![II. DEHUMANIZATION The point that systems of oppression, including patriarchy, stabilize themselves through the complicity of some set of the subordinate class, securing the meager "benefits" and degraded "entitlements" within the oppressive structure, leads to a further insight regarding Manne's claim, perhaps controversial, that misogyny relies upon the inclusion, rather than exclusion, of women from the human community. Contrary to the view she calls "humanism," Manne argues that the reactive attitudes that underwrite the hostility and accompanying violent behavior that subordinated groups, specifically women, are subjected to presupposes their humanity. Manne's argument that dehumanization is not the best explanation of violence and terror against persons as members of subordinated groups can be plausibly challenged. In particular, if one interprets the claim of dehumanization as a failure to secure the conditions of equal standing necessary for full recognition of human status, and the accompanying rights, rather than as a description of the psychological belief state of perpetrators, then Manne's arguments are better read as narrowly attacking one interpretation of what it means to "dehumanize" persons. (footnote: For example, I do not read Catharine A. MacKinnon's work as advancing the humanist theses Manne criticizes. Manne does not offer extended analysis of MacKinnon's work in the chapter devoted to humanism, so she may agree with me. However, the book opens with a quote from MacKinnon ("When will woman be human? When?") and the passages on Langton's work as an extension of MacKinnon's analysis of pornography suggest that, perhaps, Manne locates MacKinnon in the humanist tradition as she defines it. Against this possible reading of MacKinnon, I read her as arguing that human rights law, in particular, has been built upon men's experience of such violations and that human rights law itself must change to conceptualize the specific group-based injuries women experience because they are women. This argument doesn't rest on attributing psychological states to perpetrators of violence against women, including mass rape and genocide. Rather, it says the concept of human rights violations, and indeed humanity, had to be expanded to recognize that "group-based injuries [are] central to the denial of humanity, with sex- and ethnically- based harms at the core of, rather than peripheral to, human rights" (MacKinnon, 2005, p. 2). Thus, the critical point of MacKinnon's arguments about equal standing within the legal frameworks designed to secure human rights. As she writes: "Legally, one is less than human when one's violations do not violate the human rights that are recognized" (MacKinnon, p. 3). Thus, Manne's arguments that denying women's "humanity," as it were, depends upon hierarchically organized group divisions as socially situated forms of inequality is quite congenial with MacKinnon's position, rather than opposed to it. /end footnote.) Nonetheless, the arguments she offers claiming that many of the reactive attitudes that function to underwrite misogyny depend upon attributing human status to women provide grounds for thinking about gender non-conforming persons' relation to the category "human." Manne argues that the conflict that generates, supports, and structures hostility towards women, both in its structural and personal forms, relies upon attributing and recognizing the humanity of women—as the reactive attitudes of resentment, perception of rivalry, perception of another as threat, as out of place, depend upon a kind of recognition of the status of the other, the aggriever, as within the human moral community. Central to grounding these reactive attitudes is the perception that the other, women who fail to fulfill their subordinate, relational role, denies their superior some good to which they are "entitled." Misogyny works, in part, to both punish the transgression and to restore the claimed entitlement thought to be denied.](https://64.media.tumblr.com/f346645aefa9b12e8cb59427f736fd8f/298d08d2c63de6f5-88/s1280x1920/8a06cc8a4fdb7dc689f098f361449d12bccd8599.jpg)
I was skimming my copy of Gender Outlaws: TNG to find a different essay and got reminded of Julia Serano's contribution and the way it unabashedly opens with the same misconstrued hatred of Judith Butler's work (of course without naming Butler) and how much she hates the way nonbinary people talk about gender as a social construct while real transsexuals struggle and how actually nonbinary cissexuals are soooooo privileged compared to real transsexuals because nonbinary people are like white people who say they don't see race.
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as a lover of historical fiction and art about women and horny art and silly art i am so so into this premise. everyone can’t stop being like “ohh his is dick made of wood too” it’s magic dumbass. i am obsessed with how this sounds like an obscure medieval european folk tale. peter dinklage plays a basketmaker with the power to bring life to inanimate objects for an spinste’s sexual pleasure. suspend your disbelief about his cock and have a little fun
In the archetypes [of how people react to a GNC person] sketched above, the misguided altruist, the oblivious genderer, and the hostile enforcer, we can see a conflict in recognition of gender non-conforming persons’ humanity as underwriting the reactions, whether they contain reactive attitudes or not. All of the orientations, even the altruist, rest on a kind of judgment or perception that the gender non-conforming person is a kind of failure at being a human being, because human beings are intelligible only as men or women. The failure to conform to the ways of enacting humanity is what is so befuddling or enraging. Gender non-conforming persons, I think, are met with such attitudes because they are perceived as occupying a space of contradiction: human and not intelligibly human. Their bodies and self-presentation do not fit within the schema of intelligible humanity. Normative notions of humanity carry with them the gender binary. One is never simply a human. They are a kind of human, a man, a woman, a member of a racial group, and so on. […]
But, unlike those drawing on misogynist ideology to punish women for “stepping out of line”—for aspiring beyond their place, as it were—the hostile enforcer of gender conformity relies on the ideology of gender binarism to insist that the gender non-conforming person is entitled to no space, no place, no existential entitlement. There is no place for the gender non-conforming person to retreat and exist as such. Retreat—conformity to the gender binary—entails annihilation, non-existence. Misogyny’s logic doesn’t entail the annihilation of women, as a category, even if many forms of its practice target some women for annihilation. Women are permitted to exist, so long as they stay in their place.
None of this is to suggest that women’s existential choice set—adopt compliant femininity or face penalties—serves their interests or represents a superior position to the gender non-conformity person’s choice set—adopt a gender or fail to have a social existence. Both choice sets are manifestly unjust
from “Gender Policing: Comments on Down Girl” by Lori Watson
i think genuinely one of the biggest political weak spots on the trans community in terms of actually pursuing liberation is people’s aversion to meaningfully challenging the gender binary because it is personally gender affirming for them. so much reactionary bullshit in this community is intimately tied to exorsexism and transmedicalism/
and like. i also don’t want to downplay why people would feel like that. you spend your entire life suffering because of being denied your gender. it impacts your identity and your relationships and your work and your everything. and then when there’s finally a chance that you may actually be able to cross the great divide that separates the group you are forced to be to and the group you have always felt you belonged in, there is all of this talk about how we should dismantle the groups entirely, when you have barely - if at all - gotten a chance to even exist in a way that doesn’t make you want to kill yourself, when the groups are still influencing everything about the world all the time.
but the thing is! we feel this way primarily because in our present culture, to be gendered as cis-binary is to be made human. it is to socially exist, to be seen, to be loved, to have existential, ontological meaning as a person. and nonbinary people do not get to pursue gender euphoria that also makes us human, you understand? nb/gq/gnc people do not have the option of pursuing being socially recognized as you truly feel you are and not wanting to kill yourself. some people can be happy on either side of the chasm and carve out space for themselves there, but too often only on the precarious edge. and the rest of us can only jump off or wait to be shoved off.
do you understand? we don’t have the option. our insistence on fighting and deconstructing the binary is not an abstract political choice based on what we speculate would be the most #radical. it is as much a choice made out of trans survival as any binary trans man or woman’s pursuit of a passing and stealth life. and plenty of us also do not want the concept of “man” or “woman” to be erased entirely; many of nb/gq/gnc people are men and women! sometimes both at the same time! others want to see new concepts to gain acceptance and social recognition!
but that is the problem with the community’s exorsexism when it comes down to it. it is binary gender ideology which provides the foundation for patriarchal ideology and power as a whole, and so as feminists it is the binary we need to challenge (early radical feminists circled this realization, although they failed to develop it productively; intersectional feminism leads us to challenging the gender binary by challenging the related privileged oppressor/powerless oppressed binary). nb/gq/gnc people strain under a binary system and binary culture, and so tend to be more conscious of the binary and the need to challenge it, just like cis perisex women are more likely to be conscious of patriarchy than cis perisex men because they experience a lot more direct and obvious strain under it. all trans people are ultimately oppressed by gender binary ideology and exorsexism, and it goes against trans people’s class interests to support it. but a lot of trans people who identify strongly with the binary have, for decades at this point, actively decided to sacrifice the pursuit of trans liberation and liberation from patriarchy as a whole, in favor of keeping the binary in place so they can experience being the ones who benefit from it and wield it against others. like lower-middle class people being fierce defenders of capitalism and taking great pride in self-sufficiency and financial sense and not relying on handouts.
i love nonbinary killjoys. i love nonbinary people who are bitter and stubborn and don’t smile or laugh off exorsexism. i love enben who insist on their nonbinarity and make it the world’s problem. i love enben who disrupt binary people’s language and spaces and force them to acknowledge nonbinary existence on our own terms. i love nonbinary people who are cunts. who are scary. who are bitchy. who make binary people feel threatened. who don’t water down their names or pronouns or gender to make it easier for others to swallow and who are demonized for that. i love enben who demand respect every single time that binary people receive it without question. i love enben who are tired of fighting and keep doing it anyways. i love enben who are their own first and last defense.
you can’t imagine how much you matter to our community. you are on the front lines, demanding our rightful place in society, making sure we are not forgotten. carving out a space for the nonbinary people who can’t put up that fight. even if you are never recognized or appreciated, it matters.
