You rightly pointing out that the current wave of popular (radical)transfeminism is a form of separationism was a massive eye opener. I felt uncomfortable with a lot of the discussion around transfeminism, specifically the emphasis on seeing trans men as oppressors, viewing oppression as a virtue and posititioning themselves as The Most Opposed (and thus the most Virtuous), and insistence on dividing people into People Who Face The Oppression and Oppressors, and insisting that trans women are only safe around other trans women. It took a while to pinpoint it, because it's often kinda subtle, and for a while I thought it might just be me being transmisognyistic without realising, but you calling it a separationist movement made everything click into place because yeah, it really is!
On that note, do you have any good transfeminist resources for beginners? I know people in here uphold Whipping Girl as the ultimate text on transfeminism, but I'm sceptical about it since it's almost 20 years old and also the way mostly radical transfeminists treat it as infallible and above critique, as well as it apparently being very white US centric
Yeah, it's been so damaging that the problem with terfs and radfems not being fully unpacked has lead to utilizing their broken framework. If a terf is just someone who hates trans women then you never really understand why they exist in the first place, and anyone arguing with a trans women can easily be labeled a terf, even if she herself is a trans woman.
Ultimately radfeminism is both more insidious than most people think, and also deeply misunderstood. When we fail to understand them, they are just a nebulous Evil type of woman who hates trans women. When really, they are people who have been victimized by misogyny--to often really horrific extremes--and rather than see their oppression as a systemic problem, it's easier for them to find a specific class as the issue. Namely "men." And for some, "men" is anyone who was assigned male at birth regardless of identity, and for others "men" is a class you can opt into, but implies an evil about you for choosing to "be the oppressor." Both are wrong.
And I have been intentional in framing this type of trans discourse as "trans radfeminism" because that's what it is. It is trying to identify a class as the "real enemy" rather than see many classes of people fighting and being brutalized by a common system. It creates in-group mentality, where only those like you are safe, and anyone different than you is a potential threat.
Reactionary groups correctly recognize problems but wrongly attribute the source. And this can range from groups like radfems, or like zionists, or like straight up nazis, because reactionary separatism relies on upholding fascist systems. The power you are granted to smite your supposed enemies is given to you BY the oppressive system, not in opposition to it.
While I would call it transmisogyny theory, I wouldn't call most of Serano's work "transfeminist", at least certainly not Whipping Girl. Some of her later work is closer, which a lot of trans radfems love to pretend doesn't exist despite only ever invoking Serano's name and not any other theorist.
I've not read the newer editions of Whipping Girl--the latest came out in 2024--but she has some decent commentary on both her Substack and Medium. I think she writes from the perspective of a very specific type of white trans woman, and her work is treated as universal, but it is narrow. That's not necessarily bad, but pretending it isn't narrow is a problem, especially when she does sometimes speak on other trans people with a looooot of incorrect assumptions.
Some work of hers I find helpful are these:
On âMale Socializationâ and the âTrans Masc Versus Trans Femâ Discourseâ˘
A âGender Criticalâ and âTERFâ Primer
Though I will say, what I like about her work is said better by other theorists. She is a decent read for a trans woman experience, but imo not a great read for a transfeminist theory.
I think, whether you like the piece or not, you cannot begin to call yourself a transfeminist without having read
The Transfeminist Manifesto by Emi Koyama. (It's not long)
Trans radfems hate this piece, which is interesting because Emi is the one who popularized the term transfeminist. Emi wrote from the perspective of a trans woman who was also intersex, and binarist (and intersexist and exorsexist) trans people really did not like that she blurred a lot of lines. She got accused of pretending to be a trans woman because of the complicated nature of her intersex experience. She was (and still is) inclusive of trans men in her theory. And she got a lot of shit for being a woman of color who took issue with the racism of trans spaces that were supposedly feminist. Which she wrote about here and here.
My personal favorite trans author dealing with transfeminist concepts and also just gender liberation on both a broader and more personal scale is Kate Bornstein.
Two of her books that I adore are
Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us (original, next-gen re-release -- "Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, also by S. Bear Bergman), and
Most anything by Riki Wilchins, the person who coined "genderqueer", including GenderQueer : Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary edited by Joan Nestle, Clare Howell*, and Riki Wilchins (kind of a bad scan but I'm having trouble finding a good digital link--the physical book was gifted to me)
De-essentializing Anarchist Feminism: Lessons from the Transfeminist Movement by J. Rogue
Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman by Leslie Feinberg
The Transunitist Manifesto by Luke B.
An Orientalist History of Transmisogyny by Julianna Neuhouser, a critique of A Short History of Transmisogyny by Jules Gil-Peterson
Transfeminist International by Marquis Bey (who has particularly good essays), Jules Joanne Gleeson, Elle OâRourke, Trish Salah, and McKenzie Wark
*Clare had most of my favorite essays in the book and I wish desperately that she wrote more.
For some heftier reading, there is the book Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies but it tells you what all the articles inside are, so if something speaks to you, you can look up particular readings
I think it is important to read narrow things by trans women, narrow things by trans men, narrow things by cis women--even understanding narrow things by cis men, and then look at all of them and see overlap and identify patterns. Some cis men who wrote on the complicated nature of men and masculinity transitioned to women, and some cis women who wrote about being women transitioned to men. I think both their findings and the context of their gender creates plots on the map that reveal a lot about the experiences OF gender. I find most of my best readings from nonbinary people who are by the nature of their own experiences, often very inclusive of "opposite" trans people, and I think a lot more nonbinary and intersex writers have a better grasp of transfeminism because of their blurred experiences.
But a lot of my founding ideas about transfeminism (not necessarily the word but the concept) came from this interview with Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein:
