Who's Afraid of Gender? (A Guide to Judith Butler)

Judith Butler might be the most misunderstood philosopher in the world so I decided to read as much of their work as I could in one month actually I read it in like 4 months but it's YouTube videos need narrative now Butler has been writing for over 40 years about a lot of things including gender if you've ever heard the idea that gender is performative that's them their work has also been the subject of huge backlash like in 2017 protesters in Brazil burned an effigy of Judith Butler philosophy doesn't usually get that spicy I must have

missed the Effigy making class during my degree interestingly the people with the strongest reactions to Butler often haven't understood or even read their work and now they have a new book about the backlash who's afraid of gender I've deliberately filmed the bulk of this video on a white void background with minimal costumes kind of an old-fashioned Style on YouTube these days but I wanted to get across the idea that as controversial as this stuff might be there's nothing hidden you're not committing yourself to anything by hearing it it's just an invitation to listen and consider

a different point of view and really that's a skill we could all do with practicing because this philosophy has huge realworld implications I was inspired to take this research Journey when I read this article in the Washington Post students from EC glass High School in lynberg Virginia applied for a grant from it gets better a nonprofit dedicated to kids mental health and they got it they were awarded $10,000 to put a chill out room in their school a space with comfy chairs and relaxed ligh to go if they're stressed nice but the school board sent

the money back they said that if they took it students would have to watch Pro lgbtq videos which wasn't true it gets better does focus on helping lgbtq kids but the room would have been open to anyone and the Grant had no requirements about watching anything but the board wouldn't listen the board discussed this for longer than they discussed the literal closure of two entire schools in their district and that stunned me School Board rejected $10,000 of free money and talked about something that isn't true for so long it impaired their ability to work so

what happened here why couldn't they listen this polarization is exactly what Butler's interested in I'll take you through their technical philosophy although really I wish I could just show you because I'm somebody whose mind has definitely changed on these issues but it's not like I can just go back in time and talk to my past self oh my God these melins are amazing so you're surprised yeah fair but how surprised are you really [Laughter] you look like Mom right you sound different Seattle voice lab look him up I can turn it on and off whenever

I want oh my God so in about 3 years we have to move flats and the Internet contract is in your name so when I call to cancel it they won't talk to me and I have to say hang on a minute I'll go get him do your voice turn the phone I'll your mom and dad take it really well actually there's this nice moment in about 3 years when you and Dad are going to be out actually I think you're gone by this point it's just me and him and we bump into small family

friends and they're super awkward about it and Dad's just like whatever their problem he's not embarrassed why would he be embarrassed were you dressed like this I dress however I want dude that's the whole point the whole thing is so liberating seriously you are going to love it just the freedom to be how want to be I don't want to be like you why not let's talk about Fanboys I began at the beginning Butler's 1988 paper performative acts and gender Constitution one of the first things they ever wrote and right up top we should acknowledge

Butler's academic writing can sometimes be pretty difficult and that's fair enough gender is a difficult subject mine took me to attempts what made it click for me is it reminded me of a friend who will call f f is very cool clever and funny and unpretentious the kind of person who turns up to a fancy restaurant wearing a trucker hat f is also a fanboy Fanboys take on attributes that are typically considered feminine but they are not themselves women usually Fanboy is also a genre of online content F dresses up like a girl and streams

himself playing video games when I first met F I wondered is Fanboy a gender well it's less a thing that you are and more a thing that you do like a job and interestingly because the Fanboy aesthetic is so shaped by online content to do Fanboy in a way that other people will recognize requires you to adopt certain behaviors and stylized practices whose meaning is not determined by you you can't choose what the trends are what styles of makeup or dress signal Fanboy you've got to learn them and do them if you want to be

seen that way and F works pretty hard at that if you're very clever you'll already have guessed where this is going according to Butler all gender works that way in this paper they say that gender is a thing we do through repeated stylized acts not a property but an embodied event those acts get their meaning from a social world so in a way gender is also a thing that is done to us gender is in no way a stable Identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed rather it's an identity tenuously constituted in

time an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of Acts further gender instituted through a stylization of the body and hence must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures movements and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self you're ridiculous says discount Tom Heston your face doesn't look like me anymore did did you get plastic surgery on my face well there's no plastic in me babes I'm all natural artificial surgery makes you natural does it at first glance Butler's ideas seemed a little strange to me because we often talk

as if gender is an inner Truth For example when people change gender and come out we're often said to be living authentically or being true to ourselves even the term coming out implies that there was an authentic self before who was hidden but according to Butler there might be no such thing it's not that I exist and then I choose to perform gender in ways that you will recognize I can't even form a concept cep of I without using gendered language and stylized practices whose meaning exists prior to me gender is one of the ways

that human subjects come into existence the technical term here is subjectification and that process happens publicly gender creates the illusion of a private self which exists before all of that but this is just an illusion if a tree falls in the forest and nobody's around hear it it has no pronouns here in lies the distinction between performative and performance which are often mixed up when people say gender is a performance they mean that people exist first without gender and then they put on costumes or makeup or wigs the way that an actor does but that's

not what Butler is saying performative is a technical philosophy term for when you say something and by saying it you also do it for example if you say I promise you say the words and you make a promise if a judge says I sentence you they say it and they do it when Butler says that gender is performative they mean it that way you do it and you make it so and indeed by doing it you are made so and people have made fun of Butler for this idea I've seen people say oh Jud Jud

Butler says you can just choose to be any gender you want men could choose to be women and women can choose to be baboons and I can choose to be an attack helicopter ha how silly but when I actually read their work I realized that's not what they're saying at all our very concept of ourselves as gendered subjects requires a social world we depend on others for the recognition we need to become gendered subjects we can still make some choices wear whatever clothes or makeup you like but the meaning of those things is not within

our soul control people have been making jokes like that about Butler for decades even though they address this misunderstanding in their first paper in the first paragraph almost like the people mocking them aren't really listening h there is no volitional subject behind the mime who decides as it were which gender it will be today on the contrary the very possibility of becoming a viable subject requires that a certain gender mine be already underway I didn't come back here to argue with you I'm trying to help I don't believe it it's a trick you were born

in your Castle your favorite fruit is Chinese your first crush was named flossy no no you could have tortured me and gotten that information what well I don't know you could have gotten it out of me somehow in the future just listen to me we're the same height we have the same eyes your body's completely different yes that's the point human bodies can't change that much even if you are even if you are even let's talk about Kristen Stewart next on my reading list was Butler's famous 1990 book gender trouble but it's pretty tough and

Technical so we could use a bit of a runup we can actually start with this in March 2024 actor Kristen Stewart appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone looking in the interview Stuart said I want to do the gayest thing you've ever seen in your life if I could grow a little mustache if I could grow a happy trail and unbutton my pants I would later at the Berlin Film Festival she added the existence of a female body thrusting any type of sexuality that's not designed for or desired by exclusively CIS straight males is something

people are not super comfy with and so I really happy with it I had a great time a lot of people think that there's a difference between sex and gender sex is supposed to be the physical thing some combination of genes or genitals or gametes or maybe it's something in your brain but it's there in the world and gender is just what we do with it or at least that's That's How The Story Goes it might be helpful to know something of the history of that idea for Millennia male dominated societies exploited women and Justified

it by claiming that we are naturally inferior from Greek and Roman philosophers saying that women can't be educated to Victorian doctors saying that we are too emotional to vote to today some people still say women are by Nature not equipped to live as equal members of society oh she could never lead a nation what if got her period and started a war misogyny has consistently Justified Itself by appealing to facts about our bodies that are simply made up if you'd like to know more about the history of this practice then I really recommend The Once

and Future sex by historian elanar yanar into this context comes French philosopher Simone deir whose Landmark book The Second Sex comes out in 1949 and opens with this sentence one is not born but rather becomes a woman deoir challenges this history saying that whilst there are facts about female biology male dominated Society also makes a lot of stuff up and claims that the stuff it makes up is facts the technical term here is naturalization making something appear natural for example women are denied the vote well it's not cuz we live in an unequal Society it's

cuz the female brain just can't handle it because of uh biology so she says one is born female but woman is a socially constructed ideal of subordination that we are encouraged to embrace and punished for defying and then in the 1980s Along come French philosophers Monique whittig and Michelle Fuko who say this sex versus gender distinction is just another layer of control duir thinks that woman is an oppressive social construct but female somehow isn't human beings are 99.9% identical who does it serve to split hairs about the remaining .1% defining one half of the human

species in terms of our capacity to carry babies and be fertile and straight and thereby participate in systems of property and inheritance overwhelmingly controlled by men does that sound like a natural distinction or does it sound like a political one whittig actually says that women should reject Womanhood entirely by becoming lesbians rejecting the patriarchal categories of both women and female categories which she says only make sense inside the heterosexual Matrix do not try and change sex that's impossible instead only try to realize the truth what truth there is no sex we've been compelled in our

bodies and in our minds to Cor respond feature by feature with the idea of nature that has been established for us distorted to such an extent that our deformed body is what they call Natural what is supposed to exist as such before oppression distorted to such an extent that in the end oppression seems to be a consequence of this nature within ourselves by admitting that there is a natural division between women and men we naturalize history not only do we naturalize history but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression making change

impossible lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex woman and man because the designated subject lesbian is not a woman either economically or politically or ideologically for what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man a relation that we have previously called servitude a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation forced residence domestic corvet conj duties unlimited production of children Etc a relation which lesbians Escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual I'm not sure that I personally agree with everything

otic says but it's a provocative thought worth listening to and in gender trouble Butler thinks so too they say we should question the idea that sex is a natural category that might sound very out there but just listen for a moment Once Upon a Time people believed that race was a natural category they wrote scientific papers about it and measured people's skulls and took blood samples and they believed that it was real nowadays we know that race is a political grouping that was naturalized made to look natural in large part to justify slavery and we

also know that sex was a big part of that black women and white women were categorized very differently so are you certain that the distinction between male and female is as secure as you been told who told you that why did they tell you it and who benefits from you continuing to believe it you think that's you're eating now this is the artistic space that chrisen Stewart's photo shoot is playing in the piece and Stewart's comments engage in what Butler calls resignification giving a new meaning to something in this case steuart's body the question it

poses is what if this is also female what does that tell us about the sense or nonsense of gendered categories but if sex isn't real then why did I go through all the trouble of changing mine it's a blunt question but it's not an unfair one so when I finished gender trouble I also read this whipping Girl by Julia Sano Sano is a biologist she believes in what she calls subconscious sex something in the brain that expects the body to be a certain way she thinks this would explain the existence of people like me and

