April 23, 2025 • 46 mins
Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood provides an entirely new philosophical approach to trans experience, trans oppression, gender dysphoria, and the relationship between gender and identity. Arguing that the tense relation between trans oppression and resistance is mediated through the complex social phenomenon of gender make-believe, Bettcher introduces the groundbreaking theory of interpersonal spatiality, which requires rejection of the philosophical concepts of person, self, and subject. Here, Bettcher is joined in conversation with Judith Butler.
Talia Mae Bettcher is professor of philosophy at California State University, Los Angeles, and author of Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy and coeditor of Trans Philosophy.
Judith Butler is Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are author of several books including Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity and, most recently, Who’s Afraid of Gender?
Praise for the book:
"It's a beautiful book. Challenging, crucial, indispensable to our times."
—Judith Butler (in this episode)
"Profound and provocative . . . broadly relevant to many disciplines and social movements."
—Susan Stryker, Clayman Institute for Gender Research, Stanford University
Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy is available from University of Minnesota Press.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Judith Butler (00:06):
Resistance becomes part of appearing
publicly.
Talia Mae Bettcher (00:11):
And claiming reality in the face of its
denial.
Hi there, my name is Talia MaeBettcher and I am the author of
An Essay in Trans Philosophy.And I'm delighted to be joined
today by my guests, We'll nowintroduce themselves.
Judith Butler (00:32):
I'm Judith Butler, and I suppose I'm most
recently the author of Who'sAfraid of Gender? I'm just
really pleased to be here andwould like to start with a set
of questions, if that's okaywith you, Talia.
Talia Mae Bettcher (00:47):
It sounds wonderful, Judith.
Judith Butler (00:49):
Okay. So this is a brilliant book. It's both
difficult and clear, and I wouldsay complex and vital, all of
these at the same time. In theintroduction to the book, you
make clear that this is not aphilosophical approach to so
called trans issues. Right?
So trans is not the subject.Philosophy is not the approach.
(01:12):
You say rather it's a part oftransphilosophy and as such an
act of resistance. So thewriting of the book, the book
itself, the language in the bookis all part of resistance.
Indeed, you go further and saythat you're not about to unfold
an abstract philosophical visionor system to become part of the
(01:33):
grand conversation ofphilosophy.
You say that those grand andabstract projects of philosophy
are in fact a form of violence.And you take a stand against
that violence, and in doing soyou offer a different kind of
approach. My first question is,is this a nonviolent book? Is
this a book that is nonviolentin its approach or in its
(01:53):
subject matter or in itseffects? You maintain as well,
at other points throughout, infact, that some ideas of
selfhood and personhood that welive with and that are part of
our everyday discourse andphilosophical discourse are
actually abusive.
And I thought, wow, a strongword, abusive. And I was
wondering whether that claim,the ordinary language term that
(02:16):
people use, is abusive, would besurprising to some readers. I
was actually intrigued andprepared to agree, but I want to
ask if you would lay out for usin what sense these notions can
be regarded as abusive. So one,is this nonviolent? Two, in what
way are our ordinary ideas ofpersonhood and selfhood, or
(02:40):
maybe our philosophical ideasabusive?
And then three, you have yourown notion of interpersonal
spatiality. And it's a verygenerative notion, and I like
the way it repeats throughoutthe book because I got to come
back to it several times, atwhich point it has a different
dimension. Does interpersonalspatiality seek to counter this
(03:01):
violence and this abuse?
Talia Mae Bettcher (03:03):
Wow, okay. So thank you, Judith. We're
starting off big. There's a lotthere. So first, I hope that
this book is nonviolent.
That is certainly the intention.That said, there's always
unintended consequences and onecan't know in advance what
impact it's gonna have. And Ijust simply have to say that I
(03:24):
am located with my ownlimitations. And so I want to
come in humbly and note that Icould very well have performed
acts of violenceunintentionally. If I have done
so, I would hope that they arepointed out to me and I will
very swiftly apologize for themas I should, but the intention
is not to have done so.
So the kind of violence that Iwas originally thinking of sort
(03:49):
of just comes from my ownexperience. When non trans
philosophers began to take upthe issue, suddenly trans issues
became interesting to non transphilosophers when it had been
completely ignored for decades.And to them, suddenly it became
interesting in a way in whichthe question whether or not
(04:10):
tables existed had beeninteresting for years. Do tables
exist or are there just a bunchof particles? And for these
philosophers invariably thequestion was always the
following, are trans womenwomen?
That was the question So for me,there was this failure to
(04:31):
methodologically distinguishbetween the two sorts of
questions so that asking thequestion, are trans women women,
was the same sort of question asasking whether or not tables
exist. Whereas it seems to methat they're different sorts of
questions, in part because transpeople aren't tables, right?
Correct. There's a bigdifference between tables and
(04:55):
trans folk. And also a large, insome sense the book explorers,
what's the difference betweentrans folk and tables to put it
simply?
And I think that there's a kindof violence in treating a group
of folks like trans folk, anygroup like women, queer folk,
folks of color, any group andsort of then asking questions as
(05:19):
if it were just sort of anyordinary sort of philosophical
question of the day withoutthinking of asking any sorts of
like, could this raise ethicalquestions that are perhaps
different in character fromrank. So when I talk about the
grand conversation and the sortof violence that it inflicts, it
(05:40):
was sort of with that in mind.Although I was also thinking
about the long history of modernphilosophy and the role that
it's played in colonialism. SoI'm thinking of that European
history. That's where we reallyget into the concepts of person,
self and subject.
(06:02):
I would not say that theconcepts are abusive. I would
say this technically that theassumptions that sustain their
deployment, make it make senseto use those concepts, that for
them to be fitting and tocirculate around philosophical
problems and discourses, thatthose assumptions are the
(06:24):
abusive assumptions. Sort of theidea being that philosophical
concepts have a history. Theydon't just sort of exist all the
time. Certainly we have conceptsthat come from individual
philosophers like Kant gives usa synthetic a priori and there
are other concepts that become alittle bit communal.
(06:47):
I mean, do think that John Lockegives us the concepts person and
self as we know them, butthey've come a little bit more
communal.
Judith Butler (06:55):
But
Talia Mae Bettcher (06:56):
then the question becomes what are the
underlying assumptions thatsustain them? And so this book
is critical of thoseassumptions. Now to bring out
those assumptions, I think veryquickly is difficult but I will
try. So I think that one of thethings that you see with Locke
in his break from Aristotle isthis idea of moral status and
(07:18):
moral status deriving fromconsciousness and moral status
being separated from speciesmembership and morphology,
whereas in Aristotle, there'smuch more of a weddedness to
species membership and alsomorphology. Although I even
think that moral status is notthe way to put it in Aristotle.
(07:38):
And this leads to all sorts ofproblems that we've been dealing
with ever since. Ableism is oneof the most obvious ones. The
typical way of doing it is toset sort of the bar very high.
You need a very robust kind ofconsciousness in order to
qualify as a person. And beforetoo long, you end up with Peter
Singer's view that it's okay toeuthanize cognitively.
(08:01):
So that I think is like I thinkfairly intuitive right away. And
I think that the other one is abit more complicated but it gets
to the core of interpersonalspatiality theory which does not
privilege consciousness butrather it privileges boundaries
and the boundaries between us,which ends up not privileging an
individual, but ratherrelations, right?
Judith Butler (08:22):
Yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher (08:23):
And the violations and traversing and so
on and so forth. But this sortof this fundamental idea and
this is just to sort of simplifysort of this Kantian idea, we
ought not treat each other asmere objects but subjects and so
it's bad to be a mere object.There's this thought that
objects are just objects,there's one kind of object,
(08:45):
they're fungible.
Judith Butler (08:46):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (08:46):
Right, then there's subjects. But in my
view, there's different kinds ofobjects and one kind is an
object that has boundaries, aninterpersonal object. And then
there are objects like tablesthat don't have boundaries. And
the mistake is to treat them asfungible. So for example, trans
(09:07):
people have boundaries, tablesdo not have boundaries.
And it's the confusion of thatthat gets things going. And it's
because you've violated thatfirst that you actually prevent
those beings with boundariesfrom say speaking.
Judith Butler (09:24):
Well, it seems to me that you've suggested here in
this book that what we mightunderstand as a certain human
aspect of embodiment, andcorrect me if I'm wrong, I don't
want to be speciesist about it,it seems to me that you are
interested in what you call themorally saturated appearances
(09:46):
for others. Understanding selvesas appearing for others, we
might say a kind of object inthe sense that it's that we are
phenomena, we appear in theworld, and we don't just appear
randomly, we're saturated withall kinds of problems of
morality, I guess I would say. Ithink your language might be
(10:06):
different. But we're alsoappearing for others, and in
that sense relational. We don'tjust appear as such, we appear
for others.
And that suggests that the waytrans people, but people more
broadly, if we can even speakthat way, I'm not sure if we
want to, but that there'snothing beyond appearances. And
(10:26):
that appearances have beenunderestimated. Appearances are
super important. The self is, Ithink for you and correct me if
I'm wrong fully phenomenal, andit lacks what some might call
interiority. I'm not sure howyou account for interiority.
It also, as an appearance, doesnot mask something that would be
(10:47):
called its reality, that somehowhovers behind it, or that is
posited as a goal that is beyondit. I wonder, in this
interpersonal spatiality whereselves are appearing for others,
saturated with problems of moralstatus that you have outlined,
the radically unequal andpossibly violent distribution of
(11:10):
moral status, How do youapproach this question of
interiority within the theory ofinterpersonal spatiality?
