Book Review: Julia Serano's Whipping Girl

So with all the recent posts about transgender and transsexuality (And it's Transgender Awareness Week!), I finally got myself motivated to search out other reading materials to bring me up to speed about these issues.

I had no idea which book would answer my questions, but someone mentioned Whipping Girl by Julia Serano and that was the first book that popped up under the search "transsexual" at my library. I thought that might be a good place start---and it was!

Julia talks about a wide range of subjects---it was a lot to take in, but I'll try to sum up what I learned.

1) From talking to other transsexuals and her experiences, Julia believes that subconscious sex, gender expression and sexual orientation work independently from one another. Gender expression and sexual orientation are spectrums, however, I wasn't sure if she meant that subconscious sex is a spectrum or a binary. At first I didn't feel that my subconscious determines how I feel about my sex and body, but how can I argue with that when someone else doesn't feel the same way?

2) Julia talks about her transition. I was surprised that she found that female hormones made her feel more in touch with her emotions, improved her smell and touch. In my own experience, I do remember being able to cry much more easily in my early teens....heck, even now before my period. Although that means I cry about things I don't normally cry about. She mentions that when she was male, she felt more "visual." I was a bit disappointed by this, but it made me think, "Ok, but does being more visual necessarily mean that guys *have* to sexual objectify women? And does "being more visual" mean than there's more than one standard of beauty?"

3) She talked about the diversity of the transgendered/transsexual community. I've never met a trans woman who liked to dress like a guy. Or, I mean, I don't think I've met one! LOL She really deconstructed how the media shapes our views of transsexuals---they are only manly men or girly girls according to the TV--the media fails to show transitions where the transition isn't much of a difference. She also talked about how those in the LGBIT community don't always see eye to eye---they are concerned about different issues that sometimes conflict. I really hadn't thought about this before.

4) One of the big questions I had was how to reconcile my feminist education with the transsexual experience. Or in other words, many feminisms say that gender is socially constructed, however transsexual experience their femaleness/maleness despite being socialized the other gender. Julia doesn't really have the answer--although she does mention that there's a part of the brain in trans women that looks similar to bio born women (and it's the same for trans men and bio born men). She says that nature and nurture both matter, but exactly how, that's the $64,000 question.

5) Finally, this book made me realize how much we deride femininity in our society. As feminists, we often fight for the ability to be in male spaces and exhibit "male" traits. However, still, masculine women are valued more than feminine men. We really need to fight the notion that femininity is artificial, weak, etc.

1

You recommended