Judith Butler on Why Gender Is in Trump’s Crosshairs

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Speaker 3 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 3 I've been talking on this show with guests about the various ways the Trump administration is flooding the zone and eroding democracy in the process.

Speaker 3 We just spoke on Monday about how the attacks on immigration are becoming a showdown with the courts.

Speaker 3 Today, we're going to talk about how they're attempting to eradicate gender identity in favor of what they believe is good old-fashioned biology, with quote, men on one side and women on the other.

Speaker 3 It's complex. That's not how it works.
Even scientists have told the administration that. But nonetheless, they are using that paradigm to force society into a binary that doesn't exist in real life.

Speaker 3 There's no better person to try to explain why that is happening and why it's not just about transgender people than our guest today, Judith Butler.

Speaker 3 Butler is a philosopher and critical theorist, a distinguished professor at the Graduate School at UC Berkeley. They didn't create gender theory, but they are probably its most famous face.

Speaker 3 Back in 1990, they wrote a book, Gender Trouble, Feminism, and the Subversion of Identity, that opened the door to what is known as queer theory today.

Speaker 3 For a generation of transgender, non-binary, gender queer people, you name the letter, Judith Butler is an absolute icon.

Speaker 3 I think they are amazing, but to others, Butler was basically the devil incarnate, the one who opened Pandora's binary box on gender identity and then blew up the box.

Speaker 3 They have been vilified, attacked, burned in effigy. I am serious, burned in effigy.

Speaker 3 Last year, before the election, they published the book, Who's Afraid of Gender, laying out where all of the attacks on gender theory were coming from and why.

Speaker 3 Today, I'm going to talk to Butler about those forces, especially within the Trump administration and how reducing people to a sex binary of XX and XY ends up undermining everyone's democracy.

Speaker 3 They are linked people. Our question comes from political satirist and musical comedian Randy Rainbow, who is breaking his own kind of boundaries.

Speaker 3 This is a heavy one, but an important one, and it might actually be funnier than you think, and it will help explain a lot. So buckle up.

Speaker 3 By the way, if you want to catch one of our episodes in person, I'll be interviewing Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD, live on stage at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 3 this coming Monday, April 28th. It's going to be a smart conversation about semiconductor chips, industrial policy, and the future of AI.
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Speaker 3 Judith, welcome. Thanks for being on on.

Speaker 1 It's my pleasure to be here.

Speaker 3 So let's start. One of the things I'm going to do is we have a sort of a broader audience, but I want to go into a little bit of what you have been doing.

Speaker 3 And you've been a leading voice on gender and gender theory for 35 years.

Speaker 3 It's fair to say for much of that time, people outside of academia or queer circles weren't paying a lot of attention to that field, but now it's in the center of national politics.

Speaker 3 So with that in mind, I want to start by asking you about the foundational idea you wrote.

Speaker 3 in Gender Trouble, your 1990 book, which is that gender is performance, meaning not just gender of a drag queen, but everyone's gender.

Speaker 3 I know you've moved away from that in a way, but the idea remains provocative to people who think their own way of inhabiting gender is a normal or natural one.

Speaker 3 So, could you explain this theory of gender performance for those who might not be familiar with it and why it remains so subversive?

Speaker 1 Well, I think at the time

Speaker 1 I had seen

Speaker 1 actually some drag shows where

Speaker 1 I saw some performers performing femininity in a way that my mother always wished that I would.

Speaker 1 Me too. And I wondered how

Speaker 1 it was so easy for them and so kind of smooth and compelling and believable. And I felt that

Speaker 1 I couldn't even take the first steps in trying to get to whatever this ideal was.

Speaker 1 So, you know, I was impressed by those performances, but then

Speaker 1 I guess I was led to a different idea, which is that the social reality of gender is changing all the time. What it means to be a man or a woman, even if we just stay within those two categories,

Speaker 1 changes all the time. What's acceptable, it's not acceptable.
We know this.

Speaker 1 And some of those changes are obviously very disturbing to people.

Speaker 1 But the fact that there are changes and they can be disturbing or they can be exciting or pleasurable means that gender is not fixed in time.

Speaker 1 It changes depending on historical circumstances and cultural settings,

Speaker 1 different countries, different languages. We see different ways of doing gender to speak in a way that I have been trying to speak for some time.

Speaker 1 It doesn't mean it's fake or false. It doesn't mean, oh, this is just a performance and the true reality is underneath.
It's like, no, the historical reality of what we mean by gender does change.

Speaker 1 And sometimes it changes for the better and sometimes for the worse.

Speaker 1 And I think we just have to accept that there are certain ways of repeating and reproducing gender in the world that sometimes create something new and sometimes validate something quite old.

Speaker 3 So the battle over what normal or authentic gender is may seem esoteric, but it's obviously become a big deal.

Speaker 3 During the 2024 election, President Trump and his team stoked fear against the transgender community with those ads. Kamala Harris is for they, them.
Trump is for you.

Speaker 3 On his first day in office, he doubled down. He signed the Executive Order 14168.
The title,

Speaker 3 I will read it, unfortunately, is Defending Women from Gender Ideology, Extremism, and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.

Speaker 3 I know you've given a whole speech on this, but briefly, explain what this order does and the role this term gender ideology plays here.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah. Well, I think that the Trump administration uses the word ideology when it says gender ideology as a false way of knowing or as a mode of indoctrination or as

Speaker 1 a set of preposterous beliefs that should simply be corrected so that common sense can reign again.

Speaker 1 The odd thing about that particular executive order is that the biological truth that it names, the difference between the sexes, it doesn't refer to the biological sciences,

Speaker 1 which actually see more complexity at the level of biology than Trump would have it. It refers to the federal government having power to define it.

Speaker 1 So biological truth is restored to the federal government, not to science,

Speaker 1 not to biology, not to people who do research in sex determination and biology, but

Speaker 1 to the government. So it can stipulate as it wants.
And indeed, the way it has stipulated, using the term immutable, right?

Speaker 1 Immutable difference, there's an immutable, unchangeable difference between the two sexes, that comes straight from the Vatican. And so

Speaker 1 the federal government is citing the Vatican actually against science in the name of biological truth. And

Speaker 1 that's worrisome.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, so

Speaker 3 we'll get to the Vatican in a second because there's been news there. But scientists have said exactly what you're saying.
And so the word they're using is common sense.

Speaker 3 And since this is a term created by the right, I know he would hate to see it put in these terms. What kind of gender ideology do you think Trump is depending on, and why is it so important to him?

Speaker 3 More importantly, why do you think his team believes it is motivating his supporters? Because there is political elements here, but it seems very ingrained in this particular person. Aaron Powell,

Speaker 1 it is, but the term gender ideology was circulating in Eastern Europe and Latin America and throughout

Speaker 1 conservative Christian communities for a very long time,

Speaker 1 and some other religious communities and secular communities. So it just recently came to the U.S.
And when Trump uses it, he's using a certain kind of caricature, right?

Speaker 1 He knows, maybe he knows, maybe he doesn't know, that he's actually

Speaker 1 producing a kind of straw man, as it were.

Speaker 1 But it doesn't matter whether he's right about what gender studies is or what gender research is or how gender is used in social policy.

Speaker 1 What he knows clearly is that the term gender produces a certain kind of anxiety in people. What? My sex isn't natural.
What? My kid can change sex.

Speaker 1 What? These people are transitioning. They're experimenting with new ways of identifying themselves and living their lives.
And that is very frightening to a group of people.

Speaker 1 So for that group of people to be told, oh, you represent common sense, and all these changes need to be stopped and rolled back in the name of common sense is, of course, deeply reassuring to them.

Speaker 1 So I think he's using a caricature to appeal to people's anxieties and fears and ignorance, but also stoking that anxiety and fear in order to get more support for his own expanding state authority.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, obviously Trump is taking a page from playbooks of authoritarian dictators like Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Speaker 3 And just for people who don't know, last week the Hungarian parliament passed a constitutional amendment banning LGBTQ plus public events ahead of Pride.

Speaker 3 It's not just against gay people, it's the loss of freedom of assembly. It's okay, as someone noted, to be out of a closet but not in public.

Speaker 1 Well, that's been true in Eastern Europe, in parts of Eastern Europe for a long time,

Speaker 1 that assembling and showing yourself is the true danger.

Speaker 1 Because what if you do become common sense? What if it becomes normal to see people who are queer,

Speaker 1 gender nonconforming, or lesbian, gay, see gay gay, and lesbian families. Or, you know, what if that just becomes part of the ordinary landscape? I think there's a resistance to that, right?

Speaker 1 And I think as well that

Speaker 1 Trump is

Speaker 1 trying very hard to link with other authoritarians in order to expand the executive power in this country.

Speaker 1 So if he can proclaim what sex is, then That executive order is going to nullify all kinds of health care. It's going to nullify the legal status of trans people.

Speaker 1 It's going to undermine policies and laws opposed to gender-based violence.

Speaker 1 He's able to shut down a number of progressive movements and legal accomplishments with the stroke of a pen, or so he imagines.

Speaker 1 Of course, there are numerous court cases that are making it less easy than he may have imagined. Aaron Powell,

Speaker 3 you said that the term gender ideology was first coined by the Vatican in the 1990s, and tax and gender theory have continued under every pope, including now the late Pope Francis.

Speaker 3 And he just died after meeting with Catholic convert J.D. Vance.
We'll leave it there.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of good memes on the internet about it, though, which is interesting because Francis is often derided by the right for being too progressive for his support of the LGBTQ plus community.

Speaker 3 Talk a little bit about the religious institutions, including the Catholic Church, in pushing that fear, because there is a real connection to the current administration with Vance and others.

Speaker 1 Yes, of course there is. I think that the Vatican

Speaker 1 and even Pope Francis was certainly opposed to

Speaker 1 the exercise of freedom or of personal autonomy that would lead you to change your status, say you've decided you're born with one sex assignment and you want to have another.

Speaker 1 They want to say, look, that's not a human choice. That's a choice that goes beyond what humans are entitled to do.
God gave us these bodies. There's a God-given natural order, male and female.

