MISS COLLINS. She is, without a doubt, the most
garish, tasteless faggot I’ve ever run across.

There have long been feminists who have sought to repress male-to-female transsexuality on the grounds that it expressed a quintessentially male fantasy of womanhood. These days they’re known as trans-exclusionary radical feminists—TERFs, for short. The classic text here is Janice Raymond’s 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male, whose author famously claimed that “all transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves.” In Raymond’s telling, instead of rejecting sex-role stereotypes altogether, as any good feminist would do, transsexuals simply substitute “one sex-role stereotype for another.” This makes transsexuality a perverse extension of sexual objectification, “the ultimate, and we might even say the logical, conclusion of male possession of women in a patriarchal society.” “Literally,” writes Raymond, “men here possess women.”

Raymond is obviously a bigot: she makes no effort to conceal her disgust for trans women and especially for forms of medical intervention like genital surgery. (Indeed, it is an eternal irony of the trans-exclusionary feminist that she regards nothing with greater horror than the prospect of someone’s penis getting chopped off.) But she’s also not entirely wrong. Of course it would be ludicrous to try to understand a transsexual woman like Gigi Gorgeous without any reference to stereotypes; on the contrary, commitment to being stereotyped is right there in her name. Gigi Gorgeous is young, wealthy, white, blonde, blue-eyed, skinny, tanned; she has full, pouty lips and large, round breasts. This means that Gigi is a TERF’s worst nightmare: a shameless cosmetic miracle, assembled by a team of plastic surgeons, endocrinologists, agents, and marketers—a walking, talking advertisement. I love this about her.

Valerie is sometimes considered a trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a moniker I’m sure she would abhor (above all for the “feminist” part). The truth is probably blurrier than that. She certainly knew people we’d call trans today. Her biographer reports that in the summer of 1967, Valerie could be found loitering in Washington Square Park with Candy Darling, soon to become Andy Warhol’s transsexual muse. At times, Valerie spoke admiringly of Candy, describing her as “a perfect victim of male suppression” to a mutual friend she had cast in Up Your Ass; at others, paranoia on the rise, Valerie was known to accuse Candy of making fun of women for gay men’s entertainment. The SCUM Manifesto is similarly ambivalent, offering measured praise for drag queens. “The male dares to be different to the degree that he accepts his passivity and his desire to be female, his fagginess,” Solanas writes, with the qualification that the drag queen’s deep insecurity about being “sufficiently female” leads him to cling “compulsively to the man-made stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms.” This tension is borne out in the bitchy queens of Up Your Ass, who spend their brief scene strutting for an amused Bongi and ragging mercilessly on each other’s appearance. “She’s so vile. Miss Trashy-Ass,” complains Scheherazade. “Maybe so, but at least I’d never wear gold eye glitter to an afternoon mixer,” Miss Collins fires back.

The question of whether Valerie Solanas was a TERF is probably unanswerable. Far more interesting is the fact that, thanks to its byzantine theory of gender, SCUM installs the drag queen as the model for all gender—or at the very least, Daddy’s Girls. “The male must see to it that the female be clearly a ‘Woman,’ the opposite of a ‘Man,’ that is, the female must act like a faggot,” Solanas writes, “And Daddy’s Girl, all of whose female instincts were wrenched out of her when little, easily and obligingly adapts herself to the role.” The notion that trans women are the product of the pathological assimilation of misogynist stereotypes here serves not as an unnatural exception, but as the rule governing all gender: not just all men, but also any woman who is not a member of SCUM—any woman at all, perhaps, except Valerie herself.