On 9 March, I watched Ash Sarkar interview Judith Butler. It was a captivating discussion that, through heckling TERFs (trans-exclusionary-radical-feminists), became a very real illustration of the issues Butler is concerned with.
Butler located the modern “phantasm,” – that is the gender scare – where fears surrounding the precarity of modernity are disguised by the danger of “gender.” Their argument exposed the imminent threat of governments reclaiming their capacity to control and categorise the masses following the Trump administration’s executive order on “gender ideology” and “biological truth.”
Things soon shifted. Butler reflected momentarily on the dangers of trans women being sent to men’s prisons, prompting an audience member to shout about the dangers of sending trans women to a women’s prison. Butler calmly explained the risks of defining a social group by their exceptional cases – not only a heartless and demonising worldview but also illogical.
What kind of society results if we treat each individual according to the actions of the worst person in their social group? Sadly, what this heckler, and all anti-gender movements are doing, is distracting people from genuine instruments of power and control. In this case: prisons. It’s foolish to ignore the glaring oppressive force of the prison industrial complex itself.
Individualism must never be a tenant of your social justice ethos, but for TERFs it prevails, becoming agentic defenders of bio-essentialism to “save” women. Moral superiority plagues their feminism, entitling them to harm those who do not align with their rigid worldview, validated by their “care” for the feminist cause. Do they realise that their attitudes contribute to the very supremacist structures they resent?
All authority relies on categorisations and exclusions; creating an us and them. It is easier to cling to these static norms than embrace the complexity that post-structuralist thinkers like Butler demand. Understandably, they resent Butler’s assertion that womanhood is an identity that evolves through space and time, they see this as an illogical copout – one requiring women to be omniscient, transcendent beings to understand themselves and what it means to be a woman.
Butler is patronising us! They choose to miss the point, they know it’s true that a woman in Saudi Arabia experiences womanhood differently from an American – they know that our essence is located in something much deeper than reproductive organs – but the grouping and categorising persists. They need vengeance, they need to know that the violence they have experienced under patriarchy was because of something, that all women must be biologically unionised in the face of this “other.”
Punishment then becomes a tool to be seized and wielded against Butler and those denying the validity of their essentialism… Yes, most TERFs have undoubtedly suffered and become conscious of the violence and epistemic injustice that is entrenched in female socialisation.
But this suffering isn’t limited to women, but anyone in an oppressed situation. Butler’s work raises the invaluable point that as social actors, human beings can, and do, spend their lives grappling with gender categorisation, resisting or negotiating their identity every day in inventive ways. This is not a tragedy!
What this does as a theory is remind us that man is not inherently responsible for the actions of all men, but a social being interpreting and responding to the world around him. Through this lens, people are not their genders and genders cannot become ubiquitous threats or enemies.
When Queer people present gender in new and inventive ways, they are producing new possibilities for being, realities beyond what is violently imposed by binaries. So while TERFs reflect a regression into a realm of categorisation and hostility, Butler argues for a better world, one that cherishes human flourishing beyond all brutal structures.
“Judith Butler” by Jreberlein at English Wikipedia is licensed under CC BY 2.5.
