Hi everyone. At the request of a reader, this post (made 4/5/2019) has been recovered (on 9/30/2020) from a now thankfully banned debate subreddit. I'm no great fan of my thinking from this period, but it's a healthy biographical marker in that it was the last time I ever tried to commune in good faith with women who hate me for being trans. The main point about queer theory sharing much of its thought with radical feminist theory remains compelling. The comments which were also lost were pretty much all cruel, hostile, and abusive, but if you know what you are doing you can recover them using RedditSearch.
Hello everyone. Effortpost incoming. I do not usually post here but have considered starting.
After reading this post and its comments, it is clear to me that most users on this forum do not know what queer theory is. So this is an introduction to queer theory. I am covering basic concepts: use of language, beliefs about identity, and relationship to radical feminism. I am writing this to clear up what I believe are obvious misconceptions both trans-accepting and trans-denialist people seem to have, and to serve as a masterpost link to others making misstatements about queer theory in the future.
I am a queer feminist. More relevant to this forum, I am transgender. I have read feminist theory and queer theory since I was a teenager. I am a queer advocate and a woman advocate. I say this is to make clear that I am partisan. However, I hope this is well-cited enough that all parties find it helpful. I have tried to speak as simply as possible.

What Is Queer Theory?

In this primer, I will repeatedly stress the following analogy: queer theory is to sex-gender nonconformity as feminist theory is to women. I say "sex-gender nonconformity" to express the full breadth of queer theory, which can range from intersex writers (Iain Moorland, Morgan Holmes), to studies in something as seemingly superficial as drag (The Drag King Book, Judith Butler), to racial intersections (Mia McKenzie, Tourmaline) & Che Gossett) and postcolonial third genders (Qwo-Li Driskill).
Like feminist theory, queer theory is not one thing. It is a collection of diverse approaches to explaining the condition of sex-gender nonconformity in society, and, in the case of radical queers, improving that condition towards the radical end goal of the abolition of all sex-gender norms. Like feminist theory, queer theory is theory. Not all feminism is feminist theory. Not all queer advocacy is queer theory. Queer studies is not queer theory. Queer history is not queer theory. Queer praxis is not queer theory. Being queer is not queer theory.

Queer Theory & Language

Not all people who practice sex-gender nonconformity consider themselves queer. In fact, some consider the word exclusionary or pejorative. This is no more exceptional than the fact that some women do not consider themselves feminists, and consider the word exclusionary or pejorative.
Just as some black women reject feminism as being white (Clenora Hudson-Weems), some black sex-gender nonconformers reject queerness as being white (Cleo Manago). And just as some women reject feminist theory as harmful to society (Esther Vilar), some sex-gender nonconforming people reject queer theory as harmful to society (Sheila Jeffreys).
This problem, in which the purported subjects of a theory actively reject it, and even their positions as subjects within it, is no more destructive for queer advocacy than it is for feminism. The challenge has been answered affirmationally in various ways in both queer theory and feminist theory (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pgs. 115-117; Dworkin, Right Wing Women; Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto; Stone, A Posttranssexual Manifesto).
However, because much more of queer theory takes its subject's status as queer to be uncontroversially entirely socially constructed, and its use of language to be therefore open to social change, queer theorists encounter this problem less often than feminist theorists. We usually acknowledge that, in forcing people to be queer or not queer, we are passively reinforcing the exact forms of oppression we seek to end through our analyses. Leslie Feinberg, who did not use the word queer as a political identity, noted in hir Transgender Liberation (1992):

Transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions. The language used in this pamphlet may quickly become outdated as the gender community coalesces and organizes—a wonderful problem.

Today, Feinberg's "transgender[ed] people" is now most often used apolitically, for what was once called "transgenderists": the demographic of those who live or attempt to live, socially, as a sex-gender outside of that first placed on their birth certificate. "Queer" has come to have most of the solidarity-driven political meaning of Feinberg's "transgender." However, Feinberg's conception of "transgender" is not uncommon today.
Insofar as queer advocacy permits its subjects to change, establishing their own voice, own vocabulary, own concerns, and own dissent, while feminism does not, the two must be antagonistic. Riki Wilchins addresses this tension directly in hir essay "Deconstructing Trans":

Genderqueerness would seem to be a natural avenue for feminism to contest Woman's equation with nurturance, femininity, and reproduction: in short to trouble the project of Man. Yet feminists have been loath to take that avenue, in no small part because queering Woman threatens the very category on which feminism depends.

However, Wilchins is wrong: this tension between feminist theory and queer theory is local to specific versions of queer advocacy and feminism, and is not inherent to either.

Queer Theory & Gender Identity

What the hecky, y'all? Queer theory rejects gender identity politics almost unconditionally. Get it right.
There are very few things queer theorists universally agree on: this is one. In fact, queer theorists reject sexual identity politics almost unconditionally (e.g. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism). Queer theorists regularly assert that all identity formation (including identity formation as a man or woman, flat) and even the very concept of selfhood emerge as a regulatory apparatus of power, usually that of The State. These critiques in queer theory are developed out of postmodern critiques of identity and the self. Consider, for example, these quotes from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus:

To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word.
Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it.
There is no longer a Self (Moi) that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.

This denial of self is directly tied to Deleuze's concept of becoming-minority), and is constructed again and again and again in queer theoretic concepts: in anti-sociality, in death drive, in anal sublimation and butch abjection, just over and over and over again. Anyone who does not understand this general concept does not understand a single thing about queer theory, straight up.
Among the transgender population specifically, it is extremely easy to find transgender people rejecting the concept of gender identity as something forced upon us by a cisgender establishment which has all the power. It's easy to find on writing. It's easy to find on video. It's easy to find on reddit. And most of us aren't even queer theorists.
So, what is it queer theorists do, if not snort identity for breakfast? Well, generally, we sort through history, literature, science, language, the social psyche, most especially real-life experience, and whatever else we can ooze our brainjuices over to analyze and undo the structures of our oppression, the very means through which we become "queer." We argue that this oppression and our position as uniquely oppressed subjects within it is socially constructed, unnecessary, and morally outrageous. And, on most analyses, this is what many feminist theorists do with women, as well. Few have even argued that, in a culture that constructs manhood as its norm, there is a sense in which to be a "woman" is also to be "queer."

Queer Theory & Radical Feminism

It has never been clear what radical feminism is. In general, I understand people who call themselves or are called "radical feminists" to be one of the following:

• Socialist feminists, who assert women are a class in some previously understood, usually Marxist sense, who must achieve liberation through techniques espoused in pre-existing theory, e.g. wages for housework.
• Post-Marxist feminists, who assert women are a "sex-class," where "class" is some new, peculiarly feminist sense of the word, who must achieve liberation through some specifically feminist method yet to be decided, outside of Marxist, anarchist, or liberal methodologies. Its origins are often supposed to be Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. Post-Marxist radical feminism is usually considered "true" radical feminism, or even just feminism, proper (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pg. 117).
• Cultural feminists, who assert "man" and "woman" compose two competing cultures, and (more importantly) "feminism" as women's culture. Under this view, there can be no end to feminism because women cannot achieve equality, only the dominance of female culture. Men cannot be feminists because feminism is not a political position. Cultural feminists are ambivalent about their positioning on a left or right which are both seen as "male culture." Cultural feminists often call for a return to "the natural order," and approve of "biologism," the belief that one's cultural categorization is and should be derived from biology. Their purpose is to preserve women as feminists rather than achieve the radical goal which is the abolition of all classes. See Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology; Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto; Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. Not all cultural feminists claim to be radical (or cultural); see écriture féminine.

On cultural feminism, radical feminist historian Alice Echols noted in The Taming of the Id (1984):

I believe that what we have come to identify as radical feminism represents such a fundamental departure from its radical feminist roots that it requires renaming.

Brooke Williams's Redstocking's piece The Retreat to Cultural Feminism (1975) begins:

Many women feel that the women’s movement is currently at an impasse. This paper takes the position that this is due to a deradicalizing and distortion of feminism which has resulted in, among other things,"cultural feminism.”

Inasmuch as cultural feminism asserts "man" and "woman" as essential and non-relative social categories in need of preservation, queer theory can have no truck with radical feminism, because radical feminism maintains a cultural institution which is usually seen as a major genesis of queer oppression.
However, insofar as radical feminism is post-Marxist, it is often deeply aligned with queer theory. Queer theory is also usually post-Marxist, as postmodernism was developed partly in response to the failures of Marxism. Queer advocacy often adopts radical feminist methodology, particularly consciousness raising. Many radical feminists effectively advocate queerness, in what Andrea Dworkin calls a "political, ideological, and strategic confrontation with the sex-class system," as a necessary part of feminism. Please consider what radical feminists and queer advocates have historically said about the following topics common to both:

Family Reform:
RadFem: "So paternal right replaces maternal right: transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed." (De Beauvoir, Second Sex) "Patching up with band-aids the casualties of the aborted feminist revolution, it [Freudianism] succeeded in quieting the immense social unrest and role confusion that followed in the wake of the first attack on the rigid patriarchal family." (Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 70).
Queer: "The family has become the locus of retention and resonance of all the social determinations. It falls to the reactionary investment of the capitalist field to apply all the social images to the simulcra of the restricted family, with the result that, wherever one turns, one no longer finds anything but father-mother - this Oedipal filth that sticks to our skin." (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 269)
Pansexuality:
RadFem: "[Through feminist revolution] A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality - Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 11)
Queer: "When queerness began to mean little more than 'pansexual activist', Bash Back! became a liberal social scene rather than a space from which to attack, which i think had been the whole point of bashing back all along." (Interview with Not Yr Cister Press, Queer Ultraviolence: Bash Back! Anthology, pg. 385)
Degendered Gestation:
RadFem: "Scientific advances which threaten to further weaken or sever altogether the connection between sex and reproduction have scarcely been realized culturally. That the scientific revolution has had virtually no effect on feminism only illustrates the political nature of the problem: the goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 31)
Queer: "The gender of gestating is ambiguous. I am not talking about pregnancy’s deepening of one’s voice, its carpeting of one’s legs in bristly hair, or even about the ancient Greek belief that it was an analogue of men’s duty to die in battle if called upon. I am not even thinking of the heterogeneity of those who gestate. Rather, in a context where political economists are talking constantly of “the feminization of labor,” it seems to me that the economic gendering of the work itself—gestating is work, as Merve Emre says—is not as clear-cut as it would appear." (Sophie Lewis, All Reproduction is Assisted)
Institutional Debinarization:
RadFem: "[A]ll forms of sexual interaction which are directly rooted in the multisexual nature of people must be part of the fabric of human life, accepted into the lexicon of human possibility, integrated into the forms of human community. By redefining human sexuality, or by defining it correctly, we can transform human relation­ship and the institutions which seek to control that rela­tionship. Sex as the power dynamic between men and women, its primary form sadomasochism, is what we know now. Sex as community between humans, our shared humanity, is the world we must build." (Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, pg. 183)
Queer: "'Boy' and 'girl' do not tell the genital truth that Zippora knows. Quite the opposite: instead of describing her baby’s sex, these words socially enact the sex they name... Intersexuality robs 'boy' and 'girl' of referents, but it is unclear how far this intersexed scenario differs from any other gendered encounter... I suggest the claim that sex is performative must operate constatively in order to be politically effective. One has to say that performativity is the real, scientiŽc truth of sex in order to argue that intersex surgery, which claims to treat sex as a constative, is futile constructivism." (Iain Morland, Is Intersexuality Real?)

I hope these few quotations are enough to demonstrate that queer theory and radical feminist theory are deeply interwoven, and the former is in many ways a continuation of the latter.
I have noticed debate here seems quite one-sided, but I think that I could contribute something to fix what I see as a pretty egregious misrepresentation issue. I know this primer wasn't exactly structured for debate, but I can try to answer any questions below. If you read this all, thanks!

I'm interested in what I've heard of Judith Butler's theory of performativity, but I've tried to read some of the books by her I've seen recommended (namely, Gender Trouble), but I've found it really dense and difficult to understand (I didn't pick up on some of her main points in the first chapter until my third or so read of it). Is there any other writings that talk about her theories (or related theories) which are more accessible?

So I hold a bachelor in Philosophy myself and have a friend who have recently asked me a bunch about Judith Butlers theory of gender performance. I am happy to explain but I would also like to be able to recommend some reading material. I thought it was fun to read the passages in the book where she comments on eg Hegel, Lacan or Kristeva but I don't think my friend is very interested in this. Therefore I am interested in hearing if any of you guys know of any introductions or easy digest editions of Gender Trouble that don't dumb the book down too much but also is accessible without a formal education or spending absurd amounts of time researching her sources.
TLDR; do you have any recommendations for introductions to Gender Trouble that are accessible for people who aren't very into Philosophy in general?

