If a straight, white man said the following sentence, he would immediately be attacked as one of the most repugnant sexists to walk the earth: “To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. This means that femaleness, while it hurts only sometimes, is always bad for you.”

Yet the author of this sentence has been praised by NPR as "one of the sharpest new thinkers on gender and sexuality" and by New York magazine as "one of the most exciting critics working today."

So, why is calling females capricious and undesirable suddenly so popular? Because it's coming from a transgender woman. The media is so desperate for new, radical gender narratives that they'll promote any of them, even if that means promulgating sexism by biological males under the guise of "provocative" thinking. Well, consider me provoked.

Andrea Long Chu, a 26-year-old Ph.D. student, has become the internet's go-to promulgator of illogical gender criticism. Chu's claims may not be defensible, but at least they're attention-grabbing. “Everyone is female,” Chu proclaims in Females, a new book released last month. And “everyone hates it.”

As a woman, I find the idea of someone who was born a man telling me that I hate being female rather offensive. And not only do I supposedly hate my femaleness, but Chu argues that I am only female insofar as I care what other people think about me.

Chu's thesis in Females is simple: "Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels." In other words, being "female" has nothing to do with some intrinsic property and everything to do with the desires of others that we seek to fulfill.

Feminists supposedly care about mansplaining and patriarchy, yet few of them have anything critical to say about Chu's reduction of femaleness to what looks like plain old sexist stereotypes.

Chu even admits she's not necessarily trying to be feminist. “For the record, I’m not sure if what you’re reading is a feminist text, either,” Chu writes. “I’m not sure I want it to be.”

Chu admits to being born a man and then choosing to become a woman. Her "transition didn’t feel like coming out,” Chu told the New Republic. “It felt like just choosing to do something else. It’s not like coming out of the closet. It was just like walking from one room in your house to a different one, or maybe like moving into a new apartment.”

I’m sorry, but you can’t simply choose to identify as a woman and then tell me what my gender means. You may choose to identify however you like, but that doesn't mean the change suddenly gives you insight into the nature of womanhood.

Nevertheless, Chu is full of theories. Gender, according to Chu, is merely the “expression of someone else’s sexuality.” The philosophy is one of self-consciousness writ large, an ideology crafted to justify a painful concern with what others think. It has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with Chu's own experience.

Chu, known for her scathing book reviews, wrote of Bret Easton Ellis’s White that it was a “deeply needless book.” I wish I could say something of that kind about Females because it is worse than "needless." Its reductive perspective on gender is blatantly offensive and, for those who take it to heart, dangerous. To be female is to reflect a positive set of values, not the negation of the self. To believe otherwise is to diminish the value of all women.

But the scariest thing about Chu's book is not even its naive indifference to the truth. It's that some people actually take it seriously.