Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? | Judith Butler
Why is the idea of ‘gender’ provoking backlash the world over? | Judith Butler
Increasingly, authoritarians are likening ‘genderism’ to ‘communism’ and ‘totalitarianism’
Increasingly, authoritarians are likening ‘genderism’ to ‘communism’ and ‘totalitarianism’
Because bad actors are making money by weaponizing gender and dumb people are eating up what those bad actors are selling.
As capitalism destroys the world it turns to fascism and needs scapegoats to distract from the fact that the actual problem is capitalism.
Thank you for sharing this. I look forward to reading it when I'm able to. Much love to you! 💕
hold strong everyone 💗 🏳️🌈
Ignorance
I think it's worse than that. I think it's a combination of intentional ignorance and plain old bigotry.
Of course a lot of this is intentionally stirred up by very rich people who would love for the proles to be fighting against each other. This is particularly obvious if you consider the paranoia about transgender folks in US college sports. The actual number of athletes in question is incredibly small and in no way disruptive to anything, but if you watch Fox News you'd think there's some massive threat to the stability of these sporting organizations.
It's helpful to note that originally sports were not gender segregated until women started to win.
The only people who think transgenderism is a bad thing are those who sincerely believe that one gender is better than the other and crossing over that line is 'cheating', so if you hear someone talking shit about transgender issues you can safely assume they're sexist as hell.
This is why I refuse to hate the bigots in the same way that I hate the rich. They're just rubes too weak and pathetic to stand up to power. I have more hatred for wealthy elites who financially support democrats than the average Trump voter.
Fighting poor racists is an endless struggle of self defense, but going after those who let fascism win can have an unpredicted effect. They expect to remain above it all, but they're the ones who fucked around, and they're the ones who need to find out. They introduced violence and destroyed the rule of law, so now they need to hire guards if they want security. Feeding a class war will not stop the race war, but it will encourage those with capital to want the old times back, and while that is not ideal, it does give more wiggle room to not get sent to deathcamps
Yeah you hit the nail on that shit for real
They have to blame anything but the actual cause of problems, because the causes are ether too complex for a simple answer, or require them to question systems they benefit from.
This summarizes the bulk of my essay comment.
No intelligent, secure person would fall for this.
This is the same "Blame The Other" bullshit the Nazis did 100 years ago.
"There's nothing wrong with you, THEY have fucked you over."
And people still fall for it.'
TLDR Neoliberalism and fascism are puzzles that can be solved so that people look for actual solutions to their problems. The problem for us is how to reach and educate everyone.
And people still fall for it.’
That's because it isn't an intelligence test. The smartest people you know can fall for these ideologies. They demand that you suspend critical thinking. Religion instills this in people and all the fascist has to do is convince a person their ideology falls under that umbrella of suspended critical thinking.
But it goes further than that. Because people need not be religious in order to fall for these ideologies either. There is wide spread acceptance of neoliberal ideas in the Western world that causes a person to reject socialism out of hand. You've probably heard socialism doesn't work at one point or another, but probably heard little to support this thesis beyond the Soviet Union collapsed.
Many people have partially internalized neoliberalism without considering it's implications and accepted those flaws as virtues. For example, a core principle of neoliberalism is that our societies' institutions, whether they be political or economic, are near flawless and beyond reproach. According to the neoliberal it is not the systems that need to change, but the people leading the systems.
This walls people, who have accepted this idea, off from the majority of progressive and socialist policies which call for systemic change and wealth redistribution respectively. And it leaves them open to a relevant fascist idea. Rather than only changing the people running the system, change the people living within the system. This of course means genocide in the form of mass deportations and when that fails to be feasible mass executions.
“There’s nothing wrong with you, THEY have fucked you over.”
This is a much easier idea for a population, that has been living under neoliberal rule since 1981, to accept than the alternatives. Alternatives that would inherently involve restructuring society to be more inclusive both politically and economically. Such as but not limited to abolishing the electoral college, amending the constitution so that representation in Congress is proportional to the population, the redistribution of billionaire wealth through both taxation and mandated worker owned corporations. These ideas are workable alternatives to fascism, but they are a fundamental restructuring of our society.
Beyond the inherent opposition from the owner class, military industrial complex, Republican Party, the right-wing infosphere the challenge is resolving the partially internalized neoliberal ideology in people's minds. To even begin to rethink a person's relationship to society in terms of work, government, and other people, a person has to understand that these are up for rethinking. Another prevalent neoliberal idea is that we live at the end of history and all social, political, and economic problems have been solved.
If you benefit from the neoliberal society enough it can be trivial to ignore the people who have fallen through the cracks. But under a casual examination it becomes evident that injustice is still prevalent all over the world and that history did not end because politicians said it did. Even under the worst projected outcomes of climate change there will still be people. But unless a person fully internalizes that this neoliberal narrative that we live at the end of history is false, it can be difficult to see the impetus to meaningfully and rapidly change society.
Thankfully, the challenge is not be to be intelligent enough, as we don't even understand general intelligence enough to measure it. Even a rejection of fascism after fully internalizing the ideology and its self-destructive implications, while necessary, is still insufficient. In addition to a rejection of fascism, the challenge is for enough of the population to have the knowledge and critical thinking skills to full internalize neoliberalism as a sales pitch for the scam that is late-stage capitalism and reject it. This is what it takes to even have the open-mindedness needed to fully internalize socialism and progressivism as viable solutions to our problems.
On a side note, the idea that intelligence determines success or failure of a population with fascism is derived from our cultural obsession with intelligence. Everyone knows if you're a 'genius' and make a breakthrough for a corporation like Google, Facebook, or Amazon you make it rich. The only reason we care about being rich is because we know that all of our needs will be met in this society. The reason we know that is because we live in a capitalist society that only cares about profit for the owner class. So
the onlya main reason we care about intelligence is because we live in a capitalist society where if we make our corporate overlords wealthier we can have a slice of the pie.So I explained the essence of the problem. But now here's the problem. Maybe I've successfully convinced you or someone with this argument. Or maybe you've solved the fascist and neoliberal puzzles yourself. However you got here, to these conclusions, the challenge becomes an issue of scale. How do we convey this understanding to a national population of 340 million people and global population of 8 billion people before the fascist death camps are in full swing and/or climate change gets us. This is a logistical and educational problem that needs to be solved as soon as possible. edit: typos and clarification
That’s because it isn’t an intelligence test. The smartest people you know can fall for these ideologies. They demand that you suspend critical thinking.
That's where I stopped reading.
The smartest people DON'T lack critical thinking skills.
The smartest people choose to be moral, and ethical, or they choose to be amoral, and rapacious.
Some people get angry when they don't understand something, and a lot of those same people are often unwilling or unable to make an effort at understanding things.
Yeah, something that I've noticed about a lot of people that have strong opinions about transgender people is that it's clear that they've never once taken the time to get to know anything about the people that they hate.
I've spoken to one person that thought non-binary and bisexual are the same thing. And looked confused when I tried to explain the difference. And another person speaking about trans women saying "if they like men, why don't they just be gay?" It seems to me that most people don't differentiate between biological sex, gender and sexual attraction. And when they think they're talking about one, they're actually talking about another.
It's just plain ignorance all around. Willing ignorance. Like people with first grade maths education trying to dictate the rules of calculus.
And I understand that no one knows everything, especially when they haven't been exposed to certain things in their lives. Before I started spending time in certain circles, I was clueless about things that seem obvious to me now. So I get that.
But then they need to shut the fuck up and sit back down, if they're not planning on ever actually enlightening themselves. They need to go back to their small worlds that their small minds can handle and leave the rest of us alone.
I don't hate that they lack knowledge. I hate that they lack knowledge, make no effort to change that but have strong opinions about things that they know fuck all about anyway.
Very well said
It is thankfully the vast majority of the time a case of being unwilling. People can change their minds, but it takes time. The better outcomes for society and the planet depended on convincing people to change their minds as soon as possible.
As tempting as it is to just think something along the lines of "everyone is just hateful and dumb" I think it's entirely possible that there is some fundamental issue with our messaging. Focus on the things you can control.
The problem is the messaging from the alt-right. Trans people aren't pressuring kids to transition, or forcing people to have sex with them. And black freedom fighters weren't rapists. And German Jews weren't responsible for the financial disaster in post-WWI Germany.
Fascists aren't leading a charge against real trans people. They're making a rage-bait strawman and then stomping it to the ground. This mania falls apart when people actually interact with real trans people, instead of taking the talking points given by reactionary figureheads and the Republicans they promote. The only change to messaging would be to be more visible.
Considering these freaks have been killing us for centuries I'm going to disagree. I think the ability to not easily be silenced, to share stories globally that won't simply be erased by "taking care of" someone is what's actually pissing them off.
You know, I agree with you, but we're already on the same team. Keep in mind though, we aren't trying to change the minds of the few powerful and evil motherfuckers who want us all dead. It can't be done. We want the average person to side with us, and the average person builds logical arguments around their emotions, not the other way around.
The average person is not a murderous freak and being made out to be one simply because they aren't on board with something they don't understand will absolutely harbor negative sentiment. They aren't going to be discerning and they are going to take this to be about them. And like I said, then the logical arguments get built around that negative sentiment. Then they start voting, and so on.
I'm not saying calm down, because you shouldn't. But red-hot messaging does not help. Turn the temperature down and you'll see more people agreeing with you who, importantly, didn't already agree with you BEFORE they read your message.
I think this is definitely part of it, but there's a key point that you're both missing: Conservatives need someone to hate.
In the past it was gay people, abortion, that sort of thing. But gay rights are now very much supported by a majority of people, and abortion is either illegal federally in the US, or well supported in places it's legal (which was also true of the US). So, they needed a new scapegoat to whip up furore against and, unfortunately, we happen to be it. I think especially because we're so much more visible these days, that it's easy to point to us as a problem. Back in the 90s, when we were much more hidden, most people wouldn't have cared. But these days, most people have met (or at least seen) a trans person. The unfamiliar can be uncomfortable for people, and some choose not to address that, letting themselves be easily taken advantage of. As various conservative parties across the world have seen this to be an effective method of sowing division, they've adopted these policies for themselves.
Some good points, but the text seems bloated and urging. Yes, "anti-genderism" is fascist, but that word has lost a lot of its scare power.
I don't think Butler is going for "scare power", she is simply trying to accurately describe institutional transphobia. I think it's important to recognise and treat transphobia as an inherently a fascist ideology.