Talia Bhatt's Trans/Rad/Fem: An Informal Review

Talia Bhatt wrote a really good essay called “The Third Sex”, about how the third-sexing of individuals who display male-to-female cross-sex behavior/characteristics marks them for ostracization and violence in their particular societies. In other words, taking traditionalist Hindi society as an example, the classification of MTF individuals as hijira is not motivated by an enlightened sense of gender diversity (especially as opposed to ‘modern’ notions of transness), but rather by a patriarchal imperative to punish those who dare to forsake the male pedestal and instead associate with the female sex, since doing so problematizes the base assumptions of patriarchy that sex is immutable and that the male sex in particular is superior to the female sex. “The ‘gender binary’ is a misnomer,” Bhatt argues; “gender has always been a hierarchy.”

It’s a really good essay, one that speaks to how ‘pre-modern’ patriarchies rationalize the existence of trans people as well as contextualizes how our ‘modern’ society continues to dehumanize trans people by placing them in implicit (if informal) third-sex categories like “tranny” or “Oh my God, you’re so pretty! What are your pronouns?” I think part of why I liked it so much was because it flipped the notion of social constructivism, as pertains to gender/sex, on its head. Not only are non-binary gender schemes not necessarily ‘better’ but, in as much as gender is a social construct, we should ask what exactly any scheme is trying to construct—especially keeping in mind that individuals’ self-identities matter less than how society identifies them. Notably and contrary to most anthropologists I’ve read, Bhatt assumes (reasonably and, I believe, correctly) that trans people exist independently of whatever society they inhabit and how that society classifies them; this contributes to her argument above that patriarchal societies are motivated to ostracize or repress those of atypical sexual permutations (trans- or intersex) or behaviors (e.g., homosexuality).

So, I was really excited when I saw that Talia Bhatt published a book collecting essays from her newsletter, including “The Third Sex”. If you can see it from the front, wait 'til you see it from the back, right? However, although the second half of the book employs similar strategies as that particular essay, I found the first half of the book to be utterly distinct in approach and in argument—and also just, unfortunately, not as good. There’s four chapters I want to focus on because I think they’re characteristic of that first half, and I think they point to almost a paradigmatic shift in Bhatt’s work. That’s not bad per se, but it feels strange when it’s all in one book presenting itself as cohesive in content if not in form (being, again, a collection of blog posts).

Now, I will say this review is also non-cohesive, because I wrote the different parts as I was thinking about them; so, there’s some overlap and repeated ideas. But let’s say I’m working in the spirit of the text.

Transracialism

Link to Talia Bhatt’s original blog.

The discourse surrounding trans people, experience, and being is all too often identified with the objects which it merely attempts to describe. This discourse then takes on a life of its own (as discourses often do) as it is extended towards other objects, which are then encapsulated into the terms and logic of that discourse. One unfortunate implication of what we might call ‘gender ideology’—the predominant discourse of trans people which, in short, defines them as those whose gender self-identity differs from their biological sex (which, even if it is “assigned” at birth, remains qualitatively naturalized and immutable)—is the specter of transracialism: those who self-identify as a different race than how they were born or how they naturally appear.

The first chapter of Talia Bhatt’s book, barring the preface, is about transracialism, and I didn’t really like it. To figure out why, I thought I’d explore the general discourse around transracialism and what arguments are being made about it.

Adolph Reed Jr.

In his article “From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much”, Adolph Reed Jr. explores the uncomfortable relationship between trans- racialism and genderism. By his understanding, both trans-isms are founded in the emphatic acceptance of others’ authentic belief and expression of their self-declared identity. His base question is, “How do we know that Dolezal may not sense that she is ‘really’ black in the same, involuntary way that many transgender people feel that they are ‘really’ transgender?”

The problem the Jenner comparison poses is that, if identity is inherent in us in ways that are beyond our volition, how can we legitimize transgender identity–which is gender identity that does not conform with that conventionally associated with biological sex type–without the psychological stigma of dysmorphia? Confounding of sex and gender is the ideological mechanism that seems to resolve that conundrum. Thus, notwithstanding my earlier suggestion that Talusan misses the cultural fluidity of gender because she is naive anthropologically, she may also have an important ideological reason to deny it. It is only by treating gender roles as somehow endowed at birth that she can contend that transgender identity is “almost always involuntary.”

In his critique of gender ideology, Reed conflates certain categories: namely, of birth sex, gender identity, and gender roles, he conflates the latter two and accuses transgenderism of conflating the first term with his conflation. In doing so, he criticizes a presumption of involuntarism towards transgenderism contra transracialism: that gender roles (conflated with gender identity) are somehow encoded at / prior to birth, and that their preexistence takes priority over biological sex. What’s interesting is that although this is a conflation of gender ideology’s actual discursive terms, it still illuminates the basic problem underlying the discourse itself: that self-identity as based on self-perception is not a reliable narrator of one’s actual being or their position in the social matrix, because perceptions of oneself and others are always-already socially mediated. Transracial logic is therefore reducible to transgender logic, and structural critiques of one necessarily reflect on the other.

The transrace/transgender comparison makes clear the conceptual emptiness of the essentializing discourses, and the opportunist politics, that undergird identitarian ideologies. There is no coherent, principled defense of the stance that transgender identity is legitimate but transracial is not, at least not one that would satisfy basic rules of argument. The debate also throws into relief the reality that a notion of social justice that hinges on claims to entitlement based on extra-societal, ascriptive identities is neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness.

