Featuring critical essays, erotica, and stitched-up memories, Gender/Fucking explores sexual arousal as a site of knowledge about the self and world.

Taking the idea of intellectual masturbation a bit too literally, Florence Ashley draws on their experiences as a transfeminine activist, academic, and slut to interrogate what it means to live in a gendered body in our difficult yet occasionally loving world. With personal essays about the fetishization of trans bodies, recovering from surgery, and losing hope, Florence’s collection celebrates the queer messiness of sex and identity.

Through the embrace of its raw and lyrical prose, Gender/Fucking invites the reader into the intimate world of academic smut to ask what it means to be horny on main in a sex-negative world—and what power it might hold.

Florence Ashley's profile page

Florence Ashley (they/them/that bitch) is a transfeminine professor of law and bioethics at the University of Alberta. A prolific transdisciplinary researcher, Florence has mesmerized many academic fields with their incisive style and irreverent footnotes. Their first book was more boringly titled Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis. When not engaged in research or teaching, Florence enjoys speaking French and oversharing on social media.

"Working across the fields of law, bioethics, and philosophy, Florence Ashley is already a force to be reckoned with. Now with Gender/Fucking they reveal a more conversational, personal style through erotica, poetry, and a Kierkegaardian engagement with the trans memoir form that achieves the aim of putting the sex back in transsexual. By introducing new ways of thinking about love, sex, relationships, and the impending future, this book meditates on the stigma against daring to have a body—and especially a transfeminine body—in public space." —Amy Marvin, PhD, author of Laughing at Trans Women: A Theory of Transmisogyny

"Channeling the erotic legacy of Anaïs Nin, Ashley's sexual confessional dilates the traditional boundaries of trans autobiography. Can gender transition change our sexualities? Can altering our bodies open new erotic scenarios that were previously closed? Has 'transgender' neutered trans politics? Shirking the conventions that have sanitized transition, Gender/Fucking invites us to grind on the supposed distinction between desire-to-be and desire-for. Transsexuality has never been sexier." —Cáel M. Keegan, Ph.D., author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender

"In Gender∕Fucking, Florence Ashley explores the many ways in which societal presumptions and stigma complicate our experiences with gender, sexuality, and our own bodies – especially for transfeminine people. A rare book that is simultaneously insightful and silly, theoretical and visceral, sexy and heartbreaking, full of provocative and challenging ideas while also being a fun enjoyable read." —Julia Serano, author of Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back