I'm using a throwaway.
I do not know the structure this post will take, but the theme is that basically I am someone sympathetic to conservative and reactionary political opinion (including having favourable opinions of Donald Trump), who understandably seems to think I have gotten something "missing" about the current political zeitgeist, and I'm trying to figure out what.
A few of facts about my life, to contextualise things:

• I am a a mid-20s-year-old graduate living in the UK with a Sociology degree.
• I have lived my entire life, prior to and after university, in a city that is >90% "White British" (according to census data). I identify now as bisexual - having originally identified as homosexual for the first 7 or so years of my coming out. I live in a working-class nuclear family - me, my mother and father, a younger brother, and a disabled half-sister. brother and half-sister are left-leaning, whereas my parents (being a bit older) are more traditionalist, but (I would argue) more politically confused (they are both Old Labour supporting, and yet also fans of Margaret Thatcher).
• I entered university in 2014 with far-left sympathies, and during my degree found my views move further rightward. My university studies landed right in the middle of both Brexit and the Trump election - and, during both, individual lecturers on my degree chose lecture sessions to not teach the syllabus, and have a lecture session to "just talk about" the results and process what had occurred. I recall at the time, already beginning my change in political position, I viewed such lectures as a waste of my student funding (university courses here being funded for £9000 per annum from student loans).
• I was raised secular, but post-university I even joined an evangelical church for a brief time, because I considered that their social positions aligned with my sympathies at the time.
• My earliest political awareness was around the time of Gordon Brown.

During my degree, I read a lot of sources around social theory, and found it difficult to apply to my own understanding of my lived experiences. I found a lot of other social theorists (ones who I would consider more conservative) were left off the syllabus - some even openly addressed, with statements like (as I recall from one lecture) "Don't reference them, they aren't respected in European Sociology, even if they are in American Sociology" (I cannot recall who the figure was - it may have been someone like Charles Murray or Samuel Huntingdon, or it may have been one of the functionalists like Talcott Parsons or Emile Durkheim; I only recall it being a prominent name in the field, and one that surprised me when they were announced).
Having an interest in online privacy, I did my university dissertation on a topic of "self-censorship" in a social media context. I made use of sources such as Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's book "The Spiral of Silence" and Timur Kuran's book "Private Truths, Public Lies". I performed two-hour-long interviews - albeit, limited to university students - and, of the sample I had, the common experience I found that repeatedly came up was that of conservative students feeling uncomfortable expressing their views online, as well as in-person. In spite of other literature I had read, the women, ethnic minorities and LGBT people I interviewed did not provide any information directly related to feeling any sort of self-censoriousness as a result of their particular identity. This only reinforced the conservative political sentiments I had previously been coming to terms with, and led to my scepticism of the sources I was taught on the syllabus.
The syllabus has a lot of material that I found particularly egregious. There was an article referencing race, that took a quote by Michael Jackson and discussed him as being an expert on race issues. Another article was directly on fat pride, discussing the author feeling judged in a shop for their weight, imploring the obese (which I would fit into the BMI category of) to declare "Yes, I am a Fatso!". We also read sources around race and post-colonialism (Edward Said's "Orientalism", Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" and "Black Skin, White Masks"), feminist theory (Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" and Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble"), and queer theory (Jeffrey Week's "Sexuality"). None of these were materials I could understand, in large part because they had no relevance to anything I was experiencing in my daily life, nor had any relevance to the experience of my immediate social network - rather, it seemed so completely detached to me, that I could only interpret the things described as either historical artefacts or simply things that the author had themselves constructed.

• On critical race theory, the only BME person I knew and could discuss these things with was a student from Hong Kong who became my best friend on the course. He was a free-market libertarian, and similarly so no relation between what he was reading and his own life experiences. As diverse as the university I was at was, I can only recall perhaps two or three ethnic minorities on the course, of which this person was one.
• On feminist theory, it did not match with what I witnessed in my daily life at all, even if I looked at economic data. Of all the women I knew in my social network - i.e. family and friends' families - almost all were employed, and in many cases seemed to be in higher-status positions than their husbands. Of the ones I knew well enough to ask about the issues, by all means some worked part-time but by choice and often at a higher rate of pay than their husbands. I would discuss the sources I had read with them, and got a response dissonant to what I was reading. These were all, given my background, working-class people. Later on, my own anecdotal experiences have involved working in three separate workplaces where women have made up all positions of upper management, and the majority (or all, in some cases) of lower management positions. Although my jobs to date have all been low-status, this is still very discordant from what I was taught.
• On queer theory, my own experience provided no correlation to what I was reading. I came out at a young age to my Catholic mother, and received acceptance. I received no negative repercussions from anyone in my family. I joined a local LGBT youth group in my teenage years, but of the people I had met, none had troubled backgrounds that I was aware of. During my time at university, I also dated a trans man (AFAB) for two years, who I bounced ideas off of (e.g. Judith Butler). While they were radically left-leaning, they simply did not relate to the source material I was presenting to them either. My only time experiencing abuse was once, after years of holding partners' hands in public without response, one guy took offence one time and expressed verbal disapproval.

On the more economic topics, I simply became convinced of other positions. Brexit and Trump pushed me over the edge, to believing that the Marxist interpretation of class was lacking - that, rather than representing working-class sentiment, it was intellectuals trying to predict what the working-classes should want for themselves while being themselves separated (whether that be in terms of educational capital, or social capital - to use Bourdieu's view of different types of capitals) from the working-classes themselves. The exceptions sympathetic to anything left of social democracy in the UK, funnily, are mostly that of working-class (and upper-class, as I met in many cases) socially mobile students aspiring for or attending university but with little working experience, much like the background I was.
So, in regards to Trump and Brexit, all I see is largely the identified "privileged" from my degree - white, cis, straight celebrities etc. - being the spokespeople, and then come to learn of more conservative voices from minority communities (Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Milo Yiannopolous, Peter Thiel etc.) be condemned. I live in a society where the two first woman Prime Ministers - Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May - are not applauded by feminists as progress because they are the wrong type of women; a society where the death of the first woman Prime Minister after a long battle with dementia are celebrated by "progressives" with the song "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead". When I looked on social media - Reddit (e.g. reclassified), Facebook, Twitter - it's not discussions of civil rights that see people hedging their words over, or that I see there being a risk of banning over. I saw all this, even from my far-left bubble, and thought "There is something wrong here", and those were the sorts of things that pushed me right.
However, long story, but I read Reddit and see that my background and views are not the background and views of the majority. I read these sources and see nothing of value; while others read these sources and can empathize with them. I see people here daily becoming more and more leftward, and I find myself understanding them less and less (despite being of a view that I myself once held). What am I missing?

(Pasted from the New Statesman, so as not to give that rag any clicks.)
(Emphasis Mine)
INTRO:
Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler*, now 64, published a book that revolutionised popular attitudes on gender. Gender Trouble, the work she is perhaps best known for, introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define “the category of women” and, as a consequence, who it is that feminism purports to fight for. Today, it is a foundational text on any gender studies reading list, and its arguments have long crossed over from the academy to popular culture.
In the three decades since Gender Trouble was published, the world has changed beyond recognition. In 2014, TIME declared a “Transgender Tipping Point”. Butler herself has moved on from that earlier work, writing widely on culture and politics. But disagreements over biological essentialism remain, as evidenced by the tensions over trans rights within the feminist movement.
How does Butler, who is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, see this debate today? And does she see a way to break the impasse? Butler recently exchanged emails with the New Statesman about this issue. The exchange has been edited.
***
Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that "contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics?
Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.
AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence.
JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.
AF: I want to challenge you on the term “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur.
JB: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.
AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments?
JB: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time.
We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.
AF: In Gender Trouble you asked whether, by seeking to represent a particular idea of women, feminists participate in the same dynamics of oppression and heteronormativity that they are trying to shift. In the light of the bitter arguments playing out within feminism now, does the same still apply?
JB: As I remember the argument in Gender Trouble (written more than 30 years ago), the point was rather different. First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?
I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.
Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way.
AF: How much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online?
JB: I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms.
AF: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling?
JB: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.
AF: You weren't a signatory to the open letter on “cancel culture” in Harper’s this summer, but did its arguments resonate with you?
JB: I have mixed feelings about that letter. On the one hand, I am an educator and writer and believe in slow and thoughtful debate. I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life. If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should, summarise that person. We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently.
On the other hand, some of those signatories were taking aim at Black Lives Matter as if the loud and public opposition to racism were itself uncivilised behaviour. Some of them have opposed legal rights for Palestine. Others have [allegedly] committed sexual harassment. And yet others do not wish to be challenged on their racism. Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones. So I am not in favour of neutralising the strong political demands for justice on the part of subjugated people. When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud.
AF: This year, you published, The Force of Nonviolence. Does the idea of “radical equality”, which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement?
JB: My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity.
AF: You have spoken about the backlash against “gender ideology”, and wrote an essay for the New Statesman about it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights?
JB: It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.
AF: What do you think would break this impasse in feminism over trans rights? What would lead to a more constructive debate?
JB: I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.
\Judith Butler goes by she or they*
***
https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

