What a bizarre choice.

BBC Debate Night then gives a short bio for each debater, concluding with

It looks like one of Moley’s jokes but it isn’t, that’s the actual BBC tweet.

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Oh look a sharp rise in referrals.

Wouldn’t you think that would alarm the people in charge? Wouldn’t you think they would pause to try to figure out why referrals skyrocketed like that? Wouldn’t you think they would not just assume it’s because a real need is at long last being met? Wouldn’t you think they would want to make sure they hadn’t simply created a market just as advertisers create markets for particular movies or shoes or cars? If you build it they will come along to get their bits cut off.

It never ceases to amaze me the rationalizing people do. People want moral certainty and simplicity, and that means they can’t bear to be seen to be challenging anything with a rainbow sticker stuck on it, because in a simple model of the world, only Bad People do Bad Things to the Rainbow People. The walls of fear and caution and panic I have had to dig around to get people to acknowledge — even in private, just one on one — some basic, obvious problems with pediatric “transition”…

It has made me realize that gay rights wasn’t primarily achieved through analysis and understanding, much of it happened through rote learning. Society didn’t come together and think the issue through and conclude that there’s no harm in homosexuality among consenting adults; rather, society was conditioned, like Pavlov’s dog, to associate challenging the Rainbow with future social punishment and shame. They simply memorized a rule: if you don’t get on board with the Rainbow’s demands, you risk finding yourself on the wrong side of history, sullied and shamed.

I can see it clear as day, that this is the calculus everyone’s doing. Not one fucking drop of critical thinking applied to the question of gay people’s well being, even as adolescent gay people’s bodies are being carved up. They’re hung up on the only question that matters to them: will I come out looking ok in this social shift? and they conclude that the safest bet is to just go with the flow and give the Rainbow whatever it wants. There’s an added rationalization, too, that this is “inside-the-rainbow” business — the Rainbow lobby is demanding this, and transition is being done to Rainbow people (set aside the circular logic there, that once you assign a child a trans identity you rationalize away your own responsibility because now they’re “one of them”), so the responsibility will ultimately land on the rainbow people themselves. Sort of like how many white Americans treat so-called Black-on-Black crime like it’s not their concern.

And that calculus has become so apparent to others — it’s become so obvious that a rainbow sticker is a license to do whatever the fuck you want — that people with malevolent intentions, or secret agendas or desires, or mental problems they’re running from, or just a yen to gain an edge or some social cred, have come flooding in, so much so that the Rainbow has swollen to ten times what it’s supposed to be. (Science says only about 2 to 3 percent of people are LGB, but upwards of a third of young people are now calling themselves “2SLGBTQQIA+”.)

More on the no more puberty blockers news:

Children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics, NHS England has confirmed. The government said it welcomed the “landmark decision”, adding it would help ensure care is based on evidence and is in the “best interests of the child”.

Makes you wonder why care wasn’t already based on evidence and in the best interests of the child.

It used to be widely understood that “in the best interests of the child” very very often meant “not what the child wants in the moment.” It used to be widely and well understood that children don’t always know what’s best for them. I still wonder how that understanding vanished so fast and thoroughly in so many people.

It follows a public consultation on the issue and an interim policy, and comes after NHS England commissioned an independent review in 2020 of gender identity services for children under 18. That review, led by Dr Hilary Cass, followed a sharp rise in referrals to the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids) run by the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust, which is closing at the end of March.

In 2021/22, there were over 5,000 referrals to Gids, compared to just under 250 a decade earlier.

Wouldn’t you think that would alarm the people in charge? Wouldn’t you think they would pause to try to figure out why referrals skyrocketed like that? Wouldn’t you think they would not just assume it’s because a real need is at long last being met? Wouldn’t you think they would want to make sure they hadn’t simply created a market just as advertisers create markets for particular movies or shoes or cars? If you build it they will come along to get their bits cut off.

No longer:

Children will no longer be prescribed puberty blockers at gender identity clinics, NHS England has confirmed.

Puberty blockers, which pause the physical changes of puberty such as breast development or facial hair, will now only be available to children as part of clinical research trials.

Fewer than 100 young people are currently on puberty blockers and they will be able to continue their treatment, it has been confirmed.

But is it “treatment” or is it something else? That’s rather the issue, isn’t it?

Stock on Butler part 2.

There isn’t a single objection lodged against opponents that does not come freighted with the implication of moral taint and/or stupidity. Of course, painting one’s intellectual enemies as cartoon characters is a known tactic of modern transactivism; still, it is shocking to see it done so crudely by someone who retains a high reputation in many quarters.

The many quarters are the more easily fooled ones, as of course Stock knows and expects us to understand.

It is also striking how hackneyed some of the thought is. Butler’s writing in her heyday at least displayed a bit of panache and originality, assuming you could parse it successfully. In contrast, here she comes over as in thrall to established activist tropes, and with all the depth of a TikTok video in places. She even cites Pink News as a source of data.

I wonder if Butler is as afraid of the Transish Inquisition as anyone else is, and so swapped Theory-riddled jargon for stale activist tropes as one might throw cookies at a hungry bear.

Whereas she used to insist, admirably, on fluidity and impermanence in the expression of gender identity, now she exhorts “affirmation” and recognition of “the reality of trans lives”. The chapter on British so-called TERFs is a compendium of smears culled from online teenagers about their gender-critical mums: they are not real feminists; they are effectively racists focusing on a white ideal of womanhood, on the side of “colonialism and empire”; they spread “baseless fears” about vulnerable transwomen; and so on.

The Karen approach. How impressive.

I’ve done my time in the academic salt mines trying to make sense of the contradictions in Butler’s writing so I’ll leave it to others to adjudicate who is right. Instead, I prefer to turn to a more interesting question, made perfectly legitimate by the precedent she herself sets. In producing such a terrible book, what is going on for Butler psychoanalytically? What is she really scared of?

I’ll stop reading for a minute to make my own guess before I know what Stock says. My guess is that she’s scared of reputational harm of the form: “you are one of those dreary old boring stupid kareny terf types instead of the cutting edge hipster profundity-dispenser you used to be.” She’s scared of being filed as one of them.

Now, what does Stock say? That broadly speaking that’s one likely reason but that there’s also another.

But there is also, I suspect, a deeper fear at work here, and an unconscious desire to sublimate guilt. (See how annoying this is, Professor Butler?) The level of projection in this book — by which I mean, attribution of unrecognised features of one’s own behaviour to others, in the Freudian and Jungian sense — is off the scale. Butler sees authoritarian cancellers and enemies of critical thought everywhere, though apparently not so much among those closest to home.

She tells us that in the anti-gender movement, there is a hatred of rational discussion. To say gender is an ideology is, in itself, “an ideological move par excellence”. Whereas gender studies — gender studies, for gods’ sake — is a “diverse field, marked by internal debate”, by contrast its enemies refuse to “read the texts they oppose — or to learn how best to read them” and they “do not hold themselves to standards of consistency or coherence”. 

While the trans ideologues do? Pause to laugh some more. But Stock doesn’t let us get away with just laughing – she says there’s something to it.

Still, there is something correct in Butler’s observation that critics of transactivism are getting increasingly intolerant and illiberal. The dominant emotion she attributes to them is fear, but a more accurate description would be fury.

Nailed it. I’ll cop to that. I have lots and lots and lots of fury.

It is obvious that many across the world have become angered by the grandiose, narcissistic overreach of academics like her: thinkers indifferent to the real-world havoc wrought by their barmy ideas and impenetrable speech codes, and who pillory all objectors as badly intentioned or deeply confused, no matter what the background reasoning. Butler is right to fear increasing threats towards LGBT people and women across the globe but fails to notice her own significant responsibility in the aetiology of the problem. Speaking personally, I’m not remotely afraid of gender, understood blandly as sexual and bodily expression; but I am very afraid of what Judith Butler has done with it.

