Rambling

Book Thoughts: Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

After I read a book, I generally email my thoughts or notes to a friend. I'm now copying these first emails to this blog since it's easier to revisit. The following may have a lot of quotes and random commentary. Commentary is marked in darker blue.

My book club didn't really talk about this book in depth so here's just some thoughts.

This book is easier to read than probably anything else Judith Butler has ever written (though some of the book club peeps mentioned that they have heard them talk before and Butler is apparently much more comprehensible then, so it's really just in writing that they become somewhat opaque). That said, Butler is part philosopher, and asking most philosophers to be easy to understand is almost like asking a slug to do a back flip.

I was able to understand most of this, but you really have to read some of their sentences over four times or read the next one to make sure that you understand which point of view they're actually contesting. The part that I found the hardest to read was when they were talking about an interpretation of law, and they brought up — sigh — another philosopher, who I cannot actually find in the book right now oops.

But I honestly liked this book and was thinking about owning it before I realized that it's inaccessible to other people and so maybe there's no point in owning this book if I'm the only one who's going to read it.

Summary below...


Their thesis:

"Gender" is being used as a scapegoat, where its opponents claim that whatever they fear is actually the fault of the concept of gender, regardless of any logical connection. This creation of something to fear, that has no actual substance, is what Butler calls a "phantasm". They then proceed to use this term ad infinitum.

You cannot argue with a phantasm, and you should be wary of the way it slides between concepts without any real logical connection. The only way to beat the phantasm is to locate the fears where they actually come from, and to pursue change that mitigates those fears and makes life more livable for everyone.

Various fears subsumed into what people decry as "gender" include:

The phantasm is used as an easy thing to fight, and it inverts the attacker/victim and aids fascist thinking. "Gender" is a huge talking point for authoritarian politics globally right now for this reason — this scare word (along with "Critical Race Theory" in the context of the US) is used as something that has to be eradicated before it eradicates "us" (the privileged who benefit from the current system). For instance, the right will talk about gay and trans rights as something to defeat before it "destroys" the family, but in reality they are the ones that seek to take away rights from nonstandard families that already exist, because life has and will always be more diverse than idealized roles will capture. They argue that allowing other people the rights to live as themselves and access medical care will hurt their rights, when really, allowing everyone to live as they want increases freedom. It is important to remember who is actually being hurt in these made-up stakes.

"Gender" thus represents a major signifier of a ways of life that authoritarians hate, and thus is intertwined with all other major struggles. It is not simply "identity politics", nor is it only just "culture", as the forms it takes and the arguments against it are all responsive to material context.


Things I learned / thought about:

1. Those against "gender" also against any discussion of it or of engaging in any texts that talk about it because they see it as polluting.

They call it an "ideology" even though discussions of gender are not unified. They haven't read and do not intend to read the things that they are working to ban. As such, you can't get through to them with debate or logic. Though...then... how exactly are we supposed to get through to them? Unclear.

Opponents of gender portray gender advocates as dogmatic, or insist that we are critical of their authority, but never of our own beliefs. And yet gender studies is a diverse field marked by internal debate, several methodologies, and no single framework. The implicit logic here seems to be that if my opponents are reading in the way I read, and reading is submission to the authority of a text, or set of texts, considered to be unified in their message and authoritative, then gender critics are like their conservative Christian critics, except that each submits to a different dogma. It follows that the gender critics imagine that their opponents read gender theory as they themselves read the Bible, or blindly accept as they do the pronouncements of their preferred authorities. In their excited imagining, gender theory relies on wrongheaded texts authored by false, often intangible authorities who wield a rival and parallel power to biblical authority and compel a similar sort of submission to its claims.

Apparently, then, gender is construed as an “ideology” because those who read books about gender are ostensibly subjected to their dogma and do not think independently or critically. The opposition to including books on gender in schools and universities, the new efforts to expunge the curricula of such topics, rests on a certain distrust of reading and its capacity to open the mind to new possibilities. On the one hand, the mind should not be open to rethinking how sexuality or gender is socially organized, or how we refer to people more generally. The mind should apparently remain shut in that regard. On the other hand, the mind should be kept free of ideologues who would, apparently, engage in recruitment efforts, nefarious forms of seduction, or even engage in brainwashing. It does not matter that classrooms where gender is taught are full of impassioned debate; that differing schools, methods, and theories conflict; and that many gender scholars draw eclectically from different intellectual legacies formulated in different languages. Gender is said to be an “ideology,” a single and false way of knowing that has captured the minds of those who operate within its parameters—or, even, those who have momentarily been exposed to its workings. Yet the allegation that gender is an ideology mirrors the very phenomenon it decries, for “gender” becomes not only a monolith but also one with enormous power—an ideological move par excellence. This roving monolith is variously understood to capture the mind, exercise a seductive force, indoctrinate or convert those who come under its power, barge down the borders, ruin the human condition itself. Is this a description of gender studies, or a mirror reflection of a form of religious orthodoxy that has projected its own operation onto gender, figuring it as a rival orthodoxy?

(emphasis mine)

The fact that they can also just claim "gender" to be whatever they hate makes it extremely useful for them as a tool to rally against. Logic really isn't the important part here.

In fact, it is hard to say which way the ideology’s transnational influence goes, whether the United States exported homophobia through Evangelical networks, or whether the Spanish-based organization CitizenGo introduced anti–gender ideology through its channels, or whether the Vatican exported anti–gender ideology to Latin America, or what role the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches have played in the forming and fomenting of their own movements, or how debt bondage forces countries to choose between economic freedom and imposed social norms. The networks spawn zones of influence that cannot always be traced to a single cause, and as we will see, the anti-gender position takes several forms that are not necessarily consistent with one another. Nor do they require consistency to be effective. Depending on the anxieties circulating in a particular region, gender can be figured as Marxist or capitalist, tyranny or libertarianism, fascism or totalitarianism, a colonizing force or an unwanted migrant. Again: the more contradictory the movement, the more influential its discourse has proven to be.


2. The Vatican and the Catholic Church is really what started this backlash against gender in the 1990s.

They have a concept known as "complementarity" which says the human is defined as man and woman and that marriage has to be limited to between them.

