Judith Butler: Speech, Censorship, and the Goddamn Pope

On what feels like an annual basis, Judith Butler is dispatched to the British press, mostly for the purpose of reminding us that anyone who thinks that humans come in two sexes is basically the Pope. Around this time last year, we were treated to an extensive media blitz to mark the publication of Who’s Afraid of Gender?, which extended the thesis that ‘anyone who thinks there are two sexes is the Pope’ (AWTTATSITP) to a whopping 320 pages. This spring she is back, to mark the publication of the paperback edition, with an interview at Politics Joe, and a piece in the London Review of Books. Both appearances feature some top belabouring of AWTTATSITP, with particular focus on responding to the actions of the Trump administration, its crackdown on gender studies, and its issuing of the Executive Order on ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.’

Here's a sample of Butler’s AWTTATSITP proclamations from her recent media turns.

From the London Review of Books:

In…Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I noted that the campaign against ‘gender ideology’[1] was very late to gain ground in the US. The term itself was coined by the Vatican back in the 1990s…The last two popes have both taken a position against gender ideology…insisting that gender is a threat to men and women, to civilisation, the family and the natural order of human relations…

The language of ‘immutability’ belongs more properly to a natural law tradition in which male and female kinds are established by divine will and so belong to a version of creationism. They are immutable features of the human, as Pope Francis has affirmed. Trump speaks in the name of science, but the cameo appearance of the gamete theory notwithstanding, he does so effectively to insist that God decreed the immutable character of the two sexes, and that he, Trump, is decreeing it once more, either to echo the word of God, or to represent his own word as the word of God. Religious doctrine cannot serve as the basis for scientific research or state policy. But that is what is happening in this executive order.

From Politics Joe:

The extremism of gender ideology has to do with its apparent or alleged refusal to acknowledge the biological and immutable differences between the sexes. And in fact…there are a lot of people in gender studies who work on biology, especially in developmental biology, and are very interested in questions of sex determination. And nobody denies biology, but biology turns out to be a lot more complex than just two facts that are immutable. And in fact, the language of immutability obviously comes from the Vatican doctrine…from various pronouncements that the last two popes have made about the immutability of set of sexual difference and why that's important for their theological ideas about complementarity and what the human is, right?

I think that to the degree that the radical right is either evangelical or participates in a form of Christian nationalism, as it does, not only in the US, but in places like Hungary, we see that gender is understood to be something that calls into question the primacy of the heterosexual family, the hierarchical and distinct differences between men and women, the God given nature of sex and all the social orders that are based on that, including civilization itself. So, in some of the churches, gender ideology is actually described as demonic or diabolical, that it will destroy your way of life.

I don’t want to get too into the weeds of critiquing Butlerian sex denial here. I have done so extensively here, here, here, and here. What I do want to underline is that claiming that the belief in the immutability of sex “obviously comes from the Vatican doctrine” is a) fucking absurd and b) follows only from Butler’s faulty assumption that belief in the material facts of sex is necessarily conjoined with “theological ideas about complementarity,” or traditional ideas about “the family and the natural order of human relations.” As radical and materialist feminists have repeatedly noted, Butler’s thought is grounded on a staggering inability to distinguish sexual difference from the hierarchical social organisation and valuation of gendered roles. To her mind, “the hierarchical and distinct differences between men and women” are one and the same thing. Sexual difference simply is gendered hierarchy.

This conflation is routinely referred to in queer and trans ideological thinking as ‘the gender binary.’ What needs to be emphasised here is that it is Butler, and not radical and materialist feminists, who shares this conflation with the Pope and other assorted Christian conservatives. Butler’s assurance that AWTTATSITP is an ideological projection informed by her own theoretical—and biologically determinist—assumptions about the inherent conjunction of sexual difference and gendered hierarchy. In Butler’s world there are only two, mirror image, possibilities. Either you are a conservative Christian who believes sex is real and that gendered hierarchy follows directly from it, or you are a ‘gender troubling’ radical, which necessitates denying the facts of human sexual difference.

