YouSaid · the spoken record

Judith Butler

lines on the record: 51
first: 2025-04-24
most recent: 2025-04-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Outrage is hugely important. I live with enormous amount of rage, and most people I know do as well. The issue is not to repress it, but to cultivate it. I think the well-cultivated fuck you is one of the most important things you can learn in this life, right? You don't just express your rage and, oh, I got it out of my system and that's the end of it. It's like, no, no, no, no, no, figure out what form it's going to take. Figure out what demand you want. Figure out the demand for justice that's in the middle of your rage, the demand for equality or freedom that's in the middle of your rage. It's like those principles, those demands are inside the rage. You need to bring them out and put them into language or some other medium that allows them to be known. Make your claim on the world. But that takes a certain amount of patience and thoughtfulness.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have some hope when I pay attention to how these networks of solidarity are emerging and how almost everybody I know is trying to do something for someone. And moving out of their comfort zone.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are not necessarily on the front page of any newspaper, and they can't be exactly because their relationship to hyper visibility is mixed. Like on the one hand, they want to be known. On the other hand, no, we need to keep this on the down low. I'm thinking that a lot of important political activity is happening right there on the border between what's visible and what's not visible and figuring out what assistance we can offer. Those forms of, you know, I don't want to say grassroots, but it is kind of like a grassroots solidarity movement, that they actually turn into larger movements, and they do make a difference at the ballot box one day.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But look, you know, I have one friend, she's bilingual, she speaks Spanish. She spends six to eight hours every week helping people fill out their legal forms. Know she just goes to a local church and helps them. Know there's another friend who works for a local organization that's in favor of democratization, but that local organization has no idea how to put a paragraph together. She puts the paragraph together. It's not big. It's like figuring out what your power is, what your talent is from where you're living and what difference you can make. So there are a lot of networks that are being built and very quickly in the way that some of those networks were built very quickly after the repeal of Roe v. Wade”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would restore, preserve the earth and articulate our bonds to one another in ways that are ethically valuable to us, if not beautiful to us.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right? I mean, if we start with the idea, like, okay, some of the folks are losing their rights to exist legally, right? Some folks are being abducted on the street. Some are being sent into destitution by economic arrangements. Others are being deported or actually expelled from the country or being detained under conditions that are inhumane, not just in defiance of constitutional law, but international law as well. I mean, we could make a list and leave it there, like, oh, all of these ways of treating people are wrong. But what if we started to collect all of those forms of power and try to understand them as part of a new authoritarianism, a new authoritarianism that is very compelling? Well, what would a radical democracy look like that would actually not just analyze and criticize that new authoritarianism, but give us a sense of life together?”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, well, I appreciate both of them, I must say. I think they're quite heroic during this time. But I think what's much more important than a compelling or charismatic leader at this moment is a sense of solidarity, a new sense, one that we didn't think we would have.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know what? I don't know if there's a person, and I sometimes wonder, are we wrong to try to find the person who will represent all that we care about?”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think I worry about centrist Democrats trying to marginalize those whose rights are now actually under threat. And I think it's been a terrible mistake to dismiss as wokeism. And that happens not just by the right, but by the centrist Democrats as well. I think we need to rethink what is being described as wocused exactly. And does it have to do with racial justice, the struggle for racial justice? Does it have to do with the struggle against prison violence? What kind of world we want is one, yes, that is, of course, less cruel, but also I think affirms our interdependency on this earth. Because without addressing the climate issue, we won't even be around to address the social and political problems we're talking about.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, but what is the opposite of cruelty? I guess I would say the affirmation of life. I think collective life, what it means to live together on conditions of equality, what it means to overcome nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. I mean, this means living in the broader world and accepting human complexity and actually valuing it. It also means valuing knowledge. It means valuing economic equality and rethinking our institutions and our understanding of labor so that we don't see these extraordinary gaps between rich and poor and a billionaire oligarchical class ruling the world. I mean But we'd understand issues of gender equality and sexual equality as absolutely central to any vision of democracy.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interdependency, not just among each other with each other, but with the Earth itself, right? We should be putting all these issues together in a set of visions. And to do that, we need artists, we need tech people who know how to get the word out and the image out. But we also need an analysis so that our points are not just punctual and vanishing, right? We need to build a vision.