Sullivan is known for his influential work as a journalist and writer, particularly on British and American political and social issues. He has long had an online voice, often viewing issues with a countercultural perspective.
Butler is an American philosopher and gender studies scholar whose work has influenced much of the Critical Theory ideology that now holds sway in academia and, as a consequence, in the upper echelons of Western society. Her domain is political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminism, queer theory, and literary theory. She is distinguished professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. She was a founding director of the Critical Theory Program there.
Both Sullivan and Butler have had same-sex spouses.
Sullivan's celebratory note arises from the nature of the discourse manifest in Bulter's book and other sources that he discusses. He puts it this way:
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 arguments presented, however, are intellectually pathethic, Sullivan seems to say:
Reading [Butler] 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.
Sullivan is scathing over what he shows is Butler's non-engagement with the central issues of support for those contending with gender confusion, whether identifying as gay in some form because it's fashionable, or young people being caught up in the trans groundswell. He writes:
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.
As to other issues:
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.
What they want is an abolition of biological sex
Despite all this, Sullivan is optimistic about a truly human outcome after Critical Theory in all its mutations and displays of hubris is dismantled from the leading heights of Western culture. Sullivan says:
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 National Collegiate Athletic Association 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 New York Times 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.
An end to the cultural colonialism that washes from Western academia over most of the world is needed urgently. Also needed are people who are willing to show strength of character in joining the mounting numbers exposing the harm done to the vulnerable in society, harm caused by the fallacies inherent in the neo-Marxist ideology of self-invention.
* The Weekly Dish blog is largely behind a paywall.
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