Don't Read Halberstam

I recently saw someone instruct transmisandry doubters to 'read Jack Halberstam' to understand the transmasculine condition.

Jack Halberstam is one of the first (and few) people who come to mind when I think of people who hate trans men specifically - despite his understanding of his own gender as one that is intertwined with FtM people. Indeed, Halberstamesque queer theory is responsibile for many of the community tropes denigrating transmasculine transition and those who identify as men, which are now described as transmisandric. When it comes to hating transmasculinity, the call is coming from INSIDE the building.

This essay is long, but please give it the same time to consider and reflect on that I have put into compiling it.

This is personal

When I came out in 2008, I spent 4 years in trans-heavy communities. There were no trans men. There were many trans women, and many afab genderqueer people who relied on Halberstam as their key theorist alongside Butler. I knew trans women who were transitioning medically, but I think I wasn't really aware that they were on medication - they were, unsurprisingly, private about it. None of the transmasculine people were on hormones, and I had no idea such a thing was an option.

Consequently, it did not even occur to me to transition. I tried going to a drag king workshop - you can see such a workshop in Venus Boyz, showing Halberstam's social circle. We had to 'pretend to walk like a man' and 'take up space'. It was alienating and upsetting. I continued to date cis men as a cis woman, fairly happily. I got picked on for this by non-transitioning genderqueer friends, who also misgendered their male partners due to insecurity about their own straight-adjacency (these men were both trans and cis). Several friends decided to start 'they'ing me, but I didn't so much as try to bind. Everyone could smell egg, but I saw nothing in this vision of lesbian-adjacent-gender-non-conformity which I recognised or wanted.

Eventually, under my own steam, I discovered trans men, who were men, who were MEN the way other men were men. I can't overstate how little room there was for this idea in 2008. The idea of a gay trans man was unthinkable. I came out immediately.

In the intervening time between 2008 and 2015, the waiting list for healthcare ballooned from 6 months to eight years. I lost 15 years of my life. I will never access lower surgery.

When I see Jack Halberstam recommended - not as an expert on certain kinds of genderqueer experience, but as a key theorist for understanding transmasculine oppression as a whole, I take it extremely personally. I remember where I was when I read Female Masculinity (the front of the DLR coming out of Tower Gateway at night), so vivid was the distress.

Having worked for some time as a librarian of a trans collection and read everything I could get my hands on, Halberstam's framework is in fact the dominant one in theory. When I saw conversations about transandrophobia start up, I thought good: as there is no good theory about trans men. What's happened in those conversations over time, however, is the arc has bent back towards errors we already made in the 90s and 00s.

When I go to queer-heavy spaces now, I continue to be the only trans man in the room. I am the only trans man within 70km on Grindr. I am only trans man at my queer kink social meetup. I am the only trans man on Feeld within 70km. I am wholly outnumbered by non-trans-men in my fandom communities. In other words, the social pressure to remain in some way female-adjacent, to fear manhood, which Halberstam et al promoted, still defines our community. We need the next generation of transmasculine theory, which does not do this!

Just to acknowledge my subject position here, I believe in political solidarity based on shared experience, not shared identity. At times, I am in a political class with gender-non-conforming afabs, butches, trans butches and transmasculine people; at other times, I am in a class only with other trans men, with other queer men, with men generally; with all trans people, or with physically transitioning people. All these things are true at different times. At other times, I have privilege over, or under, all these different groups, depending on the topic: it's always contextual. But in my personal sense-of-self, I have never even briefly seen myself in butches or felt like we had a shared history or identity; this is not in conflict with others who do. I do not think I need to feel myself to be a butch in my personal life to show up politically or recognise shared material oppressions. I am a binary man, but one who has been genderqueered by an oppressive society; I am a nelly queen and in the contrast between that and my manhood I am transgender; and, crucially, I am seriously disabled without access to testosterone - I see biopoltics and solidarity with the disabled and drug users as inherent to my experience of transition.

Halberstam's focus is on a different kind of transmasculinity - fine & valuable - but when they come to consider FTM people, their attitude is existentially threatening. Their value as a thinker on a certain kind of transgender experience, and especially as someone who documented particular queer scenes at an interesting time and place - is fundamentally let down by their unacknolwedged anxieties and biases around physical transition and binary identification.

Key Ideas

Halberstam's framework for what a trans person is, is {a cisgender person who has done something creative with gender}. They do not seem to believe that trans people literally change sex, or can meaningfully be a person of another sex.

Halberstam over-fits his own personal experience of gender to all transmasculine people. Their own 'favourite' gender might best be described as 'afab, masc-of-center, genderfluid, lesbian, non-op'.

Key issues in Female Masculinity:

1. They include FTM people in a book on female masculinity. FTM people are not female. They do not acknowledge this error (for example, they don't begin the chapter by explaining why FTM people are relevant to a wider story of female masculinity). Equally, they do not include MTF people in their book - even though a chapter on transfem butches would be an electrifying addition to a book on female gender-non-conformity.

2. They seem to view all afab trans people as ultimately of the same 'raw material', the same 'underlying constituency' - each equally capable of making any choice about their future gender. Any egg could be happy as a butch or as an FTM. Therefore, there is a moral and political dimension to which one they 'choose'. They do not consider that a person who is FTM may be fundamentally of a different 'raw material' to a person who is a butch. Halberstam seems to have no conception of a person with such crushing genital dysphoria, he puts down the cost of a sports car to resolve it, and sees it as a situation which could equally have been resolved with a good bow tie.

3. Because Halberstam sees sex as immutable, but gender as an open choice, their moral/political reading of gender means there are 'good' genders and 'bad' genders. Throughout the chapter, Halberstam's approach is to contrast butches - radical female masculinity, which is dissonant and challenging and threatens the gender binary - to FTMs - conservative female masculinity, which 'resolves' the interest of being a butch into the ' normalcy' of a binary man. Halberstam's influential book is a root cause of 'transitioning is bad, why not be a GNC girl?' memes in queer communities.

4. As Halberstam isn't paying real attention to FTMs as a group, they do not consider that FTM transition is in its own way, radical, dissonant and destabilising for someone to wholly transition physically; or for someone to live as a man with transgender characteristics; or that FTM people can be queer and creative with their male genders post-transition.

5. Additionally, their 'compare and contrast' approach is poor politics. It is uninteresting. They could have discussed shared material oppressions experienced by masculine afab people, looked at FTM people with butch histories, or put emphasis on when butch & FTM overlaps. They do none of these things. They state that they wish to end antagonism between these two groups and demonstrate the shared ground, but their attitude is defensive and antagonistic throughout.

Halberstam uses a range of pronouns, and while their own gender is valid and important, it is also very revealing of the mistakes they are about to make about FtM experience. Here is Halberstam's description of their own name change:

When I was doing all that research on drag kings, I was like, well I’m not going to be Judith in this world of genderqueerness, I’m going by a male name. And at that point, I kind of wish I’d gone with the name Jude, because it would’ve been an easier transition for everybody, and for me too, and instead I just picked a very masculine name, I picked Jack, and now it’s stuck. So I’m Jack. But now I’m going more and more by Jack—I’m not transitioning, necessarily, but I’m in a lot of genderqueer contexts where people do gender by gender preference, not by your body, and I totally appreciate that. But then I suddenly had to face up to the question of whether Jack was my preferred name or not. So some people call me Jack, my sister calls me Jude, people who I’ve known forever call me Judith—I try not to police any of it. A lot of people call me he, some people call me she, and I let it be a weird mix of things and I’m not trying to control it.

...It’s not totally important to my understanding of self that other people read me as a man. It’s important that they read me as masculine, and it’s important that they read me in some way that I’m at odds with female embodiment. But it’s also important that they read me as someone who is not going to have that tension resolved by getting some surgeries.

This is valid, but it is also revealing of their limitations as a gender theorist. They write as if all transgender people had this experience.

For example:

People with the same characteristics as Halberstam can generate good theory, informed by reading the experiences of others. But Halberstam cannot. He is personally and politically limited as a theorist and thinker. He also fails to identify his subject-position within the chapter (although perhaps does so elsewhere in the book), taking an objective stance where, in reality, his abstract and political judgements about the value of various transitions is a mask for his personal desires.

And crucially, Halberstam's gender ideal is perhaps the most privileged within trans communities - staying adjacent to cissexual identity, with one foot in transgender identity and the other in cis womanhood, in a way which maintains both their cis privilege to be heard at all, with a passport to speak on transgender issues.

What ought the politics of transmasc people look like?

At the very least, it must:

  1. Include trans men as a key concern
  2. Reject any ranking or judging of identities as 'good' or 'bad'
  3. Recognise medical, non-medical and mixed transitions
  4. Be well informed about the topic
  5. Be rooted in practical support & liberation for human beings first and foremost, over abstraction
  6. Consider how it interacts with trans women's issues
  7. Avoid treating intersectionality as an afterthought

Female Masculinity

Now let's close-read chapter 5. For younger readers, I want to note that Halberstam uses language in this way:

I use the same definitions in this essay so me & the text use terminology in similar ways.

At first glance, a modern reader might assume Halberstam is going to talk about non-binary people undertaking physical transition; in fact, to a surprising extent, this is both excluded and demonised by the text. In Halberstam's framework, he typically associates transgender people with what we would call 'non-binary' genders and politically provocative genders; he associates transsexual people with 'binary' genders and conservative gender roles.

This chapter is subtitled 'the masculine continuum'. From the start, Halberstam's base assumption is that all afab masculinities are similar, differing only in degree.

