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Judith Butler is a giant in the field of gender studies and within academia as a whole. Their groundbreaking 1990 book Gender Trouble, which introduced the concept of gender performativity, remains the most influential and far-reaching text in its discipline. As a former gender studies major, Butler’s work implicitly figures into so much of my writing and thinking. (Back in school, my friend and I used to talk about Butler constantly, referring to them using silly nicknames as if they were a close personal friend and not an academic titan.) 

Certainly, there have been critiques of Butler’s writing, one of which is the lack of attention paid to trans issues and experiences in Gender Trouble. Butler has addressed these concerns, writing in the preface to the 1999 edition that the time passed since its initial publication has produced “evidence of a kind of gender trouble that the text itself did not anticipate.”

Many discussions of Butler also revolve around their work’s supposed density and whether or not their theories are useful out in the ‘real’ world. Is the theorist also on the hook for defining the praxis? When it comes to questions about the function of theory, it’s clear that Butler’s formulation of gender performativity has affected the world in material ways, first and foremost regarding how individuals understand and embody their own genders. So where does a scholar like Butler go from here?

In their new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler chooses to tackle a subject that is becoming more and more dangerous as the days go by: the so-called “anti-gender” movements, which encompass propagandistic ideas espoused by churches, right-wing politicians, and of course, the ever-controversial TERFs. Butler’s definition of these movements is useful, and illuminating. 

Citing the work of psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, Butler calls gender as it is portrayed by these groups a phantasm. Per Butler and Laplanche’s formulations, a phantasm is a fantasy with teeth; it has organization and structure and is constructed via psychic fears and anxieties. Gender in this frame is overdetermined, standing in for the multitude of dangers facing us in the modern world, such as climate change, economic precarity, and war. These issues are condensed and then displaced onto a single idea: gender. Anti-gender ideologies are authoritarian, paternalistic, and often fascist as well. This is also a form of what Butler calls moral sadism, imposing harm from a position of righteousness. 

Why does this phantasm take the form of gender? Butler doesn’t spend much time exploring this question, but they do give us a brief explanation as to why gender is so scary to these groups. First, an expansive vision of gender makes what was once seen as immutable no longer so, and change can be very frightening. This means that trans, non-binary, and queer folks are in effect “living out a human possibility that redefines what counts as human. “Gender ideology” then appears as a threat because these conservatives have denied themselves the possibility of such freedom.

In other words, because anti-gender agitators have worked to deny the existence of queer and trans people, “they appear as phantasms with the power to destroy a heteronormative self anchored in a primary sex assignment that has grounded itself on their denial.” Such a concept recalls Butler’s previous writings on heterosexual melancholy, which proposed that heterosexual identity is predicated on the disavowal of queer attachment. 

These ideas seem almost too pervasive and deep-rooted to tackle, and that is one of the problems Butler seeks to explore in the book. How do we oppose such rhetoric, which plays on emotion and the very real fears stemming from our unstable world? Butler suggests the solution is to create a counter-imaginary that is strong enough to expose and replace these oppressive ideas. “The task is not only to reveal the falsehood but also deflate the power of the phantasm to circulate and to convince,” they write. 

Butler spends the first half of the book analyzing the arguments of these anti-gender movements in order to expose their falsities and contradictions. They begin with the Roman Catholic Church, who initiated this rhetoric back in the 1990s. Like so many reactionary impulses, the anti-gender movement is a response to neoliberalism, which slashed social services and engendered a return to the church as a place of safety. 

Butler’s suppositions here harken back to their 2004 book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, in which they argue we are all made precarious by violence and loss, but the possibility for change lies within our response to that precarity. In this case, the Catholic Church seized on the increasing precarity of families and spread its rhetoric of protecting the children against the foreign enemy of “gender ideology.” This rhetoric is ironic, of course, considering the Catholic Church’s documented failure to protect children from abuse. Instead, the Church associates anyone looking to expand our collective understanding of gender and sexuality with the devil, lest they lose their power to define family and gender roles for themselves. 

These ideas have trickled into state institutions as well, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. Many debates about the broadening frame of gender concern censorship and education, particularly in the U.S. context. Conservative politicians maintain that reading and learning can be dangerous because kids are at risk of being penetrated or infected by damaging ideologies. The state wants to enact control over the body of the child to prevent this penetration from occurring, much like the Church wants to “protect” children from the demonic forces of gender ideology. Butler makes the important point that these transphobic and homophobic impulses within the government are also closely tied to the anti-Critical Race Theory movement, which similarly seeks to protect children from supposedly dangerous ideologies.

In Chapter 5, Butler tackles the subject many have been not-so-patiently waiting for them to address: TERFS, or Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. (Butler actually commented on the TERF movement in a 2021 interview with The Guardian, but the publication deleted that section of the conversation.) Butler is firm in their conviction that TERFS are not, or at least should not be considered feminists because they have completely moved away from the core tenants of feminism. Central to the framing of feminism is the notion that sex and gender are not immutable categories. Indeed, feminists have long sought to expand gendered categories so that women may advance in the world. TERFs want to claim that sex and gender are invariable facts, thus contesting the progressive principles on which feminism is based. 

Butler argues that “TERFS claim proprietary rights to gender categories” and see trans folks as a threat to their property. This argument immediately falls apart when you consider the fact that TERFs “still exist within the genders they have” even as trans people embody their genders as they see fit. As many will be pleased to note, Butler tears down every clause in J.K. Rowling’s TERFy argument with deadly precision. TERFs are much more aligned with the religious and political right than many of them would care to admit, and they engage in a similar process of displacement. In the case of Rowling, the author displaces and projects her own trauma and fear of gendered violence onto trans women, implying that trans women are really men and are thus all potential rapists. 

