Who’s afraid of gender?

Ferenc Laczó, editor at the Review of Democracy (CEU Democracy Institute, Budapest), in conversation with  Judith Butler.

Ferenc Laczó: Your new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, critiques what you call the ‘anti-gender ideology movement’. You argue that this movement has made gender into a site where intimate fears and anxieties gather and become socially organized. There is a phantasm at the very heart of this movement, you underline. The book aims to show it can be understood as a psychosocial phenomenon, which uses externalizations, projections and reversals. It is also an ‘inadvertently confessional’ movement, you add. Why do you interpret the anti-gender ideology movement as a psychosocial one? And what makes this movement ‘inadvertently confessional’ in your view?

Judith Butler: Let me start by saying that I’m not the one who coined the term ‘anti-gender ideology movement’. This is what a well-established group with various hubs, networks, financial support and media presence throughout the world call themselves. I’m studying a self-constituted group.

There are different versions and variants of this group with some divergent aims. But taken as a whole, they do tend to describe gender – the concept of gender, the word, the set of social movements subordinated to the category in their minds – as a destructive phenomenon. One might therefore ask, what is gender destroying? If it is destructive, just how destructive is it actually?

Some of the things that are said about gender are, frankly, preposterous. They are not backed up by anything you might read in gender studies. They do not have a basis in what we might understand as gender policy or gender politics more broadly. Yet, we hear that gender has the power to destroy man and civilization, that it works either like an Ebola virus or like a nuclear bomb. Some of these quite enlarged phantasms of what gender is make it seem quite frightening: they frighten people who may not be familiar with the term or gender studies, or how gender is operating in public policy at this time.

How do you explain a phantasm that is produced and circulated for political reasons, that is shared? On the one hand, it remains a phantasm, so it belongs to psychic life. On the other hand, it serves a social and political function, so it belongs to our social world. We need a psychological or psychoanalytic perspective that delineates the mechanisms of the phantasm – and you mentioned displacement substitution, externalization, reversal as some of those – but we do not just want a formal analysis of the phantasm. We want to understand what this phantasm is serving – what anxieties it is collecting, what fears it is enlarging and what desires it is furthering, even if it is a desire for destruction itself.

You also asked me about the confessional structure of the phantasm. I suppose when we see that a number of governments claim everyone should be restored to the sex they were assigned at birth – being opposed to sex reassignment, to trans identity being acknowledged in law, in health services or, indeed, in educational settings – they are actively involved in stripping trans people of the rights they have achieved under some more progressive legal regime, or through international human rights doctrine or law. They want to take away those rights and say that that is not a right or should never have been a right.

What they say when trying to justify themselves is that if those people who believe in gender get power, they will take your rights away, they will take away your rights to your sexed identity, to the sex you were assigned at birth and they will take away your family – you will not be able to say mother or father ever again. Of course, nobody is doing that; that is a phantasm. Nobody is saying you cannot be mother and you cannot be father anymore. No one is saying, ‘oh, you were born sexed that way, but we are going to take that sex assignment away.’ The only people who are doing that are the people who are trying to deny trans people their right to determine their sex assignment. They want to take that right away.

When I say that this operation is confessional, what I mean is that those who imagine that something called gender will take all your rights away are attributing to gender what they themselves are doing, namely taking rights away.

Ferenc Laczó: You argue that the anti-gender ideology movement renames the object of destruction as its cause and aims to enhance state power. You state that fascism calls ‘passions’ and ‘authoritarianism’ the emerging, if not accomplished, political reality. How does the anti-gender ideology movement draw on specifically fascist passions? How is it related to or embedded in new forms of authoritarianism more generally?

Judith Butler: I take it that fascist passions can take many forms, but certainly one form is the desire to strip people of their rights – their rights of citizenship, rights of belonging to a particular country, rights of self-determination. If we have the expulsion of migrants with the claim that they do not belong to a particular nation state, if we have the stripping of rights of trans people to determine their own sex, if we have the rights of women to self-determination, including bodily autonomy, taken away, then we are seeing a series of rights-stripping activities not all of which are eliminationist but some of which I think may well be. In Florida, we have heard pundits say that trans people ‘should be wiped from the face of the earth’. Among the right-wing evangelicals and Catholics in Brazil, we hear that gender is a devil that ‘must be driven from the land’.

