If you are not familiar with Judith Butler, you should be.
She is arguably the most influential gender theorist living today. Her revolutionary book, Gender Trouble, published over thirty years ago, is widely considered the most influential and consequential work in the field of gender studies. It helped establish so-called queer theory as an emerging sub-category of radical feminist thought. It also served, ironically, to erase the essential human category of woman itself.
This is because Bulter infamously holds that gender (which is the same thing as sex) is not rooted in biological fact, but is merely “performative.” For Butler and her revolutionary adherents, male and female – if they exist in any real sense – are rooted only in how individuals choose to perform what they understand male and female to be. She says as much in her 10th anniversary preface to Gender Trouble,
The view that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body.
Thus, male and female don’t really exist in any objectively real sense, but merely in the ways subjective interpreters (all human beings) act them out. And the acting is the authoritative, but subjective, determinant. Butler and her adherents are delighted with this conclusion. This is what gender theory is all about, the celebrated erasure of the binary of male and female.
We should all note that when we cannot speak truthfully about male and female, we can no longer speak sensibly about the family. That is why every citizen who cares about the family and the well-being of humanity should know about Judith Butler and her problematic influence.
Butler has been teaching at the University of California, Berkeley for decades and has become a pop sensation in gender politics. She was out as a lesbian at 14 and became a prominent lesbian activist while earning her Ph.D. at Yale.
But how should we take her claim about gender being performative rather than biological?
If she is right in gender being merely performative, what was her early identity as a lesbian actually a claim toward? This is an important question that Butler and her followers must ask themselves because it leads to an inconvenient truth.
Being a lesbian, if it is to mean anything, requires the binarity and reality of male and female that gender theory now categorically rejects.
No one should miss this fact. After all, if the word means anything at all it, is that lesbians are actual women who are attracted to actual women, no one else.
Who is she not attracted to? Males. Is she attracted or not to any of the other supposed countless genders being made up today?
No. Lesbians are woman attracted to women, who are not interested in men. This is fundamentally binary.
If Butler’s bold and self-proclaimed lesbian identity was to mean anything, we have to believe that the woman that she is, is really real and not merely performative.
But you see, Butler is no longer a woman. She has declared herself non-binary of late, not a she, but a singular they. Yes, her ideology proudly holds all of this wholly fluid. It is all performance, after all.
As she told The Guardian in 2021, “What it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade.” She added, “The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way” because “securing greater freedoms for women requires that we rethink the category of ‘women’ to include those new possibilities.”
Do you see the obvious problem here?
How can she and her gender studies disciples be securing rights for something – women – that is continually changing and merely subjective? She is admitting that the fight for a thing ironically requires the erasure of the thing itself. Just ask young female athletes who are now losing winning podium positions to men. Progressivism is certainly not progressive. It destroys. And the meaning of “woman” is what is being destroyed here.
You see, when Butler came out as a lesbian in her teens and rose to prominence as a lesbian activist in Ivy League institutions, it was all so revolutionary. But it was also inherently binary.
And now, gender theory has evolved such that the binary itself in any fashion is the new original sin that must be blotted out. Thus, the word “lesbian” – once wildly celebrated and radical – is now terribly unstylish and retrograde. (See here and here if you wonder why.)
In a recent review (dutifully entitled “Rejecting the Binary”) of Butler’s brand new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender, one of her early students described Butler in this very curious way:
When Judith Butler was serving as my dissertation adviser at the University of California in the late 1990s, they did not yet go by “they.” No one in my circle did, and at the time that circle included one of the most forward-thinking spaces in the world when it came to matters of gender.
Consider what is being said here. This progressive reviewer, in one concise but grammatically confusing paragraph, is trying to celebrate something she holds as very important. Instead, she is demonstrating how hollow it all is, and dramatically so.
Judith Butler is no longer the lesbian “she” has always proudly been because, we are to assume, she has ceased being a woman. She is now a non-binary “they” and everyone is required to play along with her new identity.
But Butler’s once-student is admitting that even among “the most forward-thinking” group of people on the planet, no one had ever imagined themselves a “they” just virtual seconds ago in the long stretch of human experience. Butler confessed to The Guardian in 2021, “When I wrote Gender Trouble, there was no category for ‘nonbinary’ – but now I don’t see how I cannot be in that category.”
Yes, they are admitting the gender theorists have just made it up, literally, through their performative imagination and clunky reconstruction of the human language. Their claims have no rootedness in objective reality.
It’s why Dylan Mulvaney, a grown man, can now masquerade as a girl and expect everyone to take him seriously. It’s why countless women athletes must compete against, lose to, and be severely injured by male competitors. Its madness.
All people should know Judith Butler because her own life experience demonstrates just how artificial contemporary gender theory is. Its adherents are making it up as they go along.
They easily admit this if you give them the respect of paying attention and taking their words and actions seriously.
Image from Shutterstock.
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