In which Julia Serano has opinions (and I love them)

 In my politics book club (now one of multiple politics book clubs, but whatever) we decided to read Julia Serano’s 2007 classic Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, even though books that came out when I was in college being “classics” now makes me feel old and creaky. I was not the one who suggested it, but I had recently picked up a copy because I’d started following Serano on Twitter, so it was a well-timed suggestion.

 

A few things have changed since the book was written, most obviously that nobody uses the term “transsexual” anymore, but overall it holds up. The second edition, released in 2016, discusses some of the things that had changed since 2007, especially in the media and pop culture landscape; this is honestly a little depressing to read because the 2016 intro was so obviously written right before the enormous backlash that’s taken off in the past year or so and is currently spreading through shitty state legislatures like fascist wildfire. 

 

While the term “transmisogyny” seems to have spread throughout The Discourse there are a couple of other really useful terms/concepts in this book that I haven’t seen used as widely as I think they could be (and as I plan to start using them). The most obvious one is the distinction between traditional and oppositional sexism, which I feel like I do hear discussed sometimes but not always with those specific terms (or any specific terms at all, which is why I think inventing specific terms is useful there). The other concept I really like is “gender entitlement,” which is basically the assumption that everyone else’s experience of gender and/or sexuality is or must be actually the same as one’s own, and the subsequent a) freakout or b) accusations of lying that follow when somebody exhibits or states a way of existing that is clearly very different. (In the ace community it is common for folks to talk about initially assuming that everybody else’s talk of sex and sexuality was all just an entire society-wide practice of exaggerating in order to seem cool, and being genuinely shocked to find out that some--indeed, most--people actually mean it. One thing I will say for the ace community is that it is expected that, by the time one is identifying as ace, one has discovered that this is wildly incorrect.) Gender entitlement can afflict anybody, no matter how marginalized, which is why liberatory movements and communities around sex and gender so frequently devolve into infuriating, balkanized little theory wars where everyone tries to prove that the way they experience sex and gender is The Way It Actually Works and everybody else is just dumb or suffering false consciousness or something. (For example, biphobia is widespread in our society, but as someone who is not bi, Ask Me About My Run-Ins With the “Science Says Everyone Is Bi Akshually” Crowd! They’re not numerous and have no societal power whatsoever, but they did manage to find teenage me and make me very uncomfortable in self-styled countercultural spaces!) 

 

There were a few things in this book that, while I don’t know if these even constitute criticisms, at least struck or were pointed out to me as odd while I was reading it. A friend of mine had a critique that it’s not entirely clear who the audience is meant to be. The book is “trans 101” enough that I am told it’s not exactly new material for trans people, but it doesn’t really coddle cis defensiveness, and it does get into critiquing some fairly academic gender and sexuality theory that is probably not going to be too accessible to the same reader for whom the bits explaining the problems with the Jerry Springer Show’s depictions of trans people are new material. Personally, I very much enjoyed Serano’s commitment to surveying and refuting such a wide-ranging spectrum of wrongness, even for fields and communities that I don’t know anything about (this is because I am a mean person). On the other hand, I was mildly thrown by the earlier chapters where she went from a detailed breakdown of all the invasive, sexualized ways in which depictions of trans people in media are constructed to cater to and enable cis prurience, and then right into a detailed breakdown of all the effects of going on HRT, including its effects on her sex life. Which is certainly not out of scope for a book about gender and sexuality, but it’s a fairly conversational sort of book and would definitely be TMI for an actual conversation.

 

The theorizing on femininity was probably the most interesting to me, and the most relatable. Like Serano, I am a reasonably gender-conforming (especially in appearance) woman with a strong sense of binary female gender identity and I consider myself a committed feminist, so I’m quite familiar with the never-winning back-and-forth of being both too gender-conforming and not gender-conforming enough for both the anti-feminists and the feminists, sometimes for the same things (in my case the ace thing is a big one, where the sexists think I should be spending more time chasing boys because that’s what women are for and the “sex-positive feminists” also think I should spend more time chasing boys, but like for feminist reasons). For this reason, Serano’s vision of gender liberation where everyone gets the fuck over themselves and leaves other people alone is very compelling to me personally. I have issues with the word “femininity” that made reading about it a bit of work, the main issue being that my brain sides right off it as not particularly meaning anything--I don’t identify as a “feminine” woman even though it is pretty objectively true that I am, but it means I can’t make any sense out of terms like “someone’s femininity.” I don’t particularly value my tendencies toward gender conformity, it’s just easier, because the alternative to instinctively learning how to be a person entirely from other women would be to pay some sort of conscious or unconscious attention to how non-women do things, and I am not going to do that. Anyway, despite skating off that specific term, there was definitely some Relatable Content there in terms of identifying very strongly as female and getting fed up with other people’s attempts to have all kinds of supposedly scientific hifalutin Opinions about it. 

 

Also I would like to take this opportunity to reiterate that, while questioning whether the “male” way of doing things is necessarily best is a critical part of feminism and also just critical thinking, “cultural feminism” is just the feminism version of queer theorying yourself right back into homophobia and, while there is no such thing as “male energy” or “female energy” objectively, trans women definitely have female energy regardless of where they are in terms of medical transition and, additionally, are the only people it’s actually fun to do sports with. This is not a shitpost and I will fight people about it. 

 

While a lot of the book is theory, a lot of it is also biographical, chronicling Serano’s personal experiences, first as a crossdresser and then through social and medical transition. This obviously limits the perspective to that of a middle-class, already somewhat “girly” looking white person, which is obviously not universal, but it generally doesn’t pretend to be. I think the personal touch works well, though, especially to add a more concrete dimension to some of the theory talk. It also means that two of my main takeaways from the book are “I hope Julia Serano has gotten better friends since 2007” and “She seems like she’d be fun to go for after-meeting drinks with,” neither of which are particularly politically enlightening thoughts, but whatever. Overall, I think it’ll be a fun book to discuss and I hope that nobody in our mostly-cis book group says anything completely embarrassing! Including me!