Mick Hartley

There are some good points in this review of Judith Butler's latest, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, by Jane O'Grady in the Telegraph – "a muddled book that can’t even define its terms":

For millennia, humans boasted of being a ­special creation, above “the beasts” because endowed with reason and free will – until, in the 19th century, we realised that we were animals ourselves, on a continuum with apes. In the past 30 years, however, we have found a new way of disclaiming animality: apparently, unlike other mammals, humans do not come in two sexes, but range along a spectrum – and/or a human’s sex is simply “assigned at birth”, therefore can be changed.

Such claims have been given intellectual respectability, if not consistency, by exaggerated statistics of those born intersex, and by “queer theory”, one of the founding texts of which is Gender Trouble, written by Judith Butler, a professor at Berkeley, in 1990. Famously obscurantist, it seems to say that sex is purely a performance….

Butler categorically denies that “gender is to culture as sex is to nature”, or that “gender is produced through forms of patriarchal power”, neglecting to mention that this Terf-ish sex/gender distinction was, according to some interpretations, first proposed in The Second Sex (a key gender-studies text). “Biological categories are saturated with meanings,” Butler complains. Which was surely Simone de Beauvoir’s point – she was seeking to purge the sex category “woman” of the cultural accretions of gender that have long distorted it. Butler, however, treats linguistic bewitchment as ineluctable: “Sex has shifting historical meanings.” But biological language aims to reach up to the real thing. Why doesn’t Butler try to distinguish the usage of “sex” from what it is intended to refer to?

“If sex is legally assigned and registered and can be re-assigned and re-registered, can we not conclude that the reality of sex has changed, or that that change is now part of our historical reality?” Butler demands. As if, guided by linguistic usage, natural selection would dismantle the sexual dimorphism that has taken so long to evolve and has been so advantageous to the survival of the human species. 

Because we're a linguistic species, somehow language now supercedes biology. If a man says he's a woman, then he is a woman. See how far we've come now to restore our special status above the crude animal world.

Butler doesn’t touch on the ­crucial issue of puberty blockers and the removal of adolescents’ breasts and penises. Excluding trans women from women-only spaces is tantamount to treating them as rapists, apparently – the statutory argument. But an ­increasingly high proportion of trans women retain their penises, so isn’t excluding them a matter, as with ordinary men, of prudent ­pre-emptiveness? The human penis, like that of any other animal, has, because it is part of nature’s drive for life, a sort of life of its own. The inadvertency of erections is what manifests the authenticity of desire, thereby flattering both their owners and their observers (when not dismaying them).

“Nothing about the organ per se produces rape,” says Butler. Like a gun lobbyist insisting that it’s the person, not the gun, that kills, this ignores the fact that some tools are more dangerous and unpredictable than others.

I hadn't seen that argument before, but yes, the gun lobby argument fits perfectly. "It's the person, not the gun." But without the gun, you don't have to worry about the person. Likewise, without the penis a woman doesn't have to worry about the person sharing her intimate space. Or these vicious American Bully dogs. It's the owner, not the dog, they say. But if you have a bad owner (and what are the chances of a bad owner with a nasty macho dog bred for aggression?) then the results, instead of a nip on the ankles, could be serious injury or death. Why take the risk?

As O'Grady notes, this latest book is "less opaquely written" than Butler's hugely influential Gender Trouble. It takes a certain amount of youthful energy, not to say hubris, to come up with page after page of the elaborately impenetrable postmodern jargon of thirty years ago. She clearly can't keep it up – as it were. So, inevitably, it becomes much easier now to see how bad her arguments are.