Reed’s analysis of trans-ism (referring to the discursive logic underlying transracialism and transgenderism) is somewhat agreeable, but only on a discursive level. Besides conflating terms within the discourse, he conflates the discourse’s objects with the very things being encapsulated by the discourse, and he reveals a lack of direct experience with the objects which he can only access through that discourse. My partner put it best, that Reed is not even big-brain transphobic, but he’s vulgarly transphobic just above the level of, “They’re castrating children at the school nurse’s office!” Historically, gender ideology is a modern rationale for behavioral phenomena (social, medical, and so on) observed universally, but transracialism has no observable basis since it was reverse-engineered from transgender discourse as a thought experiment. Rather than casting doubt upon trans-ism as a model to explain observable phenomena, Reed takes its untenable conclusions at face value and redoubles them onto (what might be called) the cross-sex phenomena themselves.

Talia Bhatt

Likewise, it’s not that Bhatt’s discourse analysis is wrong, but I think it takes the question of transracialism too seriously without fully interrogating its own premises and thus does not produce a satisfying answer. Her argument is along the lines of: gender and race are both social constructs; their being social constructs does not determine their content, but only their general structure and relationship to society (i.e., as real abstractions); race’s specific function is to categorize individuals by their ancestry in order to ascribe to them some priority of social treatment; and no matter how much an individual can change their phenotypical appearance, they cannot change their ancestry or “historical positionality”.

Let’s echo our phobic friend Adolph Reed Jr.: okay, so what is the difference? Does one’s ancestry not fulfill the same discursive function for racism as chromosomes do for sexism (notably, both emerging as rationales for racism and sexism around the same time due to increasing gains in biological research—and both applied to those institutions in order to naturalize them but not actually originating those institutions which far predate them)? Isn’t gender, within the scope of Bhatt’s argument, also a reductive categorization scheme which assigns individuals to certain social classes (whose relationships to their signifiers, whether cultural or physiological, are strictly regulated to secure a ‘natural’ appearance)? The way in which Bhatt describes race aligns very cleanly with how radical feminists tend to describe gender. So, really, what’s the difference?

In Bhatt’s negative analysis of gender through her positive analysis of race, something is conspicuously missing: sex. In as much as gender and sex are different—the former being the sociocultural signifier of the latter, which itself is encapsulated and overdetermined by the former, the two forming a semiotic or dialectical dyad—to discuss gender without sex (and without cross-sex phenomena independent of particular social contexts) traps one in discursive logic without an understanding of how that logic itself is generated. This sucks since Bhatt did perform a dialectical critique of race, but not a complementary analysis of gender/sex which would actually (hopefully) contrast it.

I subscribe to the origin of patriarchy as co-developed by de Beauvoir, Irigaray, and Lerner in their respective works (sort of represented here). Importantly, for them, gender is more than an abstract social system imposed on individuals arbitrarily assigned to the female or male sexes; rather, gender interfaces between society and one’s sex, itself a bodily system (genital, gonadal, endocrine) which exists physically, despite being categorized, expressed, and in some ways overdetermined by society. Perhaps it’s a lie of patriarchy that gender is determined by sex, but it’s equally a lie that sex does not exist apart from gender (or from patriarchal society as a system).¹ Sex is physical, sensuous, and visceral: hormones deliver messages from one’s brain to their sex organs, and determine how one’s body physically develops (or changes) along a bimodal axis, and one’s intuitive understanding of their sex seems to be instilled almost from birth. Trans people do not represent a reification of sex, but its liberation from the regulatory tendencies of patriarchy which would prefer to have its subjects believe that sex is immutable in order to justify its social relations. (That is to say, to reduce transitioning people to their gender as opposed to their changed sex is itself a lie of patriarchy.)

Race is not integrated with the pre-social body’s physiological and neurological functions, but is an abstract categorization scheme imposed top-down to rationalize caste relations. The moment you let the conversation become about an abstract and culturally contingent notion of gender, the moment you lose track of how patriarchy actually relates to sex and how trans people are specifically repressed on account of their changed sex (where by sex I refer to both the physiological system and the supposed natural basis of gender, as well as how the two overdetermine each other etc., etc., fuck you, I hate qualifying shit).

Women & Robots

Link to Talia Bhatt’s original blog.

Talia Bhatt spends a chapter analyzing Karel Čapek’s play Rossum’s Universal Robots, often shortened R.U.R., which as she says is both the first story about robots and the first story about the robot apocalypse (essentially because robots, like zombies, are expressive of a bourgeois anxiety about proletarian revolution, or more generally of class war). Her thesis about the play is that it conspicuously avoids understanding sexism or heterosexuality as a mode of bondage, despite being obsessed with sex or reproduction. I hadn’t read R.U.R., so I was basically down to believe anything about it, but I was struck by how often Bhatt cited dialogue from the play to frame it as either misogynistic or naïve about patriarchy—only for the text to seem like it was silently yelling, “Hey! This is about sexism!”, especially describing the main female character (arguably protagonist, as I would later learn) being constantly hit on by the male characters, and even being proposed to by one after asking about why the pseudo-humans are sexed despite not having sex (taking place, I’d learned from reading the play, after the man’s female secretary is outed as a robot and taken to be killed and dissected for the woman’s unwanted edu-tainment). So, I thought, surely I must be the idiot here. There must be something I’m missing.

I polled a couple people about the play, describing key scenes as Bhatt had done (many of them having more awareness of the play than I had which was kinda cool), and all of them felt very certain that she was off the mark. My partner even said, being a veteran of 2010s Tumblr literary discourse, how tired she was of people confusing a lack of an explicit statement on the characters’ part as a failure of the text’s ability to communicate its themes, or that texts must necessarily endorse the perspectives of its characters. Having also been on ‘AFAB 4chan’ (be real: only self-embarrassed 4chan users call it that) as a teenager onwards, I agree—and I fully believe that everyone who was not on Tumblr is due to repeat its mistakes, as liberal Twitter had done and Bluesky is now doing. What was wrong with Tumblr is really what’s wrong with a left-liberal discourse that confuses virtue-signaling with virtue, and thus a lack of signaling with a lack of virtue.

