Know anyone at Times Books, Henry Holt, and/or Macmillan?

Know anyone at Times Books, Henry Holt, and/or Macmillan? Then I would super-duper-appreciate it if you could help me out. Here's how:

I am trying to speak to someone (anyone!) there who handles permissions requests. Many months ago I emailed them requesting permission to excerpt a passage from a Times Books book in my forthcoming book. I did this through the channels they suggested on their website (basically, emailing Permissions@hholt.com) and got an auto-reply saying they'd get back to me in 8 weeks. But they haven't. And it's been way over 8 weeks.

I've tried calling their main phone line (646-307-5095) to speak to someone at permissions, but after over 20 attempts, I have never gotten hold of an actual person. It appears to be a perpetual-hold phone system.

Time is running out on my end. So I am asking the internets for help!

If you just so happen to know anyone who works at Times Books, Henry Holt, and/or Macmillan, could you *please* do me the favor of putting me in touch with them? Or asking them if they can find out a phone number or specific email address for anyone who works in the permission department there? Or anyone who can help me get that info?

If you are able to help, please contact me via email - my address can be found on this page of my website:
http://www.juliaserano.com/contact.html

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help!

Best wishes, -julia

P.S., I plan to delete this post once I am able to contact someone there. So if you see this post, that means I am still looking for help.

julia update april 2013

hello, here is a quick update regarding some upcoming presentations and performances that I will be doing:

This Thursday, April 25th I will be at Smith College giving a talk called "I'll See It When I Believe It: On Perception and Gender Entitlement." I was invited by a student group in the wake of the recent events there (and which I will address in my talk). The event will take place on April 25th in Weinstein Auditorium in Wright Hall, at 7:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public. More info can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/431607016930107

Friday, April 26 I will be at Stony Brook University giving a talk on "The
Intersection of Feminism, Queer, and Trans Politics. It will be held at the Poetry Center at 7pm. More info can be found here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/StonyBrookTransSolidarityProject/message/604

Sunday, May 5, I will be reading at 'LIVE THROUGH THIS- ON CREATIVITY & SELF-DESTRUCTION' which is a celebration of the 2cd edition release of Live Through This, SABRINA CHAP, DAPHNE GOTTLIEB, CAROL QUEEN and MORE! Proceeds of the evening will go to fellow 'Live Through This' contributor, and gender warrior Kate Bornstein. 5-10 suggested donation, show at 7:30pm at the Center for Sex and Culture in San Francisco. More info can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/103293396540519/?group_id=0

Tuesday, May 14, I will be at Western Washington University giving a presentation called "A Holistic View of Feminism." It will be from 6-9 PM at Artzen 100, free admission. More info can be found here: http://as.wwu.edu/events/holistic-view-feminism/

I will also be a part of two wonderful events in June during pride festivities:

Thursday, June 27th will be Girl Talk's big 5 year anniversary show! In addition to being one of the co-curators of the show, I will be performing in it as well. More details about all the performers can be found here: http://queerculturalcenter.org/NQAF/performance13/girl-talk/
also, Girl Talk has a Facebook page that you should check out and "Like"

(btw, speaking of Girl Talk, an interview with me and my co-curators Gina de Vries and Elena Rose can be found in the latest issue (issue #13) of make/shift magazine! )

Finally, Friday, June 28, it appears that I will be participating in Seattle Trans* Pride! More details can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/events/270202573124834/

That's it for now, hope some of you can make it out! -julia

P.S., as always, here is my main website:
http://www.juliaserano.com

and I tweet fairly frequently:
http://twitter.com/#!/Juliaserano

for those interested in what I have to say when I have more than 140 characters to work with, I have a blog:
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com

I also post all my upcoming events and news on my aforementioned blog, and it also all automatically gets forwarded to my Facebook "writer" page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Serano/277728205577201?ref=ts

so I encourage you to follow me ( and perhaps "like me") there!

upcoming Julia college/university appearances!