Brilliant ending.

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.

Is that true?

I assume that by ” those who have whipped up Britain’s unhinged transphobic moral panic” Jones means those who have pointed out that people can’t change sex and that men who claim to be women are displacing and bullying women.

Is it likely that four teenagers would stab a man who claims to be a woman because gender critical feminists point out that men can’t be women? I don’t think it’s likely at all. I don’t think stabby teenagers spend much time considering the arguments of gender critical feminists. To be fair I don’t think they spend any time doing that.

What was their first clue?

To Donald Trump, Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán is “fantastic,” Chinese leader Xi Jinping is “brilliant,” North Korea’s Kim Jong Un is “an OK guy,” and, most alarmingly, he allegedly said Adolf Hitler “did some good things,” a worldview that would reverse decades-old US foreign policy in a second term should he win November’s presidential election, multiple former senior advisers told CNN.

“He thought Putin was an OK guy and Kim was an OK guy — that we had pushed North Korea into a corner,” retired Gen. John Kelly, who served as Trump’s chief of staff, told me. “To him, it was like we were goading these guys. ‘If we didn’t have NATO, then Putin wouldn’t be doing these things.’”

No, he’d be doing much worse things.

The former president’s admiration for autocrats has been reported on before, but in comments by Trump recounted to me [Jim Sciutto] for my new book, “The Return of Great Powers,” out Tuesday, Kelly and others who served under Trump give new insight into why they warn that a man who consistently praises autocratic leaders opposed to US interests is ill-suited to lead the country in the Great Power clashes that could be coming, telling me they believe that the root of his admiration for these figures is that he envies their power.

“He views himself as a big guy,” John Bolton, who served as national security adviser under Trump, told me. “He likes dealing with other big guys, and big guys like Erdogan in Turkey get to put people in jail and you don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. He kind of likes that.”

In other words he’s that terrible combination: power-hungry and profoundly stupid.

“Trump believed in the power of his personal charisma and diplomacy,” recalled Matthew Pottinger, his deputy national security adviser, who was deeply involved in Trump’s meetings with North Korean leader Kim and Chinese President Xi. “He had almost unlimited faith in it. That was as true with Kim as it was with Xi — but also with allies too.”

What personal charisma would that be?

Trump and Orban agree to murder Ukraine.

Donald Trump “will not give a penny” to Ukraine if he is re-elected US president, the far-right Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, said after a controversial meeting with Trump in Florida.

“He will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war,” Orbán told state media in Hungary on Sunday. “Therefore, the war will end, because it is obvious that Ukraine can not stand on its own feet.” According to Orbán, Trump has a “detailed plan” to end the Ukraine war, which began two years ago when Russia invaded.

Oh please. Trump has no detailed anything. It doesn’t take a detailed plan, all it takes is a Toddler No, and that’s all Trump has. And the plan is not to “end the war,” the plan is to allow Putin to devour Ukraine the way Trump devours a hamburger.

The US and its allies have supported Ukraine but further US aid is held up in Congress, having passed the Senate with bipartisan support only to be blocked in the House, which is controlled by far-right Trump allies.

They’re not even far right. They’re not even political. They’re just destroyers. Trash everything & give us money: that’s their “politics.”

Calling Trump “a man of peace”, Orbán said: “If the Americans don’t give money and weapons, along with the Europeans, the war is over. And if the Americans don’t give money, the Europeans alone can’t finance this war. And then the war is over.”

Peace shmeace. It’s not about “the war is over”; it’s about Putin wins and Ukraine is obliterated.

Despite facing 91 criminal charges and having suffered multimillion-dollar reverses in civil suits concerning his business affairs and a rape allegation a judge deemed “substantially true”, Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.

And the US is a bitter degrading blight on the global landscape.

Trump said: “There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic, he’s a non-controversial figure because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss. No, he’s a great leader.”

The profound understanding of democracy from the next “boss” of the US.

Wait, you mean Hamas aren’t the good guys? Are you sure? Did you check with them?

