The New Yorker Radio Hour - Judith Butler Can’t “Take Credit or Blame” for Gender Furor

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

A legal assault on trans rights by conservative groups and the Republican Party is escalating, the journalist Erin Reed reports, with nearly five hundred bills introduced across the country  so far this year. Reed spoke with the Radio Hour about the tactics being employed. But long before gender theory became a principal target of the right, it existed principally in academic circles. And one of the leading thinkers in the field was the philosopher Judith Butler. In “Gender Trouble” (from 1990) and in other works, Butler popularized ideas about gender as a social construct, a “performance,” a matter of learned behavior. Those ideas proved highly influential for a younger generation, and Butler became the target of traditionalists who abhorred them. A protest at which Butler was burned in effigy, depicted as a witch, inspired their new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” It covers the backlash to trans rights in which conservatives from the Vatican to Vladimir Putin create a “phantasm” of gender as a destructive force. “Obviously, nobody who is thinking about gender . . . is saying you can’t be a mother, that you can’t be a father, or we’re not using those words anymore,” they tell David Remnick. “Or we’re going to take your sex away.” They also discuss Butler’s identification as nonbinary after many years of identifying as a woman. “The younger generation gave me ‘they,’ ” as Butler puts it. “At the end of ‘Gender Trouble,’ in 1990, I said, ‘Why do we restrict ourselves to thinking there are only men and women?’ . . . This generation has come along with the idea of being nonbinary. Never occurred to me. Then I thought, Of course I am. What else would I be? . . .  I just feel gratitude to the younger generation, they gave me something wonderful. That takes a certain humility.”  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Since the beginning of this year, legislatures around the country have introduced hundreds of bills that restrict, at least in some way, the rights of trans Americans. As of right now, we are at around 500, as of this morning, and last year, we had 550 the entire year. Aaron Reid is a journalist and trans advocate who compiles the data from around the country. And in fact, last year, that 550 number, that was twice as many as the year before. Now, these bills are not all being voted into law, but these aren't isolated cases. It's happening in state houses all over the country.

On the program today, I'll be speaking with Judith Butler, one of the most influential thinkers on this subject about what's motivating the attack on trans and LGBT rights. But first we wanted to hear from Aaron Reid about the wave of anti-trans legislation in the United States. And she talked with producer Jeffrey Masters. So, Aaron, we're talking about these anti-trans bills more broadly, but I want to get specific for a second. You know, using Florida as an example,

which has passed and proposed some of the most restrictive laws in the country, can you talk about what those bills are and how they're affecting people who live there? Florida just last year passed a ban on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, which is something many people have recognized. But what also happened there was they passed a restriction on transgender adults that very closely mirror the trap laws that were used to target abortion providers over the last few decades, basically stating that nurse practitioners could no longer provide care,

providing misinformation forms, very similar to the sort of abortion misinformation forms that we've seen and more. And these restrictions essentially are designed so that many clinics cannot meet those restrictions and therefore must close down. Another thing that I'll mention is that Florida has a bathroom ban, a criminal bathroom ban that could throw you in jail for up to a year for using the bathroom of your gender identity, and that makes it a very difficult place for trans people to travel in already. How is something like a bathroom ban enforced, if at all?

You know, we have seen a actually, surprisingly, a lack of enforcement in Florida. The fear is still there. And I think that a large way that the bathroom bans are enforced or through self-policing or through making people too scared to go to a bathroom. However, this has caught the eye of the DeSantis administration in Florida, which has issued rule changes to mandate that colleges and universities begin to enforce this legislation. They don't tell them how to. Like, you know, how do you do it? Do you require everybody to carry a birth certificate? Do you card people? as they go into the bathroom. The reality of this is that it's going to be enforced on people who are publicly trans, who are out as trans, and it's going to be used to basically call police whenever somebody says, oh, there's a trans person or there's a man in the bathroom is what's likely going to happen. We've actually seen this. There are videos of police being called against, quote-unquote, men in the bathroom who actually turn out to be cisgender women who are gender non-conforming, which are common targets of the legislation whenever police all.

are actually called. You know, my home state is in North Carolina, and in 2016, I know you know this, but they passed the HB2, which, among other things, banned trans people from using the proper bathroom that aligns with their gender identities. And we saw, in response, a tremendous backlash from the business community and also the sports world, the NBA, the NCAA, both move games outside the state. Why do you think you're not seeing a similar response today from the business community? Yeah, you're right.

