Judith Butler and Talia Mae Bettcher talk philosophy, personhood, resistance
Resistance becomes part of appearing publicly.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And claiming reality in the face of its denial.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Hi there, my name is Talia Mae Bettcher and I am the author of An Essay in Trans Philosophy. And I'm delighted to be joined today by my guests, We'll now introduce themselves.
Judith Butler:I'm Judith Butler, and I suppose I'm most recently the author of Who's Afraid of Gender? I'm just really pleased to be here and would like to start with a set of questions, if that's okay with you, Talia.
Talia Mae Bettcher:It sounds wonderful, Judith.
Judith Butler:Okay. So this is a brilliant book. It's both difficult and clear, and I would say complex and vital, all of these at the same time. In the introduction to the book, you make clear that this is not a philosophical approach to so called trans issues. Right?
Judith Butler:So trans is not the subject. Philosophy is not the approach. You say rather it's a part of transphilosophy and as such an act of resistance. So the writing of the book, the book itself, the language in the book is all part of resistance. Indeed, you go further and say that you're not about to unfold an abstract philosophical vision or system to become part of the grand conversation of philosophy.
Judith Butler:You say that those grand and abstract projects of philosophy are in fact a form of violence. And you take a stand against that violence, and in doing so you offer a different kind of approach. My first question is, is this a nonviolent book? Is this a book that is nonviolent in its approach or in its subject matter or in its effects? You maintain as well, at other points throughout, in fact, that some ideas of selfhood and personhood that we live with and that are part of our everyday discourse and philosophical discourse are actually abusive.
Judith Butler:And I thought, wow, a strong word, abusive. And I was wondering whether that claim, the ordinary language term that people use, is abusive, would be surprising to some readers. I was actually intrigued and prepared to agree, but I want to ask if you would lay out for us in what sense these notions can be regarded as abusive. So one, is this nonviolent? Two, in what way are our ordinary ideas of personhood and selfhood, or maybe our philosophical ideas abusive?
Judith Butler:And then three, you have your own notion of interpersonal spatiality. And it's a very generative notion, and I like the way it repeats throughout the book because I got to come back to it several times, at which point it has a different dimension. Does interpersonal spatiality seek to counter this violence and this abuse?
Talia Mae Bettcher:Wow, okay. So thank you, Judith. We're starting off big. There's a lot there. So first, I hope that this book is nonviolent.
Talia Mae Bettcher:That is certainly the intention. That said, there's always unintended consequences and one can't know in advance what impact it's gonna have. And I just simply have to say that I am located with my own limitations. And so I want to come in humbly and note that I could very well have performed acts of violence unintentionally. If I have done so, I would hope that they are pointed out to me and I will very swiftly apologize for them as I should, but the intention is not to have done so.
Talia Mae Bettcher:So the kind of violence that I was originally thinking of sort of just comes from my own experience. When non trans philosophers began to take up the issue, suddenly trans issues became interesting to non trans philosophers when it had been completely ignored for decades. And to them, suddenly it became interesting in a way in which the question whether or not tables existed had been interesting for years. Do tables exist or are there just a bunch of particles? And for these philosophers invariably the question was always the following, are trans women women?
Talia Mae Bettcher:That was the question So for me, there was this failure to methodologically distinguish between the two sorts of questions so that asking the question, are trans women women, was the same sort of question as asking whether or not tables exist. Whereas it seems to me that they're different sorts of questions, in part because trans people aren't tables, right? Correct. There's a big difference between tables and trans folk. And also a large, in some sense the book explorers, what's the difference between trans folk and tables to put it simply?
