Oh folks. I wanted very much to like this book--I'm always down for a good manifesto. I found it difficult to read at first, and I'm not sure why, but then it hit one of my Absolute No-Nos, and I couldn't put it down. It wasn't a hate-read, exactly, but it absolutely clarified certain things for me about certain forms of feminism.

So I will say first: Eltahawy's rightful and righteous anger is compelling, and it's clear she's deeply invested in protecting women and destroying patriarchy as she understands it, which is absolutely understandable. Her chapter on violence in particular asks a lot of difficult questions I think are worth chewing on, even if I am uncomfortable to some extent with their implications (as she wants me to be!) She draws on a huge number of international feminists of color and does not hold back and holding any number of nations responsible for their role in global patriarchy; I don't think anyone is really left unexamined.

What I was most enraged by was the ways in which trans women appeared in this book. Twice Eltahawy cites the statistic that the life expectancy of trans women of color is age 35, which is a statistic I'm familiar with as a nonbinary trans person who exists on the internet. That statistic is made up; no study has ever been produced of the life expectancy of trans people, period, and doing so would be incredibly difficult. In her first citation, the abstract of the report notes that the authors "had received information" from unspecified sources of the life expectancy numbers. This is my Big Beef; repeating that statistic is bad enough when it comes from trans people who are living with the threat of death (real or imagined) all the time, but now cis allies are repeating it. And not just repeating it--Eltahawy pairs the statistic with every time trans women make a major appearance in her arguments (first in her chapter on attention, where she notes that attention, a "sin" that women and girls must crave, is dangerous for trans women, and then again in her chapter on lust, where it appears alongside insisting we must consider trans women to be women) so that trans women are always alongside death in the text.

This makes sense if you understand the book to be almost wholly surrounding the experiences of cis women, which it is. Eltahawy draws repeatedly on ideas regarding socialization, though she doesn't not necessarily name it as such; these sins, she insists, women are socialized away from worldwide. Yet so many of these claims are around vaginas, menstruation, and little about the experiences of socialization are interrogated with regard to gender difference (though she is careful about race in particular, and class to a lesser extent.) Women must embrace these "sins" they have been socialized away from. Early in the book, Eltahawy insists she is not interested in the damage that patriarchy does to men, which a claim which I admire to a certain extent, but then the absence of trans men and transmasculine people, and thus of the problems they pose to her feminism, mean that she cannot actually interrogate the impact of patriarchy on people who are not cis women, despite her occasional inclusion of trans women (and once, very casually, trans men.) There is no interrogation of the impact of patriarchy on nonbinary people (as if that impact is singular, and impacts equally across all nonbinary people,) though she is quick to include them in her list of "women, nonbinary, and queer people." She includes the activism work of cis gay men in her book; she includes no trans voices at all. (Her chapter on lust also seems to hold little space for asexual people, for folks interested in that, nor does she speak of the potential of sex as a space of reenacting trauma etc, but I don't know that I expected the latter.)

Maybe I'm being too harsh because she hit on my Personal Specific Beef with the statistics, but I think the deployment of those statistics, and her inability to grapple with the problem that transgender people (especially trans men) pose to her ideas of feminism seem to indicate a larger problem within cis feminism. Eltahawy is not a TERF necessarily, though I think having her engage deeply in the legacies of radical feminism on her thinking would be really interesting (especially around issues of violence,) and she speaks the language of incorporation, but I'm left again with the understanding that mere incorporation without actually engaging in what the lives of transgender people (and trans women especially) entail in their relationship to patriarchy is not a feminism I find compelling.