The issue of “Gender Ideology” has been injected into nearly every social and political debate, becoming a target in a slew of executive orders produced by the Trump administration. But, as someone who is more than well acquainted with gender, I had no idea what “Gender Ideology” meant. The Gender Ideology doesn’t exist, or at least, not as simply one ideology. It is a term that encompasses a vast cluster of different meanings, often referring to left leaning gender theory and the waning emphasis on gender as naturally occuring, but also including the supposed ideology that blue haired LGBTQ+ students force onto their professors, or paradoxically, nonsense that professors spout in order to indoctrinate students. It is said to be a tool used by a nonexistent “New World Order,” an academic weapon of mass destruction, a somehow liberal, marxist, and fascist organization of thought, and a theory that dissolves both religious tradition and science. With these contradictions, it becomes clear that Gender Ideology isn’t this tangible movement tearing apart the country, but an invented scapegoat that combines contradictory, loosely connected threats to tradition and nationality.
In January of this year, the Trump Administration passed Executive Order No. 14168, calling for the removal of “internally incoherent” Gender Ideology from government and academic spaces in an effort to defend women. The “women” defined in this order are “[people of] the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” a definition that confusingly excludes intersex women assigned women at birth, those who have received oophorectomies, or even post-menopausal women—all women whose identity have, up until now, never been put into question. In 2015, Pope Francis proposed to “Think of the nuclear arms… think also of genetic manipulation, of the manipulation of life, or of the gender theory, that does not recognize the order of creation…The same was done by the dictators of the last century… think of the Balilla [youth groups of Fascist Italy], think of the Hitler Youth.” Although the tragic irony of the head of the Catholic Church calling for an end to the exploitation of children is apparently ignored, the quote highlights the — potentially invented — dangers that so-called Gender Ideology may bring. These invented threats become realized, not by theory taught in schools, but by their recognition in legislature and their subsequent evocation of fear. This realization, the process of making a perceived threat into a real, actively harmful one, is what Judith Butler would describe to be a phantasm.
Butler is often described to be the founder of Gender Ideology. Their breakout book Gender Trouble proposed Gender to be performative. Performative, not like an actor in a cabaret, but as in the technical philosophical term of performative speech. When a judge declares “I sentence you,” they both declare the sentencing and perform that act, actually sentencing the individual. When you say “I apologize,” you say the apology and do the apologizing. This is performative speech. Butler claims that gender, like a sentencing or an apology, becomes both a declaration and an actualization of gender, thus making gender itself performative. Note that Butler doesn’t declare gender as baseless, as the Trump Administration or Vatican may argue, for the performance relies on preconceived understandings of what “sentence,” “sorry,” or “man,” and “woman” may mean in a social context. Also note that Butler, though credited for the dissolution of gender as an act of “gender extremism” by think tanks like The Heritage Foundation, rather affirms through their theory of performatism that gender plays an extremely formative role in our gendered lives. Thus, even the demonization of the academic study of gender itself becomes a phantasmic act, converting the perceived threat to tradition posed by such theory as a physical attack on tradition.
Ignoring the actual meaning of gender performatism, conservative groups across the globe, from the Vatican to MAGA Americans to “Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists,” nicknamed TERFs, cultivate flashy headlines and spread misinformation on a “trans threat” outlined in pseudo-publications like City Journal, write laws that restrict LGBTQ+ topics being discussed in classrooms, and compare Gender Ideology to nuclear warfare and nazism (McElwee, 2015). Again, it is not that there is an actual threat posed by trans people. While 1% of the U.S population identifies as transgender, the percentage of trans students participating in college sports is reportedly under 0.001%. Additionally, transgender people are four times more likely to be a victim of murder than cisgender people. So, an invented threat of the supposed transgender criminal stalking around bathrooms or joining sports teams for an advantage must become realized through scapegoating, fearmongering, and ripping away the rights of trans people, again a phantasmic realization. Fear is delivered through phantasms in order to identify a social “in group” and to define who gets to be a part of tradition, family values, and culture.
But none of this is new. These contradictions have been clearly on display for decades now, and yet it can feel as though no one reads them. How do you change the minds of people who don’t listen? How can you swat away the illusion of so-called “gender insanity” without appearing as a proponent of that very thing? Being caught in the purpose and meaning offered by phantasms is surely alluring, and so plucking someone from this mental trap will never be consistently possible.
Well, it can surely feel that way, that those who simply don’t listen will never hear you. But, you can train yourself to be louder so that maybe, just maybe, they will have to listen. Learn not just of “Gender Ideology,” but about all that these movements fear. Read the literature by Butler, gender theorists, and anti-gender theorists alike. Look over the sources—those left and right leaning— provided in this article. Be skeptical about the beliefs you and others hold and break free from the phantasms controlling you. Donate to trustworthy charities defending those targeted by these attacks (Trevor Project, Black Trans Alliance, GATE, etc.). Organize with local activist groups (MN Anti-War Committee, Twin Cities Coalition for Justice, MN Immigrant Rights Action Committee). Make heard the freedoms you believe in. As Butler suggested in Who’s Afraid of Gender, “What if we make freedom into the air we together breathe? After all, that is the air that belongs to us all.”
