Brilliant as always, with many guffaw-worthy lines. Hard to pick just one but I especially liked "Once you’ve digested thousands of pages of French and German philosophy to write a dissertation on how there are no stable categories, you’ve got to knife any biologist who says “well actually people with disorders of sex development are all classifiable as male or female.”"
To be pedantic, I think some edge cases are hard to classify, but outside those individuals it is unambiguous, immutable and independent of whether the person is even alive.
Well, perhaps. Each human being suffers his/her congential anomalies in his/her own way and everyone is different. But someone who had no gonads at all and no Mullerian or Wolffian differentiation would still have rudimentary female external genitalia no matter whether they had an SRY gene/Y chromosome or not. What they would definitely not have is a fully formed penis with a normally placed urethra, and they would not experience male (or any) puberty. So they would be regarded as socially female (infertile of course) no matter how unclassifiable they were inside. If in addition to gonadal agenesis the individual also had congenital adrenal hyperplasia that virilized the female genitalia, it would be harder to tell even with sophisticated genetic testing.
Then there are mosaics and chimeras that cause ovotestis. If such individuals have ambiguous genitalia it will be hard to classify them. To get a handle on this you would have to read a comprehensive review of every case report and case series done on the topic. It's not quite true that female is the "default" for outward appearance, but for all intents and purposes, an individual who has a penis and testicles in a scrotum is male. (Edit: corrected a solecism in the last sentence.) If the external genitalia are female, (which is all that anyone sees in the delivery room), the child could be either a normal female or not-fully-formed male.
There's an observation that these "edge" cases are as common (1 in 5600) as a spun (not tossed) US nickel coming to rest on its edge, not toppling over to heads or tails. By that analogy, if you call "heads" when the other party spins, you lose if it yields edge, because edge and tails are both losing outcomes when the call is heads. Similarly, edge and clearly identifiable female are "losers" if the called bet is on "clearly identifiable male." (To be strictly correct, the 1/5600 figure is that frequency of all DSDs, including the common ones that are easy to classify as M or F. The true "edge" cases are much rarer, more like 1/30,000. Some are so rare that a true incidence figure isn't possible to ascertain. But OTOH, any large city will have dozens of such individuals if they all survive childhood. Not all do because of other health problems..)
Fabulous & lucid review of two very obscurantist writers. I always tell my students to be wary of poor writing: it’s an almost certain tell that it’s hiding something.
I’ve come to think of Butler et al as like the COVID-19 lab leak: these were fun (if slightly stupid) ideas to play with in graduate seminars in the 1990s, but they weren’t fit to be let loose on the streets for the hoi polloi. But then: the internet, Tumblr, Twitter, & Reddit served these (still stupid!) ideas up to bright autistic adolescents.
Given the great weight of evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a zoonotic spillover at a Wuhan "wet market", I presume your reference to "lab leak" is the illustration of an unsupported notion gaining wide traction.
Well, this is distraction from the main weight of the Bad Facts post and your comment -- because I agree with the thrust of your original comment that queer theory broke loose and made a mess. But -- with my extensive biomedical background and good knowledge of virology -- I have been following the deep, extensive -- open source --literature on this matter, and so I suspect I'm working with better information. The virologists and their colleagues who have for some decades been paying attention the biology and ecology of Coronaviruses (and other viruses of concern!), and the human-animal interfaces that drive zoonotic spillover -- contend that this virus emerged via the loathsome wildlife trade and the "wet markets". I don't know what constitutes "most rational people" these days. I don't think it would be appropriate to drop half a dozen links to the recent papers here.
Well, there are a lot of informed scientists and scientific journalists who have also posited that the lab leak is more plausible, so its not exactly Spooks 1, Informed scientists 0.
A good book on the history of biosafety and lab leaks:
Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic
The summary abstract, introduction, and discussion should be understandable. See also references therein & related literature.
This publicly available, detailed, rigorous work is more reliable than "intelligence" agencies or mainstream media & pundits, whether BBC, Fox News, NYT, Jon Stewart...
This paper takes a long time to read and thoroughly understand, even those of us educated in the field. Bur it's just detailed science, all data & methods described, in start contrast to post-modern obscurantism and faux-profundity that seeks to "subvert" or "queer" this sort of work.
[apologies for following up on the off-topic digression from Glenna's fab essay] There were intrafamily cases of COVID--or rather, some mystery virus causing bilateral interstitial pneumonia--in the weeks before the Wuhan wet market cases, in another part of the city among people with no connection to the market. The wet market theory was/is a plausible and convenient scapegoat for Wuhan city officials and the virology institute. Given that SARS has accidentally escaped the lab on several occasions and infected researchers, their family members, and others (e.g., in Beijing, in Singapore), I never understood the rush to denounce the COVID lab leak theory as ludicrous or (as some implied) racist. I support your reticence to drop links into the comments section, but if you haven't read it, political scientist Dali Yang's "Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Virus in China Spiraled Out of Control" is superb (and gripping).
Incisive critique of Rubin and Butler! As an English professor who was in graduate school in the late 80's and early 90's, I know firsthand how bad Butler's cultish dominance over feminist literary criticism has been. Your joke about English professors who walk in lockstep with Butler getting deference in many quarters hits the mark perfectly! It's darkly funny that getting on the Butler train to the land of anti-clarity seems worth it to too many of my fellow English professors for the sake of a few crumbs of cultural clout. By the way, I recommend Professor Susan Pickard's critique of Butler's warped misunderstanding of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
I'm mystified as to how educated people can get into Butler.
Thanks for the link! I took a great existentialism class in college, so from there I'm able to guess that Beauvoir does not support Butler. Existentialists actually believe in meaning.
What's more mystifying is these same educated folks being taken in by pervy sexologists and cyborg biotech Bond villains like Martine Rothblatt. Any yet that's your theory?
Her book on Beauvoir couldn't get through the publishers, but she's argued clearly and decisively on her substack and in her academic work that Beauvoir is a sex realist and would never have supported Butler.
The author is correct to note that early trans medical practice emerged from clinical traditions, particularly through figures like Harry Benjamin and John Money. However, the analysis fails to clarify that these practitioners promoted a binary, pathologizing, and adult-oriented model of transsexuality. Their frameworks required psychiatric gatekeeping and assumed that transition meant assimilation into the opposite sex—not the affirmation of fluid or self-declared identities.
While the author cites Benjamin as the origin of “gender medicine,” she omits what his model actually entailed and offers no account of how it was displaced—namely, how the binary, diagnostically gatekept model of transsexuality Benjamin established was gradually supplanted by queer theory’s reconceptualization of gender as a subjective, self-declared identity. Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the 2010s, concepts drawn from queer theory—gender as performative, sex as socially constructed, normativity as oppressive, and identity as self-authenticating—migrated from academic theory into education, clinical practice, and law. This shift replaced Benjamin’s pathologizing, clinician-controlled model with the affirmation model, in which self-identification overrides diagnosis and even children are treated as authoritative knowers of their “gender identity.”
While John Money did coin the term “gender identity,” his usage was rooted in the belief that gender was binary, socially conditioned, and fixed in early childhood. His model was not a precursor to gender self-identification, but rather an early and ultimately discredited attempt to enforce gender conformity through social engineering—as seen in the tragic David Reimer case. Contemporary gender ideology’s reliance on internal feelings as a basis for identity owes far more to poststructuralist and queer theoretical frameworks than to mid-century sexology.
By attributing the rationale for today’s trans ideology primarily to medical pseudoscience and distancing it from queer theory, the author sidesteps the philosophical and cultural reframing that made the affirmation model possible. The current landscape of gender ideology—with its emphasis on fluidity, subjectivity, and the rejection of biological sex as a meaningful category—is not a continuation of Benjamin’s clinical model, but rather a product of its ideological replacement by queer theory.
While the linked essay makes a compelling case that trans medical practice has roots in mid-20th-century clinical traditions—especially the work of Harry Benjamin—it mischaracterizes key aspects of his model. It’s misleading to say that Benjamin opposed gatekeeping or embraced a view of sex as fluid in any sense comparable to queer theory today.
Benjamin was indeed more permissive than many of his contemporaries, but his framework was still grounded in psychiatric evaluation, diagnostic criteria, and real-life experience requirements. He maintained that doctors—not patients—should determine eligibility for medical transition. This was not an early version of informed consent as it's practiced now, but a medicalized system of classification and control.
As for the "spectrum" claim: yes, Benjamin acknowledged that different aspects of sex (chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, psychological, etc.) don’t always align, and he even proposed a clinical taxonomy (the Sex Orientation Scale) to describe forms of male femininity. But this was a pathological typology, not a philosophical assertion that sex is socially constructed or meaningfully nonbinary. Benjamin still treated biological sex as real and binary, and viewed transsexuality as a rare disorder requiring medical correction.
The affirmation model that dominates today—based on self-identification, rejection of diagnosis, and claims of gender fluidity—emerged not from Benjamin’s medical paradigm but from the ideological reframing of gender and identity within queer theory and its institutional diffusion through academia, law, and activism in the 1990s and 2000s. The essay downplays this shift and elides the profound differences in epistemology, ethics, and authority between Benjamin’s model and the one now ascendant.
Well articulated but I think you [may?] be giving too much credence to academic trends and blatantly obscure authors (Butler, Beauvoir?) I’m of the opinion that it’s the Queens, active in gay bars now and at the time (70’s etc) , that put the question (issue) forward. I was already hearing “I’m twice the woman you are!” back in the eighties. Gay culture mainly. I never understood the attraction of drag shows? But they were (are?) fixtures? And male academics (Kinsey, Thomas Kuhn, studies of male-on-male cruising) navel gazing. Just saying. Before I pass on. You know, an eye witness perspective.
Kathleen Stock offers a far more accurate genealogy of gender ideology. Stock understands that what's most significant is not who coined the term first or who experimented in sex changes first, but rather from what channels did gender ideology capture the imagination of the educated classes and then trickle down to the mainstream.
Stock's genealogy, which Glenna has says she rejects:
Well you can take all of them really, ideas move around, morph and are misrepresented/inverted in successor ideologies. For the US lineage Harry Benjamin became WPATH so he's hard to ignore. Money normalized surgeries on intersex people which is another thread. His gender identity was culturally constructed so rather malleable compared to gender identity today which is posed as innate, which you change your body for. Plain old transgression is sometimes understated as it's rude to talk about weird autogynephiles and transexuals, this is where I welcome Glenda's perspective, so much that I spew lengthy musings of my own in the comments.
Imagine an alternate universe where scholar activists reinterpret Scientology through a post-structural framework and remodel it into a project for human liberation. And they succeed in capturing the imaginations of the elite classes in law, academia, media, and entertainment. Swaths of young girl start getting E-meter readings and getting "Clear".
Would we credit L. Ron Hubbard for this radical social transformation?
Yes I'm not wholly resistant to this point, I don't think it's straightforward in determining relative influence. My frame is a vast interactive evolving dynamical system. But people are key to institutions and institutions to public/medical societies, they play an outside role. Harry Benjamin largely transmitted trans to the US. Other systems, also transgressive, may independently gain steam and have huge impact on the wider culture influenced through bad academia and fawning progressive media. The ideas swap over and morph. As I said in another comment, the ideas of gender ideology have already their proto form in the 19th century, it's a mistake of modernity and a category error around identity at heart culturally. But key people are the agents and the sexologists definitely got the ball rolling, they were early progressive sociologists, and had transgressive desires of a kind with the post modernists. Really I'm just rambling - I'm sure we probably agree on a lot.
Fascinating. I'm loving this. In particular, it's so gratifying to have these threads properly untangled: "Many critics of trans ideology think it grew out of queer theory, particularly Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble. This is wrong. The rationale for gender medicine comes almost entirely from Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist who published his opus in 1966. Butler didn’t turn her attention to transgenderism until the late 1990s; other foundational queer theorists never focused on it. Doctors and lawyers draw on a long line of pseudoscience, not literary theory, to justify transing kids." Your description of Butler's timeline checks with what I know, as a woman who majored and minored in this shit in undergrad. I never for a minute thought, when I walked away, that this shit would swallow us all, but due to the unholy couplings which you're about to describe in Part 2, here we are. Can't wait to read it! Thank you, Glenna Goldis.
Educated elites who control the levers of society didn't embrace "gender is a social construct" by way of pervy sexologists and pornographers, as so many on the on gender critical front insist. The idea is preposterous.
Chase Strangio, ACLU lead counsel at SCOTUS, invokes Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin in her legal papers, not John Money and Martine Rothblatt. Listen and believe her.
I thought she had many good points. In fact, her arguments are some of the earliest sex realist arguments against Butler:
"Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women."
"The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible."
I've long thought that feminists such as Butler were funded and promoted precisely because their arguments served those who wanted to derail feminist arguments based in the material reality of being female.
Butler's ideas aren't worth the time. I appreciate the parts of Nussbaum's essay that show Butler's not original. But all the attacks on her failure to help people just miss the point. Butler isn't a feminist, isn't a pragmatist, isn't one of those philosophers whose work can be useful.
I think you might be right about some funders liking Butler because she doesn't actually challenge the status quo for women. There are some other factors behind her success too, which I'll get into in future posts.
I read the Nussbaum review in which she discusses Deirdre McCloskey's book Crossing.
A lot to unpack. On many issues she poses about trans identity, I don't agree with her. I could give a long list of my objections.
However, on several points she makes, she's stating with great eloquence matters around trans identities that I've been thinking about for a while. I quote two of these sections below.
page 275:
"Here’s what I miss in Crossing. Though belonging to a profession that is among the most male-dominated in the academy, with an unusually large share of sexism and indifference to the contributions of women, though vividly aware of male egoism and obtuse behavior, though surrounded professionally more or less entirely by men as both colleagues and graduate students (both Arjo Klamer and Steve Ziliak are important characters in the book, neither behaving in the obtuse fashion of run-of-the- mill men, but male nonetheless), and though fascinated by all the things about women’s social formation that I’ve just mentioned, women’s sensitivity, women’s gift-giving – despite all this, Deirdre does not pose the big Wollstonecraft question. Condemning men’s flaws as listeners, and a marvelous satirist of the big male ego holding forth, she does not take the next step of asking to what extent the female traits ubiquitously on display in Deirdre’s world were made by men for men, to “enslave the minds” of women, as Mill so wonderfully puts it. She says nothing much about slights and exclusions suffered by the many women in the narrative, though how could these not be ubiquitous, since we’re talking about economics! Nothing even about sexual assault and sexual harassment suffered by the many women who become Deirdre’s friends, except for assault against trans people qua trans, certainly an urgently important issue. If the men are condemned appropriately for saying “Io, io, io,” like the petulant little Italian boy Deirdre remembers, the further question should be: how have they formed the world, including women, in service of their infantile ego demands? In short: Deirdre was joining the underclass, and yet, in a very real sense, she wasn’t. This fact needs exploration."
page 280:
"All right, Deirdre. You insist that every woman should be free. I agree. But then, this gives you an obligation to confront and name the reality of women’s unequal social position, which you have to some extent luckily escaped by not getting there until already in possession of tenure and fame, and which has been for many or most women a highly burdensome confinement. So let us now return to the Wollstonecraft question. It is a social fact, despite all the progress that we have seen, that part of the cultural meaning of “woman” is still “helpmeet,” “homemaker,” “childcare provider.” That is why defining “woman” is such a thorny puzzle. As Catharine MacKinnon (wrongly thought an essentialist by some) has rightly said, “To be a woman is not yet a name for a way of being human.” Humanness is typically defined along male lines, and traditionally at least, women don’t quite fit in. “Human rights” are those that males have wanted, and the list has never yet included some things women intensely want, such as access to contraception, rights against sexual assault and domestic violence, support for child and elder care (MacKinnon 2006)."
I came to the conclusion a while ago that Butler's ideas aren't worth the time. But I happen to work in an area of engineering where many of the researchers are at UC Berkeley and other institutions in the Bay Area. Many of Butler's ideas have permeated into various Northern California DEI programs within the technology industry. It's hard for me to put my finger on any one instance where I have run directly into Butler's ideology, but I have direct experience with a number of professors in engineering and computer science at Berkeley. None of these professors ever talk about advancing women in STEM programs anymore. If you bring this up, they come back with a vague statement about non-harassment and DEI. This is very different from twenty years ago. So, unfortunately, I have had to read up on Judith Butler.
I haven't read Nussbaum's writing on trans. I look forward to reading it. Thank you!
Curious to see how you'd do the same with other conceptual pillar of trans insanity, Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality. That never mattered in the real world either? Or is dark money behind her rise to fame and gargantuan social impact too?
Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectional thesis is unfairly maligned in anti-woke, gender critical/sex realist circles, in my view. She argued that feminists need better theory developed out of better, more nuanced empirical research, research that involved paying attention to the actual experiences of black women rather than just "centering" the experiences of white, middle-class American women. Theoretically and empirically, this makes a lot of sense!
Critics of gender ideology are being intersectional when they point out how ridiculous it is for affluent, middle-aged, white, heterosexual AGPs to claim victimhood by highlighting the "trans genocide" of murdered black transwomen, many of who are gay male prostitutes killed by their johns.
It's ironic that intersectionality gets trotted out to support trans stuff. Trans ideology is the *opposite* of intersectionality. If one were to say, okay, to understand the oppression of transwomen we need to analyze how their maleness intersects with their subjective gender identity, you'd be shunned as a transphobe. The fact that transwomen are male is fundamental to their "subject position" and to their experiences of oppression/mistreatment in society. So is the fact of whether they are hetero- or homosexual, middle-class or poor.
