The Other McCain

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The Butler Did It: ‘Gender Trouble’ and the Academic Roots of the #Transcult

Posted on | July 17, 2018 | Comments Off on The Butler Did It: ‘Gender Trouble’ and the Academic Roots of the #Transcult

 

When I began researching feminism in 2014, one of the first controversies that came to my attention was the conflict between radical feminists and transgender activists. Initially, my impulse was to point and laugh at what I called the Competitive Victimhood Derby, but after further investigation, it became apparent to me that the radical feminists — crazy as they might be — were actually on the side of truth.

The stubborn facts of human nature, the biological reality of sexual dimorphism, have been targeted by a deranged mob of activists engaged in a species of magical thinking, using rhetorical distortions and propaganda slogans in an effort to hijack the Feminist™ brand as a political weapon to be used for projects that were harmful to women. We may observe that this conflict, which had smoldered for many years on the radical fringe, burst into a widespread conflagration circa 2013 and has been raging out of control for the past five years. That is to say, the transgender rage against so-called “TERFs” (trans-exclusive radical feminists) became a public spectacle during Obama’s second term, and around the time the Supreme Court (in the U.S. v. Windsor decision) struck down the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act.

The political context of this conflict, then, overlapped with the attempted exploitation of the Feminist™ brand by Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, and also with the judicial triumph of the same-sex marriage cause (in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision). Was the timing of this merely coincidental? I think not. One doesn’t need a conspiracy theory to see that, with the cultural Left seemingly triumphant circa 2013-2015, and the Feminist™ brand being widely celebrated in the lead-up to the 2016 election, there were many incentives for a power struggle within the “progressive” coalition. As the late Andrew Breitbart often said, politics is downstream from culture, and it is from this perspective that we must examine the cultural ideas that produce conflict within the factions of the Left’s 21st-century identity-politics coalition.

‘Gender Trouble’ made Professor Judith Butler a major academic figure.

We must look to academia to find the roots of this conflict. Modern feminism, which began on the fringes of the radical New Left in the 1960s had, by the 1990s, gained influence on university campuses via the Left’s “long march through the institutions.” It is impossible to understand what feminism has become in the past 25 years without examining the work of UC-Berkeley professor Judith Butler, as I explained in “Feminism: Reality Is a Social Construct” (March 30, 2017):

The enormous influence of Professor Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity has served as the vehicle by which French philosopher Michel Foucault (The History of Sexuality) became a feminist idol. . . . Keep in mind that Butler’s book is lodged more or less permanently among the Top 10 Amazon bestsellers . . . not because it is pleasant reading, but because it is required reading in so many college and university courses. Every year, many tens of thousands of young people enroll in Women’s Studies classes, and are introduced to Professor Butler’s version of feminist gender theory — the social construction of the gender binary within the heterosexual matrix.

This brief summary of Professor Butler’s influential book requires us to think clearly about three separate but related concepts:

  1. There is no such thing as human nature in terms of sexual behavior — no biological urges or instincts are involved in the behavioral differences between men and women, according to Professor Butler. All of the typical male/female patterns we may observe are the artificial products of “society,” which constructs “gender” for purposes having nothing to do with the innate qualities of men and women, as such.
  2. The division of human beings into two categories — male and female, produced by “society” — is at once both (a) essentially fictitious and (b) oppressive to women. The artificial nature of the “gender binary” is a reflection of “regimes of power/discourse” (a concept derived from Foucault) and this “binary” is also a gender hierarchy, as Butler acknowledges (p. xxx in the 1999 edition, which also cites Professor Catharine MacKinnon, pp. xii-xiii).
  3. Professor Butler’s real target, what she seeks to destroy by the “subversion of identity,” is not gender, however, but heterosexuality, per se. She does not avow this openly, by stating her destructive purpose in any declarative sentence that might be quoted as an aphorism. Indeed, quoting Professor Butler’s jargon-laden academic prose is difficult; she tends to ask leading questions, rather than to state anything plainly in concise, direct prose. Yet the anti-heterosexual premise of Gender Trouble is readily apparent to the careful and intelligent reader.

This is a topic I addressed in “Yes, ‘Gender’ Is About Sex” (April 2016):

Any reader familiar with the sources cited by Professor Butler — not only [Monique] Wittig, but also Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, Esther Newton, Teresa de Lauretis, Eve Sedwick, Diana Fuss, et al. — recognizes that she takes for granted all feminist arguments made against heterosexuality. It was simply unnecessary, in 1990, for Professor Butler to cite such outspoken lesbian-feminist enemies of heterosexuality as Charlotte Bunch, Jill Johnston, Mary Daly, Marilyn Frye and Joyce Trebilcot. By the time Gender Trouble was published, there were enough such radicals among the tenured faculty of Women’s Studies that once Professor Butler invoked “gender hierarchy and compulsory heterosexuality” (on the second page of her 1990 preface), all of her academic readers could be expected to nod in recognition: “Yes, we see exactly where she’s coming from here.”

What is apparent to the intelligent reader familiar with Professor Butler’s sources, however, is not necessarily evident to the many tens of thousands of university students who, every year, are required to read Gender Trouble. The sophomore who signs up for a class called “Sexuality and Culture” (University of Texas) or “Theories of Gender and Sexuality” (University of Pittsburgh) expecting an easy “A” may be confused by the time she reaches page 7 of Professor Butler’s book:

Perhaps there is an opportunity at this juncture of cultural politics, a period that some would call “postfeminist,” to reflect from within a feminist perspective on the injunction to construct a subject of feminism. . . .
Is the construction of the category of women as a coherent and stable subject an unwitting regulation and reification of gender relations? And is not such a reification precisely contrary to feminist aims? To what extent does the category of women achieve stability and coherence only in the context of the heterosexual matrix?[6]

Imagine yourself a sophomore, maybe hungover from last night’s keg party, trying to make sense of those three sentences. Notice, however, that two of these sentences are questions, and Professor Butler never provides direct answers to these questions. Perhaps, seeing the footnote, the sophomore will turn to page 209 and find this:

6. I use the term heterosexual matrix throughout the text to designiate that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized. I am drawing from Monique Wittig’s notion of the “heterosexual contract” and, to a lesser extent, on Adrienne Rich’s notion of “compulsory heterosexuality” to characterize a hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresse female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.

Look, I don’t care how high your SAT score was, there’s no way you can understand that paragraph without reading it at least twice, and how many college sophomores are going to be as diligent as I was, in that I ordered copies of Monique Wittig’s and Adrienne Rich’s books in an effort to make sure I understood the sources cited by Professor Butler?

Isn’t it obvious that the typical reader’s feeling of confusion as to what Professor Butler means is something she deliberate intended? That is to say, she was writing “over the heads” of the lay reader, communicating in a specialized jargon only her academic peers could understand.

“It is difficult to come to grips with Butler’s ideas, because it is difficult to figure out what they are,” declared Professor Martha Nussbaum in a 1999 essay for The New Republic. A feminist herself, Professor Nussbaum spent more than 8,000 words decoding Professor Butler’s ideas and pronounced them “evil,” a formula for political passivity:

It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture.

In other words, from Professor Nussbaum’s left-wing perspective, the message of Gender Trouble — that the “subversion of identity” is the chief project of feminism — does not yield anything useful in terms of the kind of “social justice” that progressive politics should seek.

Does this mean that Professor Butler’s ideas are conservative? No, it means that Professor Butler encourages a politics of gesture.

This Is Why Trump Won

The typical sophomore student is apt to conclude, from her introductory Gender Studies class, that her duty as a feminist is not to cooperate with the “regulation and reification of gender relations,” to escape from the cage of “gender intelligibility” that is the “heterosexual matrix.” In other words, membership in the LGBT community is the sine qua non — and perhaps also the summum bonum — of being a feminist.

