Why have attacks on gender become so pervasive, especially within right-wing movements? Our guest this week points out that “the question of gender is fundamentally linked with the future of our democratic world.” Judith Butler is a philosopher, gender theorist and cultural critic. They are also a distinguished professor in the graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley. Butler is the author of numerous books, including their latest, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” They join WITHpod to discuss their seminal work, thinking beyond gender binaries, the obsession with gender as a tool to further authoritarian movements and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Judith Butler: The question of gender is fundamentally linked with the future of our democratic world and we would be, I think, making a mistake by imagining that it’s simply identity politics or that it’s fragmenting the left or that it’s an artificial notion. It is not.
Chris Hayes: Hello, and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes. I remember back right in the weekend before the midterms in 2022 reading a piece by Dave Weigel in Semafor, and he had gone to the kind of big closing rally in Michigan for the Republican ticket for all the statewide offices. And you know, this was, I think, the Friday before Election Day. And this tends to be, you know, this sort of big close, like you’re getting everyone ready for GOTV.
And one of the people that was a headliner at this rally for the statewide Republican ticket was a swimmer, an ex-swimmer named Riley Gaines, who is a champion swimmer at the University of Kentucky, who has sort of made a name for herself subsequently as campaigning against trans athletes because she was mad that she had to compete against a trans swimmer. And Riley Gaines has become the sort of cause célèbre for people that are deeply invested in keeping trans folks out of competitive athletics or forcing them to compete in a gender that’s not their avowed gender.
And I remember reading this dispatch and being like, that’s a weird bespoke issue to close your statewide campaign on. Like, there’s lots of stuff going on. You can run on inflation, you know, you could run about the aftermath of all the things happening in 2022 as we were coming out of the pandemic and all the disruptions and supply chains.
But like, I remember thinking, like, is this going to work? Well, it didn’t work in Michigan, where Democrats swept the state. But it hasn’t stopped Republicans and conservatives from trying. They have been incredibly invested in fighting this battle over gender specifically, about trans folks specifically and trans youth, but more broadly, a kind of battle against what they call gender ideology. The belief that gender is not innate, that gender is fluid, that folks can have different genders than their biological sex. Those are different categories.
And not only are they fighting those conceptions, but fighting anyone introducing particularly children or young people to those conceptions. And this has become an enormous cause célèbre in war. And you see it raging all over the place. It has not borne the political fruit that they thought it would, which I find comforting. But it is an obsession all throughout right-wing politics and not just in the U.S., across the globe.
I mean, this is something that Vladimir Putin talks about when he gives his like one speech a year. He talks about gender ideology and Viktor Orban talks about it. Lots of right-wing leaders across the world are obsessed with this. And so, there’s a question of like, well, where does this obsession come from and what is this ideology they say they’re combating? And there is a new book out by the person who I think if you were to say is the premier theorist of gender of our times, a new book called “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” that encounters this question.
And this theorist is someone who I first encountered as an undergraduate college student when I was first kind of getting to know my wife, Kate, who was a gender studies major. And she would be reading gender studies books and I would read them, you know, because I was curious. I also wanted to impress her. And one of those theorists was a philosopher named Judith Butler, who wrote a series of incredibly powerful books about gender and gender theory.
And sort of the first time I encountered these, what to me were radical ideas about gender as sort of social construct, gender as performance, gender as a sort of socially constituted category that’s distinct from biological sex, gender as a way of ordering the world, a kind of internal logic. These ideas, which amazingly have become common ideas, I mean, sort of sewn through the culture in ways that I never would have anticipated 25 years ago when I first encountered these ideas.
These ideas are some of the most powerful and influential ideas, I think, to have emerged over the last 25 years. And when I saw that Judith Butler has a new book out called “Who’s Afraid of Gender?”, which is a sort of book about this global right-wing attack on gender and gender theory, I was immediately like, I have to interview Judith Butler. So, it is a great honor to welcome to the program Judith Butler, distinguished professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley, philosopher, gender theorist, cultural critic, author of many books, including their latest, which is “Who’s Afraid of Gender.”
They first rose to prominence in 1990 with their groundbreaking book, “Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” which was one of those books that I read as an undergrad. And Judith Butler, welcome to the program.
Judith Butler: Thank you. I’m pleased to be here.
Chris Hayes: So, there’s so much I want to talk to you about, and I want to start maybe with how you first started thinking about gender as a theorist and how you sort of found your way into it and some of the early kind of conceptual moves your work made with respect to gender that I think have had a profound social impact. I mean, not just monocausally. It’s not just you wrote a book and then everything changed.
