Butler was one of the leading luminaries to suggest the collapse of sex into gender, thus separating sex itself from human anatomy.
Last week, I wrote a piece about the Hannah Barron controversy arguing that, yes, tomboys are women (duh). I argued, against influencer Sameera Khan, that “the performance of femininity is not what makes a woman a woman.”
On a similar theme, the indomitable Abigail Anthony wrote about the pink-coded vomitorium of trans-influencer Dylan Mulvaney’s latest music video, for a song called “Days of Girlhood.”
What Dylan portrays as “girlhood” is a Barbie-esque lifestyle characterized by a vapid pursuit of conventional attractiveness and sexual pleasure without any responsibilities. . . . The people who insist that “gender” is a “social construct” resort to insulting tropes to affirm their preferred “gender identity.”
Neither Sameera Khan nor Dylan Mulvaney are the originators of such ideas. There are merely messengers of a greater prophet.
While no single person can be blamed for the seismic mess that is our current state of gender politics, one figure has remained particularly influential: Judith Butler.
Recently named “The Pope of Gender” by Compact magazine, Butler is (rightfully) dubbed the pontifex maximus of gender theory today. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Butler, 68, has been a long-standing pioneer of third-wave feminism, critical theory, and gender-as-social-construct.
The author of the piece, philosopher Nina Power, writes:
Butler’s big idea was that gender is a series of culturally meaningful performances ungrounded in any underlying “true” identity. Taking things a step further, Butler contended that sex itself is culturally constructed.
Power continues, quoting a potent line from Butler’s 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, wherein Butler states “that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”
Butler was by no means the first to assert that gender boils down to social convention and mutually recognizable performances. However, Butler was one of the leading luminaries to suggest the collapse of sex into gender, thus separating sex itself from human anatomy. Pre-Butler, men and women could perform across the spectrum of gender. Post-Butler, there are no men and women.
In Butler’s world, a baby human is born into the world sexless and genderless. It is up to that little person to decide exactly what he/she/xe/they is. Through the Butlerian lens, a baby’s genital organs have no bearing on his or her sex — if another power (i.e., a doctor) determines the baby’s sex via anatomical and biological realities, this is deemed an infringement upon that baby’s future agency. (This is how we arrived at the strange and widely used phrase “sex assigned at birth.”)
Butler’s vision is radically egalitarian. Butler (who has used both she/her and they/them pronouns in the recent past) believes that the only way to usher in true gender equality is to annihilate the dichotomous categories of “male” and “female.”
Butler seems to have won the battle to eradicate clear categories of sex from contemporary discourse with a swift and sharp victory. Major airlines allow customers to select Male (M), Female (F), Unspecified (X), or Undisclosed (U) from their “Gender” dropdown lists. Medical schools now teach “chestfeed” instead of “breastfeed” and “pregnant person” instead of “pregnant woman.” (Medical professors who revert to language of “male” and “female” or “men” and “women” will likely have to deliver a public apology.) Nearly one-quarter of Gen-Zers identify as something other than a heterosexual male or a heterosexual female.
And yet, according to Butler’s latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, there is still a big, bad boogeyman who is keeping the progress of radical gender equality at bay: Pope Francis. (You better believe it, dear reader. According to Butler, Pope Francis is No. 1 on the Evil Conservative List.)
Butler recognizes that the Catholic Church’s firm stance on the divinely ordained nature of sexual difference is the greatest rival to her theory of gender. Butler herself states that “those who believe that the gender binary is mandated by a version of natural-law references or occasioned by the Bible” — i.e., those who believe in the immovable reality of sex and gender — are her greatest enemies.
In an op-ed published by the Los Angeles Times over the weekend, Butler asserts that all “existing powers” who critique her theory of gender are fearmongers with a duplicitous mission of gaining popular control.
The fear of “gender” allows existing powers — states, churches, political movements — to frighten people to come back into their ranks, to accept censorship and to externalize their fear and hatred onto vulnerable communities.
What, then, is this “gender” that can be used so wickedly by the powers that be?
Because sex and gender are not rooted in any essential characteristics, according to Butler, their definition quickly becomes nebulous. As she wrote in Who’s Afraid of Gender?,
Whatever else gender means, it surely names for some a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world in this way.
Sex and gender — understood mutually in the Butlerian scheme — are perhaps best described as external identifiers that individuals take onto themselves to communicate who (and how) they choose to be to the world. Gender’s reality consists in its being affirmed by another. Like actors in a play, the performance gains meaning through the eyes of an appreciative audience. Can an actor truly act if there is no one to perceive him?
Butler’s goal is to vanquish norms and categories altogether. As Power writes,
The new gender dogma seeks to overturn not only religious, legal, scientific, and social norms, but to eliminate norms altogether. Norms matter for Butler only insofar as “opportunities arise to derail their reproduction.”
All social conventions surrounding gender are to be destroyed. If a baby’s gender-reveal party is celebrated with beige confetti and a cake that says “It’s a they!” — good. This is progress. Another derailment of the reproduction of an old gender construct. If a twelve-year-old girl is prescribed puberty blockers (which will make her permanently infertile) because she feels out of place with the other girls at school — excellent. She is challenging the replication of the old, misogynist way.
While these ideas may seem extreme, even Butler has been out-woked by her own side (as happens to many prominent thinkers on the left). On this front, Power writes,
(Butler) knows very well that if she puts a foot wrong, she will be eaten alive, like an inverted version of Goya’s Saturn Eating His Son.
Butler herself acknowledges that her thought has received “trans criticisms.” Why? Because she denies the reality of “men” and “women.”
If a man wants to become a trans-woman, or vice versa, he requires a fixed set to transition into (assuming this can be done in the first place). Dylan Mulvaney’s project, for example, is rooted in the idea that girls are real. Mulvaney wants to be one. Mulvaney wants to become — neither a performer nor a destroyer — but a full-fledged member of the category.
Despite these intra-Left critiques, Butler’s ideas still hold massive sway in the progressive imagination. As Power concludes her essay, “We can, and must, hold Butler responsible for some of the absurdities and horrors of the recent past and present.”