Before she was a transphobe, J.K. Rowling was a writer. In her Harry Potter series, the villain Voldemort is so feared that everyone believes it is dangerous to utter his name. Instead, they call him “You-Know-Who” and “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named,” which, in 2016, people adopted sort of jokingly as monikers for Donald Trump. The idea, in the wizarding world as in ours, is that to breathe your opponent’s name is to feed him, give him a platform. Best not to engage.

What happens when your opposition already has platforms galore? “Perhaps we should retreat from such a person who denies the existence of other people,” Judith Butler writes of Rowling in their new book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, “but if such a person has allies, if they have power to orchestrate public discourse, and if they seek to deny others of basic rights,” then, like it or not, engage we must.

Butler, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the most influential philosophers living today. If a precocious middle-schooler — perhaps one who has adopted they/them pronouns — can explain to you that gender is not a biological inevitability but a social construct, Butler is partly responsible for that. Their 1990 book Gender Trouble — in which they argued that gender is not necessarily determined by the assignment of sex at birth but is an ongoing performance one has some say in — is so influential that its ideas, mind-boggling at the time, now strike many as self-evident.

Eminent philosophers typically are concerned mainly with other eminent philosophers. In Who’s Afraid of Gender?, Butler is concerned with Ron DeSantis. At times, reading the book can feel like watching Babe Ruth play against a Little League team. The arguments that Butler takes on — like Rowling’s assertion that trans women are male predators in disguise and DeSantis’s theory that teaching kids about homosexuality will make all kids gay — will strike many readers as simply beneath consideration. But Butler asserts that these arguments are important because their consequences are all too real: the lives of transgender people, the rights of women, the freedoms of gays and lesbians are imperiled everywhere.

Who’s Afraid of Gender?, published on March 19 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is Butler’s first book from a major trade publisher, and it’s their most accessible work to date. It has disappointed some critics who say it lacks the intellectual heft of Gender Trouble. But the book is animated less by Butler’s desire to show off intellectual prowess and more by moral tenacity, what the AIDS historian Sarah Schulman has identified as the common denominator among changemakers: “an inability to sit out a historical cataclysm.”

Butler’s argument is that the word “gender” is a lightning rod for the right wing. It’s used as an umbrella term for abortion rights, drag-queen story hours, sex education, gay marriage, and sex reassignment surgery — all the threats to the days when men were men, and women made sandwiches. By making “gender” seem immoral, those who attack the freedoms it stands for are able to justify their own immorality.

Butler marshals considerable evidence on this point. In a chapter on the Vatican, Butler argues that, by portraying “gender ideology” as a cabal of gay, elitist pedophiles, the Church deflects attention from the actual pedophilia it covered up for decades.

In another chapter, Butler demonstrates that the same thing is happening in Florida, where the misrepresentation of gender studies as a woke, authoritarian dogma has led to the shuttering of departments in higher education institutions and the introduction of state-approved dogma on gender and sexuality.

The most dynamic chapter in the book is on Rowling and her trans-exclusionary-radical-feminist (TERF) peers who once practiced intelligent thinking but have now abandoned it. Butler diagnoses the TERF position as a misunderstanding of womanhood as property, something you can claim sole ownership over and of which there is a finite supply that, like wealth, is best when hoarded. “No one owns their gender,” Butler writes.

The book’s exhaustive efforts can feel tiresome. Butler is not an artful writer. In 1998, they won the first ever “Bad Writing Contest” award in the journal Philosophy and Literature. Gender Trouble has been decried as inaccessible, pedantic, and full of run-on sentences that critics say are needlessly convoluted.

But I’ve always felt that Butler’s writing is difficult by necessity. That sentences demand to be reread to be understood is part of the point. Sometimes, complex ideas are best stated in complex syntax. As you toil over the sentences, something familiar reveals itself in a startling new light. When I read Gender Trouble as a freshman in college, I swore I could feel my synapses rearranging themselves.

The prose in Who’s Afraid of Gender? is plainer — and, in turn, the thinking is often plainer. But, at its best, this plainness horseshoes into poetry. The goal of the book, Butler writes, is to help “produce a world in which we can move and breathe and love without fear of violence, with the radical and unrealistic hope in a world no longer driven by moral sadism cloaked as morality.” They mean all this literally. At the end of the book, Butler asks, “What if we make freedom into the air we together breathe?” The question is beautiful, in part, because it is not a rhetorical one. Butler would like an answer.