Intro
Having dealt with a large portion of TD's season 2 episode 1 lit. and philo. allusions in my previous post, I fear this one may disappoint people. Laying what I hope was a thick and sound groundwork could very well ensure this post looks measly in comparison. But I shall try my best.
Please add your allusions in comments. "Everyone has one option if they want it bad enough." - Ray
Here, I must piggy back off of Jean Paul Sartre and introduce his intrepid frenemy, Albert Camus.
Camus was a Algerian/French novelist and somewhat of a philosopher in the early-mid 1900s who many will lump into one large basket labeled 'Existentialism' both Camus and JPS and call it a day. This is not entirely accurate for Camus thought himself of more of an absurdist than an existentialist.
Rays words can find quite a warm welcome in An Absurd Reasoning, the beginning of Camus's philosophical contribution, The Myth of Sisyphus. Here, Camus states that every person during every day must face the question of suicide. Every morning, Camus says half-jokingly, one ought to ask oneself 'Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?' Though perhaps a bit nonchalant to many of us, the question makes sense from an absurdist and existentialist point of view.
Remember what we spoke of last week: Existentialism is the idea that you always have a choice, you always have the idea to enact radical freedom. Many people would disagree, saying that their situation limits them from avenue A, B, or C. Both Camus and Sartre would tell them that they could always commit suicide if there were really no other options.
For Camus and Sartre, life ought to be lived purposefully. No one ought to tumbleweed through the existence. If one does, Camus proposes, one is not truly living and may as well commit suicide.
Here, Ray recognizes that his primary motivation for living could very likely be taken from him. This is discussed further below.
The Water Stain
Perhaps a bit too obvious to include here, but the water stain, two browned soiled egg shapes morphing through the ceiling, are clearly Caspere’s eyes. I'd say that it could very well be the trope of the blind prophet, though, interestingly, this is a prophet from beyond the grave. In much of literature, blind characters represent those with special knowledge. Their eyesight limited, they gain the ability to see into another world. Perhaps this means that Frank’s fate will lead in a similar path to Caspere’s.
The image also put me in mind of a Rorschach test, small blots of ink which are used to gather information about one’s mental processes from psychologists. When Frank looks into those eyes, he sees his past connect with his future (I don’t want to be the one to say that time is a flat circle but....).
The Closet's State of Nature
This may be a little of a stretch, I realize, but I think there may be an insight into how Frank thinks.
In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes proposed that the natural state of the world is so horrific that one would give up nearly the entirety of one's freedom in order to remain safe. Hobbes hypothesized a government, the Leviathan, which would essentially enslave you but protect you from being killed or starving. He argued that submitting to this creature may seem insane but it would be better than being left to the wiles of the natural world.
Ultimately, Hobbes's Leviathan is an argument for the positive attributes of government. While freedom may be nice, if all it gets is pain and terror, it may be worth giving some of it up.
If we know anything about NicPizz, it’s that he does not implicitly trust a uniform or a desk. Notice how many people who are interviewed behind desks are upfront or honest. Billy Tuttle in s1; the mayor in s02e02. NicPizz seems to be very wary of bureaucratic apathy and institutionalized authority in general.
I think s1 and to a larger degree this season deal with government more than may meet the eye. Obviously, the corruption in s1 is directly referring to government. But I think the characters we are given are the results of people who realize that the institutions – the social contract – has failed them. (This will be discussed later with Ray’s “The world we deserve” comment.)
Freud's Mom Is On the Prowl
Many know about the Oedipus complex due to Freud. Every boy has a sexual fascination with his mother due to her intimacy raising him. This is compounded by the hatred of his father since his father is the one who gets the ultimate satisfaction from his mother that he so craves.
What we have with Paul and his mother is an active Jocasta moment. Jocasta was Oedipus’s mother in Oedipus Rex. She was not actively pursuing her son (though there have been stagings of the play where this was the case). Paul’s mother seems to be actively looking for some sort of sexual gratification from him. There are clearly some fishy motives in her asking him to stay for a Clint movie. I’m afraid I don’t fully understand what the short scene of him in his bedroom as we hear Eastwood’s voice entails.
Ray Velcoro- The Cuckold of our Age
If you watch the interaction between Ray and his ex-wife, you will notice that his anger – “I will burn this fucking city to the ground” – follows her threat for sole custody. However, the tone shifts when she mentions a paternity test. Farrell’s caterpillar eyebrows rise and slope sharply and it seems someone has sucked the oxygen from him.
Ray’s fear is the fear of the cuckold. In literature, there is a long tradition of fearing a cuckold. It stems from the fact that, should one’s wife have another man’s child, you may be raising, and willing, your riches to another man’s kid. The ultimate horror!
The traditional symbol of the cuckold is the bull, especially the bull-horn. Really, depending on the culture, anything with horns could work, but in Europe, it is primarily the bull-horn. Wasn’t one of the masks at Caspere’s apartment, seen right before Ray was shot, a bull? Happenstance?
There is actually a number of very interesting evolutionary psychological explanations for cuckolding. I’d check out Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene on this.
But I think the more illuminating thing this interaction shows is the gender dynamic of Ray’s character.
Childhood/parenting is much stronger in this season than even the last. Frank desperately wants to have children and give them an inheritance. Ani’s troubles with her father and mother. Paul’s clearly fucked up parental situation….
Gender
The Fag at the Bank
It seems NicPizz is actively trying to push against those who brought up the very male-dominated world of the first season. One way of doing this is by having more female characters central to the plot who are more than just avenues for Woody’s problems.
NicPizz seems to be asking questions about masculinity just as much as he is femininity.(Note: I recognize that these are loaded words and people will view them differently.)
I want to bring in Judith Butler’s idea of gender performativity. To Butler, and most contemporary theorists, gender is a construct rather than a concrete entity. She has argued that gender is simply a story that the collective has agreed upon and has re-enacted enough that it seems true. (If you’ve not encountered Nietzsche’s idea of knowledge as forgotten truth, you should.) The sheer force of this repetition carries great weight, so much that any deviation from the performance is often met with great resistance.
Though Butler is primarily concerned with women in her scholarship, many of her theories apply to men as well. What about “being a man” is socially and culturally engineered and what is “natural” (recognizing the difficulty of that word as well)? Personally, this strikes a chord. I grew up in South Texas as a Broadway-loving, defensive linebacker.
However, this is not the sum-total of Butler’s scholarship on the issue. What is described above is gender performance, what Butler deals with is gender performativity. Performance is the act of self-representation, it is how you show yourself to be. Performativity is the discussion of how one arrives at the ideas of gender identity through actions, the wrestling with performance until one finds an answer. Butler uses drag for this purpose. Many (not all) who dress in drag often (not always) do not adopt the nuances of female gender representation. Rather, they dress in ways that demonstrate an understanding and (though some disagree) acceptance of traditional gender binaries.
If anyone is more versed in Butler than I, please chime in to correct anything.
I think that, to a degree, we see a number of the characters engage in performativity. Paul does the macho “I’m-not-gay” thing with the laziest detective in California. I’m sure that something deeper is going on, because that “I’m-gay-but-nobody-can-know” thing is very Glee-like.
Bleeding Out
I’m a bit hesitant to discuss Ani only because I don’t feel NicPizz has flesher her out enough to have a full reading of her character in regards to gender.
Any Natural Law
Ray’s demonstration of performance/performativity seems to be in that interaction with his ex. We learn that he used to be a good man, used to be decent, a good parent, a good husband. But the something (the cuckold detailed above) changed him. Now, he seems driven by something else, as he put it “by natural law.” But what, really, is that natural law? Who did it benefit? As his ex says “You didn’t do it for me.”
Ray’s cuckolding and subsequent decline could very well be the result of his perceived duties as a man. Obviously, these are not the sole reasons, but they do seem to contribute and a theorist’s reading of the show would be remiss not to include it.
The Crystalized Vagina
I saw a post somewhere regarding the crystal on the therapist’s desk and how it was a strongly vaginal image, a la Georgia O’Keefe. Can't seem to find it now. Please link!
We get the world we deserve
This may be the most interesting line in the season. I discussed it a bit last week but I’m having trouble letting it rest. What exactly does Ray mean by this? I’m afraid we’ll have to talk about definitions for a moment. I’m terribly sorry if this is boring.
Often, people will define justice as “getting what you deserve.” When we say “justice has been done”, what we mean is that there was equal punishment (or pay) for the crime (or good deed).
However, when Ray says “We get what we deserve,” it is not a triumphant message. What we deserve, Ray seems to say, is this exact hell we are living.
This makes me question Ray’s feelings about cosmic justice. If Ray believes in God, one would presume that it’d be a God who would not be gracious or merciful, but would be whole heartedly just – paying out in equal measure that which is paid in. This definitely does not seem like the Judeo-Christian conception of God. Perhaps something more like karma could describe this attitude. Any negative thing taking place in your life is not an unplanned mistake but rather the payment for something that you did which harmed others.
Again, I feel as though this is somewhat Dostoevskian. However, one large difference does arise. From where Ray stands now, there seems to be no way out, no redemption – we are here because we deserve to be here and it’s time we learned to live in that – whereas FyDo would say that there is still salvation somewhere, still a level of hope that light will buckshot through the darkness and make things right. To Ray, things are already “right”. Justice has already been served.
The Raven
Much has been made of the bird-man. I’ll link to this post discussing the origin of the mask. However, I’m not sure I buy that this is what NicPizz is going for, only because the wiki link explicitly states that this group of Native Indians were located in Canada, not in California. Maybe someone else can make it fit.
I will say, however, as I believe I mentioned last week, that the raven is a symbol of impending death. For some of the characters in TD, they don’t have to wait very long to see just how impending it is.
All kinds of truth
At one point, during Ray and Ani’s discussion with the far-out therapist, he mentions that there are “all kinds of truth.” Ani seems immediately disgusted by this open moral relativism. I think this is key. Moral relativism is the position that there are no such thing as fixed, ultimate morals. More than just about any other, this position seems to incur the anger of many who disagree and leads often to loud and angry discussions of the issue. Some moral relativists say that morality is culturally determined; their opponents inevitably say that this means Hitler wasn’t wrong in the eyes of the Nazis and nobody else had any justification to say he was wrong either (If you cannot tell, I’m not very sympathetic with that reply).
Moral relativists are not, however, likely to throw up their hands and say “Anything goes! Rape and murder are fine!” Rather, sophisticated moral relativists would, like the Duke philosopher Owen Flanagan, say that morality is better understood as ethics and ethics as the ecology of human interaction. Ecology studies the way in which ecosystems are sustained and bring about the birth and death of species. In an ethical analog, one can describe the particular circumstances in which humanity prospers and compare that circumstance to another where humanity prospers less. Ecologically, the former would be superior. One does not necessarily need a God to determine that.
However, the therapist seems to be more along the lines of a non-philosopher’s view of a post-modernist, one who denies the existent of many forms of absolute truth. The therapist appears to suggest that any upbringing is just as good as the next.
Ani’s sharp rebuttal is a sign of her moral views. As discussed last week, her knife-fighting and following of the Shinjo, a very strict moral code, separate her from the relativist. She has a clearly defined idea of right and wrong and she knows what both are and she knows that what she was raised with was wrong.
Was going to include a speculative post about "The Good People" but it was deleted. Nevertheless, we know that they were an odd group.
Confirmed
Look closely behind the therapist’s head when he’s in close-up. You see a range of books. Four to be exact. Look closely. What is the only one that is visible? The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama. ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED!!!
I'll edit as things are posted below.
Hope this was okay.
Best.

I've just recently been reminded that I really need to read Judith Butler's work on gender performativity. Should I start with Gender Trouble, or is there a better place to begin?

So I've read Gender Trouble and feel that I have an alright understanding of her theory of performativity, however I have a question about gender itself. I know that Butler distinguishes performativity from performance, and she concludes that their exists no pre gendered self outside of discourse (i.e. There is no gender core and instead gender is constituted through the use of performatives). I find this compelling for a number of reasons however I ran into a problem. A lot of people around me and even more so on the internet describe their gender (particularly when talking about gender dysphoria) as a feeling on the inside. People say they are born female but really "feel like a man" or vice versa. What I want to know is does Judith Butler ever address these feelings that people have of being a specific gender? It seems to contradict her idea of performativity if one has a gendered self that is responsible for the expressions.

The advent of third-wave feminism during the 1990s served as a catalyst for transgender rights, of which several authors and activists were instrumental:
Judith Butler, a lesbian feminist theorist and philosopher, published "Gender Trouble" in 1990, a groundbreaking book on the performative nature of gender that served as the cornerstone to queer theory and is still essential reading in gender studies courses. In her followup book, "Bodies that Matter" she futher expands on her critique of gender and sexuality as reinforced through socialization, serving to perpetuate male domination of women and the intersectional oppression of LGBTQ people.
Holly Boswell, a genderqueer spiritual leader, first proposed the word "transgender" in her 1991 article "The Transgender Alternative", arguing that transgender is a term that "encompasses the whole spectrum" of gender diversity, that lumps together rather than splits apart the many subgroups. She also insisted that sex-reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite to being transgender. Holly designed the transgender symbol in 1993, a composite of Mars and Venus to symbolize gender diversity.
Leslie Feinberg, a butch lesbian, was a chief architect of the modern transgender rights movement. In the spirit of Holly Bowswell, she declared "transgender" to be a broadly inclusive umbrella for drag performers, crossdressers, femmes, butches, and transsexuals in her 1992 manifesto, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come". Leslie also coined the initialism "GLBT" for use in advocacy around this time, as organizations and media outlets were using the phrase "gay and lesbian".
Riki Anne Wilchins, a genderqueer civil rights activist and gender theorist, created the first national transgender lobbying group, GenderPAC in 1995. That same year she coined the word "GenderQueer" to describe people that socially or politically subvert the traditional binary concepts of gender, whether in identity or expression. She also conducted the first U.S. survey of anti-transgender bias. And she authored the book "Read My Lips", calling for an end to society's harmful attitudes of gender.
Throughout the 1990s, countless other trailblazers like Monica Helms and Kate Bornstein latched onto the novel term "transgender" as a catchall descriptor for any and all people that "transcended" traditional notions of gender in mainstream society, whether part time or full time, through identity or presentation or surgery.
Of course, we can go further back to spotlight those that laid the groundwork for trans activism:
Lee Brewster, a drag queen and civil rights activist founded the nation's first transgender advocacy organization in 1970, Queens Liberation Front. The organization, which successfully overturned NYC's ban on crossdressing, was represented by Lee Brewster, Bunny Eisenhower (a heterosexual transvestite), Barbarella (a transsexual woman), and Kaye Gibbons (a homosexual crossdresser).
Sylvia Rivera, an agender sex worker and civil rights activist founded the nation's second transgender advocacy organization in 1971, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and hosted a communal shelter for New York City's homeless street queens. Sylvia regularly fought for equal representation of drag queens, sex workers, butches, and femmes within broader gay and lesbian activism.
Marsha P Johnson, a gay transvestite, drag queen and sex worker, co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera in 1971. She chose her drag name to signify the masculine-and-feminine components of her persona with "P" meaning "pay it no mind". While working the streets of NYC, she became known as a drag mother, for her mentoring of other crossdressers and street queens including Sylvia Rivera.
Lou Sullivan, a gay transsexual man and civil rights activist served as a volunteer counselor for gender questioning AFAB people. In 1986 he co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society and created the first support agency for trans men, FTM. He also published "Information for the FTM transsexual and crossdresser" which became the definitive resource for trans men of the era.

Feminism is a collection of movements and ideologies aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights for women.
Liberal feminism:

• primarily focuses on women’s ability to show and maintain their equality through their own actions and choices.
  
• argues that our society holds the false belief that women are, by nature, less intellectually and physically capable than men, it tends to discriminate against women in the academy, the forum, and the marketplace. Liberal feminists believe that “female subordination is rooted in a set of customary and legal constraints that blocks women’s entrance to and success in the so-called public world” and they work hard to emphasize the equality of men and women through political and legal reform
  

Terms:

• procedural accounts of personal autonomy: in order for women to enjoy personal autonomy, they should have a broad range of autonomy-enabling conditions, such as: being free of violence and the threat of violence, being free of the limits set by paternalistic and moralistic laws, having access to options

Ecofeminism

• connects the exploitation and domination of women with that of the environment; ecofeminism argues that there is a connection between women and nature that comes from their shared history of oppression by a patriarchal Western society.

