Andrea Long Chu, the libertine

His primary concern seems to be the satiation of his own desire.

Earlier this year, the publishing house Verso reissued Andrea Long Chu’s 2019 book Females. In the new edition’s afterward, Chu criticizes the literary genre of trans memoir. He writes:

The notion that trans people’s primary contribution to culture is to “tell our stories,” however nobly this mission is conceived, has left us open to cooptation and grift. . . . Everyone will ask what happened to her. No one will ask what she thinks.

I wish I could tell Andrea it’s not that we don’t care what he thinks. It’s just that we already know what he thinks.

He thinks about himself.

Well, not only about himself. Like Michel Foucault before him, he also thinks about social engineering, and about how to convince his reader to rethink everything he knows to be good and true. If “grooming” were a genre of nonfiction writing, Chu’s work would epitomize it.

In a 2018 New York Times op-ed, Chu wrote that his gender dysphoria has worsened since he started on estrogen and he frequently considers suicide, so he was fully prepared not to feel any better after his upcoming vaginoplasty. Yet he still believes that the only thing a surgeon should require of someone who desires to be castrated is “a simple demonstration of want.” Clearly this is an insane idea, being that it would turn the whole purpose of medicine on its head. But Chu’s writing is so persuasive, that at the time many readers found themselves nodding along.

Six years later, in a 7,500-word essay for New York magazine, Chu extended his argument to children. He wrote:

We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex. It does not matter where this desire comes from.

In a 1978 interview, Michel Foucault made a similar argument during a discussion about sex between children and adults when he criticized the idea that a “child must be 'protected from his own desires', even when his desires turn him towards an adult.”

“It could be that the child, with his own sexuality, may have desired that adult, he may even have consented, he may even have made the first moves,” he said. Thus, the “legislative framework” upon which “the relations between child and adult sexuality” is based is “extremely questionable.”

Foucault went on:

[T]o assume that a child is incapable of explaining what happened and was incapable of giving his consent are two abuses that are intolerable, quite unacceptable.

I know I’m not the first person to draw a straight line between trans/queer ideology and child sexual abuse, and I don’t expect to be the last. What I can’t foresee is how long mainstream publications are going to continue to platform writers who shamelessly proselytize this ideology.

In Females, Chu insinuated he’s an autogynephile¹ by writing that “sissy porn” made him trans; that the “barest essentials” of “femaleness” are “an open mouth, an expectant asshole, [and] blank, blank eyes”; and that “getting fucked” is what makes someone female. In the book’s new afterward, he wrote that “gender-critical feminists” hold these passages up “as a kind of smoking penis, proof of my fetishization of women.” He continued:

I find this very amusing. For what am I accused of? Not, it would seem, aggression, violence, control, or any of the other supposed hallmarks of toxic masculinity. On the contrary, I am imagined as a slave to my own perversions, as a narcissist fixated on my own physical appearance, as someone broken, dominated, violated, manipulated—in short, as hopelessly feminized.

No, Andrea. I believe what these feminists object to is your abhorrent suggestion that sexual degradation defines womanhood. That you can’t understand this reveals just how severely your paraphilia impedes your intellect.

Chu went on:

How curious that what these feminists should fear most is the abandonment of masculine prerogative by people whom they stubbornly regard as male! In this aspect, for all their caterwauling about male domination, they are no different from the general public, which still greets the prospect of the willing feminization of men with horror and loathing.

Few things annoy me more than the autogynephile’s tendency to equate his sexually motivated “sissification” with the innate gender-nonconformity of the homosexual. Our experiences could not be more different. And the public’s “horror and loathing” of giant men who lumber into women’s restrooms wearing fishnets is nothing like the abuses that society has inflicted upon gay people for centuries.

Chu concluded his afterward by admitting that “desire [is] at the heart of trans identification,” that the whole concept of a mismatch between one’s “gender” and one’s sex is bullshit, and that trans identity has no single cause. “[A] trans person is quite simply a person who transitions,” he wrote, as if countless individuals who are not trans-identified Pulitzer Prize winners haven’t been publicly shamed for expressing the exact same idea. Although perhaps we should just let bygones be bygones, since nothing we say about Chu could be any worse than what he already says about himself.

Chu might be a great writer, and he can occasionally pass as someone who cares about the wellbeing of others, but at the end of the day he’s just a voluntarily castrated man whose main concern appears to be that he gets off.

1. An autogynephile is a non-homosexual male whose trans identity is driven by the sexual charge he gets from imagining himself as a woman (quite often a sexually degraded one). These males typically conform to gender roles and therefore must undergo extensive “training” to pass as female (which they very often do not). According to research, the majority of adult trans-identified males are autogynephilic, while the minority can be classified as “homosexual transsexuals”—gay males whose gender-nonconformity has been evident since earlier childhood.