genuine question please, I don't often see transfeminists so critical of Serrano and so accepting (by your critique of Serrano, though of this I am not sure) of Butler's rhetoric on gender being entirely performance. I'm nonbinary transfem and have taken some classes on feminist philosophy that touched on both Butler and Serrano, and have been met with the holier-than-thou "genderfuckery" attitude before and don't know how to reconcile that with what you're saying. Is being extremely vocal about being "beyond gender" in expression and casting shade at binary trans women (and neglecting material analysis of gender dynamics) not in itself transmisogynistic? <- (disclaimer) not something I have seen you do, just experiences I have had with others
I am looking to learn here so I hope for a good faith response, thank you!
I'm hypercritical of Serano because she is a transmedicalist and has spent her entire career distancing herself from both the gender theory work and political action of the nonbinary people who existed in transfeminist action before her — like Butler, Leslie Feinberg, Riki Wilchins, and Kate Bornstein (the latter two of which are also trans fem nonbinary people) — and conflating their work with radfem/TERF rhetoric (she does this often by associating the word genderqueer, a term coined by Wilchins, a nonbinary intersex trans fem, with radfem gender abolitionist politics). I find that deeply disingenuous of her and it shows a fundamental lack of understanding of all of their works on her part.
I also find her work very frustrating because it is often very centered on conformity/replicating the status quo and is not actually focused on any kind of politic or actual liberation for trans people, particularly trans women. And that is an intentional goal of hers, to be relatively apolitical and uninterested in liberation. She says as much in the introduction to Whipping Girl. As a deeply political person who cares about the politics of gender, that just doesn't speak to me at all and I find it to be very... white feminist/choice feminism and lacking.
Her work is also something that I'm personally very critical of because I used to be a transmedicalist who thought extremely similarly to Serano, and then I saw that the material consequences of the way that I thought was that I was actively hurting the nonbinary people in my life, and frankly was using it as a way to suppress my own nonbinary identity (not saying this is the case for Serano, just myself). Tangentially though, the way that Serano talks about nonbinary identity being a negative stepping stone for her on her own gender journey, and therefore nonbinary identity is somehow harmful because knowledge of nonbinary identity can confuse binary trans people in their search for identity is.... weird. It makes absolutely no room in gender theory or transfeminism for people like me who thought they were binary trans, only to realize they were nonbinary after — all while remaining a transsexual the whole time (which... Serano's work constantly conflates being nonbinary with being a "cissexual" with no transsexual experience, i.e. the exorsexist transmed stereotype of the non-medically transitioning nonbinary person who takes space and voice away from "real" transsexuals, in a way that deeply pisses me off as a transsexual nonbinary person, but I digress).
I don't like the misconception of Butler's work that "all gender is entirely performance" somehow means that gender is "fake" or doesn't materially impact people, because that's not really what they're saying. Performativity, as a philosophical concept, is "the capacity of speech and communication to act or to consummate an action" so essentially, "performing gender" is a bodily practice that communicates meaning. It's just nonverbal communication. A trans woman growing out her hair, wearing a dress, putting on makeup is a bodily communication that she is a woman in the way that we expect a typical woman to look in our current society. She is using her body and her expression to communicate womanhood to the people around her.
It makes sense that people misconstrue this so much though, because frankly Butler's work is a terrible introduction to the concepts it engages with. Their written work assumes a lot of prior knowledge in many ways that are unfriendly and confusing to people not entrenched in both sociological and philosophical thought. However, much like gender, money and time are social constructs that we created as a society, but that doesn't mean it doesn't materially impact me if my rent is late or I don't make it to work when I'm scheduled. Gender might be a social construction, but that doesn't mean it is void of meaning or impact just like money and time — especially within a society that so deeply values gender and effectively structures itself around it.
As someone who is also deeply invested in decolonialism, Black liberation, and other racial justice movements, I do think it's really important for myself as an otherwise white trans person to consider the ways that PoC, even cis PoC, are not afforded the social performance of gender in the same ways I and other white people are. That's part of understanding performativity theory too — the idea that gender is performed, communicated, and expressed differently in different communities. Black womanhood is performed differently from white womanhood which is performed differently from Indigenous womanhood etc. etc. and understanding that can help us understand the ways White Supremacy punishes non-white expressions and performances of gender and can help pin point exactly how that makes trans PoC of every gender more vulnerable than white trans people. This is something Butler has spoken about in their later more politically entrenched works like their book Who's Afraid of Gender?.
In contrast, Serano's work never once takes this into account in any meaningful or serious capacity. When she writes about trans womanhood, it's very clear to a non-white reader or white reader informed on racial politics that she's writing from the perspective of white gender performance and white gender expression. When faced with this criticism she always just kind of goes "oopsie sorry" and then continues to promote her work that comes from a deeply uncritically white, upper middle class perspective. Which! Is also very frustrating because she credits the work of Black women like Audre Lorde (she opens Whipping Girl with a Lorde quote) as the work that got her interested in feminism — and yet she leaves all their functional politics and racial identity at the door. It strikes me as a very classic case of "white feminist takes the work of Black women and twists it for herself all while removing any semblance of Black politics from the work".
For the record too, I have also never once myself claimed to be "beyond gender". I'm not some enlightened being, I'm a politically informed disabled person who doesn't bind all the time because I have upper respiratory & rib issues and finds skirts comfortable and thinks makeup is pretty and loves my beard and deep voice and hairy body. But the personal is also always political, so by just simply existing in the ways that are the most comfortable for my body and expressing myself in the ways that I enjoy, I am inherently rejecting the status quo that tells me I need to look and act a certain way if I want to engage with a hyper-gendered society "properly". I'm not communicating the norm with my body simply by existing. I didn't just wake up one day and decide "I'm going to be The Queerest Queer to Ever Queer", I just started living in a way that's most comfortable and in line with my sense of self, like any other trans person. However, when I began to perform gender in this way, when I stopped outwardly communicating the status quo gender presentation, suddenly the world was a much more hostile place than it ever was when I bound my chest every day, had short hair, only wore pants, and was an otherwise masculine gender conforming trans man (which is saying something because the world was still very hostile to me then too — I also experienced a lot of violence when I was out as a binary trans man).
Julia Serano is uninterested in politics, she's made that very clear over the last several years in her own writing. She is very much not a communist doing material analysis, she is, in her own words, expressing the views and experiences of one white, upper-middle class trans woman from a major city.
As a nonbinary person who materially navigates the world in a way that is functionally different from binary trans people and has a vested interest in the liberation of not only other trans people but all marginalized peoples, I think it's actually imperative that I and others question why a relatively well off binary white woman who is invested in the status quo, the medicalization of transsexuality, the distancing of oneself from material political action, and strips the work of Black women for parts for her own means is one of the largest voices in transfeminism. I see that as a genuinely intersectional critique of modern transfeminist politics.
Feminism is a political movement. If you take the politics and political action away from it and constantly defend the status quo while writing off those who subvert it or can't even exist within it in the first place, you just have a reinforcement of the way things already are, and that's how I view Serano's work.
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