Tag Archives: Julia Serano

There is no such thing as a "real" gender--there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive others to be.

This is an individualist take on gender. We do not accept that gender is individualized. We, as women, experience gender as a form of oppression at the hands of men. Woman is a gendered class that is useful for men to maintain.

cissexism, which is the belief that transsexuals' identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals [...]

We are not very far into this book as you can well see and this is about the ten millionth time Serano has lumped women in with men as arbiters of gender-based oppression. This is a deeply offensive revisionist line of thinking.

In much the same way that homophobic people are often driven by their own repressed homosexual tendencies [...]

We reject the premise that most homophobia is enacted by gay people themselves. We know that there are closeted self-loathers but we hardly believe they make up a significant portion of homophobes.

Trans women are so ridiculed and despised because we are uniquely positioned at the intersection of multiple binary gender-based forms of prejudice: transphobia, cissexism, and misogyny.

There's so much wrong with this statement, where do we even begin?

Serano again lumps women in with men as creators of patriarchy. But we foremost reject this premise because Serano makes implicit that women, along with men, benefit from binary gender-based prejudice such as misogyny.

To break everyone in nice and easy, this one will be short and sweet.

No form of gender equity can ever truly be achieved until we first work to empower femininity itself.

Huh?

Serano writes this as if it were as obvious as the sun setting in the west, with absolutely no explanation. Without a very strong case being made for this: We reject this premise.

This sense of ownership and entitlement about being a woman or being lesbian seemed hypocritical to me. After all, as soon as we would walk out the door, all of us would face similar discrimination for being women and for being dykes.

Words like "ownership" and "entitlement" build their case on faulty foundation and, you guessed it, a false premise.