Anti-Trans Ideology Threatens All Of Our Freedoms | Judith Butler Meets Ash Sarkar

In March of 2024, Macmillan published Who's Afraid of Gender?, the new book by philosopher Judith Butler.  Butler is well known as the leading voice in the academic field of Gender Studies, a field that they helped to establish in their 1990 book Gender Trouble.  In Who's Afraid of Gender, Butler focuses their gaze on the political and moral panic that has erupted over transgender rights and the concept of gender within recent political discourse.

Macmillan offers the following description of the book's intellectual and ethical intervention on their website:

"The aim of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is not to offer a new theory of gender but to examine how 'gender' has become a phantasm for emerging authoritarian regimes, fascist formations, and trans-exclusionary feminists. In their vital, courageous new book, Butler illuminates the concrete ways that this phantasm of 'gender' collects and displaces anxieties and fears of destruction. Operating in tandem with deceptive accounts of 'critical race theory' and xenophobic panics about migration, the anti-gender movement demonizes struggles for equality, fuels aggressive nationalism, and leaves millions of people vulnerable to subjugation."

In this interview with Ash Sarkar for Novara Media, Butler breaks down the main ideas that they are grappling with in Who's Afraid of Gender? and speaks about the importance of resisting transphobia and its pernicious deployment within right-wing rhetoric in ongoing political discourse.  With right-wing forces ascendant in our government and transphobic rhetoric more emboldened than ever, Butler's work serves as a necessary corrective reminding us that gender is performatively constituted and that resistance to transphobia is a necessary component of anti-fascist political ideology and praxis.

—Nolan Boyd

Full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBlV_cwpiyM