Judith Butler Is Full Of Shit

Gender ideology is such a load of horseshit that one hardly knows where to start with something like this. Butler's own thought--I use the term loosely--is a morass of inconsistency, invalid argument, and nearly meaningless claims. Gender--a somewhat interesting, but relatively minor aspect of human life--has been inflated into the most important concept in the universe--with the possible exception of "power"--by the "gender studies" crowd. 'Gender' briefly--in the 70's or so--had a useful and determinate meaning in feminism. Now it just means whatever the left wants it to mean. Like so many other postmodern progressive concepts, it's basically an equivocation generator--a term that can mean so many different things that it serves as a locus of equivocation that lets them basically draw any conclusion from any premises just by swapping out one meaning of 'gender' for another. 

   Gender ideology is, of course, a central component of the worldview of the totalitarian left. Its ideas are used to stifle free inquiry and free speech, compel speech (e.g. via pronoun laws and rules), and, of course, deny reality. Butler pretends that the opponents of the totalitarian left are fascists--I'm sure some are. But that's a typical pomo-prog ad hominem dodge. What's important is that gender ideology is a huge, steaming pile of nonsense that willingly and actively constitutes a component of pomo-prog totalitarianism. What matters is that, to affirm reality, freedom, and the pursuit of truth, you have to oppose such insanity. Gender ideology is on the side of madness and totalitarianism. Its arguments are easily shredded--it survives not via clarity and careful argument, but by spewing out huge gouts of vaporous bullshit and--see Butler--by pretending that its enemies are all Fascists, misogynists, blah, blah, blah. It's a major contributor to the anti-rationalism and anti-liberalism that now plagues the USA. Which pernicious view originated in academia, of course--mainly in highly-politicized areas of the university that have low intellectual standards--e.g. women's and gender studies.

   Consider just this from her interminable Guardian piece--which, honestly, I didn't finish. There are too many good things to read to waste my time on such utter bullshit:

   We generally think of sex assignment as happening once, but what if it is a complex and revisable process, reversible in time for those who have been wrongly assigned? To argue this way is not to take a position against science, but only to ask how science and law enter into the social regulation of identity. “But there are two sexes!” Generally, yes, but even the ideals of dimorphism that govern our everyday conceptions of sex are in many ways disputed by science as well as the intersex movement, which has shown how vexed and consequential sex assignment can be.
   To ask questions about gender, that is, how society is organized according to gender, and with what consequences for understanding bodies, lived experience, intimate association, and pleasure, is to engage in a form of open inquiry and investigation, opposing the dogmatic social positions that seek to stop and reverse emancipatory change. And yet, “gender studies” is opposed as “dogma” by those who understand themselves on the side of “critique”.

First, of course: sex is not "assigned," it is discovered. Discerned. Observed. Postmodern progressivism (including gender mythology/ideology, including Butler) has its roots in postmodern and Marxist pseudoscience. It is associated with arguments that science itself is nothing more than another "kind of writing." Such views commonly argue that literary criticism and related endeavors are epistemically prior and superior to science, because the practitioners of such fields are armed with the tools of textual analysis (and "critique"...so...I'm not sure what she's talking about at the end.)  "What if," she writes, "sex assignment" "is a complex and revisable process, reversible in time for those who have been wrongly assigned?" Oh..."what if"! Well...gosh! A mighty argument, that... I reply to this "what if?" with: it isn't. As a matter of actual fact, rather than speculative possibility, human beings are extremely sexually dimorphic. Discerning the sex, even of infants, is not generally a difficult process. Few mistakes are made, because mistakes are seldom possible. Of course there are borderline, unclassifiable cases--that's the way natural kinds are. Conclusions about borderline cases can't automatically be applied to paradigm cases. Hard cases make bad law--specifically because of that error. The big idea of gender ideology in this vicinity has nothing to do with borderline cases. It is, rather, that a paradigmatically male person can magically make himself paradigmatically female by fiat. 

   Much of the confusion here concerns gender. I've talked about this about a hundred times ever since this nonsense hit the big time around 2014 or so. 'Gender' is sometimes a synonym for sex--in which case an appeal to "gender" changes nothing: your sex is a biological fact. In a few cases it is objectively indeterminate. In no case can it be changed by fiat. The helpful meaning of 'gender' has always been as a term for the masculine/feminine distinction. These are modes of behavior. Male humans--men and boys--tend toward masculine modes of behavior. Female humans--women and girls--tend to be more feminine. And everybody's androgynous to some extent. But this has nothing to do with sex. And, contra the most significant gender studies confusion, none of the following are gender categories: man, woman, boy, girl. Those are all species/sex/age categories. Men are adult, male humans. and so on. 

   Of course there's stuff to say about sex--and even, less importantly, gender. The problem is that the left radically blows "gender" out of proportion, treating a relatively minor concept as if it were as important as mass or causation. Sex is a much more interesting and important concept...but sex is biological, and the academic left doesn't do science. Sex isn't really susceptible to deconstruction, interpretation, textual criticism. So sex gets turned into something that is: "gender." Or--per Butler above--the subject is changed to: how does sex-or-gender manifest itself in ways we can bloviate about? Ergo: "To ask questions about gender, that is, how society is organized according to gender and with what consequences..."....blah, blah, blah...

   Gender studies and gender ideology are representatives of what's wrong with the humanities and related fields. Such stuff, as Searle points out, gives bullshit a bad name. I could pretty easily go through Butler's piece and shred it in detail...but there'd be little in that that I hadn't said before. It does concern me that some people have such broken bullshit-detectors that they might need such a thing done. Some things are such shit that you really do need to be able to smell it from a mile away.