Reading Kathleen Stock’s heartwarming review of Judith Butler’s new book on Y R terfs so evil. I’ll say one thing for JB: she’s a brilliant catalyst for jokes.

Not for her the pedestrian business of going through critics’ arguments, providing non-partisan evidence, and patiently exposing internal contradictions and gaps in an understated but cumulatively devastating manner. 

She could do that, she says, but she goes on to not do it.

Instead, she wants to give the people what nobody was really asking for: a deconstruction of the “syntactical elements” of the “anti-gender movement”, understood as a “phantasmic scene” according to the “theoretical formulation of Jean Laplanche”.

Oh well then. If we’re bringing in Jean Laplanche then it’s game over. (New movie title? When Butler Met Plank?)

Butler is very compassionate though.

Or perhaps — and this is about as charitable as it gets — you are simply a naïve and credulous fool, for whom getting in a moral panic about gay marriage and LGBTQ+ library books acts as a psychic substitute for reasonable fears about climate change and neoliberalism. As such, you are being played by the reactionary rhetoric of various deplorables, including Orbán, Trump, Bolsonaro, various Popes, and er… J.K. Rowling, Holly Lawford-Smith, and Kathleen Stock. 

And then we get to my favorite sentence so far. (I haven’t read the whole thing yet. I had to interrupt myself to share.)

Though at times the author feigns charitable curiosity about some of her argumentative targets, the attitude never lasts. A sentence about gender-critical feminists that starts with “To be fair” ends up, a mere clause or two later, talking about their supposed affinities with “fascist politics”.

Bahahahahaha that’s made my day.

More to follow.