Theologians have questioned whether this doctrine of complementarity even has a basis in history, and some have persuasively argued that “complementarity” emerges in Church doctrine only in the second half of the twentieth century in response to feminist and lesbian and gay movements.

The contemporary furor took shape in 2004 when the Pope’s Council for the Family, then directed by Joseph Ratzinger, warned that gender theorists were imperiling the family by challenging the proposition that Christian family roles could and should be derived from biological sex.

Despite people claiming that Pope Francis was cool he actually continued to speaking out against "gender" and compared gender theorists to “the dictators of the last century … think of Hitler Youth.” He has only defended gay and lesbian civil unions and not gay and lesbian sexuality. Thanks everyone for lying to me.

Side note but this really makes the ending to the Conclave movie extremely interesting, even if it has its limitations. I could say more but idk if you've watched this movie.


3. The reason why countries in the global south rally against the concept against "gender" primarily has to do with the World Bank.

Countries like Uganda are forced into a debt economy where they can only receive funds if they "accept" "nondiscriminatory policies" (all the while the World Bank is discriminating against their right to food, water, shelter, etc.). So they end up seeing stuff like LGBTQ+ rights as part of imperialism and reject it.

Given that it was Western cash that galvanized the anti-gay movement in Uganda, one can see how an African country dependent on foreign aid and religious funding is pushed and pulled by the funders, leaving their own politics bound up with Western churches, states, and the World Bank, which threatened to withdraw its $90 million loan to the country if it denied the rights of lesbian and gay people. One can see why some scholars hold that gender and sexuality conflicts in Uganda are “proxy wars” launched by Western states. Having the World Bank on your side makes matters more difficult, for the coercive powers of lending agencies invariably foster anger among those mired in debt or seeking ways out of poverty. It also obscures the fact that women, along with gay, lesbian, and trans people, suffer disproportionately from debt economies, as the Argentinean political theorists Lucí Cavallero and Verónica Gago have clearly shown.

The structuring of Uganda as a debt economy not only undermines its autonomy but also makes social issues into financial demands; that is, it makes the acceptance of nondiscriminatory policies a precondition of its debt repayment plan. At which point can one rightly distinguish between the objection to gay and lesbian sexuality or transgender identity, and an objection to being subjugated by international banking systems? The World Bank is not the messenger we need to communicate the importance of LGBTQIA+ rights, for the message gets obscured by the carrier. Similarly, countries that apply for entrance into the European Union and its markets must also show compliance with its anti-discrimination policies. The opposition to “gender” that emerged in countries dependent on the EU almost always indexes a financial situation of dependency. Compliance with nondiscrimination policies is a form of coercion imposed by lenders, which can lead to the perception that accepting “gender” is a form of unacceptable coercion and even extortion. No entrance without gender; no loan forgiveness without gender. It is surely hard to embrace a policy freely, no matter how reasonable and right, if one is compelled to do so from a position of debt bondage or unwanted financial dependency on brokers of financial power. Any defense of gender rights has to include a critique of gender mainstreaming and the ways that gender has been used as a bargaining chip by those financial institutions that claim to be its advocates. Once gender becomes identified with financial powers enforcing gender rights, gender no longer belongs to a left struggle to criticize and dismantle financial powers and their modes of exploitation and extractivism. The defense of gender has to be tied to the critique of financial coercion if “gender” is not to be identified as one of its instruments.

Was completely unaware of this but it makes a lot of sense. Down with the World Bank.


4. Sex & gender aren't necessarily separate.

Consider, however, that sex assignment is not simply an announcement of the sex that an infant is perceived to be; it also communicates a set of adult desires and expectations. The infant’s future is often being imagined or desired through the act of sex assignment, so sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean. That imagining comes from elsewhere, and it does not exactly stop after sex has been legally or medically determined at birth. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; and these practices of girling and boying are repeated not just by parents but also by a range of institutions that greet the child with boxes to be checked and norms to be embodied. In a sense, sex assignment does not happen just once. It is an iterative process, repeated by different actors and institutions, and depending on where one lives, it can be reiterated in ways that are not always in conformity with one another. Sex assignment is not a mechanism, but a process, and it can generate contradictory forms and be derailed by interruptions and challenges. What we rightly call self-definition emerges within this reiterative scene, which is not just about contrasting cultural definitions of gender but the power and limits of self-determination. The problem is not just that adults name a child a certain way, or refer to their gender a certain way, but that the words, considered as signifiers, resonate with what Laplanche called “enigmatic signifiers,” which constitute primary ways of being addressed and primary sites for the incitation of desire. In effect, sex assignment, understood as an iterative process, relays a set of desires, if not fantasies, about how one is to live one’s body in the world. And such fantasies, coming from elsewhere, make us less self-knowing than we sometimes claim.

Butler also explains that frameworks (like "woman", "man", etc.) exist before us and we can only ever participate in a fraction of them, and sometimes we call said fraction "ours". But the category (such as sex or gender) always exists far more diverse than any subset of people in that category will ever fully exhibit. And people really have a problem with this because they want to "own" a gender.

As for sex, there are indeed differences between bodies, but saying "sex is just genitals" or "gender is just cultural" is reductive because both of these things as we think of them depend on the framework we use. Differences exist, but the differences we pay attention to and give meaning to are political and have real effects on how people live and how our societies are organized. For example: A baby with a vagina is sexed as female when other people around it imagine the baby's eventual reproductive capability. The sex, then, is imagined to only count for reproduction. However, not everyone with a vagina grows up to give birth to a baby, whether by choice, by biology, or by environmental effects on the body that then make carrying to term impossible. Yet if we still allow those in these categories to call themselves "women" anyway, then we have to accept that "sex" is not a one-and-done deal and that it, by nature of being a category that exists due to the relation of body and culture, is to some degree self-chosen. And that we currently only allow some people to choose this and not others.

And sex does and can change. An obvious example being one where we change our official documents.

