Butler on ‘Imagining Alternate Futures’

Judith Butler’s 2021 interview in The Guardian

In 2021, Judith Butler gave this analysis of the people who claim to oppose “gender ideology” or the concept of “gender” itself. They’re an “anti-gender movement,” Butler calls them.

In Butler’s words, today’s “struggle against fascism” is linked to “struggles against racism, nationalism, xenophobia and carceral violence,” and in this context we must be “mindful of the high rates of femicide throughout the world, which include high rates of attacks on trans and genderqueer people.”

A major failing of “the Terfs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) and the so-called gender critical writers,” as Butler names them, is their adherence to “a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism” while rejecting “important work in feminist philosophy of science showing how culture and nature interact (such as Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, EM Hammonds or Anne Fausto-Sterling).”

This movement that is “seeking to eradicate ‘gender’ as a concept or discourse, a field of study, an approach to social power” is one whose supporters “never actually read any works in gender studies.” Many of them simply reject the topic as difficult, which perhaps shouldn’t surprise us, as “we are living in anti-intellectual times.” But regardless of the reason they don’t read, the fact is that they aren’t aware of particular theories about gender, and so they are “not opposing a specific account of gender”; rather they oppose any and all inquiries that might yield such accounts. They oppose research and reflection itself. Though obviously everyone ought to “encourage intellectual inquiry as part of public life,” this, unfortunately, is exactly what they resist. The anti-gender movement describes “gender” as if it were “a force of destruction.”

“Sometimes they claim that ‘sex’ alone has scientific standing,” Butler says of them, “but other times they appeal to divine mandates for masculine domination and indifference. They don’t seem to mind contradicting themselves.” These contradictory positions are part of their alliance with “rightwing attacks on gender.”

The Guardian Deleted These Words of Butler’s

On September 7, 2021, the Guardian published Jules Gleeson’s interview of Butler. Only hours after online publication, one question of Gleeson’s, along with Butler’s three-paragraph response which I described above, were removed from the article. Fortunately, this since-deleted passage was captured by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, and you may view it there.

The sticking point seems to have been that Gleeson had referred to a controversial news event, naming a Los Angeles business. Even though Butler’s response did not directly engage that event and just talked about the anti-gender movement more generally, the Guardian chose to remove this entire part of the interaction. Interviews are often edited for brevity, although rarely does an article need to be edited after publication. Two days later, the Guardian expanded its explanatory note, but I’m still fuzzy on the reasoning.

If you are asking yourself whether the Guardian’s primary motivation behind the deletion was to position itself politically regarding trans people and trans rights, and if so, whether the Guardian’s action was pro-trans or anti-trans, I’d say: Maybe, I don’t know, it’s complicated. Arguably, Gleeson’s brief question could have been used in an anti-transgender way, and in this sense, showing the question might not have been helpful to trans people. But a big consequence of removing Butler’s response is that the terms “trans exclusionary radical feminist,” “gender critical,” and “fascism” no longer appear in the interview at all.

Surviving Parts of Butler’s Guardian Interview

If you look at the interview today, you’ll see it still contains references to “the right” and to an “anti-feminist, homophobic and transphobic” global movement that opposes what it calls “gender ideology.” This movement “insists that sex is biological and real, or that sex is divinely ordained” (according to whether the speaker is secular or religious, I’d add to clarify) and it holds that “gender is a destructive fiction.”

The interview opens with Butler’s assessment of Gender Trouble, their famous 1990 book.

“…we should be prepared and even joyous…”

Butler said that, in this book, they had described an understanding that, regarding gender, “none of us totally escape cultural norms” yet neither are we “totally determined” by those norms. “We don’t just choose it. And it is not just imposed on us.” Furthermore, everyone’s understanding of and participation in their own gender is an ongoing process. And, beyond that, the entire “social reality” of what gender means “can, and does, change.”

Gender Trouble—according to the author, in 2021, over three decades after its publication—addresses how “what it means to be a woman does not remain the same from decade to decade. The category of woman can and does change, and we need it to be that way.” Why do we need the category to be flexible? Because, Butler goes on to say, if we want to pursue a less sexist society, we have to be able to imagine those “new possibilities.” And, as we envision the future, our perception of history will also change. Thus, the category changes. The meaning of a word changes. Being present for linguistic and social evolution is part of the work of feminism and anti-racism.

“So we should not be surprised or opposed when the category of women expands to include trans women. And since we are also in the business of imagining alternate futures of masculinity, we should be prepared and even joyous to see what trans men are doing with the category of ‘men’.”

Butler also acknowledges that the right-wing often refers to “movements for racial justice” and “sexual freedom” as solely matters of “identity.” Yet these right-wing “caricatures” are reductive. A major activity of movements for racial and sexual justice, equality and freedom, Butler assures us, is “redefining what justice, equality and freedom can and should mean.” We must be “responsive to interlinked oppressions” to be able to participate in that work of redefinition. Through our redefinition of justice, equality, and freedom, we lead ourselves to the justice, equality, and freedom we want to experience.

One of the Classic ‘Bookmarked’ Articles

This interview is almost two years old, but it’s one I keep coming back to.