Learning from our mistakes: Why I wrote 'Brown/Trans/Les'

And the future direction of this newsletter.

What must be done about feminist failures?

The essays on this blog have been compiled into two books. The first, Trans/Rad/Fem, was released in January 2025, and is chiefly a radical transfeminist text concerned with developing a materialist theory of transmisogyny. It looks at the second wave, both good and ill, and eludicates how the cultural feminist expressions of transphobia are deeply at odds with that movement’s own social-constructivist roots.

Trans/Rad/Fem was motivated largely by the persistent epistemic injustice against trans women in all avenues, from feminism to anthropology to the modern coverage of our lives, healthcare and histories. It seeks to provide a ready feminist analysis of trans women’s oppression that doesn’t treat it as a particularly extreme manifestation of homophobia or a case of ‘misdirected misogyny’, but a core feature of patriarchal regimes and logics that enforce a rigid sex difference and male-supremacy.

Which did leave the question: what about the feminisms after the second wave? What about the feminist currents that denounced radical feminism and sought to elevate more diverse, marginal and underrepresented perspectives? If the trans woman continues to struggle to be seen as a feminist subject well into the 2020s, what precisely went wrong between the 90s and today?

As it so happens, the question has an answer. And the answer is unfortunately sobering: feminist currents have struggled to be as inclusive as advertised for all women excluded from the heterosexual contract—and even many who are not!

From declarations that “feminism is over”, to delineations between feminist concerns and queer studies that have left both disciplines weaker, to misperceptions of intersectionality theory and the concerns of multiply-marginalized women, feminism has been through a beating. It has been judged and denounced as insufficiently inclusive and unnecessary and outdated by those who have a vested interest in backgrounding critiques of patriarchy, and subjected to endless schisms that preclude solidarity between different demographics. Legitimate critiques have been recuperated in bad-faith, groundbreaking insights have been obfuscated and we have been told, over and over and over, that only the privileged and the bourgeois and the white and the comfortable care about feminism instead of other, more urgent concerns.

So when the screaming reactionaries today make it known how much they are motivated by gender, by the enforcement of gender, by the reversal of gains for the gender-marginalized, by the retrenchment of patriarchal and eugenical and Nationalist and natalist projects, we are left with the last laugh on a rapidly sinking ship.

I wrote Brown/Trans/Les for much the same reason that I wrote Trans/Rad/Fem: because I am tired of being told that feminism doesn’t matter in a world where the principles of patriarchy have proven foundational to conservative and repressive regimes. Because no matter how much we have erred in attempting to articulate feminist theories, feminist consciousness, and feminist futures, the oppression of women is not a lost cause, and it is not a secondary concern to anything else. It is intertwined with the very essence of fascist and statist logics, the motivations of those with power and their loyal lapdogs alike, and it is today more vital to understand how and why gender is so core to how boundaries are constructed—and violently upheld.

It’s the male-supremacy, stupid.

As for where I go from here… I’m not finished writing about feminism. Far from it. But I am at the end of a breakneck two-year period of developing and summarizing a feminist framework that can perhaps finally get to the root of how trans and queer and racialized and even white, cishet women are marginalized. I will do my best to update this blog more regularly, but I will also do it at a more relaxed pace, and cover less rigorous topics, without an eye to eventual publication or a focus on didactism. I will also put out more writing on current and personal topics, as well as more content just for subscribers.

I would like to thank all of my readers for accompanying me on this tumultuous, fraught, and exhausting journey. I hope that you will stay with me for what’s ahead, and that the fight ahead of us gets just a bit easier.

Brown/Trans/Les is out now on Amazon, Itch, and various storefronts.

In addition, the Trans/Rad/Fem audiobook is now also out on Itch and Audible.