After the truly woeful ruling by the UK’s supreme court last week – that only ‘biological’ women can be legally classified as women – I needed to pause all my work and better understand what is going on. For years, I was aware of an offshoot of British feminism who call themselves ‘gender critical’ campaigners who have been at the forefront of public discussions about what a woman ‘is’, and who can rightly call themselves a woman. At the root of their objection is that ‘anyone’ can call themselves women in the UK (a totally unacceptable, dangerous notion!), and that these ‘anyone’ can become dangerous interlopers in women-only spaces to harm women. The sheer force of this argument, despite it effectively turning the clock back for feminism, gender theory, trans rights, intersectionality in one fell swoop, has won the opinion of cis-gendered judges in a court that denied the presence of transgender people (cannot make this up).
To get a better grasp of this outrageous state of affairs, I picked up Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender (2024, Penguin). She is truly lucid in this book, sometimes wry in coming to grips with the global backlash against ‘gender’. The truly curious figures in this backlash are the ‘gender critical’ feminists* to whom she dedicates a chapter. ‘Critical’ because they, the writer J.K. Rowling being the highest profile among their number, believe that the understanding of gender as a construction – a key proposition in feminist and queer theory – is an oppressive imposition on their lives as women. How so, you ask? How does a word like ‘gender’ have this power to do so? They insist that gender construction – long de rigueur in the teaching of gender studies – has upended, even cancelled biological reality as the true basis of womanhood. By biology they mean the female genitalia (the cervix, specifically. Hold me back). This is what I mean by setting the clock of feminism and gender theory by two whole generations back to the days when biological essentialism was seen by feminists as the scourge that trapped women in reproductive roles. But no, biological reality brings us back to things that matter; “non-abstract”, common sense things like ‘male danger’ in changing rooms, public toilets, and the dating perils for cis-gender transphobic lesbians.
You see, I was somewhat aware of these arguments by ‘gender critical’ feminists years ago. I thought they were ridiculous then, I still think they’re ridiculous now. And I thought surely the illogic and transphobic nature of their propositions would be thrown out of court that has for years passed good enough and workable anti-discrimination laws. But no, they haven’t gone away, in fact they continue to circulate and amplify in the highest levels of public life – the British parliament and supreme court – and actually won. The images they create of ‘male violence’ that can take place in women-only spaces have been whipped up to a disproportionate frenzy as if to accuse –now going beyond even to suggest or imply – transgender women of ultimately being men, men who may actually possess a penis, men whom with their penis may commit sexual violence and assault and will if given the chance. Logic in that specific order.
Butler has unpacked the various parts of these arguments by ‘gender critical’ feminists – including the basic, simplistic, even misandrist view that a person-not-deemed-sufficiently-‘woman’-by-gender-critical-feminists in women-only spaces (and only women-only spaces ok? these are the favourite targets of masquerading intruders) are rapists, the problem of the penis, and the denial by ‘gender critical’ feminists that they are transphobic. Butler is the right person to comment of these developments because she is the OG theorist of gender as social construction (unless you count Simone de Beauvoir, but let’s not split hairs today). I was expecting her to feel what all teachers feel when their students don’t bother to do the reading or make an effort to come to a base level understanding of the key premise of a well-known text or term. Though I also know that the latter is a higher ask. So let’s be more generous and compassionate today.
Butler isn’t really upset that ‘gender critical’ feminists misunderstand how feminist theorists and students of gender theory conceptualise ‘gender’. She is more interested in understanding and explaining how and why they remain so stuck to rigid, self-defeating contradictions (“I’m not anti-trans or discriminatory, but transwomen are not and cannot call themselves women” “Yes transwomen are very vulnerable to male violence, but you’ll never know with these self-identifying transwomen who may actually be male”). And why ‘gender critical’ feminists seem unconcerned that their struggles can be co-opted by rightwing, misogynistic, anti-feminist movements who also hate transgender people and want to make their lives worse.
To make sense of how people can be consumed by contradictory, fearful images of the imaginary Other, Butler argues that only psychoanalysis can give us the answer, at least a partial if quite persuasive one for now. She refers to the concept of ‘phantasm’ by the neo-psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche as a broader framework for framing the argument-strategies and possible thought processes of ‘anti-gender movements’ that are rapidly on the rise and amassing greater power today. ‘Phantasm’ makes ‘sense’ because it is not pure fantasy nor total irrationality. It is a semi-conscious, deliberately unexamined ‘mixed-up’ arrangement and distillation of cultural codes and dark fantasies that bubble up and stay on the surface of one’s consciousness, that with enough emotive repetition it starts to feel and become ‘true’.
Butler also says that most rightwing anti-gender individuals who seek to ban, censor, and even destroy books, ideas, films, and the lives of feminists and LGBTQ people on religious grounds are likely to see books, ideas, films, and the facts of feminist and LGBTQ people’s lives as beyond the sphere of discussion or debate. If you believe in one immutable ‘truth’, then other truths especially those perceived oppositional to yours are invalid. If a different ‘truth’ comes along, and dares to contest what you’ve accepted as the ‘truth’ and norm for so long, then that becomes dangerous. Because if you read to seek the ‘truth’ you are the agent and defender of that ‘truth’. That ‘truth’ cannot be challenged (because it is likely to be god’s ‘truth’). What happens when you are asked to read children’s books with LGBTQ characters? If you believe books that contain ‘truth’ cannot be challenged, then you should also think that children’s books with LGBTQ characters cannot be challenged. And we cannot have that! What Butler is suggesting that it is likely ultra conservative, rightwing, anti-LGBTQ/gender folks think that the opposition read and think in the same way; i.e. dogmatic and passive ways like they do, parroting texts and talking points in verbatim. Which is why gender theory is accused by anti-gender movements as ‘propaganda’. And this is why she also says that sometimes we can’t expect everyone to read Gender Trouble, understand it, and become feminists overnight. Hell, I didn’t really understand it the first few times I read it. But I don’t see it as the work of the devil, as some ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christians do.
Reading Who’s Afraid of Gender was an act of emergency, to relieve me of my anger and confusion, but has not made me feel much better beyond that. Though I have gained more than an iota of understanding, which is all the more invaluable as we face a new world that isn’t afraid to tell you that up is down, right is left, war is peace.
*Not sure if you can call yourself a feminist if you restrict the rights of other women along with the meaning of femininity and womanhood and all the solidarity that arises from it.
Alicia Izharuddin 