Skip to content →

Judith Butler addresses TERFs and the work of Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond

Judith Butler is a preeminent gender theorist and has played an extraordinarily influential role in shaping modern feminism. She’s written extensively on gender and her concept of gender performativity is a central theme of both modern feminism and gender theory. Butler’s essays and books include Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (1993) and Undoing Gender (2004).

However, the concept of gender perfomativity has been used – and some would assert – abused to support a number of positions that misconstrues Butler’s work. I therefore wanted to ask Butler about what she really thinks about gender and the trans experience.  Along the way Butler specifically addresses TERFs and the work of Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond.


Cristan Williams: You spoke about the surgical intervention many trans people undergo as a “very brave transformation.” Can you talk about that?

Judith Butler: It is always brave to insist on undergoing transformations that feel necessary and right even when there are so many obstructions to doing so, including people and institutions who seek to pathologize or criminalize such important acts of self-definition. I know that for some feels less brave than necessary, but we all have to defend those necessities  that allow us to live and breathe in the way that feels right to us.  Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs – it is also not always what a trans person needs.  Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one’s gendered life.

CW: I think it’s safe to say that many gender theorists are controversial in one way or another. Some have lumped your work together with the work of gender theorists such as Sheila Jeffreys, who wrote:

[Transsexual surgery] could be likened to political psychiatry in the Soviet Union. I suggest that transsexualism should best be seen in this light, as directly political, medical abuse of human rights. The mutilation of healthy bodies and the subjection of such bodies to dangerous and life-threatening continuing treatment violates such people’s rights to live with dignity in the body into which they were born, what Janice Raymond refers to as their “native” bodies. It represents an attack on the body to rectify a political condition, “gender” dissatisfaction in a male supremacist society based upon a false and politically constructed notion of gender difference… Recent literature on transsexualism in the lesbian community draws connections with the practices of sadomasochism.

Can you talk about the ways in which your views might differ?

JB:  I have never agreed with Sheila Jeffreys or Janice Raymond, and for many years have been on quite the contrasting side of feminist debates.  She appoints herself to the position of judge, and she offers a kind of feminist policing of trans lives and trans choices.  I oppose this kind of prescriptivism, which seems me to aspire to a kind of feminist tyranny.

If she makes use of social construction as a theory to support her view, she very badly  misunderstands its terms.  In her view, a trans person is “constructed” by a medical discourse and therefore is the victim of a social construct.  But this idea of social constructs does not acknowledge that all of us, as bodies, are in the active position of figuring out how to live with and against the constructions  – or norms – that help to form us.  We form ourselves within the vocabularies that we did not choose, and sometimes we have to reject those vocabularies, or actively develop new ones.  For instance, gender assignment is a “construction” and yet many genderqueer and trans people refuse those assignments in part or in full.  That refusal opens the way for a more radical form of self-determination, one that happens in solidarity with others who are undergoing a similar struggle.

One problem with that view of social construction is that it suggests that what trans people feel about what their gender is, and should be, is itself “constructed” and, therefore, not real.  And then the feminist police comes along to expose the construction and dispute a trans person’s sense of their lived reality.  I oppose this use of social construction absolutely, and consider it to be a false, misleading, and oppressive use of the theory.

CW: Recently, Gloria Steinem wrote:

So now I want to be unequivocal in my words: I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make. And what I wrote decades ago does not reflect what we know today as we move away from only the binary boxes of “masculine” or “feminine” and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.

Would you comment on Steinem’s statement?

JB: I agree completely that nothing is more important for transgender people than to have access to excellent health care in trans-affirmative environments, to have the legal and institutional freedom to pursue their own lives as they wish, and to have their freedom and desire affirmed by the rest of the world. This will happen only when transphobia is overcome at the level of individual attitudes and prejudices and in larger institutions of education, law, health care, and kinship.

CW: What do you think people misrepresent most about your theories and why?

JB:  I do not read very much of those writings, so I cannot say. I do know that some people believe that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self.  My view is actually not that.   No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives.  So whether one wants to be free to live out a “hard-wired” sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization – and with full institutional and community support.  That is most important in my view.

CW: Do you think that humans have an innate and subjective experience of having a body? If so, would part of that experience also include having a body with primary sex characteristics?

