Anger

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 16 of 447 · 20 per page

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  The same criticism can be applied to the gatekeepers who complained or commented on trans women’s “exaggeration” of their femininity without ever considering that their own criteria virtually required trans women to maintain a hyperfeminine appearance in order to gain access to the means of transitioning. In 1969, Money (and coauthors) discussed the results of tests they had administered to transsexuals to measure their feminine and masculine tendencies. 47 The authors praised trans men for giving answers that were “masculine,” but not any more “masculine” than those of the average cissexual man. At no time did the authors consider the possibility that the trans men’s unexaggerated masculine responses were made possible by the fact that most gatekeepers, being male themselves, understood that there was more than one way to be a man. In contrast, trans women were derided for having scores that were higher on the feminine range than that of the average woman. Yet trans women were required to act more feminine than the average woman in order to be taken seriously as transsexuals. Evidence to support the idea that trans women’s hyperfeminine test scores were merely an attempt to appease the traditionally sexist biases of the gatekeepers can be found in Anne Bolin’s 1988 work In Search of Eve. When Bolin—who is not a gatekeeper and whose interactions with trans women occurred entirely outside of a clinical setting—administered a similar test, she found that trans women’s scores were a lot more varied and closer to the norm of cissexual women. She commented, “The importance of fulfilling caretaker expectations ... may be the single most important factor responsible for the prevalent medicalmental health conceptions of transsexualism.” 48 This, of course, is the major problem with most medical, psychiatric, and sexological research into transgenderism. While generally presented under the guise of objective science, the body of research compiled by the gatekeepers has been so undermined by their own biases that their results are nothing more than a research artifact. The gatekeepers consistently claimed that transsexuality was a “rare” phenomenon without acknowledging that they themselves played an active role in restricting the number of trans people who would be allowed to transition; they believed that crossdressing and transsexuality primarily “afflicted” those assigned a male sex at birth without realizing that their own effemimania rendered FTM spectrum individuals invisible.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Of course, attempts to focus on male desire when considering MTF transsexuality are undermined by the fact that many trans women are either lesbian or bisexual. This inconsistency is often downplayed in the media, which tends to either make trans women who have female partners invisible or asexualize them. For example, the media may depict their relationships as entirely platonic, or holdovers from a marriage that has ceased being heterosexual. Indeed, as a dyke-identified trans woman, the most common question I’m asked when I do trans outreach presentations is, “Why did you change your sex if you are attracted to women?” Essentially, what these people are asking me is why on earth would I choose to be a woman if not to attract and appease the desires of heterosexual men? Similar questions surround the existence of trans women who choose not to undergo bottom surgery or who are not interested in cultivating a highly feminine image. In all of these cases, public confusion stems from the implicit assumption that we transition in order to become the objects of heterosexual male desire. If people were to assume instead that we transition primarily for ourselves (as is indeed the case), then it would become easy to understand why some trans women might not want to put on makeup, dresses, and heels every day, or why they would choose not to undergo an expensive form of genital surgery that could potentially result in a loss of sensation or other medical complications. The popular assumption that trans women deliberately transform ourselves into sexual objects also explains why we are so frequently depicted in the media as sex workers. 3 The fact that trans female sex workers have reached the status of “stock characters” is of particular interest, as such depictions are at complete odds with other cissexual presumptions about transsexuality. Media representations of trans people that do not involve sex work typically go out of their way to stress the fact that transsexuality is an extraordinarily rare phenomenon, and to promote the idea that transsexuals are sexually undesirable. So it is unclear why, being as rare and undesirable as we supposedly are, we seem to make up such a significant percentage of sex workers on TV and in the movies. This inconsistency implicitly suggests that trans women must somehow specifically seek out jobs as sex workers, presumably because we so desperately wish to be sexually objectified by men. In fact, many trans women are sex workers, but generally not because they wish to be sexual objects. Like their cissexual counterparts, many trans women turn to such work because few other viable economic options are available to them. For example, in San Francisco, perhaps the most trans-friendly city in the nation, approximately 75 percent of transgender people cannot find full-time work, 57 percent have experienced employment discrimination on the job, and 96 percent live below the city’s median income.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  There is nothing that can make you feel more depleted and deflated, emptied and flattened out and alone than sitting in a waiting room teeming with beautiful women literally bursting with life, who are being attended to by doting husbands. I stare at them openly, willing them to measure their abundance and plentitude against my brittle heart and hollow womb. My God, am I angry! I recognize the feeling of emptiness, and it’s not new, as my years of birthing are well behind me, but now that not just birthing but also marriage is behind me, I’m furious and resentful. Why should you get the golden ring , I wonder, and you and you and you , as I look from one woman to the next, when I lost mine? The doctor bustles into the room where I am sitting on an exam table wrapped in a pale yellow robe. Without taking her eyes off the chart she’s reading, she asks me how I am. “I’m fine,” I say sharply. She looks up at me then and asks if anything in my health has changed that she should know about. “Well, yes actually, quite a bit has changed. My husband and I separated and I’ve been dating a lot and sleeping with a lot of men. So that’s new.” She puts the chart on the counter and sits down on her rolling stool, eyeing me and asking how long I was married. She contemplates my answer and then asks, “How does a marriage just end after that many years together? My friends and I were talking about this recently, trying to figure out how one extricates oneself after so much time together.” “Oh it’s easy, you cheat on your spouse and reveal that you were never who your spouse thought you were to begin with,” I say matter-of-factly. Her eyes widen and she says, “I would kill him.” “Maybe. It’s hard to predict what you would do until it happens to you. I don’t want to kill him, I just want him to disappear forever. It’s not for the weak, sustaining this,” I say shrugging, my voice tight. “OK, and tell me what you’ve been up to. You’re having sex, are you using condoms?” she asks. “Yes, for the most part. I’m not going to lie and tell you I’ve used a condom every time, and now that I’m exclusive with one man, we aren’t using condoms.” She jots down notes in my chart and says she will do a full STD screening just to be on the safe side. I suggest that while she’s at it, she also check for a UTI as I think I may have one. “I’ll run a test, but in the meantime I’m going to start you on an antibiotic so it doesn’t get worse. I’m sure you do have one with the amount of sexual activity you’re having,” she says. She is direct and forthright, which is fine, but is she judging me?

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Another popular excuse for our exclusion is the fact that some trans women have male genitals (as many of us either cannot afford or choose not to have sex reassignment surgery). This “penis” argument not only objectifies trans women by reducing us to our genitals, but propagates the male myth that men’s power and domination somehow arise from the phallus. The truth is, our penises are made of flesh and blood, nothing more. And the very idea that the femaleness of my mind, personality, lived experiences, and the rest of my body can somehow be trumped by the mere presence of a penis can only be described as phallocentric. It’s distressing that such phallocentric arguments, along with related arguments that harp on the idea that trans women “physically resemble” or “look like” men in other ways, are so regularly made by lesbian-feminists, considering that they are based in the society-wide privileging of male attributes over female ones. In what is now considered classic research, sociologists Suzanne Kessler and Wendy McKenna showed that in our culture, when people (both women and men) gender others, we tend to weigh male visual cues as far more significant than female ones, and almost invariably consider the penis as being the single most important gender cue of all (i.e., its presence trumps all other gender cues; the presence of a vagina does not elicit a similar effect).4 In their words, “There seem to be no cues that are definitely female, while there are many that are definitely male. To be male is to ‘have’ something and to be female is to ‘not have’ it.”5 Kessler and McKenna view this privileging of male cues as resulting from male-centrism (similar to how people often favor using the pronoun “he” when speaking generically). Taking this into account, it becomes rather obvious that when cissexual women deny trans women the right to participate in women-only spaces because of their own tendency to privilege any “mannish” or “masculine” traits we may have over our many female attributes, they are fostering and promoting male-centrism.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Arguably, nowhere have people felt more entitled to possess and exploit intersex and transsexual experiences and identities than in academia. The ungendering of gender-variant people has been an ongoing practice among sociologists, poststructuralist theorists, and feminists who wish to demonstrate that our notions of gender are socially constructed. One of the earliest examples of this approach is sociologist Harold Garfinkel’s 1967 book Studies in Ethnomethodology, which attempted to elucidate how members of society “produce stable, accountable practical activities, i.e., social structures of everyday activities.”16 While Garfinkel could have examined how the average person makes sense of their own gendered experiences, he instead focused on someone who didn’t have the privilege of taking their own gender for granted. That person was Agnes, a trans woman who (unbeknownst to Garfinkel) had taken female hormones for a number of years and posed as intersex in the hope of obtaining sex reassignment surgery (during the 1950s in the U.S., such surgeries were regularly carried out on intersex individuals, but not transsexuals).17 Garfinkel devoted seventy pages to describing Agnes’s attempts to reconcile her female identity and feminine behavior with the fact that she had male genitals. The account is extraordinarily objectifying, and not only with regard to Garfinkel’s descriptions of Agnes’s body (such as, “Her measurements were 38-25-38” and “she was dressed in a tight sweater which marked off her thin shoulders, ample breasts, and narrow waist”).18 He spends page after page relishing the details of how she managed to “pass” as a woman, highlighting her anxiety around the discrepancy between her anatomy and gender identity, and pointing out what he believed were inconsistencies in her personal history and her claims that she always felt like a girl. The entitled way he picks apart Agnes’s life, graphically chronicling her fears, secrets, embarrassments, and insecurities, shows no regard for her as a person or for the immense difficulty she must have faced in simply trying to survive and make sense of her life as a gender-variant person living in the 1950s.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  And when cissexual queers try to frame all forms of gender/sexual discrimination in terms of “heterosexist gender norms,” they deny the fact that, as a transsexual woman, I experience way more cissexist and trans-misogynistic animosity and condescension from members of my own lesbian community than I ever have from my straight friends and acquaintances. The truth is that whenever we enter a different space, or speak with a different person, we are forced to deal with a somewhat different set of binaries and assumptions. Indeed, my experience living in the San Francisco Bay Area—where most straight people I know are very comfortable with queerness, yet many queer people I know harbor subversivist attitudes toward straightness—makes it clear that there needs to be a more general strategy to challenge all forms of sexism, not just the typical or obvious ones.Rather than focusing on “shattering the gender binary,” I believe we should turn our attention instead to challenging all forms of gender entitlement, the privileging of one’s own perceptions, interpretations, and evaluations of other people’s genders over the way those people understand themselves. After all, whenever we assign values to other people’s genders and sexualities—whether we call them subversive or conservative, cool or uncool, normal or abnormal, natural or unnatural—we are automatically creating or reaffirming some kind of hierarchy. In other words, when we critique any gender as being “good” or “bad,” we are by definition being sexist. After all, isn’t what drives many of us into feminism and queer activism in the first place our frustration that other people often place rather arbitrary meanings and values onto our sexed bodies, gender expressions, and sexualities? Is there really any difference between the schoolyard bullies who teased us for being too feminine or masculine when we were little, the arrogant employer who assumes that we aren’t cut out for the job because we’re female, the gay men who claim that we are holding back the gay rights movement because we are not straight-acting enough, and the people—whether lesbian-feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, or subversivists in the 2000s—who decry us for not being androgynous enough to be “true gender radicals”?Some might argue that it’s simply human nature for us to assign different values to different genders and sexualities. For example, if we tend to prefer the company of men over women, or if we find androgynous people more attractive than feminine or masculine ones, isn’t that assigning them a different worth?

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  And I am fed up with other people projecting their penis obsessions onto my body. As far as I’m concerned, if they can’t fathom why I might want to trade in my penis for a clitoris and vagina, then they’re the ones who have the gender disorder.12Bending Over Backwards: Traditional Sexism and Trans-Woman-Exclusion PoliciesPrejudice usually can’t survive close contact with the people who are supposed to be so despicable, which is why the propagandists for hate always preach separation.—Patrick Califia1 OVER THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS, a major focus of my trans activism and writing has been the issue of trans-woman-inclusion in lesbian and women-only spaces. I first heard of the issue back in 1999, around the time that I was beginning to call myself transgendered—about two years before I began my physical transition. At the time, I was voraciously reading everything I could get my hands on related to trans experiences and issues. As I read, I kept stumbling upon past instances of anti-trans-woman discrimination from within the lesbian and feminist communities. These included derogatory anti-trans-woman remarks by influential feminist thinkers such as Mary Daly, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin, Robin Morgan, and of course Janice Raymond (who, in addition to writing the anti-trans screed The Transsexual Empire, tried to convince the National Center for Health Care Technology to deny transsexuals the right to hormones and surgery); stories about transsexual “witch hunts,” in which committed lesbian-feminists like Sandy Stone and Beth Elliott were publicly outed, debased, and exiled from the lesbian community solely for being transsexual; and of course, transwoman-exclusion policies, such as the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival’s euphemistically named “womyn-born-womyn-only” policy, which was retroactively instated in the early 1990s after an incident in which a woman named Nancy Burkholder was expelled from the festival when it was discovered that she was trans.2While I found it disappointing that people who identified as lesbians and as feminists would come down so harshly on another sexual minority, I cannot say that I was really surprised. After all, practically every facet of our society seemed to hate or fear trans people back then, and these incidents seemed more like a symptom of society-wide transphobia rather than something unique or specific to the lesbian community. And as I was giving thought to becoming involved in trans activism myself, there seemed to be plenty of other, more practical and relevant issues for me to take on.But in the years that followed, I experienced a number of changes in my life that would considerably reshape my views on this matter.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  However, these same academics tend to overlook (or dismiss outright) the fact that most transsexuals experience a lifelong self-knowing that they should be the other sex. This self-knowing exists despite the overwhelming social pressure for a person to identify and behave as a member of their assigned sex, which strongly suggests that there are indeed natural and intrinsic gender inclinations that can precede and/or supersede social conditioning and gender norms.I also find it disingenuous that academics in gender studies and sociology tend to concentrate rather exclusively on those gender-variant individuals who are most easily ungendered: transsexuals who have just embarked on the transitioning process, intersex people who are in the process of being “treated” by medical institutions, and those transgender people who actively engage in drag, gender bending, and/or who identify outside the male/female binary. While these groups should be given a voice, what regularly goes unreported are the views of transsexuals who are ten or twenty years post-transition, intersex people who have lived fairly gender-normative, heterosexual lives, and transgender people who at one point embraced being “in between” or “outside of” the categories of female or male as part of their coming out experience, but who later came to identify within the male/female binary. These populations of gender-variant people tend to have completely different experiences and opinions around gender. But their stories are never told, most likely because they are at odds with the positions and theories put forward by most academic gender researchers.While some transsexual and intersex people do identify outside of the gender binary, most of us have experienced a profound understanding of ourselves as being female or male. For us, the greatest struggle in our lives is reconciling the apparent discrepancies that exist between that internal self-understanding and our physical bodies. The fact that our anatomies do not perfectly coincide with the gender we experience ourselves to be results in us regularly having our identities dismissed and our bodies objectified and ridiculed. So when non-intersex, cissexual academics use gender-variant bodies and experiences to unravel the gender binary, they are essentially undermining our efforts to have our self-identifications taken seriously.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Being that Harry Benjamin (who was trained as an endocrinologist) believed that transsexuality was caused by fetal hormone levels, and Richard Green, Robert Stoller, and John Money (all trained in psychology) looked to relationships with parents and/or events that occurred during one’s formative years as its primary cause, it is not surprising that social scientists generally argue that transsexuality is the result of societal gender norms, lesbian and gay scholars claim it is the result of heterosexism, feminists blame it on patriarchy, and poststructuralists simply deconstruct it into nonexistence. Moving Beyond Cissexist Models of Transsexuality The last fifty years of sexological and sociological discourses regarding transsexuality have been nothing more than a charade, where the opinions of those who have academic and clinical credentials always trump those of transsexuals themselves; where trans people are treated as nothing more than blank slates for cissexual gender researchers to inscribe their pet theories upon. And while researchers in the humanities often frame their work as being in opposition to that of the gatekeepers, it seems to me that the similarities between both groups far outweigh the differences. Both cli nicians and academics are obsessed with meticulously documenting and subcategorizing the transgender population; both display the effemimanic compulsion of focusing primarily on MTF spectrum trans people; and both view transsexuals as anomalies that require explanation and justification rather than viewing us as a part of human diversity that just simply exists. The needs, desires, and perspectives of transsexuals have become lost in a shameful tug-of-war between those who wish to show that stereotypical gender differences arise naturally from biological predisposition and those who wish to demonstrate that those same gender differences are entirely socially constructed. As a transsexual, my lived experiences are at odds with both strict gender essentialist and social constructionist accounts of gender. And while the idea that gender is a combination of many things—some biological and others sociological—does not make for a catchy sound bite or a sexy “hook” for one’s book or thesis, it appears to me to be indisputable. And maybe once most sexologists and sociologists finally come to accept this fact, they will stop exploiting and dissecting the lives of transgender people and others who have exceptional gender inclinations and sex characteristics.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  68 Thus, to make his point that Mohave alyha and hwame represent “third genders,” Roscoe resorts to giving more credence to the judgments of non-gender-variant Mohave than to the way these individuals saw themselves. Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise, as Roscoe himself purposely uses inappropriate pronouns and favors birth sex over identified sex when writing about these groups, both throughout this essay and in his other writings. The strict dichotomy that Nanda and Roscoe attempt to make between “third genders” and trans people who “cross” from one gender to the other seems rather dubious. After all, some people who are members of non-Western “third gender” traditions do identify fully as the other sex and/or choose to physically transition when given the opportunity. 69 Furthermore, as a Western transsexual, I may identify squarely within the male/female gender binary if I want to, but once other people discover my transsexual status, they usually start slipping up on pronouns and referring to me as a MTF, boy-girl, s/he, she-he, or a she-male. In other words, people try to third-gender me. Both Roscoe and Nanda seem to have so much invested in promoting the theoretical significance of “third genders” that they’re oblivious to the ways in which these categories—rather than shattering the gender binary—may actually contribute to its stabilization by marking and segregating those people who have exceptional gender inclinations from gender-normative women and men. If you want to convince me that a culture truly has multiple genders that are dissociated from binary sex, show me one where male- and female-bodied people are both included in every gender category.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  #5 has a free guest pass which requires me to fill out forms, sign waivers and release my email address so that I will receive emails in perpetuity from which I cannot successfully unsubscribe and so am forever left with this memento of my day here. We decide we will work out first and I head to an elliptical machine while he heads for the weight corner. Every ten minutes he comes to check on me as if I might escape when he’s not looking, and finally I suggest that I go to the weight corner with him. When we finish there, we head to the locker rooms to change for the jacuzzis. We lean back against the jets, our faces flushed from the heat and my hair curling around my face from the humidity. “I’m sorry about the way I’ve spoken to you recently,” he says. “I would like to explain.” “OK, I’m listening,” I say, and he explains the origin of his lack of trust in other people, which he knows is not fair to me yet is deeply rooted all the same. I try to be compassionate and kind, but I’m no longer invested in whatever this was going to be with him, so I don’t push the topic or probe as I might with someone else. By the time we are dressed and ordering salads for lunch in the café, where he lets me know he didn’t bring his wallet so I will need to pay, I am counting down the minutes until I can say goodbye. * By Monday morning, #5’s good behavior has worn off. His phone call to me as I amble home from a Pilates class is tinged with rage, as if we hadn’t achieved some level of peace less than 24 hours earlier. “When were you going to tell me that you’ve already started dating other men?” he asks. “I know you went on a date this weekend. Just tell me his name.” “OK, I’m done. I give up. I don’t want to see you again and I don’t have to explain myself,” I say. He is adamant that I tell him my date’s name. “No,” I repeat, “and I want to make sure you understand what I’m saying, that I do not want to date you anymore, that we are done.” “Tell me his name and I’ll leave you alone,” he says. “OK then, his name is Alan.” “Alan. Aha, I knew it. That’s all I needed to know. I thought you were different, Laura, but you’re just like every other woman I’ve ever known,” he says. “OK, then it shouldn’t be too hard to let me go,” I say, but I can’t figure out why he needed to know Alan’s name, what that solidifies in his mind. “You’re a liar and a tease and you led me on. I really cared about you, I was falling in love with you.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  The very idea that there are “opposite” sexes unnecessarily polarizes women and men; it isolates us from one another and exaggerates our differences. It provides the framework for us to project other “opposite” pairs onto female and male (and femininity and masculinity). Thus, we assume that men are aggressive and women are passive; men are tough and women are weak; men are practical and women are emotional; men are big and women are small; and so on. As a culture, we regularly buy into this way of thinking despite the fact that we all encounter countless exceptions that prove these assumptions incorrect: women who are aggressive, tough, practical, and/or big, and men who are passive, weak, emotional, and/or small. This idea of “opposites” creates expectations for femaleness/femininity and maleness/masculinity that all people are encouraged to meet, and simultaneously delegitimizes all behaviors that do not fit these ideals. For example, people regularly make comments about women who are aggressive, while male acts of aggression are rarely commented on (as aggression is built into our preconception of maleness and masculinity). Similarly, people often make a big deal over men who cry in public, but not over women who do the same (as expressing emotion is built into our presumptions of femininity and femaleness). Sometimes these exceptional behaviors are further dismissed as illegitimate and unnatural through the use of gender-specific insults (e.g., an aggressive woman might be called a “bitch”; an emotional man might be called a “wimp” or a “sissy”). Many opponents of this view of gender refer to it as the binary gender system, which implies that its problematic nature stems primarily from the fact that it consists of only two classes: male and female. Personally, I do not think that there is necessarily any harm in us recognizing that there are two major categories of sex, so long as we realize that these categories are neither discrete nor mutually exclusive, and that we remain respectful of the fact that many people have exceptional sex characteristics and gender inclinations. In fact, as a trans person, having spent most of my life battling gender dissonance, I don’t have the privilege that others have of being able to presume that the femaleness or maleness of my body or mind is entirely meaningless, superficial, or unimportant. I have found that my physical sex, and how it relates to my subconscious sex, is incommensurably important to me. I would argue that the major problem with the binary gender system is not that it is binary (as most physical sex characteristics and gender inclinations appear to be bimodal in nature) but rather that it facilitates the naive and oppressive belief that women and men are “opposites.” Because the idea that women and men are “opposite” sexes automatically creates assumptions and stereotypes that are differently applied to each sex, I call this view of gender oppositional sexism.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Thus, women who do take sexual initiative are not considered to be preying on men per se, but rather opening themselves up to or inviting male sexual aggression. Of course, what constitutes “inviting” male sexualization is typically defined by male presumptions. For example, women who are raped by men are often mischaracterized as instigating their own sexual violation by virtue of the clothing they wore, their past sexual histories, or their willingness to meet privately with a man. In fact, any action carried out by a woman that can be misconstrued as enabling others to view her as a sexual object is presumed to invite male sexual advances. In this context, I would argue that trans women are hypersexualized in our culture because we are viewed as enabling our own sexual objectification (by virtue of the fact that we physically transition from male to female) in much the same way that a woman who wears a low-cut dress is presumed to facilitate her own objectification. The idea that trans women deliberately transform ourselves into women to invite male sexualization and sexual advances is perhaps the most popular assumption made about trans women. According to this myth, trans women do not “prey” on men so much as we “lure” them, by turning ourselves into sexual objects that no red-blooded man can resist. Framing the matter this way not only relieves men of any responsibility for their own sexual actions, but also prevents them from being cast in the role of sexual object or prey—an inherently subordinate position. Further, this tactic insinuates that trans women’s physical transitions are centered on the desires of men, in much the same way that people presume that women who wear highly feminine or revealing outfits do so not for themselves, but in order to attract male attention. This point is crucial: If trans women were seen as changing our sex primarily because we wanted to be female (as is generally the case), then MTF transitioning would become both a self-empowering act and one that potentially empowers femaleness itself. However, the assumption that we change our sex in order to attract men essentially sexualizes our motives for transitioning, a move that disempowers trans women and femaleness while reinforcing the idea that heterosexual male desire is central. This sexualization of trans women’s motives not only belittles our own female identities, but also implies that women as a whole have no value beyond their ability to be sexualized by men.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  On the surface, subversivism gives the appearance of accommodating a seemingly infinite array of genders and sexualities, but this is not quite the case. Subversivism does have very specific boundaries; it has an “other.” By glorifying identities and expressions that appear to subvert or blur gender binaries, subversivism automatically creates a reciprocal category of people whose gender and sexual identities and expressions are by default inherently conservative, even “hegemonic,” because they are seen as reinforcing or naturalizing the binary gender system. Not surprisingly, this often-unspoken category of bad, conservative genders is predominantly made up of feminine women and masculine men who are attracted to the “opposite” sex. One routinely sees this “dark side” of subversivism rear its head in the queer/trans community, where it is not uncommon to hear individuals critique or call into question other queers or trans folks because their gender presentation, behaviors, or sexual preferences are not deemed “subversive” enough. Indeed, if one fails to sufficiently distinguish oneself from heterosexual feminine women and masculine men, one runs the risk of being accused of “reinforcing the gender binary,” an indictment that is tantamount to being called a sexist. One of the most common targets of such critiques are transsexuals, and particularly those who are heterosexual and gender-normative post-transition. Indeed, because such transsexuals (in the eyes of others) transition from a seemingly “transgressive” queer identity to a “conservative” straight one, subversivists may even claim that they have transitioned in order to purposefully “assimilate” themselves into straight culture. While these days, such accusations are often couched in the rhetoric of current queer theory, they rely on many of the same mistaken assumptions that plagued the work of cissexist feminists like Janice Raymond and sociologists like Thomas Kando decades ago. 2 The practice of subversivism also negatively impacts trans people on the MTF spectrum. After all, in our culture, the meanings of “bold,” “rebellious,” and “dangerous”—adjectives that often come to mind when considering subversiveness—are practically built into our understanding of masculinity. In contrast, femininity conjures up antonyms like “timid,” “conventional,” and “safe,” which seem entirely incompatible with subversion. Therefore, despite the fact that the mainstream public tends to be more concerned and disturbed by MTF spectrum trans people than their FTM spectrum counterparts, subversivism creates the impression that trans masculinities are inherently “subversive” and “transgressive,” while their trans feminine counterparts are “feckless” and “conservative” in comparison. Subversivism’s privileging of trans masculinities over trans femininities helps to explain why cissexual queer women and FTM spectrum folks tend to dominate the queer/trans community: Their exceptional gender expressions and identities are routinely empowered and encouraged in such settings. In contrast, there is generally a dearth of MTF spectrum folks who regularly inhabit queer/trans spaces. 3 To me, the most surreal part of this whole transgressing-versus-reinforcing-gender-norms dialogue in the queer/trans community (and in many gender studies classrooms and books) is the unacknowledged hypocrisy of it all.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  66 Ibid. 67 Will Roscoe, “How to Become a Berdache: Toward a Unified Analysis of Gender Diversity,” in Herdt, Third Sex, Third Gender, 360–362. 68 Ibid., 362, 365. 69 For examples, see Roughgarden, Evolution’s Rainbow, 343–346; and Califia, Sex Changes, 147–149. 70 Lewins, Transsexualism in Society, 144. 71 David E. Grimm, “Toward a Theory of Gender: Transsexualism, Gender, Sexuality, and Relationships,” American Behavioral Scientist 31, no. 1 (1987), 70. 72 Eichler, The Double Standard, 75. 73 Greer, The Whole Woman, 71. 74 Judith Shapiro, “Transsexualism: Reflections on the Persistence of Gender and the Mutability of Sex,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1991), 253. 75 Thomas Kando, “Males, Females, and Transsexuals: A Comparative Study of Sexual Conservatism,” Journal of Homosexuality 1, no. 1 (1974), 63–44. 76 Bolin, In Search of Eve, 107; Namaste, Invisible Lives, 191–234. 77 Bolin, In Search of Eve, 41. 78 Ibid., 118. 79 For a general review of how transsexuals are rarely accepted socially and legally in the United States, see Currah, Juang, and Minter, Transgender Rights —this book also contains Kylar W. Broadus’s account of how much worse he was treated by coworkers as a trans man than when he was perceived as a butch dyke (page 94). 80 Mildred L. Brown and Chloe Ann Rounsley, True Selves: Understanding Transsexualism—For Families, Friends, Coworkers, and Helping Professionals (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996), 105–107. 81 For example, see Tom Waddell Health Center, “Protocols for Hormonal Reassignment of Gender,” July 24, 2001 (https://web.archive.org/web/20061010065247/http://www.dph.sf.ca.us/chn/HlthCtrs/HlthCtrDocs/TransGendprotocols.pdf). 82 Lev, Transgender Emergence . 83 Ibid., 180–181; Rudacille, The Riddle of Gender, 18. 8 Dismantling Cissexual Privilege 1 Greer, The Whole Woman, 74. 2 Califia, Sex Changes, 116. 3 During the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, eight of 3,387 female athletes screened for Y chromosomal material tested positive; the Olympics has since discontinued its genetic sex testing (Myron Genel, “Gender Verification No More?” Medscape Women’s Health 5, no. 3 [2000], https://web.archive.org/web/20220308131718/https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/408918). Infertility clinics have found that up to 11 percent of azoospermic males (i.e., males who have no sperm in their semen) have a XXY karyotype (Hiroshi Okada, Hitoshi Fujioka, Noboru Tatsumi, Masanori Kanzaki, Yoshihiro Okuda, Masato Fujisawa, Minoru Hazama, Osamu Matsumoto, Kazuo Gohji, Soichi Arakawa, and Sadao Kamidono, “Klinefelter’s Syndrome in the Male Infertility Clinic,” Human Reproduction 14, no. 4 [1999], 946–952). 4 Tarynn M. Witten, Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad, Ilana Berger, R. J. M. Ekins, Randi Ettner, Katsuki Harima, Dave King, Mikael Landén, Nuno Nodin, Volodymyr P’yatokha, and Andrew N. Sharpe, “Transgender and Transsexuality,” The Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Men and Women in the World’s Cultures, C. R. Ember and M. Ember, eds. (New York: Kluwer/Plenum, 2003), 216–229; Lynn Conway, “How Frequently Does Transsexualism Occur?” LynnConway.com (2001–2002; http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html). 5 The notion of “doing” gender is often attributed to Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman’s article, “Doing Gender,” Gender and Society 1, no.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  This premise underlies Jay Leno’s infamous question to Hugh Grant: “What were you thinking?”4 It’s why Grant and fellow celebrity Eddie Murphy are still able to star in films for Disney while the tranny prostitutes they sought out are reduced to cinematic novelties: tasteless jokes in teen comedies, bad Lou Reed anecdotes in art films produced by Andy Warhol wannabes, or as examples of urban decay in police dramas set on sordid and seedy city streets.Transgender women are portrayed as deceivers so that rabid heterosexuals can turn a blind eye to the transsexual porn ads that litter the back of men’s magazines like Hustler and Penthouse, so that mainstream moviegoers can watch The Crying Game and act surprised to find out that the woman who performs in the drag bar happens to have a penis. “Deception” is the scarlet letter that trannies are made to wear so that everybody else can claim innocence.This is why the police, lawyers, and press who worked on the Gwen Araujo case ignored the multiple sources who insisted that Gwen’s killers knew she was transgender to begin with.5 It’s why nobody ever questioned how next-to-impossible it would be for two of Gwen’s killers to have had anal sex with her without ever coming across her genitals. Nobody was willing to even consider the possibility that Gwen’s murderers knowingly had sex with her. Why challenge our culture’s myopic view of male sexuality when it’s so easy to blame it all on one deceiving tranny? And why question the psychotic paranoia with which many men defend their masculinity when it’s so convenient to trash one young trans person’s gender identity?

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  As I walk home after the appointment, I call #5. He asks me how it was and I tell him I’m fine minus an infection. I barely have the words out before he announces definitively that the infection is not from him because he doesn’t have any diseases. “Neither do I. It’s an infection. Women get them all the time. I don’t even know for sure if I have one. Anyway, thanks for your concern,” I say sarcastically. A few days later, he calls as I leave the nail salon with freshly painted bright pink fingernails, asking me my plans for the evening since Georgia is with Michael. When I tell him that I am going to dinner with my friend Danny, an old college friend, he sounds dejected. “I’m disappointed. I was going to come downtown and surprise you, take you out,” he says. I thank him, but since I’ve had these plans for a while I don’t offer to change them. “I find it a little odd that you’re having dinner with a man I’ve never heard about and that you didn’t tell me sooner,” he says. It’s not odd at all as I have a lot of friends he doesn’t know about yet, but he continues, “I don’t believe that men and women can be platonic friends because it’s impossible to be attracted to someone as a friend and not eventually be curious about what else could be there.” “Is this one of those moments in which you’re arguing with me for argument’s sake or are you serious?” I say. He replies immediately that he is serious and reiterates that he doesn’t like that I have these dinner plans. “Oh wow. Listen, I’m not someone who gets jealous easily and I’ve never been with a man who gets jealous, and I don’t like that I feel defensive when all I’m doing is having dinner with a very old friend,” I say. “I’m not jealous at all,” he says. “I’m calling you out on the fact that this is not just a friend.” “I don’t think this is going to work between us,” I say, coldly and abruptly. “It feels like we are fundamentally too different to be together.” “I’m hurt,” he says quietly. “I really like you.” Neither of us says anything for a long, awkward moment. “Let me come downtown and take you to dinner,” he says. “Tell your friend you’ll see him another night. I had a nice surprise planned for you.” “No,” I say firmly. “I’m not changing my plans. If you don’t trust me, I don’t want to see you again.” “I’m sorry,” he says evenly. “I get hot-headed sometimes. I do trust you. Give me another chance?” I tell him that I’m too frustrated to talk further and hang up the phone. * The next day, I have to acknowledge that the relentless itchy sensation I feel is likely a yeast infection. Back to the gynecologist I go, tail between my legs.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I also find it disingenuous that academics in gender studies and sociology tend to concentrate rather exclusively on those gender-variant individuals who are most easily ungendered: transsexuals who have just embarked on the transitioning process, intersex people who are in the process of being “treated” by medical institutions, and those transgender people who actively engage in drag, gender bending, and/or who identify outside the male/female binary. While these groups should be given a voice, what regularly goes unreported are the views of transsexuals who are ten or twenty years post-transition, intersex people who have lived fairly gender-normative, heterosexual lives, and transgender people who at one point embraced being “in between” or “outside of” the categories of female or male as part of their coming out experience, but who later came to identify within the male/female binary. These populations of gender-variant people tend to have completely different experiences and opinions around gender. But their stories are never told, most likely because they are at odds with the positions and theories put forward by most academic gender researchers. While some transsexual and intersex people do identify outside of the gender binary, most of us have experienced a profound understanding of ourselves as being female or male. For us, the greatest struggle in our lives is reconciling the apparent discrepancies that exist between that internal self-understanding and our physical bodies. The fact that our anatomies do not perfectly coincide with the gender we experience ourselves to be results in us regularly having our identities dismissed and our bodies objectified and ridiculed. So when non-intersex, cissexual academics use gender-variant bodies and experiences to unravel the gender binary, they are essentially undermining our efforts to have our self-identifications taken seriously. The truth is that gender deconstructs itself rather easily without having to resort to the exploitation of those who that very system most marginalizes. And because transsexual and intersex people have virtually no voice in academic and political discourses on gender, our perspectives are easily overshadowed, even subsumed, by those who have the academic credentials to position themselves as “authorities” on the subject. When academics appropriate transsexual and intersex experiences for their essays and theories, and when they clip out specific aspects of our lives and paste them together out of context to make their own creations, they are simply contributing to our erasure. If cissexual academics truly believe that transsexual and intersex people can add new perspectives to existing dialogues about gender, then they should stop reinterpreting our experiences and instead support transsexual and intersex intellectual endeavors and works of art. Instead of exploiting our experiences to further their own careers, they should insist that their universities make a point of hiring transsexual and intersex faculty, and that their publishers put out books by gender-variant writers. And they should finally acknowledge the fact that they have no legitimate claim to use transsexual and intersex identities, struggles, and histories for their own purposes.