Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars provides important theoretical background and context to the 'gender wars' or 'TERF wars' – the violent feminist fracture at the forefront of the LGBTQ international conversation. Using queer and female masculinities as a lens, Finn Mackay investigates the current generational shift that is refusing the previous assumed fixity of sex, gender and sexual identity. Transgender and trans rights movements are currently experiencing political backlash from within certain lesbian and lesbian feminist groups, resulting in a situation in which these two minority communities are frequently pitted against one another or perceived as diametrically opposed.

Uniquely, Finn Mackay approaches this debate through the context of female masculinity, butch and transmasculine lesbian masculinities. There has been increasing interest in the study of masculinity, influenced by a popular discourse around so-called 'toxic masculinity', the rise of men's rights activism and theory and critical work on Trump's America and the MeToo movement.

An increasingly important topic in political science and sociological academia, this book aims to break new ground in the discussion of the politics of gender and identity.

REVIEWS

“By turns witty and deeply serious, Finn Mackay has managed to find a way through and even around the messy gender wars currently raging on and offline. With calm precision and clear rhetoric, Mackay lays out the nuts and bolts of sex, gender, gender transition, sexual orientation, hormones, masculinity, femininity and much, much more. Whether you are a seasoned gender warrior or an armchair observer of the debates swirling around these topics today, you will find answers to your questions and concerns here. More than that, you will hear from trans, butch and gender-questioning people who, far from being examples in an argument between feminists or doctors, are living with contradiction, surviving for the most part, and, often, modeling new ways of being in the world.” – Jack Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity (1998) and Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (2018)

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