A pornified view of womanhood

Scratch the floor of trans ideology and also you’ll discover poorly disguised misogyny. There’s maybe no clearer illustration of this than the writing of Andrea Lengthy Chu.

Chu is a New York journal literary critic, finest identified for his 2019 e-book, Females. Final week, Chu received the celebrated Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism. Pulitzer describes Chu’s writing as ‘utilizing a number of cultural lenses to discover a few of society’s most fraught matters’. That’s a method of placing it.

Importantly, Chu is a organic male who identifies as a lady. A lot of his work revolves round his transness and the method of ‘changing into’ a lady. That is the primary topic of Females, a piece of cultural criticism and deeply private revelation. Right here he describes, in gory element, his compulsion to devour a specific style of pornography often known as ‘sissy porn’. That is the place ostensibly heterosexual males are ‘feminised’ towards their will, often by being pressured to put on frilly clothes. The erotic enchantment of this seemingly stems from the humiliation of the ‘sissy’ – which assumes that probably the most degrading factor that may occur to a person is to turn into extra like a lady.

If this have been merely a non-public predilection, then perhaps we may reserve judgement. However in accordance with Chu, sissy porn is key to his trans identification. Gender-critical feminists have lengthy argued that there’s a hyperlink between pornography’s objectification of ladies and the explosion of males figuring out as girls. Hardly ever, although, do trans activists admit to this hyperlink so openly. In Chu’s personal phrases, ‘sissy porn did make me trans’.

Actually, pornography appears to tell Chu’s total understanding of what it means to be a lady. His writing portrays girls as purely sexual objects, devoid of their very own will or inherent worth. Chu explains: ‘On the centre of sissy porn lies the asshole, a form of common vagina by way of which femaleness can at all times be accessed. Getting fucked makes you feminine as a result of fucked is what a feminine is.’ Charming.

For Chu, and little doubt another males who name themselves trans, their identification as ‘girls’ stems from this fetishised view of womanhood. Chu writes that he ‘transitioned for gossip and compliments… for Daisy Dukes, bikini tops and, my god, for the breasts’. He goes on to explain the ‘barest necessities’ of femaleness as ‘an open mouth, an expectant asshole, clean, clean eyes’.

It’s telling that Chu opens Females with the road, ‘Everyone seems to be feminine’. On the core of trans ideology is the concept that any male can turn into feminine – and vice versa – if he believes himself to be a she. And but Chu himself even admits that ‘there are not any good outcomes in transition’ and that transitioning is unlikely to make him completely satisfied. No quantity of hormones or surgical procedure will ever make him a organic lady. Whereas it is likely to be tempting to really feel sorry for Chu right here, he can’t even categorical his disappointments and frustrations with out alluding to misogynistic tropes. ‘Till the day I die, my physique will regard the vagina as a wound’, he says.

It’s astonishing that writing like Chu’s – which expresses such a low and degraded view of ladies – is now celebrated by well mannered society and rewarded with prestigious prizes. We now have to face as much as this new misogyny.

Lauren Smith is an editorial assistant at spiked.