Speaker 1 And here come these gender people who think you actually get to choose or

Speaker 1 you can change the order of society so that people who are

Speaker 1 gay parents who can

Speaker 1 lay claim legally to their children, which is becoming increasingly difficult in a place like Italy, informed by the Vatican,

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 trans people who are seeking to get legal recognition or appropriate health care, this too becomes more difficult.

Speaker 1 So I think that there's a consolidation of the family in a traditional sense, where there's heterosexual marriage and children

Speaker 1 who are

Speaker 1 the offspring of that marriage and sexuality itself is constrained by its reproductive role within the heterosexual framework. I mean, that idea of the family is really, really important.

Speaker 1 And it was the family council that first

Speaker 1 developed the idea of gender ideology. So we have to remember that the preservation of the family is really important for the preservation of the church.

Speaker 1 And for people like Orban as well, the preservation of the family is really important for the preservation of the nation and its unity, its nationalism.

Speaker 1 But also there,

Speaker 1 if you look at Orban,

Speaker 1 he also wanted to outlaw miscegenation. So he wants to keep his nation white.
He's afraid of these migrants coming in.

Speaker 1 So he's anti-migrant, and he's anti-trans, and he's anti-gay, and anti-lesbian, anti-bisexual, et cetera. And these things are linked

Speaker 1 because there's a certain idea of the family and sexuality, reproductive sexuality, that has to be preserved for the purposes of not just procreation, but preserving the nation state.

Speaker 3 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 3 So, in your most recent book, Who's Afraid of Gender? You write about why the very notion of gender is so upsetting to the social order for conservatives, as we just noted.

Speaker 3 But in practice, a lot of the pushback right now is around trans people.

Speaker 3 In that executive order, for example, the White House says it's correcting a supposed misapplication of the 2019 Supreme Court case, Bostock versus Clayton County, in which the justices ruled 6-3 that discrimination against trans people is sex discrimination.

Speaker 3 Why are trans people the flashpoint?

Speaker 1 Well, I think trans people are the flashpoint in part

Speaker 1 because of great ignorance of what it means.

Speaker 1 But I think trans women in particular have been maligned by the allegation that they're really men and that they have nefarious designs on women and that they're hiding in order to execute those designs, which include rape or sexual violence or other forms of domination or appropriation.

Speaker 1 And once that fantasy gets going, and it is a fantasy, it can be very compelling. And a lot of women who are born female at birth are frightened,

Speaker 1 not many feminists, but I would say a minority of feminists

Speaker 1 who believe that your biology actually determines who you are, which I thought was an anti-feminist view.

Speaker 1 They do get worked up

Speaker 1 and they have fears that something that is theirs will be taken away. I think as well that there's a big fear about children being seduced or infused with a doctrine.

Speaker 1 And of course, the irony is that the church has done that. The church has molested children.
The church has imposed its doctrines and molested children at the same time.

Speaker 3 Yes, that would be the irony.

Speaker 1 And so what have they done? You know, in many ways, they have relocated their own crimes outside of themselves.

Speaker 3 I always say every accusation is a confession.

Speaker 1 I think in this case, it is true.

Speaker 3 You talked about the fact that some feminists have been pushing against transgender women specifically.

Speaker 3 Last week's Britain Supreme Court ruled that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological sex.

Speaker 3 This has been pushed by so-called TERF movement, trans exclusionary radical feminists supported by people like the ever-loathsome Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.

Speaker 3 And now we know where the inspiration for Voldemort came from, obviously.

Speaker 3 They're using the same idea of defending women that was in Trump's executive order, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has used. Talk about

Speaker 3 this case and this argument, and where you imagine this going from here and this group.

Speaker 1 Well, I think in the case of J.K. Rowling and many of the British feminists who are part of

Speaker 1 Sex Matters, which is one of their organizations,

Speaker 1 they do think that to be a woman, you have to have certain biological characteristics and that the category should be tied to biology.

Speaker 1 So, that's what I would call a biologically reductionist view, right? Like, what you are can be reduced to your biology.

Speaker 1 At the same time, they don't actually think about biology and you know, the complexity of chromosome structure, the complexity of hormonal structure, why it's been so hard for sports organizations to decide who's a woman and who's not a woman, because it turns out there's a huge range of testosterone among women and men.

Speaker 1 And actually, the two categories overlap at a certain point.

Speaker 1 So they can't even answer that question. They can only say

Speaker 1 who's able to compete or who should be able to compete in women's sports, which is to kind of keep the question of identity to the side. And I think that was probably smart.

Speaker 1 But it tells us something about the fact that just referring to a biological fact is not enough. Most biologists, most people in science don't believe biology is just a fact.
It's a complex process,

Speaker 1 the process of sexual development involving chromosomes, hormones, but also environmental factors without which chromosomal activation isn't even possible. So

Speaker 1 we're complex creatures. and our biological systems are interactive at base.
We're always interacting with the environment.

Speaker 3 So they want to keep a word in a stasis.

Speaker 1 Well, they're going back to this idea of a simple fact.

Speaker 1 Now, if biological difference were just a simple fact and we could be done with it, then we wouldn't even have the field of developmental biology or research into sexual development or any of those things.

Speaker 1 In fact, it's complex, and intersex people, who indeed have complex anatomical and chromosomal features, wouldn't even be allowed to exist in that framework.

Speaker 1 So once again, I think that it's deeply simplifying.

Speaker 1 But those folks who are trans-exclusionary do understand their sex as a kind of property, that they own it, that someone's trying to come and take it away. But sex isn't like that.

Speaker 1 You know, we're named by others, we're given assignments by people we generally don't know. I mean, maybe we get to know that person.

Speaker 1 We're according to standards that are accepted in health institutions or legal institutions. And it doesn't make sense to say that I own the sex that I'm assigned.

Speaker 1 It's other people who've given me my sex, and it's me who decides how I'm going to live that and what it means to me and how I struggle with the various forces that have formed me.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 3 you have said it's an assault on gender is really an assault on democracy. You wrote that.
Assault on gender is also assault on democracy. What do you mean in a broader sense?

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, I think that gender is a framework for understanding society.

Speaker 1 According to feminists, there's differences in power, there's different distribution of goods, there's different ways of assuming positions of power, there are different wages, there's discrimination.

Speaker 1 We need a gender framework to even name discrimination and to understand how power works in society.

Speaker 1 And when we talk about gender identity, we're also talking about how people are living their bodies, like how they understand themselves, how they thrive in the world.

Speaker 1 Now, either we want open inquiry where we accept that there's something called gender studies or feminist and gender sexuality studies, where we get to ask questions about the kinds of bodies we end up living in and how they are socially formed and how we can also be part of their formation and how it's lived and how it's understood.

Speaker 1 How are we construed historically?

Speaker 1 How can we construe ourselves? These are really basic questions that we ask in university settings, but in any intellectual inquiry. But to say, oh, we're not asking any of those questions anymore.

Speaker 1 We don't want to know about gender differentials of power.

Speaker 1 We don't want to know about gender identity or how it's created or lived. We don't want to know about gender-based violence.
We're going to call it,

Speaker 1 like they do in Turkey, family violence, right? Even though 95% of the

Speaker 1 violence within families is men inflicting violence on women and children. So

Speaker 1 what is is it that we are saying? We're saying we don't want to know these aspects.

Speaker 1 When they censor like this, when they censor gender, or when they censor race studies for that matter, they are saying we don't want to know about these realities. We're going to set them aside.

Speaker 1 We're even going to defund them and in some cases criminalize them.

Speaker 3 Aaron Ross Powell, so if gender is one of the things

Speaker 3 performative, as you had written before, let's talk a little bit more about what Trump himself seems to be performing.

Speaker 3 There's a lot written about Trump's vision of manhood, as opposed to, to, say, Tim Waltz's.

Speaker 3 In an article at The Guardian, you wrote about Trump, the accelerations of shameless sadism incite others to celebrate this version of manhood, one that is not only willing to defy the rules and principles that govern democratic life, freedom, equality, justice, but enact these in forms of liberation from false ideologies and the constraints of legal

Speaker 3 obligation.

Speaker 3 What is this concept of masculinity? And as an appeal to voters or to his audience more broadly, talk a a little bit about what you were trying to say.

Speaker 3 What is happening here from his perspective?

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, who knows what the world looks like from his perspective? You know, one could get bugged down with a psychological reading of Donald Trump, and I know many people have.

Speaker 1 But at least what I see happening, the effects of his action,

Speaker 1 is that he's showing that he's willing to defy not just the woke left, right, defy feminism, defy LGBTQIA plus peoples and their movements and their policies.

Speaker 1 But he's actually willing to defy the Constitution and he's willing to defy internationally accepted human rights.

Speaker 1 And he's showing this in his policies on deportation, the deportation of migrants, but also the deportation of students on international visas and other more vulnerable members of academic communities who are not yet citizens.

Speaker 1 So I think that the real question is what restriction will he not not defy? And

Speaker 1 what does that appeal to in people? And especially not just young men, possibly the incel world,

Speaker 1 but men more broadly who have felt like they've lost their supremacy and hence their place in society,

Speaker 1 who've never liked equality as a principle, who've never liked the fact that women should and do make the same amount of money as they do, or have never liked the breakdown of the traditional family

Speaker 1 where women are either leaving marriages or not getting married or living to the side of men's power altogether. And I think there's a great deal of resentment against that.

Speaker 1 It's not that they're oppressed or suffering in some way, but rather that they have lost their supremacy and that supremacy gave them a place in society.

Speaker 1 But they also see a guy who is willing to do whatever he wants.

Speaker 1 And, you know, they a lot of them hate having to pay taxes, and they hate having to change their language, and they hate having to adjust to some of the new realities in the world, whether it's a multiracial world or a multi-gendered world.

Speaker 1 They have great resentment,

Speaker 1 feeling that they're displaced or replaced. And here's a guy who's just saying, no, we're going back.
I'm giving you a fantasy of restoration, of patriarchal order.

Speaker 1 And in that world that I'm going to restore, the Trumpist says, you call it furious nostalgia. I do call it a furious nostalgia because it's willing to strip people of their rights.

Speaker 1 It's also willing to defy the Constitution and very possibly destroy the Constitution in its effort to assert a form of masculine power that knows no limits at all.

Speaker 3 And had been dying for a while. Now, speaking of angry, furious people, some of the people around Trump seem very troubled by gender as well, including those in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 3 I've written and spoken a lot about Elon Musk, for instance.

