Judith Butler has spoken

[lionheart]

Damn.

www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

'If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.'

Thanks Bisom. That sounds a little bit insane.

Well men don’t exist. I know that because I keep hearing about single mothers who go around getting themselves pregnant.

@WeeBisom Thank you. It was me who asked for the primer. That explained a lot.

It was interesting that she believes most ‘feminists’ are trans-inclusionary and thus have no problem with biological men in women’s spaces. However, she’s conveniently ignoring the fact that an increasingly smaller proportion of women would describe themselves as ‘feminist’ to begin with. Is it any wonder?

The objective reality is that Judith Butler is a citizen of a country where women have no right to maternity pay, and where rights to birth control are not certain.

But why worry about that? Those concerns are for the little people.

DD watches a lot of YouTube videos of Germaine Greer and other feminists who were young in that era. The whole audience of women would be buzzing with excitement when Germaine Greer came in an stood up to men, and she was so articulate.

Now we seem to have a lot of capitulation and man pleasing.

Judith Butler is one of those rare philosophers whose work has had a deep impact on people's lives and their rights in law. Worldwide.

Few thinkers ever have their ideas become the main driver of an ideology. Often their ideas are distorted to match the ideology's aims.

Fewer still continue to bask in being lauded for their ideas when the ideology in question has been shown to use the thinker's ideas to cause worldwide damage to an oppressed class. And keep on defending it.

They take that adulation happily to their grave, no matter what the damage because they cannot imagine that they could be wrong. Any damage, if they do acknowledge it, must have arisen from a misapplication, misrepresentation or misunderstanding of their ideas, but the ideas have always been and continue to be right and righteous.

Many more thinkers who find themselves in that situation try and distance themselves either from their work, or their work from the way it has been used without drawing attention to the damage done or to the ideology using their ideas.

A few have the courage to say Not in my name. I was wrong, and what you are doing is wrong.

Anne Fausto-Sterling for instance is in that second group. She has subtly sought to distance her work from the way it has been used by claiming that her statement that there are five sexes, made as part of her influential work on people with DSDs, was a joke. Just a little professional joke not to be taken seriously. No acknowledgement of the damage done in her name, and much more crucially no public pushback disavowing the use of her work by those trying to abolish women's sex-based rights.

Judith Butler is, in my opinion, firmly in the first group. The archetypal resident of an ivory tower where she thinks on a higher plane, far removed from the cares of the ordinary people scrabbling around in the dirt below.

I confess to being perplexed...

This paragraph just makes her sound a bit dim.

Philosophically, abuse of JKR isn't balanced out or justified by abuse of trans people elsewhere, and practically people abusing prostitutes in Brazil are not influenced by JKR's position on women's rights.

Whenever anyone talks about 'bathrooms' its also a give away that they are not familiar with UK specific legislation and concerns.

Valuing abstract philosophical thought experiments over lived experience. Ugh.

Thanjs, WeeBisom.

She comes so close and yet entirely misses one crucial fact: there must be something real underlying the constructed realities we create.The

If she's of the view that the entire physical universe is created by disembodied consciousness projecting itself into absolute nothingness, that's her prerogative, but there's still an actual physical reality (which she clearly knows damned well because she's trying to project her own view onto it).

Someone needs to tell her that the fact that there's no accessible objective reality, doesn't mean we're all actually aspects of some sort of god-consciousness manifesting reality into being through sheer force of will.

Thank you for those additional links YetAnotherSpartacus and TheRealMCKenna.

Yes, she is GirlOnTheEdgeOfThePark. One of them, in any case.

I think it's already been pointed out up thread, but one thing I found interesting was that there were a lot of words devoted to explaining that it was a just a narrative that male sexual predators might feign being transgender to access women's spaces, e.g. women's toilets. All a fantasy that says much more about this school of feminists, blah blah blah.

And then she got asked a completely different question and ended up asserting that transwomen's concerns that they could be assaulted in the men's toilets were concrete fact. That wasn't termed a 'fantasy', was it?

Compare and contrast. I wonder what is different about women and transwomen that one group's concerns are accepted as based in fact and the other group's aren't.

And then she got asked a completely different question and ended up asserting that transwomen's concerns that they could be assaulted in the men's toilets were concrete fact. That wasn't termed a 'fantasy', was it?

Compare and contrast. I wonder what is different about women and transwomen that one group's concerns are accepted as based in fact and the other group's aren't.

I think that illustrates Butler's philosophy perfectly.

That's a lot of words for what seems to be essentially NAMALT.

So male on female violence is merely a subjective reality, and is only violence because we're told by those nasty feminists to view it as such.

Yet male on male violence is both a subjective and a material reality, and so is much more important because it's really real.

This is the same old Testicles of Objectivity bollocks we've been fighting against for years.

If it's really all just discourses, we could solve transphobic violence overnight by simply refusing to reify the discourse: shutting up about it, in other words.

