>I agree entirely, but there's a difference between denying science and writing a book that isn't even claiming to do science.

You can't have it both ways. She's making VERY grand pronouncements about human nature, human biology, and such. This is clearly the realm of science which is the best means for figuring out reality. her approach is more akin to Greek philosophy - very armchair but no experiments.

Good news: I'm pretty sure her vague theories are also 100% unfalsifiable, so there will NEVER be a study which contradicts it.

So rejects all known facts, replacing them with vague unfalsifiable theories, and does zero experimentation. This is what we mean by saying her theories are anti-science, it's literally doing the opposite of what scientists do.

>Butler does not claim this.

She 100% implies it, or implies that biology is so small a role it can be ignored. Which is goofy nonsense. We know biology plays a MAJOR role in men and women. She separates sex and gender as wholy separate entirely to make "sex" as small a role as possible.

Since she and her adherants haven't even bothered to do the basics, I can thus pretty much reject their theories wholecloth. If they want to be taken seriously, actually create testable hypotheses and test them!

>It doesn't deny science, what it denies is a particular philosophical commitment within a particular scientific discourse, but not science at large.

Creationists literally say the same thing. ie they're not anti-science, they're against the fake evolution science.

Think: Butler never did a study and never thought about even testing her ideas. That's literally the bedrock of science! Even thinking "how would you even test any of this?" is kind of confusing, since these theories are somewhat vague. You'd have to create a testable hypothesis. Then test it. Which would ultimately make this much stronger, since it would then become a self-correcting science and more tied to reality.

But that would almost certainly mean that people like Butler would have to NOT make extremely big pronouncements about how the universe operates, and instead make smaller testable claims, then build up from there. And people like Butler don't want to do that. They want big theories of everything.

The thesis is so goofy - saying that humans are blank slates - it's like, do I need to really explain this? Like explain how hormones and biology affect our brains? Really? It's such blatant science rejection it's like arguing for creationism.

>The idea that there are naturally occurring genders/sexes (and so masculine/feminine hormones) is exactly what's being questioned in Butler's work.

Yes, which is why it's ultimately science denying and the equivalent of gender creationism.

>The claims only work if the ideas separating the actual biology and social constructs are defined.

Funny you're getting downvoted for some rather common sense critiques. She's lumping like 20 different things into one word - gender - entirely so that she can dismiss it. The background seems to be that she doesn't trust ANY attempt to quantify or define anything relating to sex and sexuality because it's been used as a tool of oppression in the past. Thus it should be all vague as hell, and ultimately left to the individual based on their feelings.

Yes, there's some very silly cultural fluffy elements of gender. But there's fluffy elements of anything that we consider culturally important. But there's also hard biology that she is doing her damndest to sweep away.

It's hilariously anti-science - effectively saying humans are born as blank slates, that biology plays zero role in our personalities, and that nature does not follow any rules. She also does not engage in any kind of scientific testing of her grand pronouncements since she doesn't come from a science background, so writing giant opinion pieces is all she's good at.

>arguing that every single matter of gender is performative puts an incredible burden on her case.

The simplest explanation is that she believes humans are born as blank slates, nature plays zero role in "gender", and that it's all performative. It's all goofy nonsense. It literally rejects all that we know about biology.

It's also operating on a naive mind/body dualism funny enough. It seems to assume that biology would play no role in our personalities which is just wrong. Butler should have done more reading on biology and less on sociology.

But she and her adherents do literally zero testing of their theories ("feminists release groundbreaking new study" is a headline you'll never hear), and tend to make very bold very ambitious claims that are also hopelessly vague. Rather than proving their theories, they go about attacking and shaming people for not believing them. It allows them to never have to interact with reality.