Arresting the victim part 3:

During the protest some activists were heard chanting “Zionist scum, off our streets” and several placards showed support for the Houthi militias in Yemen targeting ships going through the Red Sea.

One pro-Palestine activist on the march could be seen wearing a protective helmet and carrying a riot shield. The man, whose helmet was similar to those used by reporters in combat zones, paraded holding the riot shield with the slogan: “Resistance is justified when your land is occupied.”

One young woman held a placard that read: “One holocaust does not justify another,” in defiance of criticism that such comparisons are anti-Semitic, and another placard showed a bull depicting Gaza goring a person with a Star of David on their body saying: “Slaying of the beast.”

So no wonder the Met is protecting the pro-Palestine marchers and pushing their critics to the ground.

This isn’t new, sadly. It goes back at least as far as the fatwa on Rushdie. It goes back at least to the days when the BBC constantly platformed the Muslim Council of Britain instead of its many critics.

In a video of the incident, Mr Ghorbani is heard shouting, “Shame on you” as officers held him down before saying: “I wrote down Hamas is a terrorist organisation… but they arrested me.”

Mr Ghorbani, an IT professional, said that he had been assaulted by pro-Palestine protesters as he stood holding his sign objecting to Hamas, which is a banned terror group.

Well it may be a banned terror group but it’s also The Authentic Voice of the People, while its critics are nonconforming troublesome rabble.

“They attacked me from behind and hit me in the head,” he said. “They pushed me and told me Hamas is a protector of Palestine. The police destroyed my sign and told me that I had harassed someone in the protest and that is why they arrested me.

“They arrested me because someone who supports Hamas attacked me and I defended myself. After 10 minutes my friends showed them a video of what I was doing and they released me. The person who attacked me was not arrested.”

Because that person is The Authentic Voice of the People.

Remember how the police arrested and then “de-arrested” a guy who was protesting Hamas on Saturday? It’s not working out well for them.

A former Cabinet minister has accused the Metropolitan Police of “emboldening” the mob after a counter-protester carrying a sign saying “Hamas is terrorist” at a pro-Palestine rally was arrested.

Niyak Ghorbani, 38,  was pulled to the ground and handcuffed by officers after an incident close to the march through central London on Saturday. He was arrested over an allegation of assault but was later de-arrested after officers reviewed footage of the incident.

The Met is now facing calls to take action against a protester who Mr Ghorbani, an Iranian who lives in Balham, says assaulted him.

The Met is also being told off for “two-tier policing” aka different rules for different protests. It’s much like the trans thing: pro-trans ideologists can do no wrong while critics of trans ideology can do no right. If there’s a brawl, it is necessarily the fault of the ideology-dissenter.

Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister, launched an attack on the Met for their handling of the incident and said that officers were failing to tackle “the mob” and putting free speech at risk.

“This shameful incident is the logical endpoint of consistently prioritising ‘community relations’ over even-handedly enforcing the law: the mob is emboldened and free-speech is threatened,” he said. “It’s a chilling inversion of what law-enforcement is about. Two-tier policing must end.”

Police said officers intervened to prevent a “breach of the peace” and the arrest was not over the placard but the Campaign Against Antisemitism said that the response was “outrageous” and disproportionate.

Sssshhhhhh. The Islamist communinny, like the trans communinny, can do no wrong. Critics of the communinny can do no right. This is the rule.

“Scotland will do it! Tell Scotland! Scotland will hit her for us!”

Trans rights activists are attempting to have JK Rowling arrested by Scottish police over “misgendering” after a complaint was dismissed in England.

Northumbria Police last week confirmed that it did not believe the Harry Potter author had committed a criminal offence by publicly calling India Willoughby, a transgender TV personality, a male.

Willoughby had gone to police claiming Rowling had “definitely committed a crime” by referring to the former Celebrity Big Brother contestant as male.

Willoughby is definitely a man, and a nasty aggressive bullying man at that.

