Jude Doyle On Manhood After Patriarchy
Assigned Media interviews transmasc feminist author Jude Doyle.
by Veronica Esposito
Jude Doyle had established himself as a leading feminist voice when he decided to begin his medical transition and become a man. This left Doyle with an interesting quandary—how could he continue to explore feminist subjects now that he was entering the social space of those who oppress women in a patriarchy?
Thus was born Doyle’s new book, Did I Leave Feminism? (DILF), where he explores his journey with feminism, offering field notes from where he currently stands. In the book, he weaves in personal experiences from pre-transition (including potential sexual assault and operating a phone sex line) where he felt the oppressive forces of the patriarchy, while wrestling with contemporary feminist and transfeminst matters from the position of a man.
I spoke with Doyle about the book and how he understands his new relationship to feminism, his efforts to redeem parts of second wave feminism, and some ways that feminism can be of use to trans people everywhere.
Assigned Media: Let’s start with your 30-second elevator pitch for DILF—how would you sum up the book?
Jude Doyle: I had been a public feminist for about 15 years when it became clear to me that I couldn't put transition off—it was necessary for me to move forward in my life. I was really not prepared for the sheer level of bafflement people expressed that I could be both a trans dude and a feminist—how could I be a guy and still be me, basically.
That struck me as a really nice, sticky, complicated place to start a book, because I actually do think that transmasculine people have been a huge blind spot for feminism. It's really hard to theorize us. It's really hard to know where to put us without misgendering us, so everybody just kind of throws their hands up and ignores the problem.
Secondarily, it just felt to me like the fractures between what is trans and what is feminist had been widening in some really ugly and fraught ways due to the language of mainstream feminism being entirely overtaken in the UK, and increasingly being overtaken here, by the TERFs. That it seemed to me was something that was really urgent because trans people need feminism, just like everybody does.
AM: I wanted to touch on the TERFy aspect of feminism, since I thought your book does a really good job of complicating and even “redeeming” a lot of the radical feminism of the ‘70s and ‘80s.
JD: I think it's weird, because, if you look at The Transsexual Empire, which is like the sort of Old Testament of TERFism, to the extent that it even recognizes transmasculine people exist, it mostly rests its argument on their not being there. The thought was that assigned-female people already had a way to fight gender stereotypes, which was feminism. So, if anybody thought they were a trans man, they just hadn't been exposed to enough feminism and they didn't understand that they could resist gender roles. Whereas trans women were demonized and vilified as predators and fetishists.
So when you look at the second wave, it wasn't all TERFy, and in fact, a lot of the TERFy theory was specifically a power grab to push out the trans women who were already in there and already occupying leadership roles.
AM: For people who may not have looked into the second wave so much in depth and are maybe like, “okay, second wave bad to trans people,” or like “Andrea Dworkin, she’s a TERF, she’s bad stuff,” what’s something in the book that would really surprise them?
JD: The first thing is just to take a step back—if you want to talk about the second wave as trans exclusive, you need to talk about Beth Elliott, you need to talk about Sandy Stone. Sandy Stone had to leave Olivia Records because she cared about those women and cared about her work, and the death threats were too much. Beth Elliott put together the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference and was then attacked from the stage by Robin Morgan in a speech that pretty explicitly called for violence against her for even being there.
[Editor’s Note: Elliott was ejected from the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference by TERFs; in particular, Robin Morgan made a public speech denouncing Elliott as a man invading women’s spaces and led the efforts to oust her. Sandy Stone left the feminist record label Olivia Records after a harassment campaign led by TERF Janice Raymond led to various threats against herself and Olivia Records; although Olivia Records stood by her, Stone believed that the harassment would damage the label and opted to leave]
But you also need to talk about Cell 16. This trans-feminist historian Cristan Williams has dug up all this information on Cell 16, who were apparently these really scary feminists—like they were the first separatists, and anyone who joined their commune had to embrace celibacy and never make love to a man and also learn martial arts. Everybody else in the movement was just kind of frightened of them. Cell 16 did not drop its trans members, it disbanded rather than drop them.
