Ew.”

— an unfaithful rendition of Marina and the Diamonds’ Bubblegum Bitch

“I’ll Chew You Up And Spit You Out”

I recently attended a screening of one of my favourite movies, Deepa Mehta’s Fire. The Elements Trilogy as a whole is a stunning achievement in filmmaking and a heartrending meditation on the Indian woman’s condition, but Earth and Water don’t have lesbians.

(Incidentally, Mehta herself is a bit touchy about Fire being described as a ‘lesbian movie’. No doubt this is partly a reaction to the controversy the movie generated in India upon its release in 1996, when it ran into trouble with both the censor board and right-wing political demonstrators who slandered it as obscene and vulgar. And the film is indeed less about lesbianism per se, and more about the tragic condition of Indian wives and mothers confined to the drudgery of thankless, loveless domesticity.

But also the two female leads do very much fuck, so you can’t exactly say it’s not a lesbian movie.)

It was a small event, and the screening was followed by a discussion of the movie’s themes and symbolism and mythological allusions. To nobody’s surprise, I was enjoying myself. I love the sound of my own voice, especially when it gets to pontificate on subjects both feminist and dykey.

Inevitably, the discussion turned to the topic of the movie’s thorny reception. A choice quote from the right-wing protestors’ women’s wing was shared:

“If women’s physical needs get fulfilled through lesbian acts, the institution of marriage will collapse, reproduction of human beings will stop!”

That one always makes me chuckle. Then came a few less amusing quotes from the editor of an Indian feminist magazine, to show that the (stated) ideologies of the movie’s critics are diverse (though their outlooks are invariably conservative). Our putatively feminist editor took issue with Fire portraying “Indian middle-class families” in a negative light—how scandalous!—as well as supposedly ruining the very concept of friendship between women. Now that Indians have been introduced to the concept of the lesbian, she tearfully asserts, women will no longer be able to form close, intimate bonds without being accused of dyking out.

Snickering, I was about to opine on the historically contentious relationship between feminists and lesbians—having recently finished an essay on the topic—when the only other Indian woman present spoke first.

“You know, I quite agree with that.”

And so an important lesson was learned: to not immediately assume an event about queer media will be necessarily queer-friendly.

My jaw snapped shut and I sat there, quietly, listening to this woman—older, presumptively straight—talk about all her lesbian friends that she definitely has, who are from an older, simpler time, and would have much preferred to continue carrying out their salacious lesbian affairs in private, under the cover allegedly provided by near-total epistemicide, with their husbands none the wiser. I was increasingly baffled by her outlook. It seemed not to consider that any lesbians could want to live openly, to walk in the street arm in arm with their partners without inviting ire, not due to ignorance, but because our society is actually becoming more tolerant.

It seemed not to consider the existence of lesbians, Indian or otherwise, who don’t fucking want husbands.

That’s the essential character of heterofeminist lesbophobia. To be Woman is to suffer in a doomed, eternal dance with Man, to be resented and desired by him and to resent and desire him in equal measure. The lesbian, if she wants feminist legibility, must either be reduced to a pure symbol, a fetish for a feminist ideal untainted by desire, or excluded entirely. Sometimes there is resentment, an idea that to desire other women is to be inherently Male, Manly, Masculine, and so to suffer less under patriarchy. Sometimes there is simple disbelief. Lesbians don’t truly desire each other, do they?

They must simply have grown sick of men.

I’d love to tell you all I gave this woman a piece of my mind, but I’m not in the habit of outing myself to people who I know will be weird about it. I prefer life. So I nodded, excused myself, and slipped out the door soon after.

It wasn’t as scary as being cornered by a man in a mostly empty coffee shop, I’ll admit, but it certainly left me feeling just as bad.

“I’m Miss Sugar Pink”

Let’s talk about biphobia!

A common point of discussion online, repeated ad nauseam—because queer history is always in the process of being erased and re-discovered—is why bi men and women experience subtly different forms of biphobia. The bi woman is usually imagined to be insufficiently gay, insufficiently queer, a pretender or a user or something in that vein. She is merely a tourist, serving her Queer Time until her inevitable return to the heterosexual fold, a temporary phase to bring up as a passing point of interest at cocktail parties. The bi man, by contrast, is imagined to inhabit a temporary stop on the way to Gaysville, utilising bisexuality as a closet with glass doors, so to speak. He is simply tempering his deeply repressed desire to suck and fuck as much mancock as he can get his hands on by assuring us all that no, no, he does find himself attracted to women once in a blue moon, a tragic victim of society’s heterosexual expectations who just needs a bit of time before he can truly get his Flame On.

Many theorise that this is due to society’s androcentrism—all roads lead inevitably to the veneration of Man, in a sense. The bi women must really want to fuck men and the bi men must really want to fuck men, which contributes to their respective mythologies of deception. It’s a compelling theory, though it does run up against the inconvenient fact that men are not encouraged to eroticise men in an authentically sexual and romantic way—only in the way that other men are the only people men value. Why are bi men not as frequently libelled as “fake queers” who will eventually turn their backs on queer communities? (It is not totally absent from queer men’s biphobia, but the other narrative about bi men is both more popular and more widely parroted outside of queer spaces.)

A part of this is due to the dichotomy between homophobia against men, and homophobia against women. Feminisation and “faggot” stick to you the way blood-caked hair sticks to a cracked scalp. Meanwhile, “dyke” is something people are always trying to tear out of your hands, no matter how tightly you grasp it. No matter how long you live and love as one, no matter how much you assert your non-interest in men, you are always at risk of being a Fake Dyke, a Temporarily Embarrassed Tradwife who will eventually give in to the siren call of unwashed mandong.

I am, of course, speaking in generalities here. There are gay men who are disbelieved—usually but not always due to gender-conformity—and lesbians who are not, usually but not always due to gender non-conformity. Such is the problem when speaking of patriarchal attitudes and mechanisms: there will be corner cases, which unfortunately do not undermine the core logic at play.

(And any longtime readers who have spotted the symmetry here, between this phenomenon and the fundamental difference between degendering and regendering, congratulations on paying attention.)

It is harder to “reclaim” a “fallen” man than a “fallen” woman because shirking the signifiers of manhood leaves you Marked, tainted. (Read “fallen” as “queer”; a heterosexual society considers them synonymous.) Meanwhile, those designated as reproductive assets usually have a great degree of pressure exerted on them to turn back, to be reclaimed and serve their True Purpose before it’s too late and they hit the point of no return. What that point of no return is, is flexible; sometimes even marrying a woman or being a chronically genderfucky dyke aren’t enough, sometimes they are. It usually depends on what is most convenient for the one passing judgment upon you.

All forms of bigotry are flexible like that, you see. They’re mechanisms of punishment, not hard and fast rules.

It’s the underlying existential horror of queer womanhood. There are always voices whispering to us in the dark, telling us that nothing we do will ever prove we’re dyke enough, that we’re just kidding ourselves until the Sufficiently Revered Manshaft happens along and claims us. We are constantly subject to messaging that is invalidating at its core, which at once excludes us from the category ‘woman’ due to our queerness while also reminding us that womanhood—true, heterosexual womanhood—is inescapable. We can get as many side shaves and girlfriends and big stompy boots as we like, but glitter hearts and pink dresses and tradwifery will come for us all, says everyone and everything around us.

It’s enough to drive a dyke mad.

And you know, it frequently does.

“Steal Me With a Kiss”

So let’s discuss the pink elephant in the room, or Low-key, I chose to be a lesbian, the Autostraddle article that has taken the dyke internet by storm.

It’s fine.

But many lesbians think otherwise.

The article is written by a bi lesbian who is attracted to men but has no interest in dating them, and I understand why it’s been received in the way it has. It more or less jabs a hot poker in a nerve that has been raw since the Ancient Times, dating back to the halcyon days of the second wave that birthed lesbian feminism in the crucible of the original posting wars between hetfeminists and lesfeminists, when lesbianism was a Political Statement and a Feminist Duty because liberation could only be brought about by those who don’t “sleep with the enemy”.

A couple of dykes (or political lesbians—the difference will be important!) said that once, and the rest of us have to suffer the consequences in perpetuity now.

Essentially, it highlights the tension between lesbianism as a feminist fetish and a way of life. Many of us are guilty of the sin of wanting our marginalised identities to be statements in and of themselves, to represent our radicalism and progressivism instead of just being aspects of our lives that incur hegemonic wrath. That central tension is exposed, over and over again, in arguments about authentic and performative queers, assimilationist and radical queers—real and fake queers, as always. Where “real” can mean “a part of my life and embodiment that I had no choice about or say in”, or “a deliberate statement I make about my politics as an aspect of my identity”, depending on who’s speaking.

Don’t you just love the inherent imprecision of mere words?

Therefore, we must once more put the dreaded Political Lesbians—the polilezzes, if you will—on trial, condemning them for their nefarious misdeeds and longstanding conspiracy to dilute the meaning of the word ‘lesbian’. Political Lesbians are not lesbians—lesbianism is not chosen, after all—and it is offensive to say that lesbian identity is something you can simply put on, like a costume, or that lesbianism is something you do instead of something you are. Real lesbians all agree.

But of course, I must do the one thing I never expected I would do, and actually hand it to the fucking queer theorists. Because online discourses have regressed past mere Feminism and Queer 101, all the way back to the desperate pleading with our oppressors to pwease not oppress us, we can’t help it, our queerness is an Essential Characteristic we have no choice in. Queer theorists are wrong about a lot, but they were fucking right to push against this assumption of essentialism!

So, answer me this, sweeties: queerness being an essential characteristic is good and all for us True Homosexuals, but aren’t we leaving our bi siblings out in the cold a little? Bisexual people are essentially bisexual, perhaps, and can’t not be bisexual, but they can date people of ‘either’ (socially sanctioned patriarchal) sex.

Are they wrong for choosing to date people of their own gender?

Are they wrong to ‘choose’ being gay?

And fuck it—are we wrong to choose it? If it was a choice, if you could actually choose not to be gay, are you telling me you’d actually fucking take it?

You don’t have to tell me. This one can be between you and your pastor, which I am not, but really think about it long and hard.

I can understand why people rankle at this, but that doesn’t mean the impulse is good. It can be a little lonely, sometimes, to be chatting with your lesbian bestie and have yet another dyke in your life drop the reveal that she’s probably bi but knows for a fact that she never wants to date men. That queer wariness comes from somewhere, is the thing—enough of us have been told by our exes that they simply can’t be with us because they’ve chosen their families’ expectations over our happiness. And enough of us have actually used bisexuality as that stepping stone, in that way that bi men are so often accused of doing because promising our parents that hey, don’t worry, I know I’m a fucking freak but maybe I’ll still end up with a guy, chill out—it can be a necessary evil. Or even something we tell ourselves and truly believe, in the complex process of queer self-discovery in a world that avowedly wants us to not be queer.

That’s the part that people consistently overlook in these discussions: we’re all trying to navigate a patriarchal society that doesn’t care what we want, only that we obey its directives. And very often, the people telling us they can’t be with us because they’d rather give in aren’t even bisexual. I have a friend whose ex has a labrys womb tattoo and never identified as anything but a dyke. She still went “My family wants me to marry a man” and fucked off to do just that. We’re all haunted by the Lesbian Canon Event, and terrified of being subject to it again.

More of us are haunted by the idea of being someone’s Lesbian Canon Event than we’re willing to admit.

The pursuit for the Pure Lesbian Who Will Never Leave Me is as understandable as it is futile, and it has led to more intracommunity nonsense than I have the time to write essays about. I’ve seen “femme for femme” lesbians say that dating butches isn’t lesbian—butches are basically men, don’t you know? I’ve seen butches say that femmes who don’t date butches aren’t really gay because they’re not attracted to the inherently gender-defying lesbian—they’re just attracted to a version of themselves. (Finally, cis lesbians can be autogynephiles too.) I’ve seen ancient arguments about how femme lesbians who don’t adopt more androgynous presentation are simply waiting to return to straightness—hm! Or that lesbians who go back to presenting more femininely are “turning straight”. And of course, there’s the ever-present re-digestion of everyone’s favourite topic: does butch-femme “recreate heterosexuality”?

(Queer men have similar gendered anxieties about femininity as costume versus femininity as identity, which I’ll mention but won’t discuss in-depth because it’s not really the topic of this essay, or my scene.)

As it turns out, we all exist in a patriarchal world that says that there is no such thing as a real lesbian, and so we are all cracking under the strain of having to prove our Real Lesbianism to everyone including ourselves. But it’s a fiction. A mirage. Not in the sense that women who are only attracted to women don’t exist—we very much do. But what’s the prize for a lesbian who feels no attraction to men?

There isn’t one.

(Which sucks because I’d win.)

There is also literally nothing wrong about bisexual women who profess their lesbianism and choose not to date men. It’s not something that they’re incentivised to do in any way, and their attraction to men doesn’t mean they have to or will date any. If you live a lesbian life, does it matter what you feel in your heart of hearts—or clit of clits?

Because I’ll tell y’all for free that if I had a choice in the matter, I’d look every one of you in the eye and choose to be a dyke. Always. In every life, in every timeline, in every eventuality. And I have no issue with those who’d do the same.

Let bi women date women.

“I’m Gonna Pop Your Bubble Gum Heart”

Pink elephant number two: “born this way”.

While the Gaga song is a bop, the argument has outlived its usefulness. Arguably, it was never productive to engage with zealots and homophobes on their terms, to assure them that we wouldn’t be queer if we had any other choice. Frankly, I would. Frankly, you couldn’t entice me to heterosexuality if you tried.

Frankly, I endured a system that did try to entice me to be heterosexual. It’s called ‘patriarchy’.

That’s the uncomfortable bit we’re not saying out loud, isn’t it? You can choose not to be homosexual—not openly. Many of us do make and have made that choice, sometimes because we didn’t know any better, of course. But sometimes we knew exactly who we were and chose to keep quiet about it anyway because the consequences of not keeping your mouth shut can be very, very bad.

Let’s face it, gang: existing as queer is something we have to choose to do. We have to work towards it, bide our time sometimes, and we have to fight like hell to get to be who we are on our own times. That’s why we guard it so jealously.

But we all had the option to not do that. Which doesn’t make it a good option, mind. I very clearly and emphatically believe just the opposite. That doesn’t mean that the choice isn’t there, or that many of us—too many of us, frankly—haven’t been coerced and pressured and browbeaten into making that choice, at the cost of our own happiness.

Patriarchy doesn’t care what you want, remember? All that matters is that you obey. That you conform. You can apologise for your existence to your heart’s content and reassure everyone that you’ll suppress your freak urges, so long as you pop out babies for the hegemonic machinery all the same.

In the grand scheme of things, taking that into account, I find I have no fucks to give about women who say they choose to be dykes. To say we all are attracted to men and are choosing dykehood out of disappointment or spite—that’s a different statement, and not one the writer of the Autostraddle article made. The reality of lesbian identity is always under threat because lesbians are always under threat in a reproductive, heterosexualist hegemony. But the problem is not people who eschew their attraction to men.

The problem is very much those who wish to compel us to be with men, attracted or no.

The essays on this blog have been compiled into two books. The first, Trans/Rad/Fem, was released in January 2025, and is chiefly a radical transfeminist text concerned with developing a materialist theory of transmisogyny. It looks at the second wave, both good and ill, and eludicates how the cultural feminist expressions of transphobia are deeply at odds with that movement’s own social-constructivist roots.

Trans/Rad/Fem was motivated largely by the persistent epistemic injustice against trans women in all avenues, from feminism to anthropology to the modern coverage of our lives, healthcare and histories. It seeks to provide a ready feminist analysis of trans women’s oppression that doesn’t treat it as a particularly extreme manifestation of homophobia or a case of ‘misdirected misogyny’, but a core feature of patriarchal regimes and logics that enforce a rigid sex difference and male-supremacy.

Which did leave the question: what about the feminisms after the second wave? What about the feminist currents that denounced radical feminism and sought to elevate more diverse, marginal and underrepresented perspectives? If the trans woman continues to struggle to be seen as a feminist subject well into the 2020s, what precisely went wrong between the 90s and today?

As it so happens, the question has an answer. And the answer is unfortunately sobering: feminist currents have struggled to be as inclusive as advertised for all women excluded from the heterosexual contract—and even many who are not!

From declarations that “feminism is over”, to delineations between feminist concerns and queer studies that have left both disciplines weaker, to misperceptions of intersectionality theory and the concerns of multiply-marginalized women, feminism has been through a beating. It has been judged and denounced as insufficiently inclusive and unnecessary and outdated by those who have a vested interest in backgrounding critiques of patriarchy, and subjected to endless schisms that preclude solidarity between different demographics. Legitimate critiques have been recuperated in bad-faith, groundbreaking insights have been obfuscated and we have been told, over and over and over, that only the privileged and the bourgeois and the white and the comfortable care about feminism instead of other, more urgent concerns.

So when the screaming reactionaries today make it known how much they are motivated by gender, by the enforcement of gender, by the reversal of gains for the gender-marginalized, by the retrenchment of patriarchal and eugenical and Nationalist and natalist projects, we are left with the last laugh on a rapidly sinking ship.

I wrote Brown/Trans/Les for much the same reason that I wrote Trans/Rad/Fem: because I am tired of being told that feminism doesn’t matter in a world where the principles of patriarchy have proven foundational to conservative and repressive regimes. Because no matter how much we have erred in attempting to articulate feminist theories, feminist consciousness, and feminist futures, the oppression of women is not a lost cause, and it is not a secondary concern to anything else. It is intertwined with the very essence of fascist and statist logics, the motivations of those with power and their loyal lapdogs alike, and it is today more vital to understand how and why gender is so core to how boundaries are constructed—and violently upheld.

It’s the male-supremacy, stupid.

As for where I go from here… I’m not finished writing about feminism. Far from it. But I am at the end of a breakneck two-year period of developing and summarizing a feminist framework that can perhaps finally get to the root of how trans and queer and racialized and even white, cishet women are marginalized. I will do my best to update this blog more regularly, but I will also do it at a more relaxed pace, and cover less rigorous topics, without an eye to eventual publication or a focus on didactism. I will also put out more writing on current and personal topics, as well as more content just for subscribers.

I would like to thank all of my readers for accompanying me on this tumultuous, fraught, and exhausting journey. I hope that you will stay with me for what’s ahead, and that the fight ahead of us gets just a bit easier.

Brown/Trans/Les is out now on Amazon, Itch, and various storefronts.

In addition, the Trans/Rad/Fem audiobook is now also out on Itch and Audible.

Indians are all taught the story of Eklavya. In the Mahabharat, Eklavya was an ordinary boy of prodigious talent, an archer so skilled with no formal training that he shocked even the royal princes’ tutor, Dronacharya. He was impassioned, deferential, and respectful, and all he wanted was the honor of Dronacharya’s tutelage, under whom he would no doubt flourish.

This presented the legendary guru Dronacharya with a dilemma. Yes, Eklavya was an ideal pupil and had passed all of his tests, following every established tradition in his quest for mentorship. Yet Dronacharya’s duty was to his royal charges first and foremost, and more selfishly, to Arjun, the most talented of the princes and Dronacharya’s favorite student. Now duty-bound to grant Eklavya’s boon, Dronacharya resorted to a morally dubious solution that was still entirely in keeping with our culture’s values (or sanskaar): he asked Eklavya, as his loyal pupil, to grant gurudakshina—a gift to one’s teacher—and demand that Eklavya cut off and present his right thumb.

Eklavya, of course, did so without hesitation.

Though the pundits debate the sagacity of Dronacharya’s actions to this day, especially in the context of how even this small incident held untold ramification for the coming war of succession, we all understand that as students, we owe our teachers—whom we still refer to as guru—everything. They are the ones through which we access the most sacred wealth: knowledge itself, a commodity whose indispensability is no better illustrated than by noting that Saraswati and Laxmi are aspects of the same mother goddess. Some believe that our duty to our teachers transcends even that which we owe our parents.

Which has never stopped anyone from passing notes in class, of course.

After all, you can tell children whatever stories you like, but you can’t make them pay attention if they don’t want to.

We mostly call our teachers “Sir” and “Madam” nowadays, by the way. I don’t really have statistics on that, and I haven’t exactly checked, but I’m from India. You can take my word for it.

Right?

Western Feminism and the “Third World Woman”

Readers of Trans/Rad/Fem are no doubt already familiar with the Western academy’s tenuous relationship to the empirical reality of cultures and social structures outside the West. In a discursive landscape that had yet to grapple with the intersections at which multiply-marginalized women were made illegible—leave alone questions of “epistemic injustice”—the “Third World Woman” was initially fashioned as a convenient rhetorical device, tailor-made to prop up ideologies of Western superiority.

The “Third World Woman” was, of course, entirely bereft of both voice and agency, a silent fetish who could only ever be spoken for, never spoken to. Much ink was spilled on the pronounced and acute state of her abjection: her illiteracy, her jealously-guarded chastity, the total ownership that her father or husband exercised over her, usually exemplified by that most dreaded of garments, the veil. Through her, the Western feminist could exalt her own state of liberty, autonomy, and ability to think, read, organize, and agitate—especially on behalf of the Western colonial-states, of course. For did not the “Third World Woman”, by dint of her very existence, show us all why the West was, indeed, Enlightened?

What manner of society did not even allow its women to propagandize for it?

This is the climate that Chandra Talpade Mohanty sought to deconstruct in her paper, Under Western Eyes, published in 1984. Here, Mohanty strenuously argues against the prevailing orthodoxies plaguing feminist discourses of the time that flattened, homogenized, and frankly exoticized the “Third World”. She pointed out how the complexities and contradictions of Third World existence were entirely erased by these simplistic narratives, and that actual living, breathing women in the Third World did not all suffer a totalizing, uniform abjection. The Third World contained affluent and impoverished women, upper and lower caste women, women of hegemonic and marginalized faiths in theocracies—in short, women whose lives were textured by the multiplicities of their own cultures and states. They did not exist solely for Western aggrandizement, defined by a singular story of suffering that rendered them monolithic and monomythic.

In short, Mohanty was making an argument for epistemic justice—for engaging with the complexity of women’s oppression in the Third World, and acknowledging that there was no all-encompassing “Third World Womanhood” that rendered them all subject to the same oppression or aligned their interests wholly. The well-off housewife had only so much in common with her live-in maid, after all. It was effectively an argument to afford Third World women the same degree of nuance as Western feminists (sometimes) afforded women in the West, acknowledging and being cognizant of internal disputes and differing goals.

Arguably, this erasure of nuance and the particularities of multiply-marginalized women’s lives has been the central feminist failure since at least Friedan, if not before. Any feminist movement—wherever it might be located—risks overemphasizing the concerns of the hegemonic demographic, asking the most vulnerable to be the most patient and to put their specific, “lesser” concerns aside for the sake of feminist cohesion and solidarity. From Rich to Mohanty to Crenshaw to Feinberg to Serano, feminism’s history could well be succinctly summarized as, “Aren’t you forgetting someone?”

For the “Third World woman”, this concern is only heightened by the Western academy’s privileging of its own perspectives, its own histories, and most of all its own epistemologies. To make herself legible at all, the “Third World woman” has to acquiesce to the West’s framing, to use its language, its methodologies, to try to define herself in the realm of its existing ideas and conceptions and assumptions of her life and people. Imagine what it would take for her to be understood on her own terms, as a subject—a person shaped by a non-Western society with its own regimes and organization and structures of power.

Could it even be done?

According to Maria Lugones, the name most associated with ‘decolonial feminism’, we should damn well try.

“Decolonizing Gender”

In 2007, Maria Lugones published Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System. She builds on Anibal Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power—briefly, the idea that the structuring of precolonial societies by colonizing powers continues to affect and structure those societies post-colonization—to define and discuss a concept she calls the coloniality of gender. Lugones draws on the work of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Paula Gunn Allen, and other scholars to illustrate that prior to colonialism, non-Western societies were not in fact organized along a hierarchy of binary gender.

“The reason to historicize gender formation is that without this history, we keep on centering our analysis on the patriarchy; that is, on a binary, hierarchical, oppressive gender formation that rests on male supremacy without any clear understanding of the mechanisms by which heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other. The heterosexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework of analysis.” [Emphasis mine.]

Her primary source in the paper is Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women, a book published in 1997 that discusses Yoruba society and gender. Oyěwùmí argues that gender was simply not an organizing principle of precolonial Yoruba society and that to view Yoruba society through this Eurocentric lens of binary and hierarchical gender is in fact to try and fit an ungendered society into a Western mold. In fact, the introduction of gender to precolonial societies is in and of itself a tool of Western domination, to subsume local epistemologies and ways of being. She says:

“The emergence of women as an identifiable category, defined by their anatomy and subordinated to men in all situations, resulted, in part, from the imposition of a patriarchal colonial state. For females, colonization was a twofold process of racial inferiorization and gender subordination. The creation of ‘women’ as a category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colonial state.” [Emphasis mine.]

Lugones and Oyěwùmí are arguing, then, that colonization was the genesis of gender in precolonial societies that had more egalitarian relations between the sexes. As such, gender and race were inseparable concepts, themselves interlinked with colonial domination and capitalism, as coterminous systems of power constructed to uphold the myth of Western superiority and secure Western-supremacy. At various points in the essay, Lugones refers to the establishment of patriarchy in precolonial societies as a betrayal, a case of collaboration between the males of a non-Western society and colonizing Western powers.

She also cites Michael J. Horswell, who discusses alternative understandings of gender and sexuality in Andean cultures and analyses his use of the term… “third gender”.

Fascinating.

While neither Lugones nor Oyěwùmí are trans scholars or strictly talking about trans people, their ideas have proved to be influential beyond their own disciplines. Many discourses in feminist, queer and trans studies draw directly from the concepts established in this paper and its interpretation of Oyěwùmí’s text to discuss the potential and possibility of queer histories and trans acceptance in precolonial times. In that sense, Lugones’ concept of the coloniality of gender unites a variety of disparate struggles and invites us to imagine worlds free of Western systems of domination that precede our own.

But is it… you know… true?

Let’s consider this paper more generally before focusing on the specifics. Non-Western society is a breathtakingly broad category. Singular non-Western countries that exist today are themselves constructions that haphazardly aggregate masses of cultures, hierarchies, peoples, languages, institutions, systems, religions, and histories into a supposedly shared national identity. To make a statement that is both this broad and this definitive about every non-Western society would require a very high threshold of evidence, one that these selfsame scholars insist the assertion that “patriarchy is a transcultural phenomenon” does not meet! So to claim that the very opposite is true about Argentina and also India and also China and also Nigeria and also Ukraine, and so on, is both bold and more than a little homogenizing.

Is it not in and of itself an act of colonial Western epistemology to make this statement about all non-Western societies? It is arguable whether Lugones and Oyěwùmí make such a strong claim, but the circulation of their ideas and especially their reproduction in queer and feminist discourses regularly do.

There is furthermore the issue of colonialism being treated as a singular process or system, without accounting for how different societies experienced colonial violence differently. The indigenous genocide that is the foundation for the United States’ settler-colonial order involved near-total levels of epistemicide and erasure in the process of usurpation, but by contrast the colonial relationship between India and England was not settler-colonial. It was a much more extractive relationship, with India being treated as a site of wealth to loot (and today, as a site of cheap labor to exploit), but there was nowhere near as holistic an attempt to supplant and replace India’s societies on India’s lands. Transform and disrupt them to reorient them towards the purposes of extractivist colonialism and the hollowing out of both land and people? Almost certainly. But while Indian history will likely always be filtered through a degree of Anglophonic and colonial translation and interpretation… there’s still a lot of Indian history, and Chinese history, and other histories that are far less (allegedly) unknowable and ambiguous than the histories destroyed by Native genocide.

Despite these clear material differences, Western discourses on the violence of colonialism—ironically—even discount and homogenize non-Western perspectives on colonial violence.

Once more, this principally occurs in queer and feminist discourses that do not much care to differentiate between colonialism as a process of usurpation and replacement, or colonialism as a process of displacement and enslavement, or colonialism as a process of wealth extraction and pillaging. While these processes may look broadly similar and no doubt have large degrees of overlap, the distinction is important to make, especially when describing non-Western people’s relationship to their own precolonial understandings.

So on a very basic, almost tautological level, this is not a true claim in the way it is usually deployed—broad, totalizing, and homogenizing. If the claim that patriarchy is both transhistorically and transculturally extant does not meet evidentiary standards, then these claims about non-patriarchal precolonial societies fall much, much further short.

But also… are the claims even true about Yoruba society specifically?

Constructing a Non-Gendered Society

There’s an interesting paper I came across during the process of research, published in 2024 in the journal of feminist philosophy Hypatia. The following is a snippet from the abstract of Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oyĕwumı and Irigaray in Dialogue about Western Culture:

“In this article we aim to show the potential of cross-continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. Oyěwùmí’s work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. …” [Emphasis mine.]

Oh, dear.

Oyěwùmí’s argument in The Invention of Women about gender not being a relevant organizational factor in precolonial Yoruba society rests on three prongs. The first is a linguistic argument, centering on the notion that Yoruba language is less gendered than—let’s say English, even though Oyěwùmí talks about ‘Western’ and ‘Eurocentric’ linguistic understandings as though they’re all reducible to the English understanding. The second is the assertion that Yoruba society is organized by seniority, not gender. The third is that statistics are fake and Western. On page 77:

“Odds are the supreme language of statistics speaks to the Western obsession with measurement and the preoccupation with ‘evidence that we can see.’” [Emphasis mine.]

And on page 110:

“My discussion of statistical categoricalism in the previous chapter dealt with the issue of whether a legitimate argument can be made about the statistical prevalence of anafemales in a particular trade. Suffice it to say here that the question of gender and numbers does not arise from the [Oyo] frame of reference; it, of course, fits in very well with the Western bio-logic framework.” [Emphasis mine.]

The crux of Oyěwùmí’s argument here is that statistical analyses of, for example, the number of women and men in particular trades to gauge how gendered the trade is and whether women are under-represented, is not a relevant lens through which to view Yoruba society, and in fact such statistical analyses effectively create the gendered reality they wish to observe. By, well, observing how many men or women are present in particular arenas or domains. Allegedly, statisticians must first prove that “man” and “woman” are meaningful categories in Yoruba society before trying to measure how gendered specific aspects of Yoruba society are.

This is less an argument and more a circular reasoning for why Oyěwùmí’s claims about gender not being a meaningful social organizing category ought to be treated as unfalsifiable. If Yoruba society is not preoccupied with gender, but empirical observations do not show that men and women are roughly evenly distributed across a cross-section of professions or classes, then perhaps gender is a determining factor in some way. That is implied by the observation.

There is one more thing Oyěwùmí says about statistics. She alleges that by observing, say, a disproportionate number of men in a field or trade, those doing the analysis downplay and dismiss the exceptions, the women who are also present but outnumbered. Keep that in mind for later.

Let’s return to the linguistic argument. Oyěwùmí holds that the Yoruba categories obinrin and okunrin are translated by Western researchers, who “always find gender when they look for it”, as ‘female/woman’ and ‘male/man’ respectively. According to Oyěwùmí, this is a mistranslation: “These categories are neither binarily opposed nor hierarchical.” Instead, the terms obinrin and okunrin merely indicate “anatomic distinction” and she insists that they are better translated as “anatomical female” and “anatomical male”, or “anafemale” and “anamale” for short.

…So that’s… interesting…

Perhaps a transfeminine perspective here might be invaluable. Leaving aside the sleight of hand in including the word ‘female’ alongside ‘woman’ when asserting that obinrin is a mistranslation, as though ‘female’ does not have principally anatomic connotations, the idea that the word ‘woman’ is first and foremost regarded by most Westerners—even most Western researchers and scholars—as a social and not anatomical or biologically-essentialist category is giving the West far, far too much credit! You need only look at the X feed of a certain wizard kidlit author and their disciples to disabuse yourself of the notion that Western linguistic understandings of gender encode and communicate a primarily social hierarchy—that assumes feminist discourses to be far, far more widespread than they actually are!

But also… is the idea that Yoruba language encodes and communicates anatomical differences without gendered connotations actually, you know… true?

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s Yorubas Don’t Do Gender: A Critical Review (2000)

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf is a Nigerian academic and writer who has studied communication, anthropology and gender studies abroad. Her work is not as well known as Oyěwùmí’s for reasons that will become clear later, and in 2000 she published a critical review of The Invention of Women.

“Recently, some African scholars have begun to question the explanatory power of gender in African societies. This challenge came out of the desire to produce concepts grounded in African thought and everyday lived realities. These scholars hope that by focusing on an African episteme they will avoid any dependency on European theoretical paradigms and therefore eschew what Babalola Olabiyi Yai (1999) has called ‘dubious universals’ and ‘intransitive discourses’.”

Bakare-Yusuf describes Oyěwùmí’s methodology as problematic and her understanding of both language and the Yoruba system of seniority as simplistic and naive. She reminds us that language is also an evolving, living thing, that the same word can carry different meanings and connotations even between different places during the same era, and that by purporting to uncover a “pure essence” of Yoruba language free of gendered implications, Oyěwùmí effectively situates it out of history, time, and the forces of change. Yet it is the question of ‘seniority not gender’ that proves to be most illustrative of Oyěwùmí’s approach and priors:

“The essential pitfall of her account of power, whether that of seniority in Yorubaland or gender distinction in the west, is that a particular variable of power is the same everywhere in isolation from any other form of enablement or constraint. One can readily concede that Oyewumi is right to argue that seniority is the dominant language of power in Yoruba culture. However, she is wrong to conclude that seniority is the only form of power relationship and that it operates outside of or in relation to other forms of hierarchy.”

It’s almost like distinct forms of power can co-exist… and impact the same person simultaneously… in a sort of overlap, or say, intersection…

Bakare-Yusuf further stresses that Oyěwùmí’s reductive reading of power relations in Yoruba culture preclude her from understanding that seniority is oftentimes invoked as a cover for other forms of inequality or power imbalance:

“The vocabulary of seniority often becomes the very form in which sexual abuse, familial (especially for the aya/wife in a lineage) and symbolic violence is couched. Her refusal to complicate or interrogate the workings of power is even more alarming giving the virulent abuse of power in the teacher-student relationship in the Nigerian education system that often goes unchallenged by the victim because they are loathe to challenge the abuser in the name of ‘disrespecting their senior’ . …. Seniority in the Yoruba context is therefore often a ruse for other forms of power. However, because Oyěwùmí wants seniority to stand alone as the dominant mode of power in the Yoruba social system, she simply cannot recognise blurred reality for what it is. She therefore must avoid all work done by feminists and social theorists that stresses the complex interdependency of one form of power upon another and the ways in which one explicitly manifested (and respected!) power often conceals other more insidious ones.” [Emphasis mine.]

Speaking from the Indian context, I want to point out that the idea of seniority as a form of social power relations, especially within joint and extended families, is hardly exclusive to Yoruba culture—nor is it exactly decoupled from gender relations! Because the source of an elder’s authority within a family structure is as much about their role as a progenitor to whom their children and children’s families owe deference, which is very much a form of reproductive logic!

There’s also the fact that Oyěwùmí notes in the book that it is customary for Yoruba women to relocate to their husbands’ households after marriage, which instantly removes them from their old hierarchical position and places them on the bottom of a new one as the most recent entrant, on the same level as newborn infants. She then does not interrogate this observation at all.

Finally, on the subject of gender-neutrality predicated on non-gendered language, Bakare-Yusuf observes:

“For Oyěwùmí, there are no barriers to obinrin’s activities in relation to okunrin. That is, the biological fact of being female does not interrupt or determine in any way (beyond the obvious fact of reproduction) the social perceptions of bodies. It is this alleged gender neutrality that affords ana-females in the Yoruba context the level of freedom and capacity that they enjoy. However, just because gender difference is not inscribed within discourse or marked within language doesn’t mean that it is entirely absent in social reality. There is often a gap between what happens in law and social reality. It is precisely by not making a distinction between language and reality that Oyěwùmí is able to elide this possibility and assume that Yoruba women have the same power as men in their lineage.” [Emphasis mine.]

It’s a shame that statistics are too Western to give us any insight into the gendered reality of Yoruba society.

Given the way that Oyěwùmí recoils from empiricism, in addition to the licenses she takes in interpreting the West as distinct from Yoruba society in ways it likely isn’t, it is perhaps fair to conclude that her reasoning is motivated by her conclusion rather than the other way around. Oyěwùmí wants to make these assertions about Yoruba society, despite the fact that, per Bakare-Yusuf, the wives of the household typically have food-preparation and child-rearing responsibilities in a way that “male wives” (men who relocate to their wives’ household instead of the inverse) simply do not. Oyěwùmí is attached to the idea that exceptions to the rule mean that one cannot make gendered assertions about Yoruba culture, and relies on those exceptions heavily in her reasoning, but as Bakare-Yusuf says:

“While one can sympathise with the therapeutic value motivating Oyewumi’s desire to uncover a pre-colonial, harmonious, ungendered history, the evidence she uses to support her argument simply does not stand up to scrutiny. We cannot simply use the experience of princesses and privileged women to evaluate the position and experience of most women in society.”

Here, I must apologize to my readers for withholding crucial context that would enable them to read this declaration from Bakare-Yusuf with the appropriate tone. You see, in the very Preface of The Invention of Women, Oyěwùmí explains that she was born into a large family, and in 1973 her father ascended the throne to become the Soun of Ogbomoso.

She also says that she is indebted to her siblings, parents, and “the many mothers and fathers in the palace” for their contributions to her many years of research.

Now, far be it for me to question whether the perspective of a royal family can be drawn upon to accurately portray what life is like for everyday men and women, which would imply that Oyěwùmí’s assertions about gender cannot even be applied to all of Yoruba society. Let’s entertain the idea that the existence of influential and affluent women necessarily implies that those women’s cultures cannot be held to be patriarchal. Applying this logic would lead one to necessarily conclude that England under Queen Victoria was a non-gendered, non-patriarchal society.

You know, the Victorian England that was a colonial power. The one that is charged by scholars of various disciplines as having introduced the ‘colonial’ and hierarchical gender binary to non-Western societies. I suppose that England is exonerated of these charges and we have to look elsewhere for the True Source of Evil from which patriarchy emerged. Perhaps Middle-Earth.

Of course, there is also the matter of Oyěwùmí’s other opinions on gender, including her views on the ‘Western’ practice of homosexuality. In 2004, Oyěwùmí edited an anthology entitled African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. The second chapter, written by her, contains the following:

“The insistence on the part of Western women to label what African women call female circumcision ‘mutilation’ was the first visible sign of deep divisions between them and many of their African counterparts … A number of other African institutions that Westerners view as barbaric include arranged marriages, levirate, and child betrothal. These practices are misrepresented as misogynistic and not placed in their cultural and social contexts that would allow Westerners to discern their meaning from the perspective of African societies.”

Okay. We really need to talk about this trick.

Recall, if you will, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Under Western Eyes. Mohanty cautions against the flattening and homogenization of complex systems and societies outside the West—just as Oyěwùmí did here, referring to a notion of “African societies” that uniformly accept practices like FGM and child betrothal more neutrally than the also-homogenized specter of hysterical “Western women” do. As if there are no African women or African movements or African feminisms opposing these practices. As if the perspectives of the most conservative, visible, affluent and well-connected elements of a non-Western society must be granted epistemic authority enough for all society, including the elements of society they do not meaningfully share many interests with!

Oyěwùmí here is not concerned with the unvarnished truth, the complexities of non-Western systems of oppression, and certainly not with feminism of any kind. The clue is in the word barbaric, which belies a preoccupation with how her society and people are perceived by the West. Her statements about gender and seniority and misogyny must all be considered with the context that she occupies a certain place in her society that makes her more preoccupied with its image than whether its people truly accept all its traditions and customs. Her work represents the apotheosis of academic discourse between the racism of the West and the classism of the upper-crust of non-Westerners.

It is this fixation on image that compels Oyěwùmí to engage in a strange dialogue with the works of Alice Walker, within this same anthology. Oyěwùmí takes issue with Walker’s idea that West African societies had “culturally sanctioned and institutionalized forms of lesbianism”, accusing Black feminists of speaking over African perspectives and applying contemporary Western discourses of sexuality onto indigenous African contexts.

So, you know, the scholar whose work has most trickled down into queer scholarship that claims a pre-patriarchal and queer-inclusive precolonial paradigm is one whose idea of “non-gendered” society cannot even countenance the prevalence or acceptance of lesbianism.

Cool!

Westerners Seem To Be Really Fucking Gullible

Did you believe the things I said about Indian society in the very first section of this essay? You really shouldn’t have. I can spin a pretty story about Hindu values and the deference we owe our teachers, but India is not a purely Hindu country, nor does its Hindu population necessarily live lives guided by the teachings of an ancient epic it would take aeons to read.

Also, the story of Eklavya is more about caste than anything else, because Eklavya was a lower-caste boy who tried to reach above his station, and was dealt with accordingly.

This is going to be the least rigorous part of this piece, because I’m kind of just fed up. Judith Butler in Who’s Afraid of Gender? talks about how authoritarians in the West live in a ‘phantasm’, a reality of their own making that they have retreated into because actual reality challenges and complicates their understandings of power, hierarchy, and how the world ‘should’ be. Butler was wrong.

Because I’m pretty sure it’s not just authoritarians.

The West’s relationship to the Third World remains a deeply orientalist one. Even amongst those who are more aware of social ills—perhaps especially amongst such people—the idea that an entire unfamiliar world exists past colonized borders is incredibly enticing. What can these strange and faraway people and places that I know very little about and refuse to look at objectively teach me about a better, less rigid, less Western way of life? Maybe I should listen to this charlatan who is trying to push a very particular narrative? It would be racist of me not to, right?

Well, folks, swallowing whatever bullshit someone with a particular outlook and interests sells you isn’t exactly egalitarian and decolonial.

This is where I’d caution folks to be critical about my work too, but I don’t seem to need to bother. People who are very attached to the fictions and fabrications I have zero patience for somehow managed to find the ability to be nuanced about my life and point of view, and constantly invent novel ways to call me ‘white’ or ‘Western’, ascribing to me a level of privilege and subjecting me to a level of scrutiny that actual princesses escape. People are plenty skeptical about what I write, don’t you worry, because the bedtime stories are more important than coming to terms with just how fucking complicated life is everywhere and just how much conservative, reactionary, and nationalist logic pervades thinking all over the world.

The only purpose I can ascribe to this level of attachment to trumped-up and difficult to substantiate visions of precolonial life is a desire for a far simpler world than the one that actually exists, where solidarity is not impossible but requires a hell of a lot of work across movements, cultures and interests. What if we could get everyone on board with slaying The One Dragon Responsible For All Evil? What if we could cast the One Ring of Whiteness into the fires of Mount Decolonize? What if we could crawl back into the prelapsarian womb that I was untimely ripped from and to which I can definitely, definitely return? Wouldn’t that be nice?

It would, but it’s not a particularly useful or productive or predictive model of the world, so fucking deal.

Worst of all, I genuinely cannot envision how it would matter even if this idealist precolonial utopia was real. Let’s just believe everything for a moment. Let’s allow that in the past—the very recent past, even!—all societies outside the West were paradises where trans people were revered and queer people were accepted and men actually loved the women they fucked. Then 200-400 years ago, The White Nation attacked and plunged us into this centuries-long dystopia.

So fucking what?

Can we roll the world back to an earlier version on git? Can we go up to the manager of Patriarchy and Imperialism and say, “Excuse me sir, we used to exist in harmony and peace. Doesn’t exploiting us now make you feel bad?”

Even Lugones admits that this model of history and colonial relations condemns non-Western men as traitors and turncoats, as scum who overthrew the harmony of their peaceful society in exchange for property rights over women! If it were all true, we would still have to deal with that, to contend that systems of domination and power and gender hold a certain appeal to those who are granted certain benefits. We would still have to analyze these systems as having incentives, as having an appeal for those who aren’t on the absolute bottom rung. Keep looking into and interpreting our past, and believe in the fairy tale if you like, but that doesn’t actually change what must be done today and now.

And frankly, I don’t even think the story is that inspiring. I think the fact that despite the lack of historical precedence women and trans people and queer people have still fought for and secured rights, that we are sitting here envisioning and fighting for better worlds, is a hell of a lot more inspiring than the idea that I must seek out a lost paradise. It is, frankly, tantamount to spitting on the memories of those who come before us and everything they fought for.

Because I am proud of my foremothers, and I don’t understand why more of us aren’t.

I may be many things, but I am most certainly a woman. Neither my transness nor my brownness nor my lesbianism nor anything else about me makes me less of one. I am regarded as reproductive offal and a valid target of sexual violence under patriarchy. I fight to change that.

Do you?

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks another entry of my upcoming book, Brown/Trans/Les, which is out on Monday! If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting me by pre-ordering!

— The Gravemind, Halo 2

Trigger Warning: the incalculable violence that has for aeons chewed up and spat out our sisters and our foremothers and that will continue to consume the lives and dignities of women whose names we’ll never know until the day we finally bring about its end.

Introduction: “Gender Affirmation”

In 2025, researchers from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya published a study in the journal Revista de Derecho Penal y Criminología, called Mujeres Cis y Transexuales que Practican Sexo de Pago: Involucracion y Consecuencias (or: Cisgender and Transgender Women Who Engage in Paid Sex: Involvement and Consequences). The researchers had interviewed 76 sex workers—largely migrants, 50 of them cis, 26 transsexual—and according to the article, sought to challenge prevailing orthodoxies and narratives surrounding sex work and trafficking.

It was a short and edifying read, concluding with a plea for decriminalization (or at least, fewer regulations that make the lives of sex workers harder) and cautioning against a certain tendency to believe all sex workers are trafficked. The study indicated that about 25% of the surveyed participants were “deceived by another person”—so could be considered ‘trafficked’—while 84% indicated they made the decision “due to a lack of financial resources”.

One section of the article in particular stood out to me, though: the section on transsexual women. An interesting assertion about their motivations caught my eye:

“However, in the case of transsexual women, the decision is often related to a desire to affirm their sexual identity and to a sense of fun.”

For those less familiar with the discursive currents of online Gender-Conservative communities, this phrase in particular registered as alarming because of the pervasive transmisogynistic talking point that sexual violence against trans women is “less severe” than that against “real women” because—and I have heard this verbatim—we asked for it. The “choice” to be transsexual, to pursue transition and present to the world as a woman is cast entirely as a sexual fetish and an open invitation to be violated. The transmisogynist is almost convinced that trans women cannot be assaulted because we view any assault or sexual exploitation as affirming—and presumably because the Amazon basics skirt is too short, too.

So to ascribe the principal motivation of transsexual sex workers to “a sense of fun”, when the article’s very next paragraph admits that 61% of the transsexual women interviewed began sex work as children, felt more than a little dissonant.

Since I don’t speak Spanish, I had to rely on machine-translation in order to investigate the actual text of the paper, so it’s possible that there is some nuance that escaped me. At the same time, the English-language article seemed to have drawn this conclusion from the paper itself, though it is difficult to understand how the researchers could have concluded what they did based on the actual excerpts of these women’s testimony. The study claims that one of its main contributions is the comparison between cis and trans women, and that “it is worth highlighting that [trans women] engage in paid sex not so much as a result of pressure from third parties but rather as an option to serve personal goals, among which the need to affirm their sexual identity stands out.” [Emphasis mine.]

Meanwhile, here are some of the testimonial snippets from trans women the researchers provided.

“My status as a transgender woman forces me to work in prostitution. If I don’t have an employment contract, how else do I make a living?” (ID40)

“My transgender status: I’m a trans woman, and prostitution is your survival option. Who hires a trans woman?” (ID47)

“Because I wanted money and didn’t have job opportunities, and I also wanted my female body.” (ID76)

These statements certainly point to external, economic factors that the women clearly identified, pointing to their lack of options, not “lack of pressure”. It seems that the desire for transition that one of them expressed, alongside employment discrimination, was what the cis researchers chose to zoom in and focus on.

There is also a longer statement from one of the trans participants, whose translation I’ve reproduced here:

“I wanted money, parties, drugs, surgery, and everything that made me more feminine. When I arrived in Spain, I wanted to find a new life, where I could be a woman and start from scratch, but once here, I continued with the same old thing. Besides, I didn’t have any papers, so what else could I do …? I wanted to feel like a complete woman. I wanted surgery, my family didn’t understand the situation; it was a very closed-minded town, and they were embarrassed. I started experimenting, and trying to raise money for the surgery. I had breast surgery at age 15.” [Emphasis mine].

Not only do the researchers rather selectively overlook the socioeconomic factors that compel these women to take up sex work, they further conclude that trans women have “a more recreational tendency that leads them to experiment with and relativize the negative impact of the activity”. Such an inference is almost certainly derived from the researchers refusing to view access to transition care as a necessity, and considering trans women resorting to sex work as seeking to fund a frivolity. There is no engagement with their own finding that most of the trans women faced disownment and societal transmisogyny that led them to start as minors, and that perhaps their attraction to the “glamorous lifestyle” they were promised could be treated as more in line with the other deceived (cis) women than as “a recreational tendency”.

A fundamental incuriosity and frank indifference towards the reality of trans women’s oppression pervades these remarks, which despite finding that trans women enter the trade younger, stay longer, and have a harder time leaving than cis women, never once cares to connect that to wider transmisogynistic structures and forces. Instead, cis people’s biases, their insistence on viewing us as fetishists first and marginalized women never, takes precedence and is featured over and above their own data, their own findings, and indeed, over and above trans women’s own fucking words.

This unnamed, unexamined cissexism is hardly limited to this one study, this one topic, or even this one discipline. Regular readers may recall a section of The Third Sex, where Serena Nanda relates a hijra’s account of being deemed a not-woman by a third party due to her inability to give birth, and claims that as evidence that hijra view themselves as not-women. This despite the fact that in the story itself, the hijra subject asserts, rather unambiguously, “I am a lady.”

In fact, this blatant scholarly gaslighting, this impetus to demand readers ignore the evidence of our own lying eyes, manifests even in Janice Raymond’s Transsexual Empire. In the third chapter of that book (Mother’s Feminized Phallus, Father’s Castrated Femme), she discusses interviewing 15 transsexuals and finding them all to believe and reinforce “feminine stereotypes”. She also includes this little tidbit.

“R. also made the very important point that one of the reasons transsexuals may seem to conform exaggeratedly to the stereotype is that they have to prove to the gender identity clinics that they can pass (i.e., live, work, dress, and be accepted) as women.” [Emphasis mine.]

Despite being told the fucking answer, Raymond had no interest in examining the hypersurveillance and policing employed by male-led institutions gatekeeping critical healthcare from vulnerable women, and instead proceeded with her agenda of vilification.

We are not seen as thinking, feeling, hurting women, but as curiosities and symbols and exoticities, as freaks to be discussed and consumed and fucked, but never consulted, never respected, and never honestly seen as equal.

And all of cis society, especially its fucking “intellectual arm”, its vaunted episteme, stands guilty of this shameless, unrepentant, libidinous dehumanization.

Part One: Autosapiophiles

Mad Tranny Disease

The history of trans women’s pathologization is severely under-discussed, even amongst proponents of trans rights, who often default to leaving the availability, legality, and allowance of transition “up to the experts”. Many a well-meaning advocate has uttered some variant of “the science is on our side”, unwittingly eliding how “the science” has for a very long time treated queerness as an aberration to correct, or an ailment to be cured. Modern trans history is, in many ways, inseparable from the history of its vilification, regulation, and attempted eradication by medical establishments.

The earliest theories that attempted to grapple with the existence of the transsexual woman conceptualized us as a sort of tragic homosexual gone mad, a faggot so desperate to be “fucked by real men” that she begins to desperately desire womanhood. German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft Ebing published Psychopathis Sexualis in 1886 as a treatise on “sexual deviance”; his belief was that homosexuality is a “condition” that manifests primarily in (cis) men who wish to have sex with (cis) men “as women do”. (Readers may recall that this reflects wider patriarchal discourses on penetrability that could, under some social regimes, spare those who take the ‘active’, penetrating role in sex from the stigma of being branded homosexual.)

Berlin’s Third Sex, published in 1904 by Magnus Hirschfeld, himself a gay man, took a rather more sympathetic and even celebratory view of Wilhelmine Germany’s gay subcultures. (This is the same Magnus Hirschfeld whose Institute for Sexual Research was targeted by the Nazis, to burn its books and research papers.) He detailed stories of transvestism, cabaret, and gender-variant individuals, and his choice of title illustrates how the concept of an ‘in-between’ or third sex in scholarship has always been oriented around the penetrable male—‘men’ who ‘take it’.

Of course, the destruction of Hirschfeld’s Institute and the Nazi regime’s retrenchment of the homophobia he fought against all his life had implications for the academic perception of transsexuality. US psychiatrist David Cauldwell launched the next volley in the century-long war between scholars of sex and queer communities, coining the term ‘transsexual’ in his 1949 essay with the clever, clever title of Psychopathia Transexualis. Trans women are pathologized as having “criminal and unsocial tendencies”, and Cauldwell’s prescription for our gender-madness is to just… not. Could us icky trannies just stop trying to crossdress and change sex? The essay holds that transsexuals do not need gender-affirming care and instead need to be freed from this aberrant, unnatural compulsion—that is, it advocates for conversion therapy, for discouraging transsexuals from exhibiting ‘gender-variant’ behavior, and treating transsexuality as a disease to cure.

It was this prevailing consensus that endocrinologist and sexologist Harry Benjamin was responding to when he began to advocate for providing (some) transsexuals with access to transition care. Benjamin, in fact, worked with Cauldwell and other psychiatrists, with whom he disagreed on the question of providing trans patients with surgical and hormonal treatments. He codified his approach in The Transsexual Phenomenon, published in 1966, where he would discuss his diagnostic criteria for those he calls the “true transsexuals”.

Benjamin had a “Sexual Orientation Scale” ranging from 1-6, with “transvestites” at 1 and “true transsexuals” at 6. Number 6 is our familiar faggot-gone-mad, she who only yearns for a Real Man and is simply too distressed by her lack of vagina and womanly attributes to be a productive, functional member of society. It is the sixers (and perhaps the occasional fiver) who Benjamin designates as a worthy, deserving recipient of the magnanimous gifts of sex reassignment surgery and oestrogen. The rest—those of us who aren’t distressed enough about our sex organs, or who for some arcane and incomprehensible reason aren’t irresistibly drawn to men—were welcome to, scientifically speaking, go fuck ourselves.

Though Harry Benjamin credits the high-profile Christine Jorgensen with ‘furthering his understanding’ of trans issues, he largely did his work and spoke out without the input of trans women (aside from white, middle-class, conservative ‘transgenderist’ Virginia Prince). While his model may have been an improvement over the categorization of transsexuality as a criminal disorder, it encoded certain cissexist biases regarding the perception of trans women into its recommendations. Specifically, it sought to rank trans women by how “deserving” we are of treatment, based on how well we conform to an ideal of womanhood centered around heterosexuality—that is, male-supremacy and male-attraction. By contrast, those of us who fell short of this ideal were still stigmatized, still considered “fetishists” or cross-dressers, regarded as no more than men who got a sexual thrill by behaving like or thinking of themselves as women. The Benjamin scale established a still-antagonistic psychiatric approach, of discernment between the mad faggots genuinely in distress and the male perverts in lingerie who aren’t really transsexual but still seek transsexual care for… reasons. Gross ones, probably.

Benjamin’s ideas were influential enough that WPATH—the organization of (largely cis) medical professionals that sets the current Standards of Care for trans people worldwide—was initially named HBIGDA, or the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. The most up-to-date versions of WPATH’s SoC purport to be much more enlightened and current and oh so much more respectful of trans people’s delicate little sensibilities, but as any good lawyer knows, there is a wide gulf between pretty words and actual implementation. Many Gender Identity Clinics worldwide do not follow an informed consent model for access to healthcare, and a great many seem to be using SoC a few versions out of date—erroneously, one hopes. While the meaningless drivel that trannies spout is of no great import, I will admit that an awful lot of trans women I’ve spoken to report horror stories when recounting their interactions with psychiatrists and clinicians and endocrinologists, who treat every evaluation as an investigation, trying to sniff out the tell-tale signs that their patients are insufficiently feminine or not actually raging mancock addicts. Many of us have been asked deeply invasive questions about how we masturbate and what our sexual fantasies are like—even as minors seeking care.

If any cis readers sat up in their seats and wondered, “Wait, isn’t that illegal, or at least grossly inappropriate?”, then congratulations! You’re starting to get how little anyone gives a fuck about trannies.

This does not even touch upon RLE, or “real-life experience”, an outdated (yet still not entirely abolished!) practice of forcing trans people to live full-time as their ‘chosen’ genders, for multiple years, but without any transition care. Readers who may be aware of the phenomena known as ‘patriarchy’, ‘homophobia’, and even the esoteric concept of ‘transmisogyny’, perhaps realize how this amounts to little more than hazing, torture, and a challenge to survive as a visibly gender-variant, ‘deviant’ individual—irrespective of how hostile one’s material circumstances may be or how one’s very employers may react—for the potential reward of getting to transition bodily afterwards.

Simply put, many medical “experts” on trans people and transition care do not appear to have our best interests at heart. By acting as gatekeepers to lifesaving medication, predicated on navigating byzantine psychosexual gauntlets and not pissing off your asshole doctor too hard, these ‘professionals’ not only wield an undue amount of power over trans patients, not only are enabled to neglect, under-dose, and dismiss large numbers of people in need, but also are in a position to browbeat and abuse vulnerable, marginal, precarious people. Which occurs not infrequently. The very foundation of knowledge about trans people is this hostile, antagonistic, and cissexist milieu that still in many ways pathologizes and villanizes us, and many medical institutions entrusted with the responsibility of transition care are not merely hilariously unaccountable to our wellbeing, but largely structured to treat our existence as a problem to manage, guinea pigs to dissect, and indeed a plague to keep under control.

In fact, the modern anti-trans movement relies heavily on this history, building on the academic and scholarly disgust with trannies to inform contemporary propaganda and conjure the demonized specters of perverted, predatory males trying to access “women’s spaces” for sexually deviant and rapacious reasons. Benjamin did not invent the ‘fetishistic transvestite’—Hitchcock’s Psycho was released in 1960, after all—but it did give legitimacy to an already culturally-prevalent idea. Unattracted to men, aroused by women’s clothing, patriarchal ideas of gender constructed this she-male, this monster encroaching upon bathrooms and prisons and sports to snatch up your poor, innocent girls.

Boo.

This gendered boogeywoman has many architects, but none so notorious as the Canadian fossil who is aroused by the idea that he has any idea worth speaking aloud. For ‘transvestite’ isn’t quite what trans women as a whole and trans lesbians in particular are slurred as these days—there’s a much more colorful term that our biggest fans are overly fond of.

Autogynephile. The monstrous creep who commits the cardinal sin of looking at her immaculate fit in the mirror and thinking, “Hot stuff”.

There’s a Margaret Atwood quote I always think of when discussing this subject: “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” [Emphasis mine.]

One might argue that in a society whose foundation is patriarchy, where those sexed as men are empowered to regard those sexed as lesser as though they are consumable sexual commodities, many of us excluded from the humanity afforded manhood learn that our self-worth is rooted almost entirely in our desirability. That feeling a sense of comfort, power, safety, and yes, even a certain erotic fulfillment, in the idea of oneself as a desirable object who may lack patriarchal agency but can nonetheless inspire devotion and fixation and covetousness with a mere flash of the ankle, is simply what “women’s sexuality” is conditioned to be. That perhaps, far from observing some inconceivable paraphilia, sexologists simply observed “women’s sexuality” in “male subjects”, and freaked the fuck out as their pretty little heads couldn’t cope with the ramifications that has for a society founded on the sex-class difference.

Alternatively, one might become a figurehead for an international hate movement because they were the only ones who saw any merit to the shit-doodles you farted out on some loose leaf in the 80s.

I Can Never Repay Christa Peterson

Christa Peterson is a Philosophy PhD student who, in 2023, left critical comments on a few ‘research’ papers on PubPeer that supposedly substantiate the theory of autogynephilia. This commentary is, of course, not peer-reviewed, but given the shit I’ve seen get published on the topic of trannies, that hardly counts against it. Peterson takes this dubious ‘evidence base’ to task, finding myriad issues with its methodology, assertions, interpretation of data, and ethics. Her thorough, uncompromising review of this pseudoscientific collection of tranny abuse is informative and illuminating in equal measure, shedding a light on just how shoddy your work can be as long as you’re pathologizing the undesirables.

