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.

she has said:

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.

there's a sociopolitical class of men? :o (genuine question)

Sociopolitical classes are the result of what is called "social stratification", which divides people into categories of "social worth" based on factors like sex assignment, gender presentation and identity, wealth, skin colour, physical and intellectual ability, country or culture of origin, religion, etc.

Those in the highest sociopolitical standing would be cis het monogamous men who are white, physically and mentally non-disabled, neurotypical, wealthy, and not immigrants. There are other factors, but this is essentially the top of the food chain.

The hierarchy isn't a single vertical ladder, but more like a pyramid. The more of these factors differ from the societal ideal, the lower in the pyramid you are placed. And your place in this pyramid determines your access to things like education, jobs, social programs, and also determines how authority figures that govern the system categorize you and treat you. ie black men are perceived as more dangerous and violent than white men, despite there being little to no empirical evidence for this.

So sociopolitical class Men is reserved for cisgender men, and transgender men are seen as trying to "claim" power the system deems them unentitled to. Not only do trans men not get access to this class, they are often further punished for trying to claim masculinity, particularly because queer masculinity is not accepted as "true masculinity" by the system. The argument that trans men receive privelege for identifying as men ignores this fact. Trans men are only afforded the sociopolitical class of men when they are assumed to be cis (which requires access to a full regimen of transition tools like Testosterone and surgery), which ignores and erases their identity as trans.

It also for the most part to excludes men of colour, disabled men, cis men who are gender-nonconforming, and men who otherwise do not fit into the patriarchal standard of cisgender masculinity. Even a man who fits the patriarchal ideal but rejects toxic masculinity and male superiority can be ejected from the dominant social class for non-conformity.

also note that both lines of logic above come from trying to use traditional cisfeminist thinking to make sense of transmasculine experiences.

even though the explanations are entirely flipped (one relies on male gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people assigned male more than those assigned female, the other relies on female gender performance being highly policed and that affecting trans people transitioning towards femininity more than those transitioning towards masculinity), they are both trying to take the model of “women suffer because they are women and men benefit because they are men” and contort it to explain transmasculine experiences.

this is why these explanations make very little sense when you really look at them. when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you can only analyze gender through a cissexist lens, everything looks fundamentally cis.

cisfeminism struggles greatly to actually deal with social hatred for androgyny and intersexuality and transness, because you can make feminist arguments and feminist theory that can explain many (though clearly not all) women’s experiences without ever questioning the binary.

but you fundamentally cannot do that for trans (especially nonbinary) people or intersex people, and so the framework has to bend and break itself into a contradictory and often reactionary mess in order to try and explain our experiences without giving up the binary. once again, y'all are always on that damn exorsexism and it makes your feminism shitty!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!