But if you go back, things that I first encountered when I was reading your work, you know, 25 years ago, which seemed radical beyond all imagination, unlike anything I encountered, suffuses a lot of contemporary politics and culture now in a way that I probably wouldn’t have anticipated. So, I’m curious if you could just start about how, you first started thinking about gender and wanting to kind of think through what its meaning was.
Judith Butler: Well, first, let me say that I think we all theorize about gender. I mean, I know gender theory is a —
Chris Hayes: It’s true.
Judith Butler: It’s a field we might say, or part of a discipline, gender studies, feminist studies, women’s studies. But as a kid, I think I was probably theorizing about gender without knowing that’s what I was doing. I didn’t quite understand what it meant when my mother said she was going to put herself together or put her eyes in or do her face. These were all extremely interesting locutions. And I watched as a kind of child ethnographer, really, wondering how is it that you put yourself together as a gender or as the gender that my mother happened to be?
And perhaps my perception was complicated as well by the fact that my family were involved in local movie theaters, that they were involved in showing major Hollywood films. And they were assimilating as Jews to the United States and they took some of those Hollywood figures as their models, right? So, my grandfather looked a lot like Clark Gable or tried to and my mother or my grandmother rather, tried to look like Helen Hayes and not quite sure who my mother was emulating, but it seemed a little Joan Crawford to me, to be honest.
In any case, I think later in life, I mean, as I was in high school and college, I was certainly a committed feminist and remain that way. And of course, one of the fundamental questions of feminism is what does it mean to be a woman and man? Or are there restrictions on how we can live or who we can love or what kind of work we can do? And all of those involved deciding and re-deciding what those genders were, woman and man. They weren’t settled once and for all. And in fact, we counted on that.
So, through feminist theory, I became interested and I didn’t expect to write on gender. But my friends in gender studies department said, oh, come on over, you know, see what you can do. And I thought, well, I was training as a philosopher. So, I chose Simone de Beauvoir as a starting point and that was indeed quite important for me.
Chris Hayes: One of the things that you write about in your most recent book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” because you talk about training as a philosopher, is one of the things I think that your work and other work has done with gender is actually something that good philosophy does with every concept in some ways, right? I mean, one of the experiences you have as an undergraduate in philosophy is you come to a class and there’s some concept. What’s true? What’s love? You know?
And you think, well, I know what it is. I walk around all day using this word and I throw it around. And then the whole process of philosophy, what’s a person? I know what a person is. The whole process of philosophy is taking that and saying, well, wait a second. You push on the edge cases, right? You start to pick it apart. You look at different uses and what you often find out is like, oh, this is a much more complicated concept, whatever the concept is, than what I thought when I walked into the class.
And that’s, you know, I mean, if you go back to Socrates, that’s like his whole shtick, right? He walks up to people in the street and does this. So, to me, part of what your work does and part of what you’re writing about in “Who’s Afraid of Gender” is just applying that philosophical model that you might apply again to truth or something to this concept, boy, girl, men, woman, feminine, masculine, gender that we all quote, unquote, “think we know.
Judith Butler: Well, I think that’s true, but you know, we go through everyday life and people assume that we understand gender or they assume we understand what it is to be a person. But along the way, we very often find ourselves confused or lost or disoriented. You know, some tell the story about how philosophy came into being that Thales, who was an astronomer, I guess, retrospectively considered, was walking along a road and fell in a ditch.
And from the perspective of the ditch looking up, he saw the sky and he thought, wow, the sky, let’s describe this, right? So, something went wrong with his walk, right? Something didn’t work out. And I think for many of us, especially those of us who are, I guess, non-gender conforming, gender becomes an issue because people are expecting that we will just conform to the norms that exist and that we will go along with things and something in us cannot go along.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: Or it’s either a really deeply felt incapacity or an estrangement or perhaps another kind of desire to live one’s body in a different way. So, something was not working. And then we had to think about the concept that was getting in our way. So, gender was maybe an obstruction or maybe it was a desire that had no way to be fulfilled.
Chris Hayes: Did you feel that personally?
Judith Butler: I think I did feel it personally for sure. I think I fell between the available categories, which is a very odd place to live because you’re constantly passing or trying to find a way to live without ever feeling quite right in any category.
Chris Hayes: I want to see if we could just, again, and I know like, I feel a little weird about like, hey, let’s do gender studies 101 with like one of the great theorists in the field.
Judith Butler: That’s okay.
Chris Hayes: But I do think actually this stuff is really important to kind of build from the ground up because I do think that many people’s introduction to this, if they’re outside of it, if they’re not experiencing that specific disruption you’re experiencing, maybe they are and they don’t know it. Just to build up sort of some of the basic conceptual structure here.
So, wonder if you could talk a little bit about two majors, to me, kind of conceptual breakthroughs. One is the difference between sex and gender, that distinction, and the other is gender is performance. But let’s just start with this basic difference between sex and gender, which I think is a sticking point for a lot of people.
Judith Butler: Yes. Well, I think that, first of all, when I wrote “Gender Trouble” in the late 1980s, I think I didn’t think about sex and gender the same way that I do now. At that time, we tended to say, oh, sex is nature and or it’s a biological fact of some kind and gender is the cultural or social interpretation of that fact or the way it’s socially organized or what it comes to mean in a particular society.
But that formulation didn’t quite work because it turns out that sex assignment is a pretty complicated process. When a child is born, sex assignment takes place usually by a medical authority of one kind or another and in accord with a set of norms. So, people who don’t necessarily conform to the idea of what the female child is or what the male child is fall between the cracks and those people can be intersexed or perhaps another way of describing their estrangement from that category.
But I think that, in fact, people determine sex very differently and there are different scientific paradigms. The Olympic Committee has a lot of trouble.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yes, exactly.
Judith Butler: They keep changing their mind. Is it hormones? Is it chromosomes? Is it a combination? Is it social? Is it psychological? What if something called sex is determined through a complex set of factors? And in my mind, when we start asking questions about how sex is determined and whether it’s determined correctly or whether people should be able to reassign themselves a sex, we are speaking about gender because we’re talking about the relation between existing modes of power, schemes of norms in which we live and the lived experience of the body, the way the body is treated medically or institutionally.
All these things together are part of gender studies. So, not sure we can distinguish in the old way between sex as biology and gender as the social organization of sex. We have to ask some questions about both categories and see how they work together.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. I mean, I think, right. So, when I read “Gender Trouble” and in college and when I thought about it, I mean, yeah, sex was the physical, biological manifestation. Gender was a sort of sociocultural, you know, interpersonal, political and performative, you know, practice above it.
Judith Butler: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And then, you know, Anna Faustus Sterling at Brown at the time has a great book called “Sex and the Body” which —
Judith Butler: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — complicates precisely that, you know, it’s the first time I encountered the complication of that, the actual medical fact that like babies are born along a spectrum, actually.
Judith Butler: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And then there’s a bunch of normative decisions actually physically made by doctors to intervene.
Judith Butler: Yes.
Chris Hayes: To push into those two categories. But, okay, just stay with gender. What is gender? Let’s just start there. Like, what is it? We say it like it’s woven through our language. It’s in every aspect of every interaction in some ways. It’s totalizing. It’s the first thing, you know, that you identify when a child is born, the first bit of information, their gender reveal parties.
Judith Butler: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like it’s so total, so essential that it almost is weird to say, like, I don’t even know what I would answer if an alien came to me and said, what is gender?
Judith Butler: Well, maybe we’re all aliens in relation to the concept of gender.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Judith Butler: Gender makes aliens of us all. Well, look, maybe it’s good to start with the distinction. A lot of people now tend to think, oh, gender is gender identity. Like how do you identify? What’s your gender? Or what are your pronouns? How do you define yourself or how do you identify? That’s gender identity, which is a really important notion and many people are obviously concerned with it in ways that are very affirmative and sometimes very negative.
But gender is not the same as gender identity. It’s a broader concept. It includes gender identity. But it’s, I would say, perhaps leaning on the historian Joan Scott, that gender is one form of power through which societies are organized. So, you know, if we talk about the gender division of labor, what’s the kind of work that women generally do? What’s the kind of work that men generally do? Or if we talk about the gendering of poverty, we’re talking about, well, how do people experience poverty differentially and is gender a factor there?
We’re not talking about gender identity. We’re talking about how society is organized in a set of differential power relations. And I think that’s really important to remember, that gender is a perspective, a framework for understanding difference, power, imbalance power, hierarchies, also aspirations to overcome hierarchy or to live in the world according to principles of equality.
So, you know, it works in a lot of different ways. And I hate to be too complex about it, but at least we can say, I think with some confidence, that gender identity is one thing. And gender as a larger category is a way of talking about the division of power in society, at least one major axis of power.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: Can we talk a little bit about, I want to talk about binaries and then a little bit about performance, the notion of performance. I think the notion of performance is really like important and profound one and stuck with me and has really been a helpful analytical tool for me in understanding all this.