I have nowhere else to note it, so I'll just note it here: observe how Halberstam never quotes butch theorists or people, or relays essays or books about butch people. In this text, Halberstam is the Voice of the Butch and needs no other contradictory or complimentary butch theorists. In contrast, FTM texts and theories are repeatedly brought up, as an outside experience that need analysis - and always, to critique.

Halberstam first references Jacob Hale's rules for non-transsexuals writing on transsexual topics, and identifies himself as a non-transsexual. See how you feel he does at following Hale's advice.

In 1995 the BBC broadcast a series called The Wrong Body. One episode in the series dealt with a young person called Fredd, a biological female, who claimed to have been born into the wrong body. Nine-year-old Fredd claimed that "she" was really a male and demanded that his family, friends, teachers, and other social contacts deal with him as a boy. The program followed Fredd's quest for gender reassignment over a period of three years until at age twelve, Fredd trembled on the verge of female puberty. Fredd expressed incredible anxiety about the possibility that his efforts to be resocialized as a male were to be thwarted by the persistence of the flesh, and he sought hormone-blocking drugs to stave off the onset of puberty and testosterone shots to produce desired male secondary characteristics in and on his body. The BBC program dealt with Fredd's condition as a medical problem that presented certain ethical conundrums when it came to prescribing treatment. Should Fredd be forced to be a woman before he could decide to become a man? Could a twelve year old know enough about embodiment, gender, and sexuality to demand a sex change? What were the implications of Fredd's case for other seemingly commonplace cases of tomboyism?

The chapter begins with Halberstam throwing doubt on the agency of a transgender child. In 2023, we would regard this as garden variety transphobia. Fredd's self-knowledge is questioned; he is described as a 'biological female'; and his healthcare as an 'ethical conundrum'. The spectre of Fredd being a misdiagnosed tomboy is raised.

We watched as Fredd carefully reeducated his doctor about the trials and tribulations of gender dysphoria and led his doctor through the protocols of gender reassignment, making sure that the doctor used the correct gender pronouns and refusing to allow the doctor to regender him as female. The doctor suggested at various moments that Fredd may be experiencing a severe stage of tomboy identification and that he may change his mind about his gender identity once his sexuality developed within a female adolescent growing spurt. Fredd firmly distinguished for the doctor between sexuality and gender and insisted that his sexual preference would make no difference to his sense of a core male gender identity. The doctor sometimes referred to Fredd by his female name and was calmly corrected as Fredd maintained a consistent and focused sense of himself as male and as a boy.

Fredd gives the clearest articulation of what it is to be a trans man we will see in this chapter, and is evidently an unusually brave and self-posessed young person, to seek physical transition at the age of 12 in the year 1995.

A trans ally worthy of the name would affirm Fredd's gender, note his personal strength, and critique the rudeness and obstruction of the medical system he is confined by. How does Halberstam do?

although the BBC interviewers did not push in these directions, questions about childhood cross-identification, about the effects of visible transsexualities, and about early childhood gender selection all crowded in on the body of this young person.

In other words, Halberstam unsettled by the documentary, and is 'just asking questions' about what it all might mean.

What gender is Fredd as he waits for his medical authorization to begin hormones?

Fredd is male. Halberstam has just noted that Fredd sees himself as male, and dislikes people doubting it; but the voice of the adult academic is to drown out the transsexual subject in this chapter.

What kind of refusal of gender and what kind of confirmation of conventional gender does Fredd's battle with the medical authorities represent?

This will be a key theme within the chapter. Halberstam is concerned with 'radical' genders, such as non-transitioning political genderqueers, and 're-normativising' genders, like binary post-operative transsexuals.

Finally, what do articulations of the notion of a wrong body and the persistent belief in the possibility of a "right" body register in relation to the emergence of other genders, transgenders?

The notion of 'born in the wrong' body is a key site of critique for trans thinkers. However, as we shall see, Halberstam's approach is going to be to downplay the necessity or radicalism of physical transition at every turn. Fredd is not asking for the Platonic ideal of a 'right body', in which a disruptive masculine womanhood is given conversion therapy into an appropriate, uncomplicated male identity. Fredd just wants to feel ok in his own skin.

This desire is a fundamental tenet of trans struggle. Halberstam's attitude is indivisible from contemporary TERF anti-transmasc talking points: that all transmascs are attempting to 'correct' the lesbian or female body due to misogyny or other social pressures.

We are not off to a good start

At least one of the issues I want to take up here is what model of masculinity is at stake in debates between butches and FTMS and what, if anything, separates butch masculinity from transsexual masculinities. I will examine some of the identifications that we have argued about (the stone butch in particular) and attempt to open dialogue between FTM and butch subject positions that allows for cohabitation in the territories of queer gender.

Halberstam uses all these concepts interchangeably; but they are not.

Butch masculinity, transsexual masculinity, stone butch and FTM are four meaningfully different positions - that overlap in some people, and yet must also be understood separately

Halberstam fails to articulate between these at any point in the text. They talk about butch as if it was an exclusively afab category. They see butches-and-FTMs as essentially the same gender and sex. And if at any stage someone seeks physical intervention, they view it with suspicion.

In 1994 I published an essay called "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity" in a volume called The Lesbian Postmodem. The avowed intention of the article was to examine the various representations of transsexual bodies and transgender butch bodies that surfaced around 1990 to 1991, largely within lesbian contexts. The essay was speculative and concentrated on films, videos, and narratives about gender-ambiguous characters. Much to my surprise, the essay was regarded with much suspicion and hostility by some members of FTM International, a San Francisco-based transsexual men's group; these reactions caused me to look carefully at the kinds of assumptions I was making about trans sexuality and about the kinds of continuities or overlaps that I presumed between the categories of FTM and butch. My intention here is not to apologize for that essay

Halberstam begins by saying they have already published some of this material, and they were called out by an FTM magazine. They state that their critics did not understand what they said, and they will therefore re-state their argument here - in print. Just get a sense of timeline, she wrote an essay in 1994 which was badly received by the trans people it describes, and yet chooses to re-iterate it in 1998 for this book.

As Halberstam views all afab trans people as essentially the same, they are unaware that there are privileges and disprivileges within this group. In fact, most academic work on trans men is done by afab masculine queer people who are not transitioning medically and who do not identify as men. Halberstam is unaware that maintaining 'cissexual adjacency' gives them a certain privilege - they have not lost years of their life to ill health due to lack of access to hormones, nor have they had to put their education budget towards accessing basic medical care and dignity. They also seem unaware that a certain masculinity is rewarded in women in white collar environments, when it reinforces racial & class power. Halberstam does not consider the power imbalance between their access to the academy and publication, vs trans men who are confined to a small-print-run community magazine. Halberstam will have the last word on trans men's experiences that will define the next two decades of transmasculine organising.

While neither cis nor trans is a stable and uncomplex term to describe Halberstam’s gender position - what IS stable is that he’s now a tenured professor and published author, and the critiques from entire FTM communities haven’t put any kind of dent in his career (he's still publishing! He's still being cited as the essential thinker to understand trans men!). One would hope the population you are writing about vocally disagreeing with your stance would change how your work is received, or cause you to rethink; neither has occurred. In fact, this kind of casual disregard for trans men in particular is endemic in queer/feminist theory; trans women, at least, have broken through to speak with their own voice; but trans men, on the whole, are still being spoken about. Transfeminine theory is more advanced than our own because trans women insist they are women, and that leads them to new and more interesting places. In contrast, little of what emerges as transmasculine theory starts from a belief that trans men are men and non-binary people are non-binary, and therefore not in any sense politically some kind of woman, and so it becomes 'stuck' on copy-pasting the phrase 'and transmasculine people' into existing feminist texts. For whatever reason, Halberstam has maintained unquestioned access to institutional power; and while it’s a little ungenerous to call that cis privilege, but on the other hand, I’m uncertain of what else you would call it.

Halberstam continues:

In "F2M," I attempted to describe the multiple versions of masculinity that seemed to be emerging simultaneously out of both lesbian and transsexual contexts. My project was not a fact-finding ethnography about FTM; nor did it examine the mechanics, trials, tribulations, benefits, and necessities of body alteration. Rather, I asked discursive and possibly naive questions such as: Why, in this age of gender transitivity, when many queers and feminists have agreed that gender is a social construct, is transsexuality a widespread phenomenon? Why has there been so little discussion of the shared experiences of masculine lesbians and FTMS? And, finally, why are we not in what Sandy Stone has called a "posttranssexual era"? My questions presumed that some forms of transsexuality represented gender essentialism, but from this assertion, some people understood me to be saying that butchness was postmodern and subversive whereas transsexualism was dated and deluded. I think, rather, that I was trying to create a theoretical and cultural space for the trans gender butch that did not presume transsexuality as its epistemological frame. I was also implicitly examining the possibility of the non-operated-upon trans gender person.

You can see at once, I think, why those questions would not have been well received.

Halberstam is not sure why their “attempt to ask discursive questions” was received as rude, but is not going to let that stop them doing so again here.

Halberstam is setting up the base arguments of contemporary TERF ideology which targets transmasculine people. They want to consider 'the non-operated-upon transgender person' and create space for a new way of thinking about transgender people which is not 'transsexual'.

In 1994 there must, in fact, have been many 'non-operated-upon' transgender people, as access to healthcare has always been a struggle - especially lower surgeries; but Halberstam seems not to know this or consider actually-existing-non-operated-upon men as a group to ask about their experiences and ideas. He does include Fredd & documents Fredd's distress at lack of access to healthcare, but this is not the kind of 'non-operated-upon' person who is valid within this essay. What Halberstam is actually proposing is a category of person who does not want a medical transition, but he is incapable of discussing this as a subtype of transmasculine experience. Instead, he desires it as the entire 'territory'.

My article was received, as I suggested, as a clumsy and ignorant attack on the viability of FTM transsexuality, and there was a small debate about it in the pages of the FTM Newsletter. The editor, James Green, took me to task for speaking for FTMS, and in a review essay, a writer called Isabella cast me in the role of the lesbian feminist who wanted transsexuals to disappear within some postmodern proliferation of queer identities.' Isabella noted that I focused on film and video in my essay (on representations, in other words, as opposed to "real" accounts), and she accused me offailing to integrate the real lives and words of "the successfully integrated post-op FTM" into my theory.s She went on to suggest that I was not interested in the reality of transsexuality because "it is the fluidity, the creation and dissolution of gender 'fictions' that is so fascinating"

Isabella's critique is spot on. Halberstam's attitude to this topic is:

One academic tic repeated throughout the essay is Halberstam claiming his critics misunderstood and represented his argument ('I never said that') and moments later, saying exactly that. In other words, they are not capable of taking a critcism and modifying their ideas in response. Instead, they explain their critic misunderstood then re-state their original point.

I feel for Halberstam in a sense of, trying to articulate this genderqueerish middle space before there were really words for it; but at the same time, this doesn’t excuse persisting in speaking as a trans spokesperson while ignoring critique from other trans people, and the broader umbrella of trans experience. Halberstam's books in 2018 repeat these errors, long after new frameworks have been widely developed and shared. In other words: this is no longer explicable as a lack of language or political models, it's a deep-rooted preference for how to think of all transmasculinity.

Needless to say, I have learned a great deal from these various interactions and textual conversations, and I want to use them here to resituate "F2M: The Making of Female Masculinity" in terms of a continuing "border war," to use Gayle Rubin's term, between butches and FTMS. In this chapter, I try again to create an interpretive model of transgender butchness that refuses to invest in the notion of some fundamental antagonism between lesbian and FTM subjectivities

“Needless to say, I acknowledge your disagreement, but I’m going to plough on anyway because I’m sure if you really listen to me this time, you’ll agree that lesbian women and transgender men really do have the same subjective experiences”

Halberstam's phrasing is really promising. Antagonism is bad, and there is indeed a kind of person who resists easy categorisation as either FTM or lesbian. However, Halberstam is in fact deeply 'invested in fundamental antagonism' between these categories, and that is the tone for the rest of the chapter.

Halberstam's fatal flaw is not to accept that there are some lesbian and some FTM people who understand themselves as essentially distinct - a fact that is not inherently antagonistic and need not be expressed as antagonism.

However, another strand of male transsexualism has produced a new discourse on masculinity that depends in part on startlingly conservative pronouncements about the differences between themselves and transgender butches. These conservative notions are betrayed in the tendency of some transsexual males to make distinct gender assignations to extremely and deliberately gender-ambiguous bodies, and this tendency has a history within transsexual male autobiography; indeed, the denigration of the category "butch" is a standard feature of the genre.

Halberstam reserves the right to make gender assignations to the deliberately gendered bodies of trans men at every turn in order to misgender them.

Let's see an example Halberstam gives of a trans man 'denigrating the category butch':

In Mario Martino's autobiography Emergence, Martino goes to great lengths to distinguish himself from lesbians and from butches in particular as he negotiates the complications of pretransition identifications. Before his transition, Mario falls in love with a young woman; she tells the girlfriend, Becky: "You and I are not lesbians. We relate to each other as man to woman, woman to man." One day, Becky comes home from work and asks: "Mario, what's a butch?". Mario writes, "I could actually feel my skin bristle". Becky tells Mario that the head nurse on the ward where Becky works asked her about her "butch," and in effect she wants to know the difference between Mario and a butch. Mario gives her a simple answer: "A butch is the masculine member of a lesbian team. That would make you the feminine member. But, Becky, honest-to-God, I don't feel that we're lesbians. I still maintain I should have been a male". Becky seems satisfied with the answer, but the question itself plagues Mario long into the night: "The word butch magnified itself before my eyes. Butch implied female - and I had never thought of my self as such". In Emergence, lesbianism haunts the protagonist and threatens to swallow his gender specificity and disallow his transsexuality. Unfortunately, as we see in the passages I have quoted, Martino's efforts to disentangle his maleness from lesbian masculinity tend to tum butchness into a stable female category and tend to overemphasize the differences between butch womanhood and transsexual manhood.

Here, Mario critiques Halberstam's own framing of the transmasculine constituency in the same way I have - Mario's strongest sense is that he is not 'feminine', not 'part of a lesbian team', not 'female'. Mario is articulating for himself that he does not wish to be included in the text Female Masculinity.

This is the kind of self-identification Halberstam sees as 'antagonism'. However, I do not think Mario would see it that way. Mario is very clear that he is different to lesbians, and therefore, not in any kind of tension with them - Mario is no more a lesbian than an elephant or a car is a lesbian. Nor does Mario 'denigrate' butches - he's not rude or cruel about them, he merely states his own discomfort at being grouped with a category he is not. Halberstam's framing is that FTM & Butch are two groups at war over the same essential territory - and as there can only be one winner, anyone articulating FTM as separate is causing disunity and a potential threat to Halberstam's preferred gender-radicalism 'winning' as the framework for all people in the territory.

But this is an easy error to avoid: if Halberstam was to acknowledge FTM is a wholly different sort of person, then they would represent neither disunity nor a potential threat to female masculinities. You can’t start a theory by repeatedly grouping people together who refuse that categorisation, and then get angry at them for understanding themselves in a way that does not fit.

Halberstam critiques Martino for 'turning butchness into a stable female category'. This is revealing of Halberstam's overall worldview. Stable categories are boring, fluid ones are radical. Remember here that Halberstam's ideal model for a transgender person is 'non-operated-upon' - in other words, the butches he is describing are ideally not pursuing physical transition. Halberstam's butch is not in a 'stable female category' and yet is female enough to be encapsulated by 'female masculinity'. The underlying attitude is a cissexist one: the personal genders of afab female masculine people transcend straightforward womanhood, and yet they are still socially and politically women where it counts. This is profoundly at odds with the key thesis of transsexual politics, that one is literally not the gender and sex one was assigned at birth.

Does Mario 'make distinct gender assignations to extremely and deliberately gender-ambiguous bodies'? Close-reading this passage, he is in fact quite careful to avoid calling butches 'women' in a straightforward way. Butch 'implies' female and 'is a masculine member of a lesbian team'. This is a precise choice of words which keeps many gendered possibilities open within butch as a category; and Halberstam cannot object to 'female' as he describes all his masculine afab subjects with this word in the title of his book.

Does Mario 'overemphasize the differences between butch womanhood and transsexual manhood'? In fact, he doesn't even really describe them. He says nothing in the passage about what about his body, life, mind or behaviour is different from a butch - only a gut-knowledge that butch is the wrong category for him.

In his desperation to hold the terms "lesbian" and "transsexual" apart, however, Rees...marks out the difference in terms of sexual aim as well as sexual and gender identity; he focuses, in other words, on the partner of the transsexual male for evidence of the distinctiveness of transsexual maleness. Rees claims to find a medical report confirming that lesbians and transsexuals are totally different...It added that the partners of female-to-males are normal heterosexual women, not lesbians, and see their lovers as men, in spite of their lack of a penis. The partners were feminine, many had earlier relations with genetic males and often experienced orgasms with their female-to-male partners for the first time"

Halberstam suggests there is something noteworthy about a straight man seeking straight women as partners - and vice versa - and seems to experience it as a kind of attack. As Halberstam views all transmascs as essentailly the same, the idea of a woman attracted to trans men but not available to other afab people, seems to bring up an (unacknowledged) anxiety about their own desirability Halberstam's own anxiety around the desire to transition physically also comes through. He sees all transmascs as the same raw material, and views non-medical transition as politically superior; he must therefore cast doubt on why a straight woman would be more attracted to a transsexual man with broad shoulders and a beard, and yet not to a transgender person who identifies as masculine but prefers to situate themselves politically with women.

He frames trans men's desire for a relationship in which their gender is seen and affirmed as politically suspect.

Rees's categorical distinctions between lesbians and partners of transsexual men and both his and Martino's horror of the slippage between homosexual and transsexual also echo in various informal bulletins that circulate on transsexual discussion lists on the Internet. In some bulletins, transsexual men send each other tips on how to pass as a man, and many of these tips focus almost obsessively on the care that must be taken by the transsexual man not to look like a butch lesbian. Some tips tell guys to dress preppy as opposed to the standard jeans and leather jacket look of the butch; in other instances, transsexual men are warned against certain haircuts (punk styles or crew cuts) that are supposedly popular among butches. These tips, obviously, steer the transsexual man away from transgression or alternative masculine styles and toward a conservative masculinity. One wonders whether another list of tips should circulate advising transsexual men of how not to be mistaken for straight, or worse a Republican or a banker. Most of these lists seem to place no particular political or even cultural value on the kinds of masculinity they mandate.

Halberstam has observed that this is an important priority to most transgender men; but will presume to judge it as negative anyway. He is incapable of taking seriously the truth that trans men are men, and that to be percevied as a lesbian is fundamentally at odds with that goal.

Halberstam does not understand why appearing normatively masculine might be desired or required of trans men. The pleasure of passing as a man is a key goal of transsexual men. When one has been denied access to any kind of masculine embodiment or acknowledgement, the simple delight of looking like an everybloke is the reward for all you suffered to get where you are. It can be necessary to keep a job, find a partner, and be safe on the street. Normative fits help achieve this goal, especially in early transition where your appearance is dubious and your knowledge of mens fashions inexperienced. Halberstam places disproportionate weight on trans men as 'reinforces' of patriarchy, rather than potential victims of it: a common complaint in contemporary trans 'bulletin boards' is how to balance self-expression against the confinement of normative menswear required to pass. The person first and most impacted by restrictive male gender norms is the trans man himself - not society at large.

