Females has received glowing reviews in left-leaning publications and Chu has been credited with launching the trans movement’s second wave by no less a figure than Sandy Stone, the academic widely considered to be the founder of transgender studies.

SCUM Manifesto, her most famous piece of writing, is a very strange text written by a very unwell woman. Despite her intense interest in Solanas, Chu fails to mention those aspects of her biography that might explain the deep well of rage we see in her writing. The fact that Solanas’s father sexually abused her as a child, that she was beaten by her grandfather, that she was impregnated as a 15-year-old, that her baby was taken away, and that, after her release from prison, she spent the rest of her life shuttling in and out of psychiatric institutions, drug-addicted and trapped in prostitution. She ultimately died of emphysema and pneumonia, destitute and alone, at the age of 52.

Chu does not tell us any of these salient facts. But then they aren’t very sexy, which is another way of saying that they aren’t very interesting to Chu. You see, Chu credits Solanas with persuading her not only that she is a woman but also that she is a lesbian. “Valerie can sound like a dominatrix,” she remarks, before confessing self-pityingly: “I find Valerie extremely attractive which probably means she never would have agreed to sleep with me.” Describing a pornographic video featuring lines from SCUM Manifesto, Chu is instantly enthralled: “This made instant, perfect sense.” Throughout the book Solanas is presented, not as a traumatised woman driven to violence, but as a bit-player in a masochistic fantasy. Chu is quite open about the fact that her interest in Solanas is, to put it bluntly, a sex thing.

Females...is about the nature of desire, identity and love. It is also, to a rather startling degree, about Chu’s masturbation habits. Most of the second half of the text is devoted to discussions of her porn preferences, particularly genres concerned with feminisation. “Sissy porn did make me trans,” writes Chu, in a passage that has provoked outrage among a section of trans activists, some of whom object to the candour with which Chu discusses the sexual aspects of her desire to transition (“all I want for Christmas this year is for Andrea Long Chu to get a better fucking therapist,” reads one representative tweet).

If you replace every use of “female” with “feminine” the claim begins to make sense

But then “Everyone is, to varying degrees, somewhat feminine” would be a less explosive opening line. And also, I suspect, an approach that would offer less psychic comfort to Chu herself. Because, like many trans women, Chu’s conception of herself is not just as feminine, or even womanly, but as, crucially, female: a woman in every possible sense of the word. Yet at the same time Chu writes of the vulnerability of that identity, the constant internal and external threat of invalidation

There is a sense that Chu is airing the trans movement’s dirty laundry by focusing so determinedly on sex.

https://www.ovarit.com/o/GenderCritical/4606/now-i-dont-need-to-read-long-chus-females