But before we get to that, just, you know, part of the resistance here is that the notion of gender as binary is so total in the messages sent and received. Like what we learn about the world and about ourselves that is so often about this binary, again, from the first moment and from the like the coding of the pink and the blue in the hospital, which of these two doors, which of these two doors, and about who we are as we come to know ourselves, whether we do or don’t feel comfortable with that or we rebel against it, like these two doors, these two doors. In language, when you learn about a language that has two different forms of nouns, one is masculine, one is —
Judith Butler: Yes, inflections. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, one is masculine, one is feminine. And like you could say one is black and one’s white or one’s yes and one’s no or one’s, you know, true and one false, but they’re gendered like, well, I don’t know. I guess what do you think? Why does that binary exist and isn’t part of the backlash, this was this conceptual resistance to the cracking of it?
Judith Butler: Well, first of all, let’s remember that even languages that inflect their verbs or their nouns through masculine and feminine also usually have a place for the neuter.
Chris Hayes: Yep. That’s the truth. Yeah.
Judith Butler: And so that’s important.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Judith Butler: So, there’s already a place for something that is beyond the binary.
Chris Hayes: Binary. Yeah.
Judith Butler: But you’re right to say that the binary is very insistent in many languages. I’m also mindful that in Africa, for instance, there’s a richer vocabulary for different genders that does not always reduce to the binary. We also see that I think in First World nations, there are, we might say examples that come out of parts of the Earth that have not been fully colonized or escaped colonization that do not fully conform to the binary.
And of course, language is historical, which means that we’re also innovating. We also can and do find different pronouns or different ways of referring to gender. I suppose I don’t think I can give you one reason why this binary is so insistent. But I think it would be a mistake to say, oh, look, the binary is happening everywhere. There must be something innate or inevitable or universal about the binary. No. It is dominant.
It’s dominant. But there’s always a margin that doesn’t conform. There is always a group of people that says, I don’t belong. There’s always a way of organizing society that’s indifferent to that. So, it always is reproduced, but it also is accompanied by its margins and its upside. So, I think we need to think of it as a form of power that reproduces itself and not as a necessary structure of society.
Chris Hayes: Well, and I think this relates to one of the points you make in “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” And again, we’re going to get to performance in a second. But is that the story that I think a lot of people tell or understand and people on both sides of this, I would say ideologically, I would say people that are extremely sympathetic to the sort of deconstruction of gender binaries and equality and sort of allowing people to fully inhabit who they want to inhabit and flourish and people who are extremely opposed.
But there’s actually a little bit of a shared story there, which is there was a fixed hierarchy, there was a fixed binary, there was a sort of fixed set of concepts and power relations. And now those are coming apart because people are pushing against them. And maybe you think people pushing against them is good and maybe you think people pushing against them is bad. But one of the things that I note in your book is that you sort of resist that as a story, like insistently over and over.
Judith Butler: Yes, I suppose so.
Chris Hayes: And I kept being like, well, I don’t know. That seems like kind of the story to me. But why do you resist that story? And I think it connects to what you just said, that there’s sort of always margins, there’s always different things happening outside this binary.
Judith Butler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: There’s no halcyon. There’s no fixed past in which like this was just the way it was and everyone was part of it.
Judith Butler: Well, you know, again, it depends where we are in the world. But even if we think about the United States and we say, oh, well, in the ‘50s, we knew women and men were and we had strict binaries and that actually continued to some extent into the ‘60s and then things started flying apart.
We have to ask ourselves in those decades where we think that the gender binary was fixed and everybody was living in perfect conformity to existing gender norms, who was left out, who was suffering, who didn’t have a vocabulary or who’s living in an underground world where they could be recognized or where they could find solidarity among others who are equally excluded or marginalized from society?
I think it’s a false story we tell that once gender was settled and now, you know, these young people, they’re reading the wrong texts in college and they’re all woke and they’re making stuff up and they just need to go back to the way it was. Well, no, I mean, going back to the way it was is going back to a world in which people who were deeply estranged and even suffering under the sex assignment they were given or the gender norms under which they were asked to live were silent.
So that’s like saying, oh, let’s go back to a time of absolute censorship. Let’s go back to a time when norms were imposed and people were too frightened or too stigmatized to go public about the fact that it wasn’t working for them. So, I think that that’s a fantasy about the past. And a lot of right-wing people now are asking for a restoration of that time in history.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, very explicitly.
Judith Butler: Yes. And I think we should be very anxious about that because they’re probably also asking for the restoration of racial hierarchies and a pure notion of national identity that excludes migrants. So, we need to think about who’s calling for that, the restoration of that that fantasy. I’m very skeptical.
