Judith Butler (b. 1956), is still with us and has a very lengthy career in professional philosophy. A queer person who identified as non-binary in 2020, Butler rose to prominence as a big name in feminism in the 1990s, with their provocative book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). The book and her continued work would open up feminist and queer studies to now foundational ideas.

You may have seen Butler in the news lately, given the United States government’s anti-trans policies and ideology. Butler, who identifies as non-binary, is often taken to task for writing their own “agenda” for queer people and feminists, because of their revolutionary but widely accepted ideas on gender, that violate “traditional” gender roles desired by the Trump administration and buddies.

So, what is gender, anyway? And why is it so scary? Let’s have a look.

Building Blocks: Feminism of the 20th Century

Let’s do a quick backtrack before we get to Butler’s work on gender. Butler, writing as a learned feminist, of course would have been familiar with the work before them. The 20^th century produced feminism and feminists by leaps and bounds, some of whom focused on the roles of men and women in society and at home.

In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir juxtaposes the role of an active man and a passive woman in 1950s society and home life. She describes an oppression in women having to adhere to these roles. There are limitations in these roles, certainly for women as those stuck in the home, raising children and obeying their husbands. We’ve written more extensively of this elsewhere.

Later on, in 1963, author Betty Friedan penned The Feminine Mystique, in which she built on Beauvoir’s ideas, specifically stating that the role of housewife is not inherent to the nature of women, is not the only role women should enjoy, as the patriarchal society at the time suggested.

Angela Davis, who we’ve spoken of before, took both of these hot takes and added that the roles of white women were drastically different from those of Black women, and that, if we were to take feminism seriously, we should take into account differences in lived experiences. Writing Women, Race and Class in 1981, Davis amended the more limiting accounts of Beauvoir and Friedan.

All three of these highly lauded feminists would probably agree that women and men as a binary perform different roles, according to what they are expected of, from their culture, from the patriarchy, etc. But it is not until Judith Butler that we really get into gender as a descriptor of these roles.

Gender vs. Sex: Definitions, Definitions

It’s time to discuss gender. What is it, and how does it differentiate from sex? Gender, according to our favorite etymology dictionary, was just another word for sex, that is, the biological differentiation between male and female at birth. It became used to discuss this difference after the word “sex” became more scandalous in the 20^th century.

Later on, however, the word took on a different meaning, and the word “sex” took over for gender to provide a description between male and female, especially in medical terminology. By now, most medical documents don’t ask gender in terms of someone’s genitalia at birth.

Gender became a description of a societal role that a person plays, instead of a description of what is in their pants. Butler made this very clear in their work in gender theory. As such, gender is what we call a social construct, that is, something that we, as a society or culture, agree upon to exist. Outside of society, it can be otherwise, and often is.

Let’s take a look at this more thoroughly.

The Minuet (1756) by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Courtesy of Wikipedia

Gender As a Social Construct

How does this pan out when it comes to how we live? Gender as a social construct is both easy to explain and complicated to comprehend at times, especially if you are experiencing the idea for the first time. We are going to try.

Imagine this. Your parents are super happy when you pop out of the womb. They are excited that you have a penis, because that means that they can dress you in blue onesies and put little baseball caps on you. You wouldn’t care either way as a baby, but they don’t want anyone to confuse you for a baby who has a vagina.

As you grow up, your mom does your laundry for you, makes your lunch, sends you off to school with well wishes. Your dad takes you to sport practice every afternoon. You might even join a scouting organization or camp and visit the great outdoors often.

As you grow up, you realize your mom and dad behave differently. You get more emotional support from your mom, and your dad is terse, but supports you by attending your practices and even teaching you to play guitar. He’s proud of you, and you learn how to be like him, and how society wants you to be like him.

As a teenager, you are inundated with ideas about what it is like to be a person who has a penis. You are told that you need to take an interest in sex and that you need to like certain types of people in a sexual way. You are told, by your dad and by society, that you need to “toughen up,” and that you don’t cry as a person who has a penis. You are told it is OK to be violent or angry. It is not OK to take an interest in certain things, such as dresses or even hobbies like knitting or journaling.

When you are younger, your father is proud of his son. When you finally grow into an adult, you are called a man, and you continue to take on limited roles. You are expected to dominate at work, in the bedroom, and in your household. You are expected to show emotion never, ideally, but rarely. You don’t cry. You don’t care that much about your appearance.

This is not because this is how you are, at the end of the day, and would always be this way, because you have a penis. It’s because you were taught to perform a role. You were taught to perform roles specific to the male gender. And it can be hard to get out of that.

Why Does Gender Matter?

For earlier feminists, gender mattered in the of obtaining basic human rights for women, for showing that women can and often are other than what the prescribed roles suggest. Even Mary Wollstonecraft, of the turn of the 19^th century suggested that these roles are harmful and limiting.

But with Butler, we begin to understand the complexity and fluidity of gender. It is a role, in part, because it is not always the same. For instance, a lot of people use the example of the 18^th century ideal of masculinity and compare it to today: the wigs, the heals, the powder. Yet, they were the manliest of men. But that didn’t last. Just like women wearing dresses as a uniform did not last.

In knowing gender as a performance, as a role, we can start to see when it limits, and be critical of that. We can also better understand why transgender and non-binary people exist, and be more sympathetic. If gender does not equal the part you were born with, then there is a lot more room for different expressions of it, and a lot less fear.

Such a view is more liberating than sticking to a binary view of sex, in the sense that, ideally, we can relax our views about the limitations of what our children can and cannot do as children. We can, perhaps, stop assuming gendered qualities to people who do things that are typically considered “masculine” or “feminine.”

Additionally, considering gender not as a binary but as something more like a spectrum gives us more breathing room in our own lives. I’d hate to be afraid to play guitar because I am not a manly man but rather a woman. I’d hate my friend to be afraid of knitting because it’s considered effeminate. And, most importantly, we might be kinder to those we don’t always understand.

A Small Note

I’m a feminist who grew up (academically, at least) with the idea that gender is a social construct. Butler is a respected philosopher, and it always seemed pretty obvious to me that we were playing roles.

As someone who is asexual, I was forever playing a role as a teenager, and later. I was told by others that I should find the members of boy bands attractive. I dutifully papered my walls with posters of ‘NSYNC and others, but when attending a signing, made a kind of insulting remark at Justin Timberlake, and offered Lance Bass a letter in which I told him I liked his talent. Ah, to be a tween again!

I played at heterosexuality for the vast majority of my life. My mother even commented, more than once, that she would still love me if I was a lesbian. I didn’t realize she really thought I might be, until much letter.

Life was a performance until I started learning about asexuality, and a light bulb turned on in my head. I never had a boyfriend because I couldn’t perform that way. Coming out a few years ago, to friends and family, was freeing, and took a large load off my shoulders.

As I grow older, I stop thinking so much about how women are exploited or objectified. For me, this is old hat, and I understand much of it from firsthand experience. I worry more about boys who are suffocated by these roles, and become men ready to suffocate their progeny. It is limiting for men, too. And I feel a little sadder about that these days.

If we always live the roles we are expected to live, we often find ourselves limited and unhappy. This is not to say you should abandon your job and become someone you are not. It is simply to say that, at the end of the day, assigned roles aren’t as important as how you feel about yourself, and how you affect the world around you.