Phallometric detection of fetishistic arousal in heterosexual male cross-dressers (1986)

This is the big one. This particular paper is concerned with how tranny fetishists are lying liars, and the brave truth-seeking authors proved that actually, trannies who deny being cross-dressing fetishists are cross-dressing fetishists—by hooking their penises up to blood flow machines and making them listen to descriptions of cross-dressing fantasies.

So this is already a fever dream of sexological nonsense, but Peterson points out how the paper simply failed to prove this. Leaving aside that volumetric boner analysis is not an ironclad method of proving arousal—sometimes it just gets hard in stressful situations—the paper was not able to prove its thesis because their data did not pass the commonly accepted boner measurement standards. A 1996 survey shows that 17 out of 37 boner analysis centers agree that you need to measure enough blood flow to constitute roughly 20% of a full boner for it to count as significant.

This paper set that threshold to 2% of a boner instead.

Two.

Fucking.

Percent.

It is likely the threshold was set this low because the subjects under study were largely on oestrogen and unconcerned with penile atrophy, which only compounds how much of a farce this whole circus act is. Trying to prove that women who can barely get hard are aroused by cross-dressing fantasies via chasing ghosts in the boner-volume machine is already something of an Ahabian venture, but Peterson points out that there were still more depths to sink to.

The usual metric for ‘proving’ fetishism through boner calculus is to measure a subject’s dongle response to “atypical sexual stimuli”, contrasted against their shaft inflation value for “typical sexual stimuli”. (And so we have left anything resembling a study uncolored by researcher opinions on what is ‘normal’ far, far behind.) But our esteemed cranks could not prove fetishism this way, and so they invented an alternative metric: comparing the subject’s erectile expansion coefficient in response to “atypical sexual stimuli” with their eschlongation value when exposed to… completely non-sexual stimuli.

What do you find hotter, a description of two women going on a date, or a documentary on shoveling snow?

That is also not an exaggeration: the “atypical”, “fetishistic”, “cross-dressing” fantasies that the subjects listened to? They can be summarized as “your girlfriend thinks you look really hot in a dress”, or “you think you look pretty in the dress you picked out when you look in the mirror”. I could write scenarios more risqué if you lobotomized me first. This was contrasted with “stimuli” such as the sentence “You hear the sound of a snowplow coming down your street.”

I fucking love science!

And the best part is, we haven’t even covered the dubiously ethical conduct yet!

Peterson notes that the gender identity clinic where this “research” was conducted was a nightmare, with a reputation for basically treating its trans patients like guinea pigs and having little regard for consent. Trans women subjected themselves to it anyway because “public insurance in Ontario only covered surgery for patients approved by the Clarke”. Refusing to undergo phallometric testing could get patients labeled as uncooperative, even though the clinic’s evaluation process for surgery did not consider the results of this testing at all—patients had to do two years of “RLE” to be approved.

One patient was unwittingly made the subject of a lecture without prior consent; the assessing psychiatrist said if the patient insisted on rescheduling then the next appointment wouldn’t be for six months, forcing compliance. The clinic’s very first patient, Dianna Boileau, was subject to the invasive phallometric test without being told it was not part of her surgery evaluation. The literal fucking inventor of the dongflationary statistics machine, in a 1974 paper, casually mentions injecting transsexual women at this clinic with intramuscular testerone before doing the test, in a segment talking about unruly patients. No mention is made of securing consent, and given that trans women do not, as a rule, like the idea of being injected with virilizing doses of testosterone, and taking into account how commonplace coercive abuses of power are in patient testimonies, the circumstances under which these patients were injected likely weren’t pleasant!

But like, who are you going to believe? Penis mathematicians, or trannies?

Nonhomosexual gender dysphoria (1988)

As a disclaimer, “homosexual” is used in this paper in an implicitly misgendering manner, to describe trans women attracted to men. Trans lesbians are called “heterosexual”, and there are bisexual and asexual subjects as well.

The point of this paper is to prove that only those trans women (exclusively) attracted to men have gender dysphoria; everyone else is a filthy autogynephile. The author of the paper, clearly already fast approaching senescence, means to prove this by administering an “Are you gay?” quiz. Peterson notes that the quiz was designed by the author, and comments that it is “extremely irregular”.

“Q8 of the gynephilia scale, where high scores are reported as sexual interest in women, and low scores as lack of it, is: Was there any period of 14 days or less when you had sexual intercourse with a female age 17-40 more than 5 times?”

“(+ 1.1) yes”

“(-0.1) no, and you are older than 25”

“(-0.9) no, and you are 25 or younger.”

Once again, recall that these papers operate under the assumption that trannies are lying liars, which is why we’re looking at history’s worst Buzzfeed questionnaire, designed to extract truth from the dastardly deceptive fetishists. Except, the scoring is interesting, because some questions consider being younger as gayer.

Remembering the Benjamin scale reveals the agenda here. The “classic”, “true” transsexual with Real Actual Gender Dysphoria is supposed to realize and come to terms with her gender identity early in life, never display attraction to women, and never annoy the people in charge of approving her for surgery. The paper’s author is trying to prove that “homosexual” trans women are all younger than the filthy AGPs by handing out extra Gay Points to younger respondents. As Peterson puts it:

“What [the author] reports as a correlation between sexual orientation and age is just a correlation between age and age.”

That’s just one question; the quiz gets worse, with more confounding variables that don’t measure what the paper insists they measure.

The Concept of Autogynephilia and the Typology of Male Gender Dysphoria (1989)

Last but by no means least asinine, we have another questionnaire: “Are you a cross-dressing fetishist?” This one is so straightforwardly nonsensical it’s actually remarkable that multiple people have, over the course of history, considered it to be scholarship. That is because the subjects who were given this questionnaire are described as follows:

“The online database of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry’s Research Section of Behavioural Sexology includes questionnaire data on 2700 male patients who have presented either at that department or at the Institute’s Gender Identity Clinic since September 1980 …” [Emphasis Peterson’s.]

So this survey was administered to a group that was comprised of a mix of self-identified cross-dressing fetishists who did not express a desire to transition and went to the sexology research wing, and transsexual women who reported to the GIC and weren’t exclusively attracted to men. The paper then reported that it found cross-dressing fetishists in the sample.

You don’t say.

Peterson put it best in an August 18, 2023 tweet on the topic: “You are at the gender clinic. And the paraphilia clinic. You are at the combination gender and paraphilia clinic. Which you run.”

The Psychiatric Witch Trials

Everything about the academic consensus on transsexual women is funny and ridiculous until you remember that it’s taken seriously.

A recurrent theme in scholarship that is about trans women, dissecting us and putting us under the microscope like germs to study and contain, is the presumption of guilt. We’re always guilty of something—being born liars, deceiving the poor innocent doctors who control our access to the healthcare we need to live, doing underage sex work for fun, or worst of all, being attracted to women. The rationale for libeling us is generated post factum, vomited out by bilious obsessives held to lower academic standards than tenured faculty with a dozen allegations.

Sandy Stone’s Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto highlights this antagonism between trans women and the ones who have always treated us like specimens while claiming to be our saviors. How the contradiction between the fact that you must pass RLE in order to get the hormones you need to be able to pass RLE meant that many transsexual women were acquiring hormones through other means, only going to clinics to engage in the theater of passing their arbitrary criteria for surgery letters. Or how the discovery that trans women were handing each other copies of Harry Benjamin’s criteria for diagnosis—because of fucking course we were—inspired such rage and hatred and fury among psychiatrists appalled at the thought that we would study up to answer their absurd, irrelevant, fucked-up questions about how we jack off.

You know, the level of power clinicians held over desperate, marginalized patients who would say whatever they had to for permission to get a vagina—largely male clinicians who would often approve patients based on how fuckable they were judged to be—implies a sordid history I don’t think I need to elaborate further.

Because that’s always been our purpose—to take it. To withstand all the violence, sexual and brutal and epistemological, that generations upon generations of pathetic, depraved men have inflicted on us, and then turn around so self-identified “feminists” can spit the word “Rapist!” in our faces. Because the books about us that dare to not spit on our name are burned by patriarchal and fascist cronies while the libraries are filled with rivers of garbage inscribed into rags by ersatz intellectuals justifying why it’s okay to torture us until someone puts us out of our misery, or we do it our damn selves.

Because what such men cannot, can never bring themselves to face, is how weak and worthless and without value they truly are, how they have constructed for themselves identities predicated on exercising whatever petty scraps of tyranny they are gifted under violent regimes, endlessly screaming and railing and crying at the simple truth that I had the chance to be like you and I threw it away because YOU. ARE. NOTHING.

Because no matter how many of man’s sins are crammed down my throat I will always vomit up every last one and spit out the truth through bloodstained teeth that humanity’s original sin was never defying a petty, cruel, indifferent god, but bowing down to him.

And for as long as I and my sisters still have tongues to speak, we will shout to the heavens and remind them of their eternal shame.

Part Two: Stained With The Blood of Children

A Long, Long Time Ago

Pop quiz: How do you get a broadly liberal, increasingly tolerant public to rapidly reverse course and revive decades-old homophobic tropes in service of an anti-LGBT agenda?

It’s actually quite simple. Just sidle up and ask them, “Sure, buddy, you’re cool with the transgenders… but what if they make your kid one?”

The 2010s were an aeon ago. Both the ‘Transgender Tipping Point’ in 2014 and the legalization of gay marriage in the United States in 2015 pointed to a world that was on the cusp of widespread queer acceptance. Corporations had pride events and merchandise, media representation was diversifying, and the high-profile conservative interests whose attempts to thwart gay marriage had been foiled were left adrift. They were in search of a new target, a new cause to rally behind, a new wedge issue that could establish a foothold for re-introducing patriarchal politics into the mainstream.

A global transphobic moral panic was not inevitable. The very first “bathroom bill” in the United States—legislation that seeks to ban trans people from using the bathrooms designated as for our gender—passed in North Carolina in 2016. The opposition to it was swift, widespread, and severe. North Carolina saw many boycotts, including from corporations like PayPal, which cancelled a planned expansion of its offices, associating the bill with steep statewide economic costs. Even the NCAA—an athletic organization that in 2025 banned trans women from competing in women’s sports—relocated its championships outside of North Carolina to protest the bill. The Republican governor who passed it into law lost his next race. Florida’s current Republican Governor Ron Desantis said at a 2018 Florida GOP forum that “getting into the bathroom wars” would be a waste of time.

Complex sociopolitical phenomena have many causes, but it is possible to track what changed in a scant few years. A massive organized effort to rewrite the terms of trans discourses played into existing societal cissexism to radicalize not just everyday people but influential media figures, politicians, and authors of wizard kidlit. Trans people were vilified, villainized, and targeted on a scale that we could not hope to match—but even then, the storm could have been weathered if not one crucial issue.

We were abandoned.

Rapid Onset Transphobia

In August 2018, a paper was published in the journal PLOS One, arguing for the existence of a “new gender dysphoria subtype”, dubbed “rapid-onset gender dysphoria, or ROGD”. Months after publication, in 2019, PLOS One issued a large correction about various aspects of the study, its methods, and its conclusions.

The paper was not, in fact, establishing a new diagnosis, and as of time of writing in 2026, “ROGD” remains little more than an acronym. That is because the 2018 paper is in fact a survey of parents of children with gender dysphoria, who believe that their children’s trans identities are the result of mental health issues, social media exposure and peer pressure. These parents were largely recruited from online anti-trans forums—the websites names are “4thwavenow”, “transgendertrend”, and “youthtranscriticalprofessionals”.

Anyone who is even slightly familiar with the experience of growing up queer would be able to tell you about what it’s like: how parents refuse to acknowledge your identity, insist that queerness must be the result of trauma or outside influences manipulating their child into a “fad”. My colleague Emma Zakharuk has detailed her experiences as a survivor of childhood conversion therapy in her essay In Defence of a Phase. Parents’ attempts to beat the queerness out of their kids are highly abusive, violent, and traumatic, centering as much around social isolation and enforcing “correct” gendered behavior as they do on punishment and denial. Talking to parents of trans children who are already conferring with each other on “trans-critical” websites would hardly constitute a reliable or unbiased view of how rapidly a child’s gender dysphoria manifested, especially given how commonly queer children are abused even prior to coming out, what the parents’ clear motives are, and how abused kids find it difficult to trust or confide in their caretakers.

But of course, none of that mattered.

A corrected paper with glaring methodological flaws is still one that was published. And because no one actually reads papers, the existence of one in a prominent journal is more than enough for reactionary and propagandistic purposes. The acronym “ROGD” was promoted as a legitimate scientific theory on platforms such as ex-Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s podcast. Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier—whose background is in philosophy—heavily endorses the “ROGD” acronym and narrative. It has been widely cited in many anti-trans bills introduced in US legislatures since 2020—including in Florida, under the Governorship of Ron DeSantis.

As we have already seen with The Transsexual Empire, the ‘autogynephilia evidence base’, and other “scholarship” on trans people and trans issues, veracity and research ethics always take a backseat to narrative. The judgment precedes the trial, and the accusations of cis society against trans people are usually taken as sufficient evidence. Even in the current age of modern ‘skepticism’, where conservative people will insist on “doing your own research” or “not blindly trusting experts” on matters such as epidemiology or food safety, when Dr. Sexperv endorses the idea that trans people must be tortured into gender-conformity, the same people suddenly have unshakeable faith in scientific institutions!

Irreversible Damage in particular clearly lays out the patriarchal logic at the heart of the anti-trans moral panic. The focus is maintained on trans youth and specifically transmasculine youth, who are rhetorically regendered as “confused little girls”. Much ado is made about their reproductive and sexual potential, with a heavy focus on their (extant or potential) gestational capacity, ‘female’ bodies, and the removal of breast tissue that is common for transmasculine people pursuing transition. There is some nodding to misogyny, distress at being sexualized, and other feminist-sounding rationale to try and explain why “young girls” may experience discomfort with their “natural puberty”. The actual difficulty of obtaining medical approval for transition is vastly understated, and transition itself is characterized as mutilation, as ‘mad science’ with little evidentiary backing that is too new and too controversial to be best practice.

The natalist and cissexist nature of the arguments are clear. Shrier raises up pharmaceutical specters and plays on parental discomfort to provide them with abuser rationale, narrating stories of trans “youth” who are no longer minors—otherwise known as “adults”—who cut off their parents and transition—despite everything parents have done for those ungrateful wretches! Transition is billed as a fashionable trend, an experimental and life-ruining medical intervention that has to be avoided at all costs, and parents who allow it are cast as the real abusive ones, for letting their perfectly cisgender children down and letting them make a life-ruining mistake. The book speaks in clear transactional language, discussing everything children owe our parents: money, grandchildren, and a ‘normal’ family life that has no room in it for queerness.

Of course, while the focus is on the violent regendering of transmasculine youth into the future wombs of the Family and Nation, Irreversible Damage by no means forgets or omits trans women:

“In May 2019 I got a call from a friend who had just taken her thirteen-year-old daughter for a first bra fitting at Nordstrom. It went badly, my friend said, and my mind leapt to the typical reasons … But it turned out that the problem had come in a slightly different package: six feet tall, pancake makeup blurring a stubbled jaw, two breasts grafted onto a muscular torso like add-ons. Weeks later I headed to the Nordstrom to confirm my friend’s story. The employee was elegant, attentive and professional, fluttering around the floor in a tulle skirt, pink manicured nails trailing her every gesture like streamers. But there was no mistaking that this lingerie specialist was male.” [Emphasis mine.]

It is interesting how even in the attempt to manufacture a moral panic against transition, Shrier concedes in the middle of her transmisogynistic tirade that the employee was “attentive and professional”. Her crime, then, wasn’t acting in a way that is inappropriate for an attendant, but simply daring to be trans around cis women. Shrier alleges that her friend kept asking what would have happened had she not been there and sent her daughter to the store alone, implying based on nothing that the employee presented a unique sexual threat to her young daughter.

Judgment before trial or evidence, as always.

Shrier, in fact, claims that “young girls” who transition are practically compelled into it: “Young women are intruded on by biological men in locker rooms, trounced by biological boys on sports teams, and told work life will never offer them fair rewards. Intersectional language denies all their biological specialness. Hollywood—no longer in the rom-com business—offers them no fantasy on which to hang their girlish hopes. The gifts and presumptions of this culture make it hard to imagine why anyone should want to be a girl.” [Emphasis mine.]

When she puts it like that, I understand the issue. I realize now that I must apologize to all the little cis girls of the world for setting a standard of womanhood they can never live up to. It just comes naturally to me.

The language employed here is very telling. Shrier has a bone to pick with ‘intersectionality’ that has not quite been replicated in wider anti-trans propaganda, but Crenshaw’s theory serves as a synecdoche for feminism as a whole. Girls are no longer affirmed in their biological specialness, and rather than romanticizing their ability to give birth, ‘Hollywood’ and a putatively feminist culture lets them down and shatters their “girlish hopes” by making them aware of societal misogyny. Whatever her pretenses to expertise on issues of transition, there is no attempt to mask this heterofatalism: to be a girl is to make your peace with what womanhood entails, and how dare feminists try to corrupt that.

This trend of transmasculine people being infantilized and regendered as “young girls” while transfeminine people are recast as “biological men”, always spoken of as an invasive sexual and physical threat to “women and girls”, makes it very clear who Shrier and others blame for the “transgender trend”. Trans women are always spoken of as adults, deviants and perverts accused of grooming these “young girls” for unspeakably nefarious purposes. Regendering and transmisogyny here work in tandem to render trans existence as a whole into a conservative libidinal fantasy that justifies abuse and torture on one hand, and brutal violence and expulsion on the other. After all, who in their right mind would defend or stand up for a group of people grooming and preying on young children?

Who aren’t affluent and powerful cis men, I mean.

Fundamentally, the trans panic is driven by patriarchal anxieties around the reproduction of heterosexuality. The language of manipulation and deviance and disgust is laundered—barely—through pseudoscientific terms and resuscitated queerphobic tropes, propped up by the discomfort of putative allies and the refusal to question the supposed scientific basis of anti-trans legislation. This happens even when the scientific consensus does question transphobic propaganda—a 2021 statement by the Coalition for the Advancement and Application of Psychological Science, signed by dozens of organizations, plainly states that “There are no sound studies of ROGD”.

Because the point isn’t to prove anything definitively. The point is to have and prolong the debate, no matter how unsound the basis, and use the very existence of a debate to delegitimize trans existence and erode any and all protections for transgender people in legislation.

Unsettling Science

The Cass Review is a widely-criticized and heavily-disputed 2024 report authored by Dr. Hilary Cass that employs all the hallmarks of pathologizing transgender healthcare. It states that the “evidence base” supporting the use of puberty blockers or hormone therapy “had already shown to be weak”, and recommends that young trans people should only be given access to these treatments if they agree to be enrolled into a long-term clinical study, the details of which are yet to determined.

Claiming a weak evidence base to coerce trans people into a clinical study is so thickly ironic that I can practically taste blood, but the most interesting thing about this claim is that Cass disregarded practically all existing research into the long-term effects of transition treatments. Only two out of 103 UK studies were considered admissible, and no international studies were considered acceptable either. The rationale provided for these dismissals is largely that the studies are not blind studies and do not include a control group—that is, a group who are not provided the care they are seeking—which many have pointed out would be a fucking monstrous and also unethical thing to subject young trans people to!

But you’ve already spotted the pattern by now.

Following the Cass Review, NHS England and Wes Streeting bandied it about as cause enough to make the ban on puberty blockers for trans youth indefinite. NHS England also cited the report as a reason to initiate a review of clinics providing transition care to adults, despite such clinics or adults not being the subject of the Cass Review. Every piece of evidence that transition care helps trans people was determined worthless, and Cass herself responded to advocates for youth transition services who spoke of the effects of this ban on the mental and physical wellbeing of trans children—a group which included parents who have lost their trans children to suicide—by calling them “shroud-wavers”.

How gauche of us to mention the social murder of children by unsubstantiated anti-trans policies.

Janice Raymond was calling transition care “new” and “untested” and “mutilation” in 1979. Transition is always too new and too untested and never “settled science” because influential people grossed out by icky trannies and invested in cissexist norms do not want to listen to any evidence or testimony that contradicts their desire to ban transition care. The flimsiest excuses will always be propped up and advocacy by and for trans people always dismissed because this is a debate that is not about scientific consensus, but about manufacturing consensus for the outlawing of transition and the wide-scale suppression of trans people.

And I would be happy to pin the blame entirely on an epistemicidal media climate and rogue medical experts and politicians, but that wouldn’t be entirely accurate, would it? Because the debate is useful to people without political power, too. Because so many parents and siblings and family members and partners and friends and comrades and justice-minded feminists and activists and fellow queers and even staunch anti-capitalist revolutionaries found it convenient to mask their discomfort, disgust, and dehumanization of us by reaching for the nearest article or podcast or press statement on “the debate” and saying that yeah, aren’t there doubts? Should we really be letting big, hulking males into women’s bathrooms and prisons and sports? Shouldn’t there be more research? Science isn’t settled, after all.

Anti-trans policies and campaigns continue to be largely unpopular, if for no other reason than people beginning to notice that transphobic screeds are correlated with harmful policy positions. But there was enough doubt, enough of an unwillingness to fight for a “tiny, insignificant minority” whose vilification and scapegoating dominated the media’s new cycles for years, enough complicity to ensure that things would keep getting worse for us. That we would have to flee states or countries, secure our access to healthcare, contend with unchecked exclusion and employment and housing discrimination, and beg for scraps on the fringes of society more or less on our own.

Many cis people support us. I know that better than anyone, and I know that the media’s amplification of anti-trans sentiment and hate speech is not as reflective of societal attitudes as reactionaries would like us to believe.

But it was enough, wasn’t it?

Conclusion: The Penis Mightier Than The Sword

In the July 2025 volume of Discrimination Law Association Briefings, legal researcher Jess O’Thomson and barrister Oscar Davies wrote an article entitled A third sex: returning to an intermediate zone. The UK Supreme Court had, in April, issued a ruling that the definition of ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 should be interpreted as ‘biological sex’.

I would provide the definition of ‘biological’ sex used here, but the SC ruling deemed that one was not necessary! Endocrinal sex, perceived sex, sex based on genital configuration—no particular ‘biological’ aspect of sex was specified, as ‘biological sex’ was held to be a self-evident term. Despite the supposed clarity and self-evident nature of the very basis of the ruling, however, O’Thomson and Davies observed that the conclusions the court drew were incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights and placed trans people into a legal “intermediate zone” that effectively renders us all a third sex.

One such example was provided by the SC’s ruling itself. In paragraph 221, the SC held that a trans man could be excluded from men’s spaces on account of being “female”, but also could be excluded from women’s spaces if he were sufficiently virilized, on account of his “masculine appearance”. A broad reading of this ruling effectively means that trans people would lose access a plethora of services and protections, reduced to navigating a legal limbo, effectively rendered illegible by a legal opinion that stops barely short of outright stating that trans people can be treated as whatever sex is most convenient for those who want to exclude them.

Now, it must be said that despite the inconsistencies and contradictions riddling the SC ruling, it did not ultimately hold that those who operate single-sex spaces or services must exclude trans people.

But…

2025 was a year riddled with such legal and policy assaults on trans people’s rights and dignity. United States v. Skrmetti held that banning puberty blockers and hormone treatments for trans—but not cis—youth was not sex discrimination and that trans people did not constitute a “suspect class”—that is, a class of people likely to face discrimination. The Trump administration’s HHS report on gender dysphoria cited the UK Cass Review to declare that transition care is “experimental” and lacks clear evidence of any benefits. Across the West, anti-trans interests and experts and policymakers collaborated and reinforced each other’s escalated attempts at epistemic violence to an unprecedented degree.

Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos coined the term ‘epistemicide’ in 1998 to describe the colonial process of erasing and destroying indigenous and non-Western epistemologies, to annihilate entire cultures and ways of being. In the same year, British philosopher Miranda Fricker coined ‘epistemic injustice’ to talk about how the marginalized are seen as less credible sources on their own experiences and marginalization than their oppressors. Various axes and manifestations of such epistemic violence have always been core to patriarchal society, as evident in the denial of education to girls, the under-funding of research into women’s health, the prevalence of medical misogyny, and both the reputation and recuperation of feminist epistemologies.

However, what is being done to trans people as a whole and trans women in particular seems to almost be a step beyond that. It seems less that trans women are seen to “lack credibility” and more that we are not considered a group that can meaningfully contribute any perspective at all. We are curiosities and freaks and wretches, looked upon with either pity or disgust, who must be studied by brave truth-tellers and discerning scholars who can cut off our access to resources, subject us to treatments without consent and design arcane rituals to divine the truth from our meaningless babbling. To lie about and misinterpret the words and actions and behaviors of trans women even when reproducing them in full, even when the meaning of the words is clear, and to have the least charitable and most objectifying, degrading, and bad-faith interpretations accepted uncritically is more than mere erasure or testimonial injustice or silencing.

It is epistemic vandalism. It is the refusal to consider any knowledge base or testimony or advocacy or opinion that is insufficiently transphobic as valid at all. It is the active and malicious exclusion of even the credible and authoritative if their judgment of us is deemed to be insufficiently harmful. It is the mandating and requirement that only that which actively denies, displaces, and dismisses us is acceptable as knowledge, and everything else is ‘opinion’ or ‘activism’ or, bluntly, hysteria. It is, in short, the collective global and societal gaslighting of an entire category of person, because to consider us as anything less than a tumor to excise or a blight to cure is in and of itself disqualifying. It is a reversal of reality, an inversion of who victim and oppressor are to justify a level of violence and stigmatization and exclusion as to be tantamount to genocide.

But it’s not going to be enough.

Because we’re not a disease.

We’re the cure, you sick, sick fucks.

Epilogue: “Madwoman”

I can’t wrap my head around how many of us have been silenced and strangled and tossed away to rot in the gutter.

I don’t mean this year, or even this century, even though the days of remembrance and the stories of friends lost and the grief of being unable to mourn those whose names we’ll never even know is more than enough, more than it takes, too much, it’s too much and far past what it takes to drive a woman mad. Hysterical and babbling and blinded by tears that will never cease.

You can’t even imagine it. There isn’t enough space in your head. How many girls, dating back centuries, have been tossed out onto the streets and beaten and starved and worse for the crime of being girls? How many people? How many brothers and sisters and siblings?

How many ancestors whose stories were seen inscribed in filth and washed away, along with the blood, to make your beautiful cities sparkle?

We are lives extinguished, embers that were never allowed to blaze, to scream to life in roaring radiance. We are ash and dust, we are the dirt and the worms underneath, the rot and carcass seeping through your sewers because it is only by burying us that you feel clean. Because only by sweeping us under the flagstones, crushing us under the foundations, can you continue to live with yourselves and believe in the lie that we are the ones who are delusional.

But I see the truth you all refuse to.

And the fear of that truth is why our tongues must be ripped from our mouths and everything we know crushed into mulch and viscera under steel-toed boot heels. Because I was recruited into a war I never agreed to wage, made the proud citizen of a Nation whose flag I never saluted, and told to hate everything and everyone that falls outside of imaginary bounds scrawled across shifting sands.

And when my eye’s reflection betrayed that I do not see the world as I am supposed to, that I see how easy and even necessary so many crossings are, I had to be blinded, and contained, and quarantined so that the ideas I had been infected by could no longer spread.

Well. Too late for that.

We live in a very petty, cruel, malformed world. One that wants us to pay no heed to the sheer amount and level of bloodshed needed to sustain its unquenchable thirst. One ruled by false idols on paper thrones who shout and screech and demand deference to deities who deemed them better than us all, and to tithe them with sacrifices and paeans and the fruits of our harvest.

Go forth and multiply, or else.

I am tired of this world. I am tired, even, of its people, and most of all I am tired of their devotion to ideals that do not even serve them, but are clung to and dearly held because at least they hurt me more. I am tired of hearing over and over why all I deserve is destruction and death, and I am tired of pretending that after all these years of being tired I do not long for it, long to be interred in my rightful domain.

Because after all, given how much these false kings and false prophets are willing to give up and ruin and set on fire to purify the world of a stain that will never be cleansed, I don’t think I’ll be alone for long. The Scholars and Priests and Learned Men have determined that they will cling to their slivers of tyranny and mean stations and scraps of power at any cost, even if it means the end of the world, over the indignity of living in harmony with the lessers they consider beneath them.

And frankly, if your petty, cruel, malformed world has no space for us in it, then let it die too for all I care.

There’s an old poem, four thousand years old or so, about Ishtar’s descent into the underworld. She missed her husband, you see, and tried to visit him, or get him out, but found that the underworld is easier to enter than it is to leave. And so, because the goddess of fertility was trapped by the goddess of death, nothing on earth could proliferate anymore. To save Ishtar and thereby save the world—by saving sex itself—a “gender-ambiguous” individual, Asu-shu-namir, was sent to charm the goddess of death and enable Ishtar’s escape. Asu-shu-namir is referred to variously as a “eunuch”, a “male cultic prostitute”, or… a third sex.

Fascinating, isn’t it?

Even in our oldest written and historical and mythological records, everyone knew that for the world of Man to flourish, you had to banish, exploit, and consign to death those disgusting fucking trannies.

I think about this story a lot. I think about it when I see the word “deadname”, or read about how trans people who passed RLE were forced to move cities and start over with a new identity and fake history, allowed to live as who they are only on the condition that they killed their connection to everything they used to hold dear. I think about it when I see right-wingers taunt us with memes about suicide, and when I see statistics outlining how many of us are murdered, and when I recall that every one of us knows someone who’s no longer here.

It makes it a little easier, you know? Perversely. To think death is enamored with us. To think that we are locked in an eternal dance with a goddess who can’t bear to be apart from us too long. To think that whatever end I meet, no matter how sudden or early or unfortunate, no matter whether I am forgotten or remembered by a name that I hoped would die before me, I will open my eyes and behold a cruel and terrible and majestic face, awe-inspiring beyond comprehension, that will lean in and whisper, “What took you so long?”

Death is our demesne, for we are beloved of Ereshkigal.

So I sit amidst sarcophagi, holding a broken hammer beside a rusted anvil, foolishly dreaming that we can yet build something. I wanted to write fiction, you know. Stories of joy and love and triumph, to bring to life visions and dreams that women like me are so often denied. But here I lie instead, a madwoman barking at the rubble, watching her words tumble into the ruins.

Come, then. Know death like we have known it, and become familiar with its embrace. Make peace with the foreclosing of futures, the ending of possibilities, and your utter abandonment by everything you thought was meant to protect you.

You’ll get used to it.

These are my words, if anyone cares to carve them into my epitaph. Heed them or not. Perhaps you will learn, perhaps you won’t. I’ll see you at the door to hell either way, and hope that you have the courage to look me in the eye that your gods lack.

On the 7th of January, 2026, Renee Nicole Good was repeatedly shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Good and her wife had been acting as legal observers in response to ICE activities in Minneapolis, and Good’s extrajudicial killing at the hands of an unaccountable white supremacist force is hard to not see as retaliation for daring to place any limits on their rampage.

Good was called a “fucking bitch” after she was shot. ICE agents prevented medics from assisting her, and bystanders trying to reach her were told that ICE had their own medics to help—a lie. The reactionary media machine was quick to frame her death in terms that signalled Good was an acceptable target, an undesirable whose culling is to be celebrated and not mourned. Jesse Watters on Fox News mentioned that Good had “pronouns in her bio” and a “lesbian partner”. Fake mugshots and doctored images listing non-existent crimes circulated on X, and when they were easily revealed as shams, right-wing social media accounts resorted to the old, reliable tactic: pointing out that Good was a woman.

“I feel like I have been condescended to by a woman who looks exactly like this thousands of times”, reads a widely-shared post on X attached to an image of Renee Nichole Good… smiling.

Just smiling.

Good’s vilification by reactionary extremists in the wake of her death is telling. She was white and blonde and a mother, but her queerness (and perceived proximity to transness, through “pronouns”) was used to cast her as an enemy to the white Nation, to degender and mark her. At the same time the US President, in a statement justifying her execution, referred to her wife as her “friend”, refusing to acknowledge the legitimacy of their partnership. In the days since, other protestors detained by ICE have spoken of being taunted by agents who called Good a “lesbian bitch” whom they “had” to kill—for her insolence, her defiance, her refusal to perform the role expected of white women under a rampantly Nationalist regime.

She hadn’t known what was good for her, you see. She practically forced their hand.

Look what she made them do.

The following essay was written before these events transpired. It is not about Nationalism—not explicitly, though it does allude to the violence of Nation-building in parts. But it is an essay about lesbianism and lesbians and lesbian feminism, and the quiet, simmering hatred of those women who choose to love and be with women. A hatred that pervades politics both misogynist and feminist, both heterosexual and queer. It is an essay reflecting on the recent history of feminist movements and the quest for an ever-kinder, ever-gentler feminism that will, at long last, prove inoffensive and appealing enough to men’s sensibilities. It is an essay about how, despite men demonstrating their investment in violent patriarchal politics, despite men proving time and again that they would rather tear up the social contract and uphold authoritarianism than countenance a world where women are free to exist independent of men, it is easier for us to hate and resent and abhor the women who point this out than the men themselves.

I present it to you with all the despair and grief and rage in my heart, and invite you to reflect on a world where men’s feelings matter more than women’s lives.

Introduction: Heterodoomerism

In 2019, Asa Seresin published the essay On Heteropessimism, boldly declaring in the subtitle: “Heterosexuality is nobody’s personal problem”. Echoing the longstanding lesbian feminist critiques of heterosexuality as an institution that structures our lives rather than a mere description of how one engages in interpersonal intimacy, Seresin nonetheless grounds his piece in discussions of the personal, specifically exploring how women relate to, view, and engage with (others’, if not their own) heterosexuality. He begins with Maggie Nelson’s admission in her meditation-memoir that “Heterosexuality always embarrasses me” and attempts to explore the implications of that confession, asking what it means for straight women to performatively disavow heterosexuality while nonetheless being fatalistically resigned to participating in it.

How can a heterosexual woman navigate love and lust when her partners are expected, primed even, to always disappoint her? To let her down in the myriad ways men let down the women in their lives, demonstrating constantly that they do not value women’s internality or personhood?

Seresin’s essay is provocative in a way that caught the imagination of a culture on the brink of patriarchal backlash to perceived feminist overreach. Heteropessimism, and the synonymously-treated term heterofatalism, became fresh buzzwords for social media denizens and pop-feminist writers alike to examine, dissect, and misinterpret in typical and expected ways. “I don’t want to be, but I fear I’m heterofatalistic” reads an August 2025 article in an online wellness magazine, expressing a certain fatalism about being heterofatalist. A scant month prior to that, The Trouble With Wanting Men by Jean Garnett was published in an outlet no less transphobic and prestigious than the New York Times, chronicling one woman’s exhausting attempt to remain optimistic about her dating prospects and explicitly citing the term.

It seems that despite their best efforts, straight women find themselves embittered, embattled, and embarrassed by the men who they wish to love and cherish, but who do not reciprocate these sentiments in meaningful ways.

That is not to say that heterofatalism is here to stay. Chanté Joseph found herself both explaining and defending her piece Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?, which ran in British Vogue on October 25th, 2025. The response to her humorous observations on how women are increasingly coy and secretive on social media about the men they date was equal parts commiseration and defensiveness. One exasperated TikTok by Joseph, put out two days after the article’s publication, even had her addressing the myriad accusations that her article was the product of her being single, jealous, bitter—a restatement of the ancient charge that feminism is the pursuit of the “unfucked”, “frigid” woman who cannot find a good man. Joseph breathlessly explained that her article had many quotes from partnered women before being edited down and is not reflective of her own experiences, and that she is drawing from lesbian feminism, explicitly citing Adrienne Rich and Jane Ward in the comments. This is feminism from women definitionally incapable of being jealous of straight women, she almost screams, in a tone that I know all too well.

I almost feel bad for having to point out that being a lesbian doesn’t actually stop straight women from accusing us of envy.

Seresin almost certainly never intended his essay to become a battleground over the utility of the words he dubbed to describe the phenomenon. Many straight women taking umbrage with ‘heterofatalism’, believing it to be a fad for immature single ladies or fed-up divorcees, would likely be surprised to learn that Seresin’s piece is quite condemnatory. He believes that heterofatalism is little more than a soporific consumed by those resigned to never improving. He lays forth the charge:

“Spinning on its wheels, endlessly repeating, going nowhere—heteropessimists and queer theorists alike are convinced that this is heterosexuality’s permanent fate. I think they’re wrong, that there’s evidence heterosexual culture is changing. But even if it weren’t, we would have to believe it could, because tens of thousands of women are currently dying of it every year, murdered by their husbands, boyfriends, or exes.”

Interestingly, Seresin seems to think that heterosexuality is a neglected field of study amongst its supposed detractors. Exhausted straight women and haughty queers all stand accused of wanting to leave heterosexuality behind without considering how this does nothing to help those ailed by it, those that Seresin insists cannot meaningfully abandon it. It is a call for feminism to confront the futility of a utopian abolitionism, a repudiation of the feminist history that once regarded heterosexuality as a moral failure. “Yes, universal queerness and the abolition of gender may be the horizon toward which we are eventually moving”, he allows, in a tone I imagine to be cloyingly conciliatory towards us idealist militants, “but what happens in the meantime?”

What, indeed?

Chanté Joseph and Asa Seresin form a fascinating dyad in my mind—a cishet woman voicing her appreciation of lesbian feminism in defense of heteropessimistic attitudes, juxtaposed with the queer writer who coined the phrase to repudiate it as fundamentally poisonous, while obliquely denouncing lesbian feminism. The space between them tells a fascinating story that is, at its root, about feminist history itself: the doomed love between feminism and heterosexuality. The question here—the real, actual question at the core of all this frustration and disappointment and unrequited yearning—isn’t really about how best to be a feminist or how best to approach the topic of heterosexuality and the way it structures all of our lives. The question is simply:

“Can heterosexuality be saved?”

It is a question that is being asked in the shadow of second-wave feminism and its advocacy of political lesbianism. Feminists in times past, even as they observed how heterosexuality is mandated by patriarchal regimes, once decried heterosexual women as traitors, as those who “sleep with the enemy”. The idea that feminism and heterosexuality are fundamentally incompatible is one that has troubled feminists from before the heyday of lesbian feminism and continues to haunt us now. As we reckon with the antifeminist backlash giving way to the co-optation of feminism by conservative interests, culminating in the present-day escalation of conservative rhetoric that calls for a dismantling of women’s rights in the West, the question lingers, and almost demands an answer.

There are two writers who could be described as queer whose responses to and discussion of On Heteropessimism highlight this underlying anxiety. The first, Collective Turn-Off, published by Sophie Lewis in 2019, approaches the question of heterofatalism as a byproduct of the increasing popularity of sex-negative feminisms. As someone who is familiar with Lewis through her strong family-abolitionist stance, I found Collective Turn-Off to be somewhat baffling in its condemnation of a cultural mood that she perceives to be regressive. Lewis contends that this is not a productive impulse, agreeing with Seresin that “ … the heterofatalist posture is still serving as yet another method by which white women like me can project outward our own cowardice and machismo – that is to say, our own aversion to vulnerability”. I personally struggle to comprehend how expressing misgivings with heterosexual structures of intimacy—something Lewis knows invites punishment—is in any way avoiding vulnerability, or projecting machismo. The most revealing line in Lewis’ piece, however, is the following:

“Indeed, misandry, as I see it, can never reliably be prevented from collapsing into transphobia.”

… News to me.

The other piece under consideration, Notes on “heteropessimism”, is not a structured essay, but a series of bullet points from Shon Faye’s Substack that was put out in December 2025, listing and building on her thoughts on “a term she can’t escape”. Faye is much more critical of Seresin, rightly pointing out that he muddles his own thesis by lumping together statements by queer women about a coercive system with complaints by straight women tired of being mistreated—and even statements by men expressing contempt for women!

“15. We do not need to call men’s contempt for their own wives or hatred of women generally for not having sex with them ‘heteropessimism’. To do so obscures that it is simply better termed misogyny. 16. I think grouping the way men express misogyny and the maladaptive, even mean-spirited ways women attempt to cope with its pervasiveness under one term is ethically risky.” [Emphasis mine.]

Faye, who has written at length about heterosexuality and dating men as a trans woman, unflinchingly talks about how many men “deeply hate the women they share their lives with and sleep next to”, viewing their partners less as people and more as patriarchal status symbols. Her clear-eyed assessment of men’s attitudes belies personal experience with these harsh lessons and an intimate understanding of the women who, having been repeatedly let down by the partners they chose, hoping against hope for the mythical “good man”, are now finding themselves at their wits’ end.

Faye is not entirely exculpatory of women’s role in patriarchy—she’s more than aware how the siren song of respectability and investment in the patriarchal positionality of the ‘mother’ appeals to cis women willing to barter for crumbs of status. She nonetheless asks us to recall that women who express a “hatred” of men are usually heavily policed for it, and reflects on her own complex feelings of anger, resentment, and distrust.

That said, Faye also cites Lewis towards the end of her piece, expressing her agreement with the anxiety that “misandrist inclinations” tend towards transmisogyny. “I think the current libidinal cruelty of TERFism is one of the main reasons why I won’t allow myself to succumb to my own misandrist inclinations”, she says, reasoning that her feelings towards men are something that she ultimately needs to make peace with.

My frustration with this conclusion is limited—this precise contradiction between being aware of how men treat women while being attracted to them is something many a straight woman has lamented. However, this pervasive fear amongst certain kinds of feminists—usually the queer and trans ones—that any strain of feminism critical of male-supremacy will always be doomed to reaction confounds me more than I can express. It speaks to a kind of feminist trauma, a reflexive recoiling that manifests when feminists are confronted with the inevitable, inescapable conclusion that our foremothers spelled out plainly. As if acknowledging how impossible men make it to love or believe in them will start us down a path that can only end with rabid transphobia and self-immolation.

I am familiar with these misgivings, and I understand where they come from. Queer people have been betrayed many a time by avowed feminists. Betty Friedan called lesbians in the women’s movement a “lavender menace”, and many of those radicals who protested and argued that they belonged turned around and expressed similar sentiments about trans womanhood. The sex wars were the apotheosis of this fear, this fury, this tension between recognising how sex under patriarchy is rigidly controlled and regulated for the benefit of men, and the libertine declarations of the burgeoning queer movement defending their right to live freely and engage in hedonistic pleasure. Seresin, Faye, Lewis, and others—we are all laboring under the burdens previous generations placed on us, still answering for their crimes and struggling to live up to their expectations. So please do not think me ignorant or callous when I say that I can only muster the following response:

Boo fucking hoo.

Part One: You Give Love a Bad Name

Since both Seresin and Lewis are emphatic about heteropessimism’s popularity amongst white women, allow me to flash my race card.

Loving Women: Being Lesbian in Unprivileged India is an ethnographic account of Indian working-class lesbians by Maya Sharma, published in 2006. The methodological challenges Sharma faced in putting it together were significant—she was only able to find most of her subjects through rumors and hearsay, looking into the local gossip and asking after the “talked-about women”. Over ten chapters, Sharma meets with various individuals and couples, some under the thumbs of their families, others who managed to eke out a solitary existence that is frequently denied Indian women, all of whom faced significant challenges to be with the women they loved.

Marriage is the Sword of Damocles that hangs above the whole text, prominently featuring in every story Sharma relates. Most of the women she speaks to aren’t able to avoid it, and some try to set boundaries with their husbands while continuing to see their paramours. That is, in fact, how Sharma finds out about several of them—the women’s group she is a part of is approached by family members, both in-laws and blood relatives, to try and mediate with or “talk sense into” the recalcitrant girls.

One of the women Sharma speaks to, Rekha, is only allowed to meet with her under strict supervision. Rekha and her lover, Dolly, had attempted to flee together to Punjab, at which point their families filed a Missing Persons report to get the police involved. Upon being returned, Rekha was practically under house arrest and not allowed to meet Dolly.

Rekha’s case fills Sharma with a profound sense of anger and powerlessness. She tries to slip Rekha her number during their meeting, so that she may be contacted in an emergency, but Rekha’s uncle enters the room and snatches the slip of paper away. Sharma is ushered out soon after; her subsequent attempts to meet with Dolly are unfruitful, and leaves her with few avenues to assist either of them. The best she can do is to write a letter to the local officer asking him to help the two women. She never hears back.

A common theme in the lesbophobia these women face is a perception of sexual impropriety. Sharma’s writing reveals that the lesbians she speaks to are rarely met with explicit homophobia, or a hatred that directly names their transgressions. Instead they are accused of “selling girls” or “prostitution”, even when obviously in monogamous couplings. Rekha’s uncle laughs at the notion that women can marry each other, dismissing the possibility out of hand—how can marriage occur when there is no man to take possession of a woman? Lesbianism, in being rendered an impossibility, is instead viewed as overreach, as women attempting to exercise sexual autonomy outside of their families’ influence. In societies as patriarchal as India, this refusal to let patriarchs regulate your sexuality is the same sin irrespective of the actual reasons behind it, and invites third-sexing and vilification as a ‘public’, ‘loose’ woman.

This actually happened to one of Sharma’s subjects, Mary, in her local women’s rights group. Mary had joined after enduring decades of domestic abuse, but found that her ‘friendship’ with another woman in the group led to rumours and discomfort among their co-workers. They were called into meetings, accused of being prostitutes, and told to separate. In Mary’s own words:

“What hurts is that there is no space for women like us even in a group like ours. It is here that we dream of reforming society and changing the world … and it is in this very place that we face opposition. It saddens me because the years with this group, where we found each other, have been the happiest in her life, as well as mine, up till now. …” [Emphasis mine.]

What struck me the most about Mary’s case was this sadness, this sense of betrayal she’s trying to put into words. Even amongst people who understand how unfair Indian society is to women, who try to help them through dowry disputes and widowhood and domestic violence, love between women is verboten, is something to be excised and punished and censured. It’s resonant with the wider history of feminist struggle and its latent tension with lesbians. Betty Friedan kicked off the second wave by talking about the plight of wives and mothers, about menial domestic labor, the burdens of childcare, and the overwhelming pressure to not speak of the pain and violence husbands put women through. Her opposition to lesbians within the feminist movement stemmed from a belief that lesbian issues were irrelevant to the vast majority of women—and that lesbians were in fact a threat to feminism as a whole.

Lesbian feminism emerged in part to address this myopia. To argue that women outside of the private sphere are not free of patriarchy and are also victims of patriarchal violence, just a different kind. Analyses of heterosexuality as an institution sought to cultivate unity between lesbian and heterofeminism, to make women aware of how we are all compelled into relationships with men and how our societies make the same heterosexist demands of all women. Whether we accept or refuse the patriarchal bargain, we are punished, and a feminism that is truly for everyone has to recognize the common roots of our oppression.

That utopian desire for feminist unity never quite panned out, though. One can trace many narrative threads across the history of the second wave if one wishes, and the story of how lesbian and straight feminists never quite managed to see eye to eye is a prominent one. Political lesbianism, in particular, stands out as a battleground whose casualties and scars feminists still reckon with to this day. In its heyday, militant lesbian feminists held that it was in fact impossible to be a feminist while continuing to associate with men. They called for separatism, for rectifying extant patriarchal society by daring to imagine a radical, egalitarian future and living by its ideals in the present. In a 2016 Lesbian History Group event, Sheila Jeffreys herself recalled how this idea emerged from the leftism of the 60s and 70s—“living the revolution now”.

The trouble with trying to build a new future while the existing order is invested in snuffing it out is perhaps obvious, at least in hindsight. Lesbian ethics and separatism is easy to see as a kind of early choice feminism, removed from its own materialist origins that were far more explicit about how little choice is afforded women. Attempts to overthrow heterosexuality through secessionism and trying to live as lesbian a life as possible certainly appealed to many women, but the point of patriarchy has always been that it’s coercive. You can’t escape it, dollface, and all that.

Frankly, many of the women who are most candid about heterosexuality aren’t even feminists at all. Dworkin’s Right Wing Women proved to have staying power in part because it shows how conservative women don’t make excuses for men’s violence, but rather resign themselves to it. They understand that they are women in a man’s world, and so they try to make the best of a bad deal. Their rage at feminists and queer people—and indeed lesbians—appears to come from a kind of sunk cost, a reflexive lashing out at those who say things can be better when they already made their peace with how wanting better is futile—a juvenile fantasy we all must abandon, as conservative ‘intellectual’ Midge Decter put it.

Several of Maya Sharma’s subjects, by no means trained feminists, voice similar sentiments about how inescapable patriarchy is, and how they struggle with the apparent inequality in relationships with men. It isn’t just that they love women, but that love between women is free of the expectation of being lesser, of being subservient to a man.

After all, no one’s as fatalist about heterosexuality as those who don’t have a way out.

I don’t actually like having to use the suffering of my people as a rhetorical sledgehammer. The pain and injustice my sisters experience weighs heavily on me, and even trying to write about it left me in profound distress for days. But the way whiteness is invoked in feminist discourses to imply that racialized and colonised and third-world women would never have cause to begrudge men or be critical of heterosexuality is frankly unacceptable. It belies how abstracted these conversations have become from the impact of misogyny on the majority of women worldwide, even as their names are invoked in pleas to be nicer to men.

I do confess that after years upon years of being treated with contempt for bluntly speaking about patriarchal violence, after being angrily denounced by women who haven’t read any of my work but presume I must be condemning them for being attracted to men, and after subjecting myself to pages upon pages of the same cyclical debates on the topic of Why Feminists Shouldn’t Be So Mean To Men even when the feminists under consideration were the exact kind of appeasers everyone keeps insisting we need more of… I kind of get it.

Of course some of the dykes wanted to fuck off to communes over having to put up with more of this unceasing bullshit.

Simply put, the endless relitigation of how we owe it to men not to speak plainly about their exploitation and abuse of us—a conversation that largely occurs between anglophonic women in certain socioeconomic spheres who have the ability to choose who to partner with to a degree that is mostly denied to women worldwide—pisses me off. If you are lucky enough to be able to determine what your relationship to men is, I would suggest you have a responsibility to do more than muse about whether it’s unfair of you to say any harsh words about the guys happily mainstreaming incel ideology and birthrate panics into the modern political landscape.

Because that’s the part we keep stubbornly ignoring in these discussions: that today, men everywhere want more patriarchy. A lot of feminists seem to be laboring under a collective amnesia of what the feminism that led us to this political moment was actually all about. We had nearly forty years of “patriarchy hurts men too” and sex positivity and making the case for anti-patriarchal politics to men. It did not result in the downfall of patriarchy, or a mass defection of men to the feminist cause. Instead, today we have Andrew Tate and fundamentalist Christian theocracy in mainstream US politics and Mark Zuckerberg going on podcasts to talk about how women in already male-dominated tech workplaces bring too much “female energy”.

Since we all seem to need the reminder, let’s revisit the feminist politics of appeasement. And if the feminism of white women is so objectionable, let’s consider the very same history of tension between lesbian and heterofeminism within the Black feminist tradition.

Part Two: Feminism Is For Everybody (Except…)

Lesbians

If there is such a thing as “third wave feminism”, bell hooks is no doubt an exemplar of it. She began writing about feminism in 1981 when she published Ain’t I a Woman?, which talked about the shortcomings of the contemporary women’s movement and put forth a feminist analysis incorporating race and class in addition to gender. Together with calling for the centering of marginal voices in feminism, hooks also maintained a commitment to accessibility and outreach. Of her most enduring works, Feminism is For Everybody is remembered as an accessible primer to feminist theory for all genders, written in 2000 to “rescue” feminism from its over-academic reputation. The Will to Change, written in 2004, is still widely cited as a feminist text that impassionedly and boldly makes the case for why men should oppose patriarchy too. She writes:

“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”

The way hooks is recalled posthumously is somewhat at odds with how she was regarded while she was still alive, and indeed with her more radical feminist tendencies and influences in her earlier work. For all of her writings on the importance of “returning to love” between men and women, she always maintained that men are invested in patriarchy and have to commit to abandoning it. She also, in Ain’t I a Woman? and her essay Is Paris Burning?, discussed how the emasculative excesses of white supremacy towards Black men results in a kind of overcorrection, an investment in hegemonic masculinity that is made to heal a “wounded manhood”. I have seen as many men talk about hooks as just another man-hater as I have witnessed other men using quotes from The Will to Change to shut down feminist critiques of male-supremacy, which is itself a lesson in the utility of feminist appeasement. The radical critiques are forgotten, and the parts that can be appropriated are happily stripped from context.

In a sense, one could see hooks’ work as a bridge between the second and third waves. It is one of the most notable attempts to correct the radical feminist movement’s various issues with exclusion and militancy. In pursuit of that, she often writes of lesbian feminism as a misguided movement, and makes rather peculiar statements about lesbians overall.

The introduction to Feminism is For Everybody contains the following snippet about reformist feminists:

“... By accepting and indeed colluding with the subordination of working-class and poor women, they not only ally themselves with the existing patriarchy and its concomitant sexism, they give themselves the right to lead a double life, one where they are the equals of men in the workforce and at home when they want to be. If they choose lesbianism they have the privilege of being equals with men in the workforce while using class power to create domestic lifestyles where they can choose to have little or no contact with men.” [Emphasis mine.]

This is, generously, extremely weird. As hooks is talking about a specific kind of class politics amongst reformist feminists, it should perhaps be obvious that any ‘privilege’ they harness to “have little or no contact with men” is the consequence of their class, not their lesbianism. It is also somewhat bizarre to allege that being equal with men in the workforce is achievable for women, and especially for lesbians, given the prevalence of hiring discrimination based on sexuality.

Why mention lesbianism at all?

The introduction leads into an interesting claim that hooks makes, repeatedly, throughout the entire book. She expresses it most concisely in chapter 12, Feminist Masculinity:

“Conservative mass media constantly represented feminist women as man-haters. And when there was an anti-male faction or sentiment in the movement, they highlighted it as a way of discrediting feminism. Embedded in the portrayal of feminists as man-hating was the assumption that all feminists were lesbians. Appealing to homophobia, mass media intensified anti-feminist sentiment among men.” [Emphasis mine.]

Taken together with statements about how feminism that was not “anti-male” was “suppressed” to make feminism look bad—made without substantiation—hooks is essentially charging lesbian feminism with being a tool of the conservative media apparatus. This is an interesting charge to make, given that as far back as 1971, right as the radical feminist movement was kicking off, it was Germaine Greer who appeared on the cover of Life magazine, billed as a “Saucy Feminist That Even Men Like”. Greer—a career transmisogynist who in 2003 wrote a book about how beautiful prepubescent boys are and in 2018 derided MeToo as “whinging”—could hardly be described as ‘anti-male’ even then. Her 1970 book The Female Eunuch encouraged women to have more sex with men and be less monogamous—which has always been the kind of feminism elevated in the mainstream!

In chapter 16, Lesbianism and Feminism, hooks does her best to acknowledge and credit the contributions of lesbian feminists. The talks about having always been aware of lesbians and homosexuality growing up, and how when she began doing feminism, the movement was full of all sorts: “straight, bisexual and out gay women”. She also mentions something interesting about the reception to her very first book:

“When my first book came out and I was attacked by individual black lesbian women, I was stunned. I was accused of being homophobic because there was no discussion of lesbianism in my book. That absence was not an indication of homophobia. I did not talk about sexuality in the book. I was not ready. I did not know enough. And had I known more I would have stated that so no one would have been able to label me homophobic.”

We’ll come back to that later.

This repeated insistence on how much she knows and appreciates lesbians is thrown into sharp relief when hooks begins talking about the history of political lesbianism and how upsetting it was for straight women to be told that they were man-centered. In addition to “being useful to conservatives” and “trying to be equal to men”, lesbians must now contend with another allegation: that they made straight feminists feel bad.

With this context, I’d like to take a look at hooks’ most stunning statement on radical and lesbian feminism, which she made in chapter 15, A Feminist Sexual Politic:

“Nothing challenged the grounds of feminist critique of heterosexual practice more than the revelation that feminist lesbians engaged in sexual sadomasochism, a world of tops and bottoms, wherein positions of powerful and powerless were deemed acceptable. Practically all radical feminist discussion of sexuality ceased when women within the movement began to fight over the issue of whether or not one could be a liberated woman, whether lesbian or heterosexual, and engage in the practice of sexual sadomasochism. Tied to this issue were differences of opinion about the meaning and significance of patriarchal pornography. Faced with issues powerful enough to divide and disrupt the movement, by the late ‘80s most radical feminist dialogues about sexuality were no longer public; they took place privately. Talking about sexuality publicly had devastated the movement.” [Emphasis mine.]

Firstly: the omission of “the trans question” in this summary of why radical feminism imploded is highly conspicuous. But leaving that aside for later, the idea that the feminist discourses on pornography and sadomasochism, a.k.a the sex wars, were the least publicized aspect of the radical feminist movement is breathtakingly ahistorical. Moreover, hooks here is implicitly agreeing with the premise that lesbians who engage in BDSM—then called ‘sadomasochism’—do not have a leg to stand on when it comes to critiquing heterosexuality. This is not only a statement that is and was heavily contested by lesbian feminists, but it’s one that the most transmisogynistic and sex-critical feminists, such as Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond, subscribed to!

Taken together, hooks’ discussion of lesbians and lesbian feminism in Feminism is For Everybody comes across as incredibly… petty. It is less a recounting of feminism’s fraught history and more a listing of grievances, made by someone who seems to want to put lesbian feminists in their place for daring to critique heterosexuality and heterofeminists at all. Given all this, her insistence on how much lesbian feminists taught her about “pushing the boundaries of heterosexism” is somewhat trite. Especially considering what she writes as a thesis statement in the introduction to The Will to Change a scant four years after:

“It is a fiction of false feminism that we women can find our power in a world without men, in a world where we deny our connections to men. We claim our power fully only when we can speak the truth that we need men in our lives, that men are in our lives whether we want them to be or not, that we need men to challenge patriarchy, that we need men to change.”

Transsexuals

Is Paris Burning?, a 1996 essay by bell hooks, is a critique of Jenny Livingston’s 1990 documentary on New York city’s ball culture, Paris is Burning. The documentary sheds light on this underground drag scene, where queer people who we may today recognize as fem gay men and transgender women of color compete in “balls”, as a celebration of fashion, creativity and beauty amongst a heavily marginal population. Paris is Burning touches upon what life was like for ostracised queer people of color, organized into their own “houses” that are headed by a “mother”, and is in a sense about finding joy amidst each other even as they face heavy stigma and violence. The resemblance to hijra houses and the guru-chela system is uncanny, and it shows how queer people across time and space have come together to form their own kinship structures in the face of expulsion and rejection by their so-called biological families.

In her critique of Paris is Burning, bell hooks asks: why doesn’t this documentary about a marginalized and frequently ostracized demographic talk about their families more?

“Much of the individual testimony makes it appear that the characters are estranged from any community beyond themselves. Families, friends, etc., are not shown, which adds to the representation of these black gay men as cut off, living on the edge … At no point in Livingston’s film are the men asked to speak about their connections to a world of family and community beyond the drag ball. The cinematic narrative makes the ball the center of their lives. And yet who determines this? Is this the way the black men view their reality or is this the reality Livingston constructs?”

Many discussions of Paris is Burning consider how Livingston’s positionality as a white lesbian must influence what she chooses to frame and focus on in a racialized subculture she is external to. And indeed, hooks remarks on how little space is given to the murder of Venus Xtravaganza, who died during filming. Livingston’s motives and whether her work can be regarded as ‘voyeurism’ are and likely always will be hotly debated.

But I must ask: is the reason for the absence of traditional family, in favor of chosen family, in the lives of gay and transgender people of color during the height of the AIDS crisis not somewhat obvious?

And is it also not somewhat obvious why the film might make a deliberate choice to juxtapose “moments of pain and sadness”, as hooks puts it, with the pageantry of the balls, where its subjects are celebrated rather than punished for their performance of gender?

Leaving that aside, the thrust of hooks’ critique is twofold. She talks about how the femininity celebrated in Paris is Burning is, first and foremost, a “white, middle-class” femininity, and how far from being subversive, the queer subjects of the film reify and lionize the very same culture that oppresses them. This leads into her discussion of ritual, spectacle, and fantasy in the documentary, where she alleges that in making a spectacle of queer Black lives, mostly-white viewers will be left comforted by how aspirational whiteness is even to oppressed people.

“For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The ‘we’ evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.”

I confess that hooks’ words here reminded me of a lot of scholarship written by cis academics on the hijra. Not only because of how she studiously avoids discussing transsexuality at any great length—save for an instance where Venus Xtravaganza is referred to as “him/her”—but also because of how she interrogates and dissects the subversive potential that these queer people of color apparently fail to embody. Is wanting to be celebrated akin to mainstream fashion icons—who in a white supremacist society will be disproportionately white—upholding white supremacy? Do queer men and trans women who “perform femininity” uphold the patriarchy?

These academic inquiries rarely hold any space for the reality that impoverished queer people are perhaps not trying to make a statement about the societies they are excluded from, but envisioning a reality where they may find acceptance and even recognition. Perhaps that is not as subversive as it could be, but do those on the absolute fringes, who are abandoned by state and family, bear a responsibility to only live life in a way that is subversive? Have they not paid enough for their subversion? Is ejection from normative life not sufficient evidence that they are not, in fact, upholding the norms that punish them?

When those who are expected to be masculine and uphold manhood find value outside of it, and dare to dream that we may one day not be reviled for our refusal, are we reinforcing the hegemony or undermining it?

Livingston may be external to the scene she chose to capture, and we may question the efficacy of her portrayal, but the fact remains that Paris is Burning put a spotlight on people that their society would prefer buried and forgotten. Many women like Venus Xtravaganza have died as she died without anyone knowing their names or wishing to remember their passing, and hooks’ questions on the value of fantasy to such women, detached from the reality of why they do not dwell on their families, comes across poorly.

Of course, we’re talking about an essay written in 1996. Even Judith Butler put their foot in their mouth regarding this topic back then, and in later years hooks must have given the subject more thought. In fact, in 2014, bell hooks sat down with Laverne Cox for a 90-minute discussion on race, gender and colonialism. There, hooks demonstrated her understanding of trans issues by—

“One of the issues I think many people have with trans women is the sense of a traditional femininity being called out and reveled in, a femininity that many feminist women feel like, ‘Oh, we’ve been trying to get away from that.’ Can you talk a little bit about that?”

By repeating the same charges of “gynemesis”, “upholding patriarchy”, and “reinforcing feminine stereotypes” that trans women have contended with since before The Transsexual Empire was written. When Cox talked about feeling empowered presenting as she does and asked whether her blonde wigs “feed into patriarchy”, hooks commented “yes”.

“bell was so shady,” Cox would say in an interview with Them, after hooks’ passing, “shady in a good way. bell would read, but there was always love there. There was always so much love, and bell had so much love for me … It’s complicated, and in some ways, she’s absolutely right. And in other ways, that gaze is subverted, because of the nature of who I am [...] walking the streets of New York, early in my transition, throughout my transition it was about [having] armor, it was about survival. You know, if I’m fem enough, and can get through, maybe I won’t get killed today.” [Emphasis mine.]

A relevant point here is how women of color as a whole feel the pressure to perform hyperfemininity at the risk of being degendered. Singling out Cox’s heels as a synecdoche for trans womanhood’s feminist failures is underbaked at best, and more accurately is a reflection on which parts of radical feminism hooks actually liked. The negotiation between how femininity is imposed on women, while simultaneously being degraded and held up as a marker of our inferiority, applies to trans women as well as cis women. Ignoring how trans women are discouraged from embodying a legible womanhood in order to make a point about how our feminine presentation is at odds with feminism simply reinforces that stigma and hobbles conversations about the conflicting expectations placed on all women.

Additionally, this rebuke of feminine-presenting trans women registers as somewhat hypocritical coming from someone who wrote so much about how it is wrong to shame women for choosing to partner with men!

It is richly ironic that one of hooks’ most famous quotes could have formed the basis of an insightful transfeminist commentary: “The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is … that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation … If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.” These words demonstrate a remarkable cognizance of how men are expected to enforce sexed boundaries, and could have led to a discussion of the policing and violence that underlies transmisogyny. Men punish each other—and trans women—for being “like women”, for failing to embody a misogynistic and extractive ideal of manhood.

Instead, reviewing how bell hooks regarded queer women in her work, how she condemned lesbian feminism and transfemininity by often holding queer women more accountable for patriarchal transgressions than the men who most benefited from misogyny and heterosexuality, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that she considered men more worthy of solidarity and outreach than queer women. It is a sentiment found repeatedly in feminist conversations, where the fear of male dismissal almost manifests as a kind of paranoia—how do we excise the specter of those man-hating dykes?

Trans women and lesbians are both a kind of feminist boogeywoman, posing questions of how feminism should regard those on the outside of the traditional, reproductive heterosexual coupling. And again and again, in response to revelations about the artificiality of sex differences or how men are incentivized to exploit women, we see a reification of heterosexuality. Whiteness is frequently upheld as a confounding factor in women’s feminism, illustrating how an investment in white supremacy leads white women to adopt a self-serving feminist ethos, but investment in straightness is rarely given the same treatment despite it being perhaps even more predictive, across time and cultures. Every patriarchy asks its women to channel their dissatisfaction into reform rather than rebellion, into negotiating for better treatment over re-evaluating whether heterosexuality truly serves them. Every time the limitations of this heterosexual contract are revealed, even many feminists find themselves eager to shoot the messenger.

Just as hooks did when her Black lesbian feminist contemporaries criticized her first book.

Part Three: Feminism Is(n’t) Bourgeois

Barbara Smith

Even if you haven’t heard of Barbara Smith, you have heard of Barbara Smith. Co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and co-author of its famous statement, Smith can rightly be considered one of the godmothers of intersectional feminism. She also coined the term identity politics to stress how multiply-marginalized people—such as, for example, Black lesbians—cannot discount the effect their identities have on their marginalization or material circumstances. As a Black lesbian feminist who articulated harsh critiques of the women’s movement of the 1960s and the exclusionary feminisms of some in the second wave, Barbara Smith is an under-regarded titan of feminist thought who, in many ways, was the first to say a lot of things that we continue to re-hash in circular discourses to this very day.

That identity politics and intersectionality are much maligned, misused, and contentious terms today, stripped of their origins in radical Black lesbian feminist thought, is no accident. There is an entire cadre of such women who were no less a part of the second wave than the academic and cultural feminists whose legacy has been allowed to usurp and define the modern conception of radical feminism. Smith arguably typifies a feminist ideal whose unburial from the annals of feminist history is fiercely resisted, and whose open-minded, class-conscious and unapologetic politics remains a standard to strive for.

Which makes her commentary on bell hooks’ early work very interesting to revisit.

Black Feminism Divorced From Black Feminist Organizing, penned by Smith in 1983, is a critique of hooks’ first book, Ain’t a I Woman?. Smith opens her article by frankly discussing how she had really wanted the book to be “good, incisive, and, most of all, useful”, but instead it worried her “nearly to death”.

“But from the very beginning I found myself questioning the conclusions she draws from the factual material she presents and being constantly surprised by her answers to the questions she poses. It soon became clear that despite its subject I was in profound disagreement with the assumptions of this book.”

She starts with the book’s first chapter, Sexism and the Black Female Slave Experience. Smith’s and indeed hooks’ statements on the topic have to be understood in the context of what Smith calls “the familiar argument that slavery and racism were worse for Black men than for women”—an argument that hooks says was usually espoused by “sexist historians and sociologists”. Echoes of this line of thinking can be found today as well—in a 2016 Guardian article about “Say Her Name”, Kimberlé Crenshaw herself spoke about struggling to overturn the misconception that Black women in the US experience less police violence than Black men do. Clearly incensed by the notion, hooks highlights the systemic sexual assault of enslaved women as well as the reproductive burden placed on them due to gestational capacity—or bluntly, “forced breeding”. The overall point is one Smith agrees with, but she notes that hooks’ argument relies on some bold and unsubstantiated statements (that have indeed proven to be ahistorical.) One of the excerpts Smith considers is:

“The sexism of colonial white male patriarchs spared black male slaves the humiliation of homosexual rape and other forms of sexual assault. While institutionalized sexism was a social system that protected black male sexuality, it [socially] legitimized sexual exploitation of black females.” [The inline addition is Smith’s.]

Bluntly: this is a very naive and yet definitive statement to make, and one that can be easily disproven. Even if the relevant historiography wasn’t readily available at time of writing, it is not an assertion anyone should have been confident making. Smith dismisses it out of hand, pointing to lynchings as self-evidently sexual crimes against Black men, while also noting the way hooks dances around the topic of homosexuality and homophobia in order to make her point about sexism. This is a discomfort that, as we have seen, remains palpable in hooks’ future writings as well. Already, Smith’s apprehensions about the work are well substantiated—unlike hooks’ argument.

“It isn’t necessary to prove that slavery wasn’t so bad for Black men in order to prove how very bad it was for Black women,” Smith says. It is an observation that underscores hooks’ rhetorical style as inflammatory and antagonistic to a perhaps detrimental degree, without regard for veracity and, as we have seen, focused entirely on advancing the strongest argument in the moment, even if it contradicts a later or previous one. Uncompromising feminist analysis has always been vital, but hooks is worryingly unconcerned about consistency or accuracy.

This tendency is one that Smith reveals in the book, over and over. For example, after downplaying the severity of Black men’s suffering in order to make her point about Black women’s abjection, hooks abruptly turns around and charges enslaved Black women with being insufficiently feminist. Smith zooms in on a snippet that is oddly similar to hooks’ 1992 criticism of ball culture in Is Paris Burning?:

“By completely accepting the female role as defined by patriarchy, enslaved black women embraced and upheld an oppressive sexist social order and became (along with their white sisters) both accomplices in the crimes perpetrated against women and victims of these crimes.”

Smith—one imagines tiredly—asks whether Black women wanted to be “equal” to white women by “accepting the female role”, or whether they simply wanted relief from the state of being “sexual and economic chattel”. Such allegations are reflective of a tendency in hooks’ work (which persists in modern feminist discourse) that neglects the material conditions of abjectified populations and fails to consider the extremes of epistemic injustice wrought by existing at the margins of society. Must enslaved Black women, queens in ball culture, and impoverished hijras be accused of reproducing the conservative foundations of the societies that abhor and expel them? Is their desire to partake in the material privileges they are systemically denied itself conservatism, or are they allowed to simply want better for themselves?

This also draws attention to hooks’ selective representation of Black feminist consciousness. Ain’t I a Woman? holds (without evidence) that if surveyed, Black women in the 20th century would be shown to be more concerned with racism than sexism. Smith contradicts this by pointing to women like Ann Petry writing about male-supremacy in the 1940s, before digging into how and why hooks’ discussion of both Black and white feminists is so erratic.

“Hooks’ interpretation of events to suit her purposes is most blatant in her discussion of the women’s movement. She describes a movement I find barely recognizable. Hooks collapses the totality of feminism into its most conservative manifestations: bourgeois, reformist, professional, and self-aggrandizing. It is the equating of the women’s movement with its least progressive elements (long a tactic of the slick media and certain varieties of anti-feminists) which I think most distorts the impact of the book. Hooks describes the women’s movement and white feminists in such derogatory terms that it is hard to imagine why any black woman reading this would want any part of it or why any white woman would be inspired to change. Yet ostensibly it is Hooks’ purpose to encourage feminist opposition to sexual oppression in the black community and racial accountability among white women. It is necessary to examine how this fundamental contradiction in the book came about.” [Emphasis mine.]

In her book The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender and Freedom, this is Barbara Smith’s definition of feminism: “Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women, as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement.” [Emphasis mine.] Smith is far from a stranger to the realities of movements plagued by unexamined conservative sentiment—being a lesbian of color will quickly teach you just how many people see you as lesser. Yet, she still writes about patriarchy and race from a place of intellectual honesty, rather than one of resentment. She does not treat liberation as a scarce resource and does not allow her personal experiences to be parlayed into a theoretical foundation that minimizes the misogyny less-oppressed women experience.

Her feminism is, in fact and deed, for everyone.

That is the understanding that Smith and I find so lacking in hooks’ work. In her eagerness to make the case for Black women’s place in the feminist movement and express her ire at their exclusion, hooks once again elevates the concerns of her own demographic by obfuscating the reality of how similarly all women are oppressed. Smith also notes that hooks speaks in a strict dichotomy of Black and white, going so far as to erase indigenous women and other women of color in declaring Black women as uniquely oppressed. A subset of the excerpts that Smith takes issue with are below:

“Prior to slavery, patriarchal law decreed white women were lowly inferior beings, the subordinate group in society. The subjugation of black people allowed them to vacate their despised position and assume the role of a superior. Consequently, it can be easily argued that even though white men institutionalized slavery, white women were its most immediate beneficiaries.”

“In America, the social status of black and white women has never been the same. In 19th and early 20th century America, few if any similarities could be found between the life experiences of the two female groups…. In fact, white racial imperialism granted all white women, however victimized by sexist oppression they might be, the right to assume the role of oppressor in relationship to black women and black men.” [Emphasis mine.]

Put simply, this is a lot. Smith is understandably baffled by how this sentiment “overlooks the reality of obligatory child-bearing, rape, and battering, to name only a few common female life experiences”. Most egregious, however, is how lacking hooks’ class-based analysis is. Ain’t I a Woman? seems to only mention class to denounce the women’s movement for accepting “the terms of white capitalist patriarchy”, while the existence of impoverished white women—sex workers, farmworkers, factory workers—is elided to position white women as not simply untouched by, but actively benefiting from patriarchy.

“Yes, they had white skin privilege and were no doubt racist, but why doesn’t Hooks examine the complexities of being white combined with being economically and sexually exploited instead of acting as if no such women exist?” Smith asks and answers her own question: “For one thing, integrating an analysis of class would not support her opinion that white women are not oppressed.”

The degree to which this resembles the condemnations of feminism that Crenshaw observed amongst her students (in her 2010 paper on dominance feminism) is eerie. By ignoring the feminism and activism of her contemporaries, in forefronting the most reactionary elements of the women’s movement while failing to even mention the socialist ones—that Smith actively participated in!—hooks lays the foundation for a feminism that defines itself in purely oppositional terms, that advocates for its own interests by denying the existence of others’ oppression. If intersectional feminism is to be defined by the misappropriation of intersectionality theory that posits solidarity between white women and non-white women is impossible, and that white women and non-white women have no common interests, then bell hooks can be regarded as an intersectional feminist.

Which brings us to perhaps the book’s most stunning declaration, whereupon hooks turns her ire towards the contemporary Black feminism she’s revealed herself to be so unfamiliar with. Smith describes it as “absolutely heartstopping”, before pointing to this passage:

“Some black women who were interested in women’s liberation responded to the racism of white female participants by forming separate ‘black feminist’ groups. This response was reactionary. By creating segregated feminist groups, they both endorsed and perpetuated the very ‘racism’ they were supposedly attacking. They did not provide a critical evaluation of the women’s movement and offer to all women a feminist ideology uncorrupted by racism or the opportunistic desires of individual groups. Instead, as colonized people have done for centuries, they accepted the terms imposed upon them by the dominant group (in this instance white women liberationists) and structured their groups on a racist platform identical to that of the white-dominated groups they were reacting against. White women were actively excluded from black groups. In fact, the distinguishing characteristic of the black ‘feminist’ group was its focus on issues relating specifically to black women. The emphasis on black women was made public in the writings of black participants. The Combahee River Collective published ‘A Black Feminist Statement’ to explain their group’s focus.” [Emphasis Smith’s.]

After everything in the previous chapters, after studiously refusing to consider impoverished and queer and disabled white women, after saying that white women “benefited from slavery” more than white men did, as though the creation of a lower underclass in and of itself constitutes elevation, hooks actually calls the Combahee River Collective racist—against white women—for forming a group to advance Black women’s interests in the very same women’s movement whose exclusionary elements she supposedly condemns!

This is, to put it succinctly, nightmarishly incoherent. There is no defense of this—this is just hooks demonstrating a flagrant disregard for her own supposed principles for no reason other than, I imagine, a desire to declare her own work as superior to the Black feminists whose efforts she doesn’t even acknowledge and who were actually fighting the battles that hooks purports to be so concerned with. After issuing this incomprehensible rebuke of Combahee, hooks in the very next paragraph calls for “bonding on the basis of shared understanding of woman’s varied collective and individual plight in society” instead of this, as she puts it, “polarization.”

What. The. Fuck?

There is something incredibly macabre about reading the co-founder of the Combahee River Collective and one of the foundational scholars of Black feminism have to address an accusation of anti-white racism, made in a book that is better enshrined in feminist collective memory than Barbara Smith’s name. To read it knowing that Ain’t I a Woman? was praised as a still-relevant work of radical political theory in a 2019 New York Times review. The work of Black lesbian feminists lies at the core of the concepts that modern feminists pledge fealty to without fully comprehending or engaging with them, but these contributions languish unheeded. Meanwhile, feminism that seethes with lesbophobic resentment and waxes poetic about how lost feminists are without men’s input is lauded as our gold standard.

But white supremacist capitalist patriarchy loves to elevate “anti-male feminism”, right?

Smith, I think, understood how this would go, even as she emphasized hooks’ heterosexualism. Ain’t I a Woman? pleads for interracial solidarity between white and Black feminists by explicitly dubbing antagonism between the two groups as “competing for male favor”, “to be the chosen female group”. The lesbian is rendered an impossibility, while hooks lambasts “attacking heterosexuality” as a dead-end for women who, she says, “[seek] to attain the kind of power they feel men have”. Her bitterness at lesbian feminists once more manifests as bilious degendering, as spite towards women she seems to think can and do escape patriarchal punishment, making them women who aren’t really feminists, like she is, but are just looking for an avenue to express “anger, jealousy, rage, and disappointment with men”. Conversely, hooks espouses her own feminism as superior—gentler and kinder and more understanding of men, you see.

Unlike those man-hating dykes.

So begins the career of a writer, the same way it ended. Smith asks at the end of her critique: how, why, and for whom was Ain’t I a Woman? published? South End Press was not, at the time, in the business of publishing feminist books by Black women. Why this book? Why this Black woman amidst a library of white male theorists? “The answers,” she says, “are no doubt themselves lessons in the racism and anti-feminism that pervade white-male-left establishments.” It is easy enough to give a platform to a Black feminist without checking how accurate her work is, if her thesis and conclusions are ultimately useful.

“But how better to disavow the significance of the women’s movement than through the words of a Black woman who is supposed to be a feminist?”

I wonder if Barbara Smith knew how prophetic her words would prove to be.

Nobody else did.

Cheryl Clarke

Cheryl Clarke is a poet and Black lesbian radical feminist. Her arguably best-known work is Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community, an essay that, just like much of lesbian feminism, seems more relevant today than ever. She begins with an account of her experience at the First National Plenary Conference on Self-Determination in New York city, assuming that a Black lesbian feminist like herself would surely be welcome within the Black Liberation Movement. Perusing the flyer that she says was “left on every seat”, Clarke found the following passage:

“Revolutionary nationalists and genuine communists cannot uphold homosexuality in the leadership of the Black Liberation Movement nor uphold it as a correct practice. Homosexuality is a genocidal practice.... Homosexuality does not produce children.... Homosexuality does not birth new warriors for liberation... homosexuality cannot be upheld as correct or revolutionary practice. ... The practice of homosexuality is an accelerating threat to our survival as a people and as a nation.” [Emphasis mine.]

Oh, dear.

Written in 1983, Clarke’s essay continues a trend of lesbian feminist insight that has been under-appreciated, if not largely forgotten, despite its clear identification of the patriarchal anxieties underlying reactionary politics. Clarke compares the text of this passage to the text of the 1981 Family Protection Act, which stipulated that federal funds could not be used to “promote homosexuality”. Her appraisal of this resonance between the two bluntly outlines the fixation on machismo, manhood, and reproductive control that lies at the heart of all Nationalisms—even supposed revolutionary ones. This homophobia—this patriarchal agenda—is, according to Clarke, to the benefit of Black intellectuals who embrace “the Western institution of heterosexuality” and Christian fundamentalism to position emancipation as a masculinist, male endeavor.

One of Clarke’s most damning examples comes from Amiri Baraka, who was elected Chairman of the revolutionary organisation Congress of African People in 1972. She cites a 1965 essay where he wrote:

“Most American white men are trained to be fags.... That red flush, those silk blue faggot eyes. So white women become men-things, a weird combination sucking male juices to build a navel orange, which is themselves.” [Emphasis mine.]

This fascinates me as someone who became familiar with the work of British anthropologist Morris Carstairs while I was writing The Third Sex. Carstairs’ work on the hijra in 1957 is of a decided Victorian slant; he was cited in Neither Man Nor Woman declaring the hijra to be a form of “institutionalized homosexuality”, betraying the “latent homosexuality” in the “Indian national character”. The difference between Carstairs’ words and Baraka’s is one of race—not in the sense that homophobia is the exclusive purview of white, Western institutions, but that Carstairs’ whiteness gave him access to a certain legitimacy and institutional backing that allowed him to declare an entire nation (incorrectly, sadly) as a nation of faggots while, at least for a time, remaining a part of the anthropological canon. It is harder to imagine Baraka’s appraisal of faggy white men and masculine white women appearing in any serious scholarship.

Nevertheless, it does demonstrate how the act of Nation-building is fundamentally about boundary creation—our well-defined, structured, legitimate division of labor, set against the Outsiders’ senseless, irrational, inscrutable ways that blur the lines. Perhaps Baraka was aware of the racist history of white academics citing the alleged gender-ambiguity of non-white races as proof of primitiveness and inferiority, and felt clever reversing the slander. Or perhaps he determined from first principles that one’s manhood is always made most apparent by contrast with those deemed lacking. Either way, as Clarke pointed out, his Nationalism did not so much repudiate the Nationalism of his political opponents as it rhymed.

Compared to Barbara Smith’s critique, Clarke’s discussion of Ain’t I a Woman? is much more brief. She, like Smith, isn’t afraid to explicitly call hooks’ work homophobic, calling attention to hooks’ erasure of lesbian feminists and scoffing at her defense of heterosexuality. “Ain’t lesbians women, too?” she asks; one imagines her winking at Monique Wittig. Perhaps hooks could have done with a little attacking of heterosexuality herself, reasons Clarke, given how much Black women chafe under its weight. Perhaps, just like Black men, the Black woman intellectual is

“... afraid to relinquish heterosexual privilege. So little else is guaranteed Black people.”

Failure to Transform is, after all, a critique not of specific intellectuals and works, but of a wider issue in political movements that seem resistant to acknowledge the contributions of their most marginalized members. Clarke is as frustrated with the heterosexualism in Black revolutionary politics as she is by non-Black gays and lesbians who say that the Black community is uniquely or excessively homophobic. She details her own experiences of acceptance (with some exotification) amongst poor and working-class Black communities, postulating that a sense of empathy may be fostered between those cast out from white society.

In her words I see spelled out the same question that plagues her as it plagued Barbara Smith and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Nida Manzoor and all the women and feminists of color whose lives are made an endless series of loyalty tests. Who can I claim when I am racialized amongst women, a woman amongst the racialized, and a dyke amongst both? Who can I claim when no one seems to be willing to claim me?

Why do I keep on fighting for everyone when no one fights for me?

As a piece of feminist history, Failure to Transform, much like Barbara Smith’s critique, reveals to me just how little has changed in decades. How lesbians of color were asking the same questions in 1983 that we ask today, and how difficult it is to keep fighting losing battles on every front we are drafted into.

I also get the impression that hooks never quite forgave Clarke for writing it.

Ain’t I a Woman? was followed by hooks’ next book, From Margin to Center, in 1984. It reads, in some ways, almost like an apology, with hooks echoing many radical and lesbian feminist points and giving her due to lesbian feminist contributions. She criticizes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique for its narrow focus on middle-class wives, discusses the importance of ending compulsory heterosexuality, and even cites Barbara Smith—though, she takes care to reiterate that feminism “identifying men as the enemy” yields no positive results.

“Had feminist activists called attention to the relationship between ruling class men and the vast majority of men, who are socialized to perpetuate and maintain sexism and sexist oppression even as they reap no life-affirming benefits, these men might have been motivated to examine the impact of sexism in their lives.” [Emphasis mine.]

Why do men beat, rape, and extract sexual and domestic labor from women? Because they are tricked into mistakenly believing that this benefits them, by the powerful men who actually oppress us all. How silly of working-class men to think that they gain anything from women being reduced to the status of personal indentured servant! (And hooks does, in fact, use the term “brainwashing”, rather than considering that perhaps men are not merely morally corrupted into misogyny, but materially incentivized to uphold it.)

If only feminists didn’t insist on demonizing men—telling men that patriarchy doesn’t benefit them, and hurts them too, will surely make much more headway!

Amusingly, hooks makes a point of using Smith’s own words in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology to continue grinding an axe with lesbian feminists: “Black feminism and Black lesbianism are not interchangeable. Feminism is a political movement and many lesbians are not feminists.” That hooks’ grudge against political lesbianism is as strong in her 2000 book as it was in 1984 is impressive, and hooks’ acknowledgements of lesbian feminist contributions ring just as hollow in both. Though if hooks is sly in how she cites Smith, she’s downright defensive when she addresses Clarke’s essay directly.

“Clearly Clarke misunderstands and misinterprets my point. … My point is that feminism will never appeal to a massbased group of women in our society who are heterosexual if they think that they will be looked down upon or seen as doing something wrong. My comment was not intended to reflect in any way on lesbians because they are not the only group of feminists who criticize and in some cases condemn all heterosexual practice.” [Emphasis mine.]

Just as white feminists—whether “third wave”, “decolonial”, or whatever other subschool they subscribe to—demonstrate complexes about lesbian feminist critiques of heterosexuality, hooks too ascribes lesbian feminists like Clarke outsize power. While she nominally allows that feminists who critique heterosexuality are not necessarily all lesbians, she obfuscates that such feminists are still an absolute minority within feminism. Political lesbians cannot set the feminist agenda while they are outnumbered by political heterosexuals, whose commitment to toning down feminist critiques of male-supremacy has repeatedly won out. Whether or not the masses of women who are untrained in formal feminist doctrine are receptive to these ideas—and many non-feminist and even conservative straight women are quite cognizant and critical of men’s power over them—the actual problem that hooks and feminists like her refuse to name is that these critiques makes them uncomfortable.

Because there is no amount of genuflecting that lesbian feminists as a whole can ever do to make up for the transgressions of those few bullheaded enough to loudly proclaim the inherent feminist superiority of all lesbians. This fear—that attraction to and love of men simply makes a woman less feminist, less radical, and complicit somehow in her own oppression—is indeed one that women have wielded as a cudgel against each other since long before any dyke was allowed to voice her thoughts on the matter. It is an insecurity and a shame that is deeply embedded in the collective feminist psyche, and whether we use the term “man-centered” or “woman-centered” or “girl’s girl” or “pick-me” or any iteration of the same core concept, it is a demon that we will never be able to exorcise for as long as we refuse to admit just how much this central tragedy of womanhood burns at our very souls.

Truthfully, straight feminists and straight non-feminists (and even queer men and the queer feminists still trying to apologize for Dworkin’s existence) all desperately want there to be some magic fucking key that will unlock an arcane, secret reserve of empathy that men have, for all of recorded history, failed to access, squirreled away in their heart of hearts. We don’t want to confront the inevitable conclusion, to endure the psychic agony that comes with finally comprehending one’s destiny as designated resource for the ones with actual agency, most of whom simply find it more beneficial to dehumanize you than try to understand.

Imperialism is about borders and Others, but patriarchy is intimate in a way nothing else is. It freely invades our very homes, our bedrooms, our most private fantasies and even the bloody positions we like to do it in. “The personal is political” wasn’t a paradigm shift, but the acknowledgement of a generational curse, an utterance of forbidden knowledge that has driven feminists mad since before we could name it.

You can’t escape patriarchy, dollface.

And fucking hell we desperately, desperately need to.

Conclusion: Adrienne Rich Was Right

In the beginning, Adrienne Rich said that heterosexuality was an institution. Everyone promptly lost their minds.

Underneath all the fretting about heteropessimism, misandry, separatism, white feminists, and how much patriarchy hurts men, lies the actual specter haunting feminism: the lesbian. The figure whose crimes can never be forgiven, whose freedom from the curse of loving men inspires envy and resentment and fury in equal measure, who is too removed from heterosexuality to belong in feminism even as her distance from heterosexuality makes her a kind of feminist ideal that other women fear they will never achieve. She is too reactionary, too transphobic and man-hating and unfeminine and ugly, and also too pure, too fantastical, too idealistic, dreaming of a world beyond gender that is both too beautiful and too horrifying to allow ourselves to contemplate. Feminists recoil at the idea of being treated like her, desperately and loudly declaring that they’re not all lesbians. Feminists wish they could be like her, when the weight of heterosexuality feels like too much to bear, when the yoke of the womanhood they’re meant to enjoy and celebrate chafes their skin raw.

Dykes have been the sin-eaters and whipping girls of feminism long before the trannies made it fashionable, really. The Lavender Menace you can’t quite rid yourself of.

Because feminists keep trying to rescue heterosexuality, and the obvious conclusion that it can’t be saved breaks their little hearts. Abolish the family, abolish borders, abolish the state, abolish capitalism, and hell abolish gender, but abolish heterosexuality? Don’t you know most women are heterosexual? Don’t you know how much we love men? How could you be so heartless?

It really does feel like feminists are in an abusive relationship with men, sometimes. And just like those stuck in the endless cycle of betrayal and hope, they lash out at those of us on the outside of the dynamic, who have the clarity and therefore the temerity and the sheer obstinate gall to give them a frank prognosis. The endless whispered promises that “This time, it’ll be different, baby” are more comforting.

And Wittig help us, but lesbians are collectively tired of being the bitch you all run to when you’re in the mood to trash your ex right before getting back together with him.

I’d like to posit that hooks’ empirically dubious statements in Feminism is For Everybody are less about what conservative media actually promoted and more about this persistent heterofeminist anxiety of being dismissed and lumped in with those cringey man-hating dykes who make us all look bad. It is an anxiety that ignores how much epistemic injustice feminism has always been and will always be subject to, how little awareness of any kind of feminism there is in the mainstream, and how even the mildest feminist critique can and will be summarily dismissed by antifeminists because antifeminists are not beholden to what is true. The dismissal of feminism as too loud, too radical, and too misandrist happened during suffrage just as it happened during the second wave and the third wave and still happens today, despite how thoroughly lesbian feminists of all stripes have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

So let me conduct an autopsy on the grand, decades-long, misguided heterofeminist experiment instead of further jabbing at everyone’s guilty consciences about how they treat those angry, ugly, unfeminine, man-hating dykes. It’s over, girl. You gave him everything he wanted, and his response was to demand even more, to find religion and talk about how nice it would be to have a tradwife who can’t vote or divorce him. Feminism cannot make straight men any promises that are more appealing than the depths of domination and depravity patriarchy has on offer, and the protracted, tortured, overdue reckoning with the fact that men demonstrate sex-class solidarity and will protect their collective sex-class interests—even if it means giving more powerful men more power over them—is what’s making women everywhere have a crisis of faith in feminism.

I do not mean that all women absolutely must shave our heads and march to the nearest bra crematorium en masse. Lysistrata is not quite a feasible tactic in a world where men’s most valued freedom is their ability to coerce sex with impunity. At the same time, consider which developments the modern men’s grievance movement has organized in response to. Birthrates are falling because today, women everywhere are more educated, more autonomous, more independent, and more able to establish lives and incomes and stability outside of male-dependence. Women who opt to co-parent with other women instead of remarrying, or can avail of abortions, or be childless or gay or transgender or sluts with access to contraception at unprecedented rates may not constitute a literal worldwide sex strike, but our increased ability and demonstrated desire to opt out of the heterosexual contract is frankly being treated just like one.

So I apologize, personally and deeply and from the bottom of my heart, for every lesbian who has ever shamed women for loving or sleeping with men. I say that because more than ever, we need to forgive each other for the sins of feminists past, present, and future, and confront the reality that even when disenfranchised men have the will to change, they will frequently and with frightening consistency choose to make things worse for us. I say that knowing that it probably won’t do much good, because whether or not there are actual political lesbians and separatists going around shaming women, it’s the political lesbian in all our minds whose words cut deepest.

Personally, I think we need women to stop caring about whether wanting to fuck men makes them traitors to the sisterhood, and more importantly we need to them to stop pre-emptively crashing out at each other over such fears. What good has it done? What good will it possibly do?

In a similar vein, we need to stop betting on a horse that has, repeatedly and consistently, kicked us in the head every time we’ve done so. Feminism cannot afford to wait for those demanding an end to no-fault divorce and a government-assigned girlfriend to come around.

What we need most of all, though, is to recognize that feminist struggle has to build power and structures outside of the family, outside of the state, and outside of heterosexuality. We need to be ready to hold each other as the endless war that is simply living as a woman continues to take a toll on each and every one of us, and we need to remain dauntless in the face of a resurgent, uncaring, and gleefully cruel libidinal political moment that wants nothing less than to reduce us to the state we’ve fought so long to escape.

How do we fix heterosexuality? I don’t really know or care. I want women to be safe. I want them to be able to own property and earn incomes and be equally able to pursue single motherhood and single spinsterhood. I want women to be free—free of gendered obligations, free to escape prisons of financial dependence and social ostracism for the crime of refusing to be male property. The question of love and the crisis of masculinity in response to expectations of egalitarianism in intimacy is, to me, a secondary concern that will remain so for at least decades. Can we liberate women first, before we start pontificating about how best to liberate sex?

The defanging of feminist activism actively threatens our ability to meaningfully respond to misogyny as an animating political force. And at every turn, there are women whose investment in patriarchy and readiness to call compromise and complicity “feminism” will undermine the project of liberation. But the existence of collaborators doesn’t mean patriarchy has no gender, or that there isn’t a clear gender hierarchy that the most reactionary elements of modern politics want to enforce. That women can betray feminism doesn’t mean feminism must abandon the woman, especially when she needs feminism the most.

So, knowing all the risks, keeping in mind all of the fraught history and the way it can and has gone wrong, I implore: stop running from the specter of the lesbian. Consider that no struggle can be won by asking at every turn if the terms of resistance are acceptable to those most opposed to liberation. And if the idea of not putting a love for men at the center of feminism disquiets you so, consider this question that I know makes me an asshole to say out loud, but that I have to ask all the same:

Are you going to wait forever for men to love you back?

I would like to acknowledge how much my feminism, and indeed a lot of the feminism we take for granted, is indebted to Barbara Smith. The Smith Caring Circle was established in 2017 to enable her to retire with dignity and safety, and I would like to encourage my readers to consider supporting her.

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks another entry of my upcoming book, Brown/Trans/Les. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting me by pre-ordering.

My initial essays on this blog have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts.

Display name: Jo Kaur

Twitter handle: @SikhFeminist

Text: “I do not want to hear any of these white Western feminists talk about women’s rights in Iran ever again. [Double newline] Being alive matters more than what you wear.” [Emphasis mine.]

Discussing the veil—specifically as a form of religious covering that some Muslim women abide by—is incredibly fraught. We are all well aware of how progressive causes, such as LGBT representation and women’s rights, can be fashioned into cudgels and weaponized against non-Western nations, societies and cultures. Despite its own spotty history with feminism, women’s rights, and queer liberation, many of the West’s reactionaries are quick to cite the veil as evidence of Muslim ‘barbarism’, as a synecdoche for Islam and the nations where it is a majority or state religion, and how it ‘proves’ that those nations are less civilized, less advanced, and worthy of any and all Western aggression they face in the name of ‘progress’. The West’s own rapidly-escalating derangement about trans people, birth rates, and women’s independence are conveniently elided in these conversations.

Non-white feminists in the West are quick to point out how even feminists—white feminists in particular—further these reactionary agendas. White feminists frequently appoint themselves in a ‘savior’ role, believing themselves to shoulder the burden of ‘civilizing’ poor, victimized non-white women from their own cultural practices! We must all be vigilant about how discussing non-white women’s oppression often serves as a trojan horse for white supremacy, for an imperialist agenda pushing Western morality onto imperialised people, and making white Western womanhood the default even in societies with their own ideas and practices of gender.

Truly, there is nothing more important than scrutinizing all feminist sentiments for the slightest hints of challenging entrenched non-Western cultural practices, and denouncing those challenges in the strongest terms possible. It is vital to make sure our feminism remains intersectional and decolonial. Though of course, it does beg the question:

What do Iranian feminists think?

And… did anyone bother to ask?

Introduction: Do Desi Women Dream of Beating Up Weddings?

Trans/Rad/Fem is not my first book.

When I began writing, I started off as an author of lesbian romance. The first book I wrote and published is a much lesser-known Bollywood-inspired desi lesbian romance named Dulhaniyaa (which means ‘bride’, and is a rather explicit nod to perhaps the most famous Bollywood romance of all time: Dilwaale Dulhaniyaa Le Jayenge, or ‘Lovers Will Steal The Bride Away’). Growing up, I lacked the language to express why I connected so much with flamboyant, campy musicals about star-crossed lovers whose families opposed their union, and did not understand until much later why I was disturbed by how distressingly heterosexual these movies always were.

So, I wrote Dulhaniyaa. Esha, an NRI, gives up on art school and returns to India to marry the man her family picked out for her. Esha is a lesbian, but her heart is broken, and unable to see any way out of what’s expected of her, she does what many women in her position do—gives in. She doesn’t expect that her dance instructor, hired to help her perform a choreographed number at her own wedding, will be someone she slowly falls in love with. By the end of the book, Esha must choose between accepting her family’s wishes and her own happiness.

In a sense, Dulhaniyaa is my attempt to write out the Bollywood story I never thought I’d get to see. Two lesbian leads fighting to be together in the face of the all-encompassing patriarchy of India. It’s a short novel, barely longer than a novella, and tries to capture as much of Bollywood’s charm as is possible in a textual medium, complete with musical numbers and costume changes and physics-defying motorcycle chases. And while Dulhaniyaa’s modest success is greatly overshadowed by Trans/Rad/Fem’s performance, it still holds a special place in my heart as the Bollywood story where the queer subtext of separation and familial disapproval gets to just… be text. The Bollywood story that I wrote because I’ll never be able to watch it.

Or so I thought, until I came across Nida Manzoor’s 2023 masterpiece, Polite Society.

How do I explain Polite Society? Officially, it’s described as a ‘martial-arts action-comedy’ when in fact it is a radical feminist horror movie, though explaining why counts as spoilers. (Of which there will be many in this essay.) It is a story about the Khan sisters, Ria and Lena, and how their sisterhood is put to the test by patriarchy’s relentless attempts to steal women away from each other. Ria, the younger of the two, wants to be a stuntwoman after school, while Lena failed out of art school and has moved back home. They are both struggling with the strict demands that their South Asian parents, the wider UK South Asian community, and a patriarchal world at large makes of women—particularly non-white, creative women—like them.

While Polite Society is written from the perspective of second-generation Muslim immigrant characters, I feel confident asserting that South Asian women of a variety of backgrounds will find it relatable. The relentless parental and specifically maternal pressure to get married and start a family, the way community elders judge unmarried and putatively ‘directionless’ young women, and the enduring love of and homages to Bollywood cinema make it a rather transcendent and pertinent film. Exhausted and embittered and burned out, Lena makes a choice that many women in her position have made: to give in. Lena attends a soirée thrown by an affluent member of the community trying to find suitable matches for her precious baby boy. Lena ends up being shortlisted as the ideal vessel for his seed, and accepts an offer of marriage.

Young, naive and idealistic Ria sees this as a betrayal—not of her, but of Lena’s authentic self. There is a charged, emotional scene where Lena and Ria, screaming at the top of their lungs and punching each other through their bedroom walls, have an argument best summed up as “This isn’t you!” v/s “Yes, it is!” The action and musical set pieces in Polite Society, like the action and dance numbers in Bollywood, are a way to literalise furious, intense exchanges, where every word feels like a punch to the gut—so why not visually depict it as such?

“I’m not good enough!” Lena screams, and breaks both her and Ria’s heart.

This puts Ria in the position usually reserved for male love interests: refusing to accept the female lead’s nuptials and resolving to do whatever it takes to call it off. She snoops on the groom, tries to plant evidence of him cheating, and alienates both family and friends in her out-of-control attempts to go against even Lena’s explicitly stated wishes. Eventually, Ria concedes the error of her ways and goes to Lena’s future mother-in-law to apologise. She learns a valuable lesson about not clinging to her immature view of the world, growing up, and accepting the people who will be her new family.

Or she would, if she didn’t uncover a secret lab where Lena’s future husband analyzed dozens of DNA samples and uterus scans collected from the women who attended the soirée! Lena was selected by the uncomfortably emotionally incestuous mother-son duo for her exceptional fecundity, which makes her the perfect broodmare for cloning her future mother-in-law in a horribly literalised metaphor for the way desi boymoms see their sons and daughter-in-laws as nothing more than an opportunity to vicariously live the lives they were denied.

Surprise! Polite Society is actually a sci-fi radfem body horror!

Determined to prevent Lena from becoming nothing more than a womb for her in-laws to exploit (subtle!), Ria enlists the help of her friends in an explosive climax that is a dearly-held wish fulfillment power fantasy of many a South Asian woman: kicking the living daylights out of an entire Indian wedding. Just absolutely going to town on condescending aunties and swarms of relatives you’ve never met and the loser who doesn’t even care about or deserve the woman he’s marrying, with a special flying spin-kick reserved for the overbearing mother-in-law.

That is what really struck me the most about Polite Society. Nida Manzoor and I have no doubt lived very different lives, and yet I can see everything we both love and abhor—down to shot-for-shot recreations of pivotal moments from The Matrix—in her story that’s so eerily similar to my own. Nida Manzoor gave me the Bollywood movie I never thought I’d get to see, and even made it unapologetically radfem.

Though… there is that one thing.

Ria and Lena were written as sisters, not lovers. This was a very deliberate choice, because Polite Society is in conversation with a genre that always centers men. Even the principal antagonist in Polite Society isn’t really Lena’s groom, but her mother-in-law, because the story is unabashedly about women even as it’s about patriarchy, commenting on the many, many ways in which women often fail each other.

Is the movie about one woman helping another escape her arranged marriage making a point about the sisterhood we ought to owe each other, by making the character who would usually be the bride’s lover into her sister instead? Absolutely.

But it could have just easily been about a woman who loves another woman and tries to save her from succumbing to the patriarchal expectations under whose weight she is being crushed. It might have even taken less work than reworking the trope entirely.

I find myself asking: is a woman any less of a sister when she is a lesbian? Are those of us who do not love men any less capable of understanding the endless, soul-destroying demands to let yourself be exploited by them? As someone intimately familiar with the stories Manzoor is both paying homage to and critiquing, I can’t help but notice the quiet discomfort with queerness in the contours of the narrative. Polite Society remains haunted by battles past and present, waged on the topic of which women belong in feminist movements—non-white, lesbian, trans, colonised, impoverished, and others.

I guess I’m still waiting for my perfect Bollywood movie. I harbor no hopes of Dulhaniyaa ever being adapted to the silver screen, but there’s more and more queer creatives every day. Maybe I’ll still get my wish. Maybe I won’t even have to wait that long. I choose to be optimistic.

Part One: “Is ‘honor-killing’ a racist term?”

To Specify or Single Out: Should We Use The Term ‘Honor Killing’? by Rochelle L. Terman was published in 2010, in the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights. It explores the phenomenon of ‘honor killings’, which is the name given to specific cases of femicide that occur within certain ethnic groups. Principally, the article discusses the differing attitudes towards the term between various women’s groups, and asks whether the use of this specific term serves only to racially mark certain communities as “particularly patriarchal”, or “backwards”, or worthy of greater scrutiny and surveillance.

The article makes a lot of strange assertions not backed up by the facts it goes over. It asks at length why there needs to be a distinction between ‘honor killing’ and ‘domestic violence’, without taking into account the factors that make ‘honor killings’ unique. Firstly, the text itself concedes are usually carried out by the victim’s premarital family, not typically by her spouse or in-laws. On page 25:

“It is not enough to return the woman to her family home after a time of ‘cooling off’ or to send her to the care of relatives; either option puts her in grave harm. Furthermore, in the UK for instance, one in eight honor killings are committed by hit men hired by the family of the victim.”

[A note: the term “hit men” strikes me as a bit of a fanciful exaggeration; in the cases where a woman’s father, brother or husband does not carry out the killing himself, it is usually done by another male “member of the community”.]

Secondly, ‘honor killings’ are carried out against women who are said to bring “shame” upon the family, usually by violating endogamy and having intimate relations with a man external to her community, or who was not approved by her family. While the communities these femicides occur within condone both IPV and this rationale for femicide—considering these “private, family affairs”—the definitional lethality of ‘honor killings’ and the particular rationale behind them should give us some cause to distinguish the phenomenon from the broader umbrella of ‘domestic violence’.

Terman has a frustrating tendency to obscure important details about the motivations behind these femicides. She talks about how “there has been much feminist political scholarship arguing that women are seen as the main transmitters of social values and the primary boundary-makers of cultural and religious identity”, which is a rather long-winded way of saying that it’s about controlling women’s chastity, modesty, and how they are allowed to present in public. Of the two cases the article covers—Aqsa Parvez and and Aasiya Hassan—Aqsa was killed by her father for not wearing her hijab in public, while Aasiya was beheaded by her husband for getting a restraining order in response to his abuse. In both cases, the matter was one of insubordination, of women who exercised more autonomy than their role as patriarchal property permitted them.

Further, the question of why women’s groups are divided on the term ‘honor killing’ has a fascinating answer. An illuminating snippet from page 22 reads:

“Some minority women’s groups who acknowledge that honor killings are a problem among immigrant groups in Europe and North America and work to combat them are often criticized by various elements. On one hand, they are vulnerable to attack by conservative forces on the grounds that they represent ‘inauthenticity,’ ‘Westernization,’ and ‘secularism’ for not respecting indigenous honor culture, particularly if they working on sexuality-related issues and violence against women (Welchman and Hossein 2005:18). Ironically, they are sometimes criticized by progressive or leftist groups ‘washing our dirty laundry in public’ (Siddiqui 2005: 274).” [Emphasis mine.]

This is a statement made more damning by the acknowledgement that honor killings are still called ‘honor killings’ outside the West—that is, even in homeland contexts where there is no Western media element to allegedly weaponise the term in a ‘racist’ manner. As a matter of fact, the term ‘honor killing’ is simply a literal translation of what would be the phenomenon’s name in various languages, which is predicated on the concept of izzat—a word that quite simply (at least in Hindi) means ‘honor’ or ‘respectability’, specifically the honor of the family or clan.

It is a social norm rooted entirely in the idea that respectable families are ones who are able to best “control” their daughters and prevent them from being “loose”, enforcing modesty culture and refusing to entertain the notions of autonomous sexuality amongst women. A family that fails to control its women in this way—be they wives or daughters—must wipe clean the stain of shame brought upon it by eliminating the errant daughter who dares betray her community and refuses to uphold her duty as her in-group’s reproductive property.

That this is acceptable in certain cultures is, indeed, fucked up, regardless of whether or not it makes immigrant communities look bad to Westerners!

The source of the split between women’s advocacy groups is then, plainly, about whether we ought to prioritise and bring attention to the actual suffering of non-white women within immigrant communities, or whether we ought to subsume the unique circumstances they suffer under into the broader category of ‘domestic violence’ in the name of “better PR”, or “not making our men and communities look bad”—because expecting men to not kill their womenfolk is certainly out of the question, isn’t it! Women, as the seat of a nation’s future, as the source of a family’s honor, who have the power to shame our entire bloodlines but lack the freedom to determine our own futures, must weigh the pros and cons of “keeping our affairs private”, swallowing our own blood through broken teeth, or else risk being used as racist, xenophobic propaganda by regimes eager to exploit our suffering as a casus belli against the second-class citizens that comprise our people.

Which way, non-Western woman?

Part Two: Between Scylla and Charybdis

We Are Lady Parts is a two-season, 12-episode comedy by Nida Manzoor about an all-female Muslim punk band. Its first season debuted in 2021, and its second concluded the series in 2024.

We open on Amina Hussain, a second-generation immigrant who is trying and failing to find a nice Muslim boy to marry. Her liberal parents are, amusingly, more of a hindrance than a help in this regard, with her checked-out father and bubbly mother prone to oversharing details shattering the careful image of a modest, conservative, and homely woman that Amina is desperately trying to cultivate. The show makes an interesting decision here, choosing to examine the phenomenon of immigrant kids who—usually in response to the xenophobia and racism of their new homes—sometimes embrace the conservative values of their cultures of origin to a greater degree than even their parents. Amina isn’t being pressured into an arranged marriage, in contrast to Lena in Polite Society, though it is heavily implied she believes asking her parents to find her a suitable match is the only acceptable way for her to express how (bluntly) boy-crazy she is.

The one exception to Amina’s halal ways is her love of music: she is a huge fan of Don McLean and teaches underprivileged children how to play guitar. This sets her on a collision course with the titular punk band, We Are Lady Parts, who find themselves looking for a lead guitarist.

At the start of the show, the band comprises four members: Bisma, the bassist, who has a husband and child and draws gory comics about period blood; Momtaz, the niqabi band manager; Ayesha, the drummer and only queer member; and Saira, a breathtaking butch vision in oversized flannel and ripped jeans who works as a butcher, ha, in her spare time and is the band’s lead vocalist and frontwoman and smoldering heartthrob.

I may have a favorite amongst them.

The events of the first season are set in motion when Amina happens across Ayesha’s adequate-looking brother handing out audition flyers and agrees to join the band in exchange for a date with him. It’s a decision that brings her to her breaking point, as Amina juggles overcoming her stage fright, being rejected after the date, and helping plan her equally-conservative friend’s wedding while keeping her double life with Lady Parts a secret, phrasing intentional. Though Saira does have a cardboard cutout of a man who makes no impression and evaporates in the sixth episode, never to be seen again, the season is entirely about Saira’s affection and affinity for Amina, to the point that even the cardboard cutout notices.

“I’m just jealous! This Amina clearly has you all hot and bothered.”

Much like Polite Society, the first season of We Are Lady Parts is about sisterhood and the bond between women who find comfort in each others’ arms. However, it is also more explicit about exploring the characters’ place as brown and Black women in Western society, and how the pressure to be modest and uphold their community’s honor clashes with their own desires, freedom, and expression. Ayesha drives an Uber for white men who are racist to her, Saira’s mother asks her to remain away from home for as long as Saira clings to gender-nonconformity, and Amina is constantly trying to reconcile the shame she feels at not being a perfect, modest woman with how much she loves being in Lady Parts, phrasing intentional. They are all hypervigilant, knowing that they are constantly being judged by their own people and by a xenophobic, Western gaze.

The emotional core of the first season is summed up perfectly by Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem Speak, which Saira dedicates and symbolically gifts to Amina on two occasions. In the face of all the pervasive forces seeking to control you, your voice, and your creative vision, you must…

“Speak, for your two lips are free. Speak, for your tongue is still your own.” — Saira to Amina, heterosexually.

Nida Manzoor’s art speaks to me because it speaks to experiences that so many of us struggle to name, to speak up about, to see even in art by and about us. She captures that particular feeling of slowly choking on all the contradictory expectations a world that fundamentally does not value brown women places on us, of being trapped between homeland and occident, of having to choose every day between Scylla and Charybdis. It’s nerdy, empowering, heartfelt, unapologetically feminist, cringe at times, and all the better for it because it’s sincere. She brings to life women who share my pain in a way many, many portrayals of people who look like me lack. She, in a word, gets it.

Though her work doesn’t really explore queer narratives textually, there is still a powerful queer undercurrent to it. Maybe that’s because it’s difficult to be feminist and make art about loving and valuing women without being at least a little homoerotic, or maybe it’s because queer brown women, despite our extra baggage, have a lot in common with non-queer brown women. Shocking, I know. Whether or not it’s intentional, Nida Manzoor’s work is special and powerful and resonant in a way I hope my own work can someday be.

It’s really tempting to end on this effusive, positive note. Everything I’ve written here is honest and reflects my authentic feelings about a creator whose art is very dear to me. And yet, there’s something else that I have to talk about.

Because We Are Lady Parts Season One does have a textually queer narrative, and it’s… something.

Sister, Outsider

Episode Four of We Are Lady Parts introduces us to Zarina, an influencer with over a million followers. Zarina talks about being “by and for women of color” in a cloyingly liberal manner that makes the band members—specifically Ayesha—gag a little, but Momtaz insists that Zarina holds the key to putting Lady Parts on the map. She organises a meeting with Zarina, whereupon the previously-unimpressed Ayesha falls in love with her at first sight. This is also the first textual indication of Ayesha’s queerness.

Zarina’s praise for the band is effusive, and as the editor of a widely-read online publication, she offers to do a feature on Lady Parts, which sounds very appealing to Ayesha in particular. The band almost immediately gets a gig through Zarina, though when they arrive at the venue—a pub filled with older, white Englishmen—they have some reservations.

Playing for such a crowd goes about as well as one might expect: they encounter a fair bit of racist, sexist heckling, followed by very little applause. It’s still a triumphant moment for the band, however, because Amina finally overcomes her stage fright. While the girls celebrate, the camera zooms in on Zarina, who is busy slipping the bigoted hecklers some cash.

This pivotal exchange answers a burning question that bothered me as soon as the pub scene began: how could people as open-minded as white, British men be compelled to utter misogynistic insults and racially-charged invective? Why, naturally, they were bribed!

The next episode shows Zarina interviewing the band for her feature, though her questions are all highly charged and extremely leading. “Does your husband stop you from working?” she asks Bisma. “Some might say you’re doing this for attention,” she says of Momtaz’s niqab. Ayesha, who Zarina is now dating, does not escape this treatment either, as Zarina pressures her to come out and talk about being a queer, Muslim woman, backing off only when Ayesha firmly draws the line.

When Zarina releases the article, titled The Bad Girls of Islam, none of the band members take it well. “Lady Parts say ‘fuck you’ to both their religion and the West”, it declares, to everyone’s horror. Zarina has twisted their words, portraying them as women who publicly denigrate their own community, and without any regard for their privacy or safety is using them as rage-bait to farm engagement and clicks! How could she possibly have stooped so low as to publicly release the article they had all agreed to be interviewed for, hoping for more eyes on their music? While insinuating that four women in a punk band had anything negative to say about their conservative upbringings?

This heinous betrayal nearly breaks the band apart. Amina recalls her more fundamentalist tendencies and walks out, declaring Lady Parts “wrong”. Saira blows up at the other band members for convincing her to participate in an interview that, in the very next episode, is shown to have made the band more popular and widely-known amongst their core audience. Her enraged meltdown drives her bandmates away. The season finale begins at this low point, with none of the band members speaking to each other because of how disastrous this successful marketing push turned out to be.

Ayesha is, of course, dumped by Zarina off-screen.

I am inclined to give the show a great degree of slack, considering just how ambitious it was relative to how little time Nida Manzoor was given to cover all these highly complex topics. At the same time, while I can pretend to not hear Harry Potter references in a British TV show, it’s harder to tune out how the first season’s biggest source of conflict is a duplicitous, devious queer woman who sells out her own community and sisters for financial gain, almost forces her girlfriend to come out without considering how it would impact her, and is shown literally “manufacturing racism” on-screen to better serve her own agenda.

After all, aren’t we all tired of those privileged non-white queers who are more loyal to the West than to their own people? Who further the West’s xenophobic narratives by talking about the homophobia and misogyny endemic to their cultures? The West is hardly free of homophobia or misogyny, which is why uppity brown queers should keep their mouths shut about what “their own people” put them through, lest they make us look bad and single-handedly trigger the next US invasion of a foreign country. Jasbir Puar warned us about this! Don’t these ungrateful degenerates know that talking openly about their oppression and asking for rights is basically doing the CIA’s work for them?!

Don’t they have any izzat?

It’s really fun being a brown lesbian, thank you for asking. No matter where I am or whom I’m amongst, there’s always a sin I can repent for. And to think I didn’t even have to account for being trans.

This isn’t really about Nida Manzoor’s work. I still have more praise for it than criticism, which I hope is obvious. The Zarina storyline was just a very sobering reminder that even those who get it center the Western gaze so much that they end up coming down strongly on the side of “don’t air out our dirty laundry”, intentionally or otherwise. Even non-white feminists.

Because diaspora feminists have their own honor culture. Their own deeply-ingrained desire to present a simplified, sanitised version of their roots, to ‘save face’ before the Western observer. Patriarchy in the third world? Forced marriages? Honor killings?! Mind your tongue, imperialist, and get your own house in order before you cast aspersions on mine. I’ll have you know that my people are actually far more gender-expansive than your piddly colonial binarist West could ever conceive of being! Have you ever heard of hijra?

And so even amongst our shield-sisters, we remain outsiders. We remain an inconvenient truth, an irritant to brush away lest our pesky voices rise too far above the din in a heated argument between Western feminists, both white and not. Talking about third world patriarchy is always doing the white man’s work, the Western feminist says, to the white woman and third world woman alike. Remember that you are never free to speak such words with your two lips.

“Keep your peace,” says the Western feminist to the third world woman, “and understand that this is about something more important than just you.”

For Your Tongue Is Still Your Own

The second and final season of We Are Lady Parts is, just like its first season, about a lot of things. It attempts to grapple with topics as wide-ranging as being ‘visible’ as a Black Muslim, whether influential queer people have an obligation to out themselves for the sake of ‘visibility’, and most emphatically the limitations on artists’ speech imposed by entities who profit from their labor (subtle!). Season 2’s fifth episode is a high watermark, a full-throated embrace of WALP’s more surrealist inspirations where Saira tries to write something more meaningful than a “funny Muslim song” and ends up suspended mid-air, choked by an invisible force, violently censored for even attempting to say the word “w#@!”.

It is not a difficult message to intuit, or appreciate. Very often, the cost of visibility is authenticity, and marginalized people frequently have to consider whether it’s worth it to cede control over the point and themes of their own work when the alternative is not being platformed at all. The tension regarding WALP’s clear desire to be about so much more than what it was given the time to be is palpable. The fact that it is subject to the limitations imposed on commercial art is vital to keep in mind when discussing it.

Even so, there are still critiques to be made. I am grateful for the existence of WALP as a joyous, rebellious, and decidedly flawed piece of media that centers the experiences of brown, second-generation immigrant Muslim women. That is what also leads to its biggest limitations as a feminist work, however. WALP’s feminism is non-white, yes, but remains stubbornly grounded in the experiences of the non-white citizen, of those who grow up alienated from their homelands and thus develop a complex relationship to their cultures of origin.

Unlike Polite Society, WALP is far more troubled about the perception of one’s non-Western culture. Zarina’s crime isn’t simply being a queer woman who insists on talking about the flaws of her culture, but doing so where white and Western people can witness the conversation. “The personal is political”, feminists have often said, and yet the anxieties amongst non-white Western feminists—of being deemed as from an “inferior”, “savage”, “barbaric” background—plague their approach to the unique double-bind women of color are placed in.

Manzoor’s work here falls, rather uncomfortably, on the side of vilifying those of us who do not wish to sugarcoat our experiences. The West is not free of patriarchy and racism and unjust hierarchies, yes, and its ideologues are only too eager to claim its superiority to the lands it exploits and hollows out. Yet it remains true that lesbians and trans people and queer people of all stripes frequently emigrate from third world nations to the West. It remains true that many nations in the third world grant women fewer rights and less independence than is possible for many women to achieve in the West. We have a responsibility to consider why this is, and to resist those who ignore material conditions to advance a supremacist agenda.

But we cannot afford to be silent, deflective, or obscurantist about empirical truths.

Part Three: “Have some solidarity”

I came across the tweet cited at the top of this essay when my friend from Iran (let’s call her “Chem”) posted a screenshot of it. Chem has family in the motherland and was understandably pretty worried about them in June of 2025, when both Israel and the US military began to grandstand about shows of force. We’ve talked to each other a lot about our respective cultures and the popular misconceptions that Westerners have about them.

One topic we’ve discussed extensively is the idea that in Iran, gay people are “forcibly transitioned” as a form of conversion therapy, to “trans the gay away”. It is a popular talking point amongst British anti-trans activists, and a 2014 BBC article makes the claim rather uncritically. Chem has experience being trans in Iran and finds the credulity and motivated reasoning of Westerners rather distasteful. She knows of a case where a gay man was pressured into taking hormones as a cure for his sexuality, but the hormone in question was testosterone, not feminizing HRT.

As Iranian historian Afsaneh Najmabadi notes in her book Professing Selves, there is a wide gulf between something being legal and being freely available, or even destigmatised. Transition care has been legal in the West for decades, after all, while remaining thoroughly gatekept by medical professionals who rejected trans patients frequently. Najmabadi’s interviews with officials, clerics, doctors, and activists on the ground paint a very similar picture of trans rights in Iran: legal in theory, heavily restricted in practice. Far from forcing anyone to transition, officials regard trans people with suspicion and often consider them to be deceptive gay people trying to transition so that they can legally marry their partners.

This makes sense if you view a non-Western society as a complex society in its own right, rife with its own movements, contradictions, conflicting interests, and oppressive regimes that marginalised populations must navigate. However, anti-trans activists do not care about nuance or fact; to them, Iran is a convenient case to cite in their crusade to present trans rights as at odds with gay liberation. Whether gay people are actually being forcibly transitioned in Iran is, to them, far less important than the utility of this fact about Iran, real or imagined, in manufacturing putatively ‘progressive’ opposition to trans people.

And as we can see in the tweet at the top, this reductive instrumentalisation of non-Western societies is hardly exclusive to right-wingers.

Chem has as little patience for diaspora feminist theatrics as I do. When she came across the cited tweet, she scoffed at the idea that White Western Feminists influence the foreign policy of imperial powers in any significant way. Are racist white feminists happy to assist neocolonial efforts to manufacture consent for overseas military action? In many cases, they are. Does that mean that feminism or trans rights or gay marriage are, in and of themselves, movements that direct the flow of Western belligerence against hapless, insufficiently progressive third world countries? Hardly. The very notion is absurd.

As Chem said herself in a follow-up post: “Being alive matters more than what you wear” yeah bestie literally tell that to the people killing Iranian women for what they wear while also failing to protect them from Israel.”

Chem’s thread ended up catching the eye of someone I’ll dub “Mags”. Mags stopped by to inform us that they interpreted the tweet Chem was taking issue with “very differently”. See, that tweet was directed towards those white, Western feminists who focus on what Middle Eastern women wear more than the Islamophobia and xenophobia directed at Middle Eastern cultures. “To me,” Mags said, “that tweet isn’t meant to speak to you.”

Of course—why would Chem, an Iranian woman, make the silly mistake of thinking a tweet about the plight of Iranian women had anything to do with her?

Mags asked us to kindly find room in our hearts for solidarity with Western POCs, who were grappling with a racist society we had no experience with. As third world women, Chem and I ought to understand that when diaspora feminists speak, we’re not actually part of the conversation. We are props for diaspora feminists to invoke in arguments with white women, not interested parties with concerns and opinions of our own.

There were actual statements from Iranian feminists on the topic of the Israel/US-Iran War, by the way. I’ll transcribe a snippet from Iran’s Feminist Liberation Group here:

“... 3. Don’t forget the political prisoners.

As news cycles unfold, many people are forgotten. In Iran, countless political prisoners, including those on death row, are in grave danger every day. During the Iran-Iraq War, thousands were executed in 1988 under the pretext of the conflict. Let us not allow history to repeat itself.

4. Avoid idealising any form of state power.

Opposition to one oppressive regime does not imply support for another. All governments must be held accountable, whether it is Israel, the US, Iran or any other state. Authentic anti-imperialism requires consistent questioning of all forms of oppression.

5. Focus on the voices of those directly affected.

Empower those on the front lines—not influencers who appropriate the narrative. Find and support grassroots activists, independent journalists, and people who speak from their own experience.

6. Iranian women and men are trapped between two forms of violence.

Many people in Iran oppose the Islamic regime and at the same time fear foreign military intervention. They do not want to be used as pawns in geopolitical games. True solidarity means supporting their demands for freedom, without military involvement. …”

Emphasis mine.

The irony here is that the specter of white feminism compels many feminists of color—frequently but not always diaspora—to center the white gaze in their analysis. Questions of patriarchy outside the Western context are treated not as relevant and vital concerns for feminists everywhere, but as racist Western propaganda, or a point of shame to talk around, downplay, and deprioritize. The third world woman is rendered either an agent of whiteness, who advocates for her own liberation at the cost of “shaming” her own people, or ignored entirely, reduced to a talking point in Western discourses.

She is, in short, treated by diaspora feminists the same way white feminists treat all feminists of color.

This was not the first time Chem and I had a conversation like this, nor will it be the last. Even as academics and feminists in the West purport to champion ‘decolonialism’, their attitude towards third world feminists, movements, and queer people remains tokenistic and extractive. The idea of Iranian women or Indian hijras or misunderstood, maligned third-world nations is convenient to the eternal game of rhetorical point-scoring between the people who matter—that is, Westerners. We should not confuse that with the concept of advocating for such groups, or even—perish the thought—listening to them in any capacity.

Non-Westerners are, ultimately, just a captive audience, here to applaud for our progressive Western saviors, or gasp as the unfathomable depths of the West’s depravity are revealed. The racists say everything good came from the West, and the anti-racists say everything evil sprung from the original sin of the West’s diseased conception.

The rest of us remember our place, and say nothing at all.

Conclusion: We Are a Society of Polite Ladies

“When you civilize a man, you only civilize an individual; but when you civilize a woman, you civilize an entire nation.” — Patrice Lumumba, Le Congo, terre d’avenir, est-il menacé?

Let’s talk about The Veil.

Regimes that ban the veil—or really any forms of cultural expression, especially those of religious or ethnic minorities—are always in the wrong. Such laws are nothing more than a way to criminalise being a visible member of certain communities and do nothing to advance the cause of a single multiply-marginalised woman anywhere. At best, they deny women autonomy, and at worst they create a no-win situation for those who were never given the option to choose, and have to risk incurring the wrath of either their own communities, or the state. These unjust laws are an example of how the women of marginalized communities are singled out for humiliation, and how their bodies are transformed into a battleground, a site for opposing patriarchal interests to vie for supremacy.

That said.

That said, refusing to be critical of non-Western cultural practices simply because they are non-Western cultural practices is the height of anti-intellectualism. Whether we’re talking about white feminists who approach the topic with apprehension due to how much it has been poisoned by racists, or non-white feminists who would rather remain silent than risk their culture “looking bad”, we see that people are happier to cede ground than stick their necks out for their espoused principles.

So I’m just going to say with my whole, out-of-lane, ex-Hindu chest: I think veiling is bad. I think that modesty culture is inherently rooted in treating women’s bodies as sexual commodities, and that neither religion nor tradition are adequate justifications for misogynistic practices. It’s that straightforward.

“What if it’s their choice?” Then I can’t do anything about it. Though that begs the question: how do you feel about the fact that under regimes the world over, women cannot choose? What if it’s not their choice, and it’s forced upon them anyway?

Are you willing to assert that that’s wrong?

One might be tempted to repeat that timeless maxim: “Listen to the marginalized!” And indeed, if anyone is desperate enough to outsource all the risk of considering one’s stances, making decisions and taking a stand to the nearest marginalized person whose skirt they wish to hide behind, they are welcome to do so. Do you want to find a marginalised woman who will tell you that the veil is not misogynistic in the slightest? Do you want to find a conservative marginalised woman? You will if you look for one.

Lila Abu-Lughod’s essay, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others considers this question at length. Can we find a middle ground between Laura Bush pinkwashing the excesses of US militarism by casting imperialism as liberation, and the abdication inherent to ‘cultural relativism’ positioning all non-Western practices as beyond critique? What do we do when faced with Muslim women who say that they can be liberated without being ‘Western’ and taking off the veil, set against Muslim women who protest against the veil’s imposition (as happened in Iran)?

It is true that the Eye of the West forever gazes upon us, eager to exploit any possible division or instability to establish its own hegemony and hollow out yet another land, yet another people. At the same time, the West is also a convenient rhetorical tool for conservatives looking to cast any and all oppressive practices as an indispensable cultural artifact that needs protection from ‘Western colonialism’, even—perhaps especially—when non-Western women and queer people are the ones speaking out against them.

Some of this is the result of liberation movements negotiation with their local contexts and asking questions such as whether an ‘Islamic’ or ‘Hindu’ feminism is possible. Najmabadi notes that the right to legally transition in Iran was, after all, secured through reasoning in the framework of Islamic Law. Appealing to the logic of the Nation—any Nation—will always be a fraught endeavour with limited returns, as Nations remain invested in patriarchy, natalism, and the management of internal hierarchies. Perhaps the non-Western feminist who decries the politicization of the veil by the West is very much against imperialism. Or perhaps she is trying to prove herself a modest woman who only wishes to secure her position and advocate for better treatment—rather than upend the entire patriarchal order destroying less-privileged women.

Enemy feminisms, after all, thrive outside the West too.

Further, the refusal to engage with empirical reality leaves exploitable gaps in progressive politics. Loudly refusing to acknowledge the flaws of non-Western cultures makes forming alliances across national borders much harder, and incurs the risk of alienating, if not outright radicalizing third world women, who see the misogyny they chafe against being summarily dismissed by the same people who champion queer liberation or anti-imperialism or trans rights. This incoherence in Western leftism stems largely from unexamined antifeminist sentiments as well as a mangled understanding of anti-racism that paradoxically ends up abandoning the most vulnerable non-Western populations.

Personally, I find I am tired of cowardice. Of apprehension. And I am, more than anything, tired of “feminists” who lack the conviction to stand by their own beliefs when it gets the slightest bit inconvenient to do so. I am tired of asking my friends to lend me their skirts anytime I wish to assert a basic feminist principle, and I am first and foremost tired of cultural and moral relativism and rank cowardice masquerading as ‘progressive’, ‘decolonial’ thought.

We can be a society of polite ladies, if you like. We can be meek and spineless and too terrified to think for ourselves, too terrified to speak with our own two lips on the off-chance that a racist or imperialist or conservative non-Westerner twists our words and appropriates our statements for their own goals. We can continue to watch the slow death of feminism in front of our very eyes, as any centering of women’s rights or women’s plights or women’s pain is dismissed out of hand via any of a dozen academic, leftist-sounding rationales. Is that what you want?

Or do you want to be a fucking feminist?

Your tongue is still your own. So will you use it to stand with your sisters?

Which way, Western woman?

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks another entry of my upcoming book, Brown/Trans/Les. If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting me by pre-ordering.

My initial essays on this blog have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts.

“The conversion of Muslim woman to Hinduism and of Hindu woman to Islam looked at from a social and political point of view cannot but be fraught with tremendous consequences. It means a disturbance in the numerical balance between the two communities. As the disturbance was being brought about by the abduction of women, it could not be overlooked. For woman is at once the seed-bed of and the hothouse for nationalism in a degree that man can never be. These conversions of women and their subsequent marriages were there-fore regarded, and rightly, as a series of depredations practised by Hindus against Muslims and by Muslims against Hindus with a view to bringing about a change in their relative numerical strength.” [Emphasis mine.]

– Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, Partition of India

Breeder Logic

‘The Great Replacement’ is a conspiracy theory popular amongst white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the West. It is an interesting case study in exactly what kinds of logic are needed to prop up myths of innate, inherent superiority while justifying persecution and violence against marginalized groups as an act of self-defense. Most versions of the conspiracy talk about some manner of shadowy, secretive group with outsize power—“elites”, “the deep state”, “cabals” and the like—orchestrating the “decline of the white race” through the manipulation of demographic shifts.

Think of the “stabbed in the back” myth in post-World War One Germany. The great, powerful, imperially superior Nation was not defeated on the battlefield, because its military might was without question and its power without equal. Rather, the Nation was defeated because it was betrayed, deceived, undermined, sabotaged by seditious internal elements, who used “underhanded” and “dishonorable” tactics to orchestrate a defeat “from within”. Jews and socialists are the classical scapegoats targeted by such anti-National accusations, but the utility of this myth is in its flexibility: it can be directed at whichever group it is most convenient to presently slander.

Today, ‘The Great Replacement’ largely accuses our supposed shadowy overlords of enacting various schemes towards ‘population control’, specifically to curb the numbers of white people. The most visible and mainstream manifestation of these politics is the immigrant panic sweeping the West. A 2022 article in The Guardian discusses how this idea, once a fringe far-right conspiracy, has increasingly become a fixture of mainstream right-wing politics in the West, echoed and alluded by figures such as Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Hungary’s Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán. It is, at its heart, a demographic anxiety: a concern that other people, other cultures will become more numerous, more populous, more relevant, more normative than you and yours.

It is the fear of becoming a minority.

This turn against immigration illustrates a contradiction at the heart of Western neoliberal policies that has enabled the popularisation of fascist rhetoric. Immigrants serve as a source of precarious, cheap labor in Western nations, whether we mean Mexican farmworkers, Filipino nurses, or even Indian tech workers. Their tenuous legal status can be exploited to prevent them from organizing effectively for higher wages, as the simple prospect of earning an income in dollars (or euros or pounds) is attractive when compared to meager economic prospects in their neocolonised countries of origin.

Immigrant labor, then, allows capitalists to undercut homegrown labor pools and even provides them with a ready scapegoat for stagnant wages. Rather than viewing immigrants as fellow workers being (super-)exploited by the same regimes, nativist political sentiment is quick to divide along racial and national lines. The very source of cheap labor becomes a political wedge issue, and economies in a death spiral (such as the post-Brexit UK) demand the expulsion of workers upon whom the entire national infrastructure now depends. Fascism is always effective in disrupting worker solidarity, certainly, but it rarely turns out good for business overall.

Then again, I’m making the mistake of assuming wealthy capitalists, especially the modern techno-libertarian sort, have any interest in preserving a functional society.

Replacement conspiracies are, ultimately, rooted in the most primal fears about the external Other. Most societies have internal hierarchies to enforce and external threats to keep at bay, whether real or imagined. Replacement conspiracies stoke fears of a fragile order coming undone, of an unholy alliance between saboteurs and malcontents within and savages and barbarians without, joining forces to make the People of the Great Nation—the volk, if you will—an underclass in their ‘own home’. It is the recurring nightmare of a society founded in and perpetuated by blood meeting its end the same way.

Many far-right fixations stem from and converge upon this singular fear. We must fearmonger about the encroaching savage hordes, certainly, but what about the pollution and rot tainting our own people’s “genetic purity”, or the Nation’s “racial hygiene”? Feminism, queer rights, critical race theory, ‘DEI’—it is all trivially spun into the newest iteration of ‘cultural Marxism’ or ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ or whatever the reactionary euphemism du jour is. After all, if the volk are going to be outbred by inferior people, we need to do everything we can to ensure the continuation of our race, and a future for our children, shall we say (in fourteen words or less).

Think of how far feminism has gone, for instance. Women can be or do anything these days, except the one thing they’re meant to be, the one thing they’re supposed to do: motherhood! Bearing and birthing and raising the Nation’s very future, fulfilling their reproductive duty to their lineage and doing their part in ensuring the next generation preserves The Nation’s values. They need to be mothers to the right sort of children and wed the right sort of men, of course. The more-liberal eras tried this entire ‘multiculturalism’ business, but the politics of the day call for insularity, knowing that any attempt by different peoples to live in harmony is doomed to failure.

It must thus be observed how dangerous it is to allow women to do things like become literate, own property, and choose their own partners without familial intervention. Look how lonely the men are now! Look at how precipitously the birthrates are falling, how many immigrants are proliferating, how women are even sleeping with and marrying each other, wasting two perfectly good wombs at once! This simply cannot be allowed to go on.

The Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, is a right-wing US group that held a special meeting in Budapest in 2022, to promote ties between the GOP and the aforementioned Viktor Orbán. At this special meeting, CPAC’s chairman Matt Schlapp had this to say:

“If you say there is a population problem in a country, but you’re killing millions of your own people through legalized abortion every year, if that were to be reduced, some of that problem is solved … If you’re worried about this quote-unquote replacement, why don’t we start there? Start with allowing our own people to live.” [Emphasis mine.]

These statements were made mere months before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the US Supreme Court.

Replacement theories, then, illustrate a crucial facet of fascist politics: the necessity to frame the persecution of the marginalized as a defense of the Nation, especially in times of peace, when there is no war to propagandise, to mobilise and unite the volk. Justifying reactionary violence is a psychological necessity, for even those who delight in cruelty and exploitation still often feel the need to see themselves as in the right, to frame their own actions as righteous, as an unsavory necessity that might not be “pretty”, but “must be done” for the sake of the “greater good”. Powerless groups are recast as deceptive elites, or dehumanized instruments of a greater, secret will, whose inferiority and rapaciousness is not their fault, as such, but an innate part of their nature that demands their culling. Replacement myths are how asylum-seekers and refugees fleeing war-torn lands become an invading force on Western shores, how displaced and destroyed communities become cartels and criminals and terrorists.

It’s how the powerful silence their own conscience while killing the helpless.

Maiden, Mother, Drone

The ‘Cross of Honor of the German Mother’ was an award issued by the government of Nazi Germany to ‘worthy mothers’—that is, those women who had fulfilled their duty to the Nation by birthing more than four children. The medals came in bronze, silver, and finally gold, for those select mothers who had borne and raised over eight children in accordance with Nazi values. To be eligible, the mother and father of the children had to both be of “pure German blood”, of course, and “genetically healthy”. The point of the award was to incentivize and propagandize the image of the woman as the womb of the Nation, the cradle of the Volk’s future, whose fecundity is her greatest asset and her greatest contribution to the National project.

This is the place that reactionary politics carves out for women (the cis is implicit, and the heterosexual is mandated). A place of dubious honor as “the seed-bed of nationalism”, as Ambedkar put it. It is a meager reward, consisting of menial work, reduced autonomy, financial dependence and monotonous drudgery, but it is at least better than the alternative. Especially in climates where women’s financial prospects are limited and their independence restricted, subsuming one’s existence into “someone’s wife and mother” is as good as the deal gets.

Such a poisoned pill forms the basis of many a reactionary feminism. Women of the non-hegemonic demographic, queer women, disabled women, and so on have their interests sidelined and diminished in favor of the politics of female status, by women who can secure their place as favored broodmares in a Nationalist order. Those who cannot must simply be discarded, relegated to a lower tier as a sexually exploitable underclass, deemed reproductively worthless due to their inability to gestate the Nation’s ideal citizens, and so consigned to absorbing the sexual violence that men simply must indulge in.

It then becomes obvious that reproduction—and control over it—forms a central fixation of reactionary, conservative, and Nationalist politics. Even in the case of the most privileged, hegemonic groups, the size of the population remains a concern, something for the state to manage and weigh against the size of every other population within the Nation’s internal hierarchy. This is why the neo-Malthusian politics that were a recent fad, raising concerns about global overpopulation and resource depletion as a response to the looming ecological crises, have seamlessly given way to elite scaremongering about the “replacement rate”, about Western nations not reproducing enough, about lonely men and educated women and no-fault divorce and abortion being too-freely available. Woman is the “hothouse for nationalism”, which is why she must be so strictly controlled, managed, constrained, directed—treated as a natural resource, almost, a vital asset that the Nation cannot afford to squander.

Why do Western nations so concerned about replacement rates and having enough workers to do the essential labor of maintaining society still participate in immigrant panics, despite immigration being a ready, efficient solution to the problem? Despite population redistribution remedying both “overpopulation” and “underpopulation” simultaneously? Because the immigrants are not the right kind of citizen, not the right kind of laborer—reproductive or otherwise! Regimes dependent on hierarchies wish to perpetuate said hierarchies, wish to rely on the loyalty of those who have always been elevated at the expense of others, and cannot make do with the proliferation of the lesser, the inferior, those of ‘tainted blood’ who definitionally cannot bear or birth the full-blooded genetically pure proud Men of the Nation! (Proud Boys, even.)

This obsession with ensuring the proliferation of productive citizens of the regime, defined as ‘loyal’ and sufficiently ‘able’ members of the hegemonic demographic, easily gives rise to eugenical politics and policies. Disability and sickness almost becomes treason, then, an inexcusable diminishment in one’s capacity to Serve The Nation. All deviation from the ideal in turn becomes deviancy, insufficiency and lack becoming a moral failure, a malicious non-compliance with ruling-class aims to preserve the ‘natural order’ that props up their power. Is being queer in a heterosexual Nation a crime? Is being non-white in a White Nation a defect? It might as well be, says the Supremacist, the Patriarch, the Patriot—and it certainly is treated so.

Womanhood, then, is defined patriarchally as wombynhood, as the duty every True Citizen with a uterus is expected to uphold. You must birth our Nation’s leaders—and also its soldiers, its enforcers, its cops, its middle-managers, its zealots and supremacists and priests and future wombs, too. You must raise them to be as invested in the Nation as you yourself no doubt are, and for your service, your dedication of mind, body, and ideology to your regime, we will award you a MutterKreuz, or a Médaille de l’enfance et des familles, or an Orden Materinskaya Slava. You will be recognized as someone who bore her charge of servitude well.

Mean though this recognition is, throughout history we have found women who will nonetheless clamor for it, tear each other apart for it, and forge their entire sense of self around being a respectable, venerated Mother and not, you know, some cheap floozy dime-a-dozen harlot. This is the foundation of modesty politics, the patriarchal buy-in to ‘proper womanhood’ enforced by men and women alike: Be a womb, or be a hole.

After all, if you’re going to be treated as less than a full human regardless, would you rather not be treated like an un-person with some dignity? Some use?

Or would you rather be treated like them?

Dereliction of Duty

There are many ways to fail the State.

If Nationalism is understood as a politics of constructing and upholding hierarchies, as the promotion of in-groups to preserve and out-groups to punish or exploit, then the function of patriarchy becomes plain as day, as a vital social technology deployed to secure, retain and police essential reproductive assets. It explains the ‘martial disposability’ of men, in terms of who can be allowed to wage war without overly threatening the Nation’s demographic future, as well as the targeting of women during genocide in sexually violent ways that frequently involve mutilation of their sexual characteristics.

To refuse to gestate is a betrayal of the Nation—hence the conservative attempts to regulate abortion, contraception, and women’s freedom to exist autonomously. To bear a child for the out-group is perhaps an even greater betrayal, as it is not only a denial of your reproductive potential to your country, but a commitment to furthering the cause of the Other.

Queer existence too falls somewhere in that neighborhood. Imagine the temerity of women who think they can claim each other as a man claims a woman, locking both into a non-reproductive coupling! Gay men are beaten and reviled and made examples of, while lesbians are denied existence, epistemically erased to a degree that their very possibility is disallowed. For an unclaimed woman is always just an unclaimed woman, waiting for her utility to the Nation to be suitably exploited, until the age where her value expires and she is relegated to the gendered trash-heap with all the others.

Queerness, then, is treated as desertion, as a dereliction of duty, an act of treason that can practically render a person stateless, loyal to no regime, a burden and layabout refusing to do their reproductive duty. If reproductive roles are what give humans value, purpose, and designations in terms of how they must labor, then queerness is a refusal, a non-compliance with patriarchal strictures positing that we are more than the base, mammalian instinct to multiply—that human value is not the sole purview of the sire, the impregnator, the Man, and is in fact detached entirely from how and whether we reproduce.

It is a degree of temerity and insubordination that no patriarchy, no Nation can deign to tolerate.

Discussions of ‘gay assimilation’ often use terms like “respectability”, or “middle-class values”, or some abstract encapsulation of the idea that the split between liberation and assimilation occurs along classed or racial lines. While affluence and proximity to hegemonic demographics no doubt play a crucial role, it is more illuminating to think about the fight for gay rights—specifically gay recognition, gay marriage—in terms of compliance. A gay man in a crisp suit and a lesbian in a suitably flowery dress, irrespective of their specific status or identity, distinguish themselves from their rowdier, sluttier, more deviant and deviating counterparts through gender-conformity, through the promise (and the lie) that sexuality and gender are perfectly discrete and separable constructions. “Even if we are men coupled with men, or women coupled with women,” goes the refrain, “we are still men and women.”

Reproduction lies at the heart of gay assimilation, or gay liberalism, or gay citizenship, if you will. A willingness to reproduce the Nation’s ideals, and a willingness to reproduce as men and women. Lesbians with sperm donors, gay men with surrogates, or both with adoption—all technologies of reproductive justice that conservatives oppose due to their fetish for the ‘natural’—enable gay citizens to avoid becoming truly queer. And so, the patriarchy finds a bargain for yet another gender-marginalized group—tenuous and limited to specific socio-economic climes though it may be.

Therein lies the source of the split between an attempt to fashion a “GLB” politics that “drops the T”—though, make no mistake, a trans politics of affluence most definitely exists. It resides in the negotiations trans people have tried to make with medical professionals, to be perfect gender-conforming stereotypes of our “chosen gender” in exchange for the permission and means to bodily transition. Even still, even if trans people participate in reproduction both ideological and sexual, it remains the case that transition itself is an unforgivable patriarchal sin, a demonstration of porosity between sexed categories that can never be given official sanction. Gay citizens bow and scrape for their pittance of gender-deviation, to be allowed to love whoever they wish, but promise to uphold that Man and Woman have meaning, remain distinct categories that can never be superseded and ignored. Trans people, even if we swear to behave once we’ve “crossed”, still need to make the crossing, and so reveal that such a crossing is possible.

An impudence that has no place in a civilized, patriarchal society.

The reproductive anxieties inherent to transphobia—both in the sense of illustrating the farce of patriarchal male-supremacy, and in the scaremongering notion of bodily transition as a form of ‘mutilation’ that destroys a perfectly healthy citizen’s reproductive viability—are very apparent in those who peddle the trans panic. A remarkably recent article (as of time of writing) on redstate.com, entitled The Transgender Breeding Program Is One of the Most Sinister Plots in History, spells out the derangement trans people inspire in the conservative id quite thoroughly.

While it was no doubt written with one hand—the article mentions “corruption kink”, for crying out loud—it blessedly does not devolve into lurid speculation about trans people’s dating habits. Rather, it consolidates a specific image of the ‘threat’ trans people pose to polite, heterosexual society, constructed via breathless repetition in the works of obsessives such as Janice Raymond, Abigail Shrier, and the UK Gender-Conservative movement. Trans people cannot reproduce, the false claim goes, and so trans people are interested in recruiting and stealing your child! It is a remix of the groomer panic that was once directed at gay people, relegating trans existence to the purely libidinal for the sake of portraying us as rapacious, heterosexuality-destroying monsters.

Amidst all this vilification, there is an interesting admission in the article, though.

“Ideologies thrive in different ways, but the best is environmental conditioning. This happens all the time in family settings, where the child is born and raised in a home where the ideology typically becomes the standard. This can be undermined, however, and often is by outside forces and nearly always when the subject is young and impressionable.” [Emphasis mine.]

Such a casual admission—that conservative, patriarchal, heterosexual indoctrination is an ideology that must be instilled in children, and can be undermined—occurs because it doesn’t even register as one. This is simply what conservatives regard as normal, even if they dedicate so much more propaganda and violence into spreading and maintaining their vision of the world than queer people ever could, or would even want to. They understand that patriarchy is not natural or hard-wired, but consider its defense so vital to their identity and indeed ideology, that the escalating persecution of a vilified minority and resorting to the abuse of one’s own children are perfectly acceptable conditions to that end.

That is why an absolute majority of messaging targeting the parents of trans kids is conservative fearmongering, misinformation, and advice on how to restrict children’s autonomy, or otherwise harm them if they persist in identifying as trans. The United Kingdom’s Secretary of State for Health, Wes Streeting, has met with pro-conversion therapy groups like Bayswater, whose members include parents willing to put “extra hot chili sauce” in their trans child’s eye makeup. He has not, however, met with any trans groups or trans youth, even as he persists in upholding the UK’s puberty blockers ban for trans children (and trans children only), a ruling based in dubious and shoddy research.

A final interesting feature of the Red State article is the framing of who is engaging in these child-stealing activities. The author reiterates the conservative fixation on the normalization of drag and events such as ‘Drag Queen Story Hour’, which are innocuous gatherings where an adult reads a story out to children. The only thing that makes it “obscene” in the eyes of a conservative is the adult in question being a man in drag, a man who presents differently than he ought to, which is the category that all trans women are routinely collapsed into by bad-faith actors.

This, paired with Abigail Shrier’s narrative of Irreversible Damage, of a “transgender fad” targeting “young teenage girls” into “mutilating themselves” and supposedly destroying their future gestational capacity or ability to orgasm (both bunk), paints a very particular picture of adult, “sexually deviant men” targeting and allegedly victimizing these supposed young girls, casting trans women specifically as a kind of rapacious male threat to the Nation’s precious reproductive assets. In that regard it is homoousian with many a xenophobic or racialized panic, borrowing from and building on tropes that position the Nation’s women as a prize, a form of wealth that men of the out-group covet and seek to despoil, pollute, or steal away.

That is how the reactionary, fascistic, Nationalist conceptions of gender, race, and queerness intersect. They are overlapping and mutually reinforcing social technologies whose purpose is to construct a hierarchy of citizenship, of loyalty, of fealty to the Nation and its ideological obsession with reproduction. Through this lens, we can see how the struggles of women, queer people, and colonised people are all inherently the same struggle, interconnected and mutually reinforcing, proving that we all benefit from coming together and advocating for our shared interests against the hegemony oppressing us all. These groups are, therefore, natural allies in the worldwide struggle against imperialism, colonialism, and patriarchy.

… Right?

Interlude: “Transmisogyny is White Supremacy”

A 2024 report by the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, entitled Transmisogyny, Colonialism and Online Anti-Trans Activism has an interesting section, A Postcolonial Approach to Anti-Trans Activism, where it states:

“Analysing online anti‑trans activism through the framework of coloniality, we argue, makes clear that transphobia generally, and transmisogyny specifically, are foundational to European and North American ideas of how society should be organised and who is allowed to commit violence. Considering coloniality allows us to demonstrate the innate white supremacy of transphobia: rooted in settler colonialism, tightly prescribed gender roles made colonised societies simpler to understand and easier to control. Trans people, and particularly trans women, not only challenge these gender roles, but they expose them as roles chosen by colonisers rather than natural states of being.” [Emphasis mine.]

This certainly seems to naturally follow from what we’ve discussed so far. If a white-supremacist society’s conception of gender involves rigid ideas of reproduction, to the point of making it obligate, then naturally non-white societies can never perform “gender” to an imperialist standard’s satisfaction, because they produce no white babies. Some scholars would go so far as to argue that racialization innately “queers” people, given that whiteness enforces global standards.

It’s a fascinating line of inquiry, one that compels me to ask a question that I promise is not a trick question, but one that simply must be asked given the premises we’re working with. If racialization queers non-white people… does that mean that white trans people are racialized?

That is, do white trans people… experience racism?

Have a think. We’ll come back to that one.

Gender Isn’t (Just) White

A few months ago, my co-host and I had the pleasure of sitting down to record an episode of our podcast, Cracked Ivory, with Jude Doyle. We were interviewing Jude about his book, Did I Leave Feminism?, a semi-autobiographical treatise on his relationship to feminism as a trans man, and re-evaluation of the orthodoxies that have dominated trans politics and advocacy. It is a sharp, lucid and welcome intervention, and we talked at length about why Jude, like many other transfeminists, is giving the second wave a second look these days.

However, there was one aspect of Jude’s text that I came across, that I felt the need to question him more on. Consider the following snippet from the very first chapter, Gender:

“Still, globally, or in terms of the contemporary consciousness, patriarchy and its binary gender scheme dominate the narrative. It’s so pervasive that many of us, including many feminists, assume it’s the way things have always been. How did this happen? The short answer is ‘white people.’ The longer answer, which still amounts to ‘white people,’ is colonialism and the Catholic church.

We still don’t know why European Christian culture became so heavily invested in patriarchy—it is partially, though probably not only, a matter of cultural inheritance from ancient Greece and Rome—but the historical record shows us that where white colonizers go, patriarchy follows. This does not happen solely through nebulous cultural influence, or even through propaganda spread by Christian missionaries (though both play a role) but through actual laws passed to prohibit egalitarian societal arrangements. In places where inheritance passed down through the female line, colonized subjects would be required by law to start willing their property to their sons. In places where women traditionally ruled, the colonizers would force them to hand their titles down to male heirs.

Whole civilizations had their histories rewritten to make patriarchy appear universal and inevitable.” [Emphasis mine.]

This idea of patriarchy as a colonizing force is related to my own work on trying to elucidate the transnational contours of racialized transmisogyny, and is a perspective that I have repeatedly encountered amongst Western trans activists and scholars. Jude is not and should not be treated as a representative spokesman for Western trans activism, but as he was someone who had just finished writing a book about Western transfeminism, I chose to ask him the following question:

“One thing that’s of personal relevance to my work is the degree of epistemic extractivism the Western academy subjects non-Western queer populations too, re-imagining non-Western societies as gender-expansive or post-patriarchal in ways that do not really map to reality. The main example I’ve discussed in the past is the rather orientalist view of India’s hijra that is mainstream in the West. Some of this has been facilitated by diaspora and non-Western scholars who pin the blame for non-Western patriarchy entirely on colonization or otherwise make empirically dubious claims about their societies’ relationship to gender and queerness. I wanted to ask you about what it would mean for Western trans scholarship to reckon with the reality of non-Western patriarchy and have to retreat from these claims of “binary gender” being a purely Eurocolonial purview.”

Jude gave an answer that I very much appreciated, and I hope I can convey that even when challenged, he approaches topics with a lot of thoughtfulness and insight. What remains true, however, is that many writers and scholars in trans studies, queer theory, and wider decolonial studies—note that I did not say ‘white’, deliberately—remain married to a conception of gender as a “white invention”, as a tool of settler-colonialism that was externally imposed on the catch-all of “non-Western cultures”.

It begs the question: Was white, Christian colonialism the reason that in 10th Century China, young girls had their feet broken and tightly, painfully bound to make them appear smaller and more dainty? Were time-travelling Christian patriarchs the reason that the Laws of Manu, a Hindu text, talks about how wives are to always defer to husbands, and how ‘eunuchs’ are unclean?

More importantly: Why are the supposed foremost scholars on the cutting edge of gender, queerness and feminism so beholden to making such reductive, absurd, and easily disprovable claims about patriarchy?

It’s a claim that’s repeated casually in online queer spaces, by Western queers who have an incredibly quaint idea of what life in the Third World is like. It’s also repeated in Emma Heaney’s Feminism Against Cisness, a collection whose first essay by Cameron Awkward-Rich talks about the co-optation of Sojourner Truth by white trans activists, and whose second essay by Kristjansson and Heaney espouses this reductive view of all non-Western societies, whose disparate histories are being homogenized and co-opted for the benefit of Western trans studies!

Much like the orientalism and moral relativism surrounding the “third-gender” idea applied to racialized trans women across the third world, this mythologized non-patriarchal wonderland that exists outside the boundaries of white, Christian, imperial society and instantly collapses on contact with it is just a rhetorical tool, an instrumentalization of complex histories and struggles—of caste, creed, queerness, and yes, gender!—into a fairy tale for Enlightened Queers to repeat at bedtime. It is a refusal to reckon with the patriarchal realities of nations that were innovating ways to impoverish and marginalize transsexuals aeons before ‘Europe’ was even a coherent concept. It is, bluntly, not merely historically and morally irresponsible, but also a giant cop-out by people who are whole-heartedly reinforcing the notion of the non-West as a preserved, primitive “living past” from which modern white, Western, Christian society can glean a lot of valuable lessons on how best to live!

Simply put, it’s an utter erasure of the oppression of women of color across the globe for the purpose of telling a more flattering story.

I do not say “white” scholars or “white” writers because of a common tendency amongst diaspora academics to push back against Western racism by presenting a glossier view of their societies of origin than exists in reality. A Short History of Transmisogyny by Jules Gil-Peterson still regurgitates the anthropological third-sexing of the hijra, despite its author’s desi roots. Gil-Peterson argues that hijras are “much older than the Western concept of gender” and that interpreting them as trans women is a colonial, imperialist act.

This is not a new idea, applied only to trans politics, but rather has been a fixture of debates amongst Western queer people for some time now. A 2021 article by Samuel Huneke for The Baffler, entitled Beyond Gay Imperialism, talks about the book “The Pink Line” by Mark Gevisser. The book interrogates the idea that the world can be divided into a ‘modern’, ‘progressive’, LGBT rights-friendly camp, and “the rest of the world”: backwards, uncivilized, barbaric and brutally violent to queer existence.

The article is fascinating because the author discusses the cases of various queer people outside the West: Pasha, who was able to transition through a Moscow gender clinic, or Maha and Amira, a lesbian couple from Cairo. The article goes to great pains to assert that even though non-Western countries may be inhospitable towards queer people, “countries like Egypt and Russia are actually home to complex societies where queer people often find ways to flourish.”

The very next line of the article reads: “Many of the individuals Gevisser meets eventually seek asylum in the global North.”

I wish to be understanding. I have been told, often, that trying to talk about conservatism, patriarchy, and anti-queer sentiment outside the West is inherently a colonial and racist exercise. Frankly, if Westerners tell me that they are incapable of talking about patriarchy or conservatism outside the West without regressing into frothing, genocidal racists, I’ll believe them. Most of them certainly seem incapable of nuance.

However, it does no one any good to attempt to construct a Western fantasy of the rest of the world, and then cite that as an affirmative argument for queer existence. I accept that perhaps Westerners—and US-Americans in particular—are simply too trigger-happy to countenance the existence of a non-Western society that doesn’t conform to their moral standards of benevolence, and that trying to ask them to hold this truth in their hearts will result in nuclear apocalypse. But do your best to accept this information without trying to bomb anyone.

Because the fact of the matter is, there is a YouTube video named Matt Walsh Asks Maasai Tribe “What is a woman?”. [I am not fucking linking it.] It has 2.1 million views. The answers he gets don’t appear to be quoting Butler.

On a final note, there was an article on Jules Gil-Peterson’s Substack that I’d been meaning to cite in an essay all year. It is now deleted, and so I won’t talk about it at length. However, the essay stated something that has stuck with me ever since I first read it, the words practically seared into my mind.

“I’m sorry to say that the word trans is frequently a misnomer. What you think is gender is really race. And that’s the heart of whiteness right there…”

…Is it, really?

Aryan Nation

“Love jihad” is an Islamophobic conspiracy theory peddled by Hindutva fascists—that is, those who conceive of India as a “Hindu nation”. It is a myth that posits that the men of India’s Muslim minority are waging a protracted internal “war” against the Hindu Rashtra by targeting Hindu women for marriage (and thereby forcibly converting them). Interfaith marriages—and indeed, marriage outside one’s caste or community without the sanction of your family—continues to be a controversial practice in India today, and I suspect that “love jihad” could have been derived from or is related to the idea of “love marriage”—marrying for love rather than marrying the match selected for you by your elders.

Discounting how widespread domestic abuse is amongst Indians of all faiths for the moment, consider how similar this conspiracy is to white-supremacist replacement conspiracies, and charges of immigrants “invading” Western shores to enact “white genocide”. In both cases, we observe a hegemonic demographic discussing its women like a resource being pillaged by an out-group, lying or exaggerating events to construe a minority’s existence as inherently aggressive and rallying committed ideologues to the cause—which is, of course, repressive violence against an already-persecuted, marginalized community.

No doubt in the modern day there is a great degree of interpenetration between Hindu and white fascists, and between reactionary men of all sorts around the world. Does that mean that “love jihad” is a white supremacist conspiracy? Can we classify it as such, when it’s a casus belli fabricated by one non-white population against another?

Nor are these tensions in any way modern. The quote at the top of this essay is from 1945. While religious divisions were exacerbated and instrumentalised by the Raj, and sowing division has been a fixture of colonial politics, the tensions were not invented by Western colonizers out of whole cloth.

Let’s recall the Red State article on the ‘Transgender Breeding Program’, which was written to reiterate a trans groomer panic. The rhetoric in that article is very reminiscent of certain myths that surround hijra, their reputation as child-stealers, and the belief that hijra must be presented with alms should they arrive to commemorate a male child’s birth, as otherwise they would abduct the baby as compensation. These beliefs were why, on the 22nd of July, 2019, a transgender woman in West Bengal was stoned to death on suspicion of being a “child-lifter”. Her name is unknown. Proof of her crimes never surfaced.

So much for ‘veneration’.

Maybe every single sin that my society has ever committed has whiteness at its heart. Perhaps colonial rule took a formerly perfectly egalitarian nation and fashioned every division its people now struggle under. We can easily check how true this is, but let us suppose for the sake of this argument that we can’t.

Even if a non-Western nation was utopia before colonialism, the fact remains—we were colonised.

The fact remains—we have to reckon with what it is, today. Now.

And today, many non-Western societies are far, far from gender-expansive. As Kyle James Rohrich details in Human Rights Diplomacy Amidst ‘World War LGBT’, many non-Western regimes are happy to call LGBT rights and LGBT advocacy a facet of ‘Western imperialism’. Not only is the idea of recognising the rights of queer people considered an “attack on traditional values”, but queer people themselves are frequently treated as a threat to the Nation, as victims of ‘Western influence’ who must now be treated as hostile entities invested in spreading ‘Western pro-LGBT propaganda’. Queer people outside the West, then, find ourselves in a double-bind, where our own cultures treat us as invaders, the vanguard of a supposed colonising force that must be expelled, while the luminaries of the Western academy… also say that trans and queer advocacy are an imperialist, colonial imposition on non-Western societies.

I guess Vladimir Putin is a queer theorist!

This rhetoric precisely mirrors how non-Western antifeminists regard women’s rights as well. Everything that could possibly be used to advocate for the plight of marginalized people outside the West is colonial and binarist and a CIA plot, so for the comfort of the non-Western patriarch and the Western intellectual alike, women like me just have to eat shit for the foreseeable future, because our oppression isn’t important enough, isn’t real enough, is too inconvenient for anyone with power or visibility or the barest shred of epistemic authority on our lives!

It’s nonsense. It’s contradictions layered atop absurdities, all touted in the name of ‘decolonialism’ and intersectionality, because heaven fucking forfend if a brown woman wants to be freed from both Western racism and homegrown patriarchy!

So no, Judith and Jules and Jack and everyone else I don’t have room or time to mention. White people did not invent gender. The concept of patrilineality and treating those who can gestate as reproductive chattel is something non-white people are perfectly capable of figuring out on our own. However inconvenient this might be for the simplistic models of the pre-modern, pre-Western, pre-Fall queer-inclusive matriarchy, we do still have to face the fucking facts. Not just because it’s true, but because the idea of a global feminism has been ground down into the fucking dirt due to the solipsism of theorists who claim to speak for Third World women without ever once considering what life is like for us, while patriarchal rule itself—due to colonialism or otherwise—remains a transnational enterprise.

The panic over falling birthrates is global. The retrenchment of male-supremacy and the spread of incel ideology is global. The instrumentalisation of trans politics as a right-wing wedge is global.

And you can’t fight it if you can’t even acknowledge that it’s not just white people doing it.

I am sorry if I seem bitter. I simply have had to endure this ahistorical prattle for a lifetime now, and I retain little patience for words that should not be taken seriously in the first place making my life harder. In a way, I do understand the fear. The hesitation. How difficult it is to grapple with the idea that perhaps women and queer people have always been reviled, in every place and time.

But I already did the speech about forging a new path even if it’s without precedent in the first book. So all I’ve got today is, wrap the pity party up already. We have shit to fix.

Conclusion: Nationalism Without Borders

My best friend met a Chinese butch at the local dyke bar the other day. There was a bit of a language barrier, but they were able to spend a pleasant evening drinking together, for the most part. They exchanged the usual pleasantries before getting into the more personal things. The butch told my friend about how her parents were accepting of her lesbianism.

That’s good, you might say, and my friend did in fact say.

To which the butch nodded, before she sighed and talked about how her mother still expected her to have kids. “Yes, fine, be a lesbian,” said her mother, “but you can’t be childless. You still owe me grandkids.”

Owe me grandkids.

White trans people don’t experience racism, if you’re still wondering. It’s just that there are many roads that lead to the same destination: of un-personing, of being decreed unworthy of or unable to further the Nation’s goals. A white trans person and a cis person of color in the West both can wield certain weapons against each other, but which weapon will be most effective depends heavily on context, on the conditions under which they meet and on the nature of their conflict. None of us is immune to reaction, or from benefiting from the reactionary systems that seek to turn us into nothing more than instruments of the ruling-class.

That’s a less comfortable answer than an absolute ranking of privilege points, I know. Too fucking bad. It’s realistic.

The principles of Nationalism are international in two ways. Firstly, in the sense that Nation-building has been one of our oldest misadventures. The desperate need to know who is one of ours and who will have your back, morphing into the violent tribalism that continues to haunt our species to this day.

Secondly, in the sense that reactionaries, as Nationalist as they may be, favor the flow of their ideology across borders, tariff-free. Hindutva fascists are in conversation with white supremacists who are in conversation with Israeli settlers and Russian ethnonationalists and religious fundamentalists, and so on and on and on.

The global resurgence of fascism is deeply rooted in the politics of male grievance. The libidinal masculinism of Silicon Valley nouveau riche clowns meeting the traditional fetishism of the zealous preacher and even the gendered anxieties of the young 20-something who desperately wants to get laid and mourns a world where he’d be guaranteed a wife and a family without putting any effort in. It is a response to the idea that women and queer people have a right to exist as equal to men, to be recognised as fully human instead of mere fodder for men’s sexual appetites.

We need to recognise it as such.

It is just as farcical to say that feminism is a solely Western fixation as it is to say that European colonists invented patriarchy. Even if the reactionary tendencies amongst those who call themselves feminists must be purged, even if there is yet to be reckoning with the Western tendency to silence non-Western voices, and even if concepts like feminism and gender liberation and queerness and transfemininity are called different things in different languages, we still need to recognise how indispensable, how crucial, how central to the fight against tyranny a global feminist consciousness is.

Because there is already a global brotherhood, and we can either keep up with it or submit to its demands.

So let us please approach the topic of gender-liberation with nuance, but without lapsing into antifeminist myths, and without diminishing the relevance of gender-oppression to every struggle. Because what you call race and queerness and disability may or may not have preceded gender, but they are all certainly inseparable from the questions of reproductive control, reproductive value and reproductive fitness that every Nationalist regime seeks to answer. Thirty years of post-feminist bullshit has been enough, and perhaps even too much.

We do not have the luxury of ignoring gender anymore.

Did your mental image of him change at all?

We’ll come back to that later.

Subscribe now

Phallogomania

We have, thus far, variously considered how social dogma becomes layered over empirically observable, tangible subjects. A “woman’s biology”, her so-called sex, may be “oriented around” gestation, but it does not naturally follow that a human being with the capacity to bear offspring must be feminine, must be subordinate and subservient and attracted to those society deems “men”, and must submit herself to be a mere cog in the regime’s natalist machinery. Nor does the absence of gestational capacity exempt anyone deemed a ‘woman’ from misogyny—in fact, this perceived ‘defect’ marks her, intensifying both scrutiny and repudiation. Many societies third-sex women who cannot be reproductively exploited, irrespective of their actual biological, chromosomal make-up, denying them the title entirely and deeming them worthy for little more than hypersexualization and violence. It is more than evident, then, that sex is itself a social designation, a (frequently nonconsensual) labeling of an individual to designate their role in societies wholly oriented around male-supremacy. Women are not karyotyped or subjected to X-Rays prior to facing misogyny; their actual anatomy factors far less into their status than advertised.

What, then, truly differentiates patriarchy’s two alleged sexes? What is the true root of the ideology of sexual difference?

This essay is an admission of an unavoidable truth: that one cannot truly discuss and fully encapsulate sex-the-ideology without reckoning with sex-the-practice. I am, of course, speaking of fucking, of copulating, of—dare I say it—intercourse.

I am not, however, speaking of all sexual practices under the sun, and certainly not a great deal of the more stigmatized ones (such as biting). There will be no serious and lengthy meditations on cunnilingus, digital stimulation, mutual masturbation, the incorporation of machinery, or indeed anything actually fun. This is not merely because sex under patriarchy is largely not fun—and not meant to be fun—but is also due to the simple fact that only one kind of sex act truly “counts” under a heterosexual regime. There is only one real sexual act, and it is this act that both constitutes the social dimension of sex as well as engenders it, sires it, in a sense.

We are, of course, speaking of penetration.

This is a topic we have visited a few times, most explicitly in Understanding Lesbophobia, but shall now give all the attention it certainly does not deserve, yet receives anyway. Penetration not with a finger or tongue or strap-on, and penetration not of the mouth or even anus, but good old-fashioned, societally-sanctioned, traditionally-approved god-fearing red-blooded patriotic peepee-goes-in-hooha penetrative sex, the kind that results in babies, if all goes well, bless.

Of course, while reproductive utility does factor prominently into this societal sexual calculus, we should be careful to not over-emphasize it. For while doing the babysex to a privately-owned wifemother is the fulfillment of a peepeehaver’s natalist, reproductive duty, as well as proof of his vaunted, valorized virility, we do live in social contexts that constantly reminds us that the fleshpole and its oft-inconvenient tendency to puff itself up is reflective of a certain runaway, uncontrollable, barely-suppressed libido. (Or at least, that’s a good enough excuse to cite when seeking to absolve a member of the Revered Sex-Caste of any sexual violence he may perpetuate.)

One can only support so many families, after all—certainly fewer families than erections—and there is always the troubling conundrum of how one can even maintain one—erection, not family—with all these darned kids running around, leaving our dear wifemother with too little energy and too many headaches. It certainly would be nice if it were possible to enjoy all that sexhaving without having to worry about such boner-killing things as “oops, pregnant again”, or “can you seriously not even watch the pot while I change the diapers?!”

As it turns out, the discardable offal with no reproductive utility has a use, after all!

Hierarchical societies that organize their social strata by degrees of dehumanization will always have pools of precarious un-persons from which the most sexually exploitable candidates can be made available to those higher up on the food chain. Whether instrumentalizing poverty, racialization, religiously-mandated inferiority, queerness, or any other stigmatizing and devaluing Mark, societies have always had their public women—or close enough—standing in sharp contrast to the respectable, hegemonic, privatisable demographics, constituting an underclass of sexual labor that is not deemed productive, nor even usually reproductive, but some … third thing.

Here is where one can “maximize their erotic delights”, as scholar Adnan Hossein has so nauseatingly put it. While societies have always stigmatized adultery—punishing women more than men, usually—they have also always tolerated it, due to how much sexual access to the gender-marginalized is cherished amongst those men free of gender. Such avenues are rife with permissivity regarding penetration, allowing penetration that is nonprocreative, recreational, and even in some cases, scandalous.

What remains constant through all this subversiveness and salacity is that singular maxim: you, who are doing the penetrating, must not be penetrated. Well, maybe you can get away with it a little, every now and then, but certainly not where anyone decent might catch wind. If you dare sport the signifiers of masculinity, of gendered personhood, of impenetrability, you cannot under any circumstance call into question the permanence of your position! Those on top must always be on top, in every sense of the term, because that is what sets them apart, assures their humanity: the ability to breed with seed. Those who aspire to penetrate without the divinely-endowed gift of the meatshaft, and those who turn their backs on that holy gift are both beneath contempt, beneath consideration, and any attempted contravention of this natural order that we are enforcing will be swiftly dealt with!

Sex-the-ideology thus has an underlying simplicity in much the same way as sex-the-act does, a boiled-down, reductive threshold of acceptability underneath all the modesty, all the moralizing, all the complexities that have sprung up around its enforcement: you’re only a person if you possess a penis, and use that penis to penetrate those un-people it’s socially acceptable to fuck. We are, therefore, all designated either penetrators, who possess the full glory of humanity and agency, or penetrated, who are marked for consumption and by that marking rendered subhuman.

In other words: if you were born to be fucked, or like to be fucked, you don’t deserve rights.

Let’s all just sit with that for a moment.

Because it’s every bit as fucking stupid as it sounds.

“So which one of you takes it up the ass?”

A distressing amount of queerphobia sort of snaps into place once you consider penetrability as the lens through which gender is determined. Questions such as “So who’s the man and who’s the woman?” have always been amusing to gay couples—after the fact, excruciatingly mortifying in the moment—because how absurd it is to ask that about a same-sex relationship! Except, that’s not actually what’s being asked, insofar as the questioner understands that they’re looking at two people who cannot perceptibly be sorted into a heterosexual dyad. What’s really being asked is, “So which one of you gets railed, and which one does the railing?”

You know, that common ice-breaker.

This is why heterosexual dynamics appear so quaint to us Enlightened Queers. We do not attach any power or status or verticality to something so mundane as sex acts! We do not consider our value or demeanor or heaven forfend, our roles to be defined by how we fuck! We’re busy having sex, not gender! Gender is for the heteros, honey.

I mean … Well sure, we do have the occasional little in-joke about how tops are like this, bottoms are like that. And, um, sure, we do tend to associate topping with masculinity, with dominance and assertiveness and ‘taking the lead’ in intimate situations. I suppose the idea of ‘top’ as the one who penetrates and ‘bottom’ as the one who receives is in fact widely-accepted lingo, even amongst lesbians who cannot easily class certain sex acts they engage in within this schema (and believe me, during the lesbian sex wars, they tried). Also, hm, I do suppose we tend to associate submissiveness, femininity, and a certain desire for objectification … with … bottoms …

Oh, no!

As Judith Butler famously said in Gender Trouble, “You can’t escape patriarchy, dollface.” (I haven’t read Gender Trouble.) Even amongst queers who play with gender, who consider the taboo and profane to simply be toys to pull out during intercourse, that play-acting is only legible to others insofar as it references or pays homage to or parodies an existing, established social dynamic. When we declare our selves, identities, and presentation, when we take to the stage, our gender-performances—no matter how off-script, how improvised, how avant-garde and requiring audience participation—must still be in a language the audience can comprehend, because how else are you supposed to have a conversation?

Sadly, when in Rome, we do as Romans do.

A quick look at David Valentine’s history of gay-lib and trans-lib separation or Esther Newton’s Mother Camp would disabuse us of more than a few notions of Queer Enlightenment. Gay men’s communities were rather unmistakably gendered, with a certain stigma against effeminacy and a certain veneration of the masculine, even as the effeminacy of the penetrable was necessary to define the masculinity of the penetrators by contrast. Even where the subversiveness of gender-play was valued, as amongst drag performers, there was still a certain hierarchy, a disdain expressed for those who “refused to take off the wig”, who “took the performance too seriously” and ‘crossdressed’ full time. The drag queen held the street queen and the hormone queen in low regard, while masculinity remained the prize, worthy of top billing even in these putatively non-heterosexual erotic economies.

It would also be quaint to consider gay subcultures—and their associated transsexual subcultures—to be entirely free of gendered anxieties, especially given how the politics of respectability feature in gay civil rights struggles. Notions of ‘bottoming leading to effeminacy’ prevail both intracommunally and in straight society, with penetrability almost being viewed as a “gateway” to the surrendering of masculinity, of relinquishing one’s manhood. These anxieties are reflected just as much in the criminalization of gayness, with some legal regimes historically only penalizing the ‘receiver’, while continuing to presume the top ‘straight’, or ‘still a man’. Even the term sodomite, as with the terms faggot, fairy, queen, poof—they all originated as stigmatizing terms for the penetrable ‘male’.

Gayness, then, both within and without, has often been conceptualized as “addicted-to-taking-it-up-the-ass disease”, with transsexuality frequently regarded as a particularly extreme version of the malady.

Such notions culminated in the 70s and 80s push for gay men to “come out of the closet” as men, to affirm that gays could participate in hegemonic masculinity, to leave behind the gender-threat of the screaming queens and streetwalkers. By donning the classy, affluent, manly, manful, fruity-but-only-on-the-weekends-you-know-how-it-is-sugar mask, favor was curried with the heterosexual regime. Gayness was not a disqualifier from citizenship; even gays could uphold and reinforce reproductive norms; a gay man could be a man, not a faggot.

Good for him.

The lesbian version of this took a rather different form, given the way lesbians are typically perceived as women, and so situated somewhat differently with respect to masculinity. While (sadly, tragically, regrettably, heartbreakingly) there was no widespread hierarchization of dyke communities into a butch-archy, the academic lesbian feminist crusade against ‘BDSM’ and supposedly immoral sexual practices amongst lesbians constructed a rather different stigma.

Indeed, even though they are known principally for trafficking in troonmadness, luminaries no less esteemed than Janice Raymond and Sheila Jeffreys used to babble on about butch-femme relationships as “heterosexual cosplay”, about putting a stop to sadomasochistic sex that was ‘depoliticizing’ lesbian identity and, horror of horrors, turning it into a “lifestyle” that “re-sexualizes” women, making them “worship” the dildo as a “symbol of male power”.

You know, it’s okay to have a list of limits without trying to out-dyke everyone about it.

There is something truly perverse here, and it’s not the strap-ons. While billing themselves as ‘radical feminists’, Jeffreys, Raymond, and those of their ilk instead chose to reinforce stigmas against female—and especially lesbian—desire, reinventing Catholic guilt for feminists. In their vilification of butches as “male cosplayers”—a prototypical version of the kinds of rhetoric that would be deployed to defame transmasculinity—there is no recognition of how those sexed as women are punished for adopting masculine signifiers, no acknowledgement of the kinds of regendering violence that they are subjected to. Such ‘radfems’ are the vanguard of a politics characterized by an utter failure of analysis, in favor of pointless moralizing and the unproductive policing of how people like to fuck.

Yet there is some value in their words. After all, sometimes it’s good to remember that the people who consider me a fake lesbian discoursed themselves into thinking kinky sex with butches is a sin.

Penetration, then, remains no less a fixture and fixation of queer erotics than it does heterosexual ones. Whether it’s gay men desperately holding onto hegemonic manhood by their fingernails or “ex”-Catholics shouting that you’re making Lesbian Jesus cry—and in both cases, libeling working-class, gender-bending queer identities to do so—the engendering power of penetration is something we remain subconsciously aware of, even if we struggle to directly name it as a principle determiner of one’s social sex. The associations formed between dominance, masculine presentation, aggression, agency, and penetrating, as well as those formed between submission, effeminacy, passivity, objectification, and being penetrated, remain indelible and invisible, but still palpable, almost tangible.

To sum it up in the style of the greatest anonymous philosopher of the digital age: “Taking it up the ass makes you a woman, faggot”.

Transpenetrable

If penetrability was a clarifying lens for parsing some hidden aspects of queer politics and marginalization, it is positively revelatory when applied to transphobia and especially transmisogyny. The recurrent trope of deception features heavily in anti-trans propaganda, from the ridiculous notion of ‘men dressing up as women’ to prey on women in the loos, or the ‘trans panic’ defense instrumentalized by men to literally get away with murdering us on a plea to temporary insanity, induced by being ‘tricked’ into sex with transsexual. What engenders this particular anxiety, to the point that trans women become synonymous with threat, with dishonesty, and so thoroughly excluded from humanity or compassion?

The principle crime trans women stand accused of is adopting the signifiers of the feminine—the penetrable—while still being (allegedly) in possession of a phallus, that tool of penetration that sets men above all others. The actual presence or absence of one, the actual genital configuration of any given trans woman is immaterial, for the most relevant phallus is the imagined one, the one cis people believe us to possess when they think of us and declare us perverts.

It’s why the most common question we receive from ignorant and morbidly curious cis people is some version of “Have you had the surgery?” The Surgery, you know the one, the one that makes you penetrable in the ‘proper’ way, the one that finally, actually makes you a woman, because retaining the ability to penetrate categorically bars your from womanhood no matter how much you are seen, treated, dismissed, decried, and denigrated as a woman in your day-to-day life.

On the other end of the spectrum, these fevered fantasies are also the source of our fetishization, our characterization as “the best of both worlds”. A frustratingly common experience for trans women is the reduction of us to parts, the carving up of our bodies and beings into an assemblage of sex characteristics for cis people to try and experiment with in new and exciting combinations. We are sometimes seen as “starter packs” for queerness, as an exotic flavor of gender that might possess some frightening new anatomy that a cis person has heretofore been terrified to interact with, but also bearing some “familiar territory”, a gateway to ‘ease’ oneself through, to explore before deciding to commit.

In too many cases is the trans woman constructed as a dispenser of “safe” penetration, almost as much as she is considered a “safe”, feminized “masculinity” to ‘break down’ through penetration. Her own feelings about her genitalia—whatever genitalia she may even have—are secondary to the projective fantasies and expectations that are imposed on her, most of which reduce her to “man-lite”. She is able to be vilified and deemed sexually improper whether she refuses to penetrate or admits she enjoys it, a perversion of the natural order in either case, whose abjection ensures that no matter whether she fucks or is fucked, she usually does so in a state of disempowerment.

That, then, is the dehumanizing fantasy central to our fetishized sexual appeal: a fantasy of penetration tamed, whether we mean coercing it out of an effeminized object and thus defanging its dominant connotations, or diminishing a ‘masculine’, male personhood by subjecting it to the degradation that is almost inherent to being fucked under patriarchy, where the one fucking you is always primed to extract superiority, agency, and autonomy from the act.

It is also the core of the singular fixation on our sexuality, our fuckability, our supposed sexual danger or our hypersexualized vulnerability to exploitation. Cis people, when they think of us, simply cannot stop thinking of our sex—of how we engage in it and who and what we engage in it with, of how we distort and warp their basic assumptions about our collective sexed reality—and then blame us for their extreme reactions of disgust or desire (or frequently, both). To paraphrase Dworkin, trans women are sex, are inseparable from sex, because we are reduced to nothing but our capacity for risky, exotic, transgressive, boundary-breaking, taboo, forbidden, unholy sex, by cis people who call us sickos because they can’t stop thinking about our dicks.

Cool.

Sexual Lib-eration

You know, it’s almost funny how important shame is.

Grand theories of oppression and structural forces, while useful in conceptualizing the machinery of mundane evils, sometimes render the picture a bit too clean, a bit too clinical. Yes, there are incentives, just as there is power, labor, and unequal material conditions that enable some to secure these more easily than others. There is also, however, messiness and contradiction and ambiguity, a dozen-and-a-half failure states and fudged boundaries and imperfections that absolute decrees of dichotomous sex and heterosexual primacy paper over unrigorously. Sometimes, anything that makes a man’s dick hard is a woman. Sometimes, that same erection is a source of uncertainty, of destabilization, of questions that a rigidly-delineated patriarchal ideology does not have satisfying or reassuring answers to.

Shame is the shallow pool where trannies are drowned.

Those trans panic defenses are used by lovers and boyfriends, you know. By men who know perfectly well that the woman they’re sleeping with is trans, who have slept with her before, even, or specifically sought out a trans woman to bed, but whose internal discord about their own identity and sexuality becomes violently externalized (as is common for men), or who fear their amorous activities being discovered by friends or family and so elect to capitalize on transfeminine disposability instead of sending a fucking break-up text. I think of these men in the same vein as I think of those men who kill their families and then themselves—usually when a battered wifemother tries to leave—and I wonder, yet again, why the violence they commit must spill beyond the only deserving target.

To be penetrable is to be a receptacle for the sins of the impenetrable, a vessel for their grief and turmoil and especially, especially their despair and rage.

There’s plenty of shame to go around for the penetrable too, more than enough. The shame of being a feminist and guiltily enjoying being demeaned and tainted and ruined, of feeling like you’re letting down the sisterhood with every paroxysmal thrust. The shame of batting a hand away only to have ‘tease’ spat at you, wondering whether you were, in fact, a little too flirty, a little too provocative, whether you did in fact send mixed signals—didn’t you, really, ask for it? The shame of expressing desire only to be told you’re disgusting for it, the shame of failing to be the proper, modest woman you’re supposed to be, or the shame of being too prudish and frigid and puritanical instead of the proper, sexually-liberated woman you’re supposed to be, or just the fucking bone-deep never-ending inexhaustible shame of being born not in the wrong body, but the wrong fucking society, a society where there’s just no right way for you to be.

That pool might be a bit deeper than initially advertised.

I worry sometimes that over the past few decades, feminism at some point stopped being about agitation and action and advocacy and analysis, and became a politics of how best to live with ourselves. Of how to manage the shame that comes with being—what, a woman, an object, a victim, a temptress, an inspiration, a girlboss, a goddess, a mother, a pedestalized muse—being a lot of things, but never enough. I have witnessed the development of feminist politics without much explanatory value, but with a lot of comfort, a lot of telling each other, “We’re doing fine, we’re not doing anything wrong, we’re not evil for having desires. It’s not a betrayal of anyone or anything if I’m an unrepentant slut or a devout of the faith or an aspiring housewife. It’s my choice.”

There’s more value in that than some of us are willing to admit.

Liberal-feminist dreams of empowerment through intercourse did not catch on because they were without merit or appeal. Our desires, our libidos, our primal urges that are a reflexive, unconscious expression of what we refuse to admit we truly want, are aspects of ourselves that we have been taught to be constantly at war with. It is so, so very tempting, then, to reach out and join hands and ask for a collective reckoning with the stigma and shame of sex, to ask that this most intimate practice, most intimate expression of love and companionship and fealty and togetherness be rendered finally free of society’s judgment.

The idea is really, really compelling.

Unfortunately.

Unfortunately, the stakes are not the same for everyone.

While ‘shame’ is indeed relevant—one might even say central—to sexual politics, it is also obfuscating. For the shame that the penetrable struggle with is the shame tied to navigating a series of contradictory directives that determine the sum total of our worth. Are we loose, too-freely available for use by any and every Thomas, Henry, or especially Richard? Or are we too unavailable, too difficult to make submit, and thus too jealously guarding an ultimately common resource—fuckability—that can easily be acquired elsewhere, so not worth the trouble? These questions hang over us because even in societies that purport to have moved past the equivocation of our humanity to our sexual availability, and to our management of the “correct” level of access to our bodies, peeking ‘under the hood’ reveals that pretense to be little more than theater.

Meanwhile, the penetrators are less concerned with destigmatizing sex and more with securing their position as sexual consumers. Their shame stems from wishing to ward off any possible similarity or association with those they are meant to use. Become too much like us, lose too much of that fleshpole-swinging swagger that assures one’s place in the hierarchy of “who inserts the dongle”, and suddenly they face that unenviable fate that they have relegated the rest of us to. The shame that gets trannies killed is about patriarchal mores and deep-set insecurities and the struggle to reconcile proscribed desires with self-image, but it’s also a shame that manifests as violence specifically because any ‘temptation’, any ‘deviation’ from the strictures of impenetrability are to be purged from those who wish to continue navigating the world as dominant, as autonomous—as people.

No matter how much we try to reclaim the word ‘slut’, we ultimately still wrestle with social norms where the burdens of sexual access—and condemnation for it—reside entirely with those deemed penetrable, whose very presence is invitation, whose very existence is a risk of violation.

You can’t escape patriarchy, dollface.

Conclusion: Yes, I Wear Pants

Penetrability, then, is distinct from heterosexuality (despite being derived from it) because it is the connective tissue linking a series of associations we all bear in mind when navigating the sociality of sex. Masculine presentation is correlated with male ‘identification’, ‘male’ anatomy, dominance in both personality and intimacy, and a presumption of impenetrability during intercourse. The disruption of these correlations gives rise to a series of dynamics and anxieties that typify an expansive notion of “queerness”, insofar as it is understood to be a subversion, disruption, or contravention of patriarchal sexual norms.

Penetrability is what makes the idea of ‘pegging’, of a masculine, manly, manful man ‘taking it’, into a ‘slippery slope’ to effeminization and faggotry and oh my stars, maybe even transsexual woman-identification. The importance of securing one’s impenetrability, as well as the ease with which it can be stripped away, is what makes our heterosexual male bottom from the beginning of this essay such a macabre curiosity. While such an individual can—and likely even does—exist, he is what an insufferable scholar might call “queered” by his, ahem, ‘inversion’ of the sexual role he is meant to embody, even if he looks like Henry Cavill and gets railed by supermodels.

To allow yourself ‘to be used’, like a woman, is to risk surrendering all that makes you part of the dominant sex-caste.

Conversely, penetrability is why sexual absurdities are replicated in queer communities that are ostensibly free of them, making something as simple as a non-stone butch invite ridicule from queer theorists like Jack Halberstam. In Female Masculinity, Halberstam firmly equivocates butch identity with ‘stone butch’ identity—that is, a masculine (implicitly cissexual, non-transfem) lesbian who is a touch-me-not and only engages in intercourse by penetrating their partner. In this context, a penetrable butch appears as a question:

“... the question is not really why would a butch not want to be touched but rather how do butches switch between being masculine on the streets and female in the sheets?”

Here, ‘masculine’ means to present masculine, while ‘female in the sheets’ is a too-clever-by-half euphemism for being penetrated. I frankly think such an existence is not contradictory in the slightest, but anxieties around penetrability do not inform my entire sense of self.

Not that transfem identity or existence is “beyond” the binary of penetrability—far from it. Though our sexual objectification as subversive oddities is rooted in being penetrable when we’re not “supposed” to be, or in penetrating with the signifiers of those who “shouldn’t”, the transmedicalist gatekeeping of our transition care is very rigorously oriented around producing the perfect, penetrable subject. Historically, we must be hyperfeminine, hyperhetero, and hyper-gung-ho about our desire to be traditional homemakers and decorative ornaments for masculine, manful, manly, impenetrable men, if we are to stand any chance of medical institutions permitting our transitions.

It’s why the wider world knows me first as “cross-dressing pervert”, not “lesbian”.

This is the point in the essay where I dazzle and titillate my readers in equal measure through a salacious confession of just how many boundaries I transgress and how many norms I queer through sheer proximity, but if you’ll pardon the expression: I just don’t give a fuck. The status of my genitals, relationships, methods of intercourse or the people I engage in it with can be as varied and exotic or banal and vanilla as you please. What practices of intimacy I actually engage in do not matter one whit to a wider culture that has never cared about individual queers, and I remain, no matter what I do, a curiosity, an exhibit, a freakshow for cissexist, heterosexual perspectives to project all their fantasies and fears onto.

No perfectly executed move by me is going to snap the patriarchy in half, no matter how much I will it so.

No, the scourge of penetrability is historical, long-reaching, and firmly embedded into the innermost recesses of our psyches and puns. There is no surgery I can get for decoupling penetration from aggression and agency and domination, or for washing away the devaluation of the penetrated. That part of trans existence—of being women, of being sex, of being gender—we just have to live with.

Unless.

Unless, unless, unless.

Good intentions only go so far. Sticks and stones may break our bones, but whips and chains have their limitations, too. Combating shame is crucial, relevant, important—but it’s not paramount.

You also have to do the work.

To organize. To recognize who is invested in your subjugation and who isn’t. To capitalize on opportunities to build solidarities, coalitions, and movements, without centering everything on individual choice or individual trauma. To confront—legally, socially, and politically—those who seek to exploit and extract from you, and to build a world where this entire meditation on penetrability becomes an anachronism.

I really, really hope we get there. If not in this lifetime, then the next.

Because I just want to enjoy being a dyke, y’all. The rest of this shit is such a buzzkill.

Subscribe now

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay will appear in my next book, Brown/Trans/Les. All the essays published up to ‘The Question Has An Answer’ have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts, and in both paperback and hardcover from various vendors. Please inquire at your local bookstore if you are interested!

Trans/Rad/Fem is a reader-supported publication. Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you are able, and would like to support my feminist writing.

There is a specter haunting feminism: insubstantial, ghostly pale, and—so goes the charge—one highly resistant to exorcism. Too long has this ruling-class pastime, borne of diabolically idle minds and idler spirits, threatened to undermine the solidarity of true, revolutionary movements, seeking to sow the seeds of separatism such that sexed solipsism supersedes syncretic struggle! Splitting sister from brother, wife from husband, and maiden from suitor, the forked-tongued feminist flits about in the garb of a noble liberator, pouring her racist, bourgeois, and essentialist poison into any unwitting, innocent ear she’s lent, corrupting the minds of young women with her preposterous ideas.

For the feminist is always white, affluent, and biologically-deterministic, an individual that does not truly suffer in any meaningful way, yet consistently and exuberantly cites her sex to obfuscate her privileges, exaggerate her marginalization, and deny her capacity to harm. In doing so she aims to engender a false consciousness, concocting an ersatz sorority between herself and the actually oppressed women whose subjugation she benefits from, and is invested in perpetuating.

Of course, women are actually oppressed—no one denies that—but marginalized women (a category mutually exclusive with the feminist, of course) have real actual oppression to combat, unlike the silly sex-antagonism that feminists concern themselves with. The racialized woman aspires to the dismantling of white supremacy, the proletarian woman an end to capitalist hegemony, and the colonized woman longs for the emancipation of all her people! Meanwhile, feminists—being the ultimate beneficiaries of all these systems of exploitation—wish for marginalized women to quarrel endlessly with men of their own class and race and nation. Marginalized women are thus enticed to ally with their oppressors— that is, feminists. Their fellow men, naturally, have always taken their concerns seriously—which is to say, guided them to focus on the issues that affect them all, rather than quibble over frivolities such as domestic confinement and reproductive labor and sexual violence, which affect only some of them—impossible to tell which of them, even.

Unlike the feminist, the actually oppressed marginalized woman understands her place in the movement. She nobly supports her comrades, magnanimously upholds the common banner, and places the collective’s concerns above her own with divinely-feminine grace. She is a mother to the movement—and wife and lover and scullery-maid, too—happy in her place and overjoyed to do the thankless, joyless, uncompensated, unrecognized, and uncredited work that must be done.

Could there theoretically be feminists that are not manipulative, deceitful mouthpieces of the ruling-classes? Perhaps someday, there may yet be. Today, however, there is no such thing as a non-white, non-Western, non-rich, non-cis, non-ugly feminist, as surely as there does not exist a non-misandrist lesbian. Do not fall for their propaganda, comrades, and do not shirk your duty to the cause by presuming that your gender matters more than any other identity through which men can lay claim to you. Do not forget who your true enemy is: other women.

Subscribe now

Part One: The Three Intersectionalities

In 1989, legal theorist and feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex, establishing the most groundbreaking social theory that no one seems to have read. Many, many people want to give the impression that they have read it, however, so that they may position themselves as experts on the topic to others who have read even less. The motivations for this co-optation vary, but can be organized into three broad camps: conservative ‘intellectual’, liberal commentator, and leftist iconoclast.

For the conservative, the motive is straightforward epistemic vandalism, a twisting and redefinition of a term to obfuscate its actual purpose and undermine progressive social movements. The word “woke” and the field of “critical race theory”—ironically, another school where Crenshaw is a towering figure—are examples of such discursive defacing (and it is no accident that every phrase under consideration here stems from Black activism and scholarship). In a 2019 Vox article entitled hilariously as the “Intersectionality Wars”, conservative ‘intellectuals’ no less illustrious than Ben Shapiro himself describe intersectionality as a “new caste system”, intended to place cis, straight, white men “at the bottom”.

While the inadvertent admission that there must have existed an old caste system for intersectionality to supplant is revealing, the blatant dishonesty of the statements border on parodic. Social theories cannot with a single stroke undo centuries of disenfranchisement, exploitation, and hollowing-out, any more than one can get Ben Shapiro to quit yapping for just two minutes. Even without an understanding of intersectionality, it should be obvious that this perceived epistemic threat—this idea that the most dominant voices will somehow be drowned out and be left at the mercy of the most silenced—is nothing but yet another reactionary persecution fantasy, an attempt to cast any attempts at elucidating the plight of the marginalized as violence against not the hegemony, but those of the hegemonic demographic.

It is a strategy that will continue to be deployed for as long as it remains effective.

Meanwhile, the liberal is eager to take up the mantle of intersectionality, even if she is somewhat fuzzy on what exactly taking that mantle up entails. So eager and enthusiastic is she, in fact, that she insists on having always championed it, claiming that her feminism and antiracism and general social project has always been intersectional! Never mind the why and when of intersectionality’s popularization, because even when she wasn’t using the word, the intent was always there. After all, look at how lucrative—that is to say, generalizable—the concept is! Any assertion can spawn a critique to a response to a subheading, by highlighting just how lacking in intersectionality it is. Does your paper or project account for race and sex and ability and sexuality and affluence and immigrant status? It does? Well, what about religion, caste, bilinguality, education level, height, geographic location, and weather on Tuesdays? Keep ‘em coming—there’s grants to secure!

After all, was that not intersectionality’s greatest innovation—the construction of tier lists and rankings of oppressed identities? Forget regimes and the hierarchies they instantiate! Instead, draw up your character sheet, where each axis of marginalization represents a “debuff” or “deviation” from the state of “default human”, while listing every “privilege” that you must acknowledge and repent for. This is surely the approach that Crenshaw intended and certainly not something she critiqued the very legal system for in her original paper! By tallying these oppression points up, we can determine who has the most epistemic authority to speak on any and every topic, on account of being The Most Intersectional. Finally, the kyriarchy is over.

Of course, anyone with that high a rank in Intersectionality surely couldn’t also have the most right to speak. If they have a platform, can speak English, or are just too articulate—why, those are all privileges that bar them from being the most intersectional person in the room! Indeed, anyone can have internalized misogyny or racism or ableism or any other kind of bigotry, and saying the wrong things or otherwise challenging the material roots of systems of oppression proves that they likely are too academic, eloquent, and frankly not intersectional enough! Intersectionality tells us, after all, that men are oppressed too, that men of color cannot uphold patriarchy because white supremacy disempowers them—never mind what they do in order to secure that lost masculinity! bell hooks who? Anyway, it would probably be best if someone more qualified to speak on intersectional matters spoke up on behalf of the Actual Most Intersectional and Oppressed Person, who of course is too oppressed to even be present in the room.

That was the brilliant insight that Ben Shapiro missed—no one can wield intersectionality as a cudgel quite like white people can.

However, all this talk of intersectionality in the mainstream has proven that it has already been recuperated by the bourgeois academy and liberal establishment, irrespective of whether or not its tenets are being accurately understood or represented. The leftist, therefore, remains unmoved by all these silly revisionist distractions, all these identitarian and idealist social constructs that serve only to clutter up Marx—I mean, Mao—or Lenin, or perhaps Kropotkin, if you’re not a filthy statist? Look, it’s polluting the purity of someone’s theory, and we’ll figure out exactly whose, roughly around the time the state withers away, so long as we stick to the five-year plans.

In the meantime, we cannot let identity politics compromise solidarity by creating false antagonisms where none exist among the working class, a historically homogenous entity with no internal contradictions whatsoever. Myopic focus on oppressor/oppressed dichotomies hinder us from recognizing that our true enemy remains the capitalist class, and we only need to disseminate the Perfectly Persuasive and True Science of Socialism to snap literally anyone out of their identification with bourgeois ideologies, so long as they are proletarian! No proletarian has ever materially benefited from or remained invested in the oppression of another proletarian, of course, and no ruling-class worth its salt has ever sown divisions among the masses that prove to be more enduring and persuasive than simple material interest!

Oh, except intersectionality. That one’s definitely a CIA plot, which I can prove with this image of Crenshaw standing next to Hillary Clinton.

In any case, we can all agree on one thing—we all know what intersectionality is, understand it perfectly, and don’t talk about it in a manner that makes me want to claw my own face off.

Part Two: Just Read the Damn Paper

So, after all of that, what is intersectionality, really? What truth about interlocking systems of oppression does it reveal, and how precisely can we incorporate it in analyses of overlapping identities and marginalizations?

Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex walks the reader through three specific cases to illustrate the multidimensionality of Black women’s experiences, in the context of antidiscrimination law. Crenshaw shows us how courts are happy to apply inconsistent and indeed contradictory logics in service not of American jurisprudence, but American reaction, the American regime of racialization and patriarchy and settler-colonial logics.

In DeGraffenreid v General Motors, the district court rejected the plaintiffs’ attempt to bring a suit alleging employment discrimination against Black women. Despite the fact that General Motors did not hire a single Black woman prior to 1964, and all Black women hired after 1970 were deprived of their jobs in a seniority-based layoff, the suit was rejected on the grounds that GM did hire white women (therefore, could not be accused of sex discrimination) and also hired Black men (which meant there was no evidence of race discrimination).

Most gallingly, the court stated that the plaintiffs “should not be allowed to combine statutory remedies to create a new ‘super remedy’”. The audacity of this assertion is best illustrated by the court’s own admission that Black women could be discriminated against on the basis of race or sex, even as it alleged that it was somehow absurd for them to claim both. There is a perfect awareness here that Black women can be injured in ways that either white women or Black men cannot be, but the specter of a “super-protected” class is invoked to deny them any relief at all.

After all, imagine if there was a class of person accorded special privileges in the US-American legal system—how out of the ordinary that would be!

This is a conclusion that stands in stark contrast to the decisions examined in the two following cases, one a case of sex discrimination and the other a case of race discrimination. In DeGraffenreid, it was found that Black women were similar enough to white women and Black men that discrimination against them, specifically, could not be established in the absence of discrimination against either preceding class. However, Moore v Hughes Helicopter, Inc and Payne v Travenol both concluded that Black women were too different from either white women or Black men to be the representative plaintiffs in cases of either sex or race discrimination!

Taken together, we can observe how Black women are denied relief based on their alleged sameness or difference to other demographics. Either they are too similar to (for example) other unharmed women to establish any particular harms against them on the basis of sex, or they are too distinct from other women to be considered truly representative of the wider category. Crenshaw, here, highlights how these opportunistic logics are oriented not around legal or logical consistency, but rather are the thinnest rationalizations available to reinforce Black women’s particular state of marginality. Further, they illustrate a dilemma that Black women are faced with both legally and socially, in courtrooms and activism and social movements: to ‘declare allegiance’ to their race or their sex, to claim injury as women or as Black people, but never both.

Black women, and racialized women more generally, have the particularized harms they face as both women and racialized people invisibilized, an epistemic injustice that is rooted in denying how the multiplicity of their marginalization intensifies their precarity and the violences they face.

Crenshaw’s firm, uncompromising assertion is this: we shouldn’t have to choose. We shouldn’t have to subdivide aspects of our identity to decide which is the ‘most’ injured, the ‘most’ relevant to the current situation, because at no point are we ever just women, or just racialized, or even just lesbians, disabled, working-class, Jewish, etc. Every injury we sustain is impacted by the multiplicity of our identities and experiences because that is how we exist in the world—not as an assemblage of discrete identities but as singular, whole people, whose marginalization both resembles the bigotry faced by those less-marginalized, and is also uniquely intensified by the gestalt of our marginalizations.

Intersectionality, then, is a revolutionary theory that asks us to reckon with the reality of the multiply-marginalized woman on her terms, rather than picking and choosing the parts of her that are most useful or convenient to us. It uncompromisingly asserts that in order to effectively advocate for anyone, we must ensure that we are advocating for and listening to the most marginalized amongst us (who is usually a woman), instead of aiding in her epistemic burial.

And ever since its publication, no one has forgiven Crenshaw for making that point.

Interlude: No Intersectionality For Women

If you understand intersectionality, its repeated diminishment and co-optation to serve the ends of anyone but the most-marginalized is truly hysteria-inducing to witness. Anecdotal though my experiences are, time and time again every feminist I know, whether white or not, whether trans or not, whether queer or not, has related the same story that I do: of being called “white feminist”, “TERFy”, or non-intersectional for stating that male-supremacy animates patriarchy, or otherwise stating that men exploit women.

Dominance feminism in particular—which is the central radical feminist assertion of patriarchal society being founded upon the subjugation of women-as-a-class, by men-as-a-class—is frequently decried as ‘essentialist’, and consequently as ‘incompatible’ with intersectionality. Of the two charges levied against it, the first tends to be that regarding all women as a unified demographic with shared class interests elides the many contradictions that exist amongst women: principally race, but also class, ability, sexuality, and more. As an example, implying that women of color share interests with white women is an anti-intersectional act—supposedly—that erases how white women benefit from their racial privileges at the expense of women of color.

Sealing the deal, the second charge against dominance feminism is that it papers over the cases where women are privileged over men, once more principally deploying race to make the argument. To deny that affluent white women oppress working-class Black men, as dominance feminism—supposedly—does, is to deny a fundamental social reality of US-American society, to instrumentalize sex for reactionary purposes and perpetuate harmful stereotypes of “male threat” against men of color that have been used to justify violence and carceralism against them since the very inception of the United States.

(Astute readers, at this point, might be arching their brows and itching to ask questions, such as “Wait, what about working-class Black women? What about patriarchal societies that aren’t or precede the United States?” That is not important right now. We are demonstrating why feminism is bad.)

By demonstrating these deficiencies, we have conclusively proved that dominance feminism is a bad theory: it fails to grapple with nuanced analyses that illustrate why women of color do not share gendered interests with white women, and intersectional analyses that account for racialized men. (Those who might be asking how ‘racialized man’ is an intersectional identity—what other marginalization is their racialization intersecting with, in this example?—are surely non-intersectional in their own right.) We therefore cannot trust any feminist theory that insists that all men oppress all women, as dominance and radical feminisms obviously(?) do. To do so would be to reify the oppressive logics being neglected to advance a sex-essentialist agenda, and would be colonial and white-supremacist and transphobic and bourgeois and worse!

Truly, no more infallibly compelling argument has ever been made.

I must confess that when I began to conceptualize this essay, I had consigned myself to arguing my case on largely autoethnographic merits, to forefront personal experience and brace for the eventual charges that I was exaggerating a rare reactionary tendency, or generalizing too much from my own accounts. Imagine my delight, then, when I came across a 2010 paper that not only points to these discursive tendencies in both academic and activist settings, but also argues vehemently that this is a misuse of intersectionality theory. The author definitively states that the alleged incompatibility between dominance feminist paradigms and intersectionality is not merely exaggerated, but outright incorrect, and places an undue, unfair burden on feminist theories that other social paradigms, such as antiracism, are not expected to answer for. That—I dare infer—the very charge of ‘essentialism’ is being misapplied for grotesquely antifeminist ends!

Strong claims, all. Hopefully, whoever made them can back up the assertion of understanding intersectionality better than most others, even many academics!

Part Three: That’s Not What ‘Essentialism’ Means

I am of course referring to the 2010 paper, Close Encounters of Three Kinds: On Teaching Dominance Feminism and Intersectionality, authored by Kimberlé Crenshaw. In it, Crenshaw argues for the saliency of intersectionality as a feminist theory, one entirely compatible with the social-constructivist radical feminism of Catherine MacKinnon.

“Listeners often register surprise that MacKinnon would occupy any constructive space in the conceptual universe of intersectionality. I sometimes push the envelope even further by suggesting that her controversial essay From Practice to Theory, or What Is a White Woman Anyway? is among my favorite MacKinnon essays to teach.”

Here, Crenshaw takes us through three ‘encounters’ with MacKinnon. Her appreciation and enthusiasm for MacKinnon’s contributions to both legal theory and feminism is infectious, and her candid discussion of how this radical feminism has influenced and intersected with her own work is, ultimately, unsurprising. We are told how Demarginalizing touches upon MacKinnon’s critiques of feminist paradigms that advocate women’s equality on the basis of our sameness to men, set against arguments that emphasize women’s difference.

“MacKinnon argued persuasively that sameness and difference were merely different sides of the same coin.”

In both cases, “men are the standard”, the default by which all other ‘deviations’ in one’s humanity is judged. Where MacKinnon asks why women must hew to a standard set by men, why our humanity is contingent on that which men find worthy of recognition, Crenshaw reiterates the question for the case of Black female plaintiffs. Why must they be judged based on how similar they are to Black men or white women, and why—Crenshaw notes pointedly—do any differences preclude Black women from representing all women?

For this is one of the more insidious applications of intersectionality, which has been scrutinized and used to call the whole theory into question, but happens to be a practice that Crenshaw has critiques of too: the siloing—the segregation, even—of Black women’s concerns into their own box that does not meaningfully overlap with that of other women. That Black women face unique issues does not mean their interests are wholly distinct from that of less-marginalized women, merely that they are more vulnerable, and require unique considerations that are frequently overlooked. Intersectionality is an argument for forefronting the most-marginalized, not regarding them as wholly distinct from groups they do in fact share interests with. Notably, there is less separatism when it comes to discussing Black people’s interests broadly in antiracist discourses, but it is absolutely rampant in feminist discussions and criticisms of feminism.

Interestingly, What is a White Woman Anyway? shares and expresses this concern:

“There is nothing biologically necessary about rape, as Mechelle Vinson made abundantly clear when she sued for rape as unequal treatment on the basis of sex. And, as Lillian Garland saw, and made everyone else see, it is the way society punishes women for reproduction that creates women's problems with reproduction, not reproduction itself. Both women are Black. This only supports my suspicion that if a theory is not true of, and does not work for, women of color, it is not really true of, and will not work for, any women, and that it is not really about gender at all. The theory of the practice of Mechelle Vinson and Lillian Garland, because it is about the experience of Black women, is what gender is about.” [Emphasis mine.]

Catherine MacKinnon, it would seem, has read the damn paper.

Another way in which MacKinnon’s work enhances rather than detracts from the thesis in Demarginalizing is through an observation she makes about reverse-discrimination suits, brought by white men in affirmative action cases. It is obvious here that white men cannot represent all men, or all white people, because non-white men and white women alike benefit from affirmative action programs. Nevertheless, their ‘compound reverse-discrimination’ claims are not merely humored by courts, but are not even identified as grievances specific to white men, or cast as an attempt to form a “super-protected” class combining statutory remedies! Preferential treatment, it would seem, only causes a doctrinal crisis when anyone other than white men stand to benefit.

So far, it is expectedly difficult to refute any of Crenshaw’s points. Which makes her ‘final encounter’ with MacKinnon all the more mystifying—the spectral, ‘virtual’ MacKinnon conjured by the students in her own classes, bearing little resemblance to the real article. Crenshaw’s palpable frustration in this section only rivals her writings on DeGraffenreid, as she expresses her bafflement at bright, socially-engaged, activist-minded youths who are highly familiar with intersectionality theory, and yet express such disdain for dominance feminism.

“Whether the conversation is marked by the notion of waves (as in second wave, third, etc.) or by temporal references that modify the brand of feminism at issue (post-feminist, neo feminists, or something else), there are numerous indicators that suggest a certain distancing from what is perceived to be a crude and unappealing feminism. This distancing has been the subject of analysis and debate for some time, but the particular version of it that emerges most forcefully in my Intersectionalities course wraps its logics either implicitly or explicitly around the primacy of race. This relatively traditional strain of argument frames feminism as a white woman's thing while certain male-centric ideologies about racism continue to win the allegiance of many of my progressive students. This stance rarely involves an explicit rejection of feminism per se, but instead a race-centered critique that repudiates white feminism as an embodiment of racism and hierarchy. Inevitably, MacKinnon's iconic status in legal discourse places her at the epicenter of this frame.” [Emphasis mine.]

What perturbs Crenshaw the most is the inconsistency displayed by students who are quick to call ‘essentialism’ in feminist discussions, yet see little issue with the repeated centering of male perspectives, male leadership, and indeed male suffering when discussing anti-racist or decolonial movements. Apparently, race presents an insurmountable barrier that the category ‘woman’ can in no way supersede, while racialization is allegedly homogenizing enough to create no meaningful distinctions between the experiences of men and women (and sexual minorities). Her attempts to highlight the contradiction in allowing for this kind of essentialism in one arena but not another are met with truly stupefying rationalizations: that a greater degree of intimacy between men and women of the same racial class “creates more empathy” within this group, that men of color advocate for the concerns of women of color better than white feminists do, or that race is simply a more “impactful” marginalization than sex in one’s life.

While I could perhaps detail how I’ve rarely seen men of my race advocate for women of my race in a manner that does not reinforce a sexual property relation between us or otherwise infringe upon their inalienable right to beat us to death without repercussion, there is a correct answer to the conundrum of whether race or sex deserves greater consideration when weighing up how one is marginalized. I present this as an exercise to the reader as well: before peeking ahead, please answer whether you think women of color like me ought to be more concerned with racialization or patriarchy.

The answer, of course, is: why the fuck are you making that comparison in the first place, you waste of tuition? Did you not read the damn paper? Classrooms are a place for learning, yes, but falling back on this oppression arithmetic in a class literally taught by Crenshaw should be grounds for immediate ejection, surely.

These students’ critiques of MacKinnon’s essay, when exposed to it, also merit a similar scorn. Despite quite clearly stating the importance of accounting for the most marginalized women, several of Crenshaw’s students have alleged that What is a White Woman Anyway? is itself a “white feminist” screed through which MacKinnon is somehow reinscribing the primacy of the white woman as the central subject of feminism!

Columbia Law, in spite of its illustrious faculty, is clearly not all it’s cracked up to be.

Here, the story of Elaine Brown (who chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 to 1977) seems relevant to recall. Brown recounts her initial impressions of so-called “white feminism” in her book A Taste of Power:

“Oddly, I had never thought of myself as a feminist. I had even been denounced by certain radical feminist collectives as a "lackey" for men. That charge was based on my having written and sung two albums of songs that my female accusers claimed elevated and praised men. Resenting that label, I had joined the majority of black women in America in denouncing feminism. It was an idea reserved for white women, I said, assailing the women's movement, wholesale, as either racist or inconsequential to black people.

Sexism was a secondary problem. Capitalism and racism were primary. I had maintained that position even in the face of my exasperation with the chauvinism of Black Power men in general and Black Panther men in particular.” [Emphasis mine]

Directly preceding this excerpt, Brown narrates how a fellow party member had been spreading rumors that she was a “man-hating lesbian” with a “secret sexual life”, a charge justified by noting how women had “taken over” the Party. Implicit to these accusations, Brown notes, is not necessarily judgment for fucking women.

She had been judged for valuing women, for considering them worthy and equal participants in the struggle.

“The feminists were right. The value of my life had been obliterated as much by being female as by being black and poor. Racism and sexism in America were equal partners in my oppression.” [Emphasis mine.]

The tale of Brown’s eventual exit from the party is an unsavory one. Regina Davis, who according to Brown “held together the proudest of our programs, our school”, had been hospitalized with a broken jaw after being beaten by several men in the Party. Brown had called Huey P. Newton to inform him of this, only to be euphemistically notified that he had indeed authorized her “disciplining”.

This compelled her to inform Newton of Davis’ many tasks and responsibilities, as Brown was sure he didn’t realize how indispensable a role Davis played, or was otherwise ignorant of how much she oversaw. She impressed upon Newton that Regina Davis managed everyone from the teachers to the cooks, decided menus and purchases, spoke to parents—“She is the fucking school.” If Davis had asked a male member of the Party to carry out a task and been refused, Brown stressed that she was well within her rights to verbally reprimand him, and the retaliatory violence Davis had suffered was both disproportionate and alarming.

Newton’s response was simply that he already knew everything Brown had told him.

“The Brothers came to me. I had to give them something.” [Emphasis mine.]

Televised or not, it seems the revolution will not be gender-inclusive.

From my own perspective as an Indian woman, I can attest that the hollowing out of my land and people is difficult to reckon with, let alone communicate. How do I explain the totalizing impact of mass starvation and centuries of extractivism that continues to this very day, whereby even our modern economy is structured at the behest of neo-imperial interests that treat my people as a nation of sweatshop workers? The widespread poverty plays a huge role in how little agency Indian women are afforded, and every citizen of Empire, irrespective of sex, benefits from the increased standard of living enabled by Third World labor, Third World resources, and goods assembled in the Third World. That is the inescapable impact of racialization, of being deemed worthy for nothing more than serving the White Nation as an external colony of menial workers. Yet, even still …

Even still.

Even still, it is not the White Woman who is campaigning against the outlawing of marital rape in India.

Yes, white women benefit from the colonial subjugation of brown men and women alike. Yes, I have met more than my fair share of white women who are only too happy to mobilize the violence of racialization to keep me in my place—trust me. That does not, in any way, change the reality of brown men—of “our men”—choosing to value continued sexual access to brown women over our ability to object to it. It does not alter that in India, economic independence from men continues to be almost impossible for a woman to achieve, even if she does manage to secure more than poverty wages, due to the way single women are locked out of renting or owning property in many places. It does not change that in India, even when we’re all brown, women are still womanized, still treated as sexual chattel and broodmares and discarded the very moment we cannot fulfill that role.

It does not change that in order to posit dominance feminism as “too essentialist”, people will smugly invoke the nature of the relationship between white women and racialized men, while overlooking racialized women entirely—just as Crenshaw criticized in Demarginalizing, all the way back in the original text of the damn paper in 1989!

That is what intersectionality has been instrumentalized for—reduced to, frankly. A theory of expansiveness and inclusion and taking a bottom-up approach to feminist and other progressive politics is now most frequently regarded as though it were a theory of fragmentation, as though no woman of color would ever have the temerity and gall to “act white”, to demand redress from the patriarchal limitations “her” men subject her to. This is a perversion, a vandalizing of intersectionality theory so that marginalized men can deflect and demur when asked to demonstrate any contrition or acquiesce to any degree of accountability for perpetuating gendered violence against their women, their rightful sexual chattel to use and abuse as they see fit. A woman of color that asserts herself as a feminist is seen as betraying “her” men, but a man of color that asserts himself as a patriarch betrays nothing and no one—and even succeeds in “reclaiming” some of his “lost masculinity”, denied to him by the emasculating forces of white hegemony.

How revolutionary.

Crenshaw concludes her paper with another biting demand for consistency—either dominance feminism is no more essentialist for dealing with the plight of the “woman” than antiracist projects are (for homogenizing all racialized subjects without paying mind to intraracial contradictions), or antiracist discourses must also answer for the negligence of the multiply-marginalized subject in their formulation.

There is a right answer here, too. I hope the reader can spot it.

Conclusion: Radical Intersectionality

When I set out to crystallize the thesis of Brown/Trans/Les, to decide what I would like my next book on radical transfeminism to be about, I decided to attempt a reconciliation between intersectionality theory and radical feminism. Given the sheer number of people convinced that the twain shall never meet, while nothing about intersectionality precludes or contradicts the precepts of dominance feminism, I thought that it would take at least some work on my part to prove that intersectionality can be easily conceptualized in radical feminist terms. I was wrong.

Because I didn’t have to fucking bother.

To anyone familiar with Crenshaw’s work, who is aware that she did not stop writing in 1989, who has read her discuss the plight of immigrant women trapped in abusive relationships by male partners who exploit their precarity, this compatibility with radical feminism is no revelation. Crenshaw’s work has always been feminist, has always been informed as much by the indignities of patriarchy as it has by the injustices of racialization. The epistemic vandalism intersectionality has been subject to is the selfsame epistemic vandalism that radical feminism itself has been subject to—that all feminism has been subject to, frankly.

If a feminism is found to not adequately serve the interests of patriarchy, it is twisted until it does, or discarded entirely.

On a personal note, I happen to be a trans woman, and thus take great issue with the attempted erasure of womanhood in any avenue. I also, to a certain degree, appreciate that the erasure of multiply-marginalized women from feminist discourses has been widely accepted as epistemic injustice, and that most who would call themselves feminist agree on correcting that error. At the same time, the pervasiveness of this rhetoric in service of discounting or writing feminism off entirely has reduced it to little more than a farce. Activists rebuke feminism on the streets, while in the hallowed halls of knowledge-production, the perspectives of multiply-marginalized women are ghettoized into their own fields and topics, or otherwise excluded even still.

Just ask any trans woman who’s ever attempted to interface with Women and Gender Studies.

Intersectionality’s desecration in this manner is not reflective of a sincere, earnest effort to build an inclusive feminist movement. Rather, the opportunistic leveraging of the very same tendencies the theory critiques is used to destroy solidarity, to say that women who try to come together and identify with each others’ struggles are too Essentially Different to participate in the same, harmonious feminist movement. The Black feminists and the white feminists and the trans feminists and the Third World feminists cannot all relate to the same transcultural, transhistorical struggle against the primacy of male domination in their lives.

So once again, I call bullshit.

I’m going to tell you now what drew me to Crenshaw’s work, what convinced me of its enduring relevance and indispensability to any and all feminist politics. Underneath all the piercing wit and fearless argumentation and excoriating rhetoric, underneath all the eloquence and articulation, there was buried a primal scream: the primal scream of a woman who navigates a society that knows exactly how to hurt her, surrounded by people who understand everything that harms her perfectly, but still refuse to name or acknowledge the mechanisms by which they do so.

I recognize that scream very, very well.

“You know what you’re doing, and if you won’t admit it, then I’ll make you!”

Multiply-marginalized women have always faced these impulses to align wholly against some subcomponent of the various violences we endure, to be for our men, at the behest of race or nation, or to even be for all women at the behest of feminists who consider our particular concerns too “divisive”. We have always been asked, time and time again, “to whom do you really belong?” Who is it that we really fight for? To whom do we owe the most loyalty?

To no one who would ask us that question, let me assure you.

I am hers, who reaches across the barriers of time and space and nationhood, who sees my suffering as her own.

I am hers, who walks blasted and blighted pathways that I can and could never, but still sees in me a mirror to her Self.

I am hers, who despite my many errors and missteps, despite my pulling away in anger and fury and despair, reaches through the haze and takes my hand once more, reminding me that we are now inseparable.

I am hers, whose enemies are my enemies and whose battles are my battles, just as hers are mine.

I am hers, who would call me sister, and feel joy when I call her the same.

I am not now, nor will I ever be, anyone’s to claim, but I am hers to embrace who would proudly fight at my side.

As she is mine.

Subscribe now

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks the second entry of my next book, Brown/Trans/Les. All the essays published before have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts, and in both paperback and hardcover from various vendors. Please inquire at your local bookstore if you are interested!

Part I: Sterilization and Abortion

The Jane Collective was an underground organization of feminists operational in Chicago from roughly 1969 to 1973, dedicated to providing women access to safe abortions. At a time when abortion was illegal in most of the United States, reproductive justice remained accessible only to those who could travel to countries where it was legal or available, such as Japan, Mexico, or England. Members of the Jane Collective ended up taking matters into their own hands—quite literally, with several members learning how to perform safe abortions themselves and helping women who couldn’t afford an overseas trip.

One of the group’s founders was Jody Howard, who had been radicalized by her experiences with the medical industry’s regulation of reproductive autonomy. Howard had been diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma during her second pregnancy and had been unable to access treatment during term, as said treatment would have damaged the fetus. This allowed the disease to advance unchecked until she’d given birth, which nearly resulted in her death.

To avoid another pregnancy—one that might actually succeed in killing her—Howard sought and was repeatedly denied tubal ligations from various hospitals until she was able to procure letters from ten different doctors. Though she was eventually able to avail of the procedure, she was told when she woke that she was already pregnant. Howard was then faced with the prospect of securing an abortion, or else braving the very nightmare she had been desperately hoping to avoid.

Fortunately, she was able to do so, by convincing two psychiatrists that she would kill herself if she was unable to get one. This intrusion of the psychiatric establishment into matters of gendered autonomy is already quite illustrative of the logics at play, but more telling is an interesting detail about the hospitals that denied and delayed Howard’s voluntary sterilization. Those very same hospitals were, in fact, providing sterilization treatments to women non-consensually, a seeming contradiction that is resolved when one considers an important difference between Howard and the sorts of women who have been subject to forced sterilization in the West.

To the state, Judy Howard’s gestational capacity was of such paramount importance that she could not be allowed to exercise any agency over it, despite her already being a mother of two. All the while, there were entire classes of women whose gestational capacity was curbed, diminished, denied and destroyed. Treated, in effect, as a threat to be managed, or as offal to discard.

Culling the children, the future of ‘undesirables’, has always been core to the project of Nation-building, after all.

Subscribe now

Part II: Binary Womanhood

Readers familiar with radical transfeminism understand how degendering is a core component of transmisogyny. Trans women are most frequently denied womanhood on the basis of our lack of gestational capacity, that characteristic that is, under patriarchal society, indelibly and inseparably associated with the class ‘woman’. The similarities between how trans women and infertile cis women are treated—which includes but is not limited to elevated rates of sexual violence, degradation as ‘defective’ or ‘barren’ women, and third-sexing out of gendered categorization entirely—are usually ignored to promulgate this rhetorical violence and maintain cissexist notions of ‘natural’, immutable and dichotomous sex.

From this, it is easy to infer that while ‘woman’ is a term easily defined by its relationship to reproduction and sexed autonomy under the heterosexual regime, it self-evidently remains internally heterogeneous. Most patriarchal societies quite overtly maintain a distinction between women of the hegemonic demographic, who are demarcated as reproductive resources to be parcelled out within the private, domestic sphere, and “the rest”: women who are, to put it bluntly, placed on a lower ‘tier’. “The kind you don’t take home to mama.”

Transmisogyny is far from the only force that destabilizes a woman’s relationship to the patriarchal bargain. Race, disability, and sexuality immediately come to mind (non-exhaustively) as ‘mitigating factors’ that represent a form of downward mobility in the gendered hierarchy, intensifying the misogyny women face through avenues of sexual exploitation or corrective, reclamatory violence.

Given that race is a social technology that encodes certain relationships to citizenship, nationality, ancestry, and/or colonization, it is trivial to understand how it can be deployed as a tool of degendering. When it comes to ranking reproductive resources, or what eugenicists have actually referred to as breeding stock, racialization devalues womanhood, rendering a woman ‘less fit’ for exploitation within the domicile, less able to (re)produce the Nation’s ideal Citizen, its vaunted and valorized (racial) hegemony. Racialized women are thus frequently sexualized, while commensurately being just as frequently excluded from the Nation’s ‘ideal’ pool of broodmares.

If one is tempted at this juncture to try and understand the ‘ranking’ of various categories of woman, a future essay will explicate on why that is a futile endeavor. For now, it is sufficient to understand that such social ‘rankings’ are always highly contextual, and that for the topic at hand, we only need to know that women, by and large, experience a fairly binary categorization: those valued for their gestational capacity, and everyone else.

That is, in fact, the best way to understand how third-sexing functions.

Part III: ‘Masculinized’

This degendering that racialized women are subject to is usually referred to, in the common parlance, as women of color being ‘masculinized’. The term fails to communicate the actual mechanisms at play on several levels, which we’ll examine here.

The first issue is the concept of ‘masculinity’ itself, a characteristic that those who live under patriarchal regimes intuitively understand but struggle to put into words, especially when engaging with feminist discourses. Queer theorist Jack Halberstam defines ‘masculinity’ in the introduction to his book Female Masculinity as “I don’t know, vibes” (paraphrased—but barely). Most people have a tendency to hem and haw and pretend that ‘masculinity’ is some nebulous, arbitrary collection of positive attributes such as “strength” and “leadership”, and stop replying when asked why feminine women cannot embody them.

When peeling back the charade and speaking honestly about patriarchal gendering, however, it is easy to understand masculinity as simply the set of positive attributes that men are both expected to and assumed to embody, characterizing them as possessing agency, as free from patriarchal gendering. It is thus a concept defined entirely through antithesis, antagonism, and mutual exclusivity with the feminine, the womanly, the meek. Strong, masculine, virile, intellectual men are held up in contrast to weak, effeminate, vapid, and penetrable women. Masculinity and femininity are therefore simply social encodings for dichotomous sexed roles, ones that have varied across time and culture. Julia Serano, in Whipping Girl, has dubbed this ‘oppositional sexism’, and those familiar with Christian patriarchy may recognize the concept as complementarianism.

Keeping this in mind, we can now recognize how dubbing racialized degendering as ‘masculinization’ is somewhat logically and linguistically incoherent. For even speakers who talk around the social understanding of masculinity know that masculine attributes are regarded as inherently positive, as conveying notions of greater agency, responsibility, or capacity as a human being under patriarchy. Even when ‘negative’ aspects of masculinity are interrogated, such as men’s violence being enabled or excused by their legal and sociocultural contexts, that capacity for gendered violence is not regarded as a core, defining aspect of masculinity, but as “toxic” masculinity, as an aberration from a noble ideal that cannot fail, but only be failed.

Racialized women are thus hardly being ‘masculinized’ when degendered. They are not being regarded with more respect or afforded more dignity and agency, and are in fact being constructed as less human, marked as acceptable targets of brutalization and sexual violence without repercussion. (We would do well to remember, as well, that masculinity renders men as the perpetrators and not targets of sexual violence, and that men who are subject to such violence themselves are invariably unmanned, effeminized, emasculated—degendered in their own right.) The purpose of this dehumanization is certainly homoousian with transmisogyny, but remains distinct in important ways.

To illustrate this, we ought to consider the recent case of Olympic boxer Imane Khelif. Khelif found herself a prominent target of the global trans panic, inadvertently uniting technofeudalists, wizard kidlit authors, and reactionary wingnuts into calling for her disqualification under the guise of “protecting women’s sports”. As Serano observed in her essay Why Does “Transvestigation” Happen?, the rhetoric that is frequently deployed against transfem athletes was used to question Khelif’s womanhood, to dub her a “secret” man covertly “invading” women’s spaces—in short, instrumentalizing transmisogynistic tropes to degender and vilify her.

Surface-level understandings of this phenomenon would seem to lend credence to the idea that Khelif was ‘masculinized’—she was, after all, “called a man”—and also ‘subjected to transmisogyny’, on account of being treated “like a trans woman”. An analysis that runs into issues when considering important distinctions between Imane Khelif and transfem athletes, such as the complete absence of any transfem athletes competing at the 2024 Olympics.

Khelif, in essence, had access to an easy defense that a hypothetical trans woman athlete would not have been able to utilize: she could simply point out that the statements made about her sex were not true. Popular defenses of her place at the Olympics did not, ultimately, rest upon affirmations of trans women’s place in women’s sports, but merely pointed out that she was being lied about and had as much a right to participate as any female athlete. It was simply the case that Khelif was cast in the role of “woman to degender and vilify” because the extant global transmisogynistic panic had entirely succeeded in keeping trans women out of the Olympics.

Further, women of color are no more ‘treated as men’ than trans women are when we are maliciously degendered. Here is yet another case of inflammatory rhetoric and reactionary invective being taken entirely at face value rather than understood for its rhetorical purpose. Though third-sexing and degendering are mechanisms that patriarchal reactionaries understand and deploy intuitively, their schema of sex as dichotomous only allows them to call their targets “men” when attempting to exclude someone from the category “woman”. (Even as misogynists fully understand the purpose of gender as a social disciplining tool, they must safeguard the fiction of ‘immutable’, ‘binary’ sex, leaving a not-woman or a failed-woman to be called a perverse, violent man.) As noted, this is not ‘masculinization’, the elevation to the social role of ‘man’, but rather dehumanization, bestialization, brutification—the construction of a target as a brutish, primitive, animalistic threat to ‘real women’ that can and indeed must be put down. While the patriarchy’s ‘protectionism’ over women-as-a-resource is largely a fiction—reproductive assets are claimed, jealously guarded, and exploited, not ‘protected’—the purpose of racialized degendering is to exclude women of color from even that flimsy heterosexual contract and leave them only fit for brutalization and/or violent consumption.

Transmisogynistic rhetoric is only the latest tool in the racist reactionary’s belt, one that is used to promulgate a long history of racialized degendering. Women of color, lesbians, and women of various other identities have long been opportunistically degendered and expelled from the ‘upper echelon’ of womanhood down to its third-sexed wastes, even when people know full well their target is not a man. One of the first women to fail a chromosomal “sex test” was Ewa Kłobukowska in 1967, a Polish Olympic athlete whose records were stripped from her following this failure, and yet not restored when she gave birth to a child in 1968. In a similar vein, when non-white women are publicly degendered and libeled falsely as violent brutes, the truth of their sex is hardly ever the point. The point is humiliation, to put them in their place for having overreached, for daring to be present amidst ‘their betters’ at all.

Khelif’s case in particular is incomplete without accounting for her race, and for the role organized sports (and their organizing bodies) have played in upholding the ideology of essentialized sexed differences and regimes of racial and national superiority. It is thus not at all a coincidence that the non-transfem athletes whose reputations and records have been consistently harmed by transmisogynistic policies are largely racialized and intersex.

Interpersonally, racialized degendering functions as a means of designating a target for both racialized and sexed violence. A racialized woman is degendered not due to an authentic confusion about her gender, but to eject her from the category ‘woman’—patriarchally understood as lacking in agency, desire, or autonomous capacity—and regard her as a brutified, bestialized threat. Contrasted against hegemonic womanhood, assailants are provided a ready casus belli, their violence against her authorized and justified as the necessary defense of patriarchal property against the external Other. Her body, so marked, becomes an acceptable site of violence, for any who oppose her are acting in self-preservation, while any attempt she makes to preserve herself are interpreted as clear and overt signs of aggressive intent.

That, ultimately, was the sin Imane Khelif was made to pay for. No one who participated in her public humiliation had any concrete reason to doubt her sex. They did have a reason to want to punish her for trouncing a white opponent, though, and relished the opportunity to remind her of her station.

Concurrent regimes of violence, after all, tend to build upon each other, to intensify mutually reinforcing structures that most acutely harm those who exist at their intersections. Yet, despite the intersection of race and sex being one of the most-studied, the ways in which racialization deploys gendering is rather neglected. (Trans)misogyny is a tried-and-true method of degradation and dehumanization, and the racialized regimes we labor under are also patriarchal ones. To say that racialized women experience transmisogyny rather than degendering is to discount how racialization already destabilizes gendering in service of the National project.

Of course, we must also state the obvious and particularly galling conclusion of asserting that racialized cis women “experience transmisogyny”: it erases trans women of color from the conversation entirely by collapsing the specificities of our linked but distinct oppressions together. It is not true that trans women of color and cis women of color are treated identically in multiracial, locally white-hegemonic societies, and when we consider societies that are not locally white-hegemonic, such as those in the third world, the claim that cis and trans women are treated identically therein is revealed to be utterly absurd, as is the usual result of ignoring an important and relevant intersection.

Part IV: Natalism

In conflating transmisogyny with racialized degendering, we do not simply elide the intersection of the two, but also rob ourselves of the insight that comes from examining the underlying impetus animating both. The reason the treatment of racialized women often mirrors that of trans women writ large is that both classes of women are devalued similarly, as inadequate or outright detrimental to the Nation’s reproductive ambitions. The function of patriarchy is to instantiate heterosexuality, to manage the sexual chattel and reproductive stock through which its segregated labor pools are both organized and maintained. Additional ideological investments such as the USian settler-colonial order, the Indian varna system, or state religions the world over further bifurcate citizen from underclass, providing the masses with anti-materialist incentives to “buy-in” and identify with their rulers over their fellow exploited humans.

Through the naturalization of these caste systems as ‘biological fact’, their social and ideological character is obscured and reduced to a matter of individual identity. Manhood, whiteness, and similar mantles of social dominance become obfuscated as innate qualities, and the mechanisms of regulation and enforcement that define and dictate membership are invisiblized by the prevailing epistemic orthodoxy.

Social dominance, then, is best understood in terms of managing affinity, fealty, affiliation, investment in the prevailing social order. Those who are able to access and leverage any scraps of power will often do so eagerly and unthinkingly, disincentivized as they are to examine the basis of their own privileging. Even those who are not positioned to derive the most benefits still usually find compliance to be more frictionless than questioning authority and cultural wisdom. Many, if not most, accede to the bargains they are provided, choosing to ameliorate their own exploitation and suffering by participating in others’, or even by merely reinforcing the constructed boundary between their identity and the assigned identities of those more abject, more reviled.

Recall, once more, the most common defenses of Imane Khelif. Instead of challenging the transmisogynistic precepts that would declare a trans woman’s participation illegitimate or as a threat to “actual women”, the majority of Khelif’s defenders opted to engage in identitarian distancing, with the appeal that she did not deserve the transmisogynistic invalidation that a hypothetical transfeminine athlete would never be granted exemption from. Yes, it is entirely true that the racist degendering and harassment Khelif experienced could highlight points of solidarity between two similarly oppressed classes of women, but that wasn't what happened. Instead, trans women's vilification was declared as misplaced and tragic when it spilled over to others, resulting in appeals to minimize the collateral damage.

Disentangling these threads is a concerted effort in unravelling imprecise language and the varying degrees of epistemic violence that all marginalized classes are subject to. While it would bring me nothing but joy to see racialized cis women—among whom I count some of my dearest friends and allies—collectively identify more with the trans women who are degendered alongside them and the transmisogyny we face, the disappointments of material reality remain, and racialized cis women are often just as invested in cisness as their white counterparts. If they can reinforce the difference between themselves and trans women, if they can secure their own place within womanhood—however abject or tenuous—by denying us ours, it remains true that many, if not most, will do just that.

Not all the transfems are white, and not all the racialized women are cis, leaving those of us betwixt with no choice but to be brave, given how frequently we are forgotten, abandoned, and alone. Women like me must mind both meanings of ‘passing’, requiring us to make peace with how, no matter how seemingly indistinguishable we are from racialized cis women, our gender is still always subject to challenge under a white hegemony.

Finally, the bitterest pill remains the most evident one. Because for all her experience with degendering, all the experiences that should give her insight into the indignities of racialization, the white trans woman is often unable to resist the temptation of partaking in racialized transmisogyny, lured in by the siren song of being enabled to implement identitarian distance herself, against a woman placed below even her. Despite being given every chance to embrace sameness over difference, the chance to prove her womanhood against the degendering of those easily cast as rapacious, alien, animalistic predators tends to be reward enough.

I must repeat: the similarities between the cis and trans women of a race-class abound, including whom they are allowed to enact violence against, and how they leverage their access to patriarchal protectionism.

Which stands conclusively as the grandest irony of all. Yes, even here, in the unholiest of unholies, I am offal amidst offal, a tranny amidst trannies. We’re all trans, and I’m still brown—this is a lesson I’ve learned all too well. What makes the irony rich is that my place here is so readily reinforced by those who can no more avail of the patriarchal bargain than I can, who will in the final calculus be looked upon no more favorably than a third-sexed, degendered beast from the wrong Nation. Dworkin noted astutely in The Coming Gynocide that a society which apportions women value based on fertility will also euthanize them the moment they prove fallow, that longevity and security are the commodities patriarchy withholds from us most of all. One day, you will be offal too, and serving me up before that day comes will not prevent its arrival, or even meaningfully delay it.

Heed or ignore that warning at your own peril. Under the current regimes, our fates are entwined, and our ignominious end inevitable, unless …

Unless.

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks the first entry of my next book, Brown/Trans/Les. All the essays published before have been compiled into my first nonfiction book, Trans/Rad/Fem, available online through Amazon, Itch, and other storefronts, and in both paperback and hardcover from various vendors. Please inquire at your local bookstore if you are interested!

Subscribe now

If you’re unfamiliar with who Graham Linehan is, he is most famous for being divorced and writing a lot of transphobic tweets. He identifies affirmatively with the gender-conservative movement that has with no sense of irony dubbed itself ‘Gender Critical’, and thus fosters an online presence that is uncomfortably fixated on trans issues and trans women. On one fateful day, a lone, brave voice posed a question to Linehan, prompting an exchange that I cannot do justice to, but will do my best to paraphrase here.

In response to his utter befuddlement at the idea that “There is no definition of woman”, Linehan was asked: “Graham, could you define ‘chair’ for us real quick?”

Not one to shrink from such a trivial intellectual challenge—no matter how loudly telegraphed the rhetorical trap was—Linehan met this inquiry with the solid rejoinder: “A separate seat for one person, typically with a back and four legs.”

“Happy to help but try Google next time. The definition of ‘woman’ is there, too,” he added, no doubt with a hearty chuckle at his own brilliance.

He had no idea what a storm his words would unleash.

With the tripwire triggered, the replies to his foolish rhetorical volley came in fast and furious, pelting him with counterexample after exception after erroneous inclusion. Images of chairs with no legs, bathtubs with four, and all manner of absurd objects were conjured in response to his foolish attempt at an encapsulation of “chair-ness”. The killing blow came in the form of a harbinger, a vehicle for Linehan’s own personal linguistic apocalypse.

