A Trans Woman Reacts to Andrea Long Chu’s Manifesto, Females
by Naomi Kanakia
The thesis of Andrea Long Chu's Females is that all human beings, whether men women or nonbinary, have the impulse to become the vessel for other peoples' desire, and that we are all to a greater or lesser extent ashamed of that impulse. Of course, Chu doesn't put it so clearly. She instead writes: "Everyone is female, and everyone hates it."
On a personal level, I was one hundred percent convinced by her arguments, but then I, like Chu, am a transgender woman. The book's autobiographical sections, which touched on Chu’s reactions to the men's rights movement, the pickup artist community, and sissy porn (a genre where men are forcibly turned into women) all reflected my own preoccupations, and the specifics of her trans journey mirrored my own. As with Chu, the born-this-way trans narrative didn’t entirely resonate with me. Instead, becoming trans felt like an escape. Society thought it had me by the balls, but like some folkloric trickster, a Coyote or Anansi, I found a way to escape: I would just chop them off and turn into a woman.
As a writer, I hate the idea that the most essential experience of my life is just…some sort of illness or condition. But situating transgenderism as an escape allows Chu and I to find a new relationship between ourselves and the rest of humankind: we aren’t unique in our sickness, we’re only unique in the cure for it.
Chu’s provocative writing style has garnered plenty of attention. In many ways, it resembles a work of French literary theory: aphoristic statements that purposefully misuse words to create vagueness about what she’s saying. For instance:
I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. These desires may be real or imagined, concentrated or diffuse—a boyfriend’s sexual needs, a set of cultural expectations, a literal pregnancy—but in all cases, the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force. To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. This means that femaleness, while it hurts only sometimes, is always bad for you.
And, later:
Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. If this is true, then gender is very simply the form this self-loathing takes in any given case. All gender is internalized misogyny. A female is one who has eaten the loathing of another, like an amoeba that got its nucleus by swallowing its neighbor. Or, to put a finer point on it: Gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes but also the process of internalizing itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desires, someone else’s narcissism.
The problem is that aphorism can only work if the reader accepts it intuitively as true. To me, Chu's book has tremendous explanatory power. I had many years of envying women, and the more feminine they were—the more they embodied male desire—the more I envied them. I loved and dreamed about the accoutrements of femininity: the nails, makeup, smooth skin, high heels, dresses, colors, camaraderie, even the languid movements and gentle manners. I had these desires, and I hated myself for them, because they reeked of misogyny and patriarchy.
To many radical feminists, this desire is at the heart of what makes transgender women sick. We are a projection of what men want women to be. Feminization can only be a product of the patriarchy. As Chu puts it, these radical feminists believe “if trans women were women, they would have the good sense not to be.”
Chu's book exculpates me from the shame of this desire by situating it as a universal one. I am not unique. All men and women, she says, are preoccupied with the loathsomeness of this desire to be desired, this desire to be female. Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.
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The biggest knock against this book is that I don't think it rings very true to many cis-gendered people. Although some reviews praise the book for its inventiveness and playful language, it’s clear that the reviewers do not and cannot take her ideas at face value. Many of the reviewers don't think Chu is serious in her arguments, and Chu herself gives them an out by writing, early in the book, “Or maybe I’m just projecting”—implying the book has more to say about her own turmoil than about humankind’s.
What very few literary critics (but many Amazon and Goodreads reviewers) are willing to say is that the implications of Chu's argument are misogynistic. If women want to be desired—if the essence of being female is to want to be desired--then women are complicit in the patriarchy. If dressing beautifully, doing your nails, working on your body, being gentle and feminine, if those are not just an imposition by the patriarchy—or, rather, if being imposed upon by the patriarchy in some way is the point, if women want to submit to male desire—then what's the problem? It implies that the misogynists are right, and that women are fulfilled by patriarchy.
Chu doesn't make this argument outright, and I don't think she believes that patriarchy is good. Indeed, I think she would view being male as a failed gender strategy: an attempt to flee from the desire to be desired. Patriarchy isn't an attempt to impose womanhood on women, it's an attempt to punish women for having and holding a femaleness that men cannot admit they want.
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I think the problem is that reactions from Chu's book come either from men who remain mired in that failed gender strategy, or they come from women who've never been forced to be men.
Chu spends more time discussing manhood than she does womanhood. For instance, she has several sections on the Red Pill ideology that's taken root amongst lonely young men and led several to commit acts of violence against women. The Red Pill, as Chu discusses in her book, is the idea that women are the ones with real power, and men are oppressed. Reading through Red Pill forums, one can see a clear sense of despair and longing. Men hate the power that beautiful women have over them. And men feel valueless and unloved. I have had the same thought as Chu has had, these men don’t want to screw these women, they want to become them. They want to have some of the power, some of the value, that they attribute to attractive women.
Chu's book shouldn't be read in the manner of a usual polemic, which relies on the reader to go "Aha, this book is saying something I've always known to be true." Nor should it be read as an extended work of trolling or as a playful thought exercise. It should be read like we read the memoirs of dissidents who've managed to escape oppressive governments.
Most men, even the freest, are censored by their need to remain men, to remain committed, essentially, to not becoming women.
Chu has done something almost no assigned-male people have been able to do: she has escaped from the prison of being a man, and she has done it without suffering psychological or economic damage that renders her unable to write and get published.
To me, the core of the book isn’t the idea that women might want to be desired (although is that idea really so surprising?) but that men might want the same thing. And yet that's exactly the piece that's been sidelined and ignored. And I think we know why: if men were to come out and admit the ways that this book resonates with them, then they would face the question, "What am I going to do about it?" and that's a question that, at least right now, has only a few answers.
The simplest one for me was to turn my back on manhood and all its privilege and attendant horror. Seen in this light, trans women aren’t aberrations, we’re just early adopters.
Naomi Kanakia is the author of two contemporary young adult novels, out from Little, Brown and HarperTeen. Her stories, poems and essays have appeared in Asimov’s, F&SF, Gulf Coast, The Indian- Review, West Branch, and others. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and one-year-old daughter. For more information visit her site: thewaronloneliness.com.