Talia Mae Bettcher (11:19):
That's like, wow, I'm really glad that you
raised that question. So I wantto go through it slowly. I think
you're right. So first of all, Iwould not use the term self
because of its association withreflexivity and therefore a
sense of the individual, I thinksort of automatically makes a
(11:41):
relationality sort of asecondary thing that we need to
build on.
Judith Butler (11:45):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (11:46):
And a connection automatically to like
self consciousness. So I useinterpersonal object. It's not
one that blows off the tongue,but there we have it. An
interpersonal object. And Ithink that in this system that
we exist in now, I would speakof, for example, the physical
person which is something thatwe speak of as in someone's
(12:06):
physical person was searched.
And so we think of differentappearances like the clothed
appearance and the nakedappearance, both of which are
cultural possibilities and Icall this proper and intimate
and they both have to do withboundaries. And so I do think
that those appearances areprimary that we need to think
(12:28):
about those social possibilitiesbefore we start to think about
our own experiences, our ownawareness of self.
Judith Butler (12:38):
Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (12:39):
And I do think there's a sense in which
appearances end up being veryimportant.
Judith Butler (12:44):
Yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher (12:44):
There's a sense and I think this is like
true to just trans experience.If you think about sometimes
ways in which like trans womenare housed in jails or prisons,
they may lose access to forinstance, their wigs, where a
wig is treated as something thatis inconsequential or
unimportant, a mere appearance,but it is hugely important as
(13:05):
sort of a technological deviceof, I'll use the word dignity
now, like, I have other wordsfor it, but I mean, it's
extremely important to one'sphysical person. Yes. And so
these things are important.Clothing is extremely important.
Just try walking around withoutit on the street one day and see
what happens. These things arecrucial. Now a couple of
(13:29):
qualifications. This is not todeny that there is such a thing
as experience and self awarenessonly that I would say that it
rides atop the social mechanismsthat make that possible and that
they're shaped by those socialmechanisms. But I would also,
and here's I think an importantqualification.
(13:49):
I would not say that they'reexhausted by the social
mechanisms in the followingsense because, and this is where
I follow Lugones a little bit. Ido allow for the possibility of
liminality. So for Lugones, ifyou exist in between two
different social structures,there's the possibility of
creative interplay.
Judith Butler (14:09):
Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (14:10):
If you exist, right? So if you think
about existing between twolanguages, right? And so
certainly there's that way youcan allow for a kind of like
perhaps agency or creativitywithout appealing to something
transcendental. And I wouldallow for the same thing with
apparitional liminality to talkabout my book. So I would allow
(14:31):
for that as well.
And I also don't think thatthere's any harm in allowing for
what we might call the body as akind of causal source that is
playing its role in facilitatingtendencies and experiences and
so on and so forth in the waythat for example, one reacts to
various different things. Itjust seems to me undeniable that
(14:51):
one is gonna need to appeal tothat as some sort of causal
mechanism. If we're looking atthis from a sociomoral point of
view, we need to start with sortof the social conditions that
sort of make it possible for oneto appear in the world as a
social agent.
Judith Butler (15:06):
Yes. I love that part of this work. It is
critical in the sense you don'ttake certain concepts of
personhood for granted,obviously, but you alsoyou
expose the fact that thoseconcepts actually deflect from
the conditions in which it'spossible to appear in the world.
Talia Mae Bettcher (15:27):
Yes. Yes. And
Judith Butler (15:28):
you take us you take us back to a much more
fundamental level, and you makeus ask that question, which I
think is amazing. But also goingback to the Lugones and the way
that she had, of course, an ideaof play, world traveling, and I
remember her actually speakingabout this when she was younger.
Not the work on colonialism orthe coloniality of gender, but
(15:50):
world traveling and things likethat. You talk about the fact
that trans people areapparitionals. They're like
apparitions.
Most people would say, no, no,they're not apparitions. They're
real. And we have to argue forthe reality of trans people
against those who would debunktheir reality. And of course we
do, but then the question is howbest to do that. And what you're
(16:11):
suggesting, because you are notabout to agree with those who
would in any way devalue translife, and you're giving us new
ways to value it, which I reallyappreciate.
You're saying no, trans peoplebelong to the realm of
appearances, or rather whereyou'll find them is in the
(16:31):
interstices between appearanceand reality, right? So this in
betweenness that you weretalking about in relation to
Lugones is also here with you.And I think it's an extremely
interesting concept because itmakes us wonder, well, in my
terms, I would say, well, how isreality constituted and how is
(16:52):
appearance constituted such thattrans people fall between the
two? What does that mean aboutthe history of that
constitution? You go a bitfurther than I do, and or maybe
in a different register, youtalk about reality enforcement.
Like what we're calling realityis enforced as reality, and
there are mechanisms by whichthat happens. So those who are
(17:13):
outside or even against realityenforcement are, of course,
apparitions according to theterms of reality, but they
belong to the sphere ofappearance and they're
struggling to appear. I mean, ina way, when you say that, for
instance, self recognition as atrans person takes place in
(17:35):
relation to forms of transoppression. In other words, that
recognition, the selfrecognition, is a form of
resistance. It's a relationshipof resistance to this enforced
reality.
And against that enforcedreality, trans people erecttell
me if I'm wrong inrecapitulating your argument
this way trans people erect adistinction between reality and
(17:58):
make believe. They findthemselves between appearance
and reality, and they alsodisrupt that very distinction
between appearance and realitythat trans oppressive systems
have imposed upon them and whichrely upon for their own
reproduction. I don't know ifthat sounds to you like your
position or whether I'veinflected it in a Butlerian way
(18:19):
that's unacceptable.
Talia Mae Bettcher (18:21):
You might have reflected the last part in
a Butlerian way. So let me backup a little bit and I want to
make a few qualifications, youknow, and then I want to sort of
try to explain some of theseconcepts for the folks who are
listening. So I want to be clearfirst of all that I distinguish
between theories that we need totell people when we're sort of
(18:44):
like fighting against those whowould destroy us and theories
that we might need to tellourselves if we're really trying
to find out what's going on.This essay is really about the
latter and it's a reallydifficult thing to do
particularly in these times.When I say that this is a work
of resistance, it's about, Ilike to say that we trans folk
(19:06):
or any folk who are likeoppressed, we have these
questions like what the fuck isgoing on?
And it raises questions that arephilosophical in nature where we
try to explain what's happening.And when you try to explain
what's happening, sometimes ifyou explain it in a way in which
the folks on top, they might notwanna hear it that way, you can
(19:26):
get yourself into some trouble.So this is definitely about
trying to make sense of this forlike trans folks and our
friends. And I also wanna beclear that this is when I talk
about trans folks asAboriginals, I'm not talking
about all trans folks. I'm onlytalking about some trans folks.
I wanna make sure that I don'tmake universal claims.
Judith Butler (19:45):
Okay.
Talia Mae Bettcher (19:46):
I'm suspicious as I know you are,
although maybe for differentreasons about sort of leading
with categories or like sort ofidentities.
Judith Butler (19:55):
Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (19:56):
For me, I sort of start with structures of
violence. And so the leadingthing that I'm focusing on in
this essay is a particular form,a particular structure of
violence that I think affectsmany trans people that I call
reality enforcement. It's notjust a structure that involves
misgendering trans people, butit is one in which that
(20:19):
misgendering gets framed interms of an appearance reality
contrast. So that it's not, Oh,a man, it's Talia's really a man
disguised as a woman. So how dowe explain that contrast?
And that contrast sets up adouble bind between on the one
(20:41):
hand being viewed as deceptive,right?
Judith Butler (20:44):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (20:45):
Or merely pretending. Yeah. In previous
work, what I did was I arguedfor like how what founds that
appearance reality contrast thatsets up that bind. And it was
this idea that public genderpresentation in the leading
system communicates genitalstatus. Right.
(21:08):
So that right, trans people aretaking to misalign Right, so,
and this is really interesting.And then this really connects to
what's going on now in terms oflike restoring biological truth
to the federal government,right? What biological truth?
Well, when people want toestablish the truth about trans
people, they reach between theirlegs and they grab them or they
(21:28):
pulled on their pants, right?And I know like trigger warning.
But what you notice is thatthere's a boundary violation.
This is where I began to likefocus on boundaries precisely
here. But what you realize isthat the reality here is
genitalia. And even if you makethe move to gametes or
chromosomes or what have you, inmy view, ultimately has to do
with this, it has to do with theboundaries. And so most of the
(21:52):
book is about theorizing this,this kind of reality
enforcement.
And so in the book it becomessomething more. When we think
about genitalia, they're notjust genitalia, they're
moralized genitalia, thegenitalia with boundaries, their
private parts. Then we start tothink about nakedness a moral
(22:12):
cultural phenomenon. And we endup now with what I would call
proper and intimate appearance.And so more elaborately in the
book now we get instead of apublic gender presentation
communicating a genital status,we now have proper appearance
communicating intimateappearance where these are
(22:32):
differentiated in terms of whatI would say sex differentiated
boundaries or morallydifferentiated boundaries.
And so this is a very, very sortof specific analysis of a kind
of like structural violence towhich trans people are subject,
a kind of reality enforcement.And that's sort of like key to
(22:54):
the essay. And one of the thingsthat I'm doing is focusing more
on make believe and ways inwhich trans people get stuck in
make believe and in which nontrans people play along with us,
right? They play along with usbut you know that the playing
along ends at some point whenissues of intimacy come up. Like
if sex comes up, people don'twanna have sex with the wrong
(23:17):
sex.
