Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars

"Thoughtful and often moving… The book is partly an attempt to let a butch community that is often talked over finally speak for itself… There is a quiet resolve to Mackay, who when asked how they have managed to keep a foot in both camps for so long says firmly: “I don’t think anything healthy comes from people hunkering down in their bunkers.” It is only as we go our separate ways in the sunshine that it occurs to me how much courage that now takes. -- Gaby Hinsliff * The Guardian * 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) * This book confronts, explains, explores, deconstructs and then quite beautifully and reasonably creates space, safe space, ordered space for discussion and a far greater depth of understanding. I kept thinking throughout the book that the little kid in the baseball cap has grown up to become brilliant, brave and generous. A vital spacious text. * Juno Roche, Writer * In this brave and wise guide to the gender wars, Finn Mackay combines both personal insight and illuminating scholarship. Writing as a radical feminist and masculine-presenting female person, she brings an eye-opening perspective to the validity of marginalized identities—and she points persuasively to their importance in the revolution to overthrow male supremacy. -- John Stoltenberg, author of Refusing to Be a Man and The End of Manhood ""While most people will experience my work and my being as a far left leaning enterprise in actual fact I am more interested in ‘the middle ground’, ‘the grey areas’, what I call the space of ‘queer liminality’. The first thing that strikes me, (like an ever so gentle slap in the face), about Female Masculinities and the Gender Wars, Finn Mackay’s latest public intervention, is how very similar we are, despite having a vastly different personal narrative and social circle. Finn draws upon lived experience as a female bodied person with a presentation that causes others to make assumptions about both her sex and gender identity. Finn is a questioner who eschews the comfort of binary thinking in favour of a more nuanced approach. I would even go as far to say that Finn embodies ‘true genius’ in their ability to recognize how two or more seemingly oppositional ideas can be true at the same time."" Del LaGrace Volcano, Artist and Activist * Del LaGrace Volcano, Artist and Activist * Nodding along furiously and getting all sorts of feels about how none of this has been understood very much, on butch masculinity. What Finn writes is so in sync with my childhood perception of the butch women around me, those perceptions are my compass for truth because, well, I was a child, and had zero consciousness of any issue about anyone being who they are. Finn's writing nails it so well I think, it's kind of revelatory. All too often I read stuff in LGBTQI+ arenas, or feminism, and can't see it chiming at all with those women back then. Which is not necessarily a failing or criticism, just what I think. Everyone would have been passing this writing around at The Gateways though; I'm really sure of that. * Gina Ware, daughter of Gina and Ted Ware, owners of The Gateways Club; artist, designer, and film maker *"