Gender and Its Enemies

The last decade or so has seen the rise of a curious crusade against “gender” — which at times seems to mean an academic field of study, at other times the existence of LGBTQ+ people in certain spaces and the social recognition of their existence. Anti-gender politics make strange bedfellows: disappointed radical feminists and Catholic theologians, far-right strongmen and assorted reactionary centrists. In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, the philosopher Judith Butler suggests that the anti-gender movement is ultimately “as much an attack on feminism, especially reproductive freedom, as it is on trans rights, gay marriage, and sex education.” “Gender,” at least as it is used by its critics is an “overdetermined” “phantasm.” And resistance to “gender” has emerged as a powerful weapon to be wielded against liberal democracy itself — from Hungary to Brazil to the United States.

Butler, who teaches at the University of California at Berkeley (and who uses they/them pronouns), has been the target of the movement they portray in Who’s Afraid of Gender? Their books on the topic, starting with Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), have clearly had an impact on the way we think and talk about gender and bodies in 2024. But Who’s Afraid of Gender? is neither a counteroffensive nor an assessment of Butler’s own influence. Instead, writing for the first time for a mainstream audience and publishing with a trade press, Butler makes an urgent case that the category of gender names a central axis in the anti-democratic and illiberal international. They try to explain why anti-gender positions are so central to today’s far-right movements and governments the world over.

“For several years,” Butler writes, “I encountered the anti-gender ideology movement only outside of the United States.” This movement, they argue, arose from the natural-law tradition and originated in Catholic networks in Latin America. From there it spread to Europe and Africa, often with the support of American anti-LGBTQ organizations that were at that time busy losing the fight against gay marriage in the U.S. When it arrived in the United States, it immediately made its impact felt legislatively — in laws regulating pronouns, drag bans, bans on gender care, or legislation aimed at sex ed or gender studies. “Gender” became the nexus that bundled together all these different, and at times contradictory, projects.

I spoke with the historian Susan Stryker, the political theorist Bruno Perreau, the literary scholar Katie Kadue, and the philosopher Lynne Huffer about Who’s Afraid of Gender? Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Daub: Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a book of a particular moment. It’s not that surprising that gender studies has become a target for this very well-networked, authoritarian global movement. But the precise shape the reaction takes, the permutations of this anti-gender international, can actually be quite puzzling and counterintuitive. So: Does Butler meet this strange moment that we’re in? Does the book elucidate not just what’s predictable about this latest anti-gender onslaught, this most recent rearguard action of the patriarchy, but also the specificity and weirdness of it?

Stryker: It’s remarkable the way gender, the struggle over the word itself and what it means, has become such a hot-button issue in the culture wars. I think the book is at its strongest when it maps the contemporary terrain, asking, “What are all of the things that gender is doing in our culture right now?”

Butler’s style here is more “investigative journalist” than “dense cultural theorist.” Still, the book is grounded in a predominantly psychoanalytic perspective, particularly the idea of fantasies that guide the interpretation of experience. They make the point that we can’t have wide-ranging rational arguments about gender today, because there are profound disagreements about the status of evidence, the measure of truth, let alone what the thing we’re actually talking about is. Gender has become phantasmatic, something that operates according to the syntax of dreams, caught up in the irrational, touching on deep fears and fantasies that manifest in wildly divergent takes on reality. That’s a very useful way to frame the current status of gender as a concept.

Perreau: The phantasm of gender doesn’t manifest in the social arena solely in the form of fear. However, Butler’s book reminds us that we all live in fictions. This generates tensions with our sensitive experience of the world. The book’s title is derived from Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In that play, the main characters speak of children that do not exist; they have imaginary lives. Fictions pre-exist us and exceed us all. This is why the title should not be read too literally. Anti-gender movements are far too disparate for us to name them as a single entity. However, they are based on imaginaries that resonate from one country to another: that of corruption, contamination, invasion, undifferentiation, and so on.

This is how I read the book: Butler approaches gender as a “transactional reality,” to use Michel Foucault’s term, i.e., a framework for interpreting reality that enables us to act on it, whether or not this framework conforms to reality. It is precisely why the fear of gender is a fear of theory: Thinking critically about gender can only unsettle reactionary imaginaries.

Kadue: Like Susan and Bruno, I found the “phantasm” to be a really helpful device for explaining how all these contradictory ideas about gender get bunched together. And I found projection, another psychoanalytic term, a helpful way of understanding what’s going on as well. I think the most striking example Butler uses is how the Vatican is always talking about how the ideology of gender is causing pedophilia everywhere, when the Catholic Church is obviously the institution that is most responsible for pedophilia worldwide.

