Do you understand the concerns of feminists?
Another bum-kissing paean to Judith Butler, this one from EL PAÍS.
Butler — a pioneering voice in feminism, gender studies, critical theory, and contemporary philosophy — registered as non-binary in California years ago. While their pronouns changed to they/them, they chose to keep their name, a decision, they say, [that] surprised the courthouse clerk at the time.
Really??? How fascinating. Can you tell us more? What was she wearing? What was the clerk wearing? What was the weather like? Were there refreshments?
To be fair, most of the interview is unsurprising and not terrible. Even Judith Butler can talk sense some of the time. But then we hit a bump.
Q. Do you understand the concerns of feminists who think that gender could result in the erasure of women?
A. Some feminists, I think unwittingly, have allied themselves in places like the U.K. and Spain with the far right when it comes to instigating this phantasm about gender. I understand those fears, but that doesn’t mean that I think they’re based on knowledge. Perhaps those feminists need a better understanding of who trans people are. Womanhood won’t be erased just because we open the category and invite some more people in.
Excuse me?
That amounts to saying the meaning of the word “woman” won’t change just because we open the category and invite some men in.
Sorry, Professor Butler, but yes of course it fucking will. Women will still exist, yes, but the meaning of the word that names them will be different. And that matters, for a million obvious reasons.
This is a moment for expanding alliances, not to have sectarian struggles about bathrooms. Women know what it’s like to be denied health care. They are currently being deprived of access to reproductive health in several parts of the world, including the U.S. Women know how difficult and necessary it is to struggle for autonomy. So why would they not support trans struggles for health care and to live free of the fear of violence?
One, “struggles for health care” means struggles for medical interventions to change the outward markers of sex/gender. That’s not health care, it’s something else. Nobody is objecting to actual health care for trans people. Obviously trans people should get care for illnesses and injuries and the like. Should the male ones be allowed to bunk with the women in the hospital? No, but that’s not “health care”; that’s logistics.
Two, women’s struggles for autonomy are not the same thing as trans people’s “struggles” to get everyone to pay attention to them all the time no matter what.
Three, the “violence” thing is just silly or bullying or both. Nobody is saying hooray for violence against trans people. Some trans activists, on the other hand, are shockingly enthusiastic about violence against feminist women who point out that men can’t be women.
But I’ll let her have the last word, because she can talk sense when she wants to.
I don’t agree with a lot of what she stands for — fracking, migration, Palestine — and I did not actively support her candidacy. But I did vote for her. We have a pernicious history of misogyny, which is being celebrated in the person of Trump. Guilty of sexual crimes, he has done more than any other American person to demean and degrade women as a class. The people who say, “Oh, I don’t like that part of his behavior, but I’m going to vote for him anyway because of the economy,” they’re admitting that they are willing to live with that misogyny and look away from his sexual violence. The more people who say that they can “live with” racism and misogyny in a candidate, even if they’re not enthusiastic racists, the more the enthusiastic racists and the fascists become stronger. I see a kind of restoration fantasy at play in many right-wing movements in the U.S. People want to go back to the idea of being a white country or the idea of the patriarchal family, the principle that marriages are for heterosexuals. I call it a nostalgic fury for an impossible past.
Not bad.
Well, that’s akin to a miracle, but I suppose it’s easy to be right about Trump when he goes out of his way to be wrong at every turn.
That is a great phrase. I’m not sure if she meant ‘impossible past’ the same way I think of it, but since the past they long for is more constructed than reality, showing only the June Cleaver type of fantasy, it is impossible.
It’s a bit poetic that way, in the sense of being able to mean more than one thing all at the same time – ambiguity as Empson meant it (unless I’m wrong about what he meant, which is always possible). It is a fine phrase – nostalgic fury describes such a lot. I’m oddly pleased to find that she can do it.
Not least the fact that TRAs have made it perfectly clear that all of “women’s rights” are supposed to go with the name rather than the actual people.
“Those fears” are based on experience. Men claiming to be women have been put in women’s prisons, women’s hospital wards, in, and in charge of women’s rape crisis centres, women’s sports teams. It’s not hypothetical, conjectural, or imagined; it has happened and is happening. If none of those men is “actually trans” then it’s up to the trans activist community and the captured institutions perpetrating these outrages to come up with some kind of definition and diagnosis that keeps the predators out. But the only real definition is sex-based, and they’ve already ruled that out, so all of the hurt, anguish and injustice suffered by women subjected to the results justified by the breezy, transgressive, theoretical musings of Butler and her acolytes is at least partly heir fault. If her precious “theories” are being misapplied, she should say so. If they’re not being abused by activists and authorities, then she has to own it. Meanwhile, women pay the price, while activists studiously look the other way or claim that these predicted (and ongoing) results are part of some wildly unlikely, dystopian future.
I think they know all too well. See above. That’s more than enough data and “understanding” to refute Butler’s charge of ignorance. Again, at women’s great cost. Whether or not they’re “really” “trans”, or just opportunists, they’re all still men. I think it’s Butler who needs a “better understanding”, along with some kind of acknowledgement of the actual harms that have already occurred in the name of trans “rights”.
She’s so close!
That impossible past, the glorious, yearned-for, Whiter-than-White, heteronormative, Christian, patriarchal past that MAGA promises to restore, never actually existed. It is a delusional fantasy that relies on papering over and sweeping away the large, uncomfortable parts of the past that don’t fit or support this fairy tale. The fury is inevitable, the failure from which it arises built into the fictitiousness of its foundations. But what is trans anger but a fury for an impossible future? That delusional fantasy papers over or sweeps away the uncomfortable fact that humans can’t change sex. None of those who’ve embarked on the “gender journey” will ever reach the destination that they were promised. Word games like Butler’s can’t fix that.
There could be ambiguity about Empson’s use of ambiguity? Meta
The blade cuts both ways, as it always has in politics. There are always many things to oppose, and they’re never distributed neatly so that we can say Candidate A is all bad while Candidate B is all good. We have to decide which combination is less intolerable, the lesser evil, one might say. I thought this was common wisdom. There are no perfect candidates; there are only people. There are no perfect solutions; there are only tradeoffs.
Well put, Nullius. I’ve never seen a candidate I agree with on everything; I often claim that probably would be true even if I were running. Of course, that’s only partly joking. There are things people could find that I’ve said in the past that I no longer believe; opinions change, at least if one is open to examining the evidence and admitting they might be wrong.