Before I meet Judith Butler, I am, for the first time since my teenage French lessons, genuinely anxious about pronouns. Gender identity has been perhaps the most vicious front in the culture wars. To mess up anyone’s pronouns can be modern-day heresy. To mess up Butler’s would surely also be grossly ignorant — because Butler (they/them) is perhaps the key figure in gender theory.
Their work has questioned the grouping of humans into either men or women. It helped inspire the category of non-binary. Yet embarrassingly, it seems easier for Congress to update the US Constitution than for my brain to update its grammar.
I needn’t have worried. “I err all the time with pronouns,” Butler shrugs, in a Japanese restaurant overlooking a rainy London avenue. “People tell me they’re they or he or whatever, and I forget and I have to scramble and apologise . . . We all stumble, and we are learning about new realities.” Do people forgive such slips? “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Grmph, I told you before.’ It’s like, ‘OK!’”
Butler, 68, is famous for two things. First is the idea that gender is performative — something we all sustain (and at times subvert) by our actions. That came in the book Gender Trouble, published in 1990, when sodomy was illegal in some US states and the prospects of gay marriage and multiple gender identities were remote. It became a classic: a copy was brandished by an elite sophomore in the 2021 TV satire The White Lotus.
Their second claim to fame is impenetrable prose: abstract nouns and unanswered questions, drawing on Foucault and Freud. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum despaired that Butler’s “obscurity creates an aura of importance”; writer Tom Wolfe accused Butler of “Rococo Marxist mental acrobatics”.
The professor is unrepentant: “Well, [my books] have been oddly successful. Some people do want to be challenged.” In person, Butler is — mostly — much lighter. Polyamory is “better than lying and cheating!” they joke at one point. “Sorry, I was going to be a comedian if I didn’t go into scholarly work. You’re getting my schtick here!” Lunch with Judith Butler is much easier than lunch with “Judith Butler”.
Butler’s new book Who’s Afraid of Gender? aims to be accessible. It targets the conservative forces — the Vatican, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni — engaged in “a campaign to restore an earlier order of things”. Butler points out the oddity of the Catholic Church accusing trans activists of child abuse.
In 2017, evangelical Christians burnt an effigy of Butler in São Paulo. Donald Trump could again become a vessel for anti-woke demands. “If we thought history was moving forward in an untroubled way, we were clearly wrong,” Butler says. “Were those folks always very angry or did they become angrier as our legislative and policy successes became greater?”
In the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak taunts the opposition Labour party by claiming that it doesn’t know what a woman is. “He’s imagining that they look ridiculous . . . In fact, the history of feminism dating back to the 19th century always posed the question: what is a woman, and why do we assume that women should be defined just by their reproductive capacities?”
What is a woman? “I don’t answer that question, but I point out that that question is looking for a kind of certainty, and in that way it’s trying to stop history, or it fails to recognise the category of women has gone through many changes and hopefully will go through some more.”
How exactly has the category of women changed? Butler refers to the emergence of muscular female tennis players starting with Martina Navratilova. “There was a time when, if you were a woman playing tennis, you didn’t look like that.”
I can’t quite work out if Butler has shifted the goalposts of the question. What I do know is that Butler’s take on biological differences doesn’t just provoke intolerant rightwingers. It infuriates many feminists, including Navratilova herself, who see women’s bodies as objectively different.
Lately, support for trans rights in the US and UK has ebbed. Butler wants to provide a “compelling vision” to counter the populists. In university lecture halls, audiences whoop with approval. But can Butler persuade the public at large?
By now, we have both slipped off our matching Patagonia puffer jackets: mine a gender-normative blue, Butler’s a familiar black. We raise glasses of green tea, and order miso soup, sashimi and a bento box.
Butler grew up in an upper middle-class Jewish family in Cleveland, Ohio. Some of their aunts and uncles had been killed by the Nazis. “My grandmother’s response was to appear impeccable socially. She would never be shamed as a Jew, nobody would ever look down at her. She had to appear a certain way.”
Butler’s grandfather owned cinemas, and he and his wife decided to assimilate into America by emulating movie stars. “My grandfather became Clark Gable, my grandmother Helen Hayes, and my mother was more Joan Crawford . . . I watched these people perform these extraordinarily flamboyant ideas of gender.”
Butler’s mother struggled to understand that fitting into female clothes and mannerisms was “a lived impossibility” for Butler. Suspecting that Butler was a lesbian, their father asked himself “if he’d failed as a father. He had a naive psychoanalytic idea that if I’d had a good father figure, then I would have become a proper heterosexual.”
At the age of 14, Butler’s parents took them to a psychiatrist. The sessions “were great, because he refused to fix me! In the end he told me I was quite lucky to be able to love anybody at all, coming from my family background. He did not pathologise me.” This was the 1970s. “I didn’t even come out: there was no practice of coming out.” Are kids in the US today being wrongly pathologised as Butler nearly was? “They are.”
Since 1993, Butler has taught at Berkeley. Having been labelled butch, queer and trans, they used California’s policy of self-ID in 2019 to register their legal identity as non-binary. “I thought why not occupy the shelter I built? I’m still a little suspicious of categories — we occupy them, they occupy us . . . I don’t like the idea of being fully captured by a category.”
In the US, 5 per cent of adults under 30 say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth, compared to 0.3 per cent of over-50s. Butler argues that trans people are scapegoated just like migrants. Demonising gender diversity is “central” to Meloni-style populism. “Without that terrifying motivation, I’m not sure that the other parts of that economic and political agenda will work.” Butler’s message to the public is calm: “What are they frightened of exactly? They can continue to have their lives exactly as they have.”
For Butler, our bodies do not exist outside of their interaction with the world; sex classifications are themselves shaped by society. The biologist Richard Dawkins insists that sex is a “true binary”, with only 0.02 per cent of people being intersex. Butler argues that there is more crossover, for example in testosterone levels. Sex may be a spectrum. “The social categories that we have don’t always map perfectly onto bodies with which we are born . . . Nobody denies biology – it just doesn’t tell us very much at the beginning.”
Butler is taken aback by the sashimi, which arrives decorated with fake pink cherry blossom. “It’s a little floral, but it’s fine.” I start a joke about gender stereotypes, but abort early.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? attacks feminists such as author JK Rowling who argue that sex is binary. Rowling and supporters call themselves “gender critical feminists”, but Butler says they don’t meet the academic definition of criticism. So ironically, given Butler’s commitment to self-identification, they call these critics “Terfs” — trans-exclusionary radical feminists — a term that many of them find offensive. “I think I’m respectful,” Butler insists.
I wonder if there is any common ground. Many young kids struggling with their gender identity went to London’s Tavistock clinic. Many had mental health issues and their feelings of gender dysphoria may have been resolved by therapy or puberty. But they were often quickly given puberty blockers, whose long-term safety is little studied.
Butler rejects gender dysphoria as a “pathologisation”, but concedes: “We should all be taking a lot more time with these issues. Nobody should be rushed into treatment.” Gender identity may “go back to normal . . . for some”. (Studies suggest for most.)
What about sports? Studies show male puberty has lasting benefits: trans women have an inbuilt head-start. So World Athletics has banned trans women who have gone through male puberty from women’s categories.
Butler accepts the idea of a female category, but is wary of a third category for non-binary athletes: that would be “isolation”. Under Butler’s approach, would some trans women still be excluded from women’s categories? “The criteria that interest me are complex . . . I don’t think we’ve even started to think about what a good judgment would look like.” This sidesteps the trade-offs, but I take the point that, proportionally, there may be too few trans sports champions, not too many.
In prisons, does Butler accept that people assigned male at birth can’t be placed in women’s prisons just because they identify as women? “What would it be if it weren’t [self-identification]? Who’s our expert authority?” Butler argues that trans women should not be seen as uniquely risky. Male prison guards are a risk, so are other female inmates. And if trans women are placed in male prisons, they “will be raped and will be hurt”.
Aren’t we missing the reality of male-on-female violence? I quote from Butler’s book: the penis is “not the cause” of rape. This seems like the National Rifle Association saying that guns don’t kill. “The primary function of a gun is to shoot, but the primary function of a penis is not to rape. It’s only under certain conditions.”
