Judith Butler

Quotes

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If someone asks for recognition as a given gender or wishes to be addressed by a certain pronoun, it is important to honor that request for recognition and change one's language practice.

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It is always brave to insist on undergoing transformations that feel necessary and right even when there are so many obstructions to doing so, including people and institutions who seek to pathologize or criminalize such important acts of self-definition. I know that for some feels less brave than necessary, but we all have to defend those necessities that allow us to live and breathe in the way that feels right to us. Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs – it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one's gendered life. [...] Nothing is more important for transgender people than to have access to excellent health care in trans-affirmative environments, to have the legal and institutional freedom to pursue their own lives as they wish, and to have their freedom and desire affirmed by the rest of the world. This will happen only when transphobia is overcome at the level of individual attitudes and prejudices and in larger institutions of education, law, healthcare, and kinship. [...]I think we have to accept a wide variety of positions on gender. Some want to be gender-free, but others want to be free really to be a gender that is crucial to who they are. [...]Gender Trouble' was written about 24 years ago, and at that time I did not think well enough about trans issues. Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative that I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person’s felt sense of gender was therefore “unreal.” That was never my intention. I sought to expand our sense of what gender realities could be.

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I am enjoying the world of 'they.' When I wrote Gender Trouble, there was no category for 'non-binary' – but now I don't see how I cannot be in that category.

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Selected works

• Gender Trouble (1990)
• Imitation and Gender Insubordination (1990)
• Bodies That Matter (1993)
• Excitable Speech (1997)
• Undoing Gender (2004)
• Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

Further reading

• Finlay, Toby (2017). Non-Binary Performativity: A Trans-Positive Account of Judith Butler's Queer Theory (PDF)

References

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