+♡TQM♡+

have you had enough?

(alt under cut)

Because explain to me like I’m 5 how this is any different than the kind of typing tools we’ve had on phones, tablets, and writing programs for a good long while now.

Like it feels a little telling that in the original post, they completely cropped out the actual functions and it doesn’t seem like anyone bothered to look at them when going to turn off this feature.

The Pink Triangle Legacies Project is a grassroots initiative dedicated to researching the experiences of queer and trans people in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.

A YouTube playlist of lectures from the Harriet & Kenneth Kupferberg Holocaust Center and Queensborough Community College.

On the Institute for Sexual Research

and

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wf4dmd.8

and i don’t really know what to think of it?

so, does julia serano not understand gender as a social construct or especially sex as a social construct? this kind of confuses me, because a lot of transfeminists that build on serano’s work tend to see both gender and sex as constructed, so how do they reconcile this?

i don’t think the part about hormonal predispositions being real is untrue, but serano seems to characterise gender and “biological sex” as not constructed, but instead exaggerated, so for instance, it seems like she would say that it is bad to claim that “all women are more emotional” but she would say that “women in general are more emotional” for instance, where she acknowledges that there is not universality, but at no point in this does she question the way that emotionality is typically operationalised in misogynistic ways? like earlier she talks about crying more and not being able to stop after going on HRT, and this is the stereotypical way to operationalise emotion, as a woman sniffling, as opposed to a man getting angry at a sports game or smth. like, she abides by the patriarchal metrics of something like emotion, if that makes sense? she also doesn’t question the androcentrism in operationalising “strength” as muscle mass and brute force (presumably, as she links her becoming “weaker” to going on E). she also states that typical women are “feminine” and typical men are “masculine” and posits “masculine women” and “feminine men” as outliers. and by viewing it this way, she seems to legitimise and naturalise the categories of male and female, whereas transfeminists seem to understand those categories as inherently the product of patriarchy, in the sense argued by Monique Wittig. I’ve also heard of sexgender described as a set of labour relations, for example, by transfeminists.

Generally, Serano's conception of gender isn't great. It's not like, particularly offensive, and it had some real advantages over it's contemporaries, but it's not exactly sophisticated or airtight. (In fairness, this is a press book for a general audience)

The reason for this was that neither of the theories of gender which existed at the time in which she wrote Whipping Girl could at all account for a transgendered experience. On one hand, you had gender essentialists like Luce Irigaray who explicitly thought that trans women were men, and on the other, you had social constructionists in queer theory like Judith Butler, who created a theory of gender which was totally unable to account for our lived experiences, if they were a lot nicer to us.

I'll note briefly that many new materialist feminists had acknowledged and corrected this mistake, a lot of them using trans women's memoirs and experiences in doing so.

This might sound surprising, considering the normal way this gets taught is that the evil gender essentialists were wrong and transphobic and the righteous social constructivists were correct and trans-inclusive, but this was never the case. I have another post about Butler you can check out if you want to learn more (or go read Jay Prosser's Second Skins), but the jist is that, when one places gender entirely outside of the body and in the social sphere, and when you, as Butler did, reduce gender to being an effect of a performance, it becomes impossible to understand gender as a goal, as telos. (thank you Prosser for that btw)

If gender is just an effect of performance, if it is entirely a socially constructed phenomena, why do I want to be a girl? Why do I get dysphoria? Why do I smile and blush when I go spinny in a skirt?

okay back to Serano

What Serano is doing here is pulling some of the social construction back into the body. Rather than having gender be entirely post-social and post-political, Serano sees some part of one's gender as existing prior to the social sphere. Later academics will persuasively argue that this is also wrong, and place the both the body and the social as working at the same time in a process of inter-implication, but this intervention on Serano is rather minor, and smaller than the one she is making on gender theorists in queer theory and cisfeminism.

Serano's basic point is that diversity in human behaviour doesn't require a special explanation. I like the colour purple, at least in part, just because I just do, the fact that some people like green and some people like purple doesn't require some theory of colour-attraction or whatever, people are just different. Diversity does not require explanation because it is the norm. In fact, we would be shocked if everyone liked the same colour, that actually would require special explanation.

Given this diversity, some people are just bodily more likely to prefer expressing themselves socially as men or as women, (or as neither or something entirely different, provided that is an option, which it usually isn't) and so when one of these people are not able to do that because of coercive gender assignment, gender dysphoria is the result.

A good example for this is the one she used, crying. All people could be put on a spectrum of how often/strongly they cry. If you then overlaid that spectrum with their gender, you'd see that men tend to cry less and women tend to cry more. Crucially, the reasons for this are both that men will be expected/pressured to cry less and women will be expected/pressured to cry more, and that some people who just naturally cry a lot will start identifying as women, and some people who naturally cry less will start identifying as men. (obviously, crying is a small and single example which would probably never be enough to, on it's own, make someone transition, but a bunch of more important things combined together could) Gender isn't responsible for the existence of the diversity in how much humans cry, it just exaggerates what is already present.

These are the advantages of her theory, and I've steelwomaned her here and there to provide a better and more airtight case for it, in part because Whipping Girl is a press book, not an academic dissertation on gender. It's worth noting that Jay Prosser's Second Skins, who I mentioned before, is the text which really originates a lot of this, and so in places I've chosen to fill in Serano's theory with his, given that she read and cited his book in Whipping Girl.

As you correctly point out though, Serano doesn't do this very cleanly. She ends up reinforcing aspects of the sex binary, promoting ideas like "brain sex", and nonsense about hormones. She even says that "certain aspects of femininity (and masculinity as well) transcend both socialization and biological sex", which just doesn't make sense. Like where does it come from then girl.

It's worth pointing out these flaws, but we should acknowledge that she (well, Prosser honestly) is really working with theories of gender which completely fail to account for her experiences, but that she manages to nevertheless create one. One which was a significant improvement over the existing cisfeminist and queer theories, if it still had significant and harmful problems.