Indeed, historically speaking, sex assignment and sex as a category both belong to systems of classification. Paisley Currah, for example, makes a useful point about sex classification and reclassification in relation to the law. In his extraordinary book Sex Is as Sex Does: Governing Transgender Identity, he shows how legal classifications depend on, and produce, some strange contradictions. He writes, “Perhaps because sex is thought to be prior to or outside of politics, unearthing its production as a legal classification seems qualitatively different than thinking through the politics of many other sorts of classifications.” Different sorts of classifications are used by different government agencies to “decide” the sex of a person. Two people assigned male at birth may come to have the same gender identity, but depending on which agency they confront, or which region, they may well end up with different legal sex classifications. A particular agency’s rule for deciding M or F (if those two are the only options) is linked with what Currah calls its “governance project.” Although it appears to be a matter of someone checking a box on the basis of noninterpretive facts, the box serves certain government policies, and depending on which policy a particular agency serves, the boxes checked may be different. The box and the policy should be considered together, and which box is checked—and which boxes exist—depends on the policy it serves.

Although we may imagine that the state orders sex in a coherent way, or that it seeks to exercise sovereign control over what sex can be, the situation turns out to be more complicated. A power we expect to be sovereign and calculating is distributed and relatively incoherent, so that no single operation of power reigns. Its regulatory function regularly fails because one regulation conflicts with another. Currah points out that a variety of terms are used to tether a person to the state through the box that is checked. The M or the F is said to be “indicating,” “describing,” “listing,” and “stating,” which surely makes it appear that the box selected is simply and only registering a fact. But there is “an authorizing power” that stands behind this connection. Currah cites Gayle Salamon: “Sex is something that the documents themselves enact, and sex becomes performative in the sense that the ‘m’ or the ‘f’ on the document does not merely report on the sex of its bearer but becomes the truth of and bestows the bearer’s sex.”

The use of “performative” in this quotation raises some questions. For now, let’s make a distinction that hopefully proves useful. Sometimes in popular language in recent years, to say something is “performative” means that it is mere show, a surface phenomenon, something fully artificial and not quite real. But when the law names you in a certain way, cornering you into a box, then the force of language actually does create a new situation: a legal status is conferred. In these contexts, a performative use of language brings about the reality that it names. When a judge declares you married or dead, that is not just artificial fluff. Something very real has happened. And yet performative power does not operate exclusively through the law. A performative reality is one that is expressed in, and actualized by, the enactment itself, whether it takes place in language or gesture or movement. Sometimes what is enacted is a form of effacement and other times it is a life-affirming discourse or practice. For instance, the introduction of X as a box that one can check in a wide range of countries along with M and F now produces social legibility of genderqueer and non-binary people, or trans people who understand themselves to be outside the binary. Indeed, when one is called male when one is a woman, or called female when one is a man, the calling is an effacement of what one is. That effacement is an actual effect, a modification of reality, and its own specific form of violence. None of these instances of performativity should be called “merely theatrical” or “fake”—they are lived enactments that do change the way in which we live and breathe, determining conditions of livability and unlivability. To say that performative enactments do nothing is to deprive those who require them of breath and life in the world.

(Someday if the world seems safer I want to nullify my sex. I do want that X on my passport after all...)


5. Trying to separate nature/nuture doesn't make sense.

Humans are permeable and it is our relationships to things and to other beings that inform our development and make our lives possible.

The point can be simply made by considering how bodies are formed by the kinds of foods that are ingested, which, in turn, depend on what kinds of foods are produced and available. The social and economic infrastructure of food, including supply chains and unequal distribution, inhabits the materiality of the bodies in which we live. As should be obvious, nutrition affects the growth and density of our bones, the composition of our blood, and mortality rates. Nutrition may be one site where the co-construction of material and social lives is most obvious. But another example would be the effect of clean or polluted air on the body, its very capacity to breathe. As noted above, “reproductive capacities” cannot always be assumed, and some of them have to be activated for reproduction to occur. One of several reasons we cannot assume that women are defined by their reproductive capacity is simply that not everyone living in the category has that capacity or is compelled to make use of it. Both environment and desire are already at work in the making and unmaking of capacities. Sometimes a “capacity” only gets activated with a technological intervention, at which point the gestation can be understood as emerging from more than one agent, a complex interplay of human and technological powers.5 The model of co-construction comes into play here, too. In any case, it is not to be assumed that a “natural” capacity is actually there, and it often turns out to be cruel to make that assumption.

That world of social and economic infrastructure and living processes is one in which the biological body lives, stays alive. It is one in which life is already bound up with social and economic institutions linked with other forms of life. Indeed, the biological body lives only to the extent that it is connected to other life-forms and an array of social systems and powers. Those interactions are formative and, ideally, sustaining. The body would not “be” what it is without those connections staying alive, without those related lives, which means that the life of the body is already, and continuously, linked to other living forms. That formative interplay more closely describes what a body “is,” that is, its growth and mode of becoming and its constitutive relationality.

By that last phrase, I mean only “the relations without which a body cannot be at all.” The outside is constantly taken in in order to live, which is why the politics of food, water, air, and shelter are crucial to living, to living on, and to living well. In its porosity, the body lets in the external world in order to survive, and when its boundaries are fully closed off from what is outside, it falters. It cannot breathe or eat; it cannot expel what it no longer needs. Thus, it makes no sense to think of the body as a bounded entity which bears its sex as a simple attribute. If the body and its sex are both understood as relational, then the social has enveloped and entered us way before we enter into any deliberate relation with the social. We are, as it were, from the start, outside ourselves, in the hands of others, exposed to elements, such as air, nourishment, and shelter, and all of these externals become part of biological life—ingested, inhaled, incorporated, reproducing cells and sometimes damaging them. If we care about eradicating environmental toxins and environmental racism, then we know that it is at the level of the particle that passes between the external world and the body that matters of life and death come to the fore. As a result, it makes no sense to think of the body as over here, and the environment as over there, and then ask how the two come together. We have to start with the scene of interaction, interdependency, and reciprocal permeability and then ask how the idea of a primary ontological separation between body and world came to be accepted as “common sense” in certain parts of the Western world. A living body is alive only by virtue of sustaining relations, so when we think about the body, or gendered embodiment, we are always talking about those relations as well. Indeed, if we are not acted upon in some ways, if we do not take the external world in, or find a way to be lodged there, we don’t stand much chance of living on.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor of molecular biology, cell biology, and biochemistry at Brown University, argued in 2021 that “a dynamic systems framework” is necessary to account for “gender/sex” subjectivity.1 A dynamic systems framework, in her view, moves beyond the nature/nurture debate, which assumes a contrast between internal and external factors. Those who stay within that model imagine that the inside is not formed in part by the outside, that is, by interaction, even though biological concepts such as “self-organization, complexity, embodiment, continuity in time and dynamic stability” all encompass “multiple levels of biological and social organization.” The “dynamic systems” perspective, elaborated by a host of scholars in addition to Fausto-Sterling, considers embodiment not as a discrete and bounded phenomenon, but as the effect of a complex set of interactions of an organism with an environment over time, some of which are more accelerated than others. When someone presents with a “gender/sex identity” that is the result of a complex and dynamic process, biological and social forces have already interacted. Our treasured identities, if we have them, are the stabilized result of those intricate processes.

