What People Don’t Understand About the Gender Theorist Who Remade Our World

When Judith Butler was serving as my dissertation adviser at the University of California in the late 1990s, they did not yet go by “they.” No one in my circle did, and at the time that circle included one of the most forward-thinking spaces in the world when it came to matters of gender: Butler’s dissertation seminar, which met every two weeks so that each of their advisees could present work in progress to the group.

I had never taken an actual class with Judith, who arrived at Berkeley just as I was finishing up my coursework. A few years before, just after my Ph.D.-qualifying oral exam, I had been, in academic terms, deserted at the altar: The professor I had considered my chief ally in the department abruptly, and without explanation, made it clear she would neither advise my dissertation nor recommend me to any of her colleagues. She was one of those professors (the unethical ones, I now realize) who divide their students into an in-group and an out-group, and whatever the cause, I was now on the outs.

I dropped out for a few years, working an office job in San Francisco to save up money for a self-funded year of study abroad. When I came back to Berkeley to finish my degree, the corridors of Dwinelle Hall, where both my department (comparative literature) and Judith’s (rhetoric) were housed, suddenly felt impenetrably unwelcoming. What professor who had never even taught me would be willing to take on my weird interdisciplinary thesis topic? I began awkwardly introducing myself to faculty members I hadn’t interacted with before, flailingly outlining my half-formed idea.

Whether out of interest in the project or just as an act of mercy, Judith agreed to be my adviser. As I would learn over the next few years, they were not only a committed educator but a savvy academic ally, the exact opposite of that professor who had hung me out to dry after my exams. Butler understood the adviser’s role as a crucial cog in the bureaucracy, helping their advisees land fellowships, degrees, and eventually jobs. To that end, they offered me the kindness of welcoming me into their dissertation group, a room full of scarily brilliant (and a few just plain scary) people. Butler’s work by then extended well beyond the subject matter that had made Gender Trouble so influential and controversial when it came out in 1990. That book, Butler’s second, introduced the then-radical notion that gender could be better understood as a socially constructed performance than as a stable biological fact. It was a star-making book, one of those rare academic-press publications that cross over into the mainstream conversation: Whether you read it or not, if you were interested in feminism and queerness in the 1990s, it’s certain you encountered its argument out in the wild.

Because Judith Butler had become a star, even those who never seriously engaged with their work often had an opinion about them. For a few years, the conservative-leaning journal Philosophy and Literature ran an annual “Bad Writing Contest” to mock the alleged obscurantism of contemporary humanities scholars (though every “awardee” just so happened to work on questions related to leftist politics). When Judith won the award in 1999, they published a response in the New York Times that to this day remains a model for how to casually shred someone else’s specious argument using steel-trap logic and a sense of humor. (“I’m still waiting for my check!” Butler observed in acknowledging their recent “prize.”) The editor of Philosophy and Literature, Denis Dutton, never gave out the Bad Writing prize again, demonstrating the efficacy of a bit of advice I recall Judith giving advisees: Always refuse to frame the debate in the terms your opponent has set. It was not only Butler’s writing on gender that offered an alternative to the zero-sum logic of the binary; that insistence on reframing the question was at the heart of their pedagogical method, and maybe the greatest gift they gave me as a teacher.

Thirty-four years and at least a dozen books after Gender Trouble (on their own and co-written with other scholars, covering subjects from hate speech to post-9/11 global politics to Zionist nationalism to the COVID-19 pandemic), Butler is publishing their first book with a nonacademic press. Who’s Afraid of Gender?, out this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is not the simplified, popularized reworking of their early writings on the topic you might expect. Nor is it a polemic in the tradition of Gender Trouble. Instead, it’s an analysis of contemporary political and cultural battles over the very topics that Butler’s early work brought into wider public discussion: the mutability and potential for radical social change that are contained in the category of gender, along with the right of women and all queer, gender-nonconforming, and trans people to live freely and safely in the world.

