Mick Hartley

"A leading figure in feminism and gender studies, the thinker welcomes El Pais in California after being voted one of the most influential minds in the world". Yes of course, it's Judith Butler, and the interview's header sets out the core belief of this most influential of minds: "If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic".

The theme is embellished within:

Q. Do you understand the concerns of feminists who think that gender could result in the erasure of women?

A. Some feminists, I think unwittingly, have allied themselves in places like the U.K. and Spain with the far right when it comes to instigating this phantasm about gender. I understand those fears, but that doesn’t mean that I think they’re based on knowledge. Perhaps those feminists need a better understanding of who trans people are. Womanhood won’t be erased just because we open the category and invite some more people in.

Her message would seem to be: people who disagree with me are far right fascists. Which is how first-year students tend to argue, though perhaps with less gravitas. She is – sorry, they is – in her sixties now, after all.

Perhaps it's she – they – who needs a better understanding of who trans people are. Trans women are men. If you invite men into the category of womanhood, then womanhood loses its meaning as a category. And this is not just a philosophical point: it has real world consequences in women-only spaces, in sports, in rape centres, in women's prisons….in women's lives.

Victoria Smith at UnHerd:

The El País interview is disappointing — though, really, it shouldn’t be. As far as sex and gender are concerned, it rehashes the same tired, anti-feminist non-gotchas which appear in the fifth chapter of Butler’s most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? If Butler didn’t change between the publication of Gender Trouble and that book, why should she be any different a few months down the line? It’s disappointing, all the same. There is something bewildering, not to mention enraging, about the utter lack of growth in Butler’s vision. If anything, it has become increasingly narrow. As more and more evidence piles up of the practical cost of denying the immutability and political salience of biological sex, Butler becomes more and more obtuse.

She dodges questions, feigns misunderstanding, or drifts into whataboutery. When Seisdedos attempts to pin down what is meant by “finding another way”, wondering where Butler would “draw the line for considering a minor ready to break these rules”, she waffles. When she is asked about “parents who are worried about their children making mistakes”, she recounts having “a man say to me in Chile that he didn’t want a gay or lesbian family living next door to him” — which is bad, but hardly related to whether or not an autistic 14-year-old should have her breasts cut off.

Asked to comment on the role of the pharmaceutical industry in “gender-affirming” treatments, Butler notes that “hormone replacement therapy for women who are postmenopausal is a much bigger industry”. She then suggests that puberty blockers sit on a continuum with kids “questioning gender norms, including the version of masculinity that Trump represents”. On the topic of women’s objections to trans activism, she attempts to conflate “trans struggles” with women knowing “how difficult and necessary it is to struggle for autonomy”. Clearly not too much autonomy, though, lest one becomes Hitler-adjacent.

It is all so terribly weak, and it’s difficult to believe Butler is not aware of this….

Butler is 68 years old and has never grown up. On the contrary, she has regressed to the angry adolescent stage of calling any middle-aged woman who disagrees with her a fascist. It has been a good run — 35 years — but the gig is well and truly up.