also her whose gender just feels right it's an interesting idea and I think it gets to the heart of an intuition a lot of us have to go well look like physical differences are there we can see them some human beings can get pregnant and others can't like is Butler really saying that all of that isn't real but then I read the book again and it turns out that's also a misunderstanding but let's not saying that the physical world isn't there or even that it's unknowable they're just saying that whatever facts there might be about

biological sex we can only learn them and talk about them through gender to say the sentence my brain expects my body to be female is to draw on a particular understanding of the word female and while we're at at a particular understanding of the meaning of the words my and body that get their meaning from a social world I've seen some more recent philosophers use the term sex/gender and even sex/gender slra and now I understand why we can't really think about those things separately it's not that there's sex the biological reality and then there's gender

on top of it it's all gender it's all gender always has been physical features appear to be in some sense there on the far side of language unmarked by a social system it is unclear however that these features could be named in a way that would not reproduce the reductive operation of the categories of sex in other words sex imposes an artificial Unity on an otherwise discontinuous set of attributes as both discursive and perceptual sex denotes a historically contingent epistemic regime a language that forms perception by forcibly shaping the inter relationships through which physical bodies

are perceived the existence and facticity of the material or natural dimensions of the body are not denied but reconceived as distinct from the process by which the body comes to Bear cultural meanings if gender is the cultural significance that the sex body assumes and if that significance is co-determined through various acts and their cultural perception then it would appear that from within the terms of culture it is not possible to know sex as distinct from gender and then I turned on the news biological sex really matters I'm glad you've said what a woman is because

a lot of people were thinking why can't we say what it is anymore I start with Biology yep biology um and obviously um there's a distinction between sex and gender all right well you can't change sex okay that is a biological fact and we shouldn't get bullied into believing that people can be any sex they want to be they can't a woman is a human being who belongs to the sex class that produces large git may I suggest also posting interesting and positive content on other matters I live in England where a lot of people

are talking about sex at the moment some say that sex is a fixed point that cannot be changed or resignified or questioned whereas gender is just a nebulous feeling or a contested belief I thought all that feminist philosophy was pretty interesting but it seems some people don't want to listen human bodies can't change that much even if you are even if you are even if you are me right let's just say you are for the sake of the argument right you say you're happy but what about the version of us from 20 30 40 years

into the far future what if they walk in now and say you made a mistake then I made the mistake wanted to make better the devil you know than the devil you don't the gates of hell are locked from the inside what makes me suspicious right is you're coming in here going o everything's wonderful right trying to convince me but you don't mention any downsides of course there's downsides go on then Street harassment men are going to shout at you in the street men push into you and interrupt you and and it's scary sometimes being

a woman there's this girl called Sarah everod she's going to get murdered in 2021 by a police officer it's a big thing it's on all the news and they have a vigil for her in London women come from all over the country and the police beat and arrest the women at the vigil and you're going to see that and you're going to feel scared cuz it's like wow this is how they treat us were you there no I didn't feel entitled to good the body we have is threatening uh it wouldn't be appropriate for us

to be at an event about violence against women we're not violent I mean we're like tall but so are giraffes bodies are just bodies I wish I had been there we need all the Allies we can get I tell you this you're going to have to go through so much just to get health care and all of that comes from this place of being like Oh everybody needs to fit a strict definition everyone has to be in a little box like that I'll do what I want and I'll help who I can let's talk about

feminism if there is no natural category of sex then how can we argue for women's rights that's a question some people are asking and I'll admit I was curious I've seen some say that Butler is erasing women and that in order to protect us from things like discrimination and assault the law needs a strict definition of woman grounded in facts about biological sex thing is I happen to know just off my own bat that that's actually incorrect for example suppose an employer denies a job to a candidate named Hillary because they think oh women women

be shopping women unreliable employees application denied only it turns out Hillary is Hillary with one L the candidate is a man in that case the employer can still be guilty of sexual discrimination even though their definition of what a woman is is false and didn't even apply the same principle also goes in crimes like assault if a straight person gets attacked coming out of a gay club that can still be a homophobic hate crime if the suspect beli believes that they're gay and attacks them for that reason what matters in law is the suspect's actions

and motivations not whether the victim meets a particular definition even though this is a matter of settled law some people still insist that a strict definition is required almost like those people aren't listening but anyway wouldn't it still be useful to have some definition of woman even if we all know it's kind of vague and loose could it be useful as a political standard to Rally around I read Butler's 1991 paper imitation and gender subordination which is partly about this definition question they say that defining Womanhood has been and still is a key strategy of

patriarchy and that's what deou was writing about in the' 40s trying to set an exact definition is always going to be an exclusionary project whereas a certain amount of gray area would be more inclusive indeed they say that any category like gay lesbian trans Fanboy imposes limits and trying to make everybody fit one specific box as if they must have some inner self that corresponds to one of them is just a bad idea and I understood where Butler was coming from there in Britain trans people are often expected to tell doctor a certain story about

our lives we're supposed to say oh ever since I was a child I called myself Wendy and wore my mother's dresses and if your life doesn't fit that narrative it can be very hard to get medical care the concept of an authentic inner self that needs to be discovered and verified and checked and meet somebody else's definition is used against us identity categories tend to be instruments of regulatory regimes whether as the nor normalizing categories of oppressive structures or as the rallying points for a liberatory contestation of that very oppression that is not to say