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I think that there's a kind of violence in treating a group of folks like trans folk, any group like women, queer folk, folks of color, any group and sort of then asking questions as if it were just sort of any ordinary sort of philosophical question of the day without thinking of asking any sorts of like, could this raise ethical questions that are perhaps different in character from rank. So when I talk about the grand conversation and the sort of violence that it inflicts, it was sort of with that in mind. Although I was also thinking about the long history of modern philosophy and the role that it's played in colonialism. So I'm thinking of that European history. That's where we really get into the concepts of person, self and subject.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I would not say that the concepts are abusive. I would say this technically that the assumptions that sustain their deployment, make it make sense to use those concepts, that for them to be fitting and to circulate around philosophical problems and discourses, that those assumptions are the abusive assumptions. Sort of the idea being that philosophical concepts have a history. They don't just sort of exist all the time. Certainly we have concepts that come from individual philosophers like Kant gives us a synthetic a priori and there are other concepts that become a little bit communal.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I mean, do think that John Locke gives us the concepts person and self as we know them, but they've come a little bit more communal.
Judith Butler:But
Talia Mae Bettcher:then the question becomes what are the underlying assumptions that sustain them? And so this book is critical of those assumptions. Now to bring out those assumptions, I think very quickly is difficult but I will try. So I think that one of the things that you see with Locke in his break from Aristotle is this idea of moral status and moral status deriving from consciousness and moral status being separated from species membership and morphology, whereas in Aristotle, there's much more of a weddedness to species membership and also morphology. Although I even think that moral status is not the way to put it in Aristotle.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And this leads to all sorts of problems that we've been dealing with ever since. Ableism is one of the most obvious ones. The typical way of doing it is to set sort of the bar very high. You need a very robust kind of consciousness in order to qualify as a person. And before too long, you end up with Peter Singer's view that it's okay to euthanize cognitively.
Talia Mae Bettcher:So that I think is like I think fairly intuitive right away. And I think that the other one is a bit more complicated but it gets to the core of interpersonal spatiality theory which does not privilege consciousness but rather it privileges boundaries and the boundaries between us, which ends up not privileging an individual, but rather relations, right?
Judith Butler:Yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And the violations and traversing and so on and so forth. But this sort of this fundamental idea and this is just to sort of simplify sort of this Kantian idea, we ought not treat each other as mere 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, they're fungible.
Judith Butler:Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Right, then there's subjects. But in my view, there's different kinds of objects and one kind is an object that has boundaries, an interpersonal object. And then there are objects like tables that don't have boundaries. And the mistake is to treat them as fungible. So for example, trans people have boundaries, tables do not have boundaries.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And it's the confusion of that that gets things going. And it's because you've violated that first that you actually prevent those beings with boundaries from say speaking.
Judith Butler:Well, it seems to me that you've suggested here in this book that what we might understand as a certain human aspect of embodiment, and correct 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 the morally saturated appearances for others. Understanding selves as appearing for others, we might say a kind of object in the sense that it's that we are phenomena, we appear in the world, and we don't just appear randomly, we're saturated with all kinds of problems of morality, I guess I would say. I think your language might be different. But we're also appearing for others, and in that sense relational. We don't just appear as such, we appear for others.
Judith Butler:And that suggests that the way trans people, but people more broadly, if we can even speak that way, I'm not sure if we want to, but that there's nothing beyond appearances. And that appearances have been underestimated. Appearances are super important. The self is, I think for you and correct me if I'm wrong fully phenomenal, and it lacks what some might call interiority. I'm not sure how you account for interiority.
Judith Butler:It also, as an appearance, does not mask something that would be called its reality, that somehow hovers behind it, or that is posited as a goal that is beyond it. I wonder, in this interpersonal spatiality where selves are appearing for others, saturated with problems of moral status that you have outlined, the radically unequal and possibly violent distribution of moral status, How do you approach this question of interiority within the theory of interpersonal spatiality?
Talia Mae Bettcher:That's like, wow, I'm really glad that you raised that question. So I want to go through it slowly. I think you're right. So first of all, I would not use the term self because of its association with reflexivity and therefore a sense of the individual, I think sort of automatically makes a relationality sort of a secondary thing that we need to build on.
Judith Butler:Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And a connection automatically to like self consciousness. So I use interpersonal object. It's not one that blows off the tongue, but there we have it. An interpersonal object. And I think that in this system that we exist in now, I would speak of, for example, the physical person which is something that we speak of as in someone's physical person was searched.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And so we think of different appearances like the clothed appearance and the naked appearance, both of which are cultural possibilities and I call this proper and intimate and they both have to do with boundaries. And so I do think that those appearances are primary that we need to think about those social possibilities before we start to think about our own experiences, our own awareness of self.
