Questioning the Queen of Queer Theory
I Go Viral Bringing Down Judith Butler
OMG what a ride. Even made the Daily Mail with photo, full name and title of my book. A lot of people must hate Butler and want to see her taken down a peg.
Judith Butler is not very well known outside of academia and Queer Theory so I enjoyed the opportunity to introduce her to my network as the woman who introduced the idea that sex is a social construct and thus appealed to the luxury belief set so wanting to rid themselves of the stereotypes of their sex, especially young college students. She calls herself a feminist so she represents the branch of feminism that totally lost the plot in an attempt to become more male-friendly in the academic context.
As a lesbian calling herself non-binary she neatly extricates herself from the female sex category altogether. I brushed up on her concepts with this helpful guide by another writer who pointed out that when Butler says gender she means sex class. Butler’s homophobic response to my pointed question caused quite a stir in the gender-critical universe. In telling my story to my network, the morning after, my interchange with Butler aptly served to show how this “queering of society” is dead set on throwing women and one of its own, the L in the alphabet, under the bus in order to accomplish this remaking of society. A version of gender sold as liberation while making society more homophobic in favor of transing the gay away. My original post to FB follows.
Judith Butler, a post-modernist University professor at Berkley (with a salary of $400,000), who introduced the idea that gender is a performative act based on cultural biases and that it is sex that is a social contract, gave a lecture to her adoring fans in San Francisco Thursday night. Butler holds a special place in the hearts of sex realists for unhinging an entire society from evidence-based reality, so naturally we had to show our appreciation by showing up in large numbers. Ten outside with signs focused on men being housed with women in prisons. Men who are now harassing and raping these prisoners with several lawsuits and a few pregnancies to show for it. We had cards with such details printed up, especially for the occasion. Four of us paid the $44 ticket fee to insert ourselves inside to hear what she had to say in this historic moment and possibly ask a question.
We met beforehand and the founder of Women Are Real told me I should definitely have a question because I ranked high on the intersectionality scale and would likely be called upon. So I wrote one down and Derrick Jensen, who has interviewed me on his Resistance Radio show and had driven seven hours to the event with another feminist, coached me on asking it. His talk on Queer Theory made him our expert on pushing back on the boundary erasure that queer theory aims to achieve in every discipline including between animals and humans.
Butler’s new book “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” was the reason for her appearance. In it, she tells the story of how “anti-gender ideology” is an irrational discourse that is a phantasm meant to incite fear and distract from real problems like climate change and capitalism. This is also our complaint of what she has done by introducing the idea of “queering” society. Funny how that works. Which came first, the queering or the feminists who will not be queered because we like our sex-based rights?
She attributed these fears to a right-wing, fascistic movement that now included feminists. She has so clearly charmed her fans into a narrative that serves them and never mentions real-world consequences like sports or prisons. She did mention that the biggest fear was that gender was indoctrinating children when it was really allowing children to talk about who they were in their own way. We, on the other hand, strongly object to telling children that they have the option to change sex through the miracle of body modification (surgical butchering) and a lifelong dependence on pharmaceuticals that will shorten one’s life in this mass medical experiment hijacking the natural puberty of human development. Gee, let’s see if we can make a girl into a boy with the miracle of cross-sex hormones.
During the Q&A portion, I shot my hand up, and as we had front-row seats, I was the first to be called upon. I asked, “If gender is supposed to liberate us why can’t I, as a lesbian, have a dick-free space, a space free of penises?” The audience first laughed at the ‘dick-free’ part, then hissed at this question from a biological essentialist, meaning I think biology is not a construct and that there really are real-world differences between men and women that have real-world consequences because of these differences. Hello.
She answered, “You can have such a space at home unless you have a son.”
Then she proceeded to school me on my presumed fears, that as a feminist I must think more about where violence comes from. That the penis is not the source of violence. And I should not reduce people to anatomical parts. The audience applauded her. That’s when it was clear to me she was leading a men’s rights movement. Men fawn all over her for this.
So having had my rights as a lesbian to assemble socially, without men attempting to entice me with their girl dicks, essentially removed, I felt I had accomplished my mission and was able to report back to my team outside and listen to their tales of harassment and winning at least one person over to our side. Plenty of people did take cards and were reading them inside. We also have a full recording of the talk for later use on Twitter/X.
