Tag: Whipping Girl

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

Chapter 6 of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl begins thusly:

“As a transsexual woman, I am often confronted by people who insist that I am not, nor can I ever be, a ‘real woman.’ One of the more common lines of reasoning goes something like this: There’s more to being a woman than simply putting on a dress.” I couldn’t agree more.

So what does Serano think a woman is? We’ll have to skip ahead to the end of the chapter to find anything like an answer:

The one thing that women share is that we are all perceived as women, and treated accordingly. As a feminist, I look forward to a time when we finally move beyond the idea that biology is destiny, and recognize that the most important differences that exist between women and men in our society are the different meanings that we place onto one another’s bodies.

So “women” refers to the class of people perceived as women and treated accordingly. (Why are they “perceived as” women? Never mind.)

So is that why trans women transition? So they can be perceived as women and treated accordingly?

But Serano insists that women—including trans women—are more than the “social meanings that we place onto one another’s bodies”. Yes, of course, but so then what besides those social meanings makes trans women “women”?

Serano doesn’t say. She does say, though, that not all trans women are–

…on a quest to make ourselves as pretty, pink, and passive as possible. While there are certainly some trans women who buy into mainstream dogma about beauty and femininity, others are outspoken feminists and activists fighting against all gender stereotypes. But you’d never know it by looking at the popular media, which tends to assume that all transsexuals are male-to-female, and that all trans women want to achieve stereotypical femininity

Point taken. Nevertheless, a big part of Serano’s aim in this book is to tell us that feminism should embrace “femininity” and everyone who is feminine-presenting. In Chapter 19, Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism, she writes

…[F]eminine self-presentation is often framed as though it solely exists to entice or attract men. This assumption denies any possibility that those who are feminine might wish to adorn themselves for their own benefit or pleasure.(Page 327.)

The existence of transsexuals—who transition from one sex to the other and often live completely unnoticed as the sex “opposite” to the one we were assigned at birth—has the potential to challenge the conventional assumption that gender differences arise from our chromosomes and genitals in a simple, straightforward manner.

How do trans people challenge those norms any more than gender-nonconforming non-trans people do? (Don’t bother asking.)

We can wreak havoc on such taken-for-granted concepts as woman and man, homosexual and heterosexual. These terms lose their cut-and-dried meaning when a person’s assigned sex and lived sex are not the same

And we know how much Julia Serano hates cut-and-dried meanings. Or even coherent ones.

If you don’t have the actual physical equipment, I don’t know how you can claim to “live” the sex you aren’t. You can live as if you were the other sex by imitating them in appearance. If your definition of a given sex is “people perceived and treated as such,” that should be enough, I suppose. No word here from Serano on the ontological status of trans women who don’t pass.

Again. Look. If “sex” is not about the body, it must be about…something else. I can’t think of a better word for the something else than “gender.” But gender, for Serano, means whatever she wants it to mean

So once again, we’re swimming in a sea of vague assertions.

But because we are a threat to the categories that enable traditional and oppositional sexism, the images and experiences of trans people are presented in the media in a way that reaffirms, rather than challenges, gender stereotypes. (pg 36)

Gee, I wonder why. Maybe if popular trans activists like Julia Serano offered us a definition of trans people that isn’t utter genderbabble, we would have a better way of understanding the phenomenon, one that doesn’t endlessly refer back to common societal gender signals. But they haven’t. And so the media focus on gender signals like lipstick and high heels when portraying trans women, and Julia Serano—despite her insistence later in the book that such things are all about strength, empowerment, and we-do-it-for-ourselves-not-for-men—doesn’t like that one bit:

Pgs 43-44:

Mass media images of “biological males” dressing and acting in a feminine manner could potentially challenge mainstream notions of gender, but the way they are generally presented in these feminization scenes ensures that this never happens. The media neutralizes the potential threat that trans femininities pose to the category of “woman” by playing to the audience’s subconscious belief that femininity itself is artificial

How? By portraying trans women applying makeup and such. The dastards!

After all, while most people assume that women are naturally feminine, they also (rather hypocritically) require them to spend an hour or two each day putting on their faces and getting all dressed up in order to meet societal standards for femininity (unlike men, whose masculinity is presumed to come directly from who he is and what he does). In fact, it’s the assumption that femininity is inherently “contrived,” “frivolous,” and “manipulative” that allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “sincere” by comparison.*

Yes, Julia, makeup and such—which you champion—is a big part of contemporary femininity—of being perceived as feminine. And of course it is artificial. It is artificial by fucking definition—it’s makeup. It’s artifice.

If you understand that “femininity” is not synonymous with “womanhood” you should not have a problem acknowledging that. But if your ideology leads you insist that femininity is somehow an inherent part of some people’s identity, and moreover that identity is all there is to womanhood, admitting the artifice involved gets…tricky.

Julia Serano wants us to pay no attention to the person behind the curtain. The one with $200 worth of Lancome spread out in front of them.

Thus, the media is able to depict trans women donning feminine attire and accessories without ever giving the impression that they achieve “true” femaleness in the process.

Note the scare quotes. Let’s skip for the moment the interesting implication that femaleness is something to be “achieved.” What is this true femaleness that Serano complains the media don’t grant to trans women? She doesn’t say. Doesn’t say how the media could depict trans women “achieving” it, either.

…[T]he media tends not to notice—or to outright ignore—trans men because they are unable to sensationalize them they do trans women without bringing masculinity itself into question….

Once we understand how media coverage of transsexuals is informed by the different values our society assigns to femaleness and maleness, it becomes obvious that virtually all attempts to sensationalize and deride trans women are built on a foundation of unspoken misogyny.

This is why trans women like myself, who rarely dress in an overly feminine manner and/or who are not attracted to men, are such an enigma to many people. By assuming that my desire to be female is merely some sort of femininity fetish or sexual perversion, they are essentially making the case that women have no worth beyond the extent to which they can be sexualized.

Well, no. The theory that some men transition in order to attract male sexual partners, and that others transition because they are autogynephiles, is not a mere “assumption.” Scientific theories, right or wrong, are more than assumptions. Serano is priming her readers to reject Blanchard and Bailey’s theory, which she will address in chapter 7.

Be that as it may, “they are essentially making the case that women have no worth beyond the extent to which they can be sexualized” is a non sequitur. “Women’s only/primary worth is as sex objects,” is a belief that causes untold harm, but it does not follow from the contentious claim that “some males’ desire to be female is due to a paraphilia.”

* Feminists have long recognized the way that masculinity tends to be perceived as more “natural” than femininity, and pointed out that masculinity also involves contrivance.

For a sad-funny glimpse of how artificial masculinity – trans and otherwise – can be, see here.

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen

Time for another whipping of Whipping Girl. We’re on Chapter 1, Coming to Terms with Transgenderism and Transsexuality. As the title implies, it’s about terms, but Serano slips a lot of assumptions into the mix.

If you want to play along at home, we’re on pages 25 – 28.

Serano defines “transgender”–

While the word originally had a more narrow definition, since the 1990s it has been used primarily as an umbrella term to describe those who defy societal expectations and assumptions regarding femaleness and maleness;

Note that this definition would include Portia, Viola, Atticus Finch, Scout, me, and probably you, dear reader.

this includes people who are transsexual (those who live as members of the sex other than the one they were assigned at birth), intersex…and genderqueer…as well as those whose gender expression differs from their anatomical or perceived sex (including crossdressers, drag performers, masculine women, feminine men, and so on). I will also sometimes use the synonymous term gender-variant to describe all people who are considered by others to deviate from societal norms of femaleness and maleness.

The far-reaching inclusiveness of the word “transgender” was purposely designed accommodate the many gender and sexual minorities who were excluded from the previous feminist and gay rights movements.

Excluded? No evidence is offered for this claim.

At the same time, its broadness can be highly problematic in that it often blurs or erases the distinctiveness of its constituents.

You don’t say.

The broadness of the term transgender is a conceptual mess. It confuses issues that should be considered clearly.

For example, while male crossdressers and transsexual men are both male-identified transgender people, these groups face a very different set of issues with regard to managing their gender difference….

Thus, the best way to reconcile the nebulous nature of the word is to recognize that it is primarily a political term, one that brings together disparate classes of people to fight for the common goal of ending all discrimination based on sex/gender variance….

Pay attention to the work the political term “transgender” does in trans discourse. Speaking of which–

Another point that is often overlooked in discussions about transgenderism is that many individuals who fall under the transgender umbrella choose not to identify with the term

O really?

For example, many intersex people reject the term because their condition is about physical sex (not gender) and the primary issues they face (e.g., nonconsensual “normalizing” medical procedures during infancy or childhood) differ greatly from those of the greater transgender community.

Yet still Serano includes them within the “greater transgender community.” Here, buried in a dense forest of wordage, is an acknowledgement that intersex people are not trans and that they tend to reject the term.

This speaks to this ongoing tendency within trans politics to obfuscate the distinctions between sex and gender, as well as distinctions between actual physical differences or disorders and differences in personality or personal style.

The appropriation of intersex people’s reality and concerns is one example. When reading transactivists and their allies, pay attention to how often they use terms that belong properly to intersex people (e.g., the whole “assigned at birth” trope), and give mini-lectures about how not all people fit neatly into the biological categories male and female, however irrelevant that may be to the issue at hand.

Throughout this book, I will use the word trans to refer to people who (to varying degrees) struggle with a subconscious understanding or intuition that there is something “wrong” with the sex they were assigned at birth [!] and/or who feel that they should have been born as or wish they could be the other sex…For many trans people, the fact that their appearances or behaviors may fall outside of societal gender norms is a very real issue, but one that is often seen as secondary to the cognitive dissonance that arises from the fact that their subconscious sex does not match their physical sex. This *gender dissonance* is usually experienced as a kind of emotional pain or sadness that grows more intense over time, sometimes reaching a point where it can become debilitating.

Serano doesn’t go into detail here about her claim that “many trans people” suffer from gender dissonance because of their “subconscious sex”, but she does discuss her own experience later in the book. I will get to that in another post.

I look at Serano’s constant (and politically convenient) conflation of “sex” with “gender”, and the garbage-can definition of “transgender” (which can easily include everyone, everywhere), and I suspect that she, and the trans movement as a whole, care less about understanding specific disorders that cause people pain than they do about promoting an ideology and maximizing their political clout. The more distinctions – sex/gender, female/male, persistent brain glitch/self-expression – are blurred, the harder it becomes to scrutinize the movement’s claims. And the larger the number of people who can be included under the trans umbrella, the bigger the shady bandwagon.

Serano’s quest to include everyone and his little genderqueer sibling under the trans umbrella continues on page 28:

[M]any of the above strategies and identities that trans people gravitate toward in order to relieve their gender dissonance are also shared by people who do not experience any discomfort with regards to their subconscious and physical sex. For example, some male-bodied [Why not just say *male*?] crossdressers spend much of their lives wishing they were actually female, while others see their crossdressing as simply a way to express a feminine side of their personalities.

Yet again, Serano claims both groups as “transgender”. She continues,

And while many trans people identify as genderqueer because it helps them make sense of their own experience of living in a world where their understanding of themselves differs so greatly from the way they are perceived by society, other people identify as genderqueer because, on a purely intellectual level, they question the validity of the binary gender system.

—HEAD.DESK—

Serano. People. You need to question more than the binary in “binary gender system”. You should not be promulgating and supporting gender by confusing it with sex.

As long as you do that, you are saying, “Yes, some people are male and belong to GENDER MALE (masculine), and some others are female and are belong to GENDER FEMALE (feminine), but me, I don’t.” You’ve simply made a show of opting out of it. As a privileged child of the West, this is easy for you, and it telegraphs your specialness to your friends, but the problem remains.

Let’s say there exists a binary system of stereotypes widely applied to the two most popular household pets. Something like this:

Cats are: cruel, selfish, beautiful

Dogs are: friendly, cheerful, stupid

Say you think these stereotypes are wrong, reductive, unfair, and harmful.

Say your response to this state of affairs is to proclaim

MY COMPANION ANIMAL IS PETQUEER!

Tell me how that helps matters, because I don’t see it.

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

Welcome back to another edition of me reading Whipping Girl and shouting at Julia Serano, and sharing my shouts with you.

In my last post, I pointed out that, for Serano, sexism is about “ensuring that those who are masculine have power over those who are feminine, and that only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine.” Feminism has historically been about power relations between men and women, but Serano insists that it should also be about power relations between “those who are masculine” and “those who are feminine.” (The extra step—“only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine”—reads to me like a bone tossed to old-timey feminists who concern themselves primarily with those born female.)

So Serano’s position is that feminism should be about fighting for the rights of “those who are feminine,” regardless of their sex (which is just a matter of self-declaration anyway.)

But “those who are masculine” is not a privileged class. Yes, the non-masculine of both sexes face prejudice, but they have not historically been disenfranchised or systemically oppressed. Masculine women don’t have male privilege, and non-masculine men are not exempt from it. Furthermore, “masculine” and “feminine” are not immutable categories. People can and do become more or less one or the other over time, often at will. Either can be adopted as a disguise, or as a playful mask.

I don’t mean to say that non-masculine men don’t often have a hellish time of it. They do, and as human beings we should fight that. I think feminism has a part in fighting it. But I question Serano’s attempt to remake feminism from the movement that fights for the rights of women and girls – female people – and works to equalize power between women and men, into a movement that centers everybody who exhibits certain personality characteristics.

Never fear, though – Serano’s vision goes both ways. Feminism has to be about trans activism, trans activism has to be “a feminist movement.” On page 16, she states that

Because anti-trans discrimination is steeped in traditional sexism, it is not simply enough for trans activists to challenge binary gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism)—we must also challenge the idea that femininity is inferior to masculinity and that femaleness is inferior to maleness. In other words, by necessity, trans activism must be at its core a feminist movement.

Trans activism can be that or not, as it chooses. But immediately after telling us that trans activism “must be a feminist movement,” Serano begins telling us in greater detail what *feminism* must be. She attacks what she calls “pseudofeminists,” then goes on to share her dream for a new, improved feminism:

Some might consider this contention [that trans activism must be at its core a feminist movement] controversial. Over the years, many self-described feminists have gone out of their way to dismiss trans people and in particular trans women, often resorting to many of the same tactics…that the mainstream media regularly uses against us. These pseudofeminists proclaim, ‘Women can do anything men can,’ then ridicule trans women for any perceived masculine tendency we may have. They argue that women should be strong and unafraid of speaking our minds, then tell trans women that we act like men when we voice our opinions. They claim that it is misogynistic when men create standards and expectations for women to meet, then they dismiss us for not meeting their standard of ‘woman.’ These pseudofeminists consistently preach feminism with one hand while practicing traditional sexism with the other.

There’s an awful lot to unpack there, and we don’t have all day. I’ll content myself with pointing out that feminists don’t ridicule men who identify as trans women because of their perceived masculine tendencies. They ridicule them, when they do, for behaving like men in relation to women. And if they “dismiss” trans women for “not meeting their standard of ‘woman’”, it’s because that standard consists of one essential: femaleness.

Serano, as she does, is simply slipping axioms into her argument and preemptively dismissing objections to those axioms. Her dismissal this time consists of calling the premise that men can’t be women “pseudofeminist.”

She continues:

It is time for us to take back the word ‘feminism’ from these pseudofeminists. After all, as a concept, feminism is much like the ideas of ‘democracy’ or ‘Christianity.’ Each has a major tenet at its core, yet there are a seemingly infinite number of ways in which those beliefs are practiced. And just as some forms of democracy and Christianity are corrupt and hypocritical while others are more just and righteous, we trans women must join allies of all genders and sexualities to forge a new type of feminism, one that understands that the only way for us to achieve true gender equity is to abolish both oppositional sexism and traditional sexism.

“It is no longer enough for feminism to fight solely for the rights of those born female….”

Notice the substitution of “gender equity” for equality between the sexes. And, because it’s bugging me, let me mention here that later in her book, Serano will reveal that she knew little or nothing of feminism until she began to transition. Yet here she is, lecturing us all on what feminism must be.

Instead of attempting to empower those born female by encouraging them to move further away from femininity, we should instead learn to empower femininity itself.

So feminism must also be about empowering femininity. How about instead we stop gendering personality types, Julia?

We must stop dismissing it [femininity] as ‘artificial’ or as a ‘performance’ and instead recognize that certain aspects of femininity (and masculinity as well) transcend both socialization and biological sex—otherwise there would not be feminine boy and masculine girl children.

Yes, certain aspects of personality may be rooted more in genetics than in socialization, but there is always a close dance between those two influences and we are nowhere near being able to confidently tease them apart. And yes, many – I hazard to say “most” if not “all” – aspects of personality are unrelated to sex. (See Cordelia Fine’s Testosterone Rex for a discussion about how the brain works to minimize sex differences in non-sex-related behavior.)

And so? If men can be “feminine” and women can be not-feminine, why must we center femininity in feminism?

I think we need to unpack notions of femininity and masculinity much more carefully than Serano does. That unpacking – which has been going on since long before Serano and trans activism arrived on the scene – includes the recognition that much of what we call femininity is performance – and so is masculinity. As conscious performance, the two may be seen as harmless when they are not compelled (and compelled they historically have been) – but they are definitely based on notions of what women (female people) and men (male people) should be.

And that’s sexism.

* * *

Next, Serano gives us the feminism-lite, we-do-it-for-ourselves defense of femininity:

We must challenge all those who insist that women who act or dress in a feminine manner take on a submissive or passive posture. For many of us, dressing or acting feminine is something we do for ourselves, not for others. It is our way of reclaiming our own bodies and fearlessly expressing our own personalities and sexualities. It is not us who are guilty of trying to reduce our bodies to mere playthings, but rather those who foolishly assume that our feminine style is a signal that we sexually subjugate ourselves to men.

Women (and men) do play with femininity in part for themselves and each other. Again, as uncoerced performance, as play, I don’t care. I don’t think feminism is about insisting that all women must dress butch at all times in order to be taken seriously. But how anyone can deny that performance is not at least part of what’s going on when anybody adopts girlface or boyface is beyond me. In the first place, we’re social animals, and there is always going to be an element of performance – of adapting our behavior in order to have some desired effect on others – in human personality. Maybe Serano means that femininity isn’t any more of a performance than any other complex of personality traits—but if so she should say so and stop trying to essentialize it.

She does this work of essentializing gender, and then she says:

We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men….We must move away from pretending that women and men are ‘opposite’ sexes, because when we buy into that myth it establishes a dangerous precedent [precedent!?] For if men are big, then women must be small; and if men are strong then women must be weak. And if being butch is to make yourself rock-solid, then being femme becomes allowing yourself to be malleable; and if being a man means taking control of your own situation, then being a woman becomes living up to other people’s expectations.

Again. In the course of one paragraph, Serano conflates gender (masculinity, femininity) with sex. “If men are big, then women must be small…if being butch is to make yourself rock-solid, then being femme means allowing yourself to be malleable.” Men and butch (aka acting masculine) are two different categories. They are very different categories, and one of them is a concept conceived as oppositional to another. In what world does masculinity not mean something like “making yourself [appear] rock-solid” and femininity “allowing yourself to [appear] malleable”? In what world do masculinity and femininity have any coherent meaning except as binary opposites?

Femininity and masculinity were invented in order to enforce sex roles. Femininity was how women (at least those of a certain class) were supposed to behave, masculinity was how men were supposed to behave and the two were supposed to be opposites.

What’s more, one was supposed to be the boss of the other. That one, in case you haven’t guessed, was the one with the penis. And even if he didn’t conform well to masculinity, his maleness still granted him social rights and status denied to women—however feminine or unfeminine they behaved.

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen

Still on Julia Serano’s Trans Woman Manifesto from her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Last time, you may remember, we looked at Serano’s demand that “[N]o qualifications should be placed on the term “trans woman”, and her definition of cissexism. Now let’s take a look at a neologism she seems to have invented: oppositional sexism, which she contrasts with traditional sexism.

While often different in practice, cissexism, transphobia, and homophobia are all rooted in oppositional sexism, which is the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and desires. Oppositional sexists attempt to punish or dismiss those of us who fall outside of gender or sexual norms because our existence threatens the idea that women and men are “opposite” sexes….

In addition to the rigid, mutually exclusive gender categories established by oppositional sexism, the other requirement for maintaining a male-centered gender hierarchy is to enforce traditional sexism – the belief that maleness and masculinity are superior to femaleness and femininity. Traditional and oppositional sexism work hand in hand to ensure that those who are masculine have power over those who are feminine, and that only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine. For the purposes of this manifesto, the word misogyny will be used to describe this tendency to dismiss and deride femaleness and femininity.

I’m going to skip right over Serano’s confident declaration that the notion that female and male are rigid categories with nonoverlapping sets of attributes is somehow not part and parcel of “traditional” sexism, aka sexism. What interests me here is how Serano partners maleness with masculinity and femaleness with femininity. Serano does this because she wants feminism to be about feminine people as well as females.

Feminists since Simone de Beauvoir have insisted that femininity is an artificial construct that needs to be disassociated from femaleness. They’ve acknowledged that the qualities designated as “feminine” are human qualities that are neither inherent to womanhood, or absent in men. But Serano doesn’t want to jettison femininity, because a big part of her project is to reclaim it. Femininity, per Serano – I’m skipping ahead a bit here – is a real thing, and though it doesn’t always show up in biological women – aka people who were assigned female at birth – it should be respected on a par with its converse, masculinity.
I submit that there are several problems here. One is that femininity is indissolubly associated with femaleness – it’s right there in the word – and as long as biological (“natal”, “Assigned Male at Birth”) males insist that as trans women, they ARE women—and not just women, but FEMALES—the two aren’t going to be decoupled anytime soon.

Another is that you can’t talk about challenging “oppositional” anything and hang on to the notions of masculinity and femininity, because those two things are by their nature oppositional—at least, I’m damned if I can see how one can exist without the other. Masculinity and femininity exist only in relation to each other. And – and this is important – they’re not just oppositional, they’re unequal – not in some absolute or moral sense, I think Serano is right to oppose that sort of thinking – but as strategies for living in the world, one tends to be more functional than the other. One cultivates strength, the other doesn’t; one is active, the other is passive; one leads, the other follows. No human being really is such a walking stereotype as to manifest only one of these –inities all the time, of course, but as a way of being in the world, experiencing oneself more as subject than object, strength, and a disinclination to lean on or blindly follow others, really is superior to its opposite. “Feminine” qualities are the qualities of people who are sheltered and dominated by others. (And objectified: being decorative is an essential part of femininity.)

Now, “benevolent sexism” has been a thing since forever, and femininity has at times been granted its charms—charms seen as complementary to masculinity. Sometimes feminine qualities have even been considered superior to masculine ones in some ways, but the “ways,” when not concerned with supposed sexual purity, mostly involved qualities that made women unsuited for earning their own money. The Victorian Angel in the House was morally superior to ambitious, money-grubbing, adventurous men—as long as she stayed in her (dependent) sphere and remained “feminine.”

It should go without saying that femininity is at least to some extent historically class-based – peasant women did not have the leisure or the means to pursue femininity – but apparently it doesn’t, because Serano doesn’t mention it. Evil ol’ Second Wave feminism – the kind that tackled “traditional sexism”-discussed this quite a lot, but for all their sniping at “white feminism,” I’ve yet to read a trans activist of Serano’s school who has noticed that femininity has always been attributed to middle and upper class, privileged women.

Serano pushes her neologisms and partners “maleness” with “masculinity” and “femaleness” to “femininity” for one reason: she wants to center trans women in feminism (and promote her ideas about gender). Notice that, for her, sexism is not about keeping men in power over women, it is about “[Ensuring] that those who are masculine have power over those who are feminine, and that only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine.”

When Serano insists that “female” and “male” are not categories each possessing “a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, [etc.]” I agree. But Serano wants to retain notions of femininity and masculinity—her entire book is pro-femininity. How femininity and masculinity can exist without being mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, she doesn’t say. I suspect she’d say, well, nobody is completely, or always, one or the other, and I’d agree—but then, where does that leave the notion of “transgender”?

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

Hello again. I’m back with another installment of Reading Whipping Girl.

Last time I discussed Serano’s definition of gender, which appears in the first chapter of her book. Now, I’m going to take a look at her Trans Woman Manifesto, which precedes the first chapter.

Trans Woman Manifesto

This Manifesto calls for the end of the scapegoating, deriding, and dehumanizing of trans women everywhere.

I’m with her so far, (unless “no deriding” means “no criticizing,” as it so often does with trans activists).

No qualifications should be placed on the term ‘trans woman’ based on a person’s ability to ‘pass’ as female, her hormone levels, or the state of her genitals—

Wait, hold on.

So, no qualifications at all, then? Beyond “I say so”?

What might that mean for non-trans women out here in the Real World?

Some of you reading this may be unaware of it, but since Serano wrote this Manifesto in 2007, her insistence that “no qualifications should be placed on the term ‘trans women’” has become law in many places. It can be trivially easy for a person, be he ever so bearded and be-penised, to claim trans womanhood, and thus womanhood, and thus gain legal access to any and all women’s spaces. Bathrooms. Changing rooms. Sports teams. Homeless shelters. This video by Magdalen Berns provides some pertinent references.

Moving on–

—after all, it is downright sexist to reduce any woman (trans or otherwise) down to her mere body parts or to require her to live up to certain societally dictated ideals regarding appearance.

This here? This right here? This belongs in the dictionary next to the word “specious”.

A definition does not “reduce” the thing defined. If we agree, for the purposes of argument, that a “webbis”* is a tabby cat who misbehaves, we are not “reducing” certain cats to their coat patterns or their behavior. We understand that there is more to any given cat who belongs in the class “webbis” than her stripes or her predilection for stealing human treats.

Likewise, if we define “man” as “an adult person whose gonads produce sperm rather than ova” we are not reducing men to sperm-carrying vessels. Got it?

This claim that defining “woman” using biological markers “[reduces women] down to [their] mere body parts” is blatant bullshit. It needs to be pointed, laughed, and shouted at until it slinks off the public stage to sit in a corner and think about what it did.

You want to argue that the class of people signified by the word “woman” should include include trans women? Make that argument. Don’t avoid it with sophistry.

OK, moving on a bit further. After claiming that trans women are the most maligned among sexual minorities, Serano says:

“Trans women are…ridiculed and despised because we are uniquely positioned at the intersection of multiple binary gender-based forms of prejudice: transphobia, cissexism, and misogyny.”

Serano defines transphobia, and then cissexism:

While all transgender people experience transphobia, transsexuals additionally experience a related (albeit distinct) form of prejudice: cissexism, which is the belief that transexuals’ identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals (i.e., people who are not transsexual and who have only ever experienced their subconscious and physical sexes as being aligned). The most common expression of cissexism occurs when people attempt to deny the transsexual the basic privileges that are associated with the trans person’s self-identified gender. Common examples include the purposeful misuse of pronouns or insisting that the trans person use a different public restroom. The justification for this denial is generally founded on the assumption that the trans person’s gender is not authentic because it does not correlate with the sex they were assigned at birth. In making this assumption, cissexists attempt to create an artificial hierarchy. By insisting that the trans person’s gender is “fake,” they attempt to validate their own gender as “real” or “natural.” This sort of thinking is extraordinarily naïve, as it denies a basic truth: We make assumptions every day about other people’s genders without ever seeing their birth certificates, their chromosomes, their genitals, their reproductive systems, their childhood socialization, or their legal sex. There is no such thing as a “real” gender—there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive others to be. (Note: If you haven’t read my previous post on WG, you may want to read it now; it deals with Serano’s murky definition of “gender.”)

Be gender what it may, though, what people “make assumptions every day about” is other people’s SEX. It’s true that we do this without seeing their birth certificates, etc., but 98.3% of the time** we don’t have to—humans are pretty sexually dimorphic and most of the time we can successfully sex each other at a glance. Of course, we also rely on certain conventional cues to do this—clothes, hairstyles—but if we all went about naked we wouldn’t need those at all.

But, per Serano, cissexists are attempting to create an “artificial hierarchy” between real and fake genders, whatever those are exactly, by insisting that biological sex is a meaningful category. The dastards.

The “justification for this denial” (of access to restrooms, etc.) is not about validating anyone’s subjective feelings of “gender”. It’s about sex. It’s about the fact that male people are generally bigger and stronger than female people, and the fact that, sadly, a significant percentage of them will sexually harass or predate on women given the chance. It’s about the fact that there are times when female people need to be apart from male people, for privacy, or safety, or to play sports.

Trans women are not being kept down by an artificial hierarchy invented to make non-trans people feel better about their genders.

Whew. I’m only on page three of Serano’s 9 page Manifesto. This may take a while.

* Word stolen from Shirley Arthur Jackson

** Per the Intersex Society of North America, which estimates that 1.7% of the population is intersex.

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

I recently read Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, a book beloved of trans activists, and Ophelia has invited me to share some of my thoughts here. Whipping Girl, first published in 2007, is a popular and influential book that exemplifies trans ideology, at least where that ideology intersects with feminism, and so it matters to the debate between trans ideologues and gender-critical feminists.

For now I’m going to skip ahead of Serano’s introduction and her Manifesto. Serano’s book is largely about gender; to engage Serano’s ideas about gender we need to know how she defines it, right?

Here is Serano’s definition of the word “gender”:

The word ‘gender’ is regularly used in a number of ways. Most commonly, it’s used in a manner that’s indistinguishable from ‘sex’ (i.e., to describe whether a person is physically, socially, and legally male and/or female.) [Yes, Serano has ‘sex’ doing a lot of work there. Never mind that for the moment.] Other people use the word ‘gender’ to describe a person’s gender identity (whether they define as female, male, both, or neither), their gender expression and gender roles (whether they act feminine, masculine, both, or neither), or the privileges, assumptions, expectations, and restrictions they face due to the sex others perceive them to be. Because of the many meanings infused into it, I will use the word ‘gender’ in a broad way to refer to various aspects of a person’s physical or social sex, their sex-related behaviors, the sex-based class system they are situated within, or, (in most cases) some combination thereof. (Emphasis added.)

Clear as mud.

Right off the bat, Serano makes sure the word “gender” is unencumbered by any precise meaning. “Sex-related behaviors” include all sorts of things—sex positions, masturbation, the use of tampons, giving birth—but presumably Serano doesn’t mean to include all the nitty-gritty details of living in a sexed body in her definition—does she? We can’t be sure, since she doesn’t say. For a gender critical feminist, like me, “gender” refers to performative social behaviors associated with one sex or the other, behaviors that signal, but have little or nothing to do with, biological sex. Clothes. Hairstyles. Hobbies. That sort of thing. But Serano defines the word as broadly as possible.

Now look at how Serano has defined “sex”, in part, as social (“socially male or female”). For Serano, “sex” and “gender” are interchangeable terms.

“Other people”, Serano tells us, use the word “gender” to “describe a person’s gender identity…gender expression and gender roles”. These Other People are baldly begging the question. “Gender” describes a person’s gender identity? What’s that? “Whether they define as female, male, both, or neither.” OK, but is that the same as being “female, male, both, or neither”? If not, what exactly does the word “identity” refer to here? Well, to gender. What is gender? Well, it describes a person’s gender identity.

You see the problem. Serano’s definition defines nothing much, beyond “gender” as a possible synonym for “sex”, and she’s hedged her definition of sex. There’s no escaping this circular interplay in Serano’s book. “Gender” has something to do with “sex”—that much is clear—but what, exactly? And what, exactly, is “sex”, when it’s not being the same thing as gender?

Well, for sure gender informs peoples’ identities, their self-expression and the roles they play. Maybe that’s enough to get on with. Maybe things will become clearer as we go along.

(Spoiler: it won’t.)