Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

If the inner truth of gender is a fabrication and if a true gender is fantasy instituted and inscribed on the surface of bodies, then it seems that genders can be neither true nor false, but are only produced as the truth effects of a discourse of primary and stable identity.

A couple years ago, journalist Spencer Bokat-Lindell wrote a piece titled “Turducken is Performative” and received, to his surprise, a response from Judith Butler. First, they complimented his article, then very graciously cautioned him against associating “performative” with fake, clarifying that performance can emulate desired realities, and sometimes even bring them about. It’s funny, yes, that one of the most famous scholars in the world would fire off a note about a seemingly trivial misreading, but having read Gender Trouble, it makes sense: the entire work could be flippantly summarized by the famous Vonnegut quote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be.”

Of course, it’s more complex than that. Much, much more complex. Gender Trouble is one of the most difficult texts I’ve ever completed, not due to Butler’s supposedly-impenetrable prose--I found it dense but generally quite lucid--but because it’s such a thorough investigation and dismantling of a number of theories of sex/gender, most notably Lacan and Freud but secondarily Levi-Strauss, Derrida, Foucault, Wittig, Irigaray, and structuralist theories of sex/gender as a whole. I won’t attempt to summarize their specific arguments, not that I could, except to say that they consistently tug at one particular thread: is there a pre-symbolic/pre-linguistic/ontological foundation to sex/gender, or are they entire constructed through performance of both socially acceptable and culturally heterogeneous acts?

The structuralists and their immediate predecessors--especially Lacan and Freud--say yes. As I understand it, the origin of both sexuality and language can be found in, uh, incest, the original and strongest taboo. Sexuality is a discursive effect of the repression of the Oedipal desire; because they cannot have sex with the parent, their sexual desires are projected outward toward other members of the opposite sex who can temper but not slake the original desire. Language, on the other hand, grows from the pre-verbal cries of desire, transforming, as the child gains distance from the parent, into other symbols and signifiers, and so on.

Even a cursory reading of the above makes clear the foundational binary at play; there are heterosexual men and women who have heterosexual desires, there are heterosexual men and women who have homosexual desires (caused by the much rarer Reverse Oedipus, really). Ultimately all these desires must either be subsumed in (ersatz?) heterosexual acts or suppressed entirely, because the only alternative is literally madness.

Yeah.

While this may look regressive, the binary is equally strong even in some radical feminist approaches to gender. Wittig, the mother of political lesbianism, makes great headway at dismantling the necessity of heterosexuality but only imagines a wholesale rejection of opposite-sex acts as a response, finally serving only to further establish rejection of heterosexuality as the basis of a new binary, and starting the cycle again. Even Foucault, the thinker Butler seems most in sync with, envisions sex/gender primarily as the abolishment of all sexual identity, resulting in some sort of post-gender paradise, perhaps a nice idea but not one that seems coherent with the way people are.

Butler, on the other hand, thinks bigger. Her ideas are perhaps not as shocking as they once were--though who can say, as we live through Gay Panic 2.0--but it’s still bracing, in 2023, to read about the radical deconstruction and reconstruction of sexual and gender identity in such stark (such as it is) language. A section about how sex is as socially constructed as gender, supported by Foucault’s ideas of gender as a construct of social control, was especially thought-provoking, as it posits that splitting humanity into a binary based on sexual anatomy is just as arbitrary (and no less non-binary) than divisions based on hair color, skeletal structure, or whether one has an innie or an outie--that is, unless the primary purpose of your society is to reproduce the family structure as a means of consolidating power. Then it makes perfect sense to keep the women pregnant in the kitchen while the men go out hunting and gathering and waging war.

A sense of “there is no there there” pervades the last section of the work, in which performativity is presented in its full (at the time) academic form. As I understand it (and as Butler helpfully summarized in her Turducken letter), performance can be oppressive, mandated one’s place in the cultural hierarchy. But they can also be liberative, joyful, constructive, as in a drag show where the absurdities and disjunctions of sex and gender identity are banged together until they break (I understand why drag shows scare conservatives so much now). But even performance is circumscribed by cultural laws and expectations, as Butler discusses below:

The subject is not determined by the rules because signification is not a founding act, but rather a regulated process of repetition that both concerns itself and endorses its rules precisely through the production of substantializing effects. In a sense, all signification takes place within the orbit of the compulsion to repeat; agency then is to be located within the possibility of a variation on that repetition. If the rules governing signification not only restrict but enable the assertion of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility, then it is only within the practices of repetitive signifying that a subversion of identity becomes possible.

The above was like a light at the end of the tunnel after two hundred pages of theories that presented sex and gender as either immutable, posited a post-patriarchal society that still used the binary as a load-bearing wall, or critiques that identified problems but seemingly offered no way forward. The answer, Butler seems to say, is to do what we can, to make small changes in the acts of repetition that, after all, form us and the society we live in, until finally we can look around and see that things have changed in meaningful, liberating ways.

On a personal level, a few years ago, I thought my kids would be growing up in a world where aggressive queerphobia was verboten; seeing it make a comeback has been dispiriting in a way I can't describe. In a time when conservatives at home and abroad are targeting sexual minorities, where trans high schoolers are being stabbed to death, where men kill trans women after sex, Gender Trouble is necessary, a dense, difficult work that still sounds like the future. May the future get here soon.

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

Ames, having explained the condition of juvenile elephants, drew this metaphor: Trans women are juvenile elephants. We are much stronger and more powerful than we understand. We are fifteen thousand pounds of muscle and bone forged from rage and trauma, armed with ivory spears and faces unique in nature, living in grasslands where any of the ubiquitous humans may or may not be a poacher. With our strength, we can destroy each other with ease. But we are a lost generation. We have no elders, no stable groups, no one to teach us to countenance pain. No matriarchs to tell the young girls to knock it off or show off their own long lives lived happily and well.

Ames has been seeing his boss, Katrina, but he's kept a secret from her: for years he was Amy. Born James, he transitioned after an adolescence of confusion and crossdressing, only to detransition after a brutal beating at the hands of a chaser and bigot. When Katrina becomes pregnant--something he thought his former hormone therapy would prevent--he is thrown for a loop. The possibility of becoming not just a parent but a father is so repulsive, he reaches out to his former girlfriend, a trans woman named Reese, to ask if she wants to raise the baby with them as another mother. This sounds like lunacy, of course, but Reese, who has always wanted to be a mother--a difficult prospect for a trans woman, for reasons as much social and legal as physical--is drawn to the idea, and even Katrina seems to think such an unusual family might be possible.

Detransition, Baby must be the most high-profile fiction work by a trans author and about trans people ever written. It's interesting that it would focus so much on detransition, a phenomenon that is often seized upon by transphobes writing for glossy magazines to delegitimize trans lives. Peters makes it clear that Ames' detransition occurs not because of disenchantment or regret, but because living as a cis man, without the scrutiny and threat of violence, is just easier. It's a sad decision but one the book treats with respect, and in bringing together the three women--cis, detransitioned, trans--Peters examines just some of the many paths available to women and how they intersect. In fact, perhaps one of the most sadly remarkable things about Detransition, Baby is simply that it is a work of popular culture with more than one trans character. These snapshots of diverse experiences are, one hopes, a kind of antidote to the flattening narratives about trans people in America.

At the heart of Detransition, Baby is an old question: is it better to infiltrate heteronormative institutions, or undermine them? At one point, Peters talks briefly about how trans people have always been a part of the "gay" rights movement, though often marginalized and overshadowed, and this question is an endemic one in that movement, answered in different ways by different generations. Is the triad-parent scheme at the heart of Detransition, Baby an infiltration or an undermining? Certainly it's not a version of the family that will past muster with Focus on the Family or Fox News. But Reese's maternal desires are profoundly shaped by her own normie Wisconsin upbringing, and the two mothers-to-be bond over the most normie baby ritual of all: the baby registry. When the characters imagine trans parenthood, it looks a lot like cis parenthood. Of course, parenthood is not quite like marriage--it's a necessity of life and all--but it's certainly institutionalized, and the novel effectively narrativizes the tension created by queer participation in the institution. This tension is at the heart of what works about Detransition, Baby, I think.

However. Though this tension hums at the level of theme and plot, it gets resolved at the level of style. Destransition, Baby is formally straightforward, and its language seems most to resemble those online magazines that balance the language of informed forward-thinkingness with breezy chattiness. It is intensely middlebrow, intensely book-clubbish. In fact, it is a "Roxane Gay's Audacious Book Club Pick." That is to say that aesthetically, the novel is on the side of the normies, and aesthetically, it really struggles. The best parts of the book are the "flashback" scenes in which we see Reese and Ames/James/Amy in their most formative years, when their gender dysphoria is at its most raw.

But in the "now," when the three women actually get together, the novel becomes poisonously dreary. Their first conversation together, at a GLAAD award ceremony, is so clogged with abstractions about gender, identity, and family, that Ames quips at the end, "Credit to GLAAD... Tonight they have achieved their mission of facilitating another hard-hitting discussion of LGBTQ rights." Detransition, Baby tries very hard to cover every Very Important Trans Topic: suicide, HIV, violence, chasers, hormones, surgery, etc., etc. No doubt each of these things shapes the life of trans people daily, and yet there must be a way to explore them in a story about people, rather than a "hard-hitting discussion of LGBTQ rights."

