Who’s Afraid? Maybe Judith Butler Is.

‘Gender’ means sex-based stereotypes whose purpose is to force all women into a subordinate position in relation to all men.

-The Lesbian Bill of Rights

Judith Butler is best known for her 1990 monograph Gender Trouble, which has had perhaps the greatest influence of any book on the intellectual underpinnings of the transgender movement by popularizing the concept of gender performativity. This year, she published a new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? In this book, Butler purports to define and investigate what she calls the global “anti-gender” movement that she blames for “eradicating reproductive justice, the rights of women, the rights of trans and non-binary people, gay and lesbian freedoms, and all efforts to achieve gender and sexual equality and justice” in response to the “phantasm” of gender that the movement allegedly constructed.

Butler is correct that there are many contemporary examples of anti-feminist backlash in the world, including the actions of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, Donald Trump’s USA, and the Catholic Church on the Right. But Butler’s arguments in Who’s Afraid of Gender? ultimately fail because she falsely blames so-called TERFs for what she calls “anti-gender” backlash on the Left. This is a cruel and disingenuous inversion, as Butler’s faction is currently the left-wing force most responsible for anti-feminist backlash in the Western world.

Butler is right about something else: TERFs (a term we use to mean women on the political Left who recognize that there are only two immutable sexes, based on reproductive biology) do get grouped with sex deniers like herself by right-wing forces that hate both groups for supporting reproductive autonomy for women, rights for lesbians and gay men, and other bog-standard left-wing causes. Her reaction to this fact is to say that TERFs “will have to decide whether or not to join with others who are similarly targeted or deepen the divisions among those whose scholarly and political lives are at risk of suffering discrimination, violence, and extreme censorship.” Essentially, Butler uses this book to tell TERFs, repeatedly and in a condescending manner, that we are wrong, and if we don’t get in line, the fascists will eat us alive and it may even be our own fault.  In doing so, Butler ignores the deep and essential divides that separate our two groups, presumes ownership over the feminist “side,” and vastly oversimplifies a complex global debate over many interrelated women’s sex-based issues into a false dichotomy of us vs. them.

For lesbians, this attitude is profoundly harmful. We are a vulnerable sexual minority group, harmed by the sexism and homophobia of both the Left and the Right. Recent polls have found declining support for gay marriage and anti-discrimination laws based on sex in the United States, but this does not seem to be a concern among Butler’s ilk. They remain concerned with using experimental drugs on unfeminine girls and unmasculine boys; compelling pronoun usage under anti-discrimination law; and putting peoples’ livelihoods at risk if they dare publicly disagree with her ideas about gender. To pick a side, as Butler insists we must do, is to be faced with an untenable dilemma. We should not be forced to sacrifice the women’s spaces our foremothers fought for (including single-sex rape crisis centers, prisons, lesbian-only spaces, and sex-based protections under Title IX) in order to safeguard abortion rights or gay marriage. It is not in the interests of TERFs, including lesbians, to ally with anyone who wants to force us to make that choice. In fact, the opposition to many of these feminist demands by Butler’s faction is anathema to the millions of Americans, Left and Right, who have come to appreciate the protections for women created by radical feminists in the 1970s.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? never explains why it is ideologically inconsistent to want both abortion rights and single-sex spaces. If she is indeed a feminist, what exactly is her problem with WDI’s Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights? How is it anti-feminist or even “anti-gender” for organizations like WoLF to defend women in a California prison who have been sexually assaulted by men claiming to be women? Butler never actually addresses the claims of TERF organizations in her book. All she does is mischaracterize our beliefs, notably claiming that “TERFs oppose basic claims of self-determination, freedom, and autonomy, rights to be protected from violence, and rights of access to public space, and to health care without discrimination,” when exactly none of that is true. Additional tactics of Butler in Who’s Afraid of Gender? include scarcely credible comparisons to right-wing authoritarians that could easily be said about Butler herself, and the well-trodden – if dishonest – claims that TERFs “are calling into question the very existence” of those who identify as transgender. Even those that generally oppose TERFs, like the New York Times, are willing to gently admonish Butler on this point, noting in their review that the book has been criticized for “demonizing opponents and for dismissing them as ‘fascist-adjacent.’” Despite Butler’s claims, TERFs do read “gender identity” theory, and engage with its claims. But when will Butler’s side abandon the dishonest strategy of “no debate” and engage honestly with the intellectual substance of our points, instead of misrepresenting our beliefs and insulting us? Or would actually engaging with TERF arguments immediately cause Butler et al. to lose?

The WDI USA Lesbian Caucus
Lauren Levey, coordinator 
Mary Ellen Kelleher
Katherine Kinney
Brandi Kochan
A. Schams

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