Who’s Afraid of Gender
Judith Butler
Allen Lane, £25

ANYONE dipping even the most tentative toe into the currently tempestuous waters of gender discourse won’t be able to venture too far without encountering the name Judith Butler. 

Works like Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter have become key texts in global gender studies, even as many of their theories have been misinterpreted, or just plain misunderstood over the years. That being so, it’s useful that rather than taking another deep dive into the intricacies of gender-oriented cultural philosophy, this book instead confronts head-on the current and heated so-called culture war that has sprung up in public discourse around gender. 

Butler has a not wholly undeserved reputation for writing in dense academese but they’ve thankfully reined in that tendency for the most part here to produce a largely reader-friendly text.

The book can be roughly divided into two parts — one historical and one more polemical. 

The first traces the roots of the current anti-trans hysteria to the Vatican, identifying several speeches and tracts dating back to the mid-1990 from the likes of Joseph Ratzinger and Tony Anatrella (who was last year sanctioned but not defrocked by the Vatican after several allegations of abuse from his patients). Butler then goes on to map the trail of subsequent Western attacks on gender, primarily focusing on Trump’s first (and hopefully last) administration, but also taking the time for a thorough and comprehensive dismantling of the arguments of UK-based “gender critics” like JK Rowling and Kathleen Stock.

Butler even takes exception to the term “gender critical” currently favoured by trans-exclusionary feminists as being a misnomer that not only reduces the complex reality of gender to single caricature but also shows “they misunderstand what a ‘critical’ position entails.” The result is that a number of what should be progressive voices find themselves increasingly allied with voices on the right and even far right (either unwittingly or pragmatically). 

This is a problem, Butler maintains, because the semantic weight carried by the word “gender” itself has increased dramatically, and to be an opponent of one is to at least imply tacit support of their allies’ stances on other issues, such as critical race theory or reproductive rights. 

It’s a contentious stance so it’s probably as well that Butler takes the remainder of the book to make their case in some detail. 

Firstly, they take the time to point out that the sexual dimorphism that many gender criticals take on face value is not without its own nuance and complexity. That first declaration of “It’s a boy/girl” whether in the delivery room, via ultrasound or even at the currently modish “gender reveal parties” is not as straightforward or culturally neutral as they would like to believe. “Sex” is not a basic, immutable fact which is then overlaid with the tricksy cultural and linguistic sophistry of “gender.” Rather the two are inextricably and interdependently co-constructed from the moment of birth, if not before. 

“Gender,” writes Butler, “is a site where biological and social realities interact.”

For those in doubt, Butler argues that there is nothing in this view that is inconsistent with materialism in the Marxist sense, although they make clear that it does require a jettisoning of the positivism on which the gender uncriticals often rely. Rather than being a simple immutable and lifeless “fact,” the “living,” “labouring” body is perpetually defined and redefined by its relationship to the social structures that surround and contextualise it.

Butler then goes on to discuss how this unexamined sexual dimorphism actually has its roots in colonial and imperialistic projects, and that the so-called gender binary is something that has been imposed by colonial and racist powers for the purpose of control. This is in direct opposition to the oft-made argument that “gender” is some kind of colonising force itself, intent on degrading the pure reality of sex-based identity.

Butler concludes with some strategies to enable the left to free itself from the impasse in which it finds itself trapped — from the “moral sadism” that drives them to strip away healthcare rights from trans youth in the name of “protecting them from harm” when that attack on healthcare rights in itself contains significant harm. Blunt, broad-stroked official reactions like the recent Cass report, and kneejerk, populist policies like the blanket banning of puberty blockers for trans youth in England disregard that danger of suicide and self-harm that trans youth face.

The only solution, Butler maintains, is to form broader — if possibly uneasy — coalitions that link the struggle for gender rights with the wider critique of neoliberal capitalism. This is the time for all feminist and LGBTQIA activists to “ally themselves along axes different from the ones the right has prepared for us” via the divisions of the so-called “gender debate.”

“We cannot oppose discrimination against ourselves only to support it for others,” Butler concludes — an excellent clarion call for a fresh clear-sightedness where unfortunately, at the moment, division and confusion prevails.