that I will not appear at political occasions under the sign of lesbian but that I would like to have it permanently unclear what precisely that sign signifies which version of lesbian or gay ought to be rendered visible and which internal exclusions will that rendering visible Institute can the visibility of identity suff ice as a political strategy or can it only be the starting point for a strategic Intervention which calls for a transformation of policy is it not a sign of Despair over public politics when identity becomes its own policy bringing with it those who would

police it from various sides I don't know what else to tell you man change is difficult but it is possible this is going to up our career on the contrary well it's going to up love life on the contrary well look as far as anyone knows right now I'm a sis hat white guy right I'm top of the pile surely it would be easier to not change oh yeah way easier if you want to be depressed every day of your life and kill yourself at 35 you know what I mean it politically things aren't great

in my time I assume in the future they do not vastly improve improve let's talk about 911 and dicks oh this is where things get silly and then they get very not silly a penis is an organ of the human body it has nerves and blood vessels and skin and so on its primary function is to allow women who have one to pee standing up if the toilet of the train Carriage that you're in is really gross and it also does some other stuff remember what we said earlier though it's not that there's the physical

organ and then a bunch of other social construct stuff on top according to Butler we can only know the body through the social world of symbolic meanings so that particular organ often means power strength domination particularly when used for penetration and the threat of male violence that bundle of cultural and symbolic meanings is what philosophers call the phace can a woman have a penis this question was a fad in British Med Med a year or two ago journalists kept ambushing politicians with it and watching them struggle but really the answer is quite simple in Britain

you can change your legal sex without surgery because international human rights law recognizes it's probably morally wrong to make a certain group of people undergo expensive difficult potentially risky invasive medical procedures that they may not want in order to do things like get married so if you are assigned male at Birth you can change your legal sex in Britain and become a woman without surgery it's not an easy process but surgery isn't mandatory uh if you like your dick you can keep it beyond the legal situation though if a person assigned male takes feminizing hormones

then their body will change and that includes their genitals which can change a lot more than you might think in some cases it essentially becomes a large clitoris incapable of erection or penetration and whether you want to call that a female penis or a feminine penis or whether you think there's not much distinction there legally and medically the facts are in can a woman have a penis yeah and yet people who haven't experienced all that for themselves often don't listen to those who have maybe you were giggling when I told you all of that stuff

the idea of a female penis is so unimaginable that it's like a punchline right despite the fact that it is just a normal thing that some people have it appears funny and unexpected the idea of resignifying that using it differently but not wrongly not powerful not for penetration not even male appears to be almost a contradiction because that bundle of cultural and symbolic meanings has been naturalized made to seem natural and this is a very common mistake we might even call it a fallacy all of this is deeply funny until the second it affects government

policy in February 20123 British Justice secretary Dominic Rob announced that from now on women who have male genitalia who are arrested will be sent to a Men's prison regardless of what we look like regardless of whether we have legally changed sex and regardless of what we are charged with if for example I was arrested at a protest if I was wrongfully arrested for something I would be sent to a Men's prison and I'm sure you can imagine although you may not want to how that might go there isn't really any good kind of prison but

this policy makes prison worse for a certain section of the population because of the way that we are born and in that regard it's ethically unusual it's normally a principle of justice that similar crimes should carry similar sentences but in my home country the same crime might carry a much harsher prison sentence if you're a transwoman this discrimination is justified by politicians by appealing to the supposed threat that penises carry but remember it's regardless of our crime or what our particular bodies are capable of and that's quite philosophically interesting they say that we are a

threat but they are not listening to any actual facts about us since that 2023 announcement I'd been trying to understand and and listen to the Justice secretary's perspective and work my way through the fear so the next item on my reading list was Butler's 2003 volume precarious life they write about 9/11 and the war on terror in particular the people who were detained indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay by the US government Terror suspects and suspects is a key word there because many of those imprisoned were never given a trial some of them were never even charged

the government said those people had to be imprisoned because they were dangerous but not the kind of danger that they could prove in a trial the danger that these prisoners are said to pose is unlike dangers that might be substantiated in a court of law and redress through punishment establishing dangerousness is not the same as establishing guilt a certain level of dangerousness takes a human being outside the bounds of Law and even outside the bounds of the AR tribunal itself makes that human into the state's possession infinitely detainable what counts as dangerous is what is

deemed Dangerous by the state so that once again the state posits what is dangerous and in so doing establishes the conditions for its own preemption and ipation of the law if a person is deemed dangerous then it is no longer a matter of deciding whether criminal acts occurred indeed deeming someone dangerous is an unsubstantiated judgment that in these cases Works to preempt determinations for which evidence is required if you're very clever you'll already have realized that when governments call people dangerous in this way they're using performative speech they say it and they make it so

but what's happening here isn't subjectification it's objectification creating nons subjects non people who exist outside the law and who can therefore be treated anywh the government likes we don't need trials and evidence for them cuz they're the bad guys if they have their rights violated or they die well you shouldn't care about that because they were never really alive in a way that mattered in fact if you do care about what happens to them then that's suspicious you're not going to sympathize with the bad guys oh you if you've been watching the news lately you

might be wondering the people of Gaza keep being killed but Western governments aren't listening is that maybe an example of objectification and according to Butler the answer is yes they are a longtime supporter of Palestinian rights and have often used their position as a public Jewish academic to call on the Israeli government to meet their obligations under international human rights law Butler says objectification is a the tool of government in the 21st century that we need to watch out for when the powers that be say a certain group of people are inherently dangerous whether they're

