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Judith Butler receives the Golden Medal at Circulo de las Bellas Artes on October 27, 2022, in Madrid, Spain.
We can be outraged, but we mustn't be paralyzed, the esteemed scholar of gender writes.
Donald Trump’s barrage of hateful executive orders has been enraging, but we mustn’t let outrage paralyze us, Judith Butler, a leading scholar of gender, writes in a new commentary for The Guardian.
“Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised,” Butler writes in the piece, published Thursday. “In some cases, Trump’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism.”
Butler, distinguished professor in the graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, notes Trump’s attacks on transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and immigrants.
“Many of them express fascist passions,” writes Butler, who is nonbinary. “Denying rights to healthcare, legal recognition and rights of expressive freedoms for trans, intersex and non-binary people attacks the very foundations of their lives. Even the conservative supreme court found that discrimination against trans and gender non-conforming people constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex.” That came in the Bostock v. Clayton County decision in 2020.
But it’s Trump’s goal to hold us in thrall, according to Butler, and we must not let that paralyze us. “While there is every reason to be outraged, we cannot let that outrage flood us and stop our minds,” they write.
We can counter all this by finding our own passions, Butler says: “The desire for a freedom equally shared; for an equality that makes good on democratic promises; to repair and regenerate the earth’s living processes; to accept and affirm the complexity of our embodied lives; to imagine a world in which government supports health and education for all, where we all live without fear, knowing that our interconnected lives are equally valuable.”