Everytime a contemporary binary trans person goes on and on about how nonbinary people have a "queerer than thou" attitude I blame Serano. Genuinely. With all of the theory and essays I've read she always seems to be the main source of this distrust and dislike of people who express genderfuckery and obviously socially ostracized nonbinary queerness by binary trans people. She's one of the biggest modern perpetuators of exorsexism in transfeminism of the last 2 decades and it makes me ill.
Like I'm sorry but why, as a nonbinary transsexual, should I ever trust the opinion of a binary woman who 1. cannot conceive of a nonbinary transsexual even existing and 2. is a white woman who compares nonbinary people to racists???????????
Why should I ever trust that!!!!!!
It's just frustrating. I mentioned in a server I'm in that the way Serano writes about nonbinary people and performativity theory is the way I used to talk about nonbinary people and performativity when I was deep in transmedicalism, and the friend I came out of transmedicalism alongside agreed - that's how he felt at the time too. Which makes sense, because frankly, Serano is a transmedicalist.
She values "real" transsexual experiences over "fake" nonbinary experiences and places them in a hierarchy that values binary gender conformity over everything else. That is at the very least truscummy, but is also frankly, transmed as hell. It's so very.... ~nonbinary people are stealing resources and community space from real transsexuals.~
People keep saying "Read Whipping Girl!! Read Whipping Girl!!" where she lays out these frankly transmed opinions in full, and then we wonder why there is still a pervasive issue with transmedicalism and exorsexism in our communities.
also tbh, while it is good that Serano later admitted that WG had issues in its scope and how it depicted nonbinary people & trans men and the need for further terminology etc., i do not feel like she has fully taken accountability for the impact of her book. what accountability would look like, to me, is becoming outspoken on nonbinary issues, challenging exorsexism in the community, and educating people on anti-nonbinary attitudes.
Whipping Girl was originally intended to be a book of personal essays, and as such, it is replete with my own personal stories and perspectives on the world. Of course, these particular anecdotes and interpretations stem in part from me being socially situated as a white, middle-class, able-bodied, “generation X,” out, queer-identified transsexual woman living in a major city in the U.S in the early 2000s. But now that it is often presented in classrooms and other settings as an “authoritative” or “definitive” book about trans people and issues, its rather specific focus unfortunately results in a number of other important topics getting relatively less consideration. Whipping Girl offers little discussion about the issues and experiences of non-binary-identified people, intersex people, trans male/masculine-spectrum people, straight-identified trans people, trans people of color and other cultures, and so forth. Over the years, numerous people have expressed to me their disappointment in these omissions. Had I known at the time that the book would one day be viewed as an authoritative or definitive “transgender book,” I probably would have written it very differently: less personal and transsexual-focused, and more general and intersectional. But, for better or worse, it is what it is: the perspective of one individual trans woman situated in a particular time and place.
I’d like to think that Whipping Girl makes numerous points that remain insightful or useful. But I will be the first to admit that it is far from the whole story, and I am grateful for the many other gender-variant writers of various identities, backgrounds, generations, and geographies that are filling in the many gaps that the book overlooks.
and yet, i feel like we keep hearing this song and dance and nothing ever changes. "whoops, i excluded nonbinary people and trans men, my bad! i'm not gonna really do anything about that, though, i'll leave it up to other people to talk about that stuff"
and then what happens? nothing. there never is a larger reckoning with these issues, with the erasure, with the fact that no one is as interested in talking about exorsexism or anti-transmasculinity not because trans women are remotely privileged, but because those issues cannot be narrated into cissexist feminist frameworks as easily. which is why its also so frustrating because if we actually TALK about these issues, we can start critiquing cissexism on an even deeper level and push feminism further and further to where it needs to go.
but back to Serano. i don't think the issue of the "queerer than thou" stereotype can be laid entirely at the feet of Serano, but her very very popular book she admits is taken as authoritative does spend quite a bit of time promoting that way of thinking. its frustrating that she doesn't seem to feel there's anything else to do for nonbinary people other than go "yeah its not a perfect book because it was about my experiences" and your experience being bigoted against nonbinary people? which contributes to and helps legitimize bigotry against nonbinary people in the community at large? she says if she had known it was going to be viewed this way, she would've made it "more general and intersectional," but are we meant to believe that the Serano who wrote paragraphs on subversivism would have been capable of writing a text that wasn't exorsexist at the time? the problem here is a little deeper than "the book was meant to be personal."
it just feels like another example of how not being exorsexist is seen as a matter of politeness, and not a matter of justice. the problem isn't that you didn't check our box, its that you are contributing to our oppression. its not that its rude to leave us out or forget our identities exist, its that being nonbinary has a real, material impact on people's lives, and plays a role in patriarchy and gender oppression, and we are constantly getting fucked over by people who claim to care about these things and then when called on it, they go (at best!) "oh yeah, my bad, someone else can write about that" and then nothing. ever. changes.
like. at bare minimum she should write as much about exorsexism and misandrogyny, and in as much detail, as she has about "subverisivism." i need her to go through a 12 week class on nonbinary oppression and the degree of forced/coerced binarization that occurs even in queer spaces that make a big stink about being radical and transgressive. but those classes don't even fucking exist and it doesn't feel like Serano notices or cares.
I suppose a more accurate statement would be specifically in transfeminist spaces, I pin the blame on Serano for the perpetuation of "queerer than thou" stereotypes because of how often her work is circulated and how often it comes up so consistently in her work, even outside of Whipping Girl.
The spark for the original post, and the opinion that she's one of the main perpetuators of this way of viewing other trans people, was her essay "Performance Piece" in Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation (published 3 years post-Whipping Girl), where she effectively spends 3.5 pages specifically and directly railing on nonbinary people and nonbinary theory:
If one more person tells me that "all gender is performance," I think I am going to strangle them. Perhaps most annoying about that sound-bite is the somewhat snooty "I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn't" sort of way it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. [ ... ] Look, I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like "all gender is performance" "all gender is drag" and "gender is just a construct". They seem empowered by the way these saying give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations, endlessly mutable and malleable. And of course, this is a convenient strategy, provided you're not a trans woman who lacks the means to change her legal sex to female, and who runs the very real risk of being locked up in an all-male jail cell. Provided that you're not a trans man who has to navigate the discrepancy between his male identity and female history during job interviews and first dates. Whenever I hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance, it always reminds me of that Stephen Colbert gag where he insists he doesn't see race. It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the ways in which you are privileged by it. [ ... ] Gender isn't simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters.
And honestly? I've never seen her walk back these kinds of beliefs in the same ways I have seen her walk back the way she's positioned trans men (as little as she has). As recently as last year she's made YouTube videos with thumbnails like this one where the subtitle is "a conversation on Compulsory Genderqueerness & the so-called "End of Gender"" where she effectively conflates TERF transmisogyny and nonbinary theory as simultaneous threats to binary transsexuality. Ihmo it's very clear through that video and some of her more recent Substack articles that she conflates the theory of gender performativity with TERF flavored gender abolition. Lots of her modern (as in: in the 2020's) YouTube essays are like this and when they're not, they're about linking biology and transness medically, essentially full on transmedicalism.
I really do think that a lot of this exorsexism persists within transfeminism because Serano remains a leading voice in transfeminist conversations and she continues to completely uncritically promote her past work that perpetuates these ideas — frankly because she does actually still agree with them to some extent. Why else would she continue to promote that work all the way into the mid-2020's, you know? That's why I truly don't think she'll ever write about exorsexism or misandrogyny. I think despite her wishy washy walk backs, on a fundamental level she still continues to see nonbinary people and theory as a threat to her own womanhood and transsexuality as a whole.
oh i agree with you fully. & i want to add that i was looking into her book "Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive” because i saw it mentioned she goes more into subversivism there, and uh
When we talk about all of our beefs with the gender binary—that it forces people into one box or another, how it erases those of us who are gender variant in some way, or worse, outright condemns us for not following other people’s gender norms—these problems do not stem from maleness and femaleness, or even “twoness,” but rather from gender entitlement—the fact that society expects people to identify and express their genders in particular ways and punishes them if they do not. Similarly, in traditional sexism, people presume that women are inferior to men, and that femininity is inferior to masculinity. Once again, the problem here is not women, or men, or femininity, or masculinity per se, but rather gender entitlement—the fact that people make assumptions and value judgments about certain bodies and behaviors, and then nonconsensually project those hierarchies and stereotypes onto all other people.