As I laid out in the table in ‘Against Identitarianism,’ what we have here is two sets of doctrinaire positions that are, in fact, inverted images of each other. And in the spirit of playing the ‘Eight Bar Blues Induced by Repeatedly Banging My Head Against the Culture War,’ what I want to think through here is how free speech and censorship is being affected by this mirror-image mechanism. Butler, quite rightly, is worried about Trumpian authoritarianism. And she’s not, for example, wrong when she notes:

It’s an extremist act to ban…not just a version of gender studies like gender ideology extremism…[but] the word [gender] itself…people are starting to take it out of their institutional policies, with enormous consequences for women, for feminism, for gay and lesbian and trans people…but also for people who are doing health and family stuff and trying to work…on sex discrimination and gender-based violence. (Politics Joe)

Indeed, she’s not wrong to be worried about Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to anything to do with DEI or the banning of long lists of words from research proposals. She is not wrong that “various programs…educational…scientific…grants in the humanities and the arts” are “suffering from this kind of censorship.” She’s not wrong that such censorship is “a ruse to augment state power and…justify radical…silencing,” or that it’s motivated by “a restoration fantasy” of putting “white men on top again.” And she’s not wrong that along with this authoritarian restoration fantasy we see terrifying assaults on the rule of law and due process, carefully staged spectacles of brown men being theatrically brutalised and deported, people being picked off the street and bundled into vans by masked officials for thoughtcrimes, and a systematic program of people “having their rights stripped away, detention, deportation and the rest” (Politics Joe, all subsequent quotes from Politics Joe).

What is, however, absolutely infuriating, is Butler’s point-blank refusal to understand the part that she—and the project of coercively mandating sex denial—has played in this authoritarian hall of mirrors. She rightly notes that many of “these allegations” of extremism “made by the Trump administration are also confessions of what they themselves are doing,” but cannot grasp that AWTTATSITP could equally be read as a confession about the extreme identitarianism of her own intellectual operations.

According to Butler, academic gender studies is an open and pluralistic field, with a “variety of approaches” including “materialists…intersectional people…post structuralists” and “historians.” Within the discipline “we should,” she argues, “keep those approaches open, and…value the complexity of those debates,” lamenting that “we’re living in a time when that’s being shut down, or when a single caricature of gender has replaced a really complex field of study that's represented at every major research university in the world.” By contrast to the complexity of gender studies, “in the public sphere, there's an anti-intellectual impetus and even an anti-academic animus, which…says, ‘all these people are doing the same thing, and they have a single doctrine, and they make you line up and pledge allegiance to their doctrine, and you can’t take one of those classes unless you come out believing the same thing as everybody else.’”

Trying to unpick the levels of dishonesty, and DARVOing distortion packed into these statements makes my brain want to bleed. Butler is here arguing, both and at the same time, that belief in the material immutability of reproductive sex is de facto a religious, not scientific, belief that necessarily brings you into alignment with patriarchal gender conservativism and the Pope, and that gender studies is a pluralistic discipline that in no way mandates ‘a single doctrine’ that means ‘you come out believing the same thing as everybody else.’ She is claiming that there are developmental biologists and materialists working within the discipline, while simultaneously claiming that any assertion that reproductive sex is a materially given or biologically immutable fact must be understood to belong “properly to a natural law tradition in which male and female kinds are established by divine will and so belong to a version of creationism.” And not content with positing everyone who thinks sex to be a biological fact as a conservative religious bigot, she then wants to claim that it is the people noticing that there seems to be ideological coercion operating in gender studies that are being ‘anti-intellectual,’ and who are enforcing a ‘single caricature of gender’ that amounts to a form of “biological reductionism that says there's only male and female, and that biological difference is a fact and end of discussion.”

Yes Judith, some of us, who are not in league with the Pope, think that biological sexual difference is a fact, and the facts are that it is the current gender studies paradigm, of which you are a prime architect, that has refused to engage in open discussion with us for several decades now. In the early 90s, as feminist academia was consumed by fierce arguments about the definition of ‘woman,’ Naomi Schor spoke resolutely out against “the policing of feminism by the shock troops of anti-essentialism,” noting how indictments of essentialism functioned as “the prime idiom of intellectual terrorism, and the privileged instrument of intellectual orthodoxy” (The Essential Difference, 1994). Max Dashu, the esteemed second-wave researcher of what she calls ‘matrix cultures,’ was a member of the academic feminist listserv in the US throughout the 90s, and has told me tales of the extreme intellectual battle that raged for years in the process of women being booted out of the feminist academy for the crime of thinking women were female and resisting the new orthodoxy—endlessly asserted by Butler as if an incontestable fact—that “women are a gender.” It is an act of remarkable dissimulation to pretend this history never happened and that the erasure of this history is not central to the institution of rigid discursive hegemony that controls the present. And it flies in the face of reality to claim that gender studies is a pluralist pursuit when not one woman currently in post in the Anglo-American feminist academy has gone on record to critique the theoretical foundations, or political implications, of trans ideology.

