Who’s afraid of gender?

It’s not that gender doesn’t matter. It does. The point is that people experience gender differently than others, and that recognition is next in a long journey of social progress.

Intellectuals, academics and activists in gender theory are not of uniform opinion but many discuss “co-construction” today, in which gender is a product of both culture and biological sex. The language is nuanced, and the politics are heated. That’s no reason to not push forward.

That’s from the new book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” from Judith Butler, the feminist philosopher and gender studies scholar. As an undergrad, I read “Gender Trouble,” the 1990 book Butler wrote when they were just 34 years old, and which popularized many concepts developing within gender studies. This book is about gender generally, though trans identity is a focus.

Butler, who now identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, is today one of the English-speaking world’s preeminent writers on gender, and so also a bugbear of many political movements.

Among Butler’s pushes against trans critics specifically: Trans people do bad things (ie. cherry-picking any particular incident), just like people in all other groups of people. Focusing only on bad actors within a subgroup has long been a way to challenge any given subgroup.

The book is compelling but dense; It wasn’t until page 150 that I felt Butler was making the clearest argument. Generally, I sensed impatience from Butler; I inferred at times a tone that only bad-faith actors could question the nuance between gender and sex, and the spectrum within. I challenge that, and it’s my experience that lots of Americans are generally bewildered by the topic and simply need help better understanding the argument: This book isn’t for them.

For example, Butler seems to avoid at least one good-faith criticism of more flexible gender theory. As noted above, Butler sensibly argues that trans people are no less likely to enact crimes as any other group, a point that comes up often around prisons, sports and bathroom use. But the push I’ve heard is instead that bad actors will take advantage of greater flexibility, not that trans people are criminals.

There’s a good faith debate to be had on the pros and cons of giving more Americans greater freedom. Calling them all bigots isn’t helpful in my experience. I am reminded at times of my own undergrad experience, when, even as a standard-left-leaning-young-person, I found more than one professor implying that their progressive view was the right one and anything off that was ignorant.

My experience is people are far more willing to come to a movement if their perspectives are listened to and taken seriously, not dismissed by those who are already deep in the subject matter. At times, I simply wasn’t sure who the book was for — likely not saying much new for those schooled in gender theory, but impenetrable for just about anyone newer to the conversation. I found the book helpful, and I’d recommend it if asked, so perhaps I’m one audience —familiar with the movement but not at its forefront. It was serious and thoughtful, if buried in academic language. Because the topic has become so polarizing, I wish we could have a more thoughtful conversation, so I found myself doing quite a bit of additional background research to just add to my context.

Pew surveying from 2022 portrays conflicted American opinion: Most want more protections for trans people in jobs, housing and public spaces, but found expectations changing too fast. My sense: There is coalition building to be done if we’re willing to do the work.

Below find my notes for future reference.

My notes:

Author takes on criticism that sex based claims of discrimination will be lost if gender takes place of sex

