writer, performer and activist Julia Serano's blog! most posts will focus on gender & sexuality; trans, queer & feminist politics; music & performance; and other stuff that interests or concerns me. find out more about my various creative endeavors at juliaserano.com
I just released my latest email update, which includes links to all my best 2025 essays & videos so far – you can access all of them at the link! The update also has information about how you can book me for a talk or event.
Since this is Bisexual Awareness Week (and yesterday #BiVisibilityDay), I decided to share a chapter from my novel 99 Erics called “Bomb,” so-named because it humorously defuses many straight assumptions and bisexual stereotypes. You can read it by clicking that link or via the email update.
By all means, you can sign up for my email list if you wish. But the *best* way to follow my work is through Patreon, where I post about all my latest essays, videos, music, etc., as soon as they are released. Plus Patreon just added a "JOIN FOR FREE" button, so it won't cost you anything! Although if you become a full member (for as little as $1/month) you can access all my patron-only posts, which include rare & hard-to-find writings of mine (such as those listed at the end of this post).
Some of you may recall that last August I published an essay entitled Why Does “Transvestigation” Happen? On Gendering, Ungendering, and (Mis)Perceiving Trans People. It uses so-called “transvestigators” and the JK Rowling/Imane Khelif Olympics ordeal as a jumping-off point to ask more general questions about how we see gender, how trans and gender-nonconforming people “short-circuit” this unconscious process, how our perception changes as we become more cognizant of gender & sexual minorities, and why some people seem to get “stuck” in stage where they compulsively misperceive gender and sexual diversity in cis people as “transness.”
It is one of my favorite essays that I wrote in the last few years. And now it has been turned into a video essay! You can watch it here (or via this link: https://youtu.be/kC6lsvUKEQ0):
The YouTube show notes contain the following "chapters" of the video – you can use the time stamps there to skip ahead to particular sections if you wish:
0:00 Introduction 2:18 The Two Filing Cabinets Mindset 8:00 Ungendering and “The Look” 17:15 Delusions of “Gaydar” and “Transdar” 23:00 Dismantling the Two Filing Cabinets Mindset (for better or worse) 32:50 Believing Is Seeing 39:40 Other Perceptual Biases (or why trans women, gender non-conforming women, and women of color are especially fucked) 43:53 Conclusion
I also wrote a short companion essay for the video called How Do We See Gender and Trans People? You can read it on Substack at that link or else on Medium – both are no paywall. I thought I'd end this post with the last few paragraphs from the companion essay:
In addition to being intellectually interesting, I believe this issue is one of the most underappreciated obstacles that trans people face. The fact that most cis people naively presume that they see the world “normally” or “correctly” directly leads to them imagining us as “outliers” at best and “abominations” at worse. We can explain gender and sexual diversity to them until we’re blue in the face, but the real problem is they cannot see that diversity even though it’s all around them!
Encouraging the cis majority to dismantle their Two Filing Cabinets mindset in a “good way” (as I put it in the video) has the potential to help them see that there is no such thing as a “normal” or “correct” gender—we are all simply collections of sex characteristics that vary in all sorts of ways.
Dismantling the Two Filing Cabinets mindset can also help trans people, especially those still in the “questioning” phase. I spent years believing that I’d never be able to transition because there appeared to be an immense chasm separating male from female that seemed nearly impossible to transverse. But it turned out that chasm was entirely in my mind. As I explain in the video, as my gender perception shifted—as I began seeing gender and sexual diversity in all its varied forms—I gradually realized that it was possible for me. I had been stuck on the false notion that I could never be a “real” or “normal” girl, until I was finally able to see that there is no such thing as a “normal girl.”
Anyway, whatever your current state of gender perception is, I hope you appreciate the video—and if you do, please “like” it (which will help boost it in YouTube’s algorithm) and share widely!
If you appreciate that I make videos & essays like this freely available online, please consider supporting me on Patreon (for as little as $1/month)!
Please check out my LATEST ESSAY: What Covid “Lab Leak” and “Rushing Kids into Transition” Have in Common (and more general thoughts about conspiracy theories and negativity bias) (on both Substack & Medium). It is the third piece in an unintended trilogy of sorts, so I figured I’d briefly share my thought process on it.
In 2023, I published one of my most comprehensive essays ever: Gender-Affirming Care for Trans Youth Is Neither New nor Experimental: A Timeline and Compilation of Studies. In it, I provide a timeline of how the gender-affirmative model came to be, counter the most common misconceptions and talking points against it, and include well over 100 references (including position statements from major health professional organizations) in support of it. In other words, that essay is a science- and logic-based deep-dive into the subject.
But as we all know, some people won’t accept the science on this matter regardless of how many studies are done and how high quality they are. In fact, I’ve increasingly noticed that these opponents routinely fantasize about finding some kind of “smoking gun” (whether it be the “WPATH Files,” Jamie Reed, the Cass report, etc.) that would magically appear and somehow invalidate all the past research showing that gender-affirming care is efficacious, even though that’s not how science works. In other words, they seem to treat the issue like a conspiracy theory—I made this case in my 2024 essay The Cass Review, WPATH Files, and the Perpetual Debate over Gender-Affirming Care.
My latest essay expands upon this. Specifically, I show how a basic cognitive bias known as negativity bias—our tendency to dwell more on negative outcomes than positive or neutral ones, and to presume that negative events must have been caused by something or someone rather than occurring naturally or inexplicably—can explain the behaviors of opponents of gender-affirming care and their relentless belief that kids are being “rushed into transition” despite all evidence to the contrary. I also examine the striking parallels between how “rushing kids into transition” and the Covid “lab leak” theories have spread like wildfire in the mainstream media despite the scientific consensuses against them. You can read it at:
As always, please share widely and give it lots of claps and likes and such! And if you appreciate that I make essays like this freely available online, please consider supporting me on Patreon (for as little as $1/month)!
photo of the CEOs of Meta (Facebook/Instagram), Amazon, Google (YouTube), & "X", all of whom "platform Nazis", prominently supporting Trump at his 2025 inauguration
Hello and welcome to my blog! If this is your first time here, well, that’s likely because I hardly ever post here these days.
For years, this was where I routinely penned my essays. But by the mid-2010s, readers had tapered off from visiting blogs, even when I would share links to my posts on other platforms. Increasingly, people tended to stick to their preferred social media ecosystems. And for those interested in reading and/or writing articles and essays, Medium was the most popular ecosystem at the time. There, you could follow other writers and they could follow you back. And because so many people had created their own Medium accounts, they were more likely to click on and share your posts and potentially follow you. So naturally, I began publishing my essays there.
I am still on Medium. But gradually, most of those readers and writers have since migrated to Substack, which is why I began cross-posting my essays there a couple years ago. I explained my reasons for doing so in my first Substack post. Later on, amidst a new round of protests against the platform, I penned a 2,500 word essay on the matter, entitled On Being an Artist, Author, and Activist in a World Where All the Major Online Media Platforms Suck. Don’t worry, that link will take you to an archived version of the essay, so you don’t need to actually visit Substack to read it.
In that post, I made a few main points that I will quickly touch on here TL;DR-style:
The YouTube show notes contain the following "chapters" of the video – you can use the time stamps there to skip ahead to particular sections if you wish:
0:00 Introduction (defining sexualization & the Predator/Prey mindset)
3:07 Queer people are “marked by sex” and stereotyped as “fakes”
6:30 Sexualized stereotypes of gay men
7:00 Sexualized stereotypes of lesbians
8:45 Sexualized stereotypes of asexuals
10:10 Sexualized stereotypes of bisexuals
13:30 Trans people and the “worst of both worlds” & “sexual deceiver” tropes
16:40 Anti-queer stigma is viewed “contagious”
19:15 Recurring claims that LGBTQIA+ & people of color “prey on women & children”
23:50 Critiques of “respectability politics” and “contagiousness politics”
29:00 Sexualization-centric approaches to queer activism
As if that wasn't enough, I wrote a companion essay entitled The Worst of Both Worlds: How Straight People Sexualize Queer and Trans People that places my Stigma-Contamination model of sexualization (discussed in the book and video) in the context of other feminist perspectives on sexualization. It also shares a different excerpt from the chapter (on how trans & intersex people face "The Worst of Both Worlds") that is not covered in the video. You can read it on Substack (no paywall) at the above link, or via this friend link to Medium.
As always, please share widely and give it lots of claps and likes and such!
So last week, in the hopes of drumming up some more income, I posted “Julia for Hire!” on my Substack and Medium channels. I encourage you to read and share it! Rather than reiterating the entire post, here are the main points:
As always, if you appreciate my work, you can support me on Patreon (for as little as $1 per month)!
I routinely speak at colleges, conferences, companies, and Pride events. If your organization is interested in potentially hosting me (in person or virtually), please check out my booking webpage, which includes descriptions of my most frequently requested talks.
I am open to doing freelance or contractual work (e.g., writing, consulting, editing, reading, research, fact-checking, etc.) in fields or genres that I am knowledgeable about.
Finally, if you have or know about a part- or full-time job opening that I might be particularly suited for, here’s my CV and here’s my bibliography, feel free to reach out to me and we can discuss!
Once again, here’s the original post, please share widely!
I have read and viewed numerous solid articles and videos about both the online "Transvestigator" communities that focus on ungendering celebrities, and the recent JK Rowling/Elon Musk/Fox News ungendering and harassment of Olympian Imane Khelif. But I worry that they set up a false dichotomy, where these groups are imagined to view gender “abnormally” or “incorrectly,” while the rest of us who are not in these groups (including the majority of cis people) supposedly perceive gender and trans people “normally” or “correctly.”
And frankly, nothing could be further from the truth!
So this essay is a deep-dive into how we (mis)perceive & (mis)interpret trans people and gender more generally. It draws from research I carried out and insights I forwarded in my books Whipping Girl and Sexed Up. It is a "long-read", but I believe it communicates many aspects and nuances of this story that most people are currently overlooking. You can read it at:
Happy to announce that I will be giving a virtual talk this Saturday, August 17, 2024, at 2–2:30pm Eastern time (11–11:30am Pacific) as part of Medium Day – you can register (for free) to watch it & the many other talks they have at mediumday.com.
My talk is entitled Making Sense of Debates About Gender-Affirming Care and Trans Youth. In it, I will highlight the unconscious biases, unstated presumptions, and the underlying forces and dynamics that are driving the ongoing moral panic about this issue. Hopefully, the talk will provide audiences who are relatively new to this subject with the necessary background to make sense of these debates.
Since there is far too much to say about this subject, I made the above Resource Page, which includes links to over a dozen essays I've written related to this issue over the last 8 years. You can read it (no paywall) on Medium (at the link above) or on Substack. Please share widely and give it lots of claps and likes and such!
I'm very proud of to have finally compiled all my writings on this important subject in one place, so that I (and perhaps you) can readily share it with others who have questions or concerns!
As always, this resource page was made possible by my Patreon supporters – if you appreciate that I make pieces like this freely available online, please consider supporting me there!
While a lot of work went into constructing the timeline, what I did was basically simple: I searched for the earliest instances of "transgender social contagion" and "ROGD" on the internet. I discovered that these ideas originated in 2016 on three websites run by, and catering to, reluctant parents of trans youth who were looking for justifications to deny them gender-affirming care (this has since grown into a full-fledged anti-trans parent movement). My timeline also shows how these ideas were quickly taken up by conservative outlets, gender-disaffirming doctors, and other groups who now form the backbone of the current anti-trans moral panic.
Any journalist could have easily carried out the same investigation and uncovered what I had, but none did. Whether this was due to a lack of curiosity or intentional bias on their parts, I cannot say. While other people have cited this work, Maintenance Phase is the first to share the full narrative with the general public, so I'm excited that it will finally reach a larger audience!
Since Michael and Aubrey were kind enough to link to my "Origins" post and my Patreon in their show notes, some of you may be new here – welcome! I mostly write about gender, sexuality, science, and social justice, with an emphasis on trans, LGBTQIA+, and feminist issues. Lately, much of this work has been focused on countering anti-trans science-denial and disinformation (since there's so much of it lately). If you enjoyed this Maintenance Phase episode, here are a few recent related essays you may also appreciate:
No-paywall links to many many more essays can be found on my writings webpage. If you like what you read, please consider supporting me on Patreon for as little as $1 per month!
I just published an announcement post for the book, which you can read on either Medium or Substack). It's only a 5 minute read, but here's a brief synopsis: It's basically the same book as before, but with a new Afterword on trans youth and moral panics (aka, responding to the current anti-trans backlash). It also has a new cover (as you can see to the right) — I describe the thinking process behind the cover in the announcement post as well.
In addition to the book's release in March, I have a series of essays and videos related to Whipping Girl planned for the coming months, including a transmisogyny explainer video and spoken word performances of some of the chapters. So be sure to follow me on YouTube, Medium, and/or Substack if you’re interested in those.
As always, I will be spreading the word on social media — that link provides a comprehensive list of all that platforms I am currently on if you wish to follow me there too...
I thought I’d begin the new year with a quick recap of my writings from 2023. All these essays are on Medium and have been demonetized. If you appreciate them, please consider supporting my work on Patreon!
Several of the essays were my definitive responses to major anti-trans talking points: They are thoroughly researched (citing sources all along the way), comprehensive, and well-argued—so if you only read one or a few, I encourage you to make it these:
Here are the other essays I’ve written this year. I am proud of these too, but they were less intensive research-wise (and are often shorter as a result):
Finally, since years are an admittedly arbitrary time-frame, I will end with two essays that I wrote at the very end of 2022. Both distill some of the main take-home points of my recent book Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back and apply them to our current anti-trans moral panic and what drives transphobia and biphobia within queer and feminist circles:
I have lots of essays in the works for 2024, so stay tuned—they will all be cross-posted on both Medium and Substack, with alerts and links sent to my Patreon supporters. I am also working on a talk-length video entitled “Transgender People and Biological Sex: What the Science Says,” so subscribe to my YouTube channel if you want to be notified as soon as it comes out...
Some of you who are newly following me may not know this, but in early 2020, I released my debut novel, 99 Erics: a Kat Cataclysm faux novel. The narrator/protagonist, Kat Cataclysm, is a polyamorous bisexual woman and absurdist short fiction writer. And 99 Erics is a humorous account of Kat’s experiences writing a book called 99 Erics,
which is about her experiences dating ninety-nine different people
named Eric. It is more surreal than slutty. Not that there is anything
wrong with slutty.
The
reason why I’m telling you all this now is because, after much
deliberation, I think I’ve finally found a worthy premise for the next
Kat Cataclysm novel. A few days ago, I sat down and started typing and
the words just flew out of me! Unlike my nonfiction books and essays,
which come together in a slow and methodical manner, I’ve found that my
best fiction arises when I just let my unconscious mind loose and let
improvisation take hold.
Given the good start so far, I’ve decided to take part in NaNoWriMo
this month. For those unfamiliar, that acronym stands for National
Novel Writing Month. The idea is that you try to write every day in
November, hopefully coming out the other side with a fledgling first
draft of a novel in hand. While I highly doubt that I’ll finish a whole
first draft (especially since I have other commitments), I figured I’d
give it a go and see how much progress I make!
In the
meantime, rather than inundate y’all with those super-rough drafts, I
thought I’d share all the publicly available excerpts of 99 Erics, to hopefully whet your appetite for an eventual second Kat installment.
My favorite chapter of 99 Erics—which
I believe offers a great sense of both the character and the book—is
“Posers.” A video of me reading from the entire chapter can be found on YouTube and a smaller excerpt of the first part of the chapter can be found on Medium.
cover image for my recent Medium post about Lisa Marchiano
In February 2019, on this very blog, I published Origins of “Social Contagion” and “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” which investigated the history of when these terms first appeared online and how they spread. The main finding of that piece was that the concept of “transgender social contagion” appears to have been invented by someone who went by the handle “skepticaltherapist” in a comment posted on February 20, 2016, on the anti-trans parent website 4thwavenow. I was not able to determine who exactly skepticaltherapist was, but I provided evidence that they went on to become one of the founders of the anti-trans website youthtranscriticalprofessionals.org (YTCP).
A couple days ago, I published a follow up piece on Medium entitled Did Lisa Marchiano Invent “Transgender Social Contagion” and “No Transition Before Age 25”? It was based on recent findings that Marchiano ran YTCP (which has since been confirmed; see also below) and that she possibly invented ROGD too. Based on this, I proposed that Marchiano was also likely skepticaltherapist — aka, the person who invented the notion that “social contagion” is turning kids transgender.
In this post, I provide further evidence that this is indeed the case.
If you want to receive my email updates directly into your inbox (never more than once every few months), you can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/CxWWf
photo of Julia with her two most recent books: 99 Erics & Sexed Up
It's that time of the year again, when you may be considering presents to get your friends and family (and perhaps for yourself as well). Which means it's time for me to shamelessly peddle my wares!
If you know someone who appreciates my past books, I bet they'll like my latest (and IMHO best) book Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back. It is currently available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook — those links will take you to the Seal Press website, which offers a variety of outlets to choose from. Alternatively, you can (and should!) pick up a copy at your local independent bookstore — if they don't have it in stock, just ask them to order a copy for you!
While I'm not able to sell signed copies of Sexed Up at this time, it is possible to get signed copies of any of my other books — here's how:
I have two self-published books – 99 Erics & Outspoken – which you can purchase signed copies of directly from the "stuff to buy" page of my website for $25 (PayPal or credit card), shipping included (instructions via that link). The shipping will be through USPS Media Mail, which they say takes 2 to 8 business day to deliver – this means your mailing address must be in the U.S. to do this (if not, see alternatives below). Here's more about each of those books:
It's entitled Penises, Privilege, and Feminist & LGBTQ+ Purity Politics. It's a longer read, but worth it, as it explains many intra-community debates. This includes lesbian stereotypes about bisexual women (such as the myth that we are "perpetually heterosexual privileged"), how those relate to "gender critical"/TERF stereotypes of trans women, plus recent debates between trans male/masculine and trans female/feminine communities. Basically, I show how all these sentiments stem from sexual stigma and our culture's bizarre patriarchal and heteronormative beliefs about sex and penises.
I think this is the best thing I've written since... well, since my latest book Sexed Up, I suppose. In fact, it's the first piece I've written that really builds upon some of the ideas that I introduce and flesh out in the book, including the Predator/Prey mindset and how sexual stigma shapes many popular stereotypes about queer people.
And if you like it, please give it lots of "claps" (up to 50, I think) so that other Medium users will see it.
This essay was made possible by my Patreon supporters. If you appreciate that I make writings like this available for free online, please consider supporting me there.
and if you want to receive my email updates directly to your inbox, you can sign up here.
It is a fairly long update, so I won't reiterate it all here. But highlights include:
1) links to several recent interviews (in print, podcast, and YouTube forms) with me about my new book Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back – this includes two of the book events I did back in July. These interviews, as well as all the book excerpts, reviews, etc., can also be found on the Sexed Up webpage I just linked to.
2) On September 22nd, in honor of, Bisexual Visibility Day, I will be reading a few bi+ specific passages from Sexed Up at Fabulosa Books (489 Castro St, San Francisco, CA). The event begins at 7pm; masks are recommended but not required. Here is the Facebook invite for the event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1091569688453976 – please come out if you can!
3) Just in time for the 2022-23 academic year, I've updated my booking webpage to include a bunch of new presentations, some Sexed Up-themed, others covering trans, bisexual, LGBTQIA+, and feminist issues I often write about. If you are part of a conference or college organization that's looking for speakers, definitely check it out!
4) Debunking anti-trans pseudoscience, in two parts:
Second, some of you may recall my 2019 Originsof"SocialContagion"and"RapidOnsetGenderDysphoria" post, which is essentially a timeline of all the major events regarding the invention and dissemination of these ideas within anti-trans activism. I just updated the timeline with a newer entries, many of which are recent studies that undermine or outright disprove the basic tenets of these theories. All those new entries can be found in the Post-Publication Note toward the beginning of that post.
So that's what's in the update – please check it out!
Hello everyone! I've already mentioned that tomorrow (Thursday July 21st), California Institute of Integral Studies is hosting an online conversation between me and Abeni Jones entitled OnSexualizationandSociety. We will be talking about my latest book Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back. It will take place at 7pm PDT (10pm EDT), suggested price of $10 but pay what you can. Info about registering for the event and accessibility accommodations can be found via the link. Please come out!
But if you can't make it, I'm happy to announce that one more Sexed Up book event has just been added: On Thursday, July 28th, I will be doing a Conversation with Carol Queen in which we will talk about Sexed Up. The event is FREE and will take place at the Berkeley Good Vibrations store (2504 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94702) from 5:30 - 6:30pm PDT—there is very limited seating, so you must pre-register via the link if you wish to attend in person (masking required). But you can also watch it online (and for FREE) on Good Vibes’ Instagram Live.
Whether you can make it to these events or not, you should definitely check out the latest Sexed Up interview (by Marcie Bianco) that just came out in The Advocate:Author Julia Serano Separates Sex From Stigma in Sexed Up. It discusses how the book came to be, some of the topics it covers, how me being a biologist influenced my writing, and more!
First, I just published a new excerpt from my latest book Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back – it's from a section of the last chapter entitled Sexual Dystopias and Utopias. While not explicitly discussed in the piece, it grew out of my concerns with “no kink at Pride” discourses, but it’s also pertinent to recent “don’t say gay” bills and claims that LGBTQIA+ people “groom”/“sexualize” children by merely existing. Here is the no paywall link. And if you like it, please give it lots of "claps" (up to 50, I think) so that other Medium users will see it!
For even more Sexed Up-related excerpts and writings, please check out my just-released July 2022 email update.
Second, I have two Sexed Up virtual book events coming up in the next couple weeks. Both will have ASL interpretation and require pre-registration – here are the details:
On Thursday July 14th, I'll be reading from Sexed Up and engaging in conversation about the book with Jude Doyle at a virtual event hosted by the NYC bookstore Bluestockings. The event is from 7 - 8:30pm EDT (4 - 5:30pm PDT), tickets are $0 - $15, and you can register for the event here.
Then on Thursday July 21st is On Sexualization and Society, a live online conversation about Sexed Up between me and Abeni Jones, hosted by California Institute of Integral Studies. It will take place at 7pm PDT (10pm EDT), suggested price of $10 but pay what you can. Info about registering for the event and accessibility accommodations can be found via the link.
As always, you can learn more about the book – including praise, reviews, excerpts, interviews, plus links to purchase it – at the Sexed Up webpage.
