The Transqueers Take The Mask Off
Judith Butler and Andrea Long Chu explain their gender revolution. It's wild!
It’s telling, it seems to me, that we’ve begun to see a shift in the tactics of critical queer and gender theorists. They are beginning to make actual arguments in the public square, instead of relying on the media, the government, and the courts to impose their ideas by fiat. The two most prominent examples of this are a new cover-story in New York Magazine by Andrea Long Chu, “Freedom of Sex,” and a new book by Judith Butler called Who’s Afraid of Gender? Butler has even gone so far as to write this book in decipherable, if inelegant, English for the first time in her career.
Reading her again after a few years, it becomes clearer and clearer why she is so hard to engage. This is a work so embedded in neo-Marxism it’s impossible to grasp it without accepting its collectivist and revolutionary premises. For Butler, in matters of sex and the body, nothing is as it appears, the individual has no independent existence or capacity for reason outside social and cultural forces, and even the basics of anatomy, like a penis, are just socially constructed all the way down. There is no independent, stable variable like nature or biology or evolution that can help us understand our bodies, and our sex. Everything is in our heads, and our heads are entirely created by others in the past and present:
Nature is not the ground upon which construction of gender happens. Both the material and social dimensions of the body are constructed through an array of practices, discourses, and technologies.
The material dimensions of the body are just ideas: “Anatomy alone does not determine what sex a person is.” You might think, for example, that when a baby is born with a vagina, we are observing her sex. But for Butler,
sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean. The girl continues to be girled; the boy continues to be boyed; sex assignment, understood as an iterative process, relays a set of desires, if not fantasies, about how one is to live one’s body in the world. And such fantasies, coming from elsewhere, make us less self-knowing than we sometimes claim.
Later on, Butler warmly approves of this quote from Catharine MacKinnon:
Women and men are made into the sexes as we know them by the social requirements of heterosexuality.
This is Blank Slatism in its ultimate form, a denial of any independent biological influence on human nature or behavior. The fact that we are a species of mammal, organized around a binary reproductive strategy for millions of years, in which we are divided almost exactly into male and female, and in which there are only two types of gametes, eggs and sperm — and no “speggs” — is, for Butler, irrelevant. It is not even a fact. The sex binary is, rather, a human invention — specifically, a product of American “white supremacy.” I kid you not:
The hetero-normative framework for thinking of gender as binary was imposed by colonial powers on the Global South, to track the legacies of slavery and colonialism engaged in brutal surgical and sexological practices of determining and “correcting” sex in light of ideals of whiteness … Gender norms were created through surgical racism. Black bodies were the experimental field from which white gender norms were crafted. Dimorphism serves the reproduction of the normative white family in the United States.
The golden rule of the woke applies: everything is a product of white supremacy! But of all the things you could call “socially constructed,” the sex binary is the least plausible. It existed in our species before we even achieved the intelligence to call it a sex binary. It existed before humans even evolved into the separate and mostly distinct genetic clusters we now call race. How’s that for pre-cultural! It is in countless species that have no access to an array of “practices, discourses, and technologies.” It structures our entire existence. Not a single cell in the body is unaffected by our sex. Our entire reproductive strategy as a mammal is rooted in it. If you can turn even this into a human invention — malleable and indeterminate and a “spectrum” — there is nothing real outside us at all.
This is the anarchy and nihilism intrinsic to critical theory in all its toxic forms. It deconstructs everything and constructs nothing. It is a negation of humanity’s signature mixture of the earthly and the divine, the instinctual and the intellectual. In this grim, neo-Marxist dystopia, the individual is merely a site where various social and collective powers impose their will.
Science therefore has no autonomy beyond politics; art becomes a mere expression of power dynamics; there are no stable truths — which is how critical theory has destroyed the humanities, replacing them with nihilist word-games. So the penis is female. Yeah, you heard that right, bigot. And the proof that it is female is that some people with penises say it is. And that’s it. No other form of evidence is allowed. Orwell presciently described this grotesquery:
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
But this party command is the central message of Butler’s work, 40 years after 1984. Here she is on why a dude with a beard, a rock-hard cock, and a luxuriantly hairy back is actually a woman:
[Gender-critical] feminists would claim that being a woman is not a feeling, but a reality. For trans women and men, though, being a woman or a man is also a reality, the lived reality of their bodies. The category of “woman” does not say in advance how many people can participate in the reality it describes, nor does it limit in advance the forms that that reality can take. In fact, feminism has always insisted that what a woman is is an open-ended question, a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex.
But if the open-ended question of what a woman is includes being its opposite, a man, then both categories, male and female, effectively evaporate into thin air. It is like saying that white must include black if it is to be white. That is why Butler and the TQ+ movement are trapped by their logic into being homophobic: they have to deny that gay men can exist at all, because men cannot exist at all, unless they include women in the definition of man.