This is as good an example as any of the 'antagonism' Halberstam said he intended to reject. He compares transsexual men who wish to pass as men unfavourably with afab transgender people whose masculinity is by nature visible and experimental.

Throughout the text, Halberstam implies that lesbian is not really a female category. There is a long & wise history of this idea, in better books. Yet just as he undermines the reality of trans men's identification with men, he also rules out butch and lesbian identification with women. It is important for some butches NOT to be seen as a man, and their desire for women to be seen as extremely distinct from patriarchal desire. For Halberstam, the desire to differentiate yourself from a cis man is natural and does not need to be remarked upon. It is only trans men's desire to differentiate themselves from traditional women's communities which is suspect.

He does not consider that navigating similarity and difference to cis men might be a fraught and much-discussed situation within trans men's communities.

Finally, in relation to the conservative project of making concrete distinctions between butch women and transsexual males, such distinctions all too often serve the cause of hetero-normativity by consigning homosexuality to pathology and by linking transsexuality to a new form of heterosexuality. In a popular article on transsexual men that appeared in the New Yorker, for example, reporter Amy Bloom interviews several transsexual men...she comments on the multiple, highly invasive surgeries required for sex reassignment from female to male.

Bloom spends much time detailing the looks of the men she interviews: a young transsexual man, Lyle, is "a handsome, shaggy graduating senior," and James Green is a chivalrous man with a "Jack Nicholson smile"; Loren Cameron is "a not uncommon type of handsome, cocky, possibly gay man" with "a tight, perfect build"; Luis is a "slightly built, gentle South American man". So what, you might think, these are some important descriptions of what transsexual men look like. They look, in fact, like other men, and Bloom quickly admits that she finds herself in flirtatious heterosexual dynamics with her charming companions, dynamics that quickly shore up the essential differences between men and women.

Bloom's descriptions of her interviewees and her accounts of her interactions with them raise questions about mainstream attitudes toward male transsexuals versus mainstream attitudes toward masculine lesbians. Would Bloom, in a similar article on butch lesbians, comment so approvingly on their masculinity? Would she notice a woman's muscular build, another butch's wink, another's "Jack Nicholson smile"? Would she be aware of their eating habits, their mechanical aptitudes? The answer, of course, is a resounding "no," and indeed I find confirmation for my suspicions further down the page. Bloom reflects on her meetings with these handsome transsexual men as follows:

"I expected to find psychologically disturbed, male-identified women so filled with self-loathing that it had even spilled into their physical selves, leading them to self-mutilating, self-punishing surgery. Maybe I would meet some very butch lesbians, in ties and jackets and chest binders, who could not, would not accept their female bodies. I didn't meet these people. I met men."

As before, Halberstam sees heterosexual female attraction to transgender men as threatening. When he sees an article about trans men, his first point of comparison is not other men - but butches.

Halberstam does not read this article from a trans man's perspective. An article which shares details of 'invasive surgeries' and goes on to focus on the visual appearance of transgender people is a hackneyed template for cis people writing on trans topics - far more common with trans women, to be sure, but the pattern is identical here. Nor does he notice that Bloom's comments are really quite patronising - albeit, intended supportively. In some anecdotes, she is reminded of her husband. In many ways, Bloom reveals the ways she does not see her subjects as men - is it usual for married women to gush over hot men who are husband material in print? Or is this only possible because a trans man is not 'fully man' the way a cis man is, and therefore cannot threaten the stability of her heterosexual union. It would be unusual for a woman to write such an article about cis men!

Halberstam is discussing FtM identity, and yet his example here is all in Bloom's voice. How onlookers read the genders of trans men is not a problem produced within transmasculine discourse - if Bloom is incapable of understanding what she sees without recourse to heterosexism, it does not mean these men are. In fact Bloom comments that one man reads as gay to her - in other words, he has NOT followed the style guide to look like a Republican banker, he is displaying an alternative masculinity and a challenge to heterosexism. Bloom's article does not reflect the complexities of conversations these men may have among themselves in private. It is likely that they deliberately simplified their politics and presentations to 'educate' a cis outsider.

Halberstam only mentions gay or bisexual FtM men once in this chapter, towards the end, describing a film of a ftm support group in which no participants are gay.

One quirk appearing throughout this essay is referring to trans men as 'males' as a covert misgendering tactic. An example is at the start of this quote - contrasting 'butch women and transsexual males'. In this quote, he refers to butches as 'butch women' to paraphrase the imagined voice of a trans man who is forcing butch into a 'stable woman category' - and yet he remains incapable of imagining or documenting this imagined person's self-description as a 'transsexual man'.

What a relief for Bloom that she was spared interaction with those selfhating masculine women and graced instead by the dignified presence of men! Posttransition, we must remember at all times, many transsexual men become heterosexual men, living so-called normal lives, and for folks like Amy Bloom, this is a cause for some celebration.

This stab of sarcasm is needlessly cruel, and dismissive of trans men's desires in terms that none of the FTMs he quotes as 'denigrating' butches even approach. Trans men's masculinity is deliberate, fought-for, and a source of pride. To live as a man is the specific goal of FtM transition, for the kinds of men Bloom met. It is nothing to do with butches - as in, when a man transitions, he does not do it 'at' butches, he just does it.

There is no 'resolution of antagonism' in describing other queer lives this way, and is basically ignorant of what a trans man even is.

Bloom does not actually say she dreaded meeting self-hating masculine women, nor that she thinks it is better for an afab to transition to male than to live as a transgender butch. This is projection by Halberstam. Bloom, in fact, separates the imagined 'self-hating, psychologically disturbed male-identified woman' from 'butches who don't accept their bodies' - but Halberstam rolls them into one phrase, and takes from it a form of hatred specifically targeted at the butch. In fact, Bloom is describing her initial preconceptions and prejudices she had about trans men - and which she knows her (presumed-to-be cis) reader will also have. Halberstam has no knowledge or understanding about trans men, and so does not recognise that Bloom's assumption trans men would be women as a baseline belief driving their oppression.

As a reverse discourse takes shape around the definitions of transsexual and transgender, it is extremely important to recognize the queerness of these categories, their instability and their interpretability. While identity obviously continues to be the best basis for political organizing, we have seen within various social movements of the last decade that identity politics must give way to some form of coalition if a political movement is to be successful. The current discourse in some transsexual circles, therefore, of setting up gay and lesbian politics and communities as the enemy to transgender definition is as pernicious as the gay and lesbian tendencies to ignore the specificities of transsexual political needs and demands

This is basically correct, and yet Halberstam's vision of queer instability is really a mask for the kinds of stability he views as most real. Nowhere in this chapter is the transgender woman butch considered. Nowhere is it considered that trans men might have most in common with gay and bi men.

Halberstam views the tension between gay and trans politics as a two-way street. This throwaway line does not hold up to scrutiny, or acknowledge what the tensions are or the reasons they exist, or note the imbalance of power between establishment GLB activism and transsexuals. Have transsexuals 'set up gay and lesbian politics as the enemy', or have gay and lesbian politics actually been a traditional enemy to trans liberation? Halberstam experiences productive & functional spaces for masculine lesbian gender diversity, as I have in my own life; but that does not follow that other gay-transgender interactions are untroubled. He mentions trans-woman-exclusive-lesbianism once earlier in the essay, but does not recognise the through-line between that exclusion and his own agenda. To read all trans masculinity as ontologically female and interchangeable with the lesbian as a kind of radical-afab-non-woman identity is to shut amab people out of lesbian, feminist, and female gender radicalism. Gay ftms are not on his radar.

My intent in this chapter is not to vilify male transsexualism as simply a reconsolidation of dominant masculinity. But I do want to point carefully to the places where such a reconsolidation threatens to take place

Can’t imagine why the FTM community of 1994 did not take well to Halberstam’s theory!

Halberstam's argument is that identifying as a transgender men is a threat to gender radicalism. If people identify as trans men, rather than as Halberstam's preferred 'genderfluid masculine cis woman' archetype, we lose an opportunity to challenge societal gender norms. Halberstam does not know that most physically transitioning transgender people are on some level, uninterested in challenging society as a primary motivation - although it is often an additional facet of their experience, politics and personal choices. Trans men's transitions to men are not a 'reconsolidation of dominant masculinity' which must be resisted - they are first and foremost, people making the best choice open to them to live without suffering.

Halberstam's argument here is, in fact, at odds with most contemporary transandrophobia theory - which stresses the ways trans masculinities and cis masculinities are different. This alone is a challenge to Halberstam as recommended reading for transandrophobia theory. Halberstam is not open to the ways a transitioned man challenges dominant masculinity.

Having argued strenuously that transsexual autobiographies collude in the construction of notions of an authentic sex, Hausman attempts to ease off her critical tone and express some empathy for the transsexual condition. She comments earnestly: "Those of us who are not transsexuals may wonder what it is like to feel oneself in the 'wrong body'" (174). The idea that only transsexuals experience the pain of a "wrong body" shows an incredible myopia about the trials and tribulations of many varieties of perverse embodiment. It neatly ascribes gender confusion and dysphoria once again to transsexuals and efficiently constructs a model of "right body" experience that applies, presumably, to people such as Hausman.

Here again, Halberstam lays the foundation for contemporary TERF politics. He wilfully mixes up the crude abstraction of 'being in a wrong body' transsexual people use to demand access from a world that's confused by them, with literally any body or gender discomfort - and political frameworks of 'correct' sexes and genders.

