Book review: Over the past decade, the way women and men are referred to in public discourse has shifted. It has become common to hear sex described as having been “assigned at birth”. Pregnancy can happen to “any gender”. A woman is anyone who feels themselves to be a woman, a man is anyone who feels themselves to be a man (the circularity of these definitions is a clue that something unusual is going on here). “Misgendering” – any unwanted reference to a person’s presumed sex – is increasingly considered to be, at best, impolite, and at worst, a form of hate speech.
This shift is not merely linguistic. It also manifests in fraught public debate about who should have access to women-only sports, spaces and services, and what types of psychological or medical interventions should be made available to children and teens whose sense of self is at odds with their biological sex.
No public intellectual is more closely associated with this shift than US philosopher Judith Butler. Her early work in the 1990s introduced the idea of gender as performance: a continuous reproduction and morphing of what it is to be a woman or a man through the ways we behave and express ourselves. For Butler, it was not just that social norms and expectations about women and men change over time, it was that no stable referents for the terms “woman” and “man” survive these changes.
Escaping academia and finding its way into popular culture via early 2010s social media sites such as Tumblr, this idea has itself morphed into the belief that we create ourselves as women or men – or, more expansively, as any of a plethora of bespoke gender identities, each with its own brightly coloured flag – through a process of internal self-discovery. The resulting self-concept is understood to be potent yet fragile, to the extent that any failure by onlookers to affirm a person’s gender identity may be interpreted as an existential attack.
Dedicated to “the young people who still teach me”, Butler’s latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, sets out to document what she sees as repressive forces that seek to reimpose “a patriarchal dream order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as ‘born female at birth’, resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy”. She argues that these forces induce a feverish and paranoic state in which existential anxieties that should rightly attach to issues such as climate change have become displaced on to gender.
Although Butler portrays this as a singular “anti-gender movement”, her targets are politically and philosophically disparate, ranging from far-right populist politicians and Christian conservatives to left-wing feminists such as JK Rowling and British philosopher Kathleen Stock. The former sometimes denigrate those who do not conform to gender stereotypes and often position women as naturally subservient to men. The latter are vocally supportive of women’s rights and, generally, of gender-nonconforming people in all their diversity.
Butler’s attempt to tar these feminists as fascist-adjacent rests on a seemingly wilful misrepresentation of their position. Although the book is about the amorphous something that Butler calls “gender”, the real source of the disagreement is the nature and significance of biological sex.
Within feminism, there has often been a suspicion of the concept of sex difference, which seemed too easily weaponised as a way to keep women locked into traditional roles of wife and mother. Where “gender-critical” feminists such as Rowling and Stock differ from Butler is in arguing that there are rights and interests that women have by virtue of their sex, and these may clash with or supersede rights claimed by trans activists. They argue, for example, that female prisoners should not be housed with prisoners of the opposite sex, regardless of how the latter identify.
Butler, however, questions the very concept of biological sex. She sees the assignation of sex at birth as an imposition which a person may shrug off later in life. A gender-critical feminist might say, in response, that we no more assign sex to a baby at birth than we assign gravity to a stone when we drop it. This is quite a deep philosophical disagreement. One of the frustrations of this book is that Butler skirts around it but does not seriously engage with it.
For example, Butler considers, but quickly dismisses, the idea that sex could be defined by reproductive capacity, because “despite the conservative idealisation of women as mothers, it has always been the case that only some women can, or would, be able to get pregnant” and they are “no more or less women than those who did become pregnant”. This is, of course, true, but ignores arguments from evolutionary biology that regardless of whether, as individuals, we are able to successfully reproduce, we have nonetheless been sculpted as female and male by evolutionary processes that select for characteristics that increase our chances of doing so in two distinct and complementary ways.
It is telling that Butler barely mentions non-human beings: for her, sexual dimorphism is a human projection, rather than an evolved reproductive pattern that exists throughout nature.
Although Butler’s academic prose is famously impenetrable, this book is intended for a general audience, and her sentences here are easier to parse, albeit still clotted in places with academic jargon (“the metonymy of the phantasmatic scene”). Her writing is associative and impressionistic, repetitive to the point of being almost hypnotic.
For all that, she elides and blurs distinctions, the boundaries of allowable debate on sex and gender are absolutely rigid for her. Her entire project is staked on the assumption that her own philosophical axioms are unassailable: her critics, then, must be motivated by animus.
Butler is a towering figure in gender studies, her social influence perhaps greater than any other living philosopher. But her tragic flaw may well be intellectual vanity. One has the feeling of looking in through a one-way mirror as she furiously defends her own intellectual legacy, unwilling or unable to see beyond it.
Who’s Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler (Allen Lane, $40hb, ebook, audio) is out now.