There was an inconsistency, though: Butler calls attention to how these contradictory phantasms work and claims that they can’t really be discussed in rational terms because they are structured by dream logics. But then they start trying to parse all the logical contradictions in a way that I found a bit distracting. Butler says these are structures that cannot be dealt with rationally, but then tries to deal with them rationally anyway.

Perreau: This is a paradox that Butler emphasizes in the book’s conclusion: When it comes to addressing reactionary discourses, because of their very incoherence and their inconsistencies, you always take the risk of fueling them, in a way.

Kadue: Butler’s approach mostly focuses on official discourse: They seem to be saying that these phantasms are constructed by the Vatican or by right-wing political leaders who then impose them on entire populations. But, with a few exceptions, they didn’t pay that much attention to how ordinary people who are exposed to these phantasms take them up. Do they think about gender differently from how these authorities tell them to think?

Stryker: Butler tries to distance themself somewhat now from the performative model of gender they elaborated in the 90s, but I wish they wouldn’t. I think the performative model is great. But Butler seems to have some anxiety about the relationship between performative gender and the question of sex and the real. The chapters on the construction of sex and gender from the feminist-science-studies model are, in my opinion, the two least successfully developed in the book. Butler seems always to have had some trepidation in talking about the relationship between sex and gender and can trip on that little.

But I think it’s actually quite important to dive into the weeds of the so-called “sex/gender” relationship, because the idea that gender denies the reality of biological differences of embodiment is very much in the pop culture discourse right now. I think that we need to do a better job of saying, look, sex points to a material reality, there are biological differences; we’re not arguing about that. Biology is part of the more-than-human world. Biological determinism is a human construct. And gender is the cultural practice of making meaning of that biology, of organizing our psychical experience of our bodies, of organizing our societies in ways that accord with those meanings. How we construct personhood with each other in a social context is a political question. It’s a political question about the way that we assign meaning to real biological difference.

Huffer: What I like about the book is that once again it brings gender to the forefront. That’s especially important now, in political terms, in relation to the kinds of backlash against gender we’re seeing — all the instances of that backlash — as Butler documents throughout the book. But this return to gender is also striking in terms of the trajectory of Butler’s own work. Beginning in 1990, with Gender Trouble, Butler wrote a series of books about gender. Then there was a shift, starting with Precarious Life, in 2004, toward a more ethical discourse with very little attention to gender. And with that shift comes a shift in tone: We move away from the somewhat ironic, ludic, slightly, mischievous early Butler to a more serious, solemn Butler who’s concerned with questions about ethics. From that point on Butler’s books sometimes feel to me a little bit like Sartre: the public intellectual speaking for the masses.

In that context, it’s interesting that there’s now a return to gender in 2024. But the difference between, say, Gender Trouble and Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that this new book is much more grounded than the early work on gender in what’s happening across the world. People like Martha Nussbaum have critiqued Butler’s gender theory as being out of touch with a nonacademic audience: not practical, not engaging with laws or institutions. But this new book is very much doing all of that.

I also really appreciate the focus on politics, because even in the later work when Butler approaches politics, there tends to be a swerve back toward a discourse about ethics. I appreciate the political focus here on the importance of coalitions, following Bernice Johnson Reagon, with an emphasis on the fact that coalitions involve people you don’t necessarily agree with. For example, one of the incredibly important links Butler makes is between anti-trans legislation and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, showing how reproductive freedoms are connected to gender freedom. Those links, historically, haven’t always been made. I can remember a time when there was a huge rift between feminist theory and queer theory around questions of reproductive rights. Reproduction was seen as a feminist issue and was not at all part of a queer agenda. But the way Butler shows how all these issues are interconnected in an international context allows us to think those things together.

Daub: Who’s Afraid of Gender? is analyzing and surveying the state of gender politics circa 2024, unraveling connections and thinking about how legislation and ideas travel. I really appreciated seeing Judith Butler, investigative journalist! And yet it’s also very much a philosopher’s book. Butler is not just concerned with explaining how people have gotten certain ideas about gender wrong, they’re also concerned with why those ideas are wrong. It does feel like the summa of a career.

The book has a very measured quality. As Lynne Huffer points out, there is a punning, playful, ludic Butler that is not here. When you’re writing for a bigger audience, I feel like a lot of academics try to lean into the jokes. That’s not this book. This is a pretty restrained rhetorical performance. And I do think it’s a performance: of reasonableness, of control, of a kind of tactical sobriety that seems designed to counter the kind of reactionary attack that portrays gender studies as hysterical.

