Who's afraid of gender? By JudithButler, London: Allen Lane. 2024. pp. 320. £25.00 (hardback), £10.99 (paperback)

Judith Butler has, since the publication in 1994 of the book Gender Troubles, been one of the most cited intellectual sources of the ferment around ‘trans’, and in debates concerning sexuality and gender more widely. That book established Butler as a leading figure in ‘queer studies’, whose theory of gender as ‘performative’, not an essence, has become a major reference point in academic debate. This latest book is not easy reading in parts. Butler the philosopher sometimes makes use of extended logical sequences (a entails b, and in turn c must follow from that…) to make a point. This measured and abstract style, while heavy going at times, differs from the clamour of much public discourse in the area of ‘gender’—in the peculiar sense, attached by Butler to the single word, of politics around gender issues. ‘Gender’ is the broad collection of issues and demands which along with race and decolonisation are at the centre of today's culture wars: the agendas of lesbian, gay and queer activisms, anti-heteronormativity, different family structures, access to abortion and reproductive technologies, and the rights of ‘trans’ and other emergent sexual minorities. But despite its often scholarly manner, this is an intemperate and divisive book. Its apparent cogency is overshadowed by its assertions of how dark forces of fascistic totalitarianism have created globally an image of gender politics as a destructive threat, which they then use to spread fear and to incite support for their own life-destroying ends. Obviously hateful attacks on people associated in different ways with different ‘gender’ issues do occur and vary in different contexts in their motives (conscious and unconscious) and consequences. However, book's aim appears to be to roll up all forms of opposition to what Butler sees as a unified ‘slate’ of positions on the different issues and to represent all those forms, whether hatefully violent or peacefully civil, as different facets of the same repressive force. This creates an image of a unified and destructive phenomenon, a mirror to the imagined threat which, it is claimed, others have fabricated around gender. And, like the authoritarian voices which Butler rightly criticises for their repressiveness towards diversity, the massified image of an omnipresent and ultimately ‘fascist’ threat risks encouraging split and absolute states of mind, this time amongst the supporters and sympathisers of ‘gender’ politics. The starting point of this book is hard to disagree with: the current state of the world is deeply disturbing. Our sense of the future is dominated by threats of climate change, pandemics, economic and political chaos, mass migration and nuclear war. It would be no surprise if levels of existential anxiety were very high amongst publics everywhere as the reassuring fabrics of everyday life seem fragile if not actually fraying. Liberal democracies are beset with polarisations, and their institutions seem to be losing their credibility and with it their capacity to contain public anxieties. The rise of authoritarian leaders and movements offering fake and harmful solutions is one feature of this situation: not a new thing but definitely a large and growing element in the present. For Butler, as for some other heirs of 1960s revolutionary ardour, authoritarianism is the ultimate problem. Its practitioners seize upon and manipulate public anxieties; they win power by promising to deal with the problems that cause them. Their purpose in doing so is somehow (Butler's analysis is largely absent in this area) to serve the interest of those who benefit from the world as it is, particularly the beneficiaries of ‘extractive’ capitalism. That much is common to a range of anti-capitalist analyses. Butler asserts that the core power at the centre of this interest is that of a domineering and heartless patriarchy built around beliefs in heteronormativity and sexual dimorphism. Seemingly twinned with capitalism (and racism, though in both cases the linkage is asserted rather than explained), this power can pull a particular psychological lever: it can offer an image of the patriarchal family and heterosexuality as an orderly fortress within which anxious people can find safety. In order to do this, they (the exponents of this patriarchy) must create a picture of the threat from which they are saving us, which they base on the gender agenda. Far from being a late add-on to that list, trans rights are at the centre of Butler's concerns, presumably because the trans issue cracks the pedestal of biological difference and fixity on which the whole apparatus of patriarchal power might be seen to rest. No matter that trans is very much a minority issue; it is the principle that counts, and at stake is the future of patriarchy. Butler believes trans struggles are crucial to the destruction of patriarchy and that because its defenders also know this, they need to present trans issues, and ‘gender’ as a whole, as an existential threat. Butler calls the anti-gender image of a civilisation-threatening force a ‘phantasm’, borrowing a term used by the psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, to convey a structural state of mind in which catastrophic anxiety is gathered and mobilised in a particular way, in this case around ‘gender’. The book pulls together reports from around the world of activities by religious and political leaders who are opposed to some, or all, of the items on the gender agenda, and who readily invoke the threat to society which they claim is carried by today's liberal flux. Butler is able to show that there are indeed people who are constructing gender as a monolithic enemy, a monster which must be destroyed on all fronts, because it threatens a world order of absolute sexual dimorphism and male domination. In this world, heterosexuality is the only valid site of pleasure and intimacy, and heterosexual marriage the only legitimate context for reproduction. The Christian church in a number of its forms—especially the Vatican, American evangelism and African neo-Pentecostalism – is in Butler's account a very prominent source of this bigotry and its frantic rejection of all forms of sexual and gender liberalism. Hinduism and Confucianism get mentions, but Butler is remarkably silent on the presence of theocratic Islamism in the profile of hateful clergy. It is certainly not Islamophobic to expect that an overview of attitudes regarding gender globally would match its indictments of Christianity with assessments of male dominance and homophobia in some Islamic societies. The religious doctrines and polemics matter not only because they infuse daily and private life for billions of people, but also because of their influence on politics. There is undoubtedly, as Butler argues, a transnational force at work here, which needs to be described and opposed. Above all, we need a better understanding of the appeal to wide publics of the authoritarian populisms which often lead the way into anxious support for illiberal policies – an appeal which may well be more complex than Butler suggests. However, their free and frequent use of the term ‘fascist’ in reference to this force is a melodramatic overuse of the term and is likely in different ways to incite, or to make people on various sides of the debate anxious. Moreover, the major structural flaw of this book is in its failure to discuss other, more reason-based, forms of opposition to, or ambivalence towards, the cultural politics of ‘gender’. There are many liberal, sincere and thoughtful criticisms of those politics, and such criticisms are not hard to find; they are largely out there amongst the general public. Many people might calmly disagree with the idea that gender is radically plastic or have reservations about lobbyists for self-defined identity groups making disproportionate claims on public attention and resources. Butler does not engage with them or at best does so in a very limited way, as in this book's chapter on Britain. This avoidance of engaging with wider bodies of opinion results in Butler's map of the debate being that of a simple bilateral battlefield. Basically, there are only two ways of looking at the world: yours and any others. No other differences matter: you are either for or against ‘gender’. For example, Butler's commitment to belief in the necessity of ‘trans-affirming’ health care, including puberty blockers, is so absolute that any questioning of that belief is a form of ‘abuse’. Telling some of your potential readers they are guilty of ‘sadism’ and child ‘abuse’ is likely to polarise things. Whatever the reason for this Manicheanism, it is easier for Butler to take on the extremists because it would be so much harder to launch an attack on those with no prejudice or ill-will against any of the people gathered under the LGBTQIA+ umbrella, nor ‘fear’ of them, but also with no faith in Butler's prescriptions. So those many people have disappeared behind the phantasm of an all-powerful ‘fascist’ extremism, which is as much of a ‘roving monolith’, in Butler's neat phrase, as the phantasm of ‘gender’. Thus, this book presents a clear binary choice (a striking dimorphism) and demands that we all agree with its framing and its insistence on what ‘we’ must do to fight fascism and save the world, including the installation of reproductive and ‘trans’ rights at the centre of the public sphere. It is time for the important and complex shifts and debates happening around sexuality and gender to be thought about and discussed in ways free of the polarising discourse offered by this book.