What Was That Anti-Anti-Gender Lady Talking About, Don't Pretend You Already Knew!

Unless you already knew. A Wonksplainer!

“I drank what?” Painting: The Death of Socrates, by Jacques Louis David

You may have noticed that for the last 1.5 forevers it has been difficult to wake up from our national nightmare — which has been, to coin a neologism, “long.” Depending on your age, this nightmare may have started back when Nixon, frosty about being thought a crook, declared, “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” But unsightly skin blemishes from compulsive self-pinching have really spread like a weaponized Wuhan virus since one post-election morning in 2016 when millions woke up saying either, “Brexit? Really?” or something about an orange hobgoblin depending on the country and/or the month and/or the blood serum level of absinthe.

And yet, despite slamming our collective head on the two-by-four in the bunk above us, we still seem to be dreaming this collective dream. But take heart! You are not alone! And for the last couple months, more and more academics have taken it upon themselves to tell us why. That why is “epistemology.”

When you are a PhD academic and know everything but still have 30 more years in which it is important to look productive in exchange for money, it is also important to spend a decade or two asking, “But what is all this that I know, and how do I know it, and how can I convince the chancellor that it is very hard to learn?” This, dear readers, is epistemology.

Judith Butler, a famously dense writer on and philosopher of gender and ethics, has turned now to this, writing a book from which she has excerpted an op/ed in the Los Angeles Times. At the centre of her argument are the “anti-gender” or “anti-gender ideology” activists, as she calls them, or “melonfucking Bluetooth assgadgets” as they are known to yr Wonkette. In her excerpt, she assumes we already knows what she is talking about, even if many of you (I of course do) do not. What she means is people who have created (or been packaged into) a movement opposed to any understanding of gender that is different from biological sex. They wish to return to a world without any such thing as gender, where men wear Dickies and women wear draperies and the reason why is as plain as the nose sticking out above your COVID mask.

Being a nerd, Butler desperately wishes she could sit down with these people and discuss “facts” and ask “questions” and do “thought.” Her first inclination is that it should matter that in fact we never got our pronouns from FOXP2 and that Dickies clothing postdates the codpiece. But this is not always possible, she says:

A woman in Switzerland once came up to me after a talk I gave and said, “I pray for you.” I asked why. She explained that the Scripture says that God created man and woman and that I, through my books, had denied the Scripture. She added that male and female are natural and that nature was God’s creation. I pointed out that nature admits of complexity and that the Bible itself is open to some differing interpretations, and she scoffed. I then asked if she had read my work, and she replied, “No! I would never read such a book!”

Why? Not because such people are too stultifyingly monosyllabic to read Butler’s work, but rather because “reading a book on gender would be, for her, trafficking with the devil.” Nor is it only Butler’s work or Butler’s books. “The anti-gender movement opposes thought itself as a danger to society….”

Although she does not go farther in the Times, this is alluding to her longer argument that the problem here is epistemology, a view that is more and more popular to express these days. It has made the rounds of the internet in the past few months, with Matthew Sheffield at The Flux being an unusually clear example. The anti-EU or anti-gender activists would resist being labeled as people who don’t wish to learn anything, just look at how many are vitally interested in school board meetings and libraries! No, the problem according to Sheffield is Florida that some people decide what is true not by comparing it to reality, but comparing it to authority.

The issue has come up in a number of ways, but for Sheffield the most telling example is one GOP Never-Trumper group’s political messaging.

“All attempts to undermine his conservative credentials on specific issues were ineffective,” David McIntosh wrote.

“Every traditional postproduction ad attacking President Trump either backfired or produced no impact on his ballot support and favorability,” McIntosh continued. “This includes ads that primarily feature video of him saying liberal or stupid comments from his own mouth.”

For Sheffield, this is because Trumpists “genuinely believe that facts do not derive from science, reason, or history.” Surprisingly, asking “What would Trump believe?” rather than “What does reality show?” is not inconsistent with graduating from high school or even college, because for much of one’s academic career the primary task is to repeat back accurately what a teacher has given the students. If in school one accepts teachers as authorities, learning is not incompatible with this authoritarian mindset and may not be challenged before college graduation. These students can even excel in some particularly authoritarian post-graduate disciplines like law or medicine.

But leaving school for the Wild West of adult life can be a trauma; in the wider world there are no obvious authorities. For our epistemographers (like pornographers, but for nerds), the MAGA movement isn’t so much a desire to return to a particular time or a particular policy, but to a unified understanding of authority — in gender, in academics, in politics, and more. After all, the MAGAs’ knowledge of facts is not the only thing affected by their authoritarian epistemology. They also get their knowledge of morality from authority rather than reality. Trump can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support because once one of these desperate people chooses an authority to follow, what is good or bad, right or wrong, depends solely on what that authority tells them is so. Anything the authority says is true. Anything the authority does is good.

This also explains splits on the US Right lately: Authoritarian evangelicals are sometimes miffed at MAGA evangelicals who follow Trump to the exclusion of following Christianity. The conflict here isn’t epistemology — they both agree on following authority. They disagree only on which authority to follow.

This epistemological theory of our current nightmare even explains the right wing’s one joke, “I identify as an attack helicopter.” The funny bit here isn’t “attack helicopter, haha,” as evidenced by how many different nouns have taken the place of helicopter in the phrase. The joke is “I identify.” To the authoritarian it is absurd that anyone other than authority might be a source of knowledge or truth. Socrates bid his debate opponents, “Know thyself,” but the authoritarians know that authority knows you better than you ever could.

Any source of knowledge other than approved authority will come under attack, but trans people are doomed to be particularly reviled because there is no degree in meology. Since leaving behind the gender clinic model, it has been the position of trans activists that only we can know our own thoughts and feelings well enough to determine our transness, our gender. Whatever the answer (many people still do understand themselves as cis), this Socratic individuality implicitly rejects the premise that morality, truth, fact and learning only derive from proper authority.

“Eureka!” you say. “I get it!” you say. “So now we know why we can’t talk them out of their positions,” you say. “But what does that mean for how we finally wake up from this nightmare?”

Hahahahaha. Academics don’t have the answer for that.

Keep Wonkette going forever with a one-time donation, if that’s the way you are!