They wanna have sexual relationswith like really a man or in
terms of sex segregation, oh,really? Is really a man gonna be
like in this changing room? Orwe're gonna put really men in
terms of like, you know, thisprison housing situation.
Judith Butler (23:31):
And there it is. There it is.
Talia Mae Bettcher (23:32):
Right? The make believe ends. And so here
is a structural form of makebelieve. Here's how trans people
constructed as make believers.But what it really is, how does
that really operate is that weare foreclosed from we can play
along in certain socialcircumstances, but when it comes
to a certain intimate space,we're foreclosed from that.
Judith Butler (23:54):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (23:55):
Right? So how is make believe constructed
here? It's from a certainforeclosure from an intimate
realm.
Judith Butler (24:01):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (24:01):
It's intimate foreclosure. What it is
to be constructed as makebelieve. In part, there's also
an interesting inversion inwhich trans women are trapped in
intimate spaces, dirty littlesecrets, but that's a different
kind of thing.
Judith Butler (24:16):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (24:16):
And then what I wanted to say is that in
the phenomenon wheretransphoria, not all trans
people but many of us experiencethis sort of sense of self
recognition prior to transitionwhere we see ourselves in what
is ostensibly what would berecognized as a kind of make
believe in the dominant world,but it's something more because
(24:39):
we experience this as us and welook and we say, that's my
proper appearance. And we havethese feelings of like dignity
and self collection. And what Iargue in the book is this is not
a structural form of makebelieve. This is actually a
liminal state. Yes.
It breaks free from Right.Constraints of the system. So
(25:00):
now you have this tensionbetween a resistance state, a
self recognition and thestructural forces of make
believe. And what it ultimatelyis about is relationality
connection in ways that are lifemaking versus life destroying
for trans people.
Judith Butler (25:20):
And would you say, that kind of takes us back
to the question of inbetweenness, and I'm just
wondering whether you would saythat that can be a zone of
creativity or even freedom.Would you use that word?
Talia Mae Bettcher (25:31):
Yes. Here's what I was trying to do. I think
a lot of the times inbetweenness is different. So for
me, a lot of the in betweennessis in betweenness between
subcultural, like trans worlds,like local trans worlds.
Judith Butler (25:44):
Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (25:44):
Los Angeles, and then sort of more dominant
ones. And if that's sort of moreof a Ligonian. We're coming up
actually on the anniversary ofthe death of a friend of mine.
She died when she was very youngand at her funeral, it was very
strange. There was her extendedfamily and trans community and
it was a Catholic funeral andthe priest kept dead naming her
(26:09):
and referring to her as a And wewere like in two different
worlds.
And then the aunt spoke out andsaid, she's not a son, she's a
daughter. But here was anexperience of being in between
two worlds. And she was speakingout, we couldn't speak, there
was like a barrier, we couldn'tspeak, but she was speaking out
(26:30):
across worlds. Right? Andthere's this sense of being like
relegated to pretense, but therecan be sometimes creativity and
playfulness, even though therewasn't necessarily in this case.
Judith Butler (26:41):
Right, yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (26:43):
But the kind of apparitionality that I'm sort
of talking about in the case ofself recognition is even prior
to that. It's like prior to whenyou land in a subculture. Right.
Because you could have landedmaybe in a different subculture.
Judith Butler (26:57):
No, it's the condition of appearance. It's
back to the conditions of
Talia Mae Bettcher (27:01):
It's back to the condition of the appearance.
And it's sort of advocating thatbecause I think that now we need
to even be more open for thepossibility of coalitions to not
be wedded to necessarily ourhomes or to be able to like call
into question particularassumptions that we've made, to
be able to step back and beready for becoming even broader
(27:22):
in terms of how we're thinkingof things.
Judith Butler (27:25):
Let me ask you this. I think we should probably
turn to the political situationthat is not only seeking to
eliminate basic rights, accessto healthcare, to legal status
for trans people, buteffectively eliminating their
existence as such, right? It'san attack on the existence of
(27:46):
trans people. It's funny becauseyou're absolutely right to
criticize my early work forfocusing on imitation, since I
think at that point I myself wasvery sensitive to having the
reality of a certain butch topworld called into question:
(28:06):
you're not really men, you'renot really a top, you're not,
you know, all of this. I got itfrom lesbian communities and I
got it from straightcommunities.
I think I was more in the gendernon conforming butch world than
I knew, and many people haveawakened me from that particular
slumber, which is good. I thinkthe charge against trans people
(28:28):
in particular, or the charges inthe plural, include being
disguised or practicingdeception, as you point out, or
engaging in a kind offraudulence. And I think that
your idea of intimacy andspatiality is especially
important now. In The UK, forinstance, the trans exclusionary
(28:50):
feminists say again and againthat trans women not only engage
in fraudulence, but they do soin order to do harm to so called
real women, that is to haveaccess to women's spaces, so
there we have the foreclosurethat you were talking about, and
to do harm to women in thosespaces. And the spaces can be
(29:13):
bathrooms, they can be prisons,they can be clubs, less often
but sometimes, especially spas,God forbid.
But they are places where acertain kind of bodily nearness
happens, not even necessarilycontact. And I've always been
(29:33):
amazed that not only do theyclaim that trans exclusionary
people, that trans women are indisguise, but that they are
disguising themselves on purposein order to commit sexual
violence or to do physical harmof some kind. So they attribute
to trans women the absolutelyworst version of masculinity
(29:54):
that we know, right? Somehowthey embody masculine violence
in a way that ordinary mendon't. I wonder what your read
is on that, if you have one.
Talia Mae Bettcher (30:05):
No, I do. And I think that it's actually
really important. Although I dowant to say one thing about the
imitation stuff. While I'm kindof critical of it, I do want to
say I also think that I'm kindof praising it a little cause I
see that what you do there is animportant moment and there's a
moment of intimacy orvulnerability where you share
your own concern at the timeabout being sort of put down as
(30:27):
an invitation. And it'sprecisely that that allows you
to flip things on its head.
So I think it's an importantmove that allows you to see
things differently. It allowsyou to see things as, wait a
minute, maybe she's not makingfun of women. Maybe she's making
fun of heterosexuality. MaybeI'm not just the only one who's
an imitation.
Judith Butler (30:45):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (30:45):
So it's all sort of Stalt shift.
Judith Butler (30:48):
Yes, that's true.
Talia Mae Bettcher (30:49):
I think that theories are important and they
do important work and they shedimportant light. So it's not
about we're beating up on thetheory, but it's more like, I
just think one of the thingsthat trans studies has lacked is
a distinctive trans theory or aset of trans theories that
illuminates trans oppression andwhy, for example, even a trans
person who wants to be likenormative and pass could be
(31:14):
engaging in resistance. I thinkthat that hasn't been really
clearly articulated. And I thinkthat what I'm trying to do at
least offers, for the better orthe worse, offers one way to do
that.
Judith Butler (31:26):
I see that. Resistance becomes part of
existing publicly, appearing,appearing publicly.
Talia Mae Bettcher (31:33):
And claiming reality in the face of its
denial.
Judith Butler (31:36):
And claiming reality, yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher (31:38):
I think that this charge of being a rapist, I
mean, it goes all the way backto the 'seventy '3 lesbian
conference with Robin Morgancharging Beth Elliott of being a
rapist. But you know, it's notjust this whole sort of rapist
allegation when it comes to sexsegregation, there's another
side of it. Like when transwomen and also trans men in
(31:59):
sexual relations, when later onthey're found out or the person
with whom they were having sexwith decides to sell them down
the river, that sort of allegedfraud is also equated with rape.
So also having sex with a personwhile trans, that kind of so
called deception can berepresented as rape. So there's
(32:21):
sort of the two sides of it,both when it comes to sex
segregation and also when itcomes to having sex with
somebody.
I think that it's reallyimportant when it comes to these
sex segregated spaces. And Ithink that for me, has a lot to
do with how nakedness ismythologized. And I talk a lot
about it in the book. I'm notgonna go into a lot of details
right now, but like I will say,there's this sort of sense of
(32:44):
like, well, why do women coverthemselves in the sight of a
man? Because their bodies aregonna incite rape.
Because they're getting allworked up and they're gonna
write, why do we have And you'lleven hear this in the so called
gender critical arguments forsex segregation and for why
trans women shouldn't be there,this kind of thing. We have
(33:04):
these sex segregated spacesbecause in these intimate
spaces, if you have men there,they're gonna get all worked up
and this is gonna be just thekindness place where it's gonna
get all rapey. Now what'sinteresting is they disregard
the sort of the most interestingstudies. There was a study in
2019 in Massachusetts that showsthat these bathrooms and these
(33:26):
intimate spaces are like theleast likely places where you're
gonna get any kind of suchviolence and stuff like that.
And they showed that then therewas a change in like trans
inclusive policies.
There was no meaningful changein any kind of like reports of
privacy violations or sexualassault or any kind of violence.
They disregard all of theempirical data but they're
(33:49):
playing into the mythology offemale nakedness and what
justifies female nakedness andwhat justifies female
clothedness and sex segregation.And you might argue that it's
actually playing into the sexiststructures that it allegedly
contests, right?
Judith Butler (34:07):
I think it does, for sure. Talia, in this book
you take issue at a certainpoint with what you call the
incongruence account of transexistence, the idea that one is
born into the wrong body, orthat there's some something
that's not right. Who the personis internally is not being
(34:27):
expressed in their appearance,and that something has to be
corrected. And my sense is thatyou saw these kinds of accounts
as kind of buying into apathological approach and
possibly also engaging incertain conversion narratives.