Speaker 3 The Wall Street Journal just wrote an extensive story about his harem of women and his attempt to seed the world with his babies, which is disturbing.

Speaker 3 I've been trying to get them to write that story for years. He has obviously been very passionately anti-trans, especially since his daughter Vivian

Speaker 3 is transgender.

Speaker 3 And I have to tell you, just for you to know, a lot of the radicalization I can trace to him and many others in Silicon Valley, many of them have transgender kids, which is really interesting to me.

Speaker 1 It's interesting.

Speaker 3 And that was where the flip happened. This is by way of explanation, not excuse.

Speaker 3 Do you see any connection between these gender attitudes of someone like Musk and tech billionaires who are really trying to take the country?

Speaker 3 Because these are the richest people on earth who are cosplaying victims here in some fashion.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, for Musk to have a trans kid

Speaker 1 probably is a sign that he doesn't have control

Speaker 1 over the way things are going culturally,

Speaker 1 how they're going historically. That, in fact, to be a father is not to own the child.

Speaker 1 To be a father who represents one set of values does not mean that the young person is going to reflect or continue those values.

Speaker 1 And I mean, that's been true for eternity, but it's a truth that I'm sure people like him don't like very much.

Speaker 1 And of course, Musk also has at his disposal one of the largest social media platforms in the history of the world.

Speaker 1 So for him to launch the memes that helped to advance Trump, especially the one in which

Speaker 1 it was said that Kamala Harris, if elected, would authorize trans surgeries on illegal migrants. Right, right, linking the two together.
Yeah, what has he done at that moment?

Speaker 1 He's like just gathered up a bunch of fears into a single kind of caricature phantasm that

Speaker 1 stokes people's fears and did get out the vote.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it left out zombies, but yeah.

Speaker 1 Yes, indeed.

Speaker 3 So, this shift is coming on the heels of decades in which younger generations have been pushing the envelope on gender, on race, on political activism.

Speaker 3 And every week we get a question from an outside expert. Our question today, you said one of the things about you that people is that you are goofier and funnier

Speaker 3 than you get credit for, given the seriousness of a lot of things you write about.

Speaker 3 So, we had comedian and singer Randy Rainbow, a satirist who does great parody interviews with political figures on social media, with your question. Here it is.

Speaker 19 Hello, it's Randy Rainbow, and my question is the following. It's kind of a two-parter, so go with it.

Speaker 9 Part one,

Speaker 19 this new wave of gender non-conformity and

Speaker 19 expressive freedom that we're seeing among young people feels like a real cultural awakening. I wonder where you think it comes from.

Speaker 19 Is it the result of many years of activism and theory finally coming to fruition? Or is there something unique about this particular generation and how they use

Speaker 19 community and identity and especially social media to shape themselves and the world around them?

Speaker 1 Part two,

Speaker 19 the backlash to this, of course, is increasingly more and more

Speaker 19 well-funded and widespread and annoying. So what advice would you give to young people, young activists, stepping in to fight the good fight?

Speaker 9 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Serious question. It's a great question, and I'm a big Randy Rainbow fan, so super happy to address it.

Speaker 1 First of all, I mean,

Speaker 1 so many young people are living with a very deep fear of the future. What kind of future will they have? And

Speaker 1 they're very attuned to climate catastrophe. They're very attuned to the ravages of capitalism, the deep inequalities.

Speaker 1 They're very attuned to open-ended wars that seem to be based on justifications that aren't clear or that keep changing. And I think that the question is, where do they have some sense of control?

Speaker 1 Where do they feel like they get to have a place in the world? They get to be recognized for who they are.

Speaker 1 And sometimes, you know, I think the moment in which a young person says, I go by the following pronoun,

Speaker 1 please call me that, is one of the limited zones in which they feel some power over their own lives.

Speaker 1 Call me this, you know, or this is my gender, or this is how I'm defining myself. It's a power of self-definition.

Speaker 1 In a world in which very few young people feel a lot of power, so maybe it's a way of circumscribing a zone, like we'll call it the gender zone,

Speaker 1 in which they get to say who they are and ask ask others to recognize them in ways that they prefer and see whether the world is willing. Like, are you going to say yes, or are you going to say no?

Speaker 1 Are you going to honor me as a person or are you going to dishonor me as a person?

Speaker 1 But also, I mean, I think there's been a lot of activism for sure. There have been celebratory marches and demonstrations for some time.
Yes, there's

Speaker 1 There's queer theory in universities and trans theory and trans studies in university now.

Speaker 1 But I don't believe that those academic disciplines have the power to reshape the world. They have to be appealing to something that people are already wanting.

Speaker 1 Randy Rainbow calls it expressive freedoms. Like, yes, expressive freedoms within the family, outside the family, in the community, in the world,

Speaker 1 setting themselves up to a certain degree as different or as having a choice, as having the power of self-definition somewhere.

Speaker 3 Right, where they can do that. So what advice would you give them? I always call that the what of it.

Speaker 2 What of it.

Speaker 1 Well, I also think that, especially for young people, for whom the computer is really important, you know, you can change your gender online and use an avatar and construct an identity there.

