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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we will ask, who's afraid of gender? That's the title of a new book by Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the graduate school at UC, Berkeley, whose groundbreaking book called Gender Trouble has frequently been taught in colleges for the last 30 years. They also wrote the influential book Bodies That Matter and other books as well.

In their new book, Who's Afraid of Gender?, Butler takes on what they call the anti-gender ideology movement and why it's become so central to conservative politics in the US and abroad. Now, some of you may remember that I talked recently on the show about a promotional mailer I got from the conservative Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan, advertising their school and looking for donations. That the very first line of the letter said, "If we're going to save America from the growing threats of socialism, transgenderism, and Marxism, there's only one way we can do it, education."

I thought, which one of these does not belong? Obviously, to me anyway, it was transgenderism. Socialism and Marxism, you can believe in them or not, okay, fine, but transgenderism, how you experience your own body as an ism, a belief system, a political philosophy, that was just hate speech, it struck me.

Now we can talk to somebody who knows a lot more about this than I do, and has put themselves in the crosshairs over it. They've even been burned in effigy and physically attacked. Judith Butler joins us now. Professor Butler, thank you for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Butler: Thank you. I'm pleased to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Can you start by taking us back to your book, Gender Trouble, by way of introducing yourself to our listeners? What were the politics or cultural context of the 1990s that you were trying to address then?

Professor Butler: Well, I suppose it was actually the late 1980s since-

Brian Lehrer: Sorry.

Professor Butler: -I wrote the book then. No, that's all right. It appeared in late 1989. Maybe it prefigured the 90s, but it didn't have much to do with them. I was a young professor and certainly in conversation with feminists who thought that heterosexuality was the framework within which you thought about what's a man? What's a woman? What do men want? What do women want? Very often women were identified with motherhood, and marriage was conceived of as a heterosexual institution.

All this was obviously before the legalization of gay marriage and the burgeoning of gay and lesbian and single-parent parenting. I was trying to open up the feminist framework and also bring some perspectives from gay and lesbian social movements into that academic discussion. That book focused on gender, and I put forth what is now called the performative theory of gender. Some people think that means, oh, you can choose to be whatever you want. Other people think it means, oh, you're totally socially conditioned and determined, and you have no choice. There were two very different interpretations of what I was doing. [chuckles]

Actually, the performative theory of gender was a way of saying we're formed by social power. We enact and embody it. Sometimes we can, in the course of our embodiment, change what it means to be the gender we're assigned. Sometimes we change genders or we change the meaning of that gender, but we do have some freedom.

Brian Lehrer: I see that you had been writing and speaking about other things, but came back to this topic for the new book because of a terrifying incident when you were on a speaking engagement in Brazil, which was not about gender if I have this right. Can you tell our listeners some of what happened?

Professor Butler: Yes. Well, I have been writing several books on war, on ethics, psychoanalysis, Precarious Life, another book on the pandemic, so I had wandered away from gender, it's true. It seemed to me there was a fair amount of interneting fighting among people who were working in that field. I thought maybe there were some other issues that were better thought about by me. But it's true. I was at a conference in Brazil in 2017, and it was on the question of democracy. Are we seeing the end of democracy? Are we seeing rising authoritarianism? What do we do about it?

I arrived. At the airport, I was quickly ushered through labyrinthine tunnels underneath the Sao Paulo airport by government officials who were protecting me, apparently from right-wing mobs. I thought, "Well, this seems a little overstated. This seems probably unnecessary." Then when I arrived at the venue, I saw that people were already congregating outside and that there were some pretty nasty pictures of me that had been altered, and an effigy that was then burnt in the course of that first day. I was sequestered in a room within the venue and watched most of this through pictures or video.

I did see that there were people who associated me with something they called gender ideology, and they associated gender and gender ideology with the work of the devil. I became somehow the devil, and as such needed to be banished from the land.

Brian Lehrer: Before we get to what they meant by gender ideology and how you interpret it, was there something about Brazil that made that incident more likely there, or how do you now view that attack in the broader cultural and political context of the US and globally too?

Professor Butler: Well, first, let me say that the anti-gender ideology movement is a movement that calls itself by that name. I don't call it that. I discovered it as such and worked with a number of feminists in Eastern Europe, in Turkey, in Latin America, in France, and Belgium to think more clearly about what this movement was. It was inaugurated by the Vatican in the '80s and '90s when Pope Benedict took exception to the idea of gender. He thought that this was a dangerous idea. That it contested the doctrine of creation, God created male and female.

