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
In 2010, two review articles appeared in the peer-review literature: My article The Case Against Autogynephilia was published in The International Journal of Transgenderism, and Charles Moser's article Blanchard's Autogynephilia Theory: A Critique appeared in the Journal of Homosexuality. Both of our papers presented numerous lines of evidence
that disprove the main underpinnings of autogynephilia theory, namely, the
assertions that trans female/feminine-spectrum people can be readily divided
into two clear-cut categories based upon sexual orientation and the presence or
absence of “autogynephilia,” and that “autogynephilia” is the primary
underlying cause of gender dysphoria and desire to transition in trans women
who experience it. (Note: subsequent analyses by Talia Bettcher and Jaimie Veale have further demonstrated that autogynephilia theory is incorrect.)
Where our papers differ is that, while Moser continues to use
the term “autogynephilia” to refer to sexual fantasies and patterns of arousal in
which the “thought or image of oneself as a woman” plays a contributing role, I
instead argue that we should no longer use this term for the following reasons:
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.
an introduction added September, 2015: This post started out as “Alice Dreger and making the evidence fit your thesis” (which can be found in its original form below). Dreger’s
new book Galileo’s Middle Finger had
just come out, and it contained her critical portrayal of the backlash against J.
Michael Bailey’s trans-misogynistic book The Man Who Would Be Queen. Most people outside of certain transgender
and/or sexology circles are probably unaware that this particular part of Dreger’s
book first appeared in 2009 as an article in a research journal along with
numerous peer commentaries—one of which was written by me, and most of
which criticized Dreger for being highly selective with the evidence she
presented and/or for blatantly misrepresenting trans activists’ concerns and
motives in the process. So I initially penned this post to inform potential
readers about those past critical reviews of Dreger’s depiction of this particular
matter.
And I thought that would be it. I had no reason to believe
that she had any kind of vendetta against transgender people or trans activism
per se (although some trans activists certainly did think this). Frankly, my
impression at the time was that she had a story that she wanted to tell about
“activism gone awry and constituting a threat to scientific freedom,” and that her
narrative would be easiest to sell if she played down the trans community’s
legitimate concerns and played up a handful of incidents that seemed to bolster
her case.
But now I believe that I was wrong. Not about Dreger’s
disingenuous portrayal of the backlash against Bailey’s book—I stand by that
assessment. Rather, now I do think that she has a vendetta against transgender
activism, as she has since penned a series of articles wherein she repeatedly
1) criticizes ideas and policies that are forwarded by, and generally accepted
amongst, transgender activists, 2) presents selective and/or distorted evidence
(usually via “straw men” and false dichotomies) to bolster her argument, 3) points
to instances where some trans activists have supposedly “gone too far” (in her
mind, at least) in order to paint us as unreasonable and/or extremist, 4)
ignores all reasonable and knowledgeable trans activists and advocates whose
view points would illustrate that the topic is way more nuanced and complicated
than she is presenting it, and 5) inevitably drops in a few comments to make it
seem like she is “trans-positive,” or an “ally” or “advocate” of the trans
community, when in reality the only trans people she seems to respect are those
who buy into psychopathologizing theories about trans identities and sexualities.
As many of you may know, over the years I have written a lot about Ray Blanchard's theory of autogynephilia, which wrongly argues that trans women are sexually-motivated in our transitions - I debunked the theory in the article provided in the link, and further discuss how it sexualizes and invalidates trans women here. I am currently working on a piece that (in part) compiles instances where people outside of science/psychology cite "autogynephilia" in their efforts to sensationalize trans people or to promote anti-transgender agendas and policies. I have a few examples of this in hand - most notably, from Sheila Jeffreys's recent book, one from an anti-trans Catholic organization, that horrible Rolling Stone article about Lana Wachowski published before she came out as trans, and of course, last year's New Yorker article in which Michelle Goldberg used the theory to slut-shame me. I have seen many more examples than this, but I have found them to be especially difficult to track down online, as the bajillion webpages and posts discussing and debating the theory itself overwhelm any and all search engine queries I have attempted. So that's where you come in (hopefully!). Perhaps you know of articles, news items, or stories along this line? If so, please pass along a link, a description, or a few key words so that I can search for it myself. You can do so by: 1) leaving a comment below 2) Tweet it to me @juliaserano 3) email it to me - my address can be found here: http://www.juliaserano.com/contact.html Thanks in advance! -julia
I usually don’t publicly respond to critiques of my
writings. People inevitably interpret (or misinterpret) things that I have
written in all sorts of ways, and I usually just strive to articulate my ideas
better the next time around. However, in the last two weeks, I have stumbled
across numerous instances where people have accused me of claiming that two-spirit
and other indigenous non-binary-identified people “reinforce the gender
binary.” This notion so goes against everything that I believe and have written
in the past that I feel compelled to address the matter here.
In Excluded, I argue
that instead of focusing on only one or a few forms of sexism and
marginalization, we should acknowledge that there are myriad double standards out there. And given this, it is crucial for us to more generally recognize and
challenge double standards whenever and wherever they occur.
To be honest, I think that we as activists tend not to be
very good at doing this—it is a main reason why people who are quite familiar
with one particular form of marginalization (typically one that they are
personally impacted by) will nevertheless continue to single out and invalidate
other groups of people, often using the exact same tactics that they abhor when
used against members of their own group. In other words, a failure to recognize
and understand how double standards function in a general sense is what enables
various forms of exclusion to run rampant within our movements. It is also what
enables numerous forms of sexism and marginalization to proliferate in society
at large.
I discuss this issue over the course of Excluded, but I address it head on in Chapter 14: “How Double
Standards Work”—it is one of the pieces of writing that I am most proud of.
Last week, I encountered quite a number of posts & tweets in which people shared their favorite transgender music artists and trans-themed songs. I later discovered that these posts were initially inspired by an article in Bustle that featured videos of trans anthems by trans artists (e.g., Laura Jane Grace, Namoli Brennet, and Mina Caputo) in response a recent trans-themed song by Kate Pierson. Subsequently, The Advocate published a post called 37 Alternative 'Trans Anthems' by Trans Musicians featuring additional trans-themed songs/music videos by trans artists - definitely check all those wonderful songs out!
Since I have recently returned to making music, and since many people who know me primarily as a trans author & activist are not aware that I started out as a musician/songwriter, I figured that I would take this opportunity to compile some of my own trans-themed anthems to share with the world. So here we go:
My current music project is a solo lo-fi indie-pop endeavor called *soft vowel sounds*. I recently released my first record, and it contains two trans-themed anthems:
The title track Ray is my take on/parody of The Kinks' song "Lola." The video is admittedly not especially video-ish, as I wanted to highlight the lyrics of the song:
The record also includes the song Open Letter, which I wrote shortly after I came out to my family as trans back in 2002. My previous band Bitesize used to regularly perform the song, although we never formally recorded it.
During 1997-2009, I was the guitarist, vocalist, and primary songwriter for the noise-pop indie-rock band Bitesize. We had a number of trans-themed songs & anthems - here are the ones that we recorded:
Understudy is my very favorite Bitesize song. It is about a transgender teenage thespian who gets to play the role of Ophelia in a Catholic boys school production of Hamlet.
Switch Hitter is an embellished story about how I first decided to change my sex at my little league’s all-star game.
Surprise Ending is about a trans woman who accidentally runs into the bully who picked on her as a child.
Finally, one of the first songs that I wrote for Bitesize was I Forgot My Mantra, a coy and flippant anthem that is mostly about me being a crossdresser (how I identified at the time). The chorus is the single line: "I'm a hermaphrodite, but that's beside the point." (For the record, I was not trying to claim an intersex identity with that line - I’m not sure I even knew what intersex was back then. I was just trying to express that I saw myself as harboring some combination of maleness/masculinity and femaleness/femininity within me.)
Anyway, happy listening! And if you like what you hear, you can sign up for my *soft vowel sounds* email list to stay posted about my future music and shows. . .
[note: If you appreciate my writing & music and want to see more of it, please check out my Patreon page]
When my first book Whipping Girl was published in 2007, it was (to the best of my knowledge) the first print publication to include the terms cisgender, cissexual, cissexism, and cisgenderism.* I did not invent these terms - they had been coined and used by trans activists before me, albeit rarely and sporadically. And in the years since, as these terms have increasingly caught on, I find that people sometimes use them in rather different, or even outright disparate, ways.
So for those interested in the history and evolution of cis terminology, I have subsequently written three (freely available!) blog posts that explain various aspects of, and differing perspectives on, these terms. They are as follows:
the specific way in which I used the terms cis, cisgender, cissexual, cissexism, and cisgenderism in Whipping Girl
a discussion of how these same terms are often used in a rather different manner today
how ambiguity regarding the terms "cis" and "cisgender" often erases the experiences of non-transsexual transgender-spectrum people
my proposal of an alternative (albeit not mutually-exclusive) "three-tiered" model for considering gender-non-conformity and social legitimacy - one that may better account for the gender-based marginalization experienced by those who fall under the cisgender umbrella and/or who do not fit neatly into the cis/trans distinction.
