It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Whipping Girl, The Book That Changed Everything ft. Dr. Julia Serano

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

Mia and Gare talk with Dr. Julia Serano, the author of Whipping Girl, about the forthcoming 3rd edition of the book and its wide ranging impact on how we think and talk about trans people. Buy Whipping Girl: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/julia-serano/whipping-girl/9781541604520/ Original Air Date: 2.20.24See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and putting it back together again. I'm Mia Wong, I'm with Garrison. And it is my singular honor and pleasure to introduce our guest, Dr. Julia Serrano. She is the author of many books, including Excluded, Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive, Sexed Up, How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back, Outspoken, A Decade of Transgender Activism and Transfeminism, and most famously Whipping Girl, a new edition of which is coming out in March Dr. Serrano, welcome to the show

Hi, thanks for having me I'm really really really happy you can join us. So Okay, whipping girl. I think is Really one of the one of quietly the most influential books of the 21st century to the extent that in kind of classic trans women fashion, I don't think I don't think people realize that the ideas that it introduced have an origin. So for people who haven't read the book, and you should, this book is great. You I guarantee you have seen its influence. If you if you've ever heard someone like who's not trans referred to as cis,

like that's that's from this book. The concept of misgendering is also from this book. The word transmissogyny, like also from this book. And this, I think, gets at something from the the 2015 second edition preface that you wrote, which is something I've been wondering about is, what is it like to sort of experience writing a book and have it just like ripple across society like this?

Yeah, I was very much hoping, and as I was writing it, I was hoping that I thought that it would resonate with a lot of trans female and trans feminine people, and I hope trans communities more generally. And the book, this is something that a lot of trans female and trans feminine people, and I hope trans communities more generally. And the book, this is something that a lot of times people who pick up the book now in like the 2020s don't necessarily realize is that nobody was reading

anything about trans people outside of feminists and LGBTQ plus communities. And so I was basically just speaking to those groups. And I thought it would resonate with some people, but yeah, definitely it kind of went out into the world and did a bunch of stuff that I wasn't necessarily expecting. And I'm very glad that the book has kind of touched a lot of people's lives and changed, you know,

kind of societal understanding and quote unquote discourses about trans people. So yeah, it, it must be kind of bizarre, like being 20 years ago, writing about, you know, can niche term like sis, and now the richest man in the world thinks it's like the most evil word. Yeah, it's quite bizarre. And I do want to definitely kind of clear this up and I kind of make this clear in the preface. So I did it in vet like cis versus trans like a that's like a prefix that has existed a long time. Yeah. And I've since seen other people like point out, oh, this person was using it in 1990 something or some

German writer like coined cisvestism or something like back a million years ago. So what I will say is that when I when I put out the book I was inspired by Emi Koyama who was and is an awesome activist, intersex activist, who's written a lot of really influential trans-related essays over the years. And it was from her blog post that was the first time I saw cis and trans and the idea of cissexism. And at the time, it was while I was writing the book, and it really, I was like, oh my

God, this is kind of the overall idea. I was talking about all these different facets of basically double standards between trans and non-trans people. And so I kind of grabbed onto it and I was really worried about it actually because nobody, almost nobody was using those terms. It was very niche at the time. And so the book popularized that language. So now it is kind of funny every once in a while seeing, yes, overreactions by cis people to the idea of cis being a slur or whatever. So yeah, and so yeah, so that's definitely something that is kind of bizarre. The one thing I did coin in the book that has kind of also taken a life on its own is

trans misogyny. So that is something that kind of originated with this book, and particularly a chapbook that I wrote in 2005 that some of those essays became chapters for the book. And yeah, and so there are other ideas that kind of are out there. Like, I think it was one of the first, I think it was the first book to talk about like the idea of cis privilege. I, misgendering as an idea was out there, but I kind of dove into it a little bit deeper. So yeah, so there are definitely things I was doing at the time that I didn't know whether they'd be too abstract or how they'd be taken up.

And so yes, it's been very interesting. Yeah, I wanted to talk about misgendering a bit because I think it's become this word that just means not saying someone's pronouns correctly. And I think that's it at the very best, like an incredibly reductionist and simplified version of the analysis that you're presenting. So I guess I have two questions here. One can you briefly sort of talk about what you were trying to get at when you sort of did your analysis of the process of gendering? And two, what do you think about the way that it's kind of become flattened

into this, I don't know, kind of weirdly narrow thing in modern discourse? Sure. And a lot of the misgendering definitely dovetails with the idea of passing. And a lot of my kind of diving into it in a particular way came from critiques that I had and other trans people had as well. But I kind of, you know, put them together in a particularly in the dismantling, I think it's dismantling, so sexual privilege chapter, where I kind of go through all these steps that lead to misgendering. Because I think people talk about trans people passing and also the people talk about other

marginalized groups passing as whatever dominant majority group. The term obviously had long been used with regards to people of color passing as white and in kind of white, racist, you know, US and other societies. So it's an old term and a big problem with it is that it makes it sound like we're doing something active, that trans people are actively trying to deceive other people with huge scare quotes around the word deceive. And I really wanted to highlight to people that actually all of us very unconsciously and very compulsively gender every single person we meet. Or at least that's how we're socialized to be and you know you can work towards overcoming that. But I wanted to really highlight the fact that we see people, we automatically gender them, and that puts people who do not quite, who your presumptions are wrong about,

it puts us in difficult situations. It's a double bind where do you reveal what you supposedly really are or do you just allow people to read you that way? And it works out very differently, for instance, between trans and say cis gay people. Because when cis gay people talk about passing as straight, their passing is something that they know that they are not. Whereas for a lot of trans people, if people read me as a woman, and I understand myself to be a woman,

there's, it's a very different dynamic, because it's not like I'm not hiding anything. But people are presuming what I'm really passing as is I'm passing as cisgender and people are assuming I'm cisgender when the trans is the thing that I might need to or feel like I need to clear up or other people might put pressure on me to either tell them that I'm trans or be accused of deceiving them. So that's a little bit of kind of how I was approaching it when I started working on that idea and really stressing the idea of you can't understand misgendering unless you understand that we make assumptions all the time, we gender people very actively.

And, you know, so trans people are often just reacting to that and dealing with that double bind. Yeah, and this is something that I think is interestingly discussed in the book about, like, kind of this issue with some of the sort of prevailing gender theories, which thought of which think about sort of like femininity and gender is pure performance. But this is I think like the argument that you were making

that I think is really interesting is that something that I think is is very obvious to trans people is that so much of gender is how people perceive you and how, you know, and stuff that like you don't have any control over. It's how people sort of gender you it's how people like construct a gender around you in ways that you don't really have control over. Yeah, and that was a big thing. So in kind of, I was writing the book in the mid 2000s. And so the 1990s is when Judith Butler publishes Gender Trouble, which Butler never said all genders performance are all genders drag. But that is, but that those are like slogans or soundbites that other people took from their book, right?

And they were very popular at the time. There's also there's a famous sociological article about doing gender. And so people were very focused on the way in which we create gender by by doing it particular ways. And a lot of the slogans within trans communities were sort of like, oh well, you know, I just have to do my gender differently, like more transgressively and that will like tear down all of gender. And I felt that there was, you know, that is an aspect of things and most of us, whether trans or cis, most of us have had the experience of maybe trying to perform our genders in a particular way in order to like, you know, not, you know, in order to get by in the world, in order to not be harassed by other people. So we've all had that experience. So while that's

true, there's the other partner of that dance and that's perception. And we're all perceiving people very actively and we're like projecting our ideas and meanings onto them. And I felt like that was being under discussed at the time. And that was not only a huge part of Whipping Girl, but that's become a part of a lot of my other books. I can include my most recent book, Sexed Up, How Society Sexualizes Us and How We Can Fight Back. One way that I would describe that book is it's talking about sex and sexuality, not from what people do, but from how we perceive and interpret sex and sexuality, because there are a lot of unconscious ideas,

often really horrible ideas, really hierarchical ideas, that are kind of built into the way we view the world and interrogating that. And so, yeah, that was a very big part of both Whoopin' Girl and then my writings since then. Yeah, I think that is something where things have gotten better in terms of how we think about gender, which I don't know. Like things aren't perfect, but it definitely

it definitely improved things a lot. Agreed. We're going to take a nap break. And when we come back, we're talking transmisogyny. Welcome. I'm Danny Trejo. Would you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by I Heart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