JB: Most of what people say about these matters is rather speculative. I know that some subjective experiences of sex are very firm and fundamental, even unchangeable. They can be so firm and unchanging that we call them “innate”. But given that we report on such a sense of self within a social world, a world in which we are trying to use language to express what we feel, it is unclear what language does that most effectively. I understand that “innate” is a word that conveys the sense of something hired-wired and constitutive. I suppose I would be inclined to wonder whether other vocabularies might do the job equally well. I never did like the assertion of the “innate” inferiority or women or Blacks, and I understood that when people tried to talk that way, they were trying to “fix” a social reality into a natural necessity. And yet, sometimes we do need a language that refers to a basic, fundamental, enduring, and necessary dimension of who we are, and the sense of sexed embodiment can be precisely that.

CW: Some (such as Milton Diamond) assert that there seems to be a genetic issue that can lead to transsexualism. What are your thoughts about such assertions?

JB: In the works by Milton Diamond that I have read, I have had to question the way he understands genetics and causality. Even if a gene structure could be found, it would only establish a possible development, but would in no way determine that development causally. Genetics might be yet another way of getting to that sense of being “hard-wired” for a particular sex or gender. My sense is that we may not need the language of innateness or genetics to understand that we are all ethically bound to recognize another person’s declared or enacted sense of sex and/or gender. We do not have to agree upon the “origins” of that sense of self to agree that it is ethically obligatory to support and recognize sexed and gendered modes of being that are crucial to a person’s well-being.

CW: If “gender” includes the way in which we subjectively experience, contextualize, and communicate our biology, do you think that living in a world without “gender” is possible?

JB: Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves. If gender is eradicated, so too is an important domain of pleasure for many people. And others have a strong sense of self bound up with their genders, so to get rid of gender would be to shatter their self-hood. I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are.

CB11[1]

CW: I have seen where – especially online – people who identify as “gender critical feminists” (TERFs) assert that transwoman are merely mutilated men. What are your thoughts about using “gender critical feminism” to make such assertions?

JB: I do not know this term, but I reject totally the characterization of a transwoman as a mutilated man. First, that formulation presumes that men born into that sex assignment are not mutilated. Second, it once again sets up the feminist as the prosecutor of trans people. If there is any mutilation going on in this scene, it is being done by the feminist police force who rejects the lived embodiment of transwomen. That very accusation is a form of “mutilation” as is all transphobic discourse such as these. There is a rather huge ethical difference between electing surgery and being faced with transphobic condemnation and diagnoses. I would say that the greatest risk of mutilation that trans people have comes directly from transphobia.

CW: Many trans people assert that women/females can have a penis and that men/males can have a vagina. What are your thoughts about that?

JB: I see no problem with women having a penis, and men having a vagina. People can have whatever primary characteristics they have (whether given or acquired) and that does not necessarily imply what gender they will be, or want to be. For others, primary sexual characteristics signify gender more directly.

Intersectionality may well sound like some unfortunate bowel complaint resulting in copious use of a colostomy bag, and indeed it does contain a large amount of ordure. Wikipedia defines it as ‘the study of intersections between different disenfranchised groups or groups of minorities; specifically, the study of the interactions of multiple systems of oppression or discrimination’, which seems rather mature and dignified. In reality, it seeks to make a manifesto out of the nastiest bits of Mean Girls, wherein non-white feminists especially are encouraged to bypass the obvious task of tackling the patriarchy’s power in favour of bitching about white women’s perceived privilege in terms of hair texture and body shape. – Julie Burchill

CW: Do you have any thoughts about “intersectionality?”

JB: If you are referring to the important contribution of black feminist theory, then I have many thoughts. It has made an important contribution to social and political analysis, asking all of us to think about what assumptions of race and class we make when we speak about “women” or what assumptions of gender and race we make when we speak about “class.” It allows us to unpack those categories and see the various kinds of social formations and power relations that constitute those categories.

CW: It has been asserted that if one controls the way one identifies and behaves, that one can change the way one experiences their body. For example:

He could see that I was processed of this thing, which only now, I realize was demonic. I knelt on the study floor, in tears, I was choking, forces were telling me not to do it, to walk out; freedom as a woman awaited me, after all, I had made such progress. I fought back, I cried aloud, I repented, I rebuked what had gone on in my life… All this happened 18 months ago… I gave them my suitcases of dresses, clothes, make up etc. It made me feel sick, and it was a major thing for me to do. I had to get rid of all that had held me before. They disposed of the stuff. I stopped having manicures, and cut my nails short, I grew a small beard. I threw all the [hormone] tablets away, and turned away from anything that had to do with my desires. I asked my Pastor for a verse that I could look at every day and enjoy my new freedom as a man, a father and a husband. I put a piece of paper next to my bed, with encouraging verses, which I read every morning when I got out of bed. I knew that the woman inside was dead. The power of Christ had destroyed her, and all she stood for. Eighteen months on, the devil still tries to persuade me, but he knows that I will not go down that path, as the consequences for my family would be immense. I am accountable to several people, and I am enjoying my manhood. –Sam’s Story

In the above example, the individual has made a ongoing daily ritualistic of practice of denial and repression in the belief that it will change the way they experience their body. In what seems to be a somewhat similar approach, Janice Raymond wrote:

This paper has argued that the issue of transsexualism is an ethical one that has profound social and moral ramifications. Transsexualism itself is a deeply moral question rather than a medicaltechnical answer. In concluding, I would list some suggestions for change that address the more social and ethical arguments I have raised in the preceding pages.

While there are many who feel that morality must be built into law, I believe that the elimination of transsexualism is not best achieved by legislation prohibiting transsexual treatment and surgery but rather by legislation that limits it and by other legislation that lessens the support given to sex-role stereotyping, which generated the problem to begin with…

It would raise questions such as the following: is individual gender suffering relieved at the price of role conformity and the perpetuation of role stereotypes on a social level? In changing sex, does the transsexual encourage a sexist society whose continued existence depends upon the perpetuation of these roles and stereotypes? These and similar questions are seldom raised in transsexual therapy at present.

– Raymond (1980), Technology on the Social and Ethical Aspects of Transsexual Surgery

In your understanding of “gender,” do you believe that either of these approaches – both focusing on controlling behavior (via god and religious counseling or legislation and stereotype counseling) – would be able to eliminate trans people?

JB: I think that it is incumbent on all of us to get rid of these approaches – they are painful, unnecessary, and destructive. Raymond sets herself up as the judge of what transsexuality is and is not, and we are already in a kind of moral prison as we read her work. What is much more important than any of these behaviorist or “moral” approaches are all the stories, poems, and testimonies, the theoretical and political works, that document the struggle to achieve embodied self-determination for individuals and for groups. What we need are poems that interrogate the world of pronouns, open up possibilities of language and life; forms of politics that support and encourage self-affirmation. And what we need is a political and joyous alternative to the behaviorist discourse, the Christian discourse on evil or sin, and the convergence of the two in forms of gender policing that tyrannical and destructive.

CW: Do you think “sex” is a social construct?

JB: I think that there are a variety of ways of understanding what a social construct is, and we have to be patient with terms like these. We have to find a way of understanding how one category of sex can be “assigned” from both and another sense of sex can lead us to resist and reject that sex assignment. How do we understand that second sense of sex? It is not the same as the first – it is not an assignment that others give us. But maybe it is an assignment we give ourselves? If so, do we not need a world of others, linguistic practices, social institutions, and political imaginaries in order to move forward to claim precisely those categories we require, and to reject those that work against us?

CW: What, if anything, would you like trans people to take from your work?

JB: Gender Trouble was written about 24 years ago, and at that time I did not think well enough about trans issues. Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person’s felt sense of gender was therefore “unreal.” That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel, how the primary experience of the body is registered, and the quite urgent and legitimate demand to have those aspects of sex recognized and supported. I did not mean to argue that gender is fluid and changeable (mine certainly is not). I only meant to say that we should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world.

6+

Published in Uncategorized

24 Comments

  1. I would not disagree with her point of view but only wish to broaden the view for everyone.And like all humans, this point of view has its limitations and it does not accurately address some concerns of continuing harm in our society that involve many others. I’m an artist so I really address point of view. It is visceral for me. I think the frame of the whole conversation is it’s limitation as well. There are many serious problems in our society and many ‘unnatural’ deaths occurring and increasing in ways that never existed in this society. Harm is on the increase in many new ways. There is a very serious problem that isn’t even part of the discussion here but central to it – and that is how over the centuries medical science has replaced/collaborated with the dominance of religion as being the institutional authorities of ‘truth’ – and most of these truths come through academic institutions. I rarely hear people discuss the structural limitations of that world and its harm but they exist whether denied or not. These authorities of truth have lead masses of people astray for a long time and I believe it is the limitations of comprehending the history of medical science and discounting the harm that is pervasive in such a way that what is going on with trans is only part of a much larger systematic harm through medical science authorities. I do not believe anyone is free from these false teachings nor anyone is omnivisual in their ability to see all. While Judith clearly states her values about freedoms as the underlying base for most of her comments, she seems to fail to address the basis of how these freedoms are being lost through the false teachings and power of not only medical science but academic single mindedness that has evolved in recent years. So while there is a narrow focus and narrative, the fallout of harm has already been happening by those who have done the least examination of their own educations.

    I believe in freedom so that is why I am not in disagreement, but what I do not understand is how the popular ‘singular’ narrative about ‘trans’ has been doing exactly what she talks about in others. A kind of tyranny. I can not even speak on the topic because the narrative has already closed out any creative thoughts in place of identifying some opposition. I can openly say that I am not invested in the movement for trans-freedoms. I do not wish them harm, but I also think there is some kind of privilege here and it seems they have a whole movement. In contrast, I am seeing people dying with no movement and no voice….. and if the trans community is really only 1% of the population or so, why does 1% get so much attention? But that question can not even be answered until I write a book about what frames that question for me. Why are only certain people called trans? If you look intergenerationally, everyone is forced to ‘trans’ within their own lives, but age and class has to be part of that examination. I think there is lots of fallout here by the public discourse over this issue. The law of unintended consequences is the concern I have. I understand the concern for trans and the motivations and goals. I just wish that it was not evolving in a much different way to eliminate future harms.

    4+
  2. […] Judith Butler addresses TERFs and the work of Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond […]

    0
  3. […] Jeffreys, though most modern feminists recognise the bigotry that is central to their position. Judith Butler responded to a question by Cristan Williams in an interview last year where she asked Butler about the positions of Raymond and […]

    0
  4. Anonymous Anonymous

    I’m okay with people choosing to be happy, but the biological significance of gender and it’s role in procreation and the development of psychologically healthy individuals cannot be ignored. Evolutionary Biology and Evolutionary Psychology have a lot of data to contribute and be considered in the discussion.

    1+
    • Yes, biology exists as does reproduction. What you think about those realities is gender.

      4+
    • With regard to the “biological significance of gender and it’s role in procreation and the development of psychologically healthy individuals cannot be ignored” Nothing in this sentence is supported by science. By the sound of it, you are referring to normative gender extending “naturally” and unproblematically from normative sex categories, but sexual organs are responsible for sexual reproduction, not gender. One does not “combine genders” to produce babies. If that were the case, drag kings and queens and the act of genderf*ck would be leading to babies.

      Also, your use of “psychologically healthy” seems to be a specious reference to normative gender being substantially equivalent to health, and I can’t help but think that this is an attempt to forward the old, tired, and disproven argument (see the DSM IV. What are we supposed to do with this the regrettably oblique reference to “a lot of data”? Name studies, describe their conclusions, and argue on that basis. Otherwise, as far as one can tell from your comment: (a) biology produces gender [it does not] (b) which is important for being psychologically healthy [also not the case, though who knows if that’s what you’re saying] and (c) reproduction [even though gender does not cause procreation, but whatever] because (d) “data” from evolutionary biology and psychology. You seem to misunderstand the difference between data and their interpretation.

      Also, everyone seems to forget that there are all kinds of familial and parenting structures that can produce babies, not all of which can be reduced to heterosexual love-making. Surrogacy exists, is used by all kinds of partnership arrangements, and is in no way reducible to two heterosexuals rolling around in bed after the club gets out.

      As far as the “psychologically healthy” reference, I’d suggest a return to the recent psychological literature of the past half-century or so which regards gender oppression — and not non-normative gender identities — as being the actual threat to psychological and physical well-being.

      5+
    • Laura W Laura W

      A bit late, but I am only now reading this interview and the comments and this needs to be mentioned: Evolutionary psychology is more often than not bordering on pseudo-science. It too often treats behavioral outcomes as natural and unmediated. Social sciences as well as other branches of psychology dispute this notion. If only because behavioral outcomes vary widely with time and place. In addition neurological research is at the moment busting many myths about the ‘hard’ wiring of the brain. You cannot tell if a brain is female or male just by looking at scans. The similarities and differences are individually unique across and cannot be categorized unproblematically into male or female. On top of that, bodily processes are subject to change under a wide range of influences (age, environment, stressful situations, sickness, nutrition etc). This includes hormones, metabolism and even brain structure itself.