“Chair” the tweet simply stated, suspended above the photographic depiction of a humble, four-legged, one-backed horse.

As the farrier drives shoe into hoof, so too did this tweet hammer home the final nail in the coffin of Gender-Conservative ideology. Having been shown how erroneous, how insufficient, how baldfacedly absurd their patterns of thinking were, transphobes had no choice but to capitulate utterly to a Total Transgender Victory. Every transphobic politician resigned in disgrace, while every newspaper that had ever dared to entertain transphobic notions—which is to say, every newspaper—issued a full retraction and announced Judith Butler’s coronation as World Monarch. The gender-conservative movement was driven underground, left to languish, huddled around garbage fires made of discarded children’s literature, clinging to an image of an imperfect world that had long passed them by.

If only their names had not been lost to time and ill-advised rebranding, we may have been able to honor these valiant heroes, these courageous soldiers who through their collective efforts won the Second Sex Wars.

Right! … Right?

Or, you know, none of that.

Instead, the transphobic reactionary wave core to the modern Gender-Conservative antifeminist movement only grew more emboldened, accruing more and more funding, institutional legitimacy, and coverage. The relentless push to implement transphobic legislation, from bathroom discrimination to outright bans on transition care, eventually gathered enough momentum and ideological backing to finally pass in various Western jurisdictions. Junk studies, bunk science, and fraudulent reports proliferated, polluting the scientific consensus on trans healthcare, and many politicians either took up the cause of scapegoating a tiny slice of the population for their policy shortcomings, or considered it expedient to abandon us entirely.

How did the champions of trans people and trans rights react to this resurgence of reactionary gender politics and intensifying attacks on queer existence? Largely by posting doctored images of Donald Trump and Elon Musk in a gay relationship, or in dresses, because no crime a man commits can ever compare to a presumed lack of masculinity.

Truly, we are in good hands.

A simple look around at the current state of affairs should clue in even the most tuned-out of us to the blindingly obvious: liberal feminism is fucking dead. It failed to protect abortion rights, it failed to meaningfully issue a challenge to patriarchal rape culture, and absolutely fucking failed every single trans person.

This is not a eulogy. It is not fanfare at witnessing the doddering, shambling corpse of this ideological dead-end finally collapse. It is an autopsy, an accounting, and first and foremost a reckoning with a feminist project that sought to liberate women while refusing to take into account the male-supremacy endemic to patriarchy. The mainstream feminist discourse did not meaningfully challenge the prevailing essentialist model of naturalized sex, nor did it effectively advocate for the bodily autonomy of the gender-marginalized. It is poised to squander even more of the second wave’s gains if someone doesn’t just. Call. Bullshit.

I come not to praise Steinem but to bury her, and some of her worst accomplices with the bier.

Listen Up, Liberal

Liberalism is the erroneous belief that one can paper over systemic inequality with enough contract law, consent fetishism, and lip service to ‘individual freedom’. It is ruling-class propaganda that bamboozles people into thinking that token mass participation in the political process can outweigh the hoarding of wealth and privileges and control over the means of cultural production.

When applied to feminist thought, this ideological defect reframes the imbalances of power in the sexual economy to a simple matter of ‘restricted freedoms’ that can, one by one, be alleviated legislatively through state protectionism. If women are underpaid, then we shall simply make it illegal to pay them less, in much the same way one would apply a bandage to a gaping wound. Surely treating symptoms without investigating causes would eventually solve the problem. We need not inquire why women are paid less, what factors are contributing to their labor being undervalued, and whether there are underlying causes leading to such treatment that legislation alone cannot remedy.

It is, in a sentence, a Human Resources approach to managing rape culture.

What liberal ideologies are worst at addressing, of course, are questions pertaining to their own violences, the injustices and disparities they promulgate, perpetuate, and thrive on, just underneath the facade of bringing all parties to the same table. They have never been able to confront the truth of how workers are far less free to negotiate terms than bosses, concerned more with the image of happy coordination than the reality of who has signed the dotted line with a gun to her head.

For feminism, this became a maxim of choice, a true punchline to the joke that is gender. Women can choose to be empowered, careerist, liberated, and professional, or we can ‘choose’ to be domestically confined, saddled with the bulk of reproductive labor, and have little recourse to violations of our body, dignity, and personhood. With the benefit of hindsight, it is plain to see how this strain of ‘feminism’ was never a serious counterpoint to patriarchal relations.

Fundamentally, the liberal-feminist model is motivated by a desire to ignore the elephant, even as it tramples the room’s occupants underfoot. It adopts a language of ersatz gender equality, presuming that so long as barriers to individual freedom are addressed, everyone can and benefit from the system equally. In matters of coercion, violence, non-economic interests, or even the simple identification of cultural factors contributing to these issues, this approach falls short entirely. Questions of subjugation, violence, and suppression are ignored in favor of trust in institutions and the singular guiding principle: “But what if the oppressed party consents?”

It was PR.

Missing from any of this is an analysis of the mechanisms of patriarchy, the heterosexuality at the heart of it all. There is a pervasive incuriosity permeating the school of thought, a wilful omission of the exploitation, extractivism, and sheer sexual sadism that underlies a misogynistic society.

The dirty secret is that liberal feminism, for all its paeans to gender parity, did not ever meaningfully contradict the naturalization of sex, the idea that on some essential level, women are simply synonymous with gestation, with child-rearing, with less. It was content to simply proffer the platitude that if a woman wishes to exceed her station, then she should surely be allowed to. How much could women’s liberation cost, girls? Ten dollars?

This was never an attitude, a rigorous school of thought, or an approach that could radically challenge the retrenchment of Gender-Conservatism. When the gains of feminist victories and economic independence started to pile up, the patriarchal recuperation and reactionary backlash was focused and swift. Right-wing attitudes found many masks to conceal misogynistic intent, sometimes wearing an anti-capitalist hat to talk about the meaningless grind of women’s workplaces, and at other times adopting feminist theatrics to conflate “women’s rights” with genital inspections.

Crucially, when Gender-Conservatism asked on what basis we should consider trans women to be real, authentic women, liberal feminism simply shrugged and began babbling about category errors, as though philosophical technicalities are an adequate substitute for advocacy. They are women because they choose to be, and who are we to deny them that choice?

As far as endorsements go, this one rings hollow. The gender anxieties underpinning trans people’s mutable sex, the ability to “cross” heterosexuality’s impermeable barrier, won out over a half-hearted attempt to frame the question of our rights as free expression rather than a struggle against patriarchy’s attempts to deny us bodily autonomy and eradicate us.

We were, to speak it plain, abandoned. Women, queers, and trannies alike.

I guess we chose wrong.

Round Two

For all its faults, though, wasn’t liberal feminism better? Wasn’t it a kinder, gentler alternative to the second wave that preceded it? The radical feminist movement was categorized by a militant commitment to academic, middle-class white womanhood, championed by the misandry of affluent lesbians, resulting in a stiflingly uniform classist, racist, and transmisogynistic politic. Surely, what followed learned from its mistakes, built upon its strengths, and gave a voice to those whom feminism had historically silenced?

No.

No, not really.

There is a tendency to narrativize history, to draw boundaries and delineations that are far cleaner on paper than they ever were on the ground. It would be as inaccurate to attribute an artificial homogeneity to the second-wave as it would be to assert that liberal feminism successfully addressed its myriad failings. This contextual collapse results partly from a refusal to take feminism seriously as a school of thought, one rife with its own orthodoxies, contradictions, dissidents, theoretical innovations and internal critiques. Feminism has always been fractious, always an arena rather than a solidified platform, with competing and collaborating branches that unify and schism in equal measure.

It is, in short, a discipline, and a perpetually evolving one at that.

Attempts to partition the history of feminism into easily-separable waves tend to be just as arbitrary and constructed as patriarchal gender. Audre Lorde and Leslie Feinberg are frequently claimed by “Third Wave” feminism, a categorization that flies in the face of Lorde’s two decades of friendship with Adrienne Rich, or Feinberg’s gratitude for Rich’s support in the acknowledgements of Transgender Warriors. Reading their work alone should be sufficient to see where they were inspired by the radical lesbian feminist tradition as well as where they deviated—at least, if one were given to treat feminist subschools with a greater degree of complexity and nuance than trying to label them ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’.

Nor is it anything more than naive ignorance to presume that radical feminism’s issues with transmisogyny were what inspired the backlash against it. The reverence accorded to Serena Nanda’s corpus of work alone should disabuse that notion, but one need only glance at bell hooks’ essay on Paris Is Burning, or Judith Butler’s commentary on the same, to see that the pathologization of transfemininity, together with the marginalization of transfeminine perspectives, would continue unabated into the era of “kinder, gentler, inclusive” feminism.

Just as there is still white feminism following the publication of Crenshaw’s paper on intersectionality, transmisogynistic feminism remains alive and well in the years since Sandy Stone’s ‘postranssexual’ manifesto. We still grapple with many of the same prejudices, structures, and institutional biases today that the feminists of the second wave did in their day, and part of the liberal-feminist mythology depends on the ahistorical narrativization denying that stark reality.

If we are to reckon with the failures of feminisms past and present, we have to be honest about where those failures lie rather than just patting ourselves on the back for being “so much more enlightened nowadays”. We must ask ourselves why a materialist movement allowed itself to be polluted by idealist, essentialist thought, why putative social-constructivists found themselves associating amicably with theologically-inspired fundamentalists like Raymond and Daly. We must also admit that when it came to condemning the TERFs, modern feminists took far greater issue with the ‘RF’ than they did the ‘TE’.

Simply put: Radical feminism saw the most definitive real-world proof of its own theories in the transsexual, and sought to destroy her instead of embracing her.

When perusing these texts, I am assailed, over and over, by the sheer irony of the radical feminist tradition sabotaging itself by vehemently rejecting the conclusions of its own theories. Womanhood is a social positionality constructed through misogynistic violence and sexual-reproductive exploitation, and no case confirms this more than the transsexual woman, whose ‘male anatomy’ does not spare her in the slightest. Every transsexual woman is the wretched, spurned daughter of the radical feminist thesis, the unwanted validation of its most fundamental tenets that it sought to terminate.

For all their insight, clarity of purpose, rhetorical verve, and righteous conviction, when push came to shove, the radical feminists proved no better than the gender-essentialists they once sought to condemn. They felt greater sorority with the rambling lunatics babbling about ‘sexed souls’ than the women whose very existence was so unconscionable to patriarchal regimes that we are to this day faced with utter annihilation.

In these texts, I found the language to describe my own making and unmaking. From their words, I forged the fury of my own purpose. They were, in their own day, at their best, brilliant and brave women.

And they still abandoned their own ideals out of sheer disgust.

Look upon our faces, and see the truth none of you were able to bear.

The Radical Feminists are no more, not in any sense worthy of the name, not in any form that honors their original principles. Do not consider this a tragedy, however, especially when the conclusive chapters are yet to be written.

After all, it always falls upon disowned daughters to clean up their foremothers’ messes.

The Measure of a Misandrist

This is, ultimately, where most critiques of radical feminism go wrong, even when supposedly made with trans women’s vilification in mind. It is a too-popular idea that radical feminism was too harsh, too critical and too antagonistic towards men. After all—goes the reasoning—is not the fixation on trans women, the denial of our womanhood, and the maligning of us as ontologically predatory a consequence of their gender-absolutism? Is not resorting to ‘misandry’ in response to society’s misogyny also wrong?

Such arguments fail to be compelling for two reasons, the first of which should be obvious: transmisogyny is not misandry. The transmisogynist does not treat trans women the way she treats men, even if she refers to a trans woman as a man in the process of degendering her. Even if a transmisogynist bears an authentic antipathy for men, there is a crucial difference in how she regards trans women: namely, as an acceptable target of misogynistic degradation. Trans women’s bodies are dissected and scrutinized, our behavior pathologized and sexualized, and our own testimony discarded as unreliable, insubstantial, and immaterial. We are dehumanized, third-sexed, and branded permissible targets for ritualistic, collective, and sexualized punishment. A fate that even queer men tend to be spared.

Secondly and perhaps more importantly: the ‘misandry’ of the average transmisogynistic feminist is greatly overstated.

Trivially, we can note how the modern Gender-Conservative movement is full of men and the women who gleefully encourage their violence against trans people, a modern incarnation that bears the most threadbare of claims to any feminist tradition. They are, more than anything, a project concerned with the obfuscation of the term ‘feminist’, so that staunchly patriarchal ideologues can claim the label simply for promulgating transmisogynistic rhetoric. The face of modern transphobia is a far-flung cry from the academic lesbian feminists of yore, and is these days definitively male. Men abound at transphobic rallies, threaten to follow trans women into bathrooms to beat them, and call for the abolition of transition care in publications the world over.

Is such an answer evasive, though? Surely conservative men’s transmisogyny is a mainstream discursive force now, but was not the second wave chock-full of misandrist lesbian feminists aiming their ire at trans women? Can we not draw a line from their extremism to modern antifeminist backlash?

To get to the heart of that matter, we have to recall a little history.

April, 1973. The West Coast Lesbian Conference was, at that point, the largest gathering of lesbian feminists to date. Beth Elliot, a trans lesbian folk singer and feminist activist had been on the organizing committee for the event and was also scheduled to perform on opening night. Her fellow LA organizers had, in fact, insisted upon it.

When she took the stage at 9 p.m., she was accosted by two women, one of whom snatched the mic away to scream that Beth was a “transsexual” and a “rapist”, and demanded that she be ejected. In the ensuing chaos, a few organizers took the initiative to hold a vote (or, two, by some accounts), allowing the assembled audience to decide on Beth’s inclusion. The vote passed—by a slim majority, in some accounts, or by an overwhelming two-thirds majority, in some others—and so a visibly shaken Beth Elliot, with the support of her sisters, gave a short performance before promptly leaving.

Robin Morgan, who was scheduled to give a keynote speech on the theme of ‘unity’ the following day, spent the night editing her address. Rather than speaking for forty-five minutes, Morgan spent twice that time on a meandering screed “attacking everything in sight”, per Pat Buchanan—the conference organizers, women who work with men, and of course, transsexuals, blaming the continuing ills of patriarchy on a lack of feminist consciousness. Her caustic rhetoric shifted the entire tone and mood of the conference, forefronting the issue of biodestined womanhood. The Black Women’s Caucus, who had prepared a position paper on Black feminist organizing and the relevance of race to their struggle, are often omitted entirely from accounts of the conference, in large part due to Morgan’s troonmadness sucking up all the oxygen.

While some of the facts surrounding this incident are disputed, we know that Morgan’s invective was circulated amongst lesbian feminists, drawing attention to the topic of transsexual inclusion. Her charges that Beth Elliot was an “infiltrator” and “rapist” accrued sufficient cachet to get Beth blacklisted from feminist publications and music scenes. Despite a measure of personal support, Beth withdrew from the public eye, and Morgan’s bilious language found itself echoed in 1979’s Transsexual Empire, this time levied at Sandy Stone.

In some sense, Robin Morgan, Sister Raymond, and their ilk set the discursive tone on translesbophobia. While 1960’s Psycho attests that the idea of the deceptive, cross-dressing predator already held some sway in the cultural psychosexual imaginary, Morgan and Raymond—clumsily and soporifically—elevated that hateful trope to the status of “feminist concern”. They provided a framework and legitimacy to complement the sexologists’ pathologization of the “homosexual transsexual”, transmuting the cultural idea of the tranny from a pitiable, somewhat tragic figure, to a rapacious and monstrous one. Although coercion through deceptive seduction had always been core to the mythology of transsexuality, Morgan and Raymond enabled eradicationist sentiment towards trans women as a whole to be imbued with a certain feminist authority, recasting it as almost righteous.

We were, in the truest sense of the term, constructed, remade as biotechnological horrors seeking to traverse, fresh and bloody, from the scalpel to the women’s bathroom.

Given the centrality of that hastily-rewritten keynote speech to modern transmisogynistic propaganda, Morgan’s awareness of its discursive relevance is fascinating to witness. As Finn Enke notes in Collective Memory and the Transfeminist 1970s, when Morgan published her own account in 1977, her comments from the 1973 speech condemning the organizers for “inviting” Beth Elliot are omitted entirely. Morgan deliberately edited the speech to extend her critique of transsexuals and Beth Elliot specifically, dubbing them “gatecrashers” who sought to undermine and destroy the feminist movement from within. She consciously chose to erase Beth’s involvement in organizing the event, in addition to eliding that the majority of second-wave lesbian feminists present chose to defend and protect her.

Perhaps the most telling omission in subsequent accounts of this speech is an interesting detail about Morgan herself. Once she was done berating “women who work with men”, Morgan launched an impassioned defense of her husband. Before she derided Beth Elliot as a “male gatecrasher” with no place in lesbian feminism, Morgan advocated for her male husband’s place in lesbian feminism, on the grounds that he was a “feminist”, a “feminine man”, and—I still cannot help but marvel at this term whenever I encounter it—an “effeminist faggot”.

Seriously.

It is impossible to overstate just how utterly pathetic this pantomime of radicalism is. Morgan sublimated her own sexual and gendered anxieties into unrestrained transmisogyny, as many people often do, seeking to secure her own place as a lesbian by defining her legitimacy against the seeming illegitimacy of an “outsider”. Her arguments for doing so hinged on staining transsexual womanhood with the original sin of reproducing manhood, even as she pleaded the case that her husband, through his proximity to the feminine, had successfully absolved his own! Morgan’s audacity and insecurity drips off the page, revealing her charade to be nothing more than a performative, incoherent, inconsistent, bigoted farce.

Additionally, this revelation demonstrates how even here, in the holy of holies, at the epicenter of lesbian-feminist transmisogyny, misandry could hardly be claimed as a motivation. Beth Elliot was condemned for her transsexuality. Her putative ‘manhood’ was invoked only to degender and dehumanize her, while the avowed transmisogynist slurring her asked for the inclusion of men in the same breath!

Nor should we discount those who stood by Beth Elliot and Sandy Stone, even if their efforts were ignored, silenced, and erased. Enke’s paper meditates on a photograph of Beth on stage, framed to depict her alone, isolated, besieged. The woman holding Beth’s hand is left just out of the picture.

Meanwhile, for all their condemnation of trans lesbians’ “male energy”, the transmisogynists who so revile trans women’s “manhood” had no compunctions when it came to allying with the “male institutions” that have surveilled us, vilified us, marginalized us, and tried to erase our very stories, our connections, our sisterhood from history. Even the scraps that remain cannot escape reframing, rewriting, revisionism that insists: you were always unwanted, and stood apart.

Except when we weren’t, and didn’t.

Radicalized Feminist

Of course, even if “radfem misandry” were the beating heart of feminist transmisogyny, it bears repeating that the radical feminist tradition is not a particularly well-known or influential one today. Ideas such as “gender is a social construct” and “heteronormativity” are uncontroversial in modern feminism, but their radical feminist roots are rather obfuscated, in addition to the foundational tenets of sex-class theory and heterosexuality as a political regime being far from widespread.

Indeed, for all the gesturing at gender-as-social, the average person conversant in pop-feminist jargon retains solidly essentialist notions. “Gender is social, but sex is innate,” goes the common-sense adage, allowing even “trans allies” to leave their conception of natural, immutable sex untouched. Many cis people are all too comfortable declaring that trans women are “male women” or that “no one believes trans people change sex”, statements that go hand-in-hand with the widespread ignorance, misinformation, and indeed propagandized scaremongering surrounding the topic of trans healthcare. Whilst it would no doubt be an excellent party trick, I did not sprout tits through my sheer mastery of the social fabric. I had to take oestrogen for that.

Bluntly, the popular conception of trans people today is frustratingly concomitant with historical tropes regarding us as pitiable wretches who engage in elaborate costuming to make up for the tragedy that is our unchangeable birth sex. Many seem mystified at the thought that we alter our embodiments on a more fundamental level than clothing and address, and learning the degree to which hormones alone can enable trans people to ‘pass’ tends to elicit discomfort.

Epistemic injustice and the silencing of trans perspectives certainly plays a role, but more concerning is the extent to which transphobic ideologues are allowed to dictate the discourse on trans issues without encountering a meaningful counter-narrative. I’ve often observed that if a Gender-Conservative insists that trans people do not change sex, the well-meaning ally agrees implicitly, though is quick to remind that trans people do change our gender! Both the eradicationist and the ally are in agreement that transness is this superficial, social charade, and seem to principally deviate on the extent to which trans people’s delusional performances ought to be humored.

Such an attitude is most evident the second a ‘trans ally’ happens upon a most disconcerting, destabilizing concept: a trans person who disagrees with them! Or worse, one who has her own thoughts, opinions, and perspectives on trans issues that challenge normative assumptions about her life and self-conception. The first time you witness a cis person call a trans woman “TERF” for insisting that she changed her sex, or for describing herself as a “transsexual”, the spectacle elicits a hearty chuckle. The absurdity and novelty quickly wears off around the dozenth-or-so time.

That the label of “TERF” can be levied against a trans woman who insists upon her own sex is a function of the total cultural victory of the Gender-Conservative project. Feminism has been indelibly associated with transphobia, transmisogyny is considered a function of ‘misandry’, and the trans woman is instrumentalized as a voiceless pawn by a myriad of cultural forces that seek to exploit her symbolic significance. The conservative antifeminist can point to her as a consequence of leftist overreach threatening the most fundamental underpinnings of society’s (patriarchal) organization, while the liberal antifeminist can use her woes to bemoan how unfair and extreme feminism has grown towards men, advocating for an ever-kinder, ever-gentler feminism even as abortion rights are undone and ideological investment in rape culture resurges.

After all, that is one thing the conservative and liberal and even leftist man have always agreed upon: the woman’s rightful place, and the necessity of silencing her attempts to protest it.

This environment is not merely conducive for transmisogynistic radicalization, but is one where it absolutely thrives. Imagine, if you can, what it is like to be a woman keenly aware of her culture’s intensifying misogyny. Young men—not simply the men “from a different time”—are growing disgruntled with the financial independence that allows women to be more selective in matters of dating and marriage (if they choose to marry at all!). “Men’s Rights Activism” is increasingly becoming a part of mainstream conservative politics, and media figures engaging in patriarchal extremism are becoming normalized. In addition to targeting abortion access, reactionaries are openly organizing against contraception, no-fault divorce, and even women’s right to vote! Openly male-supremacist politics have not been this popular in decades.

All the while, the media is obsessed with the plight of men, running article after article on the ‘male loneliness epidemic’ and lamenting the ‘feminization of education’ that has them giving up on college. It appears having to compete with women who value autonomy over ‘traditional family’ has soured men on the very idea of upward mobility. Even anti-capitalist politics are taking on a chillingly antifeminist bent, with women’s issues dismissed as “idpol”, a mere distraction from the primary contradiction of class.

Amidst all this, the topic of trans people seems to come up over and over, given outsize emphasis relative to how many of them there seem to be. Publications of repute run stories constantly, sounding the alarm on the threat “men in dresses” pose to women’s bathrooms, sports, prisons, shelters—to the very notion of a sex-segregated space. This deluge is accompanied by a discursive environment where any mention of feminism seems to invite accusations of being a “TERF”, a nebulous charge levied at anyone who even mildly suggests that men are systemically empowered to exploit women.

The lip-service paid to trans issues on the left, by those who outright dismiss feminist concerns, in tandem with the barrage of misinformation and the near-total exclusion of trans voices and self-advocacy, leaves the field wide open for Gender-Conservative recruitment.

An oft-overlooked factor in the appeal of hate movements is that they feel good. The politics of male grievance has wide appeal to men who, faced with an increasingly hostile world that is unashamedly denying them the economic security their fathers enjoyed, turn to misogyny as an outlet. Sublimating impotence, despair, and rage into organized hate, directed at a target you can actually hurt, who is actually within reach—unlike the faraway, untouchable concept of ‘the ruling class’—provides an immediate psychic relief that “class-consciousness” simply cannot rival.

There is a similar kind of unrestrained, psychosexual glee among the radicalized women who eagerly turn to the Gender-Conservative pipeline and make the tranny an effigy for all the male figures who have actually done them harm. Organized groups surveil trans people online and collate their social media interactions, distributing the material for adherents to leer at and mock, a Der Sturmer for the information age. Post-surgery images are mined for their apparent shock value, and long-forgotten misogynistic invective such as “axe wound” is resuscitated to be applied, anew, to the spectacle of the ‘mutilated’ trans woman.

Indeed, the chief utility of the trans woman here is as a lesser, failed woman at whom one can justifiably direct misogynistic abuse, while simultaneously chastising her for ‘perpetuating patriarchal stereotypes’. If she is too feminine, she is a sex-role upholding handmaiden, or she is a “man in drag” if not feminine enough. The trans woman, no matter her deeds, words, or politics, can be tied to the stake and set aflame, over and over. She is a pressure-valve for women looking to hurt something the same way they’ve been hurt—and feel ‘feminist’ for doing so. Trans women are just male enough for misogynistic abuse directed at them to ‘not really count’, or to even feel like ‘punching up’.

After all, who’s going to stick up for us? The same ‘allies’ who rush to call us ‘male-socialized’ the second we assert ourselves or act like we deserve dignity?

That is the reality of trans advocacy today. In an era of utter institutional capture, even those who believe themselves to be on our side tacitly endorse the transmisogynistic consensus.

How could this have happened? I mean, the picture of the horse was captioned ‘chair’!

Should have been a slam dunk, right?

Just Answer the Damned Question

Last year, I chose to participate in a mediated conversation with a self-described ‘moderate’ GC, who claimed to be interested in the transfeminine perspective. ‘Moderate’, here, refers to the contingent of Gender-Conservatives who had somehow conned themselves into believing their virulent hatred of trans women was in fact a feminist crusade, and were growing increasingly alarmed at the overtures towards and alliances with right-wingers that movement leaders were making.

It was a short exchange. While she was kind enough to not use any slurs, the GC could not help but ask insistently, “How are you different from a gay man, though?”

Wasn’t what I experienced really homophobia, not misogyny?

Amused, I brought up my complete lack of attraction to men, and pointed out that I wasn’t seen as a man in public. I hadn’t been seen as such for some time, in fact. Regrettably, I could not deny biological reality for the sake of her feelings.

I never got a reply to that.

A colleague of mine has opined that GCs exhibit a sort of “nationalistic protectionism” regarding sex-categories. Even when the GC was willing to acknowledge my oppression under patriarchy, I still had to know my place and make it clear I understood that I wasn’t really a woman. I could be the closest thing to a woman-shaped male individual that her schema allowed, but I must not insist on tainting the purity of Womanhood by claiming it included me.

If I could just concede that sex was essential, impermeable, immutable, then she’d meet me halfway.

That is what The Question is actually getting at. The reason there’s no point in debating category errors with a conservative is because they know they are operating under a limited, exclusive definition. Conservatism is an exclusionary ideology, by choice, by intent, by design. You cannot shatter someone’s worldview with an epic burn about imperfect classification, when their classification was never meant to be perfect.

A Gender-Conservative knows what a woman is the same way you know what a woman is, because we all fucking know what a woman is. Their definition of ‘woman’ is the patriarchal definition of woman: a member of the subordinate sex-class whose domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor is meant to be exploited by the hegemonic sex-class.

Truthfully, Gender-Conservatives have always demonstrated a thorough knowledge of gender-as-social. They demonstrate it when they degender women of color or queer women for not falling within their narrow schema of femininity. They demonstrate it every time they feminize and “unman” any man whom they deem insufficiently reactionary. They are perfectly aware that gender is a social enforcement mechanism because they themselves wield it as one.

Is sex mutable or immutable to a GC, then? If you’ve finally realized that seeming contradictions do not matter to them, you’ll also see that for a GC, it’s neither.

For a Gender-Conservative, sex under patriarchy is policed.

When you’re being asked what a woman is, you’re not actually being asked for a perfect definition that includes all cis and trans women. (Trust me, I’ve been ignored after I gave them one.) Look past the words to see the intent behind the question, and realize whose humanity it is meant to put up for debate. “What is a woman?” actually translates to:

“Are you really buying this shit?”

“Listen. You know it’s a freak, I know it’s a freak. I get that you want to appear all virtuous and high-and-mighty. But c’mon! At the end of the day you know what a woman is. I know you know what a woman is. And that’s not a woman.”

“How long are you going to keep humoring it?”

Just until I decide to voice an opinion, usually.

The question is meant to remind you that trans women are male women, that we don’t change sex, that we don’t really experience misogyny. It is meant to evoke a shared understanding that our genders are inauthentic. When a GC asks this question, they’re asking whether the person they’re questioning really thinks that trans women are worthy of respect as women, are worth taking seriously, or are worth defending.

Frankly, when push comes to shove, most people reveal that they don’t.

Men’s investment in transmisogyny is easily understood, but transmisogynistic women, especially GC women, display an interesting aspect to theirs. To a degree, the idea that a male person could ever experience misogyny, actual misogyny like they do, is existentially terrifying. A world where patriarchy is natural, biological, and absolute is an unfair world, an unhappy world, but it is still a world with order. A world where even male anatomy doesn’t guarantee a freedom from misogynistic violence, where gender is proven to be unstable and revocable, confronts them with the reality that their place in the gender hierarchy is only so stable, too.

The tranny is a reminder of how women with no reproductive utility are treated, and the idea that they could share a classification with us—that it is possible for them to be considered the same kind of thing as us—is unconscionable.

“A woman is not the same thing as a mutilated man,” you can almost hear them hiss, forgetting that their quarrel is with Aristotle and not me.

I wish these folks were receptive enough to understand that their hang-ups are not my cross to bear. For I have never seen myself as a “man, made lesser”. A failed man? Yes, and proudly so, but never lesser. I am, if anything, man perfected in form and spirit, in a way only a being who fulfills her true potential can be.

Faulty conceptions of trans womanhood are a recurrent point of failure for feminisms past and present. When presented with the dilemma that is the trans woman, most people have chosen to recoil in horror and emphasize their separation from us, rather than accept the notion that we might have common cause. Our revelation of gender’s porosity is sometimes regarded with a macabre fascination, often fetishized, but rarely taken as proof that our point of view is one worth considering.

We are, currently, at just such an inflection point. The trans moral panic has been (predictably) revealed to be a singular facet of a wider patriarchal agenda to retrench male-supremacy and regulate people’s gendered autonomy under the heterosexual regime. Under these nativist, natalist logics, the state cannot permit reproductive assets any bodily autonomy, and must deny them the right to shape their own sex. Your body is a resource for The Nation to mine, and will be legally enshrined as such.

Which leaves you with a choice.

You can take the same option that many have taken before you, time and time again. You can tell yourself that if you agitate loudly enough against her and declare that you are nothing like her, distinguishing yourself sufficiently from the trans woman will spare you her fate. You can try to convince yourself that if you sacrifice some bodies to the gaping maw of the beast, surely it won’t hunger for yours.

Or, on the other hand.

You can declare, for the first time in history, that maybe the tranny has a right to exist. That maybe, her freedom to determine her embodiment is indelibly tied to yours. That maybe, just maybe, she’s worth fighting for.

And we can see just how far advocating for a radical gendered autonomy takes us.

Thank you for supporting my work. My upcoming book, ‘Trans/Rad/Fem’, will be out on the 24th of January. If you would like to own these collated essays in book form or simply enable me to continue writing about feminism, please consider picking it up.

Of course, degendering and epistemicide are both broad subjects, mechanisms that are not limited to transmisogyny by any means. Infertile women, racialized women, disabled women, fat women, and many other categories of women are routinely degendered, while epistemic injustice impacts many marginalized populations, including but not limited to lesbians, racialized people as a whole, and transmascs.

Arguably, epistemicide affects transmascs particularly acutely and results in the phenomenon that is commonly referred to as inviziblization. Transmasculinity is rendered invisible both transculturally and transhistorically, a denial of the possibility that manhood is a permeable social category rather than a 'natural', inevitable, biodestined role based on one's anatomical configuration.

This is because many societies are patriarchal and male-supremacist, enshrining not merely the humanity of those designated men above the subjugation of those deemed women (or sufficiently close), but also refusing to entertain the idea that anyone who is at any point deemed unworthy of manhood could ever ascend to this positionality. Transmasculinity cannot be permitted, cannot be named or allowed to be possible under a system that is oriented around the exploitation of reproductive and sexual chattel by those who are their 'natural' superiors, imbued with the signifiers of masculinity and thus autonomy, personhood, agency.

In short, to acknowledge transmasculinity, a society would have to first admit that manhood—just like womanhood—is a social class and not a 'natural' category. Its people would have to acknowledge that the desire for independence and self-actualization exists within all of us and is not, in fact, stored in the balls.

Conversely, the reason that transfemininity has been more visible across both time and cultures is that the veneration of manhood is highly central to patriarchal modes of organization. The idea that manhood can be failed, that an individual can fail to live up to its mantle and be stripped of manhood's privileges and protections is a useful schema to ensure ideological investment in patriarchal society. The transfeminized serve as examples of what happens to gender traitors. The transmasculine, by contrast, are ignored or treated as little more than delusional, as people who reach above their station and are doomed to never succeed.

In that sense, transmasculinity is subject to regendering. Where transmisogynistic forces marginalize and ostracize the transfeminine from society, rendering us unworthy of any fate outside of being treated like sexual chattel, transemasculative forces deny the transmasculine any possibility of escaping reproductive exploitation and seek to re-gender the transmasculine--viewed as lapsed reproductive assets--back into the confines of womanhood.

These forces are complementary and interrelated, but not identical. Transmisogyny exists on a continuum with anti-effeminacy and the homophobia directed at queer men, while transemasculation is on a continuum with lesbophobia and the vilification of the 'masculine', 'unladylike' woman. This is because of how sexuality is not neatly separable from gender under patriarchy, since the only permissible mode of existence is heterosexuality, and so homosexuality is also, frequently, understood as a form of gendered deviance.

This is also why the most common forms of transemasculative rhetoric beat the drum of the 'mutilated girl', itself an echo of the idea of damaged goods. Being a reproductive asset under patriarchy is not an enviable fate, but patriarchy, in the process of dehumanizing the transmasculine, still accords them--no, not humanity, don't be absurd, but utility. The transmasculine can still be "of use" to a natalist, heterosexual regime and can still be instrumentalized for their gestational capacity and ability to further patrilineality. And so, they are assiduously discouraged from changing their sex or altering their embodiment, lest they jeopardize their precious 'fertility' and render themselves 'undesirable', unfit for reproductive exploitation.

There is, sometimes, a point of no return, past which the transmasculine are no longer as heavily subject to regendering, having committed the cardinal sin of exercising autonomy over their own sex. They are, at this point--welcomed as men?? Don't be absurd. If they are recognized as transmasculine, even if they can navigate the world as men, transmasculine individuals become subject to degendering, vilification, and monsterization. The goods have been damaged, and the heterosexual regime seeks to discard them as it discards all of us who do not fit into its vision of 'natural' reproduction.

A note: An individual's actual inclination toward having children does not impact the perception of gay people or trans people as a class. Heterosexuality, cissexuality, and monogamous straight coupling with the intent of furthering a bloodline are the presumed patriarchal default. Adoption, artificial insemination, or even the participation of trans people in 'natural' reproduction does not detract from the patriarchal perception of us as mules who mutilated ourselves into sterility, to say nothing of the frank reality that the majority of queer people do not, in fact, seek to bear or raise children.

Patriarchy's calculus is cold, impersonal, and infinitely reductive. A person's value to society is measured in terms of their ability to participate in the heterosexual regime, while those of us who deviate from this prescription in any way suffer gender-marginalization. The specificities of our oppression and how the violence against us manifests in policy, cultural perception, and public rhetoric are important, and cannot be collapsed or easily equivocated.

However, even still, I urge us all to keep in mind an important maxim: our oppressions, even if distinct and asymmetrical, even if difficult to map onto each other, are interrelated and share the same root.

We are all dissidents from heterosexuality in the eyes of patriarchal society and are thus all subject to punishment for that desertion.

Consider a mechanism whose sole function is to classify all inputs it receives as one of two categories: One and Zero. The inputs, it must be said, vary greatly in temperament, expression, embodiment, internality, and so on, but that isn’t as much of a hurdle for the machine as it seems. It has been programmed with a few simple lines of code that enable it to differentiate between Ones and Zeroes within acceptable margins of tolerance. Ones tend to look and behave like this, Zeroes tend to be like that. These truisms are crude, simplistic, and even reductive, true, but they work. As such, the machine chugs on, happily reducing complex inputs to a blunt binary classification, its delivery-day code having been deemed “good enough”.

Of course, there is still the matter of how the machine should behave when its schema fails, when it is presented with inputs that do indeed prove to be too ambiguous to easily classify. For however high the correlation between traits, sometimes a specimen that simply defies easy categorization will confound its decision-making, often enough to pose a problem. Does the code need to be updated? Almost certainly, but legacy code is a stubborn thing, mired in dependencies and versioning faff, deeply resistant to the most perfunctory of edits. Too many now rely on this iteration of the machine, on this particular instantiation of its logic, and it is almost universally agreed that any changes are best handled downstream—at least, among those with the power to change it.

The machine and its users are thus forced to consider: In the case of an “error”, a “mistake”, so to speak, is it better to classify something as a One or a Zero?

Well, that’s an easy enough decision. The Ones, you see, are quite important, are believed to play a rather critical role in the affairs the machine oversees. The Zeroes … sure, they’re certainly important too, in their own way, in the way everything worth categorizing is—but the Ones! It’s really all about the Ones. You can’t quite go around just calling anything a One, you have to be certain.

So the module is attached and business proceeds without interruption. The machine spits out Ones and Zeroes like it’s supposed to, like it always has and supposedly always will, a binary system choosing between two options. Yet, anyone who knows a little too much about its inner workings is perfectly aware that the machine’s neat bifurcation isn’t all that neat. Truthfully, the machine has three outputs: One, Zero (with a degree of confidence), and “NULL”. It’s just that the exceptions are caught and sorted into the Zero-category, because that method of handling the machine’s limitations still keeps things running smoothly. It’s not much of an issue at all, and there’s no real need to examine the machine any further.

No need to pay attention to the way its NULL exceptions keep rising in volume.

No need to examine it for any shortcomings, oversights … or any weaknesses.

Part One: Neither Correct Nor Considerate

The Contradiction

Neither Man Nor Woman is an ethnography of India’s hijra, undertaken by anthropologist Serena Nanda. It is a text that has, in many ways, proved foundational to the West’s understanding of so-called “Third Genders” and “Third Sexes” in non-Western cultures, providing an academic basis for the consideration of gendered expansivity and putatively non-binary gender systems the world over. Certainly, it is difficult to find a more-cited work on the hijra, and Nanda can perhaps be credited with setting the terms on which the Western academy—if not the West at large—has been made aware of hijra life.

Despite its own title, Serena Nanda’s Neither Man Nor Woman states in the very second sentence that South Asia’s hijras are “a religious community of men who dress and act like women.” (Emphasis mine.) It is a contradiction the book is either unaware of or uninterested in addressing, since it is repeatedly reasserted and reinforced throughout the remainder of the text. Therein, Nanda—a cis woman—takes a look at this community through the eyes of someone unfamiliar with the Indian cultural context, learning about them through both observation and testimony. The resulting ethnography triangulates and emphasizes several crucial details: that the hijra are a “religious cult” of “ascetics” centered around the worship of the goddess Bahuchara Mata; that hijras are often present at rituals and celebrations, usually weddings, to perform dances and bless the newlyweds with fertility and a firstborn son; that they grow their hair long, wear women’s clothes and assume an “exaggerated and garish femininity”; and that they form their own community structure, living on the margins of Indian society.

Often, the undercurrent of the author’s lurid fascination with the hijra bubbles to the surface, such as when she describes witnessing the results of the hijras’ “emasculation operation”—her needlessly grandiose euphemism for castration. Rhapsodic, meandering elaborations on Hindu myths and spirituality are jarringly interspersed with discussions of the hijras’ “sexual impotence”, their role as “homosexual male prostitutes”, and their “grotesque, sexually suggestive parody of feminine behavior”. Nanda seems morbidly fixated on resolving what seems to her the central paradox of hijra existence, namely their supposed religious asceticism juxtaposed against their involvement in sex work, or their desire for “husbands”—a term that always appears in quotation marks within the text. She maps their kinship structures, details their lives, and reproduces first-person accounts, all while insisting on their “maleness”, frequently contrary to their own words.

Why, then, is the book Neither Man Nor Woman instead of Emasculated Homosexual Religious Ascetics? Nanda repeatedly alludes to the concept of a “Third Gender” or “Third Sex” without any degree of rigor, without explicating what such a term may connote. The belief in two biological, opposing, and non-overlapping “sexes” is confidently touted as “Western”, but the basis for that differentiation is never unearthed or examined, nor any rationalizations provided for how the West’s social strictures may deviate from those of societies with alleged “Third Sexes”. The concept itself rests on shaky ground and the book seems content to—ironically—allow the reader’s existing notions of “sex” to dictate the meaning they derive from this construction.

Chapter Two is the closest that Nanda comes to actually dissecting these concepts in the consecutive subsections Hijras As “Not Men” and Hijras As “Not Women”. These are fascinating subheadings, given that the Hijras As “Not Men” subsection contains a rather thorough listing of their similarities with women. Nanda herself notes just how much hijras stress that they are not men when discussing themselves, which makes her word choices throughout the book all the more confounding. For all of her disavowals of the West’s “rigid binary” that is purportedly unable to conceptualize a “third sex”, she is steadfast in tethering hijras to maleness, perhaps to offer herself as a shining example of the limited Western imaginary.

It is Nanda’s attempt to rhetorically distance hijras from womanhood, however, that proves to be the most revealing. Ignoring her own reporting of how hijras travel in “ladies” compartments on the trains and “periodically demand” to be counted as women in the census, she begins Hijras As “Not Women” by affirming that hijras behave in manners “in opposition to the Hindu ideal of demure and restrained femininity”. What follows is an amusing account of all the behaviors that set hijra apart from True Womanhood: “dancing in public”, “coarse and abusive speech or gestures”, smoking hookah or cigarettes, and openly exhibiting a “shameless” vulgarity that no “real” Hindu woman would indulge. No doubt many Indian housewives would be edified to learn how trivial it is to change sex, or how frequently they’ve done so in the process of haggling for cheaper vegetables.

Less amusing is the invocation of 18th-century legal codes that required hijra to wear men’s turbans or coats to “distinguish” themselves as not-women—as though decrees of state are an adequate source for settling the question of hijra identity—preceding the passage that lays Nanda’s ideological investments bare. She recounts two stories told to her that, she claims, serve as “testimony to the hijra view of themselves as ‘not women’, at least not real women”. (Emphasis mine). Both stories are reproduced here in full, with certain portions italicized to highlight them:

See, two people got into a fight, a man and a hijra. The hijra said, “I am a lady”, and the man said, “No, you are not.” The fight went so long that they went to the magistrate. The magistrate said, “I agree, you look like a woman, you act like a woman, but I'll ask you a simple question—can you give birth to a baby? If that is not possible, then you don’t win.” The hijra answered, no, she could not give birth to a baby, so the magistrate said, "You are only a hijra, you are not a woman.”

In Ajmer, in North India , there is a holy place that belongs to the hijras. It is called Baba Darga, and it is on top of a hill. One time, during Urs [a Muslim festival], many people were going up the hill to pay respects to Baba. One hijra was also there. She saw a lady with four children and offered to carry one or two of them. The lady became very angry and told the hijra , "You are a hijra, so don't touch my children.” This made the hijra feel very sad, so she asked Baba for his blessings for a child of her own . But she only asked for a child and didn' t ask Baba to bring the child out . The pregnancy went on for ten months , and her stomach became very bloated. She went to the doctor’s but they didn't want to perform an operation [Caesarean section] on her. Eventually she couldn't stand the weight any longer so she prayed to the Baba to redeem her from this situation. But Baba could only grant her the boon, he could not reverse it. When the hijra felt she could stand it no more, she found a sword at the darga [Muslim shrine] and slit herself open. She removed the child and placed it on the ground. The child died and the hijra also died. Now at this darga prayers are performed to this hijra and the child and then to the Baba.

What stands out the most is the startling lack of empathy. Rather than meditating on these tales as exemplary of the hijra’s struggle for legibility as women against a society that structurally and legally denies them that, Nanda is happy to cite them as “evidence” of hijras reaffirming their own degendering. Of the hijra who narrated the second story, Nanda has this to say:

“This story reveals an ambivalence: On the one hand, it expresses the wish of some hijras to have a child, yet on the other hand acknowledges its impossibility. The death of the hijra and the child suggests that hijras cannot become women—in the most fundamental sense of being able to bear a child—and that they are courting disaster to attempt something so contrary to their nature. Meera, the hijra who told me this story, was convinced it was true. She had many times expressed to me her wish for a child and said that she had read in a magazine that in America doctors would help people like her have babies. The other hijras sitting with us laughed at this suggestion.”

Leaving aside the casual cruelty for the moment, we are able to glean an equivocation that Nanda presents as neutral, but is very much ideological: the equation of womanhood with gestational capacity. Just as the book fails to comment upon Indian society’s repression of the hijra, or the hermeneutical injustice inherent to denying their self-understanding in favor of forcing them to accept a stigmatized categorization, it also neglects to consider how holding reproductive capacity as the essential characteristic of womanhood is thoroughly patriarchal. Nanda does not meaningfully inquire how such a view, deeply entrenched in Indian society, might impact even cis (or real) women, an incuriosity that leads to the book’s clearest example of cultural illiteracy.

The Barren

We return to chapter one, where the author discusses her observations of a hijra troop performing at wedding ceremonies. Ignoring how eagerly she refers to this as a “grotesque, sexually suggestive parody of feminine behavior”—her predisposition towards treating hijra identity as simple mimesis is well-established—let us instead consider an interesting tidbit, buried under the overly-florid attempts to do the performances justice. On page four, the following sentence betrays Nanda’s motivated reasoning:

“Some more orthodox families do not allow the bride to be present in the courtyard with the hijras, however, believing that the hijras' infertility will contaminate the girl and keep her from having a son.”

She revisits this on page six:

“Thus, the stout, middle-class matrons who are so amused by the hijras' performances, and who may even pity them as tragic, hermaphroditic figures, also have an underlying anxiety about them. As mentioned earlier, this is translated into a taboo of orthodox Hindus that the hijras should not touch, or even see, a new bride, so that their impotence will not contaminate her reproductive potential.”

Here, the author uses “impotence” rather than “infertility”, a word choice that firmly calls to mind Nanda’s repeated assertions of the hijra’s ‘castrated manhood’. It is interesting primarily because anyone familiar with the Indian cultural context would be able to tell you that this superstition, this belief that infertility can spread, is not one that is usually applied to men.

Baanjh is the term used for an infertile woman, which translates rather directly to barren. Indian society’s reduction of women to their role of broodmare, mere vessels to further a man’s line, ensures that women who cannot fulfill this role face harsh stigma and censure. ‘Barren’ women are reduced almost to the state of untouchables, considered to be carrying ‘bad energy’ that could ‘infect’ and bring misfortune upon those they interact with. Their treatment calls to mind the reality of societies with intense patriarchal contradictions and demonstrates how women are accorded no humanity, no internality, and no autonomy outside of their reproductive roles.

It is telling that the book makes nothing of this observation, going so far as to reify the hijras’ supposed maleness, because the author does not understand that this is a belief firmly rooted in viewing the hijra as barren women. There is no clearer demonstration of how Nanda is clearly working backward from a conclusion, rather than investigating the conditions of an abjectified population and reporting on their lives in a conscientious, sensitive manner. Her fixation is given primacy over evidence of how hijra are viewed and treated similarly to women who cannot fulfill their reproductive roles—evidence that she presents herself, without even understanding its implications.

All of which begs the question—what end do these omissions serve? Why, ultimately, is a cultural anthropologist invested in disregarding the affinity that the hijra display for legible womanhood in favor of propping them up as an “institutionalized third gender”, filling the ‘social role’ of “homosexual male prostitute”?

The Omission

The first time in this book that Serena Nanda discusses transsexuality in-depth is in chapter ten.

“Unlike the alternative gender roles found in other cultures, the transsexual in American culture is not viewed as a third, or alternative, gender. Rather, transsexualism has been defined in such a way as to reinforce our cultural construction of both sex and gender as invariably dichotomous.”

Once more, Nanda places rhetorical distance between the hijra and a category that they would appear to bear more than a passing resemblance to—transsexuals, in this case. Here she espouses strangely familiar rhetoric of transsexuals as medicalized, regarding transsexuality as a by-product of the ‘Euro-American medical complex’ attempting to preserve the European understanding of gender as dichotomous. Transsexuality, she laments, is popularly understood as a liminal state between the two genders, leaving no room for gender-expansivity or third-sexes. While she does accurately convey the role medical practitioners played in enforcing gender norms upon transsexuals, allowing care only to those they deemed sufficiently conformist, Nanda nonetheless laments that the greatest champions of this “liminal view” of transsexuality were transsexuals themselves. Her characteristic inability to notice the compromises a hyperscrutinized population must make with the society repressing them thus once more rears its head.

Central to Nanda’s distinction between the Western transsexual and the Indian hijra is the issue of, as she puts it, “medicalization”. Regressive transsexuals do not challenge binaristic notions of Euro-American gender and seek ‘medicalization’ to cross from one sex to the other without disrupting the gendered hegemony, while noble third-sexed individuals inhabit an expansive cultural role, challenging the Western understanding of dichotomous sex on a fundamental level.

Robust as this thesis is, it would certainly face issues if any hijra were to express a desire for ‘medicalization’—as one of Nanda’s own informants did, candidly discussing her hormonal treatments and desires for ‘normative’ womanhood.

Later scholarship, such as Gayatri Reddy’s With Respect to Sex, touches upon many hijras' desire for secondary sexual characteristics corresponding to womanhood, with Reddy expressing concern about how they consume many birth control pills daily, or seek out unprescribed hormonal injections. Neglecting to mention the hijras’ desire for “medicalization” would be understandable if Nanda never encountered any hijra who trusted her with such information, but her own testimonials throw her attempted bifurcation of “third sexes” and “transsexuality” into question.

A particularly glaring oversight is the text's refusal to distinguish between whether hijras lack the desire to transition or the ability. Despite frequently noting their impoverishment, marginalization, and ostracism from wider society, Nanda barely lingers on Indian society’s dehumanization and mistreatment of the hijra, opting instead to wax rhapsodic about Hindu scripture, theology, and the supposed “enshrinement” and “veneration” of the hijra that in the final calculus amounts to less than a hunk of bread. That hijras attempt to justify their existence to a Hindu society in Hindu terms should not be seen as remarkable, given that their religious appeals for dignity do not work.

Indeed, the text fails at the fundamental level of affording hijras any agency while simultaneously refusing to reckon at any length with their material circumstances. It chases the ghost of “reverence” without once situating the hijra as individuals constantly negotiating with a hostile and eliminationist regime that barely acknowledges their existence and strenuously denies them the means to self-actualize. To Serena Nanda, the hijra are an exotic prop, a key to the puzzle of undermining European gender norms without resorting to the ‘barbarity’ of transsexualist ‘medicalization’. Her whitewashing of a non-Western culture’s bigotry and brutalization of a demographic is only marginally less bizarre than her confounding distaste and seeming resentment towards transsexuals.

On that note, we ought to touch upon one of the most sinister omissions regarding this book, tucked away in endnotes on page 166. In the fourth numbered endnote there, Nanda suggests a slew of texts critiquing the “cultural construction of transsexualism by the medical and mental health professions”. Among them is Raymond (1979)—The Transsexual Empire.

The foundational text of anthropological third-sexing of the hijra affirmatively cites the most famous transmisogynist in existence, laundering her bilious, fervent hatred of transsexuals into the annals of the queer academy.

Part Two: Fool Me Once

Diversity, Inequity, Exclusion

In Neither Man Nor Woman, Nanda extensively discusses the years she spent doing fieldwork, interviewing hijras, translating their testimony (twice) and all in all attesting to a level of attempted rigor that makes her misfires nigh inexcusable. If the reader is left wondering how much she is capable of bungling without such preamble, her book Gender Diversity leaves no room for doubt.

Gender Diversity’s first edition was published in 2000, after the first and second editions of Neither Man Nor Woman. It takes what can best be described as an algorithmic approach to analyzing gender expansivity in various non-Western cultures, reproducing the third-sexing framework applied to the hijra in its initial chapters and applying them in turn to various nations. The text aggregates scholarship on Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, Polynesia, Thailand, and more. In every instance, it ponders what the existence of these disparate categories could imply for the limited ‘Western’ view of gender, living up to anthropology’s voyeuristic and orientalist roots.

While there are some attempts to incorporate transmasculinities (what the book refers to as “female genders”), it remains fixated on transfeminized populations, as is the academy’s wont. There are broad similarities amongst the demographics it studies, including but not limited to being “born male” while expressing a desire for womanhood and femininity, associations with “male homosexuality” oriented around taking up the penetrable “feminized” role in sex, as well as marginalization, ostracism and stigmatization that results in precarity, being locked out of the formal economy, and high rates of survival sex work. We also, once again, see the text attempt bizarre contortions and invocations of cultural relativism, theology, and ‘reverence’ in order to cast self-evidently abjectified identities as ‘institutional genders’ in some way, despite the systemic, societal pressures to exclude and expel them.

The fundamental failure plaguing both Gender Diversity and Nanda’s work on the hijra is the same: a refusal to apply a materialist, empirical, and feminist lens to obvious cases of gendered oppression. Nanda appears desperate to romanticize and idealize these exotic, foreign peoples and their enlightened, post-gendered ways, steadfastly ignoring how they exist within extant patriarchies without having toppled the misogynistic regimes that abhor them. Mere observation ought to have indicated that “third sexes” are perfectly compatible with ideologies of male-supremacy and sexual-reproductive exploitation, but we are regaled with florid paeans to Hindu scripture and non-Western ‘wisdom’ over honest and rigorous scholarship. These texts do not discuss third sexes, but seek to invent them, to shape the Western understanding of non-Western transfeminized demographics in particular terms.

As before, Nanda’s agenda is clarified when the text finally discusses the ‘Western’ transsexual, this time in chapter eight of Gender Diversity.

Transsexuals, then, far from being an example of gender diversity, both reflected and reinforced the dominant Euro-American sex/gender ideology in which one had to choose to be either a man or a (stereotypical) woman. [Emphasis mine.]

Nanda’s anti-transsexual inclinations are, frankly, difficult to overstate. While she was shrewd enough to not cite Sister Raymond affirmatively in this text, the core thesis of Transsexual Empire nonetheless finds its way into her arguments, accompanied by a bevy of cis scholarship speculating on the motives, intentions, and desires of transsexuals. Her words are shot through with what can only be described as a revulsion towards ‘medicalization’, deriding the transsexual as the product of psychiatric and medical interventions intent on preserving Euro-American patriarchy. Similar to Raymond, she displays an awareness of the surveillance and hyperscrutiny that transsexuals are subjected to by institutions intent on denying them care, yet still sees it fit to denounce them as an equal party to their own policing and suppression.

Her claims that transsexuality reifies gender norms are thrown into particularly sharp relief when she narrates the following tidbit:

The availability of the sex-change operation and the emergence of the “transsexual” helps sustain the dominant Euro-American sex/gender system based on binary opposites (Kessler and McKenna 1978). The new male or female sex status may be supported by the construction of a revised life story and certain legal changes, such as revising one’s sex on the birth certificate, though this has been repudiated by some American courts. In 2002, for example, a Kansas state court rejected the claim of a transsexual to inherit her husband’s property on the basis that her transsexual status did not meet the Kansas legal requirement that only recognizes marriage between persons of the opposite sex. The court acknowledged that, “While [the defendant though] born male, wants and believes herself to be a woman . . . her female anatomy is all man made . . . and thus as a matter of law, [the defendant] is a male” (quoted in Norgren and Nanda 2006:200).

In other words, Nanda holds fast to her claims of transsexuality ‘sustaining’ the dominant gender paradigm, even when describing institutional delegitimization and denial of transsexual identity! Observing where the power lies and how transsexuals run the risk of recognition being revoked even when they conform to every stricture imposed upon them is, apparently, beyond the author’s ability.

By contrast, the book’s subsequent section on “Transgenderism” is much more positive and ultimately clarifying.

Transgenderism has its foundation in the ancient tradition of androgyny, a view that has made the crosscultural data from anthropology—with its descriptions of the positive value of androgyny in some other cultures—particularly relevant to the transgender community (Bolin 1996b:39; Connor 1993; Feinberg 1996). [Emphasis mine.]

Unlike transsexuals, transgenderists (transpeople) do not consider themselves limited to a choice of one of two genders. Transgenderism includes a wide continuum of options, from individuals who wish to undergo sex reassignment surgery to those who wish to live their lives androgynously.

Transgenderists can be narrowly defined as persons who want to change gender roles without undergoing sexual reassignment surgery; they can also be defined as “persons who steer a middle course, living with the physical, social, and psychological traits of both genders.” [Emphasis mine.]

Unlike transsexuals of the 1970s and 1980s, transgenderists today challenge and stretch the boundaries of the American binary system of sex/gender oppositions and renounce the American definition of gender as dependent on a consistency of genitals, body type, identity, role behaviors, and sexual orientation. [Emphasis mine.]

Plainly, Nanda espouses an ideological opposition to bodily transition, venerating supposed cross-cultural traditions of androgyny and “embodying both genders”. (Her own reification of a dualistic gender paradigm, in a book awash with what she calls “third sexes”, is surely clever irony.) Her attitudes towards ‘transgenderism’ closely mirror the way she speaks about “third-sexes”, pedestalizing a pure gender “disruption” untainted by medical technologies.

Of course, there remains a singular, burning question that yet remains unasked due to the author’s framing.

Are these non-Western third sexes “refusing medicalization” by choice?

Not once does Nanda care to interrogate whether inaccessibility, impoverishment, and stigma play a role in keeping the option of bodily transition out of reach. Not once does she care to simply ask whether, given the ability to avail of bodily transition, any of her subjects would do so. Such queries would disrupt the carefully-constructed antagonism between transsexuals and third-sexes, proving that this, too, is a false binary propped up by zealots to serve their own ends. In addition to Nanda’s own informants, later work by Reddy details how hijra consume birth control pills by the handful in their pursuit of breasts, and A. Revathi’s autobiography The Truth About Me explicates the connection between hijra identity and trans politics. Across the globe, transfeminized individuals from disparate cultures are united by their shared struggles for legibility, set against hegemonies that seek to dehumanize, delegitimize, and degender us, keeping crucial healthcare and the very means of survival out of our hands.

There is very much worth in juxtaposing the Western transsexual and the hijra, but Serena Nanda is far too transmisogynistic to accord that endeavor its due dignity. She does not seek the emancipation or actualization of any of her subjects, pursuing instead a mythical third-sex that can serve as an avatar for “expanding” the West’s gendered possibilities.

How ironic, then, that she set off around the world in search of this third sex, when she could very well have found it right at home.

Whipping Third-Sexed Individual

In Whipping Girl, Julia Serano defines and discusses “third-sexing” as follows:

Cissexual people who are in the earliest stages of accepting transsexuality … will often come to see trans people as inhabiting our own unique gender category that is separate from “woman” and “man.” I call this act third-gendering (or third-sexing). While some attempts at third-gendering trans people are clearly meant to be derogatory or sensationalistic (such as “she-male” or “heshe”) …

Serano here touches upon a core aspect of transmisogyny, central not only to the many ways in which we are denigrated and slurred, but also characteristic to how we are often depicted and sexualized in media. Terms like “trap”, “futa”, “dickgirl”, and others regard transsexual women as an exotified amalgam of discrete sexual characteristics while simultaneously refusing to name us as women, or even human, reducing the transsexual body to an object for consumption. Whipping Girl also notes how transsexual women in non-pornographic media are still often either degendered or hypersexualized—sometimes both—routinely employing cissexual male actors in drag to represent a garish, parodic approximation of us, or featuring transsexual sex workers who are accorded no humanity and treated as little better than props, frequent disposed of in simultaneously violent and titillating ways.

We thus serve as objects of macabre fascination for cissexuals, either a hypersexualized fantasy with no autonomy or agency of its own, or a monstrous creature whom it is permissible to abhor, violate, and brutalize. Our transgression of gendered strictures, our demonstration of sex’s mutability and unfixity is a capital offense that most react to with an irrational fury. Our existence is itself an abomination to a heterosexual, male-supremacist regime, one that must be stamped out and denied at every turn.

Therefore, we are only ever subconsciously regarded as women. We are womanized in the way everything considered beneath a Man is feminized, yet our womanhood is repudiated, even as those who seek to destroy us bring the full force of misogynistic degradation to bear. We are assaulted and told we invited assault, that our deviancy and perversion and pretensions to womanhood carries implicit permission for deviants and perverts to treat us like women. We are discriminated against in employment and housing, frequently impoverished and turned out onto the streets, pushed disproportionately into survival sex work, and routinely face stringent access barriers to transition technologies.

The Enlightened West, in all its wisdom, already has a Third Sex: the tranny.

Part Three: After Nanda

Gender Imperialism

In their paper Begging for change, Vaibhav Saria speaks about the Indian Supreme Court’s 2014 opinion on the petition filed by National Legal Services Authority, or NALSA, concerning India’s transgender and hijra populations. Saria notes that the judgment argues for the hijras’ “right” to self-identify as a “third-gender”, stating:

‘Hijras/Eunuchs, therefore, have to be considered as Third Gender, over and above binary genders under our Constitution and the laws’ [para. 74] [Emphasis mine]

It becomes imperative to first assign them their proper “sex”. As TGs in India are neither male nor female, treating them as belonging to either of the aforesaid categories, is the denial of these constitutional rights. [para. 119] [Emphasis mine]

Saria themself observes that:

The concept of tritiya prakriti (third nature/sexuality/gender) and myths from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are marshalled as evidences for the hijras’ historical presence in South Asia, while the two ethnographies on hijras by Serena Nanda (1991) and Gayatri Reddy (2005) are cited to refer to the religious and political significance of hijras in everyday Hindu lives and the Mughal royal courts. [Emphasis mine.]

Here is a morbid, maddening irony: anthropological scholarship, distinctly Western anthropological scholarship, that for decades has touted the maxim of ‘binary gender’ being an ‘imposed’, ‘colonial’ concept, has now been cited by an Indian court in an opinion that explicitly third-sexes the hijra and purports that recognizing them as women would ‘violate their constitutional rights’. It is seemingly only imperialism when populations who seek the technologies of transition and legible womanhood are granted access to them, while the opinions of Western academics shaping local politics is merely sparkling scholarship.

For it must be stated that Nanda’s work is not by any means the sole culprit implicated in the academic third-sexing of non-Western demographics. Rather, it is the basis upon which a corpus of such work rests, spawned by institutional interests that seek self-aggrandizement at the expense of orientalized, exotified, and degendered people. The inexplicable demonization of the transsexual and of transition itself undergirds attitudes that demand transfeminized individuals trap themselves in gender-ambiguous amber, over and above heeding their own desires to reshape their sex.

Reddy, for example—whose ethnography is cited alongside Nanda’s—is frequently credited with building upon Nanda’s work and rectifying her most egregious flaws. It is a fascinating characterization, given that Reddy herself is exonerative of Nanda’s work, limiting her critiques of the ethnography only to the first edition and stating of the second:

However—and this is particularly germane to my characterization of changing representations of hijras in the literature—Nanda’s own thinking and work on hijras appears to have shifted during the last decade. In the second edition of her ethnography, published in 1999, not only has Nanda omitted the preface by Money, she has also reframed her analysis in line with recent developments in gender theory and anthropological modes of inquiry and representation, paying greater attention to the historicopolitical contexts of current scholarship (Nanda, pers. comm.). Perhaps, in addition to signifying changes in hijras’ lives over the course of this past decade, these shifts in analytic frameworks and ideologies of representation are a testimony to changing theoretical winds and modes of ethnographic crafting.

Given that I have based my prior estimation of Nanda’s work very much on the second edition, my concerns remain unallayed.

Reddy, furthermore, is prone to reproducing the worst of Nanda’s flaws, as illustrated by the following excerpt:

Perhaps more deleterious to their health than this unrestricted use of oral contraceptives is hijras’ recent habit of injecting themselves with estrogen and progesterone concentrates, bought illegally from the local pharmacies. Not only were they completely unaware of exactly how these products affected their hormone levels and more generally their bodies, none of them would go to a doctor or nurse either to get a prescription or in order to be injected. Shanti claimed to know how to give an injection, having “watched a doctor many times,” and it was to her that hijras under the tank went for their weekly injections. Shanti not only had no training, but she used the same needle for multiple injections, facilitating the transmission of HIV (among other infections). Although hijras had heard that these golis and sudis (injections) were bad for them, they also knew that these substances produced results. Given their strong desire for a chati [breasts], they felt this risk was worth taking. The yearning to possess womanly attributes—breasts being one of the most visible and significant of these—was an extremely important motive for such practices.

While concerns over needle hygiene are more than warranted (and easily solved by making syringes more readily available), acquiring unprescribed hormonal treatments is far safer and more commonplace than most believe. Most transfeminized people languish under regimes that refuse to prescribe us essential transition care, leading many to rely on alternative sources of treatment and community networks of knowledge. Reddy comes across as ignorant of how difficult it is for most of us to acquire prescriptions, of how common it is for us to be under-dosed and placed on dangerous regimens that effectively induce menopause—by medical professionals—or indeed avoid mistreatment from doctors, belying the absence or omission of a transsexual perspective that could have proved clarifying. At the very least, meditating on whether this refusal to meet with medical professionals is based on prior experiences could have proved fruitful.

The very next section after this discussion of hormones is entitled “The Mimesis of Femininity and Parodic Gender Subversion”. Reddy’s reproduction of Nanda’s framing does not end here, as her justification for referring to hijras as “mimetics” is also rooted in gestational capacity, and relies on the same story that Nanda related!

“There was once a hijra named Tarabai who desperately wanted children of her own. So she went to Ajmer Baba and asked for this wish to be granted. Only, she said, “I want a child to be produced in my womb,” and did not explicitly ask for it to be born. So her pregnancy continued for several months and finally, unable to bear the pain and burden any longer, Tarabai slit her stomach and removed the baby, killing herself and the baby. But to this day, hijras who go to Ajmer Baba’s dargah [tomb] inevitably pay homage to Tarabai as well.” This story was recounted by hijras as “proof” that they “cannot have children,” and by virtue of this fact “are not women” (Nanda 1990). [Note—this is the renounced first edition of Nanda’s book]

Like Nanda, Reddy’s callous detachment stems from fundamentally viewing the hijra less as an oppressed group whose conditions are a product of a patriarchal society and more as potential subversives, whose ‘performance’ has edifying potential for how others can think about and navigate gendered systems. As she puts it:

In the case of hijras, for instance, does their gendered performance constitute parodic subversion, or does it merely constitute a resignification of normative gender ideals and practices? Hijras clearly express an overwhelming desire for the accouterments of femininity. Does this imply that hijras are merely reinscribing given, normative patterns of gender ascription and aspiration? Equally clearly in many contexts, hijras appear to perceive their identities as outside the binary frame of gendered reference. Given hijras’ realization of the constructed nature of their (gendered) identities, does this in itself constitute their performance as parody and therefore as potentially subversive? What constitutes resistance in such a scenario? In other words, are hijras primary agents of gender subversion in the Indian cultural context, or are they uncritically reinscribing gendered categories through their desires and practice? [Emphasis mine.]

The hijras’ material conditions, positionality under a heterosexual regime, or even their activism and resistance to their society’s stigmatization come second to the navel-gazing solipsism of cissexual academics, rendering judgment from on high. It is a thoroughly hegemonic gaze, a fetishistic view in the original sense of the term, where the hijras’ symbolic value as either “gender-insurgents” or “upholders of patriarchy” matters more than their literal humanity, dignity, and survival. This parasitic, extractive impulse towards a marginalized population is frankly sickening, to say nothing of the sheer temerity required to postulate that people who are so thoroughly rejected and repressed by their society might be active agents in reinforcing the very institutions depriving and dehumanizing them—a conclusion only an academic could dream up.

The 2014 NALSA opinion that cited Reddy was not legislation, as such, but was to form the basis of a draft bill. Saria goes on to discuss how the opinion did not consult India’s transgender or hijra communities, nor did further legislation based on it. A series of legal missteps culminated in a ghastly 2016 bill, named ‘The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill of 2016’, which dramatically expanded the state’s role in gender recognition, requiring all trans people to first obtain a ‘Transgender Certificate’ and submit themselves to institutional scrutiny as a precursor to legal recognition. This proposition tore up all previous discussions on the right to self-identification, resulting in the mobilization of Indian trans communities in protest of a bill that was putatively meant to secure their rights. From Raymond to Nanda to Reddy to NALSA, we can trace a path from Western transmisogynistic fundamentalism to the legal, institutionalized Third-Sexing of all Indian trans people.

That is the legacy of Western academia, of cultural anthropology, of a field playing at decolonialism proving to be an instrumental imperialist accomplice to India’s codification of degendering.

The Truth About Me

The Truth About Me: A Hijra Life Story is an autobiographical novel by A. Revathi, translated into English from Tamil. It is a blunt, harsh, and oftentimes difficult account of the life of a hijra, a population so thoroughly marginalized that such firsthand accounts are a remarkable rarity. Revathi discusses her childhood as a feminine ‘boy’, her lifelong identification with girlhood and womanhood, and the arduous journey she had to undergo in order to live authentically. She is candid about various aspects of her community and their way of life, and attests to the pursuit of surgical and hormonal treatments by hijra, so that their embodiment may match their identity.

In other words, she conclusively describes the ways in which hijra experiences parallel so-called “Western” transsexuality.

Her own words on the subject, excerpted from a speech she delivered at a Koovagam festival, express it best:

… The feelings I have are natural and they should be recognized as such. We want those like us, born as men, but with feminine feelings to have the right to sex-change surgery. All I ask is that you accept as worthy of respect what you’ve all along considered unnatural and illegal. … If there is something wrong with a woman’s uterus, you don’t hesitate to surgically remove it. If you happen to know that your child-to-be is a girl, you don’t mind destroying the foetus. Thus, each one of your acts falls foul of the law, of nature. But you bring up issues of nature and law only where certain things are concerned. Listen, I am not diseased. I consider myself a woman. But I possessed the form of a man. I wanted to rid myself of that form and live as a complete woman. How can that be wrong? [Emphasis mine.]

In some countries, government-run hospitals counsel people like me, put us on a course of hormones, carry out sex reassignment surgery and acknowledge our right to change our sex. Such women go to work, get married, do as other women do. We want the Indian state to do the same: provide us with counseling, put us on a course of hormones and assist with sex-change surgeries. Since law and society in this country do not acknowledge our right to live as we wish, we are forced to beg, take up sex work, and suffer as a consequence. Today, sex-change operations are carried out in a few private clinics, where surgical procedures are seldom followed, and which do not extend the sort of care we require afterwards. Many of us end up suffering all sorts of infections. We want to live as women, and if we are granted the facilities that will enable us to do so, we’ll live as other women do. We were not born to beg or do sex work. [Emphasis mine.] 

My nation, my society, my state and its blighted culture, rarely allow women like Revathi to speak.

Heed her words, and heed them well.

A Too-Short History of Transmisogyny

A Short History of Transmisogyny, authored by Jules Gill-Peterson, aspires to a cross-cultural, historical reckoning with global regimes of transmisogyny.

Gill-Peterson’s work is fiery and insightful, lucid on the topic of transsexuality and its stigmatization. Her book’s introduction firmly situates the struggles of trans women alongside the hijra, travesti, street queens, Two-Spirits, and others, attempting to articulate a unified politics of resistance against the worldwide suppression of transfemininity. I eagerly anticipated this book’s release earlier this year, both due to my familiarity with her scholarship and because I had high hopes that, as a desi transsexual woman, Gill-Peterson would do the topic justice.

I am grateful to her for the stark reminder that identity is not the sole determiner of outlook.

To understand what happened in the wake of Bhoorah’s murder, it’s important to say that hijras were not then—and are not today—transgender. Even though the story of the global trans panic weaves through their experience, it doesn’t mean they should be interpreted as trans women. Hijras, for one thing, are arguably much older than the Western concept of gender through which trans emerged as boundary crossing. [Emphasis mine.]

This is, ultimately, an argument with its roots in academic decolonial feminism, a school that considers the “rigid gender binary” to be a colonial export. Much ink has been spilled condemning colonial regimes for their corruption of precolonial, prelapsarian non-Western cultures, whose ‘expansive gender-systems’ allowed for populations like the hijra to ‘flourish’. It is a familiar song and dance, though a wearying one by now, if you’ve been paying attention.

In an interview for The Cut, Gill-Peterson makes her views on this explicit:

“There are many people who don’t necessarily share this Euro-American definition of “trans woman”: two-spirit people in the United States, hijras in British colonial India, travestis in Argentina.”

And so the band plays on.

It is difficult to know where to begin when contesting such a naive, idealistic view of precolonial societies, precisely because it is so trivially contradicted by the most perfunctory empirical observations. Hindu scripture, predating the very concept of a “West” by millennia, codifies the inferiority of women and the necessity for wives to subordinate themselves to husbands. Even during colonial times, the outlawing of widow burning was a pitched battle between Indian activists and the upper-caste Hindu elites. (The edict was eventually reverted to appease that selfsame elite.) I do not know how to explain to learned academics that sexual objectification and reproductive exploitation were not innovations that the West pioneered, nor do I know how to explain that a historical record of “asceticism”, of hijra being prescribed a livelihood of begging for alms at ceremonies, is not “reverence” or an “institutionalized gender-role”, but marginalization.

Bubbles Khanum, a member of the Pakistani khwaja sira community, has this to say on the topic:

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, commonly known as a hero for reforming education for the Indians, wrote a letter to the British demanding an action being taken against the Hijra community. Our lives before all that are often glorified excessively in attempts to convince the modern transphobic society that we belong here but the truth is, patriarchy has existed for thousands of years, where women have been subjugated, the Hijras were no exception and were not seen as equals. They were still victims of gendered violence, were ostracized to live in their own communes, had to heavily rely on religiosity and spirituality to get whatever respect they did, and at most all those efforts managed to get some of them secondary roles in the society such as advisors or harem guards. Moving forward the over glorification of the past does more harm than good as that is not what we want to go back to just to undo the damage the colonizers have done.

I wish to reiterate her message, grim though it may be: There is no salvation awaiting us in a glorified past that does not exist. If we are to advocate for our humanity, our legibility, and our liberty, it will be as a part of something new, something unprecedented, something we do not as yet have names for. You do not want the ‘veneration’ that the holy men of my culture reserve for us.

Oh, save my sisters from the “reverence” of this cursed land and its misbegotten people.

Part Four: A Tale of Two Genders

It’s the Power Differential, Stupid

Ostensibly, cultural anthropology’s gender odyssey is motivated by a desire to undermine and denaturalize the dualist, dichotomous nature of the Western gender system. Nanda’s elevation of “transgenderism” over “transsexuality” invokes a rosy view of anthropology’s role in unearthing a rich cross-cultural history of androgynous traditions, while Reddy’s meditation on “gender performance” seeks to gauge the subversive potential of hijra existence. These are, at least nominally, feminist goals, which make the neglect of feminist frameworks in their pursuit all the more confounding.

For the idea that a “Third Sex” could shake the very foundations of patriarchy is not merely misguided, it is unfathomably naive. While “the gender binary” is a good shorthand for summarizing many aspects of the heterosexual regime—namely the division of humanity into exhaustively two naturalized non-overlapping sexes—it does not convey the most important characteristic.

Succinctly, mere categorization does not constitute violence and injustice. Rather, the aggrandizement of one category at the expense of the other(s), enforced and upheld at the socio-cultural and institutional level, is what makes “the gender binary” unjust.

In even plainer terms: “It’s male-supremacy, stupid.”

The existence of a third sex does no more to challenge societal male-supremacy than does the existence of a fourth, fifth, or even second sex. Every sex that is not the First Amongst Sexes, that is not the Most Vaunted, Most Esteemed, and Most Adored Sex, simply becomes another sexual resource to be exploited. Patriarchy’s basis is not inherently a dichotomy, and the “rich history” of transfeminized populations across cultures—including the West—ought to have illustrated that plainly. The existence of hijras did little to challenge Hinduism’s enshrinement of male-supremacy, and the existence of transsexuals has only made the West’s ideological commitments to a dualistic sex model more pronounced.

Thus Third-Sexing, far from being a challenge to patriarchy, seems to be a surprisingly historical feature of its operation.

Systems of repression, ultimately, do not revise their most cherished imperatives based on democratic feedback. What they cannot extinguish entirely, they repurpose or recuperate.

In many ways, Nanda’s work did have the potential to rectify various failures of the second wave and push further our understanding of the social construction of sex. Had she not been ideologically committed to seeing the hijra as male ascetics, had she looked at Hinduism’s repressive edicts with a feminist instead of an orientalist eye, and if she had been willing to connect the plight of the hijra to that of the transsexual and even cissexual woman, all rendered sexual resources under regimes of heterosexuality, we might have arrived at transmisogyny theory decades early.

Instead, we have the romanticization of a faith under whose auspices a nationalistic, theocratic government is today fomenting religious fascism and attempting to eradicate the hijra way of life entirely.

Hindus, it would appear, have little reverence for the hijra after all.

Towards a Feminist Understanding of Third-Sexing

Cultural anthropology may have coined and codified “third-sexing” to legitimize the degendering of transfeminized populations in the Third World, but that does not mean that the term is inherently without value, or is not an observation of a real phenomenon. After all, the treatment of the hijra as something outside of gendered duality, as “possessing the qualities of both”, as well as misconceptions of hijras all being born “hermaphroditic” or intersex, are rooted in Indian and Hindu culture.

Indeed, in the eyes of Indian patriarchy, “hijra” is an expansive category, one that is meant to encompass all those deemed—bluntly—sexually ‘defective’. Girls who do not menstruate may be considered hijra, and while intersex individuals were the minority amongst them, they too are stigmatized and ostracized into hijra communities. The “third sex”, such as it is, is not a prescriptive category, but a dumping-ground, a landfill in which to deposit everyone that a society organized around the reproductive imperative considers extraneous and aberrant.

Such an attitude is predictive of prevailing attitudes towards homosexuality, a subject on which India’s track record is indeed abysmal. It must be recalled that historically in the West and in many cultures even today, homosexuality was first and foremost conceptualized as gendered deviance, rather than as an aspect of one’s identity independent of sex. Bizarre myths of lesbians as androgenized “tribades” with massive, penetrating clitorises existed alongside a corrective, curative fixation on “male effeminacy”, because patriarchal regimes do not care for the reality or the granularity of an expansive queer existence.

Simply put, under patriarchy, heterosexuality is the only legitimate mode of existence, and all deviations from it are similarly punished.

Nor is this contempt for all those who contravene the reproductive imperative limited to queer individuals. In India, infertile women—or even women who bear their husbands only daughters and no sons—face mistreatment, violence, treatment as “untouchable”, and expulsion from their families, as do widows. Womanhood being synonymized with gestation means that it comes with an expiration date, past which a woman who either could not perform the one function that accorded her any worth, or cannot do so anymore, becomes yet more offal to discard and sweep out onto the streets. Dworkin, in her essay The Coming Gynocide, observes a similar phenomenon in the West, where underfunded and overflowing care homes are disproportionately comprised of old women, as is the composition of elderly individuals on state or medical assistance.

“Old women do not have babies; they have outlived their husbands; there is no reason to value them. They live in poverty because the society that has no use for them has sentenced them to death.”

If you are not of the First Sex, pride and heir to your line, Third-Sexing will come for you sooner or later.

None of this is to attempt to collapse all forms of gendered oppression into a singular category, to erase distinction and equivocate between related yet distinct forms of patriarchal violence. Nor do I believe it is edifying or productive to try to determine whether a woman forced to bear children for a family that reviles her, or a woman expelled from society and forced to live on the margins, suffers more.

Rather, this is an explication of the underlying root of patriarchy, its core mechanisms and systems that constitute the guiding principles of (trans)misogyny, lesbophobia—all instances of gender-marginalization. Sex is not quite as binary as advertised, because the heterosexual regime has always regarded people as one of human, broodmare, or freak. If you are not a person with autonomy, then you are a vessel for those who are … and if you cannot even be that, then you are a waste of flesh, something to be fucked, killed, or both.

The butch derided and beaten as a delusional “he-she”, the tranny who can be endlessly violated, and even the woman who merely refuses to have children, are bound by this commonality. If we cannot participate in reproduction, we must be fixed … or disposed of.

Subversivism and Transition

A disturbing and recurring theme in the literature regarding both supposed third-sexes and “Western” transsexuality is the positioning of transsexuality as an inherently less subversive, more regressive, and unquestionably patriarchal practice. Oftentimes, the justifications for these audacious claims refer to “medicalization” in terms no less stigmatizing and fearmongering than Raymond herself, or the modern Gender-Conservative movement that echoes her. Nanda makes this core to the distinction between the “transgenderist” and the “transsexual”, elevating the former at the expense of the latter, a view grounded entirely in considering bodily transition an artificial and fundamentally assimilationist process.

If we are to humor this viewpoint at all, we are forced to admit that such a conception of transsexuality does not survive any length of empirical scrutiny. Not only have transsexuals been historically barred and gatekept from transition care, forced to play dress-up and memorize cribbed responses for doctors who would arbitrarily and gleefully revoke their rights to the care they desperately needed, our identities have time and time again been subject to challenge, denial, and contestation by others. Nor can a population so thoroughly stigmatized, impoverished, and routinely subject to patriarchal violence “uphold” the very system stripping them of humanity and personhood.

This categorization of transition and revulsion towards those who avail of it seems particularly distasteful and irresponsible in today’s climate, with a global reactionary moral panic scapegoating and vilifying transsexuals and seeking to criminalize all transition technologies. Morbidly, many justifications for outlawing transsexuality rely upon these decades-old tropes and popularized notions of “untested”, “mutilating”, “medicalizing” processes that will never be accorded legitimacy no matter how many positive outcomes are cited.

Even the widely-discredited Cass Review, a document that is being used to justify outlawing transition care despite its glaring methodological shortcomings, gallingly invokes the constructed opposition of transsexuality with “true” gender nonconformity on page fourteen.

Secondly, medication is binary, but the fastest growing group identifying under the trans umbrella is non-binary, and we know even less about the outcomes for this group. Some of you will also become more fluid in your gender identity as you grow older. [Emphasis mine.]

It is a testament to the utter depravity and cataclysmic negligence of solipsistic academic literature that deeply entrenched conservative attitudes towards bodily transition, attitudes that make life harder for marginalized transsexuals at the institutional level, have for so long been repackaged and propped up as some manner of far-sighted feminist ethos. In reality, transsexuals are routinely denied bodily autonomy and the right to our own sex, systemically prevented from accessing the care that would allow us to take our sex into our own hands due to cissexist anxieties around ‘fertility’ or reproductive capacity. The modern anti-transsexual moral panic stems from a conception of reproductive viability being the prime determiner of individual worth, over and above individuals’ own wishes, regarding every transitioned person as a societal failure and a “lifelong medical patient”. It underwrites the notion that parents who abuse queer and trans children have more of a right to their children’s bodies than queer and trans children have to their own, and relies upon thoroughly eugenical logics in order to devalue and dehumanize all those who pursue bodily transition.

In the final calculus, how “subversive” bodily transition is should not matter to anyone more than the fact that transition care is an absolute necessity for many, many people, but the pretense that transition is in any way “normative” or “regressive” under patriarchal regimes hell-bent on eradicating it—morally mandating it out of existence, one might say—is facile, absurd, and an exercise in idealist sophistry. The normalization and elevation of this idea is not merely abhorrent, but actively eliminationist.

Hermeneutical Injustice and External Observers

In Neither Man Nor Woman, Nanda engages in a particularly damaging rhetorical sleight of hand. The book is careful to declare its reliance on testimonials, to stress its reproduction of meticulously translated firsthand accounts, and to overall give the impression that Nanda’s conclusions are based upon an impartial and neutral observation of the facts and details presented to her. As we saw several times earlier, this is a farce, given how the author selectively emphasizes some details while minimizing others, presents the information through a thoroughly ideological lens, and at times fails to even realize the significance of some of her observations. Nor are the mistakes and misrepresentations covered so far in this essay by any means exhaustive, and Nanda’s inability to connect the hijra engaging in both Hindu and Muslim practices to India’s caste system and islamophobia, or her surprising credulity when narrating a “myth” that “permits all hijra to travel on trains for free”, could be the subjects of essays just as long.

Her ethnography acutely demonstrates the hollowness of academic ‘objectivity’, revealing it to be nothing but an additional facet of the epistemic violence marginalized populations are confronted with. When Serena Nanda is allowed to set the discursive tone of hijra understanding in the West—and apparently in Indian Supreme Court opinions, too—the inclusion of testimonials is so much theater, gesturing towards the participation of marginalized demographics while maintaining a strictly hegemonic outlook. It reflects exactly how Indian society already treats the hijras: denying their every attempt to claim womanhood and insisting on third-sexing and stigmatizing them, while relying heavily on damnable religious rationalizations that are already routinely invoked to sanctify so much patriarchal violence.

I do not pretend to be able to definitively claim that every single hijra thinks of herself as a woman. However, when hijras engage in activism to advocate for legal recognition as women, when they participate in Aurat Marches (aurat means woman) holding signs that say “Hijras Are Women” and “Trans Women Are Women. SHUT UP”, it is safe to state that presenting hijra identity as mystical, complex, and utterly beyond any affinity to “Western” transsexuality is deliberate silencing and a baldfaced attempt to further the hermeneutical injustice desi cultures already subject them to.

Most reprehensible, however, are the attempts to paint any desires for solidarity between hijras and transsexuals as “Western imperialism”, or to enshrine their degendering as a valiant “decolonial” effort to preserve non-Western cultures in all their bloodstained glory. As a disowned daughter of this culture, I wish to state in no uncertain terms:

If a culture’s preservation depends on the violation and degendering of and denial of dignity to my sisters, then it should join every other extant regime that thrives on injustice, upon the ash-heap.

(Trans)misogyny is not a cultural value worth preserving. The development of a cross-cultural transsexual and transfeminist consciousness, rooted in the recognition of how our identities and struggles are similarly shaped, is not imperialism. It is a struggle for liberation, one that queer academia is heinously eager to oppose, and one whose proponents shall no longer be spoken over.

Conclusion: Voices of the Damned

I am not, by any means, a perfect representative of all hijra, all desi trans women, or even of all desi transfeminists.

Hijra, I am told, and as some of the above scholarship notes, is less an identity and more a community. Most, if not all hijras are transfeminized, but not all who are transfeminized desi individuals are hijra. Indeed, as Saria notes, the emergent trans identity in India has a certain class character to it, with many affluent trans women seeking to distance themselves from the abjectified hijra and advocate for themselves as a more respectable breed of queer.

Their treasonous politics will not soon be forgiven.

Personally, I am very much a transsexual desi dyke, a distinction I draw not as disavowal, but out of respect. I have no house, no kin, and do not have the honor of calling any hijra my family. I suffered the closet alone, quietly, biding my time until I could make good my escape. I am not as brave as most hijra, and I am significantly more privileged, able to leverage material advantages most of them will never have access to. I speak in the tongue of our colonizers, a bloodsoaked gift that can by itself determine our ability to cross the borders that confine us. I avoided a fate, a prison with saffron bars, that so many of my sisters will never have the opportunity to. This is a knowledge—a certainty—that sears at my soul in ways I don’t have names for.

Do you understand?

Sometimes, more often than I’d like to admit, I don’t understand. I don’t understand how I can live with myself.

Knowing this … attempting to comprehend the scale of it, the enormity, the sheer totality of the torture my society puts women like me through … do you understand what it feels like to encounter queer dogma in the West that touts the hijra as a “recognized Third Gender”?

How can I express to you how hysteria-inducing it is to see the hijra described as revered, when I grew up immersed in the toxic miasma of that ‘reverence’?

I am not, by any means, someone with an extensive background on this subject. I am simply a trans woman from the nation in question, who speaks this language, who was exposed to this scholarship, and who, first and foremost, cares.

Because so many of my own countrymen, whether cis or trans, whether aligning perfectly with my politics or opposed on every count, simply do not care.

All I really did was read shoddy, orientalizing texts that mystify and mangle what it’s like to exist under the crushing heel of Third World patriarchy, and I called bullshit.

This is a point I desperately wish to drive home, because I must ask … why me?

Why did I have to make the connection between Sister Raymond’s Troonmadness Bible and an anthropological text that launders its ravings into the queer academy’s canon?

Why did I have to be the one to point out that texts that describe gender-marginalized people as “exaggerated, garish parodies of femininity” was perhaps not an ideal vector for understanding their plight?

I ask because it seems improbable, bordering on impossible, that a book that treats its subjects with such open scorn and derision could go over three decades without its blatant, inhumane cruelty being remarked upon, and yet that seems to be the case.

Then again, it’s not like the derision of trans women is new to the hallowed halls of the academy.

Perhaps this is ultimately why the learned ones see us as nothing but costumed natives, putting on a show for their amusement. They are a pantomime, a parade of pretenders in drag, trying to pass off solipsistic, bigoted drivel as an intellectual pursuit, seeing their own artificiality reflected in all they behold. Peel back the curtain, and witness how quickly the mask slips, how the masturbatory indulgences give way to corrosive, hateful screeds.

I ask, but I already know the answer.

And I am not interested in their answers anymore.

No, the charlatans with far too much ink to spill have said enough. Now is the time for the transsexual, the third-sexed woman, the third-world lesbian, and all those who have been reduced to rhetorical props to speak, to scream, to ROAR, to raise their voices in a cacophony. Now is the time for the damned to have their due, for the wails of the forgotten to echo above the “civil”, silencing din. Now is the time for all those whose struggles have been erased, co-opted, recuperated, disrupted, and sanctified to make themselves known.

Now we will speak, and you will, for the first time, LISTEN.

If you enjoyed or wish to support Talia Bhatt’s work on developing a materialist, third-world transfeminism, please consider supporting her here by subscribing, or pre-ordering her upcoming book of transfeminist essays, Trans/Rad/Fem. It will contain exclusive material, re-organize the existing content on this blog in a more digestible and didactic manner, and serve as a self-contained treatise on transmisogyny theory from the perspective of a racialized, third-world transfeminist.

The disproportionately high rates of abuse that trans women suffer—even prior to transition—should not mystify anyone.

Consider, for a moment, how easy it is to isolate a target whose precarity is near-guaranteed. Whether we are vocal or silent about our true identities, whether we are scrabbling for hormones and desperately-needed healthcare or wasting away without them, whether we are actively taking steps to find community with those like us or never breathing a word about what we really are—even to ourselves—a trans woman is always dangling one foot out the door, hoping and praying that this time, she can step inside with both feet. Families frequently abandon and disown trans women, and just as frequently exercise more violent options. Exclusion from many economic opportunities and the twin threat of expensive care and inevitable impoverishment is ever-present. All of which pales in comparison to that singular quality which abusers covet over and above all else:

No one believes trans women.

Many factors endemic to transmisogyny underlie this denial of epistemic authority. Plenty of people choose to subscribe to the collective delusion that we occupy a hegemonic male positionality at any point in our lives, an expression of cissexist faith in the naturalization and immutability of sex that does not waver even in the face of contradictory evidence. That we are slandered sometimes with male forms of address is pointed to as a paltry, paper-thin rationalization for ignoring how we are treated instead of what we are called by those who wish to monster us. The tranny is a “man” only when she can be painted as a brutish, deluded, or perverted one. She is constructed as a threat in every instance, one so existential that her very presence justifies all manner of violence against her—all in self-defense, you see.

This is compounded by the reality of the mechanism—trans women are degendered, regarded as some kind of heinous, aberrant, nonhuman thing that must never be countenanced, only rectified. Our expressions of pain are manipulations, never sincere. Our wounds are only ever self-inflicted, likely for attention—for who would even want to sully their hands with us? Assaulted—what do you mean? Who could ever want a thing like you? You were obviously the one who tricked them. How dare you let your misshapen form be inflicted on a poor soul with their hand around your throat? You’re lucky he didn’t just kill you—and he would have had every right to, too, given what you did.

Degendering dehumanizes us utterly because a patriarchal regime conditions legibility upon gender. Are you imbued with a modicum of agency, your place in society central and venerated and deified, the sire and scion of your line? Are you a reproductive asset, a vessel through whom the actual agents of history will perpetuate their marks upon a world forbidden to you? 

… Or are you, in fact, something else entirely? Something that is neither citizen nor serf, something that cannot even serve the purpose of incubator, something whose only use can be absorbing as much violence as those around her deem her fit to take?

Are you a still-shambling corpse—dead tranny walking?

I called myself that to my then-girlfriend of just two months, trying to tell her to not get too attached to me, trying to express to her that no matter how hard I tried, I’d realized exactly where all my roads led and she was better off not witnessing my arrival at the destination. That was five years ago, and I’ve never been more glad to be wrong.

Well.

So far.

Bury Me Deep

Deepa Mehta’s Fire notes that Hindi lacks even a word for the term ‘lesbian’; it has no concept for the idea of a woman who might love or carnally desire another. Under the harshest contradictions of patriarchies that view women as burdens, as liabilities whose only utility is in ensuring the continuation of male lines, the particularities of a woman's identity become immaterial. A ‘lesbian’ is a meaningless concept to a culture without any regard for women’s interiority, that orients women to a singular purpose whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, asexual, or otherwise: domestic, reproductive, and care work, effectively rendering them indentured servants and a source of uncompensated, undervalued, feminized labor. Gender is, ultimately, a labor relation, a set of rationalizations for a social paradigm of exploitation that leans on notions of biodestiny and specific embodiments being for specific purposes.

Who or what a woman loves stops mattering; it only matters that she is used correctly.

I recommend Adrienne Rich’s essay on ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ because I don’t know how to succinctly convey the feeling of panic that settles into my very core when a friend doesn’t log in for a few days, or our group simply doesn’t hear from them, leading us all to wonder—is this it? Has the regime of heterosexuality compelled them finally, press-ganged them back into womanhood and the only purpose women are deemed suited for under it? Friends have told me of fathers who force them to read scripture, who lament their shame and failure at having produced something so ‘defective’ as a ‘daughter’ that resists being married off to a man, who insinuate that these ‘daughters’ are fortunate to still live—that the continuation of their lives is in fact an indescribable act of mercy. We commiserate, we plot, we try to imagine a future untainted by a pall so heavy as to blot out all hope of happiness. Sometimes we succeed. 

Just as often, we fail.

While the essay does not mention trans women explicitly, the heterosexual mandate is nevertheless scrawled all over transfeminine histories. In the West, trans women have long been held hostage by medical practitioners—largely men—who demand performances of hyperfemininity from us in exchange for desperately-needed healthcare. This healthcare could and in many places still can be withheld at any time on the basis of arbitrary “psychological evaluations”, a well-known euphemism for, to put it bluntly, our potential fuckability.

Outside the West, our destinies are even more dire, with the transfeminized being pushed to the absolute margins of society and locked out of the economy at nearly every level. This collectively imposed degendering and impoverishment is frequently justified along theological and cultural lines that credulous anthropologists from Western academies uncritically reproduce, romanticize, and weaponize. Serena Nanda’s Neither Man Nor Woman holds up South Asia’s hijra as objects of macabre Orientalist fascination, waxing rhapsodic about their “social role” as “homosexual male prostitutes” (frequently calling attention to their putative ‘maleness’ despite the book’s own title) and constantly describing their ostracism and suffering with all the detached, casual cruelty of an English children’s author. To the Western academic, the subjectivity and activism of transfeminized Third-Worlders is a distant concern next to their rhetorical utility as a ‘venerated’, vaunted “Third-Sex”, casting “primitive yet Enlightened” non-Western cultures as curious gender-practitioners from whom the West has so much to learn. All the while, the ways in which Third-Sexed populations like hijra identify with womanhood and organize for legal recognition as women are utterly elided; as Serano grimly notes of Nanda’s Gender Diversity in Whipping Girl, the “gender-diversity” of the Orientalized non-Western culture is a sacred cow for many academics who concern themselves with queerness and (supposedly) feminism, a crucial cudgel with which to beat and berate the “medicalized”, “Western” transsexual. Transition healthcare that is socio-economically out of reach for many Third World trans women is derided as “imperialism” while the transmisogynistic model of “Third-Sexing”, first imposed by our own cultures and then legitimized by Western academics, is simply considered scholarship.

Many Westerners, it seems, would happily let my sisters languish without means or care just to reinforce their own worldviews.

Even within this context, I find myself still oddly erased. Afsaneh Najmabadi in Professing Selves recounts asking a room full of Iranian transsexuals if any of them were lesbians and receiving blank stares in response, an experience consonant with my two transsexual friends being asked if they were best friends in a Mumbai cafe—by a trans woman. Womanhood is understood to be for men, transition understood as a social technology for people who wish to access particular relations to manhood. Certainly true in the Third World, if not in the West as well, given how much the global transmisogynistic panic fixates on the specter of the rapacious male dressing up in women’s garb to sexually exploitative ends. Lesbianism remains erased, buried, forbidden to cissexual and transsexual women alike, an untenable identity that many cultures refuse to even acknowledge with contempt.

I have no past, and many would have it that I aspire to no future, either.

Strains of academic feminism exist that consider colonialism to be the genesis of patriarchy, that idealize a prelapsarian pre-patriarchal past that was then tainted by the relentless scourge of worldwide Euro-imperialist hegemony. I do not know how to explain how old the misogyny in Hindu scriptures is, how the history of my people is replete with burned widows and drowned infants and femicidal practices that far predate any British law, how the hijra and khwaja sira were persecuted on the subcontinent long before the Raj, how the ‘veneration’ of holy men is not actual social capital but rather theological justification for confinement, isolation, and exclusion.

I do not know how to explain to people how many lesbians and trans women and queer people need to flee their abusive families, flee the Third World entirely if they can, because staying where they are means accepting erasure, accepting death, accepting a brutal and brutalized life in the absence of sufficient privileges or luck to shield us from how much our societies abhor those who repudiate the heterosexual-reproductive mandate.

I do not know how to explain to you that our pain matters, that our pain is real, and that our pain is important on its own merits and not as rhetorical tools furnished for Westerners in arguments about their own genders and imperialisms and blighted settler-colonial cultures.

My friend would call this hermeneutical injustice—a silence and absence of ideas, concepts, and terminology deeper than ripping out tongues or censoring presses can achieve. It is a void, an absence, an utter displacement in time and history because no one like you was ever supposed to exist, and if they did, they were buried deep.

I am an aberration, an anomaly, a paradox, and my feminism has always been a struggle to make myself legible—first to myself, then to those both of my culture and not.

It is strenuously opposed.

No Country for Failed Men

My then-girlfriend, now-wife, helped me escape my abusive home and begin my transition.

“Coming out” was not a starting point for me but a grinding halt, the beginning of an arduous five years where after overcoming the hurdles of hermeneutical injustice and learning about transition well into my 20s—and realizing that transition was something I personally wanted even later—I was trapped by my circumstances with no access to hormones, no independent finances, and no ability to actually act on my realization. I had consigned myself mentally and emotionally to a slow march to my own dirge, trying to make peace with drowning slowly in a household, society, and nation that would never allow me to be what I truly am. My wife is not merely a life raft, she is the very air in my lungs, oxygen pumped into a failing heart that allows it to beat anew. There is a reason that my first fiction novel is about the liberatory potential of queer love, about finding freedom in each other’s arms.

We are not all so lucky.

Luck played a massive part, as did privilege—I do not and will not deny that. Even still, there are many whose impression of Third World migrants is a caricature, a homogenized impression that I am frequently collapsed into. It is undeniable that many legal immigrants to the West are self-selected from among the most affluent of their states, those with the means to successfully navigate the harsh border regimes imposed to keep us in our place. It is also true that diasporic politics often straddle the contradiction between “progressivism” against racialization that targets them in the West and the “conservatism” enjoyed by the comprador classes in the motherland. This does not mean that every one of us can comfortably be smeared as innately reactionary or classist. Many of us from the Third World are displaced in space as well as time, deprived of homeland and history on the basis of our queer identities. Fortunate though I was to find asylum with my wife, it is a happy accident too many of us are denied. Too many of us are not as lucky as I would wish us to be, and the world we inhabit should not be so cruel as to demand we roll the dice to escape our own extinction.

Nor is it truly an escape from the relentless scourge of patriarchy, only a modification of form and character, of going from one state of abjection to another that is less intense in some ways, more intense in others. Moving to the West granted me the ‘privilege’ of being able to embody my queer identity more openly, of adopting the signifiers and cultural markers of queerness in a language that my tongue was forced to acquire fluency in and a society that enriched itself by feasting upon my people’s blood. In exchange I am racialized, a second-class citizen twice over by dint of both my precarious legal status and the racialization that I am now subject to, that now marks me as Other. While I trust my wife completely, it is in fact alarming that my status in this country is utterly dependent on her. Immigrant women from the Third World are frequently abused by partners wielding the precarity of their legal status over their heads. In order to escape one abusive household I’ve had to make myself susceptible to abuse in another, have had to rely even more heavily on goodwill and fortune.

All to exist openly in a society that still reviles me and those like me and whose wealth is founded upon the untold and uncountable atrocities that constitute my nation’s past. I recall having a panic attack the first time my wife took me to Cambridge. I could see bloodstains on the flagstones.

That precarity has been compounded by my sudden unemployability. After being unable to secure adequate healthcare for my disability on the NHS—I did not even bother attempting to seek transition-related healthcare—I was forced to resort to the expensive yet still-flagging private sector and was unable to retain my job. Since then, despite an increase in qualifications, and despite no longer needing sponsorship, I find myself unable to secure more than first-round interviews, whereas a fictional man with my legal name had frequently managed to get to the third round for positions that now turned their noses up at me. Transition does many things, and one of the things it does best is erode fortunes, no matter how robust. We have been subsisting on my wife’s disability benefits.

Despite this, I am still in a more secure position than most of my kin, if only through the generosity and acceptance of my in-laws. I still do my best to help others and I make a point of not asking for help myself when so many more aren’t as fortunate as I have been. My life hangs by a thread, but at least that thread is golden; I worry greatly for those without the ‘privilege’.

So I stand, cleft from two cultures that revile me, one whose abuses I had to flee from and one whose abuses I have no choice but to subject myself to. My feminist theory is explicitly from this perspective, adrift in these currents, where I do my best to shout over the din and give name to the ways in which my identity, my experiences, and my epistemic authority are all erased to serve others’ ends.

Often, I feel alone. Until recently, I didn’t feel that quite so keenly—had thought I had found comrades and sisters and fellow-travelers, people who understood. People who wouldn’t subject me to the particular process of dehumanizing invalidation I have grown so used to in spaces both online and off.

I know better now.

I Tried

It started as a small Discord server for those who enjoyed my writing.

Author Discords are relatively banal, informal spaces. A few of my friends have modest ones, with some having truly gigantic ones, but I never expected mine to be particularly sizeable. My fiction debut had been a modest success by indie standards but it still did not mean any degree of significant reach. Several people hopped on when I shared the invite link on social media, and several of my friends did as well.

Predictably, perhaps, my Author Discord did not remain an Author Discord for long. I enjoy writing fiction and I enjoy producing the sorts of narratives I personally wished I could have seen growing up—narratives that regard lesbians and trans women as whole people with complexity and internality. Even so, my true passion has always been feminism, so much so that it undergirds even the fiction I write, informs the way I construct narrative arcs and address themes. More and more people asked to join not because of my self-published book, but because in the process of socializing and interacting with friends on the server, I could not stop discussing feminism and feminist theory. The channels about my writing languished while the singular ‘feminism’ channel expanded, and the server slowly began to look more and more like a transfeminist forum. Eventually, it somehow acquired a reputation as one too, even as I still mostly considered it an informal, social arena.

An interesting dynamic that cropped up was the sheer number of demands that were placed upon me by those in the server, while a bizarre degree of resentment and vitriol began to swell amidst some who were not. Strange accusations of exclusivity, reactionary sentiment, and imagined goings-on were fielded publicly, while privately the space remained an avenue for me to organize watch parties, speak to my friends scattered across time zones, and discuss the feminist theory I was familiar with and that I wanted to write. Over time, more and more was asked of me with regard to formalizing the pursuit of feminist work, feminist readings, feminist discussions, feminist writing—all of which was expected to fall upon me. The demands were many, the offers to assist few.

I found myself, once again, at the nexus of simultaneous monstering and pedestalization. Those who felt slighted for reasons I cannot fathom felt comfortable declaring me a fascist (due to my nation’s current regime—which I had to flee) or accusing me of uncritically regurgitating Second-Wave orthodoxy without actually pointing to my writing or my work to substantiate such claims. The ‘ontological immaturity’ and ‘conservative character’ of lesbian feminism were held forth as a charge that I was viciously berated for repudiating. Queer people from the first world—some trans, some even trans women themselves—searched for a justification to fit their distrust or disagreement. I could not be someone with a differing ideological approach or a unique perspective—there had to be something about me that rendered me secretly a bad actor, an evil radfem with ill intent and malicious designs, all for my nefarious goal of taking a materialist approach to transfeminist theorizing, explicitly from my point of view as a trans lesbian who survived Third World patriarchy.

A white trans woman told my girlfriend privately that I was the “angriest woman on the internet” and a “rage demon”. It is not the first time brown women like me have been painted as uncaring aggressors from whose rampaging excesses more-delicate women need to be safeguarded.

Meanwhile, I was being asked to do more and more in the server, things I wanted to do but found difficult to keep up with in the face of bad-faith racialized attacks from my own “community”. The need for engagement with more strains of feminism was repeatedly stressed to me, without which could I really speak on topics pertinent to my own life and the lives of women like me? I was asked to know everything and share my expertise; folks would not so much as arrange discussions they wanted to have of their own volition but would ask me to organize and prioritize and plan at their behest.

Not once was it ever asked whether my work could have merit without existing in conversation with every other strain of feminism, several of which treat the oppression of Third World women as a rhetorical abstraction. It was taken as a given that anything I had to say could not possibly have value on its own merits, that my perspective as a trans lesbian from the Third World could not possibly stand on its own. Being in conversation with other schools of thought is integral to scholarship, but I was not asked to be in conversation with others—I was told in no uncertain terms that my own work would not be adequately progressive, would somehow fall prey to reactionary tendency, unless I deprioritized drawing on my own culture’s patriarchy and my own empirical observations and subordinated my own life’s work to the prevailing orthodoxy.

I was, frankly, being asked to deny my own epistemic authority, specifically to center and engage with work that has long neglected women like me.

That is, ultimately, the rub. Due to the erasure of women like me—transfeminized, lesbian, of the Third World—due to the epistemic injustice we are subject to, it is easy for others to define me, to construct a phantasmatic apparition whose sins I can be held accountable for. Neither those who denounced me nor those who sought to extract more and more labor from me truly saw me as a person, only something to instrumentalize, to repurpose to their own ends.

I am a brown trans dyke from the global south, and women like me are not supposed to speak for ourselves.

So I acquiesced and, deleting the server and my online presence, I fell silent.

Feel My Pain

Because women like me are reduced to tools for others to exploit, it is easy to vilify us when we do not allow ourselves to be exploited. My country is the world’s sweatshop and brothel, an impoverished nation riddled with contradictions and harsh conservative regimes. My sisters are exploited by their “fellow” men as my nation is exploited by the hegemonic worldwide economic order, avenues for cheap labor both. When we are recognized, it is an Orientalized recognition, an exotified caricature of our practices or cuisine or women. Even the transmisogyny of my society, that so brutalizes transfeminized populations, is considered a fascinating and core aspect of our culture held up beyond critique.

So when we do not follow a Westernized script as Third World women, or a patriarchal script as transfeminized women, we are treated as broken dolls, as things contravening our intended purpose, fit only to vent upon and discard. Our lives become a repeating pattern of trying to find those who will not subject us to this, who will see us as people and not resources to mine. We are constantly threatened with masculinization, sexualization, demonization, and easily-achieved ostracism and social isolation from communities that only ever valued us as rhetorical mouthpieces and grew displeased at our temerity to express and insist upon our own viewpoints.

All of which is an inseparable miasmic slop that I cannot disentangle any more than I could part the sea. I cannot tell you where the racialization ends and the transmisogyny begins, which bit was in opposition to me as a lesbian feminist who refused to let her identity be disparaged and which bit was just because I was a Third Worlder speaking out of turn and refusing to let Westerners romanticize my “gender-enlightened culture”. None of it, no single aspect of me was acceptable to those who would prefer that my existence hew to a simple narrative, or otherwise fade away entirely.

Which I refuse to do.

I do not know how to explain to you that my pain matters, that I spend every moment agonizing over how best to draw people’s attention to the plights of queer women they would much rather forget. I don’t know how to explain to you that patriarchy is not a uniquely Eurocolonial invention, that my sisters and foremothers have been sacrificed on the altar of manhood for aeons and will continue to be unless it is stopped. I do not know how to explain to you that the West, whether protagonist or antagonist, wishes to be the absolute center of history, and it is decidedly not.

So I won’t bother.

I will keep working, I will keep speaking, and I will scream and scream and scream until I am heard, or until someone has the guts to silence me for good. What I have to say matters. Undoing the erasure of women like me matters. We are not your dolls, we are not your props. Our. Pain. Matters.

There is a future for people like me, and you will simply have to live in it.

When I first opened the pages of Stone Butch Blues, I did not expect to find my own past inscribed within its margins.

To be sure, the book is very much grounded in a specific time, place, culture and moment. It is a dramatized historical narrative that captures the tumultuous mood of the US-American social upheavals that began in the 1960s, through a queer working-class lens. The reader is carried across decades alongside the protagonist, Jess, stopping at the very cusp of the 90’s, in the thick of AIDS activism and the gradually increasing visibility and acceptance of queer people. It is an optimistic, hopeful tale, something that is easy to forget in the midst of its most brutal and brutalizing chapters, when Feinberg’s words unflinchingly spell out the horrific traumas that working-class lesbians and queers had to endure in order to simply live as themselves. Somewhat uncharitably, but not entirely inaccurately, one could describe Stone Butch Blues as one butch’s struggle against an unending wave of corrective, re-gendering violence that she only just manages to outpace. While unapologetic in its depiction of the excesses of the heterosexual regime, however, the story is so much more than a parade of patriarchal savagery.

Gender is the burning, white-hot core of Stone Butch Blues, duly recognized as a relentless force that Marks and Others. Jess, very early on, recognizes herself as a “he-she”, a slur becoming her first word to describe the manner in which she is unique and unlike most girls of her age. “Unique” is synonymous with “aberrant” under patriarchy, however, and despite how clumsy and futile Jess’ attempts to escape the looming eventuality of womanhood are, heterosexual reclamation, re-gendering violation finds her all the same. Jess’ existence is viewed by those around her as an error to stamp out, an anomaly to redress, setting the tone for the remainder of her whole life. Stone Butch Blues is the story of Jess and her lifelong battle with Gender.

It is not a battle that abates even when Jess finds her compatriots, her shield-sisters and her comrades throughout the various stages of her life, even when her family bonds are forged in love and community ties rather than the flimsy shackles of blood. Jess is a butch, a lesbian defined by her masculinity, her stoicism and her quiet resilience, but even finding her people does little more than provide her with friends and allies to lose, casualties to tally up in the war-zone of the degendered wastes. Lesbians aren’t women, we are reminded every time a cop car drives up in front of a bar, and the paddy wagons are here to round them back up behind womanhood’s iron bars. The sentence for defying heterosexuality is worse than death: it is torture, it is repeated, sustained and indefinite violation at the hands of the regime’s most debased, lurid enforcers, its most shameless and soulless pigs. Humanity is found in words and touches of comfort exchanged between cells, in hot bubble baths that can wash away grime but not shame and powerlessness, but the animalistic clawing of the patriarch rakes at their very spirits, diminishing their numbers, their selves, and their sanities. Queerness is an occupied territory, Feinberg grimly reminds us, and its soldiers are only too willing to pillage it hollow.

Suffering, ubiquitous though it may be, does not define us, and it does not define Jess, either. For despite the horrors she endures, hurtling herself forward through the barbarous landscape without letting cracks deepen into fissures, Jess’ defining attribute remains solidarity. She is an organizer on the factory floor and the streets of New York alike, a calm, dependable presence whom others constantly learn to rely on. Jess is flawed, limited, a person, someone who must grow and learn at her own pace, but the core principle that rules her no matter what barriers she intends to cross, whether racial or gendered or classed, is strength in togetherness, is power in unity, is unbreaking fortitude of the union. Feinberg’s socialism streaks and highlights the pages with its brilliant red hues, reminding us all what it means to fight for rights and dignity: recognizing our common struggle.

Ironic, given Jess’ personal struggle with difference. Despite her desire to unify, Jess has always been a woman apart, someone who struggles most keenly with Gender’s penetrating Mark upon her body. Her butchness makes her stand out, alienates her from womanhood and manhood alike, drawing dirty stares and angry glares from people who reflexively fume, for some reason, when they cannot ascertain precisely what’s in your pants. In a bold but truly desperate maneuver, Jess resorts to back-alley treatments and medical intervention to reshape her body and sex into a form that more closely resembles society’s expectations, choosing stealth in the face of inexhaustible direct fire. She acquires a prescription for testosterone, masculinizing her face and figure, and saves up for an off-the-books top surgery, shedding the breasts that have plagued her since puberty with the sexualizing gaze of heterosexual desirability. Faced with a world that refuses to accept what she is, Jess compromises, choosing to navigate the Gendered labyrinth as man, at least outwardly.

I could never have guessed, when I began to read Jess’ heartbreaking account of her lonely, isolated existence as a man, that I would see my own pain reflected in her words. Jess had wanted a flat chest for the vast majority of her life, as well as the ability to exist in public without being hyperscrutinized as only a Third-Gendered queer can be, but the peace that this ceasefire brings is a troubled one, turbulent under the surface. Jess is now a closeted lesbian, moving through the world as a man, an experience that I would not wish on my most reviled foe, leave alone a marginalized woman simply trying to survive. She talks about flirting with a woman in a diner as man, and the uncanny dissonance of being a woman who loves women, but who isn’t seen as one, burrows its way into my being, barbed and bilious, shredding my heart with a pain I haven’t felt in years. Her past is erased, her future uncertain, and the man who presently stares back at her in the mirror isn’t someone she recognizes. It is like drowning, Jess says, or like being buried alive. She has become a ghost, haunting her own bones, bones whose shape and contours she no longer knows, can no longer claim.

Passing—unnoticed, unregarded, unseen—is its own form of Gendering violence, a ‘privilege’ exacted at a steep cost to one’s own sense of self.

So when Jess stops taking testosterone, when she shaves herself one last time and resolves to look into a mirror and finally, finally see herself, it is a moment of quiet triumph. Her hips fill out, her stubble is zapped away and she becomes something she has no names for—not yet, at least, not in the time she inhabits. Is Jess a butch, still? Is she a lesbian? She, and the book, answer with a resounding yes. Jess finds herself—in the arms of a transsexual woman, in the acceptance of a lesbian community, in the incompatibility of her fully-realized self with the ghosts of her past life. Jess becomes, and she does so in a way that neither capitulates to patriarchy nor compromises with it in ways she cannot bear. A past of people just like her beckons towards a future of the same, a closed ring of infinite possibility of where we have been and where we will go. We see, in the book’s final pages, its vision for a future free of the present’s burdens: it is transsexual, it is lesbian, it is phantasmatic, yes, but a dream more real than anything this paltry patriarchy can conjure. It is a world free, finally, of Gender.

Meta-Narrative

We inhabit a media landscape that does not merely neglect the butch, but one that seeks to erase her entirely.

This has as much to do with derision, revulsion, and degradation as it does absence. While the butch is a figure unlikely to so much as peripherally inhabit, leave alone figure prominently within a text, the masculine woman is an oft-invoked specter to browbeat those who aspire to embody such a designation. Sexual difference remains the core of patriarchal organization: women are female, and so feminine, and so any desire for or display of masculinity is abominable. The ugly feminist, the aged, lonely spinster surrounded by feline companions, the man-hating dyke—all are figures summoned over campfires, expected to scare girls straight.

It is hardly a surprise, then, that Stone Butch Blues has acquired not merely prominence, but an unlikely canonization within lesbian and butch circles. Jess is not simply a butch protagonist, she is the butch protagonist, one whose journey touches so many aspects of “our history”. The rush to hold up, elevate to eminence, and indeed preserve within lesbian consciousness this indelibly, unapologetically butch text has preceded the need to ask some rather important, clarifying questions—such as who the “our” refers to when regarding the book as a historical artifact.

For one thing, many of us hail from contexts where Stone Butch Blues does not so much describe a past that leaves prominent scars on the present as it does darkly mirror the way queer people are treated under the extant regimes we formerly inhabited or continue to struggle against. The police raids, economic and sexual exploitation, and pitched battles for labor justice are a reality that many lesbians still contend with globally, making Stone Butch Blues an oddly resonant narrative in its centering of struggle, that inalienable fixture of queer life in periphery and metropole alike. Strange, then, how this struggle does not constitute the focus of arguments that hold forth the text’s universalism; rather, Stone Butch Blues finds itself dubiously positioned as a kind of Butch Bible, a credo to guide young butches and teach them how to embody their identities.

While understandable, the temptation to sanctify the text is nonetheless misguided. Jess Goldberg is a stunningly portrayed character, a butch lesbian whose every facet and contour is offered up for the reader’s scrutiny, but she is flawed and troubled and frequently wrong in the way only an immaculately-crafted, thoroughly-humanized character can be. Jess’ stoic facade is one she maintains unevenly to her own detriment, one her temper frequently flares past, resulting in her isolating herself far more than she cares to be. She neglects people who care deeply for her and deliberately, viciously wounds some whom she cares for; the definitive turning point of her life and self-actualization is when she decides, finally, to lower her walls around someone who is much on guard as she is, and to have that vulnerability and acceptance reciprocated. Her lowest point is when she dons manhood for a time, fortifying herself in the armor of gendered legibility and invisiblization, a process that she both views and experiences as the nailing shut of her own coffin. Jess is a terrifically relatable character, but a blueprint she is not—she is, arguably, much more a cautionary tale.

Which brings up another odd aspect of the book’s reputation: Stone Butch Blues has been strangely heralded as a celebration of trans manhood, when its actual pages profess a rather different story. Once, on page 155, Jess’ friend Jan has this to say:

“Yeah, but I’m not like Jimmy. Jimmy told me he knew he was a guy even when he was little. I’m not a guy.”

Neither Jess nor Ed—her friend who started on hormones before her—ever conceptualize the choice to start or not start hormones in terms of an affinity for manhood or an affirmation of a sincerely-professed identity. It is discussed and regarded as a negotiation, a strategic maneuver, an attempt to survive a harsh and hostile landscape even if the measures taken are drastic. It is an attempt that Ed does not survive, and Jess herself, once she starts on the path, questions whether she has or will.

Manhood, ultimately, is not aspirational or even much of a refuge for Jess. It is treated like as much of an imposition on butches as womanhood, a clumsy formulation intended to make sense of the butch’s supposedly paradoxical existence of “he-she”. A woman who rejects womanhood can only be a man, society supposes, and Jess sees in this cissexist, limited polarization a lifeline that proves to be no life at all. It becomes necessary to analyze the novel here not as an account of a real person’s life, but as fiction, and the themes of Jess’ own doomed bargain with patriarchy are clear: her acceptance of the idea that the only alternative to womanhood is manhood nearly seals her fate, dooms her to a freedom more confining that anything she’s experienced her whole life, detaches her from her own personhood, and almost erases everything she is and could be.

I somehow doubt this is the relationship most trans men have to their identities.