Judith Butler:Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I do think there's a sense in which appearances end up being very important.
Judith Butler:Yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher: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 women are housed in jails or prisons, they may lose access to for instance, their wigs, where a wig is treated as something that is inconsequential or unimportant, a mere appearance, but it is hugely important as sort of a technological device of, I'll use the word dignity now, like, I have other words for it, but I mean, it's extremely important to one's physical person. Yes. And so these things are important. Clothing is extremely important.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Just try walking around without it on the street one day and see what happens. These things are crucial. Now a couple of qualifications. This is not to deny that there is such a thing as experience and self awareness only that I would say that it rides atop the social mechanisms that make that possible and that they're shaped by those social mechanisms. But I would also, and here's I think an important qualification.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I would not say that they're exhausted by the social mechanisms in the following sense because, and this is where I follow Lugones a little bit. I do allow for the possibility of liminality. So for Lugones, if you exist in between two different social structures, there's the possibility of creative interplay.
Judith Butler:Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher:If you exist, right? So if you think about existing between two languages, right? And so certainly there's that way you can allow for a kind of like perhaps agency or creativity without appealing to something transcendental. And I would allow for the same thing with apparitional liminality to talk about my book. So I would allow for that as well.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I also don't think that there's any harm in allowing for what we might call the body as a kind of causal source that is playing its role in facilitating tendencies and experiences and so on and so forth in the way that for example, one reacts to various different things. It just seems to me undeniable that one is gonna need to appeal to that as some sort of causal mechanism. If we're looking at this from a sociomoral point of view, we need to start with sort of the social conditions that sort of make it possible for one to appear in the world as a social agent.
Judith Butler:Yes. I love that part of this work. It is critical in the sense you don't take certain concepts of personhood for granted, obviously, but you alsoyou expose the fact that those concepts actually deflect from the conditions in which it's possible to appear in the world.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Yes. Yes. And
Judith Butler:you take us you take us back to a much more fundamental level, and you make us ask that question, which I think is amazing. But also going back to the Lugones and the way that she had, of course, an idea of play, world traveling, and I remember her actually speaking about this when she was younger. Not the work on colonialism or the coloniality of gender, but world traveling and things like that. You talk about the fact that trans people are apparitionals. They're like apparitions.
Judith Butler:Most people would say, no, no, they're not apparitions. They're real. And we have to argue for the reality of trans people against those who would debunk their reality. And of course we do, but then the question is how best to do that. And what you're suggesting, because you are not about to agree with those who would in any way devalue trans life, and you're giving us new ways to value it, which I really appreciate.
Judith Butler:You're saying no, trans people belong to the realm of appearances, or rather where you'll find them is in the interstices between appearance and reality, right? So this in betweenness that you were talking about in relation to Lugones is also here with you. And I think it's an extremely interesting concept because it makes us wonder, well, in my terms, I would say, well, how is reality constituted and how is appearance constituted such that trans people fall between the two? What does that mean about the history of that constitution? You go a bit further than I do, and or maybe in a different register, you talk about reality enforcement.
Judith Butler:Like what we're calling reality is enforced as reality, and there are mechanisms by which that happens. So those who are outside or even against reality enforcement are, of course, apparitions according to the terms of reality, but they belong to the sphere of appearance and they're struggling to appear. I mean, in a way, when you say that, for instance, self recognition as a trans person takes place in relation to forms of trans oppression. In other words, that recognition, the self recognition, is a form of resistance. It's a relationship of resistance to this enforced reality.
Judith Butler:And against that enforced reality, trans people erecttell me if I'm wrong in recapitulating your argument this way trans people erect a distinction between reality and make believe. They find themselves between appearance and reality, and they also disrupt that very distinction between appearance and reality that trans oppressive systems have imposed upon them and which rely upon for their own reproduction. I don't know if that sounds to you like your position or whether I've inflected it in a Butlerian way that's unacceptable.