TERF ideologies like Rowling’s foreclose any possibility of feminist alliance or alignment with the struggle to make the world a more livable place. Of course, TERFs prefer to be called “gender-critical” feminists, but Butler shuts down this equivocation in a few short sentences. The TERFs, Butler argues, completely overlook the premise of critique, which works to deepen our understanding of how the world functions and helps us imagine new ways of living. “They prefer “gender critical” to “trans-exclusionary” and “TERF,” but they have misunderstood and distorted the history and meaning of “critique,” so we have to stay with “trans-exclusionary,” Butler concludes, delivering a burn so sick it can be seen from outer space.¹

To be sure, Who’s Afraid of Gender? isn’t just about TERFs, and one of Butler’s main arguments is that these anti-gender movements are connected to broader historical and contemporary developments, including racism, colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism, and capitalism. But Butler isn’t interested in eliding any sense of materiality either. In Chapters 6 through 8,  Butler discusses the supposed division between sex and gender, as well as nature and culture, suggesting that these schemas are not all that distinct. 

While anti-gender agitators claim that gender theorists want to ignore the existence or the “facts” of sex, Butler upends this assumption. Instead, Butler argues that all biological facts are framed by culture, and in reality, the two cannot be separated. Citing feminist sexologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, Butler invokes the “dynamic systems” perspective, which defines embodiment as “the effect of a complex set of interactions of an organism with an environment over time.” Even certain biological facts of our existence may be the result of cultural or environmental factors, and sex cannot be defined outside of the cultural frame of gender.

In every iteration, anti-gender movements are the legacy of racism and colonialism. As Butler explores in Chapter 9, modern gender in the European and American context was defined in opposition to enslaved people, who were relegated to non-personhood and not assigned a gender at all. It is these gendered ideals that anti-gender agitators are fighting to protect. Moreover, while the Vatican calls gender ideology a “colonizing force,” it is quite clearly the other way around. Colonizing empires have always imposed their ideas of gender on indigenous peoples, though it has now been reframed as a natural state of affairs despite its violent enforcement.

In addition to framing gender ideology as a colonizing force, anti-gender proponents, particularly those in Europe, define it as a foreign imposition. This notion of a foreign invader is altogether racist and xenophobic, and must be named as such. At the same time, Butler notes that the issue of translation is significant to those who oppose these fascist movements. We must take care to not impose our national or linguistic definitions of gender on other regions, especially if the goal is to create a transnational coalition to supplant these reactionary movements. 

This coalition is at the center of Butler’s proposed solution to the problem of the anti-gender movements currently sweeping the globe. But does this solution go far enough? Do we have the tools to bring it to fruition? This is a question many will be left with after reading the book, which nonetheless does an admirable job of untangling the web of fascist operations we’re facing daily.

Who’s Afraid of Gender? is no doubt a timely and necessary work, though threats to the lives of trans folks have never been anything but urgent. Butler has clearly made an effort to provide many contemporary and historical examples so readers can better track their arguments, and it’s significant that this book seems to be aimed at the general public as much as the academy. In that vein, Butler’s takedown of the TERFs will no doubt endear them to new fans and bring the book into the public discourse.

But it seems the real issue at hand here is the notion of theory vs praxis, a question that has long haunted academia. Considering the urgent, life-threatening nature of these problems, does Butler provide us with enough praxis? Their suggestion of an international coalition and the creation of a counter-imaginary is a good place to start. This process of imagining isn’t abstract, though Butler doesn’t give us any concrete examples of what it might look like. They write: “Imagining does not take place only in the mind. It requires an object, a medium, a sensuous form of expression.” Butler suggests that artists are one group who can help us imagine this emancipatory vision, though it’s up to us to consider what form this art might take. 

The notion of coalition, and of political alliances that expand beyond the narrow frame of identity politics, has been a throughline of Butler’s work at least since Precarious Life. Here, Butler makes the essential argument that everyone interested in making the world more livable should be invested in the fight for trans rights and the larger field of gender issues. They put it like this: “Let gender become part of a broader struggle for a social and economic world that eliminates precarity and provides health care, shelter, and food across all regions.”

One might be compelled to ask for more concrete tools that we could use to create this future, and that’s not an unfair request to make. A lot of space is given to untangling the contradictory, disjointed rhetoric of anti-gender movements, which Butler nonetheless contends are impossible to oppose in the realm of public debate because they’re not rooted in any logic. Though it’s satisfying to see Butler defeat these arguments with their sizeable wit, how useful is this effort?

In Butler’s estimation, it’s necessary to understand the arguments of the so-called enemy, not in order to argue against them but to propose, in the realm of public imagination, a preferable alternative. Perhaps Butler is passing the buck to us, the readers, the dreamers, and the creative, forward-thinking youth Butler dedicates the book to. (“for the young people who still teach me,” they write.) 

The practical follow-up to these ideas is the creation of a fantastic (rather than phantasmic) vision of this future, one that understands the intersectionality of the troubles that plague us all. These projects are already occurring all over the world and certainly in our local communities; the goal now is to broaden the scope of these efforts and make vigorous connections at every turn. Butler describes this objective rather elegantly. “Releasing radical democratic potentials from our own expanding alliances can show we are on the side of livable life, love in all its difficulties, and freedom, making those ideas so compelling that no one can look away, making desire desirable again in such a way that people want to live, and want others to live, in the world we envision, where gender and desire belong to what we mean by freedom and equality.” 

Contending with our hopes, dreams, and fears about the coming of fascism and the many threats to our freedoms, Who’s Afraid of Gender? is a compelling intellectual response to our current moment. If there’s disappointment to be found here, it’s that the steps it will take to dream of and create a more livable world aren’t contained within its pages.