PayPal pulled out. we saw $3.7 billion in revenue lost by the state of North Carolina. It was an unmedicated disaster. And so we actually have information from some email leaks that came out as well as some very public statements from these organizations that oppose transcare. They sort of looked to their wounds for four years and created a plan to bring this issue back up. And their plan was multi-fold. Number one, they focused on several states at once. It was much harder for a business to boycott multiple states than it is to boycott a single state in North Carolina. Number two, they focused on business-friendly states. So these are states like Florida and Texas, where it's very hard for a corporation to boycott.

And then there's a third rung of this. And I think this is a very important rung to note because it's something that queer people have had to experience from these major anti-trans influencers. And that is there is a sort of violent hate component to this where now if a corporation comes out in favor of trans people, they're going to get bomb threats. They're going to get real threats to the lives of employees. We saw what happened when Target had a Pride display. And in multiple Target stores across the country, there were videos of conservatives walking in, videotaping themselves, throwing things on the ground, yelling at employees, getting confrontational. And the company received bomb threats as well, resulting in them putting Pride displays at the back of the store or eliminating them altogether. Just over a week from Pride Month in June, the company is removing certain items and making changes to its LGBTQ merchandise nationwide.

That kind of an impact is, it's very scary, I think, for many of these people that might otherwise want to stand up for trans employees and trans people. Are there any examples of businesses that are like pushing back on any of these states? There are multiple businesses that have sort of, I think, gathered through the chambers of commerce. And while the businesses themselves have not been as public because of that sort of backlash, what we have. have seen is the Chambers of Commerce come and testify against anti-trans legislation stating that, hey, this is going to hurt our local business community. It's going to make LGBTQ people not want to move here. It's going to make companies not want to hold conferences here and more. And we saw this in Missouri. We saw this in Ohio. We've seen this in a number of states where

the Chambers of Commerce have come out strongly against the bills. I want to note that the trans community is very small. We don't take up very much space in public. We are. you know, 0.5 to 1% of the American public, we are at a natural disadvantage to people that have billions of dollars and huge platforms. I think that what fighting back looks like, what what a successful resistance looks like is a, as an allyship with reproductive health care movements, with disability movements, with other movements that are also marginalized. And I am pleased to say that as somebody that's been reporting on this for a long time now, I'm seeing those connections made. I think that the movement building that is going on right now is very

important. And I think that people are recognizing the ways in which these fights are very closely interconnected. Aaron Reid's newsletter is called Aaron in the morning, and it comes out on Substack. Now, long before gender theory became a real focus, a real target for conservative lawmakers, it existed largely within academia. And if you were interested, in gender, one of the people you were definitely reading was Judith Butler. Butler is a philosopher, and in 1990, they published gender trouble, feminism and the subversion of identity. This is a crucial book. It began popularizing the idea that gender is a social construct or a performance to use Butler's terms. In that view, gender is not just a matter of biology, but is determined

by a set of behaviors that are learned as part of culture. Those ideas of Butler's, has proved extremely influential and are now widely held by a younger generation of Americans, whether they've read Butler or not. Those ideas are also furiously contested by major conservative political forces around the world, from the Vatican to Vladimir Putin. Judith Butler addresses that backlash in a new book called Who's Afraid of Gender? Professor, an important part of any philosophical or political discussion is defining terms. What would the definition of gender be in the context that you are using it?