Butler talks about “the ring of reasonableness” that traditionalist anti-trans or anti-gender arguments can have: “We’re just saying what’s common sense: There are two sexes, and they’re biologically and culturally different. The ideologues are the other people, who deny these basic facts.” And yet is this really so reasonable? If you are looking at a sizable percentage of the population and saying, “Well, they’re not really what they say they are” — that seems like a fairly unreasonable claim! This is an ideology, then, that refuses to acknowledge its own ideological investments. Yes, it seems to succeed precisely because it repackages hardcore traditionalism as intrinsically non-ideological.

Kadue: Did anyone read Andrea Long Chu’s article responding, in part, to Butler’s book? Chu focuses on a figure that she calls the TARL: the “trans agnostic, reactionary liberal” — as opposed to the more familiar anti-trans figure of the TERF, the trans-exclusive radical feminist. Butler has a whole chapter on TERFs and their ideology, but there’s not that much attention to the figure that Chu is interested in: the perfectly reasonable liberal who reads or writes for The Atlantic or The New York Times, who concern-trolls, who reflexively repeats anti-trans talking points about detransition, “social contagion,” and the censorship and “fascism” of the Left more generally, all while claiming they’re just asking questions, just following the science, just using facts and logic and critical thinking. These people are very different from either the Pope or an ordinary person in the global South. I think part of the reason there was less focus on them and more on the Pope and Putin and figures like that is because Butler really wanted this book to be transnational and global in scope and not be so focused on the U.S. context. But I still wished they’d directly addressed the arguments (or the concern-trolling) of the group Chu identifies. As Chu puts it, the TARL “sees himself as a concerned citizen, not an ideologue,” a self-conception that may make this kind of person persuadable, or at least more so than the conservative Christians, avowed white supremacists, and even the TERFs that Butler spends most of their time critiquing.

Daub: There’s definitely a decentering, in Who’s Afraid of Gender?, of the political discourse in the United States. Queer theory has sometimes had a reputation as a kind of hyper-American thing, unconsciously taking most of its cues from U.S. politics and anglophone culture, which can spill way more ink on a specific SCOTUS case than on entire continents. But Butler makes clear that this is a global story, that the anti-gender movement is truly an international phenomenon.

One of the spurs for writing the book was a harrowing experience in 2017 when Butler was chased through an airport in São Paolo, Brazil, by a mob of right-wing protesters. Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an inquiry into the conditions of possibility of that moment. One question Butler seems to be asking is, how did it happen that I wrote a book for Routledge in 1990, and then 27 years later I’m being chased through a Brazilian airport by people who claim I’m a witch and are literally burning me in effigy? How did we get here?

Stryker: I saw this book very much as a response to that trauma. There was this traumatic thing that happened to Butler: They were just doing their work, thinking and talking about things, trying to be ethical, and then suddenly they were physically attacked by ideologically motivated strangers. They thought they might be killed by people consumed by phantasms. I agree with Adrian Daub that the style of the book does seem to be an exercise in control: Butler is trying to speak in a reasonable way about this unreasonable, dangerous, violent thing that happened. They’re trying to make rational sense of an irrational global phenomenon.

If we’re going to use a psychoanalytic vocabulary, I don’t think that the anti-gender reaction is one of neurosis or hysteria. I think we need to go to Lacan’s Imaginary, Laplanche’s “structuring fantasy.” What’s happening is indeed more like the logic of dreams than of rational discourse. For anti-gender people, encountering manifestations of gender-variance cracks the symbolic world open, allowing the phantasms to walk in broad daylight, and I think that scares the shit out of them, infuriates them. They want to erase the phantasms or put them back in the register where they belong.

Huffer: The book’s narrative structure is fascinating to me. Butler recounts being figured as a devil, a witch, and so on, but not until Page 237. And we don’t learn about the airport experience of being attacked until after the end of the book, in the acknowledgments! In all of Butler’s work there’s been a hesitation to bring the “I” too far into the forefront. It’s a characteristic of their writing: giving an account of oneself, not myself. This is Butler’s repeated philosophical point about dispossession: about being dispossessed by the very language that gives them a sense of mastery, mastery being their ability to wield this incredible philosophical, linguistic, cultural, historical apparatus. Throughout the work there is this brilliant power of synthesis along with its subtle undermining. I see that in Who’s Afraid of Gender? as well. There are tensions within this Hegelian struggle for recognition: Recognition remains a struggle, and its tensions are never fully synthesized. I love that about the work and about this book.

