Gender as performance or as innate essence

I think all of that is fair comment. Most of the unreasonable demands seem to come from middle aged straight white guys who have a sexual fetish for seeing themselves as a sexist misogynist charicature of womanhood.

@Ws2210
Butler is very pro trans/cross dressing as a way of disrupting the gender binary. If a woman has short hair (or a man wears a dress etc) Butler would say she was 'doing gender wrong' or 'queering' gender.

For her, that is a good thing as, the more people do that, the more that gender (and by extention the so-called illusion of binary sex) is revealed to be false. In other words, when we see a man in a dress we become aware that dress=woman is a false construction.

It has occurred to me that this whole trans thing could have gone differently. If trans people were clear about their biological sex - in fact that would be central to it - whilst breaking social convention by presenting as the opposite gender (or neither). If we celebrated the individuals who did this as men and women flying in the face of gender norms, and fought for their right to do this without being harassed/losing jobs/etc.

I can imagine there'd be some eyerolling on here at celebrating men in dresses (we've been wearing them for years without applause!), and some discussions about what was meant by living as a different gender... but broadly it would be something we could get behind, even if just a step on the way to dismantling gender stereotypes.

It it the conflation of sex and gender that is the problem. And the weird backwards idea that "gender" is somehow the more important, concrete thing.

Having said that, if there really is a tiny core group of people with serious sex dysphoria (which I could well believe) this is precisely the opposite of what they'd want. Ironically it is this group who more of us were ok to be polite about, or even make allowances about shared spaces. It's the overwhelming majority who have pushed things too far, who don't primarily have sex dysphoria, who would have been better funnelled into making a song and dance about being trans without that being seen as overriding biological sex.

Butler is very pro trans/cross dressing as a way of disrupting the gender binary. If a woman has short hair (or a man wears a dress etc) Butler would say she was 'doing gender wrong' or 'queering' gender.

For her, that is a good thing as, the more people do that, the more that gender (and by extention the so-called illusion of binary sex) is revealed to be false. In other words, when we see a man in a dress we become aware that dress=woman is a false construction.

Edit to add that I'm not sure what Butler would make of trans people today though. I know she is pro trans however she has always insisted that there is no such thing as a stable gender identity (as illustrated in her work) ...which ironically is the very opposite of what trans people today insist. I stopped reading her about 5 years ago when she started calling everyone who disagreed with her fascists

I’ve also concluded that I no longer believe that there is some internal “trans” state. Transitioning is something you do - a choice you make - a way of dealing with your internet feelings, whatever those may be.

And I think the internal feelings of different people who transition are wildly differing and go from variations on the traditional AGP and HSTS types in men, to the young women who just hate the expectations that come with womanhood, alongside other people with problems of different types, including mental health problems after being abused.

In my opinion then, there isn’t one coherent “trans personality”. I think that’s an invention, created in order to persuade people like your OH that there is a group of “trans people” who have some innate inner feelings which must therefore be prioritized. It allows them to assert that one can “be trans” without having to do anything.

You can even see the progress of that idea being invented if you look at the EA2010 and compare its “gender reassignment” (albeit with an inbuilt understanding you only had to be thinking about treatment) with the later Hate Crimes legislation, which uses “transgender identity”.

The vaguer it is, the more easily it can be abused by predatory men. Who benefits most from this idea of an innate, unchangeable inner life and the sense they can’t help it? Answer: men who want to make the minimum effort possible, but still gain access to women’s spaces.

Gay men never wanted to invade anyone else’s space. If this was really just about inner feelings, someone would have suggested third spaces and the campaign would have moved directly onto trying to obtain them.

I think the idea is straightforward but the terms used don’t intuitively point you towards the intended meaning

If she’s drawn on the language of speech act theory the connection is pretty opaque.

… I should probably read some and then see what I think 😁😉

Not really. Butler would say that you wear feminine coded clothes because of societal gender norms. However in wearing such clothes you also reiterate and reinforce gender norms.

