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Late to the take-party as always. But, two things to point out about Butler's magisterial replies here: 1) trans people have been saying these same things for years yet, sadly, we still need a Judith Butler to say them to outlets like the NS... (Thread>) https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times
and 2) Ferber's interview makes clear how deeply TERFism has intellectually impoverished the mainstream media discussion of feminism in the UK (and, to a nontrivial degree, elsewhere too).
Look at how narrow the terms of discussion are. The same two TERF talking points and JKR.
Look at how narrow the terms of discussion are. The same two TERF talking points and JKR.
Ferber's sad questions reveal a feminism stripped of any intellectual content or moral horizon beyond the comments on JK Rowling's tweets.
Butler's replies are, make no mistake, excellent, eloquent, and worth quoting but she was also hitting home runs off a tee. The TERF talking point that "feminists" and "trans activists" are irreconcilable opposites, are completely different groups, is an obvious lie for instance.
But it's an obvious lie that nevertheless commands miles worth of column inches, particularly in the British media, which has reduced nearly all discussion of feminism to a carnivalesque referendum on whether trans women are a threat because we need to pee.
This fatal narrowing of horizons has been obvious for a long time but Alona Ferber's interview makes it plain; it's as if she didn't know what else to ask, how else to phrase these things. The alpha is the bathroom predator myth, the omega is JKR's Twitter.
And while I am grateful for Judith Butler, I lament that someone of her intellectual stature is *reduced* to having to answer these insipid questions, and that we're all supposed to pretend they exhaust the issue of trans civil rights or trans feminism.
To no one's great surprise, a group of reactionaries who claim to support free expression have actually narrowed it to the point of suffocation. TERFs have eroded centuries of feminist work into a few memeable talking points repeated by pliable British hacks.
