A sharp, funny and fearless exploration of what it means to be a man who never stopped being a feminist.
The following is an excerpt from Jude Ellison S. Doyle’s new book, DILF (Did I Leave Feminism?), out Oct. 21, 2025.
Transmasculine people are one of feminism’s biggest blind spots. No one knows quite what to do with us, so it’s easier to pretend we’re not there. Books on “male feminism” or “feminist men” mostly teach men how to be allies to women’s struggle—the idea that there might be men who actually experience pregnancy, or abortion, or being cat-called or sexually harassed or pay-gapped or any of the other things we traditionally call “women’s issues” is not accounted for. Books on trans feminism understandably stress the importance of feminism for trans women—which is important, what with them being women and all—but do tend to reinforce the assumption that feminism is just for girls.
I’m hardly the first trans guy to run into this problem, or to write about it. The poet Cameron Awkward-Rich famously compared the relationship between trans and feminist to the one between Peter Pan and Wendy: They love each other, they need each other, but they can never quite merge, as lovers long to do. In order to be themselves, trans men must slip out of feminism’s charmed circle, but they must also perpetually return to feminism in order to understand their lives. Even as he leaves the sisterhood, Awkward-Rich says, the transmasculine person knows that “there is, as of now, no better discourse he can speak to articulate the harms he incurred for failing to be [female].”
Somewhat more hopefully, author and journalist Thomas Page McBee conceives of transmasculinity as an incentive and invitation to solidarity.
“People sometimes think that being trans means I live ‘between’ worlds, but that’s not exactly true,” McBee says. “If anything, it has just created within me a potential for empathy that I must work every day, like a muscle, to grow.”
He will never be a woman, and he doesn’t automatically “get” what women are going through, but he can treat women with the dignity and respect he would have wanted, back when people mistook him for female.
This is all good stuff, great in fact—and yet I still see so much longing and lostness, confusion and frustration, whenever trans guys talk about feminism. Is this still, you know, our thing? Do we belong here? If feminism is no longer for us, are we being punished for “defecting” or “becoming the oppressor?” If it used to be for us—if our bodies and histories are still undeniably marked by the way the world treats people it regards as “women”—then what does it mean to lose feminism’s protection? Do we still matter? Who’s got our backs?
I saw some guys crumble into bitterness and start muttering about “misandry”; others fell into an apologetic cringe and never stopped reassuring the world they were Not Like Other Men; some guys, most guys, just retreated into themselves, and stopped saying much at all.
Meanwhile, in the abyss created by ignorance, monsters spawned. In 2024, the only self-proclaimed feminists who do spend a lot of time talking about transmasculine people are doing it with the intention of wiping us off the map.
TERFs—“trans-exclusive radical feminists,” sometimes rebranded as “gender-critical,” though their refusal to criticize traditional gender constructs is one very large part of the problem—are confident that they know exactly where transmasculine people fit in feminism: We’re the enemy. TERFs believe that we hate women, and hate ourselves for being women, and that we are abandoning womanhood because our internalized misogyny leads us to believe we are better than other girls—so much better that we deserve to be treated as men, the Rolls-Royce of traditional gender options.
Not only is this strand of feminism traditionally hostile to transmasculine people, feminism is promoted as the cure for transmasculinity.
“Female-to-constructed-male transsexuals are relatively rare,” wrote Janice Raymond, in The Transsexual Empire—the infamous codifying document of second-wave TERFism, sort of the Old Testament for hating trans people—and this is because “women have had a political outlet, that is, feminism, which has helped change the distribution of power for women in society and challenge sex role rigidification.”
For decades, this has been the line: Think you’re a dude? Just be a feminist! But to be a feminist, and a dude, is impossible. All trans men are betraying feminism’s promise, pursuing the selfish “individual” solution of transition over the work of changing gender stereotypes for the culture at large.
The language of “opting out,” of “betraying” women, of aspiring to “male privilege” or opportunistically upgrading my gender the way you might upgrade from economy to first class on a long flight—all of that is coming from the TERFs, even if it has obtained alarmingly wide circulation. It is meant to discredit transmasculine people in the public sphere by casting our transness as inherently malicious. It’s also meant to inspire transmasculine people to doubt themselves, to wonder if they really are being greedy or selfish or sexist by pursuing lives that don’t make them utterly miserable every second of every day.
When I looked like a woman, I had a hundred experts telling me how to be a feminist. Now that I was visible as a man, I had almost none, and of the few that I could find, an alarming proportion of them thought I shouldn’t exist. A wise man once said that you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I had already become a man. In order to fill the absence I felt now, I would have to become the worst kind of man, the kind that had always annoyed the ever-living Christ out of me: a man who writes a book explaining feminism.
You know. To women.
Yikes.