Speaker 1 But that's very different from being part of a broader solidarity. And right now, given the freedoms that are being ripped away, the rights that are being stripped away,

Speaker 1 We actually have to find ways of connecting and of reusing our internet connections to produce broader networks of solidarity.

Speaker 1 I see this happening in the sanctuary networks that are connecting universities and helping people who are either at risk of deportation or actually in the process of being deported.

Speaker 1 And I'm seeing it also in queer communities and trans communities, ways of getting together and of figuring out strategies.

Speaker 1 But we need to prize solidarity at this point over our individual freedoms, or rather

Speaker 1 realize that without solidarity, none of us are going to have individual freedoms.

Speaker 3 Which jump to the next thing I want to talk about, what's happening on universities. They suddenly realize they're stronger together, sort of stone-souping it, essentially.
So

Speaker 3 you're a distinguished professor at the graduate school at UC Berkeley. A number of universities quickly folded to the Trump administration demands to shut down DEI policies.

Speaker 3 Many are reviewing their Title 9 policies. And also, certain people are saying things you'd be surprised at.

Speaker 3 Like Governor Newsom of California recently said that trans women participating in women's sports is deeply unfair. There's all kinds of shifting sands here.

Speaker 3 The Trump administration has launched investigations at colleges, including UC Berkeley, and has threatened to withhold government funds from the auspices of protecting students, for example, from anti-Semitism.

Speaker 3 So it's reaching all over the place.

Speaker 3 Talk a little bit about the mood on the campus.

Speaker 1 Well, I can't talk well about that because I'm living in New York this year, although I'm certainly in touch with people at Berkeley.

Speaker 1 And I think there's enormous anxiety mainly among the international students and those who have either shown up at a Palestine protest or are

Speaker 1 presumed to be sympathetic to Hamas or some such thing. So, I mean, I think that's where the concern is, at least at UC Berkeley, as I understand it.
They have not turned over their students.

Speaker 1 They've not fed

Speaker 1 ICE the names of students as some other universities have done, facilitating deportations.

Speaker 1 And I think at this point we're seeing more and more colleges and universities realizing that it's not worth selling their soul or trammeling academic freedom and self-governance, which are two hallowed principles of university life,

Speaker 1 to placate a federal government that will never be placated, right?

Speaker 1 Because if they come in asking for deportations today, they'll ask for the shutdown of ethnic studies, Afrikana studies, or African-American studies, gender and sexuality studies.

Speaker 1 They'll start deciding what the curriculum can be. They'll effectively be putting universities in receivership.
And I know Colombia is at risk of that right now.

Speaker 3 Yeah, although Colombia is now pushing back.

Speaker 1 I think it's pushing back more for sure. And I think it's being supported by the Alliance of Presidents who have come forth, I think, following the lead of Michael Roth and Eisengruber from Princeton.

Speaker 3 Right, and also Harvard's president Alan Garber.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they're losing billions of dollars. And Trump is trying to revoke Harvard's nonprofits at us.
From your perspective, what's the right strategy here?

Speaker 3 Do you think they've been slow to come together? Some of them have, some of them haven't.

Speaker 1 Look, I mean, it's good that the top schools have realized that bonding together makes them stronger and they will be able to defy

Speaker 1 Trump's demands more effectively that way.

Speaker 1 But they should also be bonding with state schools and community schools and schools that are even more dependent on federal funding and have less endowment monies than they do. So

Speaker 1 I think it would be unfortunate if the elite institutions decided just to defend themselves at the expense of everybody else.

Speaker 1 I think we need an even broader solidarity that would be based on the equal worth of all these universities and the equal value of open inquiry and self-governance and academic freedom for the very definition of the university.

Speaker 3 So you also mentioned Ford and students who come to study at American universities. They spend $56 billion a year in tuition and living expenses.
For people who don't know, the U.S.

Speaker 3 has a trade surplus in higher education or had one. Now European universities and governments are offering U.S.
researchers scientific asylum.

Speaker 3 Is there going to be this attack on academia impacting enrollment or willingness and ability of American scientists and scholars to continue their work here? This is a reverse brain drain.

Speaker 3 I've had two friends that are considering offers from France to do so. Would you consider going abroad?

Speaker 1 Well, I wouldn't consider probably because of my age. For instance, I'm too old to teach in France.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I also think whatever I have to offer needs to be offered here and now,

Speaker 1 because this is where this struggle is. And I wouldn't want to abandon universities, and I don't want to abandon the students.

Speaker 1 For those of us who are tenured or retired or established financially in ways that are fairly comfortable, I think we stay and fight.

Speaker 1 I think we keep trying to build even stronger solidarities, connecting people,

Speaker 1 trying to make good arguments, getting them out in public. That's our job.
And in fact, I think academics generally need to be making a public case for what they do to the broader public because

Speaker 1 only then will we have the power to resist the caricatures and slanders that are leveled against us. So we have at least two jobs at this point.
We teach our students and we

Speaker 1 explain to the broader public what the value of what we do is and the value of university life.

Speaker 3 Are you nervous anyway? You've been burning Edfiji before.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm always a little nervous, yeah. You know, I have security guards when I give talks, and I

Speaker 1 have a lawyer now

Speaker 1 if I run into a problem at the border.