I don’t know if this is a case where Bhatt’s analysis is simply superficial—reading and taking for granted its literal content, but not deriving its thematic significance—or if, beyond the analyst’s own summary of the text, there is truly something that forecloses such an interpretation which is otherwise (in my opinion) straightforward. If the latter, then I think Bhatt’s argument was not well supported by the evidence she submitted. Perhaps she was focused more on selecting evidence of a close shot than of the actual miss itself. So, I went to read the play for a better idea, and… oh no. Bhatt describes the first act as follows:

Helena Glory is the only woman character of note in the play and spends much of the first act being pursued and fawned over by six or so men. She accepts Domin’s proposal within twenty minutes of meeting him, and the fact that every named male character is in love with her is often stated throughout.

On this basis, she argues that R.U.R. is misogynistic and that an understanding of sexism as a type of servitude is nowhere to be found: “a particularly glaring omission given just how much of the play is about reproduction, that form of labor so crucial to every reign”—well, I think that sentence speaks for itself because I don’t think sexism is omitted at all. The first act is pointedly teeming with misogyny. Helena Glory visits the factory island as the President of the Humanity League, concerned with the welfare of robots as pseudo-humans deprived of sensuous experience. The six men, including general manager Domin, constantly speak over Glory and mock her woke humanitarianism while also hitting on her because they’re just standard chauvinists. When five of the men leave to prepare a meal—the robots are apparently not good at cooking things that taste good—Domin spends five minutes alone with Glory pestering her to marry him, threatening that if not him then she must marry one of the other five (one of which “joked” earlier that they would not let her leave the island for anything). Finally Domin forcefully grabs and kisses her (“Don’t, you’re hurting me!”) as the other men return to the room and congratulate him. Note that Glory didn’t say “Yes” to Domin’s proposal, but does remain trapped on the robot factory island and married to him for ten years up to the second act of the play.

As for that second act, I don’t think it’s necessarily the sexlessness of humanity or of the robots that motivates Helena Glory-Domin to destroy the robot formula. As robots start an international revolution—the truth of which is hidden from Helena by her husband—Domin tries to weaken their resolve by creating robots in a new way:

Henceforward we shan’t have just one factory. There won’t be Universal Robots any more. We’ll establish a factory in every country, in every state, and do you know what these new factories will make?

I mean that each of these factories will produce Robots of a different color, a different language. They’ll be complete strangers to each other. They’ll never be able to understand each other. Then we’ll egg them on a little in the matter of misunderstanding and the result will be that for ages to come every Robot will hate every other Robot of a different factory mark. So humanity will be safe.

Can you tell this play was written in 1920? Bhatt had described in her chapter how the play is basically an expression of ruling-class anxiety, about their underlings realizing that they don’t need their superiors and are indeed exploited by them, but the way this informs the character of Helena beyond being an object of the male gaze or of being purely disgusted with the robot’s sexlessness is fantastic. Remember that she first visited the island, and was trapped there, as the President of the Humanity League. The men talk about how to handle the revolution, how to negotiate with the robots and whether they should sell the robot formula to get something out of it—meanwhile condescending Helena who tries to join the conversation, especially her husband who refers to her as “child”. Helena reveals, however, that she had stolen the formula and burnt it. And then they all freak out and die. The end. There’s a last act where the robots are revealed to have a chance at reproducing, one of them being a robot copy of Helena, but if that’s a reinstatement of heterosexuality then I don’t think it’s necessarily through a positive lens (but not entirely negative, either, since the two seem to personally care about each other more than Domin did for Helena, which is in specific contrast to their marriage and may reflect the notion that communism would redeem straight sex from the patriarchy—whether or not one really believes that). Seems more about cycles of hegemony and annihilation.

Misogyny so clearly permeates this whole play, not casually but as a specific dimension of its larger themes about servitude. Even when Helena Glory-Domin tries to placate Domin by ‘accepting’ his forceful proposal, or asking for forgiveness when she burns the formula, she is so constantly preyed upon and condescended by men that her special relationship with the robots is non-coincidental and perhaps even structural in nature. She relates to the robots to the extent that she arranges for them to be given souls, and the point at which the robots rebel against their human slavers is also the point at which she rebels against her husband to ensure that no new robots will be born into slavery (“I wanted all of us to go away. I wanted to put an end to the factory and everything. It was so awful. […] That children had stopped being born. Because human beings were not needed to do the work of the world.”). I’d describe the play as being about the interconnectedness of different modes of servitude, including sexism. Even if nuanced—certainly, Helena feels that having sex and raising children is something worthwhile to preserve on account of being definitive, in her view, of the human experience—I don’t think the inclusion of anti-sexist themes is at all accidental. I think that’s, far beyond subtext, just the text.

The play’s basis thesis on feminism, by my reading, is that even women who are born or marry into higher class positions are still coerced (if not forced) into heterosexuality as a regime, and that such women retain revolutionary potential because of their relative position of servitude (which, in a universalist context, enlightens them as to the need to remove all chains of bondage from humanity)—keep in mind that Helena Glory is initially introduced to the men as acting on behalf of her powerful father, himself a President, before she reveals her true intentions.² We can argue about the extent to which that thesis is correct, considering the reactionary tendencies of white or bourgeois women (not as women per se but in their being white or bourgeois). Regardless, I don’t think it can be argued that the play is naïve towards patriarchy, or that the male characters incarnate the author’s personal inclinations when interacting with the female protagonist (who is much more active and driven than Bhatt’s summary would have led me to believe, being not just the “only woman character of note” but arguably the play’s protagonist).

Gender Abolition

Link to Talia Bhatt’s original blog.

Not gonna lie: I think that gender abolition is kind of a stupid phrase masquerading as a genuine political project. It’s kinda cool when it identifies gender 1:1 with sex, no bullshit, just mass-producing a shit-ton of test tube female babies who will never know the burden of pregnancy or the yoke of the heterosexual regime organized around the exploitation of their sexually mature bodies. I’d feel bad for potential trans-males—they better have that artificial prenatal environment down pat—but I’m strangely okay with the premise despite it being basically impossible to execute (and maybe that’s part of why, like it’s a charming thought experiment). Where it gets stupid for me is when someone slightly more towards the middle of the knowledge bell curve is like, “Obviously, sex is different from gender and you can’t really abolish sex, so we should abolish gender as a historically contingent scheme of classifying individuals to determine their social expressions and roles, but not their reproductive capabilities because again that’s more of a sex thing which is out of our control as aspirant society-makers.” Or, as Wittig does, identify gender with sex but treat both as existing entirely in a social dimension, apart from individual physiology or sexual relationships—establishing a lesbian identity of sex (or sexlessness) in specific contrast to women whose social position and existence is entirely relative to men.

For one, go big or go home. For another—and this is my real thing—I think it puts radical feminism in an awkward position when patriarchy (the oppression of a female class under a male class) is the prime contradiction of historical development, while also being highly specific to particular cultural or temporary contexts. I know Bhatt knows better than what I’m about to say, because she has written much to dispel notions of noble savagery with respect to patriarchy, but I’m thinking of those who say that not only is the modern form of patriarchy modern (duh) but that it originated gender/sex itself (as a social construct) which it also imported to colonized places.

There was a time before patriarchy, obviously, but patriarchy operates by plugging social significance and material interests into sexed bodies (of various, if bimodal, characteristics) and sexual dynamics which predate patriarchy and (in some particular historical contexts) caused it to emerge. For a particular definition of gender as the social attributes allocated to a particular sex class under patriarchy (or other systems [?] which interface between an individual, a gender class to which an individual is assigned as per their sex attributes, and the gendered attributes assigned by society to their gender class), sure, gender can differ between social contexts even for one set of sex characteristics (physical, behavioral, etc.). Doesn’t it trivialize the premise of radical feminism, though, if patriarchy is both the prime contradiction of social history while also being so geographically or historically contingent that the patriarchy cannot be said to exist as a totalist system, or exists superficially in conscious behavior? Is ‘gender’ as a specific set of social characteristics (including relational positions within a society) the problem, or is it the relatively consistent oppression of female persons by male persons across different patriarchal societies, regardless of the particular and culturally specific ‘genders’ they are assigned? Trick question!

What’s interesting about Bhatt is I think she identifies with the radical feminist tradition, but finds herself in the awkward position of having to navigate the tendencies of social and biological essentialism in order to carve out a space for trans-females who are either too biologically male to count them as women for their social femininity, or too socially masculine to count them as women for their female bodies—this being the difference in trans ontology between J.K. Rowling and Janice Raymond who rely upon patriarchy being essential to maleness (itself, for them, intrinsic to trans-females for no reason other than to establish a pseudo-phallic identity for women/lesbians) for totally orthogonal reasons. Bhatt leans towards a social essentialism, that patriarchy is embedded in masculinity (or more basically the gender of manhood), while casting trans-females beyond deserters or traitors to manhood, as the very seed of a manless world.

Make no mistake about that final sentence, the end of that transmission: heterosexuality is contemptible, as every unjust regime predicted upon subjugation always has been and always will be. Our Prophet [referring to Wittig], whose words we carry in our hearts, in the core of our very code, has spoken and shown us a glimpse of a future that is more True than anything in your farcical patriarchy ever could be. There is no Man in it.

End of log. [Huh? Oh we’re robots. Yeah.]

I don’t think Bhatt is suggesting that all males be socially or physiologically feminized, so that leaves a follow-up question: what the fuck does that even mean practically speaking, a manless world where males (presumably) still exist as such? Again, if by “man” we mean the particular roles and expressions assigned to males under patriarchy whether universal or culturally contingent, that’s fine but it’s also a lot less dramatic and perhaps overstated as a grand project, relative to how the same demand has been phrased less essentially by feminists deemed less radical. It also puts trans women in a position of being enlightened males rather than a population with a particular permutation of sex characteristics whose existence contradicts patriarchy and, rather than emerging as a reaction to it, exists prior to the social system that attempts to suppress it (even if it is, in turn, molded by it).

Generalizing from Bhatt, I think it’s sad when radical feminism excludes the majority of women from a potential revolutionary subjectivity. Wittig, for example, declares lesbians as not-women because (she supposes) they exist outside of patriarchal relations and don’t define their identity relative to men (or, perhaps, define it antagonistically towards men—unlike women who are defined not just as heterosexual but intrinsically so). Her articulation of gender abolition and the lesbian sexual identity operates, as for Bhatt, on a practically minor level while posturing as something more essentially radical in terms of people’s ontology of character. It regards bio-essentialism as vulgarly materialist while retreating to the realm of ideal forms from which sex is imposed onto human beings rather than encoding a dialectical relationship between their bodies, their interpersonal relationships, and their society at large. Social determinism and discourse analysis is not materialist; it’s just discursive and, probably, idealist (again, I must refer to the John/Joan). And I think it sucks because it supposes a social positionality relative (even if external) to heterosexuality into which one can arrive via pure reason, while locating a majority of women as unenlightened, passive NPCs who contribute by their existence to the very system that oppresses them. I can’t think that lowly of 90% of women, nor can I reduce their subjectivity to being men’s fuck-things. That’s what patriarchy does, and we shouldn’t accept its premises.

This is not to mention the phenomenon of “political lesbians” who were uninterested in actually fucking women (or whatever we need to call them now), hinting at a disconnect between Wittig’s conception of a lesbian identity politics and the sensuous experience of what’s called lesbian sex. Like, contrast her with Irigaray whose politics were grounded in physical sucking and fucking, the sensuous physicality of female-sexed erogenous zones, and the the repression of female sexuality under the patriarchy as relates to the historical development of patriarchy in women-exchange. That’s a real historical materialist analysis that refuses a patriarchal essence to gender/sex itself because that’s just idealist bullshit. Again: the physicality, sensuousness, and viscerality of sex are key vectors through which patriarchy can be criticized for its oppression of the female sex, its repression of female sexuality, and its suppression of sexual mutability—no phallic politics necessary.

But maybe gender abolition (in the context of this book) has less to do with any critique of patriarchy, than with how Talia Bhatt comprehends her own social coordinates.

Identity & Justice

Link to Talia Bhatt’s original blog.

I’m a real dialectician, y’know! I’m covering the introduction in light of the later chapters. The owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Death of a Bachelor was a good album, but it forecasts developments in Brendon Urie’s musical career that resulted in dogshit like “High Hopes” from Pray for the Wicked. Talia Bhatt’s “Antithesis” offers a psychoanalytically rich view of the author’s background which frames her arguments in the later chapters of her book as deeply connected to her relationships to her body, mind, and social position.

Sex Desertion

Let me tell you how a trans woman realizes herself without feeling like she was born in the wrong body, without longing for the sweet boys who never gave her a second look in the hallways.

What actually compelled me to transition […] was the same feeling I’ve harbored all my life, the same corrosive wrongness that I experienced as years upon years of swallowing poison, of being force-fed an unacceptable ideology until I had no choice but to puke it all up. I, simply put, could not be a man. I refused.

I REFUSE to be a man.

I REFUSE to be a man.

I’m cross-reading the introduction here with a later chapter in the book, “Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Three: Constructing the Transsexual”. There, Bhatt argues (similar to how she does in “The Third Sex”) that trans-females grow out of boys who fail to become men, this being an active process of socialization or (as Bhatt says) indoctrination into the cult of manhood which is even violent in nature (to which everyone of any sex can attest); Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy attributes the earliest formations of patriarchy to male warrior cults who had to create myths and rituals to rationalize their cosmic significance for lack of female creative power, which sounds far-fetched except when you realize that male socialization functions the same way on a socially atomic level (similar, perhaps, to how an individual’s embryogenesis mirrors the evolutionary development of its species). Anyway, trans-females are put on this track, but they ‘fail’ in such a way that exposes the faulty roots of patriarchy: they are therefore violently suppressed, dehumanized by being degendered according to “patriarchy’s reproductive logics” (neither man nor woman), and reduced to pure sex-object without the address afforded even a cis-female subject.

This analysis is sound and I agree with it, but the way in which Bhatt tells her argument is laced with a certain slippage between how society views trans women and how she views herself and her relationship to her gender/sex. Patriarchy casts trans women as boys who had flunked out of becoming men, whereas Bhatt casts herself as a boy who had refused to become a man for ethical concerns—which I feel like is the same ‘event’ with a flipped perspective, which like duh, except that it contains the implication that Bhatt’s decision to transition from male to female was a reaction to patriarchy: more like avoiding becoming a man than choosing to become a woman. On one hand, I think there should be greater consideration in Bhatt’s analysis of transness or cross-sex phenomena that predates the institution of patriarchy; this would in turn also emphasize the unnaturality of patriarchy, which must suppress natural variance in sexual behavior and characteristics because it is based upon unnatural impositions. On the other hand, I kind of worry for Talia.

Are trans-females traitors to their original gender/sex? From patriarchy’s perspective: yes, absolutely. But should the very existence of trans-females be taken per se as a statement against the pedestal they rejected for themselves? Did Talia Bhatt, as she testifies, really transition because she was too woke to be a man? I’m sorry, but I honestly cannot buy it. I think Bhatt cannot view her own motivation to transition intrinsically, and instead can only articulate it by externalizing it in terms of abstract, intellectual justice—not that she does not have an intrinsic motivation, to be clear (I think she does!), but that she’s either ignoring or not perceiving it as such. Maybe it’s because of a lack of self-confidence, or maybe it’s because she invested the female gender/sex (during the time that she did not transition) with such righteousness that she had to invest the same moral significance in her transition and herself.

We have to be aware that cis-males do not desire to change their sex, perhaps partly narrativized as due to the privilege it affords them in patriarchal society, but also more basically because they have no conflict of sex—and even cis-females with more reason to change sex simply are not. There must be some material component to trans phenomena because pure reason is not sufficient for one to desire to change their sex, nor material interest exclusive of wanting to change one’s sex. It is a desire, or demand, in itself regardless of how our patriarchal society perceives it in its terms as desertion, as failure, or as perversion. That’s literally what symbolic systems do: try to put things in its own boxes, but freak out when the box doesn’t fit (especially if or when there’s material interest vested in those boxes). We don’t need to identify an object of a system with the thing itself, and ignoring the thing itself does not yield greater understanding of the object within the system’s rationale. Dialectics!

I don’t think the future feminist utopia will (or could) eliminate men as a class, or gender as a classification scheme. I think—or, rather, hope—that the position of cis-males will be humbled and that other sexal permutations will be elevated equitably. People go on and on about bioessentialism, using it as a term for a tendency to reduce or identify societal norms with a pre-social biological reality; just as reductive, however, is what might be called social essentialism: a reduction of material phenomena to social causes, existing isolated in an abstract universe. Wait, isn’t that just idealism? Well, they’re both idealism, but bioessentialism wasn’t understood as such initially, and then we seemingly forgot the OG textbook form of idealism. Stop that! We know from the Joan/John (David Reimer) case study that a sexed neuro-component seems to exist (more or less) from birth, and it either plugs into the correct endocrine system or does not (resulting in the dysphoria David experienced, despite being raised as a girl from childhood, and probably dysphoria more generally). The male sex, as one of two bimodal poles of sex characteristics, existed prior to patriarchy even if society’s roles and expressions of maleness (what some term “gender”, but we’re better than that) are socially determined and historically contingent. How about we socially determine some better roles and expressions for the male sex, rather than casting ourselves as enlightened males? Is that how the author really thinks of herself? I truly doubt it, and I think Talia deserves better than to think of herself that way, for her self-image to be (in Ènziramire’s words) wholly reactive. This is less about affirming one’s identity, as Bhatt puts it, than not defining oneself in abstract opposition which is neither personally nor theoretically helpful.