Terms:

• deep ecology: the philosophy that environmental problems stem from a human-centered ideological position. They can only be solved when the needs of nature are put first or on the same level as human needs.
  
• biocentrism and ecocentrism: The act of putting nature's needs first or alongside human needs. Recommended authors: Françoise d'Eaubonne, Vandana Shiva, Maria Mies
  

Transfeminism

• a category of feminism, most often known for the application of transgender discourses to feminist discourses, and of feminist beliefs to transgender discourse".
  
• often criticizes the ideas of a universal sisterhood - instead, transfeminists view gender as a multifaceted set of diverse intrinsic and social qualities. For example, there are trans/cis men/women who express themselves in an unusually feminine or masculine way. Because this strongly affects how the person experiences their gender, and also their standing within patriarchy, transfeminists would argue that masculine/feminine expression is an important concept worthy of feminist inquiry, to be compared and contrasted with both birth sex and gender identity.
  

Anarcha-feminism

• views patriarchy as a manifestation of involuntary coercive hierarchy that should be replaced by decentralized voluntary association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class struggle, and the anarchist struggle against the state. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice-versa.
  
• an important aspect is its opposition to traditional concepts of family, education and gender roles; the institution of marriage is one of the most widely opposed.
  

Terms:

• free love: a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage. Its initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery. It claimed that such issues were the concern of the people involved, and no one else

Black feminism

• argues that sexism, class oppression, and racism are inextricably bound together. The way these relate to each other is called intersectionality. Forms of feminism that strive to overcome sexism and class oppression but ignore race can discriminate against many people, including women, through racial bias. Black feminist theory has argued that black women are positioned with in structures of power in fundamentally different ways than white women. Black feminist organizations emerged during the 1970s and face many difficulties from both the white feminist and black nationalist political organizations they were confronting. These women fought against suppression from the larger movements in which many of its members came from.

Terms:

• intersectionality: examining how various biological, social and cultural categories such as gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, and other axes of identity interact on multiple and often simultaneous levels, contributing to systematic social inequality. Intersectionality holds that the classical conceptualizations of oppression within society, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and religion-based bigotry, do not act independently of one another; instead, these forms of oppression interrelate, creating a system of oppression that reflects the "intersection" of multiple forms of discrimination.
  
• matrix of domination: a sociological paradigm that explains issues of oppression that deal with race, class, and gender, which, though recognized as different social classifications, are all interconnected. As an example: many argue that Colin Powell’s success (as one Black man out of millions) is proof that discrimination based on race has been, or is close to being, eradicated in the United States – however, proponents of the theory of the matrix of domination would argue that this overlooks issues of social class, gender, and age, Powell being an upper class, middle-aged/elderly male.
  

Postcolonial feminism

• through analysis of entrenched power structures in formerly colonized nations, postcolonial feminism explains how economic and political institutions and social practices in those nations often oppress and marginalize women. In addition, it demonstrates how women around the globe struggle for equality and independence for themselves, their families, and their nations.
  
• often referred to as Third World feminism centers around the idea that racism, colonialism, and the long lasting effects (economic, political, and cultural) of colonialism in the postcolonial setting, are inextricably bound up with the unique gendered realities of non-white,and non-Western women. Postcolonial feminists criticize Western feminists because they have a history of universalizing women's issues, and their discourses are often misunderstood to represent women globally.
  
• thus, one of the central ideas in postcolonial feminism is that by using the term 'woman' as a universal group, they are then only defined by their gender and not by social classes and ethnic identities. Also, it is believed by postcolonial feminists that mainstream Western feminists ignored the voices of non-white, non-western women for many years, thus creating resentment from feminists in developing nations.
  
• postcolonial feminists have had strong ties with black feminists because colonialism usually contains themes of racism. Both groups have struggled for recognition, not only by men in their own culture, but also by Western feminists.
  

Multiracial feminism

• refers to the activist and scholarly work conducted by women of color and anti-racist white allies to promote race, class, and gender equality. In comparison to the highly documented second-wave white, middle-class feminism, which centered on abolishing patriarchy and privileged patriarchy as an oppression over all others, women of color feminism resists separating oppression and insists on recognizing the intersectionality of race, class, and gender oppression.

Radical feminism

• focuses on the theory of patriarchy as a system of power that organizes society into a complex of relationships based on the assertion that male supremacy oppresses women. Radical feminism aims to challenge and overthrow patriarchy by opposing standard gender roles and oppression of women and calls for a radical reordering of society.
  
• locates the root cause of women's oppression in patriarchal gender relations, as opposed to legal systems (as in liberal feminism) or class conflict (as in socialist feminism and Marxist feminism)
  

Socialist feminism

• argues that liberation can only be achieved by working to end both the economic and cultural sources of women's oppression.
  
• broadens Marxist feminism's argument for the role of capitalism in the oppression of women (and rejects the idea that class and class struggle are the only defining elements of history and economic development) and radical feminism's theory of the role of gender and the patriarchy.
  
• reject radical feminism’s main claim that patriarchy the only or primary source of oppression of women and assert that women are unable to be free due to their financial dependence on males in society. Women are subjects to the male rulers in capitalism due to an uneven balance in wealth. They see economic dependence as the driving force of women’s subjugation to men. Further, socialist feminists see women’s liberation as a necessary part of larger quest for social, economic and political justice.
  

Postmodern feminism

• incorporates postmodern and post-structuralist theory, and thus sees itself as moving beyond the modernist polarities of liberal feminism and radical feminism
  
• has been described as the ultimate acceptor of diversity: “multiple truths, multiple roles, multiple realities are part of its focus. There is a rejectance of an essential nature of women, of one-way to be a woman. Poststructural feminism offers a useful philosophy for diversity in feminism because of its acceptance of multiple truths and rejection of essentialism”
  

Judith Butler on Gender performativity:

• sees gender as an act that has been rehearsed, much like a script, and we, as the actors make the script a reality through repetition, thus coming to perform in the mode of belief.
  
• the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies”
  
• sees gender not as an expression of what one is, rather as something that one does. Furthermore, she sees it not as a social imposition on a gender neutral body, but rather as a mode of "self-making" through which subjects become socially intelligible. According to Butler’s theory, homosexuality and heterosexuality are not fixed categories. A person is merely in a condition of “doing straightness” or “doing queerness”
  

Recommended authors: Mary Joe Frug, Judith Butler, Kate Bornstein
Further reading: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, A Postmodern Feminist Legal Manifesto
Marxist feminism

• focuses on the social institutions of private property and capitalism to explain and criticize gender inequality and oppression.
  
• posits that private property gives rise to economic inequality, dependence, political and domestic struggle between the sexes, and is the root of women's oppression in the current social context.
  

Chicana feminism

• analyzes the historical, social, political, and economic roles of Mexican American, Chicana, and Hispanic women in the United States

Post-structural feminism

• emphasizes "the contingent and discursive nature of all identities",[1] and in particular the social construction of gendered subjectivities
  
• resists universalist or normalizing conceptions of women as a group or altogether dismiss the category “woman”. They share with psychoanalytic feminists a skepticism about phallogocentric language and social structures, as well as the French feminist rejection of metanarrative explanations and prescriptive norms for gender and sexuality.
  

French feminism

• is distinguished by an approach which is more philosophical and literary. Its writings tend to be effusive and metaphorical being less concerned with political doctrine and generally focused on theories of "the body". The term includes writers who are not French, but who have worked substantially in France and the French tradition.
  
• Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis focuses on the social construction of Woman as the Other, this de Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. She argues that women have historically been considered deviant and abnormal, and contends that even Mary Wollstonecraft considered men to be the ideal toward which women should aspire. De Beauvoir argues that for feminism to move forward, this attitude must be set aside.
  

Transnational feminism

• attentive to intersections among nationhood, race, gender, sexuality and economic exploitation on a world scale, in the context of emergent global capitalism.
  
• inquires in to the social, political and economic conditions comprising imperialism; their connections to colonialism and nationalism; the role of gender, the state, race, class, and sexuality in the organization of resistance to hegemonies in the making and unmaking of nation and nation-state.
  
• transnational feminist practice is attentive to feminism as both a liberatory formation and one with longstanding ties to colonialism, racism and imperialism. As such, it resists utopic ideas about "global sisterhood" while simultaneously working to lay the groundwork for more productive and equitable social relations among women across borders and cultural contexts.
  

Atheist Feminism

• is a movement that advocates the Feminism within atheism. Atheist feminists also oppose religion as a main source of female oppression and inequality, believing that the majority of the religions are sexist and oppressive to women.

Feminist Theology

• is a movement found in several religions, including Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and New Thought, to reconsider the traditions, practices, scriptures, and theologies of those religions from a feminist perspective. Some of the goals of feminist theology include increasing the role of women among the clergy and religious authorities, reinterpreting male-dominated imagery and language about God, determining women's place in relation to career and motherhood, and studying images of women in the religion's sacred texts.

For more information about this topic, including sources, authors and organizations, please read our corresponding FAQ section.

