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Far-left feminist professor praises transgender agenda for 'frightening' people
A gender studies professor at the University of California at Berkeley said the transgender agenda is supposed to make people "uncomfortable" and has aims at "changing reality."
Judith Butler is a professor at Berkeley. She has research expertise in critical theory, gender and sexuality studies and explained her ideas to "Big Think" in June.
Butler argued that "gender wasn't a predetermined reality, but a fluid construct formed by culture, history, and individual identity."
She then discussed how transgenderism was an offspring of the feminist movement against sex stereotypes and gender roles.
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"When trans people started living openly, something changed in the world… Reality changed," she said.
"We are seeing the changing of terms. We no longer speak about family, woman, man, desire, sex in the same way," she said.
The changing of language regarding sex and gender, that those two are separately defined is driving the ideological change of reality, according to Butler.
"We're talking about an act that makes something come into being or an act that has real consequences. We're talking about the changing reality," she said.
Butler further acknowledged that the transgender agenda – to redefine the terms sex and gender – is designed to make people uncomfortable, "even among progressive and liberal people."
She proceeded to compare the language change around pronouns to racism against Black people.
"I know there can sometimes be a real resistance to thinking about trans rights… [I]t simply makes them uncomfortable. Why should I have to refer to someone as he or she or they? And yet, at least in the U.S., we learned how to talk about Black people differently."
Butler, who started her work in theorizing that femininity doesn't mean motherhood, said she is "less interested in defending a theory of gender," and is much more interested in transgenderism.
"I'm less interested in defending a theory of gender. I'm much more concerned with finding creative and effective ways of countering the attack on gender. One problem is that many people who refuse to allow transpeople to define themselves is that they feel that their own self-definition is destabilized," she said.
She proceeded to question whether anyone can have a stable gender identity.
"The idea that we can change reality, transform reality… There's an instability in that that's very frightening to people who want to understand their gender as fixed. But is anybody's gender necessarily a universal or is it a complicated emergence that happens with each of us?"
"We need to re-occupy these notions and show that concerns with racial justice and gender equality in gender freedom are an integral part of any democratic struggle," she added.
Butler did not respond to a request for comment.
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