The rising visibility of trans, intersex, and genderqueer movements has led feminists - and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the world - to an increasing awareness that M and F are only the beginning of gender identity.
(Reprint) by Debbie Rasmussen
With the release of Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and
theScapegoating of Femininity,Julia Serano offers a perspective sorely needed, but up until now rarely heard: a transfeminine critique of both feminist and mainstream understandings of gender.
As someone who has lived, at various points in her life, as male, genderqueer, and female, Serano brings unique insights to discussions of sexism and misogyny. In Whipping Girl, she weaves theoretical arguments through her compelling essays and manifestos in an attempt to bridge the gap between biological and social perspectives on gender, and calls our attention to the need for empowering femininity itself. In the process, she takes feminist and queer communities to task for dismissing male-to-female transsexuals while celebrating their counterparts on the female-to-male spectrum.
Serano lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is a biologist, writer, spoken-word artist, and musician. From 2003 to 2006 she curated and emceedGenderEnders, a trans/intersex/genderqueer-focused performance series. She’s also the vocalist-guitarist-lyricist for the Oakland-based noise-pop band Bitesize.
Bitch Magazine caught up with her at a bustling San Francisco café to talk shop, eat sweets, and subvert various paradigms.
You make clear in your introduction that this book is not intended as a memoir.
My experiences definitely shaped my thinking, and I think they also make
the points I’m describing a little more vivid. But I didn’t want this to be an autobiography, and it isn’t, because you learn very little about my actual life and history. There’s been this compulsory autobiographical tendency that’s happened with trans people, where you’re expected to tell your history: Did you know as a child? Tell me about your surgery. Et cetera. But our transitions are mere fractions of our lives — mine [took place] over the course of a year and a half. [So] having us tell our stories over and over again e
nds up making transsexual genders look artificial, like we’re always transitioning.
The idea of “empowering femininity,” as you term it, is problematic given that feminine expression is often used solely to appease and attract men. As you wrote in the book, there’s not much power in being a carrot on a stick dangled in front of someone.
Something I struggle with is the difference between how other people perceive me and how I perceive myself. For example, I’m not attracted to men. [But] sometimes I like getting dressed up, but I know that when I do, men on the street will comment more, people are going to perceive me as dressing that way in order to gain attention. And that sucks, because that’s not what my motive is. But the other option is to repress my femininity or repress my desire to dress up when I feel the desire to do so. And that’s what I did most of my life as a male. And that sucks, too.
Are the terms “femininity” and “female” synonymous?
I use the word “female” throughout the book to describe people who identify as female. Generally, female is a social category. I define femininity as a collection of heterogeneous traits that are independent of each other but are commonly associated with women. The only thing that feminine traits have in common is that they tend to be associated with people who are women or female.
Some of those traits might be entirely social in origin. Other traits have strong biological inputs, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there aren’t social things situated with them. An obvious example is that female hormones can tend to make one experience emotions more intensely than testosterone, and that being emotional is seen as a feminine trait.
There’s definitely a lot of biology there, but there are also social norms that are assigned to that, so that if you’re a boy, you’re seen as being atypical if you cry and if you’re female, you’re expected to.
You introduce a lot of new terms in this book, like “cissexual” and “cissexual assumption.” Where did these come from?
Cissexual is a synonym for nontranssexual, just as the related term, cisgender, is a synonym for nontransgender. Until now, cissexual has been used in activist circles, but I decided to use it in the book so that I could thoroughly critique the belief that cissexual genders are more legitimate than transsexual genders. Cissexual assumption occurs when we assume that everyone we meet [has] always been, and always will be, a member of the sex we perceive them to be.
Let’s talk about the use of the term “passing” and why it’s problematic when it comes to the experience of people who are transsexual.
When everything is framed around whether the trans person passes as their identified sex, it puts transsexuals in a position where our genders always come off as fake, as imitations of cissexual genders. Many of us are not actually trying to do anything. I don’t experience myself as actively doing anything to pass. I’m doing what resonates with me.
But in a certain sense, people are always trying, even if at some point it might become second nature. It seems like you’re framing it as either “choice” or “biology,” with no in-between.
I disagree. Many times in our lives we enter novel situations where we are read by others in one way or another before we even know what the rules of passing are. In the book I talk about how my mannerisms (which did not change during my transition) seemed to take on new meanings once people began perceiving me as female rather than male. It really took me by surprise. It made me realize that passing has little to do with our performance. It lies in the expectations and assumptions of those perceiving us.
Your argument seems to hinge on the need for a cultural shift in the connotations of femininity. How will that happen
The first way is by not buying into masculinist presumptions about femininity. In feminism and in the queer community, there’s a strong anti-feminine attitude. If you look at the gay male community, masculinity is praised, femininity is suspect. If you look at the lesbian community, masculinity is praised, femininity is suspect. We have to get that out of our heads. Whenever I hear a feminist argue that women are subordinating themselves to men when they dress up, to me it sounds like a slightly toned-down version of “women who dress provocatively are asking for it.” It’s the same argument.
Femininity is a scapegoat. We call it out when women dress up in a feminine way to attract men, but we don’t call out men who are hypermasculine to attract women. Femininity is seen as artificial and contrived, and we can ridicule that, while masculinity just comes across as natural.
While aspects of both femininity and masculinity are often somewhat contrived, I think that as feminists we tend to overlook the ways in which many of us are drawn toward certain gender expressions rather than others, even when they contradict our socialization. The fact that there are young feminine boy and masculine girl children suggests that gender expression often precedes or supercedes gender norms.
That’s why I think that instead of constantly critiquing femininity, we should recognize that it exists on its own and can offer its own rewards to those who naturally gravitate to it, whether female or male. We need to recognize that anyone who assumes that femininity is inherently weak, passive, and only exists to appease men is merely promoting a male-centric view of femininity.
By [talking about] empowering femininity, I don’t mean we should all be more feminine. I’m saying we should strip from it all its negative connotations. The argument that there is something inherently contrived and passive and subordinate about expressing yourself femininely leaves women in a double bind.
Can you talk about the idea of sexualization, specifically as it relates to trans women
Most people, because they can’t figure out why [men] would want to be women, assume that trans women transition for the one type of power that women are portrayed as having in our society, which is the ability to attract men. And this essentially sexualizes the motives of transsexual women. This is seen all the time, both in psychiatry and in mainstream media, where trans women are portrayed as sex workers or sexual deceivers preying on innocent straight men, or cross-dressers are portrayed as fetishizing femininity. What’s implicit in that is that women have no worth beyond their ability to be sexualized.
You talk a lot about different kinds of binaries in your book—for instance the social-constructionist vs. gender-essentialist binary.
It’s become this sad parody of itself, where on one side are people who try to naturalize sexism by saying that it all comes from biology. And a lot of people coming from a feminist perspective argue that it’s all social, it’s all a construct. I think we should acknowledge that there are two general categories of sex, while at the same time recognize that any possible exception in those two categories of sex happens all the time.
You could call me a social constructionist in that I think some of the way we express gender is social—and the way we interpret it in others is highly social. But the fact that a lot of feminism has focused on only talking about the social is bad because it gives biology to the people who are trying to support sexism. And from a biological perspective, the cut-and-dried idea of male/female, or masculine/feminine, doesn’t make any sense—biologically, there’s so much variance in humans.
Continue Reading Here
To Learn More About Julia Serano Visit her Website Here
Mail to a friendCOMMENTS
- There Are No Comments Yet
