Searching for the roots
Someone called Wren Sanders wrote a deferential piece on Judith Butler. Before we read it let’s find out who Wren Sanders is.
Wren Sanders (she/they) is an award-winning journalist and the editor of Them’s Community Section. Since joining the site in 2019, she has explored subjects such as Arca’s divine mutations, the case against LGBTQ+ military inclusion, and the power of trans monstrosity. As an editor, she is drawn to stories of resilience and insurgent joy, critiques of contemporary culture and politics, and visions of more livable worlds.
Is insurgent joy like trans joy, or is it a different kind of joy altogether? How do they both relate to intersectional joy? I’ll put research on that question aside for later, or never. So:
To be trans in the United States today is to live with a preternaturally high tolerance for the absurd. It was just a few years ago that conservative lawmakers in Ohio were faced with the mortal and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic and chose to turn the state’s legislative focus to the “issue” of five transgender girls, out of some 400,000 high school athletes, competing in youth sports.
Ah; so that’s where we are. We are of the school of thought that sneers when anyone says it’s not fair for male people to infiltrate women’s sports.
Hundreds of anti-trans bills later, it seems abundantly clear, if not painfully obvious, that there must be something deeper than rank transphobia fueling the right-wing fixation with our bodies and lives.
So Wren is a man who pretends to be a woman and treats the rights of actual women as disposable. Just the right fella to do another love letter to Butler.
The philosopher Judith Butler has spent the last several years searching for the roots of this gender panic. In their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux), the famed critical theorist frames the scourge of anti-trans legislation here in the U.S. as just one tentacle of a global neo-fascist crusade.
Oh dear. Wren is trying to write with style or panache or something, so we get a crusade with tentacles.
The “anti-gender ideology movement,” as Butler calls it, exists everywhere from Bolsanaro’s Brazil to Putin’s Russia to the TERFs of the United Kingdom and beyond. And though it may take slightly unique forms
Hahahaha “slightly unique” – this guy is a real ringer.
The interview itself is dull and badly written and edited. There is one interesting bit though where Butler just makes a dumb mistake. Not her usual word-salad “sophisticated” mistake but just a clunker. Wren invites her to demonize JKR some more and we get:
God, why does she do this? I’m going to just look this up…Oh here it is: “Happy Birthing Parent Day to all whose large gametes were fertilized, resulting in small humans whose sex was assigned by doctors making mostly lucky guesses.” I see, so she’s making fun of us.
You know, I’m a parent. I didn’t give birth to anybody. I’m no less of a parent than somebody who did. When she talks that way, she’s putting down adoptive parents, she’s putting down blended families, she’s putting down all kinds of kinship arrangements where kids end up with new guardians or new parents after having lost theirs — in war, or through forcible migration, or any number of issues.
Except she’s not, because she didn’t say “parent,” she said “birthing parent.” See? Birthing. The point of that was to specify the kind of parent that gives birth as opposed to the kind that doesn’t.
Not one of Butler’s better chats.
Yes, I agree. But not in the way you’re thinking.
To be trans in the United States today is to live with a preternaturally high tolerance for cognitive dissonance.
To quote tigger the wing from the “She didn’t blink” thread:
Yes, indeed. Absurd.
She has better chats? I thought this brief quote, clunker and all, was at least comprehensible, and that its clarity made the mistake more obvious than it would have been had she use her more usual style wherein the point being made (assuming there is one) gets lost in a digression of word salad and dies of malnutrition before reaching its conclusion.
Well, slightly better perhaps. I think there was one I shared recently in which she talked a little bit more like a human being, some of the time. It’s all relative innit.
Standard BS relying on lack of epistemic closure. Focus on the five boys. Don’t make the simple inference that those five boys’ actions affect far more than five girls. It’s the same thing in discussions of prisons. Focus on the potential danger faced by the cross-dressing man and ignore the endangerment of every woman in the female prison.
I have to keep reminding myself of everything I’ve learned about intelligence distributions and epistemic load to hold to the maxim of not attributing malice when incompetence will suffice. Unfortunately, both are rather demoralizing explanations.
Mixing metaphors used to be considered poor writing, didn’t it? (Except in very intentional subversions, of course.) Maybe I’m just misremembering middle school English.
It’s the rest of us who’ve had to develop a “preternaturally” high tolerance for the absurd.