Once people start being identified with gender and – in this phantasmic logic that we have been talking about – considered a threat to the nation, whether as a terrorist, the devil or a virus, then whatever measures the state needs to take to eliminate this threat are justified in the name of national security. Oddly, Vladimir Putin in 2015 thought gender was a threat to national security. Why? Because the spiritual core of the nation in his discourse was Christian and contained the Christian doctrine of heterosexual marriage, reproductive sexuality and all the rest.

Gender calls into question who can be a parent, whether gay and lesbian parenting is OK, whether gay and lesbian marriage is OK, whether trans rights are admissible. Gender evokes representations of progressive social movements, including feminist ones and ones that call for a separation of church and state. For Putin, all of these are threats and can be eliminated as such – those that ‘transgress’ can be either imprisoned, criminalized or driven from the land. I do consider that once people start to believe that threats to the nation, or even to their sexed identity and their ability to have a family, exist, they are willing to fight and willing to expel or even eliminate the groups that are being held accountable for those threats. I take that to be the stoking of fascist passion. It is one way that minorities or vulnerable communities can be targeted, criminalized or expelled, and sometimes targeted with violence that is exonerated in advance by police powers or military powers. I think we can link migrant communities here with gay, lesbian, queer and feminist communities, because there is something going on where these people are being understood as a threat to what is most precious and valuable to the mainstream. I know you have seen this in Hungary.

There is a further point here, which is simply that every family has its queer uncle, or its transgender kid, or its gender non-conforming sister, or somebody who is, you know, reading the wrong books, or interested in the wrong films, or has an open mind, or is affected by material on the Internet that makes them quest for more freedom or greater rights of expression. Many of the problems that are being said to emerge with gender or those allied with the idea of gender are already inside the family, whether you think of intermarriage, or divorce rates, or people having sex with people who are not from the same racial or religious background – any number of those things are already inside the family and inside the community.

There are, of course, reasons for people to feel a fundamental fear about the future and how they are going to make a living. Everybody has such fears now. We are all afraid of ecological catastrophe, and we have many other things to be afraid of. Will war ever stop? Will neoliberalism destroy all our public and social services? Will any of us be free of debt or of potential criminalization? It is all too quick and easy to say that it is those scholars who are talking about race or gender, or it is those anti-discrimination policies that prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender or sexuality that are destroying our community. We have every reason to fear destruction. It is the cause of the fear of destruction that is being misnamed.

I think it will become all the more important for the radical democratic left to address these fears, and to offer a different kind of vocabulary and a different kind of imaginary that are more inclusive and embracing of fundamental democratic values.

Ferenc Laczó: Let’s talk about questions of gender in more abstract terms too. You explain that clear dichotomies between nature and culture are untenable, and that the material and the social are in fact intertwined in the production of the gendered body. You also propose that we think about gender beyond the logic of property. What do you mean by the material and the social being intertwined and why do you emphasize this point so strongly in your book? How can we think about gender beyond the logic of property and why do you consider it important that we do so?

Judith Butler: In feminist writing of the seventies and eighties in the Anglo-American context, there tended to be an assumption that sex belongs to nature whereas gender refers to the cultural or social way that a sexed body is organized and the meanings it comes to have. The idea was that we cannot derive the meanings of this sexed body from its biology, but we can acknowledge its biology as natural and then we can ask about its social organization and what it signifies. That is one thesis I took up in my book Gender Trouble, which was published in 1990.

But there was a second thesis as well, which is that even at the level of biology – and biologists are quick to point this out – there are changing frameworks for understanding how to determine sex. Should it be chromosomes? Should it be hormones? Should it be a combination of the two? What about social-psychic factors? What about primary and secondary characteristics? What about those who are intersexed and fall outside the binary, or who have a mixture of attributes, whose chromosomes do not fall into a clear binary category because there is an extra Y or a broken X? There are many examples of this.

One question is what is that interaction between nature over here and the sociocultural world over there? And why do we imagine the two to be so far apart? Now there are those who would go back to a form of biological essentialism or would insist that biology is causal and our social forms are simply expressions of our biology. That makes things very easy, but, unfortunately, I think, false. There are others who say that maybe it is our culture and our society that produce biology, and maybe everything is environmentally formed. You could say that, but then you are still in the same logic where one aspect is causal and the other is an effect.

