The New Radical Feminism: Brown/Trans/Les, Reviewed

There is a legendary Black feminist anthology whose title was both prayer and credo: All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave. Talia Bhatt’s latest essay collection, Brown/Trans/Les, honours that bravery with more than a little of her own. This is, like her previous book Rad/Trans/Fem, an effort to redeem what is useful about the radical feminist intellectual tradition while being unflinching about where it all went wrong. Bhatt’s gift lies in her example: the way she honours her foremothers while also being unsparing about what some of them got wrong. Come for the elaborately woven explanation of what ‘intersectionality’ really means, stay for the intellectual defenestration of bell hooks.

This text necessarily contains multitudes. Minefields of theory, activism, lived experience, far too much of it written in blood, that Bhatt dances through with elegance. Not only did I have a hard time putting this book down, but I felt an intellectual invigoration I hadn’t known since my first women’s studies classes over fifteen years ago. Bhatt makes you feel like you’re firing on all cylinders with her, and each essay powers into the next with all the inevitable force of a piledriver.

Bhatt wields paragraph breaks like daggers. Her writing is so visceral at times that the reader can resile or perhaps even roll her eyes at yet another ‘fuck’ dropped into her elegant prose like the invasion of a Bluesky post into the academic paper she’s otherwise writing with such skill. And yet, these black days are a time to say fuck in Times New Roman. When she writes of transness, one feels the pain most keenly, one feels every single fuck earned as it escapes from somewhere deep within Bhatt, born and bred by a world that despises trans women with Kafkaesque viciousness and inventiveness. She is nothing if not a blazing tribune for the truth of trans experience against a tidal wave of falsehoods championed by the likes of the New York Times, the Daily Telegraph, or the British Parliament. Her skill lies in weaving that together with her keen readings of older radical feminist theory where all the women were cis.

As ever, some of us must be brave. 

To the uninitiated, the very title can seem like the laundry list of identities that populate many a social media account bio, but the contents of this cri de coeur are nothing if not a profound repudiation of the epistemic vandalism committed by so much social media activism. Bhatt famously took apart the way many Western liberals and leftists engaged in Orientalist essentializing of non-Western trans people like the hijra, and the way the (often false) idea of a “third-sex” is fetishised by Western writers. She is especially scornful of scholars like anthropologist Serena Nanda who presented the hijra as a third-sex, neither male nor female, on the basis of dubious evidence.

The purpose of this sort of un-analysis, Bhatt demonstrates, is to fetishize the idea of a “third-sex” as some kind of radical performance of gender transgression—in contrast to “Western” trans people who are presented, in Nanda’s words, “reinforc[ing] our cultural construction of both sex and gender as invariably dichotomous.” In the process, the hijra, who know themselves to be women, are de-gendered and used to cudgel trans women in the West; it’s all so much academic radical cosplay, but with real consequences. The only cultural construction being reinforced here is the idea that trans women are not women.

In Brown/Trans/Les, Bhatt explores how the racialisation of these discourses exposes other major epistemic flaws in the popular practise of feminism. Bhatt argues, cogently, that the latent prejudice inherent to third-sexing is not only about excluding trans women from womanhood, but also dissolves the very idea that womanhood is a meaningful category—for organising or anything else.

To that end, Bhatt has many forceful criticisms of how the existence of women of colour and colonialism is often used to deny the meaningfulness of womanhood. For instance, she has harsh words for people who throw terms like ‘intersectionality’ around without realizing what they mean (33).

Before peeking ahead, please answer whether you think women of colour like me ought to be more concerned with racialization or patriarchy.
The answer, of course, is: why the fuck are you making that comparison in the first place, you waste of tuition?

And now one sees why legendary trans theorist Sandy Stone called Bhatt a “shot of aquavit” (vi). 

This chapter on intersectionality is worth the price of admission alone. It is a true exegesis of Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who gave us the term and the concept “intersectionality.” The curse of the academic is that one’s ideas only gain wide currency if they’re violently misunderstood, and Crenshaw is in mighty company here with thinker/idea couplings like Judith Butler and ‘performativity.’

Many self-identified feminists, liberals, and leftists alike adhere to the dictum ‘my feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit,’ yet seem woefully unable to understand what that really means or why Crenshaw’s work was so challenging in the first place. She never endorsed the idea that intersectionality is a mere building-block perspective, where bits of one’s identity can be added or substracted from consideration, as if these things are separable or wholly objective. She also certainly never intended for intersectionality to be turned into a parlour game of oppression olympics, where one could mathematically compute who was most oppressed at any given time. 

Bhatt ably contends, not only through her own experiences, but Crenshaw’s testimony from teaching her own class on intersectionality, that many people seem unable to process the idea that intersectionality is supposed to help us understand that one should not and cannot choose which of one’s various identities truly matters. Crenshaw’s legal scholarship called attention to a double bind Black women faced where, in Bhatt’s words, they “are denied relief based on their alleged sameness or difference to other demographics. Either they are too similar to…other unharmed women to establish any particular harms against them on the basis of sex, or they are too distinct from other women to be considered truly representative of the wider category” (25). They get you coming and going, in other words. But the source of Bhatt’s rage lies in the fact that too many latter-day feminists and lefties reproduce this exact same double bind in their attempt to be our allies.

Or our siblings. This is not a failing, after all, that Bhatt lays exclusively at the feet of white or Western people. As women of colour we are, Bhatt argues, frequently essentialized as ontologically POC. Our womanhood is an incidental flourish, a bit of spice that allows for a pointed clapback now and again, but not a thing in itself. Lest, after all, we get ideas above our station such as thinking that men of colour are often capable of violent misogyny as well. In excavating the radical feminist tradition, redeeming the vital and useful ideas of scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw and Catharine MacKinnon, and the Black feminist theorists that she puts in conversation with bell hooks’ frequent forays into lesbophobia and transphobia like Barbara Smith and Cheryl Clark, she is seeking most of all to redeem the idea that “woman” is an identity, an experience, a site of organizing worth naming and building on. One we can all claim.

hooks makes for an interesting case study since she is often sainted for her later works like Feminism is for Everybody—indeed, a book I still teach from in some of my classes. Bhatt takes aim at the fact that hooks spent years making indefensible claims about lesbians and trans people—e.g., how some reformist feminists “choose lesbianism” and “have the privilege of being equals with men in the workforce” as a result, while also saying they “choose to have little or no contact with men” (149), or how Black drag queens and trans people “worship at the throne of whiteness” and fail to subvert the patriarchy because they like makeup or somesuch (155). 

This would be damning enough as a reminder, but Bhatt is merely winding up here. The real blow comes when she uses all this to demolish the myth of the ‘nice, inclusive’ bell hooks that came to dominate her legacy, the feminism that “included men” and assured us all that patriarchy hurts men too. Bhatt demonstrates that this perspective is built on excluding large groups of women—from Black lesbians to trans Latinas—and blaming them for feminism’s failures, for being the embodiment of the “man-hating” stereotype hooks made it her life’s work to excise. Bhatt builds up to a radical gesture here, worthy of her heroines, where she uses this entire sad story to question overinvestment in heterosexuality itself (158-9).

Trans women and lesbians are both a kind of feminist boogeywoman, posing questions of how feminism should regard those on the outside of the traditional, reproductive heterosexual coupling… Whiteness is frequently upheld as a confounding factor in women’s feminism, illustrating how an investment in white supremacy leads white women to adopt a self-serving feminist ethos, but investment in straightness is rarely given the same treatment despite it being perhaps even more predictive, across times and cultures. Every patriarchy asks its women to channel their dissatisfaction…into negotiating for better treatment over re-evaluating whether heterosexuality truly serves them.

This is one of many confrontational conclusions she comes to, bound to inspire porcupine-like defensiveness in some readers. But they are questions worth asking, because hiding from them leads one down the same bleak path that bell hooks took: presenting an inoffensive cuddly feminism that achieves little other than providing misogynists with a few quotes they can take out of context in bad faith to justify how little they care. 

The book drips with sarcasm on nearly every other page, a tone that might occasionally grate some readers but is, I assure you, richly deserved by the issues Bhatt is working with. She forcefully argues against shibboleths that still pervade both academia and social media activist Discourse, such as the increasingly explicitly stated idea that patriarchy was a purely Western invention, imposed on the prelapsarian gender Utopians of colonised peoples. In this commonplace telling of events, global patriarchy only spread with the rise of European empires, especially that of the British. Once again, Bhatt asks us to wake up with a dose of elegant sarcasm (76).

Was white, Christian colonialism the reason that in 10^th Century China, young girls had their feet broken and tightly, painfully bound…? Were time-travelling Chrisitan patriarchs the reason that the Laws of Manu, a Hindu text, talks about how wives are to always defer to husbands and how ‘eunuchs’ are unclean?

The purpose of this is not to justify Western adventurism whereby “white men save brown women from brown men,” per Gayatri Spivak, but to push back against the commonplace myth that patriarchy was something Westerners invented and then spread around the world like all their other diseases. Disproving that lie serves to form the foundation for Bhatt’s argument that some form of feminism is a global necessity and not “just something white women do to be racist” (4). 

At its best, radical feminism stared the universality of patriarchy in the face, not as a means of condemning non-Western cultures as backward, but rather as a way of saying we can only get out of this together. Bhatt’s forceful arguments give us a framework for that togetherness that includes trans women. 

This is harder than it sounds. Part of why intersectionality is so misunderstood is because, as Bhatt would have it, many latter day lefties find “that regarding all women as a unified demographic with shared class interests elides the many contradictions that exist among women: principally race, but also class, ability, sexuality, and more” (27). These layers of experience are made up of entire universes worth of culture, and it can sometimes seem farcical to suggest that womanhood is anything more than a thin filament connecting two drastically different experiences of domination in the world. Yet, Bhatt argues, it is. 

‘Universalism’ can feel like a dirty word these days. We are still haunted by the particularism of cultural relativism, where there is such caution among Western liberals and leftists about appearing to comment on a culture that is not “their own,” to the point where one questions whether any values are universal at all. Bhatt bravely sweeps away that enfeebling doubt, declaring that it’s “bullshit” to suggest that “the Black feminists and white feminists and trans feminists and Third World feminists cannot all relate to the same transcultural, transhistorical struggle against the primacy of male domination in their lives,” (39).

That struggle is universal, and there are epistemic and intellectual tools we can all share in order to help one another fight. Who do multiply-marginalised women ‘belong’ to, Bhatt asks? To, say, men of colour, or to an essentialised idea of a ‘nation’ that demands women reproduce it, or to a feminism that considers women of colour or trans people too ‘divisive’? Bhatt answers: “I am hers, who reaches across the barriers of time and space and nationhood, who sees my suffering as her own,” (39).

Let me be bold and say that this radical feminist credo is, also, liberalism. This is the humanistic mainspring of feminism, and what universalism can mean at its best. Not an obliteration of one’s unique needs or the particular beauty of one’s culture by a hegemon, but an understanding that the shared inheritance of our very humanity is something that can allow us to struggle together to build a better world. That human vulnerability and dignity is the shape of the horizon we’re marching towards.

Such a movement requires masses; it requires some degree of compromise, yes, but also common ground. Bhatt’s work ranges widely to provide a cartography of that common ground, not by averting difference but by elaborating on what it really means. 

The purpose of all of this is to ask what we are doing? If the point is to change the world, then we need to look for practical ways forward, not merely finding cool subcultural signals to send to one another and parodically judging each other’s failures to do so. Bhatt is a determined foe of the idea that we should waste so much intellectual time on sussing out whether this or that activity of marginalized peoples might be problematic in some way: “Must enslaved Black women, queens in ball culture, and impoverished hijras be accused of reproducing the conservative foundations of the societies that abhor and expel them?” (162).

Elsewhere, she elaborates on this point in a truly eloquent paragraph worth quoting in full (155-6).

These academic inquiries rarely hold any space for the reality that impoverished queer people are perhaps not trying to make a statement about the societies that they are excluded from, but envisioning a reality where they may find acceptance and recognition. Perhaps that is not as subversive as it could be, but do those on the absolute fringes, who are abandoned by state and family, bear a responsibility to only live life in a way that is subversive? Have they not paid enough for their subversion? Is ejection from normative life not sufficient evidence that they are not, in fact, upholding the norms that punish them?

This is in response to the well-known 1990 documentary on New York’s drag ballroom scene, Paris is Burning, which was frequently picked apart by feminist scholars—white and Black—for the way the queer and trans women within supposedly upheld the norms of hetereo-capitalist-patriarchy with their performances. 

Far from relitigating an ice-cold beef, Bhatt does important work here by showing us how these misguided, prejudicial critiques are still baked into discourses that bind us to inaction today. There’s connective tissue between the idea that a brown trans sex worker “reinforces patriarchy” by wanting a washing machine, and the idea that blowing whistles to alert people about ICE is “ableist,” or fretting about one’s personal carbon footprint, or whether it’s feminist to like a popular TV show. In short, endless, empty pieties about individual virtue that add up to so much less than the sum of a revolution.

Thus does Bhatt dispense with the endless attacks on trans people for supposedly upholding patriarchy by breathing, but it is the universalist gesture that makes her work stand out here. The book blossoms with examples of her using particularity to illustrate something useful to us all: the point is not to score points online, it is to organize. As liberal democracy reels across the globe from withering fascist assault, it is worth remembering that we won’t find a solution in individualist isolation, mummified by our various micro-identities, but instead in community with each other, on the imperiled atoll of common ground that Bhatt charts so ably. Liberal democracy is built on a foundation of women’s rights, and fighting for it collectively, with vigour and without apology will provide a powerful series of divisions in its defence.

It is impossible to look at the current crop of fascists, with their ostentatious displays of machismo, and not see the urgency of a basic education in gender studies. Bhatt gives you the ice bath of a graduate-level seminar in the subject, commensurate with the scale of the crisis we now face. Talia Bhatt provides us with something far better than a scolding screed about how bad things are, or about how incommensurably special women like us are because of our multiple identities: she uses it to teach, and to do so in a way that everyone can find something of value in, reconnecting feminism and humanism, redeeming the truly radical insights of Black Feminist thought for new audiences, and giving us a radical trans feminism that actually is for everybody.

It is not cuddly, it is not comforting; Bhatt will not lie to you. She will stab with wit and sarcasm, she will go on rhetorical flights of outraged fancy or poetic paeans to solidarity worthy of the name. There is a lot she tries to do with her platform, some things more successfully than others, but she acquits herself radiantly with theory that is actually worth throwing at people, now more than ever. In the end, Bhatt is the embodiment of Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous rejoinder to men who accused her of ‘harping on about her sex’: “I reason most deeply when I forcibly feel.”

Bhatt will force you to reason through your feelings, and it will be worth the ride.

Header image is Brown/Trans/Les, cover.