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Essays on Transfeminism #1
Trans/Rad/Fem
Can a synthesis of trans liberation and feminism be easily arrived at? This collection asserts that, as a matter of fact, we possessed the answer to that question decades ago.
Second-Wave feminism is, today, nearly synonymous with ‘transphobia’. Any mention of this era or the movement of ‘radical feminism’ conjures images of feminists allying with right-wingers and the authoritarian state, providing legal justification for outlawing gender-affirming care and spreading deeply evil caricatures of trans women to rationalize their exclusion as feminist subjects. In the ensuing struggle to reconcile trans rights with feminism, the specter of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist has often reared its head in opposition. One may be tempted to conclude that the Second Wave, as a whole, has done irreparable harm to feminist, queer and trans politics, and must be discarded entirely.
But is that truly the case?
Radical feminism also is responsible for repudiating bioessentialistic notions of gender with theories that place it as a firmly social phenomenon. It gave us the language to describe patriarchy as a regime of mandatory heterosexual existence and dared to dream of a post-gender existence long before anyone spoke the phrase “breaking the binary”. Modern transfeminism owes much to radical feminist theory, and despite all propaganda to the contrary, the two schools of thought may be far more allied than believed.
This series of essays aims to reconstruct and reintroduce the radical feminist framework that its misbegotten inheritors seem determined to forget and in doing so boldly makes the claim that transfeminism, far from being antagonistic to radical feminism, is in fact its direct descendant. It shows how a comprehensive social theory of transsexual oppression flows almost naturally from radical feminist precepts and dares to declare that a materialist, radical transfeminism is the way forward to seize the foundations of patriarchy at the root.
Second-Wave feminism is, today, nearly synonymous with ‘transphobia’. Any mention of this era or the movement of ‘radical feminism’ conjures images of feminists allying with right-wingers and the authoritarian state, providing legal justification for outlawing gender-affirming care and spreading deeply evil caricatures of trans women to rationalize their exclusion as feminist subjects. In the ensuing struggle to reconcile trans rights with feminism, the specter of the trans-exclusionary radical feminist has often reared its head in opposition. One may be tempted to conclude that the Second Wave, as a whole, has done irreparable harm to feminist, queer and trans politics, and must be discarded entirely.
But is that truly the case?
Radical feminism also is responsible for repudiating bioessentialistic notions of gender with theories that place it as a firmly social phenomenon. It gave us the language to describe patriarchy as a regime of mandatory heterosexual existence and dared to dream of a post-gender existence long before anyone spoke the phrase “breaking the binary”. Modern transfeminism owes much to radical feminist theory, and despite all propaganda to the contrary, the two schools of thought may be far more allied than believed.
This series of essays aims to reconstruct and reintroduce the radical feminist framework that its misbegotten inheritors seem determined to forget and in doing so boldly makes the claim that transfeminism, far from being antagonistic to radical feminism, is in fact its direct descendant. It shows how a comprehensive social theory of transsexual oppression flows almost naturally from radical feminist precepts and dares to declare that a materialist, radical transfeminism is the way forward to seize the foundations of patriarchy at the root.
178 pages, Paperback
First published January 24, 2025
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 39 reviews
May 6, 2026
What a goddamn book. Like when I first read STONE BUTCH BLUES, I could feel the tiny hairs on my arms and back of my neck stand up as I tore through this.
Regarding queer and trans theory, generally, I’d rather read the account of a single person and place myself in relation to their star than a theory that leaves gaping holes whilst it tries, and fails, to unify an entire group. In TRANS/RAD/FEM though, Bhatt’s star is not only burning beyond bright, but the truths she speaks are sharpened to wicked points. And the rage! Oh, the rage.
Bhatt says: Anger is the fire that keeps you warm in the bitter cold of meandering, hazy roads, the bright burning beacon that lights your way no matter how murky. […] So many women suffer because they were never permitted to feel their rage, because they had it smothered and choked out young, because they weren’t allowed to be angry at what was being done to them. My mother, bless her, wasn’t like that. She kept her fire lit.
I won’t go through everything Bhatt covers, but here are some topics especially that lit me up:
--Identity as a way of rejection. While I am not a trans woman, I felt heavily with her idea that (as she described it for herself (this is a paraphrase, so excuse that), rather than transness as a definitive ‘feeling’ of being a gender one had not been assigned, it comes to her more a repudiation of a role and poisonous placement in society thrust upon her.
--Transgender versus transracial
Bhatt debunks the logical absurdity of those who try to link transracial with transgender, as well as providing a thorough examination of the common perversion of the phrase ‘social construct.’ [Often twisted to mean ‘fake/not real’ rather than, as she points out, a consensus, a socially malleable ‘reality’ that is agreed upon (and in most cases, forcibly foisted upon) larger society.] To play a game, everyone must agree on the rules (while the majority insists there IS no game, and we are all born like this (even as they desperately try to make laws to force people to keep playing the game.)
--the fetishization of non-Western societies as more relaxed/gender ‘enlightened’ and the shameless, self-serving academia built up at the very expense of the people it writes about. [Look, I love a good Xtian/Catholic roast as much as the next, but it’s always bewildered me when certain people espoused queerness and gender-nonconformity as booming in non-Western areas, before Xtian colonists came in and impressed everyone under their gender-rigid ideas. Say what?] Bhatt tears this apart, with a particular focus on hijra and a deservedly scathing rebuttal to those who simultaneously fetishize these women as a ‘third gender,’ while mercilessly linking them with (an abandoned or failed) manhood they themselves likely don’t identify with.
--the regime of heterosexuality.
Possibly the most compelling parts of Bhatt’s writing. As a child myself (though I had no words for it coming from a more rigid Iron Curtain pseudo-Cathlick background, so it just seemed like ‘marriage’ ‘adulthood’ etc)—heterosexuality (at large, not all heteros etc. etc.) felt wicked, a place of eternal suffering and stultifying home-air, where both men and women (but women more), had few choices and even less agency. I asked myself as a kid, why were adult couples locked in what seemed an almost-cartoonishly joyless antipathy with each other? And if everyone was so unhappy, why did they seem so hellbent on herding the next generation down this same path?? It would take decades to figure it out, and Bhatt nails it with a single phrase: compulsory heterosexuality.
Reflected now in the jerky legal actions of the US is the absolute hysteria the regime feels, when it starts to believe it is losing its power to press its populace into compulsory heterosexuality [and Bhatt derives clearly how misogyny, trans-misogyny and lesbophobia all spring from this fount of needing to socially believe in a biologically ordained default, beyond any one individual’s control. All who stray or ‘fail,’ become fair game to be made gleeful examples of… (And those who give up their power are punished harshest of all...)
--loving women
Bhatt says: To love women, to really love them and be with them, you can’t not hate that which hurts them. A love that doesn’t inspire ceaseless rage at injustice, inequity, harm and dismissal isn’t much of a love at the end of the day. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
This deep love and fierce tenderness for her fellow women, woven throughout these essays (circling back to Stone Butch Blues, where the narrator's deep love and respect for her fellow women also struck me deep)--really etched Bhatt's words into my heart.
I could go on and on about this book’s brilliance and how many more issues Bhatt dissects so cleanly, but instead I’ll just say, please go out and read it. This is the radical trans fem writing I needed; the fire that the whole world needs right now.
Regarding queer and trans theory, generally, I’d rather read the account of a single person and place myself in relation to their star than a theory that leaves gaping holes whilst it tries, and fails, to unify an entire group. In TRANS/RAD/FEM though, Bhatt’s star is not only burning beyond bright, but the truths she speaks are sharpened to wicked points. And the rage! Oh, the rage.
Bhatt says: Anger is the fire that keeps you warm in the bitter cold of meandering, hazy roads, the bright burning beacon that lights your way no matter how murky. […] So many women suffer because they were never permitted to feel their rage, because they had it smothered and choked out young, because they weren’t allowed to be angry at what was being done to them. My mother, bless her, wasn’t like that. She kept her fire lit.
I won’t go through everything Bhatt covers, but here are some topics especially that lit me up:
--Identity as a way of rejection. While I am not a trans woman, I felt heavily with her idea that (as she described it for herself (this is a paraphrase, so excuse that), rather than transness as a definitive ‘feeling’ of being a gender one had not been assigned, it comes to her more a repudiation of a role and poisonous placement in society thrust upon her.
--Transgender versus transracial
Bhatt debunks the logical absurdity of those who try to link transracial with transgender, as well as providing a thorough examination of the common perversion of the phrase ‘social construct.’ [Often twisted to mean ‘fake/not real’ rather than, as she points out, a consensus, a socially malleable ‘reality’ that is agreed upon (and in most cases, forcibly foisted upon) larger society.] To play a game, everyone must agree on the rules (while the majority insists there IS no game, and we are all born like this (even as they desperately try to make laws to force people to keep playing the game.)
--the fetishization of non-Western societies as more relaxed/gender ‘enlightened’ and the shameless, self-serving academia built up at the very expense of the people it writes about. [Look, I love a good Xtian/Catholic roast as much as the next, but it’s always bewildered me when certain people espoused queerness and gender-nonconformity as booming in non-Western areas, before Xtian colonists came in and impressed everyone under their gender-rigid ideas. Say what?] Bhatt tears this apart, with a particular focus on hijra and a deservedly scathing rebuttal to those who simultaneously fetishize these women as a ‘third gender,’ while mercilessly linking them with (an abandoned or failed) manhood they themselves likely don’t identify with.
--the regime of heterosexuality.
Possibly the most compelling parts of Bhatt’s writing. As a child myself (though I had no words for it coming from a more rigid Iron Curtain pseudo-Cathlick background, so it just seemed like ‘marriage’ ‘adulthood’ etc)—heterosexuality (at large, not all heteros etc. etc.) felt wicked, a place of eternal suffering and stultifying home-air, where both men and women (but women more), had few choices and even less agency. I asked myself as a kid, why were adult couples locked in what seemed an almost-cartoonishly joyless antipathy with each other? And if everyone was so unhappy, why did they seem so hellbent on herding the next generation down this same path?? It would take decades to figure it out, and Bhatt nails it with a single phrase: compulsory heterosexuality.
Reflected now in the jerky legal actions of the US is the absolute hysteria the regime feels, when it starts to believe it is losing its power to press its populace into compulsory heterosexuality [and Bhatt derives clearly how misogyny, trans-misogyny and lesbophobia all spring from this fount of needing to socially believe in a biologically ordained default, beyond any one individual’s control. All who stray or ‘fail,’ become fair game to be made gleeful examples of… (And those who give up their power are punished harshest of all...)
--loving women
Bhatt says: To love women, to really love them and be with them, you can’t not hate that which hurts them. A love that doesn’t inspire ceaseless rage at injustice, inequity, harm and dismissal isn’t much of a love at the end of the day. (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
This deep love and fierce tenderness for her fellow women, woven throughout these essays (circling back to Stone Butch Blues, where the narrator's deep love and respect for her fellow women also struck me deep)--really etched Bhatt's words into my heart.
I could go on and on about this book’s brilliance and how many more issues Bhatt dissects so cleanly, but instead I’ll just say, please go out and read it. This is the radical trans fem writing I needed; the fire that the whole world needs right now.
January 26, 2025
There is a spectre that hangs over modern feminism and queer theory—the radfem. That belligerent hag, her face contorted in stupid and impotent rage, distorted meme after meme. She gnashes her teeth at the patriarchy but, ever the bumbling fool, in her hysteria she merely spits at other women—and at perfectly reasonable and feminist men. Finally, the radfem, having been thoroughly ridiculed for her misplaced activism in polite society, descends to thrashing in anti-transsexual rage somewhere in the bowels of the internet. She crystallises into her final form: a TERF. Proof that her cause was whispered to her by the devil from the very start.
And so by her example is every feminist chastised. Don’t get too feminist with it now. You’re not a hysterical, man-hating, unwashed, shorn-haired, un-lipsticked radfem, right? In the same breath, every trans person is warned away from feminists. You never know when one will shed their womanly skin and reveal the witch beneath—right? Above all, you should never actually read anything radical feminists have said or theorised. That would only corrupt you. Right?
Enter Talia Bhatt: a trans woman that reads. And writes. God, does she write.
To say that Trans/Rad/Fem is (only) a collection of essays is to undersell it tremendously. It is a visionary creed and a dissection; it is one woman’s reckoning with decades upon decades of epistemic erasure. With academic papers that buried her people’s lives; with vapid allies that patted her back with one hand and shut her mouth with another. It is written with the verve of a general and the piercing oracular gift/curse of Dworkin. It is nothing less or more than a recitation of truth. Truth you already know, but must not name.
Because here’s what happens when you actually read the damned thing: you stop seeing spectres. Or quasi-religious corruption. You begin to understand. To ask questions—and to arrive at answers.
Trans/Rad/Fem is both a synthesis of the best of radical feminism with transfeminism, and a thorough beating of the worst. From Bhatt’s veneration of Wittig and respect for Rich, to her searing contempt for Raymond and disgust with Nanda, she takes a scalpel to the second wave and examines its innards through the lens of a brown, Indian trans woman living today. What is born in synthesis is not merely critique—it is a whole new body of work. Though Bhatt is underpinned by years of prior scholarship, the burning core of her theory is spun from her own life, her own flesh. And the lives of all those that are not, as a rule, allowed to speak: female, racialised, lesbian, trans.
We are told to measure regimes by the fortunes of their most abject. Trans/Rad/Fem thoroughly makes that case for the patriarchy writ large. The depth of its depravity is seen most clearly through its whipping girl, its third sex: the trans woman. And so it is fitting that she must be the one to lead feminism's new chapter towards liberation. To quote,
I hope that you do. I hope that you accept this chance for understanding, for solidarity, for knowing.
I hope that you read the damned book.
And so by her example is every feminist chastised. Don’t get too feminist with it now. You’re not a hysterical, man-hating, unwashed, shorn-haired, un-lipsticked radfem, right? In the same breath, every trans person is warned away from feminists. You never know when one will shed their womanly skin and reveal the witch beneath—right? Above all, you should never actually read anything radical feminists have said or theorised. That would only corrupt you. Right?
Enter Talia Bhatt: a trans woman that reads. And writes. God, does she write.
To say that Trans/Rad/Fem is (only) a collection of essays is to undersell it tremendously. It is a visionary creed and a dissection; it is one woman’s reckoning with decades upon decades of epistemic erasure. With academic papers that buried her people’s lives; with vapid allies that patted her back with one hand and shut her mouth with another. It is written with the verve of a general and the piercing oracular gift/curse of Dworkin. It is nothing less or more than a recitation of truth. Truth you already know, but must not name.
Because here’s what happens when you actually read the damned thing: you stop seeing spectres. Or quasi-religious corruption. You begin to understand. To ask questions—and to arrive at answers.
Trans/Rad/Fem is both a synthesis of the best of radical feminism with transfeminism, and a thorough beating of the worst. From Bhatt’s veneration of Wittig and respect for Rich, to her searing contempt for Raymond and disgust with Nanda, she takes a scalpel to the second wave and examines its innards through the lens of a brown, Indian trans woman living today. What is born in synthesis is not merely critique—it is a whole new body of work. Though Bhatt is underpinned by years of prior scholarship, the burning core of her theory is spun from her own life, her own flesh. And the lives of all those that are not, as a rule, allowed to speak: female, racialised, lesbian, trans.
We are told to measure regimes by the fortunes of their most abject. Trans/Rad/Fem thoroughly makes that case for the patriarchy writ large. The depth of its depravity is seen most clearly through its whipping girl, its third sex: the trans woman. And so it is fitting that she must be the one to lead feminism's new chapter towards liberation. To quote,
Now is the time for the damned to have their due, for the wails of the forgotten to echo above the “civil”, silencing din. Now is the time for all those whose struggles have been erased, co-opted, recuperated, disrupted, and sanctified to make themselves known.
Now we will speak, and you will, for the first time, LISTEN.
I hope that you do. I hope that you accept this chance for understanding, for solidarity, for knowing.
I hope that you read the damned book.
February 17, 2025
A must read for anyone who considers themselves a feminist and/or trans ally. "the third sex" in particular is an incisive commentary on white/Western decolonization and a refusal to look at unfamiliar, but inarguable transmisogyny to score points using people of color as a rhetorical cudgel, while ignoring the reality of non-western patriarchy and misogyny as a whole.
February 10, 2025
3.5
I think it is refreshing to see radical feminism almost revitalised by Bhatt from her self-proclaimed desi transsexual woman's perspective. I certainly understand why some people have found this book to be revelatory for them.
There are some exceptional chapters in here, such as 'The Third Sex' and 'I Read It: The Sublime Lesbian Feminism of 'Stone Butch Blues'' which really demonstrate Bhatt's writing style and approaches to both criticism and literature. However, the other chapters on developing approaches to transmisogyny and lesbophobia, whilst very much embedded in radical feminism, were a bit harder for me to engage with. Some of that is down to her more personable writing style which I think can be hit and miss and more of a personal preference, it could be a bit jarring or go on slight tangents at times. Other times are that these articulations are like revision for me, reminders of radical feminist ideas that I am already aware about, primarily from the works of Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig. So in that regard, it depends on if Bhatt does a good job at this, I think she does for the most part, but I would recommend having at least some understandings of these ideas beforehand. Also there is no bibliography in this book, which is disappointing as it is clear that Bhatt is well-read, but sometimes texts are introduced in later chapters even if those ideas are clearly used in previous ones.
Some really insightful essays in here, but also some that might be somewhat familiar to those already aware of radical feminism.
I think it is refreshing to see radical feminism almost revitalised by Bhatt from her self-proclaimed desi transsexual woman's perspective. I certainly understand why some people have found this book to be revelatory for them.
There are some exceptional chapters in here, such as 'The Third Sex' and 'I Read It: The Sublime Lesbian Feminism of 'Stone Butch Blues'' which really demonstrate Bhatt's writing style and approaches to both criticism and literature. However, the other chapters on developing approaches to transmisogyny and lesbophobia, whilst very much embedded in radical feminism, were a bit harder for me to engage with. Some of that is down to her more personable writing style which I think can be hit and miss and more of a personal preference, it could be a bit jarring or go on slight tangents at times. Other times are that these articulations are like revision for me, reminders of radical feminist ideas that I am already aware about, primarily from the works of Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig. So in that regard, it depends on if Bhatt does a good job at this, I think she does for the most part, but I would recommend having at least some understandings of these ideas beforehand. Also there is no bibliography in this book, which is disappointing as it is clear that Bhatt is well-read, but sometimes texts are introduced in later chapters even if those ideas are clearly used in previous ones.
Some really insightful essays in here, but also some that might be somewhat familiar to those already aware of radical feminism.
January 25, 2025
This book is incredibly rich. I've been following Bhatt's essays as they were released online over the past year so this was a reread of many plus a bit of new stuff. It can take a while to fully absorb every point but I've found it so clarifying in understanding how these forces of power work.
Rather than going over the content itself, I am just going to make a few points that I would love to see expanded upon in the future by other theorists (or Bhatt herself):
1) I would be really interested to see someone put the analysis of the slave used in the Diabolus ex Machina chapter in conversation with Black studies more directly.
2) Although "Degendering and Regendering" is short, it offers a lot to consider in thinking about how transmasculinity fits into these frameworks and I hope someone takes that up.
3) "The Third Sex" is SUCH a critical essay. I have a lot of thoughts about how some of this may or may not apply in the case of Two-Spirit people and the precolonial Americas but overall this is such a needed intervention in the mess that is academic accounts (and subsequent popular retellings) of global gender diversity.
Rather than going over the content itself, I am just going to make a few points that I would love to see expanded upon in the future by other theorists (or Bhatt herself):
1) I would be really interested to see someone put the analysis of the slave used in the Diabolus ex Machina chapter in conversation with Black studies more directly.
2) Although "Degendering and Regendering" is short, it offers a lot to consider in thinking about how transmasculinity fits into these frameworks and I hope someone takes that up.
3) "The Third Sex" is SUCH a critical essay. I have a lot of thoughts about how some of this may or may not apply in the case of Two-Spirit people and the precolonial Americas but overall this is such a needed intervention in the mess that is academic accounts (and subsequent popular retellings) of global gender diversity.
Read
February 11, 2025This book does a sterling job of clearing up some misconceptions about Western colonialism and the so-called third genders in pre and postcolonial lecture. It's a rather important read if you're white and transgender — or even if you consider yourself an ally to queer people in general.
Now, as an aside: It is common knowledge that being a fascist and a conservative is easy, because it doesn't ask anything of you but hate and tribalism. It is also common knowledge that being on the left is hard, because it asks you to be compassionate to people who might not be like you, to educate yourself and, quite simply, to read.
That said, the amount of references and book recommendations I have been able to glean off this book is insaner than I am, and I'm freaking certified. My TBR list has grown at least twofold!
Now, as an aside: It is common knowledge that being a fascist and a conservative is easy, because it doesn't ask anything of you but hate and tribalism. It is also common knowledge that being on the left is hard, because it asks you to be compassionate to people who might not be like you, to educate yourself and, quite simply, to read.
That said, the amount of references and book recommendations I have been able to glean off this book is insaner than I am, and I'm freaking certified. My TBR list has grown at least twofold!
July 22, 2025
"does patriarchy hurt men? maybe. but it hurts women first. that's the part that matters."
as an academic, i often repeat the phrase, "it's always misogyny and it's always colonialism" whenever i think of or write about systems of oppression. this is a simplistic way to examine bigotry, yes, but the more i read, the more i feel that it might be the best way to think about things.
talia bhatt writes on her perspectives on feminism, both radical and non, from the perspective of an indian trans woman. in essays that are as emotive as they are informative, distinguishing a massive passion into researching such a topic, as well as a clear background in fiction writing, she concisely argues the merits of radical feminist thinking points, as well as speaking on subjects of racism, misogyny (both trans and otherwise), transfeminism and transemasculation (a term i love and WISH the boys on tumblr would adopt).
while the arguments are a little repetitive, especially if you've spent any time thinking about radical feminist theory at all, i particularly enjoyed bhatt's limited if insightful media analysis, as well as the entire chapter on "the third sex", a subject i wasn't previously informed on, but found absolutely shocking that these texts had gone unchecked for so long.
i recommend every reader of feminist theory, wanting to listen to the words spoken by our trans sisters, read this set of essays with an open mind and an open heart. very good!
as an academic, i often repeat the phrase, "it's always misogyny and it's always colonialism" whenever i think of or write about systems of oppression. this is a simplistic way to examine bigotry, yes, but the more i read, the more i feel that it might be the best way to think about things.
talia bhatt writes on her perspectives on feminism, both radical and non, from the perspective of an indian trans woman. in essays that are as emotive as they are informative, distinguishing a massive passion into researching such a topic, as well as a clear background in fiction writing, she concisely argues the merits of radical feminist thinking points, as well as speaking on subjects of racism, misogyny (both trans and otherwise), transfeminism and transemasculation (a term i love and WISH the boys on tumblr would adopt).
while the arguments are a little repetitive, especially if you've spent any time thinking about radical feminist theory at all, i particularly enjoyed bhatt's limited if insightful media analysis, as well as the entire chapter on "the third sex", a subject i wasn't previously informed on, but found absolutely shocking that these texts had gone unchecked for so long.
i recommend every reader of feminist theory, wanting to listen to the words spoken by our trans sisters, read this set of essays with an open mind and an open heart. very good!
April 23, 2025
Una lectura urgente y necesaria. Bhatt revitaliza y cuestiona con contundencia las prácticas transmisóginas de la derecha, de los hombres y sus mujeres disfrazadas de feministas. Desmonta argumentos transfobos con excelencia y nos deja firmes como sujetas de la lucha de erradicación del patriarcado. Mi deseo es que la leamos y la discutamos incluso con esas TE"RF" (como dice ella) que negarían nuestra existencia y derecho a vivir.
May 9, 2025
i genuinely picked up trans/rad/fem because i kept seeing discourse about it on tumblr and decided to check it out for myself.
i ended up with complicated feelings. due to its nature as a collection of serially published essays i felt like the book frequently reiterated upon itself, especially as i'd read the essay that maybe acts the most as a centerpiece "the third sex" already. let the month+ it took for me to get through everything speak for itself.
i think many people could benefit from talia bhatts perspective. regrettably i think those who could benefit from it the most are unlikely to read anything shes written, since she used scary words in the title.
i ended up with complicated feelings. due to its nature as a collection of serially published essays i felt like the book frequently reiterated upon itself, especially as i'd read the essay that maybe acts the most as a centerpiece "the third sex" already. let the month+ it took for me to get through everything speak for itself.
i think many people could benefit from talia bhatts perspective. regrettably i think those who could benefit from it the most are unlikely to read anything shes written, since she used scary words in the title.
December 12, 2025
To the Western academic, the subjectivity and activism of transfeminized Third-Worlders is a distant concern next to their rhetorical utility as a ‘venerated’, vaunted “Third-Sex”, casting “primitive yet Enlightened” non-Western cultures as curious gender-practitioners from whom the West has so much to learn. All the while, the ways in which Third-Sexed populations like hijra identify with womanhood and organize for legal recognition as women are utterly elided;
[...]
Strains of academic feminism exist that consider colonialism to be the genesis of patriarchy, that idealize a prelapsarian pre-patriarchal past that was then tainted by the relentless scourge of worldwide Euro-imperialist hegemony. I do not know how to explain how old the misogyny in Hindu scriptures is, how the history of my people is replete with burned widows and drowned infants and femicidal practices that far predate any British law, how the hijra and khwaja sira were persecuted on the subcontinent long before the Raj, how the ‘veneration’ of holy men is not actual social capital but rather theological justification for confinement, isolation, and exclusion.
[...]
I do not know how to explain to learned academics that sexual objectification and reproductive exploitation were not innovations that the West pioneered, nor do I know how to explain that a historical record of “asceticism”, of hijra being prescribed a livelihood of begging for alms at ceremonies, is not “reverence” or an “institutionalized gender-role”, but marginalization.
[...]
liberal feminism is fucking dead. It failed to protect abortion rights, it failed to meaningfully issue a challenge to patriarchal rape culture, and absolutely fucking failed every single trans person.
[...]
Strains of academic feminism exist that consider colonialism to be the genesis of patriarchy, that idealize a prelapsarian pre-patriarchal past that was then tainted by the relentless scourge of worldwide Euro-imperialist hegemony. I do not know how to explain how old the misogyny in Hindu scriptures is, how the history of my people is replete with burned widows and drowned infants and femicidal practices that far predate any British law, how the hijra and khwaja sira were persecuted on the subcontinent long before the Raj, how the ‘veneration’ of holy men is not actual social capital but rather theological justification for confinement, isolation, and exclusion.
[...]
I do not know how to explain to learned academics that sexual objectification and reproductive exploitation were not innovations that the West pioneered, nor do I know how to explain that a historical record of “asceticism”, of hijra being prescribed a livelihood of begging for alms at ceremonies, is not “reverence” or an “institutionalized gender-role”, but marginalization.
[...]
liberal feminism is fucking dead. It failed to protect abortion rights, it failed to meaningfully issue a challenge to patriarchal rape culture, and absolutely fucking failed every single trans person.
April 4, 2025
such an amazingly-argued book. bhatt gave such clear, unambiguous arguments about topics i had only begun to grasp at the edges of. a few chapters were hard to get through b/c they were on topics i was already familiar with, but after i finished, i realized i was still coming away with some new ideas. a real call to action for a trans-inclusive materialist feminism
February 5, 2025
Analysis sharp as a knife interspersed with personal experiences that similarly cut deep. This has given me a lot to think about, regarding materialist transfeminism and how we can better protect and defend our transfeminine sisters. Greatly looking forward to reading the second book in this series when it comes out.
April 8, 2025
This is required feminist reading.
It has one of the best surveys of how misogyny works that I've read. There is quite a bit of jargon, so it's not necessarily an intro level collection if essays, but Talia has filled a gap in feminism in a way that I've so long yearned for.
I have a lot more thoughts that I'm not gonna share in a goodreads review, but basically, you should read this.
It has one of the best surveys of how misogyny works that I've read. There is quite a bit of jargon, so it's not necessarily an intro level collection if essays, but Talia has filled a gap in feminism in a way that I've so long yearned for.
I have a lot more thoughts that I'm not gonna share in a goodreads review, but basically, you should read this.
May 1, 2026
This is what we've needed for a long, long time.
Read
January 26, 2026I really wish every single person even tangentially interested in gender scholarship read the sublime takedown of Serena Nanda.
April 3, 2025
This was a difficult read, lots to think on. It is as much about the heterosexual regime as it is about transness. The essays begin simple enough (although as someone who is generally unfamiliar with the formal study of feminism and the terminology therein, I had to really pay attention to parse what was going on). They culminate in the explosive final chapter, The Third Sex, which together with the Conclusion gave me so much to think about.
What particularly strikes me, beyond the theoretical revelations, is how personal this book is. This is not a dry discursive text; it has voice and life and deep feeling that you cannot, as the reader, be untouched by. It feels like Bhatt is speaking directly to you and you must listen, you cannot help but listen.
And then I understand how rare it is that trans women like Bhatt get to speak like this. She's eloquent and emotive and uninterrupted. She says what she wants to say - and even so, she asks "why does it have to be me to say this?"
I expect I will be revisiting this collection as I await the second volume next year.
What particularly strikes me, beyond the theoretical revelations, is how personal this book is. This is not a dry discursive text; it has voice and life and deep feeling that you cannot, as the reader, be untouched by. It feels like Bhatt is speaking directly to you and you must listen, you cannot help but listen.
And then I understand how rare it is that trans women like Bhatt get to speak like this. She's eloquent and emotive and uninterrupted. She says what she wants to say - and even so, she asks "why does it have to be me to say this?"
I expect I will be revisiting this collection as I await the second volume next year.
February 22, 2025
This is a really excellent book. A lot of anthologies of essays have great essays in them, as this one does, but not all of them work as well as a cohesive text as Trans/Rad/Fem does. I'd recommend this for anyone interested in transfeminism, even if you'd already read individual essays from Bhatt's newsletter by the same name. As with the essays in their newsletter format, The Third Sex and The Questions Has an Answer were my favorite.
May 16, 2025
AHHHH loved it sm, 10/10, especially the bit on hijra’s
May 27, 2025
bhatt is such a powerful writer, an essential reader in transfeminism in my humble opinion! talia bhatt you are awesome may you write for decades to come
March 20, 2026
Everybody interested in a feminism that really brings down the patriarchy, not making woman's place a bit more cozy, should read this.
May 15, 2026
I came to this book with an embarrassing origin story: I entered academic feminism as a TERF. Not through bad faith, but through what felt like the only available escape from a liberal feminism I experienced as structurally toothless. Radical feminism offered something that felt real: a materialist account of sex, power, and coercion that named patriarchy as a system rather than a collection of individual bad actors. What drew me wasn’t ideology. Radfem was the first framework I encountered that named the cage as a cage. Everything before it told me to decorate it, find the right label for the bars, perform my way into a self. Radfem said: this is a structure, and it is being enforced on you. That was true. The error was in who it identified as the threat.
What dismantled that framework for me wasn’t persuasion but research: basic undergraduate methods, statistical literacy, access to peer-reviewed work instead of shady “crime statistics” from TERFblr. Anti-trans arguments collapsed under empirical scrutiny. I tried desperately and failed to find support for beliefs I deeply held. I followed where the data led. I desisted from radical feminism because of it. If trans women aren’t victims of misogynistic violence, how is it that they meet, and often exceed, the rates of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, family violence, and gender-based economic precarity that radical feminism uses to define women as a coerced underclass? That’s the question I’ve been sitting with for years. But debunking isn’t the same as replacing. I was left with the materialist tools and nowhere coherent to stand: unable to defend radical feminism, unable to stomach liberal feminism, which I frankly detested.
I had been telling myself there were only two options. Bhatt destroys that premise entirely.
The sabotage argument.
Bhatt’s central claim is deceptively simple: radical feminism didn’t fail because its tools were wrong; it failed because it destroyed the evidence its own tools produced. The transsexual woman is the most definitive proof of sex-class theory that exists: conscripted into manhood, subjected to misogynistic violence regardless of biology, degendered and dehumanized by the very regime radical feminism set out to analyze. Her existence demonstrates exactly what the tradition argued: that womanhood is not a biological category but a social position of enforced servility, that misogyny operates as a system independent of anatomy, that the heterosexual regime punishes all deserters with particular ferocity. And the tradition chose to eradicate her rather than follow its own logic to its conclusions.
This required active effort. At the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, trans lesbian folk singer Beth Elliott, who had been on the organizing committee, was accosted as she took the stage, and her ejection demanded. The assembled audience voted to defend her. Robin Morgan, scheduled to give a keynote on unity, spent that night rewriting it into a screed attacking trans women, while simultaneously defending her male husband’s place in lesbian feminism on the grounds that he was a “feminine man” and an “effeminist faggot.” Morgan’s 1977 published account erased Elliott’s organizing role and the vote that protected her. Janice Raymond’s epilogue to The Transsexual Empire went further, prescribing concrete policy restrictions on trans clinics that saw wide adoption. These people saw where the theory led and chose not to follow it: ideological cowardice dressed as principle, quietly reintroducing biological essentialism through the back door while claiming to be social constructivists.
The tools are good. The institution is rotten. Those two things are true simultaneously because the institution worked to corrupt the tools to maintain the exclusion. What Bhatt is doing, what she explicitly frames as the task of disowned daughters, isn’t rehabilitation of the pipeline. It’s recovery of what was deliberately broken.
And then there is the common TERF retort when confronted with these statistics: “Well, they’re murdered by men.” As though this distinguishes trans women from cis women. As though cis women are being murdered by some other species. The perpetrator profile is identical. The same demographic, the same motives, the same structural entitlement to women’s bodies and lives. You’ve just conceded that the same violence, committed by the same class of people, for the same reasons, targets both groups. That isn’t an argument against trans inclusion; it’s the radical feminist thesis, fully realized, staring you in the face. You agree, apparently. You just haven’t followed your agreement to its conclusion.
Abuse, coercion, and the Global South.
Bhatt’s account of the near-total absence of safe spaces for trans women, particularly transfemmes of color in the Global South, is among the most important and most painful things in the book. She writes from inside the double bind with unflinching specificity: remain within the violence of the family home, or enter a broader world structured by many of the same violences. For trans women in the Global South, liberation often becomes synonymous with escape, but escape itself is systematically weaponized. Borders, citizenship status, economic dependence, and intimate partnerships all become instruments of coercive control. Bhatt is candid that her own escape depended entirely on her wife, that relocating to the UK meant trading one form of precarity for another, that her immigration status left her structurally vulnerable even within a relationship she trusts. She doesn’t frame this as personal misfortune. She frames it as architecture.
This hit me with particular force from my background in abuse intervention. What Bhatt describes are the exact mechanisms I watched convicted abusers use against immigrant women: legal status wielded as a leash, economic dependence weaponized, identity-based degradation deployed as control. In that power differential, consent cannot function. What looks like a relationship is a hostage situation with paperwork.
Her insistence on the epistemic standing of this testimony matters as much as the testimony itself. Dismissing marginalized women’s experiences as “too anecdotal” isn’t a methodological standard; it’s a feature of the system she is describing. The same move was made against battered women’s testimony before feminist researchers established self-report as the gold standard for domestic violence and sexual assault prevalence, precisely because official records systematically undercounted and delegitimized survivor accounts.
To deploy that dismissal against trans women isn’t skepticism. It’s the patriarchal epistemological playbook being used against the people feminist methodology was built to protect. The tactics are the same ones patented and weaponized by the men’s rights movement: the same epistemological bad faith, the same deliberate obfuscation, now deployed by self-described feminists to expel the people their own framework’s logic demands they center.
The logical contradiction at the heart of anti-trans politics is also worth naming: trans women are simultaneously too small a population to warrant institutional care and a massive civilizational threat requiring endless political mobilization. You can’t have both. The movement knows which it needs on any given day.
Epistemicide.
The book’s most academically substantial section tracks how transmisogyny gets built into knowledge systems themselves, what Bhatt frames as epistemicide: not merely the silencing of trans voices, but the construction of frameworks that make it structurally impossible to see, name, or theorize transmisogynistic harm at all.
The centerpiece is a forensic dismantling of Serena Nanda’s Neither Man Nor Woman, an anthropological ethnography of India’s hijra foundational to Western understandings of “third genders.” Bhatt shows that the book documents hijras traveling in “ladies” train compartments and periodically demanding to be counted as women in the census, then insists on their essential maleness, citing folk narratives as evidence that hijras acknowledge they “cannot become women.” What Nanda presents as hijra self-understanding is the expression of a society that structurally denies them womanhood, reproduced without examination by an anthropologist too ideologically committed to third-sexing to notice the difference.
The stakes aren’t abstract. Nanda’s work was cited in the Indian Supreme Court’s 2014 NALSA opinion, which declared that recognizing hijras as either male or female would violate their constitutional rights, institutionalizing their degendering in law rather than remedying it. And buried in Nanda’s endnotes: an affirmative citation of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire. The foundational ethnography of hijras is quietly laundering the most famous transmisogynist in existence into the queer academy’s canon.
This lit up the center of my own research. Trans femicide is routinely excluded from femicide frameworks. Violence against trans women is collapsed into generalized hate crime categories rather than recognized as gendered violence. This isn’t oversight; it’s the logical output of knowledge systems built to degender trans women at the level of concept. You can’t measure what your categories have been designed not to see. The problem isn’t quantification. The problem is that quantification built on incoherent categories produces incoherent data, then launders it as objectivity. The academic laundering Bhatt describes is not a few bad apples; it’s baked into the foundation of the academy itself, reproduced through dubious citation chains and frameworks engineered to be unable to see the harm they’re measuring.
From here Bhatt delivers the book’s most devastating observation. The liberal feminist model, with its tidy separation of mutable gender from immutable sex, its genderbread persons carefully insisting that “no one is claiming trans people actually change their sex,” has arrived at precisely the same foundational premise as Janice Raymond. The enlightened ally and the committed transphobe agree that transition is social performance layered over an unchanged biological reality. They differ only on whether to be polite about it. Raymond herself concedes, about a paragraph into her original introduction, that trans women do materially change their sex through hormones and surgery. The modern progressive is now less willing to admit this than the woman who wrote the transmisogynist bible. Liberal feminism didn’t transcend Raymond’s transmisogyny; it simply made the same premise polite.
On a personal level, this hit me hard. I grew up in the age of genderbread people when I was trying to figure out my own identity (I remember posting that graphic at eleven on my little LGBTQ pride Instagram) and later sat through undergraduate gender studies courses where it was taught (that in my experience, were dripping with colonialism and unexamined biases, particularly against queer women, but I digress). I’ve spent the majority of the last decade obsessing over gender in one way or another, and I think I’m finally able to articulate my deep discomfort with liberal inclusivity thanks to Bhatt.
Identity as refusal.
The essay that makes this most visceral is Bhatt’s account of trans identity as refusal rather than affirmation. She doesn’t describe her transition as an innate certainty or a joyful arrival at selfhood. What drove her was the accumulated, corrosive impossibility of inhabiting manhood: a role violently imposed, ideologically enforced, and ultimately unlivable. Her words: “I, simply put, could not be a man. I refused.”
This framing carries real theoretical weight, but what hit me was how deeply it mapped onto my own life from the opposite direction. I have been tormented by gender since childhood. I identified as nonbinary before I ever identified as a woman, and identifying as a woman was only something I willingly did once I became a TERF. Even then it wasn’t affirmative. I was defining myself through my shackles and rage at the material conditions I was placed in. I only ever identified as a woman because I was exhausted. I was tired of trying to get people to see me as anything but a girl.
Being heavily involved in neoliberal queer spaces as a child figuring out my identity, I quickly learned what felt like a brutal truth: nothing you do matters. You will always be a woman. Even the people who claimed to support me never seemed to see me as anything else. Every attempt at escaping the “woman” box felt hollow and performative, serving only to make me more hyperaware of how people perceived me. Living as a woman where at least people treated me normally felt easier than choosing the third option: being myself, changing nothing about how society gendered me, and getting called slurs on top of it.
This was part of what led to my radicalization. I’ve always been deeply uncomfortable with being called “cis,” a reaction I now recognize as politically reactionary, but one rooted in the implication that I somehow identified with, chose, or accepted the role imposed onto me. That’s the issue I’ve always had with the affirmative identity model Bhatt rejects. It has never matched my lived experience. I’ve never experienced gender as self-expression or self-actualization. I’ve only experienced it as coercion.
Bhatt draws on Wittig’s argument that womanhood under patriarchy is not a natural category but a class position, and that the lesbian, as a fugitive from the heterosexual contract, is not a woman in the sense that matters to the regime. Bhatt extends this: the trans woman is a deserter who has renounced the privileges of the oppressor class, and the violence directed at her is the violence of a regime that cannot afford to let desertion go unpunished. She also acknowledges the darker truth: for the transfemme who is intimately aware of what awaits her, transition to womanhood isn’t solely liberating. It’s trading one prison for another. The most dangerous thing a trans woman can do in this world is be herself. There is no world in which someone is opting into transmisogyny if they have any viable alternative.
What Bhatt offers is oxygen. The refusal is enough. You can be a gender deserter without a fixed destination. It’s enough to just be done. That framing set me free.
Bhatt is the first writer I’ve read who takes the same materialist starting point (gender as coercive system, not identity menu) and follows it somewhere that doesn’t require sacrificing the most vulnerable to get there. For some of us, that’s the difference between a framework and a home.
What this leaves.
I’m not trying to rehabilitate radical feminism as a movement or institution. The pattern is too consistent and too deliberate: suffragettes deploying white supremacy as a strategic tool, second wave sacrificing sex workers and trans women, liberal feminism dissolving structural analysis into individual choice. Each wave drawing its circle of solidarity around its founders’ specific subject position and treating everyone outside as irrelevant or threatening. The radfem pipeline is real, the institutional harm is real, and nothing in this review should be read as minimizing that.
What Bhatt demonstrates, and what I find genuinely new, is that the theoretical tradition contains resources that were never fully used, and that were actively corrupted by people who saw where they led and flinched. The materialist analysis of sex-class, heterosexuality as a political regime, misogyny as a system of labor extraction rather than a feeling: these tools work. They work most completely when applied to trans women, whose existence is the tradition’s own proof of concept, the unwanted validation of its most fundamental claims.
Transfeminism, as Bhatt is practicing it, is the first school of feminist thought I’ve encountered that takes those tools seriously enough to follow them to their conclusions without sacrificing the most vulnerable along the way. It isn’t a third option between radical and liberal feminism; it’s what feminist analysis looks like when it refuses to stop at the edge of someone’s discomfort.
That isn’t rehabilitation. It’s what disowned daughters have always had to do, as she writes: cleaning up the mess their foremothers made, using the tools their foremothers built and broke, refusing to let the people who corrupted the theory own it.
“The Gender Binary” is a misnomer; gender has always been a hierarchy. I had been arriving at this through GBV data and victimization theory for years without quite having the full architecture to defend it. This book is that architecture. To exist as a trans person in the gender hierarchy is the greatest rebellion against the binary there is. We cannot crush the gender binary without first destroying the false sex binary that both the enlightened liberal and the committed transphobe pray at: the altar of “immutable sex.”
What dismantled that framework for me wasn’t persuasion but research: basic undergraduate methods, statistical literacy, access to peer-reviewed work instead of shady “crime statistics” from TERFblr. Anti-trans arguments collapsed under empirical scrutiny. I tried desperately and failed to find support for beliefs I deeply held. I followed where the data led. I desisted from radical feminism because of it. If trans women aren’t victims of misogynistic violence, how is it that they meet, and often exceed, the rates of intimate partner violence, sexual assault, family violence, and gender-based economic precarity that radical feminism uses to define women as a coerced underclass? That’s the question I’ve been sitting with for years. But debunking isn’t the same as replacing. I was left with the materialist tools and nowhere coherent to stand: unable to defend radical feminism, unable to stomach liberal feminism, which I frankly detested.
I had been telling myself there were only two options. Bhatt destroys that premise entirely.
The sabotage argument.
Bhatt’s central claim is deceptively simple: radical feminism didn’t fail because its tools were wrong; it failed because it destroyed the evidence its own tools produced. The transsexual woman is the most definitive proof of sex-class theory that exists: conscripted into manhood, subjected to misogynistic violence regardless of biology, degendered and dehumanized by the very regime radical feminism set out to analyze. Her existence demonstrates exactly what the tradition argued: that womanhood is not a biological category but a social position of enforced servility, that misogyny operates as a system independent of anatomy, that the heterosexual regime punishes all deserters with particular ferocity. And the tradition chose to eradicate her rather than follow its own logic to its conclusions.
This required active effort. At the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, trans lesbian folk singer Beth Elliott, who had been on the organizing committee, was accosted as she took the stage, and her ejection demanded. The assembled audience voted to defend her. Robin Morgan, scheduled to give a keynote on unity, spent that night rewriting it into a screed attacking trans women, while simultaneously defending her male husband’s place in lesbian feminism on the grounds that he was a “feminine man” and an “effeminist faggot.” Morgan’s 1977 published account erased Elliott’s organizing role and the vote that protected her. Janice Raymond’s epilogue to The Transsexual Empire went further, prescribing concrete policy restrictions on trans clinics that saw wide adoption. These people saw where the theory led and chose not to follow it: ideological cowardice dressed as principle, quietly reintroducing biological essentialism through the back door while claiming to be social constructivists.
The tools are good. The institution is rotten. Those two things are true simultaneously because the institution worked to corrupt the tools to maintain the exclusion. What Bhatt is doing, what she explicitly frames as the task of disowned daughters, isn’t rehabilitation of the pipeline. It’s recovery of what was deliberately broken.
And then there is the common TERF retort when confronted with these statistics: “Well, they’re murdered by men.” As though this distinguishes trans women from cis women. As though cis women are being murdered by some other species. The perpetrator profile is identical. The same demographic, the same motives, the same structural entitlement to women’s bodies and lives. You’ve just conceded that the same violence, committed by the same class of people, for the same reasons, targets both groups. That isn’t an argument against trans inclusion; it’s the radical feminist thesis, fully realized, staring you in the face. You agree, apparently. You just haven’t followed your agreement to its conclusion.
Abuse, coercion, and the Global South.
Bhatt’s account of the near-total absence of safe spaces for trans women, particularly transfemmes of color in the Global South, is among the most important and most painful things in the book. She writes from inside the double bind with unflinching specificity: remain within the violence of the family home, or enter a broader world structured by many of the same violences. For trans women in the Global South, liberation often becomes synonymous with escape, but escape itself is systematically weaponized. Borders, citizenship status, economic dependence, and intimate partnerships all become instruments of coercive control. Bhatt is candid that her own escape depended entirely on her wife, that relocating to the UK meant trading one form of precarity for another, that her immigration status left her structurally vulnerable even within a relationship she trusts. She doesn’t frame this as personal misfortune. She frames it as architecture.
This hit me with particular force from my background in abuse intervention. What Bhatt describes are the exact mechanisms I watched convicted abusers use against immigrant women: legal status wielded as a leash, economic dependence weaponized, identity-based degradation deployed as control. In that power differential, consent cannot function. What looks like a relationship is a hostage situation with paperwork.
Her insistence on the epistemic standing of this testimony matters as much as the testimony itself. Dismissing marginalized women’s experiences as “too anecdotal” isn’t a methodological standard; it’s a feature of the system she is describing. The same move was made against battered women’s testimony before feminist researchers established self-report as the gold standard for domestic violence and sexual assault prevalence, precisely because official records systematically undercounted and delegitimized survivor accounts.
To deploy that dismissal against trans women isn’t skepticism. It’s the patriarchal epistemological playbook being used against the people feminist methodology was built to protect. The tactics are the same ones patented and weaponized by the men’s rights movement: the same epistemological bad faith, the same deliberate obfuscation, now deployed by self-described feminists to expel the people their own framework’s logic demands they center.
The logical contradiction at the heart of anti-trans politics is also worth naming: trans women are simultaneously too small a population to warrant institutional care and a massive civilizational threat requiring endless political mobilization. You can’t have both. The movement knows which it needs on any given day.
Epistemicide.
The book’s most academically substantial section tracks how transmisogyny gets built into knowledge systems themselves, what Bhatt frames as epistemicide: not merely the silencing of trans voices, but the construction of frameworks that make it structurally impossible to see, name, or theorize transmisogynistic harm at all.
The centerpiece is a forensic dismantling of Serena Nanda’s Neither Man Nor Woman, an anthropological ethnography of India’s hijra foundational to Western understandings of “third genders.” Bhatt shows that the book documents hijras traveling in “ladies” train compartments and periodically demanding to be counted as women in the census, then insists on their essential maleness, citing folk narratives as evidence that hijras acknowledge they “cannot become women.” What Nanda presents as hijra self-understanding is the expression of a society that structurally denies them womanhood, reproduced without examination by an anthropologist too ideologically committed to third-sexing to notice the difference.
The stakes aren’t abstract. Nanda’s work was cited in the Indian Supreme Court’s 2014 NALSA opinion, which declared that recognizing hijras as either male or female would violate their constitutional rights, institutionalizing their degendering in law rather than remedying it. And buried in Nanda’s endnotes: an affirmative citation of Raymond’s Transsexual Empire. The foundational ethnography of hijras is quietly laundering the most famous transmisogynist in existence into the queer academy’s canon.
This lit up the center of my own research. Trans femicide is routinely excluded from femicide frameworks. Violence against trans women is collapsed into generalized hate crime categories rather than recognized as gendered violence. This isn’t oversight; it’s the logical output of knowledge systems built to degender trans women at the level of concept. You can’t measure what your categories have been designed not to see. The problem isn’t quantification. The problem is that quantification built on incoherent categories produces incoherent data, then launders it as objectivity. The academic laundering Bhatt describes is not a few bad apples; it’s baked into the foundation of the academy itself, reproduced through dubious citation chains and frameworks engineered to be unable to see the harm they’re measuring.
From here Bhatt delivers the book’s most devastating observation. The liberal feminist model, with its tidy separation of mutable gender from immutable sex, its genderbread persons carefully insisting that “no one is claiming trans people actually change their sex,” has arrived at precisely the same foundational premise as Janice Raymond. The enlightened ally and the committed transphobe agree that transition is social performance layered over an unchanged biological reality. They differ only on whether to be polite about it. Raymond herself concedes, about a paragraph into her original introduction, that trans women do materially change their sex through hormones and surgery. The modern progressive is now less willing to admit this than the woman who wrote the transmisogynist bible. Liberal feminism didn’t transcend Raymond’s transmisogyny; it simply made the same premise polite.
On a personal level, this hit me hard. I grew up in the age of genderbread people when I was trying to figure out my own identity (I remember posting that graphic at eleven on my little LGBTQ pride Instagram) and later sat through undergraduate gender studies courses where it was taught (that in my experience, were dripping with colonialism and unexamined biases, particularly against queer women, but I digress). I’ve spent the majority of the last decade obsessing over gender in one way or another, and I think I’m finally able to articulate my deep discomfort with liberal inclusivity thanks to Bhatt.
Identity as refusal.
The essay that makes this most visceral is Bhatt’s account of trans identity as refusal rather than affirmation. She doesn’t describe her transition as an innate certainty or a joyful arrival at selfhood. What drove her was the accumulated, corrosive impossibility of inhabiting manhood: a role violently imposed, ideologically enforced, and ultimately unlivable. Her words: “I, simply put, could not be a man. I refused.”
This framing carries real theoretical weight, but what hit me was how deeply it mapped onto my own life from the opposite direction. I have been tormented by gender since childhood. I identified as nonbinary before I ever identified as a woman, and identifying as a woman was only something I willingly did once I became a TERF. Even then it wasn’t affirmative. I was defining myself through my shackles and rage at the material conditions I was placed in. I only ever identified as a woman because I was exhausted. I was tired of trying to get people to see me as anything but a girl.
Being heavily involved in neoliberal queer spaces as a child figuring out my identity, I quickly learned what felt like a brutal truth: nothing you do matters. You will always be a woman. Even the people who claimed to support me never seemed to see me as anything else. Every attempt at escaping the “woman” box felt hollow and performative, serving only to make me more hyperaware of how people perceived me. Living as a woman where at least people treated me normally felt easier than choosing the third option: being myself, changing nothing about how society gendered me, and getting called slurs on top of it.
This was part of what led to my radicalization. I’ve always been deeply uncomfortable with being called “cis,” a reaction I now recognize as politically reactionary, but one rooted in the implication that I somehow identified with, chose, or accepted the role imposed onto me. That’s the issue I’ve always had with the affirmative identity model Bhatt rejects. It has never matched my lived experience. I’ve never experienced gender as self-expression or self-actualization. I’ve only experienced it as coercion.
Bhatt draws on Wittig’s argument that womanhood under patriarchy is not a natural category but a class position, and that the lesbian, as a fugitive from the heterosexual contract, is not a woman in the sense that matters to the regime. Bhatt extends this: the trans woman is a deserter who has renounced the privileges of the oppressor class, and the violence directed at her is the violence of a regime that cannot afford to let desertion go unpunished. She also acknowledges the darker truth: for the transfemme who is intimately aware of what awaits her, transition to womanhood isn’t solely liberating. It’s trading one prison for another. The most dangerous thing a trans woman can do in this world is be herself. There is no world in which someone is opting into transmisogyny if they have any viable alternative.
What Bhatt offers is oxygen. The refusal is enough. You can be a gender deserter without a fixed destination. It’s enough to just be done. That framing set me free.
Bhatt is the first writer I’ve read who takes the same materialist starting point (gender as coercive system, not identity menu) and follows it somewhere that doesn’t require sacrificing the most vulnerable to get there. For some of us, that’s the difference between a framework and a home.
What this leaves.
I’m not trying to rehabilitate radical feminism as a movement or institution. The pattern is too consistent and too deliberate: suffragettes deploying white supremacy as a strategic tool, second wave sacrificing sex workers and trans women, liberal feminism dissolving structural analysis into individual choice. Each wave drawing its circle of solidarity around its founders’ specific subject position and treating everyone outside as irrelevant or threatening. The radfem pipeline is real, the institutional harm is real, and nothing in this review should be read as minimizing that.
What Bhatt demonstrates, and what I find genuinely new, is that the theoretical tradition contains resources that were never fully used, and that were actively corrupted by people who saw where they led and flinched. The materialist analysis of sex-class, heterosexuality as a political regime, misogyny as a system of labor extraction rather than a feeling: these tools work. They work most completely when applied to trans women, whose existence is the tradition’s own proof of concept, the unwanted validation of its most fundamental claims.
Transfeminism, as Bhatt is practicing it, is the first school of feminist thought I’ve encountered that takes those tools seriously enough to follow them to their conclusions without sacrificing the most vulnerable along the way. It isn’t a third option between radical and liberal feminism; it’s what feminist analysis looks like when it refuses to stop at the edge of someone’s discomfort.
That isn’t rehabilitation. It’s what disowned daughters have always had to do, as she writes: cleaning up the mess their foremothers made, using the tools their foremothers built and broke, refusing to let the people who corrupted the theory own it.
“The Gender Binary” is a misnomer; gender has always been a hierarchy. I had been arriving at this through GBV data and victimization theory for years without quite having the full architecture to defend it. This book is that architecture. To exist as a trans person in the gender hierarchy is the greatest rebellion against the binary there is. We cannot crush the gender binary without first destroying the false sex binary that both the enlightened liberal and the committed transphobe pray at: the altar of “immutable sex.”
April 2, 2025
Learned a lot from this. Highly, highly recommend.
March 4, 2025
I will carry this book in my heart for the rest of forever
January 23, 2026
Fascinating, definitely worth a read. Sometimes a little clunky and same-samey in rhetoric/style, but great ideas and perspectives from a non-white point of view. I learned a lot and had much to discuss with my partner. I wish I had more background knowledge of feminist theory but I don't, so I could only take her word for the references mentioned.
Quotes below I found especially interesting (missing italics because formatting on mobile sucks):
pg. 68-69
What, then, is transmisogyny? It is the process by which those conscripted into the male sex under patriarchy are denaturalized and dehumanized, being demoted from potentially liberated agent to subjugated object. It is the intensification of misogyny in a manner that does not merely enforce sexual difference but explicitly penalizes the failure to uphold it. [...] More broadly, if misogyny is the force that elevates men at the expense of women, then transmisogyny is the complementary force that makes examples out of those who dare to turn their backs on the resulting gendered rewards. Transmisogyny is the reminder, the warning, the deterrent: “Be the man you were meant to be, or else.”
pg. 139
Raymond views transsexuality as regressive, as caving to patriarchal society’s narrow definitions of “man” and “woman”; the solution is to carve out a unique path so that the individual becomes someone who fights patriarchal edicts instead of conforming to them. The fact that seizing one’s biodestiny, defying the declared immutability of sex, rejecting the enforcement of sexual difference, and embracing transsexual existence is in-and-of-itself a cataclysmic undermining of patriarchy’s very foundations, is, naturally, not remarked upon.
pg. 171
While “the gender binary” is a good shorthand for summarizing many aspects of the heterosexual regime—namely the division of humanity into exhaustively two naturalized non-overlapping sexes—it does not convey the most important characteristic.
Succinctly, mere categorization does not constitute violence and injustice. Rather, the aggrandizement of one category at the expense of the other(s), enforced and upheld at the socio-cultural and institutional level, is what makes “the gender binary” unjust.
In even plainer terms: “It’s male-supremacy, stupid.”
[...]
Patriarchy’s basis is not inherently a dichotomy, and the “rich history” of transfeminized populations across cultures—including the West—ought to have illustrated that plainly. The existence of hijras did little to challenge Hinduism’s enshrinement of male-supremacy, and the existence of transsexuals has only made the West’s ideological commitments to a dualistic sex model more pronounced.
pg. 173-174
Nor is this contempt for all those who contravene the reproductive imperative limited to queer individuals. In India, infertile women—or even women who bear their husbands only daughters and no sons—face mistreatment, violence, treatment as “untouchable”, and expulsion from their families, as do widows. Womanhood being synonymized with gestation means that it comes with an expiration date, past which a woman who either could not perform the one function that accorded her any worth, or cannot do so anymore, becomes yet more offal to discard and sweep out onto the streets. Dworkin, in her essay The Coming Gynocide, observes a similar phenomenon in the West, where underfunded and overflowing care homes are disproportionately comprised of old women, as is the composition of elderly individuals on state or medical assistance.
“Old women do not have babies; they have outlived their husbands; there is no reason to value them. They live in poverty because the society that has no use for them has sentenced them to death.”
If you are not of the First Sex, pride and heir to your line, Third-Sexing will come for you sooner or later.
pg. 186-187
It adopts a language of ersatz gender equality, presuming that so long as barriers to individual freedom are addressed, everyone can benefit from the system equally. In matters of coercion, violence, non-economic interests, or even the simple identification of cultural factors contributing to these issues, this approach falls short entirely. Questions of subjugation, violence, and suppression are ignored in favor of trust in institutions and the singular guiding principle: “But what if the oppressed party consents?”
[...]
The dirty secret is that liberal feminism, for all its paeans to gender parity, did not ever meaningfully contradict the naturalization of sex, the idea that on some essential level, women are simply synonymous with gestation, with child-rearing, with less. It was content to simply proffer the platitude that if a woman wishes to exceed her station, then she should surely be allowed to.
pg. 187
Crucially, when Gender-Conservatism asked on what basis we should consider trans women to be real, authentic women, liberal feminism simply shrugged and began babbling about category errors, as though philosophical technicalities are an adequate substitute for advocacy. They are women because they choose to be, and who are we to deny them that choice? As far as endorsements go, this one rings hollow. The gender anxieties underpinning trans people’s mutable sex, the ability to “cross” heterosexuality’s impermeable barrier, won out over a half-hearted attempt to frame the question of our rights as free expression rather than a struggle against patriarchy’s attempts to deny us bodily autonomy and eradicate us.
pg. 201
A Gender-Conservative knows what a woman is the same way you know what a woman is, because we all fucking know what a woman is. Their definition of ‘woman’ is the patriarchal definition of woman: a member of the subordinate sex-class whose domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor is meant to be exploited by the hegemonic sex-class.
Truthfully, Gender-Conservatives have always demonstrated a thorough knowledge of gender-as-social. They demonstrate it when they degender women of color or queer women for not falling within their narrow schema of femininity. They demonstrate it every time they feminize and “unman” any man whom they deem insufficiently reactionary. They are perfectly aware that gender is a social enforcement mechanism because they themselves wield it as one.
Quotes below I found especially interesting (missing italics because formatting on mobile sucks):
pg. 68-69
What, then, is transmisogyny? It is the process by which those conscripted into the male sex under patriarchy are denaturalized and dehumanized, being demoted from potentially liberated agent to subjugated object. It is the intensification of misogyny in a manner that does not merely enforce sexual difference but explicitly penalizes the failure to uphold it. [...] More broadly, if misogyny is the force that elevates men at the expense of women, then transmisogyny is the complementary force that makes examples out of those who dare to turn their backs on the resulting gendered rewards. Transmisogyny is the reminder, the warning, the deterrent: “Be the man you were meant to be, or else.”
pg. 139
Raymond views transsexuality as regressive, as caving to patriarchal society’s narrow definitions of “man” and “woman”; the solution is to carve out a unique path so that the individual becomes someone who fights patriarchal edicts instead of conforming to them. The fact that seizing one’s biodestiny, defying the declared immutability of sex, rejecting the enforcement of sexual difference, and embracing transsexual existence is in-and-of-itself a cataclysmic undermining of patriarchy’s very foundations, is, naturally, not remarked upon.
pg. 171
While “the gender binary” is a good shorthand for summarizing many aspects of the heterosexual regime—namely the division of humanity into exhaustively two naturalized non-overlapping sexes—it does not convey the most important characteristic.
Succinctly, mere categorization does not constitute violence and injustice. Rather, the aggrandizement of one category at the expense of the other(s), enforced and upheld at the socio-cultural and institutional level, is what makes “the gender binary” unjust.
In even plainer terms: “It’s male-supremacy, stupid.”
[...]
Patriarchy’s basis is not inherently a dichotomy, and the “rich history” of transfeminized populations across cultures—including the West—ought to have illustrated that plainly. The existence of hijras did little to challenge Hinduism’s enshrinement of male-supremacy, and the existence of transsexuals has only made the West’s ideological commitments to a dualistic sex model more pronounced.
pg. 173-174
Nor is this contempt for all those who contravene the reproductive imperative limited to queer individuals. In India, infertile women—or even women who bear their husbands only daughters and no sons—face mistreatment, violence, treatment as “untouchable”, and expulsion from their families, as do widows. Womanhood being synonymized with gestation means that it comes with an expiration date, past which a woman who either could not perform the one function that accorded her any worth, or cannot do so anymore, becomes yet more offal to discard and sweep out onto the streets. Dworkin, in her essay The Coming Gynocide, observes a similar phenomenon in the West, where underfunded and overflowing care homes are disproportionately comprised of old women, as is the composition of elderly individuals on state or medical assistance.
“Old women do not have babies; they have outlived their husbands; there is no reason to value them. They live in poverty because the society that has no use for them has sentenced them to death.”
If you are not of the First Sex, pride and heir to your line, Third-Sexing will come for you sooner or later.
pg. 186-187
It adopts a language of ersatz gender equality, presuming that so long as barriers to individual freedom are addressed, everyone can benefit from the system equally. In matters of coercion, violence, non-economic interests, or even the simple identification of cultural factors contributing to these issues, this approach falls short entirely. Questions of subjugation, violence, and suppression are ignored in favor of trust in institutions and the singular guiding principle: “But what if the oppressed party consents?”
[...]
The dirty secret is that liberal feminism, for all its paeans to gender parity, did not ever meaningfully contradict the naturalization of sex, the idea that on some essential level, women are simply synonymous with gestation, with child-rearing, with less. It was content to simply proffer the platitude that if a woman wishes to exceed her station, then she should surely be allowed to.
pg. 187
Crucially, when Gender-Conservatism asked on what basis we should consider trans women to be real, authentic women, liberal feminism simply shrugged and began babbling about category errors, as though philosophical technicalities are an adequate substitute for advocacy. They are women because they choose to be, and who are we to deny them that choice? As far as endorsements go, this one rings hollow. The gender anxieties underpinning trans people’s mutable sex, the ability to “cross” heterosexuality’s impermeable barrier, won out over a half-hearted attempt to frame the question of our rights as free expression rather than a struggle against patriarchy’s attempts to deny us bodily autonomy and eradicate us.
pg. 201
A Gender-Conservative knows what a woman is the same way you know what a woman is, because we all fucking know what a woman is. Their definition of ‘woman’ is the patriarchal definition of woman: a member of the subordinate sex-class whose domestic, reproductive, and sexual labor is meant to be exploited by the hegemonic sex-class.
Truthfully, Gender-Conservatives have always demonstrated a thorough knowledge of gender-as-social. They demonstrate it when they degender women of color or queer women for not falling within their narrow schema of femininity. They demonstrate it every time they feminize and “unman” any man whom they deem insufficiently reactionary. They are perfectly aware that gender is a social enforcement mechanism because they themselves wield it as one.
February 25, 2025
This is likely the single most impactful and resonant book I have read in my entire life. For the first time I felt compelled to take notes in the margin and write as I read. I probably read every word in there three times over to digest and internalize it all. Now on the required reading list for all my trans sisters, brothers, and siblings.
I do wish it had taken a more direct analysis of non-binary identities and incorporated the unique blend of transmisogyny that exists for them, but that's really being nitpick-y in light of the ground tread.
I do wish it had taken a more direct analysis of non-binary identities and incorporated the unique blend of transmisogyny that exists for them, but that's really being nitpick-y in light of the ground tread.
March 9, 2025
3.5 rounded up, primarily just essays from her substack which i have already read. i hoped for more polish, more grappling with the inherent bioessentialism in some of the cited authors (rich, feinberg, wittig), more nitty gritty, and less fourth wall address the audience breaks. that's on me for having false expectations, but i probably wouldn't have spent money if i knew it was essentially a substack bindup. worth reading if ur learning abt transfeminism, though
April 13, 2026
Bhatt touches on some interesting things. But only very briefly before moving on to other things. For example, in the introduction, she asks the question "In societies that aren't locally white-hegemonic and multiracial - in patriarchal cultures all over the third world, for example, do 'men of color' oppress 'women of color'?" I think this is an interesting and thought-provoking question that, for me, opens up additional questions about the intersection of race and sexism in non-white countries. But then she just moves on to discuss why radical feminism and its sole focus on misogyny is still so important. There is no attempt to answer the question asked or even give a reason why she's not going to attempt to answer that question right now. If you aren't going to address it, why ask the question in the first place?
For as many interesting points and thought-provoking questions she brings up, there are at least twice as many arguments that raise an eyebrow. In "Understanding Lesbophobia, Part One: Diabolical ex Machina" she states: "The only homosexuals ever persecuted under the law were men...". I feel like this goes without saying that this is just flat out wrong. I am not an expert on this by any means and I'm not here to play oppression olympics over gay men and lesbians. From the little bit I do know, both gay men and lesbians faced legal discrimination. Gay men were subject to things like sodomy laws, while lesbians were experiencing attacks to their autonomy msking it difficult to even act on their romantic or sexual desires. But like I said, I'm no expert and have no sources to support that offhand.
Speaking of sources, there are no citations in this book. None. Not even when she is directly referring to the work of others, it's not cited. As someone who spent years in academia, this is a huge red flag. It becomes an even bigger red flag when she starts talking about topics where I am well read. Bhatt brings up hermeneutical injustice several times. Hermeneutical injustice is something I focused a majority of my time in grad school on and still keep up on it years later. At no point does she define this term based on Miranda Fricker's original definition or the expansions on that definition made by people such as Jose Medina, Gayle Pohlhaus Jr., or others. A few times when she is referring to something as a hermeneutical injustice, she really means that the injustice experienced is a testimonial injustice (a related, but different sort of epistemic injustice). In The Third Sex, when she is discussing Serena Nanda's book Neither Man Nor Woman, she points out that, despite Nanda interviewing and taking testimony from hijras, she frequently gets things wrong and even contradicts her interviewees own testimony. This is a classic case of testimonial injustice. From a philosophical standpoint, hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice are different, though sometimes overlapping, phenomena. Where they differ is crucial to how to address and correct for them. Here, using a hermeneutical injustice framework will not correct the problem because the problem so clearly lies in testimonial injustice.
The last point I want to make though is about pronouns usage throughout the book. When Bhatt is referring to trans women or trans femmes in general, she will always refer to the hypothetical person with she pronouns. When discussing a hypothetical or generalized trans man or masc she uses they pronouns. This is especially concerning for me, considering Bhatt spends time discussing the degendering of trans masc people. She is aware that this happens to trans men and mascs, yet falls into the same trap. This would not be such an issue for me if she also used they pronouns to refer to general, hypothetical trans women. The most problematic of all Bhatt's pronoun usages is in relation to Leslie Feinberg. Bhatt uses solely she/her pronouns when she mentions Feinberg. Feinberg used ze/hir pronouns most often, and hir widow even reaffirmed this after ze died. Using general pronouns for hypothetical people is one thing, but misgendering a real person who made their pronouns clear during their life is another thing entirely.
For as many interesting points and thought-provoking questions she brings up, there are at least twice as many arguments that raise an eyebrow. In "Understanding Lesbophobia, Part One: Diabolical ex Machina" she states: "The only homosexuals ever persecuted under the law were men...". I feel like this goes without saying that this is just flat out wrong. I am not an expert on this by any means and I'm not here to play oppression olympics over gay men and lesbians. From the little bit I do know, both gay men and lesbians faced legal discrimination. Gay men were subject to things like sodomy laws, while lesbians were experiencing attacks to their autonomy msking it difficult to even act on their romantic or sexual desires. But like I said, I'm no expert and have no sources to support that offhand.
Speaking of sources, there are no citations in this book. None. Not even when she is directly referring to the work of others, it's not cited. As someone who spent years in academia, this is a huge red flag. It becomes an even bigger red flag when she starts talking about topics where I am well read. Bhatt brings up hermeneutical injustice several times. Hermeneutical injustice is something I focused a majority of my time in grad school on and still keep up on it years later. At no point does she define this term based on Miranda Fricker's original definition or the expansions on that definition made by people such as Jose Medina, Gayle Pohlhaus Jr., or others. A few times when she is referring to something as a hermeneutical injustice, she really means that the injustice experienced is a testimonial injustice (a related, but different sort of epistemic injustice). In The Third Sex, when she is discussing Serena Nanda's book Neither Man Nor Woman, she points out that, despite Nanda interviewing and taking testimony from hijras, she frequently gets things wrong and even contradicts her interviewees own testimony. This is a classic case of testimonial injustice. From a philosophical standpoint, hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice are different, though sometimes overlapping, phenomena. Where they differ is crucial to how to address and correct for them. Here, using a hermeneutical injustice framework will not correct the problem because the problem so clearly lies in testimonial injustice.
