Building Intersectional Coalitions with Jesus and the WNBA: A Response to Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?

In their most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender , Judith Butler documents how gender has become the phantasm that has ignited the deeply divisive “culture wars.” Butler concludes that there needs to be two responses: 1) to recognize that meaning is always open and occurs only in context, and 2) to form intersectional coalitions in order to find common ground to counter dangerous, fascist, and eventually fatal ideologies. This essay provides an example of biblical untranslatability with Matthew 5:22 and the word raka , and offers glimpses into powerful coalitions that have already begun; this essay interprets Jesus in ways that counter oppressive hierarchies, and recognizes the boundary-dissolving, binary-blending WNBA phenomenon that has united millions of extraordinarily diverse people.