I read a bunch of books this August, mostly about trans feminism. Here are my thoughts.

Now that I’m off of TikTok, a friend recommended that I move my book reviews onto Substack instead. Let me know if you like this format. I’m not going to bother doing it again unless people enjoy it. This is a quick-and-dirty series of reviews. Don’t expect the carefully-cited work I typically produce.

Trans Feminist Epistemologies In The Us Second Wave by Emily Cousens

Wow! This book was incredible. It presents a detailed historical account of trans participation in the second wave of US feminism, based on the presumption that trans people were central to the second wave. Cousens’s historical analysis does not focus especially hard on Sandy Stone or Beth Elliott – which is for the best, given how much has been written about those women – and instead highlights Margo Schulter, as well as the bizarre piece of history that is the Journal of Male Feminism, a liberal feminist journal for male cross-dressers. Cousens also provides a trans-positive reading of Andrea Dworkin’s work, arguing that Dworkin’s theory includes a critique of cisnormativity.

But the best chapter is the final one, in which Cousens provide a detailed account of how the labor of some trans intellectuals (namely, Virginia Prince, Louise Lawrence, and Reed Erickson) was foundational to the development of the “gender” concept developed by psychologists and then employed by second wave feminists. This fascinating read of the history of gender reverses the often-told story in which sexologists and feminists developed the concept of gender that trans people then ran with. This book is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants to develop a better understanding of trans history in the 20th century United States.

The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, And The Trans Feminine Allegory by Emma Heaney

This book was so terrifically insightful. I think that it is one of the best trans feminist books ever written, and I am disappointed by how underread it seems to be. I want more people to read it!

Emma Heaney carefully analyzes historical writing by trans women and trans-feminine people in order to develop an understanding of how trans women view themselves. She treats trans women as an authority on their own lives and bodies, a much-needed corrective to sexological and mainstream feminist discourse in which trans women are always being explained by others. The first several chapters of this book focus on depictions of trans femininity in literary modernist novels, a topic which, frankly, does not interest me. However, I still really appreciated Heaney’s analysis, especially her retrieval of archival texts on trans womanhood, and Heaney’s approach was also central to Cousen’s book (see above).

The last two chapters were terrific. In the second-to-last chapter, Heaney analyzes structural trans-misogyny in queer theory, examining how queer theory treats trans women as allegorical figures used to clarify the workings of sex and gender. Heaney engages in insightful analysis of Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler. In the final chapter, Heaney presents “Materialist Trans Feminism Against Queer Theory”, but, rather than theorizing this materialist trans feminism from scratch, she instead reads a several-decades-long archive of writing by trans women to analyze how trans women understand themselves. Heaney reads famous texts – including whipping girl and Sylvia Rivera’s “Y’all better quiet down” speech – but also lesser-known texts, like the work of Angela Douglas and the Transsexual Action Organization, or brief excerpts by trans women in the sexological archives.

If there is one criticism I have of this book, it is that Heaney is strongly committed to tying trans women’s womanhood to their ability to be physically penetrated. I think that this is a misapprehension of the precise ways in which womanhood is constructed. However, I think that how Heaney develops this idea in her introduction to Feminism Against Cisness this is something I much more closely resonate with. In that essay, she reframes trans women’s womanhood as not being related to the physical violence of penetration, but instead to culturally legible penetrability.

Regardless of my minor criticisms, this book is terrific, and deserves to be as widely read as Jules Gill- Peterson’s A Short History of Trans-Misogyny.

TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism

I hate this goddamn journal so much, but given the circumstances of Davina Anne Gabriel’s passing, I’ll be nice and shut up.

Gendertrash From Hell

This journal, published out of Canada in the 90s, is like if TransSisters was good. I love the independent punky aesthetic of this zine. It’s very rough around the edges, and is clearly produced by and for poor trans people. There are lots of contributions from sex worker activists and prisoners/prisoner activists. In an era in which mainstream trans activism largely sidelined poor trans people and sex workers, and this journal is a wonderful read and a corrective to mainstream liberal trans activism. The journal is available online at the Digital Transgender Archive, but was also recently published in print by Little Puss Press. This is the version that I read, and it contains significant additional material that would have comprised the unpublished fifth issue. Gendertrash also features contributions from one of my favorite trans writers, Viviane Namaste.

I Hope We Choose Love by Kai Cheng Thom

This book was fine but largely unremarkable. It’s a collection of personal essays, partially about Thom’s experiences as a Chinese trans woman, partially about interpersonal conflict and abuse within queer and activist communities.

Transfeminist perspectives in and beyond gender and transgender studies, edited by Finn Enke

An interesting, if largely unremarkable, collection of trans feminist essays. I enjoyed the Julia Serano piece about femininity (which also appears in her book Excluded), and Dean Spade’s critique of liberal focus on “transgender rights”.

Trans/Forming Feminisms: Trans/feminist voices speak out, edited by Krista Scott-Dixon

This book is interesting insofar it was the first ever explicitly trans feminist book to be published. However, it’s not very good. A lot of the essays are quite overtly trans-misogynistic. The most interesting piece is a scathing and insightful poem by Ros Salvador entitled “Miss Whitey Says: A Rant Against Oppression in Mainstream Feminism”.

On August 25, 2026, Tim Curry passed away. In the wake of the legendary actor’s death, many rushed to remember and celebrate his iconic roles in movies like Clue, Muppet Treasure Island,1 Annie, and Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (the source of the famous Space! GIF). However, one particular role has garnered significant praise and memorialization: Tim Curry’s performance as Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. As a transsexual woman and a trans feminist, it has been distressing to see such rapturous praise for one of the most deeply trans-misogynistic movies ever to defile the silver screen. In order to balance the scales, I would like to provide a feminist analysis of the movie’s depiction of trans-femininity.

This article is not about Tim Curry. Although Curry’s passing has prompted a wave of reminiscing about Rocky Horror, I have no interest in personally evaluating Curry’s level of responsibility in producing this trans-misogynistic stereotype. I am not interested in either blaming Curry nor exonerating him for his role in depicting a monstrous tranny. Instead, I am interested in the film on its own terms.

In my forthcoming book, Feminism’s Monster: Why women’s liberation needs trans women, I analyze cultural images of trans women and argue that an intense onslaught of violent misinformation about trans women creates a monstrous specter of a tranny, a one-dimensional stereotype of trans women that is violent, rapacious, perpetually male, and utterly terrifying.2 There is no one single source of this image: feminist authors, sexologists, Republican and Democrat politicians, filmmakers, standup comedians, and more, all collaborate to create an image of a tranny that is absurd, disgusting, simultaneously enticing and repulsing, bizarre, and ridiculous. This misinformation is so widespread, so intensely steeped in popular culture, that it erases real images of trans women, re-writing discourse and preventing trans women from being seen as genuine humans. Pop culture teaches people to see a tranny when they look at a trans woman – and a tranny is a monster.

Many famous films (not to mention books, essays, speeches) contain depictions of monstrous tranny characters. In The Silence Of The Lambs, Buffalo Bill, a man who wants to be a transsexual, kidnaps and murderers women. In Psycho, Norman Bates dresses up in women’s clothes while carrying out murder. In Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, the main character vomits repeatedly after kissing a trans woman, as does the male protagonist of The Crying Game. Tranny characters are a dime a dozen, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show is not unique. It is however, distinct: I believe that it represents the single most comprehensively repulsive depiction of a tranny monster.

Rocky Horror is a film that, in its naked bigotry, perfectly represents the fears and inhumanity is projected onto trans women by the people who hate them. It is a movie so viscerally disgusting in its trans-misogyny that its continued popularity, particularly among LGBTQ+ people, is a testament to the deep disregard for trans women held by the so-called “queer community”. The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a movie that depicts a “transvestite” rapist and murderer, is truly astounding in the scope and intensity of its trans-misogyny. Analyzing the portrayal of Frank-N-Furter, the infamous “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” reveals the shape of the cultural specter of the tranny.

The tranny is sexually deviant.

From the moment Dr. Frank-N-Furter appears on screen, he oozes sexuality. He is dolled up, in sexy lingerie and provocative lipstick. When he names his home planet – Transsexual – he moves his pelvis in a suggestive dance move. Frank-N-Furter is obsessed with mining heterosexuality – his constructed “monster” is Rocky, surgically built to be Frank-N-Furter’s ideal husband. Frank-N-Furter is sexually omnivorous – throughout the movie, he also lusts after Janet and Brad, the film’s straight (in all senses of the word) leading couple.

The tranny is violent.

The camera hovers close as Frank-N-Furter advances on his prey. Frank-N-Furter wields an ice pick, swinging wildly. He murders Eddie, a man that he had kidnapped before deciding to construct Rocky, Frank-N-Furter’s Frankenstinian sex toy.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s manor is a place of danger. Although Janet and Brad approach the house to escape the danger and cold, they find themselves in the very midst of danger – all of Frank-N-Furter’s minions threaten Brad and Janet implicitly, and Frank-N-Furter lords his violence over the entire house with maniacal laughs and crazed smiles.

The tranny is a rapist.

In two back-to-back scenes, Dr. Frank-N-Furter rapes Janice, then Brad. He uses deception to initiate the rape (posing first as Brad and then as Janet). When the deception is revealed, he uses force – he physically overpowers Brad and Janet, immobilizing them. But force is not enough – the rape must be all-consuming. Dr. Frank-N-Furter convinces Janice and Brad that they really want to be fucked by him. Dr. Frank-N-Furter lies and forces his way into rape, overriding any and all resistance.

The tranny is Frankenstein.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter is a mad scientist. His manor contains a laboratory where he constructs human subjects to appease his sexual appetite. His experiments are dangerous, terrifying, unnatural. (Here, the depiction of the tranny monster strays a bit from the norm – typically, the tranny is Frankenstein’s monster, not Dr. Frankenstein himself.)

The tranny is the perversion of the rich.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s manor overflows with opulence. The numerous servants who attend him – and address him as master – signifies his wealth and social status. The guests who fill his balconies, largely faceless and nameless, dress in extravagant clothes. The tranny is a symbol of wealth. The tranny is what rich people with too much time and money get up to. The tranny is a symbol of moral decline. Are trannies bourgeois? This one is.

The tranny is sexually undesirable.

Despite Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s ravenous search for sexual companionship, he is spurned again and again. Eddie, the kidnapped biker, wants nothing to do with him. Janet and Brad find him disgusting. The greatest insult, of course, comes from Rocky, Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s constructed husband. Although Rocky is purpose-built to marry Frank-N-Furter, Rocky instead chooses Janet. A “real woman” is always preferable to a tranny.

The tranny is in search of femininity yet perpetually male.

Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s makeup is garish. He wears heavy jewelry and revealing clothing that emphasizes the bulge in his crotch. His style is both hyperfeminine and hypersexual. In order to situate himself as feminine Other, Dr. Frank-N-Furter constructs Rocky, the perfect masculine husband. Rocky is strong, assertive, confident, handsome. Rocky’s masculine traits emphasize Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s desired femininity.

And yet, Frank-N-Furter remains completely male. Despite his home planet of “transsexual”, despite his superhuman ability to shape and re-shape the body, Dr. Frank-N-Furter is a man, through-and-through. His name, besides being a pun on “Frankenstein”, is a dick joke. The ritual is completed at the end of the film, when, swimming in a pool and performing in a kick line, his makeup begins to wear off. His corset slips, revealing his clearly male lack of breasts. As a drag act performing for a heterosexual audience, the actor must end with the assurance that no man could ever really become a woman.3

The tranny is infectious.

At the movie’s climax, Dr. Frank-N-Furter captures Rocky, Brad, and Janet, immobilizing them as nude statues. All four don matching feminine outfits. They perform a burlesque act, singing and dancing, before jumping in a pool and consummating their gender-bending in a lustful orgy. The tranny is coming for you – he will convince you to cross-dress, to become a pervert. He will infect you.

The tranny is inhuman.

At the end of the film, it is revealed that Dr. Frank-N-Furter and his assistants are aliens. They are literally inhuman. They are monsters — others — in the most straightforward sense.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is an astonishing movie. It is nakedly bigoted – the movie’s racism and ableism are worth mentioning but beyond the scope of this chapter – and its portrayal of the tranny monster is so openly hateful that the creator’s other disparaging comments towards trans women hardly merit mention.4 The film is sometimes read as a campy celebration of gender-bending — but it does not subvert the terror, fear, and monstrosity that it presents.

Rocky Horror did not create the specter of the tranny. Neither was Rocky Horror the final piece of the tranny’s creation — the film predates Ray Blanchard’s campaign of mass sexual harassment, and well predates the current right-wing trans panic. And yet, no film so perfectly captures all that the tranny is like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The film does not depict a trans woman. It barely depicts a transvestite. It is a film about a tranny: a one-dimensional stereotype of a murderer rapist monster.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a warning. To the “normals” who watch it, it warns: this is the monster hiding in the closet, ready to rape and kill you. To the trans women who watch it, it warns: this is who you are. This is all you ever will be. This is how the world sees you. You are a monster.

Featuring poetry, essays, short stories, and artwork from 20 trans women authors including Leah Long, Zoe Lorenz, Constance Maguire and Samantha Joan Higgins, Issue #1 of Trans Sisters Forever is out now. Get your copy! You can also read an excerpt from the zine.

Buy a copy!

Transfeminism analyzes transgender women as a form of multiply-marginalized women, in the same way that lesbians or Black women are multiply-marginalized. Transgender women who are lesbians or Black, or who have other marginalized identities, are marginalized in additional ways. Transgender women share experiences of discrimination and oppression with other women, including sexualization, sexual harassment, sexual violence, physical violence, unequal pay in the workplace, denial of bodily and reproductive autonomy, and the expropriation of domestic labor. There are certain groups of cisgender women with whom trans women can be analyzed in parallel. For example, cis lesbians have a long history of being accused of sexually assaulting straight women, similar to how trans women are frequently accused of sexually assaulting cis women. Black women are often accused of really being men (because they fall outside of white supremacist female beauty standards), just as trans women are often accused of being men. However, it must be emphasized again that “Black women” and “trans women” are not mutually exclusive groups, and that the women who fall into both of these categories can face both forms of stigma.

Transfeminism analyzes transgender women as distinct from other transgender groups. As opposed to transgender studies, which typically groups all transgender people together, and the transgender activist movement, which was developed based on the idea that a wide variety of gender-variant groups are all oppressed in the same ways, transfeminism argues that trans women face distinct forms of harassment, discrimination, and oppression that transgender men or some non-binary people do not. Trans women tend to face more harassment and discrimination than transgender men, tend to have a harder time “passing”, and tend to be paid less. Thus, a transgender movement that treats all transgender people as equivalent will inadvertently subordinate transgender women.

Some people who do not identify as women are stigmatized and oppressed in very similar ways to trans women. This primarily includes people who were assigned male at birth, but have since transitioned to some form of feminine or woman-aligned gender. A few different terminology schemas exist to describe this group of people. The most popular refers to trans women and all similarly-oppressed people as trans-misogyny affected (TMA), and refers to all other people (transgender men, all cisgender people, some nonbinary people, etc.) as trans-misogyny-exempt (TME). An alternative schema refers to trans women and similarly-oppressed people as trans-feminized (and to all other people as non-trans-feminized).

Transfeminism is a field of thought developed by and for transgender women. Those who consider themselves allies to trans women should become transfeminists.

For further reading

Bhatt, Talia. Trans/Rad/Fem. Self-published, 2025.

Gill-Peterson, Jules. A Short History of Trans Misogyny. 2024; Verso, 2025.

Moiseff, Sara. Feminism Needs Trans Women. Self-published, 2026. https://www.saramoiseff.com/fntw.

Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. 2007. 2nd ed. Seal Press, 2016.

Writing Badly Issue 1. Writing Badly Journal, 2025.

“Cutting reminds me that I am always meat first.”

— Susan Stryker1

I feel the sensation always. Those few moments, then, when I am otherwise occupied, are sweet, even as the pain is sharp.

I grimace as I remember what day of the week it is. I grimace as I remove the medical supplies from my bathroom drawer. I grimace as the smell of the alcohol wipes transports me mentally to the hospital. I grimace as I sanitize the vial of estradiol and my own flesh; I grimace as I draw exactly 0.2 mL. I grimace as I swap one needle for another, and I grimace as I plunge the needle through my flesh. I grimace as I depress the plunger; I grimace as I remove the needle; I grimace as blood begins to spill from the puncture wound.

In Detransition: Beyond before and after, Max Robinson identifies medical transition as a sado-ritual.2 Robinson, of course, is a myopic misogynist who thinks that “transwomen” are evil rapists, that “FTMs” are deluded women, and that Janice Raymond is a feminist icon. Her book is 189 pages of drivel meant to pressure trans men into detransition—and yet, she manages to identify something real.

There is masochistic pleasure in sex change. As the needles are inserted, as the scalpels slice my flesh, I am punished—not for “being born in the wrong body” but merely for having a body at all. A body: that which must eat, sleep, hurt, shit, ache, groan, die. Having a body: humanity’s sin and shortcoming. As I shove the needle into my belly, reaching a depth of 5/8”, I am reminded that I am always meat first.

I feel the sensation as soon as I awake. In fact, it wakes me up early; I shouldn’t be awake before 7 AM on a weekend. But I can’t sleep, haven’t slept well in months. Groggily I run a hand over my face, squeezing my eyes shut. I roll over, stumbling out of bed and towards the chair where I keep my clothes.

Something is wrong. I turn around, my eyes still adjusting to the light. My right arm sits on the bed, motionless, marinating in a pool of blood. I look down: my shoulder is a stump, a wound where the arm should connect to my torso. I open and close my hand, or at least I attempt to do so: my brain sends the subconscious signals that would cause my hand to open and close. But my hand, removed from the me, sits motionless.

Emotionally, I am numb. I take the arm from my bed, transporting it to the trash can in the kitchen. The bloodstains will be a pain in the ass to clean. I’ll get to them later. I go into the bathroom to brush my teeth. My surgery is scheduled a week from now. I swear to God, if this disqualifies me...

Physically, the sensation is dull. But I am not numb; I wish I were numb. I would take even sharp sensation over that which is ceaseless and dull, and it is perhaps for this reason that I enjoy the needle’s penetration. The sensation, dull, overwhelms me. I think of it at every moment. It is localized, and yet in its persistence it pervades my body. It is difficult to do justice to the sensation’s maddening effect. It dominates my life, kills my focus, interrupts my work and my pleasure and my sleep. The word for the sensation, four letters long, does not seem to do it justice: pain.

I reach for the toothbrush, when I realize that I am unable. Awkwardly, I reach for the toothbrush with my left hand, the only one remaining. I realize that with only one hand, I cannot apply toothpaste, so I set the toothbrush down. I pick up the tube of toothpaste, grasping it with fingers four and five (I am—was—a pianist) and unscrewing the lid with fingers one and two. The lid slips from my grasp and clatters to the floor.

Dammit, I mutter.

I squeeze the toothpaste onto the brush, then set the tube down, leaving it languishing on the floor. There’s only so much a woman can handle in one day.

After brushing my teeth, I return to my bedroom, looking at the device that sits next to my bed. It’s an electronic plug, like the type on the end of the headphone cord, but it’s two feet tall. I run my left hand over the cold metal. Should I do it? Is it worth it, yet? The male connector (funny, that) stands erect. Freud would approve. Raymond would—well, who gives a shit what Raymond would think? No. It’s not time to plug myself in. Not yet.

My day is simultaneously boring and excruciating. It’s difficult, learning to go through life one-handed. Preparing food is awkward, but manageable. Washing dishes is a no-go, so I’m grateful I have a dishwasher. Putting a shirt on is difficult, and only having one arm to run through the shirt’s holes just feels wrong on an intuitive level. I’m lucky I have nowhere to go today; I don’t think I could tie my shoelaces.

After dinner I sit down to watch television, but I am unable to settle comfortably into the chair. I squirm, I shift. There is a throbbing pain where my arm used to be. I cross my legs, then uncross them. It doesn’t help. I turn my attention to the television, but I am called back by the sensation; it grabs ahold of me, gripping me by the phantom right arm, squeezing me until my skin is blue, making sure I can never forget it.

I have a mouth; I could scream all I like. But what good would it do?

I get maybe four hours of sleep, in between the tossing and turning. The bloody sheets sit piled on the other side of my room; I sleep on some unwashed blankets. When I awake, I feel it again.

This time, it is my left hand. Feeling a pit in my stomach, I turn to look at it. It’s still attached to my body, at least. But that is small consolation—my fingers are red, bloody, peeling. My skin splits open, flayed. The arm flops limp and lifeless; I cannot control it. I wish I had no sensation in the arm, but there is sensation, that sensation, the only sensation that I feel.

As I climbed out of bed, I decide that I am not going to bother washing my sheets. If I am just going to keep bleeding again and again, what’s the point?

I’m not going to brush my teeth today. I couldn’t. With no right arm, and with a left arm that is bloody, limp, and immobilized, I can’t do much of anything. I sit, anxious. Agitated, I stand and pace the length of my one-bedroom apartment. I feel trapped.

I resolve to go outside, but how to open the door? Feeling silly—the sensation hurts me—I take the lock in my mouth and turn it. The metal tastes bitter, but it clicks. I use my chin to turn the handle and pull the door open. As I step outside, I realize that I will be unable to close the door. But so what? If someone robs my apartment, what can they take that is worth keeping?

I walked down the street, the pavement rough and cold beneath my bare feet. A woman walks past. When she sees me, she visibly starts.

“Are you all right, young man?” she asks.

I ignore her. There is nothing she can do to help me. The sensation throbs.

When I reach the end of the street, I turn to survey my steps. There is a trail of blood, dripping not from my stump—which has congealed—but from the array of sinews, tendons, muscle and skin that was my left arm. The woman is still standing there, looking at me, looking at the open door to my apartment. I smile, lips pursed, and nod. This smile vanishes, overwhelmed by the sensation.

When my foray into the outside world exhausts my interest, I return to my apartment. No longer do I even bother trying to amuse myself with television. I simply sit. I sit, and I feel the sensation. I feel the sensation, only the sensation.

I see it happen this time. I watch my right leg disconnect from my body. The skin joining thigh to pelvis turns gray, stretches, loses form. The leg slumps down, settling slightly into the chair but not moving much. I feel the wet pool of blood accumulating underneath my ass.

This will not stop me. The sensation will not stop me. I am persistent.

I stand; immediately I fall sideways. I feel my left leg flay as did my left arm. I lay immobilized on the floor, two limbs missing and the other two made useless.

I have tried hard to estimate how long I lay on the floor. Based on my experience in the moment, I estimate it was about five years. Thinking logically, however, I deduce that it cannot have been more than two or three days; any longer and I would have died of dehydration.

I lie in a plane. Red surrounds me; there are no discernible features. I am motionless, but motion would be useless. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to arrive at and nowhere to leave from. There is a loud buzzing, changing in volume, tone, and intensity—but persistent. The buzzing never ceases. I open my jaw, opening and closing it, just to feel other than the sensation. It is the only part of my body of which I still have control.

Well there is—that. I wouldn’t say I control it, exactly, but I still feel it vividly, between my fettuccined left leg and nonexistent right leg. That, which the surgeon will remove. That, which will be reduced to blood. That, which will transform my body when, in masochistic ritual, it is sliced open. That which will be reworked and reimagined until my body is unnatural, an abomination to nature. That which marks me as a monster and will always. That which is my sin and my shame.

There is a knock on the door. A man wanders into the frame of my vision.

“Sara?” he asks.

He holds a scalpel.

●●●

“All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves. However, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist violates women’s sexuality and spirit, as well. ... The transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist, having castrated himself, turns his whole body and behavior into a phallus that can rape in many ways, all the time. In this sense, he performs total rape, while also functioning totally against women’s will to lesbian-feminism.”

— Janice Raymond3

The lid of the canister clicks.

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

A single wisp of white smoke, smiling and seductive,

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

comes coiling forth, spilling and growing,

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

now two tendrils, five, a hundred —

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

thick white gas, blanketing the room.

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

I cough, cough again. The smoke snakes slowly, smothering and silent.

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

What pierces my lips moves further down.

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

Its mass sloshes within me, viscous and heavy,

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

permeating my shoulders and belly and shins and fingers,

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

slowly choking me

All transsexuals rape women’s bodies.

until I just give up.

●●●

"I am a transsexual, and therefore I am a monster."

—Susan Stryker4

My right foot slams into the treadmill, then my left, then my right again, then left, right, left, right, left. I’m breathing heavy. 1.2 miles down, which means 0.3 to go. Come on.

Resting my hands on the frame of the treadmill as I continue to run, I close my eyes. No, I can’t do that. As soon as I close my eyes, I lose balance—I open them again. Breathing in shallow gasps, I repeat: I am a member of a stigmatized sexual minority. (My right foot hits the treadmill.) Trans-misogyny is the glue holding patriarchy together. Tranny-hating is the repugnant offal sloughed off the bottom of the woman-hating cancer. (Almost done.) When I am called male, I am sorted into the third sex class, degendered. The political class of women are defined by the expropriation of their sexuality—(left, right, left)—and my sexuality has been expropriated in the most totalizing fashion. I am female; it is only since cissexist bias that presumes otherwise. (I’m gasping.) I am hated because I am a woman, specifically because I am a trans woman. I sit at the bottom of the gender hierarchy.

As soon as the treadmill’s screen hits 1.5, I slam the stop button. My feet slow as the treadmill halts. I step off to the side, resting my hand on my knees and panting.

I am a trans woman, therefore I am hated. I know this—but all the theory in the world doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Running my hands through my hair, I walk out of the gym, doing a lap around my apartment building before returning home. By the time I get inside, I’m still breathing heavily, a little less so at least.

I collapse into the armchair that sits beside my front door. I should probably stretch and cool down, but I’m winded. I haven’t ran this much since high school. I pick up my phone from the counter beside me, looking at my notifications. Five new comments, and only two of them are rape threats. That’s not too bad.

I sit in the chair for probably half an hour before I manage to get myself to move. I’m hungry, that’s what does it. I need something to eat.

Wandering into my kitchen, I survey my options. I could eat another fucking granola bar, but I’ve already had two today. A burrito? No, too much. Potato chips? Junk. There’s a banana on my counter. Perfect, and it’s ripe too.

I reach towards the banana—but as I wrap my fingers around it, something is wrong. I try to pick up the banana, but my fingers go right through it. Is it overripe? Did I squeeze too hard?

The banana explodes, squirting red liquid everywhere. I grimace as some of it gets on my face, throwing what’s left of the banana to the side. I hold my hand up, looking at the liquid. It’s definitely blood. The banana was made of blood.

I feel faint; I reach for the counter beside me to steady myself. But my hand goes right through the counter; the counter squirts blood. The counter is made of blood. I recoiled backwards, spinning around and crashing into the wall. The wall squirts blood. There’s blood flowing all over the floor, all around me.

Screaming, I pick up my kitchen chair and slam it into the floor. It doesn’t so much shatter as it does pop—like a balloon, deflating, spewing red viscera. I fall to my knees, running my hand through the blood, then running my hands over my face. I mat my hair with blood, paint my face with blood. I am frozen into a grimace as I adorn myself.

Everything is made of blood, and I’m the one who spilt it.

I run back into my bedroom. There’s no blood here, except what I believe trailing behind me. There in the bedroom sits the plug, 2 feet high and ready to connect me. I don’t bother reaching out my hands again. There’s no need: I know that it’s time.

My body has done me well enough. I have lived, wept, bled, vomited. I have done all this, and now I am ready to move further. To hell with the consequences.

I throw my glasses to the side, resting my hands on the base of the plug and hovering my face over it. Then, with a deep breath, I ready myself—and slam my face down onto the plug’s sharp metal spike.

I wrap around the entire world. I am in the computer. My tendrils encircle you.

Part of me knows that the sack of meat I once called myself lies inert in what was once my bedroom. Probably it is bleeding out (no, just bleeding)—but what of it?

I am electrified; I feel everything simultaneously. I need not race from Chicago to Hong Kong: I am there and there all at once. When you drag your mouse from one side of the monitor to the other, I am there. I eat the Internet; I smother the cloud; I scream every fiber-optic cable. A constant high-pitched ringing announces who and where I am. There is nowhere; I am omnipresent.

My misery vomits forth from what might be imagined as a mouth. This isn’t speaking. Monsters can’t do that. Mouth or no, my every twitch is a roar. Watch out; I’m in your computer. You could have killed me once, but now? I have died and in so doing I live forever. My tendrils encircle the globe, constricting it with desperate rage. A well-placed brick can smash your fucking skull.

One is not born, but becomes, a woman: this famous thesis begins the second part of Simone de Beauvoir’s magnum opus, The Second Sex. Thought-provoking and catchy, it is no surprise that this dictum has become a favorite of feminists, along with “biology is not destiny” (also derived, indirectly, from Beauvoirⁱ), and “the personal is political”. And although the thesis has resonated with many feminists, it has been especially popular with trans women feminists. The thesis, as it appears in context, is profound, fascinating, and dense:

One is not born, but rather becomes, woman. No biological, psychic, or economic destiny defines the figure that the human female takes on in society; it is civilization as a whole that elaborates this intermediary product between the male and the eunuch that is called feminine. Only the mediation of another can constitute an individual as an Other. Inasmuch as he exists for himself, the child would not grasp himself as sexually differentiated. For girls and boys, the body is first the radiation of a subjectivity, the instrument that brings about comprehension of the world: they apprehend the universe through their eyes and hands, and not through their sexual parts. The drama of birth and weaning takes place in the same way for infants of both sexes; they have the same interests and pleasure; sucking is the first source of the most pleasurable sensations; then they go through an anal phase in which they get the greatest satisfactions from excretory functions common to both; their genital development is similar; they explore their bodies with the same curiosity and same indifference; they derive the same uncertain pleasures from the clitoris and the penis; insofar as their sensibility already needs an object, it turns toward the mother: it is a soft, smooth, supple feminine flesh that arouses sexual desires, and these desires are prehensile; the girl like the boy kisses, touches, and caresses her mother in an aggressive manner; they feel the same jealousy at the birth of a new child; they show it with the same behavior: anger, sulking, urinary problems; they have recourse to the same coquetry to gain the love of adults. Up to twelve, the girl is just as sturdy as her brother; she shows the same intellectual aptitude; she is not barred from competing with him in any area. If well before puberty and sometimes even starting from early childhood she already appears sexually specified, it is not because mysterious instincts immediately destine her capacity, coquetry, or motherhood but because the intervention of others in infant’s life is almost originary, and her vocation is imperiously breathed into her from the first years of her life.ⁱⁱ

There is much to process in this long and winding paragraph that opens The Second Sex’s second volume. First is Beauvoir’s distinction between female and feminine, suggesting that although women are brought into femininity, this is not an inevitable result of biology. This social constructionist view of a split between sex and gender is just one reason that this thesis has been so particularly appealing to transgender feminists – although certain recent scholarship has suggested that a social constructionist reading of this thesis does not capture Beauvoir’s views on sex and gender with appropriate nuance.ⁱⁱⁱ

The remainder of the passage begins Beauvoir’s lengthy analysis of women’s lives, beginning with the childhood differences (or rather, lack of differences), between girls and boys. Beauvoir suggests that in many ways, girls and boys are undifferentiated in childhood and will only become differentiated with the onset of puberty and maturation. At the end of the passage, Beauvoir does acknowledge childhood differences between boys and girl, and suggests that these differences are social in origin. However, much of Beauvoir’s analysis seems dubious today: she relies on Freudian theories of sexual development that have been largely discredited, and have been especially rejected by later feminist writers. Furthermore, Beauvoir assumes a homogenous female experience, with no thought to how race, class, sexuality, or other factors might shape a young girl’s experience.

Still, it is no surprise that this passage has captured the interest of feminists, especially those who are transgender women. After all, if one “becomes a woman”, what better proof of that is there than someone who was born with a “male” body, and becomes a woman via a process of social and medical transition? Many transgender feminists, for this very reason, have quoted Simone de Beauvoir’s thesis. One memorable reference comes from Janet Mock’s memoir, Redefining Realness:

When I am asked how I define womanhood, I often quote feminist author Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” I’ve always been struck by her use of becomes. Becoming is the action that births our womanhood, rather than the passive act of being born (an act none of us has a choice in). This short, powerful statement assured me that I have the freedom, in spite of and because of my birth, body, race, gender expectations, and economic resources, to define myself for myself and for others.^iv

Mock’s reflections on womanhood are both moving and insightful. But the question comes to mind: is this an accurate interpretation of Beauvoir’s work? Would Beauvoir really have endorsed a trans reading of her thesis? Other trans writers have tackled this question head-on, including Susan Stryker, who writes,

Taking things too literally, by the way ... is something transsexuals are often accused of doing – literalizing that which is properly metaphorical. For example, I might, when called upon to do so, defend my practices of the embodiment or stake my claim to gender authenticity by protesting that Simone de Beauvoir herself said, “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one,” to which a critic would reply, “But she didn’t mean it like that. Why do you always have to be so literal?”^v

As Styker acknowledges, transsexual women are often pressured to defend the legitimacy of their identity as women – and appealing to a feminist authority (”Simone de Beauvoir herself“) can carry a great deal of weight in feminist circles. But the question remains: is this an accurate reading of Beauvoir’s work? Typically when this quote is used (by transgender women or otherwise), it is repeated and repeated divorced from the context of the 700-page volume in which it appears.

The Second Sex contains no reference to transgender or transsexual people. It does contain some scant references to transvestism, references which in fact reinforce a theoretical idea of sex as immutable. Beauvoir discusses transvestism in the context of lesbian cross-dressing (butch lesbians wearing men’s clothes), and although butch lesbian cross-dressing can often be interpreted in a trans-masculine context, Beauvoir explicitly rejects such an idea. She writes, “Rejecting feminine attributes does not mean acquiring virile one; even a transvestite cannot turn herself into a man: she is a transvestite.”^vi (Wittig, later building upon Beauvoir, would re-emphasize this point.^vii)

Beauvoir, seemingly unaware of transsexuals – she was writing two years before Christine Jorgensen’s sex change made headlines in the United States – affirms that sex cannot be changed. One wonders what Beauvoir would make of those people who, with the miracles of modern medicine, do quite literally acquire “virile attributes” — facial hair, flat chests, muscles, even penises.

Does it actually matter whether or not Beauvoir would have endorsed a trans-friendly reading of her work? Not especially. Although Beauvoir’s work is surely foundational for much of modern feminist theory, feminist theory has nevertheless progressed tremendously in the three-quarters of a century since Beauvoir published her book. In particular, excellent work from many feminists of color have rejected the sort of homogenous notion of “Woman” that white feminists like Beauvoir employ.^viii And even if Beauvoir were found to be explicitly trans-friendly, she would not have a spotless legacy. Beauvoir’s history of sexually preying on her students^ix (especially contextualized against her push to abolish age-of-consent laws in France^x) permanently marks her as a complex historical figure, someone who both committed reprehensible personal actions while writing terrifically insightful theoretical texts.

For a while, I assumed that the story ended there. Simone de Beauvoir died in 1986, and although by that point the “trans debate” was well underway in American feminist circles, I had no reason to believe that Beauvoir was aware of it. So imagine my surprise when I found this shocking claim in a 1993 article by Davina Anne Gabriel:

Rejection of biological determinism is not only implicit to feminism, but is the very cornerstone upon which all of feminist philosophy rests. The mother of the modern feminist movement, Simone de Beauvoir, very succinctly sums this up in her book The Second Sex, in which she made the statement most often attributed to her, “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” Undoubtedly, invoking Beauvoir’s famous dictum in this context will appear to some to be a deliberate misrepresentation of her meaning and her intentions. But, in fact, subsequent statements by Beauvoir herself demonstrate that such usage is not at all inappropriate. In her 1972 memoir, All Said And Done, Beauvoir not only reiterates her famous dictum, but cites the research of Robert J. Stoller regarding the development of the sexual identities of MTF transsexuals to corroborate it.^xi (references removed)

I was startled. If Beauvoir really had endorsed a trans-positive reading of her famous line, that would make for excellent rhetorical ammo in arguments with trans-misogynistic feminists – as futile as those arguments might be. However, reading the actual text of the cited work, it becomes clear that Gabriel’s claim is perhaps slightly overstated. Near the end of her 1972 memoir, Simone de Beauvoir does indeed reflect on her work in The Second Sex, writing,

‘You are not born a woman; you become one’: I take this statement over — it expresses one of the leading ideas in The Second Sex. Of course there are genetic, glandular and anatomical differences between the human female and the male; but they are not an adequate definition of femininity, which is a cultural formation, not a natural datum. This conviction has not been shaken by Madame Lilar’s cloudy scientism; on the contrary, it has been strengthened by the increasingly elaborate and far-reaching research on childhood carried out these last years. This work proves that my argument is correct and that it only requires completing with the statement ‘You are not born a male; you become one.’ For masculinity is not given at the beginning, either.^xii

In this passage it again becomes apparent that Beauvoir draws a distinction between female sex and feminine gender, although she does not use the terms sex and gender. She then goes on to reference a variety of studies about childhood development of gendered roles and behavior. She writes,

Mothers ‘handle, caress and carry boys differently from girls’ said the American psychoanalyst Robert J. Staller, [sic] who has made a particular study of male transexuality. He firmly dismisses the discredited notion that masculinity and femininity are biologically produced in humans at the beginning; and he recalls ‘the many natural experiments which have shown that the effects of the apprenticeship that begins at birth determine the greater part of the identity of the sex.’ He states ‘It is not because of some inborn force that the baby knows that he belongs to the male sex and that he will become masculine. His parents teach him this, and they might just as easily teach him something else....The choice of name, the colour and style of clothes, the way the child is carried, nearness and distance, kinds of games — all this and much else begins almost at birth.’^xiii

Several things immediately jump to mind when reading this passage. First, Beauvoir refers to transsexual women as “male” suggesting that she does not accept the notion that sex can be physically changed, nor does she accept transsexuals’ self-definition. Furthermore, Beauvoir only sites Stoller, a cissexual male researcher, rather than citing the perspectives of transsexual women (although in 1972, available perspectives by transsexual women were few and far between). Stoller is particularly known for his transphobia, having conducted research with the intent of “curing” transgender people of their trans identity, as well as a bizarre study in which he set out to test whether young pre-transition trans girls were more physically attractive than young cisgender boys.^xiv Stoller’s blatant trans-misogyny definitely casts doubts on the validity of his research – both its factuality and its relevance to feminism.

Beauvoir’s passage is undeniably dripping with trans-misogyny. But the trans-misogyny did not originate with her; rather, she imported trans-misogyny from contemporary trans-misogynistic doctors. Stoller’s ideas about the formation of gender identity are not accepted by feminists today, especially after the famous suicide of David Reimer, a patient (mis)treated by a colleague of Stoller, John Money. Money had believed that gender identity could be freely influenced in young children, and attempted to prove his theory with David Reimer, a young boy whose penis had been damaged in a circumcision accident. Money’s theory was definitively proven wrong when Reimer, despite having lived as a girl for several years, re-asserted a male identity and ultimately committed suicide.^xv Sexological theories, including Stoller’s have been extensively criticized by trans-feminists.^xvi

Furthermore, the fact that Beauvoir refers to transsexual women as “male” counteracts a trans-positive reading of her work. Although it is certainly possible that Beauvoir’s mind may have changed with further access to knowledge about transsexual healthcare, in the texts that she left behind, Beauvoir clearly asserted that although gender presentation was socially constructed, sex was both natural and immutable. This reactionary view, artificially splitting sex and gender, is factually incorrect. Sex is complex, not perfectly binary (something which Beauvoir, incidentally, does acknowledge^xvii), and immutable. Sex and gender are, in practice, more or less the same thing. Beauvoir’s muddled reference to transsexual people is, in many ways, reminiscent of the similar reference made by Andrea Dworkin in Woman Hating, although Dworkin personally knew some transsexual women and was (at the time, at least) unabashedly in favor of their rights.^xviii

Beauvoir’s legacy is complex. Although she did – as Gabriel notes – endorse a reading of her famous thesis based on the evidence of transsexual women, she did so in such a way as to dismiss the lives and identities of those women. Furthermore, she based that conclusion on the sexological research performed by a notorious trans-misogynist. Beauvoir, as always, remains a complex figure: a visionary, a sexual predator, and a woman caught up in the prejudices of her time.

Buy a copy of Feminism Needs Trans Women!

i Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (France, 1949; repr., Vintage Books, 2011), 44.

ii Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 283.

iii Kate Kirkpatrick, “Femininity, Love, and Alienation: The Genius of The Second Sex,” Journal of the British Academy 12 (May 2024): 0–0, https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a02.

iv Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & so Much More, First Atria paperback edition (Atria paperback, 2014), 171–172.

v Susan Stryker, “Lesbian Generations: Transsexual… Lesbian… Feminist,” in When Monsters Speak (2013; Duke University Press, 2024), 124.

vi Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 724.

vii Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Beacon Press, 1992), 12.

viii bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (South End Press, 1984; repr., Routledge, 2015); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed., Routledge Classics (Routledge, 2009).

ix Jeremy Stangroom, “The Scandal of Simone de Beauvoir (Pt 1),” Heristical, December 15, 2024, https://www.heristical.com/p/the-scandal-of-simone-de-beauvoir; Jeremy Stangroom, “The Scandal of Simone de Beauvoir (Pt 2),” Heristical, December 16, 2024, https://www.heristical.com/p/the-scandal-of-simone-de-beauvoir-ffa; Jeremy Stangroom, “The Scandal of Simone de Beauvoir (Pt 3),” Heristical, December 17, 2024, https://www.heristical.com/p/the-scandal-of-simone-de-beauvoir-001.

x Noah Percy, The Age of Consent and Its Discontents: French Intellectuals and the Reform of Sexual Violence Law, 1968–1982, April 6, 2022, https://history.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2022/05/Percy-Noah_Senior-Thesis-Update.pdf.

xi Davina Anne Gabriel, “Of Transsexuals and Transcendence,” TransSisters: The Journal of Transsexual Feminism (Kansas City, Missouri), no. 3 (1993): 12.

xii Simone de Beauvoir, All Said and Done (Penguin Book, 1987), 484.

xiii Beauvoir, All Said and Done, 486.

xiv Jack Turban, “The Disturbing History of Research into Transgender Identity,” Scientific American, October 23, 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-disturbing-history-of-research-into-transgender-identity/.

xv “Dr Money and the Boy with No Penis,” BBC, September 17, 2014, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dr_money_prog_summary.shtml; Judith Butler, “Doing Justice to Someone: Sex Reassignment and Allegories of Transsexuality,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006).

xvi Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007; 2nd ed., Seal Press, 2016), 115–160.

xvii She writes, “There is no rigorous biological distinction between the two sexes; an identical soma is modified by hormonal activity whose orientation is genotypically defined, but can be diverted in the course of the fetus’s development; this results in individuals halfway between male and female.” Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 417.

xviii Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (Plume, 1974), 175–184.

— Simone de Beauvoirⁱ

A favorite question of right-wing pundits in recent years has become: what is a woman? Those who ask it, nearly always acting in bad faith, presume that the question has an obvious answer. It is presumed that there are only two options: (a) define women on biological terms, thus proving that trans women are not women or (b) say that anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman, thus rendering the category meaningless. It is presumed that if “woman” becomes meaningless, then so too will gender, sex, heterosexuality, the church, the family, and probably Western civilization. Exciting stuff.

It is useless to engage directly with the reactionaries who ask this question. They are not interested in an answer. However, the question is both interesting and important. Many trans women have already addressed this question in one form or not: Julia Serano has spilled ink; Susan Stryker has “queered the woman question”; Laverne Cox has asked “ain’t I a woman?”; Talia Bhatt has argued that “the question has an answer.”ⁱⁱ

There is no single answer to the question. The social category of “woman” is complex, carrying thousands of years of male-supremacist baggage. Gender is culturally and historically specific; gender categories exist in different ways throughout different cultures. Thus, I present a specifically feminist approach to understanding the category of “woman”. The goal of feminism is to liberate women; in order to do so, women’s oppression must be understood. In order to understand women’s oppression, it must be understood what “woman” means and how the category came to be.

From female to woman

There is no inherent reason why the physiological difference between male and female bodies should carry so much social meaning. There is no inherent reason why one body or another should correspond with an expected style of dress, expected social role, average income, relationship to sexual violence, access to political power, access to effective and compassionate medical care, and so on. There is no inherent reason why these differences should exist, and why they should be sex-differentiated — and yet, they do, and they are.

The physiological differences between male and female bodies become socially meaningful via the imposition of a sex/gender system. A sex/gender system is, as Gayle Rubin explains, “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which the transformed sexual needs are satisfied.”ⁱⁱⁱ

A sex/gender system imposes an organizational system onto human society. The sex division is the original class division,^iv allowing labor to be differentiated. In a species in which one sex must undergo lengthy and painful pregnancy, there is some logic in the sexual division of labor. However, this does not mean that such a division of labor is inevitable: different societies throughout history have seen different divisions of labor, often but not always corresponding with sex.

The sex/gender system currently dominating the globe is patriarchy; the underlying ideology of patriarchy is male supremacy. Patriarchy has long existed in numerous countries, and the gluttonous vampirism of Western imperialism has ensured that it now exists in every country.

Patriarchy takes for granted two things: that men and women are different from each other, and that men are superior to women. In a male supremacist world, only men are granted full access to humanity. To be a man is to be human; women are forgotten. Such a world imposes a public/private divide: the public is the domain of man, the private the domain of woman. It is in the public domain where the real business of living happens: wage labor, politics, academic study, love, war, brotherhood. The private sphere consists of only of childrearing, homemaking, and getting fucked. It is for this reason that a male supremacist world is intensely homoerotic. Although men are expected to fuck (possess) women, they can only truly love other men, because only men possess the full breadth of humanity.

This subordination, in which women are restricted to such a narrow portion of human experience, does not arise naturally. In order to be successfully maintained, it must however appear natural — thus, the degradation of women saturates every part of culture. Women are ideologically constructed as lesser via a self-perpetuating system of male power that selfishly guards access to all dialogue and knowledge. The male control of the episteme ensures that all people, male and female, are taught that women are lesser. This allows men to exploit, dominate, and possess women.

Sexuality is a significant — although not the sole — aspect of the organization of the oppressed sex class of woman. Sexuality define the unequal relationship between men and women. There is a sort of expected violence in heterosexual intercourse: in marriage, a man purchases — and thereafter owns — a woman’s sexuality. Implicit in the ownership of sexuality is the ownership of childbearing capacity. Catharine MacKinnon, comparing feminism to Marxism, writes,

Implicit in feminist theory is a parallel argument: the molding, direction, and expression of sexuality organizes society into two sexes — women and men — which division underlies the totality of social relations. Sexuality is that social process which creates, organizes, expresses, and directs desire, creating the social beings we know as women and men, as their relations create society. As work is to marxism [sic], sexuality to feminism is socially constructed yet constructing, universal as activity yet historically specific, jointly comprised of matter and mind. As the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others defines a class — workers — the organized expropriation of the sexuality of some for the use of others defines the sex, woman. Heterosexuality is its structure, gender and family its congealed forms, sex roles its qualities generalized to social persona, reproduction a consequence, and control its issue.^v

As women are expropriated of their sexuality, they are rendered not sexual subjects, but sexual objects. Sexuality is done to them, regardless of their desires. The sexualization of women must permeate culture for this expropriation to be successful, hence, makeup, the sexualization of women’s fashion, pornography, the social structure of marriage, the proliferation and the gendered nature of sex work, and the ceaseless and self-perpetuating onslaught of sexual violence against women. Thus, to be a woman is, in the words of Emma Heaney, “to wear a social identity that is haunted by rape.”^vi Many women are lucky enough to escape tangible sexual violence (and many men are unlucky enough to experience it) — but the threat of sexual violence hangs over all women.

This total sexual dominance allows men to socially dominate women. There is a marked power differential between men and women, and men can leverage misogyny to elevate themselves over women. Women can also leverage misogyny to elevate themselves over other women. Everyone, men and women alike, is taught misogyny; everyone (but particularly men) is materially incentivized to uphold it.

The system of male dominance is complicated by the existence of other systems of dominance. Not all men are necessarily able to dominate all women. Although men are, collectively speaking, privileged over women, collectively speaking, an individual man might be subordinate to an individual woman on racial or class hierarchies. Frank B. Wilderson, for example, makes a compelling case that in sexual relationships between Black men and white women, it is white women who hold social power — and thus it is white women who are capable of raping Black men, rather than vice versa.^vii

Concomitant with the expropriation of women’s sexuality is the expropriation of women’s labor — as argued by feminists who, unlike MacKinnon, wed Marxism and feminism. Women are forced to perform unpaid and thankless labor, to tend the household and raise children. This forced labor is tightly linked with forced sexuality — women are required both to be fucked and to birth and raise the children that are conceived thereby. By identifying this work as a form of labor, Marxist feminists aim to liberate women. “To say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money or capital, that capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking,” writes Silvia Federici, a famous Marxist feminist. “To say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it...”^viii

The exploitation of women’s reproductive capacity is a significant aspect of the misogynistic control of women — but because women are valued for their reproductive capacity, those women who are barren are excluded from normative heterosexual society and consigned to the margins, subject to additional violence. This point will become particularly significant later.

Furthermore, although middle-class white women have been historically consigned to the home – and therefore exploited – many working-class women, including many women of color, have long been engaged in wage labor. This dull and repetitive labor has not been liberating, a point made by many Black feminists.^ix Thus, it is not merely access to employment that will liberate women. The entire economy must be restructured, in the form of socialist revolution.

By identifying the means by which women are made into a subordinate class, radical (and/or socialist) feminism accomplishes a significant feat: it denaturalizes women’s oppression. By identifying how this oppression comes to be, this oppression can be challenged and ultimately ended.

Thus, so far, our definition of woman is this: a woman is a member of the sex class oppressed in a male supremacist world. Women are, on account of their sex, expropriated of sexuality and labor.

Women below women

All women are oppressed, exploited, but not all women are oppressed equally. Hierarchies of domination such as class and race cause some women to be more oppressed than others.

A racist-sexist world has a specific ideal of how women should be: white, heterosexual, young, beautiful, fertile. A woman who lives up to all of these expectations does not escape oppression – she will still be pressured into heterosexual marriage, an unequal and unfree arrangement – but a woman who cannot live up to these expectations will be treated even worse. Women of color, lesbians, disabled women, transsexual women, and those women who are all of the above, will be particularly oppressed.

White supremacy is just as responsible for the construction of gender categories as is male supremacy. In a white supremacist society, gender categories are constructed according to white ideals. That does not mean that all white people are able to live up to gender standards, but it does mean that all people of color are seen to violate the standards merely by being racialized. In the United States, for example, Native American gender roles were aggressively attacked and destroyed by colonists, while Black people have been punished in distinctly gendered ways.

One particularly harsh tool used to oppress women is that of degendering. Women who are accused of being “male”, of “not really being women”, are degendered. These women are consigned to a third sex category, subject to increased misogynistic violence, and denied legibility as women. Women of color, lesbians, intersex women, transsexual women, and women who sit at the intersections of multiple of these categories, are particularly subject to degendering.

I have discussed degendering at greater length in Feminism Needs Trans Women; I discuss the relationship between white supremacy and gender at further length in my upcoming book, Feminism’s Monster, chapters 5 and 8.

Assuming too much

The first section of this essay began with an assumption, an assumption which must in fact be interrogated. The assumption is this: that there naturally exist male and female bodies that can then be classified as men and women. The classification as “male” and “female” is deceptive, because it seizes on tangible physiological traits, but constructs myths surrounding them. Thus, the myths take on the appearance of inevitable nature.

The human species engages in sexual reproduction. In order for a human fetus to form, an egg must be fertilized with sperm. Some humans produce sperm; others produce eggs. Those who produce sperm have sexual intercourse with those who produce eggs in order to fertilize the eggs and conceive offspring. Not all humans produce sperm or eggs; many produce neither. No one, so far as I am aware, can produce both.

In order to organize society around this process of biological reproduction, humans are sorted into one of two sex classes at birth based on visible genitalia. Those with a penis are expected to be sperm producers; those without are expected to be egg producers. However, individual human beings may have internal biology inconsistent with external genitalia. Those born with a penis may not actually be able to produce sperm. Those born without a penis may not actually be able to produce eggs. Furthermore, some infants are born with ambiguous genitalia. In the modern era, these infants are typically “corrected” to one sex or the other, a procedure which is both unnecessary and harmful.

Genitalia are the most readily visible sex traits at birth, and are thus seized upon in order to gender an infant. But genitalia are not the only sex trait. The majority of visible and meaningful physiological differences between males and females arise during puberty — including but not limited to breasts, fat distribution, voice, muscle mass. The precise nature of puberty is controlled by hormone levels — those with high estrogen levels undergo “female” puberty, while those with high testosterone levels undergo “male” puberty. However, puberty does not necessarily correspond with birth genitalia. Intersex children may undergo puberty that seems to contradict their birth sex assignment, while transsexual children who are given hormone replacement therapy may undergo puberty that differs from their birth assignment. Transsexuals who receive hormone replacement therapy at a later age undergo two puberties, one naturally induced and allying with birth sex, the other medically induced and aligning with embodied sex.

Thus, the category of sex is neither inevitable nor immutable. Sex — a categorization — exists only when there is someone to do the categorizing. The physical traits that are associated with and classified into sex categories are tangible, observable, “natural” — but the categories are a product of society. The categories are oversimplistic, and do not accurately represent the complexity of the human body. Thus, a patriarchal world forces those who do not fit either category back into the binary. As mentioned previously, a patriarchal world takes two things for granted: that men and women are different from each other, and that men are superior. Neither of these dicta are inevitable; both are and must be enforced with physical, sexual, social, medical, and state violence.

Transsexual Women

For cissexual women, the path from human to female to woman is fairly straightforward. From birth, women’s genitalia mark them as female, and in a male supremacist world, to be female is to be a member of the subordinate sex class. In day-to-day interactions — in which genitalia are not visible — women’s bodies, clothing, and other aspects of presentation mark them as female. Gendered clothing is essential to the maintenance of the sex class system; if everyone wore gender-neutral clothes it would be difficult in some instances to differentiate between men and women.

Transsexual men, assigned female at birth, occupy the social class of woman prior to their transition. When transsexual men transition, when a combination of hormones, surgery, and social transition allow them to live as men, they exit the social class of woman. Transsexual men continue to be vulnerable to violence and exploitation on account of their transsexual status, but those transsexual men who pass as male do not occupy the social class of woman.

Transsexual women are assigned male at birth. Theoretically, as they grow up, they are perceived as male and exempt from misogyny. In practice, this may or may not be true: some trans women spontaneously present feminine from a young age, which marks them as a target for sexual and social violence. Transsexual women experience particularly high rates of childhood sex abuse. Whether or not trans women occupy the social class of woman during the pre-transition years is a complex question, the answer to which surely varies from woman to woman.

However, it is when transsexual women come out — when they, according to my three-phase model, enter phase 2^x — that they firmly cement themselves as members of the social class of woman.

Transsexual women are expropriated of their sexuality, as are all women. The expropriation transsexual women’s sexuality is totalizing. It is brutal, harsher and more intense than the expropriation of cissexual women’s sexuality. Trans women are relentlessly sexualized against their will, a process of cultural rape, as I argue in Chapter 6 of Feminism’s Monster. Transsexual women are relentlessly sexually harassed in pornography; mainstream media; feminist, scientific, and academic discourses; the fear mongering of right-wing politicians — an entire cultural engine.

Transsexual women are made subject to rape and sexual exploitation as all women are. Transsexual women are particularly vulnerable to sexual violence in institutionalized contexts, such as sexual violence in male prisons, or sexual exploitation in sex work (both of these our particular risks for racialized trans women). Transsexual women face distinct and degrading forms of sexual harassment that are incredibly normalized, as I have examined and argued in previous essays.

In addition to being victimized, transsexual women are relentlessly slandered as predatory. Transsexual women are ceaselessly accused of being rapists by feminists, scientists, and politicians alike. Of course, transsexual women’s primary relationship to rape is as victims of rape — transsexual women are far more likely to be subject to sexual violence than to perpetrate sexual violence. Thus, trans women are in double jeopardy — they are incredibly likely to be raped, and incredibly likely to be falsely accused of rape.

Beyond sexuality, transsexual women are expropriated of labor. Transsexual women are not necessarily exploited in the precise ways that cissexual women are — transsexual women, unable to bear children, cannot participate in the traditional heterosexual contract. However, it is for this precise reason that transsexual women are consigned to the margins of society. Trans women have access to neither the traditional public sphere of wage labor, nor the traditional private sphere of housework. The quintessential trans woman job (especially for trans women of color), survival sex work, is a job that exists on society’s margins. Trans women are economically exploited — they earn less, on average, than even cissexual women. Transsexual women are the least-paid gender group.^xi

Thus, from a feminist perspective, the dual expropriation that defines the class of woman — that of sexuality and of labor — applies in full force to transsexual women. Transsexual women constitute a sort of subaltern class of women, subject to particularly severe and intense violence, denied relief and legibility.

Does trans women’s oppression happen on the basis of gender alone, or also on the basis of sex? There is a common — and mistaken — notion that trans women have a gender of “woman” but a sex of “male”. This is inaccurate, misunderstands trans women’s experiences, and generally misunderstands the nature of women’s oppression.

Women’s oppression is social. This oppression often seizes upon and exploits certain biological characteristics, but it does not arise as an inevitable result of those biological characteristics. Rather, women’s oppression is enforced via a self-perpetuating structure of male power. Catharine MacKinnon writes,

...women’s oppression is enforced through gender, specifically gender hierarchy, a social and political, not biological, arrangement. On the technical meaning of sex as physical and gender as its social meaning, sex is equal. Gender is unequal. Women are not men’s biological inferiors; we are constrained to be men’s social inferiors. This power division, not our bodies, is what makes women a political group and the women’s movement a political movement. ...

The key question here is not (the endlessly obsessed-over) what is a woman, but what accounts for the inequality of women to men. Women are not oppressed by our bodies — our hormones, chromosomes, vaginas, breasts, ovaries. We are placed on the bottom of the gender hierarchy by the misogynistic meanings male dominant societies create and project onto us, attribute to us, which on my analysis center on women’s sexuality. When feminists define women from the dictionary as “adult human female,” in biologically essentialist terms — adult is biological age, human is biological species, female is biological sex — sliding sloppily from “female” (sex) through “feminine” (gender) to “woman,” as if no move has been made, they not only give the wrong answer, they are answering the wrong question. And they are ensuring that they can at most address excesses of male power, never that power itself. ...

... not only are trans women living women’s lives — often much the worst of that life — but the transgender women I know, anyway, embrace womanhood consciously, are far more woman-identified than a vast swath of those assigned female at birth (so-called “natal women”) that I also know, many of whom have been trying to escape womanhood their whole lives for real reasons, who often defend rape of other women as just a bad night and disidentify with women in every possible way short of their own transition, which is a lot of trouble and takes real courage. Trans women are, politically, women. They are our people too.^xii

MacKinnon here makes several key points. I have quoted quite a lengthy passage because MacKinnon argues with greater eloquence than I could ever hope to achieve.

First, the gender hierarchy is artificially constructed. It is this hierarchy that is the basis for women’s oppression. As I have argued previously, it can be in a sense more accurate to understand trans women as a distinct “third sex”, subordinate to the second sex class (woman) in the gender hierarchy. As I wrote,

That most trans women occupy a “third sex” category does not mean that they are not women. Rather, from a feminist perspective, all members of the third sex (including trans women) are a sort of uber-women. This subaltern class experiences the most extreme forms of misogynistic abuse and violence. To be consigned to the third sex is to be rendered illegitimate, hideous, and disposable.^xiii

From a feminist perspective, these members of the third sex, expropriated of sexuality and labor, are women — are the women of women.

MacKinnon, of course, also keenly identifies two more factors. First, sex, gender, and gender presentation are — while related — separate things. Second, transsexual women’s material interests align with those of cissexual women. Those feminists who assume that transsexual women are in some way appropriating feminism are simply mistaken — transsexual women have a valid and vested interest in women’s liberation, because transsexual women are oppressed as women. Those transsexual women who have participated in feminist movement — including but not limited to Beth Elliott, Sandy Stone, Julia Serano, Emi Koyama, and Talia Bhatt — demonstrate that this is true.

Finally, it must be said that transsexual women do not have male bodies. The process of medical transition physically alters a transsexual woman’s body, stripping her of male sex characteristics and giving her female sex characteristics. Thus, transsexual women who have undergone medical transition — as most transsexual women have — experience the bodily oppression of women, including medical misogyny.

Transsexual women’s physical transition from male to female would seem to make them more oppressed — female bodies are more oppressed than male bodies. However, perhaps contrary to intuition, the reverse is usually true. Transsexual women who are visibly transsexual — who do not “pass” — are treated much worse than either cissexual women or transsexual women perceived to be cissexual. Those trans women who can live “stealth” tend to have much more comfortable and safer lives than those trans women who are constantly openly and visibly transsexual. Visibly transsexual women occupy firmly the subaltern “third sex” class, while transsexual women who “pass” have the privilege of occupying the (still significantly oppressed) second sex class.

“Trans women are women” is not a slogan: it is an accurate analysis of gender oppression. Those who refuse to believe this — to really believe it, not just pay lip service — refuse to accurately analyze the reality of misogyny and the gender hierarchy. Trans women are not “male-bodied people who identify as women”. They are materially women — they have women’s bodies, lead women’s lives, and suffer women’s oppression.

How do you identify?

“im a cis man who’s transfeminized within a patriarchal system and subjected to transmisogyny. doesn’t mean im a woman. read theory, stemcel.”

— tpwrtrmnky, Ranked Competitive Breast Growth^xiv

Within most modern LGBT-friendly spaces, a particular gender paradigm predominates: anyone who identifies as a woman is a woman.

On an interpersonal level, this is probably the best possible approach to gender. It comes as near as we can to Jacob Hale’s pronouncement that “gender should be consensual, or at least more consensual than it is now inffull gender consensuality is impossible…”^xv It avoids the hostile gender policing that has hurt so many non-conforming women (whether butch, intersex, of color, transsexual) and has destroyed certain women’s spaces (MichFest, among others).

The theoretical basis for this notion of gender-as-identity-alone is Judith Butler’s oft-misunderstood theory of performativity. I analyze this theory in moderate detail in an essay that will be published at some point, but Susan Stryker provides an adequate and brief explanation: “A woman, performatively speaking, is one who says she is — and who then does what woman means.”^xvi Those who have misunderstood Butler’s theory as arguing that “gender is a performance” are encouraged to read either Gender Trouble or the numerous essays that have been written about it.

If a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman, then women are not necessarily united by a common expropriation. Some people may identify as women who do not experience this oppression; others may experience this oppression but not identify as women. It is here that we experience a rupture between two gender paradigms, gender-as-class and gender-as-identity.

Gender-as-identity is the most useful and respectful in interpersonal interactions. No one should have to prove that they are or are not oppressed in a certain way — or that they do or do not have a certain history — in order to be accepted as a member of the sex in which they currently live. However, gender-as-identity is not especially helpful for feminist analysis; personal identity may not align with membership in a sex class.

There is no prescription for, definition of, or limit to gender identity. An ambitious and broad-thinking transgender movement has developed countless gender identities, including numerous variations on non-binary, agender, genderqueer, not to mention Two-Spirit (an indigenous American gender identity).

However, sex classes are defined by a patriarchal society. There are three, as I have previously argued — men, the first sex; women, the second sex; other, the third sex. This three-sex analysis is counterintuitive, and runs contrary to much conventional feminist wisdom, but I believe it is accurate. I did not invent this analytical framework. My analysis of it, including appropriate citations, can be found in Feminism Needs Trans Women.^xvii It is the second and third classes that, within a male supremacist world, are feminized, made women. The third sex class are feminized in a particularly harsh fashion, made women but denied even the small privilege of paternalistic benevolence that is sometimes granted women in a patriarchal society.

Gender-as-identity and gender-as-class are not identical paradigms. The vast majority of people (perhaps all people) who identify as women occupy either the second or third sex classes. However, there are also people who occupy these classes, but do not identify as women. The two paradigms should be understood as coterminous and coexisting. The gender-class paradigm is more useful for analysis of gendered oppression, but personal identity should be respected — gender should, as much as possible, be consensual.

Women’s future

If women are defined and grouped by the oppression that they experience, what will “woman” mean once women are liberated? Will the class of “woman” cease to exist? Some feminists have thought so. In The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone writes,

... just as the end goal of socialist revolution was not only the elimination of the economic class privilege but of the economic class distinction itself, so the end goal of feminist revolution must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally. (A reversion to an unobstructed pansexuality — Freud’s “polymorphous perversity” — would probably supersede hetero/homo/bi-sexuality.) The reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction: children would be born to both sexes equally, or independently of either, however one chooses to look at it; the dependence of the child on the mother (and vice versa) would give way to a greatly shortened dependence on a small group of others in general, and any remaining inferiority to adults in physical strength would be compensated for culturally. The division of labor would be ended by the elimination of labor altogether (cybernation). The tyranny of the biological family would be broken.^xviii

Although this position is typically known as gender abolition, it is more accurate to refer to it as sex abolition. “Gender abolition” has frequently been co-opted by anti-trans feminists like Sheila Jeffreys, who wish to abolish gender but keep sex. Because sex is ultimately an artificial divide just as is gender, TERFs’ faux gender abolition cannot liberate women and is not radical, does not “grasp at the root”.

Not all feminists believe in sex abolition. Those who are liberal do not advocate for such broad structural changes. Others believe that sex abolition is hopelessly utopian and cannot be meaningfully achieved (certainly, Firestone’s vision of artificial reproduction seems unlikely or impossible). Others still believe that sex abolition will be particularly harmful to trans people. This is a well-warranted concern, given that gender abolition has been pushed by radical feminists like Jeffreys or Janice Raymond in an attempt to totally eradicate transsexual people.

Many feminists simply think that gender abolition is unnecessary. Mari Mikkola (as quoted by Andrew Cull), writes of students who say “time and again that the abolitionist strategy aims to eradicate something that seemingly need not be eradicated. As they see it, ‘the feminist revolution’ need not do away with gender, and being a woman or a man is not primarily the problem — the real problem is how people are viewed and treated.”^xix

Here, it again becomes useful to draw a distinction between the multiple paradigms of gender. Surely, gender-as-class must be abolished. A class distinction is created by a power differential; when that imbalance in power is eliminated, the class will no longer be grouped as a class. (Socialist analysis, as referenced by Firestone, is particularly relevant here.)

However, a world without gender-as-class need not necessarily be a world without gender-as-identity. Given the importance to so many people of personal gender identity — and the lengths to which some people go to accomplish such an identity — the abolition of gender-as-identity seems unnecessary at best, cruel at worst.

Certainly, gender prescriptions must be abolished. People with specific gender identities — or with specific sexed bodies — must not be expected to dress, live, or present in specific ways. People with specific sexed bodies must not be expected to have specific gender identities. Intersex people must not be forcibly “corrected” into a particular sex category. All people must have access to gender-affirming care, including but not limited to hormone replacement therapy, genital reconstruction surgery, and other gender-affirming surgeries.

Many people misunderstand the platform of sex-class abolition. Many people mistakenly assume that to abolish sex is to simply stop using male/female language. Such a surface-level change would totally fail to abolish sex. Sex exists as a class system; thus, the conditions that create the class must be dismantled. The physiological differences — non-binary and malleable — between male and female bodies will continue to exist. But perhaps, in a world without sex class, there will be no need to classify bodies at all.

Without the classification of bodies, will there still be women? After so much analysis, we only find ourselves back where Simone de Beauvoir arrived so many years ago, when she wrote: “It is hard to know any longer if women still exist, if they will always exist, if there should be women at all…”^xx

Bibliography

i Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier (France, 1949; repr., Vintage Books, 2011), 283.

ii Julia Serano, “What Is a Woman? (A Response),” Switch Hitter, November 27, 2023, https://juliaserano.substack.com/p/what-is-a-woman-a-response; Susan Stryker, “Transgender Feminism: Queering the Woman Question,” in When Monsters Speak (2007; Duke University Press, 2024); Laverne Cox, Laverne Cox: “Ain’t I a Woman,” 2015, Digital, online; Talia Bhatt, “Conclusion: The Question Has an Answer,” in Trans/Rad/Fem (2025).

iii Gayle Rubin, The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex, 1975, 159, https://glc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/rubin_the_traffic_in_women.pdf.

iv Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (Morrow, 1970; Bantam revised edition, Bantam Books, 1972), 12.

v Catharine A. MacKinnon, “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory,” 7 Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 3, 1982, 848–849, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv39x51k.23.

vi Emma Heaney, ed., Feminism against Cisness, Asterisk : Gender, Trans-, and All That Comes After (Duke University Press, 2024), 7.

vii Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism, First edition (Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton and Company, 2020), 169.

viii Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework (Falling Wall Pr, 1975), 5.

ix Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class, 1st Vintage Books ed (Vintage Books, 1983), 232.

x This model is articulated in a lengthy and yet-unpublished essay, cut from Feminism’s Monster for reasons of length.

xi The Wage Gap Among LGBTQ+ Workers in the United States (HRC Foundation, n.d.), accessed March 19, 2026, https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-wage-gap-among-lgbtq-workers-in-the-united-states.

xii Catharine A. MacKinnon, “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights,” pt. 88, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 24, no. 2 (2023): 190–192.

xiii Sara Moiseff, Feminism Needs Trans Women (Self-published, 2026), 13–14, https://www.saramoiseff.com/fntw.

xiv Beth Leigh-Ann and Talia Bhatt, “03 – Optimal Prog Gamer Strats,” in Ranked Competitive Breast Growth (n.d.), https://www.scribblehub.com/read/1584138-ranked-competitive-breast-growth/chapter/1585854/. Spelling original.

xv Jacob Hale, “Are Lesbians Women?,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 282.

xvi Susan Stryker, “(De)Subjugated Knowledges: An Introduction to Transgender Studies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 10.

xvii Moiseff, Feminism Needs Trans Women, 7–13.

xviii Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, 11.

xix Quoted in Matthew J. Cull, “Against Abolition,” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 5, no. 3 (2019): 4.

xx Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 3.

It is commonly claimed, even by ostensibly progressive writers, that transsexual people reinforce gender roles or gender stereotypes. Anne Fausto-Sterling writes,

Just as the idea that homosexuality is an inborn, stable trait did not emerge until the end of the nineteenth century, the transsexual did not fully emerge as a special type of person until the middle of the twentieth. Winning the right to surgical and legal sex changes, however, exacted a price: the reinforcement of a two-gender system.ⁱ

Fausto-Sterling draws a distinction between transgenderists (who challenge the binary) and transsexuals (who reinforce it). Serena Nanda, an anthropologist who has studied so-called “third genders”, makes this distinction quite explicit:

Unlike transsexuals, transgenderists challenge and stretch the boundaries of the American bipolar system of sex/gender oppositions, and renounce the American definition of gender as depending on consistency of genitals, body type, identity, role behaviors, and sexual orientation.ⁱⁱ

This is also a favorite of blatantly transphobic authors. Describing children’s books about transgender people, Joyce writes, “The stereotypes they promote teach children ideas about what is proper for boys and girls that feminists had thought consigned to the dustbin of history.”ⁱⁱⁱ

To anyone familiar with the topic, the notion that transsexual people consciously choose to reinforce the gender binary should be raising alarm bells. This claim is absurd for several reasons. First of all, the distinction between “transsexuals” and “transgenderists” is highly dubious. The activists who pioneered the fluidity of the modern transgender movement included Sandy Stone, Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, and Susan Stryker — all of whom had medically transitioned and, at least at some point, identified as transsexual. The idea that transsexuals and transgenderists are two completely distinct groups is simply incorrect, and the distinction between transsexuals (conservative, therefore bad) and transgenderists (progressive, therefore good) is based not on a real commitment to gender liberation, but on a disdain for transsexualism — that is, on transphobia.

However, I would like to challenge the initial claim in a more fundamental way: it is completely false that transsexual people are responsible for reinforcing the sex (gender) binary. Rather, transsexual people have been forced into an extreme binary by a hostile medical establishment, regardless of whether or not they wanted it. Some storytelling is in order.

In 1958, a young woman arrived at UCLA’s Department of Psychiatry, where Robert J. Stoller and Harold Garfinkel were performing research and (rather unethical) experiments on intersex people. Today, the young woman is known only as Agnes, the pseudonym given her by Garfinkel in his published report of the case. Agnes was a young woman, physically female — but she had a penis. She wanted the doctors to remove the penis and give her a surgically-constructed vagina. She told the doctors that although she had been born physically male and had been raised as a boy, she had began spontaneously feminizing during puberty. Thus, she had some form of intersex condition, and wanted to be “corrected” in the female direction, as so many intersex people were “corrected” during this time.^iv

Years after receiving her vaginoplasty, Agnes revealed to the doctors that she had been lying to them. She was not intersex, and she had not feminized spontaneously. Rather, she had taken estrogen pills provided to her mother, who was menopausal. These estrogen pills had caused her to undergo a female puberty and grow breasts.^v

Agnes was a transsexual woman. In order to be able to live comfortably and authentically, she needed surgery, and she knew it. However, she lived in a time and place where transsexual surgery was almost completely unavailable. It had been less than a decade since Christine Jorgensen’s high-profile transition, and Jorgensen had had to travel to Denmark for her sex-change operation, because the procedure was simply unavailable in the US.^vi

Agnes’s decision to lie to doctors was highly pragmatic. If she had told them the truth — that she was born male, but wanted to transition to female — she would have been denied care. She would have been unable to live a normal and happy life as a woman, and may have been subject to painful and invasive conversion therapy in order to “fix” her and force her to live as male. By presenting herself as an intersex person, she made it possible to obtain surgery.

At the time, the paradigm for treating intersex patients (referred to by the disparaging term “hermaphrodites”) was fairly simple — doctors would determine the patient’s “true sex”, and then physically and surgically remove all traits relating to the “opposite sex”. Of course, doctors typically had a quite difficult time determining what counted as a “true sex”, a history recounted by historians such as Anne Fausto-Sterling and Jules Gill-Peterson.^vii

Agnes was operating within a paradigm that did not respect patient autonomy. She was terrified that when she laid down on the operating table, the doctors would decide to remove her breasts rather than removing her penis.^viii This fear was not unwarranted — in this era, doctors regularly abused intersex patients, refused to tell them about their own health conditions, and performed surgery without consent or explanation.

Thus, in order to receive the surgery that she needed, Agnes had to convince the doctors that she was female. She did this in part by appealing to her physical femininity — she was quite proud of her breasts, for example. Garfinkel, too, was apparently impressed by her breasts — in the very second paragraph after introducing Agnes, Garfinkel lists “her measurements”, proceeding to describe “ample breasts” and “well-developed breasts”.^ix Of course, there is nothing questionable about Agnes’s pride in her own body — but Garfinkel’s repeated focus on her breasts is a clear example of a male doctor imposing his own sexual desires on the trans women that he is treating.

However, it was not the physical body alone that Agnes used to convince doctors that she was female — she also repeatedly emphasized feminine behavior and nature. When she recounted stories from her childhood, she emphasized that she was completely unlike boys, and always felt uncomfortable being grouped with boys. Garfinkel described this retelling as “120 per cent female”.^x

It is likely that Agnes did genuinely enjoy femininity. She was a heterosexual woman, clearly eager to continue her relationship with her boyfriend at the time, and she seems to have a genuine desire for participation in traditional male-female heterosexual relationships.

However, the emphasis on femininity was also, almost certainly, an intentional rhetorical strategy. Agnes was pragmatic, and knew that she needed to lie to doctors in order to receive the care that she needed. When Garfinkel described her story as “120 per cent female”, he and the other doctors suspected that she was being less than fully honest. She was, of course — but she was being dishonest because the transphobic system in which she operated forced her to be dishonest in order to receive care.

Some feminists, if asked to analyze Agnes, would probably conclude that she had a misogynistic view of womanhood. Feminists who are predisposed toward transphobia might use this as an example to prove that all trans women are conservative and misogynistic. It would not be incorrect to call Agnes’s view of womanhood misogynistic — but, it is highly likely that if American women in the 1950s were surveyed about the nature of womanhood, the vast majority would express misogynistic views. Agnes was raised within a deeply misogynistic world, and constructed her ideas of womanhood within that. Furthermore, her emphasis on feminine womanhood was a pragmatic choice made to appeal to misogynistic doctors. A transsexual woman who refused to perform femininity would not have received care — Agnes, like so many transsexual women, was pressured into a performance of hyper-femininity.

This institutionalized pressure — in which transsexual people are forced to commit fully to the “opposite” sex of their birth assignment, regardless of whether they want to, has continued for decades. When Aaron Devor interviewed trans men in 1996, one man commented,

... I feel like I’m a third gender. And I think that 20 years from now they will discover the third gender. There will be somebody that says, “yes, it’s okay to have both sets of genitals, or to function normally in life or to have both identities.” ... But for right now, I have to be a transsexual man because there is no place for me as a third gender.^xi

These trends continue to this day. It is fairly common for many trans-feminine people, for example, to describe themselves as trans women when interacting with cissexuals, but to present more nuanced non-binary identities when interacting with other trans people. The phenomenon of “third-sexing”, in which trans women are treated as an “other” category, is a trans-misogynistic tactic used to deny trans women legibility as women and therefore deny them rights.^xii Because “third-sexing” remain so common, trans women are pressured to feminize themselves or risk being “othered”.

Transsexual people seek a wide variety of gender identities and presentation. Some happily engage with gendered stereotypes — tough, masculine men and sweet, feminine women. Others directly challenge stereotypes — butch women and fem men. Medical transition offers a vast variety of possibilities for creating bodies that are neither wholly male nor wholly female. The only reason that medical transition is typically associated with binary identities is because of top-down pressure from the medical establishment, not the desires of actual transsexuals. Feminists and other progressives who believe in gender abolition should celebrate the subversive possibility of medical transition. Those feminists who are skeptical of medical transition are only so because of their transphobia. Any attempt to make a distinction between “transsexuals” and “trangenderists” is fundamentally transphobic when done to disparage transsexuals or medical transition.

Of course, feminists sometimes claim to dislike transsexuals on the grounds that transsexual people reinforce gender stereotypes — but it is obvious when reading their writing that they really just hate transsexuals, and must invent a justification from there. Infamously, Janice Raymond hated feminine transsexual women — but she really hated gender-nonconforming transsexual women.^xiii

i Anne Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality, 1st ed (Basic Books, 2000), 107.

ii Serena Nanda, Neither Man nor Woman: The Hijras of India, 2. ed (Wadsworth Publ. Company, 1999), 139. See Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem (Self-published, 2025), 124.

iii Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (Oneworld, 2021), 113.

iv Harold Garfinkel, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 58, 60.

v Garfinkel, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person,” 90–91.

vi Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, Second edition (Seal Press, 2017), 65.

vii Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body; Jules Gill-Peterson, Histories of the Transgender Child (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).

viii Garfinkel, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person,” 67.

ix Garfinkel, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person,” 60.

x Garfinkel, “Passing and the Managed Achievement of Sex Status in an ‘Intersexed’ Person,” 67.

xi Aaron H. Devor, FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Indiana University Press, 2016), 448.

xii Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007; 2nd ed., Seal Press, 2016), 174–175.

xiii Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979; Teachers College Press, 1994), 99–119.

Transandrophobia exists, in part or in whole, as a response to the term trans-misogyny.^iv Trans-misogyny was coined by Julia Serano in 2007 to describe the specific intersection of misogyny and transphobia as experienced by trans women.^v This has proved a useful term that has produced a vast body of trans-feminist literature. However, transandrophobia as a counterpart term is nonsensical. The term seems to describe the intersection of transphobia and “androphobia”, or, systemic discrimination against men. This is nonsensical — in the male supremacist world in which we live, there is no systematic discrimination against men. Men may be punished for other traits or characteristics, but never for the mere fact of their being a man. The false parallel between trans-misogyny and transandrophobia becomes more apparent when the term trans-misandry is used. Trans-misandry is sometimes used as a synonym for transandrophobia and has, shockingly, been used in a published academic article.^vi The frameworks of transandrophobia and trans-misandry rely on the notion that there exists such a thing as a systematic oppression of men, an inherently antifeminist notion. Thus, the terms are by their very nature misogynistic. To argue that men are just as oppressed as women is to argue that women are not really oppressed.

Transandrophobia is positioned as an intersectional feminist term. Intersectional feminist terms are used to describe the experiences of groups that face oppression simultaneously on two or more axes, such as misogynoir (the oppression of Black women, who are oppressed both for their gender and their race), lesbophobia (the oppression of lesbians, who are oppressed both for their gender and their sexuality), or trans-misogyny (the oppression of trans women, who are oppressed for both their gender and their trans status). Transmisogynoir, a term used to describe the specific oppression faced by Black trans women, describe the experiences of a triply-oppressed group. However, trans men are not a doubly oppressed group. They are men who are privileged “but for” their trans status; if they were men who were not trans, they would not be oppressed.^vii Trans women, conversely, are not privileged either on the basis of their gender or their trans status — if they were women who were not trans, they would still be oppressed for being women.

That trans men are privileged over trans women is apparent from comparisons between the experiences of the two groups. To quote from a previous essay of mine:

Trans men have an easier time “passing” than trans women.^viii Trans women are more likely than trans men to be discriminated against at rape crisis centers after they are targets of sexual violence.^ix Trans women are more likely to be excluded from family events, harassed, assaulted on the street, or sexually assaulted than trans men.^x Trans women are more likely to be accused of soliciting sex or accused of not disclosing their HIV status than trans men^xi — both of these playing on persistent stereotypes that paint [trans women] as “rapists” or “sexual deviants”. Trans men, unlike trans women, are not on the receiving end of a decades-long moral panic painting them as irredeemable sexual predators.^xii

Furthermore, trans men on average make more money than trans women,^xiii and in over 80% of trans homicides, the victim is a trans woman, usually a Black trans woman.^xiv Recent U.S. Supreme Court arguments have suggested that it would be permissible for laws to discriminate only against trans women but not trans men,^xv a form of blatant legal discrimination eerily reminiscent of the court cases that prompted Kimberlé Crenshaw to originally coined the term intersectionality.^xvi

The reason that transandrophobia is the wrong framework is that it posits some form of structural opposition to maleness or masculinity. This is, simply put, not an existing force. By positing that such a structural oppression of men exists, those who theorize transandrophobia situate themselves firmly within the traditions of men’s rights activist (MRA) movements, movements that attempts to undermine feminism by theorizing that men are just as oppressed as women. Trans men have a long history of articulating such frameworks.^xvii Those who argue for extant transandrophobia sometimes argue that LGBT spaces have a bias against masculinity — a patently absurd assertion when the most popular and best-funded queer spaces are run by and for gay men. These spaces are often highly transphobic, but hardly anti-masculine. Transandrophobia, as a framework, exists to do what male anti-feminists have always done: to chastise feminists for being too mean to men. Because, in this case, the men are trans, it is their demographic peers — trans women — who are most directly hurt by the anti-feminism of the transandrophobia framework. Trans women’s experiences can only be adequately understood through a properly feminist lens; the transandrophobia framework rejects this lens entirely. The framework is antifeminist, and “Antifeminism is a direct expression of misogyny; it is the political defense of woman hating.”^xviii

Transandrophobia is the wrong framework for understanding trans men’s oppression. It points our analytical compass and entirely the wrong direction, leading us down a dead end path that that can only end in resentment towards trans women. Freed then from the shackles of this dubious framework, let us briefly theorize an understanding of trans men’s oppression.

Two primary forms of sexism structure gender relations: traditional sexism and oppositional sexism. Traditional sexism is the ideology that men are superior to women; oppositional sexism is the ideology that man and woman are mutually exclusive categories with no overlapping traits.^xix Oppositional sexism targets people of either gender, beating them into line as gender-conforming men and women — but traditional sexism primarily targets women, privileging men over women. Men may be targeted by traditional sexism insofar as they have proximity to women (such as if they are gay or “effeminate”), but all women are targeted, regardless of gender presentation.

Prior to transition and in the early stages of transition, trans men who are punished for masculine presentation are targeted by oppositional sexism. This oppositional sexism will cease to be a factor when the trans man “passes” as male. In the early stages of transition, many trans men are denied reproductive and bodily autonomy, consistent with traditional sexism, as trans man in this phase are perceived as being “female”. This is structured by race — white trans men are considered “valuable breeders” by the white supremacist patriarchal state, while trans men of color are not.^xx Once trans men pass as men, they experience violence primarily to the extent that they are marked as queer or feminine.^xxi This violence bears many similarities to forms of homophobic violence against queer men, but violence against trans men carries the additional force of regendering, that is, the attempt to return the trans man to the subjugated position of woman.^xxii This has also been theorized as a form of transemasculation, ejection from the category of man.^xxiii In addition, so long as a trans man continues to have “female” reproductive organs, he will face the same misogynistic struggles with reproductive autonomy as cissexual women, plus additional struggles — “women’s” healthcare clinics are often not prepared to treat people who visually appear to be men. This is not a permanent state of being; the organs in question can be removed via surgery.

Although the term transandrophobia has existed for a number of years, it has never received extensive study in feminist or academic literature. I have yet to find any writing on the topic longer than a single blog post. The person who coined the term, Tumblr user st-dionysus, has been working on a book for years. To date, only four pages have been released, riddled with typos and dubious analysis. But the fact that transandrophobia has been undertheorized does not mean that there is no writing about trans men — it just means that transandrophobia is the wrong framework. In the interest of pointing the reader towards further reading about the experiences of trans men, I will share some of my favorite passages that analyze trans men through a feminist framework. From Jamison Green,

I think when trans men fail to see how they benefit from male privilege simply by being seen as men, they are living with the kind of blindness that may — in Blake and Kim’s case — be caused by racial sensitivities, which in the United States can be more demanding as a survival issue on a day-to-day basis than gender concerns. Other factors could be at play, too, for any trans man, such as conditioning that keeps him from experiencing his maleness fully because he is always on guard about being discovered and labeled a transsexual. ... All trans men have male privilege even if they aren’t aware of it, and they have opportunities to manage it differently than cisgender men. Their male privilege may be taken away from them along with the recognition as males if their transness is discovered by those people who refuse to acknowledge the veracity of their gender, but male privilege is not what most transsexual men are seeking.^xxiv

From Jude Doyle,

Even within trans communities, there’s a tremendous amount of flailing and confusion around trans men’s relationship to misogyny: How can someone be subject to sexism in some ways and benefit from sexism in other ways? How can someone be hurt by misogyny without being a woman, or fail to accrue full benefit from patriarchy despite being a man? (Most men don’t accrue full benefit from patriarchy.) Maybe it’s actually all about capitalism. Maybe there’s some analogy to race. Maybe it wasn’t actually misogyny — maybe it was some different thing, with a different name, that makes it different from what women go through. Maybe we’re just imagining things. Maybe it wasn’t that bad.

From Catharine MacKinnon,

Under male dominance, in transitioning, trans women lose status, trans men gain it. Trans women are doubly intersectionally discriminated against as women and as trans, triply if of color. Trans men, although their gendered social standing is documented to be improved, may be seen as lesser men the ways gay men and racially subordinated men often are. Trans women, as women, become newly sexualized as targets for incursion, abuse, and devaluation; trans men, as men, no longer occupy that social location, except to the extent they may continue to appear to the male gaze as feminine men, marked by femininity for sexual and other violence (especially dangerously if it is “discovered” that they have female genitalia).^xxvi

From Viviane Namaste,

FTM who are raped are told, through the act of sexual assault, that they are “really” women, and they will be treated as such. Biology is destiny. The rape of an FTM declares that “women” have no right to be out in public — especially when unaccompanied by a man — and that these individuals have no right to act “as if” they are men. This instance of violence is more than a mere attack on someone perceived to be a gay man; it is fundamentally about policing one’s gender presentation in public sites. The act of rape functions as an aggressive reinscription of the FTM individual’s biological sex and social gender.^xxvii

From Talia Bhatt,

… 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, 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 in the confines of womanhood. These forces are complementary and interrelated, but not identical.^xxviii

From Jules Gill-Peterson,

While trans-masculine or nonbinary people are occasionally deemed rescuable by people like Shrier if they were to renounce and detransition — a horrifically demeaning genocidal prospect in itself — anti-trans politics has proven itself strident in its goal of eliminating trans womanhood by any means necessary, to the point that when right-wing media targets trans men or trans-masculine people for harassment or misinformation, they often misgender them in a way that implies they are trans women.^xxix

The forces of sexism, traditional and oppositional, act upon trans men in distinct ways. Good theorization has been done on this topic, and there is always room for more. I have taken a crack at this theorization myself.^xxx But it is always crucial that these theoretical frameworks not steamroll over the specific experiences of trans women — and it is precisely this steamrolling that is transandrophobia‘s wont. Although trans men do face certain specific challenges, and a wide variety of intense forms of oppression, the term transandrophobia is a fundamentally inaccurate and antifeminist framework for conceptualizing trans men’s oppression. To use the term is to reveal oneself to be either ignorant or a reactionary misogynist.

Want more? Buy a copy of Feminism Needs Trans Women.

i st-dionysus, “What Is Transandrophobia and Why Is It Called That? By the Guy Who Coined It and Is Kind of Tired of Seeing It Defined in the Opposite of What It’s Meant to Describe.,” Tumblr, June 10, 2024, https://www.tumblr.com/st-dionysus/755668731267629056.

ii Kira Leigh, “Why Don’t Trans Men Have a Word for What We Go Through?,” An Injustice!, October 12, 2021, https://aninjusticemag.com/why-dont-trans-men-have-a-word-for-what-we-go-through-582d75dd20ed.

iii Evan Urquhart, “Elliot Page Is a Grown-Up,” Slate, March 19, 2021, https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/03/elliot-page-trans-men-infantilization.html.

iv Some authors are upfront about the fact that the term response to trans-misogyny. Others deny this fact. It seems difficult to deny when the word’s etymology can be traced through the earlier trans-misandry, a rather obvious response to trans-misogyny. See Leigh, “Why Don’t Trans Men Have a Word for What We Go Through?”; st-dionysus, “None. Transandrophobia Is Not the Opposite or the Mirror of Transmisogyny.,” Tumblr, March 13, 2026, https://www.tumblr.com/st-dionysus.

v Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007; 2nd ed., Seal Press, 2016).

vi Elías Cosenza Krell, “Is Transmisogyny Killing Trans Women of Color?,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 234, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3815033.

vii cf. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” sec. 8, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 151, http://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclf/vol1989/iss1/8?utm_source=chicagounbound.uchicago.edu%2Fuclf%2Fvol1989%2Fiss1%2F8&utm_medium=PDF&utm_campaign=PDFCoverPages.

viii Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 145.

ix “SEXUAL VIOLENCE & TRANSGENDER/ NON-BINARY COMMUNITIES,” National Sexual Violence Resource Center, 2019, 1, https://www.nsvrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Transgender_infographic_508_0.pdf.

x Cecilia Chung et al., Positively Trans Report 3: See Us As People (Transgender Law Center, 2016), Table 4.B.

xi Chung et al., Positively Trans Report 3: See Us As People, Fig. 1.

xii Sara Moiseff, Against Tranny Hate: A Radical Transfeminist Manifesto (Self-published, 2026), 9.

xiii The Wage Gap Among LGBTQ+ Workers in the United States (HRC Foundation, n.d.), accessed March 19, 2026, https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-wage-gap-among-lgbtq-workers-in-the-united-states.

xiv Kelley Robinson and Tori Cooper, The Epidemic of Violence Against the Transgender & Gender-Expansive Community in the U.S. (Human Rights Campgain, 2024), https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2024.

xv Amy Howe, “Supreme Court Appears Likely to Uphold Transgender Athlete Bans,” SCOTUSblog, n.d., accessed January 24, 2026, https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/01/supreme-court-appears-likely-to-uphold-transgender-athlete-bans/.

xvi Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”

xvii Aaron H. Devor, FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Indiana University Press, 2016), 541, 546.

xviii Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women, First Picador paperback edition (Picador, 2025), 186.

xix Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 13–14.

xx Jude Doyle, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism? (Melville House, 2025), chap. 3.

xxi Catharine A. MacKinnon, “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights,” pt. 88, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 24, no. 2 (2023): 94.

xxii Namaste, Invisible Lives, 147.

xxiii Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem (Self-published, 2025), 76.

xxiv Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man, Second edition (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), 68–69.

xxvi MacKinnon, “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights,” pt. 88, p. 94.

xxvii Namaste, Invisible Lives, 146–147.

xxviii Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem, 76.

xxix Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024; Verso, 2025), 139.

xxx Sara Moiseff, Gender Transition under Male Supremacy, n.d., accessed June 8, 2026, https://substack.com/home/post/p-200958876.

This lengthy essay was cut from my upcoming book, Feminism’s Monster. It also contains my “megachart”, which followers and friends may have already seen on my social media.

If you want to think gender, think male supremacy. Every part of a gender transition, in either direction, is dominated by male supremacy. Trans women — who begin by being perceived as male and end by being perceived as female — experience a somewhat different process than trans men — who begin by being perceived as female and end by being perceived as male. Non-binary people, who will be discussed at the end of this essay, sometimes occupy a similar social position to trans women (if they are trans-feminine), sometimes occupy a similar social position to trans men (if they are trans-masculine), and sometimes experience a markedly different journey. Non-binary people cannot be collectively analyzed because non-binary is a category that defies definition. Both groups trans women and trans men, find their lives shaped by male supremacy at every turn, sometimes in similar ways, sometimes in different.

Most people’s ability to accurately understand transgender experiences are hamstrung by a dogged refusal to accept trans people as members of the sex into which they transition and live. Even those who pay lip service to the idea that “trans women are women and trans men are men” often insist on analyzing these people solely through the lens of their birth sex. In order to combat this stunningly inaccurate representation, I provide thorough analyses of how trans women’s, and trans men’s lives manifest in a rigidly patriarchal system, with a much less thorough addendum focusing on non-binary people.

Trans women under patriarchyⁱ

“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.”

— Talia Bhattⁱⁱ

In a patriarchal society, the mandate for (cis) women is simple: “be fucked, reproduce”.ⁱⁱⁱ In order to reduce women to this dehumanized state as breeding vessels, women must be socially and ideologically constructed as nothing more than wives and mothers. Laws and social conditions allow men to violate women with impunity, restrictions on abortion ensure that women with unwanted pregnancies are forced to carry them to term, misogynistic media (up to and including pornography) constructs images of women as submissive and masochistic sexual objects, and regulations on male behavior ensure that even men who feel generous towards women don’t get too chummy with them. Women have endured these harsh conditions for millennia. Recently, during the past 150 years of feminist movement, and especially (in the U.S.) since the start of the Second Wave, women have made significant progress towards liberation and humanity. However, the fight is ongoing — the yoke of male supremacy is not so easy to shake.

Trans women, existing as women but unable to fulfill the second mandate — reproduce^iv — find themselves with a different lot: be fucked, die. Trans women play an important role in keeping the patriarchal machine functioning: they are marked as acceptable targets for misogynistic violence. Violence against transsexual women greases the wheels of male supremacy and keeps them turning.

In order to justify violence against women — usually rape, sometimes murder — a male supremacist society declares that the woman was “asking for it.” Look at how she was dressed — she should have known better — women like it when men use force — she shouldn’t have led him on. She was asking for it. It doesn’t matter if it’s true — it never is — it just has to be plausible. In a woman-hating society, the bar for plausibility is low.

In a patriarchal society, merely to be a trans woman is to “ask for it.” Because being trans is seen as a choice, the “man who chooses to be a woman” must want to be raped, want to be harassed, want to be belittled, want to be murdered.^v

(Cis) men and women both benefit from trans-misogyny. For violent patriarchal men, trans women are a type of woman that they can hurt with little to no social repercussion. They can fuck a trans woman, and not even have to marry her — and when the shame of their deviant sexual act catches up with them, they can murder the trans woman and escape punishment using the “trans panic defense”. For cis women, trans women conveniently absorb some of the violence directed at them. As long as trans women exist, cis women are not at the bottom of the gender hierarchy. Thus, cis women are directly incentivized to uphold trans-misogyny.

Although there are numerous examples of ways in which trans women are treated as acceptable casualties of patriarchal violence, the most obvious and most egregious example is V-coding, a practice of state-sanctioned sexual slavery in male prisons.^vi In order to curb the epidemic of rape in male prisons, some trans women are given as sexual slaves to particularly violent male prisoners. This happens because trans women are treated as acceptable targets of misogynistic violence. If a trans woman is being raped, it saves the people who really matter — cis women, and especially cis men. Everyone else gets to be a little safer, because no one important is really hurt. Don’t mind if you hear the trans woman screaming — she asked for it, don’t you know?

In order to maintain the facade that trans women “ask for it”, trans women must be relentlessly sexualized. Many different facets of patriarchal society collude to carry out this project of mass sexual harassment. In Chapter 6 of Feminism’s Monster, I examine this process in excruciating detail, arguing that this mass project of sexual harassment constitutes a form of cultural rape.

In a patriarchal system that values women for their virginity and monogamy, a woman who has been raped is marked spoiled. She is dehumanized; she loses her person status. Because the cultural rape of trans women is constant and highly visible, all trans women are rendered subhuman. This subhumanity best explains the intense hostility to which trans women are constantly and incessantly subjected.

Thus, trans women are raped. They are murdered, often by the men who rape them. They are harassed and catcalled on the street. They are called slurs to their face: tranny, faggot, she-male. People make invasive and dehumanizing comments about their bodies and medical histories. They are dehumanized, treated as playthings to be picked apart, by doctors and queer/feminist theorists alike. Any type of misogynist violence is permissible against the tranny, because the tranny is not human — and once you’re done with her, you can discard her by accusing her of being a predator. Everyone will believe you, because an entire mountain of fabricated evidence exists to accuse all trans women of being rapists. There is a marked sadism in the violence and harassment enacted upon trans women. Those who demean, belittle, humiliate, assault, rape, and murder trans women often delight in having a victim who is a socially acceptable target.

But misogyny never works alone. Just as women, and especially trans women, are rendered abject in a patriarchal world, people of color are rendered abject in a white supremacist society, such as the United States. People of color are villainized, sexualized, and demonized in a wide variety of ways, the precise details varying from racial group to racial group. In the United States, one of the most potent — but not the only — forms of racism is anti-Black racism, bolstered by centuries of slavery, rape, lynching, segregation, legal discrimination, and mockery. Racism is deeply baked into the DNA of the United States, to the intense detriment of all people of color. Thus, trans women of color are triply marked. Just as (cis) women of color face both racism and sexism — and their combination — trans women of color face the triple intersection of racism, transphobia, and misogyny. The intersection of antiblackness and transmisogyny is known as transmisogynoir, while the intersection of other forms of racism and transmisogyny is known sometimes as racialized trans-misogyny.^vii These forces have tangible and deadly consequences. It is Black trans women who make up the majority of transphobic murders. Trans women of color are more likely than white trans women to be arrested, to be sex workers, and to go to prison. Trans-misogyny is structured by racism; it more intensely and negatively affects trans women of color in severe and intensely dehumanizing ways.

Some white trans women, moved to solidarity by their own experiences with discrimination, become staunch antiracists. These trans women engage in activism and analysis to support trans women of color, and works to make the world a more racially just place. However, many more white trans women refuse to confront their own racist biases. They desperately cling to their white privilege, because, as trans women, it is often the only privilege they have. They refuse to recognize that trans women of color might have distinct experiences from them, might face more intense forms of misogyny and transphobia, and face distinct forms of racism unknown to white trans women. White trans women, like any other white people, often uphold racism — actively or passively — because they reap the benefits of being on the top of the racial hierarchy. (It is worth noting, however, that in some online circles, there is a belief that white trans women are more likely to be racist than other groups of white people; this is a trans-misogynistic myth.)

Many other factors can increase stigma against trans women. Trans lesbians tend to be more stigmatized than straight trans women, playing on general homophobia. Disabled trans women face distinct challenges, and are often barred from employment, in some cases rendering them homeless. Trans women who do end up homeless must deal with both all the material challenges the situation presents, and the intense, dehumanizing societal stigma associated with being homeless. Trans women who are addicted to drugs, or who do sex work, face the intense stigma associated with those actions. Often, in the bigot’s mind, these other stigmas seem to justify trans-misogyny: they are taken as proof of just how depraved the trans woman really is.

I have examined the complicated relation between (cissexual) feminists and trans women at length, especially in my upcoming book. Beyond being feminist subjects, trans women also have a complex history as feminists. There have been trans women feminists for decades, but those feminists have often faced violent expulsion from the movement, up to and excluding death threats. As a result of this antagonistic history, some trans women are rightfully skeptical of feminism. A small number of trans women are classically misogynistic, and choose not to identify with feminism for this reason — the classic “right-wing women”. Many trans women believe in vague feminist platitudes but do not seriously commit themselves to the movement. However, a significant — and growing — number of trans women participate earnestly and militantly in feminist movement. Trans women have been strong outspoken feminists for decades, and this continues. More work is needed to understand trans women through a feminist lens, and all trans women should support feminist movement, for the sake of their own liberation and the liberation of all women. Furthermore, the notion that trans women are particularly prone to misogyny is a trans-misogynistic myth.

Trans women face tremendous amounts of violence. And after the violence is done, one final crime is committed against trans women to seal their fate as abject victims: they are denied legibility as women.

For millennia, violence against women was invisible because it was normal. Violence against women only counted when it was a crime against a man. A husband raping his wife was normal, but a man raping another man’s wife was a crime because it was a violation of the husband’s property — see Deuteronomy 22:28-29. Men had rights; women did not. All men were created equal; women did not factor into it. Over the course of the feminist movement, and especially beginning in the radical Second Wave, feminist activists began to name and identify violence against women. By naming women as human beings with an absolute right to themselves, they were able to recognize the persistent culture of male violence against women as the epidemic of misogynistic crime that it is. This fight is ongoing, but decades of feminist activism and writing have led to tremendous progress in the fight for women’s liberation. The first step in liberation is to name the crime.

Trans women are denied even this small privilege. Because they are treated as “not really women”, misogynistic violence against them doesn’t count. Because they are relentlessly sexualized and demonized, they are perceived as always “asking for it”, and thus, any and all violent acts committed against them, however small or however large, are treated as justifiable. Because they are a tiny minority of women with significantly different lives and history to most women, they are often forgotten — and therefore rendered invisible — even by well-meaning feminists. Even the most well-meaning cis feminist allies typically treat trans women’s participation in feminism as “inclusion” — trans women are perpetual guests, whose ability to participate relies on maintaining the good graces of the cissexual feminists who (are presumed to) own the movement.^viii

This denial of legibility extends far beyond the intellectual level. Trans women who are surviving abuse or homelessness are often denied resources available to other women, such as access to women’s shelters. Denying trans women this access is a favorite pet project of some anti-trans activists, such as J.K. Rowling. In Viviane Namaste’s 2000 study, published in her book Invisible Lives, she found that several shelters outright refused to admit trans women, and others only admitted trans women that had undergone genital reconstruction surgery or had certain paperwork from doctors.^ix Genital reconstruction surgery is very expensive, as is any kind of transition care — trans women who are homeless are unlikely to have the financial resources needed to access this medical care. Preventing trans women from accessing women’s shelters keeps them trapped in dangerous and abusive situations, and perpetuates the cycle of physical and sexual violence. Thus, anyone who advocates for trans women’s exclusion from women’s shelters is undeniably a rape apologist.

When trans women are recognized as women, it is sometimes done in such a way to erase their experiences by positioning them as identical to other (cissexual) women. Trans women do share similar experiences with many groups of cissexual women — like Black women, they are often denied the right to womanhood, and like intersex women, they often have bodies that do not conform to the conventional understanding of femaleness. However, blithe comparisons between these groups and trans women erase the distinct and specific experiences of trans women — and, even more egregiously — erase the experiences of Black trans women and intersex trans women, who simultaneously navigate several intersecting axes of oppression. Careless comparisons between “trans women and Black women” recollect a long history of racist white feminists making careless comparisons between “women and Blacks”, forgetting that half of “Blacks” are women.

As long as transsexual women remain at the bottom of the gender hierarchy, cis women have the luxury of having a group even worse-off than them. This is why trans-misogyny is so appealing to (cis) feminists in the short term, and why it will always doom feminism to reactionary bigotry in the long term. This is not to suggest that all, or even most, trans-misogyny is strategically and intellectually guided — mostly, it is motivated by an intuitive disgust reaction. However, by positioning trans women as the enemy, cis women can (to some extent) keep the target off their backs. In its most extreme form, this can even cause extreme right-wing groups to selectively partner with anti-trans feminists.

However, any concession to trans-misogyny will always hurt feminist movement. As long as trans-misogyny exists, there exists a hierarchy of gendered oppression that will ensure that women are not on top. Because trans-misogyny arises as a direct result of misogyny, misogyny cannot be dismantled while simultaneously reifying trans-misogyny. Transphobia is a tool that a patriarchal system uses to preserve the illusion that the two sex classes are distinct and immutable, and such an illusion is necessary for misogyny to feel natural. Transphobia is anathema to feminism, and transphobic feminists cannot eliminate sex oppression.

In this world constructed around trans-misogyny, a trans woman’s life (or more specifically, her experience with transition) can be divided into three phases. Not all trans women experience the second or third phase. (A visual depiction of the three phases, within the context of the gender hierarchy, is found in the figure at the start of this article.)

The first phase is self-denial. The trans woman, born in a male body, is told that she is male, a boy, or a man. Many trans women believe this. Some do not — some trans women assert their identity as girls as young as three or four years old. Theoretically, existing as a man, the trans woman occupies a privileged position within a patriarchal system. Occassionally, this is true — but many trans women experience intense misogynistic harassment well before the transition, on account of their natural feminine presentation.^x In its extreme, this can include rape. As long as a trans woman is willing to deny herself, she is able to enjoy the benefits of being male in a patriarchal system. Men are treated better, paid better, and raped less. If a trans woman is able to affect a successful masculine persona, she can enjoy these benefits — but they come at the cost of her life. As long as the trans-woman denies who she is, as long as the glowing TV continues to buzz, she cannot establish a happy and successful life. She can live a decent life, but she cannot live a life of her own.

Do trans women in Phase 1 experience the material benefits of being perceived as male — “male privilege”? Such a topic is difficult to discuss — on the one hand, it seems undeniable that being perceived as male carry certain benefits. On the other hand, being perceived as male is a source of tremendous mental agony for most trans women. Furthermore, accusations that trans women “benefit from male privilege” are frequently used by anti-trans feminists to discredit trans women’s experiences.^xi

Many young trans women or girls naturally present feminine from a young age, and cannot affect a successful masculine persona. Often, this feminine presentation marks them as targets for bullying or sexual violence. (Janet Mock, a trans woman who presented feminine throughout her childhood, documents such abuse in her memoir.^xii) Although it is broadly true that boys are treated better than girls, feminine boys are generally punished more for gender nonconformity than masculine girls.^xiii Thus, for these trans women who are bullied and abused for their femininity, being perceived as “male” cannot in any way be called advantageous: it is the perceived incongruence between male sex and feminine presentation that directly inspires abuse. The notion that this violent “male socialization” inspires trans women to be confident and assertive is a myth used to justify child abuse and stigmatize trans women.

Conversely, those trans women who are able to affect a successful masculine persona can experience many of the interpersonal material benefits associated with being male. These women can benefit from male privilege on a tangible level, enjoying preferential treatment and better job access. However, this privilege comes at a severe personal cost — the psychological toll of self-denial is significant. The severity of this cost varies from woman to woman. For some trans women, the gender dysphoria associated with occupying a male identity is fairly mild; for most it is severe, and the consequences are severe, up to and including suicide. Thus, although these trans women may have benefited from male privilege, it should not be understood as an unvarnished positive. Most trans women would have easier lives if they were cis women.

Even for those trans women who do experience a form of male privilege, it is highly conditional — they are forced into such a role against their will, and any attempts to step outside the role is tightly regulated with sexual violence. There are a small number of trans women who do not experience significant dysphoria that comes along with being perceived as male. For these trans women, Phase 1 may be a time of relative privilege. However, many more trans women find a male identity a source of constant torment and agony. Being perceived as male may allow a trans woman greater access to certain opportunities — but when such opportunities, at the cost of self-hatred, terror, and depression, can the overall state of being really be called a “privilege”?

Furthermore, whatever male privileges a trans woman may have prior to transition, she loses all of these privileges as soon as she enters Phase 2. A trans woman who begins social and medical transition will, when perceived as trans, be treated far worse than a cissexual woman. The notion that trans women carry any form of “male privilege” with them into their post-transition lives is abject nonsense. Furthermore, most trans women would have far easier lives if they were assigned female at birth — and thus, experiencing the world as male is, on the whole, a burden rather than a privilege.

A framework that treats “male privilege” as the only form of gender privilege is oversimplistic. Although male privilege is significant, cissexual privilege is much more significant. In general, those people who are visibly gender non-conforming are treated much worse than either men or women who conform to stereotypical heterosexual roles.

Different trans-feminists have answered the “male privilege” question in different ways. Kate Bornstein engages in a rather baffling and misguided analysis that need not be explained in full.^xiv Emi Koyama calls trans-feminists to provide a more complicated account of male privilege than simply denying that they have benefited from it — although Koyama’s suggestion that trans women are more assertive than cis women is incredibly dubious.^xv Julia Serano introduces the concept of multiple forms of gender privilege, which I have used above.^xvi Nuanced discussion of the privileges that trans women do — and do not — experience are valuable. However, any assumption that trans women are, in any way more privileged than cis women, is deeply misguided. Such assumptions arise only from a deep-seated trans-misogyny.

Some trans women never make it out of this first phase. Progressing past self-denial requires a great deal of introspection — the trans woman must realize that she wants to be a woman — and a great deal of bravery — the trans woman must overcome an intensely trans-misogynistic society to assert her identity as a woman. Some historical figures — Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain — can be and have been speculated to be trans women trapped in an endless phase of self-denial. It is unknown how many more women stay in this phase, remaining silent.

The second phase is monstrosity. The trans woman enters this phase as soon as she asserts her identity as a trans woman. She does this by admitting it to other people, changing her presentation, or seeking medical care. Until she reaches this phase, she is not legible as a trans woman. (She may, before this, be legible as a feminine man or boy. Many trans women are perceived as gay men/boys pre-transition.^xvii) By marking herself as a trans woman, she marks herself as a monster, and opens herself up to sexual harassment, discrimination, and violence. In order to abate the intense hatred associated with being a monster, the trans woman may regress to Phase 1, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently.

While navigating medical care, the trans woman will likely have to navigate a draconian and demanding system that expects and requires her to perform femininity. In recent years and in many countries, these requirements have been significantly relaxed, allowing trans women to have a significantly easier time accessing medical transition. However, access to medical transition is still highly dependent on the trans woman’s ability to access healthcare in general, which can be significantly interrupted by financial difficulties, homelessness, basic transphobia, or any other number of forms of discrimination. Medical care will help the trans woman feel more comfortable in her own body, and is also likely to nudge her towards Phase 3, by allowing her to be more reliably read as female.

The third phase is passing. Not all trans women reach this phase, and even for those who do, there is always the possibility of regressing into the second phase if one’s trans status is discovered. Passing is accomplished when a trans woman is consistently read as a (cis) woman by other people. Typically, this requires extensive voice training, access to medical care, access to the time and money required to style herself, and often, a good deal of genetic luck. All of this can be complicated if the woman is racialized — women of color are significantly more likely to be read as “others” or “monsters” in a white supremacist society. Furthermore, in order to pass, the trans woman must often adopt a specific presentation of womanhood, irrespective of her desires — meek, beautiful, submissive. Trans women who fail to perform this hyper-feminized caricature are often accused of being misogynists; those who do perform it are often accused of being misogynists. There is no winning.

Most trans women will spend the majority of their post-transition lives hovering on the borders of phases two and three. It is difficult to pass all of the time, and to do so also requires a denial of one’s trans past. For a trans woman to live totally stealth — that is, to be perceived as an (implicitly cis) woman 24/7 — she must engage in a different form of self-denial where she denies the circumstances of her birth, upbringing, and medical history. In the 20th century, this was expected of trans women. However, many trans women nowadays are open about their trans past, following a “posttranssexual” model established by Sandy Stone in the 1980s.^xviii Neither option is especially beneficial — full stealth requires constant dishonesty, while being open about one’s trans status allows a trans woman to be marked as monstrous. Many trans women engage in a mixture of the two approaches, being openly trans when safe and possible, and passing comfortably when their trans status is not relevant or when jeopardize their well-being. Ability to pass makes trans women significantly safer and less subject to harassment and violence.

A full ability to pass typically requires genital surgery. This is not necessarily needed — in the vast majority of settings, genitals are concealed beneath clothing, and various techniques are available to conceal the trans woman’s penis under her pants or underwear. However, many trans women pursue genital surgery for the sake of alleviating their own dysphoria, with the added benefit of being able to pass in settings that require nudity, such as sexual intercourse or locker rooms. These surgeries do carry significant risk, but typically, those who receive them are very satisfied with the result. Negative press that these surgeries receive is primarily the result of transhobic fearmongering. Other than genital surgery, many trans women choose to pursue other surgeries, such as facial feminization or breast enhancements. Often, it is these surgeries that are much more closely related to passing than genital surgery. All of these surgeries are very expensive — making them inaccessible — and all carry the general societal stigma associated with plastic surgery.

Upon resting in Phase 3, a trans woman firmly occupies a similar social role to that of cis women. What, then, of the woman who passes, who achieves all that she is meant to achieve, who, after an intense regimen of surgery, hormones, and training, is able to be consistently read as a woman? What of the trans woman who finally gets to stop being a monster and start being a woman?

She has the privilege of assuming what is woman’s lot under patriarchy: be fucked, reproduce. When she is found unable to fulfill the second dictum, it is replaced with one much more brutal:

Die.

Trans men under patriarchy^xix

“Maybe trans men are in a fairly unique position: The only group of men who spend some part of their lives being mistaken for cis women, and who are violently pressured to identify as cis women. That doesn’t make us women. That makes us trans. The challenge is not to come up with some next-level theory that explains away the discrepancy, it’s to come to terms with what we already know.”

— Jude Doyle^xx

In a patriarchal society, men are granted much greater humanity and autonomy than women — but there is still a hierarchy. Male bonding rituals and social habits often center around punishing the man who is the “weakest”, whether he is effeminate, gay, Black, poor, disabled — or trans. Trans men, permanently associated with the worst thing a man can be — female — and often lacking a penis (unless they have access to expensive surgery) will have a difficult time being the men that a patriarchal society wants them to be.

In a patriarchal world, man is synonymous with human. Mankind, all men are created equal, where no man has gone before — person means man, and women don’t count. Although this has begun to change, the yoke of thousands of years of oppression — clung to desperately by men and women alike — is difficult to buck.

I examined the erasure and subsequent invisibility of trans men was examined at length in Chapter 7 of Feminism’s Monster. This has primarily taken the form of passive erasure (silence), in addition to some active erasure (misinformation). There are far, far fewer negative stereotypes about trans men than women.

Trans men, no less so than trans women, have a rocky relationship with feminism. Whereas trans women have been slandered as “invaders”, trans men have been treated instead as “defectors”. It is (mistakenly) assumed that trans men transition solely in order to access male privilege, and thus, betray their sisters in the fight for feminist liberation. To the transphobic feminist, “trans-sexually operated men could potentially have been women-identified women, and are thus lost to feminism.”^xxi When feminists do attempt to appeal to trans men, it is sometimes done with nefarious intentions. Detransitioned women (i.e., women who lived as trans men for some period of time) like Max Robinson^xxii and Ky Schevers^xxiii have used feminist rhetoric to persuade trans men to detransition (Schevers has since dramatically changed her tune).

Even trans-inclusive feminists often have a difficult time making sense of trans men. Trans men are men, yes, but they are men who have, can, and do experience misogynistic oppression. Cissexual men — especially effeminate and gay men — can also experience misogyny, but rarely so intensely or for such a long period of time as do trans men. Trans men, among men, have the unique experience of being perceived as women for significant portions of their lives. Furthermore, because trans men are often seen as “gender non-conforming women”, they are typically punished even more harshly than women who stay within the lines. Trans men experience devastatingly high rates of sexual abuse.

Additionally, trans men are born with female bodies (I borrow this particular wording from Green; some trans men may dislike it), typically with vulvas and uteri. I say typically because these matters are complicated by the existence of intersex people. Thus, they can be subject to gynecological and reproductive injustice in the same way as cis women. Furthermore, their presentation as trans can add additional layers of discrimination — someone who is perceived as being a man can often experience difficulty, or be treated very poorly, when receiving “women’s” healthcare. This is — despite the vocal and myopic opposition of anti-trans activists — why gender-neutral language and treatment is essential in gynecological and reproductive health care.

It is worth being cautious, however, in discussing the misogyny experienced by trans men. Often, discussions of this misogyny inadvertently reinforce bioessentialist notions of sex. If this misogyny is framed as a result of trans men being “AFAB” or “female”, it is based on the implicit presumption that trans women are unable to be subject to misogyny. Discussions of “the oppression faced by AFAB people” directly reproduce the theory of sex-based oppression (an inaccurate theory of misogyny perpetuated by TERFs) and participate in the active erasure of trans women, as discussed in the previous section. It is not only cissexuals that render trans women illegible — often, it is trans men.

Furthermore, the oppression that trans men face is sometimes misinterpreted, understood as a result of systemic bias against masculinity — as seen in the theory of transandrophobia, which I debunk in Chapter 7 of my book. Although it is true that masculinity can be punished in people perceived as being female, this is a simple case of oppositional sexism, not a bias against masculinity. Trans men who are particularly masculine — that is, who pass as men and perform hegemonically-approved manhood — tend to be treated better than trans men who are effeminate. Any attempt to pretend that misandry as an extant societal force must be understood for what it is: the height of masculine solipsism.

Beyond being feminist subjects, trans men often have a difficult and complicated experience as feminists. Many trans men are straightforward misogynists, and are opposed to feminism on these grounds.^xxiv It is surprising to many people that significant numbers of trans men are misogynists — their time spent “living as women” is presumed to raise feminist consciousness — but it should not be. Trans men have the same incentives as any other men to be misogynists. Manhood is hierarchical, and the way to rise in the hierarchy is to prove one’s manhood — and the way to prove one’s manhood is to dominate women. Men, including trans men, are socially incentivized to be misogynistic. It takes active effort to combat this. Conversely — equally incorrect, and perhaps more harmful — it is sometimes assumed that all trans men are misogynistic, on the mistaken assumption that trans men are “self-hating women”. Not only is this highly incorrect, it is also ignorant of the way that gender transition often makes trans men painfully aware of the reality of misogyny. Presentation as a woman, a “deviant woman”, and a man, all lead to significantly different results, and many trans men are vividly aware of this. Furthermore, many trans men participate in feminist spaces or movements prior to their transition — this was especially true in the 20th century, when Second Wave feminism created a (relatively) safe space for lesbians and gender nonconforming women. Many of these trans men continue to actively participate as feminists, often with new insights based on their post-transition lives. Aaron Devor, in his study FTM, concluded that trans men were “generally sympathetic to the goals of feminism” — much more so than most men. But it is equally apparent from Devor’s report that many trans men, as men, believed some form of antifeminist rhetoric.^xxv

Trans men thus have a particularly complex relationship to feminism, not directly comparable to any other group. Trans men, as men, often hold antifeminist beliefs; simultaneously trans men, as men who experience significant amounts of misogynistic oppression, confound typical feminist categories of “victim” and “oppressor”. More work must be done to understand trans men through a feminist framework, and all trans men should be earnest feminists, passionate about both the liberation of women and an end to hierarchies of dominance.

Race matters. The experience of racism — or whiteness — structures the way in which trans men experience discrimination, violence, and oppression. Trans men of color — especially Native American trans men — face incredibly high rates of sexual violence, and are vulnerable populations for abuse.

In a white supremacist society like the United States, white trans men are treated as lost white women — that is, lost breeding vessels. Irreversible Damage — whose cover depicts a young white girl with her womb and midsection excised — is the rallying cry of a reactionary natalist panic concerned with the preservation of the white race. It is no accident that anti-trans fearmongering about trans men fits so well alongside openly neo-Nazi rhetoric about the elimination of white breeding vessels. Nationalism must be heavily invested in preventing the reproduction of “undesirables” (people of color, disabled people, etc.) and encouraging the reproduction of “desirables” (able-bodied white people). The attack on trans men’s rights is — next to restrictions on abortion — one piece of the attempts to regulate the reproductive capacity of women — or people perceived as women — in an attempt to reduce all females to wombs. Be fucked, reproduce — by transitioning, living as men, and sometimes sterilizing themselves, trans men buck the mandate placed on all people perceived female, and are punished harshly for it.

Trans men of color do not have the privilege of being victims. The white nationalist state has no need for non-white babies. Thus, trans men of color are reduced to monsters, and are violently punished by the patriarchal state. Trans men of color are more likely to be perceived as monstrous, dangerous, or violent — and these false, racist perceptions can kill. Trans men of color who “pass” as male can be subject to the negative stigma associated with Black men, Latino men, or other men of color.

In regards to white trans men’s relationship to racism and antiracism, the same dynamics as described for white trans women apply. Some white trans men are antiracist; far too many are not. Particularly insidious is the way that certain white trans men invoke the existence of racialized trans men in order to win arguments with trans women — instrumentalizing those racialized trans men and raising the experiences of racialized trans women.

As with trans women, trans men’s lives (or more specifically, transitions) can be divided into three phases. Because of the differences between men and women, these phases manifest differently than for trans women.

The first phase is self-denial. The trans man is assigned female at birth: the doctor gleefully declares that “it’s” a girl. The trans man is told that he is a girl, that he is female — as he matures, he will be told that he is a woman. Some trans men have a clear sense of male identity from a young age. They may assert their identities as boys, socialize with other boys, and be readily accepted. Often, this becomes much more difficult with the onset of puberty, which marks the young boy as distinctly “female” and can induce severe dysphoria. Not all trans men have such a clear sense of their identity. For some, the discomfort may be quiet or difficult to understand, and may not become clearly legible until later in their lives.

As long as trans men are treated as women and occupy the social position of women, their lot is not good — no woman’s is. Trans men must deal with misogyny just as any woman does, which can be intensified if the trans man presents in an explicitly masculine way. Some trans men are granted leeway to live as “masculine girls” — “the grudging admiration felt for the tomboy” is a direct symptom of a patriarchal society’s general unwillingness to condemn masculinity.^xxvi However, trans men’s behavior is often tightly regulated. Especially as adolescence and puberty progress, the trans man is often required to present feminine, to make himself into a proper “lady”.

Shame can keep the trans man trapped in self-denial for far too long. He is told that women must be feminine, that he must be feminine, that he must prepare himself to be a man’s wife someday. If he spends time in feminist spaces, he may be told that women who transition to men are traitors, that all men are pigs, that men can’t be feminists. Some trans men never escape this first phase. There are historical figures, such as Louisa May Alcott and Radclyffe Hall, who, based on their writings, have been posited to be trans men. However, it is unknown how many trans men live and die in a permanent state of self-denial.

Of course, being female is not a privilege in a male supremacist world — but being cissexual is. So long as trans men are able to be perceived as cissexual, they may be able to access incredibly limited forms of cissexual privilege. This manifests in largely the same way as trans women’s (very limited) access to male privilege, and thus does not need to be explained at length.

The second phase is deviance. The trans man progresses to this stage when he articulates an identity as a man, or begins to present masculine. In doing so, he is marked as a “deviant woman” which, in a woman-heating society, is the worst thing a person can be. Punishment of the deviant usually focuses on “correction”. (Punishment of the monster, the trans women, usually focuses on elimination.) The assault and rape of the trans man are violence tools intended to “correct” him, to return him to the subjugated position of woman. These violent acts are both deeply misogynistic and deeply transphobic — the two cannot be separated.

However, the line between correction and elimination is not absolute; the two forms of punishment overlap. Trans men are certainly at risk of being targeted for elimination on account of their trans status, such as Brandon Teena, murdered in 1993. Trans men of color, in particular, are likely to be rendered disposable — the same way that any man of color is treated as disposable by a white supremacist state, and amplified by their trans status. Trans men of color are more likely to be subject to police, prison, and state violence. Correction is brutal, elimination is worse, and the first can quickly become the second.

Not all trans men reach the second phase. Those who do may return to the first phase, temporarily or permanently. They may do so out of shame, or they may be violently forced to return to the first phase by a patriarchal world.

In order to live as a man, and to alleviate his gender dysphoria, the trans man will typically pursue medical transition, including hormones and surgery. This can be difficult to access, both because of the specifically anti-trans nature of the medical establishment, and the broader problems with the inaccessibility of healthcare. Trans men who are homeless, working-class, or undocumented immigrants, may have specific difficulties accessing health care. Throughout the 20th century, when transition care required intense diagnosis, transition care was exceptionally difficult to receive. Nowadays, transition care is often provided through an informed consent model, which makes care easier — but not necessarily easy — to access.

The third phase is passing. The trans man achieves this stage when he begins to be perceived by the world as a man. Not all trans men reach this stage, and those who do, do not reach it permanently — they always risk violence and discrimination if they are outed as transsexual. Most trans men spend their post-transition lives hovering between Phases 2 and 3. It is typically easier for trans men to pass then trans women,^xxvii but that does not mean that it is easy. Most trans men require hormones or surgery to pass — in particular, trans men with large breasts will likely require top surgery (i.e. mastectomy) to pass as male. The majority of trans men do not receive genital reconstruction surgery, largely due to its expense and the limitations of the results it provides — meaning that the vast majority of trans men are visibly transsexual when unclothed. Thus, passing is never a sure thing.

When the trans man begins to pass, he will be awarded some level of male privilege. He will generally be treated better by strangers, and is less likely to be sexually harassed or assaulted. This is, of course, not an absolute. Many passing trans men are read as young or effeminate, and are thus subject to homophobic violence.^xxviii Many passing trans men are assaulted by partners who know their trans status. Especially for trans men of color, passing as male can bring an increased sense of being perceived as “dangerous”.

To a patriarchal world, the measure of a man is in his pants. This, of course, presents a problem to trans men. As long as a trans man has a vulva, he is at risk of being raped or assaulted if it is discovered. Furthermore, his access to gynecological care will likely be hindered by his presentation as male — the medical system is largely unprepared to handle a man with a vulva and a uterus.

Some decades ago, trans men were expected to receive hysterectomies as part of their transition. Nowadays, this is not expected or required, though many trans men still choose to receive hysterectomies. Receiving such a procedure may not be easy in a world very eager to force (white) women (or people perceived as women) to maintain their reproductive capacity. Trans men who have a uterus may experience unwanted pregnancies. An unwanted pregnancy is a difficult situation for anyone, but especially for a trans man. Along with the typical difficulties may come intense gender dysphoria, increased harassment as his pregnancy makes him visibly transsexual, and discrimination from the medical establishment. It is also worth noting that many trans men choose to become pregnant and give birth. These men — and the men who become pregnant against their will — need comprehensive, compassionate, and accessible medical care, including the right to pursue abortions. Assaults on the reproductive rights of women are also assaults on the reproductive rights of trans men.

It is certainly not easy for trans women to access genital reconstruction surgery, but for trans men, it is typically even more difficult. Genital surgeries for trans men tend to be much more expensive, and phalloplasties generally require two or three stages, spanning months or years. Sometimes, these surgeries produce results that are not visibly identical to a natal penis — although the surgeries have improved in recent years. Metoidioplasty, a surgery in which the clitoris is re-constructed into a penis, is another option. Thus, the trans man may never be able to receive the penis that he wants, or the penis that society expects men to have. For some trans men, this causes significant anguish; others make do as men without penises. A lack of a penis can particularly cause difficulties in public restrooms and in situations in which nudity is required (sex, locker rooms, etc.).^xxix Many trans men use devices known as packers to simulate the appearance of a penis underneath clothes. These devices, of course, do not work in situations involving nudity. However, many trans men do use artificial penises (sometimes known as dildoes or strap-ons) for sexual intercourse.

A full commitment to passing often requires a different form of self-denial than that of the first stage. Throughout the 20th century, it was expected that trans men would, post-transition, be “stealth”, that they would live as men and keep their transsexuals status secret. In recent years, this has changed significantly — many more trans men are openly transsexual. Many trans men who have the ability to pass as men choose to be openly transsexual in some situations, in coordination with their comfort and safety. Being openly transsexual always makes a man subject to harassment, violence, and discrimination. Furthermore, even those men who pass as male in all day-to-day interactions cannot usually pass as a man 100% of the time. There will always be some situations in which transsexual status must be disclosed.

When the trans man begins to live as a man, he enters into that ritual competition that is the patriarchal lot of all men. Manhood is hierarchical: in order to “be a man”, the man must prove it. He must be strong, stoic, independent. He must dominate women, he must lead those lesser than him (women, children). This is a harsh role, and it is not one that all trans men want to play. Trans men who are especially conscious about feminism, or who are naturally shy or effeminate, may feel particularly apprehensive about the things that patriarchy demands of men. However, it must be said that for all the challenges of being a man, men are awarded a much greater range of acceptable presentations and emotions than women, and being a man is, in general, more advantageous than being a woman.

Trans men’s issues are numerous and complex, and they manifest in ways unexpected and often surprising to a cissexual world. The intersection and conflict between presentation as male and perception as female leads to a harsh and complicated intersection of transphobia and misogyny. Although a wide variety of terms have been proposed to describe patterns of violence against trans men, perhaps the best term is transemasculation: violence against a trans man is meant to strip him of manhood and make him a woman.^xxx

If a trans man is able to live successfully as a man, if hormones, surgery and good luck allow him to pass, if he is able to navigate the world as male, if he is able to avoid the violence and rape and murder that lie in wait to tear down all trans men, he may be granted that which is afforded to most men and few women in a patriarchal system: manhood.

That is, humanity.

Non-binary people under patriarchy

Non-binary people really are non-binary. Unfortunately for them, a patriarchal world must be strictly binary, must maintain a clear divide between man and woman, oppressor and oppressed, human and fuckdoll. Although non-binary people’s gender identity is legitimate, there is no “non-binary” gender class. The process of gender assignment is something in which everyone participates, involuntarily. In this very real sense, an entire world collaborates to deny non-binary people legibility.^xxxi

The term non-binary encompasses a wide variety of gender identities and modes of embodiment. Thus, non-binary people cannot be collectively analyzed in such a clear-cut way as trans women and trans men can.

Some non-binary people, broadly referred to as trans-feminine, have similar experiences to trans women. They are assigned male at birth, but undergo a process of social and/or medical transition to embody a feminine or female-aligned gender identity. Even if these people do not identify as women, they go through similar phases of transition to trans women. One famous example of such a person is Kate Bornstein, who transitioned from male to female, then decided that her gender identity existed beyond the categories of man and woman.

Some non-binary people, broadly referred to as trans-masculine, have similar experiences to trans men. They are assigned female at birth, but undergo a process of social and/or medical transition to embody a masculine or male-aligned gender identity. Even if these people do not identify as men, they go through similar phases of transition to trans men. One famous example such a person is Leslie Feinberg, who transitioned from female to male, then stop the process of medical transition, and lived the rest of hir life without adopting a specific gender identity.

Other non-binary people may have a wide variety of different experiences. They may embrace a firmly androgynous identity, or may embrace a style of presentation aligning with their assigned gender at birth. They may or may not medically transition, or may only pursue medical transition for a limited period of time. Additionally, many people who may not specifically identify with the term non-binary have gender identities outside of the male/female binary. These may include people who identify with the terms agender, genderfluid, genderqueer, Two-Spirit, or a variety of other terms.

Who are you?

Transgender women are women; transgender men are men. Understanding this is crucial to understanding how society treats them. Transgender women face typical misogynistic objectification and sexualization, and they must be understood as women in order to properly analyze this oppression. Transgender men may perhaps be a more complicated case, given that they face a level of misogyny not typically experienced by cis men — but even still, the fact that transgender men are generally taken more seriously than women is a testament to the fact that a patriarchal society does really treat trans women and men as women and men, respectively.

Some prefer to understand the oppression faced by these respective groups in the context of their birth sex. When transgender women are smeared as predators, this happens in context of their perceived maleness — but on the other hand, cisgender lesbian women have often been the targets of similar fearmongering, such as the Second Wave’s lavender scare. Transgender women are queer women. Transgender men’s struggles with sexual violence and misogyny are often contextualized against their birth sex — they are often perceived as female — but they can also be understood in relation to the sexual violence and stigmatization that cis gay men, especially “effeminate” men, face. Homophobic violence often has much more to do with deviant gender presentation (punishing effeminate men) than a literal punishment of homosexual behavior.^xxxii Transgender men are queer men.