Well, in general, I would say that gender is a way of organizing society. We start with a general question, like, oh, how is gender organizing, public life, health care, education? And then we go about trying to understand it. Sometimes we start with a binary notion of gender, that is an assumption that there are only two genders. And, of course, what we then discover on the basis of that hypothesis tends to be that there are two gender. genders. So sometimes we have to open up the hypothesis in order to see the mosaic of gender differences and the complications that have been introduced by the consideration of third genders or neutral pronouns or other kinds of categories that seem to describe better how people

understand themselves and how they present in society. One of the central concepts of your book gender trouble, again, 1990, is the notion that gender is in many ways performative. That's a crucial word in that book. What do you mean by that? And what was the state of play of the discussion that you were responding to when you published that book in 1990? Performativity was a concept that interested me. But it's hard to talk about now because when people say something is performative, now they mean it's fake. It's just show.

Right. that it's put on, that it's put on or empty. So that was not my meaning at all. And at first, you know, I tried to correct people like, no, that's not what it means. And of course, it's totally out of my control. It's out of everyone's control. So it's hard for me because then people think, oh, if gender is performative, it's all show. But of course, it's not.

All I meant to say was that we enact social norms in and through our body and our ways of comporting ourselves in this world, and that these social enactments that were involved in in a daily way come to constitute our sense of who we are as a gender. People in their teens and their 20s seem to have a markedly more complicated view of gender, and yet I mean this with respect, that very few of them are likely to have read Judith Butler's books in middle school or in high school, and yet ideas like yours somehow seep into society, to some degree or another. To what degree do you feel a sense of responsibility for that? I don't think I can take credit or blame for all that young people are doing with gender these days.

And you have to remember, there's a lot of gender play in the media. There's a lot of gender discussion online. There are many people who've written on gender. I was not in any sense the first, but I also described some of what I was seeing in social movements and in gay lesbian life. Something central in your book is the role of the Vatican, the papacy, and also the church hierarchy when it comes to gender. Why is that so crucial? Well, the anti-gender ideology movement can be dated back to Joseph Ratzinger's work before he became Pope. He became Pope Benedict and became co-Pope for a while too.

That's right. And he became alarmed by the theory of gender because he understood there to be a natural law that established men and women both as different. from one another and as situated within a hierarchy in which men were supposed to be doing certain kinds of work in the world and women had domestic and reproductive functions to fulfill. There's a creationism, we might say, that the Vatican was defending over and against gender ideology. Does Pope Francis differ from Benedict? Pope Francis has been so much more progressive than his predecessors, certainly his the agony of much of the Vatican.

Yes, to the agony of the Vatican. He certainly accepted homosexuality more fully. At the same time, he's distinguished between two forms of feminism. He says there's sexual difference feminism that accepts that the human always comes in a complimentary fashion, right? There's a male and a female. And then there's a gender feminism, he says, which seems to think that you don't have to be either or that whoever you become in this world, man, woman, or something else, is not

necessarily based on that natural distinction. So he was clear that gender was a diabolical force, and even at one point says that we should think of Hitler youth when we think about gender or an atomic bomb. In other words, not just Pope Francis, but the evangelical church as well, especially in Latin America, has produced a notion of gender as a demonic ideology that has to be expelled from this world. So this phantasm, this demon, this is being used to put fear into the hearts of people, to make them flock back to the church, its authority, but also to authoritarian who are very often fed by this kind of anxiety and fear. The title of your new book is Who's Afraid of Gender? I see that fear all around me politically large and small. For example,

I have a deep interest in things Russian and I follow the pronouncements and many of them or horribly scary by Vladimir Putin. And he uses in ways of asserting difference from the West, a newly Christian, conservative Russia, and part of that is that gender is seen purely traditionally, and he's mocking about the notion of there being an unlimited number of genders, and he plays with this.

What is he reacting to? Let's remember that when he says, oh, these gender ideologists will take your sex away from you or you won't be able to call yourself mother or father. He's actually saying something, indeed the exact same words, as a number of other leaders, mainly authoritarian, who have decided that gender is a threat to the nation, to the natural family. So gender has become... come for him something of a phantasm, quite frankly. Obviously, nobody who is thinking about gender or uses gender in their work or their policy or their politics is saying, you can't be a mother and

you can't be a father and we're not using those words anymore, or we're going to take your sex away. No, no one is saying that at all. As I understand it, you decided to write this book who's afraid of gender, after an incident occurred in 2017 in Brazil. Can you describe what happened there? I was part of a conference on the future of democracy, actually, and we were at a community center in Sao Paulo, and I was told that there were people gathering outside who did not want me to speak and who, in fact, wanted me to leave the country immediately.

I was sequestered in a room and I saw, at least through pictures, that they had burnt me an effigy outside and that there was a fair amount of, well, political hysteria, frankly, saying that they were against gender, the ideology of gender, that they were against pedophilia. somehow gender was associated with pedophilia, which was new to me. I had never heard that before, and that I would destroy the family and I would indoctrinate or seduce the children. Yeah. I'm not going back to Brazil, even though it has a new government and there are a lot of wonderful people there, but I won't go back. Because you think that you'd be in danger, and enough is enough.

Well, those people are still there. They're in the minority, but they're still there. I'm speaking with philosopher Judith Butler, whose new book is called Who's Afraid of Gender. We'll continue in a moment. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking with Judith Butler. Butler is one of the cornerstone figures in the study of gender, both highly influential and sometimes vilified by traditionalists.

When attending a conference in Brazil, Butler was burned in effigy as a witch by reactionary groups. partly in response to that really ugly incident, Butler began writing their new book, Who's Afraid of Gender? We'll continue our conversation now. Your book explains the importance of sex in legal frameworks, like the Supreme Court's decision to extend discrimination protections to include gay, lesbian, and trans people. Why make the distinction between sex and gender on a theoretical level? I used to make that distinction more than I do now. It turns out that the act of sex assignment itself, which takes place in hospitals or according to legal authorities, that that's already a way of socially organizing who we are. So maybe gender is happening at the very beginning.

We're being gendered. Isn't biology organizing the way we are? We take into account biology when we give a sex assignment, and that seems right. But there are also a set of exceptions to binary diverse. visions, I'm not against sex assignment. Don't get me wrong. I'm not against it at all. I just think people should be able to assign themselves a sex later in life. So I don't dispute biology, but an infant can be assigned to sex on the basis of perceived biological differences, and that makes sense. And that's a, I don't remember anything against that. But if we think that that has to stay the same through all

time, then we might be making a mistake. This is not a discussion that's limited to authoritarian's and people on the far right as well. Even in sort of liberal communities, wherever they might be, parents who think themselves very hip and up to date and politically progressive suddenly come home and they're told that, you know, in their kids' classes, that a lot of the kids in the class will identify. Again, a term that might be new to them after all these years, they identify in ways that they would not have anticipated,

and a large number of kids in the class. And how were they meant to think through that? Well, I think probably with interest and compassion, like that would be a good start. Well, their job is to love their kids. There's no question about that. But as the song goes, something is happening here, but you don't know what it is.

What is it? And how general is it? It ain't exactly clear. That's the other song. A revolution. A revolution in the elementary schools. But you know. But do you mean that? And if so, what's the nature of the revolution? No, I don't think it's a revolution, really.