That’s why the Trevor Project, the massively-funded TQ+ organization, now tells troubled young gay kids that a gay man is defined as someone who has sex with biological women as well as with men. A gay man is not attracted to the same “sex” but to the same “gender” and that now includes biological women. Trevor has abolished homosexuality! It’s why woker-than-woke Grindr, formerly an app for gay men, is now full of straight dudes with profiles that say “NOT INTERESTED IN MEN just don’t bother,” “I don’t like men,” “Str8 4T”, “do not message me if you’re cis or a man,” “Fems and Them No Men,” “No gay men u will be blocked,” and “Im straight not gay.” Just another part of the straight “queer” community.
In the postmodern world where we invent reality hour by hour, depending on how we feel, being gay now includes heterosexual sex — and by far the biggest group in the “LGBTQIA+” umbrella are bisexual women in relationships with straight men. At some point, gay men will wake up and realize that they have abolished their own identity — indeed merged it into its opposite. But they have another tea dance to get to and another Instagram vacation pic to post. Most are pathetically uninformed, or programmed by tribal insecurity to follow the queering herd.
On the most blazing practical issues of our current gender debate, Butler has little to say. Can children really give informed consent to irreversible re-ordering of their entire endocrine system before they’ve gone through puberty or even had an orgasm? She offers this non-answer:
Of course, there are serious discussions to be had about what kind of health care is wise for young people, and at what age. But to have that debate, we have to be within the sphere of legality. If the very consideration of gender-affirming care is prohibited, then no one can decide which form is best for a specific child at a certain age. We need to keep those debates open to make sure that health care serves the well-being and flourishing of the child.
This is an evasion worthy of the most craven politician, not an argument by an honest intellectual. What about the fact that 60 - 90 percent of kids grow out of gender dysphoria, as JK Rowling has noted? Another non-answer from Butler: “She does not tell us whether those referenced are tomboys, sissies, genderqueer people, cross-dressers, trans people, or something altogether different.” This is pedantic whataboutism. Almost all of them are gay, as Butler surely knows.
Is it fair to have trans women who went through puberty as men compete against women in athletics? Butler cites a single outlier study using unreliable markers claiming that among top athletes, there is considerable overlap in testosterone levels between men and women. But of course, there is no such overlap in any other study — and there are countless of them. The highest testosterone levels among women are far below the lowest for men. They differ so much in degree they differ in kind.
Is the insistence by doctors that if you don’t trans your child he will kill himself, ethically defensible, as Rowling has asked? Butler responds: “She acts as if the claim is unfair or untrue, but what if it is true?” Memo to Butler: it isn’t true 99.7 percent of the time, making the “do you want a dead boy or live girl?” blackmail all the more ethically despicable. This easily found fact is something that Butler didn’t even feel the need to research.
She also straw-mans her opponents over and over again. She claims we’re creating fear to exploit and distract from the genuine anxieties about climate change (not kidding); and we want the re-imposition of “patriarchy”, which will be news to JK Rowling or Julie Bindel. Our views are “phantasmatic”, a word Butler loves, resting on a “psychosocial fantasy that the loss of patriarchal, heteronormative, and white supremacist social orders is an unbearable one.” She describes feminists like Rowling and pioneering campaigners for gay rights like me as “fascists” and “moral sadists.” She says we are trying to “strip” gay people “of their fundamental rights, protections, and freedoms,” when of course we originally helped bring about those rights in ways she never did, and are merely trying to protect them from being defined out of existence by her pomo madness.
Butler says we practice “shameless forms of racial hatred, and controlling, demeaning, caricaturing, pathologizing, and criminalizing [marginalized] lives,” and that we “do not hold [our]selves to standards of consistency or coherence.” For fuck’s sake. No doubt some nasty characters on the right are transphobic, but to turn all of us dissenters into the theocrats we’ve spent our lives countering is beyond dishonest. She says we never read the works of the critical theorists, which will be news to James Lindsay and those of us who had to slog our way through her concrete brutalist East German-style prose in grad school and since. And, of course, she smears:
Recruitment into the anti–gender ideology movement is an invitation to join a collective dream, perhaps a psychosis, that will put an end to the implacable anxiety and fear that afflict so many people experiencing climate destruction firsthand, or ubiquitous violence and brutal war, expanding police powers, or intensifying economic precarity.
Actually, Ms Butler, we are just trying to make sure that kids aren’t medicalized irreversibly; that homosexuality is defined by attraction to the same sex, not the opposite one; and that trans people should have full civil rights (as they do), alongside a tiny number of sane, pragmatic accommodations to, yes, reality: in sports, in intimate spaces, and in the English language. That’s all. I favor aggressively tackling climate change, preventing violence and crime, opposing war, and adjusting economics to benefit the working classes more. If someone calls that “phantasmatic fascism,” it’s her sanity that needs inspection, and not my moral compass.