Cis Women & Patriarchy

There’s a related tendency throughout the introduction, and the book in toto, which gives me just a little ick: Talia Bhatt talks impersonally about how men oppress women—to the extent that she claims it motivated her transition from male to female—but talks much more personally about how cis women have wronged trans women and in doing so carry out the patriarchy’s agenda against them. Bhatt’s analysis of R.U.R. is a microcosm of this: she misses the chauvinist tendencies of the men in the drama, and how they are framed by the author to be antagonistic towards the female protagonist Helena, while criticizing her for being a passive object of the men’s desires (being sexually harassed into marrying the general manager) and reinstating heterosexuality after its near-demise (destroying the robot formula so that new robots cannot be made because their lives suck incredibly bad, fulfilling tragically her original aim of visiting the factory). Moreover, Bhatt claims that Helena is motivated by disgust at the robots being “at once [castrated men] that cannot sire and [barren women] that will not bear children”, identifying her with “the very psyche of the patriarch” (bear in mind, she destroyed the formula against the men’s own desires to continue profiting from robot manufacture). There’s a jump from “Oh, she can’t really read interpersonal relations” to “Oh, this is about cis women.”

We see this tendency pop up in the preface:

More than once, I’ve opened social media to be chided by a woman who’s never so much as visited my country on how “white feminist” my ideas are. That I should, yet again, read that paper on ‘intersectionality’. The one that I’ve already read and my interlocutors usually haven’t, so that I might fully grasp how reductive it is to assert that men exploit women of color under patriarchy.

In “Understanding Transmisogyny, Part One”:

They might even be ardently pro-choice and advocate for equal pay, but remain vigilant and suspicious of any woman their husband befriends or seems to get too close to—most women are envious and covetous, after all, and it would be naive foolishness to not safeguard the happiness you worked so hard to build. (Did you think the misogynist I was describing this whole time in gender-neutral terms was a man this whole time? Perhaps you should check your implicit biases—women can be misogynists too!)

Except for her analysis of R.U.R., nothing Bhatt says is technically wrong: women can be misogynist, and intersectionality is often wielded as a cudgel against feminist critique (much like how, Ènziramire had told me, the phrase “racial capitalism” is often used in Black theory to gesture towards the capitalist context of our society’s racism without really interrogating the implications of capitalism for racism—perhaps, we should give “capitalist racism” a try instead!). So, again, Bhatt isn’t wrong, and neither is she being aggressive or speaking out of turn or any of that; I’m not going to police her speech, or any of that shit. I just think she is more personally, emotionally affected by treatment from cis-female individuals than she is by the patriarchal system she preaches against as an abstract, unjust totality, and this seeps into her critical voice. I think part of it is that I couldn’t find it in myself to refer to the majority of other women I know as misogynist—unless they are specifically and consistently anti-female. I even empathize with women who are ‘culturally conservative’, and I find them to have a fairly deep comprehension of patriarchy even if they feel personally resigned or powerless (even understanding that men will take advantage of gains in female independence to simply put more on women, which is a ball’s throw from identifying men as the problem rather than feminism).

Related to her lofty appeals for justice, I feel like Bhatt also uses abstract categories of identity as a crutch, especially when speaking on women’s topics. I promise I’m not trying to nitpick Bhatt or her character, I just think this is related. I remember her skeeting about shitty erotic fiction for women on Bluesky and how it often has sexist undertones (true!) but, when pressed for not having personal experience with it, she referred to her identity as a lesbian like pulling out a law enforcement badge. Yes, Bhatt is a lesbian and I will not deny her that—but possessing an abstract identity does not grant one expertise on topics something for which they can only speak impersonally (the same as referring to Tumblr as ‘AFAB 4chan’). Women read and are tantalized by erotica with patriarchal elements, but surely there’s a deeper level of analysis than saying they’re unenlightened, or wondering why they won’t read power fantasy erotica for women instead? Maybe take a cue from Deleuze and Guattari, for example, and investigate why subservience tantalizes readers (especially from the standpoint of “topping from the bottom”, as one Christian Grey says)? Can such tendencies even be consciously changed?

This is not about Bhatt specifically either: lately, I keep thinking that abstractions are not useful for analysis (or establishing authority to make an analysis) unless they’re integrated with a critique or deconstruction of that abstraction. Just can’t do abstractions anymore. Agh!

Transition & Cowardice

I have had what could be described as an ‘unconventional’ transition journey, which began when I first learned of the term ‘transgender’ of trans people at the young and tender age of “my early 20s”. Despite this, I wasn’t actually able to begin transitioning until I was 29. A significant chunk of my life has been spent in this arrested development, of being aware of what I wanted and needed to live as myself, but nonetheless denied the means and opportunity to acquire them, year after year after year.

During this period, my only source of comfort was radical feminism.

I think that short biography of Bhatt’s transition from her book's preface has an interesting conflict with her longer account in the introduction—not in the sense of being historically contradictory or personally hypocritical, but in the sense that here there is a complicated subjectivity contending with and rationalizing its own experiences through its self-image. My claim is that this subjectivity is generative of Bhatt’s work as I’ve explored, despite its self-insistence on materialism (really, social determinism) and abstract justice. Specifically, the centrality of identity-building via political trans-lesbianism to Bhatt’s work is informed by the “arrested development” of her own transition into womanhood; furthermore, her delayed transition was not necessarily due to extrinsic factors but an internalized fear of being male and the implications this had for her perception of patriarchy as unjust (which is correct, but which she also takes for granted, rather than interrogating why she feels so strongly in a way that “other men” don’t) as well as a fear of reaction from her family or culture; this culminates in a project where Bhatt invests her self-image in a politically charged identity through which she could justify wanting to transition to female while living as a male for some time after acknowledging that desire. The latter is what Bhatt refers to as cowardice (emphasis in bold my own):

You could almost feel a sense of anticipation among people, waiting for me to be holstered by my own petard, for my own man-exclusion to come back and bite me because, apparently, my birth sex inducted me into a lifelong allegiance to the category ‘man’ whether I want it or not.