• Feminists: sex is about biology, gender is about culture
• “The continuing debates about the word show that no one approach to defining, or understanding, gender reigns.”
• “When the word, gender absorbs an array of fears and becomes a catch all phantasm for the contemporary right, the various conditions that actually give rise to those fears lose their names.”
• They say “phantasm” a whole lot
• “Although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti-gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely, the restoration of 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.” The project is fragile, however, since the patriarchal order it seeks to restore never quite existed in the form they see it actualized in the present.”
• Gender is “a public way of dreaming, for the past that anti gender proponents seem to restore is a dream”
• “No one arrives in the world separate from the set of norms lying in wait for them.” Author is critical of how we hand off culture around gender to each child, which I understand but I also think about how in some sense that is all culture. We can (and should!) see each generation as a chance to right past wrongs, but that has always taken time.
• “Gender names the dilemma of how to conjoin social categories and lived forms of embodiment “ — Author says is not purely “construction”
• The idea of “a dangerous gender ideology” emerged in the 1990s with Roman Catholic Church and its Vatican Council for the Family 
• Future Pope Ratzinger made clear at Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in bringing in 1995, and again in 2004 in a letter to bishops on gender distorting feminine values ; then as pope in 2012
• Pope Francis in 2016: Compared gender ideology to nuclear war and Hitler youth
• “Gender does not presume that each of us chooses who we are or how we decide and love” — Author notes that debates about free will, culture vs hard wired are all still active
• How population growth merges with gender
• Why is LGBTQIA associated with pedophile by, of all groups, the Catholic Church
• Jacques Lacan’s concept of glissement describes the constant sliding of categories
• Kimberlé Crenshaw (noted for the concept of intersectionality) and Angela Davis (the legendary Black Panther known for “antiracism”) shoutouts
• Author includes many progressive movements: against banning books on gender and LGBTQIA issues, critical race theory and gender affirming care policies, but gender affirming care for trans kids does feel different than exposure to books, in my understanding.
• Christopher Rufo, DeSantis Don’t Say Gay and Greg Abbott shoutouts 
• June 12, 2020, Health and Human Services announces the elimination gender identity as a protected category under the law; then Bostock ruling: “we do not need to establish a single and abiding definition of sex to establish sex discrimination.”
• Fear of gays in military or trans in spaces: how sex is coded or identified at birth and how it presents in adulthood 
• Criticizes Clarence Thomas; calls out Griswild, Lawrence and Obergefell — after Dobbs — all based on Dobbs. It’s true he doesn’t want those rights, but isn’t his criticism more about it not being court precedent and it should instead come via Congress? Like how Congress passed a gay marriage bill. I wish this was better addressed: Is the criticism of the failed right, or the failed process?
• Wendy Brown: fewer rights for women, more for corporations 
• Gender critical feminists like Holly Lawford Smith; this author says Holly wrongly identifies as the lineage of Ti-Grace Atkinson, Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon
• Trans feminism concept from Jack Halberstam, whom the author is in conversation with in the video above
• Author says MacKinnon argued “gender is produced through forms of patriarchal power and that gender could change when those forms of power were contested”
• Author is not an “essentialist”
• “Difficult coalitions” concept from Bernice Johnson Reagon in 1983
• “Gender-critical feminists” …” exercise, a paternalistic prerogative to strip people of their rights to self definition in order to fight against a phantasmatic attack on ‘womanhood.” (143)
• Arguing that accusing trans women as a threat to biological females confuses two points: someone’s gender, with someone’s likelihood to abuse someone else
• Argues says it was a failure when MacKinnon and Dworkin feminists sided with the Christian right around pornography even as the gay and lesbian depictions were important
• UK National Health Service covered “to change sex if they were treated and a probed by a medical practitioner” — (My note: I’m looking for author to further clarify that gender is best known as being on a spectrum, rather than biological sex, but it seems this will be further discussed later)
• “Sex can be both real and mutable”
• Criticizes JK Rowling at length in the chapter dedicated to “TERFs and British Matters of Sex” 
• “Trans advocates, often treated by opponents as a monolith with only one view that is repeated without variation, have significant differences among themselves on whether or not ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ should remain operative categories; some, like myself, see a place for both. For example, when trans writer Andrea Long Chu claims to be ‘female,’ she is insisting on sex as the category that describes her. in fact, she is hardly interested in biological reductionism, since she maintains that “femaleness is less a biological state and more of fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race, “ building on a long tradition of this topic feminism. One clear point that follows is that biological categories are saturated with meanings, and we would miss those if we decided that only gender gives meaning to sex, even if “saturation “can be one way to understand how gender works.”
