Inside, Stefánie’s world feels claustrophobic and sordid. She once made her living as a photo developer and retoucher, and delights in showing her daughter pictures of her own face montaged onto various female bodies. “Stefi in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, captured in mid plié,” Faludi writes. “Stefi in another maid’s outfit, this one belonging to a little girl, who was being disciplined by a stern schoolmarm in tweeds and lace-up boots.” Her father keeps stacks of printouts of online “forced feminization” fiction — stories in which men are turned into women as a means of sexual humiliation — with the protagonists’ names replaced by Stefánie’s own. She constantly lets her robe fall open, barges into her daughter’s room in lingerie, and objects to her sleeping with the door closed. “Because I want to be treated as a woman,” Stefánie says. “I want to be able to walk around without clothes and for you to treat it normally.”

These scenes are both unnerving and politically volatile. Many religious conservatives, as well as some groups of radical feminists, insist that trans women aren’t really women, but men with fetishes. That’s one of the rationales for discriminatory laws like the one in North Carolina, which mandates that trans people use bathrooms and locker rooms matching the gender on their birth certificates.

Beleaguered campaigners for trans rights, in turn, furiously reject the idea that anyone transitions to fulfill an erotic fixation. “A reigning tenet of modern transgenderism holds that gender identity and sexuality are two separate realms, not to be confused,” Faludi writes. Yet in her father’s fantasy world, she encounters what she calls “a transgender id in which becoming a woman was thoroughly sexualized, in which femininity was related in terms of bondage and humiliation and orgasm, and the transformation from one gender to another was eroticized at every step.”

What to make of this? Faludi searches the canon of transgender autobiography for a story that might offer insight into her father, but ends up frustrated. “The one plotline of I-have-always-been-a-woman was trumping all the other motivations that might reflect the crosscurrents of the human psyche,” she writes. She struggles to square the idea of innate femininity, which she’s not even sure exists, with her memories of her father, who had been violent and controlling in asserting masculine prerogatives.

Image Susan Faludi Credit... Sigrid Estrada

As Steven Faludi, her father had refused to let his wife work. When her parents separated, Steven smashed through the front door with a baseball bat, then repeatedly stabbed a man that Faludi’s mother was seeing. During the divorce, he turned the incident into proof that Faludi’s mother was unfaithful, which freed him from paying alimony. “As I confronted, nearly four decades and nine time zones away, my father’s new self, it was hard for me to purge that image of the violent man from her new persona,” Faludi writes.