Then I realized who I truly amand, sought to correct this this
(34:48):
terrible, mistake.
And I am wondering what youcontrast to that. I mean, I know
from the book, but it might beinteresting for readers to
understand why it is you have aproblem with that and what
you're trying to do in askingpeople to look at trans life in
a different way.
Talia Mae Bettcher (35:07):
I think that one of the problems with the
incongruence account, and notall forms of the incongruence
account sort of subscribe totraditional versions of the
wrong body. There can be moreliberal versions of it, but it
just doesn't seem to getcomplexity of trans experiences
right as far as I can tell. Howso? Well, it sort of tells this
(35:28):
before and after picture. Beforethere's an incongruence and I'm
sad and then I transition.
And then as you can imagine,there's like a TV show, like the
before and the after, with thetwo different pictures. And now
I'm happy and everything's greatat the end and roll the credits.
There have been other transtheorists who have written on
this recently, Andrea Long Chu,Hail Malatino, Cam Awkward Rich,
(35:53):
that's just not how trans lifeoperates. Even after transition,
life is not a picnic. And it'snot just because life is hard
for trans people, you stillstruggle with issues around
dysphoria.
It doesn't go away. Your lifegets better, but you still, for
complicated reasons. And thenfor me, it also got things
(36:13):
backwards because there wereways in which, as I say, like
there's this like possibility ofa kind of positive self
recognition prior to transition,which seemed to just make a
mockery of the whole before andafter picture. And furthermore,
it seemed to me that there wasthis kind of good, bad,
positive, negative feelings thatwere very overly simplistic and
(36:36):
I dropped dysphoria and euphoriaand just gone with phoria.
Knowing full well that phoria issupposed to come from Greek
meaning carrier, but I don'tcare.
To capture something that is farmore complicated that they can
have a lot of in between stuff,positive, negative and different
valences and stuff like thatbecause the experience is far
(36:59):
more complicated than that. AndI think that we want to be able
to have a way to register thatsort of complexity.
Judith Butler (37:05):
There's a wonderful section, I want to say
it has ethical beauty to it,where you talk about the
experience of looking in themirror. You say that taking
oneself in as an object, or anobject who appears in some ways,
is partly what we're doing.We're not getting rid of the
idea of the object, as you saidearlier. We're kind of accepting
(37:27):
an, I guess I would call anobjectal dimension of who we
are. And this is an appearance,not a surface of make believe
beneath which some realitylurks, but the condition for the
sensory experience of oneself.
The condition of the sensoryexperience of oneself. In other
words, becoming an object, maybeparadoxically an object that
(37:51):
appears for others, is in somesense the condition for the
sensory experience of oneself.So that's the strong argument
against interiority, I think.One only becomes the self,
right? One only senses the selfin that relational issue, when
one has, in some sense, becomean object rather than a self
burrowing subject looking forwhat can't be found there.
(38:15):
And when you write about lookingin the mirror, you suggest that
one sees and feels a sensoryappearance that is the condition
of one's presence for others. Sowe have two things going on at
the same time, which is thecondition for sensory experience
of oneself and the condition ofone's presence for others, that
(38:35):
those actually happen in andthrough this same kind of
reflection of oneself as boundedobject in this way. I of course
enjoyed this especially becauseit departs so radically from the
Lacanian idea, whereby theimage, the mirror image in
particular, is a kind ofcapturing and freezing of the
(38:56):
self so that it can't even move.For you, it seems to me it's the
occasion in which all sorts ofthings come together, and you
call it a rightful selfcollection, a rightful self
collection, which confirms thatthis appearance is, in fact,
one's proper appearance. This isit.
This is the proper. There's noimproper here. There's this is
(39:19):
the proper. And I think that theexperience of the self, even the
very possibility of experiencingoneself through the senses, only
happens in the context of thisimpersonal spatial relation,
because you're appearing, say,in the mirror for yourself, but
you're also potentiallyappearing for any number of
people. The history of yourappearance, the future of your
(39:40):
appearance is also kind ofimplied in that scene.
So I found it wonderfullydisconcerting to realize that
where one expects to find aself, there is an interpersonal
spatial relation, an appearingfor others, but also that
appearing for others is a formof resistance to trans
(40:02):
oppressive categories andsystems. So it seems to me that
you shifted the discourse. Theincongruence theories rely on a
temporal sequence. And you'resaying, let's think about space.
Maybe spatiality is the way weshould approach things.
And what's the interpersonaldimension of space? And how does
it work that we appear and thatwe emerge in our proper
(40:25):
appearance within thisinterpersonal spatiality, as you
put it? And I think that that'sa really powerfulI hope that's
okay to use that wordbut it's avery powerful challenge, both to
transphobic systems and to waysof trying to give an account of
transness that tend to fall backinto discourses that we actually
(40:46):
want to get beyond. So I don'tknow if there's a question in
there. Maybe it's just me sayingthis was great.
Talia Mae Bettcher (40:53):
Thank you. And I really appreciate your
putting it that way because Ithink that's right. I think that
that is true to what I wanted todo, although I wouldn't have put
it that way. So it's a nice,it's a different sort of
reflection. I got to see myselfas a different sort of object.
So that's nice.
Judith Butler (41:12):
I surprised you. I surprised you.
Talia Mae Bettcher (41:14):
And I do like that. And I do think that
the dialogical and also the predialogical and the movement into
the dialogical is just simply sofundamental and how that is
possible, how it is possible forus to so much as move into the
dialogical and have that andrecognizing that having a
bounded appearance is absolutelycritical to that. And also, for
(41:37):
me, this does come from, I mean,just personal experience. So
it's wonderful to be able tosort of join my own experience
as a trans person and then to beable to theorize it. And that's
where I think this type of workreally, really, really work in a
nice way.
When we're not just talkingabout the phobia and the
violence, but rather somethingwonderful.
Judith Butler (41:57):
Yes. And there is something with great dignity and
magnificence in the way that youlead us to that set of insights.
Maybe a final question. Youknow, we're living in this
horrific time, but people areengaged in all kinds of
resistance, some of which can'tbe publicized because otherwise
it's not going to work. But thephilosophical work that you do,
(42:20):
it's obviously situated withinpolitical and social struggles,
a personal life history, I'msure.
How do you see it operating inthe world? Do you see it as part
of a resistance, an act ofresistance, a practice of
resistance? What do you hopewill happen with this book if
you do have hopes of that kind,like in the broad political
(42:42):
sphere? I'm not saying, youknow, this or that policy
change. I'm saying in the broadway that we dwell in the
political world.
Talia Mae Bettcher (42:50):
You know, that's a really great question.
And I have to say, when I wrotethis book, I've been working on
this book for decades.
Judith Butler (42:57):
And
Talia Mae Bettcher (42:59):
when I was working to public, I was really
not counting on the fasciststaking over so quickly. This was
really weird timing to have thishappen. And a lot of my work, a
lot of my essays whiletheoretical have a more kind of
directly applied bent. And thisis clearly the most theoretical
thing I've ever done. It wasmore like, okay, let's think
(43:22):
through all of this stuff I'vebeen thinking through for a long
time, if not to the bottompretty deeply.
So now we have this thing, wehave this thing that is pretty
dense, pretty deep, but now wehave all of this immediate
political stuff happening andI'm kind of thinking, I wonder
about the timing. So I do thinkabout that and I'll tell you
(43:43):
what my original hopes were andwhat I hope for it now. I mean,
me, whenever I philosophize intrans stuff, I do think that I
philosophize from what I callthe existential what the fuck.
And it's like trying to makesense of things in a confusing
world where they don't want itto make sense for you, where the
common sense is not, theircommon sense is not my common
(44:04):
sense. And they're not giving methe resources to figure stuff
out.
And the theories that I've seendon't work for me. Trying to
philosophize and make sense,right? And hopefully it makes
sense for other people, othertrans people too. I think that
that is an act of resistance. Sothat's always the first kind of
impetus.
And then there was also thisthought in terms of like, if you
(44:26):
think about philosophicalliterature within the world you
know, and how different genresconnect to each other and what
they do, there was this thought,well, I would like to do a
couple of things. I would likefor this to maybe make some
coalitions with other genres.Like I would like for this to be
in coalition with decolonialfeminist philosophy.
Judith Butler (44:49):
Yes, you make that clear. Anti racist projects
of all kinds.
Talia Mae Bettcher (44:53):
Yes, right. And you know, I was also
thinking, well, I would like forthere to be an alternative to
sort of the two leading liketrans theories. We don't even
say trans theory, we say transstudies. I would like to like
make a trans theory and put itout there. But now, the
situation is very different.
I was delighted because therewas a podcast, gender reveal and
(45:17):
it was not an academic podcastand Ossie and then the folks who
were running it, they weregrooving to the book. And so
they were finding a lot of itaccessible and speaking to them.
And that really made me feellike pretty good. And if I feel
like if this speaks to transpeople and gives them tools to
make sense of what's happening,then I feel like that is a
success. And right now it mightbe useful to have a new way of
(45:41):
thinking about things.
Maybe it can be seized upon. AndI think that it really applies
to the stuff around bathroomsand sex segregation is quite
pertinent to that. I'd like tosee it used in that way, I'd
like to see it applied. My turnnow is more towards a kind of
public philosophy. I'd like tofind a way to translate some of
(46:03):
this stuff in a way that is abit more accessible to folks who
may not be theory heads likemyself, right?
Judith Butler (46:09):
Yeah, it's a beautiful book and challenging
and crucial, indispensable toour times. So I thank you very
much. It's been an honor tospeak with you today.
Talia Mae Bettcher (46:20):
Thank you very much, Judith. I really
appreciate it. Thank you. It'sbeen an honor.
Narrator (46:34):
By Talia Mae Bettcher is available from University of
Minnesota Press.
Thank you for listening.
Resistance becomes part of appearing
publicly.
Talia Mae Bettcher (00:11):
And claiming reality in the face of its
denial.
Hi there, my name is Talia MaeBettcher and I am the author of
An Essay in Trans Philosophy.And I'm delighted to be joined
today by my guests, We'll nowintroduce themselves.
Judith Butler (00:32):
I'm Judith Butler, and I suppose I'm most
recently the author of Who'sAfraid of Gender? I'm just
really pleased to be here andwould like to start with a set
of questions, if that's okaywith you, Talia.
Talia Mae Bettcher (00:47):
It sounds wonderful, Judith.
Judith Butler (00:49):
Okay. So this is a brilliant book. It's both
difficult and clear, and I wouldsay complex and vital, all of
these at the same time. In theintroduction to the book, you
make clear that this is not aphilosophical approach to so
called trans issues. Right?
So trans is not the subject.Philosophy is not the approach.
(01:12):
You say rather it's a part oftransphilosophy and as such an
act of resistance. So thewriting of the book, the book
itself, the language in the bookis all part of resistance.
Indeed, you go further and saythat you're not about to unfold
an abstract philosophical visionor system to become part of the
(01:33):
grand conversation ofphilosophy.
You say that those grand andabstract projects of philosophy
are in fact a form of violence.And you take a stand against
that violence, and in doing soyou offer a different kind of
approach. My first question is,is this a nonviolent book? Is
this a book that is nonviolentin its approach or in its
(01:53):
subject matter or in itseffects? You maintain as well,
at other points throughout, infact, that some ideas of
selfhood and personhood that welive with and that are part of
our everyday discourse andphilosophical discourse are
actually abusive.
And I thought, wow, a strongword, abusive. And I was
wondering whether that claim,the ordinary language term that
(02:16):
people use, is abusive, would besurprising to some readers. I
was actually intrigued andprepared to agree, but I want to
ask if you would lay out for usin what sense these notions can
be regarded as abusive. So one,is this nonviolent? Two, in what
way are our ordinary ideas ofpersonhood and selfhood, or
(02:40):
maybe our philosophical ideasabusive?
And then three, you have yourown notion of interpersonal
spatiality. And it's a verygenerative notion, and I like
the way it repeats throughoutthe book because I got to come
back to it several times, atwhich point it has a different
dimension. Does interpersonalspatiality seek to counter this
(03:01):
violence and this abuse?
Talia Mae Bettcher (03:03):
Wow, okay. So thank you, Judith. We're
starting off big. There's a lotthere. So first, I hope that
this book is nonviolent.
That is certainly the intention.That said, there's always
unintended consequences and onecan't know in advance what
impact it's gonna have. And Ijust simply have to say that I
(03:24):
am located with my ownlimitations. And so I want to
come in humbly and note that Icould very well have performed
acts of violenceunintentionally. If I have done
so, I would hope that they arepointed out to me and I will
very swiftly apologize for themas I should, but the intention
is not to have done so.
So the kind of violence that Iwas originally thinking of sort
(03:49):
of just comes from my ownexperience. When non trans
philosophers began to take upthe issue, suddenly trans issues
became interesting to non transphilosophers when it had been
completely ignored for decades.And to them, suddenly it became
interesting in a way in whichthe question whether or not
(04:10):
tables existed had beeninteresting for years. Do tables
exist or are there just a bunchof particles? And for these
philosophers invariably thequestion was always the
following, are trans womenwomen?
That was the question So for me,there was this failure to
(04:31):
methodologically distinguishbetween the two sorts of
questions so that asking thequestion, are trans women women,
was the same sort of question asasking whether or not tables
exist. Whereas it seems to methat they're different sorts of
questions, in part because transpeople aren't tables, right?
Correct. There's a bigdifference between tables and
(04:55):
trans folk. And also a large, insome sense the book explorers,
what's the difference betweentrans folk and tables to put it
simply?
And I think that there's a kindof violence in treating a group
of folks like trans folk, anygroup like women, queer folk,
folks of color, any group andsort of then asking questions as
(05:19):
if it were just sort of anyordinary sort of philosophical
question of the day withoutthinking of asking any sorts of
like, could this raise ethicalquestions that are perhaps
different in character fromrank. So when I talk about the
grand conversation and the sortof violence that it inflicts, it
(05:40):
was sort of with that in mind.Although I was also thinking
about the long history of modernphilosophy and the role that
it's played in colonialism. SoI'm thinking of that European
history. That's where we reallyget into the concepts of person,
self and subject.
(06:02):
I would not say that theconcepts are abusive. I would
say this technically that theassumptions that sustain their
deployment, make it make senseto use those concepts, that for
them to be fitting and tocirculate around philosophical
problems and discourses, thatthose assumptions are the
(06:24):
abusive assumptions. Sort of theidea being that philosophical
concepts have a history. Theydon't just sort of exist all the
time. Certainly we have conceptsthat come from individual
philosophers like Kant gives usa synthetic a priori and there
are other concepts that become alittle bit communal.
(06:47):
I mean, do think that John Lockegives us the concepts person and
self as we know them, butthey've come a little bit more
communal.
Judith Butler (06:55):
But
Talia Mae Bettcher (06:56):
then the question becomes what are the
underlying assumptions thatsustain them? And so this book
is critical of thoseassumptions. Now to bring out
those assumptions, I think veryquickly is difficult but I will
try. So I think that one of thethings that you see with Locke
in his break from Aristotle isthis idea of moral status and
(07:18):
moral status deriving fromconsciousness and moral status
being separated from speciesmembership and morphology,
whereas in Aristotle, there'smuch more of a weddedness to
species membership and alsomorphology. Although I even
think that moral status is notthe way to put it in Aristotle.
(07:38):
And this leads to all sorts ofproblems that we've been dealing
with ever since. Ableism is oneof the most obvious ones. The
typical way of doing it is toset sort of the bar very high.
You need a very robust kind ofconsciousness in order to
qualify as a person. And beforetoo long, you end up with Peter
Singer's view that it's okay toeuthanize cognitively.
(08:01):
So that I think is like I thinkfairly intuitive right away. And
I think that the other one is abit more complicated but it gets
to the core of interpersonalspatiality theory which does not
privilege consciousness butrather it privileges boundaries
and the boundaries between us,which ends up not privileging an
individual, but ratherrelations, right?
Judith Butler (08:22):
Yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher (08:23):
And the violations and traversing and so
on and so forth. But this sortof this fundamental idea and
this is just to sort of simplifysort of this Kantian idea, we
ought not treat each other asmere objects but subjects and so
it's bad to be a mere object.There's this thought that
objects are just objects,there's one kind of object,
(08:45):
they're fungible.
Judith Butler (08:46):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (08:46):
Right, then there's subjects. But in my
view, there's different kinds ofobjects and one kind is an
object that has boundaries, aninterpersonal object. And then
there are objects like tablesthat don't have boundaries. And
the mistake is to treat them asfungible. So for example, trans
(09:07):
people have boundaries, tablesdo not have boundaries.
And it's the confusion of thatthat gets things going. And it's
because you've violated thatfirst that you actually prevent
those beings with boundariesfrom say speaking.
Judith Butler (09:24):
Well, it seems to me that you've suggested here in
this book that what we mightunderstand as a certain human
aspect of embodiment, andcorrect me if I'm wrong, I don't
want to be speciesist about it,it seems to me that you are
interested in what you call themorally saturated appearances
(09:46):
for others. Understanding selvesas appearing for others, we
might say a kind of object inthe sense that it's that we are
phenomena, we appear in theworld, and we don't just appear
randomly, we're saturated withall kinds of problems of
morality, I guess I would say. Ithink your language might be
(10:06):
different. But we're alsoappearing for others, and in
that sense relational. We don'tjust appear as such, we appear
for others.
And that suggests that the waytrans people, but people more
broadly, if we can even speakthat way, I'm not sure if we
want to, but that there'snothing beyond appearances. And
(10:26):
that appearances have beenunderestimated. Appearances are
super important. The self is, Ithink for you and correct me if
I'm wrong fully phenomenal, andit lacks what some might call
interiority. I'm not sure howyou account for interiority.
It also, as an appearance, doesnot mask something that would be
(10:47):
called its reality, that somehowhovers behind it, or that is
posited as a goal that is beyondit. I wonder, in this
interpersonal spatiality whereselves are appearing for others,
saturated with problems of moralstatus that you have outlined,
the radically unequal andpossibly violent distribution of
(11:10):
moral status, How do youapproach this question of
interiority within the theory ofinterpersonal spatiality?
Talia Mae Bettcher (11:19):
That's like, wow, I'm really glad that you
raised that question. So I wantto go through it slowly. I think
you're right. So first of all, Iwould not use the term self
because of its association withreflexivity and therefore a
sense of the individual, I thinksort of automatically makes a
(11:41):
relationality sort of asecondary thing that we need to
build on.
