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Judith Butler has, since the publication in 1994 of the book Gender Troubles, been one of the most cited intellectual sources of the ferment around ‘trans’, and in debates concerning sexuality and gender more widely. That book established Butler as a leading figure in ‘queer studies’, whose theory of gender as ‘performative’, not an essence, has become a major reference point in academic debate. This latest book is not easy reading in parts. Butler the philosopher sometimes makes use of extended logical sequences (a entails b, and in turn c must follow from that…) to make a point. This measured and abstract style, while heavy going at times, differs from the clamour of much public discourse in the area of ‘gender’—in the peculiar sense, attached by Butler to the single word, of politics around gender issues. ‘Gender’ is the broad collection of issues and demands which along with race and decolonisation are at the centre of today's culture wars: the agendas of lesbian, gay and queer activisms, anti-heteronormativity, different family structures, access to abortion and reproductive technologies, and the rights of ‘trans’ and other emergent sexual minorities.
But despite its often scholarly manner, this is an intemperate and divisive book. Its apparent cogency is overshadowed by its assertions of how dark forces of fascistic totalitarianism have created globally an image of gender politics as a destructive threat, which they then use to spread fear and to incite support for their own life-destroying ends. Obviously hateful attacks on people associated in different ways with different ‘gender’ issues do occur and vary in different contexts in their motives (conscious and unconscious) and consequences. However, book's aim appears to be to roll up all forms of opposition to what Butler sees as a unified ‘slate’ of positions on the different issues and to represent all those forms, whether hatefully violent or peacefully civil, as different facets of the same repressive for