Kadue: I was expecting the book to be a lot more personal: Knowing that the incident in Brazil was the inciting force for it, I thought that that would be more of a red thread throughout the entire book.

I found I was not sure that reasonableness is the right way to approach this problem, especially when I’m not totally sure Butler is always being reasonable enough. There is one anti-gender idea that they keep returning to in order to critique, which is that students are being indoctrinated into freedom. They’re losing the freedom to think freely and critically and are instead being forced to swallow the ideology of gender, which is an ideology of total autonomy over one’s own body. So young people are somehow becoming unfree and too free at the same time. Isn’t this a glaring contradiction?

But I think that proponents of the anti-gender movement who make this argument see it as consistent: “Gender” doesn’t actually make young people free. They’re being indoctrinated in the name of the freedom to choose to be whoever they want, but that’s a false freedom, because it’s not based in rational choice — it’s just self-indulgence, what Milton would call “license” rather than true liberty. So, on the one hand, Butler thinks it’s beside the point to try to get to the rational bases of anti-gender phantasms, which maybe can’t even be treated rationally at all. But on the other hand, insofar as they can be treated rationally, I’m not sure they’re adequately curious about how these rationales work.

Daub: This question of freedom and submission that Katie brought up is very interesting. It’s getting at the kind of natural-law tradition that Butler clearly thinks is at the root of anti-gender ideology, this traditionalist vision of the difference between the sexes which is undercut by the gender concept and therefore occasions this incredible animus.

But there’s also a brief moment in the book where they point out that TERFism relies on a very similar dialectic of submission and autonomy. On the one hand, the TERF thinks that they are in control, identical with their sexual categories. Their politics can be identical with their categorization. Anyone who has any love for the work of Judith Butler will think, “Well, no, that’s an impossible way to relate to a category.” But TERFs experience, or claim to experience, this belonging to an immutable category as a form of self-empowerment.

But on the other hand, as Butler points out, it’s also complete submission to a category that pre-existed you, that has predetermined you before you were born — and you are now fully subject to it. So it’s both this kind of self-elevation and self-demotion. There is a consonance here with religious modes where we’re submitting to divine command, but the divine command has a funny way of making us super important. Butler seems interested in the way that far-right movements, as well as the Catholic Church or religious groups in general, play with that dialectic of autonomy and submission.

Stryker: I’m glad Butler foregrounded Catholicism in this book. In my own research into the intellectual history of anti-gender discourse, one thing that surprised me was the centrality of certain versions of Catholicism to it. Of course there’s a wider range of religious and secular motivations for embracing anti-gender discourse, but historically, a reactionary strain of Catholicism was quite central to its emergence. I had been curious about how right-wing, anti-feminist, religious extremists and self-styled “radical feminists,” many of whom came out of lesbian separatism and some of whom had embraced a woman-centered spirituality, had become strange political bedfellows with one another with regard to their transphobia. Doing my genealogical research, I found that common ground in the reworking of Catholic ideas about natural and moral law. Trans-antagonistic, anti-gender discourse was initially promulgated by Janice Raymond and Mary Daly, both of whom were disgruntled former Catholics whose feminism was in large part a reworking of Catholic intellectual traditions. Raymond’s notorious Transsexual Empire, the ur-text of feminist transphobia, began as a dissertation written in the theology department of a Jesuit university. I make an old-wine-in-new-bottles argument about this: They replace God the Father with God the Mother, but they don’t get rid of a lot of the thought categories that arise out of the Catholic tradition. TERFism and certain versions of Catholicism are joined at the root, take different paths for a while, but return to a common ground. The premises of their arguments are very, very similar.

It’s also quite interesting that we’ve all started talking about freedom today! I think that freedom is actually the most important question here. The book is called Who’s Afraid of Gender? but it could be called Who’s Afraid of Freedom? This takes us back to the religious dimension of anti-gender ideology. When you read anti-trans Catholic writers like Gabriele Kuby, they tell a story about post-Enlightenment modernity and the rejection of God. As they see it, after the Enlightenment, Western culture replaced God with a rational, self-authorizing subject — or a subject that believes it is self-authorizing, which is a sin of pride.

They tell this whole story about modernity as a kind of willfulness, waywardness, about not being an obedient child of God but having the Satanic-inspired fantasy of resistance and rebellion to a God-given truth, where you believe that you’re the master of your own destiny. They see gender ideology as the ultimate expression of that. For them, this is where humanity crosses the line. Denying your sex: That is just too much. For them it is the distillation of the enormous wrong turn that humankind has taken since the Enlightenment. There is a deeply reactionary and nostalgic move, a desire to go back to a pre-Enlightenment place and time where God is on his throne, and his sovereignty over the earth has not been challenged and denied by these uppity modern people who think they can think great thoughts and know the truth and be whatever they want to be. Freedom is a negative value for people who revel in their bondage to their lord, not the expansive enactment of a capacity for existence to become otherwise that I consider it to be.

