The debate around gender and identity has become more prominent in the public discourse, and is impacting the arenas typically studied by the social sciences-- economy, politics, society. For social scientists today, an understanding of gender theory is increasingly vital.
My name is Tim Smith-Laing. I received my DPhil at Oxford, then spent several years teaching and conducting scholarship at Oxford and Science Po in the area of literary theory and gender theory. I recently wrote an extensive peer-reviewed analysis of "Gender Trouble" by Judith Butler for an ed-tech company called Macat.
My interest in Judith Butler stems from a more general interest in the application of literary theory to the study (and creation) of literature. Like many critics, I believe in the insights theory can bring to literature; and like many critics, I also believe in the insights literature can bring back to theory. My doctoral research focused on the medieval and renaissance theories about Greek mythology, which became a privileged site for much literary, philosophical and theological debate in the period. It was fertile ground for work that asked questions and sought answers about the nature of truth, language, politics, gender and power. These are the same categories at the heart of modern literary theory. However, Butler's work has an avowedly political purpose and this is one of the reasons she has proven so thought-provoking for social science more widely. Butler's work is crucial for understanding the socially constructed dimensions of reality, and the relationship between society, power networks, and how we see ourselves. This is precisely why her insights can't be limited to the study of literature. After all, she offers arguments that can change not just how one reads literature, but how one reads the world. Twenty-five years on from its publication Gender Trouble remains an important and thought-provoking text, especially in a world where identity politics appears to becoming more, rather than less, important.
I will be online throughout the day to answer questions. Bring on the brigades! (as a commenter warned in the announcement yesterday).
If you are interested to read my analysis of Gender Trouble you can access it for free by using the access code: Macat3 when registering here. We really admire places like asksocialscience so I'd be delighted if you check out the platform.
Thanks to the mods for hosting us. Their disclosure follows:

In the interest of disclosure, the moderators of /AskSocialScience were approached independently by Macat, are receiving no financial compensation for hosting this AMA, and are linking to their website willingly without coercion or nefarious purposes. It is simply a courtesy plug for taking the initiative in organizing this AMA with us.

Edit 1 at 7:00 PM London time: Right guys - many thanks for all the questions. Time for me to step out for a couple of hours. Will try and check in later!
Edit 2 at 12:00 PM London time:
Dear all,
Thank you so much for your questions. I was honestly worried at the prospect of a gender theory AMA - I couldn't think of a more intellectually challenging or contentious topic. I knew I'd get some tough questions, and I was worried the trolls would be out in force. As it was, I have really been stretched in the best possible way by your comments and queries: absolutely fantastic, and very thought provoking for me. I hope it has been for you too.
Thank you.
Best to all,
Tim

I've been trying to close my eyes on how the world's been going crazy. I mean, we've got people who still go around partying and spreading covid and people dying, yet they need to party. Everything is politicized. LGBT issues? Politicized.
But the more time passed, the more I saw that things were getting out of hand.
I don't even expect anything these days. I don't even expect anyone to read this at this point. I feel like I am an empty space. I feel like it's all my fault.
I was abused by my mother, my sister and her husband. The abuse continued for my entire life. I got cut off abruptly after I told that I was a gay trans man, who was not willing to have children which were biological.
I was called a traitor, I listened for weeks on my mother screaming all things from men are trash to the fact that I should've been a lesbian instead and given my best friend a husband, that both me and my partner were stealing husbands from women. If you've ever seen that Julia Volkova (from t.A.T.u. interview where she says gay men are not okay and should breed more children while lesbians are cool, that's my eastern european reality). I held my patience with her for 6 years.
She said that me coming out as gay man, was worse than her parents dying 6 days apart from long, long fights with stroke and cancer. I took care of them with her. When my parents divorced, I took her side. I bottled up my childhood, I knew that I had to grow up. I remember how the ambulance arrived and that I had to stay for them. The family turned on us. Poverty is still something that I can wake up in the night screaming about. I still can hoard food, I freak out about bills and I do not even do the bills and finance because I just break down and my partner does it for me.
I recall clearly I would get one meal instead of dinner and lunch of porridge and I would ask my mother what about her and she would say she would finish after me (I had troubles with my stomach and I rarely felt hungry, since I was very small and I was born very weak coz the doctors didn't notice the umbical cord around my neck, I took longer to develop), so I would undereat on top, so that my mom would eat too. I always share my food and suggest to people, I can't control it.
She abused me. I was suicidal. I would self-harm and I wouldn't tell. I was depressed.
Summer would come every year.
My sister when I turned thirteen, after already being on shaky ground with me, said "I hate teenagers" and everything she did before paled in comparisson. I had multiple attempts of her trying to hack into my facebook, e-mail, yell at our parents to force me to add her, different websites and etc. She would scream at me for making out with my boyfriend at the time coz someone saw us kissing in the city. Kissing. I didn't even go beyond. She would lock me in her kitchen and she and her spouse would scream at me, demand answers if they wanted a certain topic, scream at how different I was, how unfeminine I was, what did I think of myself? Why did I think so highly of myself? Why would I even think that anyone would ever love me?
"No one will ever love you." That phrase haunted me for years.
"Stop acting like you're the centre of the earth."
"Your purpose in life is to have children." Was screamed at me, when I got diagnosed as infertile due to medicine sideeffects. I was yelled at how would I tell my future husband that and who would want me. My mother stood beside me and allowed it. She would allow my sister to close the door and she would go up, to sleep and I would go up after hearing everything and curl up and sleep in the same position as I would lay in.
I was threatened with physical violence. "If you were my child, I would've beaten the shit of you". I got scared of walking up the stairs with them. I couldn't get the image of them knocking me down, so I always walked behind them and with much delay.
My hands shake due to genetics, but even when I visited them for the last time, my hands shook so badly that I had to hold a tea spoon with two hands, while I would try to put sugar in my tea.
My mother destroyed so many relationships of mine, she would condone my boyfriends, besides my first abusive one, who she fought was the best fit, "because all men do is cheat and he has money and his mom is nice". She went livid on so many of them. She only accepted my current partner after he helped us numerously and even then, she always had something bad to say about him. She would say that he would never look at me, that I was too poor for him.
I had a good friend who was a lesbian. She told me to stop being friends with her in case people thought that I was a lesbian. She screamed at me when I asked why are gays being killed. She said who cares and why don't I care about children getting murdered instead?!
The abuse can be described further and further.
I was also insecure and I was raped by a person who identified as a trans woman at the time of our connection. They had kept misgendering me all the way until I blocked them, because I had a certain genitalia, yet they were a trans woman. I never reported them, because I didn't want more pressure on trans women. Eventually last I heard was that they didn't get HRT because they were denied and then they I believe either idenitified as male again or nb, I am not sure. But the fact that I never reported them, haunts me.
I was already weary with #metoo and how Asia Argento was shoved under the carpet for the same cases that other men were accused of. Rose McGowan identifying as nb and being transphobic and just spitting ´womyn born womyn´ shit made me sour away from the movement all together. My mother is a feminist. All of the idelogy and man hating was from the feminist books she read. I will be honest, I've reached my limit. I usually say, yeah, of course, feminism is different and I understand there are different waves, branches and etc. But the movement is rotten to me, when it comes to the western world.
I mean, you wanna fight for women's rights? Look at Judith Butler as they go into Brazil and Latin America and fight for women's rights there. Also, note that they are nonbinary and owned up to their mistakes in the past. We all do mistakes. Also, they got attacked by some lady who nearly killed her with an airport cart.
LGBT groups are rotten. I was volunteering for them for so many years. I saved so many LGBT people with blood and teeth, I have gotten people to survive one more day and go and live a life they never thought of. I have yelled for gay marriage in protests for countries which didn't welcome me, I raise awareness, I read and consume everything I can to keep myself up to date.
The last LGBT group I was in, the scheduling person was a rotten terf who I fought with because she would give me 30 minute slots and 1.5 hour slots to feminist activists in different day events. I also got asked my pronouns randomly because I showed up in a dress, after everyone had known me for years. And known my style. I ended up reporting the group because the core of the group with the terf (surprise, I know) would say that nb people aren't trans and other nb-phobic things, in front of an nb crowd who would come because I would invite them and they could never get an audience of over 4+ in our city without my help or market to save their lives.
I helped a lot of people get HRT, I would write guides regardless of nb/binary how to get into the system, understanding that at the time it had a massive binary bias.
Now.
I had the worst endo appointment in my life.
I walked outside and I started crying. I started screaming outside a hospital which is overfilled with covid patients and the doctor could've made her time better by helping someone else than using me as a mental punching bag.
I've seen the whole phallo is bad fiasco from years ago. I mean, sure, you don't want it, okay. But it started of with... a choice. Whatever. But as the years went on, I'd see lgbt posters with trans men with "I love my vulva", trans men in lesbian spaces to the brim, trans for trans, people not believing I was gay, because how could I just be attracted to men? I had enough of homophobia from my family, but I would get it after coming out as trans and as male, even when stealth.
The phallo lies would spread like wildfire. The whole idea of self-loving your body was becoming a bit... uncomfortable. A lot of trans men still identified as lesbians, which was nothing new if you go back to people like Leslie Feinberg with their book written when they attended mitchfest "Stone Butch Blues", yet butch subreddits are now filled with transition posts along with crossposts on ftm and the likes. I would fight here and there on my views, but I would get upset, but I never held so much pain in me as I've had for the past few months.
Queue in this last endo.
I was laughed at my name choice, which is male. I was told that it's a shame that the language spoken in the country I reside in now doesn't have gender neutral pronouns, before she even asked my pronouns. I said my pronouns are masculine and I'm binary. She laughed.
I was fat shamed. Made fun of and not believed that I exercise and ridiculed.
I was accused of being an alcoholic with a few jokes. I had to add that my liver was always bad in exams since ever without her even asking.
My partner was assumed "male and fertile" in the most disgust voice used I've ever heard and I got warned about pregnancy twice despite telling her that I had a copper IUD and she was not pleased that I knew of the birth control.
I was asked to confirm that I wanted no surgeries. I was taken back and stated that I want all surgeries as requested. She said yes, indeed, I see a surgery appointment request.
I was yelled at for using minoxidil from a dermatologist, before she even asked what kind. I was accused of sabotaging her job for using minoxidil and torching my liver with minoxidil, again, before I even got the chance to speak.
Who even asks in this situation a confirmation of no fucking surgeries?!
She denied my surgery request. She just sent everything scattered, wished me luck in life, lowered my dose despite saying that my T levels are normal.
I have never been so tired, sad, angry and frustrated.
I see that all subreddits are fighting, everyone is putting the norm of pronouns being asked, no phallo, that we should all be seen, trans rights to the front and visible, only women are pure and men always abuse, when the biggest supporters of my life have been cis/trans gay/bi men/nb.
Also, I wear dresses, I'm camp and that's an issue. I pass. I am gay. I'm a binary man. I do not identify with the trans movement anymore. And I just wanna be left alone and transition, to forget all this shit if this is the way the world is heading.
I just wanna be left alone with all the operations done.

This is just an appreciation post for Judith Butler I guess. Seeing someone that is non-binary challenging gender conventions was a formative part of realizing that I am non-binary as well. My old gender therapist recommended the book Gender Trouble and that's how I discovered them. I only read through a bit of it, to be honest. All of that combined with my interview with this director of a national transgender advocacy organization helped me gain confidence in actually coming out.
After learning about Judith Butler being a philosopher and gender theorist, I did a deep dive into philosophy and bought a bunch of books. I later learned that the books were all public domain, but I enjoyed reading Foucalt, Kierkegaard, and the rest of them all. I guess I'm grateful for how learning about one thing can lead to a lot of good things.

hey y’all i’m relatively new to reading about gender politics but am very interested in reading actual theory about the subject. i recently started reading gender trouble by judith butler but am completely unable to understand a word of what she is saying, despite my belief that i was relatively well informed on this. if anyone has read this, that’s the type of book i’m looking for subject wise, only easier to understand. help! i desperately want to read more about this but i need a stepping stone, something that i can start with and build up from! thank you!!! ps. i’ve seen a lot of recommendations that seem to be books focused mainly on women’s rights which is also interesting to me but i’m more interested in, well. understanding/dismantling gender itself

In 2020 I read 100 books, so I know what I'm capable of. This year, however, I've set my goal on 60 to give myself some space. These are all the books I'd like to read this year, feel free to comment if you've read any of them!
2021 TBR
Non-fiction / philosophy (12)

• The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays - Albert Camus
  
• Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
  
• The Fire Next Time - James Baldwin
  
• The Problem of Pain - C.S. Lewis
  
• The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
  
• Journal of a Novel - John Steinbeck
  
• Three Guineas - Virginia Woolf
  
• Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl
  
• Candide - Voltaire
  
• Essays, First Series - Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
• Utopia for Realists - Rutger Bregman
  
• What I Believe - Leo Tolstoy
  

21st-century fiction (4)

• Atonement - Ian McEwan
  
• All the Light We Cannot See - Anthony Doerr
  
• The Power - Naomi Alderman
  
• Pachinko - Min Jin Lee
  

20th-century fiction (25)