The 58-year-old former newsreader has vowed to appeal against “their decision not to prosecute” and is to request a review of the decision.

His spite is a thing of wonder.

Scotland has a different legal system than [from] England, with a controversial hate crime law, which was passed by MSPs exactly three years ago on Monday, due to come into force on April 1.

Brilliant choice of date.

In a letter to Holyrood’s criminal justice committee, the Edinburgh-based policy analysis group Murray Blackburn Mackenzie (MBM) raised concerns about implementation of the new law, which creates a new offence of “stirring up hatred” against protected groups, including trans people.

…

“Despite a clear promise made in the Parliament, over the three years since the Act was passed, the government has done nothing to engage with those concerned about the impact of the Bill on freedom of expression on questions of sex and gender identity,” MBM said. “MSPs emphasised the importance of police training, but what’s happening there is still unknown. The whole process has been a black box of top-down, closed policy-making, that does not inspire confidence.”

That’s for damn sure.

Deutsche Welle on the opening of the Amsterdam Holocaust Museum:

Israeli President Isaac Herzog attended the opening of the National Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam on Sunday. The museum tells the stories of some of the 102,000 Jews who were deported from the Netherlands and murdered in Nazi camps during the Holocaust in World War II. Three-quarters of Dutch Jews were among the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.

Who were the Nazis? Members of a genocidal political movement in Germany. DW is to the Nazis as the Washington Post is to slavery. That’s a crude comparison, but my point is that nationality is not the same as political or moral orientation. Netanyahu isn’t Israel, Germany isn’t Nazism, the Washington Post isn’t Trump. The opening of a Holocaust museum is not endorsement of war on Palestinian civilians.

Among the exhibits are a prominent photo of a boy walking past bodies at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after it was liberated, dress buttons excavated from the grounds of the Sobibor extermination camp, and walls covered with the texts of hundreds of laws discriminating against Jews enacted by the German occupiers of the Netherlands.

Enacted by the German occupiers but ordered by a much smaller set of people who had totalitarian control of the German state.

Dutch pro-Palestinian organization The Rights Forum called Herzog’s attendance “a slap in the face of the Palestinians who can only helplessly watch how Israel murders their loved ones and destroys their land.” More than 30,000 Palestinians have died in the war, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.

Amnesty International put up detour signs around the museum to direct Herzog to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the nearby city of The Hague, where South Africa filed a case against Israel accusing it of genocide. Israel denies the allegations. A smaller pro-Israel group also gathered nearby with flags and photos of the hostages that were kidnapped by Hamas militants.

Police officers were present to deescalate tensions between the two demonstrations.

Good luck with that.

Well whaddya know:

Transgender golfer Hailey Davidson’s playing options just got significantly smaller.

Transgender i.e. male.

NXXT Golf announced on Friday that, effective immediately, competitors must be a biological female at birth to participate. A statement from the tour notes that it underscores the organization’s commitment to “maintaining the integrity of women’s professional golf and ensuring fair competition.” The news comes on International Women’s Day.

“As we navigate through the evolving landscape of sports, it is crucial to uphold the competitive integrity that is the cornerstone of women’s sports,” said NXXT Golf CEO Stuart McKinnon in a statement.

Yes, it is. Thank you for noticing.

“Our revised policy is a reflection of our unwavering commitment to celebrating and protecting the achievements and opportunities of female athletes. Protected categories are a fundamental aspect of sports at all levels, and it is essential for our Tour to uphold these categories for biological females, ensuring a level playing field.”

Davidson, a three-time winner on the tour, currently ranks second on the mini tour’s season standings. She has played nine times this season on the NXXT.

That is, he has played nine times this season, thus taking nine opportunities to play away from a woman.

Gender gender gender gender.

Did I mention gender?

Hannah Gadsby has a new gendersomething. Yay.

Nanette was already an awards-scooping live show before Netflix’s cameras started rolling, but its meteoric success made a proper international celebrity of the festival circuit staple. It also made Gadsby, who grew up in a small town in north-west Tasmania, an unexpected figurehead for LGBTQ+ representation in Hollywood.