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Furthermore, by critiquing those gender expressions in an entitled way, we actively create new gender expectations that others may feel obliged to meet (which is exactly what’s now starting to happen in the queer/trans community). That is why I suggest that we turn our energies and attention away from the way that individuals “do” or “perform” their own genders and instead focus on the expectations and assumptions that those individuals project onto everybody else. By focusing on gender entitlement rather than gender performance, we may finally take the next step toward a world where all people can choose their genders and sexualities at will, rather than feeling coerced by others.NotesTrans Woman Manifesto1 Viviane K. Namaste, Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 145, 215-216; Viviane Namaste, Sex Change, Social Change: Reflections on Identity, Institutions, and Imperialism (Toronto: Women’s Press, 2005), 92-93.2 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR) (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Association, 2000), 574-575.3 Jacob Anderson-Minshall, “Michigan or Bust: Camp Trans Flourishes for Another Year,” San Francisco Bay Times, August 3, 2006, and my open letter in response to that article (www.juliaserano.com/frustration.html ). For more on how lesbian attitudes toward trans women tend to be far more negative than toward trans men, see Michelle Tea, “Transmissions from Camp Trans,” The Believer, November 2003; Julia Serano, “On the Outside Looking In,” On the Outside Looking In: A Trans Woman’s Perspective on Feminism and the Exclusion of Trans Women from Lesbian and Women-Only Spaces (Oakland: Hot Tranny Action Press, 2005); Zachary I. Nataf, “Lesbians Talk Transgender,” The Transgender Reader, Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 439-448.4 For an overview of feminist anti-trans-woman sentiment, see Pat Califia, Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1997), 86-119; Joanne Meyerowitz, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 258-262; Kay Brown, “20th Century Transgender History and Experience” (www.jenellerose.com/htmlpostings/20th_century_transgender.htm ); and Deborah Rudacille, The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights (New York: Pantheon Books, 2005), 151-174. For pertinent examples of trans-misogynistic feminist writings, see Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 67-72; Andrea Dworkin, Woman Hating (New York: E.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  Mass media images of “biological males” dressing and acting in a feminine manner could potentially challenge mainstream notions of gender, but the way they are generally presented in these feminization scenes ensures that this never happens. The media neutralizes the potential threat that trans femininities pose to the category of “woman” by playing to the audience’s subconscious belief that femininity itself is artificial. After all, while most people assume that women are naturally feminine, they also (rather hypocritically) require them to spend an hour or two each day putting on their faces and getting all dressed up in order to meet societal standards for femininity (unlike men, whose masculinity is presumed to come directly from who he is and what he does ). In fact, it’s the assumption that femininity is inherently “contrived,” “frivolous,” and “manipulative” that allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “sincere” by comparison. Thus, the media is able to depict trans women donning feminine attire and accessories without ever giving the impression that they achieve “true” femaleness in the process. Further, by focusing on the most feminine of artifices, the media evokes the idea that trans women are living out some sort of sexual fetish. This sexualization of trans women’s motives for transitioning not only belittles trans women’s female identities, but encourages the objectification of women as a whole. Of course, what always goes unseen are the great lengths to which producers will go to depict lurid and superficial scenes in which trans women get all dolled up in pretty clothes and cosmetics. Shawna Virago, a San Francisco trans activist, musician, and director of the Tranny Fest film festival, has experienced several such incidents with local news producers. For instance, when Virago was organizing a forum to facilitate communication between police and the trans community, a newspaper reporter approached her and other transgender activists to write an article about them. However, the paper was interested not in their politics but in their transitions. “They wanted each of us to include ‘before’ and ‘after’ pictures,” Shawna said. “This pissed me off, and I tried to explain to the writer that the before-and-after stuff had nothing to do with police abuse and other issues, like trans women and HIV, but he didn’t get it. So I was cut from the piece.” A few years later, someone from another paper contacted Virago and asked to photograph her “getting ready” to go out: “I told him I didn’t think having a picture of me rolling out of bed and hustling to catch [the bus] would make for a compelling photo. He said, ‘You know, getting pretty, putting on makeup.’ I refused, but they did get a trans woman who complied, and there she was, putting on mascara and lipstick and a pretty dress, none of which had anything to do with the article, which was purportedly about political and social challenges the trans community faced.” 3 Trans woman Nancy Nangeroni and her partner Gordene O.