On permanence – Judith Butler in LRB:

“The problem in discrimination is not what sex you are, but how your sex is perceived and then treated. It is simply wrong if one is treated unfairly on the basis of a prejudicial perception of sex. The argument of Bostock v. Clayton County, written by Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, seemed to have defeated any effort to make sex assigned at birth permanent and unchangeable.
It’s not surprising, then, that Executive Order 14168 includes among its dictates the need to correct any ‘mis-applications’ of Bostock v. Clayton County. Indeed, the order shifts the basis of ‘an individual’s immutable biological classification’ away from genitalia to gametes: ‘“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell ... “Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.’ Why this shift? And what does it mean that the government can change its mind about what is immutable? Is the ‘immutable’ mutable after all? The existence of intersexed people has long posed a problem for sex assignment since they are living evidence that genitalia can be combined or mixed in certain ways. Gametes must have seemed less problematic. There is a larger one and a smaller one: let that be the immutable difference between female and male.”

(…)

“If there is no such thing as ‘gender ideology’, if it is a phantasm conjured up for the purpose of opposing a raft of social policies benefiting women, children and trans, queer, nonbinary and intersexed people, then gender ideology can itself be said to be ‘constructed’. Of course it was the claim that gender is ‘socially constructed’ that enraged its opponents in the first place, especially when they misread that theory to mean that a social category somehow brings into being the thing it names. Now, in turn, they seek to produce a social consensus that ‘gender ideology’ not only exists, but that it is a dangerous, even destructive, force.
In order to respond to Trump’s rash of executive orders, we need forms of public pedagogy that involve reading them carefully, the better to explain what they are saying and doing with the language they use. What realities do they seek to create and normalise? The pace has been so quick that it has been impossible to take in the implications of all the individual orders; instead, we reel from their collective assault. But we can, given a little time, collectively take each one apart in public, and gradually build a counter-discourse.”

(…)

“Thus, the regulation of sex assignment and the eradication of trans, intersex and nonbinary legal existence is a matter of national concern: the ‘entire American system’ is at stake. Of course, the dignity, safety and well-being of women should be secured, but if we value these principles, then it makes no sense to secure one group’s dignity, safety and well-being by depriving another group of dignity, safety and well-being. Indeed, the order effectively consigns trans people to radical indignity and unsafety, if not non-existence. Women – including trans women – and trans, intersexed and nonbinary people all deserve to be free of attacks on their dignity, safety and well-being, not only because the principle applies to all of them, but because these categories of person overlap. These are not always distinct populations.
The executive order seeks not only to defend women against gender ideology extremism but also to restore ‘biological truth’ to the federal government.”

(…)

“We need a better understanding of the fears exploited by authoritarians: who is this ‘migrant’, so dangerous they must be deported; this ‘Palestinian’ whose death secures the social and political order; this notion of ‘gender’ that is so threatening to self, family and society? Any alternative to authoritarianism must address these fears with a compelling vision of a world in which there would be security for all who now fear their own vanishing and the vanishing of their communities. We know immediately that this imagined world, collectively wrought and inspired by democratic ideals, would have no place for rights-stripping, eliminationist politics and forcible dispossession, and that it would refuse all forms of violence, including legal violence, in affirming the equality, value and interdependency of all living beings. Foolish and unrealistic, no doubt. But no less necessary for that.”

Read the article here.

If we must address the fears of those who voted for the authoritarianists, the question is, where to begin?

In a democracy you tolerate what you find intolerable. But what’s intolerable?

That’s a political fight, with lots of disinformation, as Butler points out. How to inform? Yes, you should begin somewhere, but elections in quite a few countries point out that rather important minorities turn their noses at information they dislike.

The US is moving in the direction of theocracy, albeit without God, just with a Sun King. But history had not come to an end. This Sun King will also fade away. How quickly, that’s the question.

As to saving the nation, there is nothing what authoritarians like better than the state of emergency.
To be sure, some democrats love the state of emergency as well.