The human, as we know it, according to him, and according to Pope Francis as well, only appears in two forms - male and female - and it's God who creates them. Now, if people start deciding on their sex assignment or changing their gender or calling themselves by new names, that's considered by the anti-gender ideology movement informed by the Vatican to be stealing God's creative powers. Who steals God's creative powers? Well, the devil does. The devil masquerades as the creative power of God. [chuckles]

That movement moved through Argentina. A couple of important and influential books were written there. Then it entered into several churches that used to be liberation theology churches in Latin America but were slowly supplanted or taken over by right-wing evangelicals who were against gender and certainly working for a conservative agenda.

Jair Bolsonaro, who was about to become the president of Brazil at that time, had already whipped many people into a frenzy about gender, gender ideology, about education, claiming that teaching gender in schools was tantamount to indoctrination. That gender was new totalitarianism, that it had to be stopped, and that our children, their children, were endangered by this demonic ideology. It makes sense that it was Brazil at that time.

Brian Lehrer: I mentioned that flyer from Hillsdale College in Michigan warning about socialism, Marxism, and transgenderism. Do you accept the notion that there is such a thing as transgenderism?

Professor Butler: No. I don't know what that is. I don't even know what gender ideology is because these are terms that the right has concocted in order to create fear and to recruit people to conservative causes, and indeed to increasingly authoritarian candidates in municipal and presidential elections in several countries. There is no gender ideology. That's a term that's made up by them. Gender is a complex field. Gender's a complex concept. People in gender studies argue all the time about what it means and how we should approach it.

Whether we can even approach it alone without reference to race, class, other meaningful social categories. Whether we need an intersectional framework, et cetera. Gender ideology is treated as a monolith. Similarly, transgenderism is a right-wing attribution. It's suggesting that if it's an ism, it's an ideology. That it has in some sense falsely convinced people of the ability to change gender or to experience gender in diverse ways, and it's understood as a form of false consciousness. That's a right-wing construct, so we shouldn't act as if it exists anywhere except in the phantasmatic vocabulary of the right.

Brian Lehrer: That's a word you use in the book, phantasm. A phantasm. Meaning a fantasy, something made up.

Professor Butler: Well, a phantasm is-- it seems like something real that's threatening, that creates fear, but in reality, it collects a series of fears and anxieties, and it stands for them. It also, interestingly enough, conceals them. Let's say we're fueling fear about the future of the planet. Most of us are. We're aware of ecological catastrophe that is already upon us. Or let's say we feel fear about the unending nature of contemporary wars, or just how destructive they can become. Maybe we feel fear that our livelihoods cannot be guaranteed. Labor has become increasingly precarious and neoliberalism has destroyed many social goods and social benefits upon which we used to rely.

We have a lot of fear circulating. A right-wing demagogue can come along and say, "Oh, guess what? What is the source of your fear? I'll tell you, gender." Gender ideology or critical race theory or migrants or ethnic studies, or those who tell the American history that includes an elaborate and demonstrable history of slavery.

In other words, I think a number of left-wing caricatures, and I would include transgenderism among them, are very useful phantasms to the right. They are identified as the true source of what we fear. There is a kind of promise made that if we could only get rid of all these things then life will be restored to order, hierarchy. Maybe even patriarchy or white supremacy, and at least some people will feel that their place in the world is secure.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, who's afraid of gender in your life? That's the title of Judith Butler's new book, Who's Afraid of Gender? Anybody have stories of encountering people in the anti-gender ideology movement? If you are not in that movement, have you engaged them in conversation? Any story you want to tell or have you been victimized? We just heard Judith Butler's own story of how they were at risk of being physically attacked and were burned in effigy for a non-related speaking engagement in Brazil. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. Who's Afraid of Gender?

Do you have an opinion, by the way, on why categories in this realm use the term phobia? You have that fear reference in the title, Who's Afraid of, instead of anti, or if we say racist, classist, antisemitic, but we say homophobic and transphobic more often. I guess people say anti-trans also. Is that just semantics or does the distinction matter?

Professor Butler: Well, I think we have to ask about the relationship between fear and hatred, and I think the phantasm does that. It draws on fears of gay-lesbian parenting, say, or sex education, or kids changing their genders or wanting to experiment with the change of pronouns. It plays on fears and it helps to transform fears into hatreds. If we want to give a full account of how it is that the anti-gender movement becomes convincing, at least to some, I think we need what I would call a psychosocial analysis. One that understands anxiety, fear, and hatred, and how anxiety and fear can be instrumentalized to produce some pretty terrible forms of hatred.

Brian Lehrer: Well, if there are now university courses and majors and departments in gender studies, does that mean that there are some kinds of belief systems that can be called ideologies to people who study the field as academics or participate as activists?

Professor Butler: Well, it depends what you mean by ideology. I mean, ideology does interestingly enough come from the left. We can trace it back, perhaps most importantly, to Marx and Engels, the German ideology. I think at that point Marx and Engels were trying to figure out why people accept capitalism and what are the beliefs that reproduce capitalism. It's a left-wing concept back then. I think in the 20th century, the term ideology was used by Daniel Bell and others to describe totalitarianism or authoritarianism, belief systems that people come to adopt that actually destroy democracy and don't always work in their favor.

Unfortunately, I don't think that can be said about gender, because every gender studies class I've ever been part of is in conflict. [laughs] People disagree. In fact, I would say gender studies is an example of the contested character of contemporary university life and college life, and even in high schools. People ask questions about gender. Gender is a way of asking questions about presuppositions. It's open critical inquiry. It's open conflict. It's hardly a single idea.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, in a minute I'm going to read something that a well-known feminist wrote about your book that is critical of it, but we'll get to that. You're going to like this. Here's a text from a listener. It says, "Professor Butler, I'm actually on my way right now to teach your book Gender Trouble to my Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course at Wesleyan, and was part of the group that brought you to our campus via Zoom in the fall. Here's their question. If there was one thing you would want to share with students reading your work today, quite literally today, what would it be?"

Professor Butler: Well, I think when I wrote Gender Trouble I accepted in part the idea that there was nature on the one hand, and culture on the other hand. I think that was an inheritance from 1980s feminism. I think now it's much more important to consider that our biological life and our social life are interactive. That the environment has changed who we are biologically, and who we are biologically also changes the environment. I would hope to offer a more complex understanding so that sex is not identified with nature, and gender is not identified with culture or society.

I think we need to rethink that particular framework according to the wonderful work that's been done in feminist history of science and contemporary philosophy of science. I would change that.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead. So the second--

Professor Butler: I guess I would also-

Brian Lehrer: Please, go ahead.

Professor Butler: -just say I do think that Gender Trouble belongs to the philosophy of freedom, but it shouldn't be misconstrued as purely individualistic. Many people think of it as a trap that defend personal liberty, but I see it as something that's trying to establish collective freedoms.

Brian Lehrer: Does part of what you just said get back to the tension that I think you were laying out earlier in our conversation - and tell me if I'm characterizing it correctly - between embracing differences through the lens of gender being socially constructed versus more of an innate identity, "This is who I am, who I was born as"? Tell me if I'm framing a real tension that you see.

Professor Butler: Well, that is a real tension, and I'm happy to address that one. In fact, I would say it's a tension that we also see. In contemporary gender theory, there are people who claim, and trans people who claim, "My gender is not culturally constructed or socially constructed. It is who I am. It is part of my reality. It is who I've been since the beginning of time. This wasn't formed, this comes with me."

That may well be true in the sense that there are deep and abiding feelings and understandings of identity that have never changed, so I accept that. When we act politically, when we say, "Oh, by the way. On the basis of this gender that I am, I want to have rights. I want to be protected from violence. I want to be free to walk down the street at night," I'm asserting that identity and language. I'm making it public. In that part, in that sense, we are elaborating who we are socially and publicly.

We might be that thing, but we might also have to explain it, present it, make it known, decide the terms by which we appear, and all that is what is meant by construction. Construction does not mean, oh, this is an artifice and can be torn away. No. There are deep realities that might be said to be constructed. It also doesn't mean we're determined and there's nothing we can do about it.

I think the meaning of our lives changes. The meaning of what it is to be a woman has changed enormously. The meaning of what it is to be trans has changed enormously, and we depend on that historical change for our emancipatory movements and our struggles for greater freedom and equality.

Brian Lehrer: I think kind of to some of the points you were just discussing, Nicholas in Dumont, New Jersey, you're on WNYC with Judith Butler. Hi, Nicholas.

Nicholas: Hi. I'm right here. Thank you, Brian. This is a really fascinating segment on the show. I just wanted to state that I'm currently in the middle of a survey anthropology course. Just last week, one of the papers was about the Bugi people in South Asia with five genders. [laughs] My reaction was, yes, while there may be two sexes, male and female, gender is completely separate from that. There are other societies. The Navajos have three genders.

What does it matter who my next-door neighbor or across-the-street neighbor-- what gender they choose? I live my life. Surely in this entire world, there's room for all of us to be accepting of whatever people want to choose. That's all I have to say. I'll get off the phone now and leave it--

Brian Lehrer: Part of that, Nicholas, you were making a distinction between sex and gender, or saying that is a distinction people should remember to make?

Nicholas: One is biology with X and Y chromosomes, and one is something else. It's a societal thing, and you can have what you wish. Yes. [laughs]

Brian Lehrer: Nicholas, thank you. Well, he makes it sound like a personal choice on one level. I don't know if you heard it that way. Anything on the distinction between sex and gender, the way you think it's important to make or not?

Professor Butler: Well, I appreciate what Nicholas says. I think he is in fact taking a humane and capacious attitude. Like, it doesn't matter what my neighbor's gender is or how they're defining themselves. I think that-

Brian Lehrer: The most important thing.

