When my book Females first appeared in 2019, the vast majority of books by trans people were memoirs, and few of them were any good. This is still true today. The fact is that we are a young people, rapidly growing in historical consciousness but disadvantaged across every social vector, and most of us are still so occupied by the struggle to secure access to housing, employment, health care, and physical security that the question of our higher deserts—a proper literary tradition among them—remains distant and obscure. Most trans memoirs read like exercises in carefully solicited prurience, as if their authors think we will be given our rights if we just lift our skirts high enough. This is as true of the 20th-century classics (the late Jan Morris, for instance) as it is of the younger generation of media operators and activist-influencers, who for all their political ideals have generally not progressed beyond the language of self-help and righteous assertion. This kind of writing—sentimental, interiorized, aggressively humane—has had an enfeebling effect on what passes for trans intellectual life today. The notion that trans people’s primary contribution to culture is to “tell our stories,” however nobly this mission is conceived, has left us open to cooptation and grift. Story, I think, should be the mortal enemy of the trans writer, who upon setting foot in the blast zone of literature will find herself irradiated with unwanted narrative energy. Everyone will ask what happened to her. No one will ask what she thinks.
I say this with the knowledge that Females did not escape this fate. It is a short and experimental book, a philosophical tract, a work of psychoanalytic theory, a downtown hagiography, a manifesto for failed artists and by one—but it is also, if not a memoir, then at least a kind of diary. The first draft I completed before surgery; I then rewrote the book from the ground up while in recovery, which like any recovery from major surgery was very taxing, with the added burden of knowing that in some sense I had made my genitalia the business of the nation by writing about them in the local paper. I myself cannot read Females without seeing the surges of optimism and the depths of despair that surrounded that scene of writing. The recurring language of hatred in particular strikes me now as too strongly put, or at least too inflected by my own personal agonies to be useful to the reader who did not already happen to share them. Then again, there may be more such people than anyone could have ever anticipated, at least judging from the young people to whom Females has apparently meant a great deal.
The political situation today, I am sorry to say, is much worse than it was when the book was written. The anti-trans movement, while already possessed of significant raw force in the 2010s, was relatively formless and led by instinct; it lacked the ideological infrastructure necessary for genuine political organizing. This is no longer the case. The right is engaged in a coordinated legislative campaign to deny trans people civil protections and access to medical care, especially trans youth. A small but highly determined cohort of TERFs have brought anti-trans feminism to the masses, abetted by a much larger and more established group of liberal journalists and doctors who have set out to systematically erode any plausible basis for trans rights in the name of science and good sense. (I have called the latter TARLs: trans-agnostic reactionary liberals.) Janice Raymond—who, I learn as I write this, is still alive—is nonetheless a quaint memory when compared with J. K. Rowling, who judging by her strident social media accounts appears to spend more time thinking about trans people than I do. Of course, the intellectual content is as bankrupt as ever: one ranking TERF has seriously suggested that the added cognitive load of using preferred pronouns will leave “real” women more vulnerable to assault by predatory trans women—as if being forced to solve a math problem while running from a bear. Yet the movement’s influence grows.
It turns out that many of these people have read Females, which they regard as either laughable or horrifying depending on their temper. Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to notify my teenage self, who had for years followed the goings-on at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry with great interest, that the author of the best-selling book series in history would one day come to personally hate her. The general consensus, among Rowling and her friends, is that Females is a work of slavering misogyny written by a confessed male pervert. I am told, for instance, that the line about the asshole being a “universal vagina” is a great affront not just to all women but to the dignity of that hallowed organ. (I will apologize to it the next time I see it.) It goes without saying that none of this merits refutation. But I will admit that the prediction made by some of my critics on the left—that the frank airing of a trans person’s ambivalence in matters of gender and sexuality would give “ammunition” to those who seek to eliminate us—is more concrete today than it was then. The question is whether this criticism was ever sound to begin with; I think not. The enemy, it seems to me, does not come to us looking for ammunition; this they already have in the form of money, institutional support, political networks, and increasingly the law of the land. No, the enemy is looking for targets, and they will continue to find them as long as we—or they—exist.
That does not mean I would write this same book today. The strategy of couching the most challenging claims in the language of outlandish provocation appears dubious to me now, not least because the provocateur, as a type, has been so thoroughly claimed by the reactionaries in recent years. One does not want to cede all forms of insolence to the right, of course. But I do not know if I knew the difference in those days between audacity and courage; as a consequence, Females is a very bold book, but not always as brave as it could have been. The glowering political pessimism that runs through it, for instance, borders on the irresponsible (although not because it failed in its assessment of feminist thought, which I stand by). What I do wish is that the book had been more historical, more materialist, more capable of explicitly connecting its transcendental concerns with the empirical situation at hand. I wrote in New York Magazine last year that the metaphysics of sex will be an empty pursuit as long as material inequality, including inequalities of biology, persists in our society. (A powerful thought: that the right of trans people to hormones and surgery is a question of redistributing biological wealth!) I do not think this idea is incompatible with the central arguments of Females, though I did not do myself any favors by feinting at an ontological “sex.”
On a very basic level, Females was an attempt to offer a modest correction to the Freudian theory of sexuality. Psychoanalysis was, I thought, so invested in the proper development of the subject—the resolution of the Oedipus complex, the sublimation of unconscious desires into normal behavior, the brokering of a lasting truce between the life and death drives—that it took for granted something quite debatable: namely, that subjectivity is by definition something that people want. In my experience, this simply is not true. To become the subject of anything—desire, judgment, will, pleasure, interest, belief, responsibility, emotion, identity, rights, power—is very often a tortuous passage into a fragile, temporary, sometimes unbearable state. (Here I was strongly influenced by the late Lauren Berlant.) One finds examples of this everywhere. The subject of faith is plagued by fear and trembling; the subject of love, by the threat of rejection and the even greater threat of acceptance; the subject of freedom, by the abyss of the decision. At the political level, we know that in the case of trans people, as with other minority groups in the US, the achievement of even the most basic forms of civil subjectivity has entailed decades of existential struggle and violence; yet now that we have it, we find that it is precisely as persons that we are subjected to the awaiting forces of medical control, legal prohibition, and commodification under capitalism.
So the general field of psychoanalysis, I thought, made a great deal more sense when one abandoned the assumption that the libido tended toward self-realization—in other words, that it was inherently “male,” a word that Freud to his credit had used only with some hesitation. In fact, I argued, one could assume the opposite: that at its most fundamental level desire was characterized by passivity, withdrawal, and abnegation, all of which psychoanalysis and the bourgeois European culture out of which it emerged associated with the female sex. I intended this claim as something quite different from the standard precept that desire is a relation to lack, as Lacan put it. It is true that Females benefited from the general post-Lacanian milieu that I had encountered in graduate school, especially in the form of queer theory. But my goal was not simply to reaffirm the existence of the castration complex—the fear of losing his penis that will lead the little boy to pass through the Oedipus phase and accept the basic necessity of repressing his raw desires—but rather to invert this complex entirely. If there was an original childhood trauma, I thought, it was the horrified realization that castration was intended as punishment and not, as the child has been allowed to believe up until this moment, as relief. The work of the castration complex, in other words, was to drive up the value of the phallus by creating the impression that it was a bad thing not to have one. Castration was not a threat to one’s inchoate subjectivity; it threatened one with subjectivity, the way a parent threatens a child with their own full name.
My thinking here owed much to the “pessimisms” circulating in the academy around the time of the book’s writing—in particular, Afro-pessimism and the so-called queer antisocial thesis. In their severest forms, each of these trends had identified a certain position of nonbeing, one defined by exclusion from the symbolic order and exposure to the violence of the real. But the decision to sand down the rough texture of historical experience into a smooth metaphysical category—to turn from Black people to Blackness, or queer people to queerness—was in retrospect a poor one. In the first place, it ontologized suffering and mystified violence; it blamed the rain on God. In the second place, it depended on a transparently narcissistic attachment to the very kind of identity politics that its proponents so often condemned; it sprinted torch in hand to the dreaded oppression Olympics with the doubtful promise of burning it all down. That scholars could make basically identical arguments on behalf of different identity groups should have signaled the incoherence of the whole enterprise. (Lee Edelman and Calvin Warren could not both be right.) This is the problem with trying to derive ontological truth from ontic predicates: one makes one’s own problems unfathomable and everyone else’s problems not worth fathoming.