Talia Mae Bettcher:You might have reflected the last part in a Butlerian way. So let me back up a little bit and I want to make a few qualifications, you know, and then I want to sort of try to explain some of these concepts for the folks who are listening. So I want to be clear first of all that I distinguish between theories that we need to tell people when we're sort of like fighting against those who would destroy us and theories that we might need to tell ourselves if we're really trying to find out what's going on. This essay is really about the latter and it's a really difficult thing to do particularly in these times. When I say that this is a work of resistance, it's about, I like to say that we trans folk or any folk who are like oppressed, we have these questions like what the fuck is going on?
Talia Mae Bettcher:And it raises questions that are philosophical in nature where we try to explain what's happening. And when you try to explain what's happening, sometimes if you explain it in a way in which the folks on top, they might not wanna hear it that way, you can get yourself into some trouble. So this is definitely about trying to make sense of this for like trans folks and our friends. And I also wanna be clear that this is when I talk about trans folks as Aboriginals, I'm not talking about all trans folks. I'm only talking about some trans folks.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I wanna make sure that I don't make universal claims.
Judith Butler:Okay.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I'm suspicious as I know you are, although maybe for different reasons about sort of leading with categories or like sort of identities.
Judith Butler:Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher:For me, I sort of start with structures of violence. And so the leading thing that I'm focusing on in this essay is a particular form, a particular structure of violence that I think affects many trans people that I call reality enforcement. It's not just a structure that involves misgendering trans people, but it is one in which that misgendering gets framed in terms 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 do we explain that contrast?
Talia Mae Bettcher:And that contrast sets up a double bind between on the one hand being viewed as deceptive, right?
Judith Butler:Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Or merely pretending. Yeah. In previous work, what I did was I argued for like how what founds that appearance reality contrast that sets up that bind. And it was this idea that public gender presentation in the leading system communicates genital status. Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher:So that right, trans people are taking to misalign Right, so, and this is really interesting. And then this really connects to what's going on now in terms of like restoring biological truth to the federal government, right? What biological truth? Well, when people want to establish the truth about trans people, they reach between their legs and they grab them or they pulled on their pants, right? And I know like trigger warning.
Talia Mae Bettcher:But what you notice is that there's a boundary violation. This is where I began to like focus on boundaries precisely here. But what you realize is that the reality here is genitalia. And even if you make the move to gametes or chromosomes or what have you, in my view, ultimately has to do with this, it has to do with the boundaries. And so most of the book is about theorizing this, this kind of reality enforcement.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And so in the book it becomes something more. When we think about genitalia, they're not just genitalia, they're moralized genitalia, the genitalia with boundaries, their private parts. Then we start to think about nakedness a moral cultural phenomenon. And we end up now with what I would call proper and intimate appearance. And so more elaborately in the book now we get instead of a public gender presentation communicating a genital status, we now have proper appearance communicating intimate appearance where these are differentiated in terms of what I would say sex differentiated boundaries or morally differentiated boundaries.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And so this is a very, very sort of specific analysis of a kind of like structural violence to which trans people are subject, a kind of reality enforcement. And that's sort of like key to the essay. And one of the things that I'm doing is focusing more on make believe and ways in which trans people get stuck in make believe and in which non trans people play along with us, right? They play along with us but you know that the playing along ends at some point when issues of intimacy come up. Like if sex comes up, people don't wanna have sex with the wrong sex.
Talia Mae Bettcher:They wanna have sexual relations with like really a man or in terms of sex segregation, oh, really? Is really a man gonna be like in this changing room? Or we're gonna put really men in terms of like, you know, this prison housing situation.
Judith Butler:And there it is. There it is.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Right? The make believe ends. And so here is a structural form of make believe. Here's how trans people constructed as make believers. But what it really is, how does that really operate is that we are foreclosed from we can play along in certain social circumstances, but when it comes to a certain intimate space, we're foreclosed from that.
Judith Butler:Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Right? So how is make believe constructed here? It's from a certain foreclosure from an intimate realm.
