The Pope of Gender

More than any other living academic, Judith Butler has seen her ideas seep out into the real world—in particular, a version of one of them. Butler’s big idea was that gender is a series of culturally meaningful performances ungrounded in any underlying “true” identity. Taking things a step further, Butler contended that sex itself is culturally constructed. In her 1990 book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, a staple of humanities seminars the world over, she wrote: “If the immutable character of sex is contested, perhaps this construct called ‘sex’ is as culturally constructed as gender; indeed, perhaps it was always already gender, with the consequence that the distinction between sex and gender turns out to be no distinction at all.”