Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Welcome to dick It app and here, a podcast about
Speaker 2: things falling apart and putting it back together again. I'm
Speaker 2: Mia Wong, I'm with Garrison, and it is my singular
Speaker 2: honor and pleasure to introduce our guest, doctor Julia Serrano.
Speaker 2: She is the author of many books, including Excluded, Making
Speaker 2: Feminists and queer Movements More Inclusive, Sex Stop, How Society
Speaker 2: Sexualizes Us and how we can fight back, Outspoken, a
Speaker 2: Decade of transgender activism and Transfeminism, and most famously, Whipping Girl,
Speaker 2: a new edition of which is coming out in March.
Speaker 2: Doctor Serrano, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: I'm really really I'm really happy you can join us.
Speaker 2: So okay. Whipping Girl, I think is really the one
Speaker 2: of quietly the most influential books of the twenty first century,
Speaker 2: to the extent that in kind of classic trans woman fashion,
Speaker 2: I don't think I don't think people realized that the
Speaker 2: ideas that it introduced have an origin. So for people
Speaker 2: who haven't read the book, and you should, this book
Speaker 2: is great. I guarantee you have seen its influence. If
Speaker 2: you've ever heard someone like who's not trans referred to
Speaker 2: as sis, like, that's that's from this book. The concept
Speaker 2: of misgendering is also from this book. The word trans
Speaker 2: misogyny like also from this book. And this I think
Speaker 2: gets at something from the twenty fifteen second edition preface
Speaker 2: that you wrote, which is something I've been wondering about,
Speaker 2: is what is it like to sort of experience writing
Speaker 2: a book and have it just like ripple across society
Speaker 2: like this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's uh.
Speaker 4: I was very much hoping, and you know, as I
Speaker 4: was writing it, I was hoping that I thought that
Speaker 4: it would resonate with a lot of trans female and
Speaker 4: transfeminine people, and I hope trans communities more generally, and
Speaker 4: the book. This is something that a lot of times
Speaker 4: people who pick up the book now, like the twenty
Speaker 4: twenties don't necessarily realize, is that nobody was reading anything
Speaker 4: about trans people outside of feminists and LGBTQ plus communities,
Speaker 4: and so I was basically just speaking to those groups,
Speaker 4: and I thought it would resonate with some people. But yeah,
Speaker 4: definitely it kind of went out into the world and
Speaker 4: did a bunch of stuff that I wasn't necessarily expecting.
Speaker 4: And I'm very glad that the book has kind of
Speaker 4: touched a lot of people's lives and changed, you know,
Speaker 4: kind of societal understanding and quote unquote discourses about trans people.
Speaker 5: So yeah, it must be kind of bizarre, like being
Speaker 5: twenty years ago writing about you know, caniche term like
Speaker 5: sis and now the richest man in the world thinks
Speaker 5: it's like the most evil word.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's quite bizarre, and I do want to definitely
Speaker 4: kind of clear this up, but I kind of make
Speaker 4: this clear in the preface. So I didn't invet like
Speaker 4: sis versus trans like a that's like a prefix that
Speaker 4: has existed a long time. And I've since seen other
Speaker 4: people like point out, oh, this person was using it
Speaker 4: in nineteen ninety something, or some German writer like coined
Speaker 4: cis vestism or something like back a million years ago.
Speaker 3: So what I will say is that when I when
Speaker 3: I put out the book, I was.
Speaker 4: Inspired by Emi Koyama, who was and is an awesome
Speaker 4: activist intersex activists who's written a lot of really influential
Speaker 4: trans related essays over the years, And it was from
Speaker 4: her blog post that was the first time I saw
Speaker 4: sis and trans and the idea of cis sexism. And
Speaker 4: at the time it was while I was writing the book,
Speaker 4: and it really I was like, oh my god, this
Speaker 4: is kind of the overall idea. I was talking about
Speaker 4: all these different facets of basically double standards between trans
Speaker 4: and non trans people, and so I kind of grabbed
Speaker 4: on to it, and I was really worried about it
Speaker 4: actually because nobody, almost nobody was using those terms. It
Speaker 4: was very niche at the time, and so the book
Speaker 4: popularized that language. And so now it is kind of
Speaker 4: funny every once in a while seeing yes overreactions by
Speaker 4: SIS people to the idea of of SIS being a
Speaker 4: slur or whatever. So yeah, and so yeah, so that's
Speaker 4: definitely something that is kind of is the one thing
Speaker 4: I one thing I did coin in the book that
Speaker 4: has kind of also taken a life on its own
Speaker 4: is trans misogyny. So that is something that kind of
Speaker 4: originated with this book and particularly a chap book that
Speaker 4: I wrote in two thousand and five that some of those.
