Warning in a 1992 interview against a “bad reading” of her landmark Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler insisted, “I decide what gender I want to be today” was not what she had meant. Such an understanding, by which gender would be something changeable, determined by one’s personal desire and acts of self-declaration, entailed the “commodification of gender … consumerism.” She noted, likewise, her discomfort with an apparently opposite notion of gender, according to which there are “essential, core gender identities” for the sake of which people living in the “wrong” body for their gender should seek medical procedures to align themselves with their unchosen gender identity.
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