Which means all those twonks bleating on about how transwomen are the Most Oppressed Group Ever are responsible for that oppression, and if they really cared about eliminating transphobia they'd stop talking about it.

Certainly there's merit in this idea, because when no one was viewing their own experiences through the transgenderist lens, there were vanishingly few trans people for transphobia to be directed at - the sum total of transphobia in the world has increased dramatically in recent years - but even if we stop talking about the subjective reality of gender, the material reality of sexual reproduction will still exist.

If we stop talking about all the pink and blue shit, males will still be bigger and females will still be inherently exploitable due to our capacity to be impregnated.

The material world exists, even when nobody's talking about it.

I'm strongly reminded of Trump's brilliant idea to bring case numbers down by stopping testing.

Here she is expounding on some of her ideas.

So male on female violence is merely a subjective reality, and is only violence because we're told by those nasty feminists to view it as such.

Yet male on male violence is both a subjective and a material reality, and so is much more important because it's really real.

This is the same old Testicles of Objectivity bollocks we've been fighting against for years.

Brilliantly put, TyroBurningDownTheCloset, this is exactly what always strikes me as an inherently incongruous position. And there is only one reason why this contradiction is so happily ignored by people like Butler. Males reign supreme. The suffering of male victims therefore supersedes that of females. To the point here, in Butler's case, of denying these female victims exist.

Judith Butler is, in my opinion, firmly in the first group. The archetypal resident of an ivory tower where she thinks on a higher plane, far removed from the cares of the ordinary people scrabbling around in the dirt below.

I think this is literally true. Here she is defending a (female) academic suspended for harassment of one of her students because her work is too important.

www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/08/why-do-academics-defend-colleagues-accused-of-harassment/567553/

Sorry

Judith Butler is, in my opinion, firmly in the first group. The archetypal resident of an ivory tower where she thinks on a higher plane, far removed from the cares of the ordinary people scrabbling around in the dirt below.

was a quote from CharleyParley

To the point here, in Butler's case, of denying these female victims exist.

According to the Atlantic article that is unfair. She is perfectly happy to deny the existence of male victims, when it suits her purposes...

I used to quite enjoy postmodernism for a while as an undergraduate back in the day. It's quite fun to play around with ideas and pretend that nothing is real, when you are privileged enough (which I fully admit I was). It's also very silly and I imagine most teenagers grow out of it as I did.

About the reality point - Butler would say that whatever reality is, it is unknowable to us and irrelevant. She would say the very emphasis on focus on 'reality' is privileging a particular picture of the world. For example, MacKinnon gives an example she heard from a postmodernist (male)scholar - imagine an island where the men believe they have to sacrifice a young virgin girl every year or otherwise they won't be able to maintain erections (yes, really, that's the example :S) That's nonsense, an anthropologist says. Killing the girl has nothing to do with your virility. But in fact, because this culture believes it so deeply, if they don't sacrifice a girl each year they get so anxious they can't actually get it up. It becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. Their beliefs and reality combine to form a new reality. It really is true for them that they have to kill a girl each year to maintain erections. (MacKinnon hated this example and wryly commented that of course the men couldn't just be told to change their stupid beliefs. Of course a woman has to die for men's boners.)

By the way, I also think that Judy doesn't really believe any of the shit she spouts. In her feminist texts, she tells women that we can't actually overthrow patriarchy, or get out of oppressive power structures, but we can always be 'playfully subversive' of the dominant paradigm. Yet if you read her later works on Gaza you get the sense she feels very strongly that there is an injustice going on here, an injustice that has to be combatted. She doesn't tell Palestinians just to 'queer' their oppression. It's also very funny to me that she says that gender critical feminism isn't mainstream feminism and is actually a very minor position. Um...isn't her whole schtick to be deeply critical and skeptical of mainstream ideologies? Gender critical feminism should be praised as the plucky subversive postmodern underdog - gender critical feminism IS queer feminism because it turns standard feminism on its head.

"The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise." [My bold]

Thing is, this is a strawman. It's not what I've ever heard or read any feminist say. The only thing the view assumes is that some people may do those things, and that that's enough to make a previously safe space feel unsafe. It makes no assumption about how many would, and certainly no assumption that all do.

The alternative view is that all capacity for deceit, threat and assault automatically disappears from every man the moment he identifies as trans, which seems truly irrational to me.

The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person...

Its very notable that ordinary women who may or may not call themselves feminists don't feature in this discussion.

Following Butler's logic here, in refusing to allow us actual gender-transgressing females to ID as trans women, they are creating an artificial distinction - if inclusivity is the goal then we need to queer all the boundaries.

To truly break the power of the cisnormative hegemonic wossname, we need to right back against the authoritarian demands of the kyriarchal thingamajig and identify as female trans women.

Funny how the only boundaries we're allowed to queer are the boundaries protecting the class formerly known as women. The boundaries asserted by class male remain sacrosanct.

Which tells you everything you need to know about where the power lies.

Can JB really not grasp this?