The Phantasms of Judith Butler

Judith Butler, for many years a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley might be among the most influential intellectuals alive today. Even if you have never heard of them (Butler identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns), you are living in their world, in which babies are “assigned” male or female at birth, and performativity is, at least on campus, an ordinary English word. Butler’s breakout 1990 book, Gender Trouble, argued that biological sex, like gender, is socially constructed, with its physical manifestations mattering only to the degree society assigns them meaning. The book is required reading in just about every women’s-, gender-, or sexuality-studies department. Butler has won a raft of international honors and been burned in effigy as a witch in Brazil. How many thinkers can say as much?

A few decades ago, Butler was probably as famous outside academia for their impenetrable jargon-ridden prose as for anything they were trying to say. In 1998, they won first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest run by Philosophy and Literature, an academic journal. The next year, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum published a coruscating takedown, “The Professor of Parody,” in The New Republic, in which she argued that Butler had licensed a whole generation of feminist academics to blather incomprehensibly about semantics while ignoring the real-life global oppression of women. In the 1999 preface to a new edition of Gender Trouble, Butler struck back by attacking “parochial standards of transparency” and comparing critics to Richard Nixon, who would notoriously begin statements full of lies and self-excuses with the phrase “Let me make one thing perfectly clear.” Maybe the criticism stuck with Butler, though, because little by little, their nonspecialist writing has become more readable as they’ve ventured into current topics such as Donald Trump and Israel-Palestine (Butler’s view: the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, which included the murder, rape and mass kidnapping of civilian women, was a legitimate “act of armed resistance.”) Butler also began publishing in The Guardian, The Nation, and other venues. Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler’s first book for a nonacademic readership, is not particularly well-written, and it’s quite repetitious (a whole paragraph is repeated, along with many, many phrases and ideas). But it’s not difficult. In fact, it’s all too simple.

The central idea of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that fascism is gaining strength around the world, and that its weapon is what Butler calls the “phantasm of gender,” which they describe as a confused and irrational bundle of fears that displaces real dangers onto imaginary ones. Instead of facing up to the problems of, for example, war, declining living standards, environmental damage, and climate change, right-wing leaders whip up hysteria about threats to patriarchy, traditional families, and heterosexuality. And it works, Butler argues: “Circulating the phantasm of ‘gender’ is also one way for existing powers—states, churches, political movements—to frighten people to come back into their ranks, to accept censorship, and to externalize their fear and hatred onto vulnerable communities.” Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, Vladimir Putin, even Pope Francis—all inveigh against “gender.”

In the United States, this politicized use of the word “gender” itself has not caught on as it has in much of the world, where, as an English word for which many languages have no equivalent, it is often used to attack feminism and LGBTQ rights as foreign imports. Still, as Butler notes, America’s Christian fundamentalists and far-right Republicans are fervently in the anti-gender vanguard, whether or not these groups actually use the word gender.

Butler is obviously correct that the authoritarian right sets itself against feminism and modern sexual rights and freedom. This is nothing new, although being reminded of it is good. But is the gender phantasm as crucial to the global far right as Butler claims? Butler has little to say about the appeal of nationalism and community, insistence on ethnic purity, opposition to immigration, anxiety over economic and social stresses, fear of middle-class-status loss, hatred of “elites.” If I had to say why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is so popular, it would be less his invocation of the gender phantasm and more his ruthless determination to keep immigrants out, especially Muslim ones, along with his delivery of massive social services to families in an attempt to raise the birth rate. He neatly combines anti-feminist rhetoric about women’s duty to produce more Hungarians with policies that aim to make it easier for mothers to hold jobs, which is, however tacitly, feminist.

Similarly, Trump’s Christian-right supporters see this adjudicated rapist as a bulwark against sexual libertinism, but he also has a following among young men who admire him as libertine in chief and among people of every stripe who think he’ll somehow make them richer. I don’t disagree with Butler that the gender phantasm is part of the mix—some people, such as the QAnon followers who think Hillary Clinton is orchestrating child-abuse rings and the Moms for Liberty intent on purging school libraries, have clearly lost their minds. Butler mentions international organizations, such as the World Congress of Families, that seek to return us to the 1950s, or maybe the 1850s. But is obsession with “gender” really the primary motive behind current right-wing movements? And why is it so hard to trust that the noise around “gender” might actually be indicative of people’s real feelings, and not just the demagogue-fomented distraction Butler asserts it is? Their theory sounds a lot like an imposed false consciousness: You think you’re upset about Drag Queen Story Hour, but really you’re being distracted from deeper worries about unemployment or climate destruction. Instead of proving that “gender” is a crucial part of what motivates popular support for right-wing authoritarianism, Butler simply asserts that it is, and then ties it all up with a bow called “fascism.”

Fascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet. As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own. That definition is so broad and so vague as to be useless. You might even say that “fascism” functions as a kind of phantasm, frightening people into accepting views wholesale without examining them individually. It’s a kind of guilt by association—like comparing critics of your prose to Nixon.

The chapter of Who’s Afraid of Gender? that is most relevant for American and British readers is probably the one about the women, many of them British, whom opponents call “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), but who call themselves “gender-critical feminists.” It’s a clunky, confusing label, and Butler spends a lot of time attacking it. About the substance of gender-critical-feminist arguments, they have much less to say. They discuss only two authors at any length, the philosopher Kathleen Stock and J. K. Rowling. Butler does not engage with their writing in any detail—they do not quote even one sentence from Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, a serious book that has been much discussed, or indeed from any other gender-crit work, except for some writing from Rowling, including her essay in which she describes domestic violence at the hands of her first husband, an accusation he admits to in part. (Butler finds Rowling’s concern about male violence excessive.) In essence, Butler accuses gender-crits of “phantasmatic” anxieties. They dismiss, with that invocation of a “phantasm,” apprehension about the presence of trans women in women’s single-sex spaces, (as well as, gender-crits would add, biological men falsely claiming to be trans in order to gain access to same), concerns for biologically female athletes who feel cheated out of scholarships and trophies, and the slight a biological woman might experience by being referred to as a “menstruator.”

[Read: The worst argument for youth transition]

Butler wants to dismiss gender-crits as fascist-adjacent: Indeed, in an interview, they compare Stock and Rowling to Putin and the pope. Unfortunately for Butler, many of the major figures in the movement are liberals and leftists, many are lesbians, and many, such as Joan Smith and Julie Bindel, have a long history of fighting misogyny and male violence.

It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want. Butler seems to suggest that being trans is being your authentic self, but what is authenticity? In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.

Like the gender phantasm, brandishing the word fascism functions much like the stance that trans activists have taken of insisting that their positions are not up for debate. That approach worked pretty well for a while. I can't tell you how many left and liberal people I know who keep quiet about their doubts because they fear being ostracized professionally or socially. Nobody wants to be accused of putting trans people's lives in danger, and, after all, don't we all want, as the slogan goes, to “Be Kind”? This self-imposed silence is a tiny problem compared with what trans people go through. The trouble is that, in the long run, the demand for self-suppression fuels reaction. Polls show declining support for various trans demands for acceptance . People don’t like being forced by social pressure to deny what they think of as the reality of sex and gender.

Butler calls for a coalition of allies to combat the gender phantasm. That would be a very good thing, but they’re preaching to the choir. They cite the civil-rights activist and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon’s call for “difficult coalitions” but forget that coalitions necessarily involve compromise and choosing your battles, not just accusing people of sharing the views of fascists if they don’t believe, for example, that a man can have a baby or that people should be able to change their gender just by filling out a form. Why would gender-critical feminists join such a movement?

Butler seems to want their opponents to simply cave. It could happen. Maybe 10 or 20 years from now, gender-critical feminism will seem as silly as opposition to same-sex marriage does today—a moral panic over what will be by then perfectly harmless, normal life. Then again, it could go the other way: In 10 or 20 years, the present moment might seem like a parenthesis in the long history of an overwhelmingly sexually dimorphic species. So here’s a thought: What if instead of trying to suppress the questioning of skeptics, we admit we don’t have many answers? What if, instead, we had a conversation? After all, isn’t that what philosophy is all about?