Muslims or Palestinians or trans people that's them trying to use performative speech to make that group of people impossible to listen to We Become not subjects but objects a problem to be managed against our will in the name of a public good that does not recognize us as part of the public and I'm not drawing a moral equivalence between those three groups I'm just highlighting this technique of government making you aware of it because you never know when the powers that be might decide to use it on you yeah you're right about that politics in

the future gets weird how do you mean weird let's talk about JK Rowling [Music] we come at last to Butler's new book who's afraid of gender in recent years Scholars have been studying the rise of the global anti-gender movement a network of people including far-right political actors religious fundamentalists and a lot of people who are neither sometimes it's a literal network of politicians and activists working together behind the scenes but sometimes it's more of a loose Association they oppose women's rights especially abortion lgbtq rights and they strongly oppose trans people there is a part of

the movement that emerged from radical feminism and that part tends to get a lot of attention especially here on YouTube Here's three great videos if you're interested but the movement as a whole is mainly men and supports policies that would harm the vast majority of women women play an important role in selling it and helping it appear benign because protecting women is always good PR but they aren't the core the core is the fight against gender ideology but there's not much agreement on what that actually means in Eastern Europe they say that gender ideology is

spread by the UN and EU but in Italy they say it's spread by African migrants in Latin America gender ideology means feminism but in the UK they say it's against feminism in Florida they say it's gay in the UK they say it's homophobic they say that gender ideology is the new conversion therapy but some anti-gender organizations are in favor of conversion therapy gender ideology is spread by woke students with blue hair and safe spaces but it's also being pushed on innocent students by Wicked professors children must not be indoctrinated ated into gender ideology and so

the government must make sure children believe the things it says about gender all of this is deeply confusing the Oxford English Dictionary defines gender ideology [Music] as although gender ideology is a vague term there are recurring themes in how it is used one such theme is the idea that gender is in some way unnatural or artificial or fake a contested belief unlike biological sex and family values which definitely are natural another theme is that gender ideologues whoever they are are powerful commanding your obedience but also very sneaky capturing institutions behind the scenes and the sneakiness

is important because it allows the movement to claim gender ideologues are doing all sorts of Nefarious things that they have no evidence for but the reason they have no evidence is because they're so gosh darn sneaky self victimization plays a huge role here another reason there's no evidence is because ordinary people are being bullied into Silence by the woke genderist sometimes this verges into outright conspiracy theory there are people in my country people with serious political and media careers who've claimed that our civil service and healthc Care are secret L being run by the trans

deep state which frankly I wish that were true the final theme is the danger that gender ideology apparently poses whatever it is it's a threat to women who are erased and to men who are made weak and helpless to families and to children in particular who are confused or prayed upon it's a threat to the nation because you see gender makes us weak to Communism or capitalism or Vladimir Putin or Western influence or Islamic migrants it's a threat to the existence of humanity and the authority of God himself the Vatican has actually claimed that no

exaggeration Pope Francis compared gender ideology to nuclear weapons it kind of just means the opposite of how things should be and the way they should be is whatever you personally want and that's a very effective strategy because it allows people who previously might not have Associated to stand together the movement features Conservative Catholics men's rights activists neo-nazis New Age types centrists liberals and even some feminists and it's good at radicalizing them too gender ideology seems like such a big threat it can't be stopped by traditional means we have to get tough much of the blame

for starting the anti-gender movement belongs I'm afraid to Catholics since at least the 1980s Conservative Catholics both within and without the church have said that gender ideology threatens the family and God they use this claim as justification for their extreme authoritarian positions on abortion and queerness among other things it was Catholics who first started the conspiracy theory that the UN are secretly pushing an anti-christian gender agenda the Catholic church has also claimed several times in writing without evidence that gender ideology leads to the abuse of children an IMAX level Act of projection that might honestly

be funny if it weren't so insulting to the intelligence of every human being on planet earth religion still plays a big role in driving anti-gender sentiment especially in the Americas and Eastern Europe in Britain our version is a little more secular but that's not the case everywhere it's just we don't go in for Catholicism as much as we used to but it would be unfair to lay the blame on all Catholics evangelicals are getting involved too and indeed some ordinary Catholics might be getting scammed I have to be careful what I say here I can

tell you that religion also plays a role in how the movement is funded the poror skaga association a Polish group who oppose abortion and lgbtq rights have raised millions of Euros selling rosaries and pictures of saints to Catholics around the world via mail order and legally I can't say that's a scam maybe everyone who gives them money knows what they use it for maybe when a little French grandma in to L buys a calendar with the Virgin Mary on it she knows full well that her money is going to an extreme right-wing organization in Poland

who are going to send some of it to anti-abortion groups in in Brazil and spend the rest on luxury properties Grandma probably did her research and she'd have to because their adverts don't mention it and piaga's financial documents were hidden from the public until journalists broke this story in 2020 speaking of Catholic crimes though the narrative is that gender ideology is being pushed on the good people of the world by shadowy Elites who are pulling the strings and at this point in my reading I was thinking well that sounds a lot like anti-em ISM and