In what follows, there are three points worth considering more closely in order to respond to the question “Does gender deny the materiality of sex?” First, social and material construction (or formation) have to be thought of as interactive, and as supported by several scientific frameworks. Second, the distinction between nature and culture that presumes that sex is natural and gender is cultural or social does not work within such frameworks because the relation between the two refuses that very division (a historically established one that needs to be rethought in light of both social theory and science). Third, sex assignment is one place where we can see quite clearly the social powers that operate on bodies to establish sex in reference to dimorphic ideals and an array of associated social expectations. If we think that sex assignment simply names what already exists, we refuse to consider the ways established and obligatory categories describe and form bodies at the same time, and how these descriptive and formative powers can exclude and efface the sexed bodies that emerge in time. To argue that a number of formative powers act upon the matter of sex, including our own self-formative powers, is not to deny sex, but to offer an alternative way of understanding its reality apart from a natural-law thesis of complementarity or any form of biological determinism.

This is the first time I've encountered this concept of humans as being entirely about relations. It makes a lot of sense to me. Everything in context. As I get older I just really realize how interconnected we all are, even when it doesn't feel like it at all. It's kind of wild. 8 billion people on this earth, and 1% of them is still 80 million. Whenever we talk about minorities we are in fact dealing with millions of people and the relations that have led to their current position in their societies.


6. Gender ultimately represents a "gap" between the desired and the lived experience.

The book summarizes John Money's inhumane research and the coining of the term "Gender":

That which Money called to be “managed” was seen as a disturbance in the expected developmental history of the child. The beginning of that developmental story was supposed to be different; that trajectory could not begin with this disturbance at its origin, or so they thought. A perceived failure to conform to the expectation of what a sexed infant should be is what first brought the term “gender” into contemporary discourse. It was not an identity, but a gap, or the name for a noncoincidence.

The gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never fully be closed, which is why even those who happily embrace their sex assigned at birth still have to do performative work to embody that assignment in social life. Genders are not just assigned. They have to be realized or undertaken, or done, and no single act of doing secures the deal. Have I finally achieved the gender I have been seeking to become, or is becoming the name of the game, the temporality of gender itself?

In a way, the sexologists of the time were onto something that Joan W. Scott clarified later. Gender is not a noun, but a framework for
think[ing] critically about how the meanings of sexed bodies are produced in relation to one another, how these meanings are deployed and changed [my emphasis]. The focus ought to be not on the roles assigned to women and men, but on the construction of sexual difference itself.

This definition takes a while to parse for me, but it's an interesting proposition considering that most people will likely never use "gender" this way in their speech.

Anyway, before reading this book I was thinking of "sex" and "gender" as two necessarily separate terms and I really loathed that I would never "escape" my sex in terms of body parts, while the "gender" part was social roles I was/am trying to throw off. At the same time, I doubted that I had enough cred to truly prove that I was allowed to be outside what other people decided what I was, because I doubted that I had something innate in me that was so strong that its defiance could and would always be recognized. I felt like I didn't want it enough, I didn't "feel" like I was "agender" because I know I was a girl as a kid and saying "Well, I just decided to stop!" was far too courageous for someone with terrible social anxiety when social anxiety is all about failing roles that other people expect from you. (Not to mention, how does one feel an absence if one doesn't miss it, anyway?)

Besides my therapist clocking me as agender when I legitimately thought I was performing "woman" well enough to never have anyone question it, queer or not, I remember reading an essay from a trans woman about how saying you have to Know "what" you "are" is so much pressure when you've spent your whole life adapting otherwise, and that keeps people in the closet. Rather, your gender should be seen as something you want to move towards, rather than requiring that you've already arrived before you claim anything. That was the nicest way of thinking about gender for me and I think of that whenever I start feeling like I'm still not #legit enough. Like regardless of how good or how bad I am at being genderless, regardless of my past and who I used to be, it's what I want to move towards now. And that's enough. But at the same time, I never realized that this whole framework could be ported to everyone's gender, cis people included. There is a persistent gap for everyone, that leads us to do things that affirm what this means to us, over and over. That is what gender is: a gap. When you think about what you "are", it should necessarily also contain what you "want to be". And for people who feel their gendered identities strongly, this is "I am X and I want to be X and I will continue to choose to be X."

I think a lot of people would be scared that it isn't something set in stone. But the value is in the choice, and the continuing to choose something over and over again. Rather than "revealing" who you were "meant" to be, which is a more fate-brained approach that makes people overly anxious about whether they've found "that thing" yet, whether in romance or whatever they're working on or finding who they're supposed to be. The choice and the pattern of choice is something that I'm also coming to value a lot more as I get older.


7. "Gender" is not a translatable term in other languages and rather than imposing our idea of what "gender" is, we should allow space for other people existing with formations beyond our western ideas.

"Gender" is something that should always be discussed rather than defined.

In a multilingual epistemology, there are no foreign languages since every language sounds foreign from within another language; or maybe every language is foreign, which means there are no languages that are not foreign. The foreign is at the border of every language and often prompts the kinds of coinages that establish a future life for language. The effort to expunge an unwanted foreign presence from a language suggests that languages can be sealed off, that they should be neither touched nor transformed by one another, and that the borders of national languages should be patrolled for the sake of national identity. The resistance to the foreign mobilizes a fantasy that such borders can be sealed, even though every border, every movement of migration, is a scene of translation.