As with the Bloom article, Halberstam is taking things other people say about transsexuals as attributing it as a problem innate to transsexuality. He does not acknowledge that, in private, most transsexuals discuss their sex and gender in very different ways to what they say to gender doctors. Most transsexuals try and articulate the tricky balance between critiquing the 'wrong body' model yet also asserting that they need medical transition the way others need water. He does not acknowledge that non-transsexual people reacting to transsexuality is a burden on the transsexual first and foremost: for example, that we are a key group harmed by Hausman's implication of a 'right body' (whether I am seen in terms of my failure to have a 'right body' as a natal woman, or as a failure to accomplish a 'right body' as a transitioned man)

Halberstam's own uncertainty about the spectre of physical transition continues to haunt his thinking. As all transgender people are essentially the same, the types of dysphoria must be essentially the same - if a transsexual chooses surgery, they could also have chosen to endure, but far more worrying for Halberstam personally, if a transgender chooses to endure, they could also have considered surgery! Here is a key anxiety motivating the anti-transmasc TERF. Although transmisogyny is the original animating force behind contemporary transphobic movements, J.K. Rowling's essay actually focused disproportionally on medically transitioning transmasculine people. Rowling links this to her own gender, describing tomboy feelings from childhood, and imagining a (to her, horrifying) alternative timeline in which she had identified as transmasculine and sought healthcare. Rowling's attitude is indistingushable from Halberstam's. The freedom of the transsexual masc comes to embodies the writer's own anxieties about gender. That freedom must therefore be 'troubled', doubted, queered, blurred, misrepresented or legally removed in order to remove the terror of possibility. Self-actualised butches, cis women, non binary people, and no-hrt-non-op people are untroubled by transsexual men and transsexual non-binary people - they are happy in their own choices, and so the presence of alternative choices present no threat.

In Hale's list of ways you can talk about trans topics badly, Hausman is named several times as a bad example - specifically, as someone who talks over trans people, misrepresents them and refuses them as academic peers. Halberstam nevertheless takes this work as revealing about the transsexual as a whole.

Prosser thinks that queer theory (specifically, actually, my earlier essay "F2M") celebrates the in-between space as full of promise and "freedom and mobility for the subject" ("No Place like Home," 499), whereas transsexual theory embraces place, location, and specificity. The queer butch, in other words, represents fluidity to the transsexual man's stability, and stability (staying in a female body) to the transsexual man's fluidity (gender crossing). Prosser makes little or no recognition of the trials and tribulations that confront the butch who for whatever reasons (concerns about surgery or hormones, feminist scruples, desire to remain in a lesbian community, lack of funds, lack of successful phalloplasty models) decides to make a home in the body with which she was born.

Prosser's statement is intriguing, and an example of the kind of 'resolution of antagonism' Halberstam claims to desire. But Halberstam immediately diagrees with it, as his instinct and goal is in fact antagonistic. To Halberstam, all butches are temporarily embarassed FTMs - and vice versa - so the transgender butch who might like to be transsexual in future is incorporated within Prosser's model: Halberstam's 'transgender butch' stays in a female body, but lives a gender fluidity, the same as Prosser's 'queer butch'.

Halberstam's list of reasons a butch may not choose to transition is revealing: with the exception of funds, it is the list of modern reasons transphobic feminists use to pressure transmascs away from biomedical transition. We know from the chapter as a whole that to 'make a home in the body with which she was born' is Halberstam's ideal for transmasculinity. By implication, this figure is supposed to be aspirational - the key subject of a new queer theory which neither traditional lesbian-woman nor traditional-transexual politics can address. And yet this is a person who has been barred from their desires for reasons beyond their control. He does not go on to argue or agitate for the removal of these barriers, despite recognising the suffering of they cause, as he does not see transsexuality as positive or good, and does see the suffering as virtuous and interesting; and he is not interested in the day-to-day lives of transsexuals.

The phrase 'lack of successful phalloplasty models' violates basic standards of politeness and dignity advocated for in trans men's spaces. In fact, most post-phallo trans men whose genitals are judged by prurient strangers are nevertheless overjoyed with their post-surgical life & body. In this, Halberstam is falling into the error they earlier called out, of seeing FtM identity as striving for a 'right body' which fits seamlessly into heterosexual masculinity. Post-op men are in fact the embodiment of Halberstam's ideal - to create and celebrate a body and life which is not identical to cisgender masculinity, and yet is still male.

Even more alarming, he makes little or no recognition of the fact that many FTMS also live and die in those inhospitable territories in between. It is true that many transsexuals do transition to go somewhere, to be somewhere, and to leave geographies of ambiguity behind. However, many post-op MTFS are inbetween because they cannot pass as women; many FTMS who pass fully clothed have bodies that are totally ambiguous; some transsexuals cannot afford all the surgeries necessary to full sex reassignment (if there is such a thing), and these people make their home where they are; some transsexual folks do not define their trans sexuality in relation to a strong desire for penises or vaginas, and they may experience the desire to be trans or queer more strongly than the desire to be male or female.

Halberstam then raises the figure of the binary transsexual who cannot pass. Yet this is incongruous with every framework about binary transsexuality they have deployed earlier in the chapter. His underlying argument is that binary medical transition is a normativising force in contrast with genderqueer transgender gender-non-conformity which destabilises social gender catgories. And yet here, at last, he acknowledges that transsexuality can do lead to gender-non-conformity - sometimes, intentionally so.

This ought to be cause to rethink the entire framing of the essay. As there is no clear transgender/transsexual division, there is no need to present one as a threat to the other.

Yet nowhere in the essay does Halberstam group the butch with the operated-upon-person. Despite his stated goal to trouble easy binaries about two subgroups he sees as wholly overlapping, his basic assumption is that seeking medical intervention is synonymous with identifying as a binary male, and abandoning radical gender identification. He has no room for a post-top-butch-on-T - despite this being the kind of person who surely most embodies the border-troubling Halberstam celebrates in the chapter. This is because he sees medical intervention as inherently bad, and therefore, cannot be part of a radical challenge to gender normativity.

Halberstam is confused by what a trans man is, because he chooses to invalidate what he hears at every turn. What he observes is that some afabs seek full medical transition and identify as ordinary men, while others seek no interventions and live as butches. From that, he concludes that medical transition is a 'deradicalising' process, or fulfills a 'conservative' desire. He needs to recognise, first, that butches and FTMs are two wholly separate groups. Only then will he have the conceptual space to notice and explore his theme. That is, to notice butches who are transsexual, FTMs who are transgender; butches whose understanding of gender is normativising, FTMs whose understanding is radical.

Nowhere within this essay does he consider that avoiding medical transition could equally be framed as a 'confirmation of conventional gender', in contrast to the 'refusal of gender' in hormones, surgery and full social transition - if one felt this was a productive idea. The only person critiqued within this essay for reifying conservative genders is the transsexual man.

(I want to emphasise here that I am not arguing that butch or non-op-transgender is a 'conservative' gender or political position: I think this entire framework is foolish and harmful. I bring it up to point out the extent to which Halberstam is targeting transsexual men in particular, while not putting butches under similar scrutiny, to set up an argument that some genders and transitions are better than others.)

If we return for the moment to the BBC series The Wrong Body, it offers an interesting example of the power of this kind of rhetoric. In one remarkable confrontation between Fredd and his psychiatrist, the psychiatrist used an extended simile to try to express his understanding of the relation of Fredd's female and male gender identities. He said: "You, Fredd, are like someone who has learned to speak French perfectly and who immigrates to France and lives there as a Frenchman. But just because you speak French and learn to imitate Frenchness and live among French people, you are still English." Fredd countered with: "No, I don't just speak French having moved there, I AM French." In this exchange, the doctor deploys what has become a common metaphor for transsexualism as a crossing of national borders from one place to another, from one state to another, from one gender to another. Fredd rejects such a rhetorical move and insists that his expression of his boy self is not a transition but rather the expression of a self that he has always inhabited. That Fredd is young and indeed preadolescent allows him to articulate his transsexualism very differently from many adult transsexuals. He is passing into manhood not from one adult body to another but from an almost pregendered body into a fully gendered male body. The rhetoric of passing and crossing and transitioning has only a limited use for him.

This paragraph again suggests Halberstam fundamentally does not know what a transexual person is. Despite his youth, despite the early 90s - Fredd is articulating his gender in a way a modern trans person would: "not a transition but rather the expression of a self that he has always inhabited." If Halberstam views this as mostly youthful folly, this raises the question of how many adult transsexuals Halberstam is socially intimate enough with to have personal discussions about transition.

Halberstam thinks of Fredd's body as 'pregendered'. But this is incorrect. Halberstam actually describes that Fredd's body is relentlessly gendered by his doctor - an adult and medical gatekeeper with more power to shape Fredd's gender journey than Fredd has himself. The presence of a gender clinic Fredd must successfully traverse is, itself, evidence that Fredd exists within a structure of gender control. In the quote at the start of the chapter, Halberstam notes

Fredd trembled on the verge of female puberty. Fredd expressed incredible anxiety about the possibility that his efforts to be resocialized as a male were to be thwarted by the persistence of the flesh, and he sought hormone-blocking drugs to stave off the onset of puberty and testosterone shots to produce desired male secondary characteristics in and on his body.

In other words: Fredd experiences the 'gendering' of his pre-transition body acutely - it is the primary reason to transition. As Halberstam does not recognise dysphoria of this kind as genuine, he must therefore skip over evidence of Fredd's distress. To describe pre-transition Fredd as 'pregender' instead of 'female and desperately unhappy' or 'innately male, and certain of it' is a coy way to deny Fredd knowledge of his own gendered experience, deny that misgendering him causes material harm, and emphasise Halberstam's implication that Fredd is too young to know, and ought to grow up into a genderqueer tomboy.

