way of collecting and escalating multitudes of modern panics.”
If this book had focused on the American Far Right and the widespread influence of U.S. culture wars, if its arguments had been more nuanced and its sources more reliable, if its editors had been more rigorous in eliminating its many repetitions and inconsistencies, it might have been more persuasive. But Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a rambling diatribe. Butler’s observations about the extent to which Western ideas of gender have been shaped by repressive and abusive regimes of enslavement, colonial domination, and racial and sexual prejudice are weakened by the book’s superficiality and reflexively polemical tone. But the problem goes deeper, starting with the way the author talks about gender itself. Butler reifies gender, referring to it as if it were an entity that the Far Right is out to destroy rather than a concept that some reject. Their main target of condemnation is the Vatican, which comes in for many negative mentions.
I do not defend the Vatican’s gender politics, and there is ample scope for a hostile critic like Butler to launch an attack. But if, as Butler claims, neoliberalism is to blame for many of our modern ills, then surely they would notice that on this point at least they’re in agreement with Catholic social teaching? It can be argued that the Vatican’s teachings on sex and gender play into the hands of the Far Right, but Pope Francis is unrelenting in his condemnation of neoliberal economics and the proliferating inequalities, wars, and injustices of the present world order.
British gender-critical feminists are another target; they get a whole chapter titled “TERFs and British Matters of Sex.” (“TERF” stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”) I’ll focus on this chapter because it allows me to expose many of the problems with Butler’s approach in a context with which I am familiar.
“Many TERFs would be hesitant to identify with the Vatican’s stance, yet their beliefs produce the same fear and repression,” Butler writes. Quoting New York Times journalist Sophie Lewis, Butler claims that “UK TERFism is obsessed with ‘biological realities’” and continues “a long tradition of British feminism interacting with colonialism and empire,” serving “the convergent aims of heteronormativity and colonial domination.”
Except for the trans writer Shon Fayne, most theoretical sources in this chapter are American, while British writers like the philosopher Kathleen Stock are dismissed. Stock “does not seem to understand the toxicity or cruelty that she herself brings to the table.” J. K. Rowling shows “shameless disrespect” when she uses her own experience of domestic abuse to explain why, though she understands trans women’s fears of violent men and wants them to be safe, she also believes that this must not make “natal girls and women less safe.” For Butler, this shows that Rowling has failed to work through “the aftermath of sexual violence.” In other words, get over it.
Butler dismisses all arguments against allowing anatomical males who identify as women to have full access to female-only places, activities, and relationships. It’s wrong, Butler says, to associate the penis with rape because lots of objects can be used to penetrate bodies without consent. It’s wrong, they say, to scapegoat men when women are also guilty of abuse. And if trans women are winning in women’s sports, it’s because of multiple social factors to do with class and access to training that affect sexual development and hormone levels. It’s never biological sex that is the problem, but “the social organization of patriarchy and masculine domination.” Our aim should be “to keep everyone safe.”
Well, yes—but not everyone is safe. Butler fails to acknowledge that, whether we argue from biology or social conditioning, women and girls around the world are at risk from male violence and sexual domination. Trans women are often victims of these misogynistic and violent realities, but the solution is to address the problem of male sexual aggression, not to insist that women abandon any attempt to maintain protective boundaries.
Butler argues that, by insisting on the material reality of biological sex, gender-critical feminists have created an environment of “bullying, censorship campaigns, and claims of hostile workplace environments,” while trying to “shut down gender-studies programs and to associate scholars in the field of gender studies with scenes of abuse.” Let me set the record straight.
There is indeed bullying and censorship, but the main target is gender-critical academics, activists, and authors. Stock was hounded out of her post at the University of Sussex by trans activists. Women-only or lesbian events attract mobs of balaclava-clad trans activists (many of whom are not trans themselves), often with violent slogans: “Decapitate TERFs”; “Punch a TERF.” Butler “will not condone that kind of behaviour, no matter who does it,” but they quickly add that if your existence is denied by those who “have the power to orchestrate public discourse and occupy the position of the victim exclusively…you will feel and express rage [their italics], and you will doubtless be right to do so.”
Who are these British “TERFs” who “occupy the position of the victim exclusively”? Black lesbian barrister and LGB activist Allison Bailey won her case against her employer, Garden Court Chambers, when she was disciplined for refusing to delete two tweets criticizing the LGBT-rights organization Stonewall. An employee at Edinburgh’s Rape Crisis Centre, Roz Adams, was accused of transphobia and subjected to disciplinary proceedings by senior staff—including the center’s chief executive, trans woman Mridul Wadhwa—for insisting that abuse survivors have a right to know the sex of their support workers. Adams won an employment tribunal for unfair dismissal, with the judge describing the disciplinary process as Kafkaesque and likening it to a “heresy hunt.” Adams went on to work at Beira Place, a woman-only rape crisis center in Edinburgh funded by J. K. Rowling. Wadhwa is on record as saying that some victims of sexual violence are bigots, and “you have to reframe your trauma.”
What about Butler’s claim that gender-critical feminists have tried to “shut down gender-studies programs”? The Gender Critical Research Network at the Open University, which Butler condemns in a footnote, was set up by professor of criminology and sex-and-gender researcher Jo Phoenix, who is a lesbian feminist and survivor of rape. When Phoenix expressed concerns about the influence of Stonewall in silencing academic debate on trans issues, hundreds of her colleagues signed a letter accusing her of transphobia. An employment tribunal ruled in favour of Phoenix, deciding that she had suffered victimization, harassment, and direct discrimination. The Open University subsequently apologized and agreed to a compensation settlement. So yes, there are campaigns to have British gender-studies programs closed down, but none that I know of has been initiated by gender-critical feminists.
Another significant concern is the medicalization of trans bodies. Butler acknowledges that “the relationship between science, medical research and experimentation, and cruelty is a long one,” but they do not apply this crucial insight to questions surrounding the use of puberty blockers and sex-reassignment surgery. Butler expresses outrage over the now-discredited surgical practices of John Money and the “cruelty of his procedures” in operating on “intersex infants” to make their bodies conform to essentialized gender norms. But Butler also thinks that when Money’s concept of gender is freed from “compulsory gender dimorphism” by the “social constructionist thesis,” it can serve “greater claims of autonomy and richer languages of self-affirmation for intersex people, for those who seek to change their sex assignment, and for those who seek to challenge gender norms surgically or otherwise.”
First, an aside: the term “intersex” is widely rejected by persons with differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs), many of whom object to their appropriation by the purveyors of gender politics. That’s why the “I” is increasingly omitted from references to the LGBTQA+ movement. Butler seems oblivious to this development, despite their insistence that not using a person’s own definition of who they are is tantamount to denying their existence.
Butler does not refer to growing concerns about the impact of puberty blockers on young people’s physical and mental development or to the high risk of complications associated with sex-reassignment surgery. Butler ignores detrans people who sometimes express profound regret over irreversible changes to their bodies. The recent publication of the Cass Report in England highlighted the lack of reliable research or follow-up in the treatment of young people with gender dysphoria, many of whom present with mental health issues and/or a history of abuse. The head author of the report, Hilary Cass, is a highly respected pediatrician. The Cass Report has already had a significant influence on health-care policy in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, but it has been dismissed by trans activists as ideologically driven by the Far Right.
This brings me to the economics of the trans health-care industry. Butler portrays the LGBTQIA+ movement as being on the frontline of the struggle against capitalist neoliberalism. A recent report by Polaris Market Research predicts that profits from “the global sex reassignment surgery market” will rise from $784.96 million in 2024 to $1.94 billion in 2032. Beneath the Orwellian newspeak of gender-affirming care, this report makes clear that the aggressive promotion of surgical transitioning among young people is a market opportunity for the corporate profiteers of Big Pharma and the health-care industry.
In a 1999 review in the New Republic, Martha Nussbaum wrote that Butler’s “obscurity fills the void left by an absence of a real complexity of thought and argument.” Nussbaum argued that, under the influence of theorists such as Butler, the American academy had succumbed to a “virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women.” I cannot think of a better description of Butler’s new book. It takes us through the looking glass to a world in which nothing is what it seems, with a methodology that owes more to Humpty Dumpty than to sociolinguistic theory: “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’”
There are indeed phantasms at play among us—powerful psychological forces that prevent us from thinking clearly about fundamental questions to do with the practice and ethics of gendered life, which make us vulnerable to fear-mongering and political manipulation. Butler presents a mirror image of those fears. Reviewing Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Stock rightly asks, “What is Judith Butler afraid of?” Gender theorists can and must do better than this if we truly are “searching for livable lives” in which all suffering counts, and not just the suffering of those who conform to the current LGBTQA+ zeitgeist.
Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Judith Butler
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$30 | 320 pp.