Speaker 3: Essays became chapters of the book.
Speaker 4: And yeah, and so there are other ideas that kind
Speaker 4: of are out there, Like I think it was one
Speaker 4: of the first. I think it was the first book
Speaker 4: to talk about like the idea of SIS privilege. I
Speaker 4: misgendering is an idea was out there, but I kind
Speaker 4: of dove into it a little bit deeper. So yeah,
Speaker 4: so they're definitely things I was doing at the time
Speaker 4: that I didn't know whether they'd be to abstract or
Speaker 4: how they'd be taken up, and so, yes, it's been
Speaker 4: very interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wanted to talk about misgendering a bit because
Speaker 2: I think it's become this word that just means not
Speaker 2: saying someone's pronouns correctly, and I think that's, at the
Speaker 2: very best, like an incredibly reductionist and simplified version of
Speaker 2: the analysis that you were presenting. So I guess I
Speaker 2: have two questions here. One can you briefly sort of
Speaker 2: talk about what you were trying to get at when
Speaker 2: you sort of did your analysis of the process of gendering?
Speaker 2: And two, what do you think about the way that
Speaker 2: it's kind of become flattened into this I don't know,
Speaker 2: kind of weirdly narrow thing in modern discourse.
Speaker 4: Sure, and a lot of the misgendering definitely dovetails with
Speaker 4: the idea of passing, and a lot of my kind
Speaker 4: of diving into it in a particular way I came
Speaker 4: from critiques that I had other trans people had as well,
Speaker 4: but I kind of you know, put them together in
Speaker 4: a particularly in the Dismantling I think it's dismantling Sexual
Speaker 4: Privileged chapter where I kind of go through all these
Speaker 4: steps that lead to miss gendering, because I think people
Speaker 4: talk about trans people passing and also the people will
Speaker 4: talk about other marginalized groups passing is whatever dominant majority group.
Speaker 4: The term obviously had long been used with regards to
Speaker 4: people of color passing as white and in kind of
Speaker 4: white racist you know, us and other societies. So it's
Speaker 4: an old term, and a big problem with it is
Speaker 4: that it makes it sound like we're doing something active,
Speaker 4: that trans people are actively trying to deceive other people,
Speaker 4: with huge scare quotes around the word deceive. And I
Speaker 4: really wanted to highlight to people that actually all of
Speaker 4: us very unconsciously and very compulsively gender every single person
Speaker 4: we meet, or at least that's how we're socialized to be,
Speaker 4: and you know, you can work towards getting, you know,
Speaker 4: overcoming that, but I wanted to really highlight the fact
Speaker 4: that we see people, we automatically gender them, and that
Speaker 4: puts people who do not quite who your presumptions are
Speaker 4: wrong about it puts us in difficult situations.
Speaker 3: It's a double bind.
Speaker 4: Where do you reveal what you supposedly really are or
Speaker 4: do you just allow people to read you that way?
Speaker 4: And it works out very differently, for instance, between trans
Speaker 4: and say cis gay people, because when cis gay people
Speaker 4: talk about passing is straight. Their passing is something that
Speaker 4: they know that they are not. Whereas for a lot
Speaker 4: of trans people, if people read me as a woman
Speaker 4: and I understand myself to be a woman, there's it's
Speaker 4: a very different dynamic because it's not like I'm not
Speaker 4: hiding anything, but people are presuming what I'm really passing
Speaker 4: as is I'm passing assist and people are assuming I'm
Speaker 4: this gender when the trans is the thing that I
Speaker 4: might need to or feel like I need to clear up,
Speaker 4: or other people might put pressure on me to either
Speaker 4: tell them that I'm trans or be accused of deceiving them.
Speaker 4: So that's a little bit of kind of how I
Speaker 4: was approaching it when I started working on that idea
Speaker 4: and really stressing the idea of you can't understand miss
Speaker 4: gendering unless you understand that we make assumptions all the time.
Speaker 4: We gender people very actively, and you know, so trans
Speaker 4: people are often just reacting to that and dealing with
Speaker 4: that double bind.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is something that I think is interestingly
Speaker 2: discussed in the book about like kind of this this
Speaker 2: issue with some of the sort of prevailing gender theories
Speaker 2: which thought of which think about sort of like Naitian
Speaker 2: gender is pure performance. But you know, and this is
Speaker 2: I think, like the argument that you were making that
Speaker 2: I think is really interesting is that something that I
Speaker 2: think is is very obvious to trans people is that
Speaker 2: so much of gender is how people perceive you and
Speaker 2: how you know and stuff that like you don't have
Speaker 2: any control over. It's how people sort of gender you.