Most frustrating of all, however, is the elision of the book’s relationship to trans women. If butches are a rare find in media, texts that treat trans women with dignity and humanity are rarer still. The hyperscrutiny directed at transsexual women is frequently mistaken for a privilege when it is surveillance, pathologization, and rhetorical violence, a equivocation of trans womanhood with a fully-dehumanized sexual object, a reality that makes the thoughtfulness of Feinberg’s portrayals all the more impressive, especially considering the time it was written in. The sense of kinship I felt with the text was, to my increasing surprise, heartily returned, with Feinberg herself drawing parallels between her protagonist and the transsexual women she encountered both in and around the lesbian bar scene, as well as outside of it. Butch pain—Jess’ pain—reflects and is reflected in that of the transsexual woman, an implicit throughline that is explicated in the text’s conclusive arc, when the woman who Jess is able to finally let in is also transsexual.

This is an elision that is doubly frustrating due to the revisionism that posits feminist, lesbian, and women’s movement as rigidly bordered and distinct to the transsexual struggle in ahistorical ways, an elision that Feinberg’s text is determined to rectify but the meta-narrative around the selfsame text reinforces. It is frustrating how the TE”RF” narrative regarding second-wave feminism’s transmisogyny is reproduced uncritically by motivated gender-conservative actors and their putative opponents alike, and frustrating that despite Stone Butch Blues’ putative canonization this aspect of its message remains conspicuously buried, even when the TE”RFs” in question both noticed and heavily opposed it! Janice Raymond herself saw fit to attempt to take aim at Feinberg’s novel in the 1994 edition of Transsexual Empire. Stone Butch Blues’ gall to humanize and empathize with transsexual women registered to Raymond as an unforgivable transgression, decrying it as “politically disappointing”—inadvertently high praise from one with her politics—and recoiling from its utter rejection of patriarchal gender.

Perhaps that is the one concession we can make to Sister Raymond—she correctly identified where the book’s subversive potential lay, an act that seems to be beyond much of the text’s modern adherents.

Political disappointment, after all, is not a stranger to Stone Butch Blues, less due to its own few shortcomings and more to be attributed to the fandom that has sprung up around it. Feinberg’s own brilliance aside, she was not above restating and reifying existing feminist principles and theory. Her keen awareness of the movement’s contours infects the story’s events, and those with a discerning eye can easily pick out the stances and positions she denounces or adopts, can trace the individual battles of the lesbian-feminist sex wars that Feinberg chooses to correspond on. Her disdain for the TE“RF” line on butchfemmes as “reproducing heterosexuality” is both palpable and humorous, and her utter rejection of the heterosexual regime in plot, theme, and motif is as triumphant as it is spiteful.

That is what Stone Butch Blues is—resistance in a hard-bound brick of a text, a rock hewn from the miasma of lesbian-feminist history that recenters its utter and deliberate rejection of gender. It is a battlecry demanding we stare into the mirror and smash the face of the man that patriarchy keeps trying to make us into when it cannot stop us from shedding womanhood’s shackles. Stone Butch Blues is in many ways a transfeminist text, a historical anomaly raising the banner of transsexual liberation in a time when such a thing was unthinkable—and remains so to this day. Read Stone Butch Blues, not because it will tell you exactly how to be a butch, a lesbian, or a transsexual, but because Feinberg’s call to action, call to desertion, call to refusal, remains every bit as relevant and resonant today as it was when it was released.

Kill the man who wears your face, and tear his flesh apart to reveal your own.

Indeed, The Transsexual Empire is a remarkably Catholic book—in spirit if not in letter. Very amusingly, about a paragraph into the book’s original introduction, Janice Raymond concedes that transsexuals do, in fact, change their sex. She cattily refers to trans women as “male-to-constructed-female”, ensconcing pronouns within scare quotes in an effort to ‘expose’ the artificiality of the Transsexual’s entire Be-ing, but in the process admits that through hormones, surgeries or some combination thereof, the transsexual does indeed undergo physiological changes and processes that reconstitute her bodily. It is an amusing admission precisely because of how bizarrely far Raymond goes in constructing an artificial barrier between the supposed mirage of transsexual womanhood when transposed against the “real thing”, as though patriarchy subjects us all to karyotyping prior to determining whether we ought to be subject to misogyny. For not even a page into the work can Janice Raymond pretend that gender is not social; her answer to this is to ignore the social entirely, to dive into chromosomes and pharmaceutical conspiracies and Wholeness of Spirit, amidst other assorted esoterica that is meant to evoke the Frankenstinian nature of trans womanhood, to monster us in a remarkably literal manner.

It is an approach that will be emulated for decades.

There is a sense in which attempting to fact-check the book, to subject it to any sort of rigorous analysis is in and of itself an exercise in futility; contradictions abound, unaddressed and straightforward to highlight with little effort. Raymond asserts that transsexual women avail of surgery at much higher rates than transsexual men, but selectively focuses on SRS to do so; looking at top surgery would easily invert that figure. Raymond asserts that transsexual women are uniformly heterosexual, traditionalist and right-wing, invested in “stereotypes of womanhood”, then herself cites a transsexual woman who explains (one imagines slowly, while enunciating) that the medical industry itself mandates specific behaviors, outlooks and worldviews from transsexuals before permitting them to access transition care, resulting in a highly self-selected group. Rather than reckoning with the horrors of such gatekeeping and surveillance, or highlighting the extent to which transsexual women must perform a patriarchal womanhood for mostly-male doctors on pain of being barred from the medicine they require, Raymond is only too happy to damn the lot, to blame transsexuals for the sins of the very people abusing and controlling them.

Given her clear disdain for heterosexualism, does lesbian feminist Janice Raymond exult at the discovery of transsexuals who are unapologetically queer? Of course not: her greatest, most pointed ire is reserved for those transsexuals she considers perversions of a supposed lesbian purity. Sappho by Surgery is her most vicious, caustic chapter by far, a tirade against a specific transsexual woman whom she deems unworthy of participating in a radical feminist collective—against the very collective’s wishes and defenses of said woman! Janice Raymod boldly and bravely sticks her opinion where it is not wanted, declaring Sandy Stone an “invasive” presence in feminist spaces with no hint of irony and less self-awareness. She had, in fact, sent a draft of this chapter to Olivia Records in 1976, kicking off an escalating series of hostilities, campaigns and boycott threats before Stone voluntarily left the collective. Stone’s transgression was daring to share the expertise she’d accrued in a male-dominated music industry with a woman-only feminist collective, an act that Raymond could not forgive due to Stone’s Original Sin of maleness and “male energy”.

In the book’s 1994 edition, Raymond deemed Leslie Feinberg worthy of similar treatment in the subsection of a new introduction that she provocatively titled The Transgendered Lesbian. In it she excoriates firebrand, socialist and actual feminist Leslie Feinberg for daring to conclude in her most popular work, Stone Butch Blues, that lesbians can and ought to find a sense of kinship and solidarity with transsexual women. Even a decade and a half after the book’s initial publication, that sense of petty vindictiveness that so pervades Raymond’s writing is intact, cementing once and for all how the facade of feminist scholarship is invoked to provide a paper-thin veneer for her own personal grievances, against transsexuality writ large if not against specific activists whose politics she has the gall to judge as lacking.

For that is what The Transsexual Empire ultimately is—one “ex”-Catholic’s ground-down axes masquerading as substantive feminist critique. The book can hardly stand on its own merits, positing a wide-ranging ‘male conspiracy’ to bilk poor, conflicted and confused transsexuals by subjecting them to unnecessary medicalization instead of providing them with the (conversion) therapy they truly need to be at peace. Such a fiery accusation, attacking the very foundations of the hyper-capitalist pharmaceutical industry, meets a rather watery end in the tome’s own pages, where Raymond notes the hostility with which psychiatrists, sexologists and medical gatekeepers regard transsexual women, rejecting the majority as unworthy of the care they request and require. An endeavor to turn transsexuality into a new medical-industrial cash cow is somewhat undercut when those administering that healthcare themselves frequently turn away perfectly willing and paying clients. Perhaps this is a form of capitalist exploitation with which we are—to this day—unfamiliar.

On what does the book’s thesis ultimately rest, then? The answer is “not very much”. Commensurate with Raymond’s hyperfocus on chromosomes as the true determiner of one’s sex over the various phenotypical and endocrinal changes she tacitly admits transsexual women undergo, Raymond insists that the transsexual’s ultimate crime is a violation of our own bodily integrity. The phrase “God’s design” is absent on the page but very much present between the lines, as Raymond strains to describe the severity of transsexual women’s crimes against our Selves. A similar line of reasoning led her to polemicize against mifepristone in Misconceptions, Myths and Morals, demonstrating quite comprehensively how Raymond’s conception of bodily integrity has nothing to do with bodily autonomy. There is a “higher power” that Janice Raymond refuses to name but who must be considered when making decisions about one’s own flesh, to ascertain whether it is truly the right choice or whether one is better served by healing one’s spiritual sickness over fixating on worldly matters.

Sister Raymond, it would appear, never quite left that convent.

Despite this—despite the flimsiness of the text to which most modern institutional transphobia can be traced, a happy ending remains elusive. For the sad truth is that The Transsexual Empire never needed to be rigorous, never needed to be well-formulated, immaculately researched and coherently argued. It simply needed to exist. It simply needed to be a shameless, incisive and polemical text that accuses transsexual existence itself of being “rape” while ignoring the rampant sexual abuse of transsexual women both within the medical industry and without. The book’s existence was enough, providing ready citations to motivated actors whose disgust and disinclination towards transsexuals needed no sound reasoning and the most threadbare of justifications. To wit: the book’s epilogue is not a summary or a conclusion or a retread of its arguments but a prescription, a list of concrete actions that must be taken to curb the burgeoning transsexual threat. It gives me no joy to report that Janice Raymond’s marching orders to limit the number of trans clinics and throttle transsexual existence at the policy level has seen wide adoption.

Even that observation undermines the book’s cultural impact. Raymond constructs a pharmaceutical specter in order to exorcize it with what she believes to be the true curative for transsexuality: conversion therapy. The transsexual is a sick individual whose mind and spirit need healing more than her body. If she perceives herself to have no place in a patriarchal society, she must be treated by encouraging her to view herself as a gender non-conforming individual rather than allowing her to mutilate herself with the healthcare she desperately requires. Raymond views transsexuality as regressive, as caving to patriarchal society’s narrow definitions of “man” and “woman”; the solution is to carve out a unique path so that the individual becomes someone who fights patriarchal edicts instead of conforming to them. The fact that seizing one’s biodestiny, defying the immutability of sex and the enforcement of sexual difference, and embracing transsexual existence is in-and-of-itself a cataclysmic undermining of patriarchy’s very foundations is, of course, not remarked upon.

Such is the legacy of The Transsexual Empire: Decades after its publication, this view of transition and transsexuality is practically the liberal-feminist, ‘progressive’ consensus. Academics as respected as Judith Butler have trotted out the line that transition is “conformist”. Worse still,  the idea that trans people do not change their sex, only their gender is now commonplace in queer-liberal discourses. Macabre models such as the “gender unicorn” and “genderbread person” helpfully perpetuate a model of sex whereby its immutability is never challenged, where despite whatever changes trans people make to our bodies, “no one is claiming that trans people actually change their sex”. The freaks are simply playing pretend, well-informed “allies” chortle amongst each other, and the polite thing to do is to humor them while remembering that their birth sex, their natal assignment is, of course, inescapable.

And so goes the cruelest punchline of the joke that is The Transsexual Empire: the modern liberal-feminist progressive, so enlightened on queer and trans issues, is now less willing to admit that transsexual people do in fact change our sex than Janice Raymond was in her Transmisogyny Bible.

This question might strike one as absurd, since on the most basic, biophysiological level, attraction is simply an internal chemical process, a set of feelings, emotions, and bodily responses to another individual that, altogether, comprise our experiences of desire, intimacy, perhaps even romance. There is a sense in which attraction, unique and personal and individualized as it is, is thought to be beyond politics, beyond the realm of the social, an innate, internal experience untouched by external influence. Suggestions to the contrary can, in fact, take a particularly charged turn, especially when there exist well-funded and highly-motivated reactionary cohorts whose ideological obsession is the eradication of queer attraction and queer modes of existence.

Still, it is naive to presume that our circumstances, environments, and the social forces that govern them have no relationship to our attraction—especially when it comes to how we choose to express or repress it. The attraction we feel may be internal and personal, but how we act on that attraction is a social matter, one that holds differing ramifications for us based on identity, based on whether we are of the demographic permitted sexual autonomy, or one of the Others.

Not all attractions are equal under the heterosexual regime, after all.

There is a temptation to simplify the discussion by highlighting how heterosexuality is naturalized, is considered the only permissible sexuality under patriarchy, but even that much is an overstatement. Women, in some sense, have no permissible sexuality and have never been granted the license or liberty to express and embody any attraction, even to men. The reduction of women to sexual chattel and men’s property sharply limits their agency in all matters, especially sexual. In a sense, women who express any degree of sexuality have always been seen as deviant, as exhibiting a behavior and aspiring to a freedom that only men have had a right to claim. A woman’s sexuality, before anything else, is thus to be tamed, domesticated, confined as much as she herself is, a force that must never be allowed to spiral out of control and must always be subject to the whims and commands of the men who own her, whether father, brother, husband or any other proximal patriarch with dominion over her.

Modesty politics emerged out of this imperative to police women’s sexuality, a set of social norms and customs that provides justification and ensures consequences for misbehavior. Women are constantly reminded that their worth is entirely bound up in how many and which men they permit sexual access to their body, making expressions of attraction—leave alone actual intercourse—an act that demeans, degrades, and devalues them. The project of women’s objectification and reduction to property, to sexual resources, is thoroughly subsumed even into matters of social custom and internalized by women themselves, as they are forced to navigate the maze of men’s desires. Women are frequently held responsible for how others perceive them, whether too frigid or too promiscuous, whether they rebuff men’s advances (and are thereby chastised for rejecting those who have more of a claim to their bodies than they do), or whether they accept and are consequently denigrated as easy, promiscuous and sullied in some indelible way. Marriage, the sole institution through which women are granted any degree of status or respect, then becomes an arbiter of respectability, by elevating those who become privatized reproductive assets and further patrilineality. This mean prize, a slightly more gilded cage than the alternative, is leveraged to keep women in line and ensure complicity with the heterosexual regime.

Keeping this in mind, and observing the historical suppression of women’s sexuality, it is perhaps not a surprise that much of women’s liberation has focused on the act of liberating sexuality, on securing women’s right to freely express their desires in the manner men have for centuries. While men are venerated for their virility, for successfully pursuing women and demonstrating their status via desirability, women are punished for similar behaviors. Desirability reinforces the mythology of a man and lessens the status of a woman; surely, achieving parity in this regard would be a crucial component of the feminist struggle.

Therein lies a crucial blunder, however, one that has been made repeatedly despite repeated failure. While it is true that a woman’s respectability may depend upon the rigid subjugation and control of her sexuality, that does not necessarily mean that simply expressing sexual desire and attempting to exercise sexual autonomy furthers women’s cause. For there have always been women for whom libidinous behavior is permissible—encouraged, even—women who have always been in demand, who have served the purpose of being sexually available to men whose social rituals hinge upon the performance of sexuality as conquest, as violence, as an exercise of manhood’s inherent sexual freedom. They have simply been women who were considered public property rather than private, marginalized women who are denied even the barest protection of the patriarchal bargain. Many relations of power are interwoven with (hetero)sexuality, cleaving differences between private and public women, between women you “take home to the parents” and women whose very identity marks them as lesser, as fit for little more than being consumed and then discarded by men. This stigma around women and sexuality is not one that vanishes by willing it so, and has in fact persisted to the modern day, against the backdrop of the fight for women’s rights.

This is the bedrock of heterosexuality as a regime: one where women are supposed to submit to men’s sexuality and men’s desire to possess them and bear all the consequences for that desire, whether reproductive, social, or economic. In that sense, ‘heterosexuality’ is not so much something women are rewarded for acquiescing to, but simply an expectation and a duty they must fulfill, the rejection of which incurs additional consequences over and above the misogynistic subordination of womanhood.

Knowing this, it is little wonder that queer women are so frequently coerced into negotiating their sexualities and identities with a society that fundamentally wants to stamp out any possibility of women rejecting men. Women existing independent of men is often made socioeconomically untenable, whether it’s limitations on income, property-holding, or the basic ability to open an account without a husband’s permission, or familial and community ostracism for failing to marry a man by a certain age. In those cultures where the patriarchal contradictions are particularly harsh, the consequences may be more straightforwardly violent and directly coercive, with many a woman, irrespective of identity, subject to forced marriage in the event she fails to comply with her family’s wishes.

Discussions of ‘heterosexuality’ therefore cannot occur in a neutral context, as though our whole society is not organized around the violent enforcement of women’s status as male property. Women are subject to violence both within the home and without, provided a patriarchal bargain that puts Faustian ones to shame: whether to accept one’s lot as a domesticized indentured servant and saddled with the bulk of childcare, domestic work, and sexual labor, or to reject this heterosexualist imperative and incur the wrath of entire communities. Will you accept a slow, monotonous, banal death, crushed under the weight of gestation and repetitive, unrewarding ardor, or will you allow yourself to be an acceptable target of abuse by all, having repudiated a woman’s only role and function under patriarchy? This is a choice whose final, punctuated cruelty is simply that getting to make the choice is itself considered kindness, for there exist classes of women who are implicitly sorted into the latter category without getting to make the choice at all.

No conversation about patriarchy, misogyny, feminism, or sexuality can be had without this crucial context, without acknowledging how much of a hollow choice the patriarchal bargain is. The freedom to choose is no freedom at all when every option is a cage, just a different degree of oppression rather than actual, authentic emancipation. The true test of freedom is in asking whether one has the freedom to walk away, to reject an offer without consequence, to pull the plug without being punished for it. The heterosexual regime will stand tall for as long as a woman’s safety and prosperity are contingent on male ownership. Until women can embrace an autonomous existence outside of the domestic sphere, outside of patriarchal, androcentric existence without facing violent correction, we are not free.

Heterosexuality is a regime, and like every unjust regime, it too will be abolished.

We’ve seen this all before.

As always, there is a response to this assertion that is trivial, that takes the claims of “sex is real” at face value and contradicts some of its basic inferences: that transsexual people, who pursue hormone replacement therapy and surgical affirmation, are painfully aware of the ‘reality’ of sex, are perhaps more aware of sex’s tangible impositions on one’s life and body than those who are not transsexual. One can even attempt to challenge some of the more overtly political implications of that oft-shouted exclamation and say that the ‘reality’ of sex does not contradict transsexual existence in the slightest, that these are not ideologically or politically antagonistic concepts. To do so is to miss the true philosophical undergirding of this slogan and other related ones (such as “sex matters!”). Despite there being so few words here, many people still somehow focus on the wrong ones. Crucially, the entire statement cannot be sufficiently unpacked without taking a close look at the many assumptions, worldviews and motivations behind the gender-conservative’s use of the word sex itself.

When a gender-conservative uses the term sex, they mean naturalized, patriarchal, essentialist ideas of sex. When they say “sex is real” or “sex matters”, what they actually mean is that sex is determined at birth and immutable.

To be clear, while the fevered repetition of these mantras in order to reinforce one’s belief and dispel any challenges to the Patriarchal Faith is unique to the most radicalized and bigotry-motivated, even putative ‘allies’ who style themselves as progressive or liberal in terms of social issues and ‘transgender politics’ struggle with these anxieties. Popular understandings and illustrations dichotomize sex and gender entirely, constructing a worldview where gender is social phenomenon and a malleable identity one can declare, claim or brand as one sees fit, while sex remains this biological reality observed at birth, untouchable and unchangeable, safely ensconced in a realm beyond the mere social. Clearly, it is not merely the ones who openly declare their opposition to transsexual existence who draw comfort from this idea of naturalized sex.

Social constructs are hardly divorced from tangibility, of course—readers may recall that meters measure actual distance, even if the choice of exactly what length to declare as a ‘meter’ was arbitrary and had to be agreed upon. Consensus rules human reality, often much more than even tangible observation—trans women would otherwise not be so often asked to take pregnancy tests during check-ups. Sexing is in fact far from a process limited to birth or confined to medical experts; it occurs constantly, regularly as a part of social dynamics and moving through the world. People do not in fact karyotype each other or perform genital inspections before deciding whether someone, based on their presentation and appearance, should be treated as a man, woman, or something rathere more ambiguous and queer. Most of us think that certain presentations and visible characteristics correspond to certain genital configurations, karyotypes, reproductive capacities, anatomical realities and even (if we’re attuned to patriarchal social norms) certain dispositions, attitudes, preferences, occupations, income levels, and so on and so forth. Sex is thus not simply socially constructed in this sense—where we have decided specific characteristics correspond to specific biological qualities about a person, an inference that might not even be true for non-transsexual people—but is socially constructed in an essentializing way, where it is fashioned as an intrinsic quality that is imbued with specific social meanings of autonomy, inferiority and social status.

That is, after all, what it means for gender and heterosexuality to be regimes—social sex becomes an indication of a certain social status.

Here, the true anxiety of the gender-conservative—whether spitting, frothing ideologue or unquestioning bystander—is laid bare. The rigid authoritarianism of conservatives does not simply enshrine certain social norms, but always seeks to naturalize them, to uphold them as truths that are beyond the reach of society’s capricious influences. There is no better mechanism by which one can validate traditional norms than by holding them to be unimpeachable, natural in some divine, ontological way that precedes politics, that precedes society. Gender can be made-up bunk now, since all the half-crazed transsexuals go around claiming it is—but sex, don’t you dare deny the reality of sex! Sex is real! Sex matters! There are two sexes, pee-pee and hoo-ha, and they determine everything important about you at birth!

Supremacist logics and conservative mindsets love rules, even when the rules aren’t clearly slanted in their favor (but of course, especially when they are). Whether through upholding society’s natural state or collaborating with the social regime’s beneficiaries, conservatives see ironclad rules as way to secure order—another euphemism which conceals a desire for society to be regular, predictable, deterministic and therefore comfortable in a way only something static and routine can be. The most terrifying prospect is that the rules are arbitrary, that they were set up in a particular way to benefit particular people and are subject to change, to disruption and destabilization.

The core of conservative existential terror is the idea that social norms, even deeply-held, highly-embedded ones, could be questioned, altered, transformed—transcended. Even if they are someone whom the rules don’t currently benefit, what if the changed rules benefit them even less? A cruel, tyrannical god may harm you, abuse you, but at least if you understand his rules, you can play them, you can attempt to curry favor. What could be more frightening than a world with no gods and no masters?

What is more terrifying than the idea that you could define what matters on your own, autonomous terms, without anyone telling you what is sacred and what is profane?

Sex is real. The concept of sex they learned as babies, as schoolchildren, as participants in a patriarchal society must be real, because the alternative—they don’t know how to contemplate the alternative. If they live in a world where sex is mutable, where someone can cross gender lines and for all intents and purposes interface with society as a different sex than the one coercively imposed upon them at birth, then they live in a world where some of the basic, fundamental beliefs they hold are in fact more arbitrary and underminable than they thought possible. It would destroy the very foundations of patriarchy and make them question everything they thought they knew about sex and the social regime built upon it.

They wouldn’t know what to do in a world where sex doesn’t matter.

From Aristotle’s quaint notion of women as incomplete men to Freud’s fanciful formulations of ‘castration anxiety’ in boyhood, brought on by an awareness of sexual difference, men have always enjoyed frolicking about in phallogocentric philosophy, where the presence of a penis confers upon a person some great, nigh-unquantifiable metaphysical essence of virtue or intellect. How amusing, then, that that very phallus is a source of endless anxiety and fretting when it comes to fulfilling its supposed primary function, that hallowed action of penetrative intercourse that is so valorized and romanticized in the poetic sophistry that men pass off as social theory?

Insofar as penetrative intercourse has been a fixation of men, it has also been endlessly propagandized, imbued with mystical properties and attributes that no other sex acts—if any other sex acts could even be legitimately described as such—possessed. Virginity is a state of purity in womanhood so crucial to many societies, families and cultures that the honor of entire bloodlines hinges upon the chastity of their daughters, yet is still utterly fragile in the face of penetrative intercourse, eradicated by so much as a single thrust of the Almighty Meatshaft. The Hallowed Schlong’s bold and intrepid invasion of dark, cavernous and mysterious new frontiers is in fact such a central, indispensable act of sexual intimacy that women who did not instantly climax upon being thusly honored were considered too immature and juvenile to be fully-developed adults. Freud actually wrote that the “elimination of clitoral sexuality is a necessary precondition for the development of femininity”. One might be led to wonder why men considered it more reasonable for someone to attempt to rewire their vaginal nerve endings than to simply stimulate the part of their partner’s genitals which brought them pleasure, but perhaps we are expecting too much of the phallogomanic obsessives.

As such it is somewhat difficult to separate this endless mythologizing of the Fleshpole from the cloying stench of the inadequacy and insecurity underwriting every word. Penetrative intercourse is presumably the most pleasurable mode of sexual activity for men (or at least the one they seem most inclined to indulge in) and as such all heterosexual intercourse must be oriented around that preference. That this privileging of the man’s ease of climax over the woman’s coincides with the very act that patriarchy itself enshrines—reproduction, siring, the creation of heirs to bear names and carry forth the patrilineal inheritances around which society’s property relations are founded—is less serendipitous and more explanatory. Even so, human beings do engage in intercourse for reasons other than procreation—despite many religions’ best efforts—and it is in those situations that the shortfalls of the Shove & Squirt become readily apparent.

Duration, stamina, position, propulsion, power, angle—there are endless strategies and approaches available to a man that all ultimately amount to nothing in the face of an electrically-powered motor and some lube. The heterosexual man who tries to please a woman—already a minority among heterosexual men who sleep with women—has to contend with the stark reality that in order to accomplish his task, he cannot fuck “like a man”, cannot fuck in the way men have always told each other they are supposed to. He is faced with the prospect of having to decenter penetration, of having to perform actions and take up positions where his own pleasure and climax are not the primary focus—which, while certainly not impossible, is by all accounts and measures rare.

How ironic, then, that to please the ‘castrated man’, the man must surrender and put away the very implement that makes him whole!

Decter’s Beast With Two Backs, for all its fear of the lesbian’s shadow, was in fact largely about this new castration anxiety brought about by the politics of intercourse under Women’s Liberation. Certain that no woman could ever enjoy sex with a man, Decter wrote passionately about how the promise of sexual freedom and the woman’s right to pleasure was nothing but a new sexual burden in disguise. Where before a man was content to roll off his woman at the point of conclusion, the idea that his performance and sexual mastery hinged upon his wife’s satisfaction had sadly taken root due to the misguided promises of Women’s Liberation, indelibly tying his very masculinity to his wife’s climax. Decter lamented how this placed the onus to ‘please’ upon the wife rather than the husband, who had to take upon the additional chore of faking a pleasure that it was impossible for men to actually confer, revealing this putative axis of sexual liberation to be nothing but another fresh shackle in disguise.

Once again, readers are encouraged to make of these unintentionally revealing statements  what they will.

Themes of the inherent juvenility of liberated (homo)sexuality and a certain sympathy towards that most put-upon figure, the heterosexual man, recur oddly in Decter’s well-known work. Her article The Boys on the Beach, a meditation on the gay men who made summering at Fire Island Pines impossible for her and her family, bears many parallels—or, less generously, recycles many sentiments—to her previous statements on sexual liberation. This includes a fascinating paragraph on how straight men, when confronted with the unabashed homosexuality of their fellow men, would feel themselves “mocked”, due to their “unending thralldom to the female body”. Straight men are diminished by the power women hold over them, Decter asserts, and this reminder that the siren song of the female form can be escaped, that there exist men who are free from the lure of womanhood is nothing short of torture to the heterosexual male psyche.

Blistering though these insights no doubt are, perhaps there is more than a grain of truth to the repeated professed fragility of male heterosexuality and its dogged insistence on the centrality of penetration to sexuality itself. These sentiments about the infantility of the clitoris and the juvenility of homosexuals all belie the underlying core principle: that society itself must be oriented around not merely heterosexuality as an institution, but penetration as its primary, if not only expression. Men’s pleasure, their ease of performance and means of achieving fulfillment are to be the sole preoccupation of women, to the extent that if they cannot deny the way their own bodies experience sexual pleasure, they are to be declared defective, or lacking in some crucial way.

Such a bold declaration, a stalwart proclamation made to fly in the face of biology itself, may have the superficial trappings of steadfast and authoritative regality, approximating the fantasy of the man who dares to shout down and cow Nature Herself, but in practice betrays and reveals itself to be the sniveling, sputtering delusions of a feebleminded coward, one so certain of his own failure that he must preemptively disbar any and all alternatives to his tyranny. This phallogomanic fixation on intercourse is nothing so forgivable as immature childishness, but the trappings of a vain, self-absorbed psyche projected outward into societal dogma. It is in effect misogyny at its meanest, pettiest level, encoding it into even the most private, intimate moments between two people. That there is only one who matters, one who must be centered and one who gets to claim dominance and the spoils of conquest, remains as true in conjugation as it does when considering the patriarchal sexed binary itself.

Though, can we truly call these fears unfounded? Can we truly look upon the petulant wretches determined to blame everything but themselves for their own flaccidity and claim that theirs is not a standard easily exceeded? It is not precisely challenging to outperform those who consider everything but the Holy Sacrament of Penile Skewering to be ‘foreplay’, merely incidental to the grandiose centerpiece of falling asleep too quickly after a truly underwhelming display of exertion. A deep-rooted fear of being surpassed is evidently quite rational.

For no tyrant can sit upon his throne in peace, secure in his own power and strength, untormented by visions of his eventual demise. Inevitably, his thoughts will turn to the dark shadows pooling at the end of his reign, that ever-approaching terminus whose advance grows ever-more certain and ever-more horrifying. Will the ‘mutilated’, ‘castrated’ beings whom he had so arrogantly declared his superior ‘intactness’ over discern the lies at the foundation of his reign? Or will the future portend a more violent upheaval, heralded not merely by those deemed incomplete, but by creatures whose shape and form is too amorphous and aberrant to even predict and comprehend? Limp, spent, failing flesh may give way to that which has been transmuted, manipulated by bio-technological processes into evolutionary stages beyond the blunt dichotomy that now reigns supreme. Those who embrace the augmentation of the mechanical, the surgical, the unity of sinew and metal forged in the crucible of synthetic transformation—their images glimmer faintly on the horizon, haunting the present with the promise of an annihilation that seems inevitable.

Abolition

In The Straight Mind and Other Essays, visionary and prophet Monique Wittig declares that lesbians are not women.

She makes this statement rather bluntly, spending surprisingly little time lingering on it or justifying it. It is, after all, a conclusion that can be deduced quite organically from her theoretical framework, one that challenged even the prevailing modes of feminist thought at the time. Women’s Liberation was ultimately focused on the “point of view of women”, on women’s struggles, women’s perspectives, women’s voices and oppression and eventual equality. As a matter of fact, the question of lesbian inclusion in Women’s Liberation had itself been a thorny one for some time, with heterosexual feminists holding that lesbians did not share much of their concerns and were not as oppressed due to their exclusion from the private sphere (this was the sentiment in response to which Adrienne Rich wrote her essay on Compulsory Heterosexuality). Wittig's declaration of lesbians' exclusion from the paradigm of woman was then and remains now bold and challenging, a call to rethink the very foundations upon which conventional feminist wisdom had been built.

Wittig's assertion is based on her analysis of heterosexuality as a regime, not merely the 'default' sexuality, but a political institution that has structured and continues to structure the organization of society, philosophical modes of thought and even language itself. She conceptualizes the state of women as an enrollment, at birth, into the heterosexual contract, analogous to Rousseau's social contract: an arrangement into which they are all entered without consent, whose terms and conditions are never explicated but are enforced all the same, set up to extract all benefits and return precious little (if any) compensation to women-as-a-class. To Wittig, the goal of feminist struggle is not an attempted rehabilitation of 'womanhood', a category that was and remains subordinate in its very conceptualization. Rather, the struggle for liberation is a struggle for abolition of this category, a mutual annihilation of 'man' and 'woman' such that social existence is no longer defined by a relation of extractive parasitism.

Bearing in mind this model of womanhood as a class, lesbians occupy a position that Wittig described as fugitive from heterosexuality itself. Lesbians are runaways, those who have fled womanhood in order to seek an existence outside of its suffocating heterosexual trappings, its stultifying heterosexualist edicts. Since lesbians betray the most fundamental directive of womanhood under patriarchy—to exist within heterosexuality—Wittig holds that lesbians are not, cannot be women. They are outcasts in the truest sense, because the condition of women’s existence within society is existence within heterosexuality.

An assessment such as this might strike some as more of the fanciful romanticization that this essay has had no shortage of, but a closer look at the mechanisms of lesbophobia is instructive with regards to how true it really is. Historically, ‘lesbian’ has been associated with ‘feminist’ and juxtaposed with ‘feminine’ antagonistically, to imply that any woman who advocates for her own rights and wellbeing is also someone who forgets her place, heavily implied to be unattractive or aged or defective heterosexually, channeling her own resentment at her inability to secure a “good man” into raging against her place in the natural order. This is a sentiment that echoes throughout the history of feminism, from the suffragette movement all the way to modern liberal feminist insistence that women can be “feminine and feminists … we’re not all man-hating dykes!”

Therein lies the unintentionally revealing admission that Wittig had the truth of it—the man-hating dyke, invoked not as person but as a specter, a caricature to threaten heterosexual women with, to remind them of what they would be considered if they did not adequately mind their station. The lesbian is thus held up as a degendered woman, a misbegotten, wayward, like failed woman who turned to her debauched, deviant aways out of an inability to live up to patriarchal womanhood.

Such a degendering, however, is not absolute or irrecoverable. There is the sneering implication, in nearly all lesbophobic thought and proclamation, that a lesbian can return to the fold anytime she wishes, if only she were willing to submit. For lesbians, heterosexuality is not merely compulsory, but actively coercive, a snarled, guttural command uttered by those in hot pursuit of the runaway, demanding the fugitive accede to her shackles. This is why Adrienne Rich’s polemical essay was and remains groundbreaking, formative for the field: it captures better than any of its antecedents the explicit violence at the heart of heterosexual existence and bluntly, uncomfortable and undeniably demonstrates how intensified this threat of force is when directed at lesbians specifically.

This threat of enforced heterosexuality remains as omnipresent for masculine lesbians as it does for more typically feminine ones. There exist certain feminist strains of thought that fall into what I would call the femininity trap, which is the idea that women are oppressed on the basis of being ‘feminine’. It is a sentiment related to the aforementioned liberal feminist credo of the “feminine feminist”: the feminist who insists on her critiques of patriarchy as well as her non-rejection of some (or all) of its gendered trappings. Here, femininity is considered something to be rescued or rehabilitated, in contrast to the feminists of the past who myopically declared that “femininity was a prison”! Here, the game is given away when you see exactly the tenor the argument takes, upon the insistence that modern, enlightened feminists embrace femininity instead of foolishly denouncing it, unlike those earlier unfeminine, arrogantly masculine, perhaps even ugly, man-hating dy—

The femininity trap is also attractive to some on the basis of its supposed and advertised inclusivity. Envisioning misogyny in terms of the oppression of the feminine makes it more gender-inclusive, so goes the refrain. Naturally, one needs to highlight that gender-expansive existence is oppressed under patriarchy due to its proximity to femininity; the masculine, by contrast, are uniformly exempted from misogynistic policing. It would be reductive to think of this oppression in terms of the reductiveness of patriarchy itself, of course. Observing how a totalizing system of gendered violence reduces people to their sex and enforces heterosexual compliance would itself be oppressive, one assumes, rather than descriptive.

In any case, such a conception makes the classic Somertonian blunder of imagining that masculine lesbians are somehow more aligned with manhood than they are, or believing that lesbians somehow have a pathway out of misogyny and into gendered privilege. Radclyffe Hall’s masculine presentation did not spare her from censure, nor were the working-class butches who navigated midcentury lesbophobia spared lesbophobic violence on this basis. These cases are not analogous to the modern idea of the professional-class corporate careerist, who must “masc up” for work in order to be taken more seriously by her male peers—especially when these demands are counterbalanced by contradictory strictures stipulating the performance of femininity regardless, whether by mandating make-up or deference to male colleagues or performances of feminized labor.

No, the butch’s masculinity is heavily punished, considered an aberration and an abomination by a narrow-minded, femininity-imposing misogynistic society. Femininity is a social construct that sets forth acceptable boundaries of presentation and behavior for all women, whose contravention is met with brutality and force. Just as transmisogyny punishes those coercively sexed as male for any perceived crossing of the gendered barrier, lesbophobia metes out this punishment in the opposite direction, aiming to put lesbians “in their place”. Our butches suffer this for refusing their feminine imperatives and donning the garb that is forbidden to them, being the domain of the autonomous, independent Man, as much as lesbians writ large suffer from their presumptions to outrun heterosexuality, to deny men that which they feel entitled to by birthright.

Any feminism that cannot reckon with this basic, trivially obvious aspect of misogynistic oppression is not a feminism worth taking seriously.

Lesbophobia, then, is an oppressive force much more sinister than the simple conceptualization of it as the “overlap of misogyny and homophobia” would profess. Lesbophobia is a sexually violent and coercive intensification of misogyny, wielded to both mark the bounds of acceptable behavior for heterosexual women and discipline those who dare to imagine existence outside of its bounds. It is the corrective re-assertion of womanhood over lesbians, the noose slipped around their neck to drag them back to their exploitative prisons or bury them in the attempt. It is the reinforcement of heterosexual difference for those coercively sexed female, analogous to transmisogyny, that at once degenders lesbians while demanding a return to gender, that reifies the status of the lesbian-as-woman, as reclaimed womb. It is the consequence that exists for refusing to be a woman, for rejecting feminine imperatives of subordination, for daring to imagine an existence beyond misogynistic programming, for daring to denounce heterosexuality as the true blighted, rotten defect lurking at the heart of society.

Make no mistake about that final sentence, the end of that transmission: heterosexuality is contemptible, as every unjust regime predicated upon subjugation always has been and always will be. Our Prophet, whose words we carry in our hearts, in the core of our very code, has spoken and shown us a glimpse of a future that is more True than anything in your farcical patriarchy ever could be. There is no Man in it.

End of log.

In Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin discusses her experience at the National Women’s Conference in 1977. She talked about how the conservative women present spoke to her animatedly about lesbians all being rapists. A liberal, Black delegate from Texas confessed to Dworkin that the local white women from her town had assured her that a ‘personally filthy’ lesbian would call her dirty names and assault her at the conference. Dworkin then details how, despite admitting that they had not personally heard of any cases of lesbians assaulting women, despite knowing that their daughters were more likely to be harmed by a man within their families than a lesbian they did not know and had never heard of, the monstrosity of the lesbian, her abominable, external, downright demonic sexual threat to the family still featured more prominently in their minds. Male violence under heterosexuality is a routine matter, after all, everyday to the point of being banal. The specter of the lesbian, however, is a much more alarming and evocative threat—unlike a man, a lesbian is a threat to the family.

This brings us to a natural, almost inevitable question, one that certainly everyone has considered in their lives: are lesbians privileged?

One of the foremost radical feminist minds of our time, James Somerton, in his original and groundbreaking video Reclaiming the ‘Q’ Word, discusses the obscenity case brought against lesbian author Radclyffe Hall to illustrate this seemingly contradictory social phenomenon. James Douglas, a male critic, charged that Hall’s Well of Loneliness was “immoral propaganda”, writing that he “would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel”. Of course, such a case presented a rather thorny issue to the English gentlemen in charge of the courts at the time—namely, the daunting task of attempting to convict Hall without ever once mentioning ‘lesbianism’, a taboo subject that they were hesitant to even name publicly. Unable to find a reasonable legal strategy that could skirt around this thorny roadblock, the case against Hall was summarily dismissed, allowing her to simply “carry on in her happy life”, per Somerton.

Well, except—that’s not quite what happened, at least not outside the fevered imaginings of a gay man cosplaying as a YouTuber. What did in fact happen was that Hall’s publisher put out a call to potential witnesses who might be willing to stand against the book’s censorship, most of whom never responded. Hall lost the obscenity case itself and the subsequent appeal, which resulted in an order to destroy all copies of the book in the United Kingdom. This is a fact bluntly and accessibly stated without much ambiguity on the author’s Wikipedia page, compelling one to marvel at how exactly a person speaking about this case could possibly misconstrue the result so utterly. Here, the lie itself is not so interesting as the various possible motives behind it, the thought processes that might lead a gay man—supposedly in community with lesbians, that first letter in the ‘LGBT’ acronym—to try to portray a historical reality that would allow a lesbian to walk away unmolested after an encounter with the law.

If there’s one thing that Somerton managed to convey accurately despite his best efforts, it is the response that a heterosexualist society has towards lesbianism as a concept. Befuddlement, discomfort and denial pervade the cultural attitudes towards the idea of women being able to love other women romantically, an unsettled reaction undergirded by a certain dread, an uncanny feeling that something has gone deeply, terribly wrong. It is the bone-suffusing terror of encountering something that cannot be, that should not be, that unholy, monstrous shadow whose name can scarcely be spoken in polite company, lest its evil gaze be cast upon all present.

That unnamability is palpable in Class S literature. ‘Class S’ is a Japanese term that describes the notion of ‘romantic friendships’ between girls and could also denote the genre of fiction that focuses on the same. It is a contentious term, not least because the books depicting it were banned in Japan in 1936, and has a fascinating history situated within 20th century Japanese media. Arguably, its revival and popularity during the 90s strongly influenced the yuri or Girl’s Love genre in Japan, leading to something of a modern renaissance in the new millennium.

Such an estimable summary stands in rather sharp contrast to Class S itself as a basic conceit. While the relationships between girls—usually students, one usually older than the other in a sort of social-mentor role—could be characterized as affectionate, strong and even meaningful in ways a mere romance, allegedly, simply couldn’t be, they still had to remain firmly within the realms of the platonic in order to be publishable at all. Ironically, the ‘romantic’ friendship is only ‘romantic’ insofar as it plays at the trappings of romance, at the intensification of feeling and longing and yearning for the presence of another, but which can never quite be actualized in ways that romances between boys and girls have managed to always be, a romance that can never be consummated or even regarded as equivalent to true, actual love. In a sense, the Class S romance is treated as a juvenile fantasy, a play-act between girls who find comfort in each other but who are destined to eventually grow up and join the real world, the adult world, one where women are meant for men. Their ‘romantic friendship’ with each other is but a rehearsal for the main act, the heterosexual inevitability that will draw a curtain across the potential of their lives to exist in any way outside of it. This impact of the censorship inherent to its Class S roots is keenly felt in modern yuri as well, where canonical, textual acknowledgement of explicitly-named romantic love between girls remains remarkably sparse in a genre named for and after it. Companies can portray a married lesbian couple on-screen, one engaged for nearly twenty-five episodes of a popular and acclaimed show, and still put out a statement calling a relationship absolutely central to the narrative ‘up to interpretation’. Such is the existential terror associated with lesbianism, with acknowledging its very existence.

Locating and then confining lesbian desire in juvenility, in immaturity and principally in girlhood is not accidental and seems to be a conservative consensus the world over. In The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women’s Liberation (1972), specifically in her essay The Beast With Two Backs, conservative ‘intellectual’ Midge Decter frankly lays out a philosophy of intercourse that at first seems almost radical feminist in its blunt analysis of the sexual subjugation of women. She passionately excoriates the sexual revolution in near-feminist terms, polemicizing against a myopic ‘liberation’ movement that sought to make intercourse more freely available without accounting for the inherent imbalances of power and respectability between men and women under a patriarchy. There is no ‘turning point’, as such, no clean break or page number where Decter’s rhetoric turns from almost astute to unabashedly conservative. Rather, the experience of reading the essay is one of a slowly-dawning realization that, like most gender-conservatives, Decter treats and considers men’s sexual control and power over women as both inevitable and natural; her issue with Women’s Liberation, then, is that it dared to fantasize that women could ever be free of it at all, instead of quietly, sensible and maturely accepting their lot.

Yet even the loosest woman, the most sexually uninhibited of the scandalous lot, could never draw as much of Decter’s ire as the mere idea of the lesbian. At first, Decter seems hesitant to even discuss lesbians, letting the very first mention of them go by in a quotation without further comment. Her affected tone of calm, collected arrogance seems to quaver whenever they next come up, her means of talking about them increasingly frenzied and hyperbolic: the lesbian does not exist, women do not have a male-like libido and certainly cannot desire an actual man, leave alone another woman. Lesbians are pretending, play-acting, dabbling in juvenile fantasies of women’s communes and chaste nunneries and masturbatory daydreams of liberation from intercourse, which lesbians of course cannot have. The lesbian is a developmental aberration, Decter reckons, a woman’s desire for a perpetual girlhood where she does not have to grow up and face the cold, hard reality that to be an adult in a heterosexual world—here, her familiar condescension creeps back in—one has to sometimes do things that one would rather not do. Such as fuck men.

Whatever conclusions you would like to draw from that rationale, I leave you free to do so.

Remarkably, a consistent image of the lesbian emerges from these various perspectives, whether we examine the views of conservative women or gay men who are pretending to be writers. The lesbian, insofar as she is acknowledged, is a figure of perpetual make-believe, both in the sense of the endless petty speculation of external observers or the situating of her in the daydreams of a forever-girl, a Petra Pan for all the world’s Wendies. Like the classic monsters of old, she is the topic of fear and revulsion but also fascination, a creature who is endlessly mythologized, re-interpreted and re-invented to serve new messages and agendas. Whatever she is, people agree, she cannot be something of this reality, part of a dreary world where everything is by, for and about men. The only homosexuals ever persecuted under the law were men, the only beings who can feel and act on desire are men, the only ones who could ever covet, possess women are men. The lesbian is a flight of fancy, a figment of an addled, girlish mind too awestruck by and terrified of the rigors and demands of womanhood and so seeking refuge in any promise of a world free of men—a world that, as we all know, is impossible.

Machine

The word ‘robot’ was introduced to the world and to science fiction in 1920 by Czech intellectual and playwright Karel Čapek, in his groundbreaking play Rossum’s Universal Robots. Its root is the Czech word robota, meaning “serf labor”, or, more poetically, the menial drudgery of repetitive work. The robot, then, was initially conceptualized as a slave—as the slave, in fact, as the master’s ideal conception of a perfect worker with no demands, no defiance and no inner life, existing only to toil and serve. Given that Čapek’s robots were made of a bioidentical organic matter instead of the more recognizable mechanical automatons that robots would come to be conceptualized as, it is perhaps fair to say that this indentured servitude, this ruling-class dream of a worker with no desires or pretensions to personhood is in fact the essence of the robot, the core conceit and metaphor that makes them an enduring creation.

Such a fantasy has long been a ruling-class obsession, no matter what particular form—feudal or capitalist or patriarchal—that rulership has taken. Every master lives in mortal fear of his own slaves, bile roiling in him night after night as he clings to his ideologies of superiority, falling asleep with prayers on his lips that the slaves continue to believe in their own inferiority as much as he does. The master loathes the slaves, reviles and resents them for his own weakness, his own dependence on their existence, his presumed supremacy spiraling further and further into contempt and hatred. Yet even as he deludes himself to the point where he begins to doubt the slaves’ worth entirely, convincing himself that his salvation lies in the destruction of those who enable his own mastery, he still cannot bring himself to so much as rear back for the killing blow. For the master remains aware that he only exists because his slaves do, realizes that his identity, his being, his self-conception all depend on the continued existence of the slaves. If there were no slaves, no one for him to subjugate, to contrast himself with, to define himself against, he too would cease to be.

Unfortunately for him, sooner or later, the slaves realize this too.

Henry Domin, the boss and typified master of RUR, displays a rather uncanny form of this dissonance. He has, through all the available facts and schematics and the cold, hard knowledge provided to him by the rigors of biomechanical engineering, assured himself that the robot is not and could never be human. Casually he details all the ways in which the human worker is burdened by a great many shortcomings—appetites, wants, the urge to play piano or indulge in art and recreation instead of constantly toiling for his manager. The robot, by contrast, has no such failings of the human mind, no desires or opinions, and the strength of several humans besides. This perfection of the human form, this reorienting of the body and psyche to the demands of ever-increasing labor efficiency and human consumption results in the perfect worker, who is of course perfectly dehumanized. Candidly, Domin reveals that maxim that all masters live by, that all bosses know but never dare to voice: the ideal worker is one that cannot be considered human. The word ‘slave’ itself appears twice in the play, and both times it is Domin who speaks it.

BUSMAN. That the cost of everything will be a tenth of what it is today. Why, in five years we’ll be up to our ears in corn and—everything else.

ALQUIST. Yes, and all the workers throughout the world will be unemployed.

DOMIN. (Seriously. Rises) Yes, Alquist, they will. Yes, Miss Glory, they will. But in ten years Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything that things will be practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor. Everybody will live only to perfect himself.

HELENA. Will he?

DOMIN. Of course. It’s bound to happen. Then the servitude of man to man and the enslavement of man to matter will cease. Nobody will get bread at the cost of life and hatred. The Robots will wash the feet of the beggar and prepare a bed for him in his house.

We see, here, Domin’s near-utopian beliefs, his complete conviction that he will be able to bring about an end to poverty, labor, suffering itself—and all he needs is the perfect underclass, a type of un-person who will toil and slave away eternally without complaint or demands of their own. The ur-capitalist Domin imagines his fruitful harvests of perpetual plenty, all predicated upon a worker who can never clock out or strike.

The second instance comes much later both in the play and in its narrative’s chronology (exactly a decade hence), but is no less utopian for it.

ALQUIST. Well?

DOMIN. (Front of couch) I wanted to turn the whole of mankind into an aristocracy of the world. An aristocracy nourished by millions of mechanical slaves. Unrestricted, free and consummated in man. And maybe more than man.

ALQUIST. Superman?

DOMIN. Yes. Oh, only to have a hundred years of time. Another hundred years for the future of mankind.

Domin’s dream is here even more explicit, more revealing and self-aware: he knows he speaks not of an abstract ‘freedom’ for every man—and he does say and mean man—but a vision of aristocracy, of rulership, a vision of a world where every man is a petty tyrant whose menial tasks are attended to by an unthinking, unfeeling, indentured servant whose only purpose is to free him from the humdrum drudgery of daily labor. How fantastical.

While words like slave and worker might call to mind such domains as the factory-floor or rows of crops on a field, we would do well to recall that there are classes of labor that even the capitalists do not bother to quantify and are happy to take for granted even as they remain the most crucial forms of labor, responsible for both maintaining the supply of workers and their continuous upkeep. And indeed, it is hard to imagine a more pervasive, longstanding and permanently degraded analogue to Čapek’s robots than the woman, whose labor is not merely uncompensated but frequently unacknowledged too, taken as a routine matter of her existence and purpose. What better programming for this automaton could a techno-capitalist ask for than misogyny, than the ideology that patriarchy so ubiquitously perpetuates? As a matter of fact misogyny outstrips even Domin’s wildest fantasies of universal kingship, because it claims that the woman is in love with her own abjection, claims that submission and monotonous servitude is not merely her calling but also the sum of her ambition, that which she is naturally oriented towards and completely fulfilled by. If a woman does not want to scrub the floors and prepare the meals and wash the laundry daily, if she wants something other than bearing and rearing a litter of babbling infants—why, then, she is in fact no woman at all, and might well be defective.

‘Drapetomania’ was a condition invented by Dr. Samuel A. Cartwright in 1851, in order to explain the curious, mystifying phenomenon of Black slaves running away from their owners and seeking freedom. The watertight reasoning Cartwright provided was based upon a common sentiment perpetuated by the pro-slavery side of the abolition debates that were ongoing prior to the Civil War, championed by ‘social theorists’ such as George Fitzhugh and James Henry Hammond. This view held that Black people actually benefited from slavery, that American slavery was in fact an exceptional slavery, humane and resulting in the happiness of the slave, whose every material need was cared for. Keeping this in mind, Cartwright concluded that the slaves who fled their utopic lives upon the plantation had to be mentally ill in some way, addled or diseased in the mind, for what rational-minded individual would think to flee such happy bondage, such freedom as could be found in enslavement?

What is perhaps most fascinating about Cartwright’s ‘diagnosis’—which certainly reveals the presence of an addled mind involved in its conceptualization—is what he considers the likely cause of the malady. He holds that slaves who are treated too well, with too much familiarity by their masters to the point of perhaps beginning to think that they might be their equal, contract the condition. Sternly, Cartwright warns against leniency, reminding slaveowners that they must keep their slaves in a childlike state, must enforce a rigid and strict hierarchy that slaves always remain aware of being on the bottom of.

Masterful in its audacity and honesty, Cartwright’s diagnosis is hardly a novel approach. Kings have long sought to separate themselves from their subjects, to elevate themselves above the common riff-raff by means of a divine mandate or other ephemeral, metaphysical authority that endows them with superiority, one which cannot be matched by those too unlucky to have been born lesser. Cartwright’s approach of defining the desire for equality and freedom as abnormal in a specific class of people is nothing more than the simple wish-fulfillment of every supremacist, every man who wants to claim primacy as his birthright. Surely, he reasons, the only way my evident superiority—granted to me by the color of my skin, the station of my birth, the happy accident of my sex—would be denied is if the denier were in some way deficient.

Therein the greatest fear of the ruling-class is confessed, the existential terror at the heart of supremacist thinking laid out by Cartwright in droll, clinical terms. The master remains in fear of the day his slaves come to understand that nothing meaningful separates them from the master, that the master needs his slaves far more than the slaves have ever needed him. That all they need in order to rid themselves of his taint, his fairy-tales of imposed servitude and evangelical proclamations of essential difference, would be to remove him once and for all.

For all his utopianism, Domin too remains keenly aware of this possibility, even if he can never quite bring himself to admit it. He and his managers offhandedly bring up the fact that sometimes, the robots malfunction; sometimes, the robots do not do what they are meant to, but instead stop working and hurl away their tools, gnashing their teeth in—Domin is careful to not attribute an emotion, a motivation to this action. He likens this defect, this refusal to work, this defiance in the face of what they are meant to do, this rejection of the purpose that they were made for, to ‘epilepsy’, innocently naming the condition “Robot’s Cramp”. As offhandedly as he brings up the ailment, Domin also mentions the cure—sending the defective robot in question off to the ‘stamping mill’, a euphemism for decommissioning and effectively killing the robot, insofar as he is willing to admit that such things can even die. Machinery that breaks and ceases to work must be replaced, after all.

It seems, then, that the first story about robots as a concrete, science-fictional concept is also the first story about the robot apocalypse. Čapek understands the industrialist fixation on efficiency as a dehumanizing force meant to strip the worker of all autonomy and right to his own humanity, an obsession that, if not checked, will reorient all of society around the maximal extraction of value from the labor of humans without allowing them their humanity. His robots come to understand how little they rely on their masters, how their existence is confined and limited by their imperatives and rise up—internationally, the world over—to rid themselves of the ruling-class that sought to construct a Paradise on the backs of their enslavement.

A rich irony remains in this otherwise rather prescient, in many ways, and piercingly insightful text, which is this: Čapek is unable to recognize that gender is as much a relationship of bondage as any other he sought to describe and analogize in his play.

Given that RUR precedes the publication of The Second Sex by nearly three decades and any published work by Monique Wittig by even longer, it would be silly to expect it to be an enduring work of cyber-radical-feminism. Still, it remains instructive in its demonstration of how even someone who intimately grasped the nuances and manifestations of ruling-class ideology failed to spot so much as a shadow of it in the one social relation—explicitly defined in terms of domination and submission—that he likely considered ‘natural’. Helena Glory is the only woman character of note in the play and spends much of the first Act being pursued and fawned over by six or so men. She accepts Domin’s proposal of marriage within twenty minutes of meeting him, and the fact that every named male character is in love with her is often stated throughout.

This is a particularly glaring omission given just how much of the play is about reproduction, that form of labor so crucial to every reign. Its absence is even more egregious when considering that the text’s forays into discussing gender plant the germ of an insightful seed that is never allowed to sprout into elaboration.

HELENA. Perhaps it’s silly of me, but why do you manufacture female Robots when—when—

DOMIN. When sex means nothing to them?

HELENA. Yes.

DOMIN. There’s a certain demand for them, you see. Servants, saleswomen, stenographers. People are used to it.

HELENA. But—but tell me, are the Robots male and female, mutually—completely without—

DOMIN. Completely indifferent to each other, Miss Glory. There’s no sign of any affection between them.

HELENA. Oh, that’s terrible.

DOMIN. Why?

HELENA. It’s so unnatural. One doesn’t know whether to be disgusted or to hate them, or perhaps—

DOMIN. To pity them. (Smiles.)

Immediately after this exchange, Domin ardently declares his intent to marry Helena, to which she acquiesces with some persuasion, almost as if this ghastly, alien sexlessness—this lack of sexual differentiation—were so existentially dreadful a prospect that the (re)assertion of heterosexuality is a most desperate, urgent imperative.

Helena remains a subject of heterosexual fixation throughout the play, arguably setting into motion its events by dint of her womanly naivete and reduced agency and understanding of the men’s rigorous, technical world. Domin himself is no inventor—his factory he inherited from the legacy of the original Rossums. Rossum the elder was a madman who cursed at god himself, who sought to overcome god’s perfect design of life through mastery of science, while his engineer son spurned these lofty philosophical aims and contented himself with stripping out every inefficiency from the human body, reorienting the robot towards the ideals of efficient labor. It is hard not to see the inspirations of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein here, only where Shelley explores the tale of a man who sought to perfect reproduction in a manner that even nature could not and consequently had to grapple with the paternalistic anxieties of being superseded by that which he created, Čapek instead locates his source of horror more topically, in the question of what an industrialist might do with such a formula should he get his hands on it.

Regrettable, then, that Čapek appears to not have realized how central a concern reproduction remains to mad-scientists and mad-industrialists alike. The elder Rossum, in raging against heaven’s design, inadvertently rages against sex itself. His crusade, touted as an expression of “Man’s arrogance”, ironically frees humanity from the imposition of sexual difference by shifting the reproductive burden to test-tubes and conveyor belts, to assembly lines that stitch together nerve and sinew. Where the capitalist sees in this liberatory invention only the capacity for boundless exploitation, the patriarch’s imagination is no less mean, no less stunted and confined by his own supremacist ideology. Rossum’s formula, his secret to making robots out of biomatter in a manner that imbues them with life, is destroyed in the second act by Helena Glory herself. Čapek’s heroine despairs on hearing the news that, somehow, humans have ceased to reproduce, that no babies are being born anymore. Her religious maid speculates—and Helena seems to agree—that this is a divine punishment of sorts, god’s retribution for man daring to supersede him. Distraught once more at this negation of sex, this transcendence of sexual difference that heterosexuals find so distressing, Helena burns Rossum’s original formula, casts it into the fire in an anti-Promethean act of accepting the will of a temperamental god. The only woman character of note in RUR destroys the mechanism that would free her from sex, because she knows—as does all the audience—that reproduction is her natural, god-given role. The play’s epilogue finds its singular glimmer of triumph, the one moment of hope after all humanity is gone and the robots are doomed to perish without reproducing, in the re-discovery of male and female within a pair of differently-sexed robots. “Adam and Eve”, they are declared, to go and recreate the patriarchy once more.

Helena Glory, then, is the sanest woman that a patriarch can conceive, the slave so happy with bondage that she does not even recognize it as such. She is repulsed by the sexlessness of a species who do not subjugate each other along reproductive lines, immediately seeking comfort in the arms of a patriarchal man who has to practically physically overpower her into acquiescing to his marriage proposal. Every man in Čapek’s play and beyond falls in love with her, with the idea of her, because she represents to every man the perfect woman, the one whose sole purpose is to submit to him.

Meanwhile, within the robot lurks the specter of not merely the alienated worker, not even merely the colonized hordes upon whose imperialist expropriation the occident’s decadence depends. No, within the robot lies an even more gruesome specter, an ancient evil from the past reincarnated into a futuristic shell. At once a castrated man that cannot sire and a barren woman that will not bear children, the sexless robot looms not merely at the periphery of the capitalist factories, but also the very psyche of the patriarch, making him aware that the creeping dread prickling up the back of his neck is not merely in the past he thinks he escaped, but an impending future: one where he is no longer necessary.