Hello and welcome to this very special edition of Downstream IRL, very kindly hosted by reference point.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you've got no idea that 100 people have dragged their carcasses early in the morning to be with us today and that's for a very special reason.

I'm delighted to say that we are joined by Judith Butler philosopher

philosopher

philosopher author and as I found out this morning, a fan of hard-boiled eggs.

They need no introduction, but I'm going to do it anyway. They are the author of

seminal works such as gender trouble, bodies that matter, frames of war and their new book

who's afraid of gender which examines how a transphobic

backlash morphed into an all-out war against so-called gender ideology. It takes

us from the Vatican to the conservative right and it best of

all dissects how Britain became Turf Island. I'm so sorry that you have to be with us today but...

I'm glad to be here, glad to be here. Very honored actually.

So I guess my first question is when someone pops up and says what is a woman?

Yeah.

What are they really asking?

How that's such a good question.

Um, well, it depends who's asking and to whom the question is addressed.

But if Rishi Sunak asks that question of the Labor Party more generally,

or its current representative, he's trying to ridicule them or catch them out because you look

kind of foolish if you don't know, or you say, well, I'm not not sure or actually the category is open it's like oh come on

It's common sense everybody knows you're like in some

Erie obscurantist, woke ether, and you're having a problem with a very common sensical question, right? So the person who asks it in that way is trying to ally with common sense or

...