I would argue that gender entitlement plays a foundational role in all forms of sexism. Therefore, rather than trying to challenge the gender binary, or patriarchy, or any other gender system (all of which are incomplete models that omit certain forms of sexism), I would argue that we should work to eliminate all forms of gender entitlement from the world. In addition to being a more thorough approach, focusing our efforts on gender entitlement is also a more ethical approach. It is ethical because this approach does not undermine or malign people for their bodies and what desires resonate with them—whether they are female, or male, or intersex, or transsexual, or genderqueer, or feminine, or masculine, or androgynous, or heterosexual, or homosexual, or bisexual, or pansexual, or asexual, or kinky, or vanilla, or polyamorous, or monogamous, and so on. Rather, it only challenges people when they nonconsensually project their ideology and expectations about gender and sexuality onto all other people.
this is what i mean by her being so individualist-liberal about gender. i mean she straight up said we. shouldn’t be trying to challenge patriarchy? i get that she says these concepts are “incomplete models” but HER model seems profoundly lacking to me as well, and there are terms like “kyriarchy” as well as “matrix of domination” which i think work far better. additionally, Emi Koyama’s Transfeminist Manifesto also tackles the issue of autonomy and respecting people individual choices, while marrying that core value with far sharper critiques of patriarchy as a system of power.
Serano seems to locate the root problem with patriarchy not in material relations of power, but in “entitlement.” which i would agree that this kind of entitlement is a problem, but it really feels like her big takeaway from everything is “everyone should just let everyone do gender however they want and stop being so mean and judgy about it!” and its just. so liberal and middle class. it feels very similar to other western liberal capitalist political works, where there are some ideas that sound very good and in the right direction, but ultimately boil down to individualism and property rights and “live and let live” and even though noise is made about equality and restraining the powerful for the sake of the powerless, ultimately the theory avoids core issues for the sake of not rocking the boat more than would benefit the author. and the contrast between this and the work of Leslie Feinberg, a working-class genderqueer communist (or Koyama, a working-class intersex woman of color), is pretty fucking stark.
& bell hooks has even talked about this specific kind of liberal individualist feminism & her critiques apply very well to Serano (from Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center):
As more and more women acquired prestige, fame, or money from feminist writings or from gains from feminist movement for equality in the work force, individual opportunism undermined appeals for collective struggle. Women who were not opposed to patriarchy, capitalism, classism, or racism labeled themselves “feminist.” Their expectations were varied. Privileged women wanted social equality with men of their class; some women wanted equal pay for equal work; others wanted an alternative lifestyle. Many of these legitimate concerns were easily co-opted by the ruling capitalist patriarchy. […]
Feminists in the United States are aware of the contradictions. Carol Ehrlich makes the point in her essay “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Can It Be Saved?” that “feminism seems more and more to have taken on a blind, safe, nonrevolutionary outlook” as “feminist radicalism loses ground to bourgeois feminism,” stressing that “we cannot let this continue”:
Women need to know (and are increasingly prevented from finding out) that feminism is not about dressing for success, or becoming a corporate executive, or gaining elective office; it is not being able to share a two-career marriage and take skiing vacations and spend huge amounts of time with your husband and two lovely children because you have a domestic worker who makes all this possible for you, but who hasn’t the time or money to do it for herself; it is not opening a Women’s Bank, or spending a weekend in an expensive workshop that guarantees to teach you how to become assertive (but not aggressive); it is most emphatically not about becoming a police detective or CIA agent or marine corps general.
But if these distorted images of feminism have more reality than ours do, it is partly our own fault. We have not worked as hard as we should have at providing clear and meaningful alternative analyses which relate to people’s lives, and at providing active, accessible groups in which to work.
It is no accident that feminist struggle has been so easily co-opted to serve the interests of conservative and liberal feminists, since feminism in the United States has so far been a bourgeois ideology. Zillah Eisenstein discusses the liberal roots of North American feminism in The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism, explaining in the introduction:
One of the major contributions to be found in this study is the role of the ideology of liberal individualism in the construction of feminist theory. Today’s feminists either do not discuss a theory of individuality or they unself-consciously adopt the competitive, atomistic ideology of liberal individualism. There is much confusion on this issue in the feminist theory we discuss here. Until a conscious differentiation is made between a theory of individuality that recognizes the importance of the individual within the social collectivity and the ideology of individualism that assumes a competitive view of the individual, there will not be a full accounting of what a feminist theory of liberation must look like in our Western society.