Did Females fare any better? Yes and no. It certainly did not fall into the trap of “transness,” a dead-on-arrival concept which in its metaphysical form had led us exactly nowhere. The book did speak of ontology, and it did express some perfunctory reservations about feminism and politics more broadly. It also made no attempt to conceal the obviously identitarian basis of the argument: it is right there on the cover. But I would like to think that the ontological claim of Females, whether one buys it or not, was somewhat more catholic than that of its protestant cousins. I was not saying that everyone was a woman, though I cannot entirely fault the reader who thought so in good faith. I was asserting that a certain psychological attitude which Euro-American culture had long associated with the women was, in fact, a universal condition underlying all subjectivity for all people at all times in all circumstances from the beginning of history until the end of the world. Hence the tagline: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” No—and on this I was quite firm—exceptions.
Whether that catholicity recommends the argument is, of course, a question for the reader. The insouciance with which the thesis is defended—or rather, pointedly left undefended—was perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that it was built on rotten foundations. After all, I could have simply rejected the psychoanalytic frame altogether; I could have given this state of passivity a less confusing, more neutral name—Being, for instance. But Females is a book about revenge: about psychic reaction, political revanchism, and above all my own personal resentments. I felt battered in those days by the omnipresent allegation that simply by getting up in the morning I was denying the truth of my own sex. I have since learned to let this feeling go. But at the time, it seemed to me that the allegations should be turned around against my persecutors, whether real or in my head. It was not I who was secretly male; it was everyone else who was secretly female, by which I meant that they had achieved subjectivity, including their gender identities, only by resisting the gravitational pull of their own desire to be rid of the phallus.
I do not think I was wrong. What I would amend is the idea of a “condition,” which is far too static and open (fairly and not) to charges of essentialism. Perhaps one should say not that everyone “is” female but that a certain process of feminization, persistent and always incomplete, serves as the shifting sand on which the tent of subjectivity is pitched. This would be nicely in line with the sections on forced feminization in Females, which advanced what is still, in my opinion, the most elegant theory of pornography ever put to paper. Of course, like any candid analysis of a sexual subculture, this material was seized upon by some readers as lurid and inappropriate, especially given my openness. The gender-critical feminists, in particular, have held it up as a kind of smoking penis, proof of my fetishization of women and, by extension, the pathological character of all transfeminine desire. I find this very amusing. For what am I accused of? Not, it would seem, aggression, violence, control, or any of the other supposed hallmarks of toxic masculinity. On the contrary, I am imagined as a slave to my own perversions, as a narcissist fixated on my own physical appearance, as someone broken, dominated, violated, manipulated—in short, as hopelessly feminized.
How curious that what these feminists should fear most is the abandonment of masculine prerogative by people whom they stubbornly regard as male! In this aspect, for all their caterwauling about male domination, they are no different from the general public, which still greets the prospect of the willing feminization of men with horror and loathing. A fellow writer once jokingly asked me when she could expect to see the sequel to this book—Males, naturally—but the truth is that Females was always about men. The idea that all women were female was not a very hard sell, after all; the real intellectual challenge lay in showing that masculinity was itself a form of feminization, rather than a successful defense against it. There were, I admit, personal motives here. Transition can induce a kind of gender paranoia in the transitioner—or really, one can breathe in the thick smog of paranoia hanging over the world until it coats one’s lungs. It turns out that it is extremely difficult to divest oneself of every last shred of masculinity, in part because the same behavior may signify as masculine in one context and not another. So I could succumb to scrubbing the floors until my fingers bled, or I could try to prove that everything that we think of as masculinity—even the worst kind, the kind that you find in seedy subreddits and at white nationalist marches—was really a way of negotiating, and learning to enjoy, the feminizing force of desire.
In this respect, Females was a success. But I had also done precisely what I had set out not to do: I had written yet another sentimental book about why trans people like me should be allowed to exist, even if that sentimentality was eclipsed for some readers by all the braggadocio. I was still a symbol; I had not yet become a sentence. Perhaps this is a necessary road for the marginalized writer to walk, though no one should be forced to endure it. If there is one idea that has unified my thinking as a trans person since I embarked on a career as a writer, it is that we must give up the dream of explaining ourselves. I suspect I will keep moving through this idea until I am done writing. When I wrote in Females that one thing or another had “made” me trans, I was trying to embrace the abjected position as nakedly as I could: to show that desire was at the heart of trans identification. Of course I have paid for this claim. Allow me now, for posterity, to restate it fully clothed. A trans person is not a person whose gender does not “match” their sex; a trans person is quite simply a person who transitions. It is a thing one does, not a thing one is. This means that while trans identity has no cause, trans people will always have their reasons. Whether we share them is up to us.
