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… then I would offer this analysis from Helen Lewis (re the arguments and evidence for puberty blockers) for its detailed look at what is known and what is commonly believed about the procedure.
I am, of course, tempted to demand that you produce the original essay Lewis is criticizing, but I've already been through this, before, with people misreading queer context and getting all upset, and I know from experience that nothing really changes the traditionalist assertion of context. Here's an example:
Whenever I read Chu's work, I get the sense that she's mocking the strand of feminism for which I have argued all my adult life. The project of feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, has been to decouple the material reality of being born female from notions of passivity and femininity. But in her book, Females, Chu writes enthusiastically about "sissy porn," in which "getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is." (Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the more standard definition of XX chromosomes and the body type evolved to produce large gametes.) Shorn of identifying information, the author of that quotation could be assumed to be an old-school misogynist rather than a darling of the progressive left.
(Lewis↱)
Whenever she reads Chu's work? Well, consider, for a moment, that she didn't need to read Chu's work in order to write that paragraph; in discussing the book, Lewis links out to a
fellow terf's opinion article↱, which in turn refers to an excerpt posted at an anti-liberal reactionary site, with commentary by anti-feminist James Lindsay.
Hint: They're all missing the point.
It's possible to use
Google Books↱ to double-check Lindsay's treatment of the text, and, as we might expect, it's unreliable;
Females (2019), is subversive, humorous commentary throughout.
Let's start with
Lindsay's discussion↱ of Chu: "A 'universal vagina' is an anus ('through which femaleness can always be accessed')," Lindsay explains, "at least according to some activists broadly working within the realms of trans rights activism, gender studies, and queer Theory." It is an interesting perspective, especially since he explains where he gets it, "The use of this term arose from trans-identifying activist and author Andrea Long Chu in the 2019
Females, which characterizes
femaleness as, shall we say, sexual reception,
inter alia."
To be clear, what Lindsay refers to, here, is Chu's explanation of "sissy porn". The idea that "getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is" describes attitudes present in "sissy porn". Lindsay, the
self-proclaimed slow learner↑, gets it utterly wrong, but don't let that bother you, the others didn't.
Terf author and activist Joan Smith, relying on Lindsay, asserts:
Chu clearly has a very distorted idea of what being a woman is, conflating the idea with being passive and victimised in language so extreme that it’s distasteful to quote. The writer describes being a "sad, pretentious boy, furious about rape, hopelessly addicted to pornography", which he would look at for hours in the bathroom while his girlfriend was asleep. Apologies to sensitive readers, but what Chu learned from this experience is that "getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is".
And this is the basis for Helen Lewis' "old-fashioned" complaint. She's not so much criticizing Chu directly as getting all hot and bothered by what her fellows told her. "Shorn of identifying information," Lewis chides, "the author of that quotation could be assumed to be an old-school misogynist rather than a darling of the progressive left." And in its true form, as a component of "sissy porn", it is, in fact, old-school misogyny. As such, we might question why Lewis sought to distort the quotation. But we can see Lewis' priorities; she reasserts against science ("Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the more standard definition of XX chromosomes and the body type evolved to produce large gametes") and fallaciously criticizes "the progressive left".
Compared to a "detailed look at what is known and what is commonly believed", no, Lewis offers more of a personal insight that is fundamentally unreliable, or perhaps we might suggest its most reliable honesty is its unreliability,
i.e., we get to know a little more how she feels about her own fancy.
"A small reset", then.
____________________
Notes:
Lewis, Helen. "The Worst Argument for Youth Transition". The Atlantic. 19 March 2024. TheAtlantic.com. 6 July 2025. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/03/trans-youth-transition-andrea-long-chu/677796/
Lindsay, James. "Universal Vagina". New Discourses. 2021. NewDiscourses.com. 6 July 2025. https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-universal-vagina/
Long Chu, Andrea. Females. London & New York: Verso, 2019. Google.com. 6 July 2025. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Females/3zOGDwAAQBAJ
Smith, Joan. "Andrea Long Chu's Pulitzer win is an insult to women". UnHerd. 12 May 2023. UnHerd.com. 6 July 2025. https://unherd.com/newsroom/andrea-long-chus-pulitzer-win-is-an-insult-to-women/
See Also:
Hébert, L. Camille. "Defining 'Woman': Biological Sex and Gender". The Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice, v.27, i.2. 2024. JGRL.Law.UIowa.edu. 6 July 2025. https://jgrj.law.uiowa.edu/sites/jgrj.law.uiowa.edu/files/2024-05/Defining women.pdf