Gender identity is one's personal experience of one's own gender.[1] Gender identity can correlate with assigned sex at birth, or can differ from it.[2] All societies have a set of gender categories that can serve as the basis of the formation of a person's social identity in relation to other members of society.[3] In most societies, there is a basic division between gender attributes assigned to males and females,[4] a gender binary to which most people adhere and which includes expectations of masculinity and femininity in all aspects of sex and gender: biological sex, gender identity, and gender expression.[5] In all societies, some individuals do not identify with some (or all) of the aspects of gender that are assigned to their biological sex;[6] some of those individuals are transgender, genderqueer or non-binary. There are some societies that have third gender categories.
Core gender identity is usually formed by age three.[7][8] After age three, it is extremely difficult to change,[7] and attempts to reassign it can result in gender dysphoria.[9] Both biological and social factors have been suggested to influence its formation.
Age of formation
There are several theories about how and when gender identity forms, and studying the subject is difficult because children's lack of language requires researchers to make assumptions from indirect evidence.[9] John Money suggested children might have awareness of, and attach some significance to gender, as early as 18 months to two years; Lawrence Kohlberg argues that gender identity does not form until age three.[9] It is widely agreed that core gender identity is firmly formed by age three.[7][8][9][10] At this point, children can make firm statements about their gender[9][11] and tend to choose activities and toys which are considered appropriate for their gender[9] (such as dolls and painting for girls, and tools and rough-housing for boys),[12] although they do not yet fully understand the implications of gender.[11] After age three, core gender identity is extremely difficult to change,[7][13] and attempts to reassign it can result in gender dysphoria.[9][14] Gender identity refinement extends into the fourth[13] to sixth years of age,[9][15] and continues into young adulthood.[13]
Martin and Ruble conceptualize this process of development as three stages: (1) as toddlers and preschoolers, children learn about defined characteristics, which are socialized aspects of gender; (2) around the ages of 5–7 years, identity is consolidated and becomes rigid; (3) after this "peak of rigidity," fluidity returns and socially defined gender roles relax somewhat.[16] Barbara Newmann breaks it down into four parts: (1) understanding the concept of gender, (2) learning gender role standards and stereotypes, (3) identifying with parents, and (4) forming gender preference.[11]
According to UN agencies, discussions relating to comprehensive sexuality education raise awareness of topics, such as gender and gender identity. [17]
Factors influencing formation
Nature vs. nurture Main article: Nature versus nurture Although the formation of gender identity is not completely understood, many factors have been suggested as influencing its development. In particular, the extent to which it is determined by socialization (environmental factors) versus innate (biological) factors is an ongoing debate in psychology, known as "nature versus nurture". Both factors are thought to play a role. Biological factors that influence gender identity include pre- and post-natal hormone levels.[18] While genetic makeup also influences gender identity,[19] it does not inflexibly determine it.[20]
Social factors which may influence gender identity include ideas regarding gender roles conveyed by family, authority figures, mass media, and other influential people in a child's life.[21] When children are raised by individuals who adhere to stringent gender roles, they are more likely to behave in the same way, matching their gender identity with the corresponding stereotypical gender patterns.[22] Language also plays a role: children, while learning a language, learn to separate masculine and feminine characteristics and unconsciously adjust their own behavior to these predetermined roles.[23] The social learning theory posits that children furthermore develop their gender identity through observing and imitating gender-linked behaviors, and then being rewarded or punished for behaving that way,[24] thus being shaped by the people surrounding them through trying to imitate and follow them.[25]
A well-known example in the nature versus nurture debate is the case of David Reimer, otherwise known as "John/Joan". As a baby, Reimer went through a faulty circumcision, losing his male genitalia. Psychologist John Money convinced Reimer’s parents to raise him as a girl. Reimer grew up as a girl, dressing in girl clothes and surrounded by girl toys, but did not feel like a girl. After he tried to commit suicide at age 13, he was told that he had been born with male genitalia, which he underwent surgery to reconstruct.[26] This went against Money’s hypothesis that biology had nothing to do with gender identity or human sexual orientation.[27]
Biological factors Several prenatal, biological factors, including genes and hormones, may affect gender identity.[18][28] The biochemical theory of gender identity suggests that people acquire gender identities through such factors rather than socialization.
Hormonal influences are also complex; sex-determining hormones are produced at an early stage of foetal development,[29] and if prenatal hormone levels are altered, phenotype progression may be altered as well, and the natural predisposition of the brain toward one sex may not match the genetic make-up of the fetus or its external sexual organs.[citation needed][30]
Hormones may affect differences between males' and females' verbal and spatial abilities, memory, and aggression; prenatal hormone exposure affects how the hypothalamus regulates hormone secretion later in life, with "women's sex hormones usually follow[ing] a monthly cycle [while] men’s sex hormones do not follow such a pattern."[31]
Intersex people Main article: Intersex A survey of the research literature from 1955–2000 suggests that more than one in every hundred individuals may have some intersex characteristic.[32] An intersex human or other animal is one possessing any of several variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies".[33] An intersex variation may complicate initial sex assignment[34] and that assignment may not be consistent with the child's future gender identity.[35] Reinforcing sex assignments through surgical and hormonal means may violate the individual's rights.[36][37]
A 2012 clinical review paper found that between 8.5% and 20% of people with intersex variations experienced gender dysphoria.[38] Sociological research in Australia, a country with a third 'X' sex classification, shows that 19% of people born with atypical sex characteristics selected an "X" or "other" option, while 52% are women, 23% men, and 6% unsure. At birth, 52% of persons in the study were assigned female, and 41% were assigned male.[39][40]
A study by Reiner & Gearhart provides some insight into what can happen when genetically male children with cloacal exstrophy are sexually assigned female and raised as girls,[41] according to an 'optimal gender policy' developed by John Money:[36] in a sample of 14 children, follow-up between the ages of 5 to 12 showed that 8 of them identified as boys, and all of the subjects had at least moderately male-typical attitudes and interests,[41] providing support for the argument that genetic variables affect gender identity and behavior independent of socialization.
Biological causes of transgender and transsexuality See also: Causes of transsexualism Some studies have investigated whether or not there is a link between biological variables and transgender or transsexual identity.[42][43][44] Several studies have shown that sexually dimorphic brain structures in transsexuals are shifted away from what is associated with their birth sex and towards what is associated with their preferred sex.[45][46] In particular, the bed nucleus of a stria terminalis or BSTc (a constituent of the basal ganglia of the brain which is affected by prenatal androgens) of trans women is similar to cisgender women's and unlike men's.[47][48] Similar brain structure differences have been noted between gay and heterosexual men, and between lesbian and heterosexual women.[49][50] Another study suggests that transsexuality may have a genetic component.[51]
Research suggests that the same hormones that promote differentiation of sex organs in utero also elicit puberty and influence the development of gender identity. Different amounts of these male or female sex hormones within a person can result in behavior and external genitalia that do not match up with the norm of their sex assigned at birth, and in a person acting and looking like their identified gender.[52]
Social and environmental factors In 1955, John Money proposed that gender identity was malleable and determined by whether a child was raised as male or female in early childhood.[53][54] Money's hypothesis has since been discredited,[54][55] but scholars have continued to study the effect of social factors on gender identity formation.[54] In the 1960s and 1970s, factors such as the absence of a father, a mother's wish for a daughter, or parental reinforcement patterns were suggested as influences; more recent theories suggesting that parental psychopathology might partly influence gender identity formation have received only minimal empirical evidence,[54] with a 2004 article noting that "solid evidence for the importance of postnatal social factors is lacking."[56] A 2008 study found that the parents of gender-dysphoric children showed no signs of psychopathological issues aside from mild depression in the mothers.[54][57]
It has been suggested that the attitudes of the child's parents may affect the child's gender identity, although evidence is minimal.[58]
Parental establishment of gender roles Parents who do not support gender nonconformity are more likely to have children with firmer and stricter views on gender identity and gender roles.[52] Recent literature suggests a trend towards less well-defined gender roles and identities, as studies of parental coding of toys as masculine, feminine, or neutral indicate that parents increasingly code kitchens and in some cases dolls as neutral rather than exclusively feminine.[59] However, Emily Kane found that many parents still showed negative responses to items, activities, or attributes that were considered feminine, such as domestic skills, nurturance, and empathy.[59] Research has indicated that many parents attempt to define gender for their sons in a manner that distances the sons from femininity,[59] with Kane stating that “the parental boundary maintenance work evident for sons represents a crucial obstacle limiting boys options, separating boys from girls, devaluing activities marked as feminine for both boys and girls, and thus bolstering gender inequality and heteronormativity.”[59]
Many parents form gendered expectations for their child before it is even born, after determining the child's sex through technology such as ultrasound. The child thus arrives to a gender-specific name, games, and even ambitions.[28] Once the child's sex is determined, most children are raised in accordance with it to be a man or a woman, fitting a male or female gender role defined partly by the parents.
When considering the parents' social class, lower-class families typically hold traditional gender roles, where the father works and the mother, who may only work out of financial necessity, still takes care of the household. However, middle-class "professional" couples typically negotiate the division of labor and hold an egalitarian ideology. These different views on gender from a child's parents can shape the child's understanding of gender as well as the child's development of gender.[60]
Within a study conducted by Hillary Halpern[60] it was hypothesized, and proven, that parent behaviors, rather than parent beliefs, regarding gender are better predictors for a child’s attitude on gender. It was concluded that a mother’s behavior was especially influential on a child’s assumptions of the child’s own gender. For example, mothers who practiced more traditional behaviors around their children resulted in the son displaying fewer stereotypes of male roles while the daughter displayed more stereotypes of female roles. No correlation was found between a father’s behavior and his children’s knowledge of stereotypes of their own gender. It was concluded, however, that fathers who held the belief of equality between the sexes had children, especially sons, who displayed fewer preconceptions of their opposite gender.
Gender variance and non-conformance
Main articles: Gender variance, Transgender, Transsexual, and Genderqueer See also: Cisgender Gender identity can lead to security issues among individuals that do not fit on a binary scale.[61] In some cases, a person's gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex characteristics (genitals and secondary sex characteristics), resulting in individuals dressing and/or behaving in a way which is perceived by others as outside cultural gender norms. These gender expressions may be described as gender variant, transgender, or genderqueer[62] (there is an emerging vocabulary for those who defy traditional gender identity),[63] and people who have such expressions may experience gender dysphoria (traditionally called Gender Identity Disorder or GID). Transgender individuals are greatly affected by language and gender pronouns before, during, and after their transition.[64]
In recent decades it has become possible to reassign sex surgically. Some people who experience gender dysphoria seek such medical intervention to have their physiological sex match their gender identity; others retain the genitalia they were born with (see transsexual for some of the possible reasons) but adopt a gender role that is consistent with their gender identity.
History and definitions
Definitions The terms gender identity and core gender identity were first used with their current meaning — one's personal experience of one's own gender[1][65] — sometime in the 1960s.[66][67] To this day they are usually used in that sense,[4] though a few scholars additionally use the term to refer to the sexual orientation and sexual identity categories gay, lesbian and bisexual.[68]
Early medical literature In late-19th-century medical literature, women who chose not to conform to their expected gender roles were called "inverts", and they were portrayed as having an interest in knowledge and learning, and a "dislike and sometimes incapacity for needlework". During the mid 1900s, doctors pushed for corrective therapy on such women and children, which meant that gender behaviors that were not part of the norm would be punished and changed. The aim of this therapy was to push children back to their "correct" gender roles and thereby limit the number of children who became transgender.[69]
Freud and Jung's views In 1905, Sigmund Freud presented his theory of psychosexual development in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, giving evidence that in the pregenital phase children do not distinguish between sexes, but assume both parents have the same genitalia and reproductive powers. On this basis, he argued that bisexuality was the original sexual orientation and that heterosexuality was resultant of repression during the phallic stage, at which point gender identity became ascertainable. According to Freud, during this stage, children developed an Oedipus complex where they had sexual fantasies for the parent ascribed the opposite gender and hatred for the parent ascribed the same gender, and this hatred transformed into (unconscious) transference and (conscious) identification with the hated parent who both exemplified a model to appease sexual impulses and threatened to castrate the child's power to appease sexual impulses.[24] In 1913, Carl Jung proposed the Electra complex as he both believed that bisexuality did not lie at the origin of psychic life, and that Freud did not give adequate description to the female child (Freud rejected this suggestion).[70]
1950s and 1960s During the 1950s and '60s, psychologists began studying gender development in young children, partially in an effort to understand the origins of homosexuality (which was viewed as a mental disorder at the time). In 1958, the Gender Identity Research Project was established at the UCLA Medical Center for the study of intersex and transsexual individuals. Psychoanalyst Robert Stoller generalized many of the findings of the project in his book Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity (1968). He is also credited with introducing the term gender identity to the International Psychoanalytic Congress in Stockholm, Sweden in 1963. Behavioral psychologist John Money was also instrumental in the development of early theories of gender identity. His work at Johns Hopkins Medical School's Gender Identity Clinic (established in 1965) popularized an interactionist theory of gender identity, suggesting that, up to a certain age, gender identity is relatively fluid and subject to constant negotiation. His book Man and Woman, Boy and Girl (1972) became widely used as a college textbook, although many of Money's ideas have since been challenged.[71][72]
Butler's views In the late 1980s, Judith Butler began lecturing regularly on the topic of gender identity, and in 1990, she published Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, introducing the concept of gender performativity and arguing that both sex and gender are constructed.[73]
Present views
Medical field As of 2014, there is some changing of views and new discrepancies about the best way to deal with gender nonconformity. Some members of the medical field, as well as an increasing number of parents, no longer believe in the idea of conversion therapy.[74] On the other hand, there are still a large number of clinicians who believe that there should be interventions for gender nonconforming children. They believe that stereotypical gender-specific toys and games will encourage children to behave in their traditional gender roles.[69]
Transsexual self-identified people sometimes wish to undergo physical surgery to refashion their primary sexual characteristics, secondary characteristics, or both, because they feel they will be more comfortable with different genitalia. This may involve removal of penis, testicles or breasts, or the fashioning of a penis, vagina or breasts. In the past, sex assignment surgery has been performed on infants who are born with ambiguous genitalia. However, current medical opinion is strongly against this procedure, since many adults have regretted that these decisions were made for them at birth. Today, sex reassignment surgery is performed on people who choose to have this change so that their anatomical sex will match their gender identity.[75]
In the United States, it was decided under the Affordable Care Act that health insurance exchanges would have the ability to collect demographic information on gender identity and sexual identity through optional questions, to help policymakers better recognize the needs of the LGBT community.[76]
Gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder Gender dysphoria (previously called "gender identity disorder" or GID in the DSM) is the formal diagnosis of people who experience significant dysphoria (discontent) with the sex they were assigned at birth and/or the gender roles associated with that sex:[77][78] "In gender identity disorder, there is discordance between the natal sex of one's external genitalia and the brain coding of one's gender as masculine or feminine."[66] The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (302.85) has five criteria that must be met before a diagnosis of gender identity disorder can be made, and the disorder is further subdivided into specific diagnoses based on age, for example gender identity disorder in children (for children who experience gender dysphoria).
The concept of gender identity appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in its third edition, DSM-III (1980), in the form of two psychiatric diagnoses of gender dysphoria: gender identity disorder of childhood (GIDC), and transsexualism (for adolescents and adults). The 1987 revision of the manual, the DSM-III-R, added a third diagnosis: gender identity disorder of adolescence and adulthood, nontranssexual type. This latter diagnosis was removed in the subsequent revision, DSM-IV (1994), which also collapsed GIDC and transsexualism into a new diagnosis of gender identity disorder.[79] In 2013, the DSM-5 renamed the diagnosis gender dysphoria and revised its definition.[80]
The authors of a 2005 academic paper questioned the classification of gender identity problems as a mental disorder, speculating that certain DSM revisions may have been made on a tit-for-tat basis when certain groups were pushing for the removal of homosexuality as a disorder. This remains controversial,[79] although the vast majority of today's mental health professionals follow and agree with the current DSM classifications.
International human rights law The Yogyakarta Principles, a document on the application of international human rights law, provide in the preamble a definition of gender identity as each person's deeply felt internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond with the sex assigned at birth, including the person's sense of the body (which may involve, if freely chosen, modification of bodily appearance or function by medical, surgical or other means) and other experience of gender, including dress, speech and mannerism. Principle 3 states that "Each person’s self-defined [...] gender identity is integral to their personality and is one of the most basic aspects of self-determination, dignity and freedom. No one shall be forced to undergo medical procedures, including sex reassignment surgery, sterilisation or hormonal therapy, as a requirement for legal recognition of their gender identity."[81] and Principle 18 states that "Notwithstanding any classifications to the contrary, a person's sexual orientation and gender identity are not, in and of themselves, medical conditions and are not to be treated, cured or suppressed."[82] Relating to this principle, the "Jurisprudential Annotations to the Yogyakarta Principles" observed that "Gender identity differing from that assigned at birth, or socially rejected gender expression, have been treated as a form of mental illness. The pathologization of difference has led to gender-transgressive children and adolescents being confined in psychiatric institutions, and subjected to aversion techniques — including electroshock therapy — as a 'cure'."[83] The "Yogyakarta Principles in Action" says "it is important to note that while 'sexual orientation' has been declassified as a mental illness in many countries, 'gender identity' or 'gender identity disorder' often remains in consideration."[84] These Principles influenced the UN declaration on sexual orientation and gender identity In 2015, gender identity was part of a Supreme Court case in the United States called Obergefell v Hodges in which marriage was no longer restricted between man and woman.[85]
Non-binary gender identities
See also: Third gender and Genderqueer Fa'afafine Main article: Fa'afafine In some Polynesian societies, fa'afafine are considered to be a "third gender" alongside male and female. They are anatomically male, but dress and behave in a manner considered typically female. According to Tamasailau Sua'ali'i (see references), fa'afafine in Samoa at least are often physiologically unable to reproduce. Fa'afafine are accepted as a natural gender, and neither looked down upon nor discriminated against.[86] Fa'afafine also reinforce their femininity with the fact that they are only attracted to and receive sexual attention from straight masculine men. They have been and generally still are initially identified in terms of labour preferences, as they perform typically feminine household tasks.[87] The Samoan Prime Minister is patron of the Samoa Fa'afafine Association.[88] Translated literally, fa'afafine means "in the manner of a woman."[89]
Hijras Main article: Hijra (South Asia) In some cultures of Asia, a hijra is usually considered to be neither a man nor a woman. Most are anatomically male or intersex, but some are anatomically female. The hijra form a third gender role, although they do not enjoy the same acceptance and respect as males and females in their cultures. They can run their own households, and their occupations are singing and dancing, working as cooks or servants, sometimes prostitutes, or long-term sexual partners with men. Hijras can be compared to transvestites or drag queens of contemporary western culture.[90]
Khanith Main article: Khanith The khanith form an accepted third gender in Oman. The khanith are male homosexual prostitutes whose dressing is male, featuring pastel colors (rather than white, worn by men), but their mannerisms female. Khanith can mingle with women, and they often do at weddings or other formal events. Khaniths have their own households, performing all tasks (both male and female). However, similarly to men in their society, khaniths can marry women, proving their masculinity by consummating the marriage. Should a divorce or death take place, these men can revert to their status as khaniths at the next wedding.[91]
Two-spirit identities Main article: Two-Spirit Many indigenous North American Nations had more than two gender roles. Those who belong to the additional gender categories, beyond cisgender man and woman, are now often collectively termed "two-spirit" or "two-spirited." There are parts of the community that take "two-spirit" as a category over an identity itself, preferring to identify with culture or Nation-specific gender terms.[92]

