a common struggle for equality

September 23, 2020 1:57 AM

Judith Butler interviewed in the New Statesman (UK). In which Butler demonstrates how you answer reductive bad-faith biased questions with elegance and clarity.

Some highlights:

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.

[...]

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.

[...]

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.


[...] feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.

And, as commentary, a short thread by sociologist Katherine Cross:

two things to point out about Butler's magisterial replies here: 1) trans people have been saying these same things for years yet, sadly, we still need a Judith Butler to say them to outlets like the NS

and 2) Ferber's interview makes clear how deeply TERFism has intellectually impoverished the mainstream media discussion of feminism in the UK (and, to a nontrivial degree, elsewhere too).

Look at how narrow the terms of discussion are. The same two TERF talking points and JKR.

Ferber's sad questions reveal a feminism stripped of any intellectual content or moral horizon beyond the comments on JK Rowling's tweets.

Butler's replies are, make no mistake, excellent, eloquent, and worth quoting but she was also hitting home runs off a tee. The TERF talking point that "feminists" and "trans activists" are irreconcilable opposites, are completely different groups, is an obvious lie for instance.

But it's an obvious lie that nevertheless commands miles worth of column inches, particularly in the British media, which has reduced nearly all discussion of feminism to a carnivalesque referendum on whether trans women are a threat because we need to pee.

This fatal narrowing of horizons has been obvious for a long time but Alona Ferber's interview makes it plain; it's as if she didn't know what else to ask, how else to phrase these things. The alpha is the bathroom predator myth, the omega is JKR's Twitter.

And while I am grateful for Judith Butler, I lament that someone of her intellectual stature is *reduced* to having to answer these insipid questions, and that we're all supposed to pretend they exhaust the issue of trans civil rights or trans feminism.

To no one's great surprise, a group of reactionaries who claim to support free expression have actually narrowed it to the point of suffocation. TERFs have eroded centuries of feminist work into a few memeable talking points repeated by pliable British hacks.

posted by bitteschoen (2 comments total)

This has been doing the rounds in my Twitter feed as a master class in how to immediately demolish poor framing. A very satisfying read.
posted by Paragon at 2:19 AM on September 23, 2020

Demolishing poor framing is Butler's greatest skill. Gender Trouble itself spends about 80% of the book destroying other philosophers' arguments about what gender "is" before finally assembling a potential reconstruction of gender from the rubble of broken arguments. I feel like this article would benefit from being three times as long with even more of Butler destroying TERF arguments. However, she probably has other work to do.
posted by sixohsix at 2:41 AM on September 23, 2020