Look right, I like a lot of things about the foundational 2007 text Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. But if you've ever been told to read this book without any qualifiers, I'd like to apologise on behalf of the trans community.

lenin-tea

Obviously the concepts of traditional and oppositional sexism, the idea of transmisogyny, Serano's analysis of media depictions of trans women, and more are all superb and well worthy of praise. However, Serano is a land of contrasts, as AcidSmiley so concisely put it. She's read both Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein's works, and writes this extremely salient quote:

We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men. This begins with the acknowledgement that there are exceptions to every gender rule and stereotype, and this simply stated fact disproves all gender theories that purport that female and male are mutually exclusive categories.

Despite all that, Serano has a perspective that's utterly mired in exorsexist* binary-only assumptions, with language to match. On own, describing someone taking estrogen as "hormonally female" or her body prior to hormone replacement therapy as "physically male" would be unpleasantly cisnormative, but just that. I respect fully that the intent of this book is to analyse the ins and outs of being trans in the gender binary, and so the text is focused in that direction. When Serano writes goofy shit like "mtf spectrum" though, you wonder if she wouldn't be better served by thinking a little outside of the two-genders box.

She doesn't want to, though; Julia Serano circa 2007 (the text has not been meaningfully updated to my knowledge) is a brave warrior going against the grain of non binary domination :citation to defend our poor, repressed binary genders. She's taking down those woke non-binary moralists from their ivory towers:

There are many different (but often overlapping) forms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety. For example, one of the most frequently discussed forms of gender entitlement is heterosexism, the belief that heterosexuality is the only "natural," legitimate, or morally acceptable form of sexual desire. Heterosexist gender entitlement ean lead to homophobia, which is an expression of gender anxiety directed against those people who engage in same-sex relationships. Similarly, the gender-entitled belief that all women are (or should be) feminine and men masculine-which some have called cisgenderism-gives rise to transphobia, a gender anxiety that is directed against people who fall outside of those norms. While homophobia and transphobia have both received mainstream attention, thinking in terms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety also allows us to consider less well- known (but just as disparaging) forms of gender and sexual discrimination. For example, many gays and lesbians who believe that all people are "naturally" either homosexual or heterosexual often express biphobia, a gender anxiety directed toward bisexual people because they challenge the presumption that people can only be attracted to one sex or the other. I have also met some people in the transgender community who feel that identifying outside of the male/female binary is superior to, or more enlightened than, identifying within it. Such people often express gender anxiety (binary- phobia?) at people who identify strongly as either female or male.

I would be laughing if I weren't actually really mad about this classic, foundational transfeminist text featuring tons of brainworms about anyone outside the binary. It's a punchline, the phrase "binary-phobia" is perfect to sit right next to "heterophobia" or "cisphobia". It's right up there alongside white westerners claiming to be victims of racism when someone calls them a cracker, even. It should be plainly self-evident how ridiculous a claim this is. I want to ask Serano circa 2007 to tell me which genders have legal recognition - binary or non-binary ones?

It is truly incredible that a woman can write so sharply about the cultural/societal hedgemony of cis gender and heterosexuality, about how the concept of anything being inherently gendered is antithetical to feminism, and then turn around and write a deeply unserious aside about how non-binary people are apparently smug moralists commiting discrimination against people of binary gender due to the same gender anxiety**--in itself a smart concept about how queer people disrupt assumed gender/sexual normality--that drives cis people to be transphobes!! I am for real left somewhat speechless.

I don't think Whipping Girl is a book nobody should read, obviously. But I scoured the bearsite to see if anyone had dome criticism of or even qualified their recommendation of Whipping Girl, and I found nothing. Part of me wonders if anyone has made a concerted criticism of this book before, but surely someone has before me. I yap exclusively for your benefit! I wonder if Sexed Up or Excluded are better, but frankly I'm just disappointed and angry. Truly a joke.

--

*Exorsexist, I learned today, is discrimination against people outside the gender binary!

**Serano describes gender anxiety as "the act of becoming irrationally upset or being made uncomfortable by the existence of those people who challenge or bring into question one's gender entitlement." In turn, she describes gender entitlement being "an arrogant conviction that one's own beliefs, perceptions, and assumptions regarding gender and sexuality are more valid than those of other people". She is more or less insinuating that non-binary people are befuddled supremacists who cannot stand... adherence to the gender binary. Cool.

  • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
    ·
    3 hours ago

    some other quotes from her blog

    There is nothing inherently wrong with celebrating and praising supposedly “subversive” and “transgressive” expressions of gender and sexuality (although the assumption that such activities undermine the gender binary, or patriarchy, or what have you, seem rather dubious to me for reasons that I discuss throughout the second half of Excluded).

    Subversivism doesn’t merely target the heterosexual gender-conforming majority. In Excluded, I discuss how transsexuals (see Chapter 12), femmes (see Chapter 6), and bisexuals (see Chapter 9), in addition to other gender and sexual minorities, regularly face accusations of “reinforcing patriarchy/heteronormativity/the gender binary,” or of “not being queer/feminist enough” because of their appearance, dress, or partner preference. Indeed, subversivism is a common tactic that is used to marginalize and exclude these groups (and others) within these movements.

    she is talking about the underlying phenomenons that lead to things like biphobia, NOT the identities themselves that are supposed to be "better" than the target of IE biphobia. The thing she is criticizing is the same undercurrent of thought that leads to weird exclusivist terminally online arguments about the term "bisexual" being transphobic and "pansexual" being more inclusive etc. I also do not believe she has issue with celebrating or loving one's identity as being subversive by itself; She has issue with it being considered more subversive. Otherwise she would oppose queer pride in general which is blatantly not an opinion she holds.

    In Excluded, I make the case that there are myriad double standards—some which are pervasive, and others which are more temporary or fleeting; some of which exist in mainstream society, and others which exist in specific settings or subcultures; some of which we are aware of, and others which we are oblivious to. And I make the case that, as activists, we should work to challenge all double standards, rather than ignoring some and reversing others.

    Thus, while subversivism may not be prevalent in mainstream society, we should be concerned by it and we should work to eliminate it.

    So subversivism doesn’t function in the same way that we are used to thinking about “isms,” as it does not target a specific group of people. Rather, subversivism is perhaps better thought of as a mindset that often arises within activist movements, and which provides a convenient excuse for either perpetuating hierarchies that already exist within society, or to create newfangled hierarchies within that specific movement. Given this, I thought that it would be more fruitful to highlight the arbitrary nature of these subversivist hierarchies more generally—I do this in multiple chapters of Excluded, especially Chapter 12, ‘The Perversion of “The Personal Is Political”’ and Chapter 16, “Fixed Versus Holistic Perspectives.”

    Her overall take is that there is that subversive communities are first and foremost communities, and that while thought patterns like "subversivism" aren't systemic issues like other "isms", and in fact in my opinion the term may be misleading, it still leads to significant harm both in theory and community to have arbitrary hierarchies like this build within movements, and that's it's bad to do oppression olympics

    I have encountered this on many occasions within BMNOPPQ communities, were some people prefer to call themselves pansexual, or multisexual, or polysexual, rather than bisexual. And this is totally fine—people are free to self-identify however they like. However, sometimes people will claim that they have chosen their preferred label because it is supposedly more liberatory or inclusive than bisexual. This latter case is an example of word-sabotage, because now people who identify as bisexual and who use that term in an inclusive manner (such as me) are now presumed to be conservative and exclusionary.

    She believes the current "born in the wrong body" dominant narrative is bad and thinks transsexuality, as she puts it, is the dominant narrative of the present day among cis people. She does not seem to like this!

    I completely disagree with you about the "transsexual narrative has all but been wiped from the map by the rest of the umbrella we were drug under". Honestly, that is the only narrative that most people in the cis mainstream are familiar with, even though it doesn't fit all gender variant people, or even all transsexuals.

    I would not expect someone who thought of non-binary people as being some sort of "evil woke reverse-binarist oppressors" to say anything remotely like this.

    Her take is that, instead of trying to "market" our identities as subversive or inherently better than others, we should fight for queerness so we can be comfortable in our identity.

    I believe this is fundamentally compatible with the GAS manifesto. It isn't that every time someone does something more and newly subversive it breaks the binary more, it's that the continued existence of identities that don't fit into it and refuse to become assimilated slowly erodes it. Or more precisely, the systemic power of queer people and women challenges gender, not individual identity politics. (Except for the part where you challenge gender to be yourself in the first place, but I mean challenge on a systemic level not like a individual/local level). Rather than pressuring people into being something they're not to try and break gender, we should empower those who are naturally things that break gender so they can do it themselves. That might seem like "praising subversive identities" but I think there's a difference between building an in-community hierarchy and lifting an entire community up to challenge the norm.