• The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka
  
• The Trial - Franz Kafka
  
• To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
  
• Island - Aldous Huxley
  
• The Stranger - Albert Camus
  
• The Plague - Albert Camus
  
• The Go-Between - L.P. Hartley
  
• Near to the Wild Heart - Clarice Lispector
  
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
  
• A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
  
• Swann’s Way - Marcel Proust
  
• To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
  
• The Waves - Virginia Woolf
  
• Jacob’s Room - Virginia Woolf
  
• Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
  
• We - Yevgeny Zamyatin
  
• Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin
  
• Perfume - Patrick Suskind
  
• Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
  
• Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
  
• Demian - Herman Hesse
  
• Dune - Frank Herbert
  
• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
  
• Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
  
• The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
  

19th-century fiction (11)

• Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky
  
• Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
  
• The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
  
• Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
  
• The Last Day of a Condemned Man - Victor Hugo
  
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
  
• Walden - Henry David Thoreau
  
• War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  
• The Last Man - Mary Shelley
  
• Villette - Charlotte Brontë
  
• Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
  

Shakespeare / other plays (11)

• Twelfth Night - Shakespeare
  
• Much Ado About Nothing - Shakespeare
  
• Julius Caesar - Shakespeare
  
• Henry IV part 1 and 2 - Shakespeare
  
• Henry V - Shakespeare
  
• The Tempest - Shakespeare
  
• Antony and Cleopatra - Shakespeare
  
• Midsummer Night’s Dream - Shakespeare
  
• Winter’s Tale - Shakespeare
  
• Hamlet - Shakespeare
  
• The Crucible - Arthur Miller
  

So I hold a bachelor in Philosophy myself and have a friend who have recently asked me a bunch about Judith Butlers theory of gender performance. I am happy to explain but I would also like to be able to recommend some reading material. I thought it was fun to read the passages in the book where she comments on eg Hegel, Lacan or Kristeva but I don't think my friend is very interested in this. Therefore I am interested in hearing if any of you guys know of any introductions or easy digest editions of Gender Trouble that don't dumb the book down too much but also is accessible without a formal education or spending absurd amounts of time researching her sources.
TLDR; do you have any recommendations for introductions to Gender Trouble that are accessible for people who aren't very into Philosophy in general?

I'm using a throwaway.
I do not know the structure this post will take, but the theme is that basically I am someone sympathetic to conservative and reactionary political opinion (including having favourable opinions of Donald Trump), who understandably seems to think I have gotten something "missing" about the current political zeitgeist, and I'm trying to figure out what.
A few of facts about my life, to contextualise things:

• I am a a mid-20s-year-old graduate living in the UK with a Sociology degree.
• I have lived my entire life, prior to and after university, in a city that is >90% "White British" (according to census data). I identify now as bisexual - having originally identified as homosexual for the first 7 or so years of my coming out. I live in a working-class nuclear family - me, my mother and father, a younger brother, and a disabled half-sister. brother and half-sister are left-leaning, whereas my parents (being a bit older) are more traditionalist, but (I would argue) more politically confused (they are both Old Labour supporting, and yet also fans of Margaret Thatcher).
• I entered university in 2014 with far-left sympathies, and during my degree found my views move further rightward. My university studies landed right in the middle of both Brexit and the Trump election - and, during both, individual lecturers on my degree chose lecture sessions to not teach the syllabus, and have a lecture session to "just talk about" the results and process what had occurred. I recall at the time, already beginning my change in political position, I viewed such lectures as a waste of my student funding (university courses here being funded for £9000 per annum from student loans).
• I was raised secular, but post-university I even joined an evangelical church for a brief time, because I considered that their social positions aligned with my sympathies at the time.
• My earliest political awareness was around the time of Gordon Brown.

During my degree, I read a lot of sources around social theory, and found it difficult to apply to my own understanding of my lived experiences. I found a lot of other social theorists (ones who I would consider more conservative) were left off the syllabus - some even openly addressed, with statements like (as I recall from one lecture) "Don't reference them, they aren't respected in European Sociology, even if they are in American Sociology" (I cannot recall who the figure was - it may have been someone like Charles Murray or Samuel Huntingdon, or it may have been one of the functionalists like Talcott Parsons or Emile Durkheim; I only recall it being a prominent name in the field, and one that surprised me when they were announced).
Having an interest in online privacy, I did my university dissertation on a topic of "self-censorship" in a social media context. I made use of sources such as Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann's book "The Spiral of Silence" and Timur Kuran's book "Private Truths, Public Lies". I performed two-hour-long interviews - albeit, limited to university students - and, of the sample I had, the common experience I found that repeatedly came up was that of conservative students feeling uncomfortable expressing their views online, as well as in-person. In spite of other literature I had read, the women, ethnic minorities and LGBT people I interviewed did not provide any information directly related to feeling any sort of self-censoriousness as a result of their particular identity. This only reinforced the conservative political sentiments I had previously been coming to terms with, and led to my scepticism of the sources I was taught on the syllabus.
The syllabus has a lot of material that I found particularly egregious. There was an article referencing race, that took a quote by Michael Jackson and discussed him as being an expert on race issues. Another article was directly on fat pride, discussing the author feeling judged in a shop for their weight, imploring the obese (which I would fit into the BMI category of) to declare "Yes, I am a Fatso!". We also read sources around race and post-colonialism (Edward Said's "Orientalism", Frantz Fanon's "The Wretched of the Earth" and "Black Skin, White Masks"), feminist theory (Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" and Judith Butler's "Gender Trouble"), and queer theory (Jeffrey Week's "Sexuality"). None of these were materials I could understand, in large part because they had no relevance to anything I was experiencing in my daily life, nor had any relevance to the experience of my immediate social network - rather, it seemed so completely detached to me, that I could only interpret the things described as either historical artefacts or simply things that the author had themselves constructed.

• On critical race theory, the only BME person I knew and could discuss these things with was a student from Hong Kong who became my best friend on the course. He was a free-market libertarian, and similarly so no relation between what he was reading and his own life experiences. As diverse as the university I was at was, I can only recall perhaps two or three ethnic minorities on the course, of which this person was one.
• On feminist theory, it did not match with what I witnessed in my daily life at all, even if I looked at economic data. Of all the women I knew in my social network - i.e. family and friends' families - almost all were employed, and in many cases seemed to be in higher-status positions than their husbands. Of the ones I knew well enough to ask about the issues, by all means some worked part-time but by choice and often at a higher rate of pay than their husbands. I would discuss the sources I had read with them, and got a response dissonant to what I was reading. These were all, given my background, working-class people. Later on, my own anecdotal experiences have involved working in three separate workplaces where women have made up all positions of upper management, and the majority (or all, in some cases) of lower management positions. Although my jobs to date have all been low-status, this is still very discordant from what I was taught.
• On queer theory, my own experience provided no correlation to what I was reading. I came out at a young age to my Catholic mother, and received acceptance. I received no negative repercussions from anyone in my family. I joined a local LGBT youth group in my teenage years, but of the people I had met, none had troubled backgrounds that I was aware of. During my time at university, I also dated a trans man (AFAB) for two years, who I bounced ideas off of (e.g. Judith Butler). While they were radically left-leaning, they simply did not relate to the source material I was presenting to them either. My only time experiencing abuse was once, after years of holding partners' hands in public without response, one guy took offence one time and expressed verbal disapproval.

On the more economic topics, I simply became convinced of other positions. Brexit and Trump pushed me over the edge, to believing that the Marxist interpretation of class was lacking - that, rather than representing working-class sentiment, it was intellectuals trying to predict what the working-classes should want for themselves while being themselves separated (whether that be in terms of educational capital, or social capital - to use Bourdieu's view of different types of capitals) from the working-classes themselves. The exceptions sympathetic to anything left of social democracy in the UK, funnily, are mostly that of working-class (and upper-class, as I met in many cases) socially mobile students aspiring for or attending university but with little working experience, much like the background I was.
So, in regards to Trump and Brexit, all I see is largely the identified "privileged" from my degree - white, cis, straight celebrities etc. - being the spokespeople, and then come to learn of more conservative voices from minority communities (Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Milo Yiannopolous, Peter Thiel etc.) be condemned. I live in a society where the two first woman Prime Ministers - Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May - are not applauded by feminists as progress because they are the wrong type of women; a society where the death of the first woman Prime Minister after a long battle with dementia are celebrated by "progressives" with the song "Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead". When I looked on social media - Reddit (e.g. reclassified), Facebook, Twitter - it's not discussions of civil rights that see people hedging their words over, or that I see there being a risk of banning over. I saw all this, even from my far-left bubble, and thought "There is something wrong here", and those were the sorts of things that pushed me right.
However, long story, but I read Reddit and see that my background and views are not the background and views of the majority. I read these sources and see nothing of value; while others read these sources and can empathize with them. I see people here daily becoming more and more leftward, and I find myself understanding them less and less (despite being of a view that I myself once held). What am I missing?

(Pasted from the New Statesman, so as not to give that rag any clicks.)
(Emphasis Mine)
INTRO:
Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler*, now 64, published a book that revolutionised popular attitudes on gender. Gender Trouble, the work she is perhaps best known for, introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define “the category of women” and, as a consequence, who it is that feminism purports to fight for. Today, it is a foundational text on any gender studies reading list, and its arguments have long crossed over from the academy to popular culture.
In the three decades since Gender Trouble was published, the world has changed beyond recognition. In 2014, TIME declared a “Transgender Tipping Point”. Butler herself has moved on from that earlier work, writing widely on culture and politics. But disagreements over biological essentialism remain, as evidenced by the tensions over trans rights within the feminist movement.
How does Butler, who is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, see this debate today? And does she see a way to break the impasse? Butler recently exchanged emails with the New Statesman about this issue. The exchange has been edited.
***
Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that "contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics?
Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia. So I find it worrisome that suddenly the trans-exclusionary radical feminist position is understood as commonly accepted or even mainstream. I think it is actually a fringe movement that is seeking to speak in the name of the mainstream, and that our responsibility is to refuse to let that happen.
AF: One example of mainstream public discourse on this issue in the UK is the argument about allowing people to self-identify in terms of their gender. In an open letter she published in June, JK Rowling articulated the concern that this would "throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman", potentially putting women at risk of violence.
JB: If we look closely at the example that you characterise as “mainstream” we can see that a domain of fantasy is at work, one which reflects more about the feminist who has such a fear than any actually existing situation in trans life. The feminist who holds such a view presumes that the penis does define the person, and that anyone with a penis would identify as a woman for the purposes of entering such changing rooms and posing a threat to the women inside. It assumes that the penis is the threat, or that any person who has a penis who identifies as a woman is engaging in a base, deceitful, and harmful form of disguise. This is a rich fantasy, and one that comes from powerful fears, but it does not describe a social reality. Trans women are often discriminated against in men’s bathrooms, and their modes of self-identification are ways of describing a lived reality, one that cannot be captured or regulated by the fantasies brought to bear upon them. The fact that such fantasies pass as public argument is itself cause for worry.
AF: I want to challenge you on the term “terf”, or trans-exclusionary radical feminist, which some people see as a slur.
JB: I am not aware that terf is used as a slur. I wonder what name self-declared feminists who wish to exclude trans women from women's spaces would be called? If they do favour exclusion, why not call them exclusionary? If they understand themselves as belonging to that strain of radical feminism that opposes gender reassignment, why not call them radical feminists? My only regret is that there was a movement of radical sexual freedom that once travelled under the name of radical feminism, but it has sadly morphed into a campaign to pathologise trans and gender non-conforming peoples. My sense is that we have to renew the feminist commitment to gender equality and gender freedom in order to affirm the complexity of gendered lives as they are currently being lived.
AF: The consensus among progressives seems to be that feminists who are on JK Rowling’s side of the argument are on the wrong side of history. Is this fair, or is there any merit in their arguments?
JB: Let us be clear that the debate here is not between feminists and trans activists. There are trans-affirmative feminists, and many trans people are also committed feminists. So one clear problem is the framing that acts as if the debate is between feminists and trans people. It is not. One reason to militate against this framing is because trans activism is linked to queer activism and to feminist legacies that remain very alive today. Feminism has always been committed to the proposition that the social meanings of what it is to be a man or a woman are not yet settled. We tell histories about what it meant to be a woman at a certain time and place, and we track the transformation of those categories over time.
We depend on gender as a historical category, and that means we do not yet know all the ways it may come to signify, and we are open to new understandings of its social meanings. It would be a disaster for feminism to return either to a strictly biological understanding of gender or to reduce social conduct to a body part or to impose fearful fantasies, their own anxieties, on trans women... Their abiding and very real sense of gender ought to be recognised socially and publicly as a relatively simple matter of according another human dignity. The trans-exclusionary radical feminist position attacks the dignity of trans people.
AF: In Gender Trouble you asked whether, by seeking to represent a particular idea of women, feminists participate in the same dynamics of oppression and heteronormativity that they are trying to shift. In the light of the bitter arguments playing out within feminism now, does the same still apply?
JB: As I remember the argument in Gender Trouble (written more than 30 years ago), the point was rather different. First, one does not have to be a woman to be a feminist, and we should not confuse the categories. Men who are feminists, non-binary and trans people who are feminists, are part of the movement if they hold to the basic propositions of freedom and equality that are part of any feminist political struggle. When laws and social policies represent women, they make tacit decisions about who counts as a woman, and very often make presuppositions about what a woman is. We have seen this in the domain of reproductive rights. So the question I was asking then is: do we need to have a settled idea of women, or of any gender, in order to advance feminist goals?
I put the question that way… to remind us that feminists are committed to thinking about the diverse and historically shifting meanings of gender, and to the ideals of gender freedom. By gender freedom, I do not mean we all get to choose our gender. Rather, we get to make a political claim to live freely and without fear of discrimination and violence against the genders that we are. Many people who were assigned “female” at birth never felt at home with that assignment, and those people (including me) tell all of us something important about the constraints of traditional gender norms for many who fall outside its terms.
Feminists know that women with ambition are called “monstrous” or that women who are not heterosexual are pathologised. We fight those misrepresentations because they are false and because they reflect more about the misogyny of those who make demeaning caricatures than they do about the complex social diversity of women. Women should not engage in the forms of phobic caricature by which they have been traditionally demeaned. And by “women” I mean all those who identify in that way.
AF: How much is toxicity on this issue a function of culture wars playing out online?
JB: I think we are living in anti-intellectual times, and that this is evident across the political spectrum. The quickness of social media allows for forms of vitriol that do not exactly support thoughtful debate. We need to cherish the longer forms.
AF: Threats of violence and abuse would seem to take these “anti-intellectual times” to an extreme. What do you have to say about violent or abusive language used online against people like JK Rowling?
JB: I am against online abuse of all kinds. I confess to being perplexed by the fact that you point out the abuse levelled against JK Rowling, but you do not cite the abuse against trans people and their allies that happens online and in person. I disagree with JK Rowling's view on trans people, but I do not think she should suffer harassment and threats. Let us also remember, though, the threats against trans people in places like Brazil, the harassment of trans people in the streets and on the job in places like Poland and Romania – or indeed right here in the US. So if we are going to object to harassment and threats, as we surely should, we should also make sure we have a large picture of where that is happening, who is most profoundly affected, and whether it is tolerated by those who should be opposing it. It won’t do to say that threats against some people are tolerable but against others are intolerable.
AF: You weren't a signatory to the open letter on “cancel culture” in Harper’s this summer, but did its arguments resonate with you?
JB: I have mixed feelings about that letter. On the one hand, I am an educator and writer and believe in slow and thoughtful debate. I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life. If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should, summarise that person. We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently.
On the other hand, some of those signatories were taking aim at Black Lives Matter as if the loud and public opposition to racism were itself uncivilised behaviour. Some of them have opposed legal rights for Palestine. Others have [allegedly] committed sexual harassment. And yet others do not wish to be challenged on their racism. Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones. So I am not in favour of neutralising the strong political demands for justice on the part of subjugated people. When one has not been heard for decades, the cry for justice is bound to be loud.
AF: This year, you published, The Force of Nonviolence. Does the idea of “radical equality”, which you discuss in the book, have any relevance for the feminist movement?
JB: My point in the recent book is to suggest that we rethink equality in terms of interdependency. We tend to say that one person should be treated the same as another, and we measure whether or not equality has been achieved by comparing individual cases. But what if the individual – and individualism – is part of the problem? It makes a difference to understand ourselves as living in a world in which we are fundamentally dependent on others, on institutions, on the Earth, and to see that this life depends on a sustaining organisation for various forms of life. If no one escapes that interdependency, then we are equal in a different sense. We are equally dependent, that is, equally social and ecological, and that means we cease to understand ourselves only as demarcated individuals. If trans-exclusionary radical feminists understood themselves as sharing a world with trans people, in a common struggle for equality, freedom from violence, and for social recognition, there would be no more trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But feminism would surely survive as a coalitional practice and vision of solidarity.
AF: You have spoken about the backlash against “gender ideology”, and wrote an essay for the New Statesman about it in 2019. Do you see any connection between this and contemporary debates about trans rights?
JB: It is painful to see that Trump’s position that gender should be defined by biological sex, and that the evangelical and right-wing Catholic effort to purge “gender” from education and public policy accords with the trans-exclusionary radical feminists' return to biological essentialism. It is a sad day when some feminists promote the anti-gender ideology position of the most reactionary forces in our society.
AF: What do you think would break this impasse in feminism over trans rights? What would lead to a more constructive debate?
JB: I suppose a debate, were it possible, would have to reconsider the ways in which the medical determination of sex functions in relation to the lived and historical reality of gender.
\Judith Butler goes by she or they*
***
https://www.newstatesman.com/international/2020/09/judith-butler-culture-wars-jk-rowling-and-living-anti-intellectual-times

I apologize if this is a dumb or malformed question. I have always wanted to read queer theory, particularly as it relates to trans issues, and am finally getting around to it. I have been reading some Communist organization debates, the Stanford Encyclopedia or Philosophy entries on Queer theory and feminist attitudes toward Transgenderism, and im planning on reading Gender Trouble by Judith Butler, and some book, not sure which yet, by Leslie Feinberg.
All this is to say, I don't know anything yet but am very interested. I have seen many a YouTube debate wherein a "pro" trans person will cite the inclusion of Gender Dysmorphia in the DSM-IV as a short of proof of legitimacy in the scientific community. I was curious if there had been any similar opposition from LGBT people to removing homosexuality from the DSM-II on the grounds that is inclusion could be cited as a form of legitimacy in the same way that gender dysmorphia is. Also, are there contemporary 'non-terf' writings that argue for the removal of gender dysmorphia (or the decoupling of transgenderism and gender dysmorphia) from the DSM-IV?
Feel free to call my question stupid, but please explain why it is stupid.

Hi everyone. At the request of a reader, this post (made 4/5/2019) has been recovered (on 9/30/2020) from a now thankfully banned debate subreddit. I'm no great fan of my thinking from this period, but it's a healthy biographical marker in that it was the last time I ever tried to commune in good faith with women who hate me for being trans. The main point about queer theory sharing much of its thought with radical feminist theory remains compelling. The comments which were also lost were pretty much all cruel, hostile, and abusive, but if you know what you are doing you can recover them using RedditSearch.
Hello everyone. Effortpost incoming. I do not usually post here but have considered starting.
After reading this post and its comments, it is clear to me that most users on this forum do not know what queer theory is. So this is an introduction to queer theory. I am covering basic concepts: use of language, beliefs about identity, and relationship to radical feminism. I am writing this to clear up what I believe are obvious misconceptions both trans-accepting and trans-denialist people seem to have, and to serve as a masterpost link to others making misstatements about queer theory in the future.
I am a queer feminist. More relevant to this forum, I am transgender. I have read feminist theory and queer theory since I was a teenager. I am a queer advocate and a woman advocate. I say this is to make clear that I am partisan. However, I hope this is well-cited enough that all parties find it helpful. I have tried to speak as simply as possible.

