Gender is a garment society chooses for you
Virginia Woolf, Judith Butler, and the question of identity beyond gender
by Sezer Ali | MAY 1, 2026
I first read Orlando years ago and took it as a game. A beautiful, witty, slightly mad game Virginia Woolf was playing with time and gender. Last week I opened it again, almost by accident, and something had shifted — or perhaps I had. The novel struck me differently this time. Not as literature, but as a question aimed directly at me: who are you, really, when you strip away everything the world has layered onto you? It is a question Woolf never answers — and that is precisely why it continues to haunt me. I went looking for the answer in Judith Butler. I found only better questions.
Orlando was published in 1928 and dedicated to Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. The dedication is there, black on white, in plain sight. The love letter runs three hundred pages (Woolf, 1928). The novel follows a single character across four centuries — from Elizabethan England to London in 1928 — and somewhere along the way Orlando simply wakes up as a woman. No explanation. No crisis. The world around him has changed. He — has not.
That idea was revolutionary in 1928. It remains revolutionary today.
Woolf knew something we are still disputing
Woolf’s sleight of hand is that Orlando does not suffer from the change, nor seek justification or ask forgiveness. Orlando simply exists — in different bodies, across different eras, in different clothes — and remains unmistakably herself. Woolf tells us something radically simple: identity runs deeper than gender. Gender is a garment. It may be new, it may be worn, it may not quite fit — but the same person lives beneath it.
Clothes are but a symbol of something hidden deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex.
— Virginia Woolf, Orlando (1928)
This provocation was not incidental. Woolf was writing at a moment of profound social change: women in the United Kingdom had only just received full voting rights — 1928 was the same year. The notion of gender as a social role rather than a biological destiny was, for most of her contemporaries, almost unthinkable. Simone de Beauvoir would give it philosophical form two decades later: one is not born but rather becomes a woman (De Beauvoir, 1949).
Butler: Gender is something you do — every day
Sixty-one years after Orlando, Judith Butler published Gender Trouble (1990) — and the academic world was never quite the same. Butler takes Woolf’s intuition and refines it into a theory of striking precision.
Her central claim is as simple as it is disruptive: gender is not something you have — it is something you do. Every day. Through your body, your voice, and the way you take up space in a room — or fold yourself into a corner. Butler calls this the performativity of gender: not theatricality or pretence, but a repeated set of acts that produces the very reality it appears only to describe (Butler, 1990).
Consider this: where did we learn how to behave ‘as a man’ or ‘as a woman’? No one handed us a manual. We absorbed it through countless small rehearsals — whether we cry or remain silent, how much space we claim or surrender, how we learn to speak about our own bodies. Society is the director, and we are actors so immersed in the role we forget there is a stage.
There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results.
— Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)
Where Woolf shows us what identity feels like from the inside — continuous, fluid, and transhistorical — Butler maps the mechanism from the outside: a system of norms, repetitions, and sanctions that produces the categories ‘man’ and ‘woman’ not as natural facts, but as social constructions (Butler, 1990). Crucially, Butler is not claiming that the body does not exist, or that biology is a myth. She is arguing that the meaning we attach to biology — the roles, expectations, and constraints — is culturally produced. And because it is produced, it can be produced differently.
From 1990 to today: The shift and the counter-shift
Butler’s theory arrived at a precise historical moment. The LGBTQ+ movement was in the midst of the HIV/AIDS crisis — people were dying, governments were silent, and much of society was looking elsewhere. Gender Trouble gave intellectual form to what many already knew from lived experience: that the categories themselves were constraints.
The three decades that followed were turbulent. Queer theory entered universities. Movements for transgender rights secured legislative gains across dozens of countries. Words like non-binary, genderfluid, and they/them entered dictionaries. Medical frameworks began to shift (Fausto-Sterling, 2000). The world, it seemed, was moving.
And then came the backlash.
We are now in a strange moment: the ideas of Woolf and Butler are simultaneously more visible — and more fiercely contested — than ever. ‘Gender ideology’ has become a political rallying cry in Hungary, Russia, and Poland, and with increasing force across Western Europe and the United States. Legislatures are passing laws that restrict the rights of transgender children. Feminists — among them J.K. Rowling — have publicly broken with queer theory over the question of biological sex and female identity (Rowling, 2020). Social media amplifies everything, flattening nuance into noise.
It would be easy to say that nothing has changed. That would be inaccurate. Much has changed. Change has simply generated counter-change — and we are living in the tension between the two.
Two sides of one question
Let us be honest — something this debate rarely permits.
From a progressive standpoint, transgender and non-binary people are here — real, visible, and still carrying a disproportionate burden of discrimination, violence, and erasure. The right to define one’s own identity is not an abstraction but a lived necessity. Academic theory has given language to experiences that long existed without words. And the call to ‘just follow the science’ is more complex than it appears — science itself increasingly recognises that biological sex is not a simple binary, but a spectrum with variations (Fausto-Sterling, 2000).
From a critical standpoint, concern for women’s single-sex spaces is not automatically reducible to transphobia. Questions around paediatric medicine and puberty blockers remain subjects of ongoing medical debate, not merely expressions of conservative panic. Feminism has a long history of grounding rights in the material reality of biological sex — and that history does not simply dissolve as categories evolve (Stock, 2021). The concern that rapid institutional change may outpace scientific understanding is, for many, a genuine one.
Orlando would likely recognise the shape of this conflict — and perhaps smile at it. Because Woolf never claimed to offer final answers; she posed questions. And that is precisely why the novel endures.
Butler today: More nuanced than her followers
Butler has not fallen silent. She continues to write and to give interviews — and her position is more nuanced than many of her followers assume.
In her later work, she cautions against two symmetrical risks. On one side, a new essentialisation of identity, in which categories such as ‘non-binary’ or ‘transgender’ risk hardening into fixed identities rather than opening space for freedom. On the other, a refusal to acknowledge that oppression remains real and unevenly distributed — that different bodies continue to live with different vulnerabilities (Butler, 2004).
Performativity, she insists, does not mean that we can simply choose who to be, as if changing clothes. Social norms precede us and constrain us. Freedom lies not in escaping those norms, but in recognising them — and in the slow, collective, sometimes difficult work of reshaping them (Butler, 2004).
Gender performativity is not a matter of choice. It is the way in which gender norms materialise in the body — and the way in which those norms can be subverted from within.
— Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (2004)
In other words, Butler is not saying ‘be whatever you wish’. She is asking us to understand the norms we inhabit — and to look for the points at which they can be reworked. Orlando did not choose to change gender. Orlando simply woke up. The distinction matters.
What remains unchanged — and why it matters
There is something that neither Woolf nor Butler would easily recognise as a victory for their ideas: polarisation. A world in which identity has become a battlefield — where every position hardens into certainty, and every attempt at nuance is read as betrayal — is not the world they were writing toward.
Woolf writes with humour. With irony. With lightness. Orlando is joy, not a manifesto.
Butler writes with rigour, but her aim is not to prescribe a new norm. It is to open space — space in which difference can exist without punishment.
Both, in different ways, return us to the same question: not who you are, but whether you are permitted to exist without being punished for it.
As long as the answer to that question remains ‘no’ for millions of people around the world — transgender women murdered in Brazil and Turkey; same-sex couples criminalised in Uganda and Russia; non-binary people rendered invisible by systems designed for only two categories — the conversation cannot be reduced to theory. It is a matter of life.
Orlando is still waiting
The novel ends with Orlando beneath the oak tree — the same tree that has stood beside her across four centuries. She looks up. A wild goose passes overhead. The story stops.
Woolf offers no resolution. She does not say: there, the problem is solved, identity is free. She offers something quieter: here is a person, here is a sky, here is a single moment of full presence. Whether the world will allow Orlando to exist — that is the question each successive generation must answer (Woolf, 1928).
We are that generation. Our answer remains unwritten. And perhaps it is precisely in what remains unfinished — not in victories or defeats — that the freedom Woolf and Butler wrote towards still lives.
Orlando never woke up. Orlando was awake the whole time. The question is whether we are.
REFERENCES
Butler, J. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (2004) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
De Beauvoir, S. (1949) Le Deuxieme Sexe. Paris: Gallimard. [Translated by H. M. Parshley as The Second Sex. London: Jonathan Cape, 1953.]
Fausto-Sterling, A. (2000) Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books.
Rowling, J. K. (2020) J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues. Available at: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/ (Accessed: 22 April 2026).
Stock, K. (2021) Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. London: Fleet.
Woolf, V. (1928) Orlando: A Biography. London: Hogarth Press.