Judith Butler:Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher:It's intimate foreclosure. What it is to be constructed as make believe. In part, there's also an interesting inversion in which trans women are trapped in intimate spaces, dirty little secrets, but that's a different kind of thing.
Judith Butler:Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And then what I wanted to say is that in the phenomenon where transphoria, not all trans people but many of us experience this sort of sense of self recognition prior to transition where we see ourselves in what is ostensibly what would be recognized as a kind of make believe in the dominant world, but it's something more because we experience this as us and we look and we say, that's my proper appearance. And we have these feelings of like dignity and self collection. And what I argue in the book is this is not a structural form of make believe. This is actually a liminal state. Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher:It breaks free from Right. Constraints of the system. So now you have this tension between a resistance state, a self recognition and the structural forces of make believe. And what it ultimately is about is relationality connection in ways that are life making versus life destroying for trans people.
Judith Butler:And would you say, that kind of takes us back to the question of in betweenness, and I'm just wondering whether you would say that that can be a zone of creativity or even freedom. Would you use that word?
Talia Mae Bettcher:Yes. Here's what I was trying to do. I think a lot of the times in betweenness is different. So for me, a lot of the in betweenness is in betweenness between subcultural, like trans worlds, like local trans worlds.
Judith Butler:Yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Los Angeles, and then sort of more dominant ones. And if that's sort of more of a Ligonian. We're coming up actually on the anniversary of the death of a friend of mine. She died when she was very young and at her funeral, it was very strange. There was her extended family and trans community and it was a Catholic funeral and the priest kept dead naming her and referring to her as a And we were like in two different worlds.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And then the aunt spoke out and said, she's not a son, she's a daughter. But here was an experience of being in between two worlds. And she was speaking out, we couldn't speak, there was like a barrier, we couldn't speak, but she was speaking out across worlds. Right? And there's this sense of being like relegated to pretense, but there can be sometimes creativity and playfulness, even though there wasn't necessarily in this case.
Judith Butler:Right, yes.
Talia Mae Bettcher:But the kind of apparitionality that I'm sort of talking about in the case of self recognition is even prior to that. It's like prior to when you land in a subculture. Right. Because you could have landed maybe in a different subculture.
Judith Butler:No, it's the condition of appearance. It's back to the conditions of
Talia Mae Bettcher:It's back to the condition of the appearance. And it's sort of advocating that because I think that now we need to even be more open for the possibility of coalitions to not be wedded to necessarily our homes or to be able to like call into question particular assumptions that we've made, to be able to step back and be ready for becoming even broader in terms of how we're thinking of things.
Judith Butler:Let me ask you this. I think we should probably turn to the political situation that is not only seeking to eliminate basic rights, access to healthcare, to legal status for trans people, but effectively eliminating their existence as such, right? It's an attack on the existence of trans people. It's funny because you're absolutely right to criticize my early work for focusing on imitation, since I think at that point I myself was very sensitive to having the reality of a certain butch top world called into question: you're not really men, you're not really a top, you're not, you know, all of this. I got it from lesbian communities and I got it from straight communities.
Judith Butler:I think I was more in the gender non conforming butch world than I knew, and many people have awakened me from that particular slumber, which is good. I think the charge against trans people in particular, or the charges in the plural, include being disguised or practicing deception, as you point out, or engaging in a kind of fraudulence. And I think that your idea of intimacy and spatiality is especially important now. In The UK, for instance, the trans exclusionary feminists say again and again that trans women not only engage in fraudulence, but they do so in order to do harm to so called real women, that is to have access to women's spaces, so there we have the foreclosure that you were talking about, and to do harm to women in those spaces. And the spaces can be bathrooms, they can be prisons, they can be clubs, less often but sometimes, especially spas, God forbid.
Judith Butler:But they are places where a certain kind of bodily nearness happens, not even necessarily contact. And I've always been amazed that not only do they claim that trans exclusionary people, that trans women are in disguise, but that they are disguising themselves on purpose in order to commit sexual violence or to do physical harm of some kind. So they attribute to trans women the absolutely worst version of masculinity that we know, right? Somehow they embody masculine violence in a way that ordinary men don't. I wonder what your read is on that, if you have one.
Talia Mae Bettcher:No, I do. And I think that it's actually really important. Although I do want to say one thing about the imitation stuff. While I'm kind of critical of it, I do want to say I also think that I'm kind of praising it a little cause I see that what you do there is an important moment and there's a moment of intimacy or vulnerability where you share your own concern at the time about being sort of put down as an invitation. And it's precisely that that allows you to flip things on its head.
Talia Mae Bettcher:So I think it's an important move that allows you to see things differently. It allows you to see things as, wait a minute, maybe she's not making fun of women. Maybe she's making fun of heterosexuality. Maybe I'm not just the only one who's an imitation.
Judith Butler:Right.
Talia Mae Bettcher:So it's all sort of Stalt shift.
Judith Butler:Yes, that's true.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I think that theories are important and they do important work and they shed important light. So it's not about we're beating up on the theory, but it's more like, I just think one of the things that trans studies has lacked is a distinctive trans theory or a set of trans theories that illuminates trans oppression and why, for example, even a trans person who wants to be like normative and pass could be engaging in resistance. I think that that hasn't been really clearly articulated. And I think that what I'm trying to do at least offers, for the better or the worse, offers one way to do that.
Judith Butler:I see that. Resistance becomes part of existing publicly, appearing, appearing publicly.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And claiming reality in the face of its denial.
Judith Butler:And claiming reality, yeah.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I think that this charge of being a rapist, I mean, it goes all the way back to the 'seventy '3 lesbian conference with Robin Morgan charging Beth Elliott of being a rapist. But you know, it's not just this whole sort of rapist allegation when it comes to sex segregation, there's another side of it. Like when trans women and also trans men in sexual relations, when later on they're found out or the person with whom they were having sex with decides to sell them down the river, that sort of alleged fraud is also equated with rape. So also having sex with a person while trans, that kind of so called deception can be represented as rape. So there's sort of the two sides of it, both when it comes to sex segregation and also when it comes to having sex with somebody.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I think that it's really important when it comes to these sex segregated spaces. And I think that for me, has a lot to do with how nakedness is mythologized. And I talk a lot about it in the book. I'm not gonna go into a lot of details right now, but like I will say, there's this sort of sense of like, well, why do women cover themselves in the sight of a man? Because their bodies are gonna incite rape.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Because they're getting all worked up and they're gonna write, why do we have And you'll even hear this in the so called gender critical arguments for sex segregation and for why trans women shouldn't be there, this kind of thing. We have these sex segregated spaces because in these intimate spaces, if you have men there, they're gonna get all worked up and this is gonna be just the kindness place where it's gonna get all rapey. Now what's interesting is they disregard the sort of the most interesting studies. There was a study in 2019 in Massachusetts that shows that these bathrooms and these intimate spaces are like the least likely places where you're gonna get any kind of such violence and stuff like that. And they showed that then there was a change in like trans inclusive policies.
Talia Mae Bettcher:There was no meaningful change in any kind of like reports of privacy violations or sexual assault or any kind of violence. They disregard all of the empirical data but they're playing into the mythology of female nakedness and what justifies female nakedness and what justifies female clothedness and sex segregation. And you might argue that it's actually playing into the sexist structures that it allegedly contests, right?
Judith Butler:I think it does, for sure. Talia, in this book you take issue at a certain point with what you call the incongruence account of trans existence, the idea that one is born into the wrong body, or that there's some something that's not right. Who the person is internally is not being expressed in their appearance, and that something has to be corrected. And my sense is that you saw these kinds of accounts as kind of buying into a pathological approach and possibly also engaging in certain conversion narratives. Then I realized who I truly am and, sought to correct this this terrible, mistake.
Judith Butler:And I am wondering what you contrast to that. I mean, I know from the book, but it might be interesting for readers to understand why it is you have a problem with that and what you're trying to do in asking people to look at trans life in a different way.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I think that one of the problems with the incongruence account, and not all forms of the incongruence account sort of subscribe to traditional versions of the wrong body. There can be more liberal versions of it, but it just doesn't seem to get complexity of trans experiences right as far as I can tell. How so? Well, it sort of tells this before and after picture. Before there's an incongruence and I'm sad and then I transition.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And then as you can imagine, there's like a TV show, like the before and the after, with the two different pictures. And now I'm happy and everything's great at the end and roll the credits. There have been other trans theorists who have written on this recently, Andrea Long Chu, Hail Malatino, Cam Awkward Rich, that's just not how trans life operates. Even after transition, life is not a picnic. And it's not just because life is hard for trans people, you still struggle with issues around dysphoria.
Talia Mae Bettcher:It doesn't go away. Your life gets better, but you still, for complicated reasons. And then for me, it also got things backwards because there were ways in which, as I say, like there's this like possibility of a kind of positive self recognition prior to transition, which seemed to just make a mockery of the whole before and after picture. And furthermore, it seemed to me that there was this kind of good, bad, positive, negative feelings that were very overly simplistic and I dropped dysphoria and euphoria and just gone with phoria. Knowing full well that phoria is supposed to come from Greek meaning carrier, but I don't care.
Talia Mae Bettcher:To capture something that is far more complicated that they can have a lot of in between stuff, positive, negative and different valences and stuff like that because the experience is far more complicated than that. And I think that we want to be able to have a way to register that sort of complexity.
Judith Butler:There's a wonderful section, I want to say it has ethical beauty to it, where you talk about the experience of looking in the mirror. You say that taking oneself in as an object, or an object who appears in some ways, is partly what we're doing. We're not getting rid of the idea of the object, as you said earlier. We're kind of accepting an, I guess I would call an objectal dimension of who we are. And this is an appearance, not a surface of make believe beneath which some reality lurks, but the condition for the sensory experience of oneself.
Judith Butler:The condition of the sensory experience of oneself. In other words, becoming an object, maybe paradoxically an object that appears for others, is in some sense 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 self in that relational issue, when one has, in some sense, become an object rather than a self burrowing subject looking for what can't be found there.
Judith Butler:And when you write about looking in the mirror, you suggest that one sees and feels a sensory appearance that is the condition of one's presence for others. So we have two things going on at the same time, which is the condition for sensory experience of oneself and the condition of one's presence for others, that those actually happen in and through this same kind of reflection of oneself as bounded object in this way. I of course enjoyed this especially because it departs so radically from the Lacanian idea, whereby the image, the mirror image in particular, is a kind of capturing and freezing of the self so that it can't even move. For you, it seems to me it's the occasion in which all sorts of things come together, and you call it a rightful self collection, a rightful self collection, which confirms that this appearance is, in fact, one's proper appearance. This is it.
Judith Butler:This is the proper. There's no improper here. There's this is the proper. And I think that the experience of the self, even the very possibility of experiencing oneself through the senses, only happens in the context of this impersonal spatial relation, because you're appearing, say, in the mirror for yourself, but you're also potentially appearing for any number of people. The history of your appearance, the future of your appearance is also kind of implied in that scene.
Judith Butler:So I found it wonderfully disconcerting to realize that where one expects to find a self, there is an interpersonal spatial relation, an appearing for others, but also that appearing for others is a form of resistance to trans oppressive categories and systems. So it seems to me that you shifted the discourse. The incongruence theories rely on a temporal sequence. And you're saying, let's think about space. Maybe spatiality is the way we should approach things.
Judith Butler:And what's the interpersonal dimension of space? And how does it work that we appear and that we emerge in our proper appearance within this interpersonal spatiality, as you put it? And I think that that's a really powerfulI hope that's okay to use that wordbut it's a very powerful challenge, both to transphobic systems and to ways of trying to give an account of transness that tend to fall back into discourses that we actually want to get beyond. So I don't know if there's a question in there. Maybe it's just me saying this was great.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Thank you. And I really appreciate your putting it that way because I think that's right. I think that that is true to what I wanted to do, 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 myself as a different sort of object.
Talia Mae Bettcher:So that's nice.
Judith Butler:I surprised you. I surprised you.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And I do like that. And I do think that the dialogical and also the pre dialogical and the movement into the dialogical is just simply so fundamental and how that is possible, how it is possible for us to so much as move into the dialogical and have that and recognizing that having a bounded appearance is absolutely critical to that. And also, for me, this does come from, I mean, just personal experience. So it's wonderful to be able to sort of join my own experience as a trans person and then to be able to theorize it. And that's where I think this type of work really, really, really work in a nice way.
Talia Mae Bettcher:When we're not just talking about the phobia and the violence, but rather something wonderful.
Judith Butler:Yes. And there is something with great dignity and magnificence in the way that you lead us to that set of insights. Maybe a final question. You know, we're living in this horrific time, but people are engaged in all kinds of resistance, some of which can't be publicized because otherwise it's not going to work. But the philosophical work that you do, it's obviously situated within political and social struggles, a personal life history, I'm sure.
Judith Butler:How do you see it operating in the world? Do you see it as part of a resistance, an act of resistance, a practice of resistance? What do you hope will happen with this book if you do have hopes of that kind, like in the broad political sphere? I'm not saying, you know, this or that policy change. I'm saying in the broad way that we dwell in the political world.
Talia Mae Bettcher:You know, that's a really great question. And I have to say, when I wrote this book, I've been working on this book for decades.
Judith Butler:And
Talia Mae Bettcher:when I was working to public, I was really not counting on the fascists taking over so quickly. This was really weird timing to have this happen. And a lot of my work, a lot of my essays while theoretical have a more kind of directly applied bent. And this is clearly the most theoretical thing I've ever done. It was more like, okay, let's think through all of this stuff I've been thinking through for a long time, if not to the bottom pretty deeply.
Talia Mae Bettcher:So now we have this thing, we have this thing that is pretty dense, pretty deep, but now we have all of this immediate political stuff happening and I'm kind of thinking, I wonder about the timing. So I do think about that and I'll tell you what my original hopes were and what I hope for it now. I mean, me, whenever I philosophize in trans stuff, I do think that I philosophize from what I call the existential what the fuck. And it's like trying to make sense of things in a confusing world where they don't want it to make sense for you, where the common sense is not, their common sense is not my common sense. And they're not giving me the resources to figure stuff out.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And the theories that I've seen don't work for me. Trying to philosophize and make sense, right? And hopefully it makes sense for other people, other trans people too. I think that that is an act of resistance. So that's always the first kind of impetus.
Talia Mae Bettcher:And then there was also this thought in terms of like, if you think about philosophical literature within the world you know, and how different genres connect to each other and what they do, there was this thought, well, I would like to do a couple of things. I would like for this to maybe make some coalitions with other genres. Like I would like for this to be in coalition with decolonial feminist philosophy.
Judith Butler:Yes, you make that clear. Anti racist projects of all kinds.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Yes, right. And you know, I was also thinking, well, I would like for there to be an alternative to sort of the two leading like trans theories. We don't even say trans theory, we say trans studies. I would like to like make a trans theory and put it out there. But now, the situation is very different.
Talia Mae Bettcher:I was delighted because there was a podcast, gender reveal and it was not an academic podcast and Ossie and then the folks who were running it, they were grooving to the book. And so they were finding a lot of it accessible and speaking to them. And that really made me feel like pretty good. And if I feel like if this speaks to trans people and gives them tools to make sense of what's happening, then I feel like that is a success. And right now it might be useful to have a new way of thinking about things.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Maybe it can be seized upon. And I think that it really applies to the stuff around bathrooms and sex segregation is quite pertinent to that. I'd like to see it used in that way, I'd like to see it applied. My turn now is more towards a kind of public philosophy. I'd like to find a way to translate some of this stuff in a way that is a bit more accessible to folks who may not be theory heads like myself, right?
Judith Butler:Yeah, it's a beautiful book and challenging and crucial, indispensable to our times. So I thank you very much. It's been an honor to speak with you today.
Talia Mae Bettcher:Thank you very much, Judith. I really appreciate it. Thank you. It's been an honor.
Narrator:By Talia Mae Bettcher is available from University of Minnesota Press.
Narrator:Thank you for listening.