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A passion for a set of principles, a passion for a way of life. So, I mean, it seems to me that many of the people who gather together to protest Trump are also supporting one another. They look over and they go, oh, look, people who are workers are suffering and people who are trans are suffering. And yet they're here and they're courageous. They're coming out to make their views known. What kind of world do we want to live in together? How do we want to handle questions of unpayable debt and low wages, unlivable wages? How do we want to handle trans rights? Why don't we put these together? And if they're going to target migrants and trans people at the same time and strip them both of their rights, then we need an analysis of rights stripping and new authoritarianism that can allow us to produce new solidarities and a way of living that acknowledges our”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We know how to dismantle the arguments and expose the rhetoric, but to what passions do we appeal, and how do we address the fears both discovered and provoked by the right? What finally are the passions that might gather the targeted movements more effectively than the way that we are targeted? If we fail to come together and promote more compelling visions of the world in which we want to live, then we are surely lost. For that we need to know what we are fighting for, not just what we are fighting against.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's funny, the things I was maligned for for years, I felt that to be very personal and now I see that the exact same allegations are being leveled against everybody. Right. You know, I've been around the block. I've been around the block. It's useful for me to stay around.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I'm always a little nervous, yeah. You know, I have security guards when I give talks and I have a lawyer now if I run up a problem at the border But I'm not quaking, no.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have at least two jobs at this point. We teach our students and we explain to the broader public what the value of what we do is and the value of university life.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I wouldn't consider probably because of my age, for instance, I'm too old to teach in France, but I also think whatever I have to offer needs to be offered here now because this is where this struggle is and I wouldn't want to abandon universities and I don't want to abandon the students. For those of us who are tenured or retired or established financially in ways that are fairly comfortable, I think we stay and fight. I think we keep trying to build even stronger solidarities connecting people, trying to make good arguments, getting them out in public. That's our job. And in fact, I think academics generally need to be making a public case for what they do to the broader public because only then will we have the power to resist the caricatures and slanders that are leveled against us.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I mean, it's good that the top schools have realized that bonding together makes them stronger and they will be able to defy Trump's demands more effectively that way. But they should also be bonding with state schools and community schools and schools that are even more dependent on federal funding and have less endowment monies than they do. I think it would be unfortunate if the elite institutions decided just to defend themselves at the expense of everybody else. I think we need an even broader solidarity that would be based on the equal worth of all these universities and the equal value of open inquiry and self-governance and academic freedom for the very definition of the university.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's pushing back more. For sure, and I think it's being supported by the Alliance of Presidents who have come forth, I think following the lead of Michael Roth and Eisengruber from Princeton.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trammeling academic freedom and self governance, which are two hallowed principles of university life, to placate a federal government that will never be placated, right? Because if they come in asking For deportations today, they'll ask for the shutdown of ethnic studies, Afrikana studies, or African-American studies, gender and sexuality studies. They'll start deciding what the curriculum can be. They'll effectively be putting universities”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, well, I can't talk well about that because I'm living in New York this year, although I'm certainly in touch with people at Berkeley. And I think there's an enormous anxiety mainly among the international students and those who have... Either shown up at a Palestine protest or are presumed to be sympathetic to Hamas or some such thing. So, I mean, I think that's where the concern is, at least at UC Berkeley, as I understand it, they have not turned over their students, they've not fed ICE, the names of students. As some other universities have done, facilitating deportations. And I think at this point, we're seeing more and more colleges and universities realizing that it's not worth selling their soul.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm seeing it also in queer communities and trans communities, ways of getting together and of figuring out strategies. But we need to prize solidarity at this point over our individual freedoms, or rather realize that without solidarity, none of us are going to have individual freedoms.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I also think that especially for young people for whom the computer is really important, you know, you can change your gender online and use an avatar and construct an identity there. But that's very different from being part of a broader solidarity. And right now, given the freedoms that are being ripped away, the rights that are being stripped away, we actually have to find ways of connecting and of reusing our internet connections to produce broader networks of solidarity. I see this happening in the sanctuary networks that are connecting universities and helping people who are either at risk of deportation or actually in the process of being deported.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also, I mean, I think there's been a lot of activism for sure. There have been celebratory marches and demonstrations for some time. Yes, there's queer theory in universities and trans theory and trans studies in university now. But I don't believe that those academic disciplines have the power to reshape the world. They have to be appealing to something that people are already wanting. Randy Rainbow calls it expressive freedoms. Like, yes, expressive freedoms within the family, outside the family, in the community, in the world. Setting themselves up to a certain degree as different or as having a choice as having the power of self-definition somewhere.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Their own lives. Call me this. This is my gender or this is how I'm defining myself. It's a power of self-definition in a world in which very few young people feel a lot of power. So maybe it's a way of circumscribing a zone, like we'll call it the gender zone, in which they get to say who they are and ask others to recognize them in ways that they prefer and see whether the world is willing. Like, are you going to say yes or are you going to say no? You're going to honor me as a person or are you going to dishonor me as a person?”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great question, and I'm a big Randy Rainbow fan, so super happy to. Address it. First of all, I mean, so many young people are living with a very deep fear of the future, what kind of future will they have? And they're very attuned to climate catastrophe. They're very attuned to the ravages of capitalism, the deep inequalities. They're very attuned to open-ended wars that seem to be based on justifications that aren't clear or that keep changing. And I think that the question is, where do they have some sense of control? Where do they feel like they get to have a place in the world? They get to be recognized for who they are. And sometimes, you know, I think the moment in which a young person says, I go by the following pronoun, please call me that, is one of the limited zones in which they feel some power over their”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, from us to have a trans kid probably is a sign that he doesn't have control. Over the way things are going culturally, how they're going historically. In fact, to be a father is not to own the child, to be a father who represents one set of values does not mean that the young person is going to reflect or continue those values. And I mean, that's been true for eternity, but it's a truth that I'm sure people like him don't like very much. Of course, Musk also has at his disposal One of the largest social media platforms in the history of the world. So for him to launch the memes that help to advance Trump, especially the one in which it was said that Kamala Harris, if elected, would authorize trans surgeries on illegal migrants.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do call it a furious nostalgia because it's willing to strip people of their rights. It's also willing to defy the Constitution and very possibly destroy the Constitution in its effort to assert a form of masculine power that knows no limits at all.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they also see a guy who is willing to do whatever he wants. And you know, a lot of them hate having to pay taxes and they hate having to change their language and they hate having to adjust to some of the new realities in the world, whether it's a multiracial world or a multi-gendered world. They have great resentment feeling that they're displaced or replaced. And here's a guy who's just saying, no, we're going back. I'm giving you a fantasy of restoration of patriarchal order. And in that world that I'm going to restore, the Trumpist says.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what does that appeal to in people, and especially not just young men, possibly the incel world, but men more broadly who have felt like they've lost their supremacy and hence their place in society? Who never liked equality as a principle, who've never liked the fact that women should and do make the same amount of money as they do or have never liked the breakdown of the traditional family where women are either leaving marriages or not getting married or living to the side of men's power altogether? I think there's a great deal of resentment against that. It's not that they're oppressed or suffering in some way, but rather that they have lost their supremacy and that supremacy gave them a place in society.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, who knows what the world looks like from his perspective? One could get bogged down with a psychological reading of Donald Trump, and I know many people have. But at least what I see happening, the effects of his action, is that he's showing that he's willing to defy not just the woke left, right, defy feminism, defy LGBTQIA plus peoples and their movements and their policies. But he's actually willing to defy the Constitution. and he's willing to defy internationally accepted human rights and he's showing this in his policies on deportation of migrants but also the deportation of students on international visas and other more vulnerable members of academic communities who are not yet citizens so I think that the real question is what restriction will he not”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Construed historically. How can we construe ourselves? These are really basic questions that we ask in university settings, but in any intellectual inquiry. But to say, oh, we're not asking any of those questions anymore. We don't want to know about gender differentials of power. We don't want to know about gender identity or how it's created or lived. We don't want to know about gender-based violence. We're going to call it like they do in Turkey family violence, right? Even though 95% of the violence within families is men inflicting violence on women and children. So what is it that we are saying? We're saying we don't want to know these aspects when the censor like this, when they censor gender, or when they censor race studies for that matter, they are saying we don't want to know about these realities. We're going to set them aside. We're even going to.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that gender is a framework for understanding society, according to feminists, there's differences in power, there's different distribution of goods, there's different ways of assuming positions of power, there are different wages, there's discrimination. We need a gender framework to even name discrimination and to understand how power works in society. And when we talk about gender identity, we're also talking about how people are living their bodies, like how they understand themselves, how they thrive in the world. Now, either we want open inquiry where we accept that there's something called gender studies, who are feminist and gender sexuality studies, where we get to ask questions about the kinds of bodies we end up living in and how they are socially formed and how we can also be part of their formation and how it's lived and how it's understood.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But sex isn't like that. We're named by others. We're given assignments by people we generally don't know. I mean, maybe we get to know that person. According to standards that are accepted in health institutions or legal institutions. It doesn't make sense to say that I own the sex that I'm assigned. It's other people who've given me my sex and it's me who decides how I'm going to live that and what it means to me and how I struggle with the various forces that have formed me.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, they're going back to this idea of a simple fact. Now, if biological difference were just a simple fact and we could be done with it, then we wouldn't even have the field of developmental biology or research into sexual development or any of those things. In fact, it's complex and intersects people who indeed have complex anatomical and chromosomal features. Even be allowed to exist in that framework. So once again, I think that it's deeply simplifying. But those folks who are trans exclusionary, they do understand their sex as a kind of property, that they own it, that someone's trying to come and take it away”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So they can't even answer that question. They can only say who's able to compete or who should be able to compete in women's sports, which is to kind of keep the question of identity to the side. And I think that was probably smart. But it tells us something about the fact that just referring to a biological fact is not enough. Most biologists, most people in science don't believe biology is just a fact. It's a complex process. The process of sexual development involving chromosomes, hormones, but also environmental factors without which chromosomal activation isn't even possible. So we are a complex creatures and our biological systems are interactive at base. We're always interacting with the environment.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think in the case of JK Rowling and many of the British feminists who are part of sex matters, which is one of their organizations, they do think that to be a woman you have to have certain biological characteristics and that the category should be tied to biology. So that's what I would call a biologically reductionist view, right? Like what you are can be reduced to your biology. At the same time, they don't actually think about biology and, you know, the complexity of chromosome structure, the complexity of hormonal structure, why it's been so hard for sports organizations to decide who's a woman and who's not a woman because it turns out there's a huge range of testosterone among women and men and actually the two categories overlap at a certain point.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It can be very compelling, and a lot of women who are born female at birth are frightened many, not many feminists, but I would say a minority of feminists who believe that your biology actually determines who you are, which I thought was anti-feminist view. They do get worked up and they have fears that something that is theirs will be taken away. I think as well that there's a big fear about children being seduced or infused with a doctrine. And of course, the irony is that the church has done that. The church has molested children. The church has imposed its doctrines and molested children at the same time.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think trans people are the flashpoint in part because of great ignorance of what it means. But I think trans women in particular have been maligned by the allegation that they're really men and that they have nefarious designs on women and that they're hiding in order to execute those designs, which include rape or sexual violence or other forms of domination or appropriation. And once that fantasy gets going, and it is a fantasy,”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For people like Orban as well, the preservation of the family is really important for the preservation of the nation and its unity, its nationalism, but also there, if you look at Orban, he also wanted to outlaw miscegenation. So he wants to keep his nation white. He's afraid of. And these things are linked because there's a certain idea of the family and sexuality, reproductive sexuality that has to be preserved for the purposes of not just procreation, but preserving the nation state.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Increasingly difficult in a place like Italy, informed by the Vatican, or trans people who are seeking to get legal recognition or appropriate health care, this too becomes more difficult. So I think that there's a consolidation of the family in a traditional sense where there's heterosexual marriage and children who are the offspring of that marriage and sexuality itself is constrained by its reproductive role within the heterosexual framework. I mean, that idea of the family is really, really important. And it was the family council that first developed the idea of gender ideology. We have to remember that the preservation of the family is really important for the preservation of the church.