Book Review: Who’s Afraid of Gender – Judith Butler (Part 3)

Continued from part 2

TERFs and British Matters of Sex

It is paradoxical to see conservative Supreme Court justices secure trans rights against discrimination on the basis of existing sex discrimination law, while feminists who claim ownership over the categories of sex exercise a paternalistic prerogative to strip people of their rights to self-definition in order to fight against a phantasmatic attack on “womanhood”.
Page 143

Butler highlights the hypocrisy of the TERF position (Trans-exclusionary radical feminists). I’m made to think of JK Rowling saying that “If Harry Potter taught us anything, it’s that no one should live in a closet”, which she said in response to an online question asking whether there were any LGBT students at Hogwarts. I wonder if the arch-TERF would care to revise her response?

Feminism has always insisted that what a woman is is an open ended question, a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex.
Page 145

Once again, I am wondering how the TERFs would feel about having the “traditional” role of “women” enforced – as the right-wing would like? They ally themselves with the Vatican and Trump, whether they intend to or not, and weaken the whole resistance to the resurgence of a “traditional” patriarchy (ie “men” on top). TERFs seek to erase trans identity, and deny anyone’s right to self-determination. This is a problem.

Butler concludes the chapter with:

Can feminism join in an alliance against the forces of destruction rather than become a destructive force allied with other such forces? An open question, but one that seems crucial to answer in the affirmative, given how central to new fascism are the vicious attacks on women, trans people, gay and lesbian people, Black and brown people, who belong to all these categories, and in whom all these categories also live.
Page 169

Throughout this chapter, Butler critiques Trans-exclusive Radical Feminists and (to my mind) reveals them as agents of the straight white cis- patriarchy. I read the above as a plea to TERFs to reconsider and realign themselves with other persecuted minorities.

It’s not just TERFs that persecute other vulnerable minorities. I have my own pet troll determined to deny my identity. In the past I denied the bisexual identity (I was young, foolish, and I am heartily sorry for it). I suspect that we’ve all done it.

What I have grown to understand in my life is that together we are strong; divided we can easily be overpowered and destroyed.

What about sex?

It makes no sense to identity a specific biological capacity as defining gender, which should never serve as the exclusive or fundamental criterion by which gender is determined.
Page 173

Not all women can have children. Not all are fertile. Age and life choices change the biology of the “woman” person. The same is true of “male” people. Judging sex purely on reproductive ability is reductive and can be offensive.

It used to be asked, when straight people were first encountering gay couples “which one is the woman?” (of two homosexual men). People expected one of the partnership to adopt the female role, they might have been delicately asking about positions in the bedroom, or about who gets to use the electric drill. In that regard, at one time, heterosexuals could be thought to have a much more flexible view on gender than one night expect.

On the subject of those with power to decide one’s sex at birth (and therefore gender identity and expression) – this ridiculous little exchange from Blackadder II hides a deeper truth:

Out you popped, out of your mummies tumpkin and everyone shouted : “It’s a boy, it’s a boy!”. And somebody said “but it hasn’t got a winkle!”. And then I said “A boy without a winkle? God be praised, it is a miracle. A boy without a winkle!” And then Sir Thomas More pointed out that a boy without a winkle is a girl. And everyone was really disappointed.
From Blackadder II (said by Nursey about the birth of Queeney)

What if Queen Elizabeth I, when born, had undescended testicles and a very small or maybe inverted “winkle”? The proclamation at her birth would have doomed her, a “biological” male to the life of a woman. If one considers that girls were expected to marry as virgins, she might never realise the mistake. A little extreme? I know of intersex people wrongly prescribed their sex at birth.

If you’d like to read a fictional account of an intersex person raised as a girl, but realising that they were actually male later in life, read “Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides.

What gender are you?

The New York Times reports that the study [a study funded by the International Olympic Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency in 2014] found that “16.5% of men had low testosterone levels and 13.7% of women had high testosterone levels, with considerable overlap between the two groups.
Page 190

These were “biological” examples of their sex. They were not trans. They were just ordinary men and women, if I can used those terms. I have had lots testosterone after my surgery, which impacted me a lot, but the difference between one pump of Testavan and two makes very little difference to my sporting performance (or libido). An individual’s biology, irrespective of sex, determines the impact an individual hormone. Simply put, some people are more sensitive than others.

