A friend of mine (Tacitus) suggested that I watch a PhilosphyTube video called I emailed my doctor 133 times: the crisis in the British healthcare system, which introduced me to Abigail Thorne and her wonderful YouTube philosophy channel. She’s done a number of videos on Judith Butler, a key thinker in gender sociological theory. One of these she described as “the most misunderstood philosopher in the world” and she takes about Who’s afraid of gender, which inspired me to get the book.

Introduction

First: this is not going to be an easy book – every sentence is complex and dense with meaning, as a result, her meaning isn’t always completely clear to me without taking time to digest what she says.

From the introduction, I can immediately see her problem – and mine – and any non-binary or trans person’s: those opposed to gender theory won’t have read anything that would challenge their world view and instead gender theory presents a phantasm around which anxieties can gather and be mobilised.

It’s not all dry text, sometimes a wry sense of humour comes through, eg “patriarchal wet dream” on page 17 made me smile, but it also woke something up in me: is it possible that the TERFs (Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist), are actually pawns of the patriarchy? This idea grew in me when I read “Gender has been part of feminism forced in this decades” (page 17). There’s the seed of an idea in me, that trans liberation is actually a logical and necessary extension of feminism: if gender isn’t deterministic, then women can (and of course, do) exceed what Western society’s historical views on what a woman can be, reinforcing my belief that gender itself isn’t a concrete and unchanging binary state.

I love reading and writing (see the blog), and the written word has always been important to me. However, Judith takes things a little further:

Reading is not just a pasttime or luxury, but a precondition of democratic life, one of the practices that keep debate and disagreement grounded, focused, and productive.

Page 19

This is absolutely true. However we now live in a society where most people get their new ideas from the TV or internet videos. In my opinion, TV and video cannot communicate anything other than the general sense of an idea. It’s passive nature discourages thought and imagination. Reading requires work, yet the amount of information and ideas that one is exposed to via reading is beyond weighing.

Gender theory critics, typically, will not read books about gender because they do not have – maybe do not want – the critical thinking skills necessary to think about what they are exposed to.

What is mind blowing, yet obvious if one thinks about it is:

[gender] is historically formed and revisable.

Page 32

How gender is expressed does change over time. What roles are appropriate for a “gender” changes over time. Furthermore, gender expression and gender roles are also geographical scoped. In some times and in some places, there are/have been other genders, the “third gender”.

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The Global Scene

In this chapter, Judith Butler lays out the current state of the objectors to “gender” – as it was at the time of writing – it would seem that the United States has moved from a gender-ambivalent president to a gender-hostile president.

By comparing “gender ideology” to both nuclear war and Nazism, Pope Francis has galvanised those who oppose both the LGBTQIA+ movement and feminism into thinking that they are washing a just war.

Page 40

Butler shows that “gender” is used as a shorthand for everything wrong with the world, and as a repository for all resistance to personal liberty. She repeatedly illustrates that the phantasm of gender needs to be undefined, contradictory, and can therefore act as an expression for all kinds of anxieties. The less defined and understood it is, the easier it is to attach unrelated anxieties to it.

Climate change? It’s made up as part of “gender ideology”. Economic problems? Blame the Marxist gender ideologues. Can’t get a job? Blame the gender mafia.

The opposition trip “gender”, which threatens the “natural family”, is often linked to the threat of migrants, the prospect of miscegenation, and it’s apparently dangerous effect on the natural family. The “natural family” is not just heteronormative; it also serves to reproduce the nation along lines of racial and ethnic purity.

Page 50

And this is why we should always be alarmed by migrant-scapegoating, not only for its own sake, but because the attack on migrants and the attacks on feminists and LGBTQIA+ are not only linked: they are part of the same thing.

It was a core belief of the Nazi party, and all other fascist forces: anything that reduces the reproductive potential if the volk must be resisted at all costs. Jews, gypsies, disabled, or gay. In the modern world, it is the turn of Muslims to be demonised.

To be opposed to gender is to oppose equality as it has been, apparently improperly and scandalously, for women, lesbian and gay people, trans people, and all those who make their kinship ties in queer ways.

Page 56

Butler seems to be telling us here that the progress of female equality is directly tied to LGBTQ+ rights. To oppose trans rights in the basis of biological destiny also denies the potential for cis men and women to be other than their biology.

As one who has low testosterone and “enjoyed” the effects of us withdrawal, I can attest that somewhat of my mood and temperament are largely down to the presence of and absence of a hormone. Am I my hormones? Are they all that determine who I am?

The struggle for gender and sexual rights has to be embedded in a struggle against exploitation, including debt peonage, if it is to make any political sense at all as an emancipatory struggle.

Page 62

This quote comes at the end of an exploration and exposé of how indebted nations are exploited, whether this is African nations or eastern European members of the European Union. The International Monetary Fund and the European Union embed demands for equality and nondiscrimination in their contracts. It can feel that these supra-national organisations are coercing one’s country to adopt societal changes in exchange for increasing debt. That isn’t going to work.

This is the backdrop against which various conservative churches (Evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox) are waging their war against diversity.

On the one hand, I am grateful that the EU has enshrined nondiscrimination into its constitution (even though, sadly, the United Kingdom has left). I am always delighted when companies genuinely support Pride. But this does seem to illustrate that their support in the Western world (where genuine) is wonderful, it might actually be causing harm to members of our communities in other parts of the world.

Vatican Views

On the one hand, the Vatican is interpreting and re-establishing doctrine, on the other hand, it associates queer kinship and reflection on his ways to raise a child in a nontraditional arrangements with dictatorship and the destruction of nature. In a flash, “gender” becomes associated with the rise of dictatorships (most of which deploy gay and lesbian and sex self-determination) and climate destruction.

Page 78

Judith later questions what the difference is between dogma and ideology. Of course, dogma and ideology are really no different except that the church has “dogma” and is therefore right and religious, whereas ideology is “gender” and is therefore wrong and repugnant. “Gender” isn’t an ideology, however she highlights the hypocrisy.

… the lesbian and gay movement is opposed to the sexual abuse of children, and that it is heavy the Catholic Church that is at risk of bankruptcy after paying reparations to all the children that it has abused over the decades. Haunted by it’s own abuse of children, the Church externalises the origin of child abuse, attributing it to sexual and gender minorities who have for the most part thought carefully about matters of consent, defended the actions of consenting adults within the law, and fought for social freedoms on the street

Page 85

I believe that in therapeutic terms, if a person projected their own fail

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Continued …