yes there are some parts of the movement that are explicitly anti-semitic for example neo-nazis have criticized Judith Butler for being a Jewish lesbian who invented gender to weaken the west but then I read this anti-gender politics in the populist Moment by polish Scholars agesa graph and albera kuk they say not all anti- genderist are secretly anti-semitic the reason they can look similar is because they do similar things objectify make a certain group of people impossible to listen to though Jews are almost never mentioned in attacks on gender ideology genderist and especially sexual minorities are consistently

judaized an anti-gender discourse that is described in a language strongly reminiscent of conspiratorial anti-Semitism the link becomes most obvious when Soros and Butler are mentioned or when the term cultural Marxism notorious for its anti-semitic subtext is employed like Jews and anti-semitic attacks sexual minorities are presented as engaged in a secretive plot they are scheming devious and Powerful to this end the term homosexual Lobby is often used and the link between homosexuality and cosmopolitanism or rootlessness is persistently made furthermore LGBT activists are routinely accused of sacrilege their very presence is said to contain contaminate sacred events

in spaces while the rainbow flag is seen as offensive to religious sensibilities and patriotic feelings finally like Jews in preor War II Eastern Europe gays are blamed for provoking violent attacks by making themselves too conspicuous we're in the eye of the storm a lot I mean queer people generally but sometimes us specifically sometimes it feels like being under a big microscope do you remember when we were studying theology at University yeah just about we we had this one lecturer who taught us about Genesis remember he said um you are created you you are a creature

yeah I do remember that I didn't like that word creature no yeah we belong to us we decide what we do well if God does exist it seems you've got notes that's all very interesting but it doesn't explain why the anti-gender movement just doesn't listen remember back at the start when we learned about the school board who turned down $10,000 of free money remember how the same misunderstandings of Butler's work have circulated for decades remember the insist that the law must have a strict definition of woman even though we know that's not true remember all

those unevidenced conspiracies about the trans deep State and secret un plots there's something else too that's very interesting the language that the anti-gender movement uses is very action-y threat infiltration danger bullying silencing censorship a comparison to nuclear weapons it's not just that they're not listening when they're invited to listen it seems like that makes them feel as if they're under attack and Butler has an explanation for this they say that these people are caught in a fantasm fantasm is a technical philosophy term for a particular way of misinterpreting the World by projecting your feelings onto

it philosopher Michael nass says that it's a prism that refracts an as if in to an as so for example the presence of a transperson with a penis in a public bathroom makes me feel as if I am under attack becomes I am under attack people use fantasms to avoid cognitive dissonance in the face of anxiety for example literature Professor Darren tenv says we use them to help us confront death normally we don't want to think about our own deaths it makes us anxious so when we picture our own funerals and what we would want

to happen to our remains we imagine ourselves as being gone but also kind of still around like oh I'd love to be buried somewhere that has a nice view well why you're not going to be there to enjoy it by definition that's a contradictory dream but the fantasm contains that contradiction and soothes our anxiety it is as if I will still be there I will still be there what is characteristic of fantasms is that they are placed and place what could be called the subject of fantasm on both sides of a border a boundary a

limit a frontier when there is a border a limitation the fantasm lets one on the other side and not only provides a Contraband access through the Border but also keeps one on both sides at the same time there is no logic of the fantasm the fantasm is fantasm because it allows one to stand on both sides of a border for example allowing one to imagine one's own corpse while still be alive like he says there's no logic to this it's an exercise in trying to not make sense because you can't handle the conclusions that you

would reach if you did that's why people caught in a fantas will throw out all kinds of claims that it doesn't really seem like they've thought through or have any evidence for and when questioned on it they'll say you're attacking me because they're trying really hard to not think something but what exactly what is the thing that the anti-gender movement doesn't want to think well it'll probably be different for different individuals JK Rowling has been massively radical ized into the movement in the last few years she's made a lot of very weird and false claims

about trans people and gotten very aggressive when challenged people have speculated about her trauma maybe causing that but as a woman who's also survived an abusive relationship that kind of public speculation has always felt a little bit gross to me I don't want to do armchair psychology on anyone even though I'm sure plenty of people would love to do some on me it's just not the philosophy tube way so maybe we can ask a more General version of this same question why are fantasms catching on and not just about this topic but all sorts of

things on the previous episode we talked about 15minute City conspiracy theories and there's q andon and conspiracies about the royal family sometimes the way that zionists talk about Palestinians has a touch of the fantasm about it as some Jewish Scholars have noted this is a really big issue and it would be great if we could sort the whole gender thing out because we've got a lot of real problems to deal with we don't have time to be fighting imaginary ones oh graph and coral chuk say there really are a lot of problems in the world

and a lot of them are systemic a lot of women really are devalued a lot of children really are living in an increasingly dangerous and warming World a lot of people really do rely on their families to protect them from Big institutions and economic forces that really will trample every tradition and really do dissolve everything into money according to them the anti-gender fantasm is an attempt to criticize the effects of capitalism without naming capitalism as the problem people see the bad results of the system that we have but they're invested in those same systems and

so the solutions become Unthinkable their criticisms have to be expressed as a kind of moral criticis ism anti- genderism is the socialism of Fools and the feminism of Fools and the anti-colonialism of FS the anti-gender movement is so effective in attracting Mass support because it is structured and legitimized as a conservative response to the excesses of neoliberalism a crucial source of anxiety is the rampant individualism of contemporary culture the erosion of community and growing instability of everyday life opponents of gender ideology attribute these Trends to the influence of feminism and the sexual Revolution anti- genderism

