“Everyone is female and everyone hates it”

Verso books

Chu declares ethics to be “a commitment to a bit,” which tells you everything you need to know about her vision of feminism in this book. There is no real ethical seriousness. No fundamental ameliorative vision. It’s just misery through and through, with no political will.

Andrea Long Chu’s book starts off with a surprising claim: “Everyone is female,” followed immediately by another howler: “The worst books are all by females.”

She then follows this absurdity with a long list of everything that is “female,” including many obvious non-females, indicating that her statement is not to be taken at face value. She basically says every single person or thing is female. But if everything is female, how can that be a meaningful statement? It’s like saying, “Everything is tall.”

So what’s going on here?

First of all, Chu admits, that she’s “not sure” if she wants this book to be a feminist text. That might tell you something. But what’s really going on is that Chu offers a simple thesis about what it means to be female:

“Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels. Put more simply: Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”

She clarifies this by saying “female” is “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”

This definition should give us pause. On a shallow reading, it stinks of misogyny. Why should that be the definition of a word linked to womanhood? It might be a historically significant descriptive definition but it’s definitely not a normative statement and definitely not one we should be making when doing modern feminist theory. On a deeper reading, it is a psychoanalytic attempt to make heady the idea that everyone is just as miserable existing as she is.

Chu says that when this psychic operation happens the “self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force.”

Is that it? That “females” are hollowed-out incubators? It doesn’t get her out of the accusation of misogyny to simply say “everyone” is hollowed out because she’s still making the fundamental association between this state-of-being-an-incubator with being female, a condition typically associated with womanhood. Making misogynistic claims about both men and women doesn’t negate their essential misogyny.

Chu says “femaleness…is always bad for you.” I don’t know about that. I would wager many females would disagree with that statement! And while yes, theorists are allowed to stipulate definitions of their terms, redefining them in new ways, it is impossible to take a term as widely known as “female” and simply redefine it according to misogynist stereotypes and apply it to everyone without dragging women into the mud. If we are doing normative theory, not historical analysis, then shouldn’t we be making more positive connotations for the word “female”? Perhaps she thinks that is too pedestrian.

She back-steps a little saying this isn’t about biological sex or even gender but rather a “universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness. To be is to be female: the two are identical.”

Is she really saying that all of human consciousness is a miserable suffer-fest of sacrificing yourself to other people’s desires? That sounds a bit like projection to me. Surely there is more to the varied and expansive human consciousness than that! Furthermore, if all existence is sacrificing to others, surely there are other people receiving these sacrifices and being made better? Unless she wants to claim it’s turtles all the way down, which is untenable.

Recognizing the absurdity of her central thesis, she asks: why refer to this existential condition as “female”? Her answer: “Because everyone already does.”

Um….speak for yourself?

However, it’s amazing how much self-awareness Chu has when she writes:

“Feminism opposes misogyny precisely inasmuch as it also expresses it. Or maybe I’m just projecting.(emphasis mine)”

You’d think someone arguing for an absurd thesis for a book and then basically acknowledging it stems of one’s own psychological insecurities would, perhaps, come up with another thesis for a book. But no, Chu presses forward in full self-awareness of how her central thesis stems from internalized misogyny.

However, for Chu, her statement that everyone is female is “psychoanalytically uncontroversial.” Because yeah, if Freud said it, it must be uncontroversial, right? I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t take Freud seriously when talking unironically about castration complexes.

Another howler from Chu when talking about Freud is her statement that “pussy envy” is a universal desire, which seems to be an instance of her forgetting that trans men exist. And when she says, “everyone does their best to want power, because deep down, no one wants it at all,” I take this to be another instance of obvious projection.

And speaking of projection, another howler:

“Gender transition, no matter the direction, is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy. You cannot be gorgeous without someone to be gorgeous for.”

When Chu admitted she wasn’t writing a feminist text, I guess she was right, because what kind of nonsense is this? Most trans people will tell you they did not transition for someone else, but rather, for themselves. Either to avoid suicide and depression or to jump forward into gender euphoria. But always for ourselves. To think otherwise is to buy into the seriously harmful narrative that trans people’s desires emanate from anywhere else than our own authenticity. But again, that’s probably too pedestrian for Chu, who prefers to live in a world of controversial hot takes that deviate from mainstream tropes like “trans people transition to be happy.” This, after all, someone who stated in the New York Times “There are no good transition outcomes.”

Chu’s preferred form of doing gender theory is to make outrageous generalizations that are paradoxical. For example, here she is with another hot take: “All gender is internalized misogyny.”

I don’t even know what to say about that except that it speaks volumes about her own relationship to gender.

Another: “From the perspective of gender, then, we are all dumb blondes.”

Man, I hate to say it, but it really doesn’t seem like Chu has the highest respect for women.

Another weird take on gender transition:

“If there is any lesson of gender transition — from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries — it’s that gender is something other people have to give you.”

I…just don’t know. The book is just an endless stream of statements like this e.g. attempts to subvert standard trans tropes about gender being internal. She even says how you identify subjectively is “on its own basically worthless” (albeit “precious and important”). I feel like most trans people are gonna give that a big “no.” Gender identity is not worthless just because external validation exists. She downplays the importance of identity to gender by saying “if identity were all there were to gender, transition would be as easy as thinking it.” But this statement is confusing the crucial importance of identity to gender with the ways we may or may not use transition to express our gender. But that doesn’t mean identity is “worthless” without transition. That’s just insulting to the many people who don’t transition.

Going back to the definition of “female,” to her credit, Chu does make a nice point about the biological category of “female” being constructed as distinct from gender in order for 19th-century gynecologists to perform unethical research experiments on black women in the antebellum South. She says, “In this sense, a female has always been less than a person.”

But it is precisely because of that history we are not served by reproducing it by continuing to normatively define “female” as those subservient to the desires of others.

Continuing in her taste for bizarre generalizations about gender she writes, “Isn’t that the whole point of gender — letting someone else do your living for you?” To which I reply: in what world? Where is she getting these ideas? I keep coming back to her admission that all this is projection. But I keep waiting for her to reconcile that admission with all these outrageous statements about gender.

And then, a little more than half-way through the book, I run into the most outrageous howler yet. Discussing her own pre-transition fascination with sissy porn and the pseudoscience of autogynephelia which casts trans women as perverts, Chu writes:

“Autogynephilia describes not an obscure paraphilic affliction but rather the basic structure of all human sexuality. This is not just because everyone has an erotic image of themselves as female — they do — but the assimilation of any erotic image is, by nature, female. To be female is, in every case, to become what someone else wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy.”

It’s almost as if Chu, when writing this book, thought to herself: what is the most absurd thing I could say about gender? And then wrote it down and tried to defend it. Not only is this statement giving credence to the harmful pseudoscience of autogynephilia, it’s wilfully creating an association between trans women and sissies in order to defend an abstract claim in gender theory that “everyone is female.”

I would be remiss to point out that much of the book centers around an analysis of Valerie Solanas, the author of the SCUM Manifesto and the play Up Your Ass. The book also has some nice (and often hilarious) analysis of The Matrix, Pickup artists, pornography, and the manosphere.

Chu is at her best when she’s discussing obscure feminist history and cultural commentary. She’s at her worst when she’s making proclamations about trans people, gender, and feminist theory. Which is a shame because I find her to be such a brilliant writer. If only she had stuck to an analysis of Valeria Solanas and cultural commentary, the book could have been great. But I have to dock so many points for the absurd gender takes that the book becomes almost a parody of feminist theory.

However, I imagine there will be many self-proclaimed important literary people who will take this book up and declare it to be an important manifesto on trans feminist theory. Which kinda bums me out. Chu is a good writer, no doubt, but trans feminism this book is not.