A Transgender Critique of Butler's Notion of Gender

[Preface Note September 2025]:  This essay is about Butler's conceptualization of gender as expressed in her book "Gender Trouble".  Since that time, Judith Butler has substantially changed her position and understandings of the subject.  What follows is relevant in the context of what Butler wrote in the past, but does not reflect where they are today.  

This essay is a response to the the following question raised here:

I think I might grasp what you're alluding to here -- especially with regard to the social dimension of gender, and the interaction between biochemical input and gender realization -- but I'd very much like to hear what I assume will be your much more articulate assessment of what the Butlerian gender model leaves out.

I draw my understanding of Butler's view of gender primarily from her book "Gender Trouble" (available as an e-book), and "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution". (and yes, I have read her more recent book "Undoing Gender" as well)

In Performative Acts and Gender Constitution, Butler argues as follows:

Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.

(* an aside - this will not be a detailed dissection of Butler's paper *)

This is significant to me because it foreshadows Butler's view of gender as primarily existing as a social construct, to some extent influenced by biology.

Significantly, if gender is instituted through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief. If the ground of gender identity is the stylized repetition of acts through time, and not a seemingly seamless identity, then the possibilities of gender transformation are to be found in the arbitrary relation between such acts, in the possibility of a different sort of repeating, in the breaking or subversive repetition of that style.

There is a surprising irony in Butler's position. On the one hand, she dances around the concept of Gender Identity as having an individual reality, and then settles in a place where she ultimately ends up rejecting the concept, subsuming it under the social and biological aspects of gender.

Because there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis.

The problem I have with Butler's model is that it fails to successfully encompass a few key aspects of cross-gender (and in particular transsexual narratives).

First, there is a common dimension to many transsexual narratives (not all, but enough to be significant) that includes an awareness of being "built wrong" from an exceedingly early age - often before any socialization or 'gendered behaviour' is evident.

Second, is the dyssonance that transsexuals express with regard to their lives in their pre-transition gender roles. If gender were solely a matter of social construct informed by physical biology to some degree, it becomes extremely difficult to square the model with the expressed dyssonance. In Butler's model, there is no room for dyssonance. In some respects, Butler appears to try addressing the issue as one of 'discontinuity', but she fails to appreciate that while a transsexual's pre-transition identity may be externally continuous, that is not the internal experience.

Third is the situation of David Reimer. I do not claim that Reimer was a transsexual - such was unquestionably not the case, but his case is important and revealing of some key aspects of transsexual narrative.

It is very significant that when John was being raised as Brenda, he fought against being treated as a girl at every turn. Physically, and to the best of his knowledge, John had always been Brenda - and yet refused to be Brenda - not just in respect to social aspects of gender, but was also horrified by what puberty would bring. (artificially induced or not)

From a transsexual's perspective, Reimer's narrative is undeniably consistent with the 'built wrong' narrative so common among the transsexual population. There is no doubt in my mind that this should be seen as independently validating the notion that gender identity may exist and is not fully informed by either social or physical cues. (as an aside, I suspect that where there are some interesting phenotype variations that are being identified among transsexuals in more recent years.

If, as Butler proposes, gender is defined primarily in the context of social and physical cues, then one might imagine that the John Reimer story would have had a much different outcome. As it is, eventually Brenda learned the truth of her history and chose quite consciously to transition to living as John. A train of events that substantially calls into question a model of gender which is based solely upon social and physical factors. (* Butler attempts to address John Reimer's story in Undoing Gender, however my reading of her on that matter leads me to believe that she fails to understand some key aspects of the situation. *)

Similarly, I do not believe that Butler's model explains the dissonance that so many transsexuals describe as overwhelming their pre-transition lives. Butler's model suggests strongly that if one's body is physically of one gender, and the social signals received are consistent with that gender, then everything should be good, right? So why is that transsexuals so consistently report something dramatically different? Further, why is it that therapists have found that transsexuals are generally not responsive to the kinds of corrective therapy techniques that work well in other situations where cognitive dissonance is reported?

Where I fundamentally disagree with Butler is in her rejection of the notion of an abstract, but essential attribute of 'gender identity' as distinct from our physical and social gender behaviours. The problem that Butler's model faces is in the narratives of thousands of transsexuals - and those narratives reveal a significant incompleteness which leads many radical feminist thinkers to engage in tactics such as erasure in order to sustain the perceived validity of Butler's model in the dimensions where it has greater strengths - namely in the understanding of the socially constructed aspects of gender.

Reasoning That Arrives At *Gaaah*!

Once in a while, you run across a writer that seems well reasoned and thought out, and then they throw a complete monkey wrench into that impression.

Such is precisely what I found reading Julie Bindel's columns.

In particular, what drew my attention was the reasoning in this column on transsexuality.

Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations, so how is it possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?

Oh oh ... I've read this before - when I found myself reading some of Judith Butler's essays. Like Butler, Bindel is adopting a stance that gendered behaviour is purely a social construct.

The problem with this particular line of reasoning is pretty easy to pick out - young children demonstrate gendered behaviour long before there is any significant socialization. Second, one of the most common attributes of the transsexual narrative is a knowledge that "something was wrong" from the beginning - usually among their earliest memories. Like it or not, it's hard to say that

As someone who spurned dolls and make-up as a child, I find it deeply troubling that, had I gone to one of the specialist psychiatrists while growing up and explained how I did not feel like a "real girl" (which I did not, because I wanted to be a lesbian), I could be writing this as a trans man.

At about this point, Bindel has just shot her argument out the door. This is a fairly typical problem when you attempt to apply a gay or lesbian narrative to gender identity. There's quite a distinction between gender atypical behaviour which is often part of the gay or lesbian narrative, and the transsexual experience. While some transsexuals do show strong, gender atypical behaviour, a large number adopt strongly "biological gender typical" behaviour, and live for years that way.

The second thing that Bindel vastly misconstrues is the diagnostic process itself. It is very rare indeed for a competent therapist to tell a patient "I think you are a transsexual". The reality is that the therapist's role is help the client find ways to reconcile their feelings about themselves in a constructive fashion. For some clients that may lead to transition, for others it will lead to a much different understanding of themselves.

Bindel goes further, and claims that gender reassignment surgery is "aversion therapy":

During the debate I argued that sex change surgery is modern-day aversion therapy treatment for homosexuals. The highest number of sex change operations take place in Iran, where homosexuality is punishable by death. Sex change surgery, therefore, renders gays and lesbians "heterosexual".

Using the example of Iran to justify her position is something of a red herring. I would hardly point to Iran's approach to transsexualism as exemplary of the rest of the world - and in particular the "Western European" tradition which modern psychology has its roots in. I imagine that most gender and sexuality therapists in North America and Europe would be very troubled by what is going on in Iran.

However, this underscores the muddled thinking that infects Bindel (and in many respects Butler as well). Transsexuals are not gays (or lesbians) that wish to appear straight. If that were the case, then we might expect that transsexuals would be commonly homosexual prior to transition, and apparently heterosexual afterwards. Sadly for Bindel's reasoning, this is not the case. Just as there are gay, straight and bisexual people in the population, the transsexual population shows a similar range of variability in their sexual expression post-transition. There are Male-To-Female transfolk who are straight, and some who are lesbians. (Read The Sexual Spectrum for more insight into this topic)

Sadly, like a great many people who speak out against treatment for transfolk, Ms. Bindel has started from a muddled set of premises, and derives a position that ignores both evidence and clinical reality.

In large part, both Butler and Bindel have made very fundamental assumptions in their arguments that simply do not hold up to scrutiny. By claiming that gender is essentially learned behaviour, they lose sight of the fact that we can think and feel things quite different from what we demonstrate through behaviour. To make a simple example, I am very unlikely to cry at a funeral. This doesn't mean that I do not feel sadness or loss in the circumstances, but merely that I do not show my emotions outwardly. What's to say that a Male-to-Female transsexual would not feel inwardly that they should be a woman, even though their behaviour is typically masculine? (Which is actually an amazingly common narrative)

I admire and support the feminist drive to break down artificial lines between gender roles in society. I do not believe that anybody should be put in a social straightjacket based on their physical gender. I've known men who are amazingly caring, gentle people (attributes often assumed of women), and women who are strong, competitive individuals whose business savvy and negotiating skills would put most businessMEN I know to shame. A society that encourages people to be real about themselves and their feelings is a noble goal. Oddly, I don't believe that such a society would be "transsexual-free" - because a transsexual's issue is not with mere behaviour, but with a deeper sense of identity that goes to the core of the person's identity.