The way this discursive regime has played out in the lives of other academics who have challenged its claims are by now well documented. There are the cases of Kathleen Stock at the University of Sussex; the Reindorf report on the no platforming of Jo Phoenix and Rosa Freedman at the University of Essex; the work of Alice Sullivan and Judith Suissa on academic freedom; the research conducted by Laura Favaro on silencing in gender studies, which then led to her becoming a victim of the very mechanisms she was documenting; and the Employment Tribunal won by Jo Phoenix after her harassment by her colleagues at the Open University. Right now, as I write this, there is a court case happening, brought against the University College Union—the trade union for British academics—by the makers of the film Adult Human Female, because their union supported efforts to cancel a screening of their film at the University of Edinburgh in 2022. The evidence presented by UCU’s council, in defence of their position, includes the usual claims that the film is hate-speech, as well as other well-worn tropes of academic delegitimization used to maintain and enforce the academic hegemony of trans ideological approaches to sex and gender. The film should not have been shown, we have been informed, because it was not ‘peer-reviewed,’ the participants are not all academics, and the approach was insufficiently scholarly. If you believe sexual difference is a biological fact we won’t give you an academic job, and if you don’t have an academic job, your opinion is worthless. Simples.

Given all this, it is remarkable—if bone-achingly predictable—that Butler is maintaining such a monocular view about where all the authoritarianism in the story is coming from. The Trump administration’s attack on gender studies, she observes, exhibits “this hard line, which is a doctrine…a suppression of inquiry and a suppression of open debate, and an attack on universities and critical thought.” Along with her, I would forcefully oppose any attempt to censure or dictate what academics can research or write about, but this is precisely why I have long critiqued the academic hegemony of the gender studies paradigm, and its exclusion of approaches that argue, as I do here for example, that you cannot give a coherent account of the oppression of women without understanding the role of biological sex.

For Butler, “critical thought in the true sense of critical thought” must conform to an exercise in absolute constructivism, a gesture which examines only “the conditions of our lives…what we're presupposing about those conditions and how we might think critically about what we have assumed to be true for so long.” Efforts to parse what elements of reality are socially constructed from those given by material facts, and to map the complexity of their interaction, will be easily dismissed by Butler, assimilated to a conservative framework of essentialism, biological determinism, and ‘natural law.’ The ‘criticism’ in gender critical, she tells us confidently on Politics Joe, does not belong to this intellectually respectable tradition of social and ideological critique (because yeah, that’s not something the second wave ever did, is it now?). Rather, as “the gender critical movement uses it,” she continues, “critical is just negative like against.”

As the battle against trans ideology has widened, it has become true that many of the right-wing populists and gender conservatives who have joined the fight do take the ‘critical’ in ‘gender critical’ to mean ‘against gender’ in the sense that both Butler and the Pope mean it. But that is not what the radical and materialist feminists who first coined the term meant by it. We were committed to criticising the social hierarchy of gender as the mechanism of women’s oppression, in conjunction with the conviction that gendered hierarchy is applied to people on the basis of their sex for the purpose of facilitating the material exploitation of women’s bodies and labour. This account thinks patriarchy arises through the interaction of both materially given and historical factors, a ‘both/and’ position that cannot be recognised by the ‘either/or’ identitarianism of each tribal pole of the culture war.

The radical and materialist feminist position is thus erased by the mirror-image game played by both gender identity ideologues and populist gender conservatives. In that game, both sides will address themselves only to an opposition projected on the basis of their own assumptions, a refusal to recognise the reality of other people in their own terms that corresponds, exactly, to the narcissistic ‘deep structure of gender.’ Moreover, this mechanism has, by the laws of reaction and counterreaction, increasingly fed the populist response to gender identitarianism, leading it to manifest exactly as it was originally projected by Butler and her disciples. If you are pretending that an authoritarian political project was actually pluralistic, that it was open to contestation even while you claim that all your detractors are the Pope, then of course you’re not going to grasp how you might have contributed to an extremely authoritarian backlash. Clearly there was a deep well of animus to the equality of women, black and brown people, and GNC people of all types there to be drawn on, one that could be easily funnelled into identitarian othering and scapegoating when conditions of material precarity lead to people being scared about how they are going to survive. But that’s not all there is to it.