Kadue: I just wanted to echo what others are saying: The concept of freedom is at the core of the book.

But there are or have been two anti-gender arguments about freedom that the book doesn’t really disentangle. One is that what might look like freedom isn’t really freedom: it’s actually a tyranny of the passions, or it’s brainwashing from gender theorists, which gets in the way of real freedom. And the other is that freedom is overrated, that we really shouldn’t have that much freedom, or that we actually can’t have that much freedom, because it’s curtailed by God, or nature, or biology. And that’s actually good — that’s what makes us human.

This kind of argument is especially important for TERFs. The idea is: “Of course we don’t have freedom to change our gender, because if we did, then why are we so unhappy? It must be a natural limit on our freedom that we are stuck being women, because if we could actually change our sex, we would; but we can’t. And that’s why we’re so angry at trans women, because they’re using a freedom we insist no one has, and/or because they’re making fun of the natural female suffering that we have no choice but to endure.” So I think there are two different, though related, anti-gender arguments about freedom. One is that “gender” is a false promise of freedom; and the other is that too much freedom is not good, or not even possible, in the first place.

Perreau: With my French ears, when I hear Who’s Afraid of Gender? it sounds like Who Is Freed of Gender?

Huffer: But what is this freedom? It’s not entirely clear to me. When we talk about a dialectic between autonomy and freedom, as we were saying with TERFs, I hear in that opposition the French concept of assujettissement: To become a subject is also to be subjugated. This relates to Foucault’s notion of productive power, which very much informs Butler’s early work on performativity. Here, in this new book, I see a mixed conception of power, one that is both repressive and productive. On the one hand, you have anti-trans legislation and these authoritarian regimes eradicating gender-studies programs: That is clearly repressive power. But I also think, in terms of the phantasmatic scene and the creation of this imaginary that Butler is describing through a psychoanalytic lens, there’s a productive dimension. I would love to hear Butler explore that more. To me, these questions about repressive and productive power are related to the question of what we mean by freedom. Because I think one of the traps Foucault warns us against is that with productive power there’s a misrecognition of what we call freedom. We misrecognize, as freedom, that which is actually subjugating us. And I think that has to do with the phantasmatic scene, how it constitutes our inner life, how our interiority is created by a panoptical apparatus. There’s a whole story to be told about that. Maybe that’s another book, but I would be really interested in hearing more about how that relates to what Butler is calling “freedom.”

Perreau: One site that connects repressive and productive power is law. It is essential to take a closer look at how anti-gender logics have penetrated the lawmaking process in many areas of the world. If there is so much space for anti-gender movements today, it’s precisely because the left has abandoned a certain type of politics which connects social policymaking and the idea of freedom. Rather, the left seems to be pursuing an ideal of consensus: the idea that, as opposed to fighting on the terrain of law, and beyond, the solution would be to try and build consensus in a very divisive, political, arena. But consensus, a convergence of aims, doesn’t necessarily mean that the solution is normatively good; it only produces non-opposition. Minorities need antagonism! That’s why anti-gender movements use the term ideology. It allows them to instill the idea that there is a moral equivalence between their freedom to discriminate and the freedom not to be discriminated against. I agree with Lynne Huffer: We need to revisit the notion of freedom. For minorities, freedom results from transforming an experience of non-sovereignty into the ability to act. It is not a new form of sovereignty over oneself and others!

Daub: As Lynne noted, there’s a kind of curious decentering of Butler’s own personal experience in the book. But there’s also a decentering of their own work, isn’t there, and the work of gender studies in general? It would be very easy to think that these anti-gender movements sprang up in reaction to Butler’s work, to queer theory or other academic work on gender. But Butler, in foregrounding this natural-law argument, is saying no: They’re going after something much older than that. We may be the latest annoyance, but we are flattering ourselves if we think our work started this, or that the anti-gender movement is primarily worried about whatever book we put out with a university press recently. Butler is saying: This is more than a reaction to 30 years of scholarship. This is a reaction to 300 years of social history.

Stryker: Yeah. Anti-gender discourse is another Reconquista, another Counter-Reformation.

Daub: This would not be over if Gender Trouble were to be excised from your local public library. It’s going way beyond that.