Link to the first discussion
If you didn't have time to read the book/short story or you finished parts of them, I still encourage you to participate/critique what other users say. There's still time to finish the feminist short story as it's only about 10 pages.

• Feminist short story

The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892)
"[The Yellow Wallpaper] is regarded as an important early work of American feminist literature, illustrating attitudes in the 19th century toward women's physical and mental health."

• MRA book

Who Stole Feminisim (Christina Hoff Sommers, 1994)
"Despite its current dominance, Sommers maintains, [...] feminism is at odds with the real aspirations and values of most American women and undermines the cause of true equality. Who Stole Feminism? is a call to arms that will enrage or inspire, but cannot be ignored."
Questions to consider answering:

• What issues were brought up that you think are still relevant today? What issues have been fixed?
  
• Which argument did you think was the strongest from Sommers?
  
• Were there any issues that were discussed that you don't think are issues? Why?
  
• Were the authors fair in their portrayal of the issues?
  
• What did you find most surprising/interesting in each piece of work? Did you learn anything new? Has your view/opinion on a certain topic been changed at all?
  

Providing I get at least ~3 people who respond, next month we will read these books:
Month 3 - to be discussed August 15th

• Feminist book (as per the suggestion of sens2t2vethug)

Undoing Gender (Judith Butler, 2004)
"Butler examines gender, sex, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people...Butler reexamines the theory of performativity that she originally explored in Gender Trouble. While many of Butler's books are intended for a highly academic audience, Undoing Gender reaches out to a much broader readership."

• Male-oriented short story

Paul's Case (Willa Sibert Cather, 1905)
"This is the most anthologized of all of Cather's writing...It has been called a "study in temperament." It is a testimony to the reality of youthful dissatisfactions and the common failure of families to understand and of schools to be helpful... "Paul's Case" is useful in student discussions of adolescent issues..."

Of course there are 16 year old AFAB people with dyed hair who say they’re nonbinary and everybody on the internet freaks out. And there are people who transition medically and still retain aspects of their AGAB and everybody on the internet freaks out. But why does this matter? Why can’t we all just accept that maybe YOU don’t need to “understand”, because it isn’t about YOU?
I’m a nonbinary person and I have debilitating physical dysphoria. I really do. But I’m too fucking afraid of everything to medically transition in any way yet, though I do think it will happen in the future. And I fucking hate myself because I feel like a stupid girl and a trender and I’ve internalized all of this horrible shit even though I know that I live my physical dysphoria about every part of my body every single day of my life. And no, I’m not binary trans and just confused. If you try to erase everyone who doesn’t fit your schema then you aren’t truly listening.
I’m just sick of binary trans people feeling like they have to validate their realness by pointing at nb people and saying “at least we aren’t them.” Nonbinary-ness has always existed. Gender fluidity and nonconformity has always existed. But now people like me are forced to fight through all the bullshit of people who are so scared of people seeing themselves as false that my challenging existence makes them angry and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of having to prove myself and my realness. I’m sick of the fact that we all, binary and nonbinary, think we have to prove that we struggle and suffer in order to be considered real. I’m fucking sick of it. I am real. I deserve to be respected. I deserve to be allowed to exist.
Nonbinary-ness isn’t just about presentation. If I, an AFAB person, have short hair and wear doc martens, that is a reflection of what makes me comfortable in my body, not some performance of trying to fit a trend. If cis people can present however they want, and I can’t, then that’s transphobia. Why is this all so fucking hard to understand? Why can’t we all just let people fucking exist?! You can’t let people exist because my realness challenges your realness and that scares you. Your fear is not my problem. Stop your hating bullshit and get over yourself and realize the world is more expansive than you are allowing yourself to see.
I’ll admit that when I go on FTMfemininity or other places I get uncomfortable when I see a trans man willingly show or interact with his breasts. It makes a pit in my stomach. I feel disgusted and scared. But then I recognize that I feel that way because 1. I have crazy dysphoria about my own breasts and cant even look in the mirror and 2. I hold the validity of my transness to this standard of proving that I’m suffering, and these people who are not challenge the validity of my transness. But then I recognize this, recognize that this person is living their life how they want, and then I move on with my life. I don’t get all self-righteous and start talking bullshit about trenders and tucute or whatever because I’m not that fucking fragile, because I recognize that it isn’t about me, and that honestly, I’m jealous, because I wish I could be comfortable in my body at all.
That’s all. Eat me alive and call me a trender get your sweet sweet validation. Tell me that if I want to actually convince people I have to be civil. Whatever makes you sleep well at night. Posting this and allowing myself to have feelings and voice will help me do the same.
EDIT: I’m glad to see a really productive and respectful conversation happening here. It really seems like it comes down to the fact that all of us have a history of being hurt, either by our dysphoria, our societies, or our trans siblings, and I’m glad that we are able to discuss and process with each other. Something that I think everyone, in all groups need to learn is that everyone in the universe doesn’t have to agree on everything. This type of sentiment fuels dumb shit like cancel culture and is not productive for anyone. This thread has shown me that most of us a level-headed and respectful of each others existences and boundaries, regardless of other opinions, and that is what is important.
I’m making this edit to include some resources that either have informed or uphold my arguments:
A Map of Gender Diverse Cultures
Non-Binary Isn’t New
Non-Binary People Aren’t A New Phenomenon
Some gender studies 101: Gender Trouble, Judith Butler summary

Link to the second discussion
If you didn't have time to read the book/short story or you finished parts of them, I still encourage you to participate/critique what other users say. There's still time to finish the male-oriented short story as it's only about 12 pages long.

• Feminist book

Undoing Gender (Judith Butler, 2004)
"Butler examines gender, sex, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people...Butler reexamines the theory of performativity that she originally explored in Gender Trouble. While many of Butler's books are intended for a highly academic audience, Undoing Gender reaches out to a much broader readership."

• Male-oriented short story

Paul's Case (Willa Sibert Cather, 1905)
"This is the most anthologized of all of Cather's writing...It has been called a "study in temperament." It is a testimony to the reality of youthful dissatisfactions and the common failure of families to understand and of schools to be helpful... "Paul's Case" is useful in student discussions of adolescent issues..."
Questions to consider answering:

• Do you find Butler's views to be helpful/relevant in analyzing gender norms/regulations as they are today?
  
• How do Butler's views fit into the sometimes shaky relationship feminism has with LGBTQI movements/individuals?
  
• Which argument did you think was the strongest from Butler? The weakest?
  
• Was there anything that surprised you while reading Butler's work? What was the most interesting thing she said?
  
• Did Cather illuminate any issues that young people, more particularly, young men, face growing up? If so, what are those issues? Given the date of publish, do you think things have improved, gotten worse, or stayed the same? How would you like to see these issues fixed?
  
• Did you learn anything new? Has your view/opinion on a certain topic been changed at all?
  

Providing there are at least ~3 people who respond, next month we will read this book:
Month 4 - to be discussed September 15th

• MRA book

Spreading Misandry (Paul Nathanson, Katherine Young, 2001)
"Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young believe that [lurid and sensationalized events affecting men] reveals a shift in the United States and Canada to a worldview based on ideological feminism, which presents all issues from the point of view of women and, in the process, explicitly or implicitly attacks men as a class...Legalizing Misandry offers lively and compelling evidence to demonstrate the pervasiveness of this new thinking - from the courts, classrooms, government committees, and corporate bureaucracies to laws and policies affecting employment, marriage, divorce, custody, sexual harassment, violence, and human rights."
As a heads-up, the book we will be reading two months from now (that is, the sixth month, from Oct 15th - Nov 15th, with the discussion on Nov 15th) will be Warren Farrell's The Myth of Male Power. I have been unable to source an online pdf that I can share. If you plan on participating, please make the necessary efforts to ensure you can either buy the book, get a copy from the library, or have a stronger google-fu than I.

Hey, we're two cis male misogynists, gender critical Chris and queer theory Quentin, and we both love doing misogyny! But of course, we have vastly differing approaches that we've carefully thought out based on our political philosophies.
Gender critical Chris understands that men and women are determined by their chromosomes and their birth genitalia. Chris will never be misogynistic to an MtF trans person, because he understands that they're men, and therefore respects them as equals. Before he grabs someone's ass or underpays them on the job, he takes a DNA sample and runs it to the lab to check for the presence of a removed penis.
Then there's queer theory Quentin. Quentin understands that maleness and femaleness are complex psychological phenomena, and biological sex is just an artificial social construct. He has a signed copy of Gender Trouble on his desk. (Not signed by Judith Butler, he hates all women so he just found a man on the street and had him sign it instead). Quentin is never misogynistic towards trans men. Before Quentin follows someone at a medium distance for several blocks as they walk home at 1 AM, or expresses far more interest in teaching their less competent sibling how to make a simple electric motor in the garage, he makes sure to perform a thorough psychological assessment to ensure that they have a binary female gender identity and no signs of dysphoria when referred to with she/her pronouns.
We're two very real people who 100% exist, so cis women, you're 100% right in telling MtFs that they have male privilege over you on account of their DNA and never experience misogyny, so they need to shut up about you treating them like garbage. And MtFs, please do keep telling FtMs that they have male privilege on account of their male gender identity, so they need to shut up about you treating them like garbage.
Misogyny is very coherent and aligns perfectly with your political philosophy, so please do divide people into binary categories of victims and abusers, the former of whom can do no wrong and the latter of whom have no right to complain about anything ever!