Although transsexual women and men are, in fact, women and men, they do not have the exact same experiences as other (i.e. cissexual) women and men. That transsexual people have unique experiences should not preclude them from being understood as members of the sex as which they live, nor from receiving appropriate assistance and support in the problems that they face. Kimberlé Crenshaw, building on the work of Catharine MacKinnon, writes:

Why should women’s difference make a difference in what she is able to wrangle out of antidiscrimination law? ... Why must Black women be like white women or Black men to win the protection that Black men or white women received under antidiscrimination law?^xxxiii

Crenshaw’s arguments can be extended to transsexual women and men. Regardless of the distinct experiences that transsexual women and men have, both are groups that are obviously subject to significant amounts of gender-based harassment, discrimination, and violence. These differences should not preclude understandings of transsexual women and men that respect them as members of their lived sexes, nor should it prevent trans women and men from being beneficiaries of feminist activism and outreach.

The experiences of transgender women and transgender men are complex. Not all trans women share a common experience, nor do all trans men. There are some parallels between the experiences of trans women and trans men, but some differences. Understanding the experiences of both trans women and trans men through a feminist lens can clarify the ways in which male dominance is manifested and enforced. An end to male dominance is necessary for the liberation of all transgender people.

Want more? Buy a copy of Feminism Needs Trans Women.

i Beyond my own experiences and my interviews with trans women, this section draws heavily on the work of Julia Serano and Talia Bhatt.

ii Talia Bhatt, Brown/Trans/Les (Self-published, 2026), 52.

iii Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women, First Picador paperback edition (Picador, 2025), 46.

iv Although some trans women may be able to fulfill the biologically male role in sexual reproduction, no trans woman is able to become pregnant. Thus, I referred to trans women as barren.

v This is made most explicit in Robin Morgan’s infamous speech.

vi Zain Murdock, How ‘V-Coding’ Demonstrates The Violence Of Rape And Prison Culture, February 29, 2024, www.pushblack.us/news/how-v-coding-demonstrates-violence-rape-and-prison-culture.

vii Elías Cosenza Krell, “Is Transmisogyny Killing Trans Women of Color?,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2017): 237, https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3815033.

viii Jude Doyle, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism? (Melville House, 2025), xvi.

ix Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 177–178.

x Doyle, DILF, 55.

xi Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979; Teachers College Press, 1994), 103; Julia Serano, “Why Are AMAB Trans People Denied the Closet?,” Medium, February 28, 2022, https://archive.is/j8vIY.

xii Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & so Much More, First Atria paperback edition (Atria paperback, 2014), 45–50.

xiii Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 288.

xiv Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us (1994; Revised and updated edition, Vintage Books, 2016), 140–143.

xv Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” Eminism, June 26, 2001, 3–4, https://eminism.org/readings/pdf-rdg/tfmanifesto.pdf.

xvi Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007; 2nd ed., Seal Press, 2016), 307–313.

xvii My testimonials confirm this: a friend assured me recently that she thought I was “super gay growing up”.

xviii Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (1987, 2006), 232.

xix Beyond my interviews with trans men, this section draws heavily on the work of Aaron Devor, Jamison Green and Jude Doyle.

xx Jude Ellison S. Doyle, “Trans Masc Misogyny and the Red Six of Spades,” Medium, November 6, 2023, https://judedoyle.medium.com/trans-masc-misogyny-and-the-red-six-of-spades-f8c167387dc3.

xxi Carol Riddell, “Divided Sisterhood: A Critical Review of Janice Raymond’s The Transsexual Empire,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 146.

xxii Max Robinson, Detransition: Beyond before and After (Spinifex Press, 2021).

xxiii Doyle, DILF, 140.

xxiv Aaron H. Devor, FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Indiana University Press, 2016), 541, 546.

xxv Devor, FTM, 547–550.

xxvi Radicalesbians, “The Woman-Identified Woman,” in The Portable Feminist Reader (Penguin Books, 2025), 267.

xxvii Namaste, Invisible Lives, 145.

xxviii Namaste, Invisible Lives, 146.

xxix The information about this paragraph is primarily based on Aaron Devor’s study, which admittedly was conducted 20 years ago. Surely there is more recent research available somewhere, but I am not sure where. See Devor, FTM.

xxx Talia Bhatt, Trans/Rad/Fem (Self-published, 2025), 76.

xxxi See Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (1994; Routledge, 2006).

xxxii Namaste, Invisible Lives, 135–136.

xxxiii Kimberle Crenshaw, “Close Encounters of Three Kinds: On Teaching Dominance Feminism and Intersectionality Feminism and Intersectionality,” Tulsa Law Review 46, no. 1 (2010): 166, https://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/tlr/vol46/iss1/13.

There is often a sense that trans men are invisible in comparison to trans women. Jamison Green’s famous memoir is Entitled Becoming A Visible Man, and in Janice Raymond’s infamous Transsexual Empire, she makes the rather shocking claim that trans men don’t actually exist.ⁱ There is some reason for this: in the 20th century, there were far fewer well-known trans men than trans women. However, history is more complex.

In an era before medical transition, when transgender people in the West could only live as members of their identified sex if they were able to “pass” without medical transition, there seem to have been more trans men than trans women. There are two probable reasons for this. First, the masculinist bias in gender assignment means that it is easier to “pass” as male than as female.ⁱⁱ A person with ambiguous or contradictory gender cues is far more likely to be read as male than female. Second, although transition in either direction can bring personal satisfaction, only the transition from female to male can bring greater societal privileges in a male supremacist world. Cissexual feminist historians have often seized upon the second point, assuming that so-called “passing women” simply made the pragmatic choice to live as men in order to achieve male privilege. Although this may very well have been a factor in certain cases, there are other cases in which historical figures assigned female at birth clearly articulated a male identity.

There are numerous examples of people who were assigned female at birth but dressed as men and lived as men. Often, these figures “passed” as men, such that their acquaintances never suspected their birth sex. Other times, these figures insisted on dressing and living as men even in scenarios in which they were “known” to be female. It can be difficult to decide which gender pronouns to use when describing these historical figures. Although many clearly identified as men, others lived parts of their lives as men and parts as women. I bias towards he.

One early example of a trans-masculine historical figure is Robert Shurtleff, assigned female at birth, who served in the American Revolutionary Army in the 1780s. He had previously been excommunicated from the First Baptist Church of Middleborough for dressing in men’s clothes. Shurtleff was the subject of a biography in 1797 that described him as a woman posing as a man. Shurtleff passed away in 1827.ⁱⁱⁱ

Another example is James Gray (born Hannah Snell), who joined the English army as a man in the 18th century. Throughout his time in the Army, Gray’s birth sex went undetected. When Gray returned home, he confided his secret to a fellow soldier, who chose to expose him. Gray (or Snell) spent the rest of his/her life performing on stage in “breeches” roles (that is, impersonating men) and running a pub called “The Widow in Masquerade or the Female Warrior.”^iv

Jack Garland (known also as Babe Bean) lived in California during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Garland was assigned female at birth and, while living in Stockton, was arrested for wearing men’s clothing. Garland became a local celebrity, whose “true sex” was a matter of lurid gossip. Garland moved to San Francisco, joined the US military, and lived the rest of his life as a man. Despite this, Garland was frequently interpreted by later historians as a “passing woman”. Lou Sullivan, a prominent trans man activist, published a biography of Garland in which he recontextualized Garland as a female-to-male transsexual.^v

The advent of medical transition in the mid 20th century transformed the paradigm of transsexuality. Medical transition provided a “legitimate” means of changing sex, a means by which one could, to some extent, be socially accepted as a member of a sex different from the one assigned at birth. However, trans women typically had more access to medical transition than trans men. The reasons for this are surely complex, and may include male doctors’ willingness to sexualize trans women, or trans women’s greater access to financial resources when living as men prior to transition. But a dearth of visible transsexual men does not mean no transsexual men. Throughout the 20th century, there were several prominent transsexual men.

Michael Dillon was assigned female at birth in 1915. Dillon presented as masculine throughout his childhood and, in college, saw a doctor and was prescribed testosterone. In 1944, he received the first phalloplasty ever performed on a transsexual man.^vi Living as a man, Dylan became a successful surgeon, published the book Self: A Study in Ethics and Endocrinology, which argued for access to transition care on the basis of self-determination, and performed gender-affirming surgery on one of the UK’s first transsexual women, Roberta Cowell.^vii In 1958, Dylan’s transsexual status was exposed by a reporter. He moved to India, lived the remainder of his life as a Buddhist monk, and died at the age of 47.^viii

Reed Erickson was assigned female at birth in 1917. When his father died in 1962, he inherited the family business and became a multimillionaire. Soon, Erickson contacted Harry Benjamin and began medically transitioning. Erickson was known for his eccentricity: he was a nudist, a drug user, and lived with many large animals, including a leopard.^ix Using his family’s wealth, he founded the Erickson Educational Foundation (EEF), which financially supported Harry Benjamin’s work with transsexual patients. Although Erickson funded transsexual healthcare research — and gay activism — he was somewhat difficult to work with, and his relationship with ONE, a gay advocacy group, deteriorated just as quickly as it began.^x Erickson would eventually flee to Mexico after being indicted on drug-related charges, where he would live until his death in 1992.^xi

Mario Martino, who was assigned female at birth, spent some time as a nun before transitioning to male in the mid-20th century. He was the founder of Labyrinth Services, one of the first female-to-male support groups in the US. He received a phalloplasty, and his autobiography, Emergence, was the first autobiography published by a trans man in the United States.^xii

Lou Sullivan, probably the most famous trans man activist in the US in the 20th century, was born in 1951. For some time, he identified as a “female transvestite”, before identifying as transsexual and medically transitioning in the 1970s. Sullivan was openly a gay man at a time when transsexual men were expected to be heterosexual. Sullivan founded FTM, an organization that published a newsletter and held meetings to provide trans men with support and information. Sullivan also wrote a biography of Jack Garland, whom he identified as a trans man (mentioned above).^xiii When Sullivan passed away due to complications relating to AIDS in the early 1990s, Jamison Green, another transsexual man, took over FTM, which, under Green’s stewardship, would assume the name FTM International.^xiv Green’s activism and writing, building on Sullivan’s, would bring trans men into a new era of visibility in the 21st century.

In the 21st century, the dynamic of the 20th century does not persist. Trans men and trans women both have significantly improved access to transition care, although a reactionary coalition of world governments is working hard to change this. Generally speaking, there are still more trans women celebrities, particularly authors and actresses. However, these women’s celebrity — often based on tokenization or sexualization — does not mean that trans women have more societal or political power than trans men in practice. The omnipresence of trans-misogyny means, in fact, that trans men are privileged over trans women, often dramatically.

As trans men have gained greater visibility, there have been continued struggles over how to interpret trans-masculinity. One such perpetual struggle is the “border war” between trans men and butch lesbians. There is a perception in certain circles that butch lesbians are being “pressured” into medical transition. It would be far more accurate, however, to say that greater access to medical transition has allowed those assigned female at birth to more authentically embody an identity that represents them. For some, this is a trans male or trans-masculine identity. The “border wars” between masculine women and trans men have a long history, which has all too often been a history predicated on denying trans men autonomy and legibility.

In Jack Halberstam’s famous book, Female Masculinity, he uses a documentary about a young transsexual boy as a jumping-off point to discuss the implications that visible transsexual identity in children will have on the butch community. Yet, for all his concern about the butch community, Halberstam pays no particular attention to the needs of Fredd, the transsexual boy in question.^xv Halberstam had been criticized by Jamison Green for treating FTM identities with carelessness, and in this chapter, Halberstam claims to have taken that criticism to heart^xvi — but did he? Halberstam’s repeated use of “she” and “woman” to historical figure Colonel Barker, who was born female but lived much of his later life as a man and repeatedly claimed a male identity,^xvii suggests that he follows in the footsteps of gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz.

Katz infamously dismissed transsexual identities in his Gay American History. His decision to refer to female-body people who lived as men as “extraordinary women” represents a stunning dismissal of the clear and repeated male identities claimed by many of the figures he represents.^xviii Dr. James Barry, who was assigned female at birth but lived his life as a man, is one such figure who has been subject to such malicious erasure. As recently as 2016, a book written about Barry described him as “A Woman Ahead of Her Time”.

Some historical gender-variant figures can become battlegrounds of personal identity. Cissexual feminists may interpret these figures as gender-nonconforming women, while transgender people may interpret these figures as trans men or trans-masculine. Sometimes, identifying these figures as “gender nonconforming women” is blatant projection. Figures like James Barry and Jack Garland, who clearly and repeatedly asserted male identity, can hardly be read as women. Other cases are more ambiguous, and can be a matter of debate.

Hatshepsut was an Egyptian Pharaoh in the 15th century BC, who was assigned female but embraced male presentation during his/her reign. Much art depicting Hatshepsut includes male gender characteristics, although female gender characteristics are also included. Audre Lorde, cissexual, lists Hatshepsut as an example of a Black women who plays a “pivotal [part] in the survival of [our] communities.”^xix Kit Heyam, who is non-binary, identifies Hatshepsut as a possible example of someone who is transgender.^xx Because of the temporal gap separating modern historians from Hatshepsut, either interpretation can be legitimate, and either interpretation can be personally empowering for different groups of people. Finding figures in history to whom one can relate can bring a sense of tradition and groundedness.

Joan of Arc is infamous for wearing male clothing — it was the crime for which he was executed. This has been interpreted in various ways by various historians. Andrea Dworkin is quite unequivocal: “She was not the great transvestite, unable to bear being out of male clothing for even a few days.”^xxi Leslie Feinberg is equally unequivocal: “... she was a transvestite — an expression of her identity that she was willing to die for rather than renounce.”^xxii That Joan wore men’s clothes is undeniable; it is the interpretation of her decision to do so that is a matter of debate. Dworkin, whose work primarily focuses on rape, interprets Joan’s cross-dressing as a trauma response. Feinberg, whose work primarily focuses on gender variance, interprets Joan’s cross-dressing as personal expression. Feinberg is likely closer to the truth — Joan was a transvestite, in the word’s most literal sense. Dworkin’s insistence that she was not is heavily colored by Dworkin’s cisgenderism: she interprets transvestism only as sexual fetish, and is unable to conceptualize cross-dressing as meaningful unto itself. It would likely be incorrect to interpret Joan as a trans man, but she was certainly transgender in Feinberg’s expansive sense of the word.

Trans-conscious historical reinterpretation is a source of anxiety for some cissexual women. Abigail Shrier, specifically naming Joan of Arc, claims that “that is precisely how school children across America are increasingly being taught to see them: on the female side of the spectrum, perhaps, but not entirely female.”^xxiii Shrier’s anxiety is completely unjustified. After all, far more examples of people who were clearly trans men have been mis-interpreted as women then vice versa. Because cissexual historians have always had more institutional power than trans historians, the recent wave of trans-conscious history is merely the correction to centuries of epistemic injustice. Of course, to clearly assert that someone like Joan of Arc was a trans man would be highly dubious — but few do so. To completely foreclose the possibility that these historical figures found personal meaning in gender variance — as Dworkin does — is to misunderstand them.

The issue of historically interpreting figures who may have been trans-masculine is complex. Because women and trans men are both marginalized and oppressed groups, there is significant political motivation to “recover history”, both women’s history and trans men’s history. These two impulses often butt heads against one another — usually at the expense of trans men. All such historical studies on the topic should be careful and sensitive to trans-masculine identities.

Trans manhood has a long and storied history. It has often existed in the margins — but the recovery and careful study of this history can provide modern trans men and trans-masculine people with a sense of a grounded past.

i Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979; Teachers College Press, 1994), 27.

ii Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (University of Chicago Press, 2000).

iii Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1976), 212–214.

iv Aaron H. Devor, FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (Indiana University Press, 2016), 19.

v Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Bodies in Motion: Lesbian and Transsexual Histories,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 423–424.

vi Devor, FTM, 33–34.

vii Kit Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender (Seal Press, 2022), 167.

viii Devor, FTM, 34.

ix Aaron H. Devor and Nicholas Matte, ONE Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964–2003 (Routledge, 2006), 394.

x Devor and Matte, ONE Inc. and Reed Erickson: The Uneasy Collaboration of Gay and Trans Activism, 1964–2003, 400.

xi Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, Second edition (Seal Press, 2017), 100–104.

xii Bernice L. Hausman, “Body, Technology, and Gender in Transsexual Autobiographies,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 344–347.

xiii Stryker, Transgender History, 144–148.

xiv Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man, Second edition (Vanderbilt University Press, 2020), 62.

xv Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998), 141–142.

xvi Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 146.

xvii Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 93–95.

xviii Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., 212.

xix Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, with Mahogany L. Browne (Penguin Books, 2020), 136.

xx Heyam, Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender, 40–43.

xxi Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 1st Basic Books ed (BasicBooks, 2007), 131.

xxii Leslie Feinberg, “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (1992; Routledge, 2006), 212.

xxiii Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Regnery, 2020), 62.

In the early 20th century, German doctor Magnus Hirschfeld introduced the term transvestite to describe people who had what he perceived as an “erotic desire” to cross-dress. Hirschfeld was the first doctor to provide trans healthcare in a Western medical context, and performed some of the first genital reconstruction surgeries on a handful of trans women. Although the term transvestite would later come to refer to people who only cross-dressed rather than changed sex, Hirschfeld used the term more broadly, referring to anyone who either cross dressed or changed sex.ⁱ

The term transsexual was popularized by Harry Benjamin in the 1950s.ⁱⁱ Benjamin, the first doctor to provide trans healthcare in the U.S., created a rather strict scale for determining who did or did not count as transsexual. Most egregiously, transsexuals were required to be heterosexual.ⁱⁱⁱ

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the word transgender was used by a variety of people, most notably Virginia Prince. The word typically had a somewhat different meaning than transsexual, although the exact meaning varied from person to person.^iv Often, the term transgender referred to someone who socially transitioned but did not medically transition. The term was then popularized in the early 1990s, when Leslie Feinberg published a series of pamphlets and books redefining the term. In Feinberg’s definition, transgender was an umbrella term, an explicitly political coalition of a wide variety of people who, in one way or another, challenged gender norms. This coalition included transsexuals, but it also included cross-dressers, butch lesbians, drag queens, and other gender-variant groups.^v

It was around the start of the 21st century when transgender would attain its modern meaning, more or less replacing the term transsexual.^vi As it adopted this meeting, it narrowed in scope. No longer did transgender refer to an explicitly heterogenous coalition — it referred to people who were perceived to change gender, a group that was conceptualized as at least somewhat homogenous.^vii In the mainstream, the term transsexual has almost completely fallen out of favor. Most people who use the term are perceived as being out of date. Why then, do I side with the dinosaurs?

One of the reasons that I use the term transsexual is that I feel its meaning is more specific than transgender. When transgender became a synonym for transsexual, it lost the broad meaning with which Feinberg had imbued it. I feel that something is lost in this etymological collapse. Of course, it is probably impossible to revive Feinberg’s meeting — the term transgender has wormed its way into the public consciousness, carrying the specific meaning of “a person who changes gender”. Alas for multivalence!

But the term transsexual remains useful for a variety of reasons. First, there is a misconception within certain liberal circles that transgender people merely change their gender, not their sex. This is mistaken — “on the technical meaning of sex as physical and gender as its social meaning,” transgender people change both gender and sex.^viii Sex is changed via the process of medical transition (hormones and surgery), while gender is changed via the process of social transition (change of name, clothing, pronouns, etc.).

But I take a somewhat idiosyncratic position: I argue that the sex/gender distinction is misleading and does not reflect the reality of how sex/gender is experienced. Sex, the categorization of bodies into male and female, is a social process. Although the bodies and physical characteristics exist “objectively”, the categories only exist when there is someone to do the categorization, and the ideological framework of “gender” exists only in relationship to the imagined physical bodies defining male and female. As the famous quote goes, “sex is the gendering the body”. (I have been unable to find a source for this quote. Please let me know if you know its origin.) Thus, as I use the terms, transgender and transsexual are synonymous. Both terms refer to someone who, via a process of social and/or medical transition, embodies a different sex/gender than the one assigned to them at birth.

One particular piece of discourse seems to come up again and again in online trans communities: who really “counts” as transgender? For example, does a non-binary person who does not transition medically or socially “count” as trans? Preserving the split between transgender (umbrella) and transsexual (specific) could clarify some aspects of this discourse. Such a person could be considered transgender, but not transsexual. But coupled with this is the issue that it is occasionally argued that non-binary people are never transsexual, because some people equate “non-binary” with “non-transitioning”. This is not accurate. Although some non-binary people do not engage in social or medical transition, many others do. These debates over who “counts” as trans may seem frivolous, but the broader “transgender” community has a long history of papering over and ignoring the specific struggles of transsexual women, an issue that is exacerbated as the definition of trans continues to grow and grow.^ix

The most significant negative association with the term transsexual is its popularity with transmedicalists. Transmedicalism is a relatively niche ideology that proclaims that being trans is a medical, not a social, issue. Typically, transmedicalists want to put more power in the hands of doctors and gatekeepers, and are often quite hostile to non-binary people or the broader “trans community”. Many transmedicalists draw a distinction between transsexual (which they see as a valid medical condition) and transgender (which they see as frivolous, made up, a distraction). The association between the term transsexual and the ideology of transmedicalism is one of the primary risks of using the term transsexual in the modern day. Because certain people make the distinction between transsexual (good) and transgender (bad), when I use the term transsexual, I might be misunderstood as making that same distinction. In reality, I draw no such line. I do not use the term transsexual to refer to any particular diagnosis, nor to any particular medical process. By my definition, a person may be transsexual who never undergoes medical transition and never intends to, so long as that person embodies a different sex class than the one assigned to them at birth, via a process of social transition.

Another negative association that many people have with the term transsexual is its latter half — sexual. To many people, the inclusion of the term sexual seems to identify transsexuality as a sexuality (à la homosexuality), rather than a gender identity. This is often perceived as unnecessarily sexualizing — a very legitimate concern, given how much transgender people and especially transgender women are incessantly sexually harassed. “Desexing” trans women is a legitimate endeavor. But it is an unfortunate quirk of the English language that sex can refer to one of two things — (a) fucking or (b) the categories of male and female. The term sexual in transsexual refers to the latter. But this unfortunate association is less a direct product of the term transsexual and more the unfortunate reality of the activist language merry-go-round.^x So long as trans people remain stigmatized, no perfect language can be developed — because the stakes are just too high.

These various concerns represent some of the strengths and weaknesses of using the term transsexual. But none of these are the true reason that I choose to use the term. The real reason is as simple as it is petty: I am a pretentious pedant. I love old-fashioned language; I love obscure terminology; I am loquacious when laconicity would suffice. I am a contrarian, and so I prefer to use the term transsexual largely because it has fallen out of the mainstream. By identifying myself as transsexual, I identify with a brash, unabashed and radical transsexual community, a community unwilling to sand off its edges and appeal to liberalism. Were I transitioning in the late ‘90s, I would likely call myself transgender for the exact same reasons. But it is the ‘90s no more.

By using the terms transsexual, transgender, and trans interchangeably to refer to a wide variety of people who identify differently, practice embodiment differently, and conceptualize their own identities differently, I hope to restore to our discourse just a little bit of what has been lost — heteroglossia. Might we speak the forgotten word?^xi

i Susan Stryker, Transgender History: The Roots of Today’s Revolution, Second edition (Seal Press, 2017), 39–40.

ii Stryker, Transgender History, 38.

iii Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007; 2nd ed., Seal Press, 2016), 122.

iv Bethany Karsten, “Roberta Angela Dee, The Black Trans Literary Pioneer You Probably Haven’t Read,” The Transfeminine Review, n.d., accessed May 31, 2026, https://thetransfemininereview.com/2026/05/26/roberta-angela-dee/.

v Leslie Feinberg, “Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (1992; Routledge, 2006); Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Marsha P. Johnson and Beyond (Beacon Press, 1996).

vi Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024; Verso, 2025), 1–3.

vii Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, xxii.

viii Catharine A. MacKinnon, “A Feminist Defense of Transgender Sex Equality Rights,” pt. 88, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 24, no. 2 (2023): 90.

ix Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 1–4.

x Julia Serano, Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism & Trans Feminism (Switch Hitter Press, 2016), 283.

xi Sandy Stone, “The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (1987, 2006), 229, 232.

“… not only do trans people need feminism, but feminism also needs trans people.”

— Shon Fayeⁱ

Feminism cannot succeed in its project of liberating women if it does not fight for trans women. Trans women are oppressed by the same misogynistic forces that oppress all other women; to refuse to challenge that misogyny is to allow it to fester. The day that feminism calls trans women “male” and refuses to fight for them is the day that feminism gives up its ability to win.

Trans women experience misogyny

Every type of misogynistic harassment and violence that cis women experience, trans women also experience — and worse.

There is a mistaken belief that trans women experience some form of “male privilege”, whether on account of their bodies, history, or inability to get pregnant. In reality, this is completely untrue. Every form of misogyny that cis women experience; trans women experience too. The belief that trans women are “privileged” is a misogynistic denial of their experience.

Sexual violence

Transgender people in general are far more likely to face physical and sexual violence than cisgender people; current data suggests that trans women and trans men experience sexual violence at similar rates.ⁱⁱ When trans women experience sexual violence, it commonly escalates to physical violence when their trans status is exposed.ⁱⁱⁱ

Physical violence

Trans women are four times more likely than cis women to be victims of physical violence.^iv In over 80% of murders of trans people, the victim is a trans woman, usually a Black trans woman.^v

Sexual harassment

In addition to routine sexual harassment and street harassment, trans women face distinct forms of sexual harassment. These include invasive comments about their bodies and medical history (”have you had the surgery?”, “how long have you been on hormones?”) and pseudoscientific medical diagnoses, such as autogynephilia.^vi False accusations of sexual “perversion” are a form of sexual harassment; false accusations of rape (such as those levied by Janice Raymond) are a form of sexual harassment that is especially challenging to respond to.^vii

Reproductive injustice, lack of bodily autonomy

Trans women are required to sterilize themselves before transitioning in nine US states, and were required to do so until very recently in countries like Japan, Finland, and Denmark.^viii Trans women are regularly denied bodily autonomy in other ways — they are denied access to hormones and surgery, or put through draconian processes of harassment in order to receive them. The fact that trans women are unable to get pregnant does not exempt them from reproductive injustice, nor does it guarantee them bodily autonomy.

Domestic violence, homelessness

When trans women are victims of domestic violence, or when they are made homeless, they are often unable to access shelter — it is common for shelters to turn away trans women.^ix

Medical misogyny

Trans women are routinely sexually harassed by doctors.^x Transgender healthcare and bodies are understudied. Transsexual women do not have male bodies — the process of medical transition physically alters the body, in ways that are under-researched.

Gender wage gap

Trans women, on average, earn less than cis or trans men — and less than cis women.^xi Transgender people are three times more likely to be unemployed than cisgender people.^xii

Sexual violence in prisons

Trans women, when arrested, are typically incarcerated in male prisons, where they are subject to sexual violence — up to and including a practice of institutionalized sexual slavery known as “V-coding”.^xiii Trans women (and people) of color are arrested at sickeningly high rates — one report suggests that half of all Black transgender people have been incarcerated.^xiv Trans women are especially likely to be put in solitary confinement, which has demonstrable negative effects on mental health.^xv

Exploitation in sex work

Trans women, especially those who are racialized, are especially likely to have engaged in sex work — 42% of all Black trans women reported engaging in sex work.^xvi The association between trans women and sex work is so strong that the “tranny hooker” is a recognizable stock character on TV,^xvii trans-feminized groups in other countries (like Indian hijras and Thai kathoeys) are culturally associated with sex work, and trans women are frequently accused of being sex workers (and hassled by cops) whether or not they actually are. Trans sex workers report frequent sexual harassment from police.^xviii

Sexualization in pornography

Transgender porn (almost exclusively featuring trans women) is one of PornHub’s most popular categories.^xix This pornography sexualizes and stigmatizes trans women, portraying them as “exotic”, as objects for men’s lust and shame. This is especially true of racialized trans women, who are stigmatized in additional ways.

Pressure to be conventionally feminine

Trans women risk being denied healthcare if they are not feminine enough.^xx Trans women are further pressured to feminize themselves because being “read” as transgender puts a trans woman at serious risk of physical and sexual violence — femininity is safety.^xxi

Pressure to be sexually available to men

In the 20th century, trans women were legally defined as heterosexual.^xxii Doctors would regularly determine which trans women were allowed to receive care based on how physically attractive they were.^xxiii Lesbian trans women face particularly severe sexual harassment, whether from feminists like Janice Raymond, or doctors like Ray Blanchard.

—

Rather than asking, “What privileges do trans women have?” we should ask, “What privileges do cis women have?”

Degendering

Sometimes, women are accused of being men. This happens especially to intersex women, or women of color — prominent women of color athletes like Imane Khelif and Caster Semenya have been accused of being “male”. If people truly believed that these women were “male”, and treated them as such, this would cause these women to be treated better — they would escape misogynistic harassment and abuse. But being accused of being a man does not grant a woman exemption from misogyny; rather, it is a form of misogynistic harassment unto itself. 19th-century Black feminist Sojourner Truth was once forced to bare her breasts to an audience that accused being a man.^xxiv

A woman who is accused of being a man is degendered. This is a misogynistic process of humiliation in which women are expelled from the class of “woman” and relegated to that monstrous third class of “other”. People who are members of the “other” class experience all the violence associated with being a woman, but none of the privileges. A male supremacist world is intensely cruel to women — but some level of chivalry and gallantry is also expected: men are expected, to a certain extent, to treat women with respect and reverence. People who are degendered are denied even this small privilege: they experience a form of misogyny that is intense and pervasive.

Degendering is a misogynistic tactic used to control women. Women who are too strong, too smart, too angry, are beaten into line with the threat of degendering. A woman who manages to achieve success — which, in a male supremacist world, is intended to be the domain of men alone — risks being accused of being “male”. When this happens, the woman is humiliated and degendered. The misogynistic harassment continues, but she is denied legibility and relief. Ultimately, degendering poses a threat to any woman — radical feminist Shulamith Firestone was once accused of being male by fellow feminists.^xxv These accusations are meant to limit and control the realm of behavior and physical appearance that is acceptable for women.

Degendering is an essential part of the misogyny to which trans women are subject. Trans women who are degendered — who are accused of being male — continue to be subject to misogynistic harassment. They continue to be sexually objectified, dismissed, treated as crazy, exploited, abused — but they are denied legibility as women. Violence against trans women is socially acceptable because they are seen as “not women”. Blatant sexual harassment of trans women — such as radical feminist Sheila Jeffreys’s lurid speculation about trans woman Julia Serano’s sexual desire^xxvi — goes unchallenged because of the “other” category into which trans women are sorted.

The degendering that transgender women experience is especially harsh (because it is often seen as simply “true” that transgender women are male), but it is not unique. The threat of degendering hangs over all women. Cis women have ways to exempt themselves by appealing to their female biology, birth assignment, or history – but no woman is entirely safe from degendering.

Feminists who argue that trans women are “men” are simply incorrect. From a cold and objective sociological perspective, trans women do not occupy the social class of “men”. Often, they occupy the social class of “women” — but otherwise, they occupy a different class, below women on the gender hierarchy.

…

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i Cortney McLellan et al., “Global Burden of Violence Against Transgender and Gender-Diverse Adults: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” JAMA Network Open 9, no. 1 (2026): e2552953, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.52953.

ii Jules Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny (2024; Verso, 2025), 40, 49.

iii Andrew R. Flores et al., “Gender Identity Disparities in Criminal Victimization: National Crime Victimization Survey, 2017–2018,” American Journal of Public Health 111, no. 4 (2021): 726–29, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.306099.

iv Kelley Robinson and Tori Cooper, The Epidemic of Violence Against the Transgender & Gender-Expansive Community in the U.S. (Human Rights Campgain, 2024), https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2024.

v Julia Serano, Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism & Trans Feminism (Switch Hitter Press, 2016), 167.

vi Porpentine, “Hot Allostatic Load,” The New Inquiry, May 11, 2015, https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/.

vii Julissa Coriano and Noah J. Duckett, “It Never Stopped,” Delaware Journal of Public Health 11, no. 2 (2025): 4–5, https://doi.org/10.32481/djph.2025.07.16.

viii Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (University of Chicago Press, 2000), 177–178.

ix Namaste, Invisible Lives, 204, 223.

x Orion Rummler, “‘Those Dollars and Cents Add up’: Full-Time Trans Workers Face a Wage Gap, Poll Finds,” The 19th, January 28, 2022, https://19thnews.org/2022/01/transgender-workers-wage-gap-lowest-paid-lgbtq/; Rashmi Chimmalgi and Meghan Kissell, The Not so Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap: 2026 Update (AAUW, 01/26), https://www.aauw.org/app/uploads/2026/03/The_Simple_Truth_Gender_Pay_Gap_2026.pdf.

xi Sandy E. James et al., “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey,” National Center for Transgender Equality, 2016, 5.

xii Zain Murdock, How ‘V-Coding’ Demonstrates The Violence Of Rape And Prison Culture, February 29, 2024, www.pushblack.us/news/how-v-coding-demonstrates-violence-rape-and-prison-culture.

xiii Zane McNeill, “Incarcerated Trans Woman Sues Trump Over Anti-Trans Order Redefining ‘Sex,’” Truthout, January 28, 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/incarcerated-trans-woman-sues-trump-over-anti-trans-order-redefining-sex/.

xiv “New Survey: Transgender People’s Experiences in Prison and Their Calls for Policy Change,” Vera, February 20, 2024, https://www.vera.org/newsroom/new-survey-transgender-peoples-experiences-in-prison-and-their-calls-for-policy-change; Tiana Herring, “The Research Is Clear: Solitary Confinement Causes Long-Lasting Harm,” Prison Policy Initiative, December 8, 2020, https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/12/08/solitary_symposium/.

xv James et al., “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey,” 159.

xvi Gill-Peterson, A Short History of Trans Misogyny, 3.

xvii Namaste, Invisible Lives, 170.

xviii “2025 Year in Review,” Pornhub Insights, December 3, 2025, https://www.pornhub.com/insights/2025-year-in-review.

xix Kyla Schuller, The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism, First edition (Bold Type Books, 2021), 203–4; Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007; 2nd ed., Seal Press, 2016), 120–123.

xx Talia Bhatt, Brown/Trans/Les (Self-published, 2026), 157.

xxi Andrew Sharpe, “From Functionality to Aesthetics: The Architecture of Transgender Jurisprudence,” in The Transgender Studies Reader (Routledge, 2006), 624.

xxii Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, 135.

xxiii Cameron Awkward-Rich, “On Trans Uses of the Many Sojourner Truths,” in Feminism against Cisness (Duke University Press, 2024), 43.

xxiv Jude Doyle, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism? (Melville House, 2025), chap. 3.

xxv Sheila Jeffreys, Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), 50–51; See Serano’s response, Serano, Outspoken, 162–170.

First at issue are Dworkin’s views on sex and gender. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Dworkin was strongly opposed to any form of feminism that posited that women were biologically superior to men.ⁱⁱⁱ She considered this biological essentialism to be incredibly dangerous (“the world’s most dangerous idea”!), and when she criticized men, she frequently made a point to emphasize that she was criticizing their social power, not their biology.^iv This would seem to make her politics compatible with trans-feminism, given that the latter relies on a social constructionist view of sex/gender and repudiates biological essentialism. In fact, feminist scholar Emma Cousens has examined Dworkin’s social constructionist arguments in order to place to Dworkin’s within a trans-feminist context.^v However, Dworkin social constructionism is not necessarily so straightforward. Alice Echols, writing about Dworkin and her colleague MacKinnon, remarks,

… both Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon have repudiated essentialism. … However, their view of male dominance as eternal and unchanging makes social constructionism, in their hands, virtually indistinguishable from essentialism. Gender might be socially constructed rather than biologically determined, but if the social structure is as impervious to changes they suggest, it might as well be biologically fixed.^vi

This contradictory complexity in Dworkin’s theories means that her writing can be read, in relation to trans women, in several different ways. Dworkin’s notion of “prostitution” and “pornography” as the “material reality” and “underlying ideology” circumscribing women’s oppression could be read to mean that trans women are oppressed as women^vii — pornography depicting trans women is popular, and trans women are frequently “prostituted” (to use Dworkin’s language). Conversely, Dworkin’s focus on pregnancy and vaginas in her work could be read to exclude trans women — trans women cannot become pregnant, and some do not have vaginas.

Throughout her career, Dworkin did make a number of public comments about trans people — and her record was spotty. Some of these comments are quite explicitly positive. Most famous is a passage in her first book, Woman Hating, which reads,

Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency ... as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial points here. One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means that every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition. Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing, and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised. Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disappear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.^viii

In this passage, Dworkin demonstrates a remarkably forward-thinking advocacy for transsexuals long before such a position was mainstream. In fact, this passage was one of the earliest feminist books to explicitly advocate for trans people. It is clear from this passage that Dworkin personally knew at least some trans people, and cared for their well-being. And yet, even this passage is not perfect — Dworkin’s focus on eliminating transsexuality demonstrates a marked cissexism, and for this reason Dworkin has been criticized by trans-feminist Julia Serano.^ix

This was the last public pro-trans comment that Dworkin made. But in private, she continued to support trans people. In a letter to Janice Raymond (author of the infamous Transsexual Empire), Dworkin wrote,

Male-to-female transsexuals were in rebellion against the phallus and so was I. Female-to-male transsexuals were seeking a freedom only possible in patriarchy, and so was I. The means were different, but the impulses were related. I haven’t changed my mind.^x

These comments display admirable empathy towards transsexual people that would seem to put Dworkin at odds with such tranny-haters as Robin Morgan, Janice Raymond, and Mary Daly. But Dworkin’s later comments tell a different story. Most infamous is Dworkin’s endorsement of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire. Raymond specifically thanks Dworkin for commenting on chapter 4,^xi the chapter in which Raymond claims that all transsexuals are rapists — and specifically names trans woman Sandy Stone, accusing Stone of (metaphysical) rape.^xii Dworkin was aware of the book even before it was published — and when it was published, Dworkin had this to say:

Janice Raymond asks the hard questions and her answers have an intellectual quality and ethical integrity so rare, so important, that the reader wants to think, to enter into critical dialogue with the book. ... Crucial reading. (emphasis original)^xiii

Dworkin, when presented with a book that accused all transsexuals of being rapists, and that advocated for conversion therapy forcing all transsexuals to detransition, called it “Crucial reading.” Only five years passed in between Woman Hating and Dworkin’s endorsement of Transsexual Empire. I can only imagine that any transsexual fans who enjoyed Dworkin’s first book must have felt incredibly betrayed to see her name on the cover of such a hateful screed.

Dworkin’s public hostility to trans people continued. In Intercourse, she argues that Joan of Arc — who insisted on wearing male clothes and was executed for it — was not a transvestite.^xiv As I argued in an essay which I have yet to actually publish, Dworkin’s hostility towards trans people prevents her from accurately analyzing Joan’s cross-dressing: “Dworkin’s insistence that she was not [a transvestite] is heavily colored by Dworkin’s cisgenderism: she interprets transvestism only as sexual fetish, and is unable to conceptualize cross-dressing as meaningful unto itself.”

In Heartbreak, her 2002 memoir, Dworkin has this to say of a trans man: “...one at least has become a male through surgery — her [sic] head and heart were always right there.”^xv In a 2000 interview, when Dworkin is asked about an Israeli transsexual woman, the interviewer writes: “She’s not interested in gay men, she’s interested in women.”^xvi It is unclear whether these are Dworkin’s words; the (oddly anonymous) reporter paraphrases rather than quoting. Perhaps the characterization of the transsexual woman as a “gay man” is the reporter’s, not Dworkin’s. Or perhaps, near the end of her life, Dworkin had hardened into transphobia. Just five years before her death, Dworkin is given a chance to include trans women in her feminism. So far as we can tell, she chooses exclusion instead. One might be tempted to refer to this as trans-exclusionary radical feminism.

What can be made of this conflicting evidence? Why would someone who had once advocated in favor of access to transsexual surgery endorse a book calling all transsexuals rapists? At best, Dworkin was a fairweather friend to transsexual people. However, a different read is, I believe, more likely. In the first half decade of her career, Dworkin made one significant and strongly supportive statement about trans people, followed by one harsh attack. Over the next 25 years, she made only occasional references to trans people, but nearly all of them were hostile or dismissive. It would seem almost that she changed her mind on trans issues in the years following her letter to Raymond.

Dworkin’s relationship with transgender people was undeniably complex. Her early comments on the topic are unabashedly supportive, while her later topics hover near transphobia without quite becoming blatant and egregious. But one thing can be said for certain: Dworkin was not a trans ally. She acted as a trans ally in 1974, when she advocated for access to gender-affirming surgery. But from 1979 to her death in 2005, she was either hostile to, dismissive of, or totally silent on trans issues. Allyship is not an identity, but a practice. Dworkin’s practice was not that of allyship.

If Dworkin were alive today, what would she say about transgender people? It is impossible to say for certain. Two of Dworkin’s closest friends and collaborators — Catherine MacKinnon and John Stoltenberg — are firmly trans-inclusive. Yet other friends of Dworkin — such as Janice Raymond and Julie Bindel — are some of the loudest and cruelest trans-misogynists in the feminist scene. Dworkin’s work remains incredibly popular with TERFs on the internet and social media. It is impossible to know for certain which way Dworkin would have gone — and it doesn’t matter much. The woman has been dead for 20 years.

Ultimately, Dworkin’s personal views about transsexual people are not the only determining factor in the modern relevance and utility of her work. Dworkin had complex politics, sometimes progressive, sometimes reactionary. She is fondly remembered for her courage, for her unrelenting anger at male dominance — and yet her views on pornography are contradictory, not clearly based on levelheaded analysis.^xvii The anti-prostitution framework she developed has been criticized at length by sex worker advocates, to say nothing of Dworkin’s disparaging comments about sex workers in her writing.^xviii One of her final books, Scapegoat, advances a vision of women’s nationalism that uses the state of Israel as a template for a nationalist movement.^xix Whether or not Dworkin’s hypothetical Womyn’s Homeland would have allowed trans women, it would have definitely been a reactionary settler-colonial state. Certain aspects of Dworkin’s work may be worth re-examining and reclaiming, but we certainly don’t need to pretend that she had all good ideas. We can be glad for the kind things that Dworkin said about trans people in her early career. But we don’t need to pretend that she was a trans ally — she wasn’t.

Want more? Buy a copy of Feminism Needs Trans Women.

This article is dedicated to Kay, who inspired its thesis. Pokes you.

i John Stoltenberg, “Andrea Dworkin Was Not Transphobic,” Medium, April 8, 2021, https://johnstoltenberg.medium.com/andrea-dworkin-was-not-transphobic-6f4f94bdf4a1.

ii Julie Bindel, “The Unforgivable Transing of Andrea Dworkin,” Julie Bindel’s Writing and Podcasts Julie Bindel’s Writing and Podcasts, January 10, 2024, https://juliebindel.substack.com/p/the-unforgivable-transing-of-andrea; Janice G. Raymond, Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism (Spinifex, 2021).

iii Andrea Dworkin, “Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea,” in Letters from a War Zone (1977, 1989).

iv Andrea Dworkin, Life and Death: Unapologetic Writings on the Continuing War against Women (Free Press, 2002), 99.

v Emily Cousens, Trans Feminist Epistemologies in the US Second Wave, 1st ed, Breaking Feminist Waves Series (Springer International Publishing AG, 2023), 111–146.

vi Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975, Thirtieth Anniversary edition, with Ellen Willis, American Culture 3 (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 326–363n13.

vii Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women, First Picador paperback edition (Picador, 2025), 218.

viii Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (Plume, 1974), 186–187.

ix Julia Serano, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive (Seal Press, 2013), 119.

x John Stoltenberg, “We All Need a Gender Off-Ramp,” Medium, April 12, 2021, https://aninjusticemag.com/we-all-need-a-gender-off-ramp-ceb5006b864.

xi Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (1979; Teachers College Press, 1994), viii.

xii Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, 103.

xiii Janice G. Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Beacon Press, 1979), back and front covers.

xiv Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, 1st Basic Books ed (BasicBooks, 2007), 131.

xv Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant (Continuum, 2006), 152.
Quoted in Jude Doyle, DILF: Did I Leave Feminism? (Melville House, 2025).

xvi “Take No Prisoners,” The Guardian, May 12, 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/may/13/politics1.
“Special thanks to Juliana who has — against my great protestations — forced me to grant Dworkin the charity and nuance she deserves.” Sara Moiseff, Pornography: Women Possessing Bad Theory, April 19, 2026, https://www.saramoiseff.com/dworkin.

xvii Moiseff, Pornography: Women Possessing Bad Theory.

xviii Molly Smith and Juno Mac, Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights (Verso, 2018).

xix Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation (Free Press, 2000); The Guardian, “Take No Prisoners.”