      But by all means, don’t take my word for it: read Darwin’s Legacy by Dupre on the questionable scientific standards of evolutionary psychology or Sex Itself by Sarah Richardson or these links right here: http://www.newstatesman.com/future-proof/2015/02/sex-isn-t-chromosomes-story-century-misconceptions-about-x-y or http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/10684179/Men-and-women-do-not-have-different-brains-claims-neuroscientist.html

      2+
  5. […] Judith Butler speaks to Cristan Williams about TERFs and challenges those who conflate her work with that of Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond (TheTERFS.com). […]

    0
  6. […] 24 years ago, and at that time I did not think well enough about trans issues.” Read the rest of her interview here. It is so heartening to witness authority figures actively taking accountability for their harmful […]

    0
  7. […] that I see gender as a “choice” rather than as an essential and firmly fixed sense of self. My view is actually not that. No matter whether one feels one’s gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every […]

    0
  8. […] Judith Butler addresses TERFs and the work of Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond This is from last year, but it’s really good. […]

    0
  9. Kim Kim

    Great interview. Thanks

    1+
  10. Denise D. Denise D.

    Thank you for this nuanced conversation on what is a rather fraught topic these days. Though if JB says that Sheila Jeffries and Janice Raymond offer a “policing of trans lives,” I might counter to say that trans activists offer a policing of the very definition of womanhood. Their efforts to ensure the entry of male-bodied individuals into female-only spaces fails to acknowledge the very real threat women feel from men. The fact that some males identify as female does not erase the physical reality of their bodies, or the fact that the oppression of women is biologically-based. And using the term “terfs” is pointlessly inflammatory.

    6+
    • TERFs is a feminist term, invented by a non-trans feminist space that included self-identified RadFems. TERFs hate the term because it separates them from the Wittigs, Dworkins and MacKinnons of the world. Also, TERFs identify as TERFs:

      TERF is TERF

      The “TERF is a slur” meme is BS.

      Also, let’s not equivocate. You assert “fact that the oppression of women is biologically-based” is means that oppression is biological. Wittig had a few things to say about this assertion:

      The ideology of sexual difference functions as censorship in our culture by masking, on the ground of nature, the social opposition between men and women. Masculine/feminine, male/female are the categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differences always belong to an economic, political, ideological order. Every system of domination establishes divisions at the material and economic level. Furthermore, the divisions are abstracted and turned into concepts by the masters, and later on by the slaves when they rebel and start to struggle. The masters explain and justify the established divisions as a result of natural differences. The slaves, when they rebel and start to struggle, read social oppositions into the so-called natural differences. For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society. The primacy of difference so constitutes our thought that it prevents turning inward on itself to question itself, no matter how necessary that may be to apprehend the basis of that which precisely constitutes it.The ideology of sexual difference functions as censorship in our culture by masking, on the ground of nature, the social opposition between men and women. Masculine/feminine, male/female are the categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differences always belong to an economic, political, ideological order. Every system of domination establishes divisions at the material and economic level. Furthermore, the divisions are abstracted and turned into concepts by the masters, and later on by the slaves when they rebel and start to struggle. The masters explain and justify the established divisions as a result of natural differences. The slaves, when they rebel and start to struggle, read social oppositions into the so-called natural differences. For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society. The primacy of difference so constitutes our thought that it prevents turning inward on itself to question itself, no matter how necessary that may be to apprehend the basis of that which precisely constitutes it.

      It isn’t “biology-based” oppression women suffer from, it’s culturally-based material oppression. BTW, you’re appealing to the same meme right-wingers used against lesbians in the restroom, locker room, shower and military. I mean, it’s taboo to talk about it, but MichFest dealt with women raping women on the Land. They dealt with it by pressuring the victim to stay quiet and ejecting her rapist in order to preserve their talking points around biology = safe space.

      4+
  11. Valerie Larkin Valerie Larkin

    This is a wonderful conversation. Judith Butler really gets it.

    1+
  12. Thank you for the great interview!

    Question: Is there a way to change the default Facebook share picture so that it doesn’t come up with the Tweet image?

    2+
  13. This interview is really really perfect! I’m in love for the work of Judith Butler, and have too much things to learn with her! Thank you for the gift! <3

    0
  14. Alex Farebrother-Naylor Alex Farebrother-Naylor

    A rich and nuanced conversation — this really made my morning. Thank you!

    0

Comments are closed.

%d bloggers like this: