Judith Butler says the government negates trans people’s existence.
Johannes Werner
Original Air Date: Feb. 19, 2025
Host: The “new” New College’s Socratic Stage series last year featured scientific racist Steve Sailer and alt-right crusader Mike Benz, and this spring, it will offer border czar Tom Homan and Trump legal team member Alan Dershowitz. So Judith Butler’s appearance Tuesday in a packed Sainer Auditorium on the college’s Sarasota campus came as a bit of a surprise. Butler has rock star status in the LGBTQ community. The Berkeley-based gender theorist and philosopher came up with the term “gender bending,” redefined the science around sex and gender by looking at them as fluid concepts, and Butler wants to be referred to with the pronoun “they.”
They did not disappoint the friendly crowd.
Butler and Corcoran. Photos: Werner
Johannes Werner: New College President Richard Corcoran stumbled right at the beginning when he introduced Butler.
Richard Corcoran: First is Dr. Judith Butler. She’s the distinguished professor—
Crowd: They!
RC: —in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. I want everyone to have a great time, but if we could just keep it where—in fact, we’re going to have a Q&A afterwards, so if you have a question afterwards…
JW: But he recovered, avoiding using any pronoun for Butler for the remainder.
Early in their talk, Butler asked a rhetorical question:
Judith Butler: Have I destroyed western civilization yet?
[Crowd laughs]
JW: Butler referred to the fear, strong reactions, and caricature the concept of gender fluidity has prompted. One of the main points Butler tried to drive across is the damage the policies and laws that push back against “gender ideology” are wreaking on people’s lives.
JB: It’s actually what I would call an existential negation. The idea that a trans person can no longer call themselves trans or have legal rights to define in that way basically says, “The way you have defined yourself is deluded, is wrong, is a figment of your imagination, is the effect of indoctrination, and that you don’t have the capacity to judge for yourself who you need to be or what language you need to have. We, the state, the authorities who deprive you of your right to define yourself, are taking away your freedom and telling you the only possible definition,” which is a massive imposition.
Butler and Fish
JW: During the Q&A—deftly managed by Dr. Stanley Fish, the 85-year old Renaissance scholar who was reactivated at New College by President Richard Corcoran—an audience member challenged Butler on the damage hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery could inflict on children. In their response, Butler weighed the potential damage either kind of parental decision can produce.
JB: I think my concern is that, when a young person of any age comes forward and says, “You know what? I understand myself to be of this gender which is not the sex assigned to me,” that that young person be given a supportive environment to find their way. Not to be pathologized, not to be denied care, but to be given space and time and an environment to explore. I don’t think we rush, and I don’t think we block. I think rushing could be a problem, and I think refusing to accept it is a terrible problem.
JW: Butler attacked Donald Trump’s executive order banning the mention of gender in government programs and communications, saying it not only fails to reach its objective but that it ignores science.
JB: According to the recent executive order delivered by the presidential offices, Jan. 20, gender is to be removed from all federally funded activity, including healthcare, education, and sports. All of this is done in the name of defending women against gender without realizing that “women” itself is a gender and category if not the most important gender and category. The state gave itself the power to decide which science should be considered legitimate in deciding sex determination. I’ve been reading in developmental biology, and I see that there are at least 16 competing paradigms for deciding how sex determination takes place. Our elected officials went for the gamete theory of claiming that there’s a larger and smaller gamete at the outset of life and that this accounts scientifically for the immutable character of binary sex. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work that way, even scientifically. The term “immutable” comes, I believe, from Vatican doctrine although the executive order claims to be based on science, raising the question of whether such a consequential denial of basic rights is motivated by religious fervor or doctrine.
JW: Egged on by an audience comment, Butler appealed to university administrators to reinstate gender studies programs.
JB: Obviously one of the main reasons I’m here is to try to make the case that gender studies should be reinstated. Also, if anyone’s interested, I can actually show you why the major research institutions in this world all have lively gender studies programs, and I can show you how they’re organized and why it works and how many people benefit from it and why it’s not indoctrination—why it’s actually a field of study.
JW: They looked straight at New College President Richard Corcoran, who was sitting in the first row. One of the governor-appointed board’s first measures two years ago was shutting down the gender studies program.
WSLR News asked Corcoran to respond to Butler’s appeal. He referred the reporter to New College spokesman Nathan March, who did not respond before deadline.
At a New College Foundation board meeting the morning after the talk, Corcoran touted the Socratic Stage series and Butler as “the absolute authority on gender.”
Reporting for WSLR News, Johannes Werner.
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