Tag Archives: Julia Serano

Whose Gender is Artificial?

Posted on by

Radical feminist writer and blogger Meghan Murphy has written several posts over the last couple of weeks about how awful I am. I don’t really have much interest in responding in kind, but I did want to talk briefly about one argument she makes in her most recent piece, in which she accuses me of believing that gender is real, rather than a construct.
 

Berlatsky says feminist critique often involves a critique of “femininity,” which is true… Though he doesn’t quite get why. He writes:

Is femininity a tool to devalue women? Or is the devaluation of femininity a tool to devalue women? Wearing high heels doesn’t necessarily make you a dupe of the patriarchy. It could mean you’re a super-powerful rock star, and you want to show that femininity can be strong, too.

He seems to see femininity as innate, here. As though, to critique social constructs is to critique something essential about females. But “femininity” is an idea — a set of characteristics (invented and reinforced by a patriarchal society). It says “woman” means “delicate,” “passive,” “pleasant,” “accommodating,” “pretty,” “nurturing,” “irrational,” and “weak.” Feminists say women are not “naturally” any of these things. So no, femininity isn’t about “strength,” despite the fact that women are “strong.” And this is because femininity and femaleness are not connected in any material way.

What’s interesting to me here is that Murphy claims to be undermining femininity even as she reifies it.

My point, in the bit she quotes, is that there’s nothing innately weak, or innately debased, about wearing high heels. Wearing high heels is coded feminine, and is therefore seen as weak, or wrong, or silly, or stupid. But both the decision to code high heels as feminine, and the insistence that femininity is weak…those are cultural choices, not some sort of absolute truth. And pushing back against either of those assumptions — by arguing that high heels don’t have to be feminine, or arguing that high heels, as “feminine” espression, don’t have to be weak — is effectively challenging the innateness of femininity.

Murphy starts out by saying she thinks femininity is a construct too. But the construct is for her awfully real looking and solid. First, she insists that femininity has to mean nurturing, irrational, weak; it can’t mean anything else. And second, she seems oblivious to the possibility that particular gendered expressions are only feminine by convenience. She doesn’t mention any gendered expressions at all in her paragraph, presumably because everyone knows what the signs of femininity are. Murphy’s “constructed” femininity thus has both a stable meaning and a stable expression. It’s solid enough, in short, to serve as a way to police women, who are dupes and tools of the patriarchy if they express themselves in certain ways deemed artificial and constructed.

Murphy thinks she’s getting out of patriarchal thinking by de-naturalizing gender. Patriarchy insists, in her view, that gendered differences are true; by insisting that gendered differences are not innate, she paves the way for women’s liberation. But in fact, she simply replaces the binary male/female with the binary natural/artificial—and that binary is used to police and chastise the same people as ever. Note that it’s femininity here which is seen as artificial: a patriarchal trope if ever there was one. Feminine gender expression is seen as false, frivolous, weak, debased; male gender expression (in Murphy’s piece, and in general) is seen as unmarked, unremarked, and natural. The artificiality of femininity is supposed to free women from patriarchal expectations, but really it just repeats the same old patriarchal prejudices. Feminine gender expression isn’t real. That’s what patriarchy says, and Murphy cosigns it.

In contrast, maybe a better way to approach gender expression is to admit that we don’t really know what’s artificial and what’s natural, or even what those words mean in the context of human behavior. The most human thing about humans is they use all those artificial tools, like language; humans are most natural when they’re most artificial, and maybe vice versa. As long as there is a “wrong” “artificial” “weak” gender expression, it seems likely that it will be attributed to women, and used to denigrate them. So, why not just stop policing people’s gender expression altogether? As long as an individual’s gender expression isn’t hurting or impinging on others fairly directly (like, when masculinity is used as a lever to get people to shoot each other), people should be given leeway to express their gender as they wish without being told that they’re dupes or artificial or monsters or failing feminism. Because it doesn’t make much difference if you’re censuring people in the name of biological truth or the one true feminism—especially when it’s so often the very same people who end up being censured for performing their gender wrong.
 

bigexcluded

Julia Serano said most of this better than me in her book, which you should buy.

P. Marie, Zoe Samudzi, and Julia Serano on Feminist Exclusion

Posted on by

Last week I wrote a piece about Laverne Cox’s nude photoshoot for Allure and how various feminisms have often failed black women and trans women. The piece was in particular a response to a post by Meghan Murphy in which she criticized Cox in what I argued were transphobic, racist, and cruel terms.

