Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

Chapter 6 of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl begins thusly:

“As a transsexual woman, I am often confronted by people who insist that I am not, nor can I ever be, a ‘real woman.’ One of the more common lines of reasoning goes something like this: There’s more to being a woman than simply putting on a dress.” I couldn’t agree more.

So what does Serano think a woman is? We’ll have to skip ahead to the end of the chapter to find anything like an answer:

The one thing that women share is that we are all perceived as women, and treated accordingly. As a feminist, I look forward to a time when

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen

Time for another whipping of Whipping Girl. We’re on Chapter 1, Coming to Terms with Transgenderism and Transsexuality. As the title implies, it’s about terms, but Serano slips a lot of assumptions into the mix.

If you want to play along at home, we’re on pages 25 – 28.

Serano defines “transgender”–

While the word originally had a more narrow definition, since the 1990s it has been used primarily as an umbrella term to describe those who defy societal expectations and assumptions regarding femaleness and maleness;

Note that this definition would include Portia, Viola, Atticus Finch, Scout, me, and probably you, dear reader.

this includes people who are transsexual (those who live as members

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

Welcome back to another edition of me reading Whipping Girl and shouting at Julia Serano, and sharing my shouts with you.

In my last post, I pointed out that, for Serano, sexism is about “ensuring that those who are masculine have power over those who are feminine, and that only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine.” Feminism has historically been about power relations between men and women, but Serano insists that it should also be about power relations between “those who are masculine” and “those who are feminine.” (The extra step—“only those born male will be seen as authentically masculine”—reads to me like a bone tossed to old-timey feminists who concern themselves … Read the rest

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen

Still on Julia Serano’s Trans Woman Manifesto from her book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Last time, you may remember, we looked at Serano’s demand that “[N]o qualifications should be placed on the term “trans woman”, and her definition of cissexism. Now let’s take a look at a neologism she seems to have invented: oppositional sexism, which she contrasts with traditional sexism.

While often different in practice, cissexism, transphobia, and homophobia are all rooted in oppositional sexism, which is the belief that female and male are rigid, mutually exclusive categories, each possessing a unique and nonoverlapping set of attributes, aptitudes, abilities, and

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

Hello again. I’m back with another installment of Reading Whipping Girl.

Last time I discussed Serano’s definition of gender, which appears in the first chapter of her book. Now, I’m going to take a look at her Trans Woman Manifesto, which precedes the first chapter.

Trans Woman Manifesto

This Manifesto calls for the end of the scapegoating, deriding, and dehumanizing of trans women everywhere.

I’m with her so far, (unless “no deriding” means “no criticizing,” as it so often does with trans activists).

No qualifications should be placed on the term ‘trans woman’ based on a person’s ability to ‘pass’ as female, her hormone levels, or the state of her genitals—

Wait, hold on.… Read the rest

Guest post by Lady Mondegreen.

I recently read Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, a book beloved of trans activists, and Ophelia has invited me to share some of my thoughts here. Whipping Girl, first published in 2007, is a popular and influential book that exemplifies trans ideology, at least where that ideology intersects with feminism, and so it matters to the debate between trans ideologues and gender-critical feminists.

For now I’m going to skip ahead of Serano’s introduction and her Manifesto. Serano’s book is largely about gender; to engage Serano’s ideas about gender we need to know how she defines it, right?

Here is Serano’s definition of the word … Read the rest