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, of course there is. I think that the Vatican and even Pope Francis was certainly opposed to the exercise of freedom or of personal autonomy that would lead you to change your status, say, you've decided you're born with one sex assignment and you want to have another. They want to say, look, that's not a human choice. That's a choice that goes beyond what humans are entitled to do. God gave us these bodies. There's a God-given natural order, male and female. And here come these gender people who think you actually get to choose or you can change the order of society so that people who are parent gay parents who can claim legally to their children, which is becoming”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's able to shut down a number of progressive movements and legal accomplishments with the stroke of a pen, or so he imagines. Of course, there are numerous court cases that are making it less easy than he may have imagined.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's been true in Eastern Europe, in parts of Eastern Europe for a long time, that assembling and showing yourself is the true danger. Because what if you do become common sense? What if it becomes normal to see people who are queer nonconforming or lesbian, gay, gay, lesbian families? Or, you know, what if that just becomes part of the ordinary landscape? I think there's a resistance to that, right? And I think as well that Trump is trying very hard to link with other authoritarians in order to expand The executive power in this country. So if he can proclaim what sex is, then that executive order is going to nullify all kinds of healthcare. It's going to nullify the legal status of trans people. It's going to undermine policies and laws as opposed to gender-based violence.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Need to be stopped and rolled back in the name of common sense is, of course, deeply reassuring to them. So I think he's using a caricature to appeal to people's anxieties and fears and ignorance, but also stoking that anxiety and fear in order to get more support for his own expanding state authority.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it is, but the term gender ideology was circulating in Eastern Europe and Latin America and throughout conservative Christian communities for a very long time. And some other religious communities and secular communities. So it just recently came to the US. And when Trump uses it, he's using a certain kind of caricature, right? He knows, maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't know that he's actually producing a kind of straw man, as it were. But it doesn't matter whether he's right about what gender studies is or what gender research is or how gender is used in social policy, what he knows clearly is that the term gender produces a certain kind of anxiety in people. What? My sex isn't natural. What? My kid can change sex? What these people are transitioning? They're experimenting with new ways of identifying themselves and living their lives. And that is very frightening to a group of people. So for that group of people to be told, oh, you represent common sense and all these changes.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which actually seems more complexity at the level of biology than Trump would have it. It refers to the federal government having power to define it. So biological truth is restored to the federal government, not to science, not to biology, not to people who do research in sex determination and biology, but to the government. So it can stipulate as it wants. And indeed, the way it has stipulated using the term immutable, right, immutable difference, there's an immutable unchangeable difference between the two sexes. That comes straight from the Vatican. And so the federal government is citing the Vatican actually against science in the name of biological truth. That's worris”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think that the Trump administration uses the word ideology when it says gender ideology as a false way of knowing or as a mode of indoctrination or as a set of preposterous beliefs that should simply be corrected so that common sense can reign again. The odd thing about that particular executive order is that the biological truth that it names, the difference between the sexes, it doesn't refer to the biological sciences”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depending on historical circumstances and cultural settings, different countries, different languages, we see different ways of doing gender to speak in a way that I have been trying to speak for some time. It doesn't mean it's fake or false. It doesn't mean, oh, this is just a performance. And the true reality is underneath. It's like, no, the historical reality of what we mean by gender does change. And sometimes it changes for the better and sometimes for the worse. And I think we just have to accept that there are certain ways of repeating and reproducing gender in the world that sometimes creates something new and sometimes validates something quite old.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How it was like so easy for them and so kind of smooth and compelling and believable. And I felt that I couldn't even take the first steps in trying to get to whatever this ideal was. So I was impressed by those performances. But then I guess I was led to a different idea, which is that the social reality of gender is changing all the time, what it means to be man or woman, even if we just stay within those two categories, changes all the time. What's acceptable? It's not acceptable. We know this. And some of those changes are obviously very disturbing to people. But the fact that there are changes and they can be disturbing or they can be exciting or pleasurable means that gender is not fixed in time. It changes.”
2025-04-24 · On with Kara Swisher · Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT