system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Question about Judith Butler's performativity theory

When Judith Butler says that gender is strictly performance, and that it's not related to internal states, is she really saying that gender performance has nothing to do with what feels "natural" or "right" to a person? I feel like I must be misunderstanding something, because, if that's the case, how do you explain trans people? Why would someone choose a gender performance different from the one they were assigned at birth? I think it'd be easy to argue that trans people are people whose performances failed to live up to social expectations, but, a) that's not necessarily (or even usually) true, b) it wouldn't explain why someone would choose the even less socially acceptable option of transitioning, and c) it still leaves you with the question of why some people aren't able to meet social standards for performance.

Am I misunderstanding something here? If so, could someone please set me straight?
gpt
You're making a classic error in your reading of Butler, which is that you mistake performativity for a synonym of performance. They're really quite different. 

Performativity is to do with the philosophy of language, and it comes from the work of J.L. Austin. It has to do with the relationship between language and the very horizon of choice itself. Language, in short, structures both social and intimate horizons. It's not merely a means to describe things, but rather something that *does* things. 

Because language structures both the social world and the subject (i.e. the individual who speaks), the repetitive iterations (i.e. the saying over and over again, which is also necessarily a doing over and over again) of sex and gender impact on our very notion of what is possible in/for human life. "Choice," therefore, is a notion that's overdetermined by the parameters of language: none of us are "perfectly sovereign" subjects.

To better understand this, you might refer to something that may at first seem quite far afield: the discussion of interpellation in Althusser's "Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses." What Althusser says of ideology is not self-same with Butler's argument, but it comes a lot closer to performativity than you'll come if you try to understand her in terms of performance. As Althusser says of the subject:

>his ideas are his material actions inserted into his material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which we derive the ideas of that subject

To begin to understand Butler's argument, one needs only a slight modification, which is that what Althusser says of the "material" is also in and of language.