Book review: Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars by Finn Mackay

Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars: The Politics of Sex is about the relationship between butchness, transmasculinity, and the people who are against these forms of self-expression. It was published in 2021. Four years later, the political climate in the UK that it describes has materially changed, but the conflicts that Finn Mackay describes haven’t really. I think that it is as relevant now as it was when it was written: Mackay writes lucidly about the nature of the gender critical movement in a way that I feel is quite unique. They are able to do this analysis because of their deep understanding of radical feminist writing. Mackay’s project with this book is a rehabilitative one. They want radical feminism to stop being associated solely with its trans-exclusionary form, and they want to draw a line between belonging to gender critical communities and belonging to radical feminist communities–not because one excludes the other but because they are not necessarily the same thing. This is very personal for Mackay: they have identified with radical feminism since their teens and have what I would describe as a complex relationship to gender. In the book, they say that they identify as a queer butch, and politically identify as a woman. In a 2022 article, they described themselves as “a queer butch, or transmasc, identifying with much in the trans-with-an-asterisk label.” For this reason I’ve decided not to really pass judgement on whether this book is intended to be read as a ‘butch book’ or a ’transmasculine book’ and instead work with the book’s premise that these identities are very much linked.

My own relationship with being considered ‘female’ is also complicated. For me, there was a period of time growing up when I considered myself to be ‘a girl who was in all ways possible like a boy’ and as I grew up I found that the category of ‘woman’ was not one that I could bring myself to occupy without feelings of despair and inauthenticity. I now live as a man, but I don’t actually have any specific problems with being considered ‘female’ any more than I have problems with being considered ‘male’. I have taken testosterone for years and have sex characteristics that belong to both sexes. Effectively, what people think about my sex is secondary to what they think about my gender. As long as I can continue living as a man it is acceptable to me to be considered a female man, a term which one of Mackay’s interviewees uses to describe themselves. I’m aware that this isn’t everybody’s position, but I am trying to explain mine in order to make it legible why I would read a book entitled Female Masculinities and read it as personally relating to me, a trans man. I don’t think that I experience masculinity or even the degree of maleness that I have in the same manner as a cisgender man. Mackay quotes Paris Lees as saying:

I am not a woman in the same way that my mother is; I haven’t experienced female childhood; I don’t menstruate. I won’t give birth. Yes, I have no idea what it feels like to be another woman–but nor do I know what it feels like to be another man. How can anyone know what it feels like to be anyone but themselves?

This is a quote that I can personally relate to, albeit ‘from the other side.’ However, this brings me to my first criticism of the book. Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars is not afraid of engaging with discourse about and including trans women. This is the context in which Paris Lees is quoted. Mackay is trying to form an argument for including trans women in radical feminist spaces. This is all well and good, but Mackay is effectively glossing over the implications that considering trans men to have ‘female masculinity’ has for transfeminine people. If a trans woman has ‘male femininity’, what does that really mean for her? One of the things that Mackay draws out from the radical feminist tradition is a presentation of males as an oppressive class. Mackay, writing about the negative reaction that many women have toward finding men or people they percieve as men in women’s spaces, states that there has been no change in these attitudes following the ‘gender revolution’ because there has not been a revolution between the sexes that might upset the power dynamics between them. “The enemy of gender revolution is sexualized male violence against women,” Mackay writes. But Mackay doesn’t really engage with the positionality of the implied ‘male woman’, even as they leverage the words, philosophy, and activism of trans women in order to make their points about feminism and society. Given that the ‘gender wars’ Mackay refers to are fought less over who is allowed to be a man and more who is allowed to be a woman, it would have been helpful if Mackay had spelled out how they see or do not see transfeminine people as participants in and/or subjects of gendered and sexed oppressive structures.

It needs to be said that the liminal space of gendering that Mackay describes where one can be gendered as masculine and sexed as female does not exist in the opposite way for transfeminine people. While transmasculine people can feel ’evicted’ from femaleness and seek to reclaim it, it is my understanding that transfeminine people are always being pushed into maleness. Female or feminine traits that they have are seen as illegitimate. Furthermore, when a trans woman shows any masculine traits, this is seen as a sign that she is “really a man”, and that enforcement of maleness becomes enforcement of masculinity-as-a-gender. The converse is not true for transmasculine people. Because of this, describing trans women as having ‘male femininity’ should be seen as a form of transmisogynistic misgendering. It frames trans women as being in a social position that they are not in. Following this, while radical feminism’s emphasis of the monstrous capabilities of men cuts against their social position and emphasises their need to take responsibility, extending this to trans women leaves them with nothing but a monstrous image that they can only choose to reject or embody. They are effectively denied access to gender and to liminality. Mackay, to be clear, does not actually describe transfeminine people in this manner, but the empty spaces they leave can easily be filled in in this way.

The other criticism I have of Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars is that the entire structure of the book repeatedly gives trans-exclusionary viewpoints the last word. Criticising an academic book for its poor storytelling seems potentially foolish, but a stronger sense of narrative would have improved the clarity of the argumentation here. When Mackay presents the case that radical feminism has been trans-inclusive for as long as it has been trans-exclusionary, the way that they do this is by highlighting a trans woman who was heckled and discriminated against at a lesbian conference by trans-exclusionary radical feminists. They describe the bigotry and then move on. It is not until 20 pages later that the fact that other lesbians, including conference organisers, stood up for her is raised at all. This style, where an illustrative example of trans-exclusionary activity or rhetoric is raised only to segue to another topic, is characteristic of Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars and it does not serve it well. Another example, from within the same 20 pages, comes when Mackay discusses the long history of the claim that drag (sometimes extended to entail all cross-dressing and transgender expression) is equivalent to blackface. I read the rest of the book hoping that Mackay would have something to say in defense of drag, or at the very least against such a culturally ignorant comparison, but they don’t. The book is filled with missed opportunities to comment against the talking points of trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

This is also the case for the chapter about the gender critical movement that I otherwise recommend. Contextually, the point of this chapter is to establish the gender critical movement as distinct from radical feminism. Mackay does a very good job of portraying gender critical rhetoric as a mixture of unfounded hatred and more difficult-to-respond-to assertions about the ontological nature of gender and sex. It’s just a shame that Mackay only seems to respond in their full capacity as a critic when it is simple to do so, otherwise simply reproducing gender critical arguments in the service of making them understandable. It’s almost as though Mackay sets up the fact that they disagree with something, presents the thing that they find disagreeable, and then leaves it to the reader to infer precisely what the problem was. In the chapter about the gender critical movement, Mackay discusses many of the straightforwardly transphobic beliefs and attitudes that characterise the gender critical movement, but then presents the core beliefs about gender and sex that underpin it, and then seemingly accepts that it is those beliefs that are what is gender critical in nature. Finally, they associate trans writers Sandy Stone and Andrea Long Chu with the gender critical movement because they take issue with gender essentialism and the ‘requirement’ of medical intervention. I personally think that the concept of being gender critical is indelibly associated with stances that oppose trans people’s freedom of self-expression and that it does not make sense to try to broaden the meaning of the word. It is frustrating that the term ‘gender critical’ means what it does. There are a lot of ways to be critical about gender, and I think that is what Mackay is trying to get at. However, I just can’t agree with the idea that its meaning can be broadened like this.

I would recommend Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars not because I think that it can be read uncritically but because I think that it should be read, critically. I think that there is a lot of value in responding to it and carrying on the conversation that it is trying to start. While I don’t always like Mackay’s approach and writing style, I think they have a unique voice and perspective that comes through in the book. All in all, I think that it is a thought-provoking contribution to queer theory.