Butler identifies as non-binary and was dutifully honored with preferred pronouns. When another non-binary person asked how they should respond to accusations that this is not a real identity, she told them that anyone who asks such questions is not showing concern for her oppression and is not a real friend so should be dismissed. This is the no-debate part of the program of queering society.
As I was posing for this photograph a man walked by asking if we were coming to the talk. He turned out to be the usher who gave me the microphone which came at me held at waist height looking curiously phallus like. Years of using a microphone at my business networking meetings gave me the confidence to overcome my usual stage fright and holding it made me feel at home. I was also fired up from the way she characterized those who criticized gender ideology as being irrational and part of a fascist movement intent on an authoritarian agenda so I just wanted to let her have it.
When Judith Butler gave her answer to my question, we were so incredulous we just looked at each other in disbelief. You can hear my reaction on the recording. It was like what! Did she just tell me and our entire lesbian category that we had nowhere to go? And yes she’s actually going to go there. Then when the audience applauded her answer I wondered if they were going to accost me on the way out. We sat there for a few minutes savoring this incidence and the reaction of the audience. Who were these people so willing to throw out material reality for a pie-in-the-sky liberation theology that even Butler had little confidence would come to pass, but she sure was milking it for all it was worth.
The usher hurried us out and no one gave us any trouble. I was glad to have our comrades outside to tell my tale to and debrief what just happened. My carpool mate gave me a rub down to dispel the bad energy that had been directed at me. Exulansic gave me her class analysis which she would later include in her report. Derrick and Lierre Keith were listening to the recording and getting mad on my behalf. Lierre said it must have been traumatic to hear the audience reaction. “I’m still shaking,” I said from the weirdness of it and the cold.
Had I not been so deeply immersed in studying the emergence of this non-sensical dogma for five years I would have been confounded by this audience reaction. Had I been a student during this time, I might well have been swept up in it, forced teamed as we are now with the TQ that hijacked our movement. Judith Butler is just two years older than I am so she is a peer and a witness to the movement which had always been dominated by gay men. She had clearly fashioned herself in the image of a gay man, just as I had done until this emergence of the TQ snapped me back into a lesbian identity to protect the biological reality of women that she was so intent on escaping.
It was fun to experience going viral in this manageable way. One moment I’m tweeting to myself and a few friends and the next I have 4.5K views and 112 comments and retweet quotes to read, some of which were in Spanish, French, German and Chinese, plus selling 7 books after a dry spell since October (due to the Hamas attack diverting the news stream and attention of antifa who now had bigger fish to fry).
After the Daily Mail picked up my story I was able to further press the point to my network with the screenshot of the headline and headshot of the two of us with more explanation of the battle and what was at stake.
Butler's book tour is facing a lot of hard questions about material reality. So much is she hated as the figurehead of trans speak that any mention of her being challenged is good reading. That I could represent the L in the LGBT alphabet mafia shows that all is not well in the Rainbow coalition. That we were force teamed and hijacked by this trans identity phenomenon attempting to destroy sex categories which thus destroys the very meaning of a same sex orientation. My exchange with Butler handily exposed that underlying homophobia.
It's a cult when a belief system requires that all of society participate in and speak the preferred speech of such a belief system. That's the part that is hardest to understand. That this is not about liberating a people who no longer wanted to live the lie of a double life in the closet. It is about a people who DO want to live a lie unhinged from material reality while forcing the rest of society to do so as well. And it's all being done with words which will continue to attract those who are smartest with words.
We being the gender critical wing of the Left makes us more of a threat to the Democratic party for the more of us who are heard the harder it will be to keep calling it a right wing narrative. It is the fear of another Trump presidency that keeps us so far behind Europe in correcting this trans affirming capture of all our institutions. Material reality, however, has a way of prevailing.
You were brilliant! Thank you for your courage.
"And it's all being done with words which will continue to attract those who are smartest with words."
I can tell you that Judith Butler is NOT smart with words. She's incredibly stupid with words. She says very simple-minded things that are obviously wrong, so she hides them behind a screen of big words that don't always even mean what she thinks they mean. That's why her books are so hard to read: they're gibberish.
"Woman is an adult human female" is a highly intelligent sentence that captures all the relevant scientific data in a clear, succinct, inarguable statement of fact.
You can't argue against a sentence like that without resorting to gibberish.
signed,
Editor of 40+ years