Faux Steve Feminism

A Case Study of Transmasc Liberalism

For ages, I have mulled over how to clearly enunciate to my fellow trans mascs my frustration with certain popular rhetoric that we hold about ourselves and how we fit into broader society. It is an incredibly complicated topic that carries with it the heavy weight of all of human history, a history that we seemingly do not appear in until the modern era. With so little to build a coherent theory off of, trans mascs gravitate towards explanations that provide catharsis to our discontent and alienation but do little to genuinely expand our understanding of how we fit into patriarchy and what we should do about it.

When a friend sent me TERFs, Trans Mascs, & Two Steve Feminism, I knew that I finally had the avenue I needed to speak. This piece is a personal essay written by Jude Doyle, a well-established feminist writer who came out and transitioned a number of years ago. A large source of inspiration for this essay can be found in a dispute that occurred between himself and Moira Donegan, another feminist writer who is cis, four days before it was published.

On New Year’s Eve, Donegan posted a thread that apparently included a criticism of transfeminist author Julia Serano. I say apparently since the thread has been deleted; all I’ve been able to see of the debacle is the aftermath. From what I can gather, the criticism was related to Serano’s concept of the subconscious sex, a term she coined to explain why some people are trans. While Donegan’s exact position is unknown to me, my best guess is that she argued against the idea of womanhood as an innate identity that one is naturally drawn to. Rather, womanhood is a socially constructed category of individuals oppressed within patriarchy. In the ensuing conflict, multiple individuals, including Serano herself, disagreed with both Donegan’s position and her characterization of Serano’s argument.

Doyle responded to this thread and was consequently blocked. Shortly after, he posted about this incident with a screenshot of his response to her attached and then implied that Donegan is a “crypto-TERF.”

The initial post Doyle made about Donegan.

Sometime after this, Donegan unblocked him. They exchanged at least two more comments -- Doyle refuted her point once more, Donegan explained her reason for blocking him -- before she blocked him again. And, once more, Doyle shared a screenshot of this interaction.

I have no connection to either Donegan nor Doyle, only vague awareness of both individuals. Upon learning about this disagreement later that day, I initially did not care much. However, Doyle publishing TERFs, Trans Mascs, & Two Steve Feminism has compelled me into speaking out on the matter.

This response is not a personal attack but rather a tool to critique a line of thought I see trans mascs repeat over and over. Although I am empathetic to it -- I was similarly disgruntled when I was younger -- I find myself growing less and less patient with it, especially when it receives attention and praise. The line of thought I’m describing is what I am calling transmasc liberalism (purposely spelled without a space between “trans” and “masc” to highlight the specificity of this ideology to trans masculinity). It’s the outcome of trans mascs who have realized the failures of cisnormative ideologies to explain our unique position within patriarchy but have not yet fully unlearned gender essentialism. Unable to resolve this conflict, trans mascs will often turn on feminist thinking and rhetoric and take the position of the victimized. Depending on the context, our victimization is construed as the result of being trans mascs specifically, while other times it is because of our assigned sex at birth.

Instead of seeking out a material explanation for the mechanisms at play with transphobia and anti-transmasc sentiment, transmasc liberalism is drawn to idealism. There is an over reliance on the belief that our subjective experiences -- that is, the emotions we feel and our immediate perception of ourselves as related to our gender -- are external, objective realities. The dissonance that emerges from this unsustainable belief, such as complications that arise when factoring in race, class, and so on, unfortunately results in frustration, insecurity, and anxiety that eventually comes to a boiling point. Oftentimes, these feelings explode in the face of whichever woman or other trans masc has the misfortune of disagreeing.

I bring up transmasc liberalism because Doyle’s essay is a perfect encapsulation of the rhetoric and behavior associated with it. And I will not mince words: I do find Doyle’s behavior in this article abhorrent. Throughout the essay, he makes assumptions about Donegan’s beliefs that border on libelous and weaponizes personal hardships to paint himself as a victim of crimes that Donegan did not commit. Although my response is more about the ideas in his essay, his conduct is very much a symptom of transmasc liberalism that needs to be addressed. For example, I would be remiss to not point out the instance in the essay where Doyle, who is white, compares Donegan blocking him on Bluesky to the May 2020 incident when Amy Cooper, a white woman, called the police to falsely accuse Christian Cooper, a Black man, of threatening her life after he requested that she leash her dog in Central Park. Doyle’s apparent lack of awareness of how inappropriate this comparison is hopefully demonstrates the necessity of a response that challenges the politics of this essay.

Ultimately, my intention with this response is to generate a dialogue that propels us away from transmasc liberalism and towards an understanding of ourselves that considers historical context and current material realities. Oppression, after all, is not imaginary. To counter real attacks and ramifications that come with being trans, we must actively strive to understand how and why cissexism works the way it does. It’s only from an in-depth grasp of our socioeconomic position that we will be able to fight for our liberation.

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Social Constructionism: Fact or Fiction?

TERFs, Trans Mascs, & Two Steve Feminism positions itself as an exploration of feminism’s failures to consider the realities of trans masculine existence under patriarchy. This exploration is initially framed through the conflict between Doyle and Donegan, although it expands in such a way that it can be assumed that Doyle is drawing on other experiences he has had with other feminists. My reason for saying this is based on the fact that much of this essay responds to transphobic talking points from feminists that were not made by Donegan nor could be reasonably intuited from any point she did make.

At the end of the introductory section of this piece, Doyle quite clearly states his thesis:

First, your experience of gendered oppression is not necessarily about who you are. It’s about what people think you are, or what people have been primed to see when they look at you. Second: What cis people tell themselves they are doing, in regard to a trans person’s gender, is often very different than what they’ve done.

While Doyle connects his conflict with Donegan to this second point in particular, both arguments are much broader than this squabble. I doubt Doyle himself would disagree with the assertion that this essay ultimately transcends Donegan’s thread and therefore should not be limited to it. Hopefully, the contents of my response are also interpreted beyond this conflict.

Following the introduction, Doyle recounts his Bluesky interaction with Donegan. Immediately, he critiques her view on gender, specifically stating that Donegan views womanhood “as a fiction created by the patriarchal hierarchy of gender.” Although he does agree that “gender is a political construction,” he clarifies his objection to Donegan’s argument:

However, if social enforcement were all-powerful, and we all just embodied whatever genders we’re assigned by the dominant culture, there would not be a single trans person on the face of the planet. Nor would there be feminists, because feminism is a rebellion against socially constructed and enforced gender stereotypes.

This paragraph is followed by an explanation of Serano’s subconscious sex and gender dysphoria that ultimately ends with Doyle asserting: “This point — that your assigned gender and your gender identity are not the same thing, and that they can conflict with each other — is literally the mildest, most Trans 101 take you can possibly have.”

Already, there are a number of problems that are only worsened by the game of telephone at play here. Based on this essay, Doyle presents Donegan as holding a social constructionist view on gender -- that is, that gender is not something innate and unchanging but rather comprehensible only through the context of society and interpersonal interactions. The first mistake Doyle makes is the assertion that a social constructionist view on gender sees womanhood as fictional. While this is a common misconception that people have about social constructs, it is a glaring error nonetheless. Social constructionism does not view social constructs as fake or fictional; rather, the point is that social constructs could not exist without human socialization. Man and Woman are not metaphysical concepts but labels that only receive meaning through social context.

I suspect that Donegan’s apparent critique of subconscious sex is ultimately a critique of this metaphysical approach to gender. The concept that trans people are inherently the wrong gender presupposes that there is some sort of fixed category of gendered existence that supersedes human existence altogether. And if gender is purely metaphysical -- that is, if one can be a man or a woman without any tangible or observable connection to the reality we live in -- then what does that mean for the liberation of women, trans people, and queer people as a whole? For instance, are men naturally more motivated to dominate and oppress women? Must we actively resist unsavory inclinations that our inborn genders might instill within us?

Ironically, it’s this metaphysical approach to gender that leads to the very talking points that Doyle critiques in this essay as examples of feminist transphobia. The belief that men or women are inherently good or evil, or superior or inferior, is not based on any analysis of cultural conditions or infrastructure but rather subjective moral judgements. Similarly, the idea that men and women simply are broadly ignores the historical processes that have impacted the development and social perceptions of those concepts over time. Although many transphobes will pretend that they are taking a materialist view of the situation, their complete dismissal of trans realities and insistence on naturalizing their own specific experiences of gender easily pokes gaping holes into their claims.

The rebuttal to this view on gender is, ultimately, the position that Donegan supposedly takes: that is, that gender cannot be understood in any meaningful way without taking the social, economic, and political realities of patriarchy into account. This does not mean that trans people cannot exist. Actually, we can conclude the opposite: transness is itself a social construct. And transness being a social construct does not negate gender dysphoria any more than the social model of disability negates a person’s symptoms or their struggle with them, nor does race as a social construct erase the color of our skin.

All of this is to say that, while trans people cannot choose to have or rid ourselves of dysphoria about our bodies, our dysphoria is only legible through our social context and interactions. I am a trans man not because I have some inner, timeless essence that is innately male, but because I have modified my body in such a way that people interpret me as male upon meeting me. I am not not a woman because there is an inherent quality to womanhood that repulses me, but because the social context and physical features that give me dysphoria are associated with womanhood. In fact, being read as male has made it more comfortable for me than ever before to present as a woman. Why? Because the general social context of my daily life has changed. Whereas I would be read as a woman regardless of what I wore before transitioning, I now have more control over how people perceive me based on how I dress and behave. Thus, my internal desires may exist independently of what others think about or want for me, but they only receive a value judgement and label once framed within the context of interpersonal interactions.

Regardless of what her original thread stated, Donegan demonstrated shortly after the Bluesky ordeal that she understands how trans people fit into this social constructionist view very well.

Donegan: “[T]o say that an identity is constructed is not to say that it is insincere or easily changeable, let alone that it is individually experienced as voluntary.”

Donegan: “I'm unwilling to cede the territory that choosing would be wrong, or that transness, queerness, or other kinds of nonconformity would be bad things to chose.”

But perhaps Doyle also understands this. After all, he did begin his essay by discussing the difference between his internal gender identity and the process of gendering. He also agreed that gender is a social construct enforced by patriarchy. So, looking at his rebuttal again, we can see a second characterization of Donegan’s argument: that “we all just embod[y] whatever genders we’re assigned by the dominant culture.” This could potentially be read in two different ways: one, that under social constructionism, our internal perception of our gender is solely dictated by what the world tells us our gender is, which I have already shown is an incorrect understanding of the concept; or two, that under patriarchy, there is an oppressor class and an oppressed class, and anyone who is oppressed due to their gender is categorically a woman.

The former understanding aligns with his assertion that the existence of trans people and feminism disproves social constructionism. If this is the case, I would argue that Doyle’s understanding of feminism demonstrates how much feminism as a political movement has failed miserably. Admittedly, my immediate reaction was to say that feminism is not “a rebellion against socially constructed and enforced gender stereotypes,” but perhaps this is exactly what feminism is to many people. Rather than a project to raise awareness of the material causes and consequences of patriarchy and further women’s liberation through political organization, feminism is conceptualized as a performative rejection of social norms. While refusing to fall in line with other’s expectations can be a cathartic and even life-changing experience for many, we have yet to see teenage angst and counter-cultural movements lead to revolutions and infrastructural changes.

However, given the path the rest of the essay follows, the latter interpretation could be correct as well. Thus, Donegan is criticized as transphobic based on two lines of thought that Doyle accuses her of holding: firstly, that it is impossible for anybody to “feel” trans and therefore identify as such; and secondly, that regardless of how you identify, you are either the Oppressive Man or the Oppressed Woman, an outcome which either misgenders or erases the existence of a trans masc like Doyle.

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Third-Gendering & Misgendering

The next section of the essay begins with Doyle very briefly explaining the “radical feminist view of gender” on Woman as the gender-oppressed class. He writes:

I think this is correct, to an extent… It does, as previously noted, fail to account for people’s agency and internally felt identities. It also fails to account for the fact that people use the singular word “gender” to mean several different structures or realities: The patriarchal binary, the “subconscious sex” or internally felt identity, the social norms and visual signifiers of gender within a culture, and so on.

The issues he takes with this perspective, however, falls apart on closer inspection. During this section, he names transfeminist writer, Talia Bhatt, as a proponent of this view and expresses respect for her contributions. I point this out since it is peculiar for him to reference her as her work expands on this viewpoint in a way that leaves these criticisms feeling misplaced and unnecessary. He seems to avoid this obvious issue with a statement on how Donegan “cites” cis feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Monique Wittig while also ignoring the fact that Bhatt and Donegan have been acquainted for quite sometime. The chances that Donegan is aware of Bhatt’s explicitly transfeminist spin on this perspective and agrees with it to some extent seem very high.

From here, Doyle continues:

Failing to disentangle these layers causes massive fights. It’s as if you and I were throwing a party, and I said “Steve is in the kitchen,” and you said “no, Steve is in the living room,” and before long, we’re at each other’s throats about where exactly Steve is, without either of us realizing that we invited two guys named Steve. Multiple Steves can be in multiple locations. Neither of us is lying, but we’re each telling only part of the truth.

For the duration of this essay, I will ask you to entertain the Two Steves theory: "Gender" is many overlapping things, not just one thing. We’re forced to use the same word for all of them, because the patriarchal binary is deeply impoverished when it comes to ways of describing, naming, or thinking about gender.

The Singular Steve approach taken by some cis feminists insists that gender is only the patriarchal superstructure. There is no “real” gender to be found beneath it, just a heap of cultural conditioning. There are a few immediate and obvious problems with that worldview. The first is that it leaves no room for non-binary people to exist. If our genders are completely due to social construction, and our society only constructs two genders, then why are there all these people who don’t identify as either one?

Immediately, I must question Doyle’s characterization of the social constructionist view on gender as a “One Steve Feminism,” as he puts it. Certainly there are some feminists out there who believe that one’s sense of gender is strictly instilled within us by society at large, but Donegan demonstrated clearly that this is not what she believes. Furthermore, his assertion that nonbinary gender identity contradicts social constructionism is not only troubling but incorrect. While we may not have well-established terms in English that describe accepted gender categories outside of Man and Woman, this does not mean that we have no concept for them at all.

In Whipping Girl, Julia Serano coined a variety of terms that are still in use today. One of such terms is subconscious sex, as previously discussed. Another one is third-gendering. Serano says:

Cissexual people who are in the earliest stages of accepting transsexuality… will often come to see trans people as inhabiting our own unique gender category that is separate from “woman” and “man.” I call this act third-gendering (or third-sexing). While some attempts at third-gendering trans people are clearly meant to be derogatory or sensationalistic… other less offensive ones occur regularly in discussions about transsexuals… While “MTF” may be useful as an adjective… using it as a noun… completely negates the fact that I identify and live as a woman.

…I believe that this propensity for third-gendering others is simply a by-product of the assumptive and noncensual process of gendering. In other words, we are so compelled to gender people as women and men that when we come across someone who is not easily categorised that way… we tend to isolate and distinguish them from the other two genders. There is a long history of the terms “third gender” and “third sex” being applied to homosexuals, intersex people, and transgender people… (174-176).

Here, Serano demonstrates that even if the average cis individual within Western society is not consciously aware of genders outside of Man or Woman, those who violate cisheterosexist norms are treated quite differently from those who do not. As she mentions, the history of the terms “third gender” and “third sex” predate Whipping Girl and even the English language, such as the French writer Willy publishing Le Troisième Sexe, a book about gay European life, in 1927.

Talia Bhatt’s writing expands on this concept further. In Bhatt’s article, The Third Sex, she draws upon Serena Nanda’s ethnography Neither Man Nor Woman to demonstrate how hijras in India have been forcibly third-gendered. Despite the popular conception that the Western world is resistant to the idea that there are more than two genders, she reveals that it’s often far easier for society to accept that trans women are a separate category of gender as opposed to simply women. Bhatt points out:

It is Nanda’s attempt to rhetorically distance hijras from womanhood, however, that proves to be the most revealing. Ignoring her own reporting of how hijras travel in “ladies” compartments on the trains and “periodically demand” to be counted as women in the census, she begins Hijras As “Not Women” by affirming that hijras behave in manners “in opposition to the Hindu ideal of demure and restrained femininity”. What follows is an amusing account of all the behaviors that set hijra apart from True Womanhood: “dancing in public”, “coarse and abusive speech or gestures”, smoking hookah or cigarettes, and openly exhibiting a “shameless” vulgarity that no “real” Hindu woman would indulge. No doubt many Indian housewives would be edified to learn how trivial it is to change sex, or how frequently they’ve done so in the process of haggling for cheaper vegetables.

This isn’t to say that Western society has a clear concept of how we refer to nonbinary genders, nor is it to say that it is primed to accept nonbinary identities over trans people who may simply identify as male or female. Rather, as Serano described, individuals who appear to fall outside the realm of a cisheterosexist idea of gender are relegated into a category of their own regardless of how they might identify. As Bhatt puts it, “The Enlightened West, in all its wisdom, already has a Third Sex: the tranny.”

Thus, to argue that social constructionism would render it impossible for anyone to identify as nonbinary ignores that our construction of gender has already accounted for “third genders.” Nonbinary as a term has only gained significant attention and popularity within the past 20 or so years; those attracted to it would have most likely used different terms to describe themselves beforehand.

Perhaps the argument could be made that people are intrinsically nonbinary and any term they used before nonbinary existed was inaccurate and only used because our language -- also a social construction -- failed them. Even then, however, there still lies a troubling issue at the heart of nonbinary identity. Nonbinary gender can only be understood in relation to the binary genders; this is the “binary” that is being referenced within the word nonbinary itself. And before blame can be assigned to the limits of the English language and Western society, historical and current examples of other genders have only been located within cultures where male and female also exist. If there is a culture where male and/or female as concepts did not exist but other genders did, then it is exceptionally rare.

Thus, nonbinary and “third genders” are predicated on the existence of male and female genders, specifically. This does not disprove their existence or deny the “agency” of individuals to identify however they chose. Once again, this is about gender as a social construct. That means that, in order to be nonbinary, you first need a system of binary gender as “nonbinary” defines your relationship with it. If this seems puzzling, then imagine a world that was only comprised of women. But if this was the case, then how sensical would it be for them to identify themselves as women if that’s what every person in existence is? What would be the purpose of identifying as such? Woman (or Man) as a gender could not exist without another gender since it is ultimately a relational identity. Similarly, nonbinary and “third genders” could not exist without Woman and Man.

Do not interpret this as me doubting the genuineness of “feelings” of being nonbinary. Since my first day identifying as trans, I have always identified with various nonbinary genders. But my sense of nonbinary-ness only gains that meaning when I consider how I fit into society at large. And despite how I may identify myself, the perception that others have of me always wins in the end, whether that means reading me as a cis woman, as a cis man, or as a gendered other.

What I’m explaining is not anything foreign to Doyle. He begins his essay by discussing how the process of gendering means that he is treated as a woman in the small town where he lives but perceived as a man when he travels elsewhere. The mistake he makes, however, is through the assumption that his stable internal sense of gender regardless of how he is being gendered disproves a social constructionist view of gender as a whole. Again, social constructionism doesn’t mean that society creates your internal sense of your gender identity, but rather makes it (il)legible.

