Philosophical innovation from, say, the Enlightenment (i.e. from the mid-18th century) to the Seventies has focused upon a set of concepts which I've been calling, for the sake of brevity, utopia. Sure, calling it "utopia" means that, when I suggest that the historic period cited above was the Age of Utopia, I need to clarify what I mean by utopia if I am to have an audience at all. Utopia, as discussed here, is the intersection of human desire and human world-picture.

There are two types of people. Those who believe there are two types of people and those who don't.

Judith Butler, well known feminist philosopher and the author of Gender Trouble participated in an email discussion with the feminist collective Broadly on the topic Why do Men Kill Trans Women?. It is intertwined with Broadly's own offering by Diana Tourjee, He's Not Done Killing Her

There were 23 known killings of transgender women in the United States in 2015. That number nearly doubled from the 12 reported in 2014. Broadly published an in-depth feature on these crimes in which we investigate their underlying cause. In addition to contacting police departments, victims' friends, and family, we interviewed the renowned queer theorist, Gender Trouble author Judith Butler.

One of the most disturbing, yet often easily overlooked, aspects of these crimes is the gender of the killers. Butler maps anti-trans violence back to the source, ultimately suggesting that trans deaths were caused by men because of men's need to meet culturally held standards of male power and masculinity.

She also insists that gender cannot be parsed from the other realities of the victims' lives. Ninety-one percent of the trans murders we investigated were people of color. They were primarily poor; many engaged in sex work. Law enforcement agencies have widely failed to classify these murders as hate crimes, maintaining a myopic perspective. By insisting that these facts be considered together, Butler does what the police have failed to do: recognize that the context in which these women lived and died is inseparable from their lives as transgender women of color.

--Broadly