Re: Crenshaw, she argued that existing feminist theories were unable to make sense of black women's oppression because they employed a flawed, additive model: misogyny + racism = black women's oppression. Crenshaw argued that simply adding two kinds of oppression together was insufficient and inaccurate. Black women's experiences of misogyny itself were/could be distinctive because of their race/racialized existence, and that making sense of these required paying attention to how race and sex (and class, etc.) intersected.
Kim says Transwomen Are Women, and you should #SayHerName. I understand the impulse to exonerate all expressions of feminism from the rise of trans insanity, but just as men can't be women, facts are facts.
See Marnie's comment on Nussbaum's review of McCloskey. Nussbaum criticizes McCloskey for being insufficiently intersectional--not that Nussbaum phrases it that way.
This is so good. There is interesting and relevant insights from post modernists but it can't transmit anything new because it is parasitic on the normative. So it just became a dumb parlour game for status seeking narcissists to claim novelty by identifying new norms to transgress, which is just times negative one- oh but where does the standard originate that norm inversion. As you so eloquently describe. Brilliant that line about needing special minorities as characters...
"You can tell Rubin held little sway for years because otherwise gay people never would have won the right to marry and raise children."
No, you can tell Rubin et al. held great sway because these queer feminists thoroughly vanquished radical feminists and won the culture war. "Sex work is work", amirite?
Btw, radfems were/are insistent that marriage is fundamentally incompatible with a feminist political project, regardless of the sexes of the participants, and that lesbians should reject patriarchal institutions rather than seek entry into them.
Radical feminism rejects the institution of traditional (patriarchal) marriage, but many radical feminists support nontraditional types of marriage. It would not be true, for example, that a woman who is married would be blocked from joining the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF).
Welcoming new recruits into a political movement that has been on life support for four decades since their defeat at the hands of queer intersectional feminism does not equate to an embrace of marriage as a social institution.
WDI guru Shelia Jeffreys's thoughts on this matter are unambiguous. She also thinks lesbianism is something women can decide and is not innate. And she frowns on lesbians engaging in even women-only penetrative sexual practices because it replicates dominance under patriarchy.
Saw Sheila Jeffreys speak at a WDI conference in San Francisco several years ago. I thought she gave a very condescending speech about conscienceness raising and the need to raise feminist awareness among supposedly imprisoned housewives. She also was actively encouraging the idea that women leave their heterosexual marriages and join the feminist lesbian "collective".
This stands in stark contrasts to the reality of straight housewives, who are, increasingly, in happy stable marriages with husbands who try their best to be equal partners.
Furthermore, for many lesbians, they are often left with little community. A lesbian friend of mine in San Francisco, who was also a midwife, told me how little was left of the lesbian community in San Francisco and how difficult it was to live here because of the cost of living. She moved to Providence about ten years ago.
Dysphoric lesbians who amputated their breasts and started injecting roids, who then teamed up with autogynephiles to take over gay rights organizations and push the trans agenda down society's throat, socially engineered that social order.
Hello,I've just discovered that a book on scientific studies by the department of neuroscience Karolinska Institute of the University Hospital of Stockholm has been published in 2010, untitled Sex Differences in the Human Brain, their Underpinnings and Implications, and it's
Chapter 4 - "Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation", demonstrating the biological and neurological nature of sexual orientation and gender identity. Anyone knows the level of validity and confirmation of this work by the scientific community ? Thanks for your help !
The beginning of this piece got me curious about the early economic underpinnings of feminism and gay rights. Can you suggest any reading materials on this topic?
Thank you for reading Judith Butler and interpreting her for those of us who have already suffered cognitive distress and decline trying to do so ourselves. : /
"Sex has to be a construct in Butler’s view because she is a constructivist. If a woman’s body is inherently meaningful then her career is not. Once you’ve digested thousands of pages of French and German philosophy to write a dissertation on how there are no stable categories, you’ve got to knife any biologist who says “well actually people with disorders of sex development are all classifiable as male or female.” Hilarious.
Brilliant as always, with many guffaw-worthy lines. Hard to pick just one but I especially liked "Once you’ve digested thousands of pages of French and German philosophy to write a dissertation on how there are no stable categories, you’ve got to knife any biologist who says “well actually people with disorders of sex development are all classifiable as male or female.”"
To be pedantic, I think some edge cases are hard to classify, but outside those individuals it is unambiguous, immutable and independent of whether the person is even alive.
Well, perhaps. Each human being suffers his/her congential anomalies in his/her own way and everyone is different. But someone who had no gonads at all and no Mullerian or Wolffian differentiation would still have rudimentary female external genitalia no matter whether they had an SRY gene/Y chromosome or not. What they would definitely not have is a fully formed penis with a normally placed urethra, and they would not experience male (or any) puberty. So they would be regarded as socially female (infertile of course) no matter how unclassifiable they were inside. If in addition to gonadal agenesis the individual also had congenital adrenal hyperplasia that virilized the female genitalia, it would be harder to tell even with sophisticated genetic testing.
Then there are mosaics and chimeras that cause ovotestis. If such individuals have ambiguous genitalia it will be hard to classify them. To get a handle on this you would have to read a comprehensive review of every case report and case series done on the topic. It's not quite true that female is the "default" for outward appearance, but for all intents and purposes, an individual who has a penis and testicles in a scrotum is male. (Edit: corrected a solecism in the last sentence.) If the external genitalia are female, (which is all that anyone sees in the delivery room), the child could be either a normal female or not-fully-formed male.
There's an observation that these "edge" cases are as common (1 in 5600) as a spun (not tossed) US nickel coming to rest on its edge, not toppling over to heads or tails. By that analogy, if you call "heads" when the other party spins, you lose if it yields edge, because edge and tails are both losing outcomes when the call is heads. Similarly, edge and clearly identifiable female are "losers" if the called bet is on "clearly identifiable male." (To be strictly correct, the 1/5600 figure is that frequency of all DSDs, including the common ones that are easy to classify as M or F. The true "edge" cases are much rarer, more like 1/30,000. Some are so rare that a true incidence figure isn't possible to ascertain. But OTOH, any large city will have dozens of such individuals if they all survive childhood. Not all do because of other health problems..)
Yes! This passage spoke to me also.
Fabulous & lucid review of two very obscurantist writers. I always tell my students to be wary of poor writing: it’s an almost certain tell that it’s hiding something.
I’ve come to think of Butler et al as like the COVID-19 lab leak: these were fun (if slightly stupid) ideas to play with in graduate seminars in the 1990s, but they weren’t fit to be let loose on the streets for the hoi polloi. But then: the internet, Tumblr, Twitter, & Reddit served these (still stupid!) ideas up to bright autistic adolescents.
So true about bad writing. It's also rude - the writer showing no consideration for the reader.
“I’ve come to think of Butler et al as like the COVID-19 lab leak”. Love this!
You aren't the only one making that analogy: https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/gender-identity-as-an-academic-lab?utm_source=publication-search
Given the great weight of evidence that SARS-CoV-2 emerged as a zoonotic spillover at a Wuhan "wet market", I presume your reference to "lab leak" is the illustration of an unsupported notion gaining wide traction.
There is no “great weight” of evidence for either, but I think most rational people think the lab leak is more likely.
Well, this is distraction from the main weight of the Bad Facts post and your comment -- because I agree with the thrust of your original comment that queer theory broke loose and made a mess. But -- with my extensive biomedical background and good knowledge of virology -- I have been following the deep, extensive -- open source --literature on this matter, and so I suspect I'm working with better information. The virologists and their colleagues who have for some decades been paying attention the biology and ecology of Coronaviruses (and other viruses of concern!), and the human-animal interfaces that drive zoonotic spillover -- contend that this virus emerged via the loathsome wildlife trade and the "wet markets". I don't know what constitutes "most rational people" these days. I don't think it would be appropriate to drop half a dozen links to the recent papers here.
German spy agency 'believed Covid likely started in lab'
BBC
13 March 2025
"Germany's foreign intelligence service believed there was a 80-90% chance that coronavirus accidentally leaked from a Chinese lab, German media say."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7vypq31z7o
Well that settles it I guess:
Spooks: 1
Informed scientists: 0
: )
Well, there are a lot of informed scientists and scientific journalists who have also posited that the lab leak is more plausible, so its not exactly Spooks 1, Informed scientists 0.
A good book on the history of biosafety and lab leaks:
Pandora's Gamble
Alison Young (author)
And my point -- different and better information: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)00901-2
Genetic tracing of market wildlife and viruses at the epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic
The summary abstract, introduction, and discussion should be understandable. See also references therein & related literature.
This publicly available, detailed, rigorous work is more reliable than "intelligence" agencies or mainstream media & pundits, whether BBC, Fox News, NYT, Jon Stewart...
This paper takes a long time to read and thoroughly understand, even those of us educated in the field. Bur it's just detailed science, all data & methods described, in start contrast to post-modern obscurantism and faux-profundity that seeks to "subvert" or "queer" this sort of work.
Crits-Christoph et al., 2024 Retraction Request
https://biosafetynow.substack.com/p/crits-christoph-et-al-2024-retraction
[apologies for following up on the off-topic digression from Glenna's fab essay] There were intrafamily cases of COVID--or rather, some mystery virus causing bilateral interstitial pneumonia--in the weeks before the Wuhan wet market cases, in another part of the city among people with no connection to the market. The wet market theory was/is a plausible and convenient scapegoat for Wuhan city officials and the virology institute. Given that SARS has accidentally escaped the lab on several occasions and infected researchers, their family members, and others (e.g., in Beijing, in Singapore), I never understood the rush to denounce the COVID lab leak theory as ludicrous or (as some implied) racist. I support your reticence to drop links into the comments section, but if you haven't read it, political scientist Dali Yang's "Wuhan: How the COVID-19 Virus in China Spiraled Out of Control" is superb (and gripping).
"if a woman’s body is inherently meaningful then her career is not."
There you have it.
That can be taken two ways. If Butler's body is meaningful, than Butler's career is not, as well as the more general way.
Incisive critique of Rubin and Butler! As an English professor who was in graduate school in the late 80's and early 90's, I know firsthand how bad Butler's cultish dominance over feminist literary criticism has been. Your joke about English professors who walk in lockstep with Butler getting deference in many quarters hits the mark perfectly! It's darkly funny that getting on the Butler train to the land of anti-clarity seems worth it to too many of my fellow English professors for the sake of a few crumbs of cultural clout. By the way, I recommend Professor Susan Pickard's critique of Butler's warped misunderstanding of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.
I'm mystified as to how educated people can get into Butler.
Thanks for the link! I took a great existentialism class in college, so from there I'm able to guess that Beauvoir does not support Butler. Existentialists actually believe in meaning.
What's more mystifying is these same educated folks being taken in by pervy sexologists and cyborg biotech Bond villains like Martine Rothblatt. Any yet that's your theory?
https://susanpickard.substack.com
From Susan Pickard's substack:
Would Beauvoir Have Been Woke?
The answer: in a word: no.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-175980148?source=queue
Yes!
Her book on Beauvoir couldn't get through the publishers, but she's argued clearly and decisively on her substack and in her academic work that Beauvoir is a sex realist and would never have supported Butler.
Brilliant and witty take-down, in trademark Goldis style.👏👏👏
The author is correct to note that early trans medical practice emerged from clinical traditions, particularly through figures like Harry Benjamin and John Money. However, the analysis fails to clarify that these practitioners promoted a binary, pathologizing, and adult-oriented model of transsexuality. Their frameworks required psychiatric gatekeeping and assumed that transition meant assimilation into the opposite sex—not the affirmation of fluid or self-declared identities.