I think that, you know, so many kids have conformed to gender norms quickly and with some fear. And we know that in non-supportive environments, kids can suffer a lot. And I think if they seek to change their identity, if they seek to call themselves a non-binary, or maybe they want to take on a new gender altogether, they're trying to say something. And what are they saying exactly? They're trying to say that living under certain kinds of constrictions is not okay, that they can't live that way, and that they need room to define themselves. Now, I don't know, it seems to me we have to listen closely to kids who say that and stay

with them, stay close to them. I think there's nothing more important than having an exploratory period of life where you're allowed to play and decide, you know, how you want to play and in what way. And I think there's so much parental anxiety that it sometimes ends up being repressive, it shuts down the conversation or it accelerates it in a way that's probably unnecessary. Maybe we just need to spend more time with kids listening to what they're trying to tell us about who they are and how they want to live. And what's livable for them, you know? I read an interview with you in the Financial Times, and the reporter was pretty much freaking out about the notion of pronouns, and he was going to get the pronoun wrong or right or whatever it was.

And only in recent years have you started using they and them pronouns. What was that decision like for you? How important is this, I think, detail in the entire discussion of gender? It is sometimes extremely awkward to have to relearn someone's pronoun, especially if you've known them your whole life. But if that person asks you to call them by a particular name or a pronoun, they're asking for some kind of recognition about who they are and how they feel. feel and how they want to be addressed in this world. And it's one of the few ways we have of saying,

treat me like this, please. You know, if you want to treat me well, if you want to treat me with respect, then please accept the pronoun that I use for myself. So, you know, it's, I think it's a basic question. I mean, I remember in the Black Power movement and even in the Civil Rights movement, there were major discussions about how black or African-American people should be referred to. And there were always people who said, oh, why do I have to relearn? Why do I have to call them this? White people who were in a state of resistance and they were bothered and it was frustrating. Or, you know, why can't, you know, or in the feminist movement, somebody wants to be called a woman rather than a girl and people complained. Like, why do I have

to change my practice? And yet in this interview, you were very forgiving and good humor about this guy's anxiety, but underneath that, does it, does it anger you when somebody screws it up? No, it doesn't, it doesn't anger me unless somebody is trying to do it on purpose in an effort to put me back in my place or just, you know, a kind of deliberate refusal of recognition. Then it's like, why is that person doing that? They actually know. But I do, I struggle, I err. I find it difficult to always keep clear who wants to be called what, and I have to ask people, and sometimes I have to ask them a couple of times. And especially, as one gets older, one has to ask many things. Let's not discuss that. That's for another, that's for another day, if we're still around. I think we should be compassionate about people who err. I don't want to become the police. I don't want to become the police. Like, I'm, I'm a, I'm, not called that. You've misgendered me and don't do that again. But I will gently say, yeah,

I do prefer that. And I think the young people gave me the they. I mean, maybe I helped to give it to them. I have no idea. But I feel like when people, well, because it's a non-binary, it's a position outside the binary. At the end of gender trouble in 1990, I said, well, why do we restrict ourselves to thinking that there are only men and women? Maybe there are some other kinds of genders. And this generation has come along with the idea of being non-binary. It never occurred to me. And then I thought, well, of course I am. I mean, what else would I be?

And it fits perfectly. And I just feel gratitude to the younger generation. They gave me something wonderful. So, you know, and that also takes humility of a certain kind. Like, okay, you know, I'm an older person who needs to be called by this now and wants to be. and I like it. It seems right. You use the word phantasm throughout the book, which I read as a notion of a kind of dark fantasy

that's created by and aroused in certain people about gender. Could you explain it more specifically? If we look at the charges made against gender, that it will indoctrinate or seduce young people, that young people will read a book and see an image and then they will become homosexual or they will want to change their sex or they will, you know, as if they will somehow be contaminated by this thing called gender, yes. But sometimes it seems as if they oppose the freedom itself that they associate with gender. The cluster of fears around gender are not always internally consistent with one another. I think many people do believe that their sex assignment is given from God or that it's natural

and that everybody has one and that there are only two in the world and that fact is universally shared. and when your idea of natural order gets challenged by new ways of thinking about gender and sexuality, it can be very frightening for people. I fear that it works. I fear as a matter of politics, that it's easier for Donald Trump to go on about a trans swimmer than it is about tax policy.