Speaker 2: It's how people like construct a gender around you in
Speaker 2: ways that you don't really have control over.
Speaker 4: M Yeah, and that was a big thing. So in
Speaker 4: kind of I was writing the book in the mid
Speaker 4: two thousands, and so the nineteen nineties is when Judith
Speaker 4: Butler publishes Gender Trouble, which Butler never said all genders
Speaker 4: performance are all genders drag, Yeah, but that is but
Speaker 4: that those are like slogans or sound bites that other
Speaker 4: people took from their book, right, and they were very
Speaker 4: popular at the time. There's also there's a famous sociological
Speaker 4: article about doing gender, and so people were very focused
Speaker 4: on the way in which we create gender by doing
Speaker 4: it particular ways, and a lot of the slogans within
Speaker 4: trans communities were sort of like, oh, well, you know,
Speaker 4: I just have to do my gender differently, like more transgressively,
Speaker 4: and that will like tear down all of gender. And
Speaker 4: I felt that there was you know, that is an
Speaker 4: aspect of things, and most of us, whether trans or cists,
Speaker 4: most of us have had the experience of maybe trying to.
Speaker 3: Perform our genders in a particular way in.
Speaker 4: Order to like, you know, not you know, in order
Speaker 4: in order to get by in the world, in order
Speaker 4: to not be harassed by other people.
Speaker 3: So we've all had that experience.
Speaker 4: So while that's true, there's the other partner of that dance,
Speaker 4: and that's perception, and we're all perceiving people very actively,
Speaker 4: and we're like projecting our ideas and meanings onto them.
Speaker 4: And I felt like that was being under discussed at
Speaker 4: the time, and that was not only a huge part
Speaker 4: of Whipping Girl, but that's become a part of a
Speaker 4: lot of my other books, like including my most recent book,
Speaker 4: Sextup how society sexualizes us.
Speaker 3: And how we can fight back.
Speaker 4: One way that I would describe that book is it's
Speaker 4: talking about sex and sexuality not from what people do,
Speaker 4: but from how we perceive and interpret sex and sexuality,
Speaker 4: because there are a lot of unconscious ideas, often really
Speaker 4: horrible ideas, really hierarchical ideas that are kind of built
Speaker 4: into the way we view the world. And interrogating that
Speaker 4: and so, yeah, that was a very big part of
Speaker 4: both Whopen Girl and then my writings since then.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think I think that is something where
Speaker 2: things have gotten better in terms of in terms of
Speaker 2: how we think about gender, which I don't know, like
Speaker 2: things aren't perfect, but it definitely it definitely improved things
Speaker 2: a lot. Agreed, we're going to take an ad break
Speaker 2: and when we come back, we're talking trans misogyny. We're back. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So another thing I wanted to sort of talk about
Speaker 2: was I think, in like exactly the opposite process that
Speaker 2: happened to misgendering, trans misogyny has become a lot more
Speaker 2: expansive than your original sort of kind of narrow conception
Speaker 2: of it. And I think this has been changing a lot,
Speaker 2: especially in the last about half decade or so. So
Speaker 2: I was wondering what you think about the way that
Speaker 2: this concept has kind of taken on a life of
Speaker 2: its own in recent years and what it's been doing since.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So I feel like trans misogyny that there are a
Speaker 4: lot of different dialogues and discourses about it coming, like
Speaker 4: people coming from different perspectives with it, and some people
Speaker 4: feeling like the word is doing things that I never
Speaker 4: suggested it was doing.
Speaker 3: It's kind of.
Speaker 4: Hard to know like where to actually come in on this,
Speaker 4: but for me, when I was first writing about it,
Speaker 4: I was first just noticing that a lot of the
Speaker 4: quote unquote transphobia that I was facing when people know
Speaker 4: as a trans woman was actually a lot of it
Speaker 4: was just misogyny, and a lot of it targeted like
Speaker 4: kind of my femininity rather than my transness, And so
Speaker 4: I wanted to write about that, and kind of the
Speaker 4: way that I framed it in the book was, which
Speaker 4: I think is a really useful kind of model for
Speaker 4: thinking about it, is that there most of the types
Speaker 4: of sexism that feminists have described over the many years
Speaker 4: fall into two sort of camps, one of them being
Speaker 4: oppositional sexism, which is the idea that men and women
Speaker 4: are kind of perfectly opposite, mutually exclusive sexes that have
Speaker 4: different interests and attributes and desires, and so a lot
Speaker 4: of transphobia and homophobia are kind of like built into
Speaker 4: this idea that men and women are completely distinct. And
Speaker 4: then the other one is traditional sexism, which is the
Speaker 4: idea that femalists and femininity are less legitimate than malness
Speaker 4: and masculinity. And a lot of CIS feminists have kind
Speaker 4: of viewed all of that as just sexism, right, But
Speaker 4: when you break it down like that, it makes it
Speaker 4: clear that the double bind that a lot of feminists
Speaker 4: have talked about is actually kind of these two different
Speaker 4: forms of sexism. So if a CIS woman acts appropriately femininely,
Speaker 4: so appropriate with scare quotes. If a SIST woman acts femininely,
Speaker 4: she'll be seen as appropriate, but she'll be dismissed because
Speaker 4: femininity is dismissed in our culture, So that's the way
Speaker 4: that she'll be delegitimized. Whereas if she acts in ways
Speaker 4: that are coded as masculine, and if she acts assertive
Speaker 4: or aggressive, then people will malign her for being kind
Speaker 4: of a barrant or deviant, right, And so oppositional sexism
Speaker 4: helps keep traditional sexism in place because you can say
Speaker 4: that malness and masculinity or superior. But that only works
Speaker 4: if you can also make a clear distinction between you know,
Speaker 4: those people and people are female and feminine, and so
Speaker 4: I think this plays out differently. And I want to
Speaker 4: be really clear about this, because some people have interpreted
Speaker 4: trans misogyny to mean that trans mail and trans masculine
Speaker 4: people don't experience misogyny, which is something I have never said.
Speaker 4: And obviously the fact that oppositional sexism is a form
Speaker 4: of sexism, and obviously trans maild transmasculine people experience that.
Speaker 3: But also depending upon on how.
Speaker 4: You're viewed by other people, I feel like the same
Speaker 4: double pind that affects this woman affects transmeild.
Speaker 3: Trans masculine people differently.
Speaker 4: Where there's this tendency, like in a lot of anti
Speaker 4: trans discourses to dismiss trans masculine, especially transmasculine youth as
Speaker 4: being merely girls quote unquote who are like you know,
Speaker 4: misled or seduced by gender ideology, right, And there's a
Speaker 4: lot of real anti feminine and anti misogynistic ideas in there.
Speaker 4: In addition to the fact that it misgenders transmeild trans
Speaker 4: masculine people. And then if trans maild trans masculine people,
Speaker 4: when they experience transphobia, there's often you know, like they're
Speaker 4: seen as deviant for kind of breaking that role, but
Speaker 4: often the malness or their masculinity themselves are not, you know,
Speaker 4: denigrated in the same way, because being male, being masculine
Speaker 4: are seen as good in our culture. It's just that
Speaker 4: if you trans male, trans masculine, it's like, well, you're
Speaker 4: quote unquote just a woman, so you can't do it.
Speaker 4: So I think it plays out in this very complex
Speaker 4: way for a lot of trans mail trans masculine people,
Speaker 4: I think for trans female and transfeminine people, because our
Speaker 4: crossing of oppositional sexism also involves us kind of moving
Speaker 4: towards the female towards the feminine, that there's kind of
Speaker 4: those two forces intersect in a way so that it's
Speaker 4: like exacerbated. And some of the ways I talk about
Speaker 4: this in whomen Girl is that, well, we live in
Speaker 4: a world where masculinity is seen as natural and femininity
Speaker 4: is seen as artificial, and since trans people are also
Speaker 4: seen as artificial compared to this gender people, a lot
Speaker 4: of times we're viewed as doubly artificial. Furthermore, the idea
Speaker 4: that like women are seen as sex objects, men aren't
Speaker 4: seen as sex objects. Often are transitions or gender transgressions
Speaker 4: towards a female towards a feminine are presumed to be
Speaker 4: driven by sexual motives that can play out in all
Speaker 4: sorts of ways. Whether this is the idea that we're
Speaker 4: like hypersexual or promiscuous, or that we want to be
Speaker 4: sexualized by other people, or you can see it a
Speaker 4: lot with the kind of the transgender predator is often
Speaker 4: coded as like a man who either has some kind
Speaker 4: of fetish or perversion or is just literally deceiving people
Speaker 4: to get into women's restrooms to do something horrific.
Speaker 3: So those are some of the ways that it plays out.
Speaker 3: I feel that.
Speaker 4: Sometimes people view it in a cut or dried way
Speaker 4: that either they'll assume that trans misogyny means that transnal,
Speaker 4: trans massacuine people don't experience misogyny, which again is not
Speaker 4: what that's about. Or sometimes people will try to make
Speaker 4: really clear distinctions. There's kind of language like trans misogyny
Speaker 4: affected versus trans misogyny exempt. Are the terms yeah, TME
Speaker 4: and TMA, which are not terms I've used and which
Speaker 4: or that I didn't coin them.
Speaker 3: They're not in the book.
Speaker 4: And I think that when I first saw that language,
Speaker 4: and I've seen people use it in a way that
Speaker 4: appreciates the fact that some people are non binary, so
Speaker 4: it's a non identity based way. Sometimes this can play
Speaker 4: out in a really cut or dried sort of manner
Speaker 4: that you know, sometimes you know, whether it's intended this
Speaker 4: way or not, it can make it seem that, like,
Speaker 4: you know, just boiling down a really complex experience, people's
Speaker 4: complex experiences with different types of sexism into some people
Speaker 4: are privileged and some people are marginalized, which I think
Speaker 4: is a more general problem that happens kind of throughout
Speaker 4: all social justice movement.
Speaker 5: So yeah, and trans people are not alien to having
Speaker 5: complex experiences be boiled down to three and four letter acronyms.
Speaker 3: So yeah, I mean I.
Speaker 4: Did this in Twitter form, so it was like a thread,
Speaker 4: so like now, people can't access threads unless you.
Speaker 3: Have an account with Twitter. And it's from a couple
Speaker 3: of years ago.
Speaker 4: But one of the things that I talked about was
Speaker 4: I wrote this essay about ten years ago about how
Speaker 4: sis and trans is kind of a useful. Those are
Speaker 4: useful terms, but sometimes people fall in between CIS and trans,
Speaker 4: and sometimes they can be used in a way to
Speaker 4: talk about different double standards, like CIS people are treated
Speaker 4: one way, TRANS people are treated another.
Speaker 3: But sometimes it can be used in like a sort.
Speaker 4: Of reverse discourse way, where it's like, you know, SIS
Speaker 4: people of all the privilege, TRANS people of none of
Speaker 4: the privilege, and it can be used to kind of
Speaker 4: create this strict dichotomy that ends up excluding and invisibilizing
Speaker 4: some people's experiences. And I feel the same thing is
Speaker 4: happening with TME and TMA. So I don't think that
Speaker 4: those terms need to necessarily be like, I don't think
Speaker 4: there's anything bad about those terms per se in and
Speaker 4: of themselves, but I think sometimes they can be used
Speaker 4: in ways. And part of why I reference this this
Speaker 4: SYS and trans essay that I wrote many years ago.
Speaker 4: It appears in my book Outspoken. I forget the complete
Speaker 4: title right now, which is but the reason why I
Speaker 4: bring that up is so sometimes what happens is that
Speaker 4: when people learn about sexism CIS, people might be like, oh,
Speaker 4: I face the sexism right if I'm a woman and
Speaker 4: I don't shave my legs, I'm facing s sexism, and
Speaker 4: so then trans people say, yeah, but it kind of
Speaker 4: plays out differently for us, And so sometimes in order
Speaker 4: to stop people from kind of making those claims, which
Speaker 4: I think it is true that you know, a woman
Speaker 4: not shaving their legs, or if a man decides to
Speaker 4: put on a dress one day, regardless of whether they're
Speaker 4: sis or trans, they could experience says sexism or transphobia,
Speaker 4: but it plays out differently for people who are actually members
Speaker 4: of that marginalized group. And so then the marginalized group
Speaker 4: makes the distinction even sharper, and it just kind of
Speaker 4: becomes this escalating situation where the language and kind of
Speaker 4: battles over it become even more intense. In a recent piece,
Speaker 4: one of the most recent pieces, if you go to
Speaker 4: like my medium site where my essays usually are now
Speaker 4: is it talks about the trans mass versus trans discourse
Speaker 4: in terms of what I call the cultural feminist doom loop,
Speaker 4: where the doom loop refers to kind of these ideas
Speaker 4: where everyone like both sides are trying to talk about
Speaker 4: the reason why their experiences are legit, and then that
Speaker 4: seems as though the other sides are not legitimate, and
Speaker 4: then that kind of cascades in a way that ends
Speaker 4: up not being very productive but takes up a lot
Speaker 4: of energy on.
Speaker 3: Places like Twitter.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think. I think that's something We've still seen
Speaker 2: about one trillion times variety of toxic ways. But what
Speaker 2: isn't toxic is the new third edition of Whipping Girl
Speaker 2: coming out in March with you can ask your local
Speaker 2: bookstore to pre order now and Yeah, join us tomorrow
Speaker 2: for our discussion with doctor Serrano of the Anatomy of
Speaker 2: Moral Panics. This is when it could happen here. Trans
Speaker 2: people are great.
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