Judith Butler (11:45):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (11:46):
And a connection automatically to like
self consciousness. So I useinterpersonal object. It's not
one that blows off the tongue,but there we have it. An
interpersonal object. And Ithink that in this system that
we exist in now, I would speakof, for example, the physical
person which is something thatwe speak of as in someone's
(12:06):
physical person was searched.
And so we think of differentappearances like the clothed
appearance and the nakedappearance, both of which are
cultural possibilities and Icall this proper and intimate
and they both have to do withboundaries. And so I do think
that those appearances areprimary that we need to think
(12:28):
about those social possibilitiesbefore we start to think about
our own experiences, our ownawareness of self.
Judith Butler (12:38):
Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (12:39):
And I do think there's a sense in which
appearances end up being veryimportant.
Judith Butler (12:44):
Yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher (12:44):
There's a sense and I think this is like
true to just trans experience.If you think about sometimes
ways in which like trans womenare housed in jails or prisons,
they may lose access to forinstance, their wigs, where a
wig is treated as something thatis inconsequential or
unimportant, a mere appearance,but it is hugely important as
(13:05):
sort of a technological deviceof, I'll use the word dignity
now, like, I have other wordsfor it, but I mean, it's
extremely important to one'sphysical person. Yes. And so
these things are important.Clothing is extremely important.
Just try walking around withoutit on the street one day and see
what happens. These things arecrucial. Now a couple of
(13:29):
qualifications. This is not todeny that there is such a thing
as experience and self awarenessonly that I would say that it
rides atop the social mechanismsthat make that possible and that
they're shaped by those socialmechanisms. But I would also,
and here's I think an importantqualification.
(13:49):
I would not say that they'reexhausted by the social
mechanisms in the followingsense because, and this is where
I follow Lugones a little bit. Ido allow for the possibility of
liminality. So for Lugones, ifyou exist in between two
different social structures,there's the possibility of
creative interplay.
Judith Butler (14:09):
Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (14:10):
If you exist, right? So if you think
about existing between twolanguages, right? And so
certainly there's that way youcan allow for a kind of like
perhaps agency or creativitywithout appealing to something
transcendental. And I wouldallow for the same thing with
apparitional liminality to talkabout my book. So I would allow
(14:31):
for that as well.
And I also don't think thatthere's any harm in allowing for
what we might call the body as akind of causal source that is
playing its role in facilitatingtendencies and experiences and
so on and so forth in the waythat for example, one reacts to
various different things. Itjust seems to me undeniable that
(14:51):
one is gonna need to appeal tothat as some sort of causal
mechanism. If we're looking atthis from a sociomoral point of
view, we need to start with sortof the social conditions that
sort of make it possible for oneto appear in the world as a
social agent.
Judith Butler (15:06):
Yes. I love that part of this work. It is
critical in the sense you don'ttake certain concepts of
personhood for granted,obviously, but you alsoyou
expose the fact that thoseconcepts actually deflect from
the conditions in which it'spossible to appear in the world.
Talia Mae Bettcher (15:27):
Yes. Yes. And
Judith Butler (15:28):
you take us you take us back to a much more
fundamental level, and you makeus ask that question, which I
think is amazing. But also goingback to the Lugones and the way
that she had, of course, an ideaof play, world traveling, and I
remember her actually speakingabout this when she was younger.
Not the work on colonialism orthe coloniality of gender, but
(15:50):
world traveling and things likethat. You talk about the fact
that trans people areapparitionals. They're like
apparitions.
Most people would say, no, no,they're not apparitions. They're
real. And we have to argue forthe reality of trans people
against those who would debunktheir reality. And of course we
do, but then the question is howbest to do that. And what you're
(16:11):
suggesting, because you are notabout to agree with those who
would in any way devalue translife, and you're giving us new
ways to value it, which I reallyappreciate.
You're saying no, trans peoplebelong to the realm of
appearances, or rather whereyou'll find them is in the
(16:31):
interstices between appearanceand reality, right? So this in
betweenness that you weretalking about in relation to
Lugones is also here with you.And I think it's an extremely
interesting concept because itmakes us wonder, well, in my
terms, I would say, well, how isreality constituted and how is
(16:52):
appearance constituted such thattrans people fall between the
two? What does that mean aboutthe history of that
constitution? You go a bitfurther than I do, and or maybe
in a different register, youtalk about reality enforcement.
Like what we're calling realityis enforced as reality, and
there are mechanisms by whichthat happens. So those who are
(17:13):
outside or even against realityenforcement are, of course,
apparitions according to theterms of reality, but they
belong to the sphere ofappearance and they're
struggling to appear. I mean, ina way, when you say that, for
instance, self recognition as atrans person takes place in
(17:35):
relation to forms of transoppression. In other words, that
recognition, the selfrecognition, is a form of
resistance. It's a relationshipof resistance to this enforced
reality.
And against that enforcedreality, trans people erecttell
me if I'm wrong inrecapitulating your argument
this way trans people erect adistinction between reality and
(17:58):
make believe. They findthemselves between appearance
and reality, and they alsodisrupt that very distinction
between appearance and realitythat trans oppressive systems
have imposed upon them and whichrely upon for their own
reproduction. I don't know ifthat sounds to you like your
position or whether I'veinflected it in a Butlerian way
(18:19):
that's unacceptable.
Talia Mae Bettcher (18:21):
You might have reflected the last part in
a Butlerian way. So let me backup a little bit and I want to
make a few qualifications, youknow, and then I want to sort of
try to explain some of theseconcepts for the folks who are
listening. So I want to be clearfirst of all that I distinguish
between theories that we need totell people when we're sort of
(18:44):
like fighting against those whowould destroy us and theories
that we might need to tellourselves if we're really trying
to find out what's going on.This essay is really about the
latter and it's a reallydifficult thing to do
particularly in these times.When I say that this is a work
of resistance, it's about, Ilike to say that we trans folk
(19:06):
or any folk who are likeoppressed, we have these
questions like what the fuck isgoing on?
And it raises questions that arephilosophical in nature where we
try to explain what's happening.And when you try to explain
what's happening, sometimes ifyou explain it in a way in which
the folks on top, they might notwanna hear it that way, you can
(19:26):
get yourself into some trouble.So this is definitely about
trying to make sense of this forlike trans folks and our
friends. And I also wanna beclear that this is when I talk
about trans folks asAboriginals, I'm not talking
about all trans folks. I'm onlytalking about some trans folks.
I wanna make sure that I don'tmake universal claims.
Judith Butler (19:45):
Okay.
Talia Mae Bettcher (19:46):
I'm suspicious as I know you are,
although maybe for differentreasons about sort of leading
with categories or like sort ofidentities.
Judith Butler (19:55):
Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (19:56):
For me, I sort of start with structures of
violence. And so the leadingthing that I'm focusing on in
this essay is a particular form,a particular structure of
violence that I think affectsmany trans people that I call
reality enforcement. It's notjust a structure that involves
misgendering trans people, butit is one in which that
(20:19):
misgendering gets framed interms of an appearance reality
contrast. So that it's not, Oh,a man, it's Talia's really a man
disguised as a woman. So how dowe explain that contrast?
And that contrast sets up adouble bind between on the one
(20:41):
hand being viewed as deceptive,right?
Judith Butler (20:44):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (20:45):
Or merely pretending. Yeah. In previous
work, what I did was I arguedfor like how what founds that
appearance reality contrast thatsets up that bind. And it was
this idea that public genderpresentation in the leading
system communicates genitalstatus. Right.
(21:08):
So that right, trans people aretaking to misalign Right, so,
and this is really interesting.And then this really connects to
what's going on now in terms oflike restoring biological truth
to the federal government,right? What biological truth?
Well, when people want toestablish the truth about trans
people, they reach between theirlegs and they grab them or they
(21:28):
pulled on their pants, right?And I know like trigger warning.
But what you notice is thatthere's a boundary violation.
This is where I began to likefocus on boundaries precisely
here. But what you realize isthat the reality here is
genitalia. And even if you makethe move to gametes or
chromosomes or what have you, inmy view, ultimately has to do
with this, it has to do with theboundaries. And so most of the
(21:52):
book is about theorizing this,this kind of reality
enforcement.
And so in the book it becomessomething more. When we think
about genitalia, they're notjust genitalia, they're
moralized genitalia, thegenitalia with boundaries, their
private parts. Then we start tothink about nakedness a moral
(22:12):
cultural phenomenon. And we endup now with what I would call
proper and intimate appearance.And so more elaborately in the
book now we get instead of apublic gender presentation
communicating a genital status,we now have proper appearance
communicating intimateappearance where these are
(22:32):
differentiated in terms of whatI would say sex differentiated
boundaries or morallydifferentiated boundaries.
And so this is a very, very sortof specific analysis of a kind
of like structural violence towhich trans people are subject,
a kind of reality enforcement.And that's sort of like key to
(22:54):
the essay. And one of the thingsthat I'm doing is focusing more
on make believe and ways inwhich trans people get stuck in
make believe and in which nontrans people play along with us,
right? They play along with usbut you know that the playing
along ends at some point whenissues of intimacy come up. Like
if sex comes up, people don'twanna have sex with the wrong
(23:17):
sex.
They wanna have sexual relationswith like really a man or in
terms of sex segregation, oh,really? Is really a man gonna be
like in this changing room? Orwe're gonna put really men in
terms of like, you know, thisprison housing situation.
Judith Butler (23:31):
And there it is. There it is.
Talia Mae Bettcher (23:32):
Right? The make believe ends. And so here
is a structural form of makebelieve. Here's how trans people
constructed as make believers.But what it really is, how does
that really operate is that weare foreclosed from we can play
along in certain socialcircumstances, but when it comes
to a certain intimate space,we're foreclosed from that.