Marginalized populations often have different perspectives on, and take different approaches toward, articulating the obstacles they face. Two especially common activist approaches are “decentering the binary” and “reverse discourse” strategies. In this essay, I discuss the logic behind these differing approaches to activism, and explain why they tend to result in very different understandings of cissexism and the cis/trans distinction. In fact, some of the most common complaints about cis terminology are actually critiques of "reverse discourse" approaches to activism. Rather than outright championing one approach over the other, I encourage activists to familiarize themselves with the pros and cons of each strategy in order to use them in the most judicious and effective way possible.
So earlier today, I sent out my latest email update (btw, you can sign up for my email list here). It offers links to some of my more recent writings, an interview, plus two speaking events coming up this week in St. Louis & San Francisco.
I also describe two music videos I recently created for my new solo music project *soft vowel sounds*. Since I couldn't embed them in my email, I will do so here:
Music Box is the first song on the record. It is about being a third wheel and it appropriately takes place inside of a vehicle:
Ray is my parody of The Kinks' song "Lola". The video is admittedly not especially video-ish, as I wanted to highlight the lyrics of the song:
and speaking of music, on Tuesday December 2nd, I will be performing a couple of songs for the Bad Dyke Book Release + Bawdy Storytelling, featuring Allison Moon, Dixie De La Tour and other storytellers TBA. At Awaken Cafe (1429 Broadway, Oakland), Doors at 7, Show at 8, Tickets $15 (available for purchase here). More show details can be found here.
[note added November, 2016: This essay now appears as a chapter in my third book Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism] For the record: this
essay is intended to clarify misconceptions about, and to encourage more
thoughtful usage of, cis terminology. Anyone who references this piece in their
attempts to deny or eliminate use of the term "cis" (and its
variants) is clearly misinterpreting or misrepresenting my views.
In the first essay of this two-part series, I
discussed how the way in which cis terminology is often used today can
sometimes invisibilize certain forms of gender-based oppression, and
potentially exclude people who exist at the margins of the transgender umbrella
(i.e., people who don’t fit quite so neatly into a cis/trans binary). In this
essay, I want to talk about the different ways in which a cis/trans distinction
may be employed, as this can greatly shape the nature and ultimate goals of
trans activism.
“Decentering the
binary” versus “reverse discourse” approaches
One of the more commonly heard complaints about cis
terminology is that it supposedly “creates a new binary” (i.e., trans versus cis).
I strongly disagree with this argument. After all, people already make a distinction
between non-transsexuals and transsexuals, and between gender-conforming and
gender-non-conforming individuals. So the cissexual/transsexual and
cisgender/transgender binaries already exist in people’s minds. It’s just that
now we (trans activists) have explicitly named the unmarked majority as “cis.”
[note added January, 2017: This essay now appears as a chapter in my third book Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism] For the record: this essay is intended to clarify misconceptions about, and to encourage more thoughtful usage of, cis terminology. Anyone who references this piece in their attempts to deny or eliminate use of the term "cis" (and its variants) is clearly misinterpreting or misrepresenting my views.
My first book Whipping Girl helped to popularize cis terminology—that is, language that uses the prefix
“cis” to name the unmarked dominant majority (i.e., people who are not trans)
in order to better articulate the ways in which trans people are marginalized
in society. In 2009, I wrote a blog post called Whipping Girl FAQ on cissexual, cisgender, and cis privilege that explained my reasoning in forwarding cis terminology and addressed some of
the more common arguments made against such language. That blog post ended with
a section discussing some of the limitations of cis terminology and the concept
of cis privilege—a topic that I will revisit in this two-part series.
Over the years, I have observed that many people now use cis
terminology in a manner that is somewhat different from how I attempted to use
it in Whipping Girl, thus leading to
potential ambiguity—I will address such matters in this first essay. In the
last section of this essay, I will suggest another possible model for describing
how people are differentially viewed and treated with regards to gender
non-conformity, and which may (in some cases) provide a more effective
framework than a cisgender/transgender dichotomy.
So a new academic year has begun, and as always, I am looking forward to having the opportunity to speak/perform at various colleges & universities this year!
If you are affiliated with a college - especially if you belong to a trans*, LGBTQIA+, women's, and/or feminist-related organization - please consider bringing me out to your campus. And even if you aren't associated with a college yourself, feel free to forward this onto people that you know who may be students or staff elsewhere.
For those interested parties, I have a recently updated booking webpage containing pertinent information, including short descriptions of some of my most frequently requested talks.
So today’s excerpt comes from the Excluded chapter “Reclaiming Femininity.”
This chapter of the book started out as my keynote talk for the Femme 2008
Conference. And this final passage of the piece is meant to challenge certain
notions about “femme” that sometimes proliferate within queer circles.
If
there is one thing that all of us femmes have in common, it is that we all have
had to learn to embrace our own feminine expression while simultaneously
rejecting other people’s expectations of us. What makes femininity “femme” is
not the fact that it is queer, or transgressive, or ironic, or performative, or
the complement of butch. No. What makes our femininity “femme” is the fact that
we do it for ourselves. It is for that reason that it is so empowering. And
that is what makes us so powerful.
As
femmes, we can do one of two things with our power: We can celebrate it in
secret within our own insular queer communities, pat ourselves on the back for
being so much smarter and more subversive than our straight feminine sisters.
Or we can share that power with them. We can teach them that there is more than
one way to be feminine, and that no style or expression of femininity is
necessarily any better than anyone else’s. We can teach them that the only
thing fucked up about femininity is the dismissive connotations that other
people project onto it. But in order to that, we have to give up the
self-comfort of believing that our rendition of femme is more righteous, or
more cool, or more subversive than anyone else’s.
I
don’t think that my femme expression, or anyone else’s femme expressions, are
in and of themselves subversive. But I do believe that the ideas that femmes
have been forwarding for decades—about reclaiming femininity, about each person
taking the parts of femininity that resonate with them and leaving behind the
rest, about being femme for ourselves rather than for other people, about the
ways in which feminine expression can be tough and active and bad-ass and so
on—these ideas are powerful and transformative.
I
think that it’s great to celebrate femme within our own queer communities, but
we shouldn’t merely stop there. We need to share with the rest of the world the
idea of self-determined and self-empowered feminine expression, and the idea
that feminine expression is just as legitimate and powerful as masculine expression.
The idea that femininity is inferior and subservient to masculinity intersects
with all forms of oppression, and is (I feel) the single most overlooked issue
in feminism. We need to change that, not only for those of us who are queer
femmes, but for our straight cis sisters who have been disempowered by
society’s unrealistic feminine ideals, for our gender-variant and gender-non-conforming
siblings who face disdain for defying feminine expectations and/or who are
victims of trans-misogyny, and also for our straight cis brothers, who’ve been
socialized to avoid femininity like the plague, and whose misogyny, homophobia,
transphobia, and so on, are driven primarily by their fear of being seen as
feminine. While I don’t think that my femme expression is subversive, I do
believe that we together as femmes have the power to truly change the world.
More excerpts to come! And you can find out more about
the book (including reviews, interviews, and more excerpts) at my Excluded webpage.
[note: If you appreciate this essay and want to see more like it, please check out my Patreon page]
(note: this piece originally appeared in Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond
Transgender and Gender Studies, ed. Anne Enke, Temple University Press,
2012).
So today’s excerpt comes
from the first full chapter in the book, called “On the Outside Looking In.” It
is about my experience at Camp Trans in 2003, back during a time when most
queer/trans spaces (including that space) tended to be dominated by trans
male/masculine folks and cis queer women (this is still sometimes true today, albeit
less so than it used to be). The excerpt is from the very end of the piece, and
takes place at the end of an emotional and often tumultuous week (for me
personally, at least), and immediately after a Camp Trans performance event in
which I performed my spoken word piece Cocky.
And
after releasing all of this pent-up tension and frustration, I had one of those
rare moments of clarity. It happened just after my performance, when one of my
new friends, Lauren, came over to give me a hug. She said, “Your piece made me
proud to be a trans woman.” And her words were so moving because I had never
heard them spoken before. “Proud to be a trans woman.” And as I looked around
the camp at all of the female-assigned queer women and folks on the FTM
spectrum, I realized that in some ways I am very different from them—not
because of my biology or socialization, but because of the direction of my
transition and the perspective it has given me.