Female-to-male transsexual theorist Henry Rubin [views] the division that is most meaningful is between transsexuals and transgenders: "Although it is often assumed that 'transgender' is an umbrella term that refers to cross-dressers, drag queens, butch dykes, gender blenders, and transsexuals, among others, there is a tension between transsexual and transgenders." For Rubin, the tension lies between the transsexual's quest for" 'home,' a place of belonging to one sex or the other," and the transgender quest for "a world without gender" According to such logic, the trans gender person is just playing with gender and trying to deconstruct the naturalness of gender, but the transsexual bravely reaffirms the notion of stable gender and fortifies the reality of biology.

It is not clear why Halberstam raises this position to critique it, as it seems markedly similar to his own perspective. Rubin's 'transsexual quest for home' is Halberstam's 'stable category', while Rubin's 'world without gender' is the fluidities, complexities, overlaps and affinities of Halberstam's ftm-butch-lesbian-transmasc affinity group.

In other words, if queer theorists take up transsexualism as a trope for the breakdown of identity, they unwittingly shore up a postmodern evacuation of political activism by detaching transsexualism from the hard facts of gender and embodiment. Felski's warning is well taken, but to whom is it directed? Who, in other words, occasionally plays with transsexuality rather than taking it seriously? Felski finds such play to be dangerous and necessarily a sign of privilege: "Not all social subjects, after all, have equal freedom to play with and subvert the signs of gender, even as many do not perceive such playas a necessary condition of their freedom" (347). Felski identifies Arthur and Marilouise Kroker and Jean Baudrillard as being those postmodernists playing with transsexuality and therefore, we presume, failing to take seriously the differences between men and women and the differences between gender players and gender realists....but I do want to challenge the depiction of a postmodern queer constituency who play happily in some gender borderlands while others diligently and seriously refuse to take part in the celebration.

This section is really key to Halberstam's insubstantiality as a thinker. He has status anxiety about privilege and power. He wishes his own gender situation to be recognised as both radical and marginalised, and reacts defensively at the prospect of other identities that might exist in competition. Halberstam's focus is not the material goals of transsexual organising, ending social inequality, liberation or joy: it is maintaining the current gender order within which his gender has most social capital.

He would view this section as 'refusing antagonism' between queer people - which is wise. And yet,it is sometimes necessary to identify who in a given situation has the most power, so they can cede ground. What I see in it is a person with privilege promoting 'we're all in it together' as a distraction from the material inequalities experienced by different trans people.

The people, presumably, who play with trans sexuality and gleefully subvert the signs of gender are nontranssexuals who "see such playas a necessary condition of their freedom." They are indeed the transgenders of Henry Rubin's article and the queers in Jay Prosser's. I wonder if it strikes anyone else as ironic that the very people, gays and lesbians and gender deviants, who have been identified as historically the victims of heteronormativity are here invoked as dilettantes and recreationalists in the game of gender. Suddenly the transsexual has been resituated as the central figure in gender deviance, the one body that suffers, the only body that believes in gender and as an antidote to queer mobility.

This is fairly indistingushable from the contemporary TERF complaint that gay and lesbians are being 'erased', a complaint intended to derail trans activism. He seems to have no conception of how the oppression drag queens and masculine women differs in seriousness from the oppression faced by transitioning people. As Halberstam writes this, he occupies the same subject position as the contemporary cisgender butch TERF - whose whiteness, cis-adjacency and class privilege grant access to jobs in journalism, academia, and so forth. We should not be surprised, then, when he comes to the same conclusions.

As with contemporary TERFs, Halberstam is incapable of perceiving a new axis, as it is uncomfortable to acknowledge that your site of oppression may nevertheless give you privilege over others. The kyriarchy has space for afab female masculinity within it - a fact which seems intuitively wrong to many cis & non-transitioning women, lesbians and feminists, and yet at the same time obvious and correct to any transitioning person. Transition brings you into conflict with the regulatory structures of gender in society - medical boards, academia, documentation - in a way that gender-non-conformity does not. Transition thus reveals a separate dimension to the gender system.

This prospect brings up profound anxiety for anyone whose status relied on being the expert on gender, by virtue of their marginalised status. Therefore, denying the subjectivity and reobscuring the axis of oppression experienced by transsexuals is a key goal of such thinkers, so they remain 'the central figure'. But this is no route to liberation, which must start with seeing the facts clear.

The tone of this passage is passive-aggressive, and he puts words into the mouth of the sort of person he imagines disagreeing with him. He does not offer a citation or example for writing of this kind. Rubin and Prosser did not describe gay people as 'dilettantes and recreationalists' or say transsexuals were 'the one body that suffers' or 'the central figure in gender deviance'. Their arguments have been restated in the most defensive and inflammatory tone.

"I was a child of imperial times," writes Morris at one point to explain her impression of "Black Africa" as "everything I wanted not to be." While cities like Venice represent the feminine (and therefore a desired female self) to the pre-transsexual James Morris, Black Africa represents a masculinity that scares him because it is "alien" and "vicious." In this transsexual autobiography, the space in between male and female is represented as monstrous

Halberstam's sense of butch grievance is so strong, so the primary thing he takes from this quote is that genderqueer people are monstered in society. This paragraph would have been best cut entirely.

Halberstam does not justify his inclusion of a trans woman's text in a chapter predominantly dunking on trans men; but will nevertheless refer to Morris in the conclusion to establish that there is something implicitly racist about transsexuality as a whole. I view this as a poor approach: as there are enough actual issues to talk about that we do not need to work in abstractions (from racialised gender norms, to inequalities in healthcare access, to exclusion from queer communities). Halberstam intends to make this point about transsexual colonialism, whether there is the evidence for it or not - in the absence of a transmasculine example, he brings in a transfeminine one. I do want to flag that if Halberstam wanted to revisit this theme, Jivaka (Michael) Dillon's autobiography (published for a popular audience in 2018, but maybe available to academics earlier) is a spectacular document of transitioning into imperialist conservatism.

Morris' racism is the most extensive & deeply considered presence of a trans woman in this chapter.

The next section briefly reads 'crossing of borders and territories' in transition against the same themes in travelogues, colonialism, border walls, nationality and so forth. I dislike theory of this kind, I think because it sees neither topic as fully real. Border walls are no metaphor to be compared to identity skirmishes; and vice versa.

When nine-year-old Fredd rejects his doctor's simile of naturalized citizenship for his transsexual condition, Fredd rejects both the history of the rhetorical containment of trans sexuality within conventional medical taxonomies and a recent attempt to translate the rhetoric of trans sexuality into the language of home and belonging. Fredd does not, however, reject the popular formulation of being a "boy trapped in a girl's body," and he holds on to his fantasy of male adulthood even as his body begins to betray him.

It's really weird that the trans man whose story bookends the chapter is twelve! In fact, twelve-year-old Fredd in 1994 speaks in much the same way an adult in 2023 does about their transsexual experience; but the selection of a child implies that the FtM subject is immature, childish, incapable of agency, and can be spoken over. The figure of the transgender child is deployed in this way by contemporary transphobes, as the first step to deligitimising all transition.

This choice is also bullying: Fredd is a person who might read this book! Halberstam describes Fredd's gender being dissected and put under the microscope by a doctor. He never acknowledges that this process is likely distressing and dehumanising for Fredd, as Halberstam doesn't understand the specific material oppressions experienced by people who transition medically. Because of this, he has no qualms about continuing the dissection process in print. Fredd's gender is a source of fascination and raw material for political analysis.

Fredd is TWELVE!

Halberstam's perception is that when Fredd 'rejects his doctor's simile of naturalized citizenship for his transsexual condition, [he] rejects a recent attempt to translate the rhetoric of trans sexuality into the language of home and belonging.'. This is actually inaccurate. When the doctor suggests he would be like someone who moved to France, Fredd counters he would already be French - that is, Fredd identifies 'belonging to a home' within the terms proposed by the cisgender professional who is interrogating his selfhood. Fredd does not say that the metaphor is nonsense (but he is in no position to do so either: he must be conciliatory and compliant to achieve his healthcare goals). This is unacceptable to Halberstam, who views Fredd's male identification as inherently false. What Fredd does is reject the notion of crossing a border from one gender to another, asserting - as most contemporary trans people do - that his 'chosen' gender is as innate and deeply felt as a cis gender is. In Halberstam's reading, as Fredd locates his home 'wrongly', he must have rejected the framing of 'home' entirely.

We might do well to work on other formulations of gender and body, right body, and right gender to provide children such as Fredd, queer cross-identifying children, with futures and bodies that seem habitable.

This is the explict goal of contemporary transphobic campaigns. They construct the figure of a gender-non-conforming child who is at risk of being 'transitioned' and must be saved by the rejection of 'transgender ideology'. Fredd himself does not ask for 'other formulations' of his situation: he asks for timely and informed medical care. Fredd is not considered a valid authority on what he and other children like him need.

And with contemporary transphobic campaigns, Halberstam directs their fullest critique of transexuality at children - where one is most likely to sucessfully argue that transition is too risky, radical or dangerous - as a first step to delegitimising transition as a whole. If one begins by attacking adults, most people will concede that adults can do what they like - even if they do not know anything about transgender people or feel any affinity or affection for them. But children's status in society allows their consent and agency to be easily undermined by the 'adult expert', such as Fredd's doctor - whose questioning process underpinned by worldly power parallels Halberstam's own.