Hello! Here is a quickie message about some upcoming out of town presentations I will be doing over the next month:

Tomorrow, March 19, 2013
Pacific University (Portland, OR)
http://www.pacificu.edu/academics/gender-equity/JuliaSerano.cfm

Wednesday, March 27, 2013
Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
https://www.facebook.com/events/510355485673150/

Thursday, March 28, 2013
Concordia University (Montreal, QC)
https://www.facebook.com/events/116000955254221/?fref=ts

Saturday, March 30, 2013
University of Texas, San Antonio
“Technologies and Locales of Knowledge: An Interdisciplinary Symposium Exploring Discourse, Meaning, and Power”
http://colfa.utsa.edu/english/events.html

more info here:
http://utsa.edu/academics/diversity/pdf/WHM_Schedule_of_Events_2013.pdf


Thursday, April 4, 2013
Clark University
http://allevents.in/events/Recognizing-All-Forms-of-Sexism-by-Julia-Serano/462969170450261

I will likely have a few more events in April, but they aren't formalized yet. more to come...

Hope you can make it!
-julia

++++++++++++++

here is my main website:
http://www.juliaserano.com

and I tweet fairly frequently:
http://twitter.com/#!/Juliaserano

for those interested in what I have to say when I have more than 140 characters to work with, I have a blog:
http://juliaserano.blogspot.com

I also post all my upcoming events and news on my aforementioned blog, and it also all automatically gets forwarded to my Facebook "writer" page:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Julia-Serano/277728205577201?ref=ts

so I encourage you to follow me ( and perhaps "like me") there!

FAAB-mentality

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now, as an explanation and reference for what I’ve been calling FAAB-mentality (described below). I originally wrote and performed this piece for the fourth annual installment of Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue in March 2012.

Post-note 3-8-13: I added a few clarifying notes at the end of the piece. 

Baby Talk

I read blogs. And an unfortunate consequence of reading blogs is that sometimes you stumble upon statements that make you upset. Lately, I’ve been dwelling over one single sentence from a blog post that I read a few months ago. The author was a femme-identified cis woman who described her identity this way:

“I only say I’m queer to steer clear of sex acts with cisgender men whilst simultaneously accommodating my devout lesbianism and propensity towards dating trans men when the butch pool feels too shallow.”

I have become preoccupied with this quote, not because it is unusual or extraordinary - on the contrary, these are very commonplace sentiments among queer women these days. Rather, my interest in this quote stems from how perfectly it illustrates the subtle ways in which exclusion transpires in today’s queer women’s communities.

First, she defines “queer” in terms of her “devout lesbianism” and “steering clear of cisgender men.” Given her definition, a bisexual woman (such as me), who sometimes does have sex with cis men, must automatically be *not* queer—aka, straight. Ah, the decades old lesbian tradition of erasing the B out of LGBT.

Second, she describes trans men as though they are not *really* men, but just another variety of butch woman. Indeed, trans male acceptance and desirability in queer women’s spaces often hinges on this assumption, which is partly why so many FTM-spectrum folks who are on “T,” prefer the pronoun “he,” and move through the world as men, nevertheless disavow any male-identification.

But from my perspective, the most poignant aspect of this quote is that there is absolutely no mention of trans women. We are absent, irrelevant, just as we are in most queer women’s spaces. I suppose that this isn’t surprising. If, like the author, most cis queer women believe that trans men are really butch women, then trans women must really be men. And, given this, if they believe that dating men disqualifies them from being queer, then trans women aren’t even going to be on their radar.

Lately, I’ve begun calling this mindset the FAAB-mentality. FAAB is an acronym for female-assigned-at-birth. Both FAAB and its counterpart MAAB (male-assigned-at-birth) were originally coined by trans activists in order to challenge invalidating concepts such as “birth sex,” “bio boys” and “genetic girls,” and to stress that our gender identities are far more relevant than how the straight world nonconsensually categorized us when we were babies. Yet somehow, over the last few years, FAAB has been appropriated by many cis queer women who wish to convey their affiliation with trans men, and to distance themselves trans women as well as cis men.

For instance, the musician Bitch recently wrote an “open letter” explaining why her support of trans woman-excluding women’s spaces is not “transphobic.” She begins her letter by dismissing cis/trans terminology, then she reframes the issue in terms of FAABs versus MAABs. Again, this is not an isolated incident—one can see FAAB-mentality rear its ugly head in radical-feminist blogs, butch/femme settings, and trans events. I’ve even seen queer folks wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the word FAABulous.

So let me state for the record: I am not a fucking MAAB! I am a trans woman. And unlike all the so-called “FAAB FTMs” who move freely in queer women’s spaces, I identify and move through the world as a woman. The whole fucking point of trans activism is to get people to respect us for who we are, not for what the straight world expected us to grow up to be when we were mere babies. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who categorizes any trans person based upon how we were coercively assigned at birth is not merely being anti-trans, but they are quite literally engaging in baby talk.

But FAAB-mentality isn’t only transphobic—it’s also biphobic, specifically toward bi women who are sexual with cis men. It plays into baseless accusations that bisexual-identified women “reinforce the binary,” yet celebrates those who embrace the supposedly more righteous label “pansexual.” Now I have nothing against the term “pansexual” per se. But in queer women’s circles, it is often used as a code word to communicate: “I am sexual with everyone except cis men and trans women.”

Finally, despite all the cis femmes who have embraced FAAB terminology (as it allows them to partner with trans men yet still be considered lesbian), FAAB-mentality is highly femmephobic. After all, we live in a queer culture that valorizes sexual- and gender-non-conformity. So when FAAB-mentality defines womanhood in terms of being labeled “girl” as a baby, then the most queerest, coolest thing you can grow up to be is androgynous, or butch, or trans masculine. In other words, FAAB-mentality is inexorably linked to masculine-centrism in queer women’s communities. As a result, femmes are viewed as suspect, unless of course they prove their queerness by pairing with someone more outwardly gender-non-conforming than them.

So I say: let’s stop talking in baby talk! Let’s purge the terms FAAB and MAAB from our queer vocabularies [*see clarifications below*]. And most importantly, let’s stop viewing the world through the distorted lens of FAAB-mentality, as it inevitably causes femme, bisexual and trans women to be treated as second-class queer citizens. Instead of fetishizing birth assignments and masculine gender expression, let’s create new heterogeneous queer women’s communities that celebrate difference—where a woman doesn’t have to be born a particular way, or have sex a particular way, or dress or express their genders a particular way, or fulfill some kind of queer stereotype, in order to be appreciated.

endnote: I understand the need to talk about transgender spectrums, and to develop language that accommodates trans people who don't fully identify as trans women or trans men. Rather than using MAAB and FAAB, I believe that we should refer to people who have a MTF trajectory as being on the trans female/feminine spectrum, and those with a FTM trajectory as being on the trans male/masculine spectrum. And since people seem to love acronyms when referring to trans people (a tendency I personally find rather dehumanizing), we could refer to these categories as the TF and TM spectrums, respectively (where the “F” in TF can refer to either female and/or feminine, and the “M” in TM refers can refer to either male and/or masculine). I believe that this terminology is fully inclusive, and centers our experiences on our self-identities and self-understandings, rather than non-consensual birth assignments.

another note (added 3-7-13): in response to one reader's comment (see below), I want to offer this clarification: For the record, I am not 100% against talking about sex assigned at birth - it is relevant in many instances. Indeed, that's why gender variant folks invented FAAB/MAAB terminology, so that we could talk about that aspect of our person without invalidating our current identity (whatever that might be). My main beef is with how those terms have been co-opted by cis queer women who now use them as labels to categorize people, and to impart legitimacy upon FAAB folks, and suspicion onto MAAB folks. My intention with this piece is not to censor MAAB/FAAB terminology completely, but rather to raise awareness about how these terms are regularly used to invalidate trans gender identities and expressions, as well as other queer identities (e.g., bisexual and femme).


yet another note, added 3-8-13: as I said in the previous note, I recognize that MAAB & FAAB have some usefulness, which is why gender variant communities invented that terminology in the first place. When I said we should "purge these terms from our queer vocabularies," I was specifically referring to using those acronyms as catch-all terms to describe MTF & FTM spectrum folks, respectively [and have added this note to make that clear].

I have no problems with people self-identifying as MAAB or FAAB if they feel that that's the best fit for them. But when people nonconsensually conceptualize and categorize a trans woman like myself as a "MAAB," it is no different than when pathologizing psychologists refer to me as a “transsexual man,” or when cis rad fems refer to me as a "man-born-womyn." I do not identify with my birth sex! That is the problem with using MAAB and FAAB as catch-all categories for trans folks: it centers our identities on nonconsensual acts committed against us, rather than recognizing our gender identities and expressions. And that is what cissexist forces have been trying to do to us all along.

I feel like trans female/feminine and trans male/masculine are decent attempts to rectify this problem. After all, most trans people on the MTF spectrum gravitate toward the direction of either female gender identities and/or feminine gender expression, even if we never fully identify as female or feminine. [and to clarify again, the "/" is meant to be read as "and/or."] But some commenters have nevertheless said that they don't like that terminology. I am open to entertaining other possibilities.

Once again, the main point of this piece was to critique FAAB-mentality (and how it undermines femme, bisexual and trans women in queer women's communities), rather than to critique FAAB & MAAB terminology (which I had no problems with until they were co-opted by others to dismiss trans women's and trans men's identities).

Finally, as I have said elsewhere (see Bisexuality and Binaries Revisited), I have nothing against the term pansexual, and I am fine with people who choose to self-identify that way. But I have observed a tendency in queer women's communities for queer women who partner with trans men but not cis men to use the self-descriptor pansexual, rather than bisexual (presumably because the latter is associated with women who do partner with cis men). I am not insinuating that this is true of all people who choose the label pansexual. But it is a trend I've observed.

I'll be giving a presentation tomorrow (1-15-13) at Stanford Universiy

Hey folks, for those who are (relatively) local, I will be giving a presentation at Stanford University tomorrow (Jan. 15th)! It is a variant of my "Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism" talk, with some bonus spoken word. All the details can be found at this website, and are also pasted below...

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JULIA SERANO: What we think of blue and pink! TUESDAY Jan 15, 7:30PM, BCSC Family Room
JULIA SERANO

WHAT WE THINK OF BLUE AND PINK

JANUARY 15, 2013, 7:30PM

Black Community Services Center, Family Room

Julia Serano is a writer, biologist, spoken-word poet, activist.  She has a lot to say about social conceptions of gender, and how "blue is for boys and pink is for girls" works out to affect everyone in different ways.

Her book "Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity" is a combination of history, personal experiences, biology and psychology.

This talk is meant to be accessible to everyone, whatever your background in feminism or social justice.

Please come scent-free if you can: bit.ly/bGazuI and bit.ly/KBqdhm

For access needs please contact esqg@stanford.edu

Facebook event: http://on.fb.me/11dhHOK

Sponsored by:

Stanford Students for Queer Liberation, Stanford STATIC, Stanford Feminist Studies,  Queer Straight Alliance, ASSU Speakers' Bureau, GradQ: queer grad students at Stanford, with aid from the GSC

Follow up on DSM-still-considers-trans-folks-"disordered" post

First, thanks to everyone re-tweeted, re-posted, shared links, and commented on my Trans people still “disordered” according to latest DSM blogpost yesterday. The response has been overwhelming, and I'm sorry that I haven't been able to respond to people's comments and questions...

As I alluded to in that post, I was disappointed that the DSM's Transvestic Disorder diagnosis received so little attention at the time. But this latest interest/outrage encourages me that we may be able to work toward completely removing this diagnosis from the next revision of the DSM (DSM-VI?).

There are a few things that I want to add here as a postscript:

1) several people asked me what the official language of Transvestic Disorder is. So I went to the dsm5.org (the official DSM-V site), where all the proposed language once resided, but it is no longer there. Here's the explanation they give:

Because the draft diagnostic criteria posted most recently on www.dsm5.org are undergoing revisions and are no longer current, the specific criteria text has been removed from the website to avoid confusion or use of outdated categories and definitions.

How convenient...

So I went through my past notes and found the following update from May-17-2010. Note: it could have been subsequently updated, so I am not 100% sure this is the final language. In any case, here it is:

Transvestic Disorder

A.    Over a period of at least six months, recurrent and intense sexual fantasies, 
        sexual urges, or sexual behaviors involving cross‑dressing. 

B.     The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically significant 
         distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas 
         of functioning.

Specify if:

With Fetishism (Sexually Aroused by Fabrics, Materials, or Garments)

With Autogynephilia (Sexually Aroused by Thought or Image of Self as Female)

With Autoandrophilia (Sexually Aroused by Thought or Image of Self as Male)

2) Fascinating shenanigans: This was not the initial language. As I mentioned in my last post, the initial language was specific to "heterosexual males" (cissexist psychiatry jargon for assigned-male-at-birth individuals who are sexually oriented toward women).

Those of us who fought against the initial Transvestic Disorder diagnosis did so on the grounds that it did not serve the trans community (e.g., unlike GID/Gender Dysphoria, it does not provide access to the means to legally and/or medically transition), that it pathologizes gender variance, that it sexualizes trans female/feminine spectrum people's gender identities and expressions, and that it was sexist (in that it singled out trans folks of a specific identity, trajectory and orientation).

In what seemed to be an unprecedented move (although I am not a DSM scholar), the DSM quietly expanded the language in May 2010 (after the period for comments had passed) to include trans people of all identities, orientations & trajectories. Presumably, this was done to avoid accusations that the diagnosis was sexist. So in other words, they used trans activist & advocate criticisms as an excuse to *expand* the diagnosis rather than remove or reform it.

3) Upon reading the above diagnoses, some might cite the requirement that such behaviors must "cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning" in order to argue that a trans person is not considered Transvestically Disordered if they do not experience such issues. However, this is not necessarily the case. The "distress or impairment" language is quite vague and open to the psychiatrist/therapists's interpretation. If I am fired from my job because of my manner of dress, and if this causes me distress, I could potentially be diagnosed with Transvestic Disorder. This has historically been a problem with diagnoses targeting gender and sexual minorities (as well as other populations that have been DSM'd), namely, that they do not distinguish between personal distress, and distress that arises secondarily due to social stigma and marginalization.

4) I am curious as to why all these news articles about transgender people supposedly no longer being considered "disordered" in the DSM suddenly appeared in the last few days. As I scoured the internet for such articles, I noticed that most of them were quite short, offered no critical analysis, nor did they seek comments from any trans activist and advocates who have been immersed in challenging the DSM.

This has led me to believe that the DSM must have sent out some kind of press release touting their supposed "trans-friendliness," and that several gay, queer and LGbt outlets that are largely oblivious to the nuances of trans politics simply engaged in copywriting based on the DSM press release. Granted, this is speculation on my part, but I'd love to hear what went down behind the scenes to cause this bizarre flurry of inaccurate news stories...

-julia

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further postscript added 1:15pm 12-4-12:

via a friend of a friend, I was able to access what I think may be the final Transvestic Disorder language, described as being "Updated April-28-2012":

Transvestic Disorder

A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent and intense sexual arousal from cross‑dressing, as manifested by fantasies, urges, or behaviors.

B. The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause marked distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. 

Specify if:

With Fetishism (Sexually Aroused by Fabrics, Materials, or Garments)

With Autogynephilia (Sexually Aroused by Thought or Image of Self as Female)

With Autoandrophilia (Sexually Aroused by Thought or Image of Self as Male)

Specify if:

In a Controlled Environment

In Remission (No Distress, Impairment, or Recurring Behavior for Five Years and in an Uncontrolled Environment) 

So this is mostly the same except for some word rearrangement in part A, and in the addition "Controlled Environment" and "In Remission" as specifications. This latter language is new to me, so I haven't had a chance to digest it yet. But the thing that immediately jumps out at me is the "In Remission" clause. This seems to expand the diagnosis even further. After all, regardless of one's current sexuality and/or manner of dress, one could still be considered as being Transvestically Disordered, albeit in remission...

Trans people still “disordered” according to latest DSM

This morning, I woke up and found my Twitter feed full of article links celebrating that transgender people are no longer “disordered” according to the DSM (that is, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - often referred to as the "psychiatric Bible" because it contains all of the official psychiatric diagnoses). The DSM gets revised every 10-20 years or so, and diagnoses sometimes get modified, expanded, or completely removed. The change that people are now celebrating is the fact that the previous diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) has now been changed to Gender Dysphoria.

Admittedly, the new Gender Dysphoria diagnosis is an improvement over GID for a number of reasons - Kelly Winter of GIDreform.org describes some of these improvements, as well as many of the lingering problems with the new diagnosis. Despite the remaining drawbacks (for instance, that gender variance is still formally pathologized in the DSM), many people seem excited that transgender people are no longer described as being "disordered" in the DSM. But the problem is that this is patently untrue.

When the new DSM committee was chosen back in 2008, all the focus was on what the new committee (chaired by the notorious Ken Zucker) would do with GID. This is understandable, given that this is the diagnosis that trans people are required to submit to if they with to access the means to legally and/or physically transition. It has also been used to justify horrible reparative therapies against gender-non-conforming children. But the greater trans community gave short shrift to the other existing DSM diagnosis that affected transgender people: Transvestic Fetishism.

I was especially horrified when Ray Blanchard was named to head the DSM "Paraphilia" section, which historically contains several sexual crimes (e.g., pedophilia, frotteurism and exhibitionism) and a handful of other generally consensual but unnecessarily stigmatized sexual acts (such as fetishism and BDSM) that are considered “atypical” by sex researchers - including Transvestic Fetishism.

I sometimes joke that Ray Blanchard is my arch nemesis (after all, every trans narrative needs a good arch nemesis!). Much of his career has been spent psychiatrically sexualizing trans female/feminine-spectrum people, most notably via his theory of "autogynephilia." I won't go into all the details here, as I have written about Ray Blanchard's theories extensively elsewhere.

Being familiar with his work, I was worried that Blanchard might try to expand the Transvestic Fetishism diagnosis. He did not disappoint. As I outlined in my 2009 article "Why feminists should be concerned with the impending revision of the DSM," Blanchard sought to both expand the DSM definition of "Paraphilia," as well as expand the previous Transvestic Fetishism diagnosis, which he renamed "Transvestic Disorder." As I pointed out in my keynote for the Philly Trans Health Conference that year:

Ray Blanchard has been named to chair the Paraphilia subworkgroup for the DSM-V, and he has proposed changing the Transvestic Fetishism diagnosis to Transvestic Disorder with one of two modifiers: with Fetishism, or with Autogynephilia. While the diagnosis supposedly targets “heterosexual males” who crossdress, the psychological literature regarding autogynephilia (the bulk of it written by Blanchard) repeatedly claims that lesbian, bisexual and asexual trans women are really just heterosexual men with a fantasy problem. Therefore, according to Blanchard’s proposal, a queer-identified trans woman (such as myself) could theoretically be diagnosed as having "Transvestic Disorder" any time that I have any kind of sexual urge while wearing women's clothing. Since I wear women's clothing pretty much every day of my life these days, my sexuality would presumably be considered perpetually transvestically disordered according to this diagnosis.

I tried at great length to raise awareness of the Transvestic Disorder diagnosis when it was first proposed. So did a few other trans activists and advocates, most notably Kelly Winters. But for the most part, the trans community ignored the proposed diagnosis, probably because (in its original form) it was not applicable to trans male/masculine folks nor heterosexual-identified trans women. Personally, I stopped writing about it because I felt like the community was simply not concerned.

And then, when no one was looking, in mid-2010, Blanchard and the DSM committee expanded it even further, so that it now includes trans people of all identities, trajectories and sexual orientations. As it is written now, Transvestic Disorder can be applied to any person who is sexually active while wearing clothing incongruent with their birth-assigned sex. It also canonizes the term "autoandrophilia" as a sexualizing diagnosis that can be applied to trans male/masculine folks. And while GID/Gender Dysphoria are pathologizing, Transvestic Disorder is both pathologizing and sexualizing. And when you sexualize someone, you invalidate them!

So please don't say that transgender people are no longer considered "disordered" according to the latest DSM. It is simply not true.

post-note: here is a speech I wrote for the trans protest of the 2009 American Psychiatric Association (who write the DSM) called "Stop Sexualizing Us"