It’s been 35 years since the publication of Judith Butler’s book Gender Trouble, which argued that gender is performative (that is, it’s “real only to the extent that it’s performed”). Recently, the queer feminist theorist discussed the book’s enduring impact, as well as the role of gender in this year’s elections in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País, which had previously named them one of the most influential minds in the world.

And they had harsh words for people on the left thinking about abandoning trans people in hopes of future electoral success.

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Butler laid out their stance on several issues, including access to gender-affirming care for trans youth. “Not providing support to gender non-conforming youth strikes me as an act of cruelty,” they said. “I don’t think every time a kid says, oh, I want hormones, you rush to the doctor. But you also don’t refuse the idea.”

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“Womanhood won’t be erased just because we open the category and invite some more people in,” they added.

They talked about a straight, cis father they met in Chile who said he doesn’t want to live next door to a gay family because his “way of life is the way that God has mandated, and it is the only correct and moral one.”

“His fear was that if there were different kinds of legitimate families, then his form would become less natural and less necessary,” Butler recounted.

Butler had thoughts on this year’s elections. They said they don’t believe the reason Donald Trump won was because of trans equality, instead pinning the blame on how Trump was able to speak to people’s “anxiety” on a variety of issues, including “the economy, war, climate catastrophe” and then use those issues to “scapegoat minorities.”

Part of Trump’s success came with constructing an image of Kamala Harris as the source of these problems because she’s “the woke, the Marxist, the feminist, Black and brown, who presumably supports trans surgery (terrifying) on migrants who flooded over the border (also terrifying),” Butler said.

“On the left, we don’t know how to appeal to people’s deep passions. We think we’re very smart and very critical. But where’s the radical imaginary by which people will be passionately absorbed?” they asked.

“People want to go back to the idea of being a white country or the idea of the patriarchal family, the principle that marriages are for heterosexuals,” they continued. “I call it a nostalgic fury for an impossible past.”

“As a consequence of that, they’re furiously turning against some of the most vulnerable people in this country, stripping of them of rights as they fear that the same will be done to them.”

When asked about people on the left – including some Democrats – who are calling for an abandonment of trans rights, Butler said that that logic is steeped in fascism.

“You could say that about the Jews, Black people or Haitians, or any very vulnerable minority. Once you decide that a single vulnerable minority can be sacrificed, you’re operating within a fascist logic, because that means there might be a second one you’re willing to sacrifice, and a third, a fourth, and then what happens?”

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