You wouldn’t necessarily know, from listening to the TERF narrative about Cell 16, that John Stoltenberg, Dworkin's partner, has been openly protesting the trans exclusivity of many of his radical feminist colleagues for quite some time. And he's been writing about masculinity and biological sex in particular as a cultural construct that doesn't adequately describe human behavior. I talked to Stoltenberg for DILF and he's dead serious about finding transphobia repellent.
AM: What thinkers have helped you think about second wave feminism in a much more diverse and trans-inclusive way.
JD: If you look at writers like Talia Bhatt, or Cristin Williams, radical feminism at its core was interested in saying that gender is not an essential characteristic. You know, the idea that boys are blue, and girls are pink, and you're born as one or the other. Biological determinism was deeply antithetical to the work of someone like Shulamith Firestone, who explicitly wrote that, even if gender somehow could be found to be determined by nature, human beings don't have to abide by the laws of nature. We have vaccines, we cook our food, we have toilets. We’re allowed to advance beyond a state of nature, and gender might be one of the ways we do that.
[Editor’s Note: Bhatt and Williams are contemporary transfeminists working at the intersections of radical feminism, transfeminity, and structural injustice]
AM: You put so much of your own struggles as a trans male feminist into the book. Now that you're a man, what has really challenged you about your journey with feminism?
JD: I had to face my own ideas that I had internalized about what a man was. Like everyone else in this culture, I’ve been told and have at times believed that “man” is just the word we use for someone who is in the winning position in a patriarchy. “Man” is the word we use for someone who is entitled to use coercive violence against gender marginalized people in order to get their way. And that is not what man has always meant, it's not what it always will mean. There are plenty of examples of more egalitarian cultures.
To denaturalize that and to say that it is possible to be a man without being a foot soldier for the patriarchy was really difficult for me, and also really important for me. To try to unhook gender as an identity from gender as a position in the power structure is, I think, pretty core to the mission of feminism. I think doing that work, saying that “man” can mean more than just something that everybody else has to be afraid of, gave me a way to speak about feminism that didn't feel like misgendering myself or appropriating something that wasn't necessarily my struggle.
AM: How might feminism make more space for trans men?
JD: Well, I think that if we view feminism as the struggle of gender-marginalized people for bodily autonomy, rather than just calling these things “women's issues,” then we make room for all trans people within feminism. We can state that the right to change sex is a bodily autonomy struggle. It is regulated in the same ways that things like abortion have historically been regulated. It is opposed by the same people. They really strongly want to link us to our reproductive anatomy and say that that defines us. That this is the only thing we can ever be, and that our lives essentially need to be run by it. Taking it to a bodily autonomy front leaves room for all trans people to participate, particularly transmasculine people.
I think it would also help tremendously if we recognize that sexual violence is routinely wielded against anyone who steps out of line within patriarchy. We have a really essentialized view of who a victim is and who a perpetrator is, and really often that leaves sexual violence survivors who aren't young cis women out of the picture. It’s intensely harmful, when you look at the sheer rate of sexual violence in the trans community.
AM: I really like that framing of “folks of marginalized genders against the patriarchal binary,” but then where does that leave feminism for cis men?
JD: I do think that cis men are emotionally brutalized by the patriarchy. bell hooks talks about that the first violence a man learns to commit in patriarchy is violence against himself, and violence against anything within himself that could be construed as feminine. Masculinity within patriarchy is just like this void that has to perpetually prove itself, like you're perpetually trying to act like a man, but you never actually are one. It's a pyramid scheme—every man is under the control of some other man is under the control of some other man, you know, you never get to the top.
Cis men are starting to recognize that they have feelings and emotions, but they also don't link that up to a wider politics of who else is getting hurt by the system that's hurting you? Nobody's benefited by being caught up in a rule that is entirely about being emotionally disconnected from others.
AM: What do people get wrong or not understand about feminism as it pertains to trans people?
JD: The challenge that I would take to trans people who are maybe mistrustful of feminism is to say that we have always been within feminism, and we have been in places that you don't necessarily expect. I would ask that we be willing to look at those movements with a more reparative eye, to look for the places where this could have gone in a better direction. Robin Morgan was self-conscious about having a husband at the West Coast Lesbian Conference and decided to direct all that ire sideways onto a trans woman. What would have happened if that hadn't happened? Where was the potential, and how can we recover that potential in our own movements? How can we be the next chapter that feminism needs? How can we be the feminists that we were missing?
