 Irrational, Inconsistent, and Infuriating
Millot has no question driving her research, no hypothesis that can be disproved, no methodology, and no thesis. This book is a stream of opinions like the ravings of a talk host who has forgotten the topic. The chapter on Lacan is unintelligible due to theoretical jargon. The omnipresent symbol of the phallus refers to anything from mothers, children, boys, girls, sex, desire, patriarchy, unity, and why transsexuals are evil-that is to say, as a philosophical concept, Millot's "phallus" is utterly meaningless. Although she isn't hateful or repulsed by transsexuality, she is dismissive of transsexual identity and the choice to have surgery, which determines the book's worth for this transsexual.There are a few smart moments. She observes that transsexuals speak more dogmatically about their gender before they have surgery because they have to defend their decision. She knows that not all female-to-male transsexuals (FTMs) demand phalloplasty and not all male-to-female transsexuals (MTFs) are sexually attracted to men. I learned about two significant historical movements of self-castration. This is not a run-of-the-mill rant. It has some creativity, vision, and is definitely original. It's worth a look by those who want to have fun picking it apart. That's all I can bring myself to say in its favor. In the bulk of the text, she claims that MTFs pursue an essentialized feminine ideal "free of doubts or questions" while FTMs have a more modest goal of being an ordinary, specific man that nevertheless "identifies with male power". But in her four-page conclusion, she admits her evidence does not support these claims at all. A person with more intellectual integrity would have gone back and revised her thesis. Millot just threw her hands into the air and sent the manuscript to the publisher with all its contradictions and confusions. At the last minute she proposes a new theory: MTFs want to be The Woman while FTMs want to avoid being The Woman. She then opposes MTFs because they allegedly embrace a sexist stereotype and FTMs because they allegedly reject it. Apparently transsexuals are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Sometimes she says that the conviction of being the opposite sex and the demand for sex-reassignment surgery is the very definition of transsexuality; at other times, merely a symptom of it. She interviewed a few FTMs for her project. All except one were post-operative. She doesn't hint at how she discovered, selected, and interviewed these men. She venerates Robert Stoller, author of "Sex and Gender," in a long, jargon-ridden chapter where she claims that the transsexual identity/symptom is somehow Oedipal, and which concludes with an admission that neither she nor Stoller can explain exactly what this Oedipal conflict is. She also admits that none of the FTMs she interviewed had a "privileged relationship" with their fathers, which Stoller considered invariant. And Stoller's assertion that transsexuals can't "situate themselves without hesitation as men or as women," which "even perverts and neurotics" can do, is the exact opposite of Millot's claim and she fails to notice it. Only at the end of the book when she finally concedes that transsexuals are capable of subtlety does she proclaim that they "want to belong to the sex of the angels" and rhetorically asks why FTMs think they want penises anyway. The deciding factor in choosing to identify as a transsexual or a non-surgical transvestite may be just the "market forces of prostitution". What is her point: that individuals with the conviction of being the opposite sex really don't have that conviction at all? She claims that transsexuals should learn to accept their bodies without surgery but does not seem aware of the existence of people who do so. Bizarrely, when she stumbles across one, she dismisses him as psychotic. And, although she quotes Jan Morris on the burden and embarrassment of androgyny, she is insensitive to her difficulties and complains that surgery annihilated her "privileged in-between status." If she thinks it's so privileged, maybe she should try living it for a week! Most paranoid, damning, and cutting is Millot's belief that MTFs are trying to overthrow women by providing barren vaginas for insatiable male lust. She all but blames MTFs for setting back women's liberation and says they can never achieve feminist solidarity. When she find two MTFs who criticize sexism, she changes the subject and reminds the reader that these people are psychotic. Any attempts by MTFs to become intimate with women are "mental rapes." But if that is so, her problem seems to be with all male heterosexual intimacy. She observes that MTFs can identify as straight or lesbian, but assures that, in either case, they have no libido and only want partners to validate their feminine identity. By contrast, FTMs (who, according to her, are always straight), must be genuinely attracted to their partners because they mask their true sex. So, for Millot, true attraction breeds deception, and the desire to be loved is false attraction-a dim view of human sexuality. Since she has had limited contact with transsexuals, the intellectual horrors for which she blames them are usually inconsistencies in her own thought. She complains about the sexism that pervades our society as if it were uniquely the fault of FTMs. She ridicules MTFs for possessing definitions, stereotypes, and ideas of womanhood-as if thinking about gender were wrong, and as if transsexuals were the only ones who do it! Does she avoid it when she claims that sex difference is "real," that its reality endures despite surgery? At least MTFs define themselves as individuals. Millot defines a group of which she's never even met a flesh-and-blood example. She also indirectly refers to an essential femininity in phrases such as "the female position," "consummately feminine ardor," and masturbation in a "feminine way." Who is guilty of stereotyping women's nature? While she complains that MTFs are flamboyant, she is the one who chose to put a full-frontal nude shot on the cover of her book!
 Very Poorly Done and Inaccurate
A rehash of the defeated and debunked theories that were propounded in the 70s by purists. Author Millot has apparently not done much if any research because of the tremendous number of errors in historical information.
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