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of the Challenge 40 Battle of the Eras. Listen to MTV's official challenge podcast on the iHe I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. We're back. Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to sort of talk about was I think in like exactly the opposite process that happened to misgendering. Trans misogyny has become a lot more expansive

than your original sort of kind of narrow conception of it. And I think this is this has been changing a lot, especially in the last about half decade or so. So I was wondering what you think about the way that this concept is kind of taking on a life of its own in recent years and what it's been doing since? Yeah, so I feel like transmisogyny, that there are a lot of different dialogues and discourses about it coming, like people coming from different perspectives with it. And some people feeling like the word is doing things that I never suggested

it was doing. It's kind of hard to know like where to actually come in on this. But for me, when I was first writing about it, I was first just noticing that a lot of the quote unquote transphobia that I was facing when people know I was a trans woman was actually a lot of it was just misogyny and a lot of it targeted like kind of my femininity rather than my transness and so I wanted to write about that and kind of the way that I framed it in the book was which I think is a really useful kind of model for thinking about it,

is that most of the types of sexism that feminists have described over the many years fall into two sort of camps. One of them being oppositional sexism, which is the idea that men and women are kind of perfectly opposite mutually exclusive sexes that have different interests and attributes and desires. And so a lot of transphobia and homophobia are kind of like built into this idea that men and women are completely distinct. And then the other one is traditional sexism, which is the idea that femaleness and femininity are less legitimate than maleness and masculinity. femininity are less legitimate than malness and masculinity. And a lot of cis feminists have kind of viewed all of that as just sexism, right? But when you break it down like that, it makes it clear that the double bind that a lot of feminists have talked about is actually

kind of these two different forms of sexism. So if a cis woman acts appropriately femininely, so appropriate with scare quotes, if a cis woman acts femininely, she'll be seen as appropriate, but she'll be dismissed because femininity is dismissed in our culture. So that's the way that she'll be delegitimized. Whereas if she acts in ways that are coded as masculine, if she acts assertive or aggressive, then people will malign her for being kind of aberrant or deviant, right? And so oppositional sexism helps keep traditional sexism in place, because you can say that maleness and masculinity are superior, but that only works if you can also make a clear distinction between, you know, those people and people who are female and feminine.

And so I think this plays out differently. And I want to be really clear about this because some people have interpreted transmisogyny to mean that trans male and trans masculine people don't experience misogyny, which is something I have never said. And obviously the fact that oppositional sexism is a form of sexism and obviously trans male and trans masculine people experience that. But also depending upon how you're viewed by other people, I feel like the same double pine that affects cis women affects trans male and trans masculine people differently, where there's this tendency like in a lot of anti trans discourses to dismiss trans masculine, especially trans masculine youth as being merely girls, quote unquote, who are like, you know, misled or seduced by gender ideology, right? And there's a lot of real anti-feminine and anti-misogynistic ideas in there, in addition to the fact that it misgenders trans male and trans masculine people. And then

if trans male and trans masculine people, when they experience transphobia, there's often, you know, like they're seen as deviant for kind of breaking that rule, but often the maleness or their masculinity themselves are not, you know, denigrated in the same way because being male and being masculine are seen as good in our culture. It's just that if you're trans male, trans masculine, it's like, well, you're quote unquote, just a woman, so you male trans masculine it's like well you're quote unquote just a woman so you can't do it. So I think it plays out in this very you know complex way for a lot of trans male trans masculine people. I think for trans female and trans feminine people because our crossing of oppositional sexism also involves us kind of moving towards the female, towards the feminine, that there's kind of those

two forces intersect in a way so that it's like exacerbated. And some of the ways I talk about this in Whipping Girl is that, well, we live in a world where masculinity is seen as natural and femininity is seen as artificial. And since trans people are also seen as artificial compared to cisgender people, a lot of times we're viewed as doubly artificial. Furthermore, the idea that, like, women are seen as sex objects, whereas men aren't seen as sex objects, often are transitions or gender transgressions towards a female, towards a feminine, are presumed to be driven by sexual motives that can play out in all sorts of ways, whether this is the idea that we're like hypersexual or promiscuous, or that we want to be sexualized by other people. Or you can see it a lot with

the kind of the transgender predator is often coded as like a man who either has some kind of fetish or perversion or is just literally deceiving people to get into women's restrooms to do something horrific. So those are some of the ways that it plays out. I feel that sometimes people view it in a cut or dried way that either they'll assume that transmisogyny means that transminal transmasculine people don't experience misogyny, which again is not what that's about. Or sometimes people will like try to make really clear distinctions. There's kind of language like transmisogyny affected versus

transmisogyny exempt. Are the terms, yeah, TME and TMA, which are not terms I've used and which or that I didn't coin them. They're not in the book. And I think that when I first saw that language and I've seen people use it in a way that appreciates the fact that some people are non-binary, it's a non-identity based way. Sometimes this can play out in a really cut or dried sort of manner that, you know, sometimes, you know, whether it's intended this way or not, it can make it seem that like, you know, just boiling down a really complex experience, people's complex experiences with different types of sexism into some people are privileged and some people are marginalized.

Which I think is a more general problem that happens kind of throughout all social justice movements. Yeah, and trans people are not alien to having complex experiences be boiled down to three and four letter acronyms. So yeah, I mean, I did this in Twitter form. So it was like a thread. So like now people can't access threads unless you have an account with Twitter and it's from a couple years ago. But one of the things that I talked about was I wrote this essay about 10 years ago about how cis and trans is kind of a useful, those are useful terms, but sometimes people fall in between cis and trans and sometimes they can be used in a way to talk about different double

standards like cis people are treated one way, trans people are treated another, but sometimes it can be used in like a sort of reverse discourse way, where it's like, you know, cis people have all the privilege, trans people have none of the privilege, and it can be used to kind of create this strict dichotomy that ends up excluding and invisibilizing some people's experiences. And I feel the same thing is happening with TME and TMA. So I don't think that those terms need to necessarily be like, I don't think there's anything bad about those terms per se in and of themselves, but I think sometimes they can be used in ways. And part of why I reference this, the cis and trans essay that I wrote many years ago, it appears in my book Outspoken. I forget the complete title

right now, which is... But the reason why I bring that up is... So sometimes what happens is that when people learn about cis-sexism, cis people might be like, oh, I face cis-sexism, right? If I'm a woman and I don't shave my legs, I'm facing cis-sexism. And so then trans people say, yeah, but it kind of plays out differently for us. And so sometimes in order to stop people from kind of making those claims, which I think it is true that, you know, a woman not shaving their legs, or if a man decides to put on a dress one day, regardless of whether they're cis or trans, they could experience cis-sexism or transphobia, but it plays out differently for people who are actually members of that marginalized group. And then so then the marginalized group makes

the distinction even sharper, and it just kind of becomes this escalating situation where the language and kind of battles over it become even more intense. In a recent piece, one of the most recent pieces, if you go to like my Medium site where my essays usually are now, is it talks about the trans mass versus trans femme discourse in terms of what I call the cultural feminist doom loop, where then the doom loop refers to kind of these ideas where everyone, like both sides are trying to talk about the reason why their experiences are legitimate. And then that seems as though the other sides

are not legitimate. And then that kind of cascades in a way that ends up not being very productive, but takes up a lot of energy on places like Twitter. Yeah, I think that's something we've all seen about one trillion times in a variety of toxic ways. But what isn't toxic is the new third edition of Whipping Girl coming out in March, which you can ask your local bookstore to pre-order now. And yeah, join us tomorrow for our discussion with Dr. Serrano of the Anatomy of Moral Panics. This has been It Could Happen Here.

Trans people are great. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly, at coolzonedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

Join me, Danny Dre, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.

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now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season, digging into Tech's elite, and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and, at times, unhinged look at the underbelly of tech, brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

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