Source pdf
About the book:
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is a 1990 book by Judith Butler. Influential in academic feminism and queer theory, it is credited with creating the seminal notion of gender performativity. It is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory and postmodern/poststructural feminism.
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About the author:
Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminist philosophy, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley, and is also the Hannah Arendt Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School.
Butler received her PhD in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late 1980s she held several teaching/research appointments, and was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism. Considered "one of the most influential voices in contemporary political theory" and as "one of the most influential feminist theorists" today, she is best known for her seminal work Gender Trouble. She was awarded the Theodor W. Adorno Award in 2012 for her work on "political theory, on moral philosophy and gender studies."
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I've been reading some queer theory lately, and I encountered an interesting passage in Judith Butler's Gender Trouble:

The figure of the interior soul understood as "within" the body is signified through its inscription on the body, even thought its primary mode of signification is through its very absence, its potent invisibility. The effect of a structuring inner space is produced through the signification of a body as a vital and sacred enclosure. The soul is precisely what the body lacks; hence, the body presents itself as a signifying lack. That lack which is the body signifies the soul as that which cannot show. In this sense, then, the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inneouter distinction itself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification that perpetually renounces itself as such. In Foucult's terms, the soul is not imprisoned by or within the body, as some Christian imagery would suggest, but the "soul is the prison of the body."

I think this is interesting to apply to the Church as the Body of Christ. We often figure the Body of Christ as centered around its "Soul", either Jesus himself or, Christ herself. (The distinction between Jesus and Christ is important here; I'll get back to it.)
However, Butler's performativity radically calls this into question. If the soul is precisely what the body lacks, if we insist on the center--the soul--we are unable to liberate the body of Christ by showing itself its own performativity.
Far be it from me to suggest that Paul prefigures Butler, but I think the way that he makes distinctions between Christ and Jesus is here. We are the Body of Christ, not the body of Jesus, which makes me think that if we center Christ in the Body of Christ, we have an avenue to showing the body its own performativity. "Christ" is a signifier begging a signified for our traditional theology to remain intact, but if Christ in the world is the-Church-the-body-of-Christ, we are recursively delaying that signified, because the Church is the Christ embodied for Paul, while the body-of-Christ suggests the "soul" of Christ (itself embodied in the church, suggesting again the "soul" as a complement to the body, the soul then being shown to be delayed again, referencing only the body, etc.) delaying the signified infinitely.
Thoughts? Criticisms? Reasons I'm wrong? Do I need to pull my head out of my ass?

I just finished reading Gender Trouble by Judith Butler and I have a few questions that I hope can get answered. So, as far as I can understand, Butler is claiming that gender is just a social construct that is performed through out life. This means that people can enact the gender that they feel fits them the best. Butler details that we are raised within a heterosexist matrix that teaches us to perform in certain ways to fit in with the gender norms of wider society. My question is: If gender is a social construct then why isn't everyone straight?
If gender is a social construct that is performed by people. . .
. . . and we live in a society that is dominated by heterosexual people. . .
. . .then wouldn't it follow that everyone would conform to the gender the dominate society forces them into?
I want to apologize if there is an obvious answer to this, I haven't been able to phrase the question in a Google friendly way. Thank you to anyone who takes the time to answer!

I'll try and write these summaries within as short a time as possible after having had the lecture, in order to work with fresh and hopefully accurate information. I make no guarantees when it comes to quality, but will strive to make it as high as possible, as I intend to revisit these notes come the exam period. I'll also attempt to present the information presented in the course and the material, and leave out opposing information I believe I have access to, if I did not share it with the rest of the course.
First, quick information about the course. It is explicitly made with a Nordic perspective, and carries clear influence of this. Additionally, it is meant to be a critical course, with an understanding of academic work as intent on influencing society. Finally, it focuses on a sociocultural approach, taking primary inspiration from the social sciences and the humanities.
As an opening to the course, this lecture focused mostly on the historical development of the perspectives on sex and gender, and a brief introduction to most perspectives. While it did not define any lens that is the right one, it was helpful in deciding on one that is wrong. We proceed to biological determinism
First, the lecturer did grant that biological sex is a thing, and that it causes certain differences between men and women. Among these differences were: Genitals, different on a rather essential level, serving different functions and the like; differences in anatomy, physiology, and hormones, which are relatively small and nearly all biologists agree about that. Furthermore, the small sex differences in biology are not big enough to offer a valid explanation of societal differences between the genders.
Biological determinism was seen to rise out of the inception of the two-sex model. This segment takes Thomas Laqueur's book "Making Sex" as the primary source. In it, a history of views on sex is detailed. Put briefly, for a while it followed the logic of a one-sex model, where men were men, and women were incomplete men, where the differences between men and women were in degree. On the other hand, coming around with biology and anatomy research, a dichotomy of the sexes as different in essence came around. This difference was seen as an absolute, and separated the sexes with little to no acknowledgement of overlap. This information was used to discriminate based on sex, fueling such arguments as different voting rights, or different pay.
When asked whether the fault in this lay with the underlying facts, or the reasoning that accompanied them, the lecturer called it a good question. It was extrapolated upon that the reasoning was not necessarily wrong, different lengths in parental leave being brought up as a reasonable way to discriminate based on biological facts. On the other hand, it was acknowledged that it depends on whether one were to identify as a "liberal" or a "radical" on the matter of equality, where the former would be more prone to want equal treatment, and the latter more likely to condone differential treatment.
Then we asked the question of what defines sex. What counts, who decides, and when/where is biological sex important? Intersex examples were offered to outline the blurring of the line, the ethics of sex conforming surgeries on intersex infants was questioned. Hormones and chromosomes were offered as possible measurements of what biological sex is. As for when it is important, reproduction was a clear example, while sports was mentioned, and the lecturer offered that one might find some other metrics than genitalia to sort people in categories that might be just as fair for the competitors. Affirmative action was also mentioned, where a counter that it regards social gender, was offered.
The matter of gendering items was also discussed, where the students were prompted to find different items that were gendered, and discuss how they were gendered, and why. This takes inspiration from this research, featuring a broad set of household items, and how they have been gendered. The example I will bring up is an electric screwdriver versus an electric whisk. Where the purpose of both is to make things spin, they tend to be different in design. More rounded lines, lighter colors, less accessibility to dismantle, and ease of operation were things described to be associated with gendering an item as feminine. Social commentary about how we in turn treat these items was offered. In this sense, designers were presented as ignorant as to what gender their product was getting, and unconscious bias was briefly mentioned, but not elaborated upon. I don't completely understand the offered perspective, but will try and dive deeper into it if anyone is interested in discussing the gender of things.
The matter of social gender was next up. With the defined areas being gender role, gender identity, gender relations, gender in relation to society, and gendered language. The main argument seemed to be that sex and/or gender inform all of these, who in turn affect gender.
After this primer, the course proceeded to extrapolate on how the different understandings of gender were created. We have the biological-medical perspective, which has been extrapolated on, and will not be very relevant going forward. Then we have sociocultural perspectives, and critical perspectives, forming the main categories that will be brought forward into the course.
Margaret Mead, an anthropologist and the author of "Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive societies" (1935) was used as an example of a sociocultural perspective, representing anthropological and ethnographic studies of gender which challenged biological understandings. The research is an example of criticism against understandings of gender based on white, western culture. Outlining three societies living on a single island, with widely different gender expressions, it was used as activist research, prompting the quote: "if the characteristics we consider as feminine can easily be considered as masculine in other cultures, there is no ground for linking these characteristics to the biological sex." On this note, the book does briefly acknowledge that her research has been criticized for being overly simplistic, stating she did it to clarify her arguments in relation to the American society. It (the book, not the lecture) concludes that even though her overarching points underline cultural organization of gender, and are correct, her handling of details in research shows that the relationship between activism and science at times can be strained.
Simone de Beauvoir, with her book "the second sex" (1949), forms a representation of gender seen from the humanities. And Toril Moi, with her interpretations and critique of Beauvoir was brought up in the same category. In this case, it was described that Simone described society as she saw it, with gender roles put on women, and being something that was learned. While transcendence was something she considered tied to the masculine, she argued that the immanence of women was a necessary contrast in the dominant system. Transcendence in this sense refers to a certain accessibility of the future, and freedom of action, while immanence is the lack of awareness of free choice brought on due to oppression.
Our ending note is on Judith Butler with Gender Trouble (1990), whose attributed view is that sex is as much a product of social construction as gender. A central theory is centered around performance. Where one performs gender in ones daily life, and thereby reproduce the social norms connected to that gender. An additional note is that she doesn't consider gender to be something one is, but rather something you do, act like, and look like. Her view of gender comes across more as if it was a tradition, where stepping too far outside ones gender causes social sanctions, and seemingly arguing that "misquoting" ones performance of gender serves as a way to change gender. Strikes me as very "be the change you want to see in the world."
Next week, we will look at feminism and gender studies, the former being another category of lenses to view gender through. I have noticed that I haven't been able to get everything down, but this was a four hour course, and a couple more hours of comparing notes, literature, and the slides. I'll try and see if I can produce a more accurate transcript to work with next time. I'll also, happily accept comments on the format. Could be that I should use bullet-points, and extrapolate on the most interesting bits in the comments upon request.

So after finishing Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, I started thinking about how her ideas on gender being a performance, rather than an essence, would apply to race. Obviously, race and gender are two very different categories with two very different histories, but the idea of a "performativity of race" doesn't seem to make too much sense to me.
For example, just as "male" and "female" are just performances, and drag destabilizes the boundaries between the two, are "black," "white," "Asian," "Latino," etc. all performances as well, and how would someone "perform blackness" without looking totally ridiculous? What would it mean to "perform" a race?

Not just feet of clay, but a faceful. Justin Trudeau went into Canada’s election on October 21st amid a row about his past penchant for applying black and brown make-up in the name, supposedly, of a laugh. The contrast between past blackface and current carefully cultivated wokeface was sharp. But the prime minister’s right-wing adversary, Maxime Bernier of the Canadian People’s Party, raised a question that has troubled feminists for a while. Why is it blatantly unacceptable for white people to dress up as black or brown, but harmless fun when men dress up as women? Aren’t drag queens effectively doing womanface? In a month when the BBC splurged publicity on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK (pictured, right) the question deserves attention here too.
In a 2014 article in Feminist Current, Meghan Murphy argues that just as white people in blackface appropriate exaggerated cultural stereotypes of ethnicity in order to mock black people, drag queens mock women by appropriating exaggerated cultural stereotypes of womanhood. These include hairstyles, make-up, nails, dresses and supposedly feminised traits like “cattiness”. Worse, just as white people who don blackface typically have whiteness-related privileges that black people lack, drag queens typically have male-related privileges that women lack.
So do drag queens mock women? Individual intent is less relevant than it might seem. In his defence, Trudeau rightly avoided talking about whether he had intended to mock anyone, referring instead to racism he didn’t see at the time. The real question, raised by Murphy, is if drag has a mocking cultural meaning beyond its practitioners’ intentions. In fact, drag often isn’t directed towards humour at all. In his book The Changing Room, historian Laurence Senelick describes the antecedents of modern drag: shamanism, aimed at ends like divination and the expulsion of spirits, and various stylized forms of theatre, such as Japanese Kabuki and English Elizabethan. Even so, he does little to dislodge the suspicion that drag is very often misogynistic. “[T]he contaminating reality of woman was to be sublimated by means of abstract, masked impersonation”; “The perfect universe of poetic illusion is best configured by a youth in women’s garb, rather than a girl in men’s clothes”; and “women in local theatre troupes . . . faded into the background because they were being women, rather than playing women” are just a few sentences from the book.
The central question is whether drag’s modern, Western, humorous incarnation has a misogynistic, mocking cultural meaning. I think it does. As with blackface, a fundamental source of humour operates independently of any wittiness, observation, or timing. Namely: a white person as a black person, or a man as a woman, is found by audiences to be hilariously incongruent, given the presumed superior social status of the performers relative to the “inferior” groups they respectively impersonate. The temporary, assumed degradation of a performer’s status is in itself funny. This explains why drag kings—women performing as men—or black people playing white people, are not usually found funny at first sight, though witty or well-observed material may make them so. It also explains the outcome of the following thought experiment: for any given drag performance, an identical performance, though this time given by what the audience knew to be a woman underneath equally heavy make-up and sequins, would not be as funny.
Some in the gender studies field argue that drag queens positively “queer” gender: that is, they subvert otherwise rigid cultural binaries that would put men and masculinity on one side, and women and femininity on the other, and assign heterosexuality to both of them. The philosopher Judith Butler argues (jargon alert): “Parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalised or essentialist gender identities.” Yet drag has been around for millennia, and the binaries still look pretty stable to me. Far from drag queens making it more acceptable for men to exhibit femininity, in the UK at least it seems rather to have become more acceptable for young women to look like drag queens. I am not sure if that is much of an advance.
A further problem with Butler’s thesis is that contemporary drag queens tend to aim for humour, and humour is often highly conservative. Many jokes depend on shared norms between the performer’s persona and the audience, in order to subvert those norms for comic effect. But usually the subversion is only temporary, and purely instrumental—to produce the belly laugh, leaving the norms untouched, and arguably even reinforced by the enjoyably cathartic experience. The laugh reveals, at least to others, if not to its owner, the structure of prejudices but does not challenge them. Much laughter towards drag queens depends on, and simultaneously nurtures, the attitude that a man can be made to look preposterous by dressing up as a woman, but not vice versa.
Performers can and do use creativity and intelligence to try to work subversively against drag’s inbuilt reactionary grain. To that end, they may call upon its long, rich history for inspiration, to quote or satirise. (As Ru Paul has said: “I don’t dress like a woman, I dress like a drag queen”.) The fact remains, though, that in uncreative hands, drag collapses all too quickly into “look at the silly man in the dress”; with an accompanying persistent undertone of “aren’t women silly?”
If there can be non-misogynist drag, then the door is left open, in some distant but possible world, for a performance in blackface to challenge and genuinely subvert the racism in which actual cases of blackface, in our actual world, are thoroughly grounded. Those who reject this suggestion as outrageous need to explain why creative recuperation is eternally impossible for blackface, but not for drag. And the answer can’t simply be “because misogyny’s fine, but racism isn’t”.
(source: https://standpointmag.co.uk/issues/november-2019/blackface-is-evil-why-isnt-drag/)

