Judith Butler’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” published in February 2025, is a queer theory manifesto which suggests that for people she calls anti-gender activists, gender is a phantasm, a ghostly conglomeration of everything the conservatives, the religious, the patriarchs, the racists and indeed gender critical and radical feminists fear and want to destroy. Anti gender actors want to restore a racist patriarchal religious order, she says, and it’s a mistake that radical and gender critical feminists don’t join with the LGBTQI+ to fight them.

The first section of the book attacks the religious and the conservatives – much of it I would agree with. Butler writes “The idealized past can be found in the anti–gender ideology movement’s call to restore a patriarchal order for family, marriage, and kinship, including proscriptions on reproductive freedoms, gender self-determination, and health care for LGBTQIA+ people.” She is anti-racist, post-colonial, environmentally conscious and attacks the right on these issues. Like adding TQIA+ onto LGB, she takes many of the good bits of feminism and adds on some anti safeguarding, anti-women bits and then vilifies the original feminists.

She attacks the right and then adds an attack on GC and radical feminists. After a section criticising many christians for only believing in the bible, Butler argues “the anti-gender advocates are largely committed to not reading critically because they imagine that reading would expose them—or subjugate them—to a doctrine to which they have, from the start, levied objections.” She then segues into an attack on gender critical feminists: “To be “gender critical” is thus a misnomer deployed by some feminists who make implicit or explicit alliances with the right-wing opposition to gender. Their views are emphatically objectionable not only because they reduce “gender” to a single caricatured version of a complex reality but also because they misunderstand what a “critical” position entails.” It is a hard read because as shown here, she repeatedly misrepresents us. This is where most of the trans rights activists are getting their information, sadly. She never acknowledges that radical feminists refuse gender because it’s a crucial way we are oppressed. Females are forced or groomed into performing gender, sex roles like being kind, or doing all the unpaid work, or wearing high heels. We are not afraid of complexity, or reading. It’s the sexism inherent in gender we hate. We are not afraid of gender, we hate gender.

Butler loves gender which she sees as a dynamic location for revolutionary change. Sex which she insists is “assigned at birth” is in complex interplay with gender. “To refuse gender is, sadly, to refuse to encounter that complexity, to refuse, in other words, to let one’s thinking be transformed by the complexity that one finds in contemporary life across the world.” The message is that gender is part of a wider progressive liberation struggle and to be afraid of it is misguided fear. Her title, Who’s Afraid of Gender? and her thesis that gender has become a phantasm, suggests out that we are misguided to be wary of gender. But actually we are very sensible to worry about gender. The three little pigs were justifiably scared of the wolf who wanted to blow their houses down and eat them, and cheered each other on with the phrase, "Who's afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?" Her title, is very revealing, really, reminding us of the dangers wolves pose to pigs and in our case, men to women and children, whether in sheep’s or women’s clothes or not.

Butler criticises conservatives as having old fashioned self-satisfied views about gender, but presents them nevertheless as viewing themselves and the world through a gender lens: “Some people like to think of their own gender as not only natural but also universal: I am a man in the same way that everyone else is, and nature makes it so.” She presents gender as a form of freedom, a movement, or a prison. “You can do gender on the streets, celebrating with others the body you inhabit, or find that others have gendered you before you even enter the space. To inhabit a gender is to live out a certain historical complexity that has become possible for the lives we live now.” It is attractive because her argument makes personal breaking of gender roles into political actions to overthrow all interconnected oppressions. Radical feminists also make that argument – the personal is political and rejection of sex role stereotypes is good. The difference is that we do not suggest that wearing clothes of the opposite sex actually changes our sex.

She glorifies gender as a choice you can do. She’s making gender a thing, a place, a promised land in all it’s glorious manifestations. Gender is freedom, she suggests, but she doesn’t investigate what’s happening in the women’s prison cells, the girls changing rooms, the gender affirmation clinics, the LGBTQ+ youth clubs, the rape relief centres.

But her description of her beloved gender is also revealing: “Gender comes along with vulnerability, penetrability, agency, dependency, illness, social recognition, basic requirements, shame, passion, sexuality, and variable conditions of life and aliveness.”

Butler attacks sex in two ways, and muddles the meaning of it. She says it is not a fact, and it is dripping with sexist expectations: “many people refer to “sex” as if it is an obvious fact, based on observation, and worry that academics have needlessly obfuscated plain matters. Consider, however, that sex assignment is not simply an announcement of the sex that an infant is perceived to be; it also communicates a set of adult desires and expectations.” It’s true that many sexist conservatives want to impose desires and expectations (gender) along with sex, but to make out that everyone who believes sex is a fact does that is wilful ignorance. Feminists have been fighting sexist stereotypes for centuries.