When I am misgendered as a woman, it does not render me a woman -- or at least, not in the way a cis woman is a woman, since my misattributed womanhood either exists on incredibly shaky grounds or out of spiteful malice. The dysphoria that arises with misgendering does not indicate that a trans person is functionally the same as a cis person of the same assigned sex at birth. Rather, what misgendering indicates to me is a confirmation that I am treated differently than a cis man would be treated because I am trans. “Not a Cis Man,” however, does not mean “Is a Woman,” as women do not generally alter their body, social presentation, and legal documents to be perceived as anything but that. The illegibility of my transness within cisnormativity is the function behind third-gendering and also a large reason why I have never identified as “binary.”

But it is not enough to point to third-gendering as a process to prove a social constructionist theory on gender. I am concerned that the fixation on labels in and of themselves has hindered our ability to critically analyze how gender impacts our relationship with others and the social infrastructure that envelops us. Thus, we must ask: what is the function of gender? Why does it exist?

The shortest answer I can give is that gender is a form of social organization. In her book The Creation of Patriarchy, historian Gerda Lerner argues that the oppression of women is inseparable from the creation of private property -- in fact, she asserts that women themselves were the original form of private property. In prehistoric human society, childbirth was the most essential piece of a tribe’s survival; as such, controlling the sexuality of those who could give birth was critical to maintaining order and power. The hierarchy established by this subjugation is ultimately the foundation of gender. Through the course of The Creation of Patriarchy, Lerner documents the development of Ancient Near East civilizations and their evolving laws over thousands of years to demonstrate how the status and perception of women gradually deteriorated over time.

Although the role of reproduction has always been essential to the oppression of women, this does not mean that trans women are men and that trans men are women. The continued development of civilization and technology results in sociological changes that complicate how we understand ourselves and others. Thus, as gender becomes reified through various social cues and cultural myths, it is possible for different kinds of gendered existences to occur. In fact, Lerner makes note of “transvestites” that served as prostitutes in Ancient Babylon (131). Given that the vast majority of prostitutes have always been women, so much so that misogynistic slurs are often words used to refer to prostitutes, it’s noteworthy that the only time cross-dressing is mentioned in this book is in reference to “male” prostitution.

To summarize what we gather from Lerner’s work, Womanhood is defined ultimately by a lack of agency over one’s sexuality and the intense repercussions that come from violating sexual norms. As an example, Lerner makes note of various laws that gave permission to men to mutilate and murder their wives for committing adultery, but the same permission was not granted to the wife of an adulterous man (114-115).

The lopsided restrictions, punishments, and social ostracization imposed on women serve to uphold the patriarchal social order. From this, we see the development of cisheternormativity which then leads to Serano’s concept of third gendering. This is why, as Serano mentioned, queer people as a whole and intersex individuals have been denoted as being a third sex alongside trans people. Here, we can see the intimate connection between misogyny and third-gendering: both are necessary to uphold patriarchy which, by definition, is ruled by Man. The purpose of this control over sexuality and gender is to ensure the continued existence of private property and the production of capital through the act of reproduction.

Because third gendering is ultimately born out of patriarchy and sexism, it is impossible to unlink “third genders” from Womanhood. In Degendering and Regendering, Bhatt writes:

Where transmisogynistic forces marginalize and ostracize the transfeminine from society, rendering us unworthy of any fate outside of being treated like sexual chattel, transemasculative forces deny the transmasculine any possibility of escaping reproductive exploitation and seek to re-gender the transmasculine--viewed as lapsed reproductive assets--back into the confines of womanhood.

In a sense, then, trans men and women are relegated into a sort of Womanhood: trans women become Disparaged Women who cannot provide any reproductive value and thus can only exist for the sexual gratification of men, while trans men are Failed Women who must be corrected back into the nuclear family structure at all costs.

To say that trans masculinity as a whole is viewed as Failed Womanhood does not mean that we are women. We failed for a reason! Just as Doyle suggested that there are perhaps multiple definitions of the word gender at play, I would suggest not interpreting the term Woman within a transfeminist social constructionist theory so literally.

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A Brief Word on Gender Dysphoria

The second issue of Single Steve Feminism, according to Doyle,

is that it leaves no rational explanation for gender dysphoria. If gender is purely an oppressive hierarchy, and embodiment or internally felt identity has nothing to do with it, then trans people who experience intense discomfort with their bodies are delusional — they’ve bought into the gender hierarchy so hard that they’ve concocted some hallucinatory sense of “being” the gender whose experience they wish to share.

There are incredible leaps of logic being made here based on inaccurate framing. Although Doyle is ultimately describing a position I have witnessed from some transphobes, I must object to this section on two bases: firstly, because he is collapsing an explicitly pro-trans and materialist understanding of gender with anti-trans positions; and secondly, because he does not attempt to provide his own rational explanation for the existence of gender dysphoria.

One might say that the subconscious sex idea is the rational explanation… except that it is not. If one’s internal sense of gender is predetermined by the mind or soul, then could we say that the same rationally explains other things we hold true about ourselves? For instance, is there something innate to my existence that predetermined that I would prefer chocolate ice cream over vanilla? Perhaps you could get pedantic and argue that my brain is configured in such a way that it does dictate my tastes and interests, but even then, the human brain did not come into existence knowing what chocolate and vanilla ice cream taste like. Human beings created ice cream, just like we created gender.

The point I really want to make, however, is that gender dysphoria -- or physical dysphoria, at least -- is irrational, and that’s okay. Human emotions and desires are often irrational. I do not know why I have never been able to picture myself as a woman. I do not know why my chest dysphoria is so intense that I was essentially unable to refer to breasts at all even when I was a prepubescent child. There isn’t really a rational explanation for any of that and there doesn’t need to be one, just as there isn’t a rational explanation for why I started dying my hair or why my sister has pierced both of her ears half a dozen times each or why some people love caring for pets or engaging in high-risk hobbies.

I am not trans because of a subconscious sex or because of a delusion, as Doyle puts it. For some inexplicable reason, I have always felt dysphoric about my body and how the world gendered me. That dysphoria and the ensuing actions I took to alleviate it is considered “trans” by society. The resulting gendered experience from those actions means that people now generally view me as “male.”

Ultimately, the battle over trans rights is a battle of bodily autonomy. I don’t need to prove some logical chain of events to have the right to take testosterone shots just like I wouldn’t need to prove anything to get a tattoo. It’s just because I want to do it and it improves my quality of life. As such, I won’t allow people to disguise their desire to control others with phony appeals to rationality.

If anything, in my personal experience, many people have tried to over-rationalize my dysphoria and attribute it to childhood trauma. This does not mean that transphobes all take an overly rational approach. The point here is that, in the mind of the transphobe, trans people are always incorrect, whether it’s because our dysphoria defies explanation or because there is a perfectly reasonable explanation that could be solved through therapy -- conversion therapy, that is. Furthermore, I am skeptical of the idea that the subconscious sex explanation for dysphoria is doing much to counter transphobes who see trans people as psychotic (nor is it doing much to fight for the autonomy of psychotic individuals, cis and trans, for that matter).

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Trans Masc Mirror World

At the beginning of Doyle’s essay, he made it clear that he strives to address the failures of cis feminism to account for trans masc realities. Similarly, at the beginning of my response, I made it clear that I am addressing the failure of trans mascs to grapple with those very failures.

Here, over halfway into his essay, we finally arrive at his charge against cis feminism. Specifically, he targets those feminists who believe they’re trans-inclusive and will include trans women into their feminism but treat trans mascs poorly. It is difficult not to read this following section as a swipe at Donegan, but we will set that conflict aside for the moment as we read the following:

Let’s imagine that you’re this feminist. You know you’re not supposed to be transphobic, but you’re also enlightened enough to know that “dysphoria” is really just a social construct. How do you reconcile yourself to the idea that trans women “want to be women?” Well, you can tell yourself that they’re heroically giving up their Male Privilege. You can conclude that they are sensitive enough to side with the truly oppressed… and should be rewarded for it. You can feel flattered… You can Welcome Them to Womanhood, and thrill in their gratitude and the self-esteem boost you get from being a benevolent gatekeeper.

None of this involves thinking of trans women as your equals — none of it involves thinking of trans women as women, in fact — but you can tell yourself it’s tolerant, because you’re deploying pity and condescension rather than hate and fear. However, now that you’ve gone down this road, you also have to explain why trans men “want to be men.” This is where your attempts at tolerance will fail you.

Why would someone who is “really” a woman “want to be” a man? Easy: She’s experiencing sexism, and she wants out. So do you, but you are fighting sexism the right way, by being a feminist. This other person… [is] trying to become the oppressor rather than fighting the oppression. Why would anyone be a trans man? Because they’re a bad, sexist person. That’s the only possible answer. After all: It's not like they will literally die if they don't transition. Right?

I am not being paranoid or attributing malice here so much as I am summing up something that occurs throughout the feminist canon. Janice Raymond wrote (inaccurately) that there were almost no trans men in the world because “the surgery" is intended as "a way out of rigid gender roles," and "women have had a political outlet, that is, feminism, which has helped change the distribution of power for women in society and challenge sex role rigidification.” J. K. Rowling says that, if she grew up in this century, her feminist rage would have been misdirected into transitioning. In my twenties, the biggest RETVRN-to-the-Second-Wave text was Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs, which had a whole chapter about how young women are internalizing misogyny so deeply that they’re transitioning into young men. The idea that the transmasculine person is a failed feminist is deeply embedded in particular strains of feminist theory.

So, to recap: Doyle opens this critique of cis feminism by singling out cis feminists who include trans women but exclude trans men. He explains the underlying belief at play and then provides three prominent examples of women who take this position. What he does not mention, however, is that two out of his three examples are renowned transmisogynists. Raymond and Rowling are both notorious for their intense hatred of trans women. Although I am more unfamiliar with Ariel Levy, I cannot find any proof that she is accepting of trans women.

I want to make it clear that there are indeed a number of cis people who mistake patronizing pity as proof that they are not transphobic. But outside of a few random trans women and nonbinary people that I’ve run into online, I am hard pressed to provide evidence that this is a notable trend, especially among cis feminists. What I can do, however, is prove that the exact opposite is true.

There is a wave of anti-transmasculine sentiment sweeping both the US and UK, but it is not one that views trans mascs as failed feminists for the most part. It’s the stance taken by Abigail Shrier in her infamous book, Irreversible Damage: that trans men are confused, pittable little girls and hysterical women who must be stopped before we mutilate our bodies. This is ultimately the belief that underpins the anti-transmasculine arguments made by Raymond, Rowling, and Levy. Once we alter our bodies, once we unleash that “irreversible damage” unto ourselves, we are ideologically lost and socially worthless.

A particularly important note is that this anti-transmasculine sentiment always coexists with vicious transmisogyny. Trans women are generally conceived of as predators; as such, they are the predators that are grooming trans boys or traumatizing them into being trans. And once trans boys transition, they are third-gendered into a similar predatory role. But why are trans mascs given more grace than trans fems? In Degendering and Regendering, Talia Bhatt writes:

…[T]he reason that transfemininity has been more visible across both time and cultures is that the veneration of manhood is highly central to patriarchal modes of organization. The idea that manhood can be failed, that an individual can fail to live up to its mantle and be stripped of manhood's privileges and protections is a useful schema to ensure ideological investment in patriarchal society. The transfeminized serve as examples of what happens to gender traitors. The transmasculine, by contrast, are ignored or treated as little more than delusional, as people who reach above their station and are doomed to never succeed.

…The transmasculine can still be "of use" to a natalist, heterosexual regime and can still be instrumentalized for their gestational capacity and ability to further patrilineality. And so, they are assiduously discouraged from changing their sex or altering their embodiment, lest they jeopardize their precious 'fertility' and render themselves 'undesirable', unfit for reproductive exploitation.

Within a gendered hierarchy, trans men have never been on top. Our autonomy is denied the way it is denied to women, both cis and trans. But we are also distinctly infantilized. The TERFs I used to spend all day arguing with and my conservative Christian family both attempted to appeal to me with faux sympathy, cooing to me about how my father’s abuse had led me to falsely believe I couldn’t ever be a woman, a wife, a mother. Yes, I was physically assaulted as a child for expressing my dysphoria; I had rumors spread about me in high school; I’ve been called slurs and harassed. But it is this approach, the pseudo-compassionate approach, the one that treats me as a victim in a state of arrested development, that is the most prominent. It’s the approach that nearly convinced me to desist. It’s the approach that made me believe that transitioning would cause my boyfriend to stop loving and desiring me. Even though this had never been true, the thought plagued and terrified me because we have been conditioned into believing that we mean nothing if we are not wives and mothers.

This condescending sympathy, this appeal to womanhood, is a toxic rhetoric that seeks to strangle you in the cradle before you ever begin to explore a reality outside the life forced upon you by patriarchy. It is also a rhetoric that evaporates the moment you do take that leap of faith as I learned when my grandfather disowned me not after I came out, but after I started testosterone.

Transphobic feminists may claim to be anti-patriarchy but the truth is that you cannot be anti-patriarchy and anti-trans at the same time. Transphobia is necessary to maintain patriarchy. Thus, TERFs have a vested interest in appealing to anyone who was assigned female at birth, even if the approach they take is insincere and manipulative. In fact, the term TERF was coined in response to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival -- an event that allowed trans mascs but explicitly banned trans fems from attending. Of course, this does not indicate that trans mascs are being treated well by any means. But the point I want to stress is that there is virtually no physical, virtual, or philosophical space dominated by cis women that tolerates trans women but is actively antagonistic to trans men. The fact that Doyle singles out this largely hypothetical transphobic cis feminist who is kinder to trans women than trans men instead of identifying how TERFs manipulate, abuse, and weaponize trans men against trans women is concerning, to say the least.

However, let’s pretend for a moment that such a feminist exists. How, then, does she treat us trans mascs? According to Doyle:

Now, some transmasculine people will tell you… that no matter how feminist they were, and no matter how feminist they are now, nothing actually alleviated their dysphoria but transition — but you, a Woman of Lived Experience, have no need to listen to this kind of mansplaining. If they want to be men, why, you’ll treat them like men! But with a particular, angry emphasis, because you view their manhood as a betrayal! And this is not only feminist, it is trans-inclusive, because you’re treating them the same way you would any other guy!

They aren’t “any other guy.” They’re trans guys, and you’re a cis person, and as such, you hold social and political power over them, which you are ignoring in order to assume total authority over an experience you do not share, and (this seems pertinent) to get away with treating somebody like crap because they are transgender. You're not treating them the way you treat "any other guy," you're treating them the way you treat trans guys, and the way you treat trans guys is: Bad.

Notice how Doyle does not actually provide any examples of what he is talking about. We could presume that he is referencing Donegan’s treatment of him. If this is the case, then we can return to the earlier screenshots and conclude that this is an egregious mischaracterization of the situation. Additionally -- ironically -- the indignation Doyle displays here echoes the same sort of indignation that women are quite familiar with receiving from men they have upset.

Nonetheless, he continues to explain how the

"enlightened" feminist transphobia that can seem benign and pity-based when it comes to trans women tends to be overt when it comes to trans men: Transitioning makes you bad, untrustworthy, anti-feminist, scheming, selfish, etc. (This gets reversed in the dominant culture, where trans women are openly demonized and trans men are ignored — and, obviously, it is counterbalanced by a whole lot of feminist transmisogyny. Again, I'm discussing a specific, pseudo-tolerant approach.)

His note at the end is amusing, to say the least. Describing specific examples normally requires concrete evidence. I have yet to even see a personal anecdote.

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Trans Mascs v. Patriarchy

In the next section of his essay, Doyle muses on why trans mascs appear to take more issue with Donegan’s social constructionist view on gender than trans fems. He restates his (mistaken) belief once more: because people like Donegan allegedly believe that “woman” is synonymous with “gender oppressed” which, in turn, erases trans masc experiences. He writes:

The patriarchal binary divides the world into two tiers: “Men” and “women,” people who get stomped on and people who do the stomping. That’s objectively true. However, it gets complicated when you realize that not everyone sorted into the “woman” tier actually belongs there. This is the uncomfortable reality presented by trans guys: One can actually experience sexism, misogyny, gender-based pay discrimination, sexual harassment, sexual violence, reproductive coercion, the pink tax, and every other form of degradation dealt out to people perceived as “women,” and still be a man. The two Steves, operating independently, work at cross purposes to each other, and in the battle between Culturally Imposed Steve and Personal Steve, culture often wins.

His explanation of patriarchy is puzzling. Doyle states that it is “objectively true” that men “do the stomping” while women “get stomped on.” Trans men, he concludes, throws a wrench in this perception as trans men are assumedly the ones being “stomped on” despite not being women.

The main issue I take with his description of patriarchy is not the concept that trans men are Not-Women while also Not-Cis-Men, but that it is incredibly reductive and overly simplistic in its understanding of power. While patriarchy is a hierarchy of power rooted in gender, it does not exist on gender lines alone. For instance, in The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner makes ample commentary on the importance of class. In fact, class is so important to patriarchy that it is perhaps the main reason that women adhere to its norms as adherence results in better socioeconomic outcomes. As she explains, the wife, concubine, and female slaves may all have their social status defined in relation to men, but the wife still exercises considerable power over the concubine and all slaves, both male and female, while the female slaves are absolutely powerless compared to both the wife and the concubine.

Age is also a key factor in patriarchal power, as patriarchy is ultimately a system that values the decisions of elders over the lives of the young. We can see this happen when young men are drafted to die in wars that aging politicians and military officials started or when mothers, aunts, and grandmothers bully, shame, and assault the girls in their families for failing to uphold to expectations. There is a reason why the stereotypical patriarch is generally imagined as an elderly man as opposed to a young one. There is also a reason why anti-transmasculine rhetoric tends to conceptualize us naive teenagers.

We can further see the complications of how gender and power manifests under patriarchy when we consider the creation of race. In her influential piece Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe, Black feminist Hortense Spillers argues that “‘gendering’ takes place within the confines of the domestic” (452) and is intimately related to kinship structures. As such, because slavery turned Africans into property and disrupted their kinship structures, the process of gendering could not apply to enslaved Africans in the US the same way that it applied to white settlers. Rather, we get the ungendered male and female, as Spillers puts it, whose gendered existence is not defined solely by sexual relations, but by racial ones, as well. After sharing an excerpt from a woman who recounted being sexually assaulted by her female owner, Spiller states:

Since the gendered female exists for the male, we might suggest that the ungendered female—in an amazing stroke of pansexual potential—might be invaded/raided by another woman or man (458).

More specifically, enslaved Black people, male and female, were vulnerable to physical and sexual violence from not just white men, but white women as well. The legacy of this relationship continues to echo into the present. As such, we must consider the weight of race when discussing the gendered hierarchy of who is “doing the stomping” and who is “getting stomped on.”

Spillers’ work has proven to be hugely influential in the development of Black trans thought which further expands on a social constructionist perspective of gender. While I cannot do an exhaustive summary of these works, I will provide examples of these writings for anyone interested at the end of this essay. The main thing to grasp is that our understanding of gender -- both for ourselves and for others -- is rooted in our relationship to class hierarchy, production, and kinship structures. Man and Woman, then, are not clear cut boxes, but rather fuzzy blotches that crudely describe the way a person is expected to sexually relate to others. When Doyle describes Culturally Imposed Steve triumphing over Personal Steve, this is what he’s referring to, whether he realizes it or not.

So, what does it look like when Doyle speaks out on Culturally Imposed Steve? According to him:

In practice, when I disagree with a woman about feminism, things get charged and uncomfortable very quickly. There’s a sense that I shouldn’t be able to hold strong opinions about this topic… because I’m a… you know, a guy.

Where does “guy” derive from, in that conversation? It doesn’t derive from me having the exact same life experiences as a cis man… occupying a dominant position within patriarchy… [or] from me being seen as a man in my everyday social interactions… It’s based on the fact that I use the word “man” to identify myself… My internal identification as a man remains relevant, even if we’re having a conversation about how internal identifications aren’t real.

…Yet Singular Steve theory — a “man” is an oppressor and an oppressor is a man — means that even saying transmasculine people face misogyny or gendered oppression makes some people uncomfortable. Power and dominance are so integral to how the patriarchy defines “manhood” that we literally can’t imagine a man without them. Thus, it’s common to dismiss or downplay the violence that transmasculine people face…

It is just never safe to be trans, no matter how you slice it. It is never safe to be any kind of gender-marginalized person within a patriarchy, and it never will be. That is why it’s imperative for cis feminists to reckon with transmasculinity: People are being exposed to sexist oppression, but left out of the circle of feminist soldarity [sic] and concern. You “affirm” our genders by not giving a shit about us, which is not affirming, but, pretty explicitly, punishing somebody for being transgender.

There is an irony embedded in this excerpt: when Doyle discusses violence against trans mascs as something of an oddity for a man to experience, he consequently ignores that men are more likely to experience violence in general (Lauritsen & Heimer, 2012). I mention this not to dismiss or downplay the violence that trans mascs experience, but rather to point out that patriarchy does not, in fact, protect men from violence. Rather, men experience violence more frequently because of patriarchy. Of course, it is other men assaulting them, murdering them, or setting the stage for them to be injured or die in war or workplace accidents for the most part, but patriarchy does not mean that men are all on the same team, especially not when age, class, nationality, race, and sexuality continually divide them.

However, contrary to what men’s rights activists might say, the fact that men experience such realities does not mean that patriarchy is not real. Patriarchy is simply a form of social organization developed over thousands of years that placed social power primarily in the hands of men, conceptualized in its very earliest days as those who could impregnate. Power struggles between men and their ensuing violence do not disrupt this system of social organization but rather serve to keep men in line. Manhood is so firmly wrapped into patriarchy that men often instinctively protect the interests of patriarchy rather than ever considering their own individual best interests. After all, failing to uphold patriarchal expectations and interests results in ostracization and material repercussions.

Take, for instance, how military service so frequently devastates the minds, bodies, and lives of men, and yet the Soldier has been mythologized into the primary example of exemplary masculinity. Relatedly, the US military essentially bribes men into enlistment by providing them financial, educational, and health care benefits that may otherwise be inaccessible. We must ask, then, how many men have only been able to gain and support a wife and children because of this bargain with the military -- and how many men have destroyed this same family because of the inherent destructiveness of this bargain.

In a sense, Doyle is right to talk about the erasure of violence against trans mascs as problem within cis feminism. Cis feminism often doesn’t discuss violence against men at all. However, society as a whole generally ignores patriarchal violence. And there is a reason for this: patriarchy and its incentives are so normalized and alluring that men and women alike strive to uphold it -- not because it makes the most sense, but because to do anything different requires a profound struggle that would completely upend the only type of life we have ever known. Patriarchy may not be the best option, but it is far more comfortable than to take up the task to abolish it entirely.

Of course, any feminist that sincerely believes that men as a group of people (as opposed to Manhood as a concept under patriarchy) are ontologically evil and exempt from hardship would benefit from an actual material analysis of the situation. I have attempted to provide starting points for such an exploration. But Doyle, on the other hand, fails to provide any alternative perspective. Rather, he appears to accept the Single Steve premise and utilizes violence against trans mascs as proof that we are categorically different from cis men in such a way that our specific experiences warrant inclusion within a discussion of patriarchal violence whereas cis men are always exempt. This, too, ignores how cis queer men often experience rates of sexual and intimate partner violence similar to or higher than the rates of straight women (CDC 2023; Xu & Yeng, 2017).

What is the point of me saying all this? While it can indeed hurt to have your experiences with patriarchal violence as a trans masc downplayed and ignored, framing this issue as one where we try to disidentify ourselves with men as a whole and frame men as invulnerable to harm and abuse only further normalizes patriarchal violence. That is, to say that experiencing patriarchal violence is an experience so alien to Manhood as a concept that it deserves special consideration further normalizes and invisiblizes the violence that cis men experience because of patriarchy. If anything, trans mascs are in an interesting position where we can better expose and articulate the violence done to men and women within patriarchy than cis people might otherwise be able to.

With that all said, I do strongly agree with the premise that any feminist analysis that does not take trans mascs into account is ultimately an incomplete and ineffective analysis. Such an inclusion also necessitates sincerely engaging with us as human beings with complex experiences and emotions instead of tacking us on as a footnote. Unfortunately, Doyle’s essay does not do much to steer feminist discourse in any helpful direction.

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Bringing It All Together

So far, I’ve highlighted a number of sections of Doyle’s essay that are representative of the ideology I call transmasc liberalism. In short, it is an adherence to a transgender essentialism: that is, our souls are inherently transmasc. It is also gender essentialist in that it internalizes the belief that men hold power purely because they are men, and that holding gendered power means that you are exempt from gendered disempowerment. However, the conflict that emerges between this belief and the reality of trans masc existence leads to a new sort of essentialism, one that creates a wedge between ourselves, men, and all women, both cis and trans. Instead of interrogating this conflict, transmasc liberalism becomes ensnared by it with little motivation to break out. Any sort of rebuttal to this viewpoint is viewed with suspicion as the assumption is that alternative perspectives only continue to erase and misgender trans mascs.

At the end of this essay, Doyle provides us some insight into his distrust with a candid section about his feelings about cis feminists.

This episode has unsettled me, obviously. I have been trying to articulate to myself why it was so deeply hurtful to be treated as an enemy of feminism… It was the sense that I didn’t count, that I didn’t matter, that I wasn’t a peer, a colleague, a feminist, a person; I was just some obstacle to be done away with because I was trans.

It was the feeling — and I’ve had it for years, this feeling — that I have no human worth to anyone around me, and that none of the cis people I built my life with ever saw me or cared about me at all. My only worth resided in my “womanhood,” in being a fighter “for women,” and so, even if trying to be a woman was killing me, I had to keep it up, because the only other option was to become The Enemy. I feel, sometimes, that my fellow feminists would rather have me die young of my own misery than participate in feminism as my full self. And it hurts. I would like you to think, for a minute, about what it would be like to… give your life to a cause, to put absolutely everything you have into it, and to be told that your work is worthless because you didn’t die.

Although I have been rather snarky throughout my response, I’ll also put my cards on the table here. I deeply understand what Doyle means. Before I was aware that I was trans, feminism was a reprieve not just from misogyny, but specifically from the forces in my life that attempted to correct the way I experienced my gender. It was the one thing that didn’t force me to go dress shopping even when I broke down in tears at each dress store, that didn’t judge me when I became physically nauseated at the idea of having sex with men as a woman, that offered some sort of empathy when I was constantly suicidal.

There is genuinely something to be said about the shock that comes when you start identifying as trans masc, especially when people in spaces that seemed so radical on the position of gender can no longer find room for you. A lot of transphobia, or at least in my experience, is not so much direct and overt, but rather exists like a noxious gas. It’s silent, invisible, slowly burning your lungs from the inside out, leaving you with symptoms of a condition with no identifiable cause that nobody is particularly interested in remedying.

Doyle’s honesty confirms a hunch I’ve had for quite some time: that transmasc liberalism is something of an instinctual reaction. It is not born from serious contemplation but is the emotional reaction from someone who is disturbed by the reality of being third-gendered and cannot make sense of it. The fact that we are moving away from being female as opposed to moving towards it particularly complicates matters. Doyle is not incorrect in the least bit to criticize the transphobia of cis feminism, both overt and subtle; the fact that it has been almost exclusively the product of cis women makes it exceptionally challenging to map our experiences as Not-Women-but-Not-Cis-Men onto it.

However, the resulting distrust of feminism -- something I completely understand to the extent that I used to explicitly keep an anti-radfem statement in my Twitter bio to avoid any more heartache -- creates a misdirected anger. Most frequently, I see trans women, such as Bhatt, be lambasted as specifically anti-transmasculine, even when they are quite persistent on including trans men in both their theoretical understandings of gender and within their social circles. Sometimes, we see episodes like the Doyle-Donegan dispute, where Donegan becomes a blank slate to be distorted in such a way that Doyle can unload all his otherwise legitimate grievances onto her.

The fixation Doyle demonstrated earlier with a feminism that tolerated trans women but loathed trans men is a glimpse into this misdirected anger that I often see from the transmasc liberals. Much of the time, there is a resentment that trans mascs hold towards trans fems. Sometimes, they are able to harbor this resentment so that it isn’t immediately obvious, while other times it manifests in constant, overt attacks on trans women for being untrustworthy and traitors to trans men. I suspect that this resentment comes from the insecurity we feel about our relationship with gender and patriarchy. It can feel quite simple to be a trans woman in a sense; you are both trans and a woman, so there is theoretically no dispute about your status as a victim or oppressed. However, because gender essentialism is so ingrained in public consciousness and is challenging to unlearn, trans mascs may also feel a sense of guilt or despair over the idea of assuming the role of the Oppressor or confusion and rage when it becomes obvious that being a man does not necessarily protect you from violence.

Thus, transmasc liberalism often tries to bargain with gender essentialist beliefs, arguing that we’re not really men, that sometimes we’re actually more substantially Not-Men than trans women are and therefore trump the contributions that trans women make. The transmasc liberal is vaguely aware that we are somehow different from cis men and cis women but becomes upset if we’re not treated as men, or we’re not treated as women, or we’re not treated as some other kind of gender category. We’re gendered chameleons, unable to find a home, unable to understand that shared experiences with others does not negate our own gendered experience.

The waffling between how we understand our gender also appears in the aftermath of conflicts and transmasc liberalism-induced fits. Cis people are painted as violently transphobic; trans women are painted as “male-socialized”, as predators, as too triggering for someone with male-induced trauma. In the latter situation, it generally comes off as a game of projection, a way to cope with the weight of being trans by dumping it on a group who is more vulnerable, generally speaking. Once again, as Bhatt says in Degendering and Regendering, “The transfeminized serve as examples of what happens to gender traitors.”

In the final paragraph of TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism, Doyle asks: “Is your feminism about uplifting ‘women’ and putting them on the same level as ‘men’ on some imaginary playing field? Or is it about ending patriarchal oppression?” I’m sure Doyle and I would both agree that we’re interested in the latter. But transmasc liberalism -- Faux Steve Feminism -- does not expand our knowledge of patriarchy, nor does it provide a way out.

Related Readings

Black Trans Writers

Please note: the purpose of this section is to promote perspectives of Black trans writers as related to my earlier section on Hortense Spillers. This does not mean all these writers necessarily agree with each other or even with what I have written. However, I want to promote perspectives related to the intersection between anti-Blackness, race, gender, and transness from individuals who are knowledgeable and write about it more in-depth.

• For Those Seeking or in Flight: Black Trans*feminist Nihilism by g

• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton

• Writing from Nsámbu Za Suékama

• Writing from Marquis Bey

Additional Readings

• Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body - first chapter of Queering the Color Line by Siobhan Somerville

References

Bhatt, T. (2024, Sep 1). The third sex. Substack.

The Third Sex

Bhatt, T. (2024, October 8). Degendering and regendering. Substack.

The Third Sex

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). The national intimate partner and sexual violence survey: 2016/2017 Report on victimization by sexual identity. https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/nisvsreportonsexualidentity.pdf

Doyle, J. (2025, Jan 4). TERFs, trans mascs, and two steve feminism. Jude Doyle. Ghost. https://jude-doyle.ghost.io/terfs-trans-mascs-and-two-steve-feminism/

Lauritsen, J, and Heimer, K. (2012). Gender and Violent Victimization, 1973-2005 [United States] (ICPSR 27082) [Data set]. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR36966.v1

Lerner, G (1987). The Creation of Patriarchy. Oxford University Press.

Serano, J. (2016). Whipping Girl: A Transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity (2nd ed.). Seal press.

Spillers, H.J. (1987). Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book. In Warhl-Down, R. & Herndl, D.P. (Eds.), Feminisms REDUX: An anthology of literary theory and criticism. (pp. 443 - 464). Rutgers University Press.

Xu, Y., & Zheng, Y. (2017). Does Sexual Orientation Precede Childhood Sexual Abuse? Childhood Gender Nonconformity as a Risk Factor and Instrumental Variable Analysis. Sexual Abuse, 29(8), 786-802. https://doi.org/10.1177/1079063215618378