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A review by vagaybond
Female Husbands by Jen Manion
3.0
This review is going to start with my biggest beefs and ease into the stuff I liked. Within these sections they are listed in no particular order other than what came to mind.
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I have a series of gripes with this. Mainly that it's written in a very cis flavoured way, to me. (I'm a trans sensitivity reader though so take that for what it is.)
To give you a quick synopsis of the book, it's through Cambridge University Press and it's pretty much a study of specific trans masc-ish people through the 19th century in the UK and so-called USA.
The author is likely British and doesn't seem to get the fact that calling Indigenous people "Indians" is not okay, and this is done at least two times in the book. (I think maybe the author took the "American Indian Movement" as somehow permission to use what is extremely pejorative here.) (Here on the continent called North America or Turtle Island among other things — I just need to clarify I'm not American though the Medicine Line or the border does not affect difference so much as individual Indigenous nations and cultures, hence me using the term 'here'.)
As for gender specifically, terminology is constantly used which implies that:
- even those cases where the specific individual clearly stated that they were men despite biological differences to those assigned men, that they are he/hims etc, the author consistently refers to these people as they/them, claiming ~we just don't know~ how these people would have liked to be referred to.
- putting stock into assigned sex as some kind of category of note. Maybe it's gender 201 rather than 101 to have to debunk to people that biological sex is a socially constructed category just as much as gender, but this should be understood by someone in academia (I assume anyway) writing a trans studies book.
- implications that one can be "socialized female"
-- (socialization theory is not the same as social role theory and it is Extremely Offensive IMO to be more comfortable assuming these people would have been comfortable having their social-psychological experiences gendered in this way but *not* comfortable using the pronouns heavily implied to have been preferred by said historical figures)
-- (also there's So Much transmisogyny to unpack here; the catch-all assumption that trans men are 'socialized female' and that male privilege is 100% a binary thing that is reliant on how you are seen is very un-nuanced and implies that trans women are 'socialized male' and have male privilege while closeted, which is not the case for a fair majority.)
- the way race was talked about felt weird and performative to me. (I'm white so take this with a grain of salt.)
-- I may have been misreading parts of this but I believe there were parts of this where the author, in attempt to contextualize how a ""female husband"" was feeling in a courtroom, would point out the comparison of it being white men judges even when all those involved in the situation were white. The author would go into a sort of "how would they have felt in x context?" This felt weird because I don't think these white people would have actually been considering race in those contexts. In fact I think in the context of whiteness, I assume they probably would have felt like. Seamless I guess? Not even thinking of the privilege, just benefitting from it. (This is my assumption of most people's thinking unless actively expressing awareness of inequalities. We don't know enough of these people's personal narratives to know, so I think it's safe to say the default white person in this era didn't think too much about it unless we have evidence otherwise.)
-- talk about Indigenous genders was very much a one and done few sentence situation. Nothing was explained in a way that I think did the matter justice.
-- The author did not seem to acknowledge the overwhelming whiteness of the cases featured in the book, even though there was a little bit about how enslaved people sometimes turned to gender disguise as a means of escape (from slavery and from misogynoir, though that term wasn't used).
--- I don't want to pit trans studies authors against each other but I think referencing Jules Gill-Peterson's "Histories of the Transgender Child"'s intro may be a good example on how to talk about this. (In that book it was explained as being a thing related to what was able to be researched, along with several pages at least that went into how some of what was in public record was related to how culturally, gender was handled differently by different groups in the eras researched. As in, some people were more protective of their trans kids in the face of the medical system and with reporting because of the way the state and white society would react to shit. Cis parents of trans kids who were white might bring them in for "treatment" but this does not necessarily carry to other ethnic groups for a variety of reasons related to racism, as well as cultural norms vs what was taboo to white people.)
- I understand that this book specifically is covering the cases of those reported as "Female Husbands" by newspapers and such, and as a general phenomenon of how they were referred to at the time. But I think more could have been said about how this is not necessarily the language that they would have wanted, and that it does not translate to contemporary understanding of gender. But judging by the way this was written, I think the author may be genuinely unaware of this not being respectful language to trans people in a modern setting.
- use of the term "female wives"
-
I have a series of gripes with this. Mainly that it's written in a very cis flavoured way, to me. (I'm a trans sensitivity reader though so take that for what it is.)
To give you a quick synopsis of the book, it's through Cambridge University Press and it's pretty much a study of specific trans masc-ish people through the 19th century in the UK and so-called USA.
The author is likely British and doesn't seem to get the fact that calling Indigenous people "Indians" is not okay, and this is done at least two times in the book. (I think maybe the author took the "American Indian Movement" as somehow permission to use what is extremely pejorative here.) (Here on the continent called North America or Turtle Island among other things — I just need to clarify I'm not American though the Medicine Line or the border does not affect difference so much as individual Indigenous nations and cultures, hence me using the term 'here'.)
As for gender specifically, terminology is constantly used which implies that:
- even those cases where the specific individual clearly stated that they were men despite biological differences to those assigned men, that they are he/hims etc, the author consistently refers to these people as they/them, claiming ~we just don't know~ how these people would have liked to be referred to.
- putting stock into assigned sex as some kind of category of note. Maybe it's gender 201 rather than 101 to have to debunk to people that biological sex is a socially constructed category just as much as gender, but this should be understood by someone in academia (I assume anyway) writing a trans studies book.
- implications that one can be "socialized female"
-- (socialization theory is not the same as social role theory and it is Extremely Offensive IMO to be more comfortable assuming these people would have been comfortable having their social-psychological experiences gendered in this way but *not* comfortable using the pronouns heavily implied to have been preferred by said historical figures)
-- (also there's So Much transmisogyny to unpack here; the catch-all assumption that trans men are 'socialized female' and that male privilege is 100% a binary thing that is reliant on how you are seen is very un-nuanced and implies that trans women are 'socialized male' and have male privilege while closeted, which is not the case for a fair majority.)
- the way race was talked about felt weird and performative to me. (I'm white so take this with a grain of salt.)
-- I may have been misreading parts of this but I believe there were parts of this where the author, in attempt to contextualize how a ""female husband"" was feeling in a courtroom, would point out the comparison of it being white men judges even when all those involved in the situation were white. The author would go into a sort of "how would they have felt in x context?" This felt weird because I don't think these white people would have actually been considering race in those contexts. In fact I think in the context of whiteness, I assume they probably would have felt like. Seamless I guess? Not even thinking of the privilege, just benefitting from it. (This is my assumption of most people's thinking unless actively expressing awareness of inequalities. We don't know enough of these people's personal narratives to know, so I think it's safe to say the default white person in this era didn't think too much about it unless we have evidence otherwise.)
-- talk about Indigenous genders was very much a one and done few sentence situation. Nothing was explained in a way that I think did the matter justice.
-- The author did not seem to acknowledge the overwhelming whiteness of the cases featured in the book, even though there was a little bit about how enslaved people sometimes turned to gender disguise as a means of escape (from slavery and from misogynoir, though that term wasn't used).
--- I don't want to pit trans studies authors against each other but I think referencing Jules Gill-Peterson's "Histories of the Transgender Child"'s intro may be a good example on how to talk about this. (In that book it was explained as being a thing related to what was able to be researched, along with several pages at least that went into how some of what was in public record was related to how culturally, gender was handled differently by different groups in the eras researched. As in, some people were more protective of their trans kids in the face of the medical system and with reporting because of the way the state and white society would react to shit. Cis parents of trans kids who were white might bring them in for "treatment" but this does not necessarily carry to other ethnic groups for a variety of reasons related to racism, as well as cultural norms vs what was taboo to white people.)
- I understand that this book specifically is covering the cases of those reported as "Female Husbands" by newspapers and such, and as a general phenomenon of how they were referred to at the time. But I think more could have been said about how this is not necessarily the language that they would have wanted, and that it does not translate to contemporary understanding of gender. But judging by the way this was written, I think the author may be genuinely unaware of this not being respectful language to trans people in a modern setting.
- use of the term "female wives"