Lindsey German analyses the arguments and conceptual confusions in Judith Butler’s latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

‘Is biology woman’s destiny?’ was the title of an essay by the US Marxist anthropologist Evelyn Reed, written more than fifty years ago at the height of the Women’s Liberation Movement. It chimed with the feeling of many women that their role as mothers should not prevent them from fighting for very different roles within society from those normally allotted to them. Reed made the point that biology and anthropology, as academic disciplines under capitalism, were themselves full of loaded social assumptions about sex roles and of women’s supposed ‘inferiority’.

Today, the debates about sex and gender, particularly controversial and fierce around the questions of transgender people, are again raising questions about the relationship between nature and culture, between biology and social attitudes, between sex and gender.

Judith Butler is the key academic figure in what is often called the gender-identity movement. Butler identifies as non-binary and so uses they/them pronouns. The arguments which they raise are important and have often proved themselves highly divisive on the left, the toxicity of debate meaning that many people now fear to engage in discussion about issues which really do need to be discussed.

We should be grateful that Judith Butler’s latest book Who’s afraid of Gender? is written in a much more accessible style than most of their previous work. But accessibility is relative: this still remains a book whose central ideas are often obscure, where the author uses the word ‘phantasm’ more than 100 times, where we hear a great deal of the word ‘critique’, but are given a rather inadequate critique of some of those positions they oppose, and where we are treated to definitions and examples of gender which are abstracted from the material conditions in which men and women make their lives.

Butler also falls short of giving us a clear definition of gender or indeed of sex. While Butler refutes the idea that they deny sex exists, in practice they talk about ‘co-construction’ of sex and gender and suggests that we have to see sex and gender as completely intertwined. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this leads to a refusal to – as far as I could tell from the book – even discuss the major issues of social reproduction and the family under capitalism, or the extent to which women’s biology has impacted on their inferior position in society.

Who is afraid of gender: Butler on the extreme right and culture wars

In a sense much of Butler’s book is aimed at easy targets. Gender has become part of the ‘culture wars’ and it is to these, and the individuals propagating them, that Butler addresses their concerns. So there are masses of material on the right wing and its attack on what it calls gender theory. We get substantial rebuttals – sometimes whole chapters – of the views of Donald Trump, Italian fascist prime minister Giorgia Meloni, Hungary’s Victor Orban, and the Pope.

Nor is it just about their views as individuals; as Butler points out, ‘One of the most powerful sites of anti-gender influence is in national elections’ (p.43). They cite Brazil, Costa Rica, Colombia, France, Switzerland, the UK, Scotland, Ecuador and Germany, as well as Hungary and Spain, where the far-right Vox party uses ‘references to “gender jihadism” and “feminazis”’ (p.44) as part of their campaigns. Meanwhile Vladimir Putin ‘in response to the legalization of gay marriage in parts of Europe … referred to “Gayropa” to mock and thwart the potential tidal wave of LGBTQIA+ influence on Russian values’ (p.44).

That these views are a threat to those who want full personal and sexual equality is not in doubt. And nor should be the fact that they are being propagated by extremely powerful people who are in a position to pass laws and enforce state discrimination against anyone not conforming to the model of sex, procreation and the family to which they adhere. This model stresses the Christian heterosexual family, not simply as part of religious or social teaching and ideology but closely linked to nation and state.

It is something that is current in many states in the US where books are banned, liberties restricted, healthcare for young people, including trans people, is denied, and abortion is made illegal. Butler describes a bill by proposed by Oklahoma senator Rob Standridge in 2021 which aimed to prohibit state schools from ‘having or promoting books that address the study of sex, sexual preferences, sexual activity, sexual perversion, sex-based classifications, sexual identity, gender identity, or books that contain content of a sexual nature that a reasonable parent or legal guardian would want to know about or approve of before their child was exposed to it’ (p.100).

This draws – as do other examples – robust criticism from Butler. However their analysis of why it is happening once again starts from the ideas rather than any material reality which might shape them. The ‘attack on “woke” is animated by a psychosocial fantasy that the loss of patriarchal, heteronormative, and white supremacist social orders is an unbearable one, tantamount to social death and, at times, physical danger’ (pp.110-11). Yet this and the description of ‘Apparently dangerous phantasms now gathered under the rubric of “woke”’ (p.111) ignores the material conditions which may have led to these views in these particular times and places.

Any understanding must, it seems to me, take into account the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, including deindustrialisation and falling living standards, the deliberate weaponising of anti-migrant and racist sentiment, the militaristic and brutalised nature of US society in particular, in order to understand why such views can take hold as they do.

