trans women are women! plus free book chapters & a NY Times interview

Yesterday I sent out my latest email update - you can read it via the link and/or sign up for my email list here. Here are some of the highlights:

I was interviewed in the New York Times as part of their Pride 2017 coverage - the article is called Julia Serano, Transfeminist Thinker, Talks Trans-Misogyny. You can read it via that link; if it's behind a paywall, here is a PDF version.

I wrote a new Medium essay called Debunking “Trans Women Are Not Women” Arguments. If you like the piece, please click the "heart" icon at the bottom of the article - that way more people on Medium will see it!

I recently made three chapters from my latest book Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism freely available for download - all of them challenge psychological theories and diagnoses that needlessly pathologize transgender people (which is why I wanted to make them readily accessible). Find out how to download them (btw, the linked post also includes excerpts from my novel-in-progress).

I am able to make these book chapters and the Debunking “Trans Women Are Not Women” Arguments piece freely available thanks to my Patreon supporters. If you support me there (for as little as $1 per month) you'll have access to behind-the-scenes updates & polls, and unpublished writings & recordings. If you pledge at higher levels, you may be eligible for rewards such as free e-books, signed copies of any of my previous books, and/or choosing the topic of a future blogpost. So if you appreciate my work, please consider supporting me there!

first Outspoken review! (and future excerpts, reviews, and interviews)

As you may (or may not) know, at the end of 2016, I released my third book, Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism. It's a collection of forty-eight chapters spanning the last decade-plus, including my early slam poems and spoken word, essays and manifestos written contemporaneously with my previous books Whipping Girl and Excluded, plus my recent writings addressing differences within trans communities and activism.

I self-published Outspoken (on my own imprint Switch Hitter Press) and (for personal reasons) I haven't been able to do much promotion for the book until now. In the coming weeks, I plan to publish numerous excerpts from the book, and I've already started uploading YouTube videos for some of the slam poems that appear in the book! (More will be released later this week...)

If you are a writer and/or run some sort of zine, podcast, website, etc., and are interested in potentially reviewing the book and/or interviewing me about it, feel free contact me and I can try to get you a copy!

So about that whole Jenner thing

note added 5/2/15: a few days after posting this, I wrote an op-ed for the The Guardian (US edition) about the Bruce Jenner-Diane Sawyer interview.

I had no intentions of writing this. Celebrities come out as trans once every year or two or three. For me, it's like a comet, or perhaps Mercury retrograde. It always keeps happening. I've lived through numerous permutations of this before. For me, this is history repeating itself, albeit somewhat differently each time.

I haven't even watched Jenner's interview with Diane Sawyer yet. I DVR'd it. On purpose. It is a buffer. The media often screws things up, so I wanted to hear about how it went before watching it. So I could prepare myself, just in case. Because it's hard to watch a newly out trans person answer a barrage of intrusive questions about their gender and identity, when you've personally been a newly out trans person who had to endure a very similar (albeit not publicly broadcasted) barrage of similar questions regarding your own gender and identity.

julia update - Excluded BOOK TOUR starts now, plus excerpts, reviews & interviews

note: this is my monthly email update for October, 2013 - to get these updates emailed directly to you, you can sign up for my email list here.

julia update october 2013

in this update:
1) Julia's Excluded book reading tour is afoot!
2) Excluded-related reviews and interviews
3) recent essays

Myriad Double Standards

So last week, my new book, Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, was reviewed in Publisher's Weekly - you can read the review here. It is generally positive and I am pretty happy with it! However, there is one line in the review that I feel misconstrues what I was trying to say in the book. Namely, the reviewer describes my supposed ‘denial of the existence of a “gender system”’ and how it ‘flies in the face of much social research.’

I could imagine that people who read that review without having read the whole book might presume that I am denying that gender norms, assumptions, stereotypes, etc., often work together in a coordinated way to legitimize certain people but not others. Or that I am denying that gender-based oppression is institutionalized and entrenched in our culture. I can assure you that I do not deny any of these things.

Two new articles about trans women in queer women's communities

So in the last two days, two articles have come out about how trans women are often excluded from, or made to feel unwelcome within, lesbian and queer women's communities.

The dyke-oriented magazine/website Velvetpark just published my piece "How to Be an Ally to Trans Women." It is an excerpt from my new book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, which officially comes out October 1st, but may appear in stores as early as mid-September, so keep an eye out for it!

The other article appears in the Huffington Post, and is called "Are Queer Women Leaving Trans Women Behind?" Several trans women are interviewed in it, including myself.

Some much needed attention for an issue that is often overlooked or ignored... -j.

Link week!

OK, so after spending 2 weeks ago blogging about, and replying to, my whole "transsexual vs transsexual" intervention, and taking last week to recuperate from all that, I figured that this week I would ease back into blogging by sharing a bunch of links related to my writing, performance and activism.

I will start today by sharing this link to an interview with me that appeared Friday on Persephone Magazine.

more to come tomorrow... -j.

BAR piece on Zucker, Blanchard & DSM workgroup

originally posted on LJ 6-1-08

So I'm sure that most of the folks who check out my blog are aware of the recent appointments of Ken Zucker & Ray Blanchard (among others) to the DSM working group that will hash out new gender/sexuality related "mental disorders" for the DSM. I have written at great length about some of the major problems with Blanchard's views of trans women and others on the trans feminine spectrum. Needless to say, I was not happy with their appointments.

An article recently came out in the Bay Area Reporter on the issue (full disclaimer: I am quoted in it) which went into great detail about the obstacles these appointments pose for trans activists. It also discussed some of the more over-the-top reactions it generated within the trans community, which included fears that the APA would put homosexuality back into the DSM or that Ken Zucker would advocate reparative therapy for young trans children in it (the DSM doesn't include therapies, only diagnoses).