By Miriam Cosic
SOCIETY
Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Judith Butler
Allen Lane, $55
Judith Butler is an American philosopher whose feminism is controversial, especially on gender. For Butler it is a fluid concept, mutating between the traditional division between two discrete sexes – the kind of thing that right-wing politicians like to bluster about.
The broad church of feminist theorists itself is divided on the subject. Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, for example, long considered conservative for their public campaign to make pornography and prostitution illegal, nonetheless support the rights of transgender people, including Butler’s view of them. “We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete,” Dworkin has written.
And yet, the broadmindedly small-l liberal philosopher Martha Nussbaum disapproves of the “performative” aspect of Butler’s gender theory: a word with the negative (as well as Butler’s positive) connotation that the name of an action can actually invent what it names.
Butler is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and goes by the pronoun “they”. Their long-term partner is political theorist Wendy Brown: both are influential, one way or another, in academic circles.
Butler is also copping it right now from defenders of the Israeli government’s actions against Palestinians, something Butler has criticised for decades. Their Jewish credentials are strong: raised a reform Jew, most of their maternal family was murdered during the Holocaust. They are one of many Jews worldwide increasingly going public with their condemnation of the Likud government.
Butler’s new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, is another that will enrage the right – and some of the left. It is a powerful argument for the natural existence of transgender people, and also for their political and social rights.
It is relatively readable for the non-philosophically trained. A great deal consists of outlining the history of people with congenital sexual differences, their slow advance to acceptance in the Western world, and the backlash. And it makes a useful primer for those who wish to defend all members of the LGBTQ community, and for those who wish to understand fully what they’re talking about when they attack it.
They begin by discussing all the ideas the word “gender” stands in for. “Some suspect ‘gender’ is a way of discussing women’s inequality or presume that the word is synonymous with ‘women’,” Butler writes. “Others think it’s a covert way of referring to ‘homosexuality’.” And there are many more definitions.
“The ‘anti-gender ideology movement’, however, treats gender as a monolith, frightening in its power and reach,” they continue. “Quite apart from the mundane and academic ways that it circulates, gender has, in some parts of the world, become a matter of extraordinary alarm.”
The Vatican has described it as not only a “threat to civilisation” but to “man” as a species. And Catholic teaching soon spread through Africa, with deadly ramifications for those born different, and Latin America. In Russia it has been called a threat to national security. In the US there are campaigns to keep “gender” out of the classroom and the word is equated with paedophilia. In Evangelical and Catholic circles all over the world, Butler writes, “gender is taken for a political agenda that seeks not only to destroy the traditional family but also to prohibit any reference to ‘mother’ and ‘father’ in favour of a genderless future”.
They also examine the biological aspects of homosexuality and transgenderism and the misunderstandings we have of all types of sexuality. In discussing sport, they point out, “‘sex’ is disarticulated into hormonal, anatomical, biological, and chromosomal features that do not always line up according to common expectations”.
In a 2014 study funded by the International Olympic Committee, for example, testosterone levels were tested in nearly 700 professional athletes across 15 sports. The study found “that 16.5 per cent of men had low testosterone levels and 13.7 per cent of women had high testosterone levels, with considerable overlap between the two groups,” according to a New York Times report.
Indeed, multiple genders exist not only in the human world but also in the animal world where no one can accuse creatures who don’t stick to heteronormative practices of theorising their way out of God’s purpose.
Butler’s detailed discussion clearly has its own agenda. It makes fascinating and informative reading whether you agree with it or not. It points out, among other things, not only the underlying patriarchal basis for asserting the existence of only two sexes, but also an underlying colonial agenda reminiscent of studies of the colonial origins of outlawing marijuana and opium and other substances that were not alcohol – Europe’s preferred drug.
In their conclusion, Butler reminds us of the realities that should be causing fear among us today. “Climate destruction is the most terrifying example,” they write. “It teaches us, however, not only that many now live with a fear of destruction that their way of life has helped to produce. It teaches us also that many have no idea how to live with that fear of destruction …”
That enveloping fear is far easier to manage when it is shrunk into something local, tangible, individual and easy to attack, they point out. The magnitude of environmental catastrophe is beyond imagining. But we can roll up our sleeves and get stuck into the transgender girl who is using the girls’ bathroom at our kids’ school.
