Dominion Over All Things

But what about the tits?

These?

No Sex Please, We’re British

I recently stumbled over this article in El País: Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2024-12-15/judith-butler-philosopher-if-you-sacrifice-a-minority-like-trans-people-you-are-operating-within-a-fascist-logic.html?

(When I tried to embed the link, all it did was put the title in something like 36pt bold. Weird.)

Judith Butler, 68, isn’t particularly “interested in lists,” even when they top them. “I am in illustrious male company,” they remark upon hearing the names of Thomas Piketty, Noam Chomsky, and Jürgen Habermas — the next most influential thinkers, according to experts questioned by EL PAÍS. “Does that make me a man?” they quip.

Butler — a pioneering voice in feminism, gender studies, critical theory, and contemporary philosophy — registered as non-binary in California years ago. While their pronouns changed to they/them, they chose to keep their name, a decision, they say, surprised the courthouse clerk at the time.

Butler has been teaching and researching at Berkeley since the 1990s, where they live with their partner, the political scientist Wendy Brown. Butler met us at the university clock tower on a stormy day in San Francisco Bay. They spoke of the enduring impact of their most famous book, Gender Trouble — especially on young people — as well as the seismic reaction those theories provoked in society, politics, and even pop culture, a shockwave explored in their latest book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? (2024).

Aside from rendering the entire passage nearly impossible to parse, Butler can’t even keep her grammar straight (I hope I didn’t just micro-aggress them):

“Does that make me a man?” they quip.

What the pretentious influential thinker meant to say was “Does that make us a men?”

Of course, all these problems go away if Butler was to change her pronoun to “it”.

Why is that option never chosen?