In a new book, the influential theorist tries to indict gender-critical feminists.

Judith Butler, for many years a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at UC Berkeley might be among the most influential intellectuals alive today. Even if you have never heard of them (Butler identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns), you are living in their world, in which babies are “assigned” male or female at birth, and performativity is, at least on campus, an ordinary English word. Butler’s breakout 1990 book, Gender Trouble, argued that biological sex, like gender, is socially constructed, with its physical manifestations mattering only to the degree society assigns them meaning. The book is required reading in just about every women’s-, gender-, or sexuality-studies department. Butler has won a raft of international honors and been burned in effigy as a witch in Brazil. How many thinkers can say as much?

A few decades ago, Butler was probably as famous outside academia for their impenetrable jargon-ridden prose as for anything they were trying to say. In 1998, they won first prize in the annual Bad Writing Contest run by Philosophy and Literature, an academic journal. The next year, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum published a coruscating takedown, “The Professor of Parody,” in The New Republic, in which she argued that Butler had licensed a whole generation of feminist academics to blather incomprehensibly about semantics while ignoring the real-life global oppression of women. In the 1999 preface to a new edition of Gender Trouble, Butler struck back by attacking “parochial standards of transparency” and comparing critics to Richard Nixon, who would notoriously begin statements full of lies and self-excuses with the phrase “Let me make one thing perfectly clear.” Maybe the criticism stuck with Butler, though, because little by little, their nonspecialist writing has become more readable as they’ve ventured into current topics such as Donald Trump and Israel-Palestine (Butler’s view: the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, which included the murder, rape and mass kidnapping of civilian women, was a legitimate “act of armed resistance.”) Butler also began publishing in The Guardian, The Nation, and other venues. Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler’s first book for a nonacademic readership, is not particularly well-written, and it’s quite repetitious (a whole paragraph is repeated, along with many, many phrases and ideas). But it’s not difficult. In fact, it’s all too simple.

The central idea of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that fascism is gaining strength around the world, and that its weapon is what Butler calls the “phantasm of gender,” which they describe as a confused and irrational bundle of fears that displaces real dangers onto imaginary ones. Instead of facing up to the problems of, for example, war, declining living standards, environmental damage, and climate change,........

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