Speaker 1 But I'm not quaking, no.

Speaker 3 Not quaking. I mean, obviously you've been burning effigy, so you're used to this is no.

Speaker 1 No, I've been,

Speaker 1 it's funny, the things I was maligned for for years,

Speaker 1 I felt that to be very personal. And now I see that the exact same allegations are being leveled against everybody.
So So,

Speaker 1 you know, I've been around the block. I've been around the block.
It's useful for me to stay around.

Speaker 3 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 3 So before we go into, I want to talk about the way forward and who's afraid of gender. You wrote something about the left.
I want to play a clip from the audio book.

Speaker 22 We know how to dismantle the arguments and expose the rhetoric, but to what passions do we appeal? And how do we address the fears both discovered and provoked by the right?

Speaker 22 What finally are the passions that might gather the targeted movements more effectively than the way that we are targeted.

Speaker 22 If we fail to come together and promote more compelling visions of the world in which we want to live, then we are surely lost.

Speaker 22 For that, we need to know what we are fighting for, not just what we are fighting against.

Speaker 3 So you wrote this before President Biden stepped down from the presidential

Speaker 3 campaign in 2024, before Vice President Kamala Harris took up the mantle.

Speaker 3 Talk about that, because one of the things is there is not a compelling vision that progressives have or that they seem censorious or tisky or Trump's terrible is their only vision here, which is true, but doesn't seem to be compelling to people.

Speaker 3 What do you think,

Speaker 3 I guess, Democrats or progressives should be doing to combat the politics of cruelty? What you're saying there is passion.

Speaker 1 Well, a passion for a set of principles, a passion for a way of life. So, I mean,

Speaker 1 it seems to me that many of the people who gather together to protest Trump are also supporting one another.

Speaker 1 They look over and they go, oh, look, people who are workers are suffering and people who are trans are suffering, and yet they're here and they're courageous and

Speaker 1 they're coming out to make their views known. What kind of world do we want to live in together? How do we want to handle

Speaker 1 questions of unpayable debt and low wages, unlivable wages? How do we want to handle trans rights? Why don't we put these together?

Speaker 1 And if they're going to target migrants and trans people at the same time and strip them both of their rights, then we need an analysis of rights stripping and new authoritarianism that can allow us to produce new solidarities and a way of living that acknowledges our interdependency, not just among each other, with each other, but with the earth itself.

Speaker 1 We should be putting all these issues together in a set of visions.

Speaker 1 And to do that, you know, we need artists, we need tech people who know how to get the word out and the image out, but we also need an analysis so that our points are not just punctual and vanishing, right?

Speaker 1 We need to build a vision. Aaron Trevor Bowie, and what is that from your perspective?

Speaker 3 Because it can't be just combating the politics of cruelty, saying he's an idiot.

Speaker 1 No, but

Speaker 1 what is the opposite of cruelty? I guess I would say the affirmation of life.

Speaker 1 I think collective life, what it means to live together on conditions of equality, what it means to overcome nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. I mean,

Speaker 1 this means living in the broader world and accepting human complexity and actually valuing it.

Speaker 1 It also means valuing knowledge. It means valuing economic equality and rethinking our institutions and our understanding of labor so that we don't see these

Speaker 1 extraordinary gaps between rich and poor and a billionaire oligarchical class ruling the world. I mean,

Speaker 1 I think we need to listen to Bernie or maybe the next generation of Bernie's

Speaker 1 who will let us know what democratic socialism is for our time, one that would be

Speaker 1 not a fair weather friend of trans people like Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 3 Huge disappointment.

Speaker 1 But would understand issues of gender equality and sexual equality as absolutely central to any vision of democracy.

Speaker 3 Aaron Ross Powell, if you had to give a criticism of progressives or or left or Democrats, what would it be?

Speaker 3 Is it that it's only about saying they're cruel and not enough about ⁇ and who is that person? Is it AOC? Is it...

Speaker 1 No, I think I worry about centrist Democrats

Speaker 1 trying to marginalize those whose rights are now actually

Speaker 1 under threat.

Speaker 1 And I think it's been a terrible mistake to dismiss as wokeism,

Speaker 1 and that happens not just by the right, but by the centrist Democrats as well. I think we need to rethink what is being described as wokist exactly.

Speaker 1 And does it have to do with racial justice, the struggle for racial justice? Does it have to do with the struggle against prison violence?

Speaker 1 What kind of world we want is one, yes, that is, of course, less cruel, but also, I think, affirms our interdependency on this earth.

Speaker 1 Because without addressing the climate issue, we won't even be around to address the social and political problems we're talking about.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, which is the biggest joke. You get that.
It's the biggest joke in the end of that.

Speaker 3 Who is that person? Is that Alexander Ocasio-Cortez?

Speaker 1 Who do you think? You know what? I don't know if there's a person, and I sometimes wonder: are we wrong to try to find the person who will represent all that we care about?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, it's just Bernie's been holding her hand a lot lately.

Speaker 1 No, well, I appreciate both of them. I must say, I think they're quite heroic during this time.

