Whipping girl

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Serano, J. (2007) Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press.

Contents

Introduction

  • Focusing less on the challenges of trans genderism than on femininity itself
  • "Today, while it is generally considered to be offensive or prejudiced to openly discriminate against someone for being female, discriminating against someone's femininity is still considered fair game." (5)
  • Arguing that "certain aspects of femininity (as well as masc) are natural and can both precede socialization and supersede biological sex." (6)

Trans woman manifesto

Operating definitions

  • Trans woman, defined as any person who was assigned a male sex at birth, but who identifies as and/or lives as a woman. (11)
  • Cissexual, person who is not transsexual and who has only ever experienced their subconscious and physical sexes as being aligned (12)
  • Cissexism, belief that transsexuals' identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals (12)
  • Oppositional sexism, belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories (13)
  • Misogyny, word used to describe this tendency to dismiss and deride femaleness and femininity (14)
  • Trans-misogyny, specific discrimination faced on failing to live up to gender norms (15)

Why MTF is worse of ...

"While trans people on the female-to-male (FTM) spectrum face discrimination for breaking gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism), their expressions of maleness or masculinity themselves are not targeted for ridicule - to do so would require one to question masculinity itself." (14)

How a male-centered culture dismisses MTF

  • Hyperfeminization, emphasizing makeup, heels, "frivolity", and derogatory femm characteristics (weak, catty) (15)
  • Hypersexualization, create impression that most trans women are sex workers or "traps", and that the transition is primarly for sexual reasons (16)
  • Sensationalization of reassignment surgery, atypical attention to the construction of trans genitalia, either through obsessive attention to surgery details or penises a la "chicks with dicks" (16)

Pseudofeminists

  • Tendency among some to dismiss trans women from feminism
  • "Trans activism must be at its core a feminist movement" (16)

Feminism attending to femininity

  • "We must stop dismissing [femininity] as 'artificial' or as a 'performance,' and instead recognize that certain aspects of femininity (and masc) transcend both socialization and biological sex - otherwise there would not be feminine boy and masculine girl children." (18)
  • Must empower femaleness, femininity

Coming to terms with transgenderism and transsexuality

  • Glossary of terms of art re: transgenderism, transsexuality

Third sex problematic

"Attempts to relegate trans people to "third sex" categories not only disregard the profoundly felt gender identity of the transsexual in question, but also ignore the very real experiences that trans person has had being treated as a member of the sex that they have transitioned to." (30)

Serano responding to fascination w SRS

  • Compares SRS to heart surgery
  • Wonders why non-trans people would be fascinated, compelled, or curious
  • Demeaning language is unexcusable and offensive -- but is the curiosity all that surprising?

Skirt chasers: Why the media depicts the trans revolution in lipstick and heels

Trans woman archetypes in the media

  • Nearly always attempting to achieve conventional feminine appearance
    • Makeup, dresses, heels
    • In entertainment as well as news media
  • Does this preoccupation with presentation reinforce the notion that the women are "really" men "underneath"? (43)

Deceptive (39)

Pathetic (41)

The media's transgender gap

News media tendency to...

  • Sensationalize trans women
  • Depict trans men as self-evident ("of course women want to be men") (47)

Feministc depictions of trans women

Raymond, Janice G. (1979) The transsexual empire: The making of the she-male

  • Ignores trans men as "tokens" (48)
  • Emphasizes that femininity is a byproduct of patriarchy
  • Thus the feminine trans woman is "male-to-constructed-female" (48)
  • Legacy of this text persists in some feminist spaces, e.g. Michigan fest is "womyn-born-womyn-only" (50)

Trans women in a double bind viz 1970s feminism

"If they act feminine they are perceived as being a parody, but if they act masculine it is seen as a sign of their true male identity." (49)

Before and after: Class and body transformations

  • Overemphasis on the bio-medical aspects of transition in television programming (53)
  • Manifest in the "before" and "after" photographic phenomena (54-5)
    • Related to similar phenomena in plastic surgery shows (as well as stomach stapling, weight loss) (56)
    • Boundary crossing (fat to thin, male to female) (58)
  • Editorial intervention assures that before/after photos emphasis natural/artificial distinction

Boygasms and girlgasms: A frank discussion about hormones and gender differences

  • Contested role of hormones in contemporary popular and medicine discourses (65)

Hormone basics

  • Hormones are not on/off switches
    • All people have androgens (incl testosterone) and estrogens (66)
    • Numerous variables in the operation of these chemicals
  • Extremely difficult to parse "real" hormonal effects from perceived or presumed effects
    • Easy to make a type I error (mistakenly rejecting the null hypothesis that effects are coincidental)

Serano's comparative "psychological" reporting

  • Emotions "come in crystal clear", varying in intensity, no longer "deadened" by testosterone (67)
  • Re-arranged sensorium (68)
    • Increased touch intensity
    • Increased smell (taste) sensitivity
    • Changing priority of touch and sight in sexual stimulation (71)
  • Decreased sex drive (69)
  • Changes to the nature of orgasm (70)
  • Little change to preferences
    • In women
    • Sense of humor
    • Aesthetics

Production v exaggeration of biological sex differences

  • Studs/sluts as productive interpellation or as exaggeration of biological characteristics
  • Exceptional people might "curb" their differences to conform (74)

Interpretation

  • Different analytic lens from focusing on production of femininity/masculinity
  • Hormonal changes Serano described are conventionally thought negative (75)
    • "Femininity and femaleness are not appreciated nor valued to the extend of m" (75)

Preserving biological sex differences, it's not all social

  • "Social exaggeration" instead of "social construction" (76)
  • "Bio sex differences are very real, most of the connotations, values, and assumptions ... are not" (76)

Blind spots: On subconscious sex and gender entitlement

  • Differentiating... (78)
    • Gender identity: choice, agency
    • Subconscious sex: feeling, not chosen

Speaking about trans

  • Failure of language to describe Serano's experience of being a trans kid (80)
    • "Saw" myself, "knew" myself, "wished", "wanted"

Hard-wired brains

"My brain expects my body to be female" (80)
  • re: botched circumcions become SRS, but many eventually identify as male
  • BSTc, a "sexually dimorphic region of the brain" may indicate similarity between trans women and most women (81)

Serano's experience of transsexuality

"After 20 years of exploration and experimentation, I eventually reach the conclusion that my female subconscious sex had nothing to do with gender roles, femininity, or sexual expression - it was about the personal relationship I had with my own body." (84-5)
  • Cognitive, gender dissonance, gender sadness, a persistent grief over the fact that [she] felt so wrong in [her] body (85)
  • Over 20 years, what changed was not a desire to be female but a waning ability to cope with being male (86)

Sacrificing privilege

"I went from being a straight man to a lesbian woman in the eyes of the world. And while I have lost the significant benefits of male and heterosexual privilege, I still consider my transition to be well worth it." (87)

Gender anxiety

  • "Becoming irrationally upset by or Being made uncomfortable by the existence of those people who challenge or bring into question one's gender entitlement" (90)

Intrinsic inclinations: Explaining gender and sexual diversity

Gender expression, presentation, behaviors, affinities + fem/masc norms

  • "Constructionists", understand this in terms of socially-constructed "gender roles"
    • Wrong because very young children demonstrate gender characteristics, "before ... fully socialized") (98)
  • "Essentialists", understand people to be born "pre-programmed" according to male or female (96)
    • Wrong because of copious evidence of exceptions

Gender inclination

  • "Persistent desire, affinity, urge that predisposes us toward particular gender and sexual expressions and experiencse" (98)
  • "Naturally occuring" in other species (99)
    • Assuming other species not subject to social construction

Intrinsic inclination

  • "Subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation represent separate gender inclinations that are determined largely independent of one another" (99)
  • "Gender inclinations are intrinsic ... deep, subconscious ... remain intact despite ... concious attempts ... to purge, repress, or ignore" (99)
  • "Multiple factors determine [gender inclinations]"
  • "Each of these inclinations roughly correlates with physical sex, resulting in a bimodal distribution pattern" (99-100)

Reconciling intrinsic inclinations with social constructs

Physical sex categories (101)

  • Chromosomal
  • Gonadal
  • Genital
  • Hormonal
  • Secondary sex chars

Overlapping social constructs

For Serano

  • Dyke
  • Transsexual
  • Transgender

Continuous, not binary, inclinations (103)

Connecting to ...

  • Binary gender system (104)
  • Oppositional sexism (105)
  • Normative homosexual appeals (106)
  • Notions that genderqueer ppl are more "radical"/"queer" than transsexual ppl (110)

How does hetero-normativity persist?

  • "It resonates with the majority's gender inclinations (that most - but not all - men gravitate toward masculinity and women to femininity" (112)

Experiential gender

  • Distinction between internal experience of gender and ability to interpret, observe, apprehend the gender of others

Pathological science: Debunking sexological and sociological models of transgenderism

  • Until 1998, psychiatric/behavior scientists were "gatekeepers" to SRS, hormonal treatment (116)

Oppositional sexism and sex reassignment

  • "The only thing that has ever been shown to successfully alleviate gender dissonance is allowing the trans person to live in their identified gender" (117)

Harry Benjamin

  • Endocrinologist met an trans woman who wished to obtain female hormones in the 1920s (117)
  • Benjamin, H. (1966) The transsexual phenomenon.
  • Met many trans people who were desperate, some of whom resorted to suicide or self-castration for relief
  • Advocated hormone replacement to ease pain of gender dissonance
    • SRS in extreme cases

Trans treatment process (according to HBIGDA Standards of Care, 1979)

Each step requires authorization from previous step

  • Psychotherapy
  • "Real-life test", 1-2 yrs living as identified sex
    • If they receive diagnosis of "gender identity disorder" (GID)
  • Hormone replacement therapy
  • SRS
    • Usually requiring evaluation from 2nd mental health professional (120)

Implicit gatekeeper goals

Three goals

  • Minimize number of transitions
  • Ensure that transitioning people would not be "gender ambiguous"
  • Ensure silence among transitioned people about the process (120)

How?

  • Limited access, options
  • Huge financial burden (121)
  • Made passing a requirement (122)

Evidence

  • Dismissive remarks in the literature regarding "impatience" (123)
  • Trans people report learning to "game the system", providing expected responses
    • Or risk foreclosing access to treatment
  • Forced trans people to relocate, sever connections with their past (124-125)
    • Closeted, socially isolated

Traditional sexism

  • Nearly all research concerned MTF people, reflecting researcher bias (126-7)
  • Why?
    • Taking men more seriously?
    • Greater financial resources among men?
    • Or was MTF more threatening / therefore fascinating? (127)
  • Male femininity written more psychopathological (127)
    • "Stricter standard of conformity for straight males" (128)

"Primary" v "secondary" transsexuals

  • Primary is what we've been talking about
  • Secondary are autogynephilic
    • Attracted to women and to the idea of being "in" women's bodies
    • Hypersexual
    • Coined in late 80s by Ray Blanchard
    • Never scientifically substantiated by appears in DSM (131)

Effemimania

  • Effemimaniac, an obsession with "male femininity" (129)
  • Passive/absent father, dominant mother theory
    • Robert Stoller, psychiatrist
    • Applied to both male homosexuality and MTF transsexuality
  • Also, creation of numerous subcategories of MTF trans women that do not exist for FTM people
  • An expression of traditional sexism (133)
  • Lack of attention to "female masculinity" explored in Burke, Phyllis (1996) Gender shock

Effemimania specifically targets femininity (133)

  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1991) "How to bring your kids up gay: The war on effeminate boys."
    • Analysis of Friedman, Richard C. (?) Male homosexuality: A contemporary psychoanalytic perspective.
    • Admires masculine gay men
    • Pathologizes effeminate men
  • Masculine trans men are tacitly considered more psychologically "stable" (134)
    • Assumption by researchers that masculinity is "more rational, healthy" (134)

Heteronormativity and attraction among clinicians

  • Expressing a stronger belief in the "femaleness" of patients if the clinician finds them attractive (135)
  • Bailey, J. Michael. (2003) The man who would be queen.
    • "Most homosexual transsexuals are much better looking than most autogynephilic transsexuals" (quoted on 136)
  • Bolin, Anne. (1988) In search of eve
    • Trans women report that "shrinks" expect "skirts, stockings, the whole nine yards" (136)
  • Namaste, Viviane. (2000) Invisible lives
    • Trans woman denied hormones because she appeared to appointments in traditionally male attire

Critiquing the critics (role of academics)

  • Assumption that transsexuality arises from modern tech, psychology, patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, etc. (139)
  • Framing according to "false consciousness" (140)
    • Transsexuals caught as either "dupes" or "fakes"
  • Less widely publicized than sexological accounts, social scientific/ academic work has had strong impact on how trans people are discdussed and considered in academia + feminism (140)

Misconception: Gatekeepers prey on gender-variant people

  • Encourage SRS (141)
  • Billings, D. B. & Urban, T. (1982)
    • "Transsexualism is a socially constructed reality which only exists in and through medical practice" (quoted 141)
    • Believing that surgery distracts trans women from consciousness raising and sexual politics (141)
  • Assumption that transpeople are easily "duped" contradicts clinician accounts of "stubborn" patients (142)

Misconception: Uniquely modern phenomenon

  • Historians, anthropologists provide evidence that gender variance exists outside of the contemporary moment
  • Gatekeepers "didn't invent SRS", they were "dragged into it" (142)
  • Hausman, Bernice L. (1995) Changing sex uses narrow definition of "transsexual" referring only to those who undergo physiological change
    • Serano strongly rejects this definition (143)
    • What was the utility of a narrow definition for Hausman?
  • Serano supports histories that locate trans people in different discursive moments (historical, cultural, geographic) (144)
    • How is this problematic in a different way from Hausman?
    • Transsexuals don't exist if the conditions do not exist to make sense
    • Their behaviors, practices, interests, desires, etc might --- but not in the unique combo, right?

Misconception: "Third", "multiple", "alternate" genders

  • Anthropology (145)
  • Blur distinctions among transsexuality, homosexuality, transgenderism yet enforce a binary understanding (145)
  • Nanda, Serena. (2000) Gender diversity: Crosscultural variations.
  • Serano feels that social constructivist explanations deny something important about transsexuals
    • Is it self-evidence? Naturalism?
    • What is valuable about these things that cannot be achieved amid social construction?
  • "Transsexuals complicate [rejecting the gender binary by being] gender-variant but typically identify within the binary." (146)
    • Nanda creates a new binary between radical transgender people and conservative male/female identifying people (146)
    • See also, Roscoe, Will. (1994) "How to become a berdache".

Misconception: transsexuals as assimilationist "gender sellouts" (149)

  • Transsexuals are less "radical" or "queer" than other queer people because they fit into the gender binary (149)
    • "Uncle Toms of the sexual liberation movement" Kando, Thomas. (1974) (quoted 150)
  • Faulty research, data collection, lack of transparency, reflectivity, sampling (151-2)
    • Contrast with work in which researchers had trusting relationships with the transsexual subject
      • Anne Bolin, Viviane K. Namaste
  • Damaging assumptions:
    • That passing is "fitting in" (154)
    • That passing trans people are more accepted by dominant norm than other queer peoples (154)

Discipline-specific errors

"Researchers' academic backgrounds ... primary determinant as to what explanations for transsexuality they will posit." (155)
  • Harry Benjamin, endocrinologist, hormonal levels
  • Richard Green, Robert Stoller, John Money, psychologists, parental relationships / childhood experiences
  • Social scientists, societal gender norms
  • Lesbian + gay scholars, heterosexism
  • Feminists, patriarchy
  • Poststructuralists, deconstruct it into nonexistence

Moving beyond cisexist models of transsexuality

  • Last 50 years have been a "charade" in which voices of credentialed academics, clinicians "trump those of transsexuals themselves" (155)
    • Needs, desires, perspectives of trans people lost amid a tug-of-war between social constructionists + biological essentialists (156)
    • Serano believes it is a combo
  • "The process of socially and legally changing one's sex should be entirely uncoupled from medicine and psychiatry" (158)
    • Suffering transsexual people denied treatment in the interest of a "small minority of cissexuals" (159)
  • Gender dissonance has always been "self-diagnosed" (159)
    • Medical practitioners should give up regulating the diagnosis and focus on facilitating safe transitions (160)

Dismantling cissexual privilege

  • Transgender activism
    • Gender variant people oppressed by binary gender norms (161)
    • Focused on opposing the binary gender system
    • Obscures as it helps transsexual people (162)

Gendering assumption

  • Active process of distinguishing men + women, compulsive (163)
  • Perceived gender is how one is perceived, recognized by others
  • Process seems invisible because, for most, the perception of others matches the self-perception (164)
  • Differing "passing" experience in suburbs v cities (164)
  • Cissexual people assume others are cissexual
    • Contributes to cissexual gender entitlement and privilege (165)

Trans-facsimilation and ungendering

  • Understanding trans people as "fake" (170)
    • Mimic, impersonate, emulate, imitate
  • Ungendering is what Serano calls the change she experiences in people who learn of her trans status
    • "Searching for clues of the boy I used to be" (172)

Bio, genetic, s/he

  • Broken descriptors that reveal hierarchies of authenticity (173)
  • Moving beyond "bio boys" and "genetic girls" (172)
  • Using MTF, FTM as nouns (175)

Problematizing passing

  • Passing is helpful to describe the circulation of privilege
  • But passing implies deceit, "getting away with something" (176)
    • e.g. cissexual people are not thought of as "passing"
  • Passing implies that the passer is doing all the work (177)
    • When it is a power exchange among the trans person and the observers
  • To be replaced with misgendered/appropriately gendered (179)
    • And conditional cissexual privilege to replace the privileges accorded via passing (180)

Overlaps between transphobia, cissexual privilege

  • Example of the cissexual butch lesbian being misgendered in the bathroom
  • How different for a trans woman? (184)
  • Would cissexual privilege be extended?

Trans-exclusion

  • Trans people excluded from spaces, orgs, events
  • Purposeful use of wrong pronouns

Trans-objectification

  • Physical version of overemphsizing passing

Trans-mystification

  • Getting caught up in the taboo, hidden secret, plot twist

Trans-interrogation

  • Focusing on the "why?"
  • People reduced to objects of inquiry
  • Asking "Why do transsexuals exist?" is an act of nonacceptance

Trans-erasure

  • Speaking for...

Gender perception, not performance

"The most radical thing that any of us can do is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people's behaviors and bodies." (193)
  • Performance-oriented schema deny naturalness to gender
  • Some activists/theorists believe that by doing queer performance, the oppressive nature of binary gender privilege will be eroded
  • Serano: "The vast majority of us are gendered primarily based on our physical bodies rather than our behaviors" (192)
  • Serano understands performance according to agency + behavior
    • But might her changed body be a kind of performance? (193)

Ungendering in art and academia

Fables of deconstruction

  • Ungendering among sociologists, poststructuralist theorists, feminists
  • Treating people as specimens, objects of research

Examples

"The accounts are akin to offering an explicit play-by-play description of a rape scene for the sole purpose of making some rather generic point about human sexuality." (207)
  • Garfinkel, Harold. (1967) Studies in ethnomethodology.
    • Detailed account of real life trans woman narrated by heteronorm academic
  • Foucault, Michel. (1978) Herculine barbin.
    • Historical story of an intersex used to challenge "true sex" assumption (206)

Inherent denaturalizing problem of queer theory

"The very goal of queer theory - denaturalizing and deconstructing the binary sex/gender system - inevitably tempts many scholars to appropriate the bodies and experiences of those people who are most marginalized by that very system." (209)
  • Namaste Invisible lives argues that trans people are rhetorical tropes in the cultural texts of cissexuals
  • Prosser, Jay. (??) Second skins: The body narratives of transsexuality.
    • Emphasizes the use of trans people as rhetorical tools by queer theorists to denaturalize gender

Intellectual dishonesty in data included

  • Little work on trans people 10 or 20 years after their transition
  • Most work focuses on examples that will support the social construction hypothesis (210)
  • Because transsexual and intersex people have "virtually no voice" in academic and political discourses on gender
    • "...our persepctives are easily overshadowed, even subsumed, by those who have the academic credentials to position themselves as 'authorities' on the subject" (211)

What is to be done?

