If your field has better authors, why am I always told to go read Butler?
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Replying to @DimorphicDiva @JillTempered and
Anyway, I want to address this specific issue I have no idea why the specific people who told you to go read Butler told you to read Butler I kind of doubt this ever even actually happened - Butler being a favorite punching bag of people who want to mock queer theory and all
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
But assuming this is in earnest, it's probably because the idea of WHAT so-called "gender ideology" is is very simple, and you've already seen it hundreds of times Gender as a performance of internal identity and all that
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
WHAT it is can be described and observed in very small and simple ways Respecting the pronouns in the bio "Trans women are women and trans men are men" "Transition is just letting the outside of me match who I am inside. I know I'm a woman, I just want to be treated like one"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
The whole "read Butler" thing is about WHY (Although a lot of trans people have a lot of problems with Butler's take, the cool person to recommend on this topic now is Talia Bettcher) But WHY is a much more difficult problem, as it always is
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
"WHY are you a woman? HOW DO YOU KNOW you're a woman? WHAT REASON DO I HAVE to just go along with it? EXPLAIN TO ME EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN by words like 'woman' and 'man' in this context" Etc, etc
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
I don't think it's wrong to have these questions, which are natural I think these questions have answers and discussing the answers can be enlightening But as the old observational comedy routine about nine-year-olds points out, "WHY" questions have no limit They go on forever
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
As
@PhilosophyTube pointed out in his famous video about this, they are an excellent tactic from "skeptics" to just waste your time indefinitely without any intention of ever admitting you have a point1 reply 3 retweets 29 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
And as every freshman dorm room philosopher knows, the longer and deeper you go down the "WHY" rabbit hole, the harder it gets to talk about these things in ordinary, everyday small words, the more effort you have to put in to even know what you're talking about
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
Which is why when someone demands answers to these very deep questions that cut to the core of who you are, demanding you justify the basic way you see the world and live your life, and then they cut you off because the words you're using are too big, they're not in good faith
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It's notable that Gender Trouble gets singled out here, because Gender Trouble was never intended for or marketed to your random conservative dad who doesn't get what trans stuff is about It was aimed at other academic feminists for whom this was an ongoing debate
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
It feels so abstruse and dense to an outsider because it's using language from within the field to defend "the performative theory of gender" from a specific line of attack Namely the feminist worry that "If anyone can just be a woman there won't be any more feminism"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @JillTempered and
This (extremely oversimplified) concern is, of course, what TERFs are obsessed with and what they think of as obviously true to the level of a religious tenet So of course they think of Butler as the Antichrist and this book in particular as an abomination they attack constantly
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