Professor Mimi Marinucci and her textbook, ‘Feminism Is Queer.’

The rise of “queer feminism” has produced a Coalition of the Weird among young progressives in recent years. If Feminism Is Queer, as we are assured by Eastern Washington University Professor Mimi Marinucci, and if support for feminism is a prerequisite for membership in the progressive coalition, it follows as a logical conclusion that no one who conforms to what Professor Butler calls “gender intelligibility” within the “heterosexual matrix” can be progressive.

Of course, our universities don’t teach logic, nor do they teach Latin (“Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat“), and so this destructive craziness takes hold in the minds of vulnerable young people who have not been taught either (a) how to identify the premises of an argument embedded in clever sophistry or (b) how to construct a syllogism to more clearly understand the consequences of what is being asserted.

 

When I tell you this is why Trump won — that feminist insanity produced a backlash that was crucial to the 2016 election — I realize this assertion may seem like hyperbole, rhetorical bombast intended humorously. But just because it’s funny doesn’t mean it’s not also true.

Democrats have obviously failed to perceive this cause-and-effect connection, but remember that politics is downstream from culture. If what is taught as feminist theory by university professors has the effect of encouraging “the subversion of identity,” and if this produces behavioral changes among young adherents of feminism, what consequences should we expect? Isn’t it obvious that the university students who most enthusiastically identify as “feminists” are apt to be young women with some sort of psychiatric problems? Won’t “queer feminism” attract to its banner not only a disproportionate number of lesbians, but also a lot of emotionally disturbed teenage girls — unpopular outcasts, antisocial misfits, offspring of dysfunctional families — full of inchoate resentments and lonely desperation? And shouldn’t we expect, by the obverse influence, that the more well-adjusted (and more popular) girls on campus will avoid associating with such a mob of lunatics?

 

On a campus with several thousand students, it is easy to organize a handful of outspoken radicals who will act as leaders of protest movements, and it is rather predictable what sort of followers will form the rank-and-file of such movements. Anyone familiar with Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer knows that radicalism always attracts certain types of personalities, but today’s college students probably haven’t read Hoffer just as they never studied logic or Latin. The psychology of radical “mass movements,” which Hoffer derived from studying Nazis and Communists, is no less apparent in the feminist movement. No matter how “mainstream” feminism may seem at any given time, its core principles are radical, so that the success of Democrats and their media allies in popularizing the Feminist™ brand in the years prior to the 2016 election had the effect of enlarging the rank-and-file mob of lunatics. They were encouraged to believe they were “on the right side of history,” and their defeat in November 2016 was an emotional trauma.

 

What happens if the identity-politics strategy — the Coalition of the Weird — brings disaster instead of triumph? But I digress . . .

‘Treating a Social Illness With Drugs’

The influences of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble and academic “queer feminism” have produced confusion and conflict in the real world. Dani Tauni, one of the organizers of a 2013 radical feminist conference, told journalist Julian Vigo that a significant consequence of the promotion of “queer feminism” in Australia’s education system was the destruction of the lesbian community there:

“The ideologies were all transgender and queer was being pushed onto us. . . . Now the vibrant lesbian community is all gone so we do understand what it is like to be trans, and we understand what it is like to be boxed into gender. We just disagree that being transgender is the way to resolve this issue. . . . There is this particular aesthetic you have to be — it is the coolest thing to be trans. The hottest lesbian now is the trans man and so a lot of lesbians are going this way. The other lesbians can pressure their partners to become trans. They fetishise other trans men and then they pressure their partners through their sexuality.”

According to Tauni, students in Australia are being exposed to transgender ideology in elementary schools, and children as young as 10 are being “treated” for gender dysphoria (prepared for “transition”) with drugs that inhibit normal adolescent physical development. Tauni calls this “a human rights violation that these drugs are being pushed onto children and vulnerable adults. Essentially they are treating a socially-created disorder — treating a social illness with drugs.”