Racial and Colonial Legacies of Gender Dimorphism

Colonial powers, imposing biblical models of the gender binary, very often condemned and pathologized African firms of intimate relationality and gender appearance, so, once again, were see this was an imposition by urban elites, but by Christian forms of colonization.
Page 225

Gender as binary is a Eurocentric Christian view. Other societies did not necessarily have gender binary, and indeed American First Nations are famous for recognising “two spirit peoples” and had no problem with assigning intersex people into a gender unintelligible to Europeans. In Africa, there are plenty of historic instances of the pre-European peoples having complex and not directly translatable ideas of gender – ideas that were suppressed and demonised by the colonial powers. As such, it is the current homophobic sand transphobic leaders of African nations who are behaving in a distinctly un-African and pro-colonist way by enforcing a strict gender binary and punishing those who do not fit – sometimes making them pay the ultimate price just for being who they are.

I am glad that Butler uses “Eurocentric Christian” to identify the colonial source: even in Europe, gender was seen as more nuanced than just male and female … my own eunuch gender has a degree of recognition (even if that was not one of liberation) in the ancient world.

Foreign Terms, or the Disturbance of Translation

This chapter starts to unpack the fact that “gender” as a term doesn’t always – or indeed often – have a direct equivalent. In Western European languages, equivalence is more easily negotiated, but the further one gets from the Anglosphere, the less one is likely to find a direct equivalent to the term “gender”.

Therefore, many nations, seeking to defend their cultural borders from cultural imperialism, resist anything to do with our western gender discussion, seeing it as an external imposition.

This isn’t helped by making acceptance of rights regarding gender and sexuality a condition of financial engagement.

Even within the monolingual frame, the foreign is there from the start. In being named, in being assigned a sex at birth, someone else’s desire is lodged in the name, if not the whole history of desires coming from elsewhere. Is there not a phantasmatic and foreign element also lodged in that assigned name and gender that one is left to decipher or live with our change?
Page 239

Butler stretches the meaning of “foreign” a bit, but I feel the point is made: where we are born dictates what hopes, fears, and expectations are put into us at birth – without or consent and without the possibility of negotiation when we get old enough to do so.

Is it fair, that a tiny baby, should have the aspirations of us parents and the wider society, based on whatever is perceived as being between us legs direct it’s entire future?

The untranslatable dimension of gender opens up the question of how to cohabit a world when conceptual nonequivalence is a condition of the increasingly global feminist and gender conversation.
Page 241

Butler expands on the difficulties translating the philosophy around gender into other cultures that have no words for the concepts expressed. I’m rather delighted that she asks us in the Anglosphere to be less arrogant with our assumptions of language and the values that it defines and imposes, and allow ourselves to learn from the other cultures on our planet.

Conclusion

It is, then, crucial that gender politics oppose neoliberalism and other forms of capitalist devastation and not become their instrument, that it opposes the continuing of colonization and all forms of racism, including those afflicting migrants, and that it takes its stand within expanding alliances.
Page 259

Throughout the book, Judith Butler strongly advocates for unity between all minorities. She is dismayed at the beach between feminist and trans issues, seeing them as natural allies – the opposition of some Feminists to trans people is the desire of powers that wish to see the side of liberty and freedom disunited and at conflict. The left has a history of fighting itself rather than the real enemies of liberty and freedom – and economic stability. This is how (in my opinion), the Conservatives in the United Kingdom have been generally more successful politically than the Labour Party.

The powers that wish to dismantle the welfare state and personal freedom do so under the guise of granting freedom to people who have never had theirs diminished (at least, not in the way that compares with the more active persecution of LGBTQ+ people, people of colour, and women). To do so, they raise “phantasm” that are not coherent yet have loci around LGBT+ people and migrants, and encourage the public to “tilt at windmills” that they come to represent. Thus enabling the further dismantling of the very systems that protect us all

The only way out of this bind is to ally the struggle for gender freedoms and rights with the critique of capitalism, to formulate the freedoms for which we struggle wa collective ones, and to let gender become part of a broader struggle for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity and provides health care, shelter, and food across all regions.
Page 260

And so it is: united we may stand, divided we shall certainly fall.

Summing up “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”

There were a number of key ideas that I want to summarise:

Babies are gendered at birth, imposing society’s hopes and expectations on the child.
The gender binary is a Christian Eurocentric ideology imposed on more fluid, nuanced cultures.
The persecution of trans people acts as a gateway to attacking other LGBTQIA+ identities.
The “phantasm” of transness is used to distract from neoliberalism’s assault on public services and freedoms.

“Who’s Afraid of Gender” is an insightful read and had warnings for all of us who live somewhere on the edge of society. However, I am not completely clear on who Butler’s target audience is: the language is often opaque and every sentence required me to read it several times – if Judith Butler ever wrote a sentence under 25 words, I must’ve missed it. It’s a testament to the amount of thinking that Butler put into the work – and that I had to put in to read it – that I have three quite long posts reviewing it.

You have to be bloody determined to get to the end of the book!