It's a more electric. gathering the base strategy. It is true, but my sense is that Trump watched dissentists try to use gender and race to scare the people of Florida, but also in the United States more generally. And he saw that it wasn't quite working. Is this because Descentus is bad at it and Trump is better at it? I think that Trump decided that anti-migrant discourse works better. And I think if you count how many times he'll say something about migrants versus trans people, you'll see that the anti-migrant discourses is for him more promising as a way of stoking fear.

But it is the same. Yeah, yeah, it's the same method. I don't mean to change the subject too abruptly, but you are engaged in any number of other political arguments over time, and I want to sort of set the record straight here because it seems to me that there's a lot of confusion about this. You originally described what happened on October 7th in Israel as an armed resistance, saying that it was, quote, not a terrorist attack, and it is not an anti-Semitic attack. You later described October 7th as a terrifying and revolting massacre. Have your views on that attack changed over time? I just want to give you a chance to

sort of set it out. Oh, well, I think it's the other way around. I published something in the London Review books. And I did certainly condemn Hamas and describe just how anguishing it was to see the massacres that occurred on October 7th as a Jewish person. My first feeling and my continuing feeling is that the atrocities committed by Hamas are certainly not justifiable. And they should be condemned and they remain

appalling and anguishing to me. So nothing in my view has changed. Did it change your view, I'm sorry to interpret it, did a change your view expressed in the past that both Hamas and Hezbollah are progressive, use the word progressive movements, which also got a lot of play? Yes, they did get a lot of flak. But, you know, in both of those instances, we're talking about extracts from a longer discussion that people who oppose my views circulated on the web. And in both discussions, because I am someone who has published a book

on nonviolence, and I am always in favor of nonviolence, I was saying, I was asking how groups such as these can be brought to the diplomatic table. And rather than call them terrorists, which means that they can't be spoken to, they can't be dealt with, why don't we understand what the aims of their movements are, put them in conversation with people who are committed to a non-violent resolution of that conflict and get them to lay down their arms. Now, that is what I said about Hezbollah and Hamas. I made that very clear, and I actually likened it to the Irish Republican Army.

I said, how did that work, such that. those folks agreed to put down their arms, who reached out to them, who made it possible for them. So I actually see it as an obligation of the left, let's say, you want equality for Palestinians, you want political self-determination for Palestinians, or you want Israeli Jews and Palestinians to live on the basis of equality in a single state or a two-state solution. the only way you're going to get that is through a transformation of power, the end to the occupation, and the end to the siege of Gaza and the bombardments and the forms of imprisonment that we're seeing. So I have always been in favor of non-violent modes of achieving equality and justice in Palestine.

and I believe that it is possible to understand something like Hamas as part of a liberation struggle with a hideous tactic, with an unjustifiable tactic. So those who are in favor of that liberation should be speaking to them and working with them, as I believe they are now, to persuade people to move to nonviolent modes of reconciliation and forms of justice. What is terrorism then? Is that something that you think is a term just used as a cudgel? Well, it can be used as a cudgel. Was al-Qaeda a terrorist group or part of a liberation movement? No, Al-Qaeda is a terrorist group without any question. When we talk about Hamas as terrorist, when people call it terrorists,

they're talking about the militaristic wing of Hamas and the atrocity. that it has committed. But if we're going to say that it has no political aim, that it's just pure evil, then we are missing the opportunity to understand what is in that political aim that is worth retrieving and affirming and what in that political aim is not worth retrieving and affirming. I just worry that when we revert too quickly to the word terrorist, we no longer have a political analysis of the situation. And we're not interested in a political solution. Professor Butler, thank you very, very much.

Oh, right. Take care. Judith Butler is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and their books include Gender Trouble from 1990, and the new book, Who's Afraid of Gender, which addresses the global backlash against LGBTQ rights. I'm David Remnick. That's the program for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts

with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Walton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandro Deket. And we had additional help this week from Alicia Zuckerman and Jared Paul. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.