What Is Queer Theory?

In this primer, I will repeatedly stress the following analogy: queer theory is to sex-gender nonconformity as feminist theory is to women. I say "sex-gender nonconformity" to express the full breadth of queer theory, which can range from intersex writers (Iain Moorland, Morgan Holmes), to studies in something as seemingly superficial as drag (The Drag King Book, Judith Butler), to racial intersections (Mia McKenzie, Tourmaline) & Che Gossett) and postcolonial third genders (Qwo-Li Driskill).
Like feminist theory, queer theory is not one thing. It is a collection of diverse approaches to explaining the condition of sex-gender nonconformity in society, and, in the case of radical queers, improving that condition towards the radical end goal of the abolition of all sex-gender norms. Like feminist theory, queer theory is theory. Not all feminism is feminist theory. Not all queer advocacy is queer theory. Queer studies is not queer theory. Queer history is not queer theory. Queer praxis is not queer theory. Being queer is not queer theory.

Queer Theory & Language

Not all people who practice sex-gender nonconformity consider themselves queer. In fact, some consider the word exclusionary or pejorative. This is no more exceptional than the fact that some women do not consider themselves feminists, and consider the word exclusionary or pejorative.
Just as some black women reject feminism as being white (Clenora Hudson-Weems), some black sex-gender nonconformers reject queerness as being white (Cleo Manago). And just as some women reject feminist theory as harmful to society (Esther Vilar), some sex-gender nonconforming people reject queer theory as harmful to society (Sheila Jeffreys).
This problem, in which the purported subjects of a theory actively reject it, and even their positions as subjects within it, is no more destructive for queer advocacy than it is for feminism. The challenge has been answered affirmationally in various ways in both queer theory and feminist theory (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pgs. 115-117; Dworkin, Right Wing Women; Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto; Stone, A Posttranssexual Manifesto).
However, because much more of queer theory takes its subject's status as queer to be uncontroversially entirely socially constructed, and its use of language to be therefore open to social change, queer theorists encounter this problem less often than feminist theorists. We usually acknowledge that, in forcing people to be queer or not queer, we are passively reinforcing the exact forms of oppression we seek to end through our analyses. Leslie Feinberg, who did not use the word queer as a political identity, noted in hir Transgender Liberation (1992):

Transgendered people are demanding the right to choose our own self-definitions. The language used in this pamphlet may quickly become outdated as the gender community coalesces and organizes—a wonderful problem.

Today, Feinberg's "transgender[ed] people" is now most often used apolitically, for what was once called "transgenderists": the demographic of those who live or attempt to live, socially, as a sex-gender outside of that first placed on their birth certificate. "Queer" has come to have most of the solidarity-driven political meaning of Feinberg's "transgender." However, Feinberg's conception of "transgender" is not uncommon today.
Insofar as queer advocacy permits its subjects to change, establishing their own voice, own vocabulary, own concerns, and own dissent, while feminism does not, the two must be antagonistic. Riki Wilchins addresses this tension directly in hir essay "Deconstructing Trans":

Genderqueerness would seem to be a natural avenue for feminism to contest Woman's equation with nurturance, femininity, and reproduction: in short to trouble the project of Man. Yet feminists have been loath to take that avenue, in no small part because queering Woman threatens the very category on which feminism depends.

However, Wilchins is wrong: this tension between feminist theory and queer theory is local to specific versions of queer advocacy and feminism, and is not inherent to either.

Queer Theory & Gender Identity

What the hecky, y'all? Queer theory rejects gender identity politics almost unconditionally. Get it right.
There are very few things queer theorists universally agree on: this is one. In fact, queer theorists reject sexual identity politics almost unconditionally (e.g. Rosemary Hennessy, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism). Queer theorists regularly assert that all identity formation (including identity formation as a man or woman, flat) and even the very concept of selfhood emerge as a regulatory apparatus of power, usually that of The State. These critiques in queer theory are developed out of postmodern critiques of identity and the self. Consider, for example, these quotes from Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus:

To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call my Self (Moi). I is an order-word.
Where psychoanalysis says, "Stop, find your self again," we should say instead, "Let's go further still, we haven't found our BwO yet, we haven't sufficiently dismantled our self." Substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation. Find your body without organs. Find out how to make it.
There is no longer a Self (Moi) that feels, acts, and recalls; there is "a glowing fog, a dark yellow mist" that has affects and experiences movements, speeds.

This denial of self is directly tied to Deleuze's concept of becoming-minority), and is constructed again and again and again in queer theoretic concepts: in anti-sociality, in death drive, in anal sublimation and butch abjection, just over and over and over again. Anyone who does not understand this general concept does not understand a single thing about queer theory, straight up.
Among the transgender population specifically, it is extremely easy to find transgender people rejecting the concept of gender identity as something forced upon us by a cisgender establishment which has all the power. It's easy to find on writing. It's easy to find on video. It's easy to find on reddit. And most of us aren't even queer theorists.
So, what is it queer theorists do, if not snort identity for breakfast? Well, generally, we sort through history, literature, science, language, the social psyche, most especially real-life experience, and whatever else we can ooze our brainjuices over to analyze and undo the structures of our oppression, the very means through which we become "queer." We argue that this oppression and our position as uniquely oppressed subjects within it is socially constructed, unnecessary, and morally outrageous. And, on most analyses, this is what many feminist theorists do with women, as well. Few have even argued that, in a culture that constructs manhood as its norm, there is a sense in which to be a "woman" is also to be "queer."

