Our story begins in early 2018, when the hipster intellectual magazine N+1 published “On Liking Women: The Society for Cutting Up Men is a rather fabulous name for a transsexual book club.”
Aug 29, 2023·edited Aug 29, 2023Liked by Daniel Oppenheimer
This was a really fascinating convo. I'm not sure I buy Smith's theory about Coates and Chu either, but it's very interesting. On Chu herself I find her so frustrating-there's a part of me that really does admire her refusal to do what the Point a while back called "Left Straussianism" the way so many people do, while on the other hand I don't think she's really honest either! I suspect because of where she comes from in terms of queer and lit theory (and maybe also just her personality) there's a tendency to play up the more outré, offputting-to-the-straights and non-normative quality of the experience in a way that probably works in academe but is totally unsuited for the public-facing articles of her early career, imo at least.
Can you point me to the Left Straussianism essay? I'm intrigued. I think this was clear in the episode, but yeah I too have this intuition that she's not on the level in some basic way. Is it a game she's knowingly playing? Is it that she isn't herself in touch with what she believes? Don't know, but there's a missing core that makes it hard for me to take her too seriously while I can acknowledge that in the abstract she has chops.
As someone raised in a conservative Christian household, read Ayn Rand as a teen and thought I discovered the secrets of the universe, went to a small liberal arts college full of weirdos, and has written in Tablet, I relate to Blake a lot.
Regarding Chu saying that Asian American identity is a void… there is some credo there. Wesley Yang himself wrote about the alienation a lot of Asian men of his generation felt from mainstream American life. And there really isn’t any clear conception of Asian American identity. What do Koreans have with Sri Lankans?
Also, have either of you read the essay “Good Immigrant Novels”? “One of each category” reminded me of how being that token forced authors to develop a certain inauthentic style. Again, the theme is to sacrifice truth on the altar of sales. https://www.thedriftmag.com/good-immigrant-novels/
ahah, I'm heartened to hear my experience resonated with you... I wonder if you know the work of the poet Li-Young Lee? I just read his book "The City in Which I Love You" (1990) which deals a lot with growing up with a preacher for a father.
I looked at the 'Good Immigrant Novels' essay and while it's interesting to see the author stage her resentment and ambivalence towards Lahiri, it does seem to be rather a rehash of typical complaints directed a generation ago to Cisnernos to Tan and Hong-Kingston--plus the (quite privileged!) author's psychosexual axes to grind about white guys lol, as in this passage:
"I understand the instinct to perform public relations. I once gifted a white boyfriend’s father The Namesake and The Interpreter of Maladies, though he’d asked to read some of my grandmother’s translated stories; her work, I feared, dealt too much with Kerala village ritual and the parochialities of our motherland. I guessed that he would understand Lahiri’s New England autumns, her domestic disruptions, and especially her white people. I was right. He loved Lahiri and was pleased to “learn from” her. He felt closer to my family, he said, having read these books. I did not expect to feel so ill — so misunderstood — in the face of his warmth."
Like on the one hand all of the above makes sense (although she is the one who staged this whole little drama of giving him the wrong gift and then being mad at him for telling her he liked it!), but it's very strange how what is essentially a problem for this woman's therapist or friends can be frame for The Drift as a bit of politically progressive literary criticism (one could fill countless anthologies with the work of contemporary 'brown' women who went to nice schools and feel huffy about how they want white dick--and this style of confessional writing, cast in politically correct terms, any more 'authentic' than 'Lahirism'? It seems to me like another of the limited range of voices of our hegemonic MFA credentialed globalized anglophone literary production)!
Or I suppose what really irks me here is that these expressions of racial-sexual resentment can be expressed by certain kinds of people and in certain tones, and even imagined as politically 'good' and intellectually respectable--while their natural counterparts (eg, whatever the white bf might be thinking!) are verboten... Sathian nods to Roth but it's hard to imagine her putting up with anything like Roth's fiction and criticism from one of her male contemporaries...
I've read Li-Young Lee before, but I had no idea he was a preacher's kid. Have to go back and re-evaluate what he wrote.
I'm gotten the strong sense over the past couple of years just how much the "I hate white men" rhetoric from straight nonwhite women and gay nonwhite men is wrapped in being attracted to white men. I think most people know this already, but it's one of those things people aren't supposed to bring up, just like you writing about frumpy straight women that like gay men. I wrote about it myself for a recent book on the Asian American literary scene: https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2023/06/01/the_role_reversal_of_rf_kuangs_yellowface_902514.html
At first I thought it was just Asian American women, but no, it seems that was only the case because there's more Asian American women in those spaces than other women. Black women who get to the MFA level end up doing it to: Luster, Such A Fun Age, and Everything's Fine all center around a young black woman and complicated-but-sexual feelings toward white men, two of which have female-cuckoldry plots where a black woman "steals" a white man that was with a white woman. So much of American literature today is rooted in things Freud and Lacan would have a field day with.
Also, considering that you yourself have an Asian partner, I wonder if you see the same dynamics. I can't name many sticky rice Asians in the literary scene. Chen Chen talks about his white husband, and I remember reading Bite Hard by Justin Chin and thinking, "wow, obsession with white men remains the same across sexuality."
An Asian trend-bucker I can think of is the poet Tina Chang, who is married to a black man and wrote a poetry book called Hybrida talking about her half-black, half-Asian child and how she is so worried that cops will shoot her kid in the street. Basically stealing black valor for her own poetry career. I took a poetry class with her back when I was at Sarah Lawrence, and I always got this vibe that she felt like she was one-upping all those Asian women with white husbands by marrying a black man.
For a while I was annoying my partner by reading aloud to him from the work of Michael Chang, who has a terrible book of poems, 'Almanac of Useless Talents,' about being obsessed with a white guy named Blake lol (as far as I know, it's not me!). I haven't read Chen or Chin, though. In general I think that a kind of ambivalent investment in 'types' associated with race, class, etc., is a normal feature of sexuality, but one that seems to especially disturb and embarrass us in our contemporary ethical dispensation.
(I was living in Macedonia last year and it was very funny to see friends talk about finding this or that person 'exotic' and sexually exciting for their supposedly 'Turkish' 'Eastern' etc features, when to my untrained eye all these Balkan peoples look the same to me--or similarly I've been reading gay fiction from the 70s, which is often set in New York and in which Anglos, Jews, Italians and Puerto Ricans all find each other sexually fascinating but also irritating for their culturally different styles of masculinity... whereas again from my southern perspective New York more-or-less-white people all sort of run together)...
I recently read an anthology of Asian-American erotic fiction from the 90s--again with the intention of finding stuff to annoy my partner with lol--with the cringey title "On a Bed of Rice". It was striking to see that stories tended to cluster around either a kind of sad, guilty introspective autofiction mode, or a kind of semi-ironic exultation in the 'problematic' typed-ness of one's desires (the latter of course I find much more enjoyable)... and also that about half of the writing was from straight men, which certainly isn't the case now! (the funniest story btw was a section from this novel by Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, which I think is absolutely brilliant and which I've been wanting to write about (https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0168.htm)
There is a way in which especially gay men's and women's writing about 'white dick' seems to echo Andrea Long Chu's writing about her new vagina, with the moral being something like 'I know it's not great that I want this but I should be allowed to want it, and aren't I showing you all how thoughtful and tortured and nuanced my self-consciousness about my desire can be?'--for instance this interesting but also incredibly self-indulgent book about being an Asian bottom who likes white guys: https://www.dukeupress.edu/a-view-from-the-bottom (Chu actually rips off portions of its argument in essays like 'Did Sissy Porn Make me Trans?').
It's struck me that from this gay/queer Asian literature you'd get the impression there are no Asian tops (even though my, uh, personal experience demonstrates the contrary)! Maybe because of the massive feminization of literature and literary criticism, white dick seems to remain in this fantastically elevated position in both this theoretical work and in fiction (notably Chu's earlier writing as a 'straight white man' is all about how evil her desires are and how she oppresses women--as though you can only write about your weird, messy desire acceptably once you've sacrificed your dick).
Blake... what a name. So WASPy. Like that Vampire Weekend song "Blake’s Got a New Face"... which is very WASPy. Stings, almost.
And yeah, straight men don't write that kind of erotic fiction like they used to. That's why a guy like Delicious Tacos exists as an anomaly (although I personally don't like his work). I was weaned on Bret Easton Ellis before I read any Roth, so my first exposures to erotic sex by men were gay scenes. Less Than Zero remains one of my favorite books.
Have you ever read A Little Life? What are your thoughts on it? The number of straight women who love that book is a sign to behold. Do you taxonomize Hanya Yanagihara into the "frumpy women who love gay men" category?
Also, I wonder if Chu's obsession with sissy porn had anything to do with Chu's increased identification as Asian. As you note, Asian is coded as submissive in America culture. On the flip side, I remember a Wesley Morris piece in The New York Times about how he was about to have sex with a white man before the white man saw his penis and left because it didn't match up to black male stereotypes. There's so much psychosexual drama to mine in the world, but our prudish publishing scene doesn't allow the really spicy takes to filter through.
Right, I've only read a few paragraphs of DT but his success (and his being taken seriously, at least as a cultural symptom, in places like Compact) seems so bizarre, insofar as the writing isn't particularly good nor are semi-ironic rape fantasies or other sort of explorations of the darkness of male sexuality so rare, although perhaps it is just the case now that straight men aren't allowed to approach that sort of material unless, as in the N+1 story, it's framed in a just-right acceptable way... (indeed that seems to be a kind of house style of N+1, to have authors be 'transgressive' in ways that are immanent to the left-liberal moral-political order rather than really running against it). A former student of mine who's Chinese-American told me he'd felt too uncomfortable in a creative writing class that was 90% women to write anything about sex relationships etc--I wonder how true that is more broadly.
I guess I don't read enough contemporary fiction by straight men to know if there are still Roths and Mailers and Batailles and Sades out there, or hetero versions of Dennis Cooper--it was instructive to see Andrea Long Chu a few years ago attacking Easton Ellis as a white male edgelord...
I haven't read Yanigahara, in part because it was the sort of thing NYT/NYRB etc was promoting, and in part because I'm not in general interested in women writing about gay men (although Marguerite Yourcenar's 'Memoirs of Hadrien' and 'The Work in Black' and 'Alexis' are all great... as is Patricia Highsmith) or in stories about gays dying. My partner read her and said it was pretty tedious grim stuff...
btw to avoid further filling Dan's inbox with substack notifications my email is b_e_smith@outlook.com
Very interesting interview. I genuinely don't understand Chu's pronouncements. It seems in a lot of her recent writing, her position on what being trans is conflicts increasingly with her commitment to trans rights. I wonder if someday she will very much regret these statements The take-away of Chu's work, "I chose to be a woman, and that's fine!", just seems deeply inimical to the idea of trans rights. I definitely did not choose to be a woman (in the same way gay people don't choose to be gay). Like, I think it's fine to choose to be a woman, but trans rights aren't founded in that choice.
I'd have to think about where I stood on that, honestly. I think there were clear strategic reasons, earlier in the fight for gay rights, to make the public case that it wasn't a choice, that we shouldn't punish people for an orientation over which they have no control, but there's obviously another perspective which is that people should be able to be with whomever they want, romantically, just because they want to, and it's not the state's job to decide. I would think you could say basically the same thing about trans rights, though I guess there are some edge cases (e.g. sports) where it's not quite that simple.
Granting up front that I'm not wholly sure that I understand where Chu is coming from, and it's possible that that's my fault, my suspicion is about her is that her writing is too much a shtick, that she's performing something rather than doing the work of getting to the core of what she believes. I don't want to hold her writing to some external standard of what's good for trans rights, but I do want to hold her to a literary standard of whether what she's writing is actually good or not. Also, what if her trans-ness actually is a choice, i.e. she doesn't experience it the way you do?
I'm certain she believes she experiences it differently--whether it's actually different or not is an unanswerable question. I just think that her positions wrt trans rights become a lot weaker given her own narrative. Like there's an internal inconsistency there that haunts her own writing. It's most notable in the vagina essay: if her vagina won't make her happy, why should insurance pay for it? Similarly, she's in favor of trans women playing women's sports and being in women's prison--it's just rhetorically very weak to be like "I am a woman because I find being a woman and being around women intensely sexually arousing, and therefore I should be incarcerated with other women." It's exactly what people like JKR say trans women are like. Like, there is something socially irresponsible about the main trains intellectual, the main advocate for trans rights in a certain sphere of life, advancing such weak arguments
And it's not really an edge case, because being trans, the way I am trans, involves a LOT of medical intervention. I'd like that to be paid for by my insurance (as mandated by the state of CA), because it's essential to my well-being. But if it's a choice, then it probably wouldn't be
That makes a lot of sense. I guess my question for you hangs on whether your critique is that Chu shouldn't talk at all about her experience of her trans-ness being elective (to put it in health care terms), or whether the issue is that intellectually she can't have her cake and eat it too? If it's elective, to some degree, than maybe it doesn't hold up that she also defending total inclusion when it comes so sports and prisons, etc.?
In general my default is that I want the writers to air out all the possibilities and nuances and tensions, and to prioritize being authentic to their sense of the world, and then I want the activists to focus laser-like on the goals even if that means suppressing nuance and internal contradiction. I don't want to hold the writers to a standard of social responsibility but to standards of beauty and intellectual coherence and authenticity and concepts like that.
If that's what she believes, and feels compelled to talk about, isn't that what we want writers to do, even if it cuts against the political case? Which of course doesn't protect her against critiques that she's intellectually incoherent or inauthentic, etc. Thoughts?
Essentially just the latter point. Her viewpoint doesn't hold up internally. I think she would say, and has said, that trans rights increase to the extent that legal recognition of gender decreases. So when you have gay marriage, for instance, it becomes a lot easier to change the letter on your birth certificate. So her legislative and political agenda involves erasing gender, but her life involves reifying it. She embodies the contradiction of transness but waves it away by saying "we all want things that are bad for us". Because her understanding of transness is so compatible with the idea that gender is a social construct, it's become popular w a lot of people, but it puts transness in a much weaker position than it was before she started explaining it! And that is a contradiction that I'd like her work to explore. I suspect it doesn't explore that contradiction because, given her own (rather than my or your) political commitments, the conclusion would be that her work is harmful. As a result if she fully explored these contradictions she wouldn't hold many of the positions, either on trans rights or trans identity, that she does.
That's a good point, about where her premises would lead her, and the reluctance to follow them through. I'll buy that.
To the larger point, what do you think the strongest conceptual position is, strategically, from which trans advocates could argue for various rights, policies? If it's not that gender is a social construct, then what is it? And if being trans is biological, what's the theory? Is it some version of what gay folks said back in the day, that even if we don't know precisely the mechanism it doesn't mean we can't know pretty confidently that it's biological?
Relatedly, any interest in coming on the podcast, and if so what would we talk about? What's the person, or discourse, or publication, you have the most to say about?
This was a really fascinating convo. I'm not sure I buy Smith's theory about Coates and Chu either, but it's very interesting. On Chu herself I find her so frustrating-there's a part of me that really does admire her refusal to do what the Point a while back called "Left Straussianism" the way so many people do, while on the other hand I don't think she's really honest either! I suspect because of where she comes from in terms of queer and lit theory (and maybe also just her personality) there's a tendency to play up the more outré, offputting-to-the-straights and non-normative quality of the experience in a way that probably works in academe but is totally unsuited for the public-facing articles of her early career, imo at least.
Can you point me to the Left Straussianism essay? I'm intrigued. I think this was clear in the episode, but yeah I too have this intuition that she's not on the level in some basic way. Is it a game she's knowingly playing? Is it that she isn't herself in touch with what she believes? Don't know, but there's a missing core that makes it hard for me to take her too seriously while I can acknowledge that in the abstract she has chops.
As someone raised in a conservative Christian household, read Ayn Rand as a teen and thought I discovered the secrets of the universe, went to a small liberal arts college full of weirdos, and has written in Tablet, I relate to Blake a lot.
Regarding Chu saying that Asian American identity is a void… there is some credo there. Wesley Yang himself wrote about the alienation a lot of Asian men of his generation felt from mainstream American life. And there really isn’t any clear conception of Asian American identity. What do Koreans have with Sri Lankans?
Also, have either of you read the essay “Good Immigrant Novels”? “One of each category” reminded me of how being that token forced authors to develop a certain inauthentic style. Again, the theme is to sacrifice truth on the altar of sales. https://www.thedriftmag.com/good-immigrant-novels/
ahah, I'm heartened to hear my experience resonated with you... I wonder if you know the work of the poet Li-Young Lee? I just read his book "The City in Which I Love You" (1990) which deals a lot with growing up with a preacher for a father.
I looked at the 'Good Immigrant Novels' essay and while it's interesting to see the author stage her resentment and ambivalence towards Lahiri, it does seem to be rather a rehash of typical complaints directed a generation ago to Cisnernos to Tan and Hong-Kingston--plus the (quite privileged!) author's psychosexual axes to grind about white guys lol, as in this passage:
"I understand the instinct to perform public relations. I once gifted a white boyfriend’s father The Namesake and The Interpreter of Maladies, though he’d asked to read some of my grandmother’s translated stories; her work, I feared, dealt too much with Kerala village ritual and the parochialities of our motherland. I guessed that he would understand Lahiri’s New England autumns, her domestic disruptions, and especially her white people. I was right. He loved Lahiri and was pleased to “learn from” her. He felt closer to my family, he said, having read these books. I did not expect to feel so ill — so misunderstood — in the face of his warmth."
Like on the one hand all of the above makes sense (although she is the one who staged this whole little drama of giving him the wrong gift and then being mad at him for telling her he liked it!), but it's very strange how what is essentially a problem for this woman's therapist or friends can be frame for The Drift as a bit of politically progressive literary criticism (one could fill countless anthologies with the work of contemporary 'brown' women who went to nice schools and feel huffy about how they want white dick--and this style of confessional writing, cast in politically correct terms, any more 'authentic' than 'Lahirism'? It seems to me like another of the limited range of voices of our hegemonic MFA credentialed globalized anglophone literary production)!
Or I suppose what really irks me here is that these expressions of racial-sexual resentment can be expressed by certain kinds of people and in certain tones, and even imagined as politically 'good' and intellectually respectable--while their natural counterparts (eg, whatever the white bf might be thinking!) are verboten... Sathian nods to Roth but it's hard to imagine her putting up with anything like Roth's fiction and criticism from one of her male contemporaries...
I've read Li-Young Lee before, but I had no idea he was a preacher's kid. Have to go back and re-evaluate what he wrote.
I'm gotten the strong sense over the past couple of years just how much the "I hate white men" rhetoric from straight nonwhite women and gay nonwhite men is wrapped in being attracted to white men. I think most people know this already, but it's one of those things people aren't supposed to bring up, just like you writing about frumpy straight women that like gay men. I wrote about it myself for a recent book on the Asian American literary scene: https://www.realclearbooks.com/articles/2023/06/01/the_role_reversal_of_rf_kuangs_yellowface_902514.html
At first I thought it was just Asian American women, but no, it seems that was only the case because there's more Asian American women in those spaces than other women. Black women who get to the MFA level end up doing it to: Luster, Such A Fun Age, and Everything's Fine all center around a young black woman and complicated-but-sexual feelings toward white men, two of which have female-cuckoldry plots where a black woman "steals" a white man that was with a white woman. So much of American literature today is rooted in things Freud and Lacan would have a field day with.
Also, considering that you yourself have an Asian partner, I wonder if you see the same dynamics. I can't name many sticky rice Asians in the literary scene. Chen Chen talks about his white husband, and I remember reading Bite Hard by Justin Chin and thinking, "wow, obsession with white men remains the same across sexuality."
An Asian trend-bucker I can think of is the poet Tina Chang, who is married to a black man and wrote a poetry book called Hybrida talking about her half-black, half-Asian child and how she is so worried that cops will shoot her kid in the street. Basically stealing black valor for her own poetry career. I took a poetry class with her back when I was at Sarah Lawrence, and I always got this vibe that she felt like she was one-upping all those Asian women with white husbands by marrying a black man.
For a while I was annoying my partner by reading aloud to him from the work of Michael Chang, who has a terrible book of poems, 'Almanac of Useless Talents,' about being obsessed with a white guy named Blake lol (as far as I know, it's not me!). I haven't read Chen or Chin, though. In general I think that a kind of ambivalent investment in 'types' associated with race, class, etc., is a normal feature of sexuality, but one that seems to especially disturb and embarrass us in our contemporary ethical dispensation.
(I was living in Macedonia last year and it was very funny to see friends talk about finding this or that person 'exotic' and sexually exciting for their supposedly 'Turkish' 'Eastern' etc features, when to my untrained eye all these Balkan peoples look the same to me--or similarly I've been reading gay fiction from the 70s, which is often set in New York and in which Anglos, Jews, Italians and Puerto Ricans all find each other sexually fascinating but also irritating for their culturally different styles of masculinity... whereas again from my southern perspective New York more-or-less-white people all sort of run together)...
I recently read an anthology of Asian-American erotic fiction from the 90s--again with the intention of finding stuff to annoy my partner with lol--with the cringey title "On a Bed of Rice". It was striking to see that stories tended to cluster around either a kind of sad, guilty introspective autofiction mode, or a kind of semi-ironic exultation in the 'problematic' typed-ness of one's desires (the latter of course I find much more enjoyable)... and also that about half of the writing was from straight men, which certainly isn't the case now! (the funniest story btw was a section from this novel by Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, which I think is absolutely brilliant and which I've been wanting to write about (https://uwpress.wisc.edu/books/0168.htm)
There is a way in which especially gay men's and women's writing about 'white dick' seems to echo Andrea Long Chu's writing about her new vagina, with the moral being something like 'I know it's not great that I want this but I should be allowed to want it, and aren't I showing you all how thoughtful and tortured and nuanced my self-consciousness about my desire can be?'--for instance this interesting but also incredibly self-indulgent book about being an Asian bottom who likes white guys: https://www.dukeupress.edu/a-view-from-the-bottom (Chu actually rips off portions of its argument in essays like 'Did Sissy Porn Make me Trans?').
It's struck me that from this gay/queer Asian literature you'd get the impression there are no Asian tops (even though my, uh, personal experience demonstrates the contrary)! Maybe because of the massive feminization of literature and literary criticism, white dick seems to remain in this fantastically elevated position in both this theoretical work and in fiction (notably Chu's earlier writing as a 'straight white man' is all about how evil her desires are and how she oppresses women--as though you can only write about your weird, messy desire acceptably once you've sacrificed your dick).
Blake... what a name. So WASPy. Like that Vampire Weekend song "Blake’s Got a New Face"... which is very WASPy. Stings, almost.
And yeah, straight men don't write that kind of erotic fiction like they used to. That's why a guy like Delicious Tacos exists as an anomaly (although I personally don't like his work). I was weaned on Bret Easton Ellis before I read any Roth, so my first exposures to erotic sex by men were gay scenes. Less Than Zero remains one of my favorite books.
Have you ever read A Little Life? What are your thoughts on it? The number of straight women who love that book is a sign to behold. Do you taxonomize Hanya Yanagihara into the "frumpy women who love gay men" category?
Also, I wonder if Chu's obsession with sissy porn had anything to do with Chu's increased identification as Asian. As you note, Asian is coded as submissive in America culture. On the flip side, I remember a Wesley Morris piece in The New York Times about how he was about to have sex with a white man before the white man saw his penis and left because it didn't match up to black male stereotypes. There's so much psychosexual drama to mine in the world, but our prudish publishing scene doesn't allow the really spicy takes to filter through.
Well, except for this one. https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/
Right, I've only read a few paragraphs of DT but his success (and his being taken seriously, at least as a cultural symptom, in places like Compact) seems so bizarre, insofar as the writing isn't particularly good nor are semi-ironic rape fantasies or other sort of explorations of the darkness of male sexuality so rare, although perhaps it is just the case now that straight men aren't allowed to approach that sort of material unless, as in the N+1 story, it's framed in a just-right acceptable way... (indeed that seems to be a kind of house style of N+1, to have authors be 'transgressive' in ways that are immanent to the left-liberal moral-political order rather than really running against it). A former student of mine who's Chinese-American told me he'd felt too uncomfortable in a creative writing class that was 90% women to write anything about sex relationships etc--I wonder how true that is more broadly.
I guess I don't read enough contemporary fiction by straight men to know if there are still Roths and Mailers and Batailles and Sades out there, or hetero versions of Dennis Cooper--it was instructive to see Andrea Long Chu a few years ago attacking Easton Ellis as a white male edgelord...
I haven't read Yanigahara, in part because it was the sort of thing NYT/NYRB etc was promoting, and in part because I'm not in general interested in women writing about gay men (although Marguerite Yourcenar's 'Memoirs of Hadrien' and 'The Work in Black' and 'Alexis' are all great... as is Patricia Highsmith) or in stories about gays dying. My partner read her and said it was pretty tedious grim stuff...
btw to avoid further filling Dan's inbox with substack notifications my email is b_e_smith@outlook.com
I emailed you a few hours ago. Maybe it's in your spam.
Andrew Chu is a disgusting man who hates women because he knows he'll never be one of us.
In a sane world, a pig like him would be in a mental hospital.
In clown world, he wins prizes and is interviewed as if he holds some type of special wisdom.
He's a porn sick freak who should be locked up.
Very interesting interview. I genuinely don't understand Chu's pronouncements. It seems in a lot of her recent writing, her position on what being trans is conflicts increasingly with her commitment to trans rights. I wonder if someday she will very much regret these statements The take-away of Chu's work, "I chose to be a woman, and that's fine!", just seems deeply inimical to the idea of trans rights. I definitely did not choose to be a woman (in the same way gay people don't choose to be gay). Like, I think it's fine to choose to be a woman, but trans rights aren't founded in that choice.
I'd have to think about where I stood on that, honestly. I think there were clear strategic reasons, earlier in the fight for gay rights, to make the public case that it wasn't a choice, that we shouldn't punish people for an orientation over which they have no control, but there's obviously another perspective which is that people should be able to be with whomever they want, romantically, just because they want to, and it's not the state's job to decide. I would think you could say basically the same thing about trans rights, though I guess there are some edge cases (e.g. sports) where it's not quite that simple.
Granting up front that I'm not wholly sure that I understand where Chu is coming from, and it's possible that that's my fault, my suspicion is about her is that her writing is too much a shtick, that she's performing something rather than doing the work of getting to the core of what she believes. I don't want to hold her writing to some external standard of what's good for trans rights, but I do want to hold her to a literary standard of whether what she's writing is actually good or not. Also, what if her trans-ness actually is a choice, i.e. she doesn't experience it the way you do?
I'm certain she believes she experiences it differently--whether it's actually different or not is an unanswerable question. I just think that her positions wrt trans rights become a lot weaker given her own narrative. Like there's an internal inconsistency there that haunts her own writing. It's most notable in the vagina essay: if her vagina won't make her happy, why should insurance pay for it? Similarly, she's in favor of trans women playing women's sports and being in women's prison--it's just rhetorically very weak to be like "I am a woman because I find being a woman and being around women intensely sexually arousing, and therefore I should be incarcerated with other women." It's exactly what people like JKR say trans women are like. Like, there is something socially irresponsible about the main trains intellectual, the main advocate for trans rights in a certain sphere of life, advancing such weak arguments
And it's not really an edge case, because being trans, the way I am trans, involves a LOT of medical intervention. I'd like that to be paid for by my insurance (as mandated by the state of CA), because it's essential to my well-being. But if it's a choice, then it probably wouldn't be
That makes a lot of sense. I guess my question for you hangs on whether your critique is that Chu shouldn't talk at all about her experience of her trans-ness being elective (to put it in health care terms), or whether the issue is that intellectually she can't have her cake and eat it too? If it's elective, to some degree, than maybe it doesn't hold up that she also defending total inclusion when it comes so sports and prisons, etc.?
In general my default is that I want the writers to air out all the possibilities and nuances and tensions, and to prioritize being authentic to their sense of the world, and then I want the activists to focus laser-like on the goals even if that means suppressing nuance and internal contradiction. I don't want to hold the writers to a standard of social responsibility but to standards of beauty and intellectual coherence and authenticity and concepts like that.
If that's what she believes, and feels compelled to talk about, isn't that what we want writers to do, even if it cuts against the political case? Which of course doesn't protect her against critiques that she's intellectually incoherent or inauthentic, etc. Thoughts?
Essentially just the latter point. Her viewpoint doesn't hold up internally. I think she would say, and has said, that trans rights increase to the extent that legal recognition of gender decreases. So when you have gay marriage, for instance, it becomes a lot easier to change the letter on your birth certificate. So her legislative and political agenda involves erasing gender, but her life involves reifying it. She embodies the contradiction of transness but waves it away by saying "we all want things that are bad for us". Because her understanding of transness is so compatible with the idea that gender is a social construct, it's become popular w a lot of people, but it puts transness in a much weaker position than it was before she started explaining it! And that is a contradiction that I'd like her work to explore. I suspect it doesn't explore that contradiction because, given her own (rather than my or your) political commitments, the conclusion would be that her work is harmful. As a result if she fully explored these contradictions she wouldn't hold many of the positions, either on trans rights or trans identity, that she does.
That's a good point, about where her premises would lead her, and the reluctance to follow them through. I'll buy that.
To the larger point, what do you think the strongest conceptual position is, strategically, from which trans advocates could argue for various rights, policies? If it's not that gender is a social construct, then what is it? And if being trans is biological, what's the theory? Is it some version of what gay folks said back in the day, that even if we don't know precisely the mechanism it doesn't mean we can't know pretty confidently that it's biological?
Relatedly, any interest in coming on the podcast, and if so what would we talk about? What's the person, or discourse, or publication, you have the most to say about?