In the United States, gender has been considered a relatively common term. We are asked to check a box on a form and most of us do it without giving it much thought. But some of us don't like to check the box and think there should be many more boxes or maybe none at all. The countless and continuous debates about gender show that no single approach prevails to define or understand it. It is no longer a mundane box to check on official forms.
The movement against gender ideology, however, treats the range of sometimes contradictory ideas about gender as a monolith, terrifying in its power and reach.
Fear of “gender” allows the powers that be (states, churches, political movements) to scare people back into their ranks, accept censorship, and externalize their fear and hatred on vulnerable communities. These powers not only appeal to the existing fears that many workers have about the future of their work or the sanctity of their family life, but they also incite those fears, insisting, as it were, that people conveniently identify gender as the true cause of his feelings. of anxiety and fear of the world.
The project of restoring the world to a ghostly pre-gender era promises a return to a patriarchal dream order that only a strong state can restore. The reinforcement of state powers, including the courts, implicates the anti-gender movement in a broader authoritarian, even fascist, project. We consider the rollback of progressive legislation and the attack on sexual and gender minorities to be dangers to society, as an example of the most destructive force in the world, aimed at stripping them of their fundamental rights, protections and freedoms.
Consider the accusation that “gender” – whatever that is – puts children at risk through programs such as reading books with queer characters presented as examples of indoctrination or seduction. The fear that children will be harmed, the fear that the family, or the family itself, will be destroyed, that the “man” will be dismantled, including the men and men that some of us are, that a new totalitarianism will descend upon us. These are all fears deeply felt by those who have committed to eradicating “gender”: the word, the concept, the academic field, and the various social movements it has come to mean.
The resulting authoritarian restrictions on freedom abound, whether through the establishment of LGBTQ+-free zones in Poland or the strangling of progressive educational curricula in Florida that address gender freedom and sexuality in sex education. But no matter how intensely authoritarian forces try to restrict freedoms, the fact that the categories of women and men change historically and contextually is undeniable. New gender formations are part of history and reality. In reality, gender is minimally the rubric under which we consider changes in the way men, women, and other similar categories have been understood.
As an educator, I'm inclined to say to these people, “Let's read some key texts in gender studies together and see what gender does and doesn't mean and whether the caricature holds up.” Reading is a precondition of democratic life, keeping debate and disagreement informed and productive.
Unfortunately, that strategy rarely works.
A woman in Switzerland once came up to me after a speech I gave and said, “I pray for you.” I asked why. She explained that Scripture says that God created man and woman and that I, through my books, had denied Scripture. She added that man and woman are natural and that nature was God's creation. I pointed out that nature allows for complexity and that the Bible itself is open to a few different interpretations, and she scoffed. I then asked her if she had read my work and she replied, “No! I would never read a book like that!” I realized that reading a book about gender would be, for her, trafficking with the devil. Her view resonates with the demand to remove gender books from the classroom and the fear that those who read them are contaminated by them or subject to ideological inculcation, even though those who seek to restrict them have typically never read them.
Unfortunately, to reject the genre is to refuse to encounter the complexity that one finds in contemporary life around the world. The anti-gender movement opposes thinking itself as a danger to society: fertile ground for the horrible collaboration of fascist passions with authoritarian regimes.
We need to take a stand against the anti-gender movement in the name of breathing and living free from the fear of violence.
Transnational coalitions should bring together and mobilize all the people targeted by the movement against gender ideology. Infighting within the field must become dynamic and productive conversations and confrontations, however difficult, within an expansive movement dedicated to equality and justice. Coalitions are never easy, but when conflicts cannot be resolved, movements can still move forward together with an eye toward common sources of oppression.
Whether or not people are assigned a gender at birth or assume it over time, they can truly love being the gender they are and reject any efforts to disrupt that pleasure. They seek to strut and celebrate, express themselves and communicate the reality of who they are. No one should take that joy away from us, as long as those people don't insist that their joy is the only one possible. However, it is important to note that many endure suffering, ambivalence and disorientation within existing categories, especially the one to which they were assigned at birth. They may be transgender or trans, or anything else, and they seek to live life as the body that makes sense to them and allows them to live life, if not joyfully. Whatever the genre means, for some it surely names a felt sense of the body, in its surfaces and depths, a lived sense of being a body in the world in this way.
No matter how much someone wants to cling to a single idea of what it is to be a woman or a man, historical reality defeats that project and makes things worse by insisting on genders that have always exceeded binary alternatives. Therefore, how we live that complexity and how we let others live becomes of utmost importance.
There is still much to understand about gender as a structural problem in society, as an identity, as a field of study, as an enigmatic and highly inverted term that circulates in ways that inspire some and terrify others. We have to keep thinking about what we mean by this and what others mean when they are up in arms about the term.
Judith Butler is a professor of comparative literature at UC Berkeley. This essay was adapted from her upcoming book “Who's Afraid of Gender?”
