Lightning in my veins: a personal rumination on Trans/Rad/Fem

Talia Bhatt's Trans/Rad/Fem: Essays on Transfeminism is precisely the book I needed and the book for the present moment.

You can find Trans/Rad/Fem on itch.io here.

I finished all of Trans/Rad/Fem in less than twenty-four hours. I don't think that I've ever done that with any other book in my life. I like books, but I am a very slow reader, easily-distracted as I am. You can tell from this website's sidebar that I have a lot of projects going on, but I spent all of the 25th of January reading. It's that important.

Before I dig into the arguments presented in Trans/Rad/Fem, I simply have to praise the quality of the prose itself. Talia Bhatt is an incredible writer, demonstrating a razor wit and an unshakable ardor for transfeminist liberation. There were multiple passages in this book that made me want to jump out of my seat, scream at the sky, howl at the moon. There's a reason that I said on Bluesky that if she wanted to, Bhatt could become an excellent lyricist for a metal band.

I wanted to scream at the sky not just for the quality of the writing, but also because Bhatt addresses many of the problems trans women face in ways that I had inklings of but wasn't able to express nearly as well. This was originally supposed to be a book review, but it wound up being more of a personal rumination on how the text reflects my own experience in myriad ways.

"What happens if you fail?"

"Understanding Transmisogyny, Part Three: Constructing the Transsexual," the fifth and final essay in Part I, was particularly eye-opening to me. This essay deals with the violence that boys are subjected to under patriarchy in order to "make them men," and how this violence gets worse if the boy in question doesn't get the hint and dares to transgress the bounds of acceptable boyhood and manhood too much.

It was resonant to me because I am just now, at the age of twenty-eight, starting to process some of the things that happened to me in middle school, high school, and college. I never understood when I was younger why all the boys in school treated me the way they did. In middle school I really disliked being touched by anyone, so boys would hug me or touch me from behind in order to see my upset reaction. I dreaded going to school, and especially to PE class, because this happened to me daily. My boundaries were a joke to the boys I was in school with. I realize now that the worst of this behavior constituted sexual assault.

I also never understood why I seemed to sink to the bottom of the pecking order in every male friend group I was ever part of. Among my male friends, I was always the butt of jokes, occasionally told openly to my face that they didn't care about the things I said. I don't know why I kept hanging around them for another year after that. It engendered an irrational fear in me that I'm only kept around by my friends as a source of ridicule. I'm still, thirteen years later, trying to permanently shake that fear.

I understand now that I was treated this way because they perceived that I wasn't a good enough boy, and they were socialized to believe that made me worthy of abuse. It was all an attempt to "correct" me into manhood. Joke's on all of them, though, they failed, I failed to become a man, and I couldn't be happier for it.

Genesis was a formative band for me in my early adulthood; my name literally comes from "The Cinema Show" (Bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this). In the song "The Colony of Slippermen," the protagonist meets a colony of disturbing, diseased looking creatures who gleefully inform the him that he's going to be like them soon. His response is a horrified "me? Like you? Like THAT?" In the end, this was my reaction to the attempt to torture me into a man.

In the introduction to Trans/Rad/Fem, Bhatt states plainly, "I REFUSE to be a man," and even repeats it again for emphasis. Having once been a boy, I experienced how boys treat each other, how adults treat boys, and how men treat everyone. I refuse to be party to repeating that cycle. It's the same reason that I quit being a teacher after I realized the role of the American education system is to traumatize kids into compliance with capitalism. I know, then, that I made the right choice in refusing to participate, even though there are consequences. Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Oops, I third-sexed myself

A repeated theme in Talia Bhatt's work is the third-sexing that transfeminized people are subjected to. Having betrayed Patriarchy by rejecting it and refusing to be men, we're punished by not being considered women either, a third thing against whom everything can be done without any consequence. I've had insults yelled at me from passing cars, had slurs yelled at me by teenagers, and nearly got into a fight when someone called me ugly at the kebab shop for no reason. I've had cishet men repeatedly insist that no lesbian would ever want me because I'm not a "real" woman (joke's on that guy, the ladies love me). I once had a cishet men who called himself a "gender abolitionist" claim that I was upholding the gender binary by being a woman rather than non-binary (rich coming from the cishet dude). I've been relatively lucky compared to some of my sisters' experiences, but I regularly have nightmares about much worse things happening to me. It's a frightening thing.

