A book like no other
As I wrote elsewhere, transfeminine professor of law and bioethics Florence Ashley’s first book, Banning Transgender Conversion Practices, was nothing short of a rhetorical tour de force. “The subject matter is not easy, given how emotional people can get when it comes to providing affirming care to trans and gender-diverse people,” I said. “Ashley is all too familiar with being on the receiving end of social media abuse. In writing a legal and policy analysis of the subject, they contribute to lowering the temperature. In doing so, they also bring a welcome dose of clarity, knowledge and information to the issue.”
Their most recent book, Gender / Fucking: The pleasures and politics of living in a gendered body, does something entirely different. It “explores sexual arousal as a site of knowledge about the self and the world.”
Smut has been relegated to fanfiction and self-published novels, as though it were an art without teaching. Not even an art—a craft. Craft is the name of derided arts. But all arts are crafts, all crafts are art. If I had to describe my book, that’s what I would call it. Academic smut. A web from interweaved strands of sex, speculation, messiness, and camp.
To be clear, this book isn’t for everybody. If you can’t discuss sex and arousal without feeling shame, it’s not for you. If you think being open and outspoken about one’s sexuality is perverse, you should look elsewhere. And if you aren’t confortable with gender diversity, it ain’t for you either. Gender / Fucking is graphic and in-your-face and there are details about Ashley’s surgery and sexual preferences that are bound to make some people uncomfortable.
I absolutely loved it.
There is incredible value in normalizing the life experiences of humans whose gender, gender expression and sexual orientation or preferences diverge from what we’ve been told for decades are “the norm.” I put big scary quotes around that because I have long been convinced that heteronormativity is in fact the purview of the minority. What puritans call “deviant” is a lot more popular and common than they’d care to hear about. Morally upstanding folks would be floored if they knew just how many married men — good men, too — cheat on their wives, and not just with other women. That’s probably OK, since there’s a lot of fun stuff happening to many married women, too. Maybe one day humanity will evolve to the point of being honest about our wants and desires and arranging our lives to avoid the intense frustration of not having them fulfilled.
In the meantime, people hide their real selves except for the predators who take advantage of that enormously damaging prudish blind spot in the culture to rape and pillage because they’ve convinced themselves they can.
The hurt I hold because of chasers is real, but in my animosity toward cis men who profess their preference for transfeminine bodies, I also discern a hint of self-hatred. There are parts of me that do not believe a cis man could truly love my transfeminine self, without their ‘love’ being grounded in fetish, objectification, and misgendering. So often do I feel that my full self cannot be loved because of its transitude, that the only love I could ever receive is begrudging.
The transgender body, Ashley notes, is taboo and therefore arousing. Men who are predators both jeer at and intensely desire it. The self-hatred they feel because of that dual emotion results in transmisogyny because there is nothing predatory men hate more than that which they uncontrollably want. I know that much from many years of experiencing that oft-repeated phenomenon in my cis-female body. I shudder to imagine what it’s like for transgender folks.
Normalizing the life experiences of gender diverse humans is very healthy. A public discourse where regular talk about diverse experiences and relationships is part of the mainstream tells everyone they are beautiful, normal and worth loving just as they are.
In matters of sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, there are no wrongs, except for the wrongs that apply to everyone — rape or violence, to take the worst ones that immediately come to mind. If the thought of having a sexual experience with a person who has both breasts and a penis turns you off, there’s a very simple solution. Don’t have sex with that person.
Ashley is brave to have written this book, and to have done it in a style I positively adore.
Oh shit! I forgot to make a mold of my penis. How will I go fuck myself when people tell me to?!
It’s raw but precise and just stream-of-consciousness enough to be hard to predict. And it never lets a good emotional knot go without philosophizing the dickens out of it. Not always philosophy I agree with. But never one whose logic I can’t follow.
I asked Ashley if they could pick one thing readers should take away from the book. After rightly objecting that this was way too hard a question, they said, “to embrace the messiness of life.”
If that’s a challenge you feel up to, I highly encourage you to pick up this book.
