Barrelhouse Reviews: Gender/Fucking by Florence Ashley

Reviewed by Alex Carrigan

CLASH Books / February 2024 / 160 pp

CW: This review discusses sexual abuse, transphobia, and violence against transgender/non-binary individuals.

“We might benefit from taking intellectual masturbation a bit more literally. Some truths can only be told through the erotic,” Florence Ashley writes in the preface of Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Politics of Living in a Gendered Body. As they continue, they discuss the messiness and double standards that come from talking about gender, sexuality, and eroticism, especially in academic settings. “You are messy too; you have your trauma and hang-ups too. Perhaps far worse than mine. That’s why I suspect my words might speak to you.”

That sentiment carries throughout Gender/Fucking. Ashley, a non-binary transfeminine professor of law and bioethics, uses hybridity (essays, poetry, erotica, and memoir) to explore their personal engagement with “intellectual masturbation.” The pieces range from heartbreaking accounts of abuse to humorous reflections on their own transition, all merging to make one complicated, fascinating recollection of Ashley’s history with their sex and gender. They relate compellingly how it all plays into the personal and larger environments in which they find themselves.

The first essay, “Sexually Transmissible Transitude,” opens with an erotic anecdote of Ashley with another transwoman, before discussing their practice of t4t (trans for trans). “Trespass on the Fox,” discusses the fetishization of transpeople, primarily by cisgender men; in it, Ashley discusses their “dystrust” for such chasers.

The chaser gaze finds my transfeminine body enticing because it can never be female—and not because I am non-binary, since I wasn’t back then. No. It can never be female to them because it is the gender in-betweenness that makes me taboo and, thus, arousing.

The following trio of essays speak about Ashley’s gender confirmation surgery from different angles. In “Wonderfully Monstrous Bodies,” they introduce discuss the idea of transition surgery as the product of “a patriarchal medical establishment that sought to eradicate gender non-conformity.” While they bring up many sources that criticize this notion, it’s here that they discuss Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as “a story of how we, as agents in the world, have a surplus of subjectivity that cannot be constrained by the boundaries of our creation.”

This essay introduces a poem of Ashley’s that recurs in this trio of essays, primarily the lines “Is Frankenstein’s monster conforming to society / for not being a mount of rotting flesh? / I will always be sewn together, / flesh-bound to be as grotesque / as I am sublime, / the essence of humanity / expressed in the messiness of my body.” This returns in “Vaginomancy,” an essay where Ashley discusses the experiences of masturbation and orgasming following their surgery.

Between these two is a long essay, “The Cutting Table,” in which Ashley writes about the day of their surgery and the immediate days after. Ashley doesn’t hold back on the realities of gender confirmation surgery, detailing post-surgery urination and dilation, but they still find ways to bring levity into the situation. They talk frankly about their experience with a catheter, but also bemoan the fact that they didn’t make a mold of their penis before the surgery.

Later pieces discuss sex and eroticism. While there are some lighter pieces, such as the erotic merfolk story “Triton and Nereid,” Ashley also discusses some of their more harrowing experiences with sexual abuse. “Permission to Hurt” and “Libidinal Vertigo” both recount harmful sexual encounters, including violated boundaries in a kinkier sexual encounter and a non-consensual act of violence during sex.

While both anecdotes are on their own difficult to read, Ashley uses them to discuss wider issues regarding violence against the transgender body. Both encounters happened with other transpeople.

I feared revealing that I spoke of a trans woman, that I was hurt by someone in the community I breathe and live with. We live in a society so eager to exile trans women at any slight, a world that associates transfeminine bodies with masculinity, with penetration, with danger, with rape. These terms for our bodies are symbolically interchangeable; violence is not what transfeminine bodies do—it is what they are.

They later add, “As for her identity, I doubt I will ever reveal it. Scratch that—I never will. I have neither the strength nor the weakness to see her ostracized, to risk her blood on my hands. Social death is often literal death, to trans women.” In “Libidinal Vertigo,” Ashley discusses essays from TERF writers like Mary Daly and Janice Raymond, the latter of whom claims that transitioning itself is a rape of a body, and how those works are a form of violence against the existence of trans bodies.

While these essays can be difficult to get through, Ashley’s more hopeful pieces wait on the other side. “A Law Clerk Comes in Ottawa” discusses their attempts to become the first openly transfeminine clerk at the Supreme Court of Canada, balancing that tale with an anecdote of a consensual, safe threesome. The final essay, “Daydreams of an Apocalypse,” ties it all together by sharing a loving, intimate moment in between hopeful ruminations of the future of activism.

Gender/Fucking is a powerful collection that uses multiple forms of writing to discuss the nature of the body. Ashley peers at the minutiae of their own body, then zooms out to the placement of their body in a greater cultural and societal context. It’s a celebration of messiness, and form follows function: Ashley’s organized chaos of styles and genres explains how they navigate sex and gender while holding on to the part of themself that is not tied to that. Ashley’s work speaks of hope and change, but also asks the reader to really think about what it means to be gendered, and to explore that gender.

Alex Carrigan (he/him) is a Pushcart-nominated editor, poet, and critic from Alexandria, VA. He is the author of Now Let’s Get Brunch: A Collection of RuPaul’s Drag Race Twitter Poetry (Querencia Press, 2023) and May All Our Pain Be Champagne: A Collection of Real Housewives Twitter Poetry (Alien Buddha Press, 2022). He has appeared in The Broadkill Review, Sage Cigarettes, Barrelhouse, Fifth Wheel Press, Cutbow Quarterly, and more. Visit carriganak.wordpress.com or follow him on Twitter @carriganak for more info.