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.
Butler has blood on her hands. Fledgling young women and men (teens, twenty-somethings, disproportionately autistic or gay or just finding their way toward adulthood) have healthy body parts cut off because of the insanity she sowed and continues shamelessly to spread.
Did she have enough remnant of conscience to touch on those kinds of outcomes of her navel-gazing musings? How do the physical losses, the resultant curtailing of life opportunities tally in her cost/benefit non-analysis?
Thanks for letting us know she's still selling her snake oil unashamedly, Eliza. Most wouldn't dare say that the Empress of Gender is wearing no clothes, and is up to no good.
Thanks for this, Eliza. KQED and Forum disappoint again and again to interrogate gender ideology and "gender affirming care" - even when callers get through the screeners (which is rare). I have tried!
At 27 minutes into the interview, the host brings in a question from a listener named Lisa, who asks Butler to comment on Lisa’s observation that people in the “queer” community often exhibit the same gender essentialism that Butler accuses the right wing of exhibiting. Butler is clearly caught on the back foot by the question, and seems to be at a loss as to how to answer it. So what does Butler do? She deliberately avoids Lisa’s question by misinterpreting it, saying nothing about the “queer” community and instead accusing gender-critical feminists of essentializing gender.
Great story. I'm about a third of the way through "Who's Afraid of Gender?" and am surprised (should I be?) at how little Butler interrogates the arguments of gender-critical people; people who are directly arguing with the "Gender Trouble" thesis. "The anti-gender advocates are largely committed to not reading critically," Butler writes. Really? Physician, heal themself.
“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.” 😂 Quite.
Question: is Butler a uniquely awful philosopher, or is it just that now that women, ethnic minorities, and working-class-background people can become philosophers, the status of it has lowered enough that we can finally be honest about how onanistic and problematic it is as a profession? 😅😬 Maybe professional-philosopher is a job that only makes sense in a non-democracy? Isn’t that the point of democracy- that we the people are supposed to do this idea-exploration ourselves and not rely on a ruling class of elites for our thinking?
I read something about this on Reddit -- trans* had its heyday on various forums. I forgot what it meant, but it was another in-group signifier that got worn out once everybody caught on.
Thanks for the note. I stopped reading nonsense academia in the 90’s, they’re incredibly stereotyped writing, but they still cause trouble don’t they.
The world is changing. I built a few dozen books last weekend refuting Butler in her own language to examine her ideas.
The most interesting was the Nancy Drew book which in one section pointed out that if gender is a performance “a mask” there remains a biological human behind the mask with an unchanging biological reality of sex.
I was pleased to see Eliza linked to Kathleen Stock's brilliant review of /Who's Afraid of Gender?/, which includes this: 'She seems unruffled by the fact that, in prosecuting her case, she can’t define “gender” clearly — her most definite pronouncement is that it is “a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world /in this way/”.'
The last three words are italicized (in the original, I presume), which strikes me as utterly bizarre. It would indicate a speaker was gesturing to complete the meaning, but since you can't see what the writer is doing, it oozes knowing obfuscation. It adds nothing to what came before, which anyway means nothing more than "what it feels like to be you, *physically*." And that emphasizes to me that "gender" (as normally understood in gender identity ideology) is clearly NOT the felt sense of the body, it's the imagined felt sense of a different body. If "gender" meant what it felt like to be your body's surfaces and depths, there'd be no need for all the carnage.
I feel like we aren’t ruffled enough about the fact that they can’t provide a clear definition of gender.
The entire ideology and policy regime it’s spawned is predicated on the assumption that there is this clearly defined property of humans called gender that we must respect.
If we can convince the public that isn’t true, then the entire apparatus comes crumbling down.
They are also unable to define "trans." I agree with your conclusion that their arguments have no foundation at all without a clear definition of their terms. Not only do their arguments collapse, but their basic problem in life is exposed, which is that they have no identities at all, just labels with no meaning.
I refuse to use the terms “trans person” or “trans people.” It gives the false impression that there is actually some category of human-being that is “trans.” But no one can *be* trans.
Trans is short for transition, which is a verb. A verb is something you do, not something you are. We would never call an obese person who is on a diet to lose weight a “diet person.” We would say “that person who is dieting.” Making clear that the diet is a course of action (among many) that is being chosen, not an immutable expression of identity.
I too am no longer using the "trans" terminology, for exactly the same reason you stated so well. The repetition of this term has created a linguistic category that refers to no existing thing. The term "cis gender" creates a similar illusion that there is more than one kind of woman and more than one kind of man.
I think that we should all demand that people define their terminology, then confront them if they are unable to do so. Defining terms is a foundation of scientific discourse, and adhering to scientific standards keeps a conversation in the realm of real things.
I think a lot of this mess is words. Words that have been designed to create confusion. Speaking clearly will go a long way towards bringing us back to reality.
I heard her a bit! It was all about how silly for people to think their child will turn queer after a mild exposure, and how funny for us old people sincerely trying to get the pronouns right. Have to keep humbly trying! I have so many family members who love npr, so it helps me feel where they are at and how they experience things.
I haven’t been able to stomach Forum for years, nor KQED. Sad to hear they had Butler on because now ALL of my NorCal neighbors and friends are going to be sending me the link to try to ‘help me’ and virtue signal that they understand and know what’s going on, better then I know my own daughter. One particularly woke neighbor even offered to take a walk with my autistic daughter, I suspect because she was worried our daughter wasn’t being ‘heard or recognized’. They act surprised when I explain to them how terrible at ‘reporting’ NPR has become. Bubble, bubble, bubble.
I don't know if it is truly good, but, at least they are trying to communicate and connect, I think. I always turn on npr for a moment when I get in the car to try to have some exposure to what a large demographic are hearing and probably aligning themselves to. I have hopes to be able to somehow communicate on these factionalized topics in some way that can get past the usual triggers and rehearsed roles with people that I do want to be able to find contact with. I haven't been greatly successful, but I will keep trying to see where there is an opportunity.
I agree it is so important to hear what they are hearing. And try to find some way to engage, drop a hint of reality. But once my kid fell into all of this, and I woke up, I just couldn't stomach it anymore. Too painful to hear.
You're in a tough area of the country, as I imagine most think they know better. Npr is truly well-respected by a set of people, so I want to understand what it feels like to be on that page. It does make for culture shock, for sure. I want to help there be a different cultural option that is perceptible and understandable.
I used to be in the NPR camp, I truly was. It was a good source of media long ago, definitely left leaning but not to the degree it is now. But I think we go through several 'awakening' moments in this process and once you've had several it's impossible to go back.
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.
Butler has blood on her hands. Fledgling young women and men (teens, twenty-somethings, disproportionately autistic or gay or just finding their way toward adulthood) have healthy body parts cut off because of the insanity she sowed and continues shamelessly to spread.
Did she have enough remnant of conscience to touch on those kinds of outcomes of her navel-gazing musings? How do the physical losses, the resultant curtailing of life opportunities tally in her cost/benefit non-analysis?
Thanks for letting us know she's still selling her snake oil unashamedly, Eliza. Most wouldn't dare say that the Empress of Gender is wearing no clothes, and is up to no good.
Thanks for this, Eliza. KQED and Forum disappoint again and again to interrogate gender ideology and "gender affirming care" - even when callers get through the screeners (which is rare). I have tried!
At 27 minutes into the interview, the host brings in a question from a listener named Lisa, who asks Butler to comment on Lisa’s observation that people in the “queer” community often exhibit the same gender essentialism that Butler accuses the right wing of exhibiting. Butler is clearly caught on the back foot by the question, and seems to be at a loss as to how to answer it. So what does Butler do? She deliberately avoids Lisa’s question by misinterpreting it, saying nothing about the “queer” community and instead accusing gender-critical feminists of essentializing gender.
Great story. I'm about a third of the way through "Who's Afraid of Gender?" and am surprised (should I be?) at how little Butler interrogates the arguments of gender-critical people; people who are directly arguing with the "Gender Trouble" thesis. "The anti-gender advocates are largely committed to not reading critically," Butler writes. Really? Physician, heal themself.
“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.” 😂 Quite.
Question: is Butler a uniquely awful philosopher, or is it just that now that women, ethnic minorities, and working-class-background people can become philosophers, the status of it has lowered enough that we can finally be honest about how onanistic and problematic it is as a profession? 😅😬 Maybe professional-philosopher is a job that only makes sense in a non-democracy? Isn’t that the point of democracy- that we the people are supposed to do this idea-exploration ourselves and not rely on a ruling class of elites for our thinking?
Butler might not be "uniquely awful," but she shares space with the worst.
I listened to the whole hour. What the hell is trans asterisk? I assume she means this " trans* ". Are people now identifying as punctuation marks?
I read something about this on Reddit -- trans* had its heyday on various forums. I forgot what it meant, but it was another in-group signifier that got worn out once everybody caught on.
Thanks for the note. I stopped reading nonsense academia in the 90’s, they’re incredibly stereotyped writing, but they still cause trouble don’t they.
The world is changing. I built a few dozen books last weekend refuting Butler in her own language to examine her ideas.
The most interesting was the Nancy Drew book which in one section pointed out that if gender is a performance “a mask” there remains a biological human behind the mask with an unchanging biological reality of sex.