Yet again – how does that work? How can anyone be a figurehead for all of those categories?

Gadsby spends much of their time based in Australia but has seen trans rights become a divisive political issue in the US and UK, one often divorced from the voices and experiences of trans and genderqueer people.

I think you’ll find that a hell of a lot of LGBTQ+ “activism” is very divorced from the voices and experiences of L and G and B people who don’t subscribe to trans doctrine. Sometimes people simply disagree on things and therefore are “divorced” from each other.

“It’s just part of the broader culture wars – trans people are being held up as this wedge issue. It’s happened before, we know it’s wrong. We always feel regret, culturally, after these moments – ‘Oh we were a bit harsh there weren’t we?’ But these moral panics exist in a time of great uncertainty, which it is, and certain groups of individuals cop it. And that’s what’s happening, and that makes it very dangerous. And Australia isn’t immune.”

Apparently Gadsby hasn’t noticed that the QT communinny is more than a bit harsh to people who reject trans ideology. What about that eh? Maybe the harshness isn’t all on one side?

University of Victoria celebrates Women’s Day by celebrating men, because of course it does.

Psst – Jamey – trans is colonialism. You’re the colonizer, chum.

The Washington state department of health promoted this article on Facebook and did so without any “pregnant people” genuflection so I got my hopes up, but of course that was a mistake.

Abortion

Abortion is legal and protected in Washington state. Abortions have been legal in Washington since 1970, and that has not changed even after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

A lawsuit in Texas seeks to remove U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval of mifepristone, a safe and effective drug that’s been used in medication abortions by millions of Americans for over 20 years. As of April 21, 2023, the Supreme Court maintained full access to the drug nationally.

Third sentence in and it’s all over. It’s not women who need abortion rights, it’s “Americans.”

How WA Protects Abortion Rights

In Washington:

• Abortions are legal up to the point of fetal viability (as determined by a provider) or to protect the life or health of the pregnant individual.

Were you thinking “or to protect the life or health of the pregnant woman”? Shame on you.

People of any age have the right to independently consent for their own abortion care – parental involvement is not required.

A boy age 12 can absolutely consent for his own abortion care.

Be less inclooosive, Washington state.

Hey gang, let’s go protest the opening of a Holocaust museum. Maybe dress up as Anne Frank to really underline the point.

Oh dear, Willz is feeling let down by the police, who are after all there to do the bidding of angry men.

Sarah Ditum takes a chainsaw to Judith Butler’s new book:

Who’s Afraid of Gender? is an elaboration on her big idea, as laid out in the 1990 book Gender Trouble, that gender is “performative” — that is, whether you’re a man or a woman is determined by whether you act in a manly or womanly way, not by your physical body. This is the intellectual ballast in the now-common claim that “trans women are women, trans men are men”. (Butler identifies as nonbinary, but generously tolerates being called “she”.)

The insight that men and women’s behaviour is at least partly socially constructed wasn’t new, but Butler pushed it further. Not only gendered behaviour but sex itself was socially constructed. Female, she wrote in Gender Trouble, “no longer appears to be a stable notion”. The proper job of feminism, therefore, was to ask “what political possibilities are the consequence of a radical critique of the categories of identity”.

Welp, now we’ve found out, and it turns out they suck. The political possibilities are men grabbing everything that belongs to women and bullying women who object and destroying feminism. Happy now?

All critics of gender ideology, according to Butler, desire “the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as ‘born female at birth’, resume their natural and ‘moral’ positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy”.

You what now? How did that last clause get in there? Same way all the rest of it gets in there: sheer arbitrary will.

In all the verbosity you could almost miss how insulting Butler is to female victims of male violence. But it’s there. After a section on JK Rowling, Butler writes: “Living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality.” In other words, women who have been abused (which includes Rowling) cannot be trusted. No wonder Butler doesn’t want to identify as a woman: she doesn’t seem to like them very much.

It’s mutual, babes.