Astacia

“The weaponization of this fearsome phantasm of “gender” is authoritarian at its core. Rolling back progressive legislation is surely fueled by backlash, but backlash describes only the reactive moment in this scene. The project of restoring the world to a time before “gender” promises a return to a patriarchal dream-order that may never have existed but that occupies the place of “history” or “nature”—an order that only a strong state can restore.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?

“The gap between the perceived or lived body and prevailing social norms can never fully be closed, which is why even those who happily embrace their sex assigned at birth still have to do performative work to embody that assignment in social life. Genders are not just assigned. They have to be realized or undertaken, or done, and no single act of doing secures the deal. Have I finally achieved the gender I have been seeking to become, or is becoming the name of the game, the temporality of gender itself?”
― Judith Butler, Who’s Afraid of Gender?

“A commemorative mug that said Monsters Are Real?”
― Leigh Bardugo, Ninth House

“Although interpreted as a backlash against progressive movements, anti–gender ideology is driven by a stronger wish, namely, the restoration of a patriarchal dream-order where a father is a father; a sexed identity never changes; women, conceived as “born female at birth,” resume their natural and “moral” positions within the household; and white people hold uncontested racial supremacy.”
― Judith Butler, Who's Afraid of Gender?