The fight for gender identity is a movement against violence

Blanche Petrich

Newspaper La Jornada
Thursday, November 17, 2022, p. 12

Far-right groups around the world have taken over what they call gender ideology as a battle horse to attack feminists, homosexuals and trans people. And the American philosopher Judith Butler is a feminist and a lesbian; She also defends the right to be trans. She is the author of El género en disputa, among 12 other ground-breaking books. She is a reference for many libertarian movements; but also a demon for the most violent conservatives, to the extent that in some places they must travel with escorts for their safety.

And it is not that his ideas were originally political, but that his detractors took them to that terrain. “What I maintain –she explains in an interview with La Jornada– is that the attacks by the anti-gender movement, known as Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERF), are indeed a phenomenon of the right; sometimes authoritarian, other times directly fascist.”

Butler, professor at the University of California at Berkeley and recognized as a pioneer of the queer theory (which emerged in the 90s and rejects the single classification of people under labels of men, woman, homosexual Y Heterosexual), arrived yesterday in Mexico City. Today he will receive an honorary doctorate from the National Autonomous University of Mexico from the rector Enrique Graue and on Friday he will give a lecture at the Palace of the School of Medicine. He comes to Mexico, she assures, very aware of the situation of violence: femicides, hate crimes against LGTBQ+ and trans people, rapes, murders throughout the country. Everyone counts, everyone must be damnedexpress.

Despite the fact that today he is in the eye of the hurricane, particularly because of his criticism of transphobia and the furious campaigns unleashed by what he calls classic feminists and the TERF, refuses to be pigeonholed in this debate. “It’s not just about the fight for gender identity. It is a social movement against violence, and I think this is particularly important in Mexico, where there is a mobilization against different forms of violence. If we do not include violence against trans people, we are not consistent. We must integrate the struggles in favor of reproductive rights, of women, against the attack on transgender people, against indigenous people, against people at the borders, or in favor of student protesters, like the students of Ayotzinapa.

“If we position ourselves in favor of social justice, but we do not include reproductive rights as social justice, we are missing the bottom. We cannot discriminate and choose what kind of people we want to defend and who we don’t. In this case, we base our social movement on exclusion and inequality, and this makes us unfair. We cannot fight for justice if we are not fair.

–I suppose that on the agenda of the movement for justice in the United States, the fight against the criminalization of abortion is a priority issue, after the resolution of the Supreme Court in this regard.

-Absolutely. Reproductive rights are fundamental for women and for anyone who may become pregnant, including trans men. I totally reject the decision of the Court that ruled that the State has the power to decide over the bodies of others. The attack on abortion is an attack against women’s autonomy, a restriction on freedom, a radical injustice and a matter of economic and racial inequality, because women with money can access an abortion in a private institution, but women public health institutions are not able to provide this service to others.

It’s all about alliances, coalitions, solidarity

In short, everything must be linked: the rights of women, their reproductive rights, the rights of lesbians and gays, trans people, social justice and against economic inequality and against violence. All these causes are necessarily interrelated. That’s what I mean by queer theory. It is about alliances, weaving networks, solidarity.

– Is this an existing movement? Is it rather marginal, does it have possibilities to influence?

-Yes it exists. And I find it very sad that in Mexico, or in Spain now, where a transgender law is being debated, there are classic feminists who do not defend it. We need feminists to be our allies; join our struggles against racism, inequality, the destruction of the planet, by indigenous people, against corporate extractivism. And yes, I think there are movements that are paving the way in that direction. Outside of the so-called classical feminism model there are many other models that constantly make alliances with other causes. And they are not transphobic.

–Your theories, your literature and activism in favor of all these queer identities, has turned out to go far beyond academia, culture or philosophy. These are ideas that have been placed at the center of politics. And he has defined homophobic or transphobic positions in the far-right spectrum…

–I maintain that the anti-gender movement is a phenomenon of the right; sometimes authoritarian, others directly fascist. But those who consider that gender is an ideology – which it is not, from my point of view – assume that we are going to destroy the family, that it is going to be used to promote transgender processes or same-sex marriages and things like that.

“Actually, it is my critics who have made my ideas sound more political than they originally were. I was not proposing a political agenda when I wrote The Disputed Gender. I made an observation about how people live their gender identity, how there are communities that move outside of the rigid canons of what is considered feminine or masculine. I wanted to offer a theory that would take these changes into account.

But my opponents took this into politics, claiming that my intention was to destroy the idea of ​​man or woman, or civilization, or family. Some feminists who took it as an attack on the feminine. I think they are imagining me much more powerful than I really am.

I am an activist

laugh. Judith Butler, 66, Jewish and lesbian, laughs a lot. And she speaks with her hands, big, expressive hands that move in front of the screen where she heard her in the Zoom interview. And I’m really not powerful.

–In the field of ideas, many would say yes.

-In the field of ideas, yes. But I don’t just produce ideas. I am an activist. For example, in a little while I’m going out on the Berkeley campus, my university, to support a strike by graduate students fighting for sustainable wage jobs. In other words, in that sense I am political.

But my training is philosophy, and from there I question some of the things that we usually assume as a society about how our sexuality is organized, how our bodies should be understood, if the heterosexual family is the only possibility of a social agreement between couples: obviously No. I question all of this. And I call for a wide spectrum of freedoms, including reproductive freedom, freedom so that trans people can walk down the street without fear of violence, so that gay and lesbian people don’t suffer discrimination. Yes, I offer a philosophy of freedom. But I also consider myself a philosopher of nonviolence.