citation:
Julia Serano,
Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism(Oakland, CA: Switch Hitter Press, 2016), pp. 69–76.

Part Two
Articulating
Trans-Misogyny
At the end of the previous chapter, I mentioned a series of trans woman-centric writings that I was beginning to work on, one that would draw
connections between the various forms of sexism that I personally faced as aqueer-identified transsexual woman. While I assumed that this book project
would “take some time to finish,” a serendipitous turn of events resulted in thatcollection (which ultimately became Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on
Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity) coming to fruition far sooner than I
had expected. Since all the chapters in this section were either written concurrently with, or are related in some way to, Whipping Girl, I figured that I would
briefly describe how that book (and some of the ideas contained therein) cameto be.
In December 2004, I was invited to read at Michelle Tea’s Radar Reading
Series in San Francisco. After the event, Brooke Warner introduced herself
to me and mentioned that she was an editor at Seal Press. She said that she
missed my reading (a set of performance poetry), but liked what I had to say
during the question and answer session. I thanked her and gave her a copy of
my chapbook Draw Blood. I didn’t think too much about it at the time, as Seal

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Press was not actively publishing poetry. But then a few months later, in April
2005, Brooke contacted me out of the blue and asked if I had ever consideredwriting a book of personal essays. And it turns out that I was already in theearly stages of working on one.
While performance poetry is a powerful medium for expressing personal
stories and opinions, its time constraints often make it too limiting for taking
on more complex topics or rolling out long and involved arguments, which iswhat I now wanted to do. While in my poetry, I regularly described the transphobia that I faced as a trans person and the misogyny that I faced since transitioning to female, I now wanted to explore how these phenomena intersectedin my life, and for others on the trans female/feminine spectrum. The first ofsuch essays was “Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution
in Lipstick and Heels,” which first appeared in Bitch Magazine in the Fall of
2004.1 Then in June 2005, I released a chapbook entitled On the Outside Looking In: a trans woman’s perspective on feminism and the exclusion of trans womenfrom lesbian and women-only spaces, which included three additional essays on
this topic (which were later re-worked for Whipping Girl and Excluded).2
To the best of my knowledge, On the Outside Looking In was the first publication to contain the word “trans-misogyny”—a term I used to refer to theintersection of transphobia and misogyny, and which has since caught on, atleast within transgender and activist circles. I believe that I coined the term,
although I cannot rule out the possibility that it arose elsewhere independently,
as during that time I had had conversations with a number of trans women
about how much of the transphobia we face might be better described as expressions of misogyny.
In the years since Whipping Girl was published, the term “trans-misogyny” has taken on a life of its own, and people now use it in ways that I neverintended. Specifically, I used the term to describe how the existence of societal
misogyny/traditional sexism greatly informs how people perceive, interpret,or treat gender-variant people who seemingly “want to be female” or “wantto be feminine” (regardless of their actual identity). However, many people
nowadays use the word “trans-misogyny” in an identity-based manner to refer
to any and all forms of discrimination targeting trans women. According tothis latter usage, some would argue that people who identify as men, or malecrossdressers, or drag queens, cannot possibly experience trans-misogyny—aclose reading of Whipping Girl will reveal that I very much disagree with thispremise. (See Chapter 48 of this book for a detailed explanation regarding why

Articulating Trans-misogyny

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identity-based views of marginalization tend to be inaccurate and exclusive.)
Along similar lines, I have observed people using “trans-misogyny” asshorthand to suggest that “trans men are privileged, and trans women oppressed, end of story.” I reject such oversimplifications for the very same reasons that I rejected earlier reciprocal claims (which were quite prevalent backwhen I was writing Whipping Girl) that “trans women experience male privilege, whereas trans men do not.” Male and masculine privileges can provide
very real advantages to those who are granted them. But this does not meanthat those who experience said privileges automatically have it easy, are fully
accepted by society, and/or are immune from other forms of marginalization(e.g., transphobia).
It should also be said that trans-misogyny (in my original conceptualization of the term) was not intended to suggest that trans female/feminine folks
experience misogyny whereas trans male/masculine folks do not. Obviously,trans male/masculine individuals may experience misogyny at various points
throughout their lives, including post-transition (e.g., if their trans status is
discovered). Once again, what I was trying to convey with “trans-misogyny” is
how the widespread presumption that femaleness and femininity are inferior
to, or less legitimate than, maleness and masculinity, creates assumptions, stereotypes, and obstacles for trans female/feminine people that are not generally
experienced by those on the trans male/masculine spectrum (unless, of course,
post-transition they are read by others as a man who wants, or is trying, to befemale and/or feminine).
I was interested in articulating trans-misogyny because it both accounted
for how people on the trans female/feminine spectrum tend to face the lion’sshare of sensationalization, consternation, and demonization in mainstream
considerations of trans people, and also helped to make sense of the disparities
in acceptance of trans men versus trans women that existed within my own
queer women’s community during the time (as I alluded to at the end of thelast chapter). To be clear, I don’t think that this disparity was solely due totrans-misogyny, but it most certainly was a contributing factor.3
Over the years, I have occasionally come across people who will protestthat lesbians in their community don’t accept trans men at all, or that transwomen are accepted in their own queer women’s community to the same extent as (or perhaps even more so than) trans men. I don’t doubt that these
configurations exist—in fact, in my mind they seem to form a continuum overtime, with the former being extremely common during the ’80s and ’90s, and72

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the latter resembling where we may slowly be heading. But throughout mostof the ’00s, especially in U.S. urban queer women’s communities, the disparitythat I describe in these pieces was extremely commonplace, if not ubiquitous.
I am perfectly fine with the idea of trans male/masculine people participating in (what are ostensibly) