Guten Tag!

More here.

This isn't a bad thing. But I do think it's a bad thing to form the basis of your queer understanding on a book that is intended to connect on an emotional level and make you have a borderline religious experience about how you are awesome because you are a trans woman. It's good as a jump start to your self esteem but not as an ongoing source of self worth and certainly not a basis of theory. Because what happens then is anything that doesn't square completely with the book meant to make you feel good becomes a personal attack.

And, unfortunately, the book says some incorrect and even outright indefensibly ignorant things at times. The book is dedicated to building up trans women, and one of the techniques it uses to do so is tearing down others. It's not enough that trans women are great, they have to be better than everyone else. Many of the most famous quotes from the book focus on propping up trans women as specifically the best, which necessarily involves saying everyone else is worse. That is what the best means, and is why Julia Serano felt the need to specifically comment on other identities to compare them to trans women and declare trans women better.

And when some trans woman is really hurting reads the book and for the first time in her life actually feels really good about herself and hangs her self esteem on the ideas presented in the book, this attitude of comparing trans women to others becomes a core part of her basis for self esteem. And anything that challenges the narrative in anyway is perceived as a personal attack and transmisogyny, no matter how irrational that is. No matter how prejudice that is.

It's not just whipping girl of course, lots of trans women culture and literature is like this. But whipping girl is a convenient example for being so popular and visible.

And this is the part that's going to really get me in trouble.

I do not personally like whipping girl. Frankly, it creeps me out to read it. Those famous quotes that people love so much set off all sorts of warnings in the back of my head and I've only recently figured out why. The sections that are dedicated to building up trans women by putting them above others read like Mormon propaganda, and having been born into the Mormon cult I have a very bad reaction to this type of rhetorical technique. An aversion to "you are just better than other people" type propaganda earned the hard way through more than twenty years of this type of stuff being an integral part of the trap that very nearly killed me before I managed to get out.

I still have the baby blanket I made your son, it's embroidered with his name on the front, but it never made it to the mail, he must be nearly ten years old now, I remember when you mentored me about that one life skill, thanks for letting me talk to you when you were busy, do you remember when I was telling you about my family, what about the time you and I voice called over dinner, or when I told you to try rambutans and jujubes, I still have the pencil holder you sent me seven years ago, but of course I ate the chocolate, the last time we talked you didn't seem so good, you were worried about your health, I haven't been back there in years, I hope you're well -

After a long and heavy silent pause, I leveled what could only have been a very angry look at him and loudly asked “What kind of a husband films his wife sobbing without consoling her?”

He tried to back it up, chuckled to himself, and put the phone away. She attempted to relay the joke by pointing one back at him as if it were in good humor.

My grandmother smiled and immediately told the story of how I became part of the family again including exactly how happy she was that I was there.

I can’t agree more with OP. We have to remember that in the age of digital records, it takes a cold heart to film people when they are vulnerable.