conflates gender with those aspects of capitalism that are most frustrating to members of the working and lower middle class especially to parents and wouldbe parents precarity and the crisis of care resulting from unequal distribution of wealth instead of naming the problem in economic terms as Injustice and exploitation anti- genderism presents the world of capitalism's winners as degenerate and morally corrup corupt and here's where we tie it all together and bring it back to Judith Butler when the anti-gender movement say that gender is an ideology and sex is a fixed point we Now understand they aren't

making an observation they're making a demand when they say that you can't change sex they mean you shouldn't be allowed to because that would be dangerous not the kind of danger that is proven with evidence but the kind they want the state to posit and punish what they want is morally righteous violence that restores an imaginary order because they are anxious about real problems that they cannot or will not think about and so they can only Glimpse those problems through the prism of un reality the contradictory character of the fantasm allows it to contain Whatever

anxiety or fear that the anti-gender ideology wishes to stoke for its own purposes without having to make any of it cohere depending on the anxieties circulating in a particular region gender can be figured as Marxist or capitalist tyranny or libertarianism fascism or totalitarianism a totalizing force or an unwanted migrant it it is not that people are unmindful of the contradiction and need to be enlightened no the contradiction itself is what works in effect emancipa people from the task of developing a rational [Music] position maybe it's cuz I'm older but part of the reason I came

back is to tell you life is too short to spend it being miserable actually that's a point how come you look younger than me cuz I'm happier Joy is youthful also we get a really good skincare routine I don't want to think about getting older you know mom's fish pie recipe yeah there's this really amazing moment that's going to happen when you're 30 you make that fish pie for a friend who's like 23 and you bring it out and she says you are literally my mother and that is going to be one of the first

times you realize that we're getting older but it's actually nice cuz it's like we have knowledge that younger people don't andless it's not like a superiority thing it's we get to be helpful we become an antie we have little nieces and and a nephew and we help them put on their shoes and they ask us to tell them about Shakespeare and I wish I could tell you that it's all going to be moments like that but you're right your future has ups and downs and it is it's mainly us but the politics is Big down

does it get better let's talk about brainworms brainworms is a 2024 novel by Allison rumit about a woman who discovers that several high-ranking British politicians and journalists are being secretly controlled by a contagious parasite that makes them bigoted she has to uncover the conspiracy but nobody will believe her because she's working class and trans and maybe imagining it I like that the worms are never confirmed to be real we could read them as hallucinations that ambiguity forces us to engage only with the metaphor brain worms might not be real but hate is infectious disgusting and

perverse one character is a famous author who writes books about Teenage Witch is there's a scene where she infects someone else coming close to her victim worms dripping from her open mouth and she says a line and in the movie version this would be the line that reveals a glimpse of her evil plan right but instead she says I've seen the future of this country and it's going to get so much worse the the worms don't make her happy in fact they're a kind of contagious misery nobody who is infected ever gets better so what

can we do about all the things that we have learned today well there's actually two questions rolled into one there the first is what can we practically do about the political situation that we're all living in and secondly can we convince people who are stuck inside fantasms so first things first uh practically speaking what can we do well if you've been watching the show for any amount of time you know that I hate telling people what to do or think but here's some suggestions maybe if you're Catholic and you like buying little medals or rosaries

or chachkies if you have relatives who do maybe older relatives who do you might like to double check where that money is going if you happen to work in media then all of this Theory could have some practical applications for you we might like to talk about anti- genderist the way we talk about antivaxers or climate deniers for example Mrs X says this which is false organization y claims this which is pseudo science another thing that you might like to try is using the word cisgender it was coined in the early '90s it means not

transgender and the English language anti-gender movement hated because it implies that trans people and CIS people are both worth listening to it resists objectification by putting us on an even playing field kind of like using the word straight or heterosexual instead of saying normal beyond that graph and K shuk say we need to appreciate the fact that right-wing populism is criticizing capitalism albeit in Fantasmic terms they say we should move beyond the old idea that the left are anti- capitalist and the right are always PR market now some of them are to be sure but

not all they say that these days a lot of people on the right are actually criticizing capitalism even if they don't use that kind of language and so sticking to the same old economic policies we've had for the last 40 years is leaving yourself wide open to those farri extremists they also say that lgbtq stuff and gender stuff can't really be separated from normal politics anymore cuz that's how a lot of people are engaging with normal politics these days the anti-gender fantasm isn't the only thing powering the global right to be sure but it's big

enough that it can't be ignored important lessons there for centrists perhaps they recommend a strategy called populist feminism which involves tapping into people's emotions in the moment an example from the UK might be the group sisters uncut who've been very successful mobilizing a broad Coalition against austerity domestic violence Cuts police violence prisons Healthcare segregation arm sales to the Israeli government and many other things because they recognized that all those forces disproportionately hurt women and therefore women can be brought together to protest against them if given the chance to express our feelings of hurt and righteous

anger there's many ways to be involved in a group like that from actually taking part in demonstrations to donating money which again empowers a broad Coalition a broad Coalition a coalition of broads Dames dime pieces chicks dolls all standing together will it work well join me at the end of the 21st century to see Humanity's final scores and now our second question can we reach people stuck in fantasms is there a cure for brain worms well to be honest as somebody who does a lot of public education I really hate to admit this but I

