An encounter with people unfamiliar but nevertheless hostile to their work motivated Judith Butler to write Who’s Afraid of Gender? The writer, who began their career working on the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, has, since the publication of Gender Trouble (1990), become synonymous with everything wrong and right about how we think about gender.

In 2017, Brazilian members of the Catholic authoritarian Tradition, Family, Property movement staged a protest against Butler, who was scheduled to speak at a conference in São Paulo on the threats democracies around the world face. Crowds of conservative Catholics burned the gender theorist in effigy and denounced their alleged attempts to destroy traditional gender roles. The political agenda that Butler endorsed, their opponents claimed, was not just immoral but pedophilic.

Five thousand miles north, the US Supreme Court had recently entertained arguments made by defenders of anti-trans school bathroom policies, who ironically cited Butler to support their case. In a legal brief filed by three conservative academics, Butler’s early philosophy on the sex-gender divide was twisted to imply that gender — unlike biological sex — is a “fluid concept,” one which is “fuzzy and mercurial” and without a “truly objective meaning.” Ergo, sex is a more appropriate basis for deciding who may enter a male or female restroom.