This Is Wrong -- Judith Butler on Executive Order 14168 -- London Review Of Books

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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/judith-butler/this-is-wrong

In the weeks​ since his inauguration, Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders intended to undermine progressive law and, in some cases, the foundations of constitutional democracy itself. The impression, as the orders arrive one after another, nearly ninety of them so far, is of a self-amplifying state bent on overcoming the rule of law and testing the limits of authoritarian power. The effect on many has been to induce a sense of disorientation and terror; they wonder when, or whether, it will stop. Some wave the orders away, stressing the difficulties of implementing them and affirming their faith that the courts will, in the end, prevent them from becoming law. Others, self-assured in their realism (or cynicism?), proclaim the inevitable end of democracy at the hands of authoritarianism, effectively giving up the struggle in advance. Many organizations succumbed to the orders as soon as they were issued. Some will have assented out of fear of the consequences of non-compliance. Others are excited by the fear Trump inspires, in thrall to the power to which they capitulate. Seemingly, they did not stop to ask themselves what the effect of their capitulation might be, or to recognize that by reproducing and enforcing the orders, they were strengthening them.

Executive Order 14168, issued on 20 January, is titled ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’. In the book I published last year, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, I noted that the campaign against ‘gender ideology’ was very late to gain ground in the US. The term itself was coined by the Vatican back in the 1990s. It was circulated in Latin America by both Catholic and evangelical churches (thus helping to mend a rift between them), and taken up by the World Congress of Families, especially in 2017, when Trump representatives were in attendance. It was an incendiary topic in presidential campaigns in Costa Rica, Uganda, South Korea, Taiwan, France, Italy, Argentina and Brazil, to name a few, though the US press hardly noticed. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán effectively allied with the Russian Orthodox Church in condemning ‘gender ideology’; in turn, Putin declared his fidelity to J.K. Rowling’s critique of trans rights, asserting that the ‘gender freedoms’ associated with ‘the West’ were a threat to Russia’s spiritual essence and national security. The last two popes have both taken a position against gender ideology; Pope Francis, despite his occasional progressivism, has accelerated the discourse, insisting that gender is a threat to men and women, to civilization, the family and the natural order of human relations.