Judith Butler (23:54):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (23:55):
Right? So how is make believe constructed
here? It's from a certainforeclosure from an intimate
realm.
Judith Butler (24:01):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (24:01):
It's intimate foreclosure. What it is
to be constructed as makebelieve. In part, there's also
an interesting inversion inwhich trans women are trapped in
intimate spaces, dirty littlesecrets, but that's a different
kind of thing.
Judith Butler (24:16):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (24:16):
And then what I wanted to say is that in
the phenomenon wheretransphoria, not all trans
people but many of us experiencethis sort of sense of self
recognition prior to transitionwhere we see ourselves in what
is ostensibly what would berecognized as a kind of make
believe in the dominant world,but it's something more because
(24:39):
we experience this as us and welook and we say, that's my
proper appearance. And we havethese feelings of like dignity
and self collection. And what Iargue in the book is this is not
a structural form of makebelieve. This is actually a
liminal state. Yes.
It breaks free from Right.Constraints of the system. So
(25:00):
now you have this tensionbetween a resistance state, a
self recognition and thestructural forces of make
believe. And what it ultimatelyis about is relationality
connection in ways that are lifemaking versus life destroying
for trans people.
Judith Butler (25:20):
And would you say, that kind of takes us back
to the question of inbetweenness, and I'm just
wondering whether you would saythat that can be a zone of
creativity or even freedom.Would you use that word?
Talia Mae Bettcher (25:31):
Yes. Here's what I was trying to do. I think
a lot of the times inbetweenness is different. So for
me, a lot of the in betweennessis in betweenness between
subcultural, like trans worlds,like local trans worlds.
Judith Butler (25:44):
Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (25:44):
Los Angeles, and then sort of more dominant
ones. And if that's sort of moreof a Ligonian. We're coming up
actually on the anniversary ofthe death of a friend of mine.
She died when she was very youngand at her funeral, it was very
strange. There was her extendedfamily and trans community and
it was a Catholic funeral andthe priest kept dead naming her
(26:09):
and referring to her as a And wewere like in two different
worlds.
And then the aunt spoke out andsaid, she's not a son, she's a
daughter. But here was anexperience of being in between
two worlds. And she was speakingout, we couldn't speak, there
was like a barrier, we couldn'tspeak, but she was speaking out
(26:30):
across worlds. Right? Andthere's this sense of being like
relegated to pretense, but therecan be sometimes creativity and
playfulness, even though therewasn't necessarily in this case.
Judith Butler (26:41):
Right, yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher (26:43):
But the kind of apparitionality that I'm sort
of talking about in the case ofself recognition is even prior
to that. It's like prior to whenyou land in a subculture. Right.
Because you could have landedmaybe in a different subculture.
Judith Butler (26:57):
No, it's the condition of appearance. It's
back to the conditions of
Talia Mae Bettcher (27:01):
It's back to the condition of the appearance.
And it's sort of advocating thatbecause I think that now we need
to even be more open for thepossibility of coalitions to not
be wedded to necessarily ourhomes or to be able to like call
into question particularassumptions that we've made, to
be able to step back and beready for becoming even broader
(27:22):
in terms of how we're thinkingof things.
Judith Butler (27:25):
Let me ask you this. I think we should probably
turn to the political situationthat is not only seeking to
eliminate basic rights, accessto healthcare, to legal status
for trans people, buteffectively eliminating their
existence as such, right? It'san attack on the existence of
(27:46):
trans people. It's funny becauseyou're absolutely right to
criticize my early work forfocusing on imitation, since I
think at that point I myself wasvery sensitive to having the
reality of a certain butch topworld called into question:
(28:06):
you're not really men, you'renot really a top, you're not,
you know, all of this. I got itfrom lesbian communities and I
got it from straightcommunities.
I think I was more in the gendernon conforming butch world than
I knew, and many people haveawakened me from that particular
slumber, which is good. I thinkthe charge against trans people
(28:28):
in particular, or the charges inthe plural, include being
disguised or practicingdeception, as you point out, or
engaging in a kind offraudulence. And I think that
your idea of intimacy andspatiality is especially
important now. In The UK, forinstance, the trans exclusionary
(28:50):
feminists say again and againthat trans women not only engage
in fraudulence, but they do soin order to do harm to so called
real women, that is to haveaccess to women's spaces, so
there we have the foreclosurethat you were talking about, and
to do harm to women in thosespaces. And the spaces can be
(29:13):
bathrooms, they can be prisons,they can be clubs, less often
but sometimes, especially spas,God forbid.
But they are places where acertain kind of bodily nearness
happens, not even necessarilycontact. And I've always been
(29:33):
amazed that not only do theyclaim that trans exclusionary
people, that trans women are indisguise, but that they are
disguising themselves on purposein order to commit sexual
violence or to do physical harmof some kind. So they attribute
to trans women the absolutelyworst version of masculinity
(29:54):
that we know, right? Somehowthey embody masculine violence
in a way that ordinary mendon't. I wonder what your read
is on that, if you have one.
Talia Mae Bettcher (30:05):
No, I do. And I think that it's actually
really important. Although I dowant to say one thing about the
imitation stuff. While I'm kindof critical of it, I do want to
say I also think that I'm kindof praising it a little cause I
see that what you do there is animportant moment and there's a
moment of intimacy orvulnerability where you share
your own concern at the timeabout being sort of put down as
(30:27):
an invitation. And it'sprecisely that that allows you
to flip things on its head.
So I think it's an importantmove that allows you to see
things differently. It allowsyou to see things as, wait a
minute, maybe she's not makingfun of women. Maybe she's making
fun of heterosexuality. MaybeI'm not just the only one who's
an imitation.
Judith Butler (30:45):
Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher (30:45):
So it's all sort of Stalt shift.
Judith Butler (30:48):
Yes, that's true.
Talia Mae Bettcher (30:49):
I think that theories are important and they
do important work and they shedimportant light. So it's not
about we're beating up on thetheory, but it's more like, I
just think one of the thingsthat trans studies has lacked is
a distinctive trans theory or aset of trans theories that
illuminates trans oppression andwhy, for example, even a trans
person who wants to be likenormative and pass could be
(31:14):
engaging in resistance. I thinkthat that hasn't been really
clearly articulated. And I thinkthat what I'm trying to do at
least offers, for the better orthe worse, offers one way to do
that.
Judith Butler (31:26):
I see that. Resistance becomes part of
existing publicly, appearing,appearing publicly.
Talia Mae Bettcher (31:33):
And claiming reality in the face of its
denial.
Judith Butler (31:36):
And claiming reality, yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher (31:38):
I think that this charge of being a rapist, I
mean, it goes all the way backto the 'seventy '3 lesbian
conference with Robin Morgancharging Beth Elliott of being a
rapist. But you know, it's notjust this whole sort of rapist
allegation when it comes to sexsegregation, there's another
side of it. Like when transwomen and also trans men in
(31:59):
sexual relations, when later onthey're found out or the person
with whom they were having sexwith decides to sell them down
the river, that sort of allegedfraud is also equated with rape.
So also having sex with a personwhile trans, that kind of so
called deception can berepresented as rape. So there's
(32:21):
sort of the two sides of it,both when it comes to sex
segregation and also when itcomes to having sex with
somebody.
I think that it's reallyimportant when it comes to these
sex segregated spaces. And Ithink that for me, has a lot to
do with how nakedness ismythologized. And I talk a lot
about it in the book. I'm notgonna go into a lot of details
right now, but like I will say,there's this sort of sense of
(32:44):
like, well, why do women coverthemselves in the sight of a
man? Because their bodies aregonna incite rape.
Because they're getting allworked up and they're gonna
write, why do we have And you'lleven hear this in the so called
gender critical arguments forsex segregation and for why
trans women shouldn't be there,this kind of thing. We have
(33:04):
these sex segregated spacesbecause in these intimate
spaces, if you have men there,they're gonna get all worked up
and this is gonna be just thekindness place where it's gonna
get all rapey. Now what'sinteresting is they disregard
the sort of the most interestingstudies. There was a study in
2019 in Massachusetts that showsthat these bathrooms and these
(33:26):
intimate spaces are like theleast likely places where you're
gonna get any kind of suchviolence and stuff like that.
And they showed that then therewas a change in like trans
inclusive policies.
There was no meaningful changein any kind of like reports of
privacy violations or sexualassault or any kind of violence.
They disregard all of theempirical data but they're
(33:49):
playing into the mythology offemale nakedness and what
justifies female nakedness andwhat justifies female
clothedness and sex segregation.And you might argue that it's
actually playing into the sexiststructures that it allegedly
contests, right?
Judith Butler (34:07):
I think it does, for sure. Talia, in this book
you take issue at a certainpoint with what you call the
incongruence account of transexistence, the idea that one is
born into the wrong body, orthat there's some something
that's not right. Who the personis internally is not being
(34:27):
expressed in their appearance,and that something has to be
corrected. And my sense is thatyou saw these kinds of accounts
as kind of buying into apathological approach and
possibly also engaging incertain conversion narratives.
Then I realized who I truly amand, sought to correct this this
(34:48):
terrible, mistake.
And I am wondering what youcontrast to that. I mean, I know
from the book, but it might beinteresting for readers to
understand why it is you have aproblem with that and what
you're trying to do in askingpeople to look at trans life in
a different way.