The last point I want to make though is about pronouns usage throughout the book. When Bhatt is referring to trans women or trans femmes in general, she will always refer to the hypothetical person with she pronouns. When discussing a hypothetical or generalized trans man or masc she uses they pronouns. This is especially concerning for me, considering Bhatt spends time discussing the degendering of trans masc people. She is aware that this happens to trans men and mascs, yet falls into the same trap. This would not be such an issue for me if she also used they pronouns to refer to general, hypothetical trans women. The most problematic of all Bhatt's pronoun usages is in relation to Leslie Feinberg. Bhatt uses solely she/her pronouns when she mentions Feinberg. Feinberg used ze/hir pronouns most often, and hir widow even reaffirmed this after ze died. Using general pronouns for hypothetical people is one thing, but misgendering a real person who made their pronouns clear during their life is another thing entirely.
February 9, 2025
tellement contente d'être tombée sur cette pépite au ton délicieusement polémique mais très précis politiquement !
Talia Bhatt est une meuf trans indienne qui vit au Royaume-Uni, et son bouquin compile plusieurs textes théoriques qu'elle diffuse dans sa super newsletter . Ça donne une série de textes vraiment très percutants et convaincants qui proposent un cadrage théorique inspirée du féminisme radical des années 70, le racisme et les dérives transphobes de certaines des figures du mouvement en moins, pour penser l'intrication du féminisme, du lesbianisme et de la transitude.
en vrac, quelques éléments que j'ai aimés :
- la manière dont elle raconte que sa transition est motivée d'abord par le refus et la haine de la position sociale des hommes que d'un sentiment métaphysique de se "sentir femme"
- l'argumentaire sur l'impasse de la distinction sexe/genre du féminisme libéral qui mène droit vers la naturalisation du sexe et l'idée que, au fond, les trans ne change "que" leur genre, et restent donc quand même plus ou moins de leur sexe de naissance
- l'analyse transféministe de stone butch blues, notamment dans le combat commun que butch et transfem mènent contre le "dégenrage" permanent qui leur nie le droit d'être des femmes, mais aussi les résonances entre le parcours de l'héroïne du roman, Jess, et les parcours transfem
- et surtout la partie sur le "Troisième sexe", qui démontre comme ce concept, largement mobilisés même dans les cercles queer et féministes souvent pour se donner un air décolonial, peut largement être remis en question. Elle explique comme il a émergé du texte d'une anthropologue occidentale, inspirée par des textes transphobes, et qu'il est notamment mobilisé pour empêcher les Hijras qui le souhaitent d'être vraiment considérés comme des femmes, et d'accéder aux soins et à une transition médicale. C'est un moyen pour dégenrer les femmes trans, pour ne surtout pas qu'elles puissent être considérées comme des femmes, des "vraies". Elle arrive à mener à la fois une critique du concept de base, mais aussi de sa mobilisation dans les espaces militants occidentaux qui sous couvert de dénoncer le modèle "binaire" qu'aurait imposé le colonialisme, fait l'impasse sur une vraie analyse transféministe de cette idée de "Troisième sexe". Le texte complet sur ce sujet est dispo ici d'ailleurs.
Je rêve déjà de le voir traduit en français et édité par Hystériques & AssociéEs…
Talia Bhatt est une meuf trans indienne qui vit au Royaume-Uni, et son bouquin compile plusieurs textes théoriques qu'elle diffuse dans sa super newsletter . Ça donne une série de textes vraiment très percutants et convaincants qui proposent un cadrage théorique inspirée du féminisme radical des années 70, le racisme et les dérives transphobes de certaines des figures du mouvement en moins, pour penser l'intrication du féminisme, du lesbianisme et de la transitude.
en vrac, quelques éléments que j'ai aimés :
- la manière dont elle raconte que sa transition est motivée d'abord par le refus et la haine de la position sociale des hommes que d'un sentiment métaphysique de se "sentir femme"
- l'argumentaire sur l'impasse de la distinction sexe/genre du féminisme libéral qui mène droit vers la naturalisation du sexe et l'idée que, au fond, les trans ne change "que" leur genre, et restent donc quand même plus ou moins de leur sexe de naissance
- l'analyse transféministe de stone butch blues, notamment dans le combat commun que butch et transfem mènent contre le "dégenrage" permanent qui leur nie le droit d'être des femmes, mais aussi les résonances entre le parcours de l'héroïne du roman, Jess, et les parcours transfem
- et surtout la partie sur le "Troisième sexe", qui démontre comme ce concept, largement mobilisés même dans les cercles queer et féministes souvent pour se donner un air décolonial, peut largement être remis en question. Elle explique comme il a émergé du texte d'une anthropologue occidentale, inspirée par des textes transphobes, et qu'il est notamment mobilisé pour empêcher les Hijras qui le souhaitent d'être vraiment considérés comme des femmes, et d'accéder aux soins et à une transition médicale. C'est un moyen pour dégenrer les femmes trans, pour ne surtout pas qu'elles puissent être considérées comme des femmes, des "vraies". Elle arrive à mener à la fois une critique du concept de base, mais aussi de sa mobilisation dans les espaces militants occidentaux qui sous couvert de dénoncer le modèle "binaire" qu'aurait imposé le colonialisme, fait l'impasse sur une vraie analyse transféministe de cette idée de "Troisième sexe". Le texte complet sur ce sujet est dispo ici d'ailleurs.
Je rêve déjà de le voir traduit en français et édité par Hystériques & AssociéEs…
August 16, 2025
Solid four out of five.
This book is dense, but also rich in what it conveys. That being said, I think I was expecting something different than what Bhatt ends up conveying. The first half almost seems like a bit of a primer for those unfamiliar, and I feel other writers, such as Dworkin, just dive into the material. That being said, all the handholding leads to an explosive second half wherein Bhatt more explosively conveys her own points (such as epistemic injustice as it relates to third-sexing, for example), and the conclusion is absolutely fantastic. More than anything, it feels very much written for cis folks (as the ending of the text is addressed to them) and she takes great pains to make it legible, so her approach is quite understandable.
That being said, while most of the time I think Bhatt is good at citations (while they're informal, I did learn about a variety of sources I want to dive into), sometimes the lack of them feels like it makes her arguments less potent because it's harder to tell what she's building up to and adding and what's just crafting a foundation. For me, this was most notable in terms of her mention of hegemonic masculinity. I can see her need for cohesiveness, but I do feel her lack of even a brief explanation obscured her specific additions to the work.
I don't want to say Bhatt's at her best with her personal essays, because glamorizing trans pain is overdone and there's so much else this volume offers, but it's true, not because of the pain, but because in this and several other works here (such as expounding on Rossum's Universal Robots and patriarchal anxiety), is where her own thought most clearly shines out. I don't know, I'd just like the entire volume to be as great an expounding of Bhatt's thought as the second half is, as much as I appreciate the need for foundations. That being said, to defend radical feminism, you must outline its concepts, granted and Bhatt does that well.
Overall, very much recommend this book. It's not what I thought it'd be, and it's imperfect, but for what it is, it's very well done and we shouldn't pedastalize folks anyway. Still, praises are definitely due. Bhatt's work is uniquely incisive, cutting, and observant, and stands a head above the rest. When she's at her best, her brilliance is unmatched in her arena, and even when reiterating existing theory, she gives it new life and makes it accessible.
This book is dense, but also rich in what it conveys. That being said, I think I was expecting something different than what Bhatt ends up conveying. The first half almost seems like a bit of a primer for those unfamiliar, and I feel other writers, such as Dworkin, just dive into the material. That being said, all the handholding leads to an explosive second half wherein Bhatt more explosively conveys her own points (such as epistemic injustice as it relates to third-sexing, for example), and the conclusion is absolutely fantastic. More than anything, it feels very much written for cis folks (as the ending of the text is addressed to them) and she takes great pains to make it legible, so her approach is quite understandable.
That being said, while most of the time I think Bhatt is good at citations (while they're informal, I did learn about a variety of sources I want to dive into), sometimes the lack of them feels like it makes her arguments less potent because it's harder to tell what she's building up to and adding and what's just crafting a foundation. For me, this was most notable in terms of her mention of hegemonic masculinity. I can see her need for cohesiveness, but I do feel her lack of even a brief explanation obscured her specific additions to the work.
I don't want to say Bhatt's at her best with her personal essays, because glamorizing trans pain is overdone and there's so much else this volume offers, but it's true, not because of the pain, but because in this and several other works here (such as expounding on Rossum's Universal Robots and patriarchal anxiety), is where her own thought most clearly shines out. I don't know, I'd just like the entire volume to be as great an expounding of Bhatt's thought as the second half is, as much as I appreciate the need for foundations. That being said, to defend radical feminism, you must outline its concepts, granted and Bhatt does that well.
Overall, very much recommend this book. It's not what I thought it'd be, and it's imperfect, but for what it is, it's very well done and we shouldn't pedastalize folks anyway. Still, praises are definitely due. Bhatt's work is uniquely incisive, cutting, and observant, and stands a head above the rest. When she's at her best, her brilliance is unmatched in her arena, and even when reiterating existing theory, she gives it new life and makes it accessible.
March 28, 2026
I'm almost certainly not the intended audience for this book, so any thoughts of mine should be taken with an appropriate grain of salt.
Ok, so. I personally found this book to be uneven, in both its substance and readability. IMO the essays at the beginning and end are the strongest. The author is loosened up, the passion is apparent, and I think there's some really insightful stuff. I don't agree with all of it, but it's good stuff.
The middle is much more an academic book report and critique, which I had to slog through. There's a lot of jargon, and it's very dense. I also think that the author probably should have given an overview of the hijra population first, to ground the reader in the appropriate context. I did appreciate the critique on how Western authors project their own views onto a different culture.
The essay on the discord server should, IMO, have been left out. I didn't think it fit particularly well, and kinda felt like a recounting of drama from any random online leftist niche group: lots of internecine feuding.
Overall, I'm glad I read this book.
Ok, so. I personally found this book to be uneven, in both its substance and readability. IMO the essays at the beginning and end are the strongest. The author is loosened up, the passion is apparent, and I think there's some really insightful stuff. I don't agree with all of it, but it's good stuff.
The middle is much more an academic book report and critique, which I had to slog through. There's a lot of jargon, and it's very dense. I also think that the author probably should have given an overview of the hijra population first, to ground the reader in the appropriate context. I did appreciate the critique on how Western authors project their own views onto a different culture.
The essay on the discord server should, IMO, have been left out. I didn't think it fit particularly well, and kinda felt like a recounting of drama from any random online leftist niche group: lots of internecine feuding.
Overall, I'm glad I read this book.
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