The Eternal Recurrence of Gender
On Judith Butler, Anti-Zionism, and transmisogyny
Image: Erin Connolly, Nymph Meal (2021).
This essay was originally published in The Whitney Review Issue 003. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing. Purchase it here. This is an essay and review of Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender Now? that interpolates thoughts on their earlier book Parting Ways as well as the work of Jules Gill-Peterson, Erin Baker, Hannah Arendt, Laplanche, and Rebecca Jane Morgan.
Ghosts always ask something of us. They come back to haunt us because they have demand. Their names appear on beaches and on trees. Litanies of names are ready in parks and town squares. These names ask us about justice but justice is not running down like water. Righteousness is not rolling like a mighty stream. Ideas can be ghosts too. Fantasies that recur no matter how hard we try to suffocate them. Judith Butler’s very name recurs like a phantom evoking ideas of performativity, Gender Trouble, and dense theory speak. “‘Judith Butler’ is both an exciting idea and an actual person,” Molly Fischer wrote in The Cut. In an infamous 2021 Guardian interview, Butler even spoke about the legacy that follows them: “I have found a way to live to the side of my name.” They now offer something of a layman’s book on gender, focused on understanding the Right’s conception of gender.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? hypothesizes that “gender” is not just an ideology but a phantasy. A phantasy in the Laplanchian sense, a repository for the Right’s ghosts. Such constructions can hold, are even made, for contradictions. The abuse of children is hidden through the fear that “gender” is itself child abuse. The Right destroys and limits freedom in the very name of freedom. These dichotomies short-circuit any possible logical arguments, such passions are meant to stir up trouble and unite unlikely allies on the Right. Radical feminists, Republicans, and fascists abroad unite over “children’s safety” while denying trans children any of the same rights. Rights are stripped in the name of infringing on others’ rights. The Other is foreign, the Other is a threat.
The Other becomes “ideology,” linked to genocide. Anything can be genocide these days it seems — except actual genocide. The Pope has linked “gender theory” to both Hitler and the nuclear arms race. Gender theory, the Right argues, is a form of annihilation. Instead of perceiving its own war on bodily autonomy as destructive, it is the Left’s freedom that is seen as murderous.
Butler draws on the work of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to understand the construction of phantasy: “Condensation names how disparate psychic and social elements are arbitrarily connected with one another and reduced to a single reality. Displacement names the way that one or many topics are pushed out of the mind… in favor of the one that both stands for them and conceals them.” These two forces, Butler argues, demonstrate how the fantasy of gender is erected. Words like “gender’ and “ideology” become dumping grounds that can mean nearly anything in the rhetoric of the Right. “Rather than warding off destruction, the anti-gender ideology movement is dedicated to making an ever-more-destructive world.”
For Butler, this signifies the erosion of democracy. They argue that the religious Right sees reading as a form of feminized submission, recalling the emergence of trad-theory and trad-wives who wish to return to simpler times. Simpler times almost always mean a time without feminism. “This attitude is part of the broader anti-intellectual trend marked by its hostility to all forms of critical thought,” Butler points out.
Butler’s analysis of the Right’s hysteria is creative, carefully unpacking how their contradictory statements serve to bridge disparate conservative alliances while the Left merely bemoans their lack of common sense. They carefully point out the Right has a far more aggressive — and successful — way of harnessing hysteria. Butler’s argument that the Left needs to harness a more convincing passion to defeat the Right is less cohesive. Instead of threading a purely psychoanalytic argument or inserting a nuanced history of transphobia, they split their time to both — similar to the lack of coherence in their book The Force of Nonviolence. (In their new book they condemn paramilitary violence of all kinds — including in Palestine, as they recently have in the London Review of Books.)
“How does one argue with a psychosocial fantasy that gathers up so many anxieties?” Butler asks. Butler believes that we are all entitled to pleasure, joy, and ambivalence. This is a shared right, a part of being in community with one another. In Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, Butler draws on Hannah Arendt to argue that we do not get to choose with whom we share the world. “The ethical encounter with difference,” Butler calls it in Who’s Afraid Of Gender. It is hubristic to think we can choose our neighbors. That we can’t is the fundamental tenet of democracy and how Butler argues against Zionism. With regards to gender, the argument functions much the same, cis people can’t choose to live without trans people. The problem, of course, is that they can certainly try to destroy us.
+
It isn’t coincidental that Palestine comes up in Butler’s new book, nor is coincidental that many prominent TERFs and Zionists are one and the same. Both movements use displacement and condensation to assuage their guilt, claiming the Other is the one who is truly monstrous. Both use scant mythologies to claim trans people and Palestinians are evil, worthy of exterminating. Both ignore the ethical demand of living in a pluralistic society. The Nationalist Right would like to see a heterosexual, nationalist, conservative, homogenous world.