For my essay I conducted several interviews — but as often happens, I was only able to use little bits of them. The interviews were all really thoughtful and enlightening, though, and it seemed a shame to waste them. So I asked folks if it would be okay to reprint them here, and everyone (including Playboy) kindly agreed. All the interviews are below, from shortest to longest responses, more or less. My questions are in italics; answers are of course by the interviewees.
_______
P. Marie is a former sex worker; she blogs a mix of trash, nail art, and selfies at pmariejust.tumblr.com and @_peech on twitter.

Why has feminism and radical feminism had trouble respecting black women?

As far as I can see, the problem can be boiled down to (among many things) entitlement and a sense of ownership. For decades, white feminism has said things like “being a voice for the voiceless” – essentially taking ownership of the voices (and bodies) of Black women, sex workers, and Transgender people through exclusion and subscribing to violent, racist, and transphobic rhetoric.

While at points in history, speaking up to protect others was necessary and desired by us from them, it’s now turned into a clear case of overbearing entitlement and greed for the spotlight. Opportunistic hatred is published quickly and easily by both news houses and blogs with large followings, giving bigoted white feminists a platform to share their trash with a digital megaphone.

The shame in all this is how difficult it seems for feminists as a community to see this happening as often as it does.

With dangerous ideas like “women born women”, the new emergence of the “rescue industry”, and anti sex work and anti black feminists these newest waves of feminism are going on the offensive and becoming more harmful by the day. The problem blooms larger when the actuality of “being the voice for the voiceless” is comprised solely of ignoring people who are willing to speak for themselves. Feminism isn’t helping anyone anymore – unless helping yourself to take the stage by way of abusing women you don’t like counts, and I don’t think it should.

Could you talk just briefly as a black woman and a sex worker what your reaction to the Laverne Cox photos are? Is it empowering or satisfying to see black women recognized as beautiful in that way? Do you see sexualized images of black women as a problem at all, or does it depend on agency/the situation?

As for my reaction to Laverne’s pictures, I feel a sense of happiness for her. She’s done interviews and spoken about her self esteem/appearance, and to see her be able to have those photos done and (very obviously) look and feel so beautiful, what a happy moment. It helps me as an individual when I see any Black woman feeling beautiful and sharing that with the world – reminding people we ARE beautiful, desirable, feminine, and strong – which is exactly, thankfully, what Laverne Cox has done for us.

When it comes to sexualized images of us, for me it’s all about agency! Did we consent? Are we respected? Is this our choice? Is this a collection of body parts or erased humanity? There are a lot of questions that run through my mind at that intersection of sex work and being a Black woman.

What Laverne Cox did put a smile on many faces and some hope in a lot of hearts. I think there are very few better things a person could do in life.
__________
Zoe Samudzi is a researcher and activist; she’s a project assistant at UCSF. You can follow her on twitter, @ztsamudzi.

Could you talk just briefly about how some strains of radical feminism have marginalized black women and trans women? Like, specifically, why does feminism have trouble embracing those groups? Are the reasons linked?

It isn’t just radical feminism, but also mainstream White Feminism that has targeted and excluded women of color, sex workers, trans women, and others marginalized identities. But these radical second wave feminisms emerged in reaction to traditional femininity, a part of which is female sexuality, which they characterized as “slavery to patriarchy.” These radical feminisms, in my opinion, don’t even feign inclusivity: there’s a very prescriptive understanding of what emancipation and liberation looks like and in the rejection of femininity, it fails to recognize women’s agency (including sexual agency). Couple this misogynistic demonization of femininity with the general devaluing of certain bodies and identities – black women, trans women, and sex workers most notably – and you have shaming, commentaries about “self-objectification” (actually the imposition of the male gaze) when women pose nude, refusal to recognise sex workers as agents, and so on. This exclusion and marginalisation links to white female entitlement and the refusal to de-center whiteness. White women have historically been perpetrators of violence against black women’s bodies, and the same entitlement and identity-centerdness in feminism has enabled them to proclaim themselves as the arbiters of womanhood. It’s also worth nothing that it isn’t just radical feminism that has marginalized trans women and sex workers: that has and does happen in black feminism/womanism, as well.

Do you see fashion images of black women as disempowering? empowering? Some mix of both? Do black women have a different relationship to objectification/sexualization than white women do?

I guess I don’t pay them much attention, but the models are gorgeous. Beyond being empowering or disempowering, I see fashion images of black women as promoting similar discouraging messages about body images as white ones. But black women lend an element of “cool” and afford a cultural capital to fashion that white models to not (they’re always thrown in there for some performance of athleticism or exoticism). The objectification of black women is both gendered and racialized: there’s not only a gendered sexualization, but also a fetishization as an exotic radicalised “other.”

I know you don’t identify as a feminist right now…I guess I wondered what feminism would have to do to get you back? What needs to change before you’d feel comfortable identifying as a feminist again?

I don’t think I’ll ever identify as a feminist again, though there’s a tremendous amount of scholarship in marginal feminisms (i.e. from sex workers, in transfeminism, from migrant/immigrant women, from disabled women, from women in the Global South, and so on). I’m not spending any more energy trying to convince white women that my identity is worthy: I’d rather invest my energy in gender politics grounded in intersectional understandings, as womanism is.
________

Julia Serano is a trans feminist and author. Her most recent book is Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive.

Why has feminism been so resistant to including trans women?

There was a time when most feminists (like society at large) were very resistant toward trans women, largely because of misconceptions that people in general had about us. But with increasing trans awareness over the last ten or twenty years, most strands of feminism now acknowledge (and sometimes ally with) trans people and issues. One major exception has been trans-exclusive radical feminists (often called TERFs).

While they may differ to some degree in their perspectives, most TERFs subscribe to a single-issue view of sexism, where men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story. This rigidly binary view of sexism erases transgender perspectives. It leads TERFs to view trans men as “dupes” or “traitors” who have bought into patriarchy’s insistence that being a man is superior to being a woman. This framing also leads them to depict trans women as entitled men who are “infiltrating” women’s spaces and “parodying” women’s oppression, or as “gender-confused” or androgynous people who transition to female in some hapless attempt to “assimilate” into the gender binary. Which is so bizarre that they think that, because no one in the straight mainstream views out trans women as being well-respected legitimate gendered citizens!

Is that linked to, or how is it linked to, feminism’s discussions of objectification, or with its discomfort with sex workers/sexualized portrayals of women?

Yes. Their single-issue view of sexism (i.e., men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed, end of story) ignores intersectionality—the fact that there are many forms of sexism and marginalization that exacerbate one another, and that people who experience multiple forms of marginalization may view sexism (and feminist responses to sexism) very differently.

Some feminists (including many trans-exclusionary ones) forward the following overly simplistic argument: In patriarchy, men sexualize and objectify women, therefore women should avoid being sexualized and objectified, because it is inherently disempowering and anti-feminist. This seems to be the case that Meghan Murphy is making. But it ignores the fact that all women are not seen and interpreted the same in the eyes of society. If you happen to be a disabled woman, or a woman of color, or a queer or trans woman, or a sex worker, then you are also constantly receiving messages that you are *not* considered desirable or loveable according to society’s norms.

Feminists have long discussed the “virgin/whore” double-bind: If we express our sexualities and/or expose our bodies, many people will sexualize and objectify us. But if we repress our sexualities and hide our bodies, that also has negative ramifications, especially for those of us who are deemed to be non-normative or undesirable for some reason or another.

I completely understand why, in a world that constantly attempts to erase and eradicate trans women of color, Laverne Cox might feel that that photo-shoot might be empowering for her and for other trans women who share similar identities, backgrounds, or circumstances. This does not by any means imply that they are “buying into the system”—rather, it most likely means that they are navigating their own way through society’s mixed messages (e.g., women are seen as sexual objects, but at the same time, trans women and women of color are viewed as sexually deviant, undesirable, or sexual abominations).

Laverne Cox is an outspoken feminist who has been raising public awareness about sexism and multiple forms of marginalization for several years now. Given that history, Murphy’s response seemed especially condescending to me. It is okay for feminists to disagree. But when you accuse someone who is creating positive change in so many ways of “reinforcing” sexism (especially when they face obstacles that you do not have to face), then you should probably consider whether you are the one who is “holding back the movement” by excluding women who differ in their experiences from you.
 

laverne-cox-nude

Performance Piece

Posted on by

This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007. It was reprinted in Julia Serano’s book Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Communities More Inclusive which everyone should buy, damn it. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.
__________

bigexcluded

 
If one more person tells me that “all gender is performance” I think I am going to strangle them. What’s most annoying about that sound-bite is how it is often recited in a somewhat snooty “I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn’t” sort of way, which is ironic given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification that is as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there’s one thing that every person in this room should be able to agree on, it’s that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It’s like a junior high school mixer where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another and with the external expectations that other people place on us.

Sure, I can perform gender if I want. I can curtsy or throw like a girl or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn’t explain why some behaviors and ways of being come more naturally to me than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn’t capture the very real physical and emotional changes I experienced when I hormonally shifted from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn’t begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same — wore the same t-shirts, jeans and sneakers that I always had — yet once people started reading me as female they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, it seems to me that we let the audience — with all of their interpretations, prejudices and assumptions — completely off the hook.

