Late to the take-party as always. But, two things to point out about Butler& #39;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">https://www.newstatesman.com/internati...
and 2) Ferber& #39;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.
Ferber& #39;s sad questions reveal a feminism stripped of any intellectual content or moral horizon beyond the comments on JK Rowling& #39;s tweets.
Butler& #39;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& #39;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& #39;s interview makes it plain; it& #39;s as if she didn& #39;t know what else to ask, how else to phrase these things. The alpha is the bathroom predator myth, the omega is JKR& #39;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& #39;re all supposed to pretend they exhaust the issue of trans civil rights or trans feminism.
To no one& #39;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.
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