After the Piers Morgan debacle, when Laurie Penny proudly declared herself to be trans and non-binary but couldn't quite manage to explain what she was talking about, Victoria Smith takes a deeper look at what's really going on:
Non-binary is the gender identity you end up claiming if you’re a feminist who’s made the category “woman” uninhabitable for any female human with an ounce of self-respect.
Judith Butler now lays claim to they/them pronouns, and advocates for what she calls “gender freedom”, suggesting that if anyone doesn’t like the “woman” box, they’re welcome to jump right out of it. That doing so might impose intolerable costs — for instance, in terms of the resources, legacies, research, spaces, boundaries to which one may lay claim — is ignored, presumably because they’re not the kind of cost which have much impact on someone of Butler’s status.
A point many gender critical feminists have made over the years is that if we agreed with the regressive, stereotype-laden definitions of gender ideologues — if we, too, saw gender as a spectrum between Barbie and GI Joe — then we’d be non-binary as well.
Women like Laurie Penny and Judith Butler have accepted the male/trans stereotype of a woman as passive, blank, a receptacle for male desires, etc. etc.. So they decide, unsurprisingly, that they themselves are actually not silly women like that, but something much better – non-binary! You'd think it would make more sense, from a feminist perspective, to challenge this gender stereotype of a woman rather than decide that you're not one, but this whole trans/queer theory world view depends on gender stereotypes, and they really really don't want to see that. Plus, it makes them special – which is always nice.
Leave a Reply