Chris Hayes: Before we move to that, because I want to talk about sort of how things have manifested in the political fights that we’re having now, not just here in the U.S. One of the things that’s very useful about this book is really just this is happening globally. It’s being invoked in all kinds of different places across all kinds of interesting lines of cultural, linguistic, political difference. Just the notion of gender as performance and if you can explain that to people that are encountering it here in their ears for the first time.
Judith Butler: Yeah, well, I never meant to say that gender was a kind of role that we play or something we put on in a joking way. I think we learn how to be the genders we are. I think very rarely gender comes naturally. Kids are socialized. They are exposed to certain conventions or certain practices in school. They’re told to get in this line or that line, or they’re offered clothing at a very early age that basically communicates a certain kind of message.
I think some of that is inevitable, but I think we do repeat what we see, not in a behaviorist way, not automatically, but we get a sense like, oh, this is acceptable to do things this way. And there are certain kinds of punishments waiting for us if we don’t do them the right way. So, I think there’s an anxiety about making sure we appear a certain way or talk the right way or even laugh the right way.
And the way in which we assume a gender, I mean, take it on and embody it. I think that happens through a series of repetitions. We enact it. We enact the norms and the norms work because we enact them. So maybe the word enactment is a better word than performance because that confuses people. But I think we learn how to act a certain way over time and we get better at it or worse at it or we play with it or we find ourselves changing the terms in the middle of the script.
And that’s part of what it means to be kind of deeply formed socially at the same time that we’re trying to find our own way in society. What’s the right trajectory for us? That’s my idea of performativity. I know a long and strange word, but I think that’s my basic idea.
Chris Hayes: Well, I think that the acting and enactment is useful because I think the default way that many of us are taught to think about gender, it is that a state or an essential truth or just a fact, right? Like, I don’t have to enact the fact that I’m six feet tall. I just am six feet tall. I just physically am six feet tall. You know, I can slouch or I can stand up, but like I’m not making a whole set of choices and practices about that. That’s just there.
And I think people think about gender the same way. Like there just is, you know, it just is who I am. But when you actually zoom in, it’s like, well, every morning you’re waking up and you’re putting on clothes that are, you know, some set of ways. And then you’re interacting with people in some sort of vocal register with some sort of physicality. You’re constantly doing things in the world that relate to the expectations that other people have, that society has, that the sort of sources of power have about these categories.
Judith Butler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And you’re constantly, all the time, out of every sentence out of your mouth, you’re doing something in relation to that.
Judith Butler: Yeah. I guess I want to just step back for a moment and say, look, a lot of people do feel that the gender they are is something they experience internally as very fixed and very true. And I don’t dispute that. I think that there can be deeply felt senses of who one is and that gender is a fundamental part of that. And some of the reaction against gender as a concept is a reaction coming from that place. Look, I know who I am. Don’t tell me that this is somehow acquired over time or that it could go differently. No, this is definitely who I am.
But even in those cases, like, if I say I am this gender and I know it, or you say, I mean, maybe the analogy works, you’re a tall guy. There are ways of living that, right? There are different ways of living that. Some tall guys, like, whoa, they really use their tallness and it’s like, I’m going to be the tallest guy and I’m going to use my tallness to assert. And other people are like, oh, I’m tall. I better, like, hunched over talking to this person. I’m embarrassed that I’m looking down at them.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: You know, there are ways of —
Chris Hayes: Being in the world.
Judith Butler: Yeah, there are ways of living out your tallness. There are ways of living out your gender.
Chris Hayes: Well, it’s funny. When I said the height thing, I was like, oh, no, Judith Butler is going to tell me that height is socially constructed.
Judith Butler: Not that it —
Chris Hayes: But that’s where we ended up.
Judith Butler: But remember, constructed doesn’t mean fake or artificial.
Chris Hayes: Correct. Yes.
Judith Butler: It means you’re doing it in a specific way.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: You know, and you know, you’re a certain kind. You know, you’re doing it this way rather than another way. Well, maybe there’s a range of ways you do it, but you’re not just being it, you’re also doing it. And that’s the part that we might say is enactment. And I don’t mean to say that if you enact it, that’s in the place of being it. It might be both.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: One of the things you say that I think is just is very simple and direct and profound in the book is I hear you people when you say that you feel threatened by me or us saying there’s something that you possess to your core that you think we’re trying to take away from you.
Judith Butler: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And your response is, no, we’re not. But other people feel that exact same feeling of threat, that exact same feeling of alienation and dislocation because they have a different relationship to this and you’re trying to take that away from them.
Judith Butler: Yes. Well, I guess there are two things to say about it. One, let’s take the case of Italy right now. So, Giorgia Meloni, who now runs the government of Italy, in her campaigns, said that the gender ideologists or ideologues will strip you of your sex assignment. You know, they will take your sex away.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: Your sexed identity, she calls it. And I was trying to think, why is it that she imagines that anyone wants to take anyone else’s sexed identity away? And in fact, if we agree that trans people should be able to change their sex assignment so that it more clearly and readily corresponds to the sex that they assign themselves, does that affect other people who are staying with their original sex assignment?
I mean, we could just say, oh, some people stay with their sex assignment and they’re okay with that and they might even love it. They write like, yes, I was assigned this sex and it’s the best thing in the world. And other people are like, I was assigned to sex that is absolutely wrong for me and I’m going to change it so that I can live and flourish as the person that I am. Now, there’s not an obvious contradiction between those two positions.
Chris Hayes: No.
Judith Butler: But if the person who’s living out their assigned sex happily or curiously, as the case may be, feels like, oh, this is natural or this is universal, like everybody should feel like I do or we should all be restricted to the sex to which we were assigned at birth, it’s nonsense for anyone to depart, what they’re basically doing is saying that their experience of their sex assignment should be everybody’s experience.
They’re generalizing, they’re universalizing, and they’re not listening to the fact that it really doesn’t work and it actually is not just for people to have to live with a sex assignment that does not belong to them and does not correspond to how they understand themselves to be. So, you know, nobody is taking that sex assignment away from the person who was assigned a certain sex at birth and likes that.
The only thing that’s being taken away is the sense that those folks are living a universal condition. They’re not. And it’s not natural or universal or necessarily shared. And they can still affirm their lives and keep their sex. No one’s taking it away. But they do have to lose the belief that everybody should live exactly as they do and have the same sense about their sex assignment as they do.
Chris Hayes: The place where this gets very fraught and contested in the U.S. context is children or I should say teenagers really more specifically. And part of that, I think, is I want too just be clear. I think a lot of it is bad faith, is driven by bad faith as a means of kind of using a sort of useful crowbar on a kind of what is seen as a political weakness to kind of pry the whole thing open, right?
So, it’s like, well, let’s just talk about kids and kids getting gender affirming care. We all agree that, you know, kids and then, you know, next thing you know, it’s trying to ban all gender affirming care because what they’re really after is the entire edifice. But to people that aren’t engaging in bad faith on that, how do you think about this question of its inevitably the fact that starting from the earliest moments, we have this relationship with gender.
And it’s also inevitably the fact that as you go through adolescence and these questions are sort of ratcheted up and really presented to you most intensely, that the people are going to feel a whole panoply of experiences about how they relate to the sex they were assigned at birth, the categories of gender and how they, you know, fit into that or transcend it.
And so, you’ve got this issue, which is it like it’s going to manifest earlier than 18, like inevitably. But until you’re 18, you’re a different kind of subject politically and legally than when you’re not. And how do you think about that? How should people think about that?
Judith Butler: Well, there are many issues here. I mean, I’m interested in the fact that some people declare as trans who are much older in their 40s, 50s and even 60s. So, do we say they were always trans? Do we say they became trans, that they came to understand that later? Was it there at birth? Was it there at a young age? I don’t have a view on that. I think it’s interesting.
But I think we’re probably mistaken if we imagine that gender identity gets firmed up at a particular point in time and then it’s sort of there for the duration.
Chris Hayes: Right. Yeah.
Judith Butler: Many things affect our sense of what gender we are or wish to be. I suppose what I’m most worried about are queer kids or trans kids or gender nonconforming kids who are sent to medical institutions to be corrected or to be given psychiatric evaluations or to be put into programs that try to normalize them in one way or another.
So, let’s remember that some forms of medical care can be very damaging for young people who are trying to find their way in a broadly gender nonconforming life. So, my sense is that the right-wing opposition to gender-affirming care is based on an idea that children have been either indoctrinated at school or that they are excessively susceptible to peer pressure or that they learn about such matters in sex education classes or in the books they read that are gender-affirming, and they, therefore, become this character that they read about.
All of which doesn’t really give children any respect or dignity as young people who are trying to find their way and very often find their way through play and through experimentation and through trying on this and that or trying to figure out what language exists for who they are, experimenting with language, with self-definition.
I think there should be a lot of time given to that time of life in which one is trying to find one’s way and that we shouldn’t be intervening so quickly, you know, to stop it or to assume we know what the end of that process is. We should be listening to what a child is saying. I find it interesting that some kids, when you ask them what gender they are, they actually give you an animal, that’s my gender.