It makes good political sense to resist when an imperial power’s language has entered a region or a nation as a colonizing force. When “gender” moves from English into another language, it is English that is also entering, and certainly not for the first time. English has been doubtless entering for a long time. Yet imperial powers cannot keep control over the words they impose or exclude; they do not automatically reproduce the imperialism of the language from which they emerge. The origin of a term in no way predicts all its eventual usages.

When in English we make various generalizations about gender—generalizations that might include “gender is performative” or “gender is relational” or “intersectional” or “primarily a question of labor”—we presume that such claims are easily if not fully translatable by virtue of their generalizability. Although Anglophone gender theorists do not always recognize it, they unwittingly take up an attitude toward translation when they are arguing about gender. Granted, there are those who simply do not care whether the key terms are translatable—that is a problem for translators, after all, and though we are even sometimes glad to assist them with their struggles, we do not always consider that the generalizability of our claims actually depends on establishing a conceptual equivalence between the terms in both languages. This view is a form of smug monolingualism. For when no conceptual equivalence can be established between English and another language, we are confronted with a different problem. But if we solve that by inviting everyone into English as the established contemporary linguistic frame, or we export that frame in a beneficent spirit, then we become no more than polite imperialists. Or it may be that philosophically we think gender names a concept and that the language we use to name or to describe the concept is quite incidental to the concept itself. If linguistic usage does not generate or sustain concepts, add or subtract meanings, and if concepts have a relative independence of linguistic usage, then we could not understand how gender is inflected by verbs, or how other kinds of nomenclature work in a language to designate what is called “gender” in English. Our understanding of the phenomenon is enlarged, but only if we give up our attachment to the monolingual frame. Translation is, in fact, the condition of possibility of gender theory in a global frame.

Examples of specific terms in different languages that similarly are in the gap between binary genders and can't be translated:

Ifi Amadiume, in Male Daughters, Female Husbands, describes gender arrangements in Nigeria before the twentieth century, underscoring how gender relations and assignments change depending on the distribution of wealth, the power to participate economically, and the role assumed in relations of care within extended kinship networks. African scholars have documented women marrying women, and how women could become husbands when there was no son to inherit the wealth. What does this say about how gender can change depending on the role assigned or assumed? Further, as Christian colonizers sought to replace African deities with a masculinized version of God, they promoted the idea of masculinity in ways that ran counter to the religious notion of chi, a term in Igbo that refers equally to male and female deities. The idea of a unitary “woman” brought by Christian moralists has no place in African contexts where women could take on social roles, including that of a husband, depending on shifting circumstances and social demands.

unongayindoda

Elaborating further on Amadiume’s framework, Matebeni studies how the term unongayindoda has become less common in the Nguni language on South Africa’s Eastern Cape. A term used to describe a woman who appears like a man, or does things a man would generally do, or who “dresses funny,” its usage has moved from the merely descriptive to the increasingly derogative. But it is not necessarily linked with sexual identity or practice, nor can it be easily assimilated into the binary gender model. A now derogatory term recently reclaimed for the purposes of asserting freedom or, indeed, to escape abuse, unongayindoda is a specific linguistic term that can be understood only in relation to various social coordinates. As it is reused, it becomes a term open to a multitude of meanings, generating unexpected possibilities and even new imaginaries.

The examples Matebeni offers are not meant primarily to support or contest Western theories; rather, they are meant to recover and introduce a new, different language for understanding gender attributions. For Matebeni, unongayindoda exists beyond gender itself.

gogo

Emphasizing again the importance of language, Matebeni discusses the term gogo, which means the mother of either a mother or father, but also a prophet, a seer, or a healer. The term opens up several meanings that confound both colonial and homonormative versions of gender and sexuality. For Matebeni, gogo moves beyond gender, for it refers to male and female grandparents as well as to a body of Indigenous knowledge that connects the living and the dead. It challenges the binary but cannot serve as the non-Western example that supports Western queer theory’s rejection of binarism. Rather, it belongs to a strain of African philosophy that links connectivity in kinship and intimacy with dignity. It belongs, specifically, to an Ubuntu understanding of the human as part of a larger world, connected to a spiritual inter-relationality. If gogo is translated too quickly into “gender theory” as a dominant framework, or if it becomes a box to be checked, it loses all those temporal, spiritual, and social coordinates and meanings. It becomes truly lost in translation.

hijra (from India)

it is roughly translated as “third gender” but not “transgender.” The hijras were criminalized in 1871 under British colonial rule. The name functions not only as an “identity” but also as a designation for a set of relations, a group to which they belong (and have been traditionally inducted), and a set of practices, including song and dance, that they traditionally perform. It makes no sense to fit this group of people who have been present for hundreds of years into contemporary gender typologies, especially when the legacy of their criminalization still haunts and marginalizes them. If local and vernacular ways of displacing binary gender exist, as they surely have and do, that means that the Western discourse—or any other “foreign” imposition—did not produce those ways of living and desiring, but only developed a vocabulary for them whose universality is to be challenged and whose powers of effacement should be exposed. The imperialist move takes place when “gender” is taken up by organizations and states that seek to advertise their gay and lesbian human rights records as a way of deflecting from their racist immigration policies, their colonial wars, and their rights-stripping activities against Indigenous and subjugated peoples. Allies like these we do not need.

And in general...

No one language has the exclusive power to define gender or to regulate its grammatical usage, and that means that every way of referring to gender has a certain contingency. We may understandably feel disrespected if we are referred to in the wrong way, but why have we asked people to enter into our own frame of reference? Those reactions can be moments of monolingual obstinacy or a failure to see that the work of translation is obligatory.
...
If one’s sense of self is bound up with the language one uses to describe oneself, and if the insistence on this or that term plunges one more deeply into monolingualism, one closes off the encounters with other languages and with what it might teach us about what some of us call “gender.”

Some feminists and gender theorists have argued about whether there can be genders that go beyond man and woman, or whether gender itself should be transcended or abolished, and whether we should live in a world without gender categories at all. My own view is that we should seek to bring about a world where the many relations to being socially embodied that exist become more livable, and people generally become more open to the ways that gender can be done and lived without judgment, fear, or hatred. Some people love the binary character of gender and do not want it changed. Some trans people affirm the binary and only want to find their rightful place either as a man or as a woman and to live peaceably, if not joyously, in that linguistic abode. For them, securing a place in the language of gender is a prerequisite for inhabiting the world. Ethically considered, such a desire is to be honored—radically and without qualification. At the same time, there are others who cannot live very well within those binary terms, including trans people who understand “trans” to exist at a critical angle to the binary, and for them other gender vocabularies, including pronouns, are required for inhabiting the world and feeling at home, or relatively at home, in the language they use, or in refusing the language that negates who they are; that refusal is also an opening onto a habitable world, and those who oppose it are opposing a livable life for a group of people who have made their livable conditions clear. And so, reasonably enough, there are some who ask for new lexicons, or for ways of living outside received categories of gender altogether, as non-binary people sometimes do, for instance: they press coinage to a further extreme and for another purpose, refining their vocabulary for self-reference within a monolingual frame, or they abandon the practice of a new naming, undertaking a linguistic and embodied strike against gender categories as we know them.

All of these are legitimate positions because each of them tells us about a group of people who are searching for livable lives within the language that they find or make or refuse. One cannot be “against” any of these positions, if each of them opens up a different trajectory of hope for a livable life. Given that not everyone finds the same terms livable, we have to be careful not to impose a new gender norm that generalizes the conditions of livability, or that decides without consultation what someone else should be called (some of the debates about whose perception defines “cisgender” bring this to the fore).4 We have to be prepared to translate between a language in which we live, the one that we require to live, and another’s language that dispossesses us from that sure sense of things that comes with monolingual conviction. After all, some find life and breath by escaping the terms by which gender recognition is conferred, and others find life and breath precisely through feeling recognized by existing terms, and some welcome or make the foreign term as a way of contesting the naturalizing function of language, or of English in particular.

Even within the monolingual frame, the foreign is there from the start. In being named, in being assigned a sex at birth, someone else’s desire is lodged in this name, if not a whole history of desires coming from elsewhere. Is there not a phantasmatic and foreign element also lodged in that assigned name and gender that one is left to decipher or live with or change?

Before reading this, I was thinking of "sex" and "gender" as two necessarily separate terms and lamenting whenever "gender" wasn't an option in stuff (including trying to read Japanese character descriptions for gender-weird characters and just seeing 性別 and wondering how to even interpret that in terms of what the character actually wants and claims for themself). But I see now that I mostly just fell into the monolingual trap with this one. There's also been a trend in Japanese autobiographical comics that deal with gender that get translated into English using concepts like separating "sex" and "gender", so I guess I was just assuming that they were going to follow us on this with ジェンダー (jendaa).

(Butler does spend a paragraph explaining the new terms Japanese and Chinese have come up with to try to translate the English concept of "gender", but I didn't find it interesting enough to copy since I guess it's not that new to me.)


8. TERFs ally with authoritarians because they wish to "own" gender in terms of property and have built their own phantasms around the penis

In denying the reality of trans lives, TERFs claim proprietary rights to gender categories, especially the category of women, yet gender categories are not property, and they cannot be owned. Gender categories precede and exceed our individual lives. Categories have social and historical lives that are not the same as ours as living creatures. The categories preceded us and come to bear on us when we are named and assigned a sex, as most of us were. When we are named a gender, however, we are entered into a class of people so named, and if we rename ourselves, we move into another category whose history no one individually possesses. Gender categories change through time, and feminism has always relied on the historically changing character of gender categories in order to demand changes in the way that women and men are defined and treated. If these were timeless categories, they could not be redefined, which means that whatever the category of “women” once meant is what it means forever. That would toss both feminism and history into the dustbin. Joan W. Scott’s description from 1988 remains more than useful: “‘Man’ and ‘woman’ are at once empty and overflowing categories. Empty because they have no ultimate, transcendental meaning. Overflowing because even when they appear to be fixed, they still contain within them alternative, denied, or suppressed definitions.”

If such categories were understood as forms of property belonging to individuals or classes, then property relations—and capitalism—would have already captured in advance the framework in which we seek to make change. The denial of trans rights to self-determination sends trans people back to their deadnames, denying their very existence, all the while laying claim paternalistically to know the true existential reality of trans people better than trans people do themselves.

It's interesting to think about how people who are transphobic are also intimately afraid of losing their own sex/gender. They're afraid that trans people will render their own cisgender-ness and all related meanings moot.

It makes sense with the whole like, white people fear losing their whiteness (and thus their social power) as well. There's an identity that's imagined to be threatened by the existence of others when really they're the ones threatening the others' existence.


Also this whole next segment I'm just going to copy because it's literally the shit-tier logical sliding that affected my TERF ex-friend:

Stock uses only one example from a prison setting [in which trans women are transferred to women’s prisons and commit sexual violence] to make a generalization. In calling for sex segregation where sex is equated with the sex assigned at birth, she rejects the idea that sex segregation is like race segregation, and imagines that women will be protected under such circumstances. But are trans women protected under that rubric? Or is their exposure to violence and harassment in men’s prisons of no concern? Although she makes clear that not all trans women are rapists, she argues that even if a very small percentage turn out to be, or even to fake trans status for that purpose, a policy of separating trans women from women assigned female at birth should apply presumably because the presence of trans women is a danger to those women who are not trans.

What assumptions are made in this argument, and how much of what passes as argument is phantasmatic sliding in the service of fearmongering? Are they grounded? Stock’s valid concern is that no woman should be subject to possible rape, and I agree that everyone should share that concern. And yet, if securing women against rape in prison were her main focus, should she not first consult the statistics on male prison guards engaging in precisely that activity, which, given their magnitude, should, according to her logic, lead to a policy in which no man ever works as a prison guard in any women’s prison? Perhaps she has signed petitions to this effect or written on this policy, but I am not finding it in my research. And what about sexual abuse inflicted by women (assigned female at birth) against other women? Many people report abuse by women, so it hardly seems right to imagine that only those assigned male at birth are capable of abuse or assault. The problem is not just that certain stories and incidents are foregrounded over others, but that such incidents launch a chain of escalating claims until a general picture of reality is achieved, even though it is no more than a specter-infused hypothetical that is meant to stoke fear and scapegoat an entire class of people.