Talia Mae Bettcher (35:07):
I think that one of the problems with the
incongruence account, and notall forms of the incongruence
account sort of subscribe totraditional versions of the
wrong body. There can be moreliberal versions of it, but it
just doesn't seem to getcomplexity of trans experiences
right as far as I can tell. Howso? Well, it sort of tells this
(35:28):
before and after picture. Beforethere's an incongruence and I'm
sad and then I transition.
And then as you can imagine,there's like a TV show, like the
before and the after, with thetwo different pictures. And now
I'm happy and everything's greatat the end and roll the credits.
There have been other transtheorists who have written on
this recently, Andrea Long Chu,Hail Malatino, Cam Awkward Rich,
(35:53):
that's just not how trans lifeoperates. Even after transition,
life is not a picnic. And it'snot just because life is hard
for trans people, you stillstruggle with issues around
dysphoria.
It doesn't go away. Your lifegets better, but you still, for
complicated reasons. And thenfor me, it also got things
(36:13):
backwards because there wereways in which, as I say, like
there's this like possibility ofa kind of positive self
recognition prior to transition,which seemed to just make a
mockery of the whole before andafter picture. And furthermore,
it seemed to me that there wasthis kind of good, bad,
positive, negative feelings thatwere very overly simplistic and
(36:36):
I dropped dysphoria and euphoriaand just gone with phoria.
Knowing full well that phoria issupposed to come from Greek
meaning carrier, but I don'tcare.
To capture something that is farmore complicated that they can
have a lot of in between stuff,positive, negative and different
valences and stuff like thatbecause the experience is far
(36:59):
more complicated than that. AndI think that we want to be able
to have a way to register thatsort of complexity.
Judith Butler (37:05):
There's a wonderful section, I want to say
it has ethical beauty to it,where you talk about the
experience of looking in themirror. You say that taking
oneself in as an object, or anobject who appears in some ways,
is partly what we're doing.We're not getting rid of the
idea of the object, as you saidearlier. We're kind of accepting
(37:27):
an, I guess I would call anobjectal dimension of who we
are. And this is an appearance,not a surface of make believe
beneath which some realitylurks, but the condition for the
sensory experience of oneself.
The condition of the sensoryexperience of oneself. In other
words, becoming an object, maybeparadoxically an object that
(37:51):
appears for others, is in somesense the condition for the
sensory experience of oneself.So that's the strong argument
against interiority, I think.One only becomes the self,
right? One only senses the selfin that relational issue, when
one has, in some sense, becomean object rather than a self
burrowing subject looking forwhat can't be found there.
(38:15):
And when you write about lookingin the mirror, you suggest that
one sees and feels a sensoryappearance that is the condition
of one's presence for others. Sowe have two things going on at
the same time, which is thecondition for sensory experience
of oneself and the condition ofone's presence for others, that
(38:35):
those actually happen in andthrough this same kind of
reflection of oneself as boundedobject in this way. I of course
enjoyed this especially becauseit departs so radically from the
Lacanian idea, whereby theimage, the mirror image in
particular, is a kind ofcapturing and freezing of the
(38:56):
self so that it can't even move.For you, it seems to me it's the
occasion in which all sorts ofthings come together, and you
call it a rightful selfcollection, a rightful self
collection, which confirms thatthis appearance is, in fact,
one's proper appearance. This isit.
This is the proper. There's noimproper here. There's this is
(39:19):
the proper. And I think that theexperience of the self, even the
very possibility of experiencingoneself through the senses, only
happens in the context of thisimpersonal spatial relation,
because you're appearing, say,in the mirror for yourself, but
you're also potentiallyappearing for any number of
people. The history of yourappearance, the future of your
(39:40):
appearance is also kind ofimplied in that scene.
So I found it wonderfullydisconcerting to realize that
where one expects to find aself, there is an interpersonal
spatial relation, an appearingfor others, but also that
appearing for others is a formof resistance to trans
(40:02):
oppressive categories andsystems. So it seems to me that
you shifted the discourse. Theincongruence theories rely on a
temporal sequence. And you'resaying, let's think about space.
Maybe spatiality is the way weshould approach things.
And what's the interpersonaldimension of space? And how does
it work that we appear and thatwe emerge in our proper
(40:25):
appearance within thisinterpersonal spatiality, as you
put it? And I think that that'sa really powerfulI hope that's
okay to use that wordbut it's avery powerful challenge, both to
transphobic systems and to waysof trying to give an account of
transness that tend to fall backinto discourses that we actually
(40:46):
want to get beyond. So I don'tknow if there's a question in
there. Maybe it's just me sayingthis was great.
Talia Mae Bettcher (40:53):
Thank you. And I really appreciate your
putting it that way because Ithink that's right. I think that
that is true to what I wanted todo, although I wouldn't have put
it that way. So it's a nice,it's a different sort of
reflection. I got to see myselfas a different sort of object.
So that's nice.
Judith Butler (41:12):
I surprised you. I surprised you.
Talia Mae Bettcher (41:14):
And I do like that. And I do think that
the dialogical and also the predialogical and the movement into
the dialogical is just simply sofundamental and how that is
possible, how it is possible forus to so much as move into the
dialogical and have that andrecognizing that having a
bounded appearance is absolutelycritical to that. And also, for
(41:37):
me, this does come from, I mean,just personal experience. So
it's wonderful to be able tosort of join my own experience
as a trans person and then to beable to theorize it. And that's
where I think this type of workreally, really, really work in a
nice way.
When we're not just talkingabout the phobia and the
violence, but rather somethingwonderful.
Judith Butler (41:57):
Yes. And there is something with great dignity and
magnificence in the way that youlead us to that set of insights.
Maybe a final question. Youknow, we're living in this
horrific time, but people areengaged in all kinds of
resistance, some of which can'tbe publicized because otherwise
it's not going to work. But thephilosophical work that you do,
(42:20):
it's obviously situated withinpolitical and social struggles,
a personal life history, I'msure.
How do you see it operating inthe world? Do you see it as part
of a resistance, an act ofresistance, a practice of
resistance? What do you hopewill happen with this book if
you do have hopes of that kind,like in the broad political
(42:42):
sphere? I'm not saying, youknow, this or that policy
change. I'm saying in the broadway that we dwell in the
political world.
Talia Mae Bettcher (42:50):
You know, that's a really great question.
And I have to say, when I wrotethis book, I've been working on
this book for decades.
Judith Butler (42:57):
And
Talia Mae Bettcher (42:59):
when I was working to public, I was really
not counting on the fasciststaking over so quickly. This was
really weird timing to have thishappen. And a lot of my work, a
lot of my essays whiletheoretical have a more kind of
directly applied bent. And thisis clearly the most theoretical
thing I've ever done. It wasmore like, okay, let's think
(43:22):
through all of this stuff I'vebeen thinking through for a long
time, if not to the bottompretty deeply.
So now we have this thing, wehave this thing that is pretty
dense, pretty deep, but now wehave all of this immediate
political stuff happening andI'm kind of thinking, I wonder
about the timing. So I do thinkabout that and I'll tell you
(43:43):
what my original hopes were andwhat I hope for it now. I mean,
me, whenever I philosophize intrans stuff, I do think that I
philosophize from what I callthe existential what the fuck.
And it's like trying to makesense of things in a confusing
world where they don't want itto make sense for you, where the
common sense is not, theircommon sense is not my common
(44:04):
sense. And they're not giving methe resources to figure stuff
out.
And the theories that I've seendon't work for me. Trying to
philosophize and make sense,right? And hopefully it makes
sense for other people, othertrans people too. I think that
that is an act of resistance. Sothat's always the first kind of
impetus.
And then there was also thisthought in terms of like, if you
(44:26):
think about philosophicalliterature within the world you
know, and how different genresconnect to each other and what
they do, there was this thought,well, I would like to do a
couple of things. I would likefor this to maybe make some
coalitions with other genres.Like I would like for this to be
in coalition with decolonialfeminist philosophy.
Judith Butler (44:49):
Yes, you make that clear. Anti racist projects
of all kinds.
Talia Mae Bettcher (44:53):
Yes, right. And you know, I was also
thinking, well, I would like forthere to be an alternative to
sort of the two leading liketrans theories. We don't even
say trans theory, we say transstudies. I would like to like
make a trans theory and put itout there. But now, the
situation is very different.
I was delighted because therewas a podcast, gender reveal and
(45:17):
it was not an academic podcastand Ossie and then the folks who
were running it, they weregrooving to the book. And so
they were finding a lot of itaccessible and speaking to them.
And that really made me feellike pretty good. And if I feel
like if this speaks to transpeople and gives them tools to
make sense of what's happening,then I feel like that is a
success. And right now it mightbe useful to have a new way of
(45:41):
thinking about things.
Maybe it can be seized upon. AndI think that it really applies
to the stuff around bathroomsand sex segregation is quite
pertinent to that. I'd like tosee it used in that way, I'd
like to see it applied. My turnnow is more towards a kind of
public philosophy. I'd like tofind a way to translate some of
(46:03):
this stuff in a way that is abit more accessible to folks who
may not be theory heads likemyself, right?
Judith Butler (46:09):
Yeah, it's a beautiful book and challenging
and crucial, indispensable toour times. So I thank you very
much. It's been an honor tospeak with you today.
Talia Mae Bettcher (46:20):
Thank you very much, Judith. I really
appreciate it. Thank you. It'sbeen an honor.
Narrator (46:34):
By Talia Mae Bettcher is available from University of
Minnesota Press.
Thank you for listening.
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