Geraniums

The stories we tell about who we are and about our culture, imprint our actions; however, it’s also true that reality bursts onto the scene unexpectedly, declaring itself incomprehensibly. These encounters have hidden power.

I’ll start with geraniums. I was walking down the street in Greenwich when a woman I’d never met approached me, she was pointing to a balcony on the other side of the railing. “Wow, I never knew what my geraniums looked like from over here,” she said, excited, as if we were continuing a conversation we’d been having for years.

Later, I was sitting in a Nepali restaurant in Woolwich, enjoying the ambiance in a small room where people could sit as long as they liked, a gem where such spaces are increasingly rare. A chap ate curry while watching football on his phone, and me, reading.

Stepping outside, I heard someone talking and felt something. A man with impaired vision was poking me with his stick—a bicycle blocked his way. I overcame my annoyance at having my post-lunch bliss interrupted. I moved aside so he could avoid the obstacle, and we went on. Something stayed with me however, the shift from inner bliss to public encounter, from annoyance to recognition. I’d been reading about how it’s through others and the ‘inter’ that we find ourselves. It felt fitting to add these two characters to our journey, as if the world around me wanted me to include them on the screen you are reading from.

Bicocca

A few weeks earlier my wife and I were in Italy, where she had been invited to give a talk at the University of Milan-Bicocca, a left-leaning institution. It was there that I met Judith Butler who, I would learn, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time, when it comes to gender. My wife rescheduled her film screening to make room for Butler’s lecture. She suggested I attend. The lecture was entitled “Gender Phantasms and the New Authoritarian Times.” 

We entered the packed lecture room. She had already started so we found a spot near the back, propped against the back doors on the floor. I tuned in. Butler stood at the podium, a live translation in Italian above her. She had her head down, reading from her paper. I thought it would be hard to follow, but her serious yet conversational tone seemed to invite us all to lean in, as if gathered around a campsite fire.

“If you care about freedom,” she’d said in her closing statement, “then you need to care about the freedoms being taken away from the underrepresented and those on the margins, because next it will be your freedoms.” I’ve always known that gender rights are important but did not, in all honesty, see how they could be more pressing than climate impact and all its downstream implications for the marginalised (which unfairly also impacts women).

The talk allowed me to appreciate that gender isn’t secondary to climate change impact in the way that I had thought, but perhaps is the cornerstone. Drawing on Butler’s concepts of who counts as fully human, whose lives are “grievable,” and whose reality is recognized as valid, I came to see that, when you control how people understand the most basic categories of human existence, you control their capacity to respond to everything else. If you can make people police the boundaries of their own being, reject their own complexity, then you’ve already won. They’ll police everything else for you. When you control how people see themselves at the most basic level, as Butler’s work illuminates, you control everything built on top, which includes how we see our shared environment.

While I have come to understand that the academic and feminist movements are multilayered and nuanced and far from settled on these topics, what struck me wasn’t just this adjustment of priorities in my mindset, but the mechanism she exposed.

For most of my life I’ve tried to understand people on the far right, to explain their actions through rational frameworks. In the 1980s, when skinheads attacked me on the street, I even managed to create a narrative to understand why they did what they did. Butler introduced what she calls the “fascist passion” – a deliberate lust for destruction that feeds on breaking taboos and transgressing norms, where the outrage that is provoked is actually the point. These concepts reshaped my understanding in many ways and continue to do so. I’ll unpack these ideas in a bit.

I wanted to talk to her. I felt compelled to respond to what had surfaced for me after the first lecture. She’d identified gender as the foundation on which entire worldviews are built. If that foundation isn’t fixed, if it’s actually fluid, then everything is fundamentally free, and that is worth fighting for.

“Are people ready for this?” I asked. I wanted to believe they must be.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “as we can see en masse, people don’t get it. And that’s where we are.”

“Is your work preparing the philosophical ground for that shift to happen?”

She seemed to grow larger (she’s tiny) when I asked that, and emphatically said

“Yes!”

The Pope

That same week, Pope Francis had died. My wife is a human rights activist who weaves action into her research and has followed him for years. She went to a convent school with nuns (we still visit), and in her youth would read the papal papers and argue with them about the position of women in the faith. She’s as fierce a critic of the Church as any. Yet his death hit her. “We need figures like him nowadays more than ever”.

This is where it gets complicated: Butler’s recent work begins with a devastating critique of the Church’s position, particularly Pope Francis’s writings. The Pope, I learned, has described “gender ideology” as one of the most dangerous ideological colonisations facing our world. In a 2015 book interview, he grouped it alongside nuclear weapons and genetic manipulation as threats that “do not recognise the order of creation.”

In his writings and speeches, he’d characterized gender theory as an attack on creation itself, on God’s design of man and woman, on the natural order that holds families and societies together. Pope Francis spoke of it as a form of cultural imperialism imposed by wealthy nations on poorer ones, destroying traditional values and the very concept of humanity.