Butler writes: “sex assignment is not a simple description of anatomical facts, but a way of imagining what they will mean, or should mean.” Just because many people have sexist views, Butler suggests we get rid of sex. She doesn’t mention that we’d then not have sex disaggregated statistics, women only shelters etc.

Butler then goes on to “consider British debates on the matter of sex, paying close attention to phantasmatic anxieties found in the argumentation of trans-exclusionary feminists such as J. K. Rowling, the Sex Matters organization, and the views of Kathleen Stock and New Zealand (sic) scholar Holly Lawford-Smith.”

She says Lawford Smith’s reference to radical feminist Andrea Dworkin undermines our argument because Dworkin thought sex was a spectrum: “We are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.” Lawford Smith’s reference to Catherine MacKinnon is also undermining because MacKinnon thought it wasn’t necessary to define women and anyone who’s treated as a woman should count. Butler also dismisses Lawford Smith’s defence of single issue concern for women’s rights as not in line with most feminists who are intersectional.

Butler criticises J K Rowling for writing “If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased.” Butler counters: “If sex is legally assigned and registered and can be reassigned and reregistered, can we not conclude that the reality of sex has changed, or that that change is now part of our historical reality? Sex can be both real and mutable, unless we believe that “the truth” is always immutable and never historical, a proposition that would once again ally Rowling with the papacy.”

It is irritating to read because Butler often misrepresents us. She writes “The gender-critical feminists seek to dispute trans identity, particularly the claims of trans women, arguing that sex is real and that gender is constructed, by which they mean both false and artificial.” But she doesn’t quote anyone who has said this. We don’t think gender is “false and artificial” – it’s a brutal form of control over women.

You can’t be wrong all the time and Butler is sometimes accurate: “To act as if feminism and gender are opposed is to accept the terms proposed by trans-exclusionary feminists” She repeatedly links us to the right “Like the right-wing efforts to strip trans people of their rights of self-definition, the cruelest of the trans-exclusionary positions also deny the rights of self-assignment to trans women and men”.

She argues that breaking out of the constructed norm of binary gender tied to sex assigned at birth will overthrow patriarchy but that multiplicities of new genders are needed as an escape route, a revolutionary method and should be retained. “Continuing the “anti–gender ideology” discourse places contemporary “radical feminists” in a position of woeful complicity with the key aims of new fascism.”

Butler talks as if we are all shaping society together, from a position of choice and relatively equal power. In fact, women and girls are oppressed, subjected to violence, denied political voice. Just as we are exposing issues such as entrenched pay gaps, male violence against women, Butler is arguing that we stop collecting sex disaggregated statistics. She uses the tired old argument that stopping men who say they are women participating in women’s sports is “to exclude an entire class of people from participation in sports”

Butler’s book is written for the massed ranks of her gender loving supporters. She misrepresents us and claims feminism for herself. “Trans-exclusionary feminists claim that trans women cannot be women, or that they may belong to a second-class order of women. Otherwise, they would take something away from women assigned female at birth. …… Self-definition is an age-old feminist prerogative, so why forfeit that now in the name of an authority both paternalistic and proprietary? It is hard to understand why the life of a trans woman should threaten in any way the life of a woman who has kept her original sex assignment.” It’s hard to understand how Butler, hasn’t come across any of the evidence we’ve been putting out.

She repeatedly says we are similar to the right: “Like Trump, Orbán, Meloni, the Vatican, and all others on the Right who refuse self-determination as the basis for sex reassignment, trans-exclusionary feminists argue that gender mutability is an illegitimate exercise of freedom, an overreach, an appropriation, and so they support bureaucratic, psychiatric, and medical barriers to exercising that right.” She adds that we never stop to differentiate ourselves from the right, which is utterly untrue.

In her attack on feminists who oppose gender identity ideology, Butler does not mention actual radical feminists, most notably Sheila Jeffreys and Kara Dansky, who don’t fit the picture she’s painting. I’d like to see Butler’s answer to Jeffrey’s notion of womanface. Neither does she mention Laura Lecuona, Julia Long and Lauren Levey who have written clearly on gender as oppression, the problems with femininity and the threats to lesbians if men can say they are women. Nor does she mention critiques of gender from LGB groups such as the LGB Alliance. Or indeed, the Declaration on Women’s Sex Based Rights that has been signed by nearly 40,000 people and 543 organisations world wide.