Judith Butler on Gender-Scepticism, Donald Trump and How to Mobilise People

Words: Zara Aftab | Photography: Charlotte Amy Landrum

There are few gender theorists and philosophers whose appearance at a café in North London would be met with knowing glances and wide eyes, or who would be approached by a group of 20-somethings at a random restaurant wanting to celebrate their birthday with them. But there are few gender theorists who have changed the world like Judith Butler.

Over the course of their four-decade long career, Butler has, albeit unwittingly, become synonymous with the word gender. “I have mixed feelings about this fame,” they say, over coffee at the aforementioned café. “I don’t want to be a celebrity because that means I’m like a trend that comes and goes. While being in the public eye does give you a platform, often I feel like people just want to put me in the news or occupy a space, but are perhaps not really listening to what I have to say.”

Butler details this feeling in their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender, released last year. The book sees them grappling with the anti-gender moment which has gained such traction in recent years. They cite an incident when their presence at a conference in Brazil caused massive protests, and they were, in typical misogynist tradition, labelled a witch. It was, they say, the first time they understood that there was an anti-gender ideology movement that perceived gender as a diabolical force. 

In Who’s Afraid of Gender, Butler charts how these global networks have been formed and sustained alongside the rise of increasingly authoritarian and fascist regimes. Throughout the book, Butler is concerned with how and why ‘gender’ has become a phantasm that “allows it to contain whatever anxiety or fear that the anti-gender ideology wishes to stoke for its own purposes”. This baseless and often contradictory anxiety surrounding gender should make it difficult to make coherent arguments against it – but Butler does it with effortless ease, maintaining all of their trademark wit, while using more accessible language than in their earlier academic work. 

“I wrote it in an accessible style because I was aware that there was this emerging right-wing movement that I had encountered quite intensely in Latin America, Switzerland, Belgium, some parts of Eastern Europe and even France and wanted people in the Anglophone world to know about it,” Butler explains. They add that when they started writing the book, the anti-gender movement in the US was only beginning to materialise. 

In the time since they finished writing, there has been no denying that the state of geopolitics, censorship and gender discourse has taken a sharp turn for the worse. Butler speaks quite frankly about their frustration surrounding Donald Trump’s second term as president, particularly with reference to the decision to reverse safeguarding provisions for transgender and non-binary people through executive orders, especially those that restrict gender-affirming health care for young people, noting that these are nothing attempts to hide anti-feminist and transphobic rhetoric under the guise of pearl-clutching “safety”.

“What is really clear to me is that kids need to be able to read and make sense of the world and what’s confusing about it. They need good books on gender and sexuality, on race. Kids need to find their own opinions and their own way with issues that are sometimes, admittedly, controversial – but these thoughts should not be banned or censored.”

“We all share fear regarding the well-being of children,” Butler says, “But there’s a lot of mention of safety in talks around politics regarding gender. I find this disingenuous, especially when it comes from the Catholic Church, which suddenly seems to worry about the well-being of children while still not reckoning with its own well-substantiated history of child abuse and molestation.”

The UK is currently embroiled in a very similar argument regarding the ban of puberty blockers, and the country’s position as the birthplace of ‘gender-critical’ feminism is (quite stupidly) wrapped up in ideas of keeping children and cis-women safe. In both the US and the UK, there also seems to be an aversion to bringing topics of gender and sexuality into the classroom or having any real sustained debate about them. Instead, as Butler tells me, “They accuse queer people, trans people and teachers of sex education and gender studies of pedophilia and indoctrination. What is really clear to me is that kids need to be able to read and make sense of the world and what’s confusing about it. They need good books on gender and sexuality, on race. Kids need to find their own opinions and their own way with issues that are sometimes, admittedly, controversial – but these thoughts should not be banned or censored. And we certainly shouldn't be pulling books off shelves. What we should be encouraging is reading and discussion. This idea of protection is a farce because denying kids the healthcare they need is not protecting children,” they say. “So if you're going to deny them a good education, deny them healthcare and accuse those who are trying to open their minds of molestation and indoctrination, that's not serving children. Children need protection from the forces that impose these rules.” 

I would have been remiss if I had not ended our chat without asking Butler the singular question that is plaguing the left: “How do we, beyond engaging in political theory, begin to unravel the mess of the world?” 

To finish, I will just include their answer in full: 

“How do we work across national boundaries, across generations to think about the world we want to live in? Because it's one thing to spend all your time criticising the right wing and the patriarchy and capitalism, calling for it all to be torn down. We know what we don't like, we know what we want to negate. But what do we want to build, and why are we not making a popular enough case for what we want to build so that people are voting in better ways than they are right now? Why can Nigel Farage and Donald Trump arouse people's passions in ways that we don't know how to do, and what do we want to arouse? We need artists, we need people, we need academics. We need activists all working together to produce a desire for that world, not to tell people what they must desire but to give them the language, imagery, and sounds of an exciting future that they want to bring into being. That’s what mobilises people.”