Fuck that. I’m not a coward.

Repudiating the societal imperative to embrace manhoood may not be comfortable, may not be easy and may invite harsh repercussions, but it’s the only principle that can form the core of an effect feminism.

Again, here we see an explicit identity between rejecting manhood by transitioning one’s sex as an individual and the political project of (radical) feminism. Bhatt is not a coward—but was she one in the past? How should that period of non-transition be understood, if not as a paralysis out of fear for repercussions? She says that she lacked the means and opportunity to transition, but she hails from an Anglophone Brahmin family and had moved multiple times between India, the United States, and the United Kingdom. I think she clarifies her motivation or lack thereof when discussing her relationship to her parents (emphasis in bold my own):

You have to convince yourself that the man who slaved your existence to his own didn’t hollow you out, didn’t reduce you to a shell of the woman you might have been without him. Have to, because imagining that woman is in and of itself painful, not to mention nearly impossible in a culture so unforgiving and cruel to unbound women. What else could she have been, I think she reasons. At least she had her life.

At least she had her son.

Me, I’ve never been able to lie to myself quite like that. To others, certainly. Insofar as keeping a stony countenance whenever you’re called something you’re not is dishonesty. My father’s bier needed his son’s shoulder, so that he may be laid to rest in peace. I did him that last kindness. Then, as the flames rose up to consume him, I placed my male self atop his corpse and left my old life behind in his ashes.

Don’t you like that imagery? I quite do. Gives the mess of my life a certain dramatic heft. Phoenixes and flames and purification, and all that. Maybe I’m better at lying to myself than I thought I was.

In this passage, I perceive Bhatt as: empathizing with her mother, despite the story of her life being foreclosed to her; fearing in turn becoming like her father, both individually and relationally; and yet feeling bound to her father as his ‘son’ or, more intrinsically, as ‘male’ up to the point (perhaps) of transition. This to me locates Bhatt in a position of cowardice, which is not a moral judgment on my part (we are all cowards) but an investigation of the development of her life and her self-narrative of it insofar as it informs her broader views about the world and about patriarchy (or gender) in particular. Cowardice is a natural and rational response to conflict, not to mention that the specific manifestation of cowardice makes perfect sense in as patriarchal a society as India has. However, to cope with one’s failure to overcome cowardice produces neither natural nor rational self-narration of the event. To cope is to fantasize, which we all do (like, I cope a lot about my political activity or my mental pathologies or my sexuality), but we all also need to accept that we do, especially when we generalize a fantasy’s symbology towards society at large.

Bhatt coped with her fear of transitioning by getting really into radical feminism, through which she could construct an abstract trans-lesbian identity irrespective of her particular socio-material context at the time (functionally as a woke man) because—in Wittig’s own articulation—the identity requires nothing but an ‘escape’ from heterosexuality in order to negate one’s sex (female or male) and claim victory over the patriarchal regime (if only on an individual level, prior to gender abolition in society at large). Let’s reiterate: all this has nothing to do with Bhatt’s base desire to transition to female, but only with her narration of that desire through which she rationalizes it in terms of her justice-seeking tendencies in the specific context of patriarchy. She selected this narrative over a more sensuous one because the sensuous one was foreclosed by a double fear of abandoning her family and feeling like an imposter as a trans-female. Bhatt needed something more certain than her blood crying out to her from beneath her skin: something calling out to her from on high, to become something she felt like she couldn’t be.

I recognize that tendency because I recognize it in myself, from when I was a teenager living under my family’s roof. Everyone at the time, including my girl friends and now-partner, thought I was gay or trans or some shit but that I didn’t realize it. I knew, though, and I first picked up Judith Butler to figure out whatever my deal was and whether I could escape it. When I started actually transitioning, I also took from Butler a certain lesbian identity on account of having lesbian friends and perceiving it as an enlightened way of life detached from man’s world. But that was a form of cope, and so is where I am now (insisting upon my bisexuality and historical attraction to men because of my self-embarrassment at now being more attracted to women because I just relate to them more). When it comes to my career, I sometimes joke that I didn’t get into academia because it’s bourgeois, but the real reason is that I wanted to sell my soul for tech industry money because I knew it’d give me and those I care about a better chance at life (even though I have also definitely lost my soul doing so; thank God it’s not ‘defense’ tech at least). The only reason I wouldn’t say the same about my general communist inclination is because that just felt natural to how I was raised given my parents’ background and the values they instilled in me. I’m full of cowardice and cope, and I think most people are. I’m speaking from a place of kinship rather than of superiority.

But I also think there’s nothing more important than knowing thyself, especially before one’s fantastic symbology seeps into broader conclusions about the world, and not claiming that one’s position of fear is in fact of resolve. The specter haunting Bhatt’s work seems to be those nine-ish years of hesitation and lingering, and only through casting herself as downtrodden by virtue of her forbidden feminist knowledge can she absolve herself of her own guilt at both transitioning and waiting to do so. But there’s poor-as-fuck trans women in India, in the United States, all over who’ve accepted a life of less than nothing, being already poor and lower caste, because they love themselves more than they fear persecution. I was fortunate enough to have a better starting place, but still made the decision to ghost on relationships with my family and friends, watching from far away as my grandfather was dying while wondering what had happened to me or if I had abandoned him and the rest of my family—which itself was a compromise with cowardice, but I at least sacrificed something for it. I don’t doubt that Bhatt is going through shit now that she has actually transitioned, but getting into radical feminism as a fantastic substitute for transitioning for fear of going through with it, up until she would no longer face personal consequences, is not so great a sacrifice to say that she’s not a coward. The fear and her reaction to it is rational, as self-preservation, but the cope is a cope—and that cope is deeply embedded in how she narrates her sex transition, her lesbian womanhood, and her political project. Maybe we should work with and through our own cowardice rather than act like we’re badasses who came out of shit unscathed, cleansed by feminist theory.