While the author cites Benjamin as the origin of “gender medicine,” she omits what his model actually entailed and offers no account of how it was displaced—namely, how the binary, diagnostically gatekept model of transsexuality Benjamin established was gradually supplanted by queer theory’s reconceptualization of gender as a subjective, self-declared identity. Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating in the 2010s, concepts drawn from queer theory—gender as performative, sex as socially constructed, normativity as oppressive, and identity as self-authenticating—migrated from academic theory into education, clinical practice, and law. This shift replaced Benjamin’s pathologizing, clinician-controlled model with the affirmation model, in which self-identification overrides diagnosis and even children are treated as authoritative knowers of their “gender identity.”
While John Money did coin the term “gender identity,” his usage was rooted in the belief that gender was binary, socially conditioned, and fixed in early childhood. His model was not a precursor to gender self-identification, but rather an early and ultimately discredited attempt to enforce gender conformity through social engineering—as seen in the tragic David Reimer case. Contemporary gender ideology’s reliance on internal feelings as a basis for identity owes far more to poststructuralist and queer theoretical frameworks than to mid-century sexology.
By attributing the rationale for today’s trans ideology primarily to medical pseudoscience and distancing it from queer theory, the author sidesteps the philosophical and cultural reframing that made the affirmation model possible. The current landscape of gender ideology—with its emphasis on fluidity, subjectivity, and the rejection of biological sex as a meaningful category—is not a continuation of Benjamin’s clinical model, but rather a product of its ideological replacement by queer theory.
You're wrong about Benjamin. He opposed gatekeeping and proposed sex was a spectrum. Read the post I linked.
While the linked essay makes a compelling case that trans medical practice has roots in mid-20th-century clinical traditions—especially the work of Harry Benjamin—it mischaracterizes key aspects of his model. It’s misleading to say that Benjamin opposed gatekeeping or embraced a view of sex as fluid in any sense comparable to queer theory today.
Benjamin was indeed more permissive than many of his contemporaries, but his framework was still grounded in psychiatric evaluation, diagnostic criteria, and real-life experience requirements. He maintained that doctors—not patients—should determine eligibility for medical transition. This was not an early version of informed consent as it's practiced now, but a medicalized system of classification and control.
As for the "spectrum" claim: yes, Benjamin acknowledged that different aspects of sex (chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal, psychological, etc.) don’t always align, and he even proposed a clinical taxonomy (the Sex Orientation Scale) to describe forms of male femininity. But this was a pathological typology, not a philosophical assertion that sex is socially constructed or meaningfully nonbinary. Benjamin still treated biological sex as real and binary, and viewed transsexuality as a rare disorder requiring medical correction.
The affirmation model that dominates today—based on self-identification, rejection of diagnosis, and claims of gender fluidity—emerged not from Benjamin’s medical paradigm but from the ideological reframing of gender and identity within queer theory and its institutional diffusion through academia, law, and activism in the 1990s and 2000s. The essay downplays this shift and elides the profound differences in epistemology, ethics, and authority between Benjamin’s model and the one now ascendant.
Well articulated but I think you [may?] be giving too much credence to academic trends and blatantly obscure authors (Butler, Beauvoir?) I’m of the opinion that it’s the Queens, active in gay bars now and at the time (70’s etc) , that put the question (issue) forward. I was already hearing “I’m twice the woman you are!” back in the eighties. Gay culture mainly. I never understood the attraction of drag shows? But they were (are?) fixtures? And male academics (Kinsey, Thomas Kuhn, studies of male-on-male cruising) navel gazing. Just saying. Before I pass on. You know, an eye witness perspective.
Kathleen Stock offers a far more accurate genealogy of gender ideology. Stock understands that what's most significant is not who coined the term first or who experimented in sex changes first, but rather from what channels did gender ideology capture the imagination of the educated classes and then trickle down to the mainstream.
Stock's genealogy, which Glenna has says she rejects:
1. Simon de Beauvoir
2. John Money
3. Anne Fausto-Sterling
4. Judith Butler
5. Julia Serrano
6. Yogyakarta Principles
7. Standpoint epistemology
8. Queer intersectional identities
Well you can take all of them really, ideas move around, morph and are misrepresented/inverted in successor ideologies. For the US lineage Harry Benjamin became WPATH so he's hard to ignore. Money normalized surgeries on intersex people which is another thread. His gender identity was culturally constructed so rather malleable compared to gender identity today which is posed as innate, which you change your body for. Plain old transgression is sometimes understated as it's rude to talk about weird autogynephiles and transexuals, this is where I welcome Glenda's perspective, so much that I spew lengthy musings of my own in the comments.
Imagine an alternate universe where scholar activists reinterpret Scientology through a post-structural framework and remodel it into a project for human liberation. And they succeed in capturing the imaginations of the elite classes in law, academia, media, and entertainment. Swaths of young girl start getting E-meter readings and getting "Clear".
Would we credit L. Ron Hubbard for this radical social transformation?
Yes I'm not wholly resistant to this point, I don't think it's straightforward in determining relative influence. My frame is a vast interactive evolving dynamical system. But people are key to institutions and institutions to public/medical societies, they play an outside role. Harry Benjamin largely transmitted trans to the US. Other systems, also transgressive, may independently gain steam and have huge impact on the wider culture influenced through bad academia and fawning progressive media. The ideas swap over and morph. As I said in another comment, the ideas of gender ideology have already their proto form in the 19th century, it's a mistake of modernity and a category error around identity at heart culturally. But key people are the agents and the sexologists definitely got the ball rolling, they were early progressive sociologists, and had transgressive desires of a kind with the post modernists. Really I'm just rambling - I'm sure we probably agree on a lot.
Fascinating. I'm loving this. In particular, it's so gratifying to have these threads properly untangled: "Many critics of trans ideology think it grew out of queer theory, particularly Judith Butler’s 1990 book Gender Trouble. This is wrong. The rationale for gender medicine comes almost entirely from Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist who published his opus in 1966. Butler didn’t turn her attention to transgenderism until the late 1990s; other foundational queer theorists never focused on it. Doctors and lawyers draw on a long line of pseudoscience, not literary theory, to justify transing kids." Your description of Butler's timeline checks with what I know, as a woman who majored and minored in this shit in undergrad. I never for a minute thought, when I walked away, that this shit would swallow us all, but due to the unholy couplings which you're about to describe in Part 2, here we are. Can't wait to read it! Thank you, Glenna Goldis.
