Judith Butler’s “Who’s Afraid of Gender?” An Insightful Read for LGBTQ+ Catholics

Today’s post is from guest contributor Adam Beyt (he/him), a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Norbert College, Wisconsin. His first book, Remaking Humanity: Embodiment and Hope in Catholic Theology, is a constructive political theology using the work of Dominican theologian Edward Schillebeeckx and American philosopher Judith Butler. The book will be published with Bloomsbury in the fall of 2024.

With the publication of the 1990 book Gender Trouble, American philosopher Judith Butler (they/she) articulated a highly influential framework for how academics, activists, and many queer people today discuss gender. Beginning with this work, Butler’s writings have popularized the idea that gender is a performance. This term does not mean it is a “show” but an ongoing and repeated process, one whereby bodies are categorized as male and female and are taught to inhabit culturally-conditioned dispositions, behaviors, and orientations.

Under Butler’s theory, we might think of gender as a “local group project” whereby it is socially constructed and contextually embodied. In other words, from the moment a doctor announces “it’s a boy!” about a child assigned male at birth, the child is continuously “boy-ed” into a certain way of being in the world. Butler, among many other scholars, have recognized that their work was not the first to make this observation about gender, yet their work has been a helpful conversation partner for discussing LGBTQ+ issues and their entanglement with other aspects of public life.

In the past decades, Butler themselves has become a target for what many anti-LGBTQ+ movements, along with certain clusters of feminists, have referred to as “gender ideology.” In fact, Butler was burnt in effigy in Brazil in 2017. Originating in the 1990s, the phrase “gender ideology” has become a catch-all term for many social conservatives, including Pope Francis and other Catholic leaders, who interpret discourse involving “gender” to deviate from what they believe to be the revealed laws of nature. For those who accept John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body” (TOB), “gender ideology” encompasses how now-pervasive understandings of “freedom” have veered away from the nuptial “truth” of the human body. For TOB, human bodies come in only two distinct sexed shapes, limited to what many would label cisgender men and cisgender women. Such a couple is  meant to lovingly implement God’s gift of sexuality to complement one another in a heterosexual, monogamous, sacramental marriage— that is both unitive and open to the creation of life. “Gender ideology,” so its critics claim, undermines this purported meaning of the body, enticing people to use artificial contraception, undergo gender-affirming care, demand access to abortion, and act on sexual desires that are “intrinsically disordered.”

In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler offers their response to such critics in one of their most public and widely readable works, providing an insightful conversation partner for queer-affirming Catholics today. Butler notes that “gender” has become a “phantasm,” a “psychosocial phenomenon… a site where intimate fears and anxieties become socially organized to incite political passions.” This phantasm names “a way of organizing the world wrought by the fear of a destruction for which gender is held responsible.” To put this in more religious terms, the movement in opposition to so-called “gender ideology” interprets culturally pervasive assertions around gender as if it were a “demon” needing to be exorcized from public discourse to defend the common good. For Butler, this demon named “gender” obscures other fears and biases.

Butler begins the work by focusing on the use of “gender ideology” within Vatican statements, noting its appearance in statements from Pope Francis and other documents like like the much-maligned 2019 text “Male and Female He Created Them” from the Congregation for Catholic Education. While Butler commends Francis’ kinder approach to the topic, they are troubled by the pontiff’s comparison of gender ideology to nuclear weapons. Butler also notes how the term “gender ideology” is considered through colonial terms, meaning that the Western, imperialist framework of “gender” is being wrongfully imposed on the Global South. In fact, human variance on gender, sex, and sexuality (and the inscrutability of those categories themselves) remains an universal phenomenon across cultures and geographies.

Butler then tracks how the “phantasm of gender” traverses different localities and movements, ranging from the xenophobia of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to the United Kingdom’s trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs)—who refer to themselves as “gender critical.” Importantly, Butler also cites Black and decolonial scholars who note how the cultural mediation of gender is also entangled with categories connected to race and colonization.

Throughout Butler’s career, reflections on ethics have probed their Jewish roots to foreground responsibility to marginalized communities. These moral concerns overlap with those of Catholics, such as honoring human dignity and building a more just world where all can flourish. In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler’s citations include queer-affirming theologians such as Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ, and Dan Horan, OFM, along with a positive reference to DignityUSA, a Catholic LGBTQ+ organization.

Their critique ends with an exhortation for building coalitions for a more just world, one where many different types of humans can be free. Furthermore, their critique joins the chorus of many other Catholics, myself included, who demand life-giving accounts of humanity in Catholic theology. Different genders, abilities, races, and sexualities can all mirror the sacred image of God (Imago Dei), as a kaleidoscope of the glorious mystery of the Divine.

The book offers a helpful entry point into how an influential thinker grapples with a concerted and global effort to undermine queer people’s human dignity and their participation in public life. I recommend it for those wanting a thought-provoking take on ongoing debates about gender, human dignity, and our shared lives together.

As we anticipate another document from the Dicastery for the Doctrine of Faith that is expected to reproduce the incoherent phantasm around “gender ideology,” let us remember that God’s mercy, love, and justice demand so much more of our Church.

—Adam Beyt (he/him), April 5, 2024