I was so frightened and off-put by societal third-sexing, in fact, that I did it to myself pre- emptively. Around June of last year I started calling myself a "girlmonster," a practice I continued somewhat regularly until December or so. My logic was that a lot of people would never see me as a woman, so I should at least have some fun with it and adopt an edgy name for my own mistreatment. I realize now that that was a cope. I AM a woman, god damn it.

Monsterizing myself for my own oppressors was a black pill; it was the wrong reaction. If I'm treated poorly and third-sexed, that's not an indictment of me, it's an indictment of the people doing it to me. Bhatt's writing gave me the conviction to state for with certainty here that I was wrong to third- sex myself and to isolate myself from connection on that basis.

"Girlmonster" was a label of isolation for me. It was an excuse to draw up into myself and keep others out. I adopted goth aesthetics in 2022 and it/its pronouns around the same time as the "girlmonster" label for similar reasons, but those have stuck, whereas my self-monsterization hasn't. The difference is that after I adopted goth style, I had the fortune to meet real goth friends who took me under their wing and really initiated me into the subculture. It connected me to others. Similarly, I still like my it/its pronouns because I enjoy the sound of them on the lips of people I love. These are things that draw me to others, while "girlmonster" pushed me apart from others. I plan to write in greater detail about this in a future video essay.

I responded to being third-sexed as a trans woman by doing it to myself. This is the wrong answer. The answer, as demonstrated by Bhatt, is to demand that we be seen and treated as the women we are. Not only that, we shouldn't even settle for the way women are treated by the misogynistic society we were born into. An end to transmisogyny isn't enough. We should demand an end to all misogyny.

A Better Answer

I've always been frustrated by a lot of the ways that liberal feminism has talked about trans women. Bhatt notes this too, criticizing liberal feminism for offering us nothing but platitudes and slogans in the face of an eradicationist movement aimed squarely at us. The best they could offer us is "trans women are women." Yeah, no shit. I'm looking at two decent-sized pieces of evidence that I'm a woman right now. One centimeter bigger and they'll be D-cups. Not to mention that dreaded, hateful word "valid." If I hear one more liberal call me valid I'm gonna puke.

he lack of materialism in the current queer and feminist discourse has been really frustrating for me, historically. We tell trans people early in transition that they've always been the gender they're transitioning into, but this doesn't sit right with me anymore. I was treated as a boy for the first twenty- five years of my life, and I was completely unaware of who I was. When I look back, I see evidence of the person I later became, but that doesn't magically make it always the case. Transition was still something I had to choose, to reach out for and claim.

"Trans women are women" is a weak argument because it doesn't advocate for any action. Saying "I've always been a woman" denies the fact that I was a boy that they tried to torture into a man and failed. Bhatt calls for us to bury liberal feminism and return to more materialist and radical practice, and I agree. Saying slogans won't keep any trans people from losing their hormones; action and a more rigorous analysis will.

At the Crossroads

Trans/Rad/Fem went live on itch.io on January 24th. I bought it that afternoon, and started reading just before midnight. By about 8pm on the 25th, I had read the whole thing cover-to-cover. Over the weekend, there has been an outpouring of appreciation and excitement from feminists in response. We've all seen over the past few years and especially the past few months where things are going as they are now.

This book feels like a shot of adrenaline amid the malaise. My hope is that this will be a turning point. I like the excitement I've been seeing, and I hope that this is only the first step toward a new materialist transfeminism with a lot of contributors. I humbly hope that I can contribute in my own way.

I demand that you read this book. It felt like lightning in my veins. It gave me the most hope I've felt in months. Most importantly, it gave me newfound confidence to stand up for myself and to join my voice to the chorus. This book and the response to it has me convinced that we've got this. For that I'm unspeakably grateful.