The ideology of “competitive, atomistic … liberal individualism” has permeated feminist thought to such an extent that it undermines the potential radicalism of feminist struggle. The usurpation of feminism by bourgeois women to support their class interests has been to a very grave extent justified by feminist theory as it has so far been conceived (for example, the ideology of “common oppression”). Any movement to resist the co-optation of feminist struggle must begin by introducing a different feminist perspective—a new theory—one that is not informed by the ideology of liberal individualism.
The exclusionary practices of women who dominate feminist discourse have made it practically impossible for new and varied theories to emerge. Feminism has its party line, and women who feel a need for a different strategy, a different foundation, often find themselves ostracized and silenced. Criticisms of or alternatives to established feminist ideas are not encouraged, e.g. recent controversies about expanding feminist discussions of sexuality. […]
to quote Koyama, Serano’s goal is just making a version of white feminism that fits trans women like her. the problems of white liberal feminism are Serano’s problems. the more i read and hear from her on these topics the harder and harder it is to take her in the best faith.
So I came across this quote by Julia Serano, and I wanted to share my take on it:
“When you’re a trans woman you are made to walk this very fine line, where if you act feminine you are accused of being a parody and if you act masculine, it is seen as a sign of your true male identity. And if you act sweet and demure, you’re accused of reinforcing patriarchal ideas of female passivity, but if you stand up for your own rights and make your voice heard, then you are dismissed as wielding male privilege and entitlement. We trans women are made to teeter on this tightrope, not because we are transsexuals, but because we are women. This is the same double bind that forces teenage girls to negotiate their way between virgin and whore, that forces female politicians and business women to be aggressive without being seen as a bitch, and to be feminine enough not to emasculate their alpha male colleagues, without being so girly as to undermine their own authority.”
Now, I absolutely agree that this behavior is based in misogyny. The only thing I really disagree with is the idea that it doesn’t have anything to do with being trans.
For one, trans men also are forced to walk this tightrope, if in the opposite direction. If a trans man is feminine, he’s actually a girl, but if he’s masculine, he’s idolizing toxic masculinity. If a trans man is sweet and passive, he’ll never be a real man, but if he’s outspoken and demands to be heard, he’s a raging misogynist wielding male privilege. Nonbinary people, too, have to walk the tightrope, with the added element of “too masc/fem and you aren’t really nonbinary, too androgynous and you are suspicious and cringe and probably a pedophile”. Reducing this tightrope down to just misogyny, in my opinion, obscures the way that other trans people besides trans women are also forced to walk this tightrope.
Additionally, while I understand why she compares it to things like the madonna/whore complex, I don’t feel like it’s exactly the same thing. If a cis woman (especially/specifically a white, straight-presenting one*) acts masculine or assertive, she’ll certainly be called a bitch, a cunt, evil, unfeminine and ugly, all the misogynistic tricks in the book- but she’ll never be called a misogynistic entitled male.
Cis women do not face the combined forces of misandry/misogyny/misandrogyny the way trans people do. Cis women do not have to fear being seen as male and therefore sexually predatory, naturally aggressive, and an oppressor to be taken down in the way that all trans people are. Cis women are seen as women, while trans people are seen as grotesquely occupying the space between genders. Cis women are punished for acting outside of the bounds of the class of woman, while trans people are punished for acting outside the bounds of binary gender. We fail to be proper women or proper men, and so anything we do is punishable because transness is seen as something which taints any gender it touches. Trans people are deviant women who need to be put in their place, and dangerous men who are a threat to patriarchal men, and androgynous freaks who threaten the very foundation of the gender binary and the patriarchy built upon it.
I don’t wanna claim to know the true reasons behind why Serano comes to the conclusions she does, so this is just my own reading of this quote:
It feels like she is leaning heavily into the “its all misogyny” to make a point about how trans women face the same struggles cis women do, therefore they should be considered equally female and equally oppressed by misogyny as cis women. Transmisogyny is just another way to oppress women, as women, and therefore cis feminists should accept trans women as women.
And I don’t blame her for that, if that was her motive. Especially considering that a lot of her writing was done during a time where radical feminists were intensely scrutinizing trans women’s oppression & trans activism was even less well known or supported by mainstream feminism than it is now. But I do think that, in trying to align the experiences of trans women with the experiences of cis women, it has led to the thriving idea that trans men cannot experience equal levels of oppression, because they are men and therefore their experiences must be closer to that of cis men’s.
It’s not that the thing she’s talking about isn’t transmisogyny, or that she should’ve brought up trans men- I have no issues with her specifically talking about how this impacts trans women and how its based in transmisogyny. But I feel very strongly that the three-arm model of transphobia explained by @transunity is a far more accurate way of conceptualizing transphobia & all of its individual forms (transmisogyny, transandrophobia, exorsexism). It accepts that all trans people can be attacked from the position that they are men, or women, or both/neither.
It also makes sense that this model comes from the transunity movement, because it prioritizes shared experience & solidarity between all trans people rather than shared experience & solidarity between trans people and cis people who share their gender. Not that that is intrinsically bad, because it isn’t- but I feel that Serano’s model of transmisogyny, in rejecting the idea of “trans” as a class of its own, negatively impacts other trans people and especially trans men by forcing them to be seen only in relation to their cis counterparts, and not as trans people first and foremost.
*Edited to specify white/straight womanhood
need binary trans people to understand that being nonbinary/genderqueer/gnc and getting euphoria from being androgynous/“genderfuck” doesn’t actually mean that experiencing the misandrogyny and dehumanization that comes with being recognizably outside the binary any better. all it means is that there is no hypothetical endpoint, there is no “if i could only xyz then everyone would see my real binary gender and treat me like any other human being and i could escape being treated as an disgusting creature that doesn’t fit in anywhere” because the thing that makes you feel real, the thing that relieves your dysphoria and makes you feel like yourself and not want to die, is the very thing that makes you be seen as a disgusting creature. so its either never transition or swap one closet (binary cis person) for another (binary trans person) or just accept that this is the price you pay for being nb/gq/gnc and open about it, and even then people will forcibly stuff you back into the closet, and also you may not even be able to access the gender affirming care you need on account of you not being binary and your goals not being binary.
& like. misandrogyny hurts all trans people because we are all outside the binary to some degree in the eyes of patriarchal society. there are nb/gq/gnc people who may be less personally affected by it day-to-day than some binary/gender conforming trans people! but it does drive me insane seeing people be like “no one in the world could ever understand the immense suffering caused by being read as androgynous more than me, a white binary trans woman, and frankly every nonbinary person who gets euphoria from androgyny is valor-stealing from Me Personally because they must not understand that being androgynous is bad” as if when you get queerbashed for being an obvious tranny, its somehow less painful if you get euphoria from being androgynous in instead of experiencing androgyny as an inherently lesser state of being to be escaped.
Anonymous asked:
sorry if this is a dumb question, im new to your blog, but whats the difference between misandrogyny and exorsexism? are they synonyms or do they describe different things?
I would consider them to have a similar relationship to sexism in general and misogyny. I use exorsexism to refer to the total system which oppresses those who violate the binary, and misandrogyny to refer to the specific, gender-policing bigotry targeting people perceived as insufficiently binary. Exorsexism utilizes misandrogyny, misogyny, and misandry in various ways in order to maintain itself as a system.
So like, “nonbinary people seen as female are delusional young girls who need to be medically "corrected” before they destroy their fertility" is very misogynistic exorsexism. “Nonbinary people seen as male are sexual predators who failed at being real men and target vulnerable (cis) women” is very misandristic exorsexism. “Nonbinary people are unnatural freaks whose bodies have been made ugly and broken from their experimental treatments” is very misandrogynistic exorsexism. Exorsexism uses misogyny and misandry to point out the class people think a nb/gq/gnc person should be conforming to and their relationship to the patriarchal stereotypes of men and women, while misandrogyny emphasizes their refusal or inability to conform to either class and the stereotypes surrounding androgyny (in whatever form) as something unnatural, disordered, containing the worst elements of maleness and femaleness, viscerally disgusting, and something which marks the androgynous person as outside the bounds of normal society and humanity.
But also like sexism and misogyny, this is not an objective distinction as much as one we choose to draw for our own purposes in how we want to talk about gender oppression. So don’t be too concerned about having the exact perfect. taxonomy of terminology for gender oppression. If you see someone saying shit that’s harmful to nonbinary people, whether you call it exorsexism or misandrogyny, calling it a term that makes visible that their rhetoric is harmful to specifically people outside the binary is what is most important.