Butler counterposes their own views to those of these extreme traditional views of the family which stress heteronormative values. Gay, lesbian and trans people are seen as deviating from this model, but so also are women defending abortion, living alone without men, or seeking to challenge the view of women as centred on domesticity. Butler takes issue with the idea that those posing alternative ways of living are threatening children, or that sex education in schools is harming them, querying the role of the Church in ‘protecting children’:

‘In this standoff between Church and feminism and LGBTQIA+ rights, where has the child molestation actually taken place? In France alone over the last seventy years, approximately 330,000 minors suffered sexual abuse by priests. Why does this appear nowhere in the allegation that gender ideology leads to paedophilia?’ (p.88).

Here Butler is addressing the traditional role of church and state in upholding and reinforcing conservative values about the family and sexuality. Similar views have been particularly current during periods of right-wing and fascist dictatorship, as the family is used to buttress conservative values and to oppose and demonise anything which challenges them. We are seeing such a period again, with the failure of neoliberalism creating a backlash, leading to conservative movements to strengthen family, religion and ‘national values’.

All socialists should concur that these conservative forces need to be fought politically and ideologically. Their rise threatens all those who want to change society for the better and to challenge the priorities of capital. Socialists and Marxists have long had a critique of the family and its role within class society, but that is based on a materialist view which is completely missing from Butler’s analysis.

What does Butler mean by gender?

In reality, Butler has effectively collapsed the sex/gender division and sees no real distinction between the two. They see sex and gender as the same thing. So they argue: ‘If sex is framed within cultural norms, then it is already gender … The claim that sex is immutable invokes a religious and linguistic frame for thinking about sex. Wherever there is a frame, gender is at work. To say that there is a cultural construction of sex in such an instance does not mean that culture produces sex out of thin air. It does mean, however, that the matter of sex is being framed in a certain way and for a political purpose’ (p.119).

What this does is to recreate a real physical category as an ideology, rather than seeing the ideology as developing from the reality of sex and reproduction. In the chapter on ‘What gender are you?’ they talk of ‘co-construction’ of sex and gender and argue:

‘Rather than regard gender as the cultural or social version of biological sex, we should ask whether gender is operating as the framework that tends to establish the sexes within specific classificatory schemes. If so, gender is then already operative as the scheme of power within which sex assignment takes place’ (p.188).

But this is surely to put the cart before the horse. It implies that social factors can totally override biological ones. That is empirically untrue: none of us can live to 200, all our bodies need food and water to sustain them, and reproduction of the species is a biological fact without which the human race could not survive, and it depends overwhelmingly on sexual relations between men and women. Where this is not the case, as with lesbian couples using IVF, it still depends on the male sperm fertilising the female egg. When we talk about sex and gender, we can talk about the relationship between these natural facts and the social constructions placed upon them, but it is pure idealism to deny that the former exist. Unfortunately, Butler’s views reject that material reality and try to suggest that ideas and concepts about gender are the material reality.

So to them, there is no sex but gender, and gender is seen as performative, that is, you can be whatever gender means to you. Gender is what you do. Various reasons for taking this view are put forward: one is the idea that we cannot talk about two sexes as binary but rather that everything is on a spectrum, with individuals at various points on that spectrum. So in reference to the controversies over sport, they quote figures that suggest 16.5% of men have low testosterone levels while 13.7% of women have high testosterone levels (p.190), but this suggests that the overwhelming majority – 84% and 86% respectively – do have levels considered normal. Even when they don’t, the male and female ranges do not overlap. They are that radically different.

It is a common trait in academia to invoke argument by exception. This tends to try to disprove any generalisation or theory on the grounds that there are always exceptions. But it doesn’t help us understand anything, nor does it help with a wider understanding of society. As the saying goes, the exception proves the rule, it does not disprove the rule.

In continuing this argument by exception, Butler’s idealism, or the belief that ideas are the driving force in society, takes on some odd forms: they discuss whether trans women have an advantage in sport because of their hormonal constitution and argue that: ‘Undergoing male puberty does not suffice to make anyone into a great athlete. Male puberty and free access to tennis courts change the picture. Male puberty and a private trainer change it yet again’ (p.191). This is a non sequitur. There is no level playing field, true, but it’s also true that the vast majority of those with access to tennis courts or personal trainers don’t make great athletes either. Far from accepting some inequality by reference to other inequalities, socialists (and other progressives) fight to reduce inequality: in the specific instance of sport and class, by fighting for no cuts to school budgets, and against the hoarding of resources in the hands of the elite schools.

