Financial Times interview with Judith Butler

[RoyalCorgi]

The FT has carried a really rubbish interview with Judith Butler. The interview refers to her as "they" throughout and doesn't challenge her on any of her most ludicrous statements.

Take her statement that it's fine to put trans women into women's prisons because they [trans women] are "not uniquely risky" and that "male prison guards are a risk, so are other female inmates." Obviously absurd, but anyway. She then goes on to say (as summarised by the interviewer): "And if trans women are placed in male prisons, they 'will be raped and they will be hurt.'"

So having just spent most of the interview saying that biological differences between the sexes aren't important, and that female inmates can be as much of a risk to other female inmates as male inmates, she then claims that trans women would be raped in male prisons! She completely undermines her entire argument.

Why didn't the interviewer challenge that particularly glaring failure of logic? I'm enraged at the stupidity.

Unfortunately, comments are now closed otherwise I'd have said as much.

https://www.ft.com/content/cfe35ca1-9dbd-4a83-a3a9-372967ab5fac

surely Butler has for years been filed under "flat earth nutter". I would no more pay attention to whatever she said than some random street loony. Why she still has a job remains a profound mystery.

Are there any articles with Judith that aren't rubbish?

The comments and top likes, if you can see them, are worth a look. Most people very much on the side of reality, more than I had expected given the previous lack of coverage in the FT and the business-focussed angle of much of its other content.

Why on earth the FT, or any legitimate journalist, would interview Butler is beyond me.

She can't construct even a vaguely logical argument as OP notes. E minus, do better FT.

No. The only thing to admire about Butler is how she has managed to get away with it for long. And be paid for it.

In the UK, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak taunts the opposition Labour party by claiming that it doesn’t know what a woman is. “He’s imagining that they look ridiculous . . . In fact, the history of feminism dating back to the 19th century always posed the question: what is a woman, and why do we assume that women should be defined just by their reproductive capacities?”
What is a woman? “I don’t answer that question, but I point out that that question is looking for a kind of certainty, and in that way it’s trying to stop history, or it fails to recognise the category of women has gone through many changes and hopefully will go through some more.”
How exactly has the category of women changed? Butler refers to the emergence of muscular female tennis players starting with Martina Navratilova. “There was a time when, if you were a woman playing tennis, you didn’t look like that.”

I can’t quite work out if Butler has shifted the goalposts of the question.

I can help you out there, FT journalist. Butler did indeed shift the goalposts. Most spectacularly in the last para there. Navratilova is indeed muscular. She's also undoubtedly a biological woman. Given Navratilova's stance in the gender wars, that's an odd example to use.

I thought it was a really good interview.

He just lets her talk.

No more is necessary.

I can’t quite work out if Butler has shifted the goalposts of the question.

It was this that made me wonder if the interviewer was a little bit thick. Or was he just trying to be amusingly self-deprecating? Of course (as you point out) she moved the fucking goalposts. It's what she does.

The interview annoyed me for three reasons:

1. That the FT saw fit to do it in the first place
2. That the interviewer seems to have done next-to-no research on the issue and was therefore apparently unable or unwilling to make any of the obvious points to her that any one of us would have made.
3. That the below-the-line commenters were, for the most part, so utterly feeble. I do wonder if there were perhaps some decent comments that the FT deleted.

The FT is generally hopeless on Gender Issues. Remember they did an issue a while ago, on Women of the Year. And included Munroe Bergdorf?
However, these 'lunch with' articles are about letting the subject talk. And the journalist did correct some of her statements, after the interview. And, tbh, it was enough to let them talk, as a previous poster says.

I just read the article expecting it to be by an inexperienced young journalist but it's by the FT's chief features writer!

To give him his due, he clearly did a bit of homework and asked the right questions - women's sports, males in women's prisons, to which Butler gives batshit crazy answers and then he says something feeble like 'oh dear look Butler sidestepped me' or 'has Butler moved the goalposts on me?'

It is like Tim nice but Dim interviewing Butler. I am not a regular FT features reader but would they really make themselves look this stupid for any other subject?

The short answer is yes. Irritating as it is (and I do find it Irritating), this is a weekly feature where they have lunch and a conversation. Not a grilling.
I think jb condemned herself without extra prodding.

Blimey at this academic theory response which is just pure bumpf

I cannot wait for women in academia to start analysing how on earth we got to where we are and detailing the failings along the way

Like a post McCarthy honesty that exposes the lies

Butler refers to the emergence of muscular female tennis players starting with Martina Navratilova. “There was a time when, if you were a woman playing tennis, you didn’t look like that.”

This choice seems deliberate. I can’t believe Butler isn’t aware of Navratilova’s views.

Having said it’s also an astonishingly weak argument. Navratilova may have received abuse for being gender non conforming, but that was because she is female.

Fuck she's daft.

I think it’s interesting to hear her speak about her background.

My impression is that she projects her parent’s views onto people who disagree with her, and has difficulty engaging with people from a completely different cultural and social background. - E.g. left wing British feminists.

I feel like we read her stuff in feminism 25 odd years ago at university

She must have been saying something better than this surely

Maybe in thinking of someone else

Plus sex was fixed back then, gender a spectrum. We should go back to that

I feel like we read her stuff in feminism 25 odd years ago at university - She must have been saying something better than this surely

She provided an "academic" view of what in reality 3rd Wave Feminism was ie anything that 70s Women's Liberationists said or had done was old fashioned and reactionary. And I think, much as gender identity is now a "fashion" for younger people, we shouldn't underestimate how trends are more important than substance. Also how the individuals caught up in trends will never ever admit they are just a fashion victim.