Butler methodically tracks transphobia and patriarchy across time and space from the Pope to the Supreme Court to a brief glossing of TERF history. Butler has long spoken out against TERFs, and even faced censorship for an interview in The Guardian where they denounced such gender-critical feminists. Butler argues that feminism is a field of alliances, not one where feminism can be owned like property. Trans-exclusive radical feminism believes there’s a “phantasmic” attack on womanhood that is simply not taking place. Regardless of the truth, this condensation allows TERFs to construct a common enemy out of trans people. Butler has an astute and clear maxim about the attacks on trans youth: “Harm is done to young people through the argument that harm is being prevented.” Butler writes gender-critical feminists will have to choose who they want to build an allegiance with — but of course, they have. Rebecca Jane Morgan has demonstrated that in her excellent study Gender Heretics, a passionate plea for Christians to turn away from transphobia and their alliance with gender-critical feminists.
There is a seance performed on the penis. Yes, curiously, Butler tries to do a reparative reading of the trans penis, arguing that it is a phantasy perceived as inherently violent even before violence has been done. “None of us were violated by an entire class, even if it sometimes feels that way.” Trauma, Butler says, is not social reality. Instead it can warp our ideas of what is really happening.
+
Ultimately, Butler doesn’t take their Laplachian reading of gender far enough — condensation and displacement cast trans women and women of color in particular as monstrous deviants. Trans scholars like Jules Gill-Peterson and Shon Faye have mounted more materialist critiques of the trans panic and the particular dimensions of transmisogyny. Butler mentions the phallus numerous times — though without the historical framework Gill-Peterson undertakes in A Short History of Transmisogyny. Butler’s theory isn’t weak per se, but it would benefit from delving into the specifics of transmisogyny or citing more trans scholars whose work often runs in tandem to their own. Butler is onto something when they analyze the specter of trans women, colonial gender, and radical feminists — but Christofascist scapegoating goes further.
The eternal recurrence of gender is a problem in and of itself. Butler’s whole point is that the word gender has become a stand-in for non-normative gender, neopronouns, and transness more generally. But the word has always had a spectral quality — to be gendered, as Butler has written about previously, can be a violent act that strips one of their agency. The ability to move through the world with bodily autonomy has been a geo-political issue across time and space — from hijras to travestis to the Public Universal Friend. Gender has always been a thorn in the side of empire. Gender has been a “wedge issue” long before the emergence of modern identity politics; it is a ghost forged in the colonial process of trans-feminization that Gill-Peterson describes in her most recent book. The word trans is a framework that unites disparate gendered embodiments in order to create a “problem” for the empire to solve.
+
When something is diabolical, Butler points out, the only way to get rid of it is to burn an effigy or perform an exorcism. Trans people, particularly trans women, are unbearable images to the Right. We are uncanny — known colloquially as traps and dolls. Things. Objects. Problems. This issue is further complicated in A Short History of Transmisogyny, where Gill-Peterson points out the way white supremacy enforced these gender norms and further constructed non-white femininity as deviant. Trans feminine people like travestis are seen as too much, or as Gill-Peterson paraphrased on a recent episode of Death Panel, “the most woman.”
Gender becomes a powerful enemy, even a “dictatorship,” a “lavender mafia,” or a group of “homofascists,” in some cases. But in truth, Butler points out, gender is merely a proxy for numerous “social dissatisfactions.” Instead of rallying around material issues of class, healthcare, or racism, the Church turns its citizens against a common enemy. When so many rely on the Church to fill in the gaps that austerity has left, it’s no wonder many have fallen in line.
“The obligation to discriminate follows, it seems, from the commitment to religious freedom,” they write. In many cases, the Church links up with the nation and the nuclear family, each one informing the other that they are under attack from the specter of gender. The word loses its meaning on purpose — the contradictory nature gives its power. Gender is an outsider, slinking around for an opportunity to erode borders, restrict freedom, and harm children. At times the forces of the Right invoke Leftist rhetoric to argue against so-called “gender.” The Pope says he is in favor of the poor, while deriding single-parent family structures. “Ideology” becomes a synonym for false, even though the Right has an ideology of its own. This destruction of language recalls Trump’s infamous line: “fake news.” Without a common language, it is even easier to construct a fantasy, one humming with fear, smoke, and mirrors.
One of Butler’s strongest points about displacement is that it often hides the very accusation it makes. For instance, the Church accuses queer people of being pedophiles as a way to obscure its own history of sexual violence: “Haunted by its own abuse of children, the Church externalizes the origin of child abuse, attributing it to sexual and gender minorities who have for the most part thought carefully about matters of consent.”
Even thinking about queerness becomes cause for concern–as Butler puts it, a sliding of premise and conclusion that argues just reading or thinking about being gay can transform the subject. This is a case of the Right protesting too much: “Those who seek to make queer life unthinkable have, in fact, already thought it, which is why their efforts are invariably fraught and repetitious.” To attribute books with such talismanic power is not altogether wrong, but certainly one does not become Other simply through an encounter with the Other.
Butler notes that books on the Holocaust are censored alongside books about race and gender–the ethical demand that arises from seeing the Other must be wiped out. This, of course, also applies to the US media’s treatment of Palestine and libraries’s refusals to stock books about Palestine. If one sees one must think, and thinking, Butler shows us, is a valuable process the Right does not want us to do. In Parting Ways, Butler points out that Arendt believes thinking is one of our valuable moral weapons and that Eichmman’s failure was not just his actions, but also his neglect to think before acting. Of course, a reliance on thinking as protection from doing harm is an incomplete analysis, but thinking is a first step to right speech and right action.
Thinking about something is a form of submission, “to be overwhelmed by it, or pierced by it.” The Right’s patriarchal dominance does not want to be put in such a feminized position. Thought is too much like the act of penetration. “Don’t Say Gay” bills won’t even let the utterance of queerness occur. Similarly, Critical Race Theory is regarded as a danger to children–without any credence given to the children who may be in danger if no such theory is taught. These issues are deeply intertwined, all a danger to the nationalist project.
+
Butler’s book often relies on close-readings of the law and philosophy to understand how sex and gender are socially co-constructed. The last few chapters of the book are devoted to these iterative processes. The development of trans surgeries through coerced “corrective surgeries” of intersex children, the performative utterance, and racialized concepts of womanhood are all swiftly written through towards a natural conclusion. (Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child is, once again, glaringly missing.)
“Genders are not just assigned,” Butler writes. “They have to be realized or undertaken…and no single act of doing secures the deal.” Bad news for those who want to pass all the time. But also bad news for cis people who think their gender is eternally stable. Some of us are simply gendered the way we want more often. Butler argues we must make life more livable for more people. Thus, if someone is nonbinary in order to move through the world in a way that allows them can become socially embodied, then what’s the harm? Butler argues that we should each let the other live their desire, that we must make “desire desirable again.”
A politics of desire runs both ways: destructive and freeing. Butler seems to forget that for many it's much more fun to knock down a tower than to build one up from the ground. Building a constructive revolution is less sexy because it requires experimentation rather than vengeful glee. Not all revolutions are meant to be additive, some are merely obstructive. So how do we make a reparative reading of gender? Do we engage with TERFs and the Right at large with common sense or arguments about the contradictions of their own ideology?
+
One possible way forward begins by decentering a Western notion of transness, a kind of trans politics that focuses on legibility in the eyes of the state. Instead of shrinking, trans feminine people can, in colloquial terms, become ungovernable by being the most feminine, the most woman, as Gill-Peterson phrases it when discussing travesti culture. “Feminity is the reward, here and now.” Elsewhere in A Short History of Transmisogyny, she asks “What if the trans queens of the gay world were actual queens, sovereign figures meant to lead all sorts of exiles from American culture labeled deviant?” It’s important to note that for Gill-Peterson this is not the tokenization or sacrificial artifice of utilizing Black trans women as a material, “a preface to someone else’s work, used up in memoriam.” This is about who’s actively leading the movement, not about invoking symbols. The aim is “to transform what is already here, instead of hoping one day the world will be redeemed.”
If we want to create a banner that is more seductive than the Right’s homogeneity, it can’t be one we create while on our back legs. We must move forward and play offense. The revolution must be sensual. It must be a warm, vigorous, inviting alternative that promises more, not less—not the least amount of rights we can claw back from the State.
In Gender Heretics, Rebecca Jane Morgan argues that before the Fall of Man, “Gender [was]… a love language… a tool for self-exploration, not a means of hierarchically distinguishing roles.” We must each discover how to translate the enigma of gender that is handed to us. This process is not isolated, it’s a socially co-constructed process. Butler argues that we must see gender as the opportunity to “affirm the value of openness and alliance.” We must not decide there is only one language to translate the enigma of gender into. Gender must remain open or risk becoming colonial. This is the ethical demand of the other: openness, mutual struggle, shared precarity.
If we engage in shared precarity, our ethical demands for the other extend outward in polymorphous directions, not just to do right by those gendered other than us—but to do right across broad, multivalent coalitions. We do not need to share the same concept of democracy as Butler or Arendt to understand the idea that no one chooses who they live with. No one gets to choose their neighbors, as Butler discusses in Parting Ways, to do so is genocide. Yet too many are attempting to do this right now both in America and Israel. In February, Aaron Bushnell self-immolated in protest against the Zionist war machine. Many have considered what it means to self-sacrifice in the name of making life more livable for others. Tenzin Paldron recognizes the “virtue and remaking of suffering” in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of resistance through flames. Erik Baker calls the legacy of immolation “a challenge to the rest of us to prove with our own freedom that there are other ways to meaningfully resist a society whose cruelty has become intolerable.” This is the gauntlet. To make the world more sustainable for all. We must create a world where all are free to live and settler-colonialism has no place. Cohabitation is not merely humanism, but the very basis of the ethical demand of the other.
Recent writing:
On Garth Greenwell for The Guardian.
On Sophie’s New Album for Vogue.
On Doll Invasion and Fire Island for Vogue.
Drift Mentions on Bright Eyes and The Substance.
Waiting for the Fear in the new issue of The Believer. Print only currently.