In a talk for her upcoming book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender” Judith Butler says the sexual dimorphism of male vs female is an “observational imposition” of Christian colonialism.
This idea is the root rot of postmodern trans ideology, which actually believes the objective truth of the sex binary between egg producers vs sperm producers is only true relative to hegemonic discourse.
Butler believes that if trans people had hegemonic cultural power instead of Western non-trans people, then the “objective” truth of the sex binary would be different because truth is relative to whoever holds cultural power.
Butler doesn’t believe in objective truth or that it’s possible to arrive at objective truth. The very notion of objectivity is seen as suspect.
It’s hegemonic power all the way down. It’s subjectivity and cultural relativism all the way down.
Butler thinks if only society wasn’t so transphobic then the objective evolutionary truth of the egg-sperm binary would magically change because it’s only because of transphobic colonialism that we have “imposed” the observation of the sex binary.
The claim is that we’d observe something else if we weren’t so transphobic as Westerners.
This is pure sophistry because she relies on the trivially true observation that human perception is *to some extent* culturally mediated to make a epistemically much stronger claim that truly objective observation of reality is impossible and that the only possible reason why Western science has observed the sex binary is because of the “imposition” of transphobia and other isms.
This rejection of objectivity as an imposition of hegemonic power is why the gender discourse has become so intractable and confused. Because science itself is seen as a tool for oppression vs a tool for knowledge.
Instead of the male vs female dimorphism being an objective biological fact that theoretically unifies the evolutionary sciences, the sciences are now conceived as “sites of power” where knowledge production itself becomes a “problematic” instead of an empirical method for determining objective reality.
The ultimate implication of Butler’s work is that there’s now “trans science” and “cis science” and the only way to meditate between the two is not through an objective assessment of the facts but through political struggle.
Science becomes reduced to politics, and politics gets reduced to personal feelings.
We must reject this entire project wholeheartedly and not be afraid of being cancelled and being labeled a “transphobe” for stating what our eyes (and science) plainly tell us: there is an objective dimorphism between males and females that is true regardless of our political opinions, regardless of whether we’re trans or not, regardless of whether we’re Westerners or not.
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