There is a moment when Katrina steps off the train to visit Reese in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (The book's loveless and sour depiction of my neighborhood is a criticism I'll keep mostly to myself.) Katrina points out the word Tranny on a nearby poster, which repulses and angers Reese, even though it turns out to be an advertisement for the memoir of that name by Against Me! singer Laura Jane Grace. Now, I haven't read the memoir, but Brent tells me it depicts the musician at a moment of near-homelessness and extreme precarity. Katrina tells Reese that, as a marketing exec, she wouldn't have chosen that title. ("Can you imagine a trans woman buying that book? I mean, what, is she going to read it on the subway?") This observation supposedly endears Katrina to Reese; for the first time she's able to see Katrina as an ally and a possible partner in motherhood. But I was strongly repelled by this small detail, partly because of the authority rooted in Katrina's job as a marketing executive. Grace's title is provocative--I think the intentions, like it or not, are clear--but is it good branding?

This moment also makes the book's ambitions clear: It's the trans book that a trans woman can read on the subway. It is respectable and palatable. And you know, we probably need books like that. I suspect their power is culturally and politically limited, but what do I know? I recognize that I don't really have any standing to pass judgment in that regard. I can say that I found the book artistically limited for these reasons. I'm a little wary of saying I didn't like it, because it's so important, but I think that really gets to the heart of why I didn't like it: it's too busy being important to be good.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

How to explain--"trans" may work well enough as a shorthand, but the quickly developing mainstream narrative it evokes ("born in the wrong body," necessitating an orthopedic pilgrimage between two fixed destinations) is useless for some--but partially, or even profoundly, useful for others? That for some "transitioning" may mean leaving one gender entirely behind, while for others--like Harry, who is happy to identify as a butch on T--it doesn't? How to explain, in a culture frantic for resolution, that sometimes the shit stays messy? I do not want the female gender that has been assigned to me at birth. Neither do I want the male gender that transsexual medicine can furnish and that the state will award me if I behave in the right way. I don't want any of it. [Beatrix Preciado] How to explain that for some, or for some at some times, this irresolution is OK--desirable, even (e.g., "gender hackers")--whereas for others, or for others at some times, it stays a source of conflict or grief? How does one get across the best way to find out how other people feel about their gender or their sexuality--or anything else, really--is to listen to what they tell you, and try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours? 

Maggie Nelson's theory-memoir The Argonauts tells the story--peripatetic, looping--of her marriage to Harry Dodge, a non-binary sculptor and playwright, and the birth of their son, Iggy. The title refers to the ship Argo, which, according to myth, was rebuilt plank by plank, provoking the question: is the new ship the same as the old? And if not, when did the transition occur? The word transition makes the metaphor plain, but hides much of the nuance: Nelson dwells at length on the nature of bodies and identities that change in all sorts of ways, not just because of the presence of prescribed hormones, but because of the nature of aging and childbirth. For Nelson, the body is a site of indeterminacy and slippage, but this is one of its wonders. We want our gender roles, like our bodies, to be clear and coherent, but as she writes above, "the shit stays messy."

One of the peculiar things about The Argonauts, especially for a book that is relatively popular, is that it's absolutely dripping with theory: Lacan, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and many, many others. You might be forgiven for picking up and putting it down, thinking it pretentious, but to me, one of the marvels of The Argonauts is that it is anti-pretentious: by weaving the words of theorists into her own paragraphs and sentences--Nelson highlights them by italicizing, and places the names in the margin, even as her "borrowing" makes it clear that she speaking for herself with their voices--Nelson removes theory from the realm of the brain and claims it as a way of understanding her own body, her own husband, her own child. She's contemptuous of the trendy notion that our words are tragically incapable of conveying real truths; it may be true, but still they do much for us, and The Argonauts is clearly a book by someone for whom words are a mode of self-exploration.

One of the remarkable things about gender is that, even though it permeates our lives in ineradicable ways, we seem to be unable to talk about it. The conservative understanding is, as Nelson writes, like a child's drawing of a mommy and a daddy, all simple triangles and squares, but even thoughtful and accepting people have trouble being able to even say what gender is. I appreciated Nelson's attempt to mine the words of others to communicate her own experience, as a woman, as a pregnant body, as a lover, as a wife, etc., etc. But I appreciated, too, the honesty with which Nelson approaches the messiness of it all, and the way gender, like so much about our identities, refuses to be pinned down, like a butterfly to a board.