AM: I want to get back to this point of biological essentialism, and just how important that is to this anti-trans thought. If you’ve ever had the experience of transitioning, and just feeling the power of that social fabric just working on you—how whether or not you want it to, it starts to shape you into what it wants you to be.
If you’ve had that experience, it's hard to be in the mind of someone who's like “a man's man and a woman's a woman, and you got the ovaries and the testes here,” you know?
JD: Yeah, this is something Devin Price says, that socialization is not like something we submit you to and then you're done for the rest of your life. Socialization is always an ongoing process. I think that that was something I really didn't recognize when I started transitioning. I was like, “I'm free, I'm clear, everything's gonna be fine from now on.” I didn't realize how much socialization was still working on me. We all operate within these contexts that are continually trying to determine us and continually impressing tremendous amounts of very violent pressure to make us behave the way they've decided we should behave.
[Editor’s Note: Devin Price is a trans author and psychologist who writes on relevant themes]
I remember this one time, I was stuck in an airport for 24 hours. I was supposed to go to Italy, and the flight kept getting delayed and delayed and delayed, and at like 2:00 in the morning it got canceled. I was so tired that I started crying, and every other dude in the airport terminal looked at me like, “What!?” And I thought, “So now I'm doing gender wrong on top of everything else.” There's like a loneliness, there's a sense that it's hard to be friends with women because they worry that you're maybe a creep, and it's hard to be friends with men because you're always in competition with each other, and you're not supposed to like, enjoy being a parent, and you're not supposed to, talk about your emotions too publicly.
AM: I liked how you re-imagine queer family as being more communal than just the nuclear family. I think that particularly speaks to trans kids, since transness isn’t genetically passed down like other forms of marginalization. I think mental health spaces, like trans therapists or trans help lines where kids can talk with elders, is a big part of that.
JD: It's so hard to recognize how vulnerable a kid is, unless you're actually around them all the time. With my own kid, it’s terrifying how much power I have in that relationship, just being her parent. I didn't do anything to deserve that power! It’s so easy to just flake out, or lose my temper, and do something that leaves a scar on someone for the rest of their life.
I would hope that the awareness of kids’ vulnerability opens us up to the recognition that there are a million kids in the world exactly as deserving, exactly as vulnerable, and forces us to take some kind of communal responsibility. Young people today are being faced with a big, scary, violent world. They have no context for it. Their brains are still developing and they need help to adjust. It’s really imperative for us to realize that these are very young human beings who don't get to decide who they're born to, who are in some cases trapped in abusive situations. We don't think about the need to build a community and to be a safe person in the lives of the children around you—even one safe adult that you can talk to about your life, makes a massive difference. That's especially true for queer kids, who are often just like strangers who got dropped down into their families where they don't feel that they belong.
AM: I do a lot of presenting to cis audiences about how to show up for trans kids, and I always always cite the research about how just one accepting and affirming adult can really change a life. It can be so protective, but even so, there can still be so much risk and trauma.
JD: I was writing the book when Nex Benedict died, and that's an example of what happens when a child does not have that community. Nex Benedict's mother loved him very much, and you can tell on the tape where she's like begging the school to do something to protect her child. But the school wasn't active. One parent against the whole hateful community. It's fucking tragic, but that is not enough. There has to be more than one person having that kid’s back. And even if you're not directly going to the school and talking to the kids, you can support policies that are not barbarically cruel to trans children. You can agitate for the right of trans girls, particularly to be on sports teams. You can agitate for youth gender medicine to be available. You can try to create a world that doesn’t just punish these kids over and over for who they are, so that by the time they reach high school or even middle school, they're beginning to get the sense that the world doesn't want them around anymore.
AM: Okay, last question. What is giving you hope right now?
JD: I came out in 2020, and I had no excuse—I knew things were probably going to get really bad, but I was like, “I can handle it.” And you know, it’s so scary right now, but there are so many of us that have come out and transitioned, that it’s hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube at this point. As much as our enemies are louder and crueler, and in many cases more powerful than ever, we have more allies than ever too. There have been dark and scary times, there have been backlashes, but every backlash we come a little bit further forward.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.