Because if you’re asking, they sense that you’re asking about, like, what’s my deepest identification in life?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: Well, it might be a walrus, might really be a walrus —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: — or a seal, right? Similarly, an object of desire, like, oh, my sexuality. Well, that would be cats. That would definitely be cats. You know, I mean, what are we actually doing? We’re trying to impose something really early on kids who need to find their way and discover language and be able to talk about it openly.
So, I think gender-affirming care is, broadly speaking, there should be a commitment to listening to what young people are saying and trying to give them a safe environment in which to explore everything they need to explore. I don’t think it should be accelerated in a panicked way. I also am very opposed to it being blocked.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: I think we need a more, I don’t know, ethically capacious relationship to children and their ways of being and their ways of knowing. And it’s, of course, enormously damaging to trans youth and non-gender conforming kids, to queer kids, to gay, lesbian kids to be told at a very early age that how they identify or what they might desire is pathological or that they will not be receiving the kind of affirmative care they need in order to flourish in this world.
That’s a damaging practice. And it’s heartbreaking to see how many communities are convinced that they somehow have to control and damage kids today rather than give them the freedom to find their way.
Chris Hayes: This question of understanding people’s relationship to gender and expanding an ethically capacious vision of how a society treats that. You know, there’s a sort of two ways of looking at it, which I think is the kind of the point of conflict of the political conflict, particularly the sort of right-wing forces that have set themselves against it. And you write about them in the book from the Vatican Church, whose politics can be different in different ways, but this is very conservative.
You know, the Catholic Church in the Vatican, international figures across what we call the West, but also in other places as well. Vladimir Putin has talked about the sort of specter of gender ideology, Giorgia Meloni, obviously in the U.S., conservative figures and Ron DeSantis. And so, it seems to me there’s sort of two visions, right?
So, what you’re saying is we want each person to flourish to the best of their ability and produce a set of social norms of flexibility that encourage that and facilitate it. And what they say is you are taking a set of beliefs that we have and an order that we have and you are dismantling it and then propagandizing young people particularly to remove them from that order and to deconstruct that order.
Judith Butler: It’s so exciting. The attribution of power is so exciting.
Chris Hayes: Well, I think the funny thing is one place where I think I slightly disagree with you, if I can be so bold in reading your book, is that like, I don’t know. I sort of think that you’re theorizing and the theorists that you work in is pretty radical and does actually do some dismantling. And I think actually that’s kind of a good thing, normatively speaking. And you seem to be much more sort of circumspect about just how radical the power of the vision you’re enunciating is.
Judith Butler: Well, I’ll tell you what I find paradoxical. I mean, if we agree, let’s say that every individual has a right to flourish and that flourishing takes place in supportive communities and with institutional infrastructures that support their way of life, then we’re not really saying anything super radical. It’s just that that idea of freedom to live freely without fear of violence, pathologization, discrimination, that idea of freedom is something that’s not particularly new.
What’s new is that we’re insisting that gender is also a space of that freedom and that sex reassignment is, that self-determination and flourishing looks a certain way if you accept that gender binaries and gender hierarchies are not the natural and necessary way of structuring society for people who are trying to live outside of those norms or at the critical margins of those norms or they’re doing something with those norms in a different way.
Why are we so frightened that they are seeking to flourish and live without fear and violence? I mean, so many of us are committed to that. Like, you know, let’s take a vote. Should people live without fear of violence? Like, oh, yeah. Like, yeah, people should live without fear of violence. People shouldn’t be discriminated against. I mean, it’s not —
Chris Hayes: No.
Judith Butler: You know, it’s not so far from a classical liberal position, except that I would insist that individuals only flourish under certain kinds of social conditions. And we’re calling for the change of those social conditions so that people can more fully flourish. That sounds radical.
Chris Hayes: But you’re actually just situating it in, like, the most, like, bedrock liberalism in that telling.
Judith Butler: But, you know, the problem with bedrock liberalism is that it’s always had its limits, right?
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: It always applied to certain populations and not to others, right? So, you can have the Constitution of the United States written by slavers. You know, we know this. So, we’re always testing the limits of democracy. Will these principles apply, you know, to migrants? Will they apply to people who suffer from racism? Will they apply to people who are gender non-normative? And it’s like, no, you got to draw a line somewhere, right? And then suddenly we find that there’s a contradiction that a lot of people are willing to live with.
Chris Hayes: I mean, yes, totally. To situate it in that trajectory makes a lot of sense is how I think about it. The one thing I would say is that I think there’s a sizable chunk of folks across the world here, other places, who don’t actually think that, like, an individual flourishing is a particularly important social value. That like individual freedoms are important and actually think that social cohesion or whatever kind of community project or whatever social order that is constructed is actually more important than that.
And so, yeah, like, it’s a bummer if you don’t want to be a housewife, but that’s actually important to the social order. So that flourishing doesn’t really bother me that much. And I think one of the things that you see actually in the tension of this political moment on the question of gender is precisely that, which is that a lot of people who say that they believe in individual freedom or view that kind of human individual flourishing as a value, when push comes to shove, would be happy to subsume it to some other value.
Judith Butler: Yeah. But look, I mean, I’m also calling for a new social order. I’m also calling for a new ordering of society, right? I mean, the social order they think that is defending against chaos or destruction is a very conservative one that has fixed hierarchies and that very often bases itself on notions of natural law that are, you know, 17th century notions that have no business organizing our social and intimate lives.
So, I am calling not just for individual flourishing, but the reordering of society so that society more adequately actualizes principles of equality, freedom and justice. That’s what I suppose we would call a radical democratic position.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Judith Butler: So, my approach to gender belongs to a radical democratic vision, which is also anti-nationalist and anti-authoritarian. Many of the people who want a return to a dream order, a patriarchal order, are also supporting authoritarian candidates and authoritarian rule because they think that’s security and that that will protect them.
But of course, that puts them on the side of anti-democracy. So, the question of gender is fundamentally linked with the future of our democratic world. And we would be, I think, making a mistake by imagining that it’s simply identity politics or that it’s fragmenting the left or that it’s an artificial notion. It is not.
Chris Hayes: Well, let’s turn to that thing you just said about fragmenting the left, because it’s very clear the case that there are an array of right-wing conservative forces that are sort of engaging these backlash politics against new forms of understanding gender and social practice of it. But there’s also people who consider themselves on the left, consider themselves liberal, who have really radicalized against this in a way that I find like a little hard to understand.
You have a chapter in the book about this, particularly in the experience of the U.K., where it’s extremely intense. I don’t think they call themselves TERFs, although I think they sort of reappropriated trans exclusive radical feminists. It’s a tradition that actually goes back a number of decades and starts with some bedrock questions about gender essentialism, second or third wave understandings of what feminism is.
But how do you understand the sort of intensity of this sort of anti-trans activism among a certain portion of people who very much consider themselves or have considered themselves liberals or on the left?
Judith Butler: That’s a really good question. I am, I admit, confounded by it. I don’t understand why people who, especially feminists, who have fought discrimination for so long, would actively advocate for discrimination against trans people or debunk the self-definition of people who undergo gender change or sex reassignment.
I feel that it may be that feminism has actually divided internally between those who are trying to ground feminism in a biological essentialism in order to establish a very specific foundation for their politics, a politics of discrimination, anti-discrimination or a politics for reproductive rights. But in fact, I think they’re making a mistake because it’s only through alliance and solidarity that any of us are going to be able to defend basic rights, especially the rights of minorities broadly considered.
But I think the left has fallen apart for reasons that, I don’t think it’s the queer trans world that has broken the left apart. I think left alliances are suffering everywhere, partly because some groups have allowed themselves to be captured by neoliberal trends and other groups are working outside of democratic electoral politics because they’ve despaired about finding decent representation.
I think there’s a lot of segmentation and fragmentation, which is lamentable, which is why I think it’s really important to see that the same right-wing groups that are attacking feminism are attacking trans people, that the violent gangs that do violence to trans people are also more than willing to do violence to women.
And there is every reason in the world to have larger alliances that would manifest a new kind of left that would centrally include trans, queer, feminist actors of a variety of orientations that may not always agree with one another. But whoever said coalitions are, you know, people in love. They’re not in love with each other. It’s okay. It’s okay.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Judith Butler: But you do stay in because the forces of fascism and authoritarianism are rising as we see. So, I think we would have to have a deeper analysis of why the left has scattered in the way that it has in order to understand how trans-exclusionary feminists have severed their alliance with trans and queer people. It’s enormously lamentable. And we see that those who have actually even disavowed the left have found themselves agreeing with Putin or Orban or Meloni on biological essentialism. And that cannot be the feminism we want to affirm, a feminism that finds itself echoing the worst authoritarians of our time.
Chris Hayes: Judith Butler is a distinguished professor in the graduate school, University of California, Berkeley, philosopher, gender theorist, cultural critic, author of many books and articles through the years. The latest is called “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” It’s a great joy and delight to be able to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Judith Butler: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Judith Butler. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that conversation. If and when you sort of encountered gender theory or had your ideas about what gender is and is not and how it functions in the world, challenged or subverted or demonstrated, I’d love to hear your feedback. You can always get in touch with us at our email WITHpod@gmail.com.
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“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here, by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?