Speaker 1 But I think what's much more more important than a compelling or charismatic leader at this moment is a sense of solidarity, a new sense, one that we didn't think we would have.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 if we start with the idea, like, okay,

Speaker 1 some of the folks are losing their rights to exist legally, right? Some folks are being abducted on the street. Some are being sent into destitution by economic arrangements.

Speaker 1 Others are being deported or actually expelled from the country or being detained under conditions that are inhumane, not just in defiance of constitutional law, but international law as well.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, we could make a list and leave it there, like, oh, all of these ways of treating people are wrong.

Speaker 1 But what if we started to collect all of those forms of power and try to understand them as part of a new authoritarianism, a new authoritarianism that is very compelling?

Speaker 1 Well, what would a radical democracy look like that would actually not just analyze and criticize that new authoritarianism, but give us a sense of life together that would restore, preserve the earth, and articulate our bonds to one another in ways that are ethically valuable to us, if not beautiful to us?

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, what about the rest of us?

Speaker 3 This is something you wrote, and I'd love you to finish on this, that I thought was very compelling, that you wrote in The Guardian, because it's about rage, and it's being stuck in rage, right?

Speaker 3 Being stuckness and rage, I think is what you call it. If we continue to be gripped by outrage and stilled by stupefaction by each day's new proclamation, we will fail to discern what links them.

Speaker 3 To be gripped by his statements is precisely the aim of their utterance. We are, in some ways, in its thrall when it captures and paralyzes us.

Speaker 3 While there is every reason to be outrage, we cannot let that outrage flood us and stop our minds. I spend a lot of time when people say, Can you believe it? I'm like, I believe it.

Speaker 1 Like, I believe what he just did. Next step.

Speaker 3 What do you think people should do right now to overcome this tide? Well, look,

Speaker 1 you know, I have one friend. She's bilingual.
She speaks Spanish. She spends, you know, six to eight hours every week helping people fill out their legal forms.

Speaker 1 You know, she just goes to a local church and helps them.

Speaker 1 You know, there's another friend who works for a local organization that's

Speaker 1 in favor of democratization, but that local organization has no idea how to put a paragraph together. She puts the paragraph together.
It's not big.

Speaker 1 It's like figuring out what your power is, what your talent is from where you're living and what difference you can make. So there are a lot of networks that are being built and very quickly

Speaker 1 in the way that some of those networks were built very quickly after the repeal of Roe v. Wade.

Speaker 1 And these are not necessarily on the front page of any newspaper and they can't be exactly because

Speaker 1 their relationship to hyper-visibility

Speaker 1 is mixed. Like, on the one hand, they want to be known.
On the other hand, like, no, we need to keep this on the down low. And

Speaker 1 so,

Speaker 1 I'm thinking that a lot of important political activity is happening right there on the border between what's visible and what's not visible, and figuring out what assistance we can offer.

Speaker 1 Those forms of, you know, I don't want to say grassroots, but it is kind of like a grassroots solidarity movement, they actually turn into larger movements and they do make a difference at the ballot box one day.

Speaker 3 Aaron Powell, you sound hopeful.

Speaker 2 Are you hopeful?

Speaker 1 I have some hope when I pay attention to how these networks of solidarity are emerging and how almost everybody I know is trying to do something for someone and moving out of their comfort zone

Speaker 3 to

Speaker 1 take a stand and actually asking others to do the same.

Speaker 3 Is there a place for outrage?

Speaker 1 Outrage is hugely important.

Speaker 1 I live with an enormous amount of rage and most people I know do as well.

Speaker 1 The issue is not to repress it, but to cultivate it. I think like the well-cultivated fuck you is one of the most important things you can learn in this life, right?

Speaker 1 You don't just like express your rage and oh, I got it out of my system and that's the end of it. It's like, no, no, no, no, no.
Figure out what form it's going to take.

Speaker 1 Figure out what demand you want. Figure out the demand for justice that's in the middle of your rage.
The demand for equality or freedom that's in the middle of your rage.

Speaker 1 It's like those principles, those demands are inside the rage. You need to bring them out and put them into language or some other medium that allows them to be known.

Speaker 1 Make your claim on the world. But that takes a certain amount of patience and thoughtfulness, but also always solidarity.
You can't just act alone.

Speaker 3 Well, I think The Well Cultivated Fuck You is the name of your next book, honestly.

Speaker 1 There you have it. Yeah, that would be a good one.

Speaker 2 That would be so good. I dare you.
I dare you.

Speaker 3 Anyway, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you.

Speaker 3 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor-Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Dave Shaw, Megan Burney, Megan Kunane, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Korwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

Speaker 3 Special thanks to Eamon Whalen. Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

Speaker 3 If you're already following the show, you have a well-cultivated fuck you ready to go. If not, bring your rage into language and allow it to be known.

Speaker 3 Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

Speaker 3 We'll be back on Monday with more.

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Speaker 21 Who are worried about the obvious problem, students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments.

Speaker 21 But when our team went and poked at the story, they found that the issues in education with AI go a lot deeper, to the very philosophy of education itself.

Speaker 23 If this technology becomes more ubiquitous, we'll have courses created by AI, graded by AI, with submissions from students absolutely generated by AI.

Speaker 23 So it begs the question: what are we even doing here in higher ed?

Speaker 21 This episode is presented by Salesforce.