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

Episode Date: February 20, 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 peopleSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami?

Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 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, 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 woman 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've ever heard someone who's not trans referred to as cis, that's from this book.

The concept of misgendering is also from this book. The word transmisogyny, 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,

it's, uh, I was very much hoping and, you know, 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 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 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 like a niche term like cis um and now the richest man in the world thinks it's like the most evil word yeah it's 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 didn't invent 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. 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 cis sexism. 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 and so now it

is kind of funny every once in a while seeing yes um overreactions by cis people to the idea of of cis being a slur or whatever so yeah um and so yeah so that's definitely something that is um kind of bizarre the one thing i uh 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. 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 at the very best, like an incredibly reductionist and simplified version of the analysis that you were 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. 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 cissexual 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 is whatever dominant majority group um the term obviously um had long been used with regards um to people of color passing as white and in kind of

white racist you know U.S. 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 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 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 people read me as a woman and I understand myself to be a woman there's it's a 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 this issue with some of the prevailing gender theories, which think about femininity and gender as pure performance. And this is, I think, like the argument that you were making that I think is really interesting is that something that I think 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, in kind of, I was writing the book in the mid 2000s. And so the 1990s is when, um, Judith Butler publishes gender trouble, which Butler never said all genders performance are all genders drag. Yeah, 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 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. gender and I felt that there was you know that is an aspect of things and 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 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 uh whipping girl but that's become a part of a lot of my other books like include my most recent book sexed up um 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 Whipping 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 improved things a lot. Agreed. We're going to take an ab break, and when we come back, we're talking transmisogyny.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has 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 from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to the leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though though. I love technology.

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It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, pelic German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture,

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kind of taken 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. 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 uh I and I want to be really clear about this because some people have interpreted trans misogyny to mean that trans male and trans masculine people don't experience misogyny 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-pined 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 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 it misgenders trans male trans masculine people and then if trans male trans masculine people when 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 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 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 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 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 um i feel that sometimes people view it in a cut or dried way that either they'll assume that transmisogyny means that trans male trans masculine people don't

experience misogyny which again is not what that's about or sometimes people will like try to make really clear distinctions um there's kind of language like trans misogyny affected versus trans misogyny exempt are the terms yeah tme and tma um which are not terms i've used and which or that i 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 so 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, um, which I think is a more general problem that happens kind of throughout all social justice movements, so. Yeah, and trans people are not uh alien to having complex experiences be boiled down to three and four letter acronyms so yeah i mean i i did this in in twitter form so it was like a thread so like now people can't access threads unless you uh have an account with Twitter. And it's from a couple of 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 uh 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 referenced this the cis and trans essay that I wrote many years ago um it appears in my book outspoken I forget the complete title right now which is but um the reason why I bring that up is so sometimes what happens is that when people learn about cis sexism or 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 cissexism 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 my Medium site where my essays usually are now, is it talks about the transmasc versus trans femme discourse in terms of what i call the cultural feminist doom loop where that and the doom loop refers to kind of these ideas

where everyone like 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 uh takes up a lot of energy yeah on places like twitter yeah i think i think that's something we've all seen about one trillion times variety 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, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. here updated monthly at coolzonemedia It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. 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. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida.

And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.