Honestly not sure what I thought of this... it was clearly trying to be provocative and majorly deviates from much of established gender theory. I thought it was a fascinating concept and I don't necessarily want to negatively review a book of theory because I didn't understand or resonate with parts of it (although as theory goes, this one is pretty comprehensible). I'm thinking about what some other reviewers have said regarding how Long Chu potentially falls into the hole of gender essentialism, but it's tricky to even say that because of how she upends our traditional understanding of gender (even gender as a social construct).

I will also say, if I never have to hear Freud's name again, it will be too soon (although Long Chu has interesting things to say about him).

Key points:

-Daddy's Girl: A female who is conned into adopting male—that is, traditionally feminine—traits as her own, devolving into niceness, self-absorption, and insecurity.
-The thesis of this little book is that femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels. Put more simply: Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.
-I'll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another...To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.
-Everyone is female, but how one copes with being female—the specific defense mechanisms that one consciously or unconsciously develops as a reaction formation against one's femaleness, within the terms of what is historically and socioculturally available—this is what we ordinarily call gender.
-The castration complex is easily mistaken for the fear that one will be castrated; in fact, it is the fear that one, having been castrated, will like it. Pussy envy is therefore not the mutually exclusive opposite of penis envy, but a universal desire atop which the latter develops as a reaction formation: Everyone does their best to want power, because deep down, no one wants it at all.
-When she makes herself beautiful…she does so not out of self-regard, but because she has emptied herself out and assumed their desires as her own. We might call this a narcissism for the other; vanity as the expression of someone else’s narcissism.
Everyone is female, and everyone hates it. If this is true, then gender is very simply the form this self-loathing takes in any given case.
-Gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes but also the process of internalizing itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desires, someone else’s narcissism.
-What makes gender gender...is the fact that it expresses, in every case, the desires of another. Gender has therefore a complementary relation to sexual orientation: If sexual orientation is basically the social expression of one’s own sexuality, then gender is basically a social expression of someone else’s sexuality. In the former case, one takes an object; in the latter case, one is an object.
-Gender transition begins from the understanding that you you identify yourself subjectively—as precious and important as this identification may be—is nevertheless on its own basically worthless. If identity were all there were to gender, transition would be as easy as thinking it— a light bulb, suddenly switched on. Your gender identity would simply exist, in mute abstraction…
-…gender is something other people have to give you.
-You do not get to consent to yourself—a definition of femaleness.
-The distinction between biological females and women as a social category, far from a neutral scientific observation, developed precisely in order for the captive black woman to be recognized as female—making Sims’s research applicable to his women patients in polite white society—without being granted the status of social and legal personhood. Sex was produced, in other words, precisely at the juncture where gender was denied. In this sense, a female has always been less than a person.
-If the Adam and Eve story had been written in a 20th century institute of embryological research, Eve would have been created first.