Tauni’s interpretation — that normal expectations of male-female behavior are “a social illness” — fails to interrogate the fundamental premise of Professor Butler’s argument, which is the same as Tauni’s own radical lesbian ideology. That is to say, while both Tauni and Butler claim that these societal expectations are oppressive, they disagree as to how to fight this oppression. What needs to be questioned, however, is how real this oppression actually is. Every day, people who are in some sense “gender non-conforming” get up, eat breakfast, go to work and go about their daily lives without encountering anything that could rightly be called oppression. What they may encounter, however, is disapproval, and “queer” politics is about silencing these disapproving voices.

This reflects the speech-as-violence motif of “discursive” power that Professor Butler borrowed from Foucault. If you call someone a “dyke,” a “faggot” or a “tranny,” they may resent the insult, but are they actually harmed by your rudeness? Most people avoid such insulting language, of course. As a matter of common courtesy, we don’t go around shouting “porky” at fat people, but this is not enough for “fat pride” activists, who claim that the obese are victims of oppression in less blatant forms.

What has happened in recent decades, you see, is that everyone has tried to use the civil-rights movement as an all-purpose template for “social justice” activism, manufacturing dubious claims of victimhood which they blame on an unjust “society.” The belief that mere disapproval is synonymous with “oppression” has become widespread among leftists in recent decades, as witness the crusade against “homophobia.” If your opinion of homosexuality is anything other than enthusiastic approval, you’ll be accused of “hate,” and maybe the SPLC will put you on a map to make it easier for deranged gay people to kill you.

This kind of bullying behavior on behalf of “social justice” causes — attempting to silence dissent — has become commonplace in academia, where it is dangerous to deviate from politically correct beliefs. Professor John McAdams had to appeal all the way to the state supreme court to get reinstated after he was suspended without pay for criticizing an instructor who bullied a Catholic student at Marquette University. The student had a Catholic opinion (against same-sex marriage) at a Catholic university, but the instructor, Cheryl Abbate, forbade him to express his opinion in class because it was “homophobic.” When McAdams wrote a blog post about this incident, he was accused of inciting harassment of Abbate. So the university not only forbids dissent from politically correct opinion, but it is forbids reporting on how this infringement of free speech is enforced on campus. This is Orwell’s Thought Police in action.

What results from this totalitarian suppression of dissent in academia? Many young people go through this indoctrination process without ever encountering an articulate proponent of opinions that are conservative or libertarian, Christian or traditionalist. They are insulated inside a bubble — a progressive echo chamber — and have only the vaguest concept of the allegedly dangerous ideas they’re being protected from.

Clinton James Crawford, a/k/a “Char Vortryss” a/k/a “Char the Butcher.”

Where did “Char Vortryss” get the idea that brandishing a baseball bat to intimidate “cis scum” was acceptable? Isn’t it obvious that our cultural elite — who believe students must be protected against any opinions that might hurt their feelings — are deeply implicated in this?

Now we return to Professor Butler’s influential book Gender Trouble where, on p. 98 of the 2006 edition, we find this passage:

Can the prohibition against incest that proscribes and sanctions hierarchical and binary gendered positions be reconceived as a productive power that inadvertently generates several cultural configurations of gender? Is the incest taboo subject to the critique of the repressive hypothesis that Foucault provides? What would a feminist deployment of that critique look like? Would such a critique mobilize the project to confound the binary restrictions on sex/gender imposed by the heterosexual matrix? Clearly, one of the most influential feminist readings of Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Freud is Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic of Women: The ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” published in 1975. Although Foucault does not appear in that article, Rubin effectively sets the stage for a Foucaultian critique.

A Foucault-inspired critique of “the prohibition against incest”? What does this have to do with feminism? According to Professor Butler, “the incest taboo” is part of a system of “power” that “sanctions hierarchical and binary gender positions.” Doesn’t it seem to you, the non-academic reader, that an author who seems to be defending incest would be considered controversial? This book is assigned as a standard text in universities across America, and indeed around the world, but nobody ever notices the pro-incest argument embedded in this attack on “the heterosexual matrix”? And what about Butler’s reverence toward Michel Foucault, a gay man who died of AIDS in 1984, a few years after signing his name to a petition for the abolition of the age of consent in France?

Professor Butler’s project of undoing “the binary restrictions on sex/gender” required her to rely on sources whose ideas most people would consider disreputable if not indeed dangerous, and her citation of University of Michigan Professor Gayle Rubin is a case in point. Professor Rubin’s Ph.D. dissertation was a “cultural anthropology” project on the San Francisco gay “leather” BDSM subculture, and if you want to read something truly bizarre, you should consult “The Catacombs: A Temple of the Butthole” (Chapter 9 of Professor Rubin’s anthology, Deviations). Le spécialité de la maison at the Catacombs was anal fisting, along with other unpleasant and painful practices. The Catacombs finally shut down in 1984 as its patrons and proprietors succumbed to the AIDS epidemic.

If her celebration of sadomasochism did not suffice to make Professor Rubin notorious, what about her defense of pedophilia and child pornography in her 1984 essay, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality”?

For over a century, no tactic for stirring up erotic hysteria has been as reliable as the appeal to protect children. The current wave of erotic terror has reached deepest into those areas bordered in some way, if only symbolically, by the sexuality of the young. The motto of the Dade County repeal campaign was ‘Save Our Children’ from alleged homosexual recruitment. In February 1977, shortly before the Dade County vote, a sudden concern with ‘child pornography’ swept the national media. In May, the Chicago Tribune ran a lurid four-day series with three-inch headlines, which claimed to expose a national vice ring organized to lure young boys into prostitution and pornography. Newspapers across the country ran similar stories, most of them worthy of the National Enquirer. By the end of May, a congressional investigation was underway. Within weeks, the federal government had enacted a sweeping bill against ‘child pornography’ and many of the states followed with bills of their own. These laws have reestablished restrictions on sexual materials that had been relaxed by some of the important Supreme Court decisions. For instance, the Court ruled that neither nudity nor sexual activity per se were obscene. But the child pornography laws define as obscene any depiction of minors who are nude or engaged in sexual activity. . . .
The laws produced by the child porn panic are ill-conceived and misdirected. They represent farreaching alterations in the regulation of sexual behaviour and abrogate important sexual civil liberties. But hardly anyone noticed as they swept through Congress and state legislatures. With the exception of the North American Man/Boy Love Association and American Civil Liberties Union, no one raised a peep of protest.

If you express concern about child molesters, you’re inciting “erotic hysteria,” according to Professor Rubin, and laws against child pornography are “ill-conceived and misdirected,” enacted amid a “panic.” Her praise for NAMBLA, which one might think would be enough to discredit anyone, did not prevent Professor Rubin from obtaining such academic honors as being named the 2014 F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professor of Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. Students can’t have an evangelical Christian club at Harvard, but pro-pedophile enthusiasts of BDSM are acceptable as faculty.

Such is the source which Professor Butler cites in Gender Trouble (pp. 98-102), crediting Professor Rubin for the insight that “gender is merely a function of compulsory heterosexuality”:

With the loosening of the compulsory character of heterosexuality and the simultaneous emergence of bisexual and homosexual cultural possibilities for behavior and identity, Rubin envisions the overthrow of gender itself.

The Consequences of ‘Feminist Revolution’

It is fair to say that Professor Rubin and Professor Butler advocate what Matt Barber has called “Sexual Anarchy,” a world in which there are no rules, no laws, no morality governing sexual behavior. What such a lawless and amoral culture would mean for women (and for children) is not a topic these two professors seem to have given much thought; neither of them have children, and why should they care what becomes of our daughters and granddaughters in this no-rules future?

  • LAKE COUNTY, FLORIDA — A Lakeport couple was arrested this week on suspicion of human trafficking after allegedly befriending and recruiting high school girls and later selling them as prostitutes in San Francisco.
    Sam Lindsey Massette, 37, and his wife, Krystina Marie Pickersgill, 27, were booked Tuesday into the Lake County Jail on charges of human trafficking for the purpose of prostitution. . . .
    The District Attorney’s Office alleged Wednesday that Massette and Pickersgill would recruit girls while in high school. “After turning 18, they would then take them to San Francisco where they would be sold as prostitutes,” the news release stated. The couple “would coerce and threaten the girls to perform acts of prostitution,” according to the release.
  • SALINAS, CALIFORNIA — Four men from cities across the Salinas Valley were arrested in a human trafficking bust, and eight teenage girls were rescued, Salinas police announced Thursday. . . .
    A 14-year-old girl’s family tried to rescue the girl from a vehicle parked on Kern Street, and officers were alerted of a “disturbance.”
    When officers arrived, they discovered that the girl was a runaway who was being trafficked by Daniel Amaro, 19, of Soledad, police said. . . .
    “Over the next few days, detectives from the Salinas Police Department’s Investigations Bureau followed up on information they were receiving and identified other victims, as well as at least three additional suspects,” police said.
    Eight girls, whose ages range between 14-18, were being exploited by a group of men, police said. Two of the girls were only 14 years old.
  • CONROE, TEXAS — A 25-year-old mother has been sentenced to prison for 40 years after pleading guilty to trying to sell her toddler daughter for sex.
    In February, the Montgomery County Precinct 1 Constable’s Office was conducting an investigation into child exploitation. Sarah Peters entered into an agreement with an undercover officer to sell her 2-year-old daughter for sex.
    Peters brought the girl to Conroe in order to allow a man to have sex with the girl for $1,200. She was arrested at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery County, and her daughter was taken into protective custody.

Just a few recent news items from around the country which are perhaps omens portending a future that Professor Butler and Professor Rubin almost certainly did not intend to bring about, but if your project involves the destruction of all social norms regulating sexual behavior, a lot of unintended consequences can be expected. Recall that what Professor Rubin seeks, in citing Rubin, is a “critique” that would “confound the binary restrictions on sex/gender imposed by the heterosexual matrix.” This is why she cites Professor Rubin’s 1975 essay that begins thus:

The literature on women — both feminist and anti-feminist — is a long rumination on the question of the nature and genesis of women’s oppression and social subordination. The question is not a trivial one, since the answers given it determine our visions of the future, and our evaluation of whether or not it is realistic to hope for a sexually egalitarian society. More importantly, the analysis of the causes of women’s oppression forms the basis for any assessment of just what would have to be changed in order to achieve a society without gender hierarchy.

Notice that Professor Rubin twice uses the word “oppression” to describe the universal condition of women. Were women everywhere “oppressed” in 1975? Were they “socially subordinated”? It requires a very expansive definition of “oppression” to suppose this was true. In 1975, Gayle Rubin was a 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Michigan — are grad students “oppressed”? — when she published this essay in an anthology edited by Reina Reiter, who had recently obtained a Ph.D. in anthropology and was teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York. Was Professor Reiter also “oppressed”? Isn’t it a strange thing to find such unquestionably privileged women claiming to be victims of “oppression”? But this was in 1975, and still is, the unquestioned premise of feminist theory: Because we do not live in “a sexuality egalitarian society . . . without gender hierarchy,” according to Professor Rubin, all women are “oppressed” as a class. This is an idea derived from Marxism, and Professor Rubin explores the ideas of both Marx and his Communist colleague Friedrich Engels at length before wading through theories of psychology and anthropology to arrive at her conclusion:

In short, feminism must call for a revolution in kinship.
The organization of sex and gender once had functions other than itself — it organized society. Now, it only organizes and reproduces itself. The kinds of relationships of sexuality established in the dim human past still dominate our sexual lives, our ideas about men and women, and the ways we raise our children. But they lack the functional load they once carried. . . .
Ultimately, a thoroughgoing feminist revolution would liberate more than women. It would liberal forms of sexual expression, and it would liberate human personality from the straitjacket of gender.