Excerpts from Nancy Arden McHugh's "Feminist Philosophies A–Z", entries for the letter B.
From the intro of the book:
"Feminist Philosophies A–Z is a reference covering contemporary feminist philosophy. It is oriented toward students in feminist philosophy and women’s studies classes as well as a general audience interested in feminist theory. The goal of the A–Z Series is to provide pithy coverage of important terminology and figures in philosophy. Because of this there is a fair amount of breadth in the volumes, with depth in some areas, but not all.
In Feminist Philosophies A–Z my goal is to have a representative coverage of the field as well as to focus on some areas of feminist philosophy. In this volume I have tried to be particularly conscious of areas of feminist philosophy that may have received less coverage in other references or are newer to feminist philosophy and are receiving increased coverage in feminist philosophy courses. For example, there are several entries devoted to debates in transnational feminism, Third World feminism and antiglobalisation. Furthermore, I have tried to show how debates in areas such as Chicana/Latina feminism, Black feminist thought and Third World feminism have informed other areas of feminist philosophy. Thus many general entries make reference to these areas to show the crossfertilisation of ideas and make clear that feminist philosophy is an ongoing, critical practice that seeks growth and revision. The volume is also attentive to many of the ongoing debates and ideas in feminist philosophy. For example, there are entries on reproductive rights, reproductive technologies, postmodern feminism, radical feminism, Marxist feminism, the public/private distinction, feminist epistemology and feminist ethics."
Background assumptions: Background assumptions are unrecognised assumptions that inform one’s view of something. For example, a background assumption that many people of European decent hold is that Europe is the cradle of all legitimate culture. This assumption, Eurocentrism, infects many of the actions of its holders. Background assumptions are difficult to recognise and acknowledge because they are held so deeply by individuals and cultures that even when they are pointed out they appear to be normal and true. Further reading: Longino (1990)
Barrett, Michele: white British socialist feminist in sociology. Barrett is the author of The Politics of Truth: From Marx to Foucault (1991) in which she reframes for feminist theory Marx’s notion of ideology of as ‘economics of truth’. In light of increased attention to feminist issues that cannot be explained in terms of class oppression, Foucaultian understanding of a ‘politics of truth’ is able to explain a more complex matrix of oppression that affects women that are multiply situated. Barrett is also the author of Women’s Oppression Today: The Marxist/Feminist Encounter (1989) and Imagination in Theory: Culture, Writing, Words, and Things (1999). In the now classic and widely referenced text, The Anti- Social Family (1991), Barrett and Mary McIntosh articulate how the social ideal of the family masks the reality of family life and enables violence and abuse in the home. See Marxist feminism; socialist feminism Bartky, Sandra Lee: white US, feminist philosopher specialising in existential phenomenology. Bartky’s 1991 Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression is one of the first books in feminist philosophy to provide a systematic, critical analysis of beauty and the embodiment of beauty ideals. Through an existential phenomenological account Bartky argues that the fashion-beauty complex alienates women from themselves by first replicating western hegemony’s view of women as purely bodily and then through alienating women from ‘control [over] the shape and nature these bodies take’ (41). Women become obedient to the demands of fashion and culture and are docile in the face of these imperatives. In her more recent work Sympathy and Solidarity: and Other Essays (2002) Bartky again employs existential phenomenology to analyse beauty, as well as whiteness, ageing and racial guilt. Bartky is one of the founders of the Society for Women in Philosophy. Beauvoir, Simone de (1908–86): Simone de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher and the author of the important feminist text The Second Sex (1952). In The Second Sex Beauvoir sets out to address ‘Why woman is the Other’ (33). She argues that in all situations, perspectives and experiences woman is Othered. She thus argues against the biological, Freudian and Marxist monolithic responses to this problem that treat woman’s status as Other as the result of having a certain kind of body, a certain relation to her own body, or performing particular types of labour such as child care and cooking. Through an existentialist approach Beauvoir puts forth that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ (267). Man identifies himself as the norm because woman poses a threat to male selfhood, thus woman is constructed as Other and deviant, not self, and exists only in relation to man. Man sees woman’s nature as essential, not constructed. Because women’s otherness is not a result of women’s essential nature, in a final chapter of The Second Sex, ‘Liberation: The Independent Woman’, Beauvoir argues that women’s ‘future remains largely open’ and she is not powerless in her situation (714). She can refuse her status as ‘Other’ by becoming economically independent, creative, intellectual, sexually empowered, work toward social change, and not allow herself to experience herself as Other. In addition to Beauvoir’s important contribution to feminist theory, Beauvoir adds significantly to the existentialist concept of the Other by developing this concept to explain social relations instead of only the individual relations Sartre seeks to understand (Simons, 2000). This formulation has been important in postmodern feminism. Some of Beauvoir’s other works are The Ethics of Ambiguity (1967), which pursues the ethical implications of existentialism, and America Day By Day (1999), which is a study of race relations in the United States. See essentialism; social construction Further reading: Moi (1994); Simons (2006, 2000)
Benhabib, Seyla: Turkish-American feminist philosopher specialising in social and political philosophy from a Continental perspective. Benhabib’s work in feminist social and political philosophy provides a critical analysis of current issues through figures in the history of philosophy, such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and Hannah Arendt, and through her own incisive arguments. In her book Situating the Self (1992), Benhabib reformulates communitarian moral theory, developing a postmetaphysical, interactive universalism that situates reason in embodied, embedded, gendered selves that are members of discursive communities. Her recent work, The Rights of Others (2004), argues for a cosmopolitan approach – an approach that recognises global membership and the right of all humans to inalienable human rights – to global justice and the migration of peoples across borders. From this perspective and employing Hannah Arendt and Immanuel Kant, while critiquing John Rawls, Benhabib analyses world hunger, globalisation, the European Union and several late twentieth, early twenty-first-century political events. Benhabib is also the author of Democracy and Difference (1996a), The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1996b) and The Claims of Culture (2002). Biological Determinism: biological determinism is the view that certain biological features determine either the totality of one’s being (personality, appearance, likes and dislikes) or certain significant features of a person. Feminists have been particularly concerned about deterministic views of gender, sexuality and race. A biological determinist would argue that one’s gendered behaviour is determined solely by genetics and that society has nothing to do with how and whether one exhibits certain gendered behaviour. For example, a biological determinist would argue that aggression in males is a natural, biological gendered trait. A person critiquing this view may argue that male aggression is the product of a society that promotes and values aggression in males. Further reading: Fausto-Sterling (2000)
Biopower: French philosopher Michel Foucault used the term biopower to denote the exercise of control over bodies through regulatory systems and practices. In the History of Sexuality (1990) Foucault argues that the rise of capitalism and modern government necessitated a greater regulation of bodies that wasn’t needed under sovereign rule because sovereign power needed only to threaten death to control its population. The state employs a series of regulatory controls over the population in the guise of protecting life. In doing so the state effectively guarantees its ability to inhibit certain kinds of life choices and in certain cases ends lives. Examples of biopower are those practices that seek to regulate family, health, sexuality, birth, death, security or movement. For example, Foucault points to census taking and heteronormative training as examples of biopower. Further reading: Foucault (1990); McWhorter (1999)
Black Feminist Thought: Patricia Hill Collins in her 1991 book Black Feminist Thought defines Black feminist thought. Black feminist thought is a type of standpoint epistemology that originates from the insights of Black feminist intellectuals such as Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith and bell hooks, and the experiences of oppression and domination that are the legacy of slavery. It emphasises the importance of seeing Black women as agents of knowledge and recognising the partiality of all knowledge. Collins is careful to articulate the importance of linking together activism and oppression as well as the importance of social transformation in the development of Black feminist thought. Further reading: Collins (2005, 2006); hooks (1981, 1984, 1994, 2000); Lorde (1980, 1983, 1984, 1995); Smith (2000a&b)
Bordo, Susan: white US feminist philosopher, specialising in aesthetics and philosophy of the body. Susan Bordo endeavours to make philosophy accessible to the wider public by not only writing on topics that are of interest to a popular audience, but by writing in a style that is accessible to the public. Bordo brought the body and eating disorders to the forefront of philosophical attention and made them a legitimate area of study with her book Unbearable Weight (1993), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. In this text Bordo uses the lens of the gendered body to understand how advertising, media and cultural norms have taught women how to see their bodies. She states that ‘culture – working not only through ideology and images, but through the organisation of the family, the construction of personality, the training of perceptions – as not singularly contributory but productive of eating disorders’ (50). In her 2000 book, The Male Body, she analyses masculinity and male bodies from a feminist perspective, thus contributing to the growing field of masculinity studies. Her other books include The Flight to Objectivity (1987) and Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (1999). See embodiment
Braidotti, Rosi: white Italian feminist philosopher teaching in the Netherlands, specialising in embodiment, poststructualism and psychoanalysis. In Metamorphoses: Toward a Materialist Theory of Becoming (2002) Braidotti states that all of her books are connected by a question: ‘how can one free difference from the negative charge which it seems to have been built into it?’ (4). In her book Nomadic Subjects (1994) Braidotti provides a series of essays that consider the nomadic nature of subjectivity, in other words the multiple, situated, embodied ‘critical consciousness that resists settling into social coded modes of thought and behavior’ (5). This critical positioning allows Braidotti to assess everything from technology to the status of women’s studies. She argues that nomadic subjectivity and the recognition of difference leaves feminists with a ‘crucial political question . . . how is this awareness – the recognition of differences – likely to affect the often fragile allegiance of women of different classes, races, ages, and sexual preferences?’ (257). Furthermore, she asks how will this affect coalition building, consensus making and assessments of common interests and pertinent differences. Braidotti turns her recognition of multiplicity to feminist theories, arguing that with the rapid growth of feminist theories feminists need to establish a feminist genealogy to counterbalance the continual misogyny in academia. Braidotti is also the author of Patterns of Dissonance (1991). See embodiment; postmodern feminism
Butler, Judith: white US feminist philosopher specialising in queer theory and postmodernism. Judith Butler is credited with initiating philosophical interest in queer theory with her book Gender Trouble (1990) as well as generating increased attention to postmodernism as both theory and methodology in Anglo-American philosophy. Butler provides a critique of standard cultural, philosophical and psychological notions of ‘gender’ in both Gender Trouble and Bodies that Matter (1993) and argues that gender should be understood as performativity. In Gender Trouble Butler argues that ‘gender is not a noun, neither is it a set of free-floating attributes . . . gender is performativity produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence. Gender is always doing . . . .’ Furthermore, gender identity is the expression of performing gender and nothing more than this (25). Butler makes clear in her preface to Bodies that Matter that gender is not performed in the sense of something that is donned every morning. Gender is not intentional in that wilful sense. Gender is something that is put on a body by the materiality of its existence. One performs gender as society expects that repetitious, ritualised performance (x). In her more recent book Undoing Gender (2004), Butler works through the implications of her performative understanding of gender to connect them to questions of ‘persistence and survival’, that is human rights issues and issues of personhood as they relate to sexuality and gender, providing an analysis of intersex and transgender identity, activism, surgery and autonomy. See postmodern feminism; queer theory; transgenderist
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