My latest for UnHerd:
Judith Butler is out promoting a new book, the first the notoriously enigmatic theorist has ever written with actual readers in mind. Who’s Afraid of Gender? explores what Butler characterises as a global movement animated by the “phantasm of gender”, which “collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction, resulting in a movement that demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation”. Or, to put it more succinctly, how everyone who disagrees with Butler — from Viktor Orbán to Julie Bindel — is probably just a fascist.
But there’s always risk involved in descending from the ivory tower and mixing with the (suspiciously anti-gender) plebs. In an interview this week with KQED Forum — a public-radio programme based in the San Francisco Bay Area — Butler ran headfirst into some of the hard facts she managed to evade on the page.
For the greater part of the interview, Butler goes on at length about how losing one’s sense of “superiority” or “inevitability” or “natural[ness]” in the face of bold new formulations of gender is a source of “grief” for some people — mostly fascists, who must learn how to live in a “broader and more capacious world” and “accept equality and the expansive nature of kinship and of gender”. She gives little consideration to the possible existence of legitimate grievances, such as female athletes who are being asked to accept inequality in their own sporting leagues and who must contend with the “expansive nature” of certain men’s entitlement.
Thank you for reporting on this. Her blasé and dismissive attitude towards to any and all legitimate concerns in the new book - be it sports, single sex spaces, concerns about medicalising children or violence against women and girls - is abhorrent, particularly when she then goes on to lump everyone together in one "fascist" mob. Phantasms indeed.
In her defense - I dare say Ms. Butler couldn't find her own arse if she used both hands.