If the implicit point is that someone who has a penis, or even someone who once had one, will rape, because the penis is the cause of rape, or the socialization of those who have penises is the cause of rape, then surely such claims should be debated. Rape is an act of social and sexual domination, as many feminists have argued, arising from social relations that establish masculine domination and access to women’s bodies without consent as a right and a privilege. The reason for this domination is not biological; the body, rather, is organized and suffused by the operative relations of power at work. Yes, rape is unwanted penetration, and that can be from a penis, a fist, or anything else that can serve as a blunt instrument. The instrument does not give rise to rape, though it makes it happen. Strangulation requires the hands, but the hands themselves are not the reason why someone is strangling someone else. The activity of the penis or, indeed, a blunt instrument to execute a rape is surely not the cause of rape, but one of its possible instruments.

A certain mode of argumentation belies an organizing phantasmatic scene: the penis in the picture is the cause and condition of rape and, without the penis in the room, rape will not happen. Rape does not unfold naturally from the presence of a penis, and it would doubtless serve us well to consider how many kinds of objects and body parts are used to hurt and enter others’ bodies without their consent. When the aim is proprietary domination, then any and all instruments will do. That violent desire does not arise from the penis, but is sometimes executed by a penis in the service not of a biological urge but rather of a social desire for absolute domination (a view that used to belong to radical feminism before the biological reductionist appropriation of the term). We would surely benefit from understanding more about how that desire for domination emerges, as so many feminists, prior to the TERF generation, have ably done.

Stock’s argument for not letting trans women into women’s spaces—an overtly discriminatory position—seems based on the notion that women will feel unsafe if there is a penis in the room. Where does that idea come from? What power is given to the penis in such a scenario, and what does it actually represent? Is the penis always threatening? What if it is limp or simply in the way, or the last thing on anyone’s mind? When we raise our sons, do we recoil from their penises as if they were always and only potential threats to women? I am sure that is not the case, or perhaps I should more fervently hope that is not the case. Calling for segregation and discrimination can only seem “reasonable” when this phantasmatic construal of the penis as weapon is organizing reality. But that view cannot withstand the critical scrutiny of how analogy and generalization work in this position. If we were to find evidence, for example, that two Black people have committed crimes, do we then demand social policies that would make the entire Black community pay for those crimes? Or if one Jewish person overcharges for a transaction, are we then free to generalize about the avaricious character of Jews as a class? Clearly, we are not justified in doing so.

If the argument is that trans women are abusive because they are “really” men, then the abiding assumption is that men are abusive as a class, or by virtue of their penises, and that in any scenario they, the ones assigned male at birth, are the true abusers. To make sense of this claim, we would have to know whether all men are potential or actual abusers, whether they are abusive because of their penis, whether trans men with or without penises are part of that class of abusers, and whether other kinds of abuse are occluded by this rather stringent framework for identifying when and how it happens. It would seem that the argument rests on a romantic idea that women are only victims and never abusers, even though children of abusive mothers know how untrue this can be, as do survivors of lesbian intimate and domestic violence. If the argument put forward is that trans women are a risk to women assigned female at birth because some of the former still have a penis, we have to again ask how the penis functions to organize and incite a fantasy of threat.

If we are asked by gender-critical feminists, in the spirit of realism, to accept the reality of the penis, we can surely agree to do precisely that. But that acceptance hardly explains why men rape, for nothing about the organ per se produces rape. What does rape do for a man, or what does a man expect that rape will do for him? Such questions cannot be answered by a purely psychological approach, since the framework for understanding why some men rape is surely widespread masculine domination, which includes rights of access to bodies they seek to control. That form of domination supports ideals of masculine power defined in part by the capacity (personal and social) or, indeed, the right to violate women. The organ is phantasmatically invested with social power under some conditions and becomes the site of a fearful fantasy under others. It may be that the organ per se rarely appears in this scene apart from a phantasmatic investment of some kind, for if men understand that violating a woman is an entitlement, that entitlement comes from somewhere, and it is internalized, if not incorporated, as a capacity and power. Call me a radical feminist, if you must, but this social power was surely what earlier generations of feminists were clear about. In fact, the descriptions offered by both Rowling and Stock testify to this power. The trans-exclusionary feminist approach to banning those with penises from the bathroom or changing room, or mandating sex-segregated prisons, makes no sense without understanding the powers of fantasy that seize upon the organ (including those brought by penis-bearing men themselves), even when the organ is not a matter for concern or, indeed, as it is for many trans women, when it is put out of play. Consider, then, the irony that the women most feared for having a penis may be among those people most disinterested in having one. Why should they, of all people, carry the brunt of masculine violence? Trans women, one of the most vulnerable groups, a group that includes those who may or may not have penises, have already dis-identified from traditional masculinity and, in many if not most cases, know, suffer, and resist masculine violence in their everyday lives. How foolish, then, not to realize the alliance at hand between trans people and feminists of all kinds, especially when so often they are not distinct groups at all. Transfeminism makes this clear, drawing on the intersectional approach developed by Black feminism and developing a new framework that moves beyond the divisions considered here. Masculinity does not have to remain tied to the framework of domination and violation, as many newer forms of masculinity attest, especially in queer and trans communities.

Keeping trans women safe, as safe as all women and girls, is not a contradiction unless you believe that women assigned female at birth are imperiled by women whose gendered status is publicly achieved through self-declaration, social recognition, or medical and legal recertification. Suddenly, the figure of the trans woman attacker seems to stand for all trans women, and the category of “trans women” is replaced simply by “men.” The two claims seem to move together, but no logic tethers them: trans women are reduced to men, and (all) men are potential rapists. I take it that those men assigned female at birth may, or may not, fit under the second generalization. Or, one trans woman attacks and, hence, all trans women are attackers. The few who have committed assault—Karen White imprisoned for sex offenses in the United Kingdom in 2018 among them—come to represent the potential to attack that all trans women represent, and the reason for that is that trans women are actually men, and men—or, their penises—are attackers.35 This wild reduction and effacement lets the instance stand for the whole, giving way to a generalization and then a full-blown panic, a phantasmatic reduction of men not only to their penises, but to attacking penises. Yes, that can happen in dream, or in the ideation following trauma, but when this phantasm is set forth as social reality, then the syntax of the phantasmatic scene takes the place of a thoughtful consideration of social reality.

No distinction is made between a law that lets “any man” into specific spaces for girls or women and those women and girls who arrive at that same door after transitioning and self-identifying as a woman. Let’s be clear: transition and self-identification are not whims, and even if a person chooses to take the step of self-declaring on legal forms, that does not mean that the lived reality of gender is a whimsical choice, a strategic way for that person to get into women’s spaces and to have their way with those they encounter. Even if we can point to a few instances where such things have occurred, how do those numbers compare with the ever-increasing forms of sexual violence committed against women, lesbians, gay men, travestis, and trans people by those men—and state powers—who feel that it is their right and power? A trans woman is more fully exposed to violence in a space full of men than she is a threat to other women who share her need for protection. Some studies report that trans women are thirteen times more likely to be assaulted in men’s prisons than men are.

Violent crimes are real. Sexual violence is real. The traumatic aftermath is also real, but living in the repetitive temporality of trauma does not always give us an adequate account of social reality. In fact, the reality of the trauma we suffer makes it difficult to distinguish between what we most fear and what is actually happening, what happened in the past and what is happening now. It takes some careful work for those distinctions to emerge in a stable form for clear judgment. The obliteration of those distinctions is part of trauma’s damage. The associations that any of us live with as a result of traumatic violence make it difficult to navigate the world. We may find ourselves fearful of certain kinds of looks or spaces, smells or sounds. One might see someone who is reminiscent of the person who has done the violence, but is it not up to us to ask whether that new person should be bearing the burden of our memory, our trauma? Or should we be given license to ascribe guilt by association because we were harmed? I think not. If having been traumatized allows one to see the scene of trauma everywhere, then part of reparation is being able to localize what happened, and to relieve the mind of uncontrollable associations that, left unchecked, would vilify everyone who prompts an association with the traumatic material.

Traumatic associations operate by way of proximity, likeness, echoes, displacements, and condensations. They are the waking version of hideous dreams. Living in and working through the aftermath of sexual violence is an enormous struggle, one that requires support, therapy, and good political analysis as part of the process. But none of us were violated by an entire class, even if it sometimes feels that way. To refuse to recognize trans women as women because one is afraid that they are really men, and hence potentially rapists, is to let the traumatic scenario loose on one’s description of reality, to flood an undeserving group of people with one’s unbridled terror and fear, and to fail to grasp social reality in its complexity, while also failing to identify the truer source of harm, an insight that could very well precipitate an alliance in the place of paranoid division. If I became convinced that a trans person carries or represents my personal trauma, then I have accomplished a projection and displacement that makes it even more difficult to tell my story, as well as theirs. Trans people now represent the violence of what has happened to me, even though they were not there, and someone else, who is strangely nameless, and notably a cis male, certainly was. Are feminists not inflicting a form of psychic violence on trans people by projecting in this way, associating them with rape when they are themselves struggling to get free of myriad forms of social violence as well? If feminists of the exclusionary brand deny the reality of trans lives and engage in discrimination, existential negation, and hatred, seeking recourse to personal trauma to inflict fresh harm, then they commit an injustice rather than forge an alliance for justice. Feminism has always been a struggle for justice, or is, at its best, precisely such a struggle, formed in alliance and affirming difference. Trans-exclusionary feminism is not feminism, or, rather, should not be.

Reading this really reminded me of her. Like, oh, yeah. That was exactly it. My ex-friend literally linked me a site that was a compilation of cherry picked instances of trans women abusing cis women in women's prisons. And her whole logic was basically "I had a bad encounter with a [cis man's] penis so everyone with a penis is evil and a rapist", which was definitely trauma logic sliding.


9. "Sex" does not have to be defined to protect against sexual discrimination.

Rather, all that is necessary is the proof that someone perceived a difference in sex and chose to discriminate against that. This has been the legal basis for a while.

To Trump’s chagrin, [Bostock v. Clayton County] went in another lexical direction, relying on a different model of language that confirmed the possibility of self-definition on matters of sex. Justice Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, hardly the most progressive members of the court, rejected the government’s view. One argument Gorsuch made was that losing a job because one declares or shows an attraction to someone of the same sex is surely discriminatory, since the job would presumably not be lost if the person to whom one was attracted were of the opposite sex. Indeed, the arguments in Bostock that secured the rights of trans, lesbian, and gay people to make claims under the legal rubric of sex discrimination made clear that it was less important to secure the meaning of “sex” than to determine how “sex” becomes a factor in discriminatory treatment in the workplace.

If an employer, for instance, treats someone in a way that makes assumptions about that person’s sex and decides they ought to be paid less than others or be ruled out of certain positions, it matters less that the assumptions made about what sex is are wrong than that those assumptions or prejudices played a role in unequal treatment. The employer’s actions make sex into a key element in an employment-related decision that produces unequal treatment as a consequence. It does not matter if they are right or wrong about the sex of a person, since most discriminatory actions of this sort do make false presumptions about sex, the way someone assigned a sex of a certain kind will appear, what limits they have, what propensities they show. “Sex” here comes into play less as an established fact than as a key component of discriminatory treatment. The task is to find out how the treatment is figuring sex, how “sex” emerges in the midst of a decision that reproduces inequality. We don’t have to have a common definition of “sex” to establish sex discrimination. We need only to know how sex is being invoked and figured in certain kinds of discriminatory actions—how prejudicial understandings lead to discriminatory conduct.

The Court also effectively asserts that sex cannot be defined exclusively in terms of the sex assigned at birth, that sex is a process marked by possible shifts. In the following passage, it makes clear that the sex assigned or identified at birth is not the entirety of sex since a person can alter that identification:

"Take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision."

The Court makes clear in this passage that for transgender people, there can be two moments of identification, the first related to how one’s sex is identified at birth, and the second to how sex taken on as self-identification in time. Significantly, both are considered as part of “sex,” even, we might say, equally a part of “sex.” In other words, sex is not definitively or irreversibly determined at birth. The majority decision puts it this way:

"By discriminating against transgender persons, the employer unavoidably discriminates against persons with one sex identified at birth and another today. Any way you slice it, the employer intentionally refuses to hire applicants in part because of the affected individual’s sex, even if it never learns any applicant’s sex."

That's about most of the things I was thinking about while reading this book. "Sex" was way more fluid a concept than I was giving it credit for.

#books #nonfiction