Butler also makes great play of the fact that the birth process and the sex of the child are greeted with all sorts of social assumptions. This is clearly true: the announcement of it’s a boy or a girl will lead to both family members and wider society deciding that this will mean certain things about these infants’ dress, interests, educational prospects, character, and much more. These assumptions are the sum of countless generations’ attitudes towards the different sexes. These too become altered or modified by real, lived experience. These are also the reasons why many socialists and feminists describe sex as biological and gender as a social construct, something which relates to ideological views in wider society.

However, the reality that social construction begins early doesn’t abolish sex as a natural fact. What it demonstrates is that material and ideological factors are very closely intertwined, not that the former do not exist.

This social construct contains within it a whole range of ideological concepts about what is masculine or feminine, and of what is a man or woman. One of the great advances of the women’s liberation movement, or second-wave feminism, was to challenge these concepts and to deny what it called traditional stereotypes of men and women. We know from our own experience that as children develop, they often reject these assumptions and try to find ways of coming to terms with them. This has been the basis of much feminism as women try to break free of the fetters which constitute traditional views of ‘femininity’. It is also true that men find the traditional views of ‘masculinity’ oppressive and distressing and that many men too try to challenge them. However, regarding sexual stereotypes as oppressive and the straitjacket of the family as reinforcing them doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t matter.

The reaction of individuals to these social constructs also varies; some accept the definitions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’, but many actively and consciously reject them. Rejecting these stereotypes again leads to a number of responses, including conscious political decisions which lead people towards socialist or feminist politics. Some of those who are natal female or male wish to transition, often expressing the view that they have been ‘born in the wrong body’. Others however have no desire to do so but want to fight against the social attitudes of what it means to be a man or a woman.

What does Marxism say about nature and culture?

Butler quotes Marx and Engels’ famous writing in The German Ideology that ‘we do not set out from what people say, imagine, conceive, nor from people as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at people in the flesh. We set out from real, active people, and on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process … The phantoms formed in the human brain are, also, necessarily sublimates of their material life-process’ (p.27). However, Butler seems to misunderstand the whole point Marx is making here. He saw ideas as coming from the material reality of human beings’ lives. Of course, ideas and ideology can act in certain ways in order to reinforce material circumstances, but to see them as creating these circumstances or detached from material reality is certainly to subvert Marx’s views and his whole idea that ‘being determines consciousness’.

Butler here not only demonstrates a fundamental misconception about the whole theory of Marxism (and the passage quoted from The German Ideology is in my view absolutely key to any understanding of the historical materialism that is the foundation of the theory), but they also display a sort of idealism which sees ideas as driving reality rather than being the product of the material circumstances in which people find themselves.

Butler seems to think that their references to ‘phantasms’ or ghosts being similar to Marx and Engels’ references to phantoms amount to the same thing. But Butler’s assumption that anyone can be what they choose to be by simply thinking this to be so is a very long way from Marxist materialism and repeatedly leads to the conclusion that the ‘phantasms’ are all in people’s heads and can be detached from material reality.

Marx and Engels took the view that history develops and ideas change as a result of the way in which humans act on nature to gain their subsistence – food, shelter and so on -and how they use tools, including the human hand, in order to do so. Butler tends to dismiss Marxism as a means of understanding sex and gender, saying that the view that ‘culture is defined by its transformative activity, while nature is there as a given object to be transformed by culture, no longer holds today. It constitutes a well-intentioned but counter-ecological view that denies dynamism, agency, and transformative processes to nature’ (p.206). While it is true that nature can be dynamic and transformative in certain circumstances, it cannot be said to have agency in the way that human beings do.

Yet human beings themselves are part of nature and not simply ideological constructs. And their real activity impacts on nature in particular ways. To simply wave this away as outdated because it does not fit the idealism of postmodern theory is to ignore how society does develop. Take the Marxist view on the family, which is that in early ‘primitive communist’ societies there was a rudimentary equality between the sexes and no particular stigma or discrimination because of women’s biological role as mothers and nurturers. As society developed, so the accumulation of a surplus of wealth in society led to the creation of classes, a state machine to protect the wealth of those ruling, and a family structure to ensure that wealth passed into the right hands. It was this that Engels referred to as ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’ and which ensured that women’s oppression became a feature of all class societies.

Both Marx and Engels saw this area as a very serious point of study towards the end of their lives, in order to develop a materialist explanation of why women continued to be oppressed, despite the vast changes capitalism had wrought in production, ideas, and personal lives. They saw the various forms of the family as fitting with the needs of the particular modes of production in which it existed. For most of human history, the family and social reproduction were very closely entwined with work, in the fields, in artisan workshops and so on. It was only under capitalism that the division between home and work became much starker, and work within the home (unpaid labour) became separate from and regarded as inferior to paid labour.

The discipline of capitalist exploitation required a family suited to this division between work and home, and one based on a degree of atomisation, hierarchy and conformity. This included sexual conformity – women and children were subordinate to the man, sex was stressed as for procreation and within marriage, ‘deviations’ from the ‘norm’ in terms of gender and sexuality were frowned upon, responses ranging from criminalisation to pretence that they did not exist. The root of LGBT oppression lies precisely in its challenge to these norms, which have been seen by many, especially on the right, as challenges to the very existence of the nuclear family. In this way it can be seen to be connected to the family and women’s oppression.

Marx and Engels studied the attitudes to family and sexual relations in different societies historically, and in different parts of the world, recognising that the capitalist form of the family, with its nuclear structure and its strict rules about deviation from the ‘norm’, was not typical but a particular social construct fitted to the capitalist mode of production and the centrality of exploitation to that system. While the anthropological evidence they used to look at this history many be outdated or simply wrong in some cases, the method they used and the general approach has been borne out by the continued important role of women in both production and reproduction not just of life itself but of the social conditions which ensure the wellbeing and health of human beings.

In this respect, it is superior both to the postmodernism displayed by Butler and much of gender theory, and to the biological determinism and positivism which is adopted by some radical feminists.

The family and social reproduction

The role of women in reproduction is central: they are essential to the reproduction of the human race but also to what is sometimes called social reproduction: the nurturing and reproduction of labour power within the system itself. The family under capitalism plays therefore both economic and social roles: it nurtures, cares for, socialises and educates the next generation of workers so that they are fitted for their role in the exploitative process, at relatively little cost to the capitalist class. There is no natural reason why women’s role as mothers should put them at a disadvantage, but there are plenty of social and economic reasons why this benefits the capitalist class.

In this process, sex is real, and the vast majority of people are biologically unambiguously either male or female. In exceptionally rare ambiguous instances, those arise from difference of sexual development that are unique to either a male or a female. There is no range of ‘intersex’. It is wrong to imply that there is no sexual binary and that it is simply a spectrum.

Without it, there would be no physical reproduction of human beings. But how it is organised socially is something that can be and is changed. For example, the family unit in Britain in 2024, where each member of the family who is able to sells its labour power on the market – is different from that of the early years of the twentieth century where few married women worked outside the home and where the male breadwinner and older children engaged in paid labour. What is common between them, however, is that domestic labour in the household is still carried out predominantly by the woman, and much of the paid work engaged in social reproduction outside the home such as caring, cooking and cleaning is also carried out by women for low wages.

Here the relationship between nature and culture is complex but is coloured by women’s biological role. It is this which means that only women can give birth but also that a set of ideological assumptions will accompany this fact. These include the assumption that women will be more nurturing, that they will be less assertive or dominant than men, that they will be attracted to different work, and that this work will tend to be worse paid and with less chances of advancement than that of men (which of course has nothing to do with biology and everything to do with social relations). All of these assumptions act to reinforce the material reality for women, which is that they operate at a severe disadvantage in the labour market.

This is where we begin to see how nature and culture interact and how women’s biological role affects their cultural place. Biological factors still play a big role in women’s oppression: maternity itself, and the surrounding pressures of pregnancy and breastfeeding, the menopause, menstruation and much else. The fact that much of the pressures and disadvantage which accompany these phenomena could be eradicated in any socialist society doesn’t alter the fact that the social relations of production under capitalism mean that women are simply expected to cope individually with these factors, often to their detriment. Then, of course, there are many aspects of women’s oppression beyond this: the whole economic oppression at work, the threat of sexual assault and rape, domestic violence, the sexualisation of culture, and more.

Butler seems to believe that a serious debating point is to argue that because some women don’t choose to have children, some are post-menopausal so cannot, some are unable, for a series of reasons, to have children, this invalidates the argument that there is a biological element to women’s oppression. It doesn’t, just as living in communes does not allow individuals to escape the pressures of the family under capitalism. Again, the exceptions prove the rule: the central role of women in the family and as child bearers and rearers defines that oppression, regardless of the situation of individuals, and whether or not they choose to conform to particular roles. Many women and men challenge the assumptions and constrictions that these roles place on them, but they cannot totally overcome them, because of the nature of the system itself. Women’s oppression is reinforced throughout society but primarily through the institution of the family which, however imperfect, is propped up by the capitalist class as the central unit for the reproduction of labour power. It also plays a major ideological role in reinforcing the ideas which maintain oppression within capitalism.