am not optimistic that education will work Butler says that this movement is not only irrational but anti-rational many of the most prominent people in it proudly do not engage with any of the academic material on gender at the end of my research journey I realized the reason they don't listen is because they feel that listening is an act of submission and I I I can't help it I think that's really sad I I really don't want to come across it's like patronizing or giving people Mercy that they wouldn't give me but I I I think

it is really sad when people refuse their own complexity when they refuse to become the person that they might become if they just listened indeed there could be no greater enemy for philosophy tube than the anti-gender fantasm this show is is about compassion and reason and sharing knowledge between equals it's it's born out of my belief that thinking and and and research and and words and writing that they matter and I'm trans like this is my final boss fight in formed public debate becomes impossible when some parties refuse to read the material under dispute it

is nearly impossible to breach this epistemic divide with good arguments because of the fear that reading will introduce confusion into the reader's mind or bring her into direct contact with the devil they're skeptical of the academy for fear that intellectual debates May well confuse them about the values they hold their refusal to care much about consistency to base their criticisms on a reading of the text their way of snatching phrases and micking them into lightning rods however are all finally a refusal to think [Music] critically some individual people do get better when we first come

out there's going to be people who do not take it well but in time they see that we are happy and for most of them that's enough I'm scared have changing no offense yeah we will change but you keep the good bits are you uh still making philosophy tube in the future um what do the audience say I brought them with me hi it's nice to see you all there's more of them a lot more [Music] I love you I love you [Music] too I'd like to end by telling you my hopes for the future

I hope that I will grow old I hope that when I am old I will still be cooking the way that my mom taught me and that I will have the wisdom of my dad I hope that my nieces and my nephew grow up into good and happy people I hope that I will see younger people have opportunities that I didn't and I hope that I won't be too jealous I I hope that I will be acting and making art for the rest of my life I hope that this is not the cleverest or the

most compassionate that I will ever be but that I will continue to change because the only people who don't change are the dead speaking of changes I've been doing philosophy tube for 11 years now some of you have been here that whole time and I don't know if you realize it but you have changed my life off YouTube I'm a professional actor YouTube kind of blew up first but it's always been separate from my acting career until I wrote a play called the prince which a lot of you came to see so it did really

well and then I got cast in Boulders Gate 3 and then I got cast in Star Wars and then I got cast in something that's even bigger than Star Wars that I'm not allowed to tell you about yet and the engine of all of this has been you I used to think that I would probably have to leave YouTube behind someday to focus on acting but now I realize that because of you and your lovely enthusiasm for all of the things that I make and that I'm in I now realize we can combine YouTube and

acting into something more powerful than either one can be alone so then I was like okay I want to write a short film and I did it's called Dracula's ex-girlfriend it's about two vampire chicks in La being horrible to each other I pitched it to a streaming service called nebula I said hey I've got this big audience and we already had success with my play do you maybe want to do a movie and they said yes once again you have changed my life do you know how many actors would kill to have a streaming service

pick up their debut film I'm going to be in it too my co-stars are Morana ignis and Brandon Rogers from hell of a boss one of the biggest shows in the world and you will be able to see the film when it comes out at go. show on Disney plus say I don't know Star Wars the acolyte well you do the job and you have a great time and at the end of the day you go home Star Wars belongs to Disney but on nebula the people who create the thing own the thing I wrote

Dracula's ex-girlfriend so I keep the rights they're giving the creators more power and even better if you all go and get Disney plus to watch Star Wars then that's really cool but the creators of the show don't get like a bonus or anything however if you get nebula using that link specifically then I get a cut and you get a discount $22.50 a month with an annual subscription so I help you you're helping me we are helping each other and there's even more if you want to see the full scene that we shot for this

episode without all the video essay bits in between that's on nebula 2 every episode of philosophy tube goes up there early and uncensored l L Alis is on there legal eagal is on there H bomy is on there they're making a whole bunch of documentaries now they're making a sci-fi movie directed by Jesse gender that I'm going to be in it's called identities it comes out in June if you get nebula you can see all of that we are combining YouTube and acting and we are unlocking the power you and I have had a lot

of fun over these last 11 years the next step is Dracula's ex-girlfriend and after that wait and [Music] see who will get what she wants doesn't hide always out in the sun and it kills me slowly see BS Me by in the City of Dreams wish that I have that power in me but I'm just too mightly in secure all the time that I Wast and always looking a strangers thinking this so much better than me all the time that I wait is that I'm making some changes it's C who's that girl she walks around

like she could rule the world she goes for everything that she deserves say what would it take for me to be like her I wouldn't [Music] know I want to know cuz I just want to be somebody not just anybody tell me who's that who's that who's that there's a sense of belief I just cry at my Petty party and I'm getting nowhere why she com first how can I get some confidence where my mind never wants to be friends it just keeps comparing me to her that she walks around like she could Ru the

world she goes for everything that she Des say what would it take for me to be like I want to know who's that girl she's got a power that I bet she's got to wake away with say what would it take for me to be like I want know I [Music] want want to be somebody not just anybody tell me who's that who's that who [Music] that who that cuz I just want to be somebody not just anybody tell me who's that who's that who's that you can moonwalk another Talent apparently pretty good I can

that's it that's the end of the video I'm just kidding all right all right nice