The Vatican says gender theory threatens human dignity – but Judith Butler believes the ‘threat’ is social change

• It has become an “overdetermined” concept, “absorbing wildly different ideas of what threatens the world”, writes American feminist philospher Judith Butler.
• For the Vatican, the traditional family will be ruined and children are now vulnerable to “ideological colonization”.
• And for right-wing politicians and heads of state, (from Liberal senator Alex Antic, who believes gender dysphoria is a “trend”, to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Vladimir Putin), gender is a weapon of social destruction.

• Butler’s overarching argument is that “gender” – the overdetermined concept to which “anti-gender ideologists” object –  is really a nightmarish bogeyman, a “phantasm with destructive powers, one way of collecting and escalating multitudes of modern panics”.
• Read more:
  Judith Butler: their philosophy of gender explained

Misplaced fears and misunderstandings

• The first, to which much of the book is dedicated, is to expose the absurdity of arguments against gender ideology.
• Butler demonstrates the ways “gender ideology” critics invert, externalise and project the very harms they claim “gender ideologists” pose.
• Then there’s the supposed threat of sexual violence to cisgender women if transgender women are allowed into single-sex spaces like prisons.
• Read more:
  'Toxic masculinity': what does it mean, where did it come from – and is the term useful or harmful?

More than two sexes

• Feminists like Butler reject “sexual dimorphism”: the belief there are two, and only two, sexes.
• But we expect to find two sexes because that is how many sexes we have learned to see.
• And we look for two sexes because we only recognise two genders.
• And because we expect to find two sexes in humanity, we automatically start to explain away any evidence (like intersex diversity) that would contradict this received truth.

Fighting back

• These rules, we think, apply both to ourselves and others.
• To critics, “gender ideologues” are breaking all the organisational rules of gender, inverting all sense and order.
• When we question gender as an organising principle, it introduces further questions about the right way to live.

• Ultimately, Butler’s point is that while gender seems scary to many, the reality is: it’s not.
• Take a pause and ask, they suggest: what are the agendas of those who may try to convince you otherwise?
• But in imagining a shared future together, we can “emerge into a world committed to cohabitation and equality across difference”.

Louise Richardson-Self receives funding from the Australian Research Council for two projects: DE190100719: Hate Speech Against Women Online: Concepts and Countermeasures; and DP200100395: Religious Freedom, LGBT+ Employees, and the Right to Discriminate.