In fact, I think this is what’s key to the paradigmatic shift I encountered in the book as a chronological account of the author’s theoretical AND personal development. The more time Talia Bhatt spends living as a woman, the less attached she is to abstract identities of political lesbianism than to her own lived experiences as a brown trans woman in the first world. To be extra double clear, it’s not that Bhatt isn’t lesbian, but that she conflates her exclusive attraction to women with an abstract political identity and project which undermines the physicality and sensuousness of being lesbian. My partner and I sort of talk about Taylor Swift similarly, that her songwriting sucks shit when she borrows symbolic clichés for an inherent, abstract deepness they’re perceived to have (but don’t actually), but there’s something there when she speaks to her own feelings and experiences even as an uber-wealthy popstar. Similarly, my partner often says, anyone can illustrate a heart to represent love or a skull to represent death, but it’s so uninteresting in its universality and superficiality. What’s more interesting is when an artist embeds their personal symbology into a work, like the role that teeth play for Lorde in some of her songs. That’s where I see Talia Bhatt behind the abstract identity politics, the Reddit-ass edgelord monologues (my try: “We’re the daughters of the eunuchs you couldn’t castrate!”), and the impersonal posturing. That’s why the second half of the book, including “The Third Sex”, is really good—and maybe you’ll notice the difference between the declaration of a third sex and a description of one. That’s her materialist turn, and her gains in realness are palpable.

Conclusion

Second half of the book is good! I need to emphasize that.

I also feel like I came out of the book with a way stronger appreciation of Feinberg. Bhatt points out, contrary to many readers, that Feinberg viewed (her transition to) manhood as an imposition upon her self-image and lifestyle as a butch dyke. I don’t consider myself a lesbian because I’ve had the opposite experience of Bhatt, in that I grew up knowing that I was some sort of faggot (being feminine, mostly attracted to men). Like, my partner and I sorta bearded for each other in late high school, even though we were truly dating. I have a better idea of what it was like for Bhatt, and other trans women like her, starting from a more relatively degendered position comparable to Feinberg; in turn, I feel like I now have a greater understanding of Feinberg as someone who re-transitioned to female (while not compromising her masculine expression). I do think this has to be hand-in-hand with an acknowledgement that her being non-conforming is different from her being trans-sex (female-to-male-to-female haha), or more generally that her strategic wager didn’t work, but yeah I just understand her more on a personal level now. Possible angle of analysis: does Feinberg perceive herself as Bhatt does, and does any difference of perception point to a more or less true evaluation of her experience?

Nevertheless, I feel like the book’s first half lays bare the limitations of radical feminism, trans-inclusive or otherwise. Let’s qualify that: I’d like to think I’m a feminist who’s radical in my approach, but I’m not a capital-letter Radical Feminist because I think the project is mostly about trying to establish (as I’ve gestured towards earlier) a pseudo-phallic identity for women through which a politics of mastery can mobilized. There’s nothing wrong with identity formation or building, to organize around a particular subjectivity or desire-mode, but capital-letter Radical Feminism tends to essentialize its discursive symbology beyond the point of materialist practicality or sensibility. This is why I think it often finds a certain confluence with fascist thought in as much as the preservation of a supposed identity takes center (and it’s maybe also comparable with workerism as opposed to communism). I’ll happily keep my Irigaray and Davis and Serano because their analyses are extremely well-integrated across the physiological, interpersonal, and societal dimensions of sex and don’t concern themselves as much with identity over experience—as does the second half of Bhatt's book.

Thank you a ton to my partner S. as well as my friends Ènziramire and Weird Writer and others with whom I'd discussed and vented about this book. All y'all make me feel a little less crazy! Jamaica me NORMAL! :D End of log. Beep boop.

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1. With the caveat that I am using de Beauvoir’s original distinction between gender and sex, which is useful but has been criticized (well, I think) by Butler and others—although Butler’s configuration can be described as a dialectical unity/contradiction in the same way that I am summarizing de Beauvoir. For my peace of mind, I’ll clarify my position that I only think the gender-sex distinction is useful if: it’s not between subjectivity and objectivity, but between social and phenotypical categories; if sex as phenotypical categorization is understood as motivated and overdetermined by gender as social categorization; and if the characteristics which ‘determine’ sex are understood as unstable, mutable, and arbitrary relative to each other (considering neurological, endocrine, and genital aspects, which exist independently yet within the context of each other as well as within society itself). Is this enough boilerplate? Did I cover all my bases? ↩︎

2. That’s almost a radical feminist outlook, if we define radical feminism as the primacy of the sexist contradiction over others like class, nation, or race. I personally think that the primary of one social axis over others is something that can only be gleaned through—we hate to say it—a material analysis of its particular social context, rather than by looking at any set of social axes in the abstract. Like, first-and-second-wave feminism worked great in the twentieth century to ensure political, economic, and reproductive independence for women from men, but that didn’t do much to help (e.g.) poor or non-white women because it’s their class or race that acts as the limiting factor on their self-determination, preventing them from enjoying the fruits of feminism and even exacerbating patriarchal violence. This is some broken-record type shit, but these are more the grounds on which R.U.R. can be criticized rather than acting like it doesn’t engage at all. It’s similar to how the play treats nationalism as a ploy to divide the international proletariat, rather than as a structural dimension of the capitalist world economy itself. I would not accuse the play of conspicuously lacking a perspective on race. ↩︎