Edit to clarify: it's not your own internal gender identity you realise by wearing female clothes, it's the cultural idea of 'woman/female' you reinforce. E.g. for every woman who wears a dress, dress-wearing becomes more and more associated with, and seen as a normal and natural part of, 'being a woman' .

I used to teach this stuff to undergrads so am well practiced in trying to make it clear....but it's still a struggle!

Drawing on JL Austin’s speech-act theory. That some forms of speech are actions eg wedding ceremony.

It's not necessarily a consistent or lasting state. But I wouldn't get too hung up on Butler - it's not really what most people are referring to when they talk about gender.

"Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler offered a new, more Continental (specifically, Foucauldian) reading of the notion of performativity, which has its roots in linguistics and philosophy of language. They describe performativity as "that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains."[9] They have largely used this concept in their analysis of gender development.[10]
The concept places emphasis on the manners by which identity is passed or brought to life through discourse. Performative acts are types of authoritative speech. This can only happen and be enforced through the law or norms of the society. These statements, just by speaking them, carry out a certain action and exhibit a certain level of power. Examples of these types of statements are declarations of ownership, baptisms, inaugurations, and legal sentences. Something that is key to performativity is repetition.[11] The statements are not singular in nature or use and must be used consistently in order to exert power.[12]

Performance theory and gender perspectives
Butler explains gender as constructed by repeated acts. Acts that people come to perform in the mode of belief which cite existing norms, analogous to a script. Butler sees gender not as an expression of what one is but as something that one does. The appearance of a gendered essence is merely a "performative accomplishment".[13] Furthermore, they do not see it as socially imposed on a self that is prior to gender, as the self is not distinct from the categories which constitute it. According to Butler's theory, homosexuality and heterosexuality are not fixed categories. For Butler, a person is merely in a condition of "doing straightness" or "doing queerness," where these categories are not natural but historical and socially constititued.[14]
"For Butler, the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies".[15]"

(Old thread on those criteria here)
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/4096882-Surely-this-list-of-behaviours-that-challenge-social-convention-are-not-THE-list-used-by-medical-professionals-to-diagnos-gender-dysphoria

I totally accept that some people, for whatever reason, strongly wish to have the opposite sex body. I don't think that's really in any doubt. (What is in question is whether anything harmful underlies that wish, or to what extent someone should be helped to have surgery or whatever).

I don't think that's necessarily, now, what "gender identity" always means, although often it is. Read the recent AMA with the very thoughtful trans man - they are in the former camp of simply knowing they want to be biologically male.

There is a huge question in my mind as to why people reach the conclusion that they're "really" the opposite gender. Not that they simply 'want to change their body', but that there is some indefinable essence or characteristic that is only shared by people of that gender and they also have it. (Proving, obviously, that whatever that essence is does present in either sex, but that is never brought up....)

The criteria for gender dysphoria rely heavily on gender stereotypes- "playing with toys often played with by the opposite gender", for example. It's no wonder really that people then use this to conclude there is a thing you can do that "makes you really the opposite gender".

If you're asking me what Butler means, I can't help, I'm afraid but yes to some extent it looks like that. And tbf it often overlaps with our common understanding of "performance".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performativity there is a Judith Butler section on there which outlines it.

Myself, I broadly see "gender " as "the expectations or assumptions placed on you by society based on your perceived sex" - slightly different from "gender identity" which is some indefinable feeling that both is and isn't to do with biological sex.

Oh so she’s extending the language of speech act theory

So in the sense that ‘acting like’ an x (man/woman/etc) makes it so, purely by virtue of performing the act?

Similar to how simply pronouncing someone husband and wife makes it so?

I think the existence of two separate words for the same thing may have caused a lot of trouble in the anglophone world. And..

That Butler should be ignored.

That gender is a synonym for sex (unless referring to grammar or copulation).