Which brings me to New York Magazine’s “moral case” for allowing children “regardless of age” with no parental consent, to change their sex, simply because they want to. The sub-hed — “The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies”— undersells the piece: it’s actually a case for letting any kid for any reason undergo sex reassignment. It’s not a “moral case” because simply stating a want and demanding it be realized is not an act of morality; it’s an act of unmediated will. And the implications of this demand are immense. In good queer-theory fashion, Chu destroys any and all distinctions between being a child and being an adult. And he does so with aplomb, as if expecting a wave of snapping fingers in response.
(A word about pronouns. I always respect the pronouns of actual trans people, so won’t in this case. Chu has never “always wanted” to be a woman; he has said rather that “sissy porn did make me trans”; he defines womanhood in grotesquely misogynistic terms (“Getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”). He is as much a woman as Dylan Mulvaney is, which is to say he is no such thing. He is just a seriously depressed careerist with a new orifice: “Until the day I die, my body will regard the vagina as a wound.” A decade ago, he declared: “I am straight. I am male. I am white (mostly). I am comfortably middle-class.” He still is all those things — but those things, even when declared in self-hatred, don’t get you a Pulitzer. Hence the current piece of performance shock-art. I see no reason to cooperate in this bullshit. It’s an abuse of good faith interlocutors. And it’s a fucking insult to actual trans people, a mockery of the challenges they face.)
David Haskell’s New York Magazine has been committed to publishing the psychotic on the subject of transgenderism for a while: first by an “asexual gay man with a penis and a vagina” who carved a fake dick out of her thigh to place next to her actual vagina, and luxuriated in her edgy madness; and now an Ivy League porn addict marinated in postmodern nihilism who didn’t get a fake vagina and take female hormones to cure his gender dysphoria, but — prepare yourself for the épater la bourgeoisie frisson — because it made him feel shitty: “I feel demonstrably worse since I started on hormones … I was not suicidal before hormones. Now I often am … I want the tears; I want the pain … There are no good outcomes in transition.” That was in a memorable essay in the NYT a while back: a poem in baller nihilism.
For good measure, Chu in his new essay rejects any notion of the Hippocratic Oath in medicine. Almost in an aside! That’s how far he’ll go to make sure there are no limits on child transition, even if it destroys a kid’s life, even if informed consent is impossible, even though the treatment is experimental and off-label. If a patient demands a treatment, and a doctor believes it will be harmful, Chu believes the patient should be able to demand being harmed, just as he did.
Then there are the grave implications of abolishing any distinction between children and adults. Or to put it more baldly: New York Magazine has a cover story implicitly defending sex with children. That’ll get a National Magazine Award! But think about it for a millisecond: if a child of any age can demand to have his own genitals removed with no safeguards at all, why can’t he demand to have his genitals played with by an adult as well? Who dare impede a child’s total freedom?
Remember: Chu is not justifying child sex reassignment as a necessary medication for a serious illness; he is justifying it simply because a child wants it for any reason, specious or fantastic or real. Any editor reading this piece as a draft would ask the writer to grapple with this obvious, massive implication. I’ve been edited by New York Magazine and “fact-checked” by their social justice activists. I know how thorough they can be in demanding a writer address unintended implications. But not this time. Matt Taibbi compares direct quotes from Chu and from NAMBLA pamphlets. They are indeed hard to tell apart. And so we’re back to the pomo French intellectuals of the 1970s petitioning against age-of-consent laws. In fact, queer theory’s core pioneers — Michel Foucault, Gayle Rubin, and Patrick Califia — all once defended adults fucking kids. Foucault defended sex with infants. This is not extraneous to queer theory; it is intrinsic to it. The point of queer theory is that there are no limiting principles. Defending the integrity, dignity and safety of children makes you un-queer. It’s a label I will gladly wear.
Chu’s cover-story also contains such gems as: “the belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism.” So we live in fantasy instead? And this: “Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.” Did no editor ask Chu to explain why he both believes sex is real, as he states, and yet denies the core reality of sex differences? Nah. Did anyone inquire what exactly Chu means by “changing sex,” when that is of course impossible at a cellular level. Nah. Did anyone edit this at all?
Or we get statements like this: “If children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right.” So a healthy natural process is equated with premature sterilization, using an off-label, non-FDA-approved experimental medicine with unknown side effects. But remember: making kids happy is not the point. Making them adults is. There is not much more to say about this moral excrescence — except that publishing it is deeply revealing of what New York media types, including Pulitzer Prize back-slappers, find unutterably cool. In a word, it’s sickening.
