The nine years between the prefaces give the reader insight into the evolution of Butler's perspective on the meaning of making trouble with their project. In the 1990 Preface, Butler introduces the theme of making trouble to explain the genesis of their critical project. From a young age and through their early intellectual history, they came to understand that certain assumptions about gender, especially the masculine/feminine binary, were examples of effects of discourse and compulsory heterosexuality masquerading as natural facts, as power concealing itself.

Butler's discussion of genealogy previews for the reader one of their primary means of exposing the workings of power and anticipates their use of poststructuralist critique in their work to deconstruct these accepted facts of gender, identity, and the body. Butler's 1990 Preface also reveals their understanding that their work was calculated to make trouble for feminism by bringing the insights of other disciplines to bear on it and intervene in feminism's reliance on a stable feminine subject as its foundation.

The 1999 Preface felicitously offers Butler's perspective on what trouble they ultimately managed to make, and the difference between the writer's voice in the 1990 Preface and the writer's voice in the 1999 Preface is a measure of Butler's arrival as a theorist. While the voice in the 1990 Preface is more playful and speculative, the voice in the 1999 Preface is more serious. The anecdote at the start of the 1990 Preface reaches all the way back to childhood and is almost lighthearted, while the autobiographical elements in the 1999 Preface document the pain and difficulty of Butler and their uncle as they confronted a gender reality of compulsory heterosexuality.

Butler also assumes a defensive posture in the 1999 Preface. They explain that they had no intention of undermining feminism, only to engage in the necessary work of "self-criticism" (vii). They defend poststructuralism as being attentive to social and political concerns. They express regret at not more thoroughly theorizing gender performativity, transgender identity, and intersexuality. They don't think drag is a paradigm for subversion. They indicate that they will do more work in psychoanalysis and have done more work to refine their ideas about gender. These explanations and offers of additional context are likely the result of the many criticisms inside and outside of the field of feminism that came Butler's way after the publication of Gender Trouble.

Ultimately, however, the 1999 Preface is a recognition of Butler's stature and their awareness of the influence of their work. Their (factual) statement at the start of the 1999 Preface that their work is foundational to queer theory also indicates that Butler is not the cheeky upstart of the 1990 Preface, one intent on disrupting feminism to make space for their concerns. Their closing in the 1999 Preface—"Judith Butler, Berkeley, California, June 1999" (xxviii) is an acknowledgement that making trouble for feminism ultimately created a space that moved concerns about gay, lesbian, and transgender identity from the margins to the center of institutions devoted to the study of gender.