Female Husbands: A Trans History by Jen Manion Book Review

    Manion prefers not to use pronouns and I have done my best to represent this in this review.

This book is not very good in a myriad of ways, some more important than others. In the first, The text contradicts itself at various points, both making it confusing, at times meaningless, and frustrating. In the second, Manion’s writing is repetitive. I won’t fault Manion for the stories always playing out the same, as that really isn’t the fault of Manion. But some paragraphs would contain the same sentence worded differently upwards of twice, which is unforgivable. Manion would directly quote a primary source and then reword it nearly verbatim before explaining its meaning, making the reading of this book monotonous and almost boring at points.
    I say almost boring at points because despite the sin of being repetitive for the most part this book inspires only rage in me. The stories of the men in this book are interesting and deserve to be told as the precursor to trans men today, but the disrespect they receive from the author had me fuming.
    The author makes the choice to use they/them for every following case of a trans person in the book, citing in the first pages of the book that we do not know how they would have identified--as lesbians in male disguise or as trans people--and therefore should not make assumptions on what identities and pronouns they might have liked, preferring to only see them through a lens which they might have seen themselves, and in fact sex and gender might not be so easily separable as we have come to think of it as. This sounds all well and good until you read the bulk of the text. Most of the men described were that--unambiguously men--and it feels disingenuous to act like someone who dressed as a man since their early teenage years including before and after they had a wife might be doing it because of same-sex desire. A person who dressed as a man for thirty plus years deserves the respect of being allowed to be a man in the minds of those who remember him. And there were many such cases in this book.
    The use of they/them is dishonest at best and ahistorical at worst but it was the extending of the use of they/them to three people in particular that I find downright unforgivable.
    One husband in the book was a cis man who is accused by his wife of being a female husband solely to get an annulment after she finds out that he is poor and disabled. It is stated in the book that Manion even believes this person was a cis man and still for reasons that are unclear degenders him in death by calling him they/them.
    Additionally, Manion uses they/them to talk about Leslie Feinberg, a trans activist who famously DID NOT use they/them, and had the opportunity to, considering zie lived to 2016. Manion even refers to which pronouns Feinberg did and did not use, meaning Manion is making the deliberate choice to know someone’s pronouns for a fact, and disregard them. (For reference, Feinberg used he/him in trans spaces, she/her in lesbian speaces, and she/her and zie/hir in all situations. Feinberg at no point used they/them.)
    And finally and to my utter disgust, Manion argued that famous trans man Alan L. Hart “might” have been a transsexual, but very easily could have transitioned to more easily be in a lesbian relationship. At one point, Manion quotes Hart as having said, “I have been happier since [transitioning] than I ever have been in my life, and I will continue this way as long as I live,” and then immediately questions whether “the most singular or compelling factor that drove [him] to seek manhood” was “heteronormativity” or “male privilege.” Manion spends more time positing that Hart was a lesbian and trying to prove it by using his transphobic and eugenicist doctor’s writings than telling of the myriad of accomplishments Hart made as a man.
    Additionally, despite saying we shouldn't assume or assign modern labels to people who could not choose them, there are two husbands (Bundy and Guelph) that Manion states definitively were nonbinary. Despite the fact that some of these men lived as a time as women after living as men, Manion never takes the time to think that detransition (often forcibly) might play a role in why a man might live as a woman for a time. Manion posits that moving between man and woman means they were nonbinary and while this might be true, it might also be true that navigating the world as a trans person in this time period was difficult and unsafe, and they might never have stopped identifying as men, but had to don womens’ clothes for a time for their safety. Manion even goes as far as to say a widow is a type of nonbinary gender expression (no I’m not kidding, page 181) before allowing these trans men of yore to actually be men.
    Also to my distaste, Manion talks at length about how white feminists of the mid-19th century America were staunchly anti-racist abolitionists, and cherry picks examples of women who spoke to integrated crowds to make this point, despite the fact that Suffragettes were notoriously racist, and often advocated specifically for black women NOT to get suffrage.
    I’ve also found that on Manion’s wikipedia article, Manion is lauded for talking about how race and class come into play when determining how one interacts with gender, and to Manion’s credit, this is touched on a few times. Despite mentioning that there were a handful of Black female sailors, Manion mentions only one and only in a segue to talking about another white female sailor. I would have liked to hear more about the actual experiences of the Black trans community and not just that it was different.
    Similarly, it seems Manion made no attempt to speak to even a single intersex person while writing despite mentioning the topic a handful of times, as Manion repeatedly uses the H-slur as a synonym for intersex.
    Overall, this is a book that talks about people who were almost explicitly trans men (or at least trans masculine) and suggests you consider they might have actually been lesbians in disguise. It uses the term same-sex interchangeably with homosexual, lumping straight trans men in with lesbians, it uses the term “assigned female at birth” approximately nine million times, which was fine at first but began to rub me the wrong way as the book started to drag on. The information about these men is valuable and interesting and deserves to be told and I commend Manion (in a way) for compiling it and archiving and saving their stories for another generation, but I would have rather we just be honest and call a spade a spade.
    This book contains too much racism, intersexism, and refusal to gender people correctly for me to EVER recommend it to ANYONE. Reading this book is like being struck repetitively over the head with a mallet. In fact I might have preferred the mallet.