Feminist biologists – especially those in developmental biology, though we find this idea in a fair amount of work on immunology as well – have proposed ideas of interaction. What we eat enters into our bones; what is prepared in the social and economic world determines to some degree our internal health. We take in air and it either gives us oxygen or it gives us toxins. An environmental perspective on these issues would show that many aspects of the human body are deeply affected by the environment. The environment is not just outside: it is always taken inside through ingestion, through breathing, through the impress of our skin, through absorption. As biological creatures, we depend on interactions to live; if there is no food, we are not going to survive. What is external has to become internal for us to be activated.

It turns out that even testosterone – which we very often refer to in trying to differentiate the sexes – is activated by interaction. We can’t just say that testosterone is internal and biological, and the environment is over there which then gets affected by testosterone.

So, how does that framework change the way we think about sex and gender? If you say to me that somebody who is going through male puberty is bound to do better on the tennis court than someone who is not, I would ask, first of all, is that true? It is not always true because we find male athletes with very low testosterone levels who are doing really well on the courts. But what if two guys with the relatively same testosterone levels compete, but one of them has had access to a free tennis court his whole life whereas the other one has had to pay and work nights. Muscular formation happens in environments and as an interactive process.

Many of our discussions about sex and gender that think of them strictly as nature and as culture or society are mistaken, I think. Those ideas belong to older causal models that, frankly, most scientists don’t accept anymore.

Ferenc Laczó: Another crucial ambition of this new book is to think about the problem of racialization and possibilities of decolonization. You aim to place Anglophone scholarship and critical thought on gender in a broader, global context. What new insights has such broad contextualization allowed you to develop? How might those insights reflect on the ways gender studies has been practiced in the English language?

Judith Butler: There are several points to be made here. In the US context, as well as in the UK and very often in Australia, there are debates between some people who understand themselves as radical feminists and others who are feminists or who are gay, lesbian or trans activists and do not share the trans-exclusionary convictions of this radical group . In those debates, gender is treated as gender identity, but gender is actually a much broader category. We talk about the gendered division of labour, about the gendered dimensions of public life, about the gendered dimensions of war, etc. We aren’t talking about gender identity but rather forms of power that organize society in certain ways and develop certain ideals of masculinity according to which government policies and cultural representations fashion themselves.

These groups who fight with one another do not always have a global perspective. They do not understand how the Christian Right – evangelical and Catholic – has developed a discourse against gender or how the anti-gender ideology works in different parts of the world. In Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Mexico, feminists who are fighting violence against women are also fighting violence against trans people and violence against migrants, because they are against violence that is perpetrated against vulnerable communities. They have a broader principle which allows them to make connections among very different groups. It would in fact be very odd for someone to say ‘I want to protect women assigned female at birth on the streets against violence, but I do not care about the other people who are suffering violence on the street.’ As a feminist, I would say everybody must be protected who is being attacked on the basis of their gender, their sexuality, whether natal or acquired, or however it is established, or however it is perceived – because you can also be perceived by someone on the street for something you are not and it is not like attackers define who we are, their definitions are in fact usually very, very wrong.

The White House, Washington, D.C., USA, in rainbow colours. Image by Rob O’Donnell via Wikimedia Commons

My view is that if the Anglo-American crowd were to take in the global movement against gender, they would see that they must make alliances and not just against those who are doing violence on the street but also against the states and the religious institutions that are trying to shut down the teaching of gender in schools, shut down sex education, restrict the images we can see in arts institutions, taking books out of the library that let children know about the diversity of ways of living and loving in the world. This is a much broader movement, which is part of a new form of authoritarianism. All of us are subjects to the fascist passions of hatred and exclusion, and we should be bonding together in large, difficult alliances to fight this. I guess I am trying to nudge the somewhat provincial urban centers of the Global North away from their internecine battles and towards a more global perspective.

The Vatican has said that gender is a colonizing ideology. Sometimes people on the Religious Right, and the Christian Right in particular, will say that gender is totalitarian – there are German scholars who say that – or that gender is a form of indoctrination, or a form of seduction. Those charges are another of those confessional moments – the Church says that we are seducing children and, of course, we aren’t. We give them things to read and ask them to come up with their own interpretations of what they have read. What we do has to do with the freedom of inquiry – we are trying to teach them to have an open mind. It is the paedophilia and the abuse of children by the Church that has been demonstrated to be systematic and absolutely appalling, so I see those accusations as a moment of externalization that we might say is a hidden confessional.

