I first came to Jules’s work via the Death Panel podcast (highly recommend for all my DJ bookworms!), & her new book did not disappoint. A Short History of Trans Misogyny is a brief but impactful attempt to answer questions like why the average life expectancy for American trans women is 35 years of age. Jules powerfully explicates that, despite continuous calls for trans equity, the violence & harm perpetrated against trans women, especially Black & Brown trans women, seems to continue unquestioned. This book opens by asking if men are not inherently violent & there is nothing about trans feminity that inherently invites violence, where & why did this phenomenon begin? To answer these questions, Jules takes us first to 19th-century British India to discover how hijras were trans-feminized &, thus, forced into sex work for survival. She contrasts this treatment with the 2020 pardon of a US soldier for the murder of a trans-Filipina woman, emphasizing how colonial capitalism has facilitated the Western gender binary’s entrapment of the globe. Jules’s next stop is antebellum America’s sex work industry: she investigates how newly-freed Black & Brown trans feminized people turned to sex work to avoid other types of extraction, be it in labor or in marriage. Jules then turns to the street queens of the American 50s & 60s, investigating how they served as foils against which gay men contrasted themselves to gain entry to a middle-class status they had previously been denied. Lastly, Jules introduces us to the mujerista of Latin America, explaining that “mujerísma underlies a fierce commitment to being unabashedly the most feminine, or the womanliest of all, in a loudly travesti way, manifestly different from the normative ideal of womanhood.”

This book is such an important read. I think all cis women, especially white ones & queer ones, should read this book to understand the importance of standing in solidarity & unity with our trans sisters against misogyny. I also appreciated Jules’s insistence on how crucial abolition is to trans liberation. As she tells us in the book’s closing, “Keep the faith, but don’t give up the political struggle on which it depends.”