None of this seems to impact on Butler, as they don’t locate oppression in the family or social reproduction but in restrictions on the performativity of gender roles. This in turn leads to a lacuna over, for example, gay and lesbian marriage. Same-sex marriage has been recognised in a number of countries in recent decades, including Britain, which we can all welcome. It is a challenge to the far-right politicians with their view of the monogamous heterosexual Christian family. But we should also recognise that civil partnerships and gay and lesbian marriage reinforce the stability of society and the idea that marriage is the norm. Same-sex marriage is perfectly compatible with neoliberal capital and does not challenge but reinforces the role of the family in social reproduction. What it says is, marriage does not have to be heterosexual, but it has to be seen as something to aspire to.

Class and gender: the dismissal of fears of women

In the process of putting their arguments, Butler manages to minimise the specific question of women’s oppression, seeing it as merely part of gender oppression. But whatever our views on their ideas about gender, it should be clear that there is a specific women’s oppression which is rooted in women’s role in society, and which affects half of humanity.

This minimising takes a variety of forms. So, for example, equality laws which ban sex discrimination are regarded by Butler as concerned with gender and social assumptions rather than with the sex of the person. They argue: ‘To say that these rules are “based” on sex does not mean that those rules are derived from sex; rather, it means they are derived from ideas – prejudices or conventions – about how sex should appear, what sex is thought to imply about the capacity to do a job, and what values are attributed to work when it is undertaken by a woman or a man’ (p.118). Or again, ‘If sex is framed within cultural norms, then it is already gender. That does not mean that it is fake or artificial, but only that it is being mobilised in the service of one power or another. The claim that sex is immutable invokes a religious and linguistic framework for thinking about sex. Wherever there is such a frame, gender is at work’ (p.119).

Once again Butler’s technique is to take social attitudes towards sex and to recreate a real category as ideology, in a spectacular piece of subjective idealism which says that arguing for the biological reality of sex is to oneself fall victim of some kind of false consciousness. To say that a material phenomenon which is regarded in all sorts of different social ways is therefore not real is quite a leap, and one which they are forced to make by denying that reality and by suggesting that gender is something that everyone performs, completely separated from biological questions.

They also have a tendency to ignore real issues that feminists have fought for, for example single-sex spaces and refuges against rape and domestic violence. It is as though they cannot admit that there can be women’s oppression as such, or that women are by far the greatest number of victims of violence.

This becomes apparent in the chapter on ‘Terfs and British matters of sex’ when Butler attacks the so called ‘trans exclusionary radical feminists’ who stress various critiques of gender-identity theory. Butler concentrates their fire on two high-profile ones, Kathleen Stock and J.K. Rowling, but does not talk about a range of individuals and organisations who might share some of those criticisms but who don’t see themselves as trans exclusionary and often not as radical feminists either.

The truth is it is an insulting and misleading term, which is used as a means of discrediting anyone who criticises the theory but also has the effect of silencing debate around an issue about which there clearly is debate (why after all does Butler spend a considerable part of their book on it if this were not the case?). There are anti-trans people, some of whom may call themselves radical feminists, and they are wrong, but what about all those women on the left who are unhappy about the theory and some of the practice – for example the real phenomenon of men attacking women in the most degrading terms for not supporting trans rights? I have personal experience of talking to a range of women with generally left-wing and socialist politics, some of them lesbians who have often fought discrimination within the movement, who do not agree with the gender theory put forward by Butler, but who feel it is impossible to raise discussion on this without being dragged into an unpleasant debate or, worse, threatened with discipline at work, sanction from trade unions and so on.

What about those who want to develop a theory which integrates sex and gender in a way that Butler and their supporters do not approve? Are we seriously saying that they have no right to do so and that if they do, they will be objectively siding with the fascists? It is ludicrous. I have no wish to defend Rowling, whose politics I regard as mainstream reformist and whose tactics have sometimes been unnecessarily insensitive, but even Butler quotes Rowling’s statement on her own background and political development with some sympathy, while criticising its conclusion (pp.162-3). Surely it should be possible to discuss and reject or accept a different analysis without those putting it forward being denounced?