But my main point is that the gender binary was imposed by colonial powers and so, when the Vatican says that we need to undo this colonization for which gender is responsible, what it is really saying is that we should go back to the original missionary colonial position: that there are only two genders and that men and women belong together exclusively in marriage. They are saying that marriage should be heterosexual and that sexuality should be reproductive in its function, which was in fact a colonial imposition. What the Vatican is objecting to is an idea of gender that questions whether the binary and all that goes with it is as necessary as he claims.

To fight the anti-gender ideology movement, we thus need to take on a decolonial perspective. We need to see how Christian missionary views of sex, gender and family have been imposed on Africa. We need to learn a whole lot more about African ways of naming and knowing sex and sexuality that do not conform to the very idea of gender. And we all need to be prepared, and especially those of us who function in English, for other ways of approaching this topic that do not necessarily use the word gender. We need to see that there are languages that inflect gender differently, or do not use that word at all, and have ways of referring to people in their relationships with one another or what they do that do not translate into sex assignment or gender identity – which many people who are arguing in the urban centres of the Global North do not seem aware of.

Ferenc Laczó: Your book shows how the anti-gender ideology movement figures gender as Marxist or capitalist, tyranny or libertarianism, fascism or totalitarianism, a colonizing force or an unwanted migrant. This is blatantly self-contradictory. As you show, its discourses in fact use a kind of associative logic and slide between premise and conclusion. You underline that such discourses foreclose thought. Your aim, very much on the contrary, is to enable clear thinking, to open up categories, and thereby foster radical imagining. You also state that you support alliances that reflect the interdependency of both human and nonhuman life, oppose climate destruction and stand for a radical democracy informed by socialist ideals. Would you say that radical democracy amounts to a permanent exercise in thinking and imagining whereas authoritarianism and fascism are ultimately dangerous forms of the refusal to think and imagine? And, if so, what do you see as ways to support that broad alliance and foster such a permanent exercise?

Judith Butler: Democracies only thrive when there is support for education based on the idea of open inquiry and where universities in particular are understood to have open critical inquiry as the core of their mission. We have to be able to question the presuppositions that we have accepted in our lives or that have come down to us from various authorities. We need to be able to adjudicate among the values that we find most important and those that we think are in fact harmful to our world, whether the human world, the ecological world, the animal world. And we need to base our conclusions on evidence and good reasoning.

Such free and open inquiry is not radical scepticism. It is questioning in service of clarifying values. It is about trying to figure out what kind of world we want to make and live in, what is hurting this world and what could repair it? Different disciplines, I think, approach these questions quite differently. I would say all of them are needed, especially now when so much of what we value most in life feels imperilled.

The anti-gender ideology movement is one among many anti-intellectual movements. They make fun of universities and consider that we are completely obscure – which is in fact one of the reasons I wrote a trade book. I wished to talk to people who do not necessarily have the same education that I do and who may well be confused about what they are hearing about gender.

But perhaps most importantly, the attack on intellectual life is an attack on critical thought, an attack on asking whether what the Church says is right and what the state says is right. What is at stake is freedom of thought: how do we develop an independent view and how do we form a judgment? Sadly, we are often accused of indoctrination, but it is precisely doctrine that we are not taking for granted. It is precisely those doctrines that we have been told we must accept, including the natural law thesis that there is only male and female and that the two exclusively belong together in sexuality, love and marriage. When we start asking whether that is necessary and true, we are not saying ‘oh, let’s destroy the heterosexual family’. We are just saying that there are other ways and we can live together – different ways of making family or kinship or community can cohabit this earth. They should be equally valuable and it is not going to hurt anyone to live in a state of equality with others.

I should add that the contradictory character of the anti-gender ideology movement is very exciting for some people. If you don’t need to have a clear argument in order to accept what the anti-gender people are saying, then you might respond to one part of it and not to the other, or you might respond to all of it and not worry whether it comes together. It may be that your fear of capitalism and your fear of totalitarianism come together, and it will seem to you like gender is responsible for both. This might well meet an emotional need. It may even create an emotional need without accountability to reason, logic, evidence or documentation. In that way, it is against thought – against the kind of thought that is necessary for democracy.

Although some people would say ‘gender, that is some identitarian politics’ or ‘that is a secondary or tertiary problem, not the real problem’, gender is right now a prism through which we can see a massive crisis in democracy. Once you start on the road to censorship, expulsion, rights-stripping, anti-intellectualism undermining free thought within universities, you are on your way towards an authoritarian regime. Gender should be right at the center of all our debates on the crisis of democracy today.

This conversation took place on 3 April 2024 and was originally published by The Review of Democracy on 13 May 2024.