03/05/2024
Sometimes the popular and right wing press can present feminism and trans rights as battling it out against each other. But this is a distortion that plays into their divide and rule tactics of pitting different social groups against each other. The fact is that, as a sticker we saw in the St Paul's district put it "Feminists Support Trans Rights", and people like Joanne "JK" Rowling are in the minority opinion. News portal Them.us meets up this week with feminist philosopher, Judith Butler, whose new book is called Who's Afraid of Gender. Them.us reports "the famed critical theorist frames the scourge of anti-trans legislation here in the U.S. as just one tentacle of a global neo-fascist crusade. The “anti-gender ideology movement,” as Butler calls it, exists everywhere from Bolsanaro’s Brazil to Putin’s Russia to the TERFs of the United Kingdom and beyond. And though it may take slightly unique forms, the movement is united in its posing of “gender” not so much as an identity, but as a conceptual container — a “phantasm,” as they put it — for the perceived erosion of traditional (read: white, cis, and patriarchal) models of family and society." The interview with Judith is fascinating and wide ranging, and is too large to summarise here, but in part, Judith notes "I think it’s harder for feminists to be phobic about trans issues if they know people personally who are in transition, or who are changing pronouns, or who are in love with people who are, or whose intimate worlds — kids, cousins, friends — are filled with that. I have seen them give [their hateful views] up, and I also have seen them get it that the right wing is the biggest force of transphobia right now; they are the ones who are threatening trans people with elimination, denying them rights of self-definition, legally and medically denying kids trans-affirmative care. So if you think you’re a progressive liberal feminist and you see what the right wing is doing, you have to ask yourself, “What side are you on?” So I constantly bring them back to that, or I ask them, “How would you feel if this was your kid, or your friend, or your cousin, and you’re speaking this way?" Judith also concludes "I think that we do see forms of solidarity that are quite beautiful that maybe are not always in the public eye. But when people get sick, their community and their kin come together, and it’s not necessarily a family, it’s not necessarily a marriage; it’s outside of a lot of those categories, the communities of care that I’m thinking about, and I want us to hold onto that idea because we’re going to need it both to regenerate ourselves and to regenerate the alliances we’re going to need as we fight the right."
https://www.them.us/story/judith-butler-whos-afraid-of-gender-interview
