Instead, in her groundbreaking book, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler claims that gender roles are taught and learned—often unwittingly, through socialization—as sets of actions, behaviors, manners, and expectations, and people perform those roles accordingly. Gender, for Butler, is a set of things a person

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Now, Butler is not denying that biological sex differences exist at all. Rather, she is arguing that any categorization or meaning we ascribe to those differences is a matter of power, not of truth. There’s no good reason, in her view, for seeing those differences as any more significant than differences of hair or eye color. The body, for her,

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