Mick Hartley

Judith Butler is interviewed on the trans debate by Alona Ferber at the New Statesman:

Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that "contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics?

Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen. 

Oh dear. Not a promising start.

They continue.

AF: I want to challenge you on the term “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur. 

JB: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur.

Really?? She's either not aware of what's been going on then – in which case why does she think she has something interesting to say on the subject? – or she's lying. I'll go for the latter.

But the interviewer is generally only too happy to help her along:

AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments?

JB: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time. 

We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women… Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people. 

And trans ideology attacks the dignity of women – but she doesn't see that. To be seen as progressive is the fundamental requirement here.

Then this:

AF: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling?

JB: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.

"I confess to being perplexed…". Oh ffs. This is straightforward whataboutery of the crudest kind. As Sam Leith notes: 

Prof Butler pivots from the question asked to bring up the street harassment of trans people in Poland or Romania. This is an irrelevant false equivalence. Telling JK Rowling to choke on a dick doesn’t stop trans people being harassed in Romania; and finding the former objectionable doesn’t green light the latter.

So no, not enlightening. Though why anyone would expect anything different from Judith Butler is beyond me. Remember this?

Yes, understanding Hamas, Hezbollah as social movements that are progressive, that are on the Left, that are part of a global Left, is extremely important.  

Judith Butler….reliably wrong, on everything.