Sarah Stilton, Review:
Who’s Afraid of Gender?
by Judith Butler
(Knopf, $37, 320 pages)
Judith Butler is a famous, or infamous, feminist and leading influence on gender theory through her earlier works such as Gender Trouble, Undoing Gender, and Bodies that Matter. This year she returns to the topic in Who’s Afraid Gender? which undermines many of her earlier arguments. Three decades ago, she criticized the idea that gender was mutable while also arguing that there were no essential gender identities. The confusion of this position has always been present as she tried to navigate uncertain ground between the voluntarist and essentialist models of gender identity. To say that this led to an instability in her argument is an understatement. Readers probably anticipated an exploration or explanation of how Butler traversed that middle ground. They will be disappointed.
In Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler is now on board with self-identifying fantasies, the delusions of gender, that is afflicting a growing number of adolescents and twenty-somethings. But her book offers very little in the way of reconciling her earlier work with her new views, or for that matter any argument for why gender is purely an individual choice, a mood really. Instead she focuses on attacking those who doubt the self-identification of the transgendered and other Alphabet People (Butler considers herself non-binary and has begun using they/them pronouns, which this review will not honour). In a way, though, she ended up precisely where the trajectory of her arguments in the 1980s and 1990s would inevitably lead: as a gender theorist she sought to keep the categories of male and female flexible and open to constant discussion, which meant constant undermining. That she could not then, but can now, countenance the abolition of the categories of male and female is not all that surprising.
What she cannot countenance is the opposition of people of faith and others unconvinced by trans activism, which she liberally calls fascist, white nationalist, trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs), and other assorted villainous labels. She literally begins a sentence with the words “to be fair” but before the period appears Butler labels their views “fascist politics.” Imagine if she chose not to be fair. Indeed, all gender critics (whatever that means) are dismissed as bigots and probably, she asserts, closeted homosexuals, who use “junk science” to support their bigotry. Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not really about gender as it is about its critics, none of whom she engages with honestly. If the psychologizing of gender critics as people who cannot admit their homosexuality was not enough, she says attacks on gender are a “phantasm,” a distraction from the world’s real problems (according to Butler) of capitalism, climate change, mass migrations, poverty, and a host of other left-wing issues.
While critiquing gender critics for using junk science, Butler herself is adamant that science is on the side that claims gender and sex are unrelated and quotes “feminist scholars” to prove her point. (Did you, too, giggle when you read the term “feminist scholar”?) The problem is that when she evokes a feminist scholar like Daphna Joel and her Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of Male and Female, she mispresents Joel’s work as supporting the notion that sex “is a spectrum or mosaic,” which, in fact, it does not. Her delving into the “science” of gender is downright laughable when she invokes Joan Roughgarden’s Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People and the fact that some species such as yeasts “reproduce sexually” even though there is no male or female yeast; it is an understatement to say that there are problems comparing yeast and human beings.
Too much of the book quotes chat room complaints of teenagers with parents who are not totally accepting of their child’s chosen gender and too little attention is given to the vast amounts of evidence from hospitals and detransitioners about the harm caused with so-called “gender-affirming care.”
Perhaps it is too much to ask of Butler, one of the past half century’s most influential intellectuals in academia, to parse what she means by gender because she does not bother doing so except with the circuitous argument that it is “a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world this way.” Put another way, it is precisely what she said it wasn’t in the early 1990s.
In fact, throughout the book, Butler eschews both explanation and argument almost completely. Butler admits she could “provide good arguments as to why looking at gender this way is wrong, which would be useful for educators and policymakers,” she says of engaging with critics’ views of gender theory, then does no such thing. She admits it is “tempting to try and expose and puncture this inflammatory caricature of gender through an intellectual exercise,” and then doesn’t. She heads directly for the ad hominin attack and cheap psychological evaluations.
Considering that she opened the door, it is fair to speculate whether Butler’s views on the fluidity of gender have changed because of an intellectual eureka moment or whether she might have less noble motivations, such a desire to evade cancellation by upstart gender theorists perturbed by her earlier opposition to what has become trans orthodoxy. I’m just putting it out there; if it weren’t such a gender-laden phrase, I might be tempted to say what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. Or to delve further into the psyche, is Butler atoning for a sense of guilt over being a late convert to the modern transgender ideology even if she laid the groundwork for the notion that gender is fluid?
One needn’t question her motives though to notice the shoddiness of Who’s Afraid of Gender?, a hit job on critics of modern gender theory and defenders of the realities of biological sex while offering little of substance to one of the culture war’s most vexing issues today.
Sarah Stilton studied philosophy and the classics at Harvard and Oxford and has worked in British and European politics for more than 20 years.