While these views appeared primarily in interviews and speeches rather than official papal documents, the language has had significant impact. Yet, this same Pope embraced those the Church had historically rejected and spoke constantly of mercy and encounter. I don’t believe that this was PR but also don’t wish to diminish the long shadow that many religious institutions cast in the pursuit of their ideals of purity.

Butler documents how this papal language became state policy. In one of many similar examples in Poland, municipalities were seen declaring themselves “LGBT-free zones” and using the Vatican’s “gender ideology” language. Politicians and bishops cited papal statements to justify their opposition to LGBT rights, translating theological concepts into discriminatory territorial policies that went well beyond what the Vatican itself advocated and clearly in opposition to the Popes teachings on refugees, poverty and mercy.

Phantasm

Reading Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? felt like taking a course in gender studies and learning about how gender has been made the source of fear through what she calls a phantasm. As I understand Butler’s analysis, she describes this phantasm as a collective projection, drawing upon Marx and psychoanalysis. According to her framework, the phantasm emerges from terrors too vast to face directly, things such as climate collapse, economic precarity, the unravelling of everything we know as technology pulls the rug from underneath us. Rather than confront the fact that we’ve built a civilization destroying its own life support systems, Butler suggests our collective unconscious does something almost logical: it displaces these overwhelming fears onto something that seems more manageable. Gender becomes the screen for our existential dread.

In Butler’s account, the phantasm’s modus operandi is actually quite simple: it transforms “diffuse anxiety” into a concrete enemy. Gender ideology becomes the threat that can be named, located, and targeted. This offers false comfort. Now we have something to do, someone to blame. I also don’t want to depersonalise it too much, as there are very real individuals and organisations involved in fanning the flame of this particular cultural construct.

For me what makes this lens powerful is how it explains contradictions that otherwise seem without explanation. It clarifies something many people feel but have not named. If we understand this movement occurring in our culture from a deeper standpoint, it creates some opening for other possibilities.

The concept of the fascist passion describes a lust for destruction that thrives on transgression. When politicians deliberately cross every line, the outrage isn’t accidental; it’s the point. In Butler’s analysis, the passion operates through contradiction and strangely invokes a sense of freedom, while crushing it. A regime that speaks about defending one’s people while committing atrocities just a few miles away.

She provides more and more complex examples of the counter-intuitive channels that these inconsistencies travel through, how alliances are formed and how gender seems to have become a nexus point across cultural and national lines; new age movements siding with the far right and so on. These aren’t logical failures but rather features of how the phantasm works. It doesn’t need coherence; it needs dissonance and enemies. This in and of itself is strangely liberating to understand.

Furthermore – and this for me has proved very important to know – the phantasm cannot survive actual encounters. Like the climax of a science fiction film, where the terrifying enemy is revealed to be nothing more than a shadow cast from a hidden projector, the phantasm disintegrates in its own incoherence when we’re genuinely present to each other.

Butler writes: “the community is now more fundamentally defended, depending on exclusions and excisions to secure the borders of its self-understanding. The borders ensure that the community is not open to the promise that comprises the danger of its undoing, the surprise of its transformation. For this reason, I think it is rarely the case that a community turns against itself without having been incited to do so, without some effective incitation to act against those who threaten the community’s self-definition and cohesion.”

The phantasm needs borders and the idea of pure categories. This is expanded in her book and is another powerful contribution which I can hardly do justice to here. But when we actually encounter the stranger, something shifts. As Butler puts it, “I am no longer at ease… I am disturbed; I have been unsettled.”

I think that is why those manufacturing fear work so hard to prevent actual encounters. They need the distance that allows projection. But life keeps breaking through, in Pope Francis washing trans women’s feet, in unexpected conversations that reveal our porousness. Each genuine encounter is a small demolition of the phantasm’s logic.

Perhaps most importantly, Butler reveals what the phantasm cannot tolerate: the truth that “we are made through one another, not in a secondary or derivative way, but from the start and all along the way.” Our fundamental interdependence, our co-creation of each other, this is what the phantasm must deny to maintain its logic of certainties and the other as the impure or dehumanised.

But then a stranger stops you on the street to share how different the geraniums look from another angle. I am still impacted by this a few months later. A blind man needs you to move and something gets in, a sense that you never know how you may be of assistance.

I feel that Pope Francis knew this, even while holding to his doctrine. I don’t believe his encounters were planned theatrics. They were life demanding responses and a morphing of ourselves and others.

The world doesn’t need perfect stories or institutions. It needs people who can be interrupted. Who can live through grief, scandal, accusation, and still notice when someone needs the pavement cleared. Who can hold their worldview lightly enough that a stranger’s perspective can nudge them, potentially leading to a transformed self.