Queer Theory & Radical Feminism

It has never been clear what radical feminism is. In general, I understand people who call themselves or are called "radical feminists" to be one of the following:

• Socialist feminists, who assert women are a class in some previously understood, usually Marxist sense, who must achieve liberation through techniques espoused in pre-existing theory, e.g. wages for housework.
• Post-Marxist feminists, who assert women are a "sex-class," where "class" is some new, peculiarly feminist sense of the word, who must achieve liberation through some specifically feminist method yet to be decided, outside of Marxist, anarchist, or liberal methodologies. Its origins are often supposed to be Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. Post-Marxist radical feminism is usually considered "true" radical feminism, or even just feminism, proper (MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, pg. 117).
• Cultural feminists, who assert "man" and "woman" compose two competing cultures, and (more importantly) "feminism" as women's culture. Under this view, there can be no end to feminism because women cannot achieve equality, only the dominance of female culture. Men cannot be feminists because feminism is not a political position. Cultural feminists are ambivalent about their positioning on a left or right which are both seen as "male culture." Cultural feminists often call for a return to "the natural order," and approve of "biologism," the belief that one's cultural categorization is and should be derived from biology. Their purpose is to preserve women as feminists rather than achieve the radical goal which is the abolition of all classes. See Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology; Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto; Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. Not all cultural feminists claim to be radical (or cultural); see écriture féminine.

On cultural feminism, radical feminist historian Alice Echols noted in The Taming of the Id (1984):

I believe that what we have come to identify as radical feminism represents such a fundamental departure from its radical feminist roots that it requires renaming.

Brooke Williams's Redstocking's piece The Retreat to Cultural Feminism (1975) begins:

Many women feel that the women’s movement is currently at an impasse. This paper takes the position that this is due to a deradicalizing and distortion of feminism which has resulted in, among other things,"cultural feminism.”

Inasmuch as cultural feminism asserts "man" and "woman" as essential and non-relative social categories in need of preservation, queer theory can have no truck with radical feminism, because radical feminism maintains a cultural institution which is usually seen as a major genesis of queer oppression.
However, insofar as radical feminism is post-Marxist, it is often deeply aligned with queer theory. Queer theory is also usually post-Marxist, as postmodernism was developed partly in response to the failures of Marxism. Queer advocacy often adopts radical feminist methodology, particularly consciousness raising. Many radical feminists effectively advocate queerness, in what Andrea Dworkin calls a "political, ideological, and strategic confrontation with the sex-class system," as a necessary part of feminism. Please consider what radical feminists and queer advocates have historically said about the following topics common to both:

Family Reform:
RadFem: "So paternal right replaces maternal right: transmission of property is from father to son and no longer from woman to her clan. This is the advent of the patriarchal family founded on private property. In such a family woman is oppressed." (De Beauvoir, Second Sex) "Patching up with band-aids the casualties of the aborted feminist revolution, it [Freudianism] succeeded in quieting the immense social unrest and role confusion that followed in the wake of the first attack on the rigid patriarchal family." (Shulamith Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 70).
Queer: "The family has become the locus of retention and resonance of all the social determinations. It falls to the reactionary investment of the capitalist field to apply all the social images to the simulcra of the restricted family, with the result that, wherever one turns, one no longer finds anything but father-mother - this Oedipal filth that sticks to our skin." (Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pg. 269)
Pansexuality:
RadFem: "[Through feminist revolution] A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality - Freud's 'polymorphous perversity' - would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 11)
Queer: "When queerness began to mean little more than 'pansexual activist', Bash Back! became a liberal social scene rather than a space from which to attack, which i think had been the whole point of bashing back all along." (Interview with Not Yr Cister Press, Queer Ultraviolence: Bash Back! Anthology, pg. 385)
Degendered Gestation:
RadFem: "Scientific advances which threaten to further weaken or sever altogether the connection between sex and reproduction have scarcely been realized culturally. That the scientific revolution has had virtually no effect on feminism only illustrates the political nature of the problem: the goals of feminism can never be achieved through evolution, but only through revolution." (Firestone, Dialectic of Sex, pg. 31)
Queer: "The gender of gestating is ambiguous. I am not talking about pregnancy’s deepening of one’s voice, its carpeting of one’s legs in bristly hair, or even about the ancient Greek belief that it was an analogue of men’s duty to die in battle if called upon. I am not even thinking of the heterogeneity of those who gestate. Rather, in a context where political economists are talking constantly of “the feminization of labor,” it seems to me that the economic gendering of the work itself—gestating is work, as Merve Emre says—is not as clear-cut as it would appear." (Sophie Lewis, All Reproduction is Assisted)
Institutional Debinarization:
RadFem: "[A]ll forms of sexual interaction which are directly rooted in the multisexual nature of people must be part of the fabric of human life, accepted into the lexicon of human possibility, integrated into the forms of human community. By redefining human sexuality, or by defining it correctly, we can transform human relation­ship and the institutions which seek to control that rela­tionship. Sex as the power dynamic between men and women, its primary form sadomasochism, is what we know now. Sex as community between humans, our shared humanity, is the world we must build." (Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating, pg. 183)
Queer: "'Boy' and 'girl' do not tell the genital truth that Zippora knows. Quite the opposite: instead of describing her baby’s sex, these words socially enact the sex they name... Intersexuality robs 'boy' and 'girl' of referents, but it is unclear how far this intersexed scenario differs from any other gendered encounter... I suggest the claim that sex is performative must operate constatively in order to be politically effective. One has to say that performativity is the real, scientiŽc truth of sex in order to argue that intersex surgery, which claims to treat sex as a constative, is futile constructivism." (Iain Morland, Is Intersexuality Real?)

I hope these few quotations are enough to demonstrate that queer theory and radical feminist theory are deeply interwoven, and the former is in many ways a continuation of the latter.
I have noticed debate here seems quite one-sided, but I think that I could contribute something to fix what I see as a pretty egregious misrepresentation issue. I know this primer wasn't exactly structured for debate, but I can try to answer any questions below. If you read this all, thanks!

Hi all, I have a course starting soon where we have some required readings, and then we have to choose an additional reading of our own (about 150 pages) that is preferably an original classic text and a secondary interpretation of that text.
Any ideas? I am interested in gender-based violence in low and middle income countries, women's individual asset ownership, relative positions within the household, etc.
​

Although I don't fully agree with Judith Butler I feel like reading some of her works will help me understand her more. So would Gender Trouble be a good book to start with or should I start with something else? The reason it's important to know is that it's quite pricey and I don't want to spend $40 on a book I would need context to understand. Thank you.

Here is the link for the Discord Server called Continental Philosophy to join the Judith Butler's Gender Trouble Reading Group:
https://discord.gg/ykc5SQ4
The reading group will start on Monday (July 20th) 2 PM PDT. We will meet every Monday 2 PM to discuss each chaptesections of the book. We will discuss the prefaces of the book (vii-xxxvi).