The Butler rebuttal PDF:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/5vwtrgnc06kipela6muug/Butler_112233full.pdf?rlkey=39zh8v4p2dsluni0xznlt1k8j&dl=0
Butler gently refuted by Nancy Drew PDF:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l64vkkcs9q1z3hzt5tyi1/ButlerDrew_112233full.pdf?rlkey=d1k8968emvlmvkhw9i6s1hm61&dl=0
I have not had time to read Sontag pulling Butler apart, nor Dawkins. I wish I read Spanish for the Allende edition.
Does she actually define gender? My guess is no.
I was pleased to see Eliza linked to Kathleen Stock's brilliant review of /Who's Afraid of Gender?/, which includes this: 'She seems unruffled by the fact that, in prosecuting her case, she can’t define “gender” clearly — her most definite pronouncement is that it is “a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world /in this way/”.'
The last three words are italicized (in the original, I presume), which strikes me as utterly bizarre. It would indicate a speaker was gesturing to complete the meaning, but since you can't see what the writer is doing, it oozes knowing obfuscation. It adds nothing to what came before, which anyway means nothing more than "what it feels like to be you, *physically*." And that emphasizes to me that "gender" (as normally understood in gender identity ideology) is clearly NOT the felt sense of the body, it's the imagined felt sense of a different body. If "gender" meant what it felt like to be your body's surfaces and depths, there'd be no need for all the carnage.
Haha, that’s great!
I feel like we aren’t ruffled enough about the fact that they can’t provide a clear definition of gender.
The entire ideology and policy regime it’s spawned is predicated on the assumption that there is this clearly defined property of humans called gender that we must respect.
If we can convince the public that isn’t true, then the entire apparatus comes crumbling down.
They are also unable to define "trans." I agree with your conclusion that their arguments have no foundation at all without a clear definition of their terms. Not only do their arguments collapse, but their basic problem in life is exposed, which is that they have no identities at all, just labels with no meaning.
I refuse to use the terms “trans person” or “trans people.” It gives the false impression that there is actually some category of human-being that is “trans.” But no one can *be* trans.
Trans is short for transition, which is a verb. A verb is something you do, not something you are. We would never call an obese person who is on a diet to lose weight a “diet person.” We would say “that person who is dieting.” Making clear that the diet is a course of action (among many) that is being chosen, not an immutable expression of identity.
I too am no longer using the "trans" terminology, for exactly the same reason you stated so well. The repetition of this term has created a linguistic category that refers to no existing thing. The term "cis gender" creates a similar illusion that there is more than one kind of woman and more than one kind of man.
I think that we should all demand that people define their terminology, then confront them if they are unable to do so. Defining terms is a foundation of scientific discourse, and adhering to scientific standards keeps a conversation in the realm of real things.
I think a lot of this mess is words. Words that have been designed to create confusion. Speaking clearly will go a long way towards bringing us back to reality.
Good article on Ms Nutbar Butler.
I heard her a bit! It was all about how silly for people to think their child will turn queer after a mild exposure, and how funny for us old people sincerely trying to get the pronouns right. Have to keep humbly trying! I have so many family members who love npr, so it helps me feel where they are at and how they experience things.
I haven’t been able to stomach Forum for years, nor KQED. Sad to hear they had Butler on because now ALL of my NorCal neighbors and friends are going to be sending me the link to try to ‘help me’ and virtue signal that they understand and know what’s going on, better then I know my own daughter. One particularly woke neighbor even offered to take a walk with my autistic daughter, I suspect because she was worried our daughter wasn’t being ‘heard or recognized’. They act surprised when I explain to them how terrible at ‘reporting’ NPR has become. Bubble, bubble, bubble.
I don't know if it is truly good, but, at least they are trying to communicate and connect, I think. I always turn on npr for a moment when I get in the car to try to have some exposure to what a large demographic are hearing and probably aligning themselves to. I have hopes to be able to somehow communicate on these factionalized topics in some way that can get past the usual triggers and rehearsed roles with people that I do want to be able to find contact with. I haven't been greatly successful, but I will keep trying to see where there is an opportunity.
I agree it is so important to hear what they are hearing. And try to find some way to engage, drop a hint of reality. But once my kid fell into all of this, and I woke up, I just couldn't stomach it anymore. Too painful to hear.
You're in a tough area of the country, as I imagine most think they know better. Npr is truly well-respected by a set of people, so I want to understand what it feels like to be on that page. It does make for culture shock, for sure. I want to help there be a different cultural option that is perceptible and understandable.
I used to be in the NPR camp, I truly was. It was a good source of media long ago, definitely left leaning but not to the degree it is now. But I think we go through several 'awakening' moments in this process and once you've had several it's impossible to go back.
Same. I can't stomach NPR at all now, but it was my everything for a couple decades. And it's not just that I changed. NPR changed, too.
I just saw that she will be speaking in Chicago on April 9th. I live too far away, but I wonder if she will be taking questions.