these people simply need throat punches

The Transqueers Take The Mask Off

Judith Butler and Andrea Long Chu explain their gender revolution. It's wild!

It’s telling, it seems to me, that we’ve begun to see a shift in the tactics of critical queer and gender theorists. They are beginning to make actual arguments in the public square, instead of relying on the media, the government, and the courts to impose their ideas by fiat. The two most prominent examples of this are a new cover-story in New York Magazine by Andrea Long Chu, “Freedom of Sex,” and a new book by Judith Butler called Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler has even gone so far as to write this book in decipherable, if inelegant, English for the first time in her career.

Reading her again after a few years, it becomes clearer and clearer why she is so hard to engage. This is a work so embedded in neo-Marxism it’s impossible to grasp it without accepting its collectivist and revolutionary premises. For Butler, in matters of sex and the body, nothing is as it appears, the individual has no independent existence or capacity for reason outside social and cultural forces, and even the basics of anatomy, like a penis, are just socially constructed all the way down. There is no independent, stable variable like nature or biology or evolution that can help us understand our bodies, and our sex. Everything is in our heads, and our heads are entirely created by others in the past and present:

Nature is not the ground upon which construction of gender happens. Both the material and social dimensions of the body are constructed through an array of practices, discourses, and technologies.

The material dimensions of the body are just ideas: “Anatomy alone does not determine what sex a person is.” You might think, for example, that when a baby is born with a vagina, we are observing her sex. But for Butler,

sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; sex assignment, understood as an iterative process, relays a set of desires, if not fantasies, about how one is to live one’s body in the world. And such fantasies, coming from elsewhere, make us less self-knowing than we sometimes claim.

Later on, Butler warmly approves of this quote from Catharine MacKinnon:

Women and men are made into the sexes as we know them by the social requirements of heterosexuality.

This is Blank Slatism in its ultimate form, a denial of any independent biological influence on human nature or behavior. The fact that we are a species of mammal, organized around a binary reproductive strategy for millions of years, in which we are divided almost exactly into male and female, and in which there are only two types of gametes, eggs and sperm — and no “speggs” — is, for Butler, irrelevant. It is not even a fact. The sex binary is, rather, a human invention — specifically, a product of American “white supremacy.” I kid you not:

The hetero-normative framework for thinking of gender as binary was imposed by colonial powers on the Global South, to track the legacies of slavery and colonialism engaged in brutal surgical and sexological practices of determining and “correcting” sex in light of ideals of whiteness … Gender norms were created through surgical racism. Black bodies were the experimental field from which white gender norms were crafted. Dimorphism serves the reproduction of the normative white family in the United States.