re: the judith butler thing, there is a blog post (i think?) where I remember serano talking about how she had said "[...] and fuck judith butler!" at the end of a public speaking/reading event of some sort, but that butler had later attended an event of serano's where they both finally got to meet and she made it clear that there was no ill will etc.
just an odd anecdote that I've always found interesting. i did notice how WG seems to be plagued with butler's theories but. yeah. given the popularity & importance of butler though I have a sense that her reaction was more about saving face by not being a jerk in public, but suddenly being confronted. but she's got some odd animosity towards butler, that's for sure. honestly it comes across as feeling threatened at her own sense of self, which isn't necessarily her fault, but the way she deals with it in this sorta drawn out introspection-lacking way is what I think the issue really is.
I don't think trans people being their true identities is inherently threatened by butler's theories. it just disrupts the narratives I think a lot of trans people wanna cling to i.e. societal comforting lies about "born in the wrong body" etc. and this sorta "no no no you're just as pericis as everyone else you were just wronged by the universe" attitude, as if the whole thing isn't socially constructed. but it's hard for people to reconcile the dialectic of "you're still who you say you are, you still have an identity, you can still transition and consider yourself a man/woman/etc., you still have things like physical dysphoria that may or may not exist separate from social influences, etc." mixed with "it's still a socially constructed performative role created through a mixture of time and action and history, though". like I don't think butler's ideas of gender performativity truly clash with some of the stuff in WG. nor transness in general. but one of the things argued in some Sylvia Wynter texts I've been reading is this idea that we are kinda "addicted" to being oppressed and to the lies sold to us, as it gives us hope and a strange form of dopamine to feel that we are conforming to the thing we're told will give us a certain outcome. doing The Thing We're Supposed To Do provides a psychological reward that becomes something we're psychologically dependent on and keep coming back to, even if it hurts us while we're doing that. and tbf this is being used in the context of things like racism and how you are told that if you're One Of The Good Ones, then you won't be killed or brutalized. but I really do think that the idea of people being "addicted" to certain cultural narratives about social categories rings so so so true considering how people will repeatedly wrestle with concepts surrounding the harms of gender (as a system) vs the very visceral ways we feel about who we are & our identities. it feels irreconcilable, but I don't think it really is (& I think that false notion of irreconcilability is the exact point where people get stuck and, like serano, pivot to denying that there could be any safety-blanket-ification of the attachment we all have to our gender identities at all, even though cis people deal with the same issue to varying extents as well)
Very much agree with a lot of your analysis here. Like you said, Butler's work challenges a lot of common narratives about transness that people take comfort in and build their identities around. When you challenge those narratives, people then feel like their entire identity is being challenged. Serano strikes me as a writer who very much falls into that camp of people. I often see a reflection of myself and my own insecurities as a trans person from 10 years ago when I reread Whipping Girl.
I also wholly agree that it's not irreconcilable. I mean, once Butler's theories finally clicked for me after I had read more performance theory broadly, studied more philosophy and critical theory, and frankly went to therapy and processed a lot of my own gender insecurities - it was genuinely like a door opened for me with regards to my understanding of structural power and identity.
I think the tricky thing of it is that it requires an understanding of philosophy and abstraction that deeply discomforts a lot of people in general nowadays, and I think that's just a symptom of broader cultural issue. It's a tall ask to get people to think abstractly about their sense of self and identities when they're under constant fire. The general you can't really blame people for getting stuck, but it's difficult to watch nonetheless.
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