Educated elites who control the levers of society didn't embrace "gender is a social construct" by way of pervy sexologists and pornographers, as so many on the on gender critical front insist. The idea is preposterous.
Chase Strangio, ACLU lead counsel at SCOTUS, invokes Judith Butler and Gayle Rubin in her legal papers, not John Money and Martine Rothblatt. Listen and believe her.
Strangio invokes Butler and Rubin in interviews, not briefs. Big difference.
When does Strangio *ever* appeal to Harry Benjamin? Or Martine Rothblatt?
Strangio is a full-blown queer theorist radical. She says as much. And you know she says as much.
Loved the history lesson and the snark!
Would appreciate a more detailed discussion of Martha Nussbaum's 1999 long essay on Bulter:
The Professor of Parody: The hip defeatism of Judith Butler
https://newrepublic.com/article/150687/professor-parody
I thought she had many good points. In fact, her arguments are some of the earliest sex realist arguments against Butler:
"Something more insidious than provincialism has come to prominence in the American academy. It is the virtually complete turning from the material side of life, toward a type of verbal and symbolic politics that makes only the flimsiest of connections with the real situation of real women."
"The new feminism, moreover, instructs its members that there is little room for large-scale social change, and maybe no room at all. We are all, more or less, prisoners of the structures of power that have defined our identity as women; we can never change those structures in a large-scale way, and we can never escape from them. All that we can hope to do is to find spaces within the structures of power in which to parody them, to poke fun at them, to transgress them in speech. And so symbolic verbal politics, in addition to being offered as a type of real politics, is held to be the only politics that is really possible."
I've long thought that feminists such as Butler were funded and promoted precisely because their arguments served those who wanted to derail feminist arguments based in the material reality of being female.
Butler's ideas aren't worth the time. I appreciate the parts of Nussbaum's essay that show Butler's not original. But all the attacks on her failure to help people just miss the point. Butler isn't a feminist, isn't a pragmatist, isn't one of those philosophers whose work can be useful.
I think you might be right about some funders liking Butler because she doesn't actually challenge the status quo for women. There are some other factors behind her success too, which I'll get into in future posts.
Have you seen Nussbaum's writing on trans?
https://elibrary.duncker-humblot.com/article/61983/identity-equality-freedom-mccloskeyrsquos-crossing-and-the-new-trans-scholarship
I read the Nussbaum review in which she discusses Deirdre McCloskey's book Crossing.
A lot to unpack. On many issues she poses about trans identity, I don't agree with her. I could give a long list of my objections.
However, on several points she makes, she's stating with great eloquence matters around trans identities that I've been thinking about for a while. I quote two of these sections below.
page 275:
"Here’s what I miss in Crossing. Though belonging to a profession that is among the most male-dominated in the academy, with an unusually large share of sexism and indifference to the contributions of women, though vividly aware of male egoism and obtuse behavior, though surrounded professionally more or less entirely by men as both colleagues and graduate students (both Arjo Klamer and Steve Ziliak are important characters in the book, neither behaving in the obtuse fashion of run-of-the- mill men, but male nonetheless), and though fascinated by all the things about women’s social formation that I’ve just mentioned, women’s sensitivity, women’s gift-giving – despite all this, Deirdre does not pose the big Wollstonecraft question. Condemning men’s flaws as listeners, and a marvelous satirist of the big male ego holding forth, she does not take the next step of asking to what extent the female traits ubiquitously on display in Deirdre’s world were made by men for men, to “enslave the minds” of women, as Mill so wonderfully puts it. She says nothing much about slights and exclusions suffered by the many women in the narrative, though how could these not be ubiquitous, since we’re talking about economics! Nothing even about sexual assault and sexual harassment suffered by the many women who become Deirdre’s friends, except for assault against trans people qua trans, certainly an urgently important issue. If the men are condemned appropriately for saying “Io, io, io,” like the petulant little Italian boy Deirdre remembers, the further question should be: how have they formed the world, including women, in service of their infantile ego demands? In short: Deirdre was joining the underclass, and yet, in a very real sense, she wasn’t. This fact needs exploration."
page 280:
"All right, Deirdre. You insist that every woman should be free. I agree. But then, this gives you an obligation to confront and name the reality of women’s unequal social position, which you have to some extent luckily escaped by not getting there until already in possession of tenure and fame, and which has been for many or most women a highly burdensome confinement. So let us now return to the Wollstonecraft question. It is a social fact, despite all the progress that we have seen, that part of the cultural meaning of “woman” is still “helpmeet,” “homemaker,” “childcare provider.” That is why defining “woman” is such a thorny puzzle. As Catharine MacKinnon (wrongly thought an essentialist by some) has rightly said, “To be a woman is not yet a name for a way of being human.” Humanness is typically defined along male lines, and traditionally at least, women don’t quite fit in. “Human rights” are those that males have wanted, and the list has never yet included some things women intensely want, such as access to contraception, rights against sexual assault and domestic violence, support for child and elder care (MacKinnon 2006)."
I came to the conclusion a while ago that Butler's ideas aren't worth the time. But I happen to work in an area of engineering where many of the researchers are at UC Berkeley and other institutions in the Bay Area. Many of Butler's ideas have permeated into various Northern California DEI programs within the technology industry. It's hard for me to put my finger on any one instance where I have run directly into Butler's ideology, but I have direct experience with a number of professors in engineering and computer science at Berkeley. None of these professors ever talk about advancing women in STEM programs anymore. If you bring this up, they come back with a vague statement about non-harassment and DEI. This is very different from twenty years ago. So, unfortunately, I have had to read up on Judith Butler.
I haven't read Nussbaum's writing on trans. I look forward to reading it. Thank you!
Curious to see how you'd do the same with other conceptual pillar of trans insanity, Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectionality. That never mattered in the real world either? Or is dark money behind her rise to fame and gargantuan social impact too?
Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectional thesis is unfairly maligned in anti-woke, gender critical/sex realist circles, in my view. She argued that feminists need better theory developed out of better, more nuanced empirical research, research that involved paying attention to the actual experiences of black women rather than just "centering" the experiences of white, middle-class American women. Theoretically and empirically, this makes a lot of sense!
Critics of gender ideology are being intersectional when they point out how ridiculous it is for affluent, middle-aged, white, heterosexual AGPs to claim victimhood by highlighting the "trans genocide" of murdered black transwomen, many of who are gay male prostitutes killed by their johns.
It's ironic that intersectionality gets trotted out to support trans stuff. Trans ideology is the *opposite* of intersectionality. If one were to say, okay, to understand the oppression of transwomen we need to analyze how their maleness intersects with their subjective gender identity, you'd be shunned as a transphobe. The fact that transwomen are male is fundamental to their "subject position" and to their experiences of oppression/mistreatment in society. So is the fact of whether they are hetero- or homosexual, middle-class or poor.
Re: Crenshaw, she argued that existing feminist theories were unable to make sense of black women's oppression because they employed a flawed, additive model: misogyny + racism = black women's oppression. Crenshaw argued that simply adding two kinds of oppression together was insufficient and inaccurate. Black women's experiences of misogyny itself were/could be distinctive because of their race/racialized existence, and that making sense of these required paying attention to how race and sex (and class, etc.) intersected.
Kim says Transwomen Are Women, and you should #SayHerName. I understand the impulse to exonerate all expressions of feminism from the rise of trans insanity, but just as men can't be women, facts are facts.
https://x.com/sandylocks/status/978687258671927296?t=33APvw0E-BRsfAsRJtumqw&s=19
See Marnie's comment on Nussbaum's review of McCloskey. Nussbaum criticizes McCloskey for being insufficiently intersectional--not that Nussbaum phrases it that way.
This is so good. There is interesting and relevant insights from post modernists but it can't transmit anything new because it is parasitic on the normative. So it just became a dumb parlour game for status seeking narcissists to claim novelty by identifying new norms to transgress, which is just times negative one- oh but where does the standard originate that norm inversion. As you so eloquently describe. Brilliant that line about needing special minorities as characters...
"You can tell Rubin held little sway for years because otherwise gay people never would have won the right to marry and raise children."
No, you can tell Rubin et al. held great sway because these queer feminists thoroughly vanquished radical feminists and won the culture war. "Sex work is work", amirite?
Btw, radfems were/are insistent that marriage is fundamentally incompatible with a feminist political project, regardless of the sexes of the participants, and that lesbians should reject patriarchal institutions rather than seek entry into them.
But darn them they did anyway!
Radical feminism rejects the institution of traditional (patriarchal) marriage, but many radical feminists support nontraditional types of marriage. It would not be true, for example, that a woman who is married would be blocked from joining the Women's Liberation Front (WoLF).
But what would this non-traditional non-patriarchal marriage look like? American radical feminism doesn't say much about this.
Welcoming new recruits into a political movement that has been on life support for four decades since their defeat at the hands of queer intersectional feminism does not equate to an embrace of marriage as a social institution.
WDI guru Shelia Jeffreys's thoughts on this matter are unambiguous. She also thinks lesbianism is something women can decide and is not innate. And she frowns on lesbians engaging in even women-only penetrative sexual practices because it replicates dominance under patriarchy.
Saw Sheila Jeffreys speak at a WDI conference in San Francisco several years ago. I thought she gave a very condescending speech about conscienceness raising and the need to raise feminist awareness among supposedly imprisoned housewives. She also was actively encouraging the idea that women leave their heterosexual marriages and join the feminist lesbian "collective".
This stands in stark contrasts to the reality of straight housewives, who are, increasingly, in happy stable marriages with husbands who try their best to be equal partners.
Furthermore, for many lesbians, they are often left with little community. A lesbian friend of mine in San Francisco, who was also a midwife, told me how little was left of the lesbian community in San Francisco and how difficult it was to live here because of the cost of living. She moved to Providence about ten years ago.
Cost of living and queer theory. A lesbian in SF who explains that lesbians don't like dick will not have an easy time there.
Oh, how did John Money and Martine Rothblatt socially engineer that social order, Glenna?
Dysphoric lesbians who amputated their breasts and started injecting roids, who then teamed up with autogynephiles to take over gay rights organizations and push the trans agenda down society's throat, socially engineered that social order.
have to admit I couldn’t make it all the way through this. Just amazing what people can believe and advocate for
If you haven't seen this news article, in the New York Post yesterday, it's worth reading:
https://nypost.com/2025/11/17/opinion/mamdanis-gender-affirming-care-plan-surgically-erases-gays-just-like-iran/
disturbing
Yep.
Hello,I've just discovered that a book on scientific studies by the department of neuroscience Karolinska Institute of the University Hospital of Stockholm has been published in 2010, untitled Sex Differences in the Human Brain, their Underpinnings and Implications, and it's
Chapter 4 - "Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation", demonstrating the biological and neurological nature of sexual orientation and gender identity. Anyone knows the level of validity and confirmation of this work by the scientific community ? Thanks for your help !
The beginning of this piece got me curious about the early economic underpinnings of feminism and gay rights. Can you suggest any reading materials on this topic?
I wrote about the founding of Lambda Legal. You can find more sources there -
https://badfacts.substack.com/p/lambda-legals-right-to-exist
Thanks, Glenna!
Thank you for reading Judith Butler and interpreting her for those of us who have already suffered cognitive distress and decline trying to do so ourselves. : /
You should read Kate Phelan's "Feminism, Defeated" if you have not.
"Sex has to be a construct in Butler’s view because she is a constructivist. If a woman’s body is inherently meaningful then her career is not. Once you’ve digested thousands of pages of French and German philosophy to write a dissertation on how there are no stable categories, you’ve got to knife any biologist who says “well actually people with disorders of sex development are all classifiable as male or female.” Hilarious.