I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like “all gender is performance”, “all gender is drag” and “gender is just a construct”. They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations. And of course, this is a convenient strategy, provided that you are not a trans woman who lacks the means to have her legal sex changed to female, and who thus runs the real risk of being locked up in an all male jail cell. Provided that you’re not a trans man who has to navigate the discrepancy between his male identity and female history during job interviews and first dates. Whenever I hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance, it always reminds me of that Stephen Colbert gag where he insists that he doesn’t see race. It’s easy to fictionalize an issue when you are not fully in touch with all of the ways in which you are privileged by it.

Almost every day of my life I deal with people who insist on seeing my femaleness as fake. People who make a point of calling me effeminate rather than feminine. People who slip up my pronouns only after they find out that I’m trans, but never beforehand. People who insist on third-sexing me with labels like MTF, boy-girl, he-she, she-male, ze & hir — anything but simply female. Because I’m transsexual, I am sometimes accused of impersonation or deception when I am simply being myself. So it seems to me that this strategy of fictionalizing gender will only ever serve to marginalize me further.

So I ask you: Can’t we find new ways of speaking? Shouldn’t we be championing new slogans that empower all of us, whether trans or non-trans, queer or straight, female and/or male and/or none of the above?

Instead of saying that all gender is this or all gender is that, let’s recognize that the word gender has scores of meanings built into it. It’s an amalgamation of bodies, identities and life experiences, subconscious urges, sensations and behaviors, some of which develop organically, and others of which are shaped by language and culture. Instead of arguing that gender is any one single thing, let’s start describing it as a holistic experience.

Instead of dismissing all gender as performance, let’s admit that sometimes gender is an act, and other times it isn’t. And since we can’t get inside one another’s minds, we have no way of knowing whether any given person’s gender is sincere or contrived. Let’s fess up to the fact that when we make judgments about other people’s genders, we’re typically basing it on our own assumptions (and we all know what happens when you assume, right?)

Let’s stop claiming that certain genders and sexualities reinforce the gender binary. In the past, that tactic has been used to dismiss butches and femmes, bisexuals, trans people and our partners, and feminine people of every persuasion. Gender is not simply some faucet that we can turn on and off in order to appease other people, whether they be heterosexist bigots or queerer-than-thou hipsters. How about this: Let’s stop pretending that we have all the answers, because when it comes to gender, none of us is fucking omniscient.

Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let’s talk about all of the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn’t feel like drag when you’re a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn’t feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you finally feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn’t feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let’s stop trying to deconstruct gender into non-existence and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound and intricate.

So don’t dare dismiss my gender as a construct, drag or a performance, because my gender is a work of non-fiction.

Julia Serano on Call Out Culture

Posted on by

I have an interview with Julia Serano up today at the Atlantic, in which we talk about her wonderful new book Excluded, which you should all go out and buy right now.

The interview got cut a little for space reasons, so with the Atlantic’s kind permission, I decided to post the excised bit over here.

You talk a bit about call out culture and where you see problems with it. So, thinking about the Hugo Schwyzer mess in particular, I wonder if you could talk a little about how you think activist communities can be inclusive and open to difference, while still being able to respond to or deal with folks who actually are undermining their goals or exploiting them.

The chapter in which I talk about call-out culture is the last chapter and it’s called “Balancing Acts.” And I talk about how activism needs to be a balancing act between the fact that we each have our own issues and concerns and agendas, and then there are other activists coming from other perspectives who have their own issues and concerns and agendas. And the best thing for us to do moving forward is to create intentionally intersectional spaces where we both talk and listen to one another, and where we give people the benefit of the doubt.

I think that can happen on a very conscious level, especially in smaller situations.

It becomes a real problem on the Internet. Just because, as you pointed out, there are bad actors, and people who are either going to be selfish and only talk about their own issues, or who are purposefully undermining other people. And you usually can’t police who shows up at your blog post, or who comments or who doesn’t.

As I was writing that chapter, I knew that it was a very complicated issue. But I do think it’s important to try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I know for myself, that I grew up in straight mainstream culture that didn’t really have a feminist analysis and that was very anti-queer. And I learned what I’ve learned as an activist slowly but surely, and I went through various stages of probably being messed up in my perspective, just because I was new. And I think that we need a way to give people who are new to activism a chance to learn, and to be given the benefit of the doubt if they say something that other people think is problematic, as long as they’re willing to listen to others and learn moving forward.

The other reason that I bring it up is that a lot of exclusion that happens within feminist and queer movement comes from having some minority member of the group being called out under the assumption that who they are is inherently oppressive. So there’s a long history of trans women in feminist and queer spaces being accused of having transitioned in order to have heterosexual privilege, or being accused of upholding heteronormative ideas of what women are and so on. So that was another concern of mine.

 

Excluded_print-467x700