That it's most often used in compound nouns - gender norms, acquired gender, gender reassignment, gender recognition, gender identity.

That gender identity is a supposed sense of which sex category the self belongs in and therefore wishes to associate with: it does not entail 'feeling like' members of that category.

That trans people believe that they have a gender identity incongruent with their body, and this is proof that they are really the opposite sex: hence the emphasis on early medicalisation and rewriting the past. This belief is unfalsifiable.

That gender norms, roles, and stereotypes are irrelevant to the trans issue. They are just a collection of ideas about masculinity and femininity that are partly broadly natural and partly culturally contingent, but should not be forced on any one individual. They are useful to trans people for 'acting the part' of their 'true' sex.

Butler's theories are nothing more than a crude reappropriation (and not as well-written) as Foucault's theories of constructivism.

She certainly seems to have backtracked on some of her earlier and more persuasive work. Because, if gender is a social construct - something we perform in terms of citation, iteration and reiteration of the new 'subject positions' which form identities (she writes of this in 'Critically Queer') - than how can it be intrinsic? It can't be both.

Like a lot of poststructuralists she's tied herself up in a knot of her own complex theorising.

'Queer' theory started out with some very good concepts and wasn't (to my mind) the root of the evil it's sometimes made out to be. Feminists were really excited about this stuff to start with: it freed us from the essentialism of supposed innate gender and the chains attaching us to the kitchen sink.

It's what it's been bastardised into that sticks in the craw.

Yes – I should add that I also believe biological sex is real and immutable, so don’t think the two ideas are mutually exclusive.

I haven’t read the Cass report directly, thanks for sharing.

Fair enough. I'm not but then plenty of people are.

Dr Cass is clearly happy to believe that having a sense of gender identity is a real thing, as evidenced in the Cass Report (and mentioned above re sections 6 and 8). Gillian Keegan is too - her recent comments on Radio 4 with Emma Barnett are covered on another thread.

The most important things for educators, healthcare providers and law makers to recognise are that a) not everyone does believe in it and b) anyone who does and feels distressed about their own body deserves evidence-based healthcare to unpick and address their distress.

Dr Cass and Gillian Keegan seem to be in broad agreement with point b. Gillian Keegan seems to have (reluctantly?) accepted point a and Dr Cass does acknowledge, in section 8.23, that there are lots of unknowns relating to gender identity.

I’m willing to believe that (natural) variances in exposure to and production of various hormones account for some of the ‘feeling like the opposite sex’ (aka having an independent, innate sense of gender) that some people experience, and which in some individuals drives the desire to transition.

I basically see gender identity as loosely what we would call "masculinity"/"femininity" (acknowledging that what falls under each category changes between cultures and over time) and sex is male/ female.

It's entirely normal for female and feminine to overlap, and it's entirely normal for them to be mutually exclusive.

The idea that they "match" or "are aligned" is inherently sexist imo - anyone female must be in some way feminine, or anyone feminine must be in some way female - makes no sense.

I was explaining to my OH in a recent conversation that I didn't think it made sense to say someone could be a trans woman "in the closet." Because trans-ing is something that you do. If you don't have the opportunity to wear estrogen patches or get wrap skirts made in your size or whatever else transition might involve, you're just a man who thinks he might like to be a trans woman.
OH said this means I don't believe that trans is a thing. To him, it makes just as much sense to talk of a gay man in the closet as a trans woman in the closet.
I couldn't understand what it was about the would-be-trans-woman that made him different from a fanciful man.

To add to the confusion, "performative" doesn't mean "is a performance" as in "an act", despite many people using it to mean this in many contexts.

A performative action, literally speaking, is something (usually language-based) that actually causes a state, or something similar, to come into being. Eg a jury declaring "not guilty" is a performative action because it affects reality for the person being judged.

I think it came out later that Money also sexually abused both twins during their psychotherapy with him. One or both of them (can't remember which) then went on to commit suicide. So tragic