Boss sent me GT video and now seething

[TotesLegit]

so something happened at work this lunchtime and Im absolutely seething 😡😡😡

there was a discussion at our workplace about the bathrooms and labeling. i get all my information from MN so have been very clear that transwomen are not women because its basic actual science!!! 🙄

at lunchtime my boss sent me an email with a link to this video of some lefty looney and asked me to watch it its only short so I did and am furious at what my boss is implying and attacking my views and the view of science!

to save you having to watch the whole thing the bits that are most offensive is a reference to , the fact the Cambridge bloody dic has a defintion of woman that , the suggestion that people like us just want to be the center of our , and most insulting of all is the suggestion that we are anti-trans because our sense !

what i want to do is reply to my boss and quit but that seems like hes won and my opinion counts for nothing! 😡😡😡

AIBU?

Yes. And I've something to add (with the proviso, again, of not getting yourself into trouble, OP).

That's just right about misrepresentation of de Beauvoir. (Obviously so if you read the original.) And, ...

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Dear Boss,

Thank you for that interesting video about gender. If you have time I'd be happy to give you a little lecture on how the speaker has misrepresented Simone de Beauvoir. Let me know if you're interested.

(My addition ... ) Oh, and you might also note how that speaker falls for the (by now so commonly recognised) particularly egregious error of Jacques Derrida in taking the lack of a transcendental signified to deny the possibility of the meaning of (in particular) "woman" in its everyday sense rather than (the more clearly obvious alternative conclusion) that the said signified was not, in fact, transcendental after all, so "woman" (as the recent Supreme Court judgement emphasised with regard to the Equality Act), means (and hence refers exclusively to) a person whose biological sex is female.

In the meantime, as per our discussion yesterday, the law says that toilet facilities are to be divided by biological sex not gender, and that unisex facilities are to be provided for anyone who doesn't feel able to use the provision for their biological sex. That should work for everyone and I hope that our company policies will follow the law as we could get in trouble otherwise.

I asked ChatGP for a response (Butler style) 😆

Dear [Boss’s Name],

Thank you for the dispatch — or perhaps the interpellative gesture — that brought Butler into the discursive field of our present exchange. I find myself compelled to ask, though not from a place of epistemic certainty, what precisely is being done through this act of transmission.

Does the citation of Butler here function merely as reference, or does it instantiate a performative disruption — a kind of Derridean différance enacted within the bureaucratic economy of legal signification? That is: are we bearing witness to an epistemological supplement, or a sovereign claim disguised as critique?

Insofar as the UK Supreme Court’s juridical articulation of “sex” presupposes a stable referent, I wonder if your inclusion of Butler was intended to foreground the law’s failure to account for what Foucault might call the productive dispersal of power across biopolitical regimes. Or are we being reminded — à la Spivak — that even the invocation of marginal critique risks reinscribing the very structures it seeks to destabilize?

And if, as Althusser would have it, the subject is constituted through interpellation by the ideological apparatus, then what subject-position is inaugurated by this email, and whose law is it that I am being asked to obey — or resist?

Ultimately, I am left questioning whether the sending of Butler is itself a kind of performative contradiction: invoking the anti-normative within the very frame of normative authority. Or perhaps — and I say this with due caution — it is merely a joke that has functioned too well.

Warmly (and with ontological hesitation),
[Your Name]

So tempting, if probably unwise.

Also far too coherent for Butler. And funnier.

If I was feeling brave I'd be tempted to reply with a link to Derrick Jenson's Arnarchy and Queer theory jeopardy...

Butler is a professor of comparative literature, based in the US.

Your boss is making an appeal to authority, meaning that he is trying to use the credibility of someone who he thinks is cleverer than both of you.

Unfortunately, Judith Butler still gets invited to fancy academic conferences and some academics truly worship her, so she has credibility, even if, in my humble opinion, she has exposed herself as quite stupid and malignant. But in your case, her misinformed mutterings are just totally irrelevant. She’s just some professor, not a lawmaker, not a politician, and thank fuck for that.

... Few figures have achieved the feat of elevating confusion to the level of dogma with the mastery of Judith Butler. While ancient philosophers struggled to discover the meaning of being, she, with a stoicism worthy of a better cause, has dedicated herself to demonstrating that there is no such being, but only an endless choreography of "performativities" whose sole function seems to be to torment those who still dare to think with their heads and not with a poststructuralist dictionary.

Of course, in her benevolence, Butler has freed us from the tyranny of biology, logic, and common sense, because, as we well know, reality is nothing more than an oppression constructed by the perfidious agents of heteropatriarchy. It no longer matters that the categories of man and woman have been used with a certain consistency by humanity since time immemorial; Now, thanks to the magic of “discourse,” we can free ourselves from those oppressive chains and, with enough conviction and a confusing thesis, self-define as anything from a houseplant to a non-binary divine being.

Butler's great feat, however, is not her skillful use of academic gibberish or her ability to write sentences more indecipherable than a moldy medieval manuscript or a text written in my handwriting. No. Her crowning achievement has been to turn incoherence into a political weapon. Her doctrine has not only given activists the pleasure of denouncing oppression on every street corner—without anyone telling them anything—but it has also allowed an entire generation of “thinkers” to avoid the danger of thinking. Why be precise when you can deconstruct? Why seek the truth when you can claim that truth is just another form of domination? ...

That's so good, who wrote it?

That's so good, who wrote it?

I copied it from a post on an earlier thread but when I searched MN it just didn't come up.

Its too late now but will try and search again tomorrow.

I think it is this. Original in Spanish?

Ask Google to translate page https://revistareplicante.com/judith-butler-y-la-metafisica-del-desproposito/

Imagine believing that any of Judith Butler’s waffle has any relevance towards how human beings should live their lives in the real world.

I think you should politely ask your boss - by email - what exactly it means. His own written interpretation should be illuminating.

And, as ever, thanks for my user name Judith 👍🏻

It's Judith Butler. She writes complex word salad, that passes for philosophy because it is so hard to make sense of...She quotes de Beauvoir, who did say women are not born but made, but Butler leaves out the context: that the gender stereotypes that are forced on women are what feminize women, and that feminity is required of women.

No, being a woman determines much of how your life will go - which is what de Beauvoir meant, not what Butler says.

Hi Boss,

Thanks for the vid of JB. I understood almost all of the words that she used but couldn't understand any of the sentences that she constructed from them. Please could you translate for me?

Kind regards,
Etc.

I think you need polite but firm

Dear boss,

Thank you for your email with a link to a video talk by Judith Butler: I appreciate your positive intent here to share your beliefs.

Politely, I request that you respect my beliefs and do not send me any more of this material. I am copying this to HR to ensure that there is a record of our communication on this.

I expect that our team has a wide range of different beliefs and religions and this has not been a barrier to working together in the past: I respect your belief here and see no reason why it should be a barrier to working together well in the future.

I would strongly advise against sending any email that has gotcha assertions, or attempts to counterargue the video content. This becomes a ball ache situation that HR has to wearily arbitrate, and the op risks having to make some sort of compromise on what she can or can’t say. Let HIM explain and defend his position: ask him why he sent it, and let him walk his way into trouble. Or backtrack.

Yes I'd go for a short neutral 'Sorry, what is this video about French existentialism related to?' type response, and leave it to him to commit himself to making statements about toilet provision etc.

Wait, do you really not know who Judith Butler is?

I like that.