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