After all, there are many different ways of analysing, for example, racism. Does it stem from capitalism, imperialism, from a lack of human understanding, fear of the ‘other’, from ignorance? I would argue that there should be no controls on immigration as they are a racist concept. Many good anti-racists would disagree, does that mean they are racism deniers or objectively siding with the fascists? Only the most myopic sectarian would make that point. Yet anyone who does not accept the overall analysis, not just that we should support trans rights and be against all forms of discrimination, is regarded as themselves part of the oppressors. The constant attempt to lump those on the left, who do not agree with the theories totally, in with the far right is both a dishonest sleight of hand and a sign of lack of confidence about the strength of the argument.

One of my own differences with radical feminism is that it places far too much emphasis on male violence and on the need to separate from men, rather than stressing the need for a class response to women’s oppression, which involves women fighting alongside men to overthrow the system which leads to this oppression. However, I am also aware of the horrendous levels of domestic violence, the widespread incidence of rape, and the overall culture which demonstrates the constant objectification and attempted subjugation of women. It first came to widespread awareness in the 70s and 80s, as a result of women’s liberation turning it into a political issue, but has never had the resources or attention directed to it to make inroads into its widespread practice. The effect on women is huge: and it needs to be taken seriously, as well as being recognised that such individual acts are socially created but also impact on women in many different ways.

In what I found a particularly uncomfortable section, Butler tries to diminish fears about rape and sexual assault in for example women’s prisons and the demand for single-sex spaces, suggesting (rightly) that male prison guards already rape women prisoners, but too often minimising fears of rape and of the penis itself. Here again, Butler tries to minimise the general facts by citing exceptions. ‘Yes, rape is unwanted penetration, and that can be from a penis, a fist, or anything else that can serve as a blunt instrument.’ They continue, ‘Rape does not unfold naturally from the presence of a penis, and it would doubtless serve us well to consider how many kinds of objects and body parts are used to hurt and enter others’ bodies without their consent’ (p.157).

What might serve us even better is to recognise that the overwhelming violence is of men against women and that the biggest number of rapes by far is men using their penis as the instrument of rape. So it does matter and many women, because of their experiences, are fearful of men and what they can do. It is not right to treat those fears as anything less than well founded and worthy of appropriate treatment and consideration. Certainly they should not be patronised or dismissed, and definitely not in the name of feminism and equality.

Unfortunately this is what Butler does. In fact, it is clear that the economic and social concerns of women which do not fit with Butler’s theories are consigned to the margins. The central role of working-class women in reproduction and their equality problems generally – that women as a sex are paid considerably lower than men or that they tend to work in lower paid jobs – is little commented on.

This reflects the abstract theory Butler promotes and the academic milieu in which they operate, and where their ideas of gender theory are highly influential. This is perhaps why there is some talk of their opponents’ lack of critique – and criticism of them for not reading Butler’s books. But their own handling of ‘gender critical feminists’ shows a lack of serious critique of those ideas and a refusal to engage with them.

The book argues that we can’t understand what is a woman without looking globally and multilingually. There are, of course, huge social and cultural differences between women, as there are class differences. But these cannot be defined just in cultural terms but in the reality of material lives as well. And the lives of women in the Philippines or Sri Lanka have also to be seen as part of a global class system of exploitation, where they often leave their own children to work in distant parts of the world, in cleaning and caring jobs.

It is surely the case that these women have a common interest with those workers in the countries they arrive in, whether female or male, black or white, regardless of sexuality or gender. Here the relationship between class and oppression is missing from the book: we can identify oppression, we can struggle against it individually and collectively, but its ending can only be achieved as part of the ending of class society. And the class division on this question will ultimately be decisive in those who simply want individual liberation and those who want to change all the oppressive structures.

Butler ends their book by urging those debating this question to ‘be kind’. On this we can agree, and it’s not just an individual question. As struggles develop, many people who have racist ideas, oppose LGBT rights, have sexist attitudes to women, can and will change their ideas in the light of their own experience. To refuse to debate, to discuss or to allow people to develop their ideas, is self-defeating and a denial of what real socialism should be about.

The argument about sex and gender is an important one. It cannot be reduced to slogans, nor can it be dismissed as not suitable for debate. But any discussion has to be rooted in the wider issues of class, family and social reproduction. This enables us to link individual aspects of sexuality and gender to the system which gives rise to oppression. This means a return to the historical materialist analysis which allows us to understand there is a reason why women’s oppression is central to capitalism, how it relates to other oppressions, and how we can organise to overcome it.