So who is afraid of gender? Many, many institutional and governmental entities, not to mention activist groups both online and off, are now staging a mass moral panic about a “phantasmatic cluster” of anxieties related to gender and sexuality: queer and trans rights, feminism, abortion, contraception, reproductive technology, book banning. These issues, Butler demonstrates, can all be seen as parts of one very large and urgent problem: the global rise of authoritarianism. Donald Trump, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro—right-wing leaders and religious organizations from around the world are all busy stoking the same fearful rhetoric around the same handful of reliably incendiary issues. Any consumer of right-wing media is dosed many times per hour with “news” about their children being groomed by secret networks of left-wing pedophiles, or the imminent threat posed by imaginary gender pirates whose demand for basic bodily autonomy somehow imperils the sexual self-definition and even the continued existence of heteronormative cis people.

As statistics persistently show, the reverse is true: It’s women and LGBTQ+ people, especially those of color, who are far more likely to be the targets of workplace discrimination, online and street harassment, sexual violence, and murder. The projection of one’s own desire to oppress onto the target of that persecution is the kind of psychosocial phenomenon Butler excels at spotting in the wild, and at dismantling with the swiftness of a hunter field-dressing their prey. “They want to quash critical thought in the name of doctrine,” Butler writes after a discussion of Ron DeSantis’ attempt to institute a “Don’t Say Gay” policy in public schools, “and, by way of an inadvertently confessional projection, assume that their adversaries want the same.”

Gender is taking over, conservatives tell us. It is endangering the purity of the body politic. Butler notes how the right wing employs the language of migration to characterize gender as a force invading from below, transgressing its proper boundaries. Yet conservatives are also happy to replace that language with the image of gender activists as colonizing elites, bent on imposing their corrupt urban values on traditional rural cultures. The cognitive fog induced by letting these side-by-side contradictions stand unremarked upon is part of the point of such rhetoric. In the right-wing imagination, “gender” is nowhere and everywhere at once, an all-purpose wedge issue that Butler describes as a “diabolical” category. It can be spun so as to encompass every horror from Orwellian totalitarianism to lawless anarchy and also, somehow, both at the same time. The same kind of free-floating demonization has been used against Butler in their personal life, as they note in a rare autobiographical passage in the book’s acknowledgments. As their work has been translated and published around the globe, they and their longtime partner, the political theorist Wendy Brown, have been accused by fundamentalist groups of “a chaotic and lurid cluster of sexual crimes”; during a 2017 visit to a conference in Brazil, Butler was burned in effigy and denounced as a witch.

The intersection of psychic and political territory is nowhere better explored—or Butler’s refusal to cede the terms of the debate to the oppressors better displayed—than in Butler’s chapter on TERFs and the British. You might argue that this author’s rhetorical firepower is squandered on opponents with as weak a case to make for themselves as the anti-trans “feminist” movement that claims several high-profile proponents in the U.K. But Butler’s methodical examination of this group’s self-contradicting claims sheds welcome light on the way fantasy, paranoia, and scapegoating can supplant rational argument when it comes to the particular issue of trans rights. The chapter’s highlight is a section on the June 2020 post to J.K. Rowling’s website in which the Harry Potter author revealed for the first time the personal history of domestic abuse that, Rowling wrote, provided the origin story for her ongoing support of anti-trans bathroom legislation.

Butler’s response to Rowling’s autobiographical revelation is a case study in the value of close reading. They start off by conceding two important points: The online bullying and threats to which Rowling was subjected to were unseemly (“I will not condone that kind of behavior, no matter who does it,” Butler writes) and the abuse she suffered at her first husband’s hands was horrific. But Butler’s empathy toward the transphobic billionaire ends there, as they go on to coolly point out that “the motivation one has for entering into a public debate may be worth knowing, but it rarely suffices as the reason everyone should agree with one’s point of view.” Butler zooms in on the language of that 2020 post, a curious document that careens between the confessional and the delusional, with abrupt 180-degree shifts in logic. Immediately after a passage proclaiming her “solidarity and kinship” with trans women, and after stating that her empathy for them includes a desire to keep them safe, Rowling observes that

With the dry sense of humor that often characterizes their public speeches (and that used to leaven the mood of those long, sometimes dull dissertation workshops), Butler notes how quickly Rowling transforms these much-empathized-with trans women into a marauding band of poorly disguised men with violent intentions. The volley of questions Butler then poses to the absent specter of Rowling shows how broad a swath of social and political reality the novelist’s gaslighting brief on behalf of transphobia has left out. Rowling stresses her preoccupation with cis women endangered by cis men posing as trans, something that almost never happens, while making no mention of the frequently documented violence against real trans people in virtually all public and private spaces. “It would seem,” Butler writes, “that the violence she is concerned about is domestic violence perpetrated by men, but what about other forms of social violence inflicted against trans people more broadly? … What about incarceration, psychiatric pathologization, street violence, loss of employment?”