Anonymous asked:
LMAO hey what's up i'm one of the old mods from transunity & part of why i left the blog was feeling that our current transunitist theory did not adequately account for racialized experiences. i appreciate you pointing it out and continuing these discussions in my/our absence because i simply do not do discourse publicly anymore (anxiety).
genderkoolaid answered:
thank you so much!! i really do believe in transunity and want to see it grow and develop as a transfeminist thread of thought. i think the fundamental framework of the three transphobias, and understanding misogyny/misandry/misandrogyny, are really important theoretical contributions for all trans people and for feminism as a whole. If I ever do get around to writing a piece on my transfeminist approach, transunity will definitely feature heavily.
Transunity > transfeminism
I see transunity as an extension of transfeminism, not something in opposition to it. Transunity is born from transfeminism and more broadly the discussion draws greatly from feminist works. I am not about to concede to cissexists that feminism is only for women, and that therefore transfeminism is only for trans women. It's both/and, nor either/or.
Absolutely! However as I already said in the tags, it seems like the current state of transfeminism is too focused on transfeminine people and women, thus theres is little or no space for the rest of us. Whenever I start talking about transandrophobia or exorsexism, I got told Im transmisogymistic. And its NOT “just a few bad apples”.
Also its been a while but if I remember correctly part of why Tranunisity “failed” is because trans women and fems here on tumblr couldnt stand trans men and mascs get to have a voice and talk about their oppression.
A lot of the backlash to transunity did use claims that it was exclusionary to trans women. Its not just a few bad apples, but it’s also not all trans women and it’s not only trans women. A LOT of trans men are behind the virulent pushback against talking about transandrophobia.
Also, not trying to nitpick, but when you said in the notes “transfeminism focuses only on transwomen and fems” alongside saying “transunity > transfeminism,” that read more of a statement on what transfeminism inherently is/does, rather than how it is currently being used, so that shaped how I responded.
I agree that’s a problem with the current state of transfeminism, but I think saying “transunity > transfeminism” cedes the grounds of that term rather than encouraging people to see transunity as a better approach to transfeminism. A lot of people already use the term transfeminism to talk about trans men’s and nonbinary issues, anyways. I’m just not a fan of treating transunity and transfeminism as opposing choices, or treating transfeminism as synonymous with how trans-divisive feminists use it.
Anonymous asked:
time to bitch about a super cisgendered feminism post i saw yesterday: it was an art of a young woman in revealing clothing with the text “stop staring and start respecting women and nonbinary people” but something about the woman and nb focus set me off cause it was so obvious that the op’s view of patriarchy-based issues begins and ends with “cis conventionally pretty women (and uh nonbinary people too or something) get creeped on for being attractive and i refuse to expand my thinking or compassion outside of that palatable demographic” like i guess if a guy looks like that he can just go fuck himself cause he’s not a woman or nonbinary :/
I guess the realisation that you need to have radical compassion for all combinations of genders, characteristics and situations is too much for some people because then they’d need to put work into how they understand and interact with these constructs. sorry if this is incoherent im just sipping the angry gender juice rn
genderkoolaid answered:
I get what you’re saying. I think the artist probably had the best intentions, but like…
For one, it would’ve been okay to me if they just said “women”. If you want to talk about women specifically, that’s fine! But adding in “nonbinary” feels like the artists thinks “women” and “nonbinary” are like. completely overlapping categories?
Like, idk. It’s weird to put “nonbinary” in there and no other trans people, if you want to talk about how all gender variant people are stared at in public. Trans men also get stared at. GNC men get stared at! TBH “Stop staring and start respecting (us)” could’ve been a good slogan if you want to cover all of that.
But by saying “women and nonbinary people”, it feels like another cis woman randomly sliding in nonbinary people because she views them as. spicy futuristic women, instead of out of actual knowledge about exorsexism. What about nonbinary men? What about nonbinary people who look indistinguishable from cis men? Technically they are included in that, but it’s strange to view nonbinary people as overlapping with women but somehow not overlapping with men. It erases a lot of nonbinary experiences to view it as inherently associated with women but inherently disconnected from men.
It reminds of that “Her-story” book that for some reason included nonbinary people. In a book about women’s history. I need cis women to understand that while there are nonbinary women… just putting “and nonbinary people!” in an issue that is otherwise ENTIRELY focused on (cis) women isn’t actually the allyship they think it is. “Nonbinary” isn’t “women”’s twin sibling gender, it’s an umbrella term. If you are going to include nonbinary people in something about women’s issues, think about which nonbinary people you are including, why you are including them, and whether or not it’s even relevant to all nonbinary people or not.
This is the book I mentioned. It’s just like… why don’t cis people ever say “men and nonbinary people”? Why do nonbinary people always have to be grouped in with binary people for us to matter?