Opinion
When even the dim bulbs of The Economist come out against a bien pensant leftist icon, you really know they’ve screwed up. So, its recent scathing review of Judith Butler’s latest book is perhaps as sure a prodigy as any that even the NPCs are ready to call time on the Groomers.
Because, when it comes to Rainbow Groomers, Judith Butler is right up at the top of the tree.
There was a time when outlandish theories about gender were confined to the fringes of social-science faculties. Now such notions—and particularly the idea that sex is mutable—are debated everywhere, from kitchen tables and pubs to state legislatures, thanks to a few academics. Chief among them is Judith Butler of the University of California, Berkeley, known as “the godmother of queer theory”. As the revolution Butler helped start has recently met with more intellectual and political resistance, the author has written a new book in its defence.
And it’s just as ludicrous as anything else she’s written.
Butler went on to develop queer theory—an ideology that says that gender identity trumps biological sex in defining who a person is—promoting this concept in notoriously impenetrable academic prose.
It’s all but unreadable on purpose. The point of such deliberately obscurantist academic prose is not to explain, it’s to conceal. “Every sentence contains a guilty secret,” as Theodore Dalrymple describes such nonsense. Because, if these tenured idiots actually said what they really mean in plain language, they’d be laughed out of the building.
Now, Butler’s made the mistake of being almost straightforward, for a change.
The problem is that pretty soon, the author leaves the path of gay-rights advocacy and disappears down an ideological rabbit hole. Soon after critiques of “the so-called facts of sex”, the TQ+ overwhelms the LGB. The result is a stir-fry of disingenuous provocations, served up with a large portion of post-modern word salad. The reader is left wondering how Butler ever became so influential.
Well, readers of The Economist, perhaps. Those of us unburdened with the middle brows of the bien pensant left twigged that she is full of what makes the daisies grow, years ago.
And she’s not happy about it. So, as leftists who know they’ve lost the argument are wont to, she resorts to childish abuse.
Butler smears the growing army of liberal-minded women who oppose these views on sex and gender, including J.K. Rowling, as hysterical right-wingers allied with the pope, Mr Trump and Vladimir Putin. Soon the author descends into the quicksand of intersectionality, where all oppressions overlap, accusing people who criticise the Butler perspective of buttressing “white supremacy”. By the end, all opponents are extremists. The words “fascism” and “fascist” appear nearly 70 times.
So, nearly as often as mainstream media like The Economist use the words “far-right”.
But that’s nothing compared to this howler:
The book is a lesson in how well-meaning activism can overreach.
The Economist
“Well-meaning activism”? Butler’s demonstrably stupid ideas — the idea that “gender is a social construct” was already soundly demolished by the grotesque, paedophilic experiments of John Money before Butler ever picked up her pen — have caused Irreversible Damage (to use the title of Abigail Shrier’s scathing book) to a generation of children.
If that’s “well-meaning, ” Mussolini was just misunderstood, and Communism will work next time.