Well, what consequences might be expected from such a “feminist revolution”? Having declared, more than four decades ago, that the “organization of sex and gender” was an obsolete vestige of systems “established in the dim human past,” what did Professor Rubin expect to emerge, once we had been liberated “from the straitjacket of gender”?

 

 

 

Craziness is everywhere. Bruce Jenner, Olympic gold medalist — a father and grandfather — announces he’s “Caitlyn,” and we’re supposed to pretend that Bruce/“Caitlyn” is entirely sane. How dare you suggest otherwise? How dare you doubt that he/“she” was a “woman trapped in a men’s body” when he was winning the 1976 Olympic decathlon, marrying women, fathering children and so forth? He was trapped in “the straitjacket of gender” — a 6-foot-2 victim of societal oppression!

 

You’re not allowed to criticize such behavior — the SPLC will put you on its “hate map” and you’ll be banned from Twitter — and all of this, you see, because intellectuals like Professor Butler set out to destroy the “hegemonic discursive/epistemic model of gender intelligibility” which is “defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality.”

You might suppose that feminists would be celebrating this, but they’re not. In fact, many feminists are angry as all hell about it:

Miriam Ben-Shalom, an LGB activist and teacher, was honorably discharged from the military for homosexuality in 1976, but she challenged her discharge in court and returned to military service in 1987. She reached the rank of Staff Sergeant. In 2016, she was invited to be the Grand Marshall of the Milwaukee Pride Parade, but the parade rescinded the offer after discovering “transphobic” comments on her Facebook page. . . .
“Transgender activists’ erasure of women is horrifying,” Ben-Shalom wrote in The Federalist. “Women, especially lesbians, should not be told they are haters if they refuse to sleep with males who identify as trans. Women and children should not be forced to deal with males in their spaces, whether it be locker rooms or bathrooms.” . . .
Ben-Shalom insisted that a person may wear whatever clothing he or she prefers, a person can self-identify as he or she sees fit, and a person should not experience discrimination.
“But I ought not to be expected to believe that by some magic and lots of surgeries and chemicals that a man can be a woman and a woman a man,” the lesbian powerfully declared. . . .
Ben-Shalom denounced different kinds of transgender “oppression.” First, she declared that “children should not be experimented upon by infusing them with puberty blockers to keep them from growing up,” and they “should not be operated upon and have body parts removed because they ‘feel’ they are something other than what they are.” . . .
[E]arlier this month, a group called “Get the L Out” marched against transgenderism at the London Pride Parade. This group claimed that the transgender push for “the social transition of lesbians” is actually a form of conversion therapy, because it turns lesbian women into straight men. The group also warned — rightly — about the long-lasting damage transgender “therapies” can wreak on healthy human bodies.
Most importantly, “Get the L Out” attacked transgenderism for “erasing” lesbians by socially forcing them to be open to having sex with men. If a biological man with a penis “identifies” as a woman, lesbians will be attacked as transphobic for refusing to have sex with him for that reason.

“This is not the feminist revolution we wanted!”

The theories of Professor Butler and her academic feminist comrades were perhaps not intended as a blueprint for a society in which lesbians are accused of “hate” for refusing to sleep with men in dresses, but this is what has happened. In the real world, the “straitjacket of gender” still serves useful purposes which may not have been apparent to feminist intellectuals in their university grad-school seminars.

What if “a sexuality egalitarian society . . . without gender hierarchy” proves to be impossible? What if the destruction wrought by “feminist revolution” actually proves harmful to women? What if the result is that our society is overrun by maniacs and barbarians?

Well, good luck getting Professor Butler to answer that question. It’s obvious she did not foresee the consequences of her crazy ideas.



 

 

Category: Intellectuals, Sex Trouble, The Transgender Cult

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