Professor Butler: -is exactly true. There are people who think it does matter. That if somebody who has changed gender in the course of their lives is living next door, that that somehow threatens their own gender or their own family structure, or their ways of understanding the world. Of course, those folks have to be convinced that it actually doesn't threaten them. It may be that those who are straight and feel quite at home in the gender they were assigned at birth, maybe they think they're living a life that everyone should be living, or that is the natural or necessary way of life.

All they need to do is understand that it's one form of life and they can have it, but they can't assume that everybody else wants it too or is living it. For some people, that shift is very hard because they lose a sense of being natural, or right, or normal, and they have to accept that there's a diversity in human sexuality, and also a diversity in gender and gender identification. The only thing I would perhaps question about Nicholas's remark is his idea that male and female are set by chromosomes.

If you take a look at a book like Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain, written by Daphna Joel and Vikhanski, you will see that there's enormous complexity both in the way that chromosomes are arranged, but also in endocrinology and in neurology more broadly. We also know from intersex folks and others whose primary or secondary characteristics, sexual characteristics, are mixed or indeterminate. That it's been a real struggle getting recognition and rights for those people because so many within the medical establishment assume that male and female are discreet.

In fact, there's-- some people call it a spectrum and others call it a mosaic. I like the mosaic idea, and I think it's perhaps a way to affirm the complexity of the human creature in both its biological, social, and historical dimensions.

Brian Lehrer: As our last thing, as we start to run out of time, I do want to bring up the place where you become controversial among some feminists, and that's your take on the so-called trans-exclusionary radical feminists. I want to read a little stretch here from a somewhat critical review of your book in The Atlantic by the feminist writer Katha Pollitt.

Writing about you, Katha Pollitt writes, "They dismiss, with that invocation of a phantasm, apprehension about the presence of trans women in women's single-sex spaces, (as well as gender-crits would add, biological men falsely claiming to be trans in order to gain access to same), concerns for biologically female athletes who feel cheated out of scholarships and trophies, and the slight a biological woman might experience by being referred to as a menstruator. Butler wants to dismiss gender-crits as fascist-adjacent. Indeed, in an interview, they compare Stock," the philosopher Kathleen Stock, "and J. K. Rowling to Putin and the pope." Would you respond to that?

Professor Butler: Yes. Well, I have great respect for Katha Pollitt, but I am surprised that she didn't read the text carefully. Of course, emotions do run high on this issue, especially among feminists and sometimes intergenerationally. I have never said that Kathleen Stock or J. K. Rowling are fascist-adjacent, but I have said that I hope that trans-exclusionary feminists who make the same kinds of arguments as Putin, as Orbán, and Maloney, would ask themselves why it is that their arguments ally with right-wing authoritarians. I make clear that I think this is an unwitting alliance. I don't think they're embracing fascism. I don't think they are fascists. I've never said any such thing.

I think they do have to ask themselves why their alliance is there rather than with gay, lesbian, queer, transgender, non-conforming people. If you look at feminist organizations in Latin America, organizations that are dedicated to opposing violence against women, both in private spaces and in public spaces and in education and prisons, they always include an opposition to violence done against trans and travestis because the same people who are attacking women violently and very often murdering them are attacking trans people as well, and that the alliance between us has to get firmer if we are to oppose the anti-gender people.

Now, we have to also remember that the anti-gender ideology movement, and think Putin, Orbán, Maloney, Bolsonaro, many, many leaders, but many right-wing Christian nationalists as well in Texas and in Florida, they are against reproductive rights for women. They are against anti-discrimination laws for women. They're against feminism. They're against gay and lesbian parenting. They are against sex education courses.

They want to take down explicitly nude pictures from arts institutions. They are targeting critical race theory and ways in which history is taught. We actually need a very large alliance which includes feminists and queer people and gay and lesbian and people who are fighting racism and people who are trying to open the borders to migrants and to establish decent and lawful forms of passage for migration to the United States. All of this is related.

We are being targeted more effectively by the right than we are gathering ourselves as an alliance, and that is really sad. In some ways, my book is an appeal to the trans-exclusionary feminists to rethink their stance. They don't have to applaud or love trans people or even come to understand them as deeply as I wish they would, but they do need to be in alliance with them against the right, because if feminism is not on the left and if it's not in alliance against rising authoritarianism, then what is feminism? It makes no sense to me.

We can't be against discrimination against women, but for discrimination against trans people. That makes us completely contradictory. It also means we're not reading the political situation we are in or taking up the kinds of alliances that are most necessary now, especially as a possible Trump victory looms.

Brian Lehrer: Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the graduate school at UC, Berkeley, is now the author of Who's Afraid of Gender. Thank you for sharing it with us.

Professor Butler: Thank you.

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