In the UK, 99 per cent of female rape victims say the perpetrator was male; 93 per cent of convicted murderers are men. Aren’t women just less violent? “You would be surprised at how many women are battered by their mothers, and what in church settings or in family settings gets sanitised as ‘discipline’ . . . Even if [men were by nature violent], which they’re not, would it really be by virtue of that organ?”
I am struggling to combine critical theory and chopsticks, so focus on the latter, dipping my tempura asparagus in the sweet sauce.
Butler talks of building coalitions. Have LGBTQIA+ activists pushed too fast? Perhaps society isn’t ready to abandon terms such as “motherhood”. Our familiar language may generalise imperfectly, but it brings people together.
“Do you think motherhood is being abandoned as a term?” Butler swats back. “I don’t think I know this. Maybe you have something to teach me here,” they add, in what I interpret as a gentle dismissal of my contributions over the previous 90 minutes. (UK campaign group Stonewall has suggested that companies’ parental policies should refer to, for example, “birth parents”, not mothers.)
“Why can’t we have a world in which there are women that get pregnant, there are people who don’t identify as women that get pregnant, there are women who don’t get pregnant?” says Butler. “I feel like people’s hearts and minds are closed and fearful.”
Unlike some activists, Butler does not want a world without gender or sex assignment at birth. But sex assignment is “always provisional”: it “doesn’t mean that assignment as it’s lived by a person is going to be liveable.”
Butler and their partner of 34 years, political scientist Wendy Brown, have a son. “Did I know that men could be so lovely? Maybe not! A different kind of masculinity is possible now.”
Gay rights turned out to be arguably conservative by expanding marriage. Will trans rights transform society? “It may turn out to be much more mundane. I actually hope it is,” Butler says. “It’d be great to be ordinary. A lot of queer and trans people would like to have ordinary lives, and not to be the focus of anxiety, fear, fantasy, terror, phobia, all that . . . Sorry to be disappointing. It’s not a bad thing to drain the drama out of some of this.” (The next day, talking to students, Butler strikes a more radical note, declaring themselves in favour of rethinking the nuclear family. It strikes me Butler is happier pushing at the edges, not channelling the mainstream.)
Butler is outspoken about Israel. So we finally move on to a less controversial topic than trans rights: the Middle East. Butler grew up with “a sense of Jewish exceptionalism”. When they first heard the Israeli regime described as apartheid, “I was so angry — it was completely inadmissible to me”. But visits to Israel brought home the extent of Palestinian subjugation.
“We’re told now that Palestinians are vessels of violence, that all they want is to kill or to push Israel into the sea, when I think they are looking mainly to live in freedom and equality and actually be citizens of a state, whether it’s one state or two states.”
So why are young people changing their pronouns, when they could be changing the world? “I think they’re doing both. Pronouns are the micro-changes that they feel like they can make . . . Pronouns do change things, they call into question some of our presuppositions. Most people I know who are asking for pronoun changes are also out there fighting for climate justice or Black Lives Matter or Jewish Voice for Peace.”
I ask if being non-binary has been a personal liberation. “At my age, age is more important than gender in how I understand the world . . . I worry when everything becomes reduced to identity. Identity alone is not a politics.” I mention that old people often find young people censorious. “When a young kid comes to you and says this is my gender identity, they’re trying to say something to you. They’re trying to establish a relationship to you. Are you listening to them?”
Butler has more or less reconciled with their mother: “She’s sort of proud of me, although she doesn’t really understand what I do.” Could Butler reconcile with their critics? “You have to have the right enemies. Some people should be my enemy.”
I dig out a fat tip to compensate the restaurant for our modest bill. I feel relieved at having discussed gender identity without having fallen into a crevasse of incivility. One great thing about meeting face-to-face is everyone’s pronouns are you/yours. The professor persuaded me that change is often feared pointlessly. At times Butler also countenanced that change creates practical problems. Nuanced solutions, rather than opaque dogma, might be the best way to deflate the populists.
Henry Mance is the FT’s chief features writer
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