• Sex is category most interested by trans people though some focus on gender
• Author asks: why does Kathleen Stock reference violence done by trans people in prison and not form coalitions to consider everyone who endures abuse? Shouldn’t there be no male prison guards? Who has raped more women in prison: trans women or male prison guards? (P 157)
• Male bodies use the penis (or anything else) to rape not for biological reasons but social reasons — something radical feminists once embraced
• Author asks: Are trans women thought to be a threat because some have penises or because all men are threats, or because they are damaged people?
• “Consider the irony that the women most feared for having a penis may be among those most disinterested in having one.” (160)
• “Are men the problem, or is it the social organization of patriarchy and masculine domination?”
• Much argument is severity: what’s more harm, that bad faith actors could take advantage of gender leniency or that people who need that leniency don’t get it? 
• “A trans woman is more fully exposed to violence in a space full of men than she is a threat to other women who share her need for protection.” (165)
• Author criticizes JK Rowling for saying “any man” can make use of changing rooms and restrooms but JK’s point is that some bad faith actors could make use of this; author argues this was essentially always possible; JK would say it’s easier now. So what is the bigger risk?
• Joan W Scott’s “paradox is the promise”: When feminists argued for political rights in the context of liberal democracy they faced an impossible choice. On the one hand, they insisted that the differences between men and women were irrelevant for citizenship. On the other hand, by the fact that they acted on behalf of women, they introduced the very idea of difference they sought to eliminate. This paradox–the need both to accept and to refuse sexual difference in politics–was the constitutive condition of the long struggle by women to gain the right of citizenship. In this new book, remarkable in both its findings and its methodology, award-winning historian Joan Wallach Scott reads feminist history in terms of this paradox of sexual difference.
• Sex-based forms of discrimination usually are based on assumptions, even to remove sex from these decisions altogether , author says
• The prevalence of intersex in human populations has been estimated at 1.7% by sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, but this estimate has been called into question. One paper put at 100 times lower.
• “The argument that reproductive capacities differentiate the sex idealizes reproduction as the defining moment of sex” (171) Author says: but many people are infertile so what value?
• “Given the range of capacities, desires, and gender identities, it makes no sense to identify a specific biological capacity as defining gender, which should never serve as the exclusive or fundamental criterion by which gender is determined.”
• “Is reproductive freedom related to the freedom of gender self determination?”
• Donna Haraway critiques what she calls “antagonistic dualisms” within second wave feminism, which refers to the tendency to create rigid, binary divisions like “male/female,” “nature/culture,” or “mind/body,” that often reinforce power imbalances and fail to account for the complex realities of women’s experiences, particularly those of women of color
• “In what follows, there are three points worth considering more closely in order to respond to the question “Does gender deny the materiality of sex?” First, social and material construction (or formation) have to be thought of as interactive, and as supported by several scientific frameworks. Second, the distinction between nature and culture that presumes that sex is natural and gender is cultural or social does not work within such frameworks because the relation between the two refuses that very division (a historically established one that needs to be rethought in light of both social theory and science). Third, sex assignment is one place where we can see quite clearly the social powers that operate on bodies to establish sex in reference to dimorphic ideals and an array of associated social expectations. If we think that sex assignment simply names what already exists, we refuse to consider the ways established and obligatory categories describe and form bodies at the same time, and how these descriptive and formative powers can exclude and efface the sexed bodies that emerge in time. To argue that a number of formative powers act upon the matter of sex, including our own self-formative powers, is not to deny sex, but to offer an alternative way of understanding its reality apart from a natural-law thesis of complementarity or any form of biological determinism?”
• John Berger’s Way of Seeing essay in 1972: how we see affects what we see
• “Is the naming of an infant’s sex already a defining moment of the adult imagining of that life?”
• Paisley Curran: governance project “ in Sex is as Sex Does 
• We don’t answer what gender at birth but which gender precedes birth (188)
• “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature: co-construction is a better way to understand the dynamic relation between the social and biological matters of sex”
• “Rather than regard gender as the cultural or social version of biological sex, we should ask whether gender is operating as the framework that tends to establish the sexes within specific classificatory schemes. If so, gender is then already operative as the scheme of power within which sex assignment takes place. When a designated official assigns a sex on the basis of observation, they rely on a mode of observation generally structured by the anticipation of the binary option: male or female.
• They do not answer the question “What gender?” Rather, they answer the question “Which gender?” The marking of sex is the first operation of gender, even though that obligatory binary option of “male” or “female” has prepared the scene. In this sense, gender might be said to precede sex assignment, functioning as a structural anticipation of the binary that organizes observable facts and regulates the act of assignment itself.”
• Reassessing white feminism of 1980s and 1990s: “Gender is not to culture as sex is to nature: co-construction is a better way to understand the dynamic relation between the social and the biological on matters of sex”
• Testosterone in sports: male and female athletes have overlapping levels of it and having a lot of it doesn’t necessarily make you better at sports 
• (((I remember the discourse around Barry Bonds taking steroids in baseball included the idea that they didn’t make him hit the ball, but they helped him hit the ball farther when he did — and recover from injury))
• John Money at Hopkins gave gender language but his intersex surgeries are now seen as cruel and his critique formed modern gender theory
• Gender reveal parties: “Full of anticipation and excitement not because the simple fact is disclosed, but because the realization of an imagined gendered life, according to preconceived norms can begin.”
• Jack Halberstam: queer failure
• Key Issues Facing People With Intersex Traits
• Author: Hopkins’s Money opened up the gender incompatability with sex but he didn’t take his own advice and did cruel intersex surgeries
• “Genders are not just assigned. They have to be realized or undertaken, or done, and no single act of doing secures the deal.”
• (((At 203 pages, the book hasn’t mentioned that biological male and female people do still need to meet to have children. Though author does briefly previously note that giving birth shouldn’t be the defining category, it is a pretty important one, right? It seems there has to be a middle ground there))
• Sherry Ortner 1974: is female to male as a nature is to culture
• Early 1990s anglophone feminism “insisted that being born female, and becoming a woman, are two different trajectories, and that the first is neither the cause nor the teleological aim of the second.”
• Nature /culture divide was second wave feminism
• But now they use “assigned at birth” rather than natural
• Author shouts out Anne Fausto Sterling, who is behind the most commonly cited statistics around the prevalence of intersex people
• Catherine Clune Taylor “material construction”
• Argues that gender binary is not an effect but a tool of racism and colonial power
• Evolution’s Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden: for a biologist, male makes small gametes (sperm) and female makes large ones (eggs), but fungi have only mating types  (p 214 is first partial reference to baby making)
• “Interactionist model” of sex/gender co-mingling
• Alison Jaggar: in 1980s argued women could be smaller because they were fed less
• C Riley Snorton: Black on Both Sides 
• Oyewumi The Invention of Women
• “Colonial powers, imposing biblical models of the gender binary, very often condemned in pathologist, African forms of intimate relationality and gender appearance so once again we see that this is an imposition not by urban elites, but by Christian forms of colonization”
• Matebeni on shift of Neguni word “unongayindoda “ term shifted from descriptive to derogatory — but African terms like that could be useful because LGBTQIA is seen as overly westernized 
• “Gogo “ word too
• Argues that gender/sex binary is not coming from west into developing countries but instead a return to pre colonial 
• How much is it a challenge of translation or resistance to multilingualism?
• “Hijara “ in India is another example, criminalized in 1871 in British colonial rule
• “The alternative to defamation is not mastery” of criticisms of authors name
• Derrida: monolingualism of the other “monolingual obstinacy”
• Jean Laplanche: gender assignment is when the infant is given the desires of the adult world
• Reagon: “if you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you know it’s not a broad enough coalition”
• “The inequality of the grievable” 248
• Gender is not a culture war, it’s responding to “economic formations” that left many insecure
• Neville Hoad argues gender and social western values have tied to aid to poor countries which creates a divide. Author argues gender has to oppose and be separate from these forces
• “Ally the struggle for gender freedoms and rights with the critique of capitalism, to formulate the freedoms for which we struggle as collective ones”