As materialist feminists were warning for years, coercively mandating that everyone believe that humans are not sexed—with all its bonkers and dangerous policy implications—has handed an open goal the size of a small planet to the hard and populist right, one they have expertly exploited. The refusal of the institutional left to listen to women’s concerns has pushed many disaffected women towards the right, and the paucity of left-leaning platforms has led to many being sucked into a media ecosystem now functioning as a hard right radicalisation machine. This is particularly relevant to social media, and the mechanisms of an attention economy which, as Jeni Harvey discussed recently, grooms people towards producing the kind of content that gets them traction within an increasingly rightward leaning landscape. Lastly, trying to railroad through a political program based on sex erasure by dismissing all your critics as conservative Christians, bigots, and nazis has pretty much destroyed the legitimacy of the many-decade-long compact excluding hard-right authoritarianism from democratic space, because of the threat it poses to democracy, [2] and left us rhetorically and politically defenceless. For the last two or three years, left-wing feminist women, confronted with the rise of hard-right populism, have been shouting ‘wolf wolf wolf wolf’ at the top of our lungs, only to frequently receive some version of the response, ‘I was called a wolf for saying that sex was real, so I don’t believe wolves exist anymore.’ This is bad logic, but it’s not hard to see how it happens. And while every individual woman is ultimately responsible for the political choices she makes, the people who cried wolf have responsibility to bear as well.

I do not believe that left identitarianism poses, or perhaps posed, a threat to democracy as dangerous as what is unfolding right now in the United States. But that is not to say that it was not authoritarian in its ideological operations or can be absolved of responsibility for fuelling its own counterreaction. Democracy depends on a collectively shared commitment to representing reality to the best of our ability, and not rewriting history to pretend current configurations of power are themselves some kind of immutable fact. No project that claims to be informed by “the history of critical philosophy” should pretend its erasure of biological sex could not, itself, be some kind of aberrant historical construction, especially given that it hadn’t occurred to anyone much before 1985. And no poststructuralist worth their salt should be surprised, when, having immunized themselves against all external critique, they are then attacked, as if from outside, by an extreme reaction to their own projections and defences.

In these first few, terrifying, weeks of the Trump administration, many left/liberals in the United States have been turning to Timothy Snyder’s influential pamphlet ‘On Tyranny’ to give them guidance about how to respond to their new authoritarian reality.

The tenth point reads:

Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.

One can only wish the lesson had been learned somewhat sooner.

And hope that some people ever learn it at all.

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[1] Another version of the effective erasure of the materialist feminist position from this debate surrounds the conflation of the phrase ‘gender ideology’ with the phrases ‘trans ideology’ and ‘gender identity ideology’ originally used by materialist feminist women in the UK. It is true that the phrase ‘gender ideology’ has roots in the religious right and refers to all beliefs that confound traditional conservative notions of gender, including feminism and the gay rights project, as well as trans ideology. Materialist feminist critiques of trans ideology are grounded on objections to a) sex erasure and b) gender identity essentialism, and not to any use of the concept of gender to critique patriarchal social conventions. It is notable that for Butler, specific critiques of trans ideological sex erasure/essentialism must be conflated with more general defences of gendered hierarchy, and materialist feminists must be erased and positioned as gender conservatives. By this point, Butler has been massively helped in her efforts to perform this erasure by gender conservative activists involved in the pushback against trans ideology, who have also pressured materialist feminist women’s efforts to keep their politics distinct from conservative Christians and right-wing populists. Notably, as the space of materialist feminist pushback in the UK has been progressively—and in many cases coercively—subsumed within the culture war framing, the use of the phrase ‘gender ideology’ has become increasingly common.

[2] This is one of the classic examples of fundamental paradox in political thinking, which Derrida would call the ‘aporetics of democracy.’ Derrida’s example was the suspension of democracy in Algeria in order to protect democracy for its own good. Indeed, democratic suspension may be itself an excuse used by authoritarianism in order to instate itself, or it may be an effort to prevent its instatement, as we could read a timely intervention to prevent Hitler, or indeed, Trump, coming to power. There is always some degree of undecidability here, which in this day and age of fracturing consensus is endlessly exploited, Vance and the populists accusing European states of abrogating free speech (which they have, to some degree), while themselves enforcing authoritarian crackdowns in the name of freedom from woke censorship.

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Shameless plugs:

I’m very pleased to announce that a collection of my essays translated into French has just been published, appropriately for this post, Judith made it into the title. They’re available to purchase for any Francophone readers here.

For anyone who does want to wrestle with Butler in more detail, or study how the whole ‘amazing disappearing woman’ clusterfuck happened in third wave feminism, I teach a course on it here, and there are a few places still free for the course starting on April 21.