Read the interview I thought she came across as really facile. To be talking like that when there is now so much evidence as to how women's rights are being eroded by the trans agenda is just cowardice. Or maybe this is how academics exist in their ivory tower. And yes the interviewer could have being much more challenging.

But overall I cant get over what comes up as being her jumping off point which is that being a woman now is different to what being a woman in the past was. Well knock me down with a feather. When women weren't in control of their reproductive functions pregnancy was a huge hinderance to women being able to be equal in society even without male sexism.

Its just delusional to say that women in 21st century are different to women in the 19th means that sex is a spectrum, rather than societal / patriarchal presumptions stood in women's way. (Not forgetting that is some other cultures who haven't been through the industrial revolution and the growth of a consumer society many women are still living a life as contrained as western women in earlier centuries.

I'm almost cross with myself for wasting my time on this, but far angrier at what I call media feminism. By that I mean the media trying to feed us stuff that actually most women dont care about or identify with, by marketing it as feminism.

What a load of tosh.

(Not sure if it was given but the link to the archived version is https://archive.ph/foGzG but would suggest not wasting your time on it. It's just pitiable. But it is an example of how the media deflects from what women really think is important. If only we could stop them. )

This Judith Butler person is off her head, isn't she? She has spent so much of her life in pure academia that she is (presumably) incapable of recognising the real world.

I have two transwomen in my (male) prison at present. Neither has been raped, both are coping perfectly well in normal location. There is no justification to place either of them into the female estate.

Judith Butler, the intellectual behind the trans movement, bites her feminist critics
In Who’s Afraid of Gender? the academic who put gender ideology into the mainstream tries and fails to explain her views
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/judith-butler-the-intellectual-behind-the-trans-movement-bites-her-feminist-critics-psk3jh86m

By coincidence the Sunday Times is apparently challenging JB but I cant find an archive copy of it so dont know what it says!!

Anyone got a share token?

What’s insane to me is butler really is at the very top of the academic tree, an immensely respected professor, and yet the stuff she is saying is incredibly stupid. It’s the sort of stuff I would except a young student to come out with, if they hadn’t given something much thought. I would wonder if she goes through life shitting herself that she’s going to be exposed as a fraud , but she’s so comfortably deep in the system now I bet it doesn’t cross her mind.

shes asked to define woman … she can’t and she won’t. But then she says womanhood (which she won’t define) has “changed” over time and continues to change. Cool, how? Because famous female tennis players showed it was ok for women to have muscles. It’s just such a non sequitur , it’s just such bullshit, that I imagine she usually stuns people into silence.

does she really believe that women were NEVER muscular , and then along came Navratilova and boom suddenly society went “womanhood has changed! Women can be muscular now!” We never had strong fishwives or women in hard manual labour? No women pulling coal carts? Looking further back, no female warriors? So womanhood somehow for centuries involved being skinny and then all of a sudden it, the concept, “changed”?

the incredibly frustrating thing to me about butler is she knows what a woman is (the adult female class) and she knows everyone else knows , so when she refuses to define woman she relies on everyone actually knowing what she’s talking about when she says things like “womanhood has changed”. If she didn’t have some pre conception of what a woman is her muscular comment would make zero sense. She must have in her mind a stable group that had characteristics in order for them to change in the first place. But then she always backs away and says womanhood is an undefinable concept.

sometimes I really wish butler would be properly pinned down on what she says, but I don’t really think there’s much “there”.

I must admit , I did laugh at her distaste for the flowers on the sushi. Oh no! If she eats it, she might become a woman! I also found it funny that black is apparently a non binary colour.

I do hope the Sunday Times article does grill her appropriately as the headline promises.

The FT is a paper read by senior managers and decision makers. It could have used a Butler interview to ask questions of most influential promoter of the ideology that is now fracturing their organisations in so many ways. So many HR/legal cases are directly linked to her thinking, it would be great to get an interview on that with say the FT legal editor rather than give it to a features guy to make small talk over sushi.

@weeBisom exactly she won't do categories when it comes to the category of 'woman' but happy to make use of stable category and concepts when it comes to 'muscles' and 'tennis' in her explanation why she won't define the category of woman.

It is such an idiotic philosophy but has the effect of temporarily confusing interviewers so they freeze in panic like a rabbit in headlights.

She also has a pretty clear category of a 'book launch press junket' which is what she appears to be engaged in.

I hope other journalists who are invited to talk to her/review her book apply some critical thinking.

It's virtually impossible to sack a tenured professor in the US, as I understand it.

Rachel McKinnon did achieve it, though.

I had a close encounter with academia a few years ago, and it taught me a few things:
There are a lot of grifters out there who talk clever-sounding bollocks and when you break it down they're just saying 'our choice of words can reveal what we really think even if we're trying to sound impartial' or, 'The government is trying to claim that people's health is their own problem, which lets said government ignore environmental or systemic issues'.
There are a lot of people in academia who have fixed opinions and will cherry-pick, misquote and slant their writing accordingly.

I remember one notable arse having a go at a foreign academic who criticised her own (deeply repressive) government because he felt they had a 'utopian vision' and everyone should just put up and shut up for the Greater Good.

My respect for academia nosedived. It has sparked an interest in the website Retraction Watch, which looks for bullshit science.

So Judith Butler is no surprise.

The Sunday Times article is a review of her new book by Sarah Ditum. Judith Butler, the intellectual behind the trans movement, bites her feminist critics

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/25c2ccfd-d9d1-46a9-8c82-c8b501494688?shareToken=37f39d7bf12326da4fbfb55e6767e026