Having opened up the concept of “violence” to a broader set of possible meanings, Butler proceeds to do the same with “men”: “Are gay men even included in this category, or are they not thinkable inside the category? What about genderqueer men, or all those who categorize themselves as transmasculine? Transgender men?” True to their own advice, Butler refuses to engage Rowling’s argument on the novelist’s spurious terms. By interrogating her conveniently narrow framing of imagined cis-on-cis sexual aggression that is still, somehow, trans people’s fault, Butler exposes the blinkered paranoia of Rowling’s bathroom-invasion scenario.

As an opponent in a reasoned debate, J.K. Rowling is fairly easy to leave flopping on the deck. But there is nonetheless a lot to be learned from this confrontation between her brand of feelings-based anti-trans activism and Butler’s expansive view of gender, not as the possession of a privileged group that must circle the wagons to defend it, but as a feature of human life that transcends the concept of ownership. Trans-exclusionary feminists, Butler notes, “maintain that their rightful property, their sex, is being taken from them by ‘fake’ women.” But “gender categories are not property, and they cannot be owned. Gender categories precede and exceed our individual lives.” For Butler, gender is best understood not as something one is or has, but as something one does.

In the decades since Gender Trouble came out, though, Butler has acknowledged that their earlier view of the category now seems limited in ways they were unable to see at the time as a white Western feminist trained in traditional European philosophy. Citing the work of feminist and gender-studies scholars from Argentina, Nigeria, and South Africa, Butler observes that many non-Western languages have long had a vocabulary for forms of gendered existence outside the male/female binary.

It’s Butler’s embrace of the ultimate impossibility (even undesirability) of finding one final answer to the question “But what is gender?” that animates their long intellectual and ethical engagement with the subject. At one point in this new book, discussing the work of pioneering feminist scholar Joan W. Scott, Butler calls gender a “form of power”; on the next page, it’s a “structure that saturates the world,” which, while not a contradiction of the previous formulation, is far from a simple restatement of the same idea. Still elsewhere, Butler designates gender as “a site where biological and social realities interact with one another.” Near the end of Who’s Afraid of Gender? comes a burst of lyricism not typical of Butler’s usual rigorously pragmatic voice: “Gender has to remain relatively wild in relation to all those who claim to possess its correct definition.” Here I understand wild not as a synonym for “fierce” or “unruly,” but as the opposite of “domestic” or “tame.” Like a deer encountered on a walk in the woods, gender should be allowed to take off at a run to wherever it’s headed, to lead a free life without fear of unasked-for intrusion. No one, including Butler themself, should be allowed to capture that wild thing.

What about that Bad Writing award? In their first trade-press book, Butler makes a concerted effort to keep Who’s Afraid of Gender? accessible and jargon-free. It is, without question, a demanding read, but not because the author is obfuscating or showing off. Rather, the difficulty derives from the rigor of the thought itself, and the work of accompanying the movement of that thought brings its own kind of pleasure. More than anything, reading this book reminded me of attending one of Butler’s large lecture classes for Berkeley undergrads, which I used to drop into sometimes for the sheer joy of watching Professor Butler think on their feet as they boiled down big ideas into a form that students new to that way of thinking and writing could understand. A generation after I was lucky enough to study with them, Butler has gone from a star in the world of academia to that rare thing: a genuine public intellectual, one whose goal is not to restrict their ideas to an academic in-group, but to bring them to the world and, perhaps, to change it. If you’re not sure whether this book is for you, watch one of the many clips online of Butler talking about their work, like this 2023 lecture, which presents much of the material that makes up the book’s conclusion. What Judith Butler was for me 25 years ago, they now are to whoever cares to read them: a born teacher.