Obviously, the metaphor of crossing over and indeed migrating to the right body from the wrong body merely leaves the politics of stable gender identities, and therefore stable gender hierarchies, completely intact. The BBC program avoided the more general questions raised by the topic of transsexuality by emphasizing Fredd's individual needs and his urgent desire for maleness. When Fredd was shown in dialogue with other transsexual men, the group as a whole expressed their desire simply to be "normal" boys and men and to live like other male subjects.

The BBC, rightly, lets the subject of the documentary determine the focal point. For most transgender people, living authentically is a top priority, and healthcare a key barrier to doing so. By implication Fredd's 'individual needs and urgent desire for maleness' ought not to be the focal point of conversations on trans topics, in favour of Halberstam's transphobic formulation in which Fredd's desires are critiqued, problematised, and judged by their implications for other people's genders and society as a whole.

In this section, I have tried to argue that wholesale adoptions of the rhetoric of home and migration within some transsexual aesthetic practices alongside the rejection of a queer border politics can have the uncanny effect of using postcolonial rhetorics to redeem colonial texts (such as Morris's) or of using formulations of home and essence advanced by feminists of color to ratify the location of white transsexual men

Halberstam attempts to give his chapter extra weight as it draws to a close with an appeal to intersectionality. I view this as gauche. The chapter is long, and yet the colonial argument takes up no more than two pages.

The argument here is that:

All things are to be judged on the level of ideas and abstraction. This is a bad argument:

Earlier in the text, Halberstam notes in passing that trans men of colour have different experiences to white men - but does not consider it in any depth. Nor does he note if the same dynamics are present within lesbian communities; nor does he fit this observation into a wider discussion of people within the FTM-butch border (for example, whether Blackness is a factor in who chooses FTM vs butch identification, or whether there are distinctive FtM or butch subcultures of colour whose take on the FTM-butch border differs from Halberstam's usual social mileu.) It's just there, to seed the idea in the readers mind between 'transsexual politics' and 'racist politics'.

Here, race is a kind of essay confetti. It is important to be seen to consider and center scholars of color - but by deploying the confetti, one can always avoid actually internalising new frameworks and ways of seeing & just write whatever white thoughts you had in the first place.

Such rhetoric also assumes that the proper solution to "painful wrong embodiment" (Prosser) is moving to the right body, where "rightness" may as easily depend on whiteness or class privilege as it does on being regendered. Who, we might ask, can afford to dream of a right body? Who believes that such a body exists?

Again, transsexuality is specifically implied to be a racist construct, in comparison to gender-non-conformity which is not. Halberstam rightly notes that some people do not have the resources to transition medically, but his solution is to critique away changing your body in favour of changing your mindset. He gestures that gender is interrelated with ethnicity and class, but we are rapidly running out of words in this chapter and so has nothing substantial to say about it. It's just there to imply an inherent racism that exists within medicalised binary genders, which is somehow NOT true of those genders adopted by non-transsexual queer people.

Likewise, Halberstam does not consider that marginalised people may have less freedom and resources to self-express in a cissexual-but-gender-non-conforming way, that the additional pressures of race and class may create those who cannot afford ambiguity. It is certainly true that privilege limits what is possible, but the dreamed-of-genders could be of any kind: visible or passing, op or non-op, transgender or transsexual.

He does not like transsexuality, and is attempting to persuade the reader to dislike it also, so attempts to associate it with another bad thing - racism - in the reader's mind. This is as cheap as it is grotesque. Intersections with race are underconsidered in the essay because demonisising transexuality is the actual goal.

Once more, Halberstam does not seem to understand that physical dysphoria exists and is ruinous and is distinct enough from discomfort to make transsexuality essential to some people. Who can afford not to transition? With this question, I propose the option to identify as a bravely suffering non-op transgender person for political reasons is itself privilege and a luxury. I am unable to function off testosterone - detransition is not an option. I am so overcome by brain fog, physial fatigue, memory issues, and emotional instability that any kind of life is impossible: I cannot complete basic self-care, aspire to a career - or even a job or hobby, or maintain relationships. The idea that anyone can choose a 'good gender' by not transitioning seems to me a privileged choice: for people who can endure disability without ending up on the street, because there are other social supports and privilege nets to counterbalance additional struggle. While my level of endocrine-disability seems to be a outlier, it is nevertheless normal for transition to resolve depression, dissociation, mystery illnesses and suffering in transsexual people. Halberstam is once again ignorant of the stakes of physical transition.

Finally, as long as migration and borders and home remain metaphorical figures within such discourse, transsexuals and transgendered people who actually are border dwellers or who really do work as undocumented laborers or who really have migrated from their homelands never to return must always remain just outside discourse, invisible and unrecognized, always inhabiting the wrong body.

This is just an embarassment. More race confetti. Halberstam does not quote anyone in this situation, doesn't consider them specifically. He asserts that they 'must remain outside the discourse'. As a professional academic, it is Halberstam himself and others like him who exclude them, and must do the work of recentering their voices. He has the opportunity within this book to give them access to the discourse. He does not take it.

This paragraph is here to ward off the very critiques of his 'transition as crossing national borders' detour that I made further up; it is not motivated by meaningful solidarity with those he has chosen to otherwise exclude from the text and from his analysis. It makes the colonialism metaphor no less tacky.

Halberstam repeatedly mentions race in the final two pages of the chapter to trick anyone who skim read or jumped to the conclusion that intersectionality was deeply considered throughout. It was not.

Radical interventions come from careful consideration of racial and class constructions of sexual identities and gender identities and from a consideration of the politics of mobility outlined by that potent prefix "trans." Who, in other words, can afford transition, whether that transition be a move from female to male, a journey across the border and back, a holiday in the sun, a trip to the moon, a passage to a new body, a one-way ticket to white manhood? Who, on the other hand, can afford to stay home, who can afford to make a home, build a new home, move homes, have no home, leave home? Who can afford metaphors?

This is not a bad take. However, Halberstam has no interest in these topics. They only exist in the final paragraph. Remember the opening:

My project was not a fact-finding ethnography about FTM; nor did it examine the mechanics, trials, tribulations, benefits, and necessities of body alteration

In other words, he rejected the 'affordability' of transition as a theme. He uses 'home' as a metaphor, without ever touching on actual transgender homelessness.

A common tactic on tumblr is to overload social signifiers onto an imagined person when you wish to criticise them. 'Cis men', 'cis white men', 'cis white straight men' and so forth. This behaviour has been called out. For example, white people casually dunking on 'cis white men' as a way to distance themselves from whiteness in a situation; or using identity labels to mark someone as generically 'very bad' without really engaging with how these multiple identities interact in a given situation. Here, Halberstam associates 'white manhood' together as the destination of ftm transition - despite having namechecked trans men of colour earlier in the chapter. The intention is to depict transsexuality as an inherently oppressive desire. The white butch or white lesbian woman is put under no such scrutiny. It is indeed an interesting question for trans men of colour - 'what is it to desire manhood within a white supremacist society, when white and male power are so intertwined?' - but Halberstam doesn't get into it. And we could as easily ask that question of other genders.

Final score

So has Halberstam followed Hale's Suggested Rules for Non-Transsexuals Writing about Transsexuals, Transsexuality, Transsexualism, or Trans ____.?

  1. FAIL: Approach topic with a sense of humility - you are not an expert, transsexuals are
    • He never considers FtM people as expert on FtM lives, assuming his own transgender status is sufficient.
  2. FAIL: Interrogate your own subject position: the ways in which you have power that we don't (including powers of access, juridicial power, institutional power, material power, power of intelligible subjectivity). Remember that using those with less power within institutionalized, material and discursive structures as your meal ticket (retention, tenure, promotion) is objectionable to those so used.
    • Does not acknowledge his comparative privilege within either lesbian or trans communities compared to transsexual people generally or transfem lesbians and butches. No shame about close-reading a 12-year-old boy's transition.
  3. MIXED: Beware of replicating the following discursive movement: Initial fascination with the exotic; denial of subjectivity, lack of access to dominant discourse; followed by a species of rehabilitation.
    • He doesn't exoticise, and he's arguing against rehabilitation; but he does deny subjectivity
  4. MIXED: Don't erase our voices by ignoring what we say and write, through gross misrepresentation, by denying us our academic credentials if we have them, or by insisting that we must have academic credentials if we are to be taken seriously.
    • He cites FTM thinkers, people and texts, but always to critique
  5. MIXED: Be aware that our words are very often part of conversations we're having within our communities, and that we may be participating in overlapping conversations within multiple communities, Be aware of these conversations, our places within them, and our places within community and power structures. Otherwise, you won't understand our words.
    • Halberstam doesn't seem to be closely in dialogue with any transsexual people, but he does touch on intersectionality and the use of terminology occasionally.
  6. PASS: Don't totalize us, don't represent us or our discourses as monolithic or univocal; look carefully at each use of 'the', and at plurals.
    • The goal of the article is to trouble static notions of monolithic identity categories, and he does this well (to the extent he refuses that bounded categories might exist). Ultimately, Halberstam does open up a space modern trans people all benefit from, which is less rigid.
  7. MIXED: Don't uncritically quote non-transsexual "experts"
    • he doesn't lean on ideological transphobes, but he does center Fredd's doctor, Hausman and Bloom over the people they are describing
  8. FAIL: Start a working hypothesis: "Transsexual lives are lived, hence livable"
    • his perspective is that medically-transitioning lives are, in some way, deficient, and suspect
  9. FAIL: When you're talking about male-to-female transsexual, make that explicit and keep making it explicit throughout. Don't toss in occasional references to female-to-male without asking what purposes those references serve you and whether or not those purposes are legitimate.
    • he does this the other way around; while failing to incorporate pertinent examples of transfem butches
  10. FAIL: if you judge us with reference to your political agenda taken as the measure or standard, especially without even asking if your agenda(s) might conflict with ours and might not automatically take precedence over ours, that it's equally legitimate (or illegitimate, as the case may be) for us to use our political agenda(s) as measures by which to judge you and your work.
  11. FAIL: Focus on: What does looking at transsexuals tell you about *yourself*, *not* what does it tell you about trans.
    • He is unselfaware about how his own gender desires bias his argument
  12. MIXED: Ask yourself if you can travel in our trans worlds. If not, you probably don't get what we're talking about. Remember that we live most of our lives in non-transsexual worlds, so we probably do get what you're talking about.
    • Arguably, Halberstam's great failing is his own transgender experience; he is too close to the subject to see things clear; and yet he is not a 'stranger'
  13. FAIL: Don't imagine that you can write about transsexual discourse/s without writing about transsexual subjectivities, lives, experiences, embodiments.
    • does not register the material reality that physical transition is essential to those who desire it
  14. PASS: Don't imagine that there is only one trope of transsexuality, only one figure of "the" transsexual, or only one transsexual discourse at any one temporal and cultural location.
    • I'm going to be generous, as gender variance among trans people is his theme; but you could critique the absence of other intersections. He really only talks about gender variance among his pals.
  15. FAIL: If we attend to your work closely enough to engage in angry, detailed criticism, don't take this as a rejection, crankiness, disordered ranting and raving
    • He explicitly rejects criticism given of earlier drafts as valid.

But this is in line with the chapter as a whole: trans men may be cited & gestured towards, but one doesn't need to take them seriously or let their ideas change you.

Time for a break! Go make a cup of tea and we will continue to Trans!

Part 2: Trans

(WIP!)

In 2018, Halberstam was published in a popular non fiction text called Trans

I'm fascinated by the choice of name. I remember around the year 2009-2011, the shift from everyone using 'trans*' - to the decision that it was problematic, and we should instead use 'trans' without the asterisk. This is of course, a little silly, but it was about how this terminology had come to be used in practice. Trans* signified the whole trans umbrella, and was a very Halberstamesque worldview, in which we were all very excited about drag queens and gender-play. Critiques of 'trans*' as a term came predominantly from trans women, who felt the playfulness and radicalism of trans* scenes and discourses were out-of-step with the unfunny material reality and struggle of transsexual lives. The shift to the term 'trans' was to signify moving away from centering gender-non-conformity as the most important and interesting focus of the trans movement, and served as a critique of those who used the term 'trans*' most enthusiastically as they tended to be unseeing of their privileges within the community.

To still be using the word Trans* in the year 2018 is a deliberate & political statement - Halberstam is either unaware of those conversations, suggesting they are out of the loop, or they thought those conversations were silly, which suggests they still do not understand the stakes at play for certain gender embodiments.

Within the first 21 pages, Halberstam wades in in defence of the bar named “Trannyshack” and defends RuPaul’s use of the word 'tranny'. He seems to be unaware of political critiques of that word by trans women - for example, the prominence of the term as a porn category, in campy representations that erase actual complexities of trans women's daily lives, or as a hate word many transfeminine people have heard during physical violence. I would also guess that he does not have close friends or colleagues who are trans women, whom he might have had an everyday conversation with about how hurtful that word is, or their own experiences of hearing it.

This episode reminds us that sometimes we really cannot see the forest for the trees, the Roman Empire for the cheery centurions, or the site of linguistic domination for the miscellaneous slurs directed at marginal subjects. In queer communities today, while we fight about words like “tranny,” worry about being triggered, and “call each other out” for our supposed micro-crimes of omission/inclusion/slang, we are, like the People’s Front of Judea, trying to fight power by battling over the relations between signifiers and signifieds while leaving the structures of signification itself intact.

He then goes on to use Monty Python’s Life of Brian as an illustrative example of the pointlessness of trying to control language. There’s definitely a “oh no I will be arrested for using a wrong pronoun :(” vibe to it. In this paragraph, I am immediately reminded of my dad. My father is a working class conservative from a Northern industrial town who went to university in the 70s - and in later life, became solidly affluent. This is how he sees student politics: as like a Monty Python skit lamopooning silly, out-of-touch radicals. I don't see 'calling one another out for language errors' as liberationary; and yet, I would not cite Monty Python. They met at Oxford university, a conservative environment for wealthier people, and the intention is clearly to depict all radicalism as daft, rather than affectionate critique. As Halberstam is, himself, conservative - he does see Monty Python's ideas as coming from his 'in group'.

I also don’t think irritating language skirmishes would be the main thrust of page 14 of chapter one of my book on Transness, was I ever given the opportunity to write one.

Monty Python certainly thought that trans identities offered a platform for more ostentatious forms of critique.

Nor would I prominently quote Monty Python as an informed source on transgender politics. Does Monty Python think anything on this topic, beyond knowing men in dresses get a laugh?

Referring to a scene in which Eric Idle's (male) student radical discloses to a friend that she would like to be a woman, and be known as Loretta, Halberstam argues:

In this case, the different place is the transgender desire harbored by a male-bodied person, Stan, to become female-bodied Loretta and to bear children. Loretta claims that it is her right as a man to have babies and that Reg is “oppressing” her by denying her this right. While the defensive response to this text might be to claim that it makes light of the experience of transgender women, a trans* reading could open the sequence up to a new rendering of transgenderism as a desire for forms of embodiment that are necessarily impossible and yet deeply desired, all at once. Even though Loretta’s sex reassignment will never allow her to have babies, the People’s Front of Judea affirms her right to fight for the right to have babies because this demand for the impossible “symbolizes” the anti-imperial struggle to which they have committed. Loretta’s trans desire, indeed, represents both the impossibility and possibilities of all forms of embodiment

Halberstam views critics of a 1970s comedy skit featuring a non-passing trans woman character written by a bunch of posh cis men as “defensive”. While the issue of drag and pantomime comedy is nuanced, entry-level transfeminism sees all such representations as a potential site for hate. Monty Python is a clear candidate for comedy which intends us to laugh at men in dresses and, in this scene, to laugh at transfeminine desire.

Ineplicably, this is the first depiction of a trans woman in a text that comes to mind for Halberstam to use, in the introduction to a new major work, judged as worthy of serious analysis as a representation of transgender politics.

If a cis-identified person tried this we’d rightfully shred them for it - it’s uninformed, detached from real-life activism, it blithely speaks over trans women twice in the first 21 pages without recognising the limits of his perspective, or recognising trivial examples of transmisogyny - like cis male drag comedy and the word 'tr*nny'.

Notice that Halberstam implicitly agrees with John Cleese's character Reg here: Loretta's trans desire to be a woman is like the impossibility of the struggle. In the scene, Loretta expresses that she wants to be a woman in order that she might have babies; Reg points out she can't have babies because she doesn't have a womb. This argument is in line with trans-exclusionary feminist campaigning, which see trans women's fertility as a key characteristic excluding them from womanhood. For a TERF, Loretta's desire to be a woman is impossible because she is womb-less. This scene matches Halberstam's overall viewpoint on trans people - that we are cross-dreaming cissex people - and he therefore chooses an example of a trans woman with an 'impossible' desire. In Halberstam, everyone is trans* but no one is transitioning.

In fact, many desires can be embodied through physical transition, enabling you to change your social sex, political affiliation and personal experience of the world. And yet this kind of person does not match Halberstam's ideal. They have no interest in the radical potential of a self-actualised post-operative trans woman. The innate impossibility of transition is a key idea for Halberstam, as they are deeply committed to a non-medicalised life.

This, too, emphasises an essentially conservative worldview. What if we were to disagree with Reg - and see anti-imperialist struggle as not 'demand for the impossible' but indeed, as 'demand for the possible'? Halberstam cannot recognise the capitalist realism of the People's Front of Judea skits, nor in his own perspective, and describes anti-imperialism as inherently impossible (and therefore, agrees with Python's view on student radicals, that activism is just for the sake of being noisy rather than tactics for legitimate political change).

But enough of this gay banter!

I'm not sure I have the strength to read Trans* just to dunk on it. I skim read the chapter on trans men, and it's fascinating to find the same outline of their argument here re-sketched - particularly around medical transition as colonialism - as well as learning that they have now had one gender surgery, a desire that was very clear to me from their writing in 1998.

Conclusion

Let's sum up.

Halberstam is the archetypal gender theorist of the 90s and 00s. Their perspectives were poor even at that time, and they were called out for them by other trans people - particularly, by people undergoing medical transition or who felt strongly that they were not their gender assigned at birth. This book caused harm: its presence on reading lists gave it an outsized influence on communities on the ground, and acted as a barrier to transition and community for trans men anywhere its ideas were promoted.

As modern readers, we can see in Halberstam the template for modern transphobic feminism; and more specifically, the template for hatreds and suspicions targed at trans men and transmasculinity. If this chapter was to be republished today - say as a blogpost, under a pseudonym - nobody would mistake it for a pro-trans text.

The book is an interesting document of a time and place, and in particular, one of a set of 90s & 00s books which begin to articulate a non-binary space. I have no doubt that if one does identify as a transmasculine butch, there's much you can find in it to strengthen and consider - particularly in other chapters.

However, it is unacceptable as a founder text for transmasculine organising as a whole. It is too flawed. It is actively hateful towards too many within the transmasculine umbrella, and completely uninformed. And it is dated. It is the kind of text we need to write against to move our field and organising forward.

We need to reject 'my gender is better than your gender' theorising; reject theory that has no interest in lived transgender lives & struggles; reject theory which sees intersectionality as an afterthought; and reject anything which sees the lives, dreams and transitions of trans men as politically suspect and in error.

I like that Jacob Hale line: transsexual lives are lived, hence livable.

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