I
am a transsexual in a dyke community where most women have not had to fight for
their right to be recognized as female—it is merely something they’ve taken for
granted. And I am a woman in a segment of the trans community dominated by
folks on the FTM spectrum who have never experienced the special social stigma
that is reserved for feminine transgender expression and for those who
transition to female. My experiences as a trans woman have given me a valid and
unique understanding of what it means to be both female and feminine—a
perspective that many women here at Michigan seem unable or unwilling to comprehend.
At
Camp Trans, I learned to be proud that I am a trans woman. And when I describe
myself with the word “trans,” it does not necessarily signify that I transgress
the gender binary, but that I straddle two identities—transsexual and
woman—that others insist are in opposition to each other. And I will continue
to work for trans woman–inclusion at Michigan, because this is my dyke
community too. And I know that it will not be easy, and plenty of people will
try to make me feel like an alien in my own community. But I will take on their
prejudices with my own unique perspective because sometimes you see things more
clearly when you’ve been made to feel like you are on the outside looking in.
(note: this chapter was originally written to be a spoken word piece, and video excerpts of my performance of it in 2005 (which includes the above passage) can be found here)
More excerpts to come! And you can find out more about
the book (including reviews, interviews, and more excerpts) at my Excluded webpage.
[note: If you appreciate my work and want to see more of it, please check out my Patreon page]
I figured that it would be
best to begin with an excerpt (from Chapter 12) that explains what drove me to write the book:
As
countless writers and activists have chronicled, and as my own essays in the
previous section of this book attest to, exclusion is a recurring problem in
feminist and queer movements, organizations, and spaces. Whether unconscious or
overt, exclusion always leads to the same end result: Many individuals who wish
to participate are left behind, and the few who remain often bask in the
misconception that they are part of a unified, righteous movement. To put it
another way, exclusion inevitably leads to far smaller movements with far more
narrow and distorted agendas.
Those
of us who face exclusion within feminism or queer activism will often focus our
efforts on challenging the specific isms that we believe are driving our
exclusion. In my case, this has led me to spend much of the last decade
critiquing cissexism, trans-misogyny, masculine-centrism, and monosexism within
the queer and feminist spaces I have participated in. Others have focused their
efforts on challenging heterosexism, racism, classism, ableism, ageism, and
sizeism within these movements. All of this is important work, to be sure. But
honestly, sometimes I feel like we are all playing one giant game of
Whac-A-Mole—as soon as we make gains challenging a particular type of
exclusion, another type arises or becomes apparent. So while we may make
significant inroads in challenging certain isms, as a whole, the phenomenon of
exclusion continues unabated.
So next month will be the
one-year anniversary of my book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive being released, and I will be celebrating by posting small excerpts of some of my favorite paragraphs and passages from the
book on my blog over the course of September.
One of the passages I was
planning to quote is very germane to the latest round of TERF debates,
so I am posting it today instead.
Radical feminists who are opposed to
trans people repeatedly offer this justification: They are trying to bring on
the “end of gender” whereas trans people “reinforce gender.” Throughout Excluded, I eviscerate the “reinforcing trope” and how it is arbitrarily used as a tool within activism to exclude minorities/marginalized
subpopulations within movements (including lesbians in the early days of
radical feminism).
And in the following passage
from the book, I point out how ridiculously vague and arbitrary such “end of
gender” claims really are.
Three days ago, my formal response to Goldberg’s article was published
as an op-ed on The Advocate. It is
entitled “An Open Letter to The New Yorker.” Rather than merely listing all my grievances with Goldberg’s piece (many of
which have been addressed in the critical reviews listed above, and a few more
will be described in this post), I talk more generally about what it was like
for me (behind the scenes, if you will) to be a long-time activist within a
marginalized community, and to have a mainstream journalist swoop in and cover
really complicated issues, only to oversimplify and misrepresent them in a
manner that mainstream audiences will find “titillating” and misperceive as “balanced.”
1) I have a new article out on Ms. Magazine blog today called Empowering Femininity, wherein I revisit some of the ideas I initially forwarded in the chapter of Whipping Girl called "Putting the Feminine Back into Feminism." Check it out!
2) Some of you may be aware of a New Yorker article by Michelle Goldberg that came out today entitled "What Is a Woman? The dispute between radical feminism and transgenderism." It is basically about how Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminists (TERFs) are increasingly becoming marginalized within feminism, and it is mostly written from their perspective (e.g., about ways in which they have been personally attacked or "censored" by trans activists). Let's just say that it is not the piece that I would have written on the matter.
I do not have the time or energy to write a formal response to the entire piece, but since I am one of the few trans voices included in the article, I feel compelled to make a few points "for the record" as it were:
