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Our Reasons | Online Only | n+1 | Andrea Long Chu

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Like any candid analysis of a sexual subculture, this material was seized upon by some readers as lurid and inappropriate, especially given my openness. The gender-critical feminists, in particular, have held it up as a kind of smoking penis, proof of my fetishization of women and, by extension, the pathological character of all transfeminine desire. I find this very amusing. For what am I accused of? Not, it would seem, aggression, violence, control, or any of the other supposed hallmarks of toxic masculinity. On the contrary, I am imagined as a slave to my own perversions, as a narcissist fixated on my own physical appearance, as someone broken, dominated, violated, manipulated—in short, as hopelessly feminized.

The following is an edited version of the afterword of Andrea Long Chu’s Females, reissued by Verso and out this week. When my book Females first appeared in 2019, the vast majority of books by trans people were memoirs, and few of them were any good. This is still true today. The fact is that we are a young people, rapidly growing in historical consciousness but disadvantaged across every social vector, and most of us are still so occupied by the struggle to secure access to housing, employment, health care, and physical security that the question of our higher deserts—a proper literary…

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