Title is probably more inflammatory than my actual point. Basically, I'm finding that as I try to read more philosophy, a lot of the books I find that talk about the topics I'm interested in seem to spend a lot of time in really granular details that mostly rely on a knowledge of other philosophers.
For example, I made a post recently about Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, and I think that's a really good example of what I mean: there's a section of the book where she spends quite a bit of time comparing and contrasting 3 other historical notions of (albeit binary) gender and pointing out where she would agree or disagree with them.
While I understand that this is a good thing for someone to do if they're introducing a novel concept or responding to particular other ideas, my question is: am I doing a Bad Philosophy if I largely skim over those kinds of sections? Just saying "it's okay, I don't want to have an all-encompassing understanding of this thing and its whole history right now, I just want to learn what it is"? Or am I doing a disservice to "learning what it is" by ignoring parts of its arguments?
A more pointed question: am I wrong to develop opinions about these philosophies while also missing sections of their writing? When trying to really engage in something to determine what I think of it, it can be really tempting to say "I shouldn't disagree with this unless I fully understand it."
A quick note: I know I'm using moral/ethical wording here ("is it wrong"), but I'm referring to whether it's good or bad practice, not whether it's morally right or wrong.

Here is the link for the Discord Server called Continental Philosophy to join the Judith Butler's Gender Trouble Reading Group:
https://discord.gg/ykc5SQ4
The reading group will start on Monday (July 20th) 2 PM PDT. We will meet every Monday 2 PM to discuss each chaptesections of the book. We will discuss the prefaces of the book (vii-xxxvi).

Here is the link for the Discord Server called Continental Philosophy to join the Judith Butler's Gender Trouble Reading Group:
https://discord.gg/ykc5SQ4
The reading group will start on Monday (July 20th) 2 PM PDT. We will meet every Monday 2 PM to discuss each chaptesections of the book. We will discuss the prefaces of the book (vii-xxxvi).

The advent of third-wave feminism during the 1990s served as a catalyst for transgender rights, of which several authors and activists were instrumental:
Judith Butler, a lesbian feminist theorist and philosopher, published "Gender Trouble" in 1990, a groundbreaking book on the performative nature of gender that served as the cornerstone to queer theory and is still essential reading in gender studies courses. In her followup book, "Bodies that Matter" she futher expands on her critique of gender and sexuality as reinforced through socialization, serving to perpetuate male domination of women and the intersectional oppression of LGBTQ people.
Holly Boswell, a genderqueer spiritual leader, first proposed the word "transgender" in her 1991 article "The Transgender Alternative", arguing that transgender is a term that "encompasses the whole spectrum" of gender diversity, that lumps together rather than splits apart the many subgroups. She also insisted that sex-reassignment surgery is not a prerequisite to being transgender. Holly designed the transgender symbol in 1993, a composite of Mars and Venus to symbolize gender diversity.
Leslie Feinberg, a butch lesbian, was a chief architect of the modern transgender rights movement. In the spirit of Holly Bowswell, she declared "transgender" to be a broadly inclusive umbrella for drag performers, crossdressers, femmes, butches, and transsexuals in her 1992 manifesto, "Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come". Leslie also coined the initialism "GLBT" for use in advocacy around this time, as organizations and media outlets were using the phrase "gay and lesbian".
Riki Anne Wilchins, a genderqueer civil rights activist and gender theorist, created the first national transgender lobbying group, GenderPAC in 1995. That same year she coined the word "GenderQueer" to describe people that socially or politically subvert the traditional binary concepts of gender, whether in identity or expression. She also conducted the first U.S. survey of anti-transgender bias. And she authored the book "Read My Lips", calling for an end to society's harmful attitudes of gender.
Throughout the 1990s, countless other trailblazers like Monica Helms and Kate Bornstein latched onto the novel term "transgender" as a catchall descriptor for any and all people that "transcended" traditional notions of gender in mainstream society, whether part time or full time, through identity or presentation or surgery.
Of course, we can go further back to spotlight those that laid the groundwork for trans activism:
Lee Brewster, a drag queen and civil rights activist founded the nation's first transgender advocacy organization in 1970, Queens Liberation Front. The organization, which successfully overturned NYC's ban on crossdressing, was represented by Lee Brewster, Bunny Eisenhower (a heterosexual transvestite), Barbarella (a transsexual woman), and Kaye Gibbons (a homosexual crossdresser).
Sylvia Rivera, an agender sex worker and civil rights activist founded the nation's second transgender advocacy organization in 1971, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, and hosted a communal shelter for New York City's homeless street queens. Sylvia regularly fought for equal representation of drag queens, sex workers, butches, and femmes within broader gay and lesbian activism.
Marsha P Johnson, a gay transvestite, drag queen and sex worker, co-founded STAR with Sylvia Rivera in 1971. She chose her drag name to signify the masculine-and-feminine components of her persona with "P" meaning "pay it no mind". While working the streets of NYC, she became known as a drag mother, for her mentoring of other crossdressers and street queens including Sylvia Rivera.
Lou Sullivan, a gay transsexual man and civil rights activist served as a volunteer counselor for gender questioning AFAB people. In 1986 he co-founded the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society and created the first support agency for trans men, FTM. He also published "Information for the FTM transsexual and crossdresser" which became the definitive resource for trans men of the era.

I'm interested in what I've heard of Judith Butler's theory of performativity, but I've tried to read some of the books by her I've seen recommended (namely, Gender Trouble), but I've found it really dense and difficult to understand (I didn't pick up on some of her main points in the first chapter until my third or so read of it). Is there any other writings that talk about her theories (or related theories) which are more accessible?

Judith Butler,addressing criticisms against Gender Trouble,wrote:

Both critics and friends of Gender Trouble have drawn attention to the difficulty of its style. It is no doubt strange, and maddening to some, to find a book that is not easily consumed to be “popular” according to academic standards. The surprise over this is perhaps attributable to the way we underestimate the reading public, its capacity and desire for reading complicated and challenging texts, when the complication is not gratuitous, when the challenge is in the service of calling taken-for-granted truths into question, when the taken for grantedness of those truths is, indeed, oppressive.
I think that style is a complicated terrain, and not one that we uni- laterally choose or control with the purposes we consciously intend. Fredric Jameson made this clear in his early book on Sartre. Certainly, one can practice styles, but the styles that become available to you are not entirely a matter of choice. Moreover, neither grammar nor style are politically neutral. Learning the rules that govern intelligible speech is an inculcation into normalized language, where the price of not conforming is the loss of intelligibility itself. As Drucilla Cornell, in the tradition of Adorno, reminds me: there is nothing radical about common sense. It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammar or that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of propositional sense are clearly irritating for some. They produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for “plain speaking” or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of intellectual life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty? If gender itself is naturalized through grammatical norms, as Monique Wittig has argued, then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part, through contesting the grammar in which gender is given.

Are there any other theorists that further explore the relationship between language/grammar and radicalism or power?