Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Transgender NonfictionThis provocative and searing take on the current feminist movement explores the intersections of gender and desire--from "one...

Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Nonfiction

This provocative and searing take on the current feminist movement explores the intersections of gender and desire--from "one of the most exciting critics working today" (New York Magazine)

Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.

Females is Andrea Long Chu's genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.

Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas--the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol--Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race--men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she's just projecting.

A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the "second wave" of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.