The truth is: we have come a long way in understanding and respecting the unique human experience of being transgender. In the US, trans people are protected by the gold standard of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. They are everywhere in our popular culture. An entire generation has even been told that being trans is the most glamorous thing you could possibly be. But none of this is sufficient for the transqueers. What they want is an abolition of biological sex for everyone; the end of men and of women as separate categories; the sex reassignment of children on demand; the destruction of the nuclear family; an end to the Hippocratic Oath; the abolition of homosexuality; the presence of male bodies in women’s showers, prisons and shelter; the creation of fantastical post-everything genders and pronouns; and the criminalization of anyone who would ever question this cultural revolution.
They are not winning, but it is not for lack of trying. The pseudoscience behind child transition is beginning to be exposed and puberty blockers are now banned in the UK outside clinical trials. A new lawsuit is being filed against the NCAA for destroying women’s sports. Public opinion has responded to the transqueer ideology by moving in the opposite direction, and now gay people are being caught in the queer crossfire.
Newspapers like the NYT have refused to be intimidated into suppressing coverage of the debate. Detransitioners are increasingly public about the medical abuse they were subjected to and still suffer from. Leaked files from WPATH have proven that doctors know full well their patients can’t give informed consent and still trans them. Comedians have poked fun at the entire mountain of incoherence and emotional cray-cray of the transqueer. And even gay men and lesbians are beginning to cotton on to the homophobia implicit in all of it.
Butler’s and Chu’s contributions will, in my view, only confirm this changing of the tide. Too late to save many, but never too late to protect our children — gay and straight and trans — from his nihilist abuse of their bodies and souls. Know hope; and pray for the victims. One day this madness will appear to be exactly what it is. And that day cannot come too soon.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a conversation with Abigail Shrier on the risks of therapy for everyday kids; dissents over my pieces on Biden’s SOTU and the WPATH Files; five quotes from the week in news; 15 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of subjects; a Hathos Alert of auto-tuned sexism; a Mental Health Break of a Biden impression; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
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New On The Dishcast: Abigail Shrier
Abigail is an independent journalist and author. Her first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was a bestseller, and her new book is a bestseller even the NYT has had to recognize eventually. It’s called Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up. She also has a substack, The Truth Fairy. Check it out.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the news of UK restricting puberty blockers, and the harm that therapy can do to normal kids. That link also takes you to listener emails on our episode with Christian Wiman on suffering and transcendence, and Rob Henderson’s on overcoming childhood trauma. Plus, more rescue pups!
Coming up: Richard Dawkins on religion, Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs, Adam Moss on the artistic process, and George Will on Trump and conservatism. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Dissents Of The Week
On my piece last week on WPATH, a transgender reader writes:
Oh, Andrew, you have become so marinated in this online clique of anti-trans ideologues that you are missing the point spectacularly. For years, anti-trans crusaders have been falsely claiming that medical professionals are lying to people, fiendishly trying to “trans” them for unclear but definitely very sinister reasons. Now they discover evidence that yes, specialists do have dialogs with people presenting for trans care. The risks are discussed. The pros and cons are made clear. Doctors do make an effort to explain the negative consequences to young people who don’t always want to listen.
Literally any trans person who has been through the system in the past 40 years could have told them this, but these reactionaries who hate the very idea of us refuse to listen to trans people. So now their independent research has shown that there is no grand conspiracy, that the process of offering trans healthcare looks an awful lot like the process of offering any other kind of healthcare, and the conclusion they come to is: “See? We were right all along! It’s child abuse!” What now?
The mistake that these anti-trans obsessives make is assuming that trans people are as ignorant as they are. Discovering that sometimes medical treatment doesn’t work out — or that sometimes people make decisions they later regret — is some kind of explosive revelation, something that should evoke shock and horror and widespread disgust — the same level of disgust that these folks already felt for trans people and led them to go out fishing for controversy in the first place.
The truth is that trans people, and the specialists who help us, have known and talked about poor surgical outcomes, complications of hormone-replacement therapy, and regrets from transitioning since day one. We know it doesn't always work out and we go ahead with it anyway, because that’s what it means to live in a free society. We are free to make our own dumb mistakes, or not.
Meanwhile healthcare will progress. The efficacies of different treatments will be compared. Approaches will be changed and adapted to fit the times. This is progress. It’s a good thing.
Read my response to that dissent, along with another dissent over the SOTU, here. And please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
In The ‘Stacks
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as TikTok on the chopping block, two big liberal cities moderating, and amphibian milk. Below is one example, followed by a brand new substack:
“There’s good news and bad news in Alabama’s new IVF law,” says David Lat, a lawyer with two sons thanks to IVF.
Welcome, Matt Bruenig! He reveals the anti-labor race card used by the ACLU to fire a worker.
If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
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See you next Friday.