  • Support of intersex / transsexual art and intellectual activity
  • Hiring people into the academy
  • Acknowledge that cissexual academics have "no legitimate claim to use transsexual and intersex identities, struggles, and histories for their own purposes" (212)
  • Emphasis on listening

Experiential gender

Challenging "woman trapped in man's body" cliché (217)

  • Serano describes "transitioning in 'boy mode'"
    • Dressing and acting the way you always had while undergoing therapy
    • Such that you hit a transition point when you "lose the ability to 'pass' as a man" (217)
    • Other people recognize you according to the identified gender
  • Very little time "in between" - tendency to be either one or the other
    • Serano embraced a genderqueerness (219-220)
  • Affirming material selfness (220)
    • "body feelings" (220-222)

Living female in a man-oriented world

"Words cannot express how condescending and infuriating it feels to have men speak down to me, talk over me, and sometimes even practically put on baby-talk voices when addressing me." (223)
  • When and by what did Serano begin to feel more comfortable as "woman" than "genderqueer"? (225-227)
  • "Woman is a holistic concept" (227)

Deconstructive surgery

  • "No-win inquisition" regarding bottom surgery
    • "Straight men quake in their boots" upon knowing that Serano still has a penis (229)
  • Phallocentric popular understanding of SRS
    • Lingering effect of Freud and penis envy (230)
    • Wanting to be a woman is "unimaginable" (231)

Bending over backwards: Traditional sexism and trans-woman-exclusion policies

  • Transphobia among lesbian and feminist communities/spaces
  • Emphasis on birth sex, trans men accepted when trans women are excluded (236-7)

Phallocentric exclusion

  • MTF people may still have penises
  • The ultimate marker of gender (240)

Self-deception

  • Premeditated transphobic murder leads to hung jury based on "sexual deceit" and "passion" defense (247)
    • Police ignored sources who claimed that the killers knew that the victim was trans despite the fact that they had anal sex (249)

Trans-sexualization

  • Catcalling as an expression of power and control (254)
    • Not desire
  • Strangers tend to make sexualizing comments
    • In person, people who assume Serano is cissexual do not
    • Unless they understand her to be trans woman and then they may turn to sexualizing cmoments (257)
  • Transsexual out for some straight men is a signal of availability (258)

In porn

  • Trans men not objectified by industry to nearly the same extent as trans women (256)
  • Trans man porn attracts predominantly gay male and queer female audience

Trap

  • Trans women "lure" straight men by transforming themselves into irresistable sexual objects (258)
  • Undermines the empowering potential of transitioning by understanding it in relation to hetero man desire (259)

And sex work

  • Connected to disproportionate representation as sex workers in entertainment/news media (261)
    • Trans women often turn to sex work because there are few options available
      • (and treatment is an enormous burden) (261)

And psychology

  • Trans women not willing to meet all the criteria of heteronormative desire (263-264)
    • Denied treatment, SRS, hormones
    • Categorized as "merely" transvestites
  • Autogynephilia as a sexual orientation focuses exclusively on the object of desire
    • Ignoring the role of our own bodies (268)
    • Also denying the role of the penis in heterosexual men's fantasy lives

Submissive streak

  • Submission and rape fantasies collapsing feminine and submission into a single sex role (275)
  • A mark of survival (276)

Love rant

  • Why Serano falls for trans women

Crossdressing: Demystifying femininity and rethinking "male privilege"

  • Psychiatric transvestite == "crossdresser" (283)
  • Widely misunderstood complex identity (284)

Effemimania and feminine expression

  • Anxiety abound re: perceived male femininity (286)
  • Women play a role in supporting this form of sexism
  • Class, race, ethnic interactions?
  • See also: Ducat, Stephen J. (??) The wimp factor: Gender gaps, holy wars, and the politics of anxious masculinity.
  • Self-censorship, hiding (288)

Enforced ignorance and the mystification of femininity

  • hooks, bell. (??) Feminist theory: From margin to center.
  • Prominent feminists in the 60s/70s ignored the concerns of many different women according to class, race
  • Marginalized people understand the center, but the opposite is not true (290)
  • Men describe women as "mysterious", "enchanting" (293)
  • May couple with a dehumanizing misunderstanding of women (294)

Crossdresser development

  • Often a life-long practice (295)
  • Demystifies femininity, femaleness for those who have been socialized to believe that they are unknowable (296)

Demystifying fem and unlearning masc

  • Sexual stimulation associated with cross-dressing
  • Women's clothes hold a cultural eroticism not typically found in men's attire (298)
  • Phases of cross-dressing

Clothing

  • Trying on different pieces of clothing (299)
  • the "mirror moment" (291)
  • Demystifying women's clothes

Public

  • Taking cross dressing out into the world (300)
  • One reason to indulge in exaggerated femininity is that it was previously unavailable (302)

Interactive

  • Hanging out with other people while crossdressed (303)
  • Dual life: girl-mode, boy-mode (304)
  • Included fantasy role-playing with ppl from personal ads
    • Demystifying sexuality/femininity

Rethinking "male privilege"

  • Oppression and sexism operate on many axes
  • Affecting the lives of different people in diverse ways
  • Interacting with classism, racism

Barrette manifesto

  • Defense of women's things (315)
  • Encouraging "boys to learn to embrace girl stuff" (316)

Putting the feminine back in feminism

  • Popular notion that feminism implies a rejection of femininity (319)

Origins of femininity

  • Serano argues for "combination of biology and socialization" (322)

Feminist interpretations of femininity

Two "broad trends" (330)

Unilateral feminism

  • Women oppressed at the hands of men.
  • Friedan, B. () The feminine mystique.
  • Femininity is the result of coercion

Deconstructive feminism

  • Social construction of sex and gender (336)
  • Butler, J
  • gender performativity (336)

Ramifications of artificializing femininity

  • Marginalizing all femme groups, including
    • Femme dykes
    • Nelly queens (339)
  • Extending "misogyny" to "effemimania" (342)

The future of queer/trans activism

  • Many believe that queer/trans is vanguard (345)
  • "Subversivism", practice of valorizing gender/sex expressions that are non-normative (346)
  • Feminine stereotypes are incompatible with subversion, thus MTFs seem "lame" or "conservative" (348)
  • No way to know whether someone's gender is "sincere" or "coerced" (361)




Questions

  • Dehumanizing effect of mystifying femininity
  • Emphasis on femininity via STUFF, THINGS

Serano, J. (2007) Whipping girl: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity. Berkeley: Seal Press.

Introduction

  • Focusing less on the challenges of trans genderism than on femininity itself
  • "Today, while it is generally considered to be offensive or prejudiced to openly discriminate against someone for being female, discriminating against someone's femininity is still considered fair game." (5)
  • Arguing that "certain aspects of femininity (as well as masc) are natural and can both precede socialization and supersede biological sex." (6)

Trans woman manifesto

Operating definitions

  • Trans woman, defined as any person who was assigned a male sex at birth, but who identifies as and/or lives as a woman. (11)
  • Cissexual, person who is not transsexual and who has only ever experienced their subconscious and physical sexes as being aligned (12)
  • Cissexism, belief that transsexuals' identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals (12)
  • Oppositional sexism, belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories (13)
  • Misogyny, word used to describe this tendency to dismiss and deride femaleness and femininity (14)
  • Trans-misogyny, specific discrimination faced on failing to live up to gender norms (15)

Why MTF is worse of ...

"While trans people on the female-to-male (FTM) spectrum face discrimination for breaking gender norms (i.e., oppositional sexism), their expressions of maleness or masculinity themselves are not targeted for ridicule - to do so would require one to question masculinity itself." (14)

How a male-centered culture dismisses MTF

  • Hyperfeminization, emphasizing makeup, heels, "frivolity", and derogatory femm characteristics (weak, catty) (15)
  • Hypersexualization, create impression that most trans women are sex workers or "traps", and that the transition is primarly for sexual reasons (16)
  • Sensationalization of reassignment surgery, atypical attention to the construction of trans genitalia, either through obsessive attention to surgery details or penises a la "chicks with dicks" (16)

Pseudofeminists

  • Tendency among some to dismiss trans women from feminism
  • "Trans activism must be at its core a feminist movement" (16)

Feminism attending to femininity

  • "We must stop dismissing [femininity] as 'artificial' or as a 'performance,' and instead recognize that certain aspects of femininity (and masc) transcend both socialization and biological sex - otherwise there would not be feminine boy and masculine girl children." (18)
  • Must empower femaleness, femininity

Coming to terms with transgenderism and transsexuality

  • Glossary of terms of art re: transgenderism, transsexuality

Third sex problematic

"Attempts to relegate trans people to "third sex" categories not only disregard the profoundly felt gender identity of the transsexual in question, but also ignore the very real experiences that trans person has had being treated as a member of the sex that they have transitioned to." (30)

Serano responding to fascination w SRS

  • Compares SRS to heart surgery
  • Wonders why non-trans people would be fascinated, compelled, or curious
  • Demeaning language is unexcusable and offensive -- but is the curiosity all that surprising?

Skirt chasers: Why the media depicts the trans revolution in lipstick and heels

Trans woman archetypes in the media

  • Nearly always attempting to achieve conventional feminine appearance
    • Makeup, dresses, heels
    • In entertainment as well as news media
  • Does this preoccupation with presentation reinforce the notion that the women are "really" men "underneath"? (43)

Deceptive (39)

Pathetic (41)

The media's transgender gap

News media tendency to...

  • Sensationalize trans women
  • Depict trans men as self-evident ("of course women want to be men") (47)

Feministc depictions of trans women

Raymond, Janice G. (1979) The transsexual empire: The making of the she-male

  • Ignores trans men as "tokens" (48)
  • Emphasizes that femininity is a byproduct of patriarchy
  • Thus the feminine trans woman is "male-to-constructed-female" (48)
  • Legacy of this text persists in some feminist spaces, e.g. Michigan fest is "womyn-born-womyn-only" (50)

Trans women in a double bind viz 1970s feminism

"If they act feminine they are perceived as being a parody, but if they act masculine it is seen as a sign of their true male identity." (49)

Before and after: Class and body transformations

  • Overemphasis on the bio-medical aspects of transition in television programming (53)
  • Manifest in the "before" and "after" photographic phenomena (54-5)
    • Related to similar phenomena in plastic surgery shows (as well as stomach stapling, weight loss) (56)
    • Boundary crossing (fat to thin, male to female) (58)
  • Editorial intervention assures that before/after photos emphasis natural/artificial distinction

Boygasms and girlgasms: A frank discussion about hormones and gender differences

  • Contested role of hormones in contemporary popular and medicine discourses (65)

Hormone basics

  • Hormones are not on/off switches
    • All people have androgens (incl testosterone) and estrogens (66)
    • Numerous variables in the operation of these chemicals
  • Extremely difficult to parse "real" hormonal effects from perceived or presumed effects
    • Easy to make a type I error (mistakenly rejecting the null hypothesis that effects are coincidental)

Serano's comparative "psychological" reporting

  • Emotions "come in crystal clear", varying in intensity, no longer "deadened" by testosterone (67)
  • Re-arranged sensorium (68)
    • Increased touch intensity
    • Increased smell (taste) sensitivity
    • Changing priority of touch and sight in sexual stimulation (71)
  • Decreased sex drive (69)
  • Changes to the nature of orgasm (70)
  • Little change to preferences
    • In women
    • Sense of humor
    • Aesthetics

Production v exaggeration of biological sex differences

  • Studs/sluts as productive interpellation or as exaggeration of biological characteristics
  • Exceptional people might "curb" their differences to conform (74)

Interpretation

  • Different analytic lens from focusing on production of femininity/masculinity
  • Hormonal changes Serano described are conventionally thought negative (75)
    • "Femininity and femaleness are not appreciated nor valued to the extend of m" (75)

Preserving biological sex differences, it's not all social

  • "Social exaggeration" instead of "social construction" (76)
  • "Bio sex differences are very real, most of the connotations, values, and assumptions ... are not" (76)

Blind spots: On subconscious sex and gender entitlement

  • Differentiating... (78)
    • Gender identity: choice, agency
    • Subconscious sex: feeling, not chosen

Speaking about trans

  • Failure of language to describe Serano's experience of being a trans kid (80)
    • "Saw" myself, "knew" myself, "wished", "wanted"

Hard-wired brains

"My brain expects my body to be female" (80)
  • re: botched circumcions become SRS, but many eventually identify as male
  • BSTc, a "sexually dimorphic region of the brain" may indicate similarity between trans women and most women (81)

Serano's experience of transsexuality

"After 20 years of exploration and experimentation, I eventually reach the conclusion that my female subconscious sex had nothing to do with gender roles, femininity, or sexual expression - it was about the personal relationship I had with my own body." (84-5)
  • Cognitive, gender dissonance, gender sadness, a persistent grief over the fact that [she] felt so wrong in [her] body (85)
  • Over 20 years, what changed was not a desire to be female but a waning ability to cope with being male (86)

Sacrificing privilege

"I went from being a straight man to a lesbian woman in the eyes of the world. And while I have lost the significant benefits of male and heterosexual privilege, I still consider my transition to be well worth it." (87)

Gender anxiety

  • "Becoming irrationally upset by or Being made uncomfortable by the existence of those people who challenge or bring into question one's gender entitlement" (90)

Intrinsic inclinations: Explaining gender and sexual diversity

Gender expression, presentation, behaviors, affinities + fem/masc norms

  • "Constructionists", understand this in terms of socially-constructed "gender roles"
    • Wrong because very young children demonstrate gender characteristics, "before ... fully socialized") (98)
  • "Essentialists", understand people to be born "pre-programmed" according to male or female (96)
    • Wrong because of copious evidence of exceptions

Gender inclination

  • "Persistent desire, affinity, urge that predisposes us toward particular gender and sexual expressions and experiencse" (98)
  • "Naturally occuring" in other species (99)
    • Assuming other species not subject to social construction

Intrinsic inclination

  • "Subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation represent separate gender inclinations that are determined largely independent of one another" (99)
  • "Gender inclinations are intrinsic ... deep, subconscious ... remain intact despite ... concious attempts ... to purge, repress, or ignore" (99)
  • "Multiple factors determine [gender inclinations]"
  • "Each of these inclinations roughly correlates with physical sex, resulting in a bimodal distribution pattern" (99-100)

Reconciling intrinsic inclinations with social constructs

Physical sex categories (101)

  • Chromosomal
  • Gonadal
  • Genital
  • Hormonal
  • Secondary sex chars

Overlapping social constructs

For Serano

  • Dyke
  • Transsexual
  • Transgender

Continuous, not binary, inclinations (103)

Connecting to ...

  • Binary gender system (104)
  • Oppositional sexism (105)
  • Normative homosexual appeals (106)
  • Notions that genderqueer ppl are more "radical"/"queer" than transsexual ppl (110)

How does hetero-normativity persist?

  • "It resonates with the majority's gender inclinations (that most - but not all - men gravitate toward masculinity and women to femininity" (112)

Experiential gender

  • Distinction between internal experience of gender and ability to interpret, observe, apprehend the gender of others

Pathological science: Debunking sexological and sociological models of transgenderism

  • Until 1998, psychiatric/behavior scientists were "gatekeepers" to SRS, hormonal treatment (116)

Oppositional sexism and sex reassignment

  • "The only thing that has ever been shown to successfully alleviate gender dissonance is allowing the trans person to live in their identified gender" (117)

Harry Benjamin

  • Endocrinologist met an trans woman who wished to obtain female hormones in the 1920s (117)
  • Benjamin, H. (1966) The transsexual phenomenon.
  • Met many trans people who were desperate, some of whom resorted to suicide or self-castration for relief
  • Advocated hormone replacement to ease pain of gender dissonance
    • SRS in extreme cases

Trans treatment process (according to HBIGDA Standards of Care, 1979)

Each step requires authorization from previous step

  • Psychotherapy
  • "Real-life test", 1-2 yrs living as identified sex
    • If they receive diagnosis of "gender identity disorder" (GID)
  • Hormone replacement therapy
  • SRS
    • Usually requiring evaluation from 2nd mental health professional (120)

Implicit gatekeeper goals

Three goals

  • Minimize number of transitions
  • Ensure that transitioning people would not be "gender ambiguous"
  • Ensure silence among transitioned people about the process (120)

How?

  • Limited access, options
  • Huge financial burden (121)
  • Made passing a requirement (122)

Evidence

  • Dismissive remarks in the literature regarding "impatience" (123)
  • Trans people report learning to "game the system", providing expected responses
    • Or risk foreclosing access to treatment
  • Forced trans people to relocate, sever connections with their past (124-125)
    • Closeted, socially isolated

Traditional sexism

  • Nearly all research concerned MTF people, reflecting researcher bias (126-7)
  • Why?
    • Taking men more seriously?
    • Greater financial resources among men?
    • Or was MTF more threatening / therefore fascinating? (127)
  • Male femininity written more psychopathological (127)
    • "Stricter standard of conformity for straight males" (128)

"Primary" v "secondary" transsexuals

  • Primary is what we've been talking about
  • Secondary are autogynephilic
    • Attracted to women and to the idea of being "in" women's bodies
    • Hypersexual
    • Coined in late 80s by Ray Blanchard
    • Never scientifically substantiated by appears in DSM (131)

Effemimania

  • Effemimaniac, an obsession with "male femininity" (129)
  • Passive/absent father, dominant mother theory
    • Robert Stoller, psychiatrist
    • Applied to both male homosexuality and MTF transsexuality
  • Also, creation of numerous subcategories of MTF trans women that do not exist for FTM people
  • An expression of traditional sexism (133)
  • Lack of attention to "female masculinity" explored in Burke, Phyllis (1996) Gender shock

Effemimania specifically targets femininity (133)

  • Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. (1991) "How to bring your kids up gay: The war on effeminate boys."
    • Analysis of Friedman, Richard C. (?) Male homosexuality: A contemporary psychoanalytic perspective.
    • Admires masculine gay men
    • Pathologizes effeminate men
  • Masculine trans men are tacitly considered more psychologically "stable" (134)
    • Assumption by researchers that masculinity is "more rational, healthy" (134)

Heteronormativity and attraction among clinicians

  • Expressing a stronger belief in the "femaleness" of patients if the clinician finds them attractive (135)
  • Bailey, J. Michael. (2003) The man who would be queen.
    • "Most homosexual transsexuals are much better looking than most autogynephilic transsexuals" (quoted on 136)
  • Bolin, Anne. (1988) In search of eve
    • Trans women report that "shrinks" expect "skirts, stockings, the whole nine yards" (136)
  • Namaste, Viviane. (2000) Invisible lives
    • Trans woman denied hormones because she appeared to appointments in traditionally male attire

Critiquing the critics (role of academics)

  • Assumption that transsexuality arises from modern tech, psychology, patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism, etc. (139)
  • Framing according to "false consciousness" (140)
    • Transsexuals caught as either "dupes" or "fakes"
  • Less widely publicized than sexological accounts, social scientific/ academic work has had strong impact on how trans people are discdussed and considered in academia + feminism (140)

Misconception: Gatekeepers prey on gender-variant people

  • Encourage SRS (141)
  • Billings, D. B. & Urban, T. (1982)
    • "Transsexualism is a socially constructed reality which only exists in and through medical practice" (quoted 141)
    • Believing that surgery distracts trans women from consciousness raising and sexual politics (141)
  • Assumption that transpeople are easily "duped" contradicts clinician accounts of "stubborn" patients (142)

Misconception: Uniquely modern phenomenon

  • Historians, anthropologists provide evidence that gender variance exists outside of the contemporary moment
  • Gatekeepers "didn't invent SRS", they were "dragged into it" (142)
  • Hausman, Bernice L. (1995) Changing sex uses narrow definition of "transsexual" referring only to those who undergo physiological change
    • Serano strongly rejects this definition (143)
    • What was the utility of a narrow definition for Hausman?
  • Serano supports histories that locate trans people in different discursive moments (historical, cultural, geographic) (144)
    • How is this problematic in a different way from Hausman?
    • Transsexuals don't exist if the conditions do not exist to make sense
    • Their behaviors, practices, interests, desires, etc might --- but not in the unique combo, right?

Misconception: "Third", "multiple", "alternate" genders

  • Anthropology (145)
  • Blur distinctions among transsexuality, homosexuality, transgenderism yet enforce a binary understanding (145)
  • Nanda, Serena. (2000) Gender diversity: Crosscultural variations.
  • Serano feels that social constructivist explanations deny something important about transsexuals
    • Is it self-evidence? Naturalism?
    • What is valuable about these things that cannot be achieved amid social construction?
  • "Transsexuals complicate [rejecting the gender binary by being] gender-variant but typically identify within the binary." (146)
    • Nanda creates a new binary between radical transgender people and conservative male/female identifying people (146)
    • See also, Roscoe, Will. (1994) "How to become a berdache".

Misconception: transsexuals as assimilationist "gender sellouts" (149)

  • Transsexuals are less "radical" or "queer" than other queer people because they fit into the gender binary (149)
    • "Uncle Toms of the sexual liberation movement" Kando, Thomas. (1974) (quoted 150)
  • Faulty research, data collection, lack of transparency, reflectivity, sampling (151-2)
    • Contrast with work in which researchers had trusting relationships with the transsexual subject
      • Anne Bolin, Viviane K. Namaste
  • Damaging assumptions:
    • That passing is "fitting in" (154)
    • That passing trans people are more accepted by dominant norm than other queer peoples (154)

Discipline-specific errors

"Researchers' academic backgrounds ... primary determinant as to what explanations for transsexuality they will posit." (155)
  • Harry Benjamin, endocrinologist, hormonal levels
  • Richard Green, Robert Stoller, John Money, psychologists, parental relationships / childhood experiences
  • Social scientists, societal gender norms
  • Lesbian + gay scholars, heterosexism
  • Feminists, patriarchy
  • Poststructuralists, deconstruct it into nonexistence

Moving beyond cisexist models of transsexuality

  • Last 50 years have been a "charade" in which voices of credentialed academics, clinicians "trump those of transsexuals themselves" (155)
    • Needs, desires, perspectives of trans people lost amid a tug-of-war between social constructionists + biological essentialists (156)
    • Serano believes it is a combo
  • "The process of socially and legally changing one's sex should be entirely uncoupled from medicine and psychiatry" (158)
    • Suffering transsexual people denied treatment in the interest of a "small minority of cissexuals" (159)
  • Gender dissonance has always been "self-diagnosed" (159)
    • Medical practitioners should give up regulating the diagnosis and focus on facilitating safe transitions (160)

Dismantling cissexual privilege

  • Transgender activism
    • Gender variant people oppressed by binary gender norms (161)
    • Focused on opposing the binary gender system
    • Obscures as it helps transsexual people (162)

Gendering assumption

  • Active process of distinguishing men + women, compulsive (163)
  • Perceived gender is how one is perceived, recognized by others
  • Process seems invisible because, for most, the perception of others matches the self-perception (164)
  • Differing "passing" experience in suburbs v cities (164)
  • Cissexual people assume others are cissexual
    • Contributes to cissexual gender entitlement and privilege (165)

Trans-facsimilation and ungendering

  • Understanding trans people as "fake" (170)
    • Mimic, impersonate, emulate, imitate
  • Ungendering is what Serano calls the change she experiences in people who learn of her trans status
    • "Searching for clues of the boy I used to be" (172)

Bio, genetic, s/he

  • Broken descriptors that reveal hierarchies of authenticity (173)
  • Moving beyond "bio boys" and "genetic girls" (172)
  • Using MTF, FTM as nouns (175)

Problematizing passing

  • Passing is helpful to describe the circulation of privilege
  • But passing implies deceit, "getting away with something" (176)
    • e.g. cissexual people are not thought of as "passing"
  • Passing implies that the passer is doing all the work (177)
    • When it is a power exchange among the trans person and the observers
  • To be replaced with misgendered/appropriately gendered (179)
    • And conditional cissexual privilege to replace the privileges accorded via passing (180)

Overlaps between transphobia, cissexual privilege

  • Example of the cissexual butch lesbian being misgendered in the bathroom
  • How different for a trans woman? (184)
  • Would cissexual privilege be extended?

Trans-exclusion

  • Trans people excluded from spaces, orgs, events
  • Purposeful use of wrong pronouns

Trans-objectification

  • Physical version of overemphsizing passing

Trans-mystification

  • Getting caught up in the taboo, hidden secret, plot twist

Trans-interrogation

  • Focusing on the "why?"
  • People reduced to objects of inquiry
  • Asking "Why do transsexuals exist?" is an act of nonacceptance

Trans-erasure

  • Speaking for...

Gender perception, not performance

"The most radical thing that any of us can do is to stop projecting our beliefs about gender onto other people's behaviors and bodies." (193)
  • Performance-oriented schema deny naturalness to gender
  • Some activists/theorists believe that by doing queer performance, the oppressive nature of binary gender privilege will be eroded
  • Serano: "The vast majority of us are gendered primarily based on our physical bodies rather than our behaviors" (192)
  • Serano understands performance according to agency + behavior
    • But might her changed body be a kind of performance? (193)

Ungendering in art and academia

Fables of deconstruction

  • Ungendering among sociologists, poststructuralist theorists, feminists
  • Treating people as specimens, objects of research

Examples

"The accounts are akin to offering an explicit play-by-play description of a rape scene for the sole purpose of making some rather generic point about human sexuality." (207)
  • Garfinkel, Harold. (1967) Studies in ethnomethodology.
    • Detailed account of real life trans woman narrated by heteronorm academic
  • Foucault, Michel. (1978) Herculine barbin.
    • Historical story of an intersex used to challenge "true sex" assumption (206)

Inherent denaturalizing problem of queer theory

"The very goal of queer theory - denaturalizing and deconstructing the binary sex/gender system - inevitably tempts many scholars to appropriate the bodies and experiences of those people who are most marginalized by that very system." (209)
  • Namaste Invisible lives argues that trans people are rhetorical tropes in the cultural texts of cissexuals
  • Prosser, Jay. (??) Second skins: The body narratives of transsexuality.
    • Emphasizes the use of trans people as rhetorical tools by queer theorists to denaturalize gender

Intellectual dishonesty in data included

  • Little work on trans people 10 or 20 years after their transition
  • Most work focuses on examples that will support the social construction hypothesis (210)
  • Because transsexual and intersex people have "virtually no voice" in academic and political discourses on gender
    • "...our persepctives are easily overshadowed, even subsumed, by those who have the academic credentials to position themselves as 'authorities' on the subject" (211)

What is to be done?

  • Support of intersex / transsexual art and intellectual activity
  • Hiring people into the academy
  • Acknowledge that cissexual academics have "no legitimate claim to use transsexual and intersex identities, struggles, and histories for their own purposes" (212)
  • Emphasis on listening

Experiential gender

Challenging "woman trapped in man's body" cliché (217)

  • Serano describes "transitioning in 'boy mode'"
    • Dressing and acting the way you always had while undergoing therapy
    • Such that you hit a transition point when you "lose the ability to 'pass' as a man" (217)
    • Other people recognize you according to the identified gender
  • Very little time "in between" - tendency to be either one or the other
    • Serano embraced a genderqueerness (219-220)
  • Affirming material selfness (220)
    • "body feelings" (220-222)

Living female in a man-oriented world

"Words cannot express how condescending and infuriating it feels to have men speak down to me, talk over me, and sometimes even practically put on baby-talk voices when addressing me." (223)
  • When and by what did Serano begin to feel more comfortable as "woman" than "genderqueer"? (225-227)
  • "Woman is a holistic concept" (227)

Deconstructive surgery

  • "No-win inquisition" regarding bottom surgery
    • "Straight men quake in their boots" upon knowing that Serano still has a penis (229)
  • Phallocentric popular understanding of SRS
    • Lingering effect of Freud and penis envy (230)
    • Wanting to be a woman is "unimaginable" (231)

Bending over backwards: Traditional sexism and trans-woman-exclusion policies

  • Transphobia among lesbian and feminist communities/spaces
  • Emphasis on birth sex, trans men accepted when trans women are excluded (236-7)

Phallocentric exclusion

  • MTF people may still have penises
  • The ultimate marker of gender (240)

Self-deception

  • Premeditated transphobic murder leads to hung jury based on "sexual deceit" and "passion" defense (247)
    • Police ignored sources who claimed that the killers knew that the victim was trans despite the fact that they had anal sex (249)

Trans-sexualization

  • Catcalling as an expression of power and control (254)
    • Not desire
  • Strangers tend to make sexualizing comments
    • In person, people who assume Serano is cissexual do not
    • Unless they understand her to be trans woman and then they may turn to sexualizing cmoments (257)
  • Transsexual out for some straight men is a signal of availability (258)

In porn

  • Trans men not objectified by industry to nearly the same extent as trans women (256)
  • Trans man porn attracts predominantly gay male and queer female audience

Trap

  • Trans women "lure" straight men by transforming themselves into irresistable sexual objects (258)
  • Undermines the empowering potential of transitioning by understanding it in relation to hetero man desire (259)

And sex work

  • Connected to disproportionate representation as sex workers in entertainment/news media (261)
    • Trans women often turn to sex work because there are few options available
      • (and treatment is an enormous burden) (261)

And psychology

  • Trans women not willing to meet all the criteria of heteronormative desire (263-264)
    • Denied treatment, SRS, hormones
    • Categorized as "merely" transvestites
  • Autogynephilia as a sexual orientation focuses exclusively on the object of desire
    • Ignoring the role of our own bodies (268)
    • Also denying the role of the penis in heterosexual men's fantasy lives

Submissive streak

  • Submission and rape fantasies collapsing feminine and submission into a single sex role (275)
  • A mark of survival (276)

Love rant

  • Why Serano falls for trans women

Crossdressing: Demystifying femininity and rethinking "male privilege"

  • Psychiatric transvestite == "crossdresser" (283)
  • Widely misunderstood complex identity (284)

Effemimania and feminine expression

  • Anxiety abound re: perceived male femininity (286)
  • Women play a role in supporting this form of sexism
  • Class, race, ethnic interactions?
  • See also: Ducat, Stephen J. (??) The wimp factor: Gender gaps, holy wars, and the politics of anxious masculinity.
  • Self-censorship, hiding (288)

Enforced ignorance and the mystification of femininity

  • hooks, bell. (??) Feminist theory: From margin to center.
  • Prominent feminists in the 60s/70s ignored the concerns of many different women according to class, race
  • Marginalized people understand the center, but the opposite is not true (290)
  • Men describe women as "mysterious", "enchanting" (293)
  • May couple with a dehumanizing misunderstanding of women (294)

Crossdresser development

  • Often a life-long practice (295)
  • Demystifies femininity, femaleness for those who have been socialized to believe that they are unknowable (296)

Demystifying fem and unlearning masc

  • Sexual stimulation associated with cross-dressing
  • Women's clothes hold a cultural eroticism not typically found in men's attire (298)
  • Phases of cross-dressing

Clothing

  • Trying on different pieces of clothing (299)
  • the "mirror moment" (291)
  • Demystifying women's clothes

Public

  • Taking cross dressing out into the world (300)
  • One reason to indulge in exaggerated femininity is that it was previously unavailable (302)

Interactive

  • Hanging out with other people while crossdressed (303)
  • Dual life: girl-mode, boy-mode (304)
  • Included fantasy role-playing with ppl from personal ads
    • Demystifying sexuality/femininity

Rethinking "male privilege"

  • Oppression and sexism operate on many axes
  • Affecting the lives of different people in diverse ways
  • Interacting with classism, racism

Barrette manifesto

  • Defense of women's things (315)
  • Encouraging "boys to learn to embrace girl stuff" (316)

Putting the feminine back in feminism

  • Popular notion that feminism implies a rejection of femininity (319)

Origins of femininity

  • Serano argues for "combination of biology and socialization" (322)

Feminist interpretations of femininity

Two "broad trends" (330)

Unilateral feminism

  • Women oppressed at the hands of men.
  • Friedan, B. () The feminine mystique.
  • Femininity is the result of coercion

Deconstructive feminism

  • Social construction of sex and gender (336)
  • Butler, J
  • gender performativity (336)

Ramifications of artificializing femininity

  • Marginalizing all femme groups, including
    • Femme dykes
    • Nelly queens (339)
  • Extending "misogyny" to "effemimania" (342)

The future of queer/trans activism

  • Many believe that queer/trans is vanguard (345)
  • "Subversivism", practice of valorizing gender/sex expressions that are non-normative (346)
  • Feminine stereotypes are incompatible with subversion, thus MTFs seem "lame" or "conservative" (348)
  • No way to know whether someone's gender is "sincere" or "coerced" (361)




Questions

  • Dehumanizing effect of mystifying femininity
  • Emphasis on femininity via STUFF, THINGS
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