Review: "Gender/Fucking" by Florence Ashley

Embracing the messiness of the queer erotic

I think all queer people, especially trans people, can agree that being queer is messy AF. Every single one of us has had to spend a considerable amount of time making sense of our individual gender and sexuality. We often try to fit them into neat and tidy labels only to realize that those labels don’t adequately describe our unique queer flavor. Celebrating and embracing this messiness is the central theme of Florence Ashley’s new book, “Gender/Fucking: The Pleasures and Realities of Living in a Gendered Body”. Through a mixture of critical essays and erotic stories, Florence addresses deeply personal topics that affect all queer people in a way that is raw, intense, cathartic, and incredibly thought-provoking.

From the outset, I loved the way Florence structured and wrote this book. Each chapter contains thoughtful discussion of a topic related to gender and sexuality framed by erotic tales from their life. Not only does it perfectly illustrate how the erotic can be a gateway into a deeper understanding of ourselves, but it also prompts the reader to think about their relationship to their own erotic nature. Granted, I may never have done some of the things that Florence has, but their willingness to share their experiences with the world gave me the space to reflect upon my own. In terms of the prose, the entire book is written in a very casual and fun style with tons of humor. There are some sections that feel like they are entirely composed of random thoughts Florence wrote down on their Notes app and then copied word for word into the book. All of this makes the book feel more like a personal text conversation with your smart, funny, and kinky friend and less like a philosophical investigation into the nature of sex and gender as a transgender person in a cishet normative society. 

As a transwoman, this book felt very cathartic to read. Florence discusses so many major issues that all transgender people, but especially transfemmes, struggle with. In doing so, they give voice to fears and anxieties I, and I’m sure others like me, have experienced. There’s chaser culture, how we’re fetishized by people who in the light of day would never want to be seen with us. We’re seen as sexual objects to be lusted after, but not worthy of true love. There’s the push and pull of the desire to embrace our sexuality in our gender and the fear of being labeled as mere sexual deviants for doing so. There’s our relationships to our own bodies and our transness. It’s a fucking mental mine field sometimes. Time and again in this book Florence reminds us that they are right there with us. The entire book is them saying, “Yeah, it’s a fucking mine field and it sucks. But I’m right here with you. We can get through it together.”  

While Florence doesn’t always offer solutions or hope when faced with all of these issues, two points where they do really stood out to me. The first is related to embracing the messiness of the queer erotic. They write, “acknowledging the inescapable messiness of queer life can be liberating.” Later on, they add,

Learning to find comfort in the messiness of human experience is a queer virtue. Rejecting the call to provide tidy narratives of sexual orientation can be an integral part of queer liberation.

The reason I love this so much is because it encourages queer people to seize the agency over their own sexuality and how they express it. Together with their commentary on respectability, it is a clarion call to seize the means of our own erotic production. It tells us to push past the shame that cisnormative and heteronormative power structures try to burden us with. It even tells us to push past those within queer society who would shun us for not being queer in the way they want us to. Our pleasure and our partner’s (or partners’) pleasure is all that matters. How fucking liberating.

The second concept that stood out to me was Florence’s concept of palliative activism. This concept stems from their fear that no grand revolution or overthrowing of current systems of oppression will ever come. As they say, “How do you live in a world that can never be repaired? How do you resist when you’re too exhausted to dream of a future?” Palliative activism, they propose, is the answer. Rather than fight for grand changes that will never come, we should fight to ensure that there is some good in the world as it burns around us. In their words, “If we are doomed to suffer, maybe we can ensure that there will be love among the suffering.”

This concept really resonated with me because there are times that I feel so overwhelmed by everything going on. Over the past few years, there has been a massive wave of hate rolling through the United States and other Western countries, especially in the state in which I currently reside. Book bans. Bathroom bans. Don’t Say Gay laws. Laws attacking the teaching of Black history. Meanwhile, bigots are being given more freedom and encouragement to attack people from minority groups. And yet, I still have to go to work and take care of my family. It’s a lot and some days I feel like I can’t do it all, which causes feelings of guilt and burn out. Florence Ashley’s concept of palliative activism gives me reassurance that that’s okay. It tells me that it’s okay to focus the majority of my attention on taking care of myself and my loved ones. It tells me that I don’t have to do it all. Just do what I can.  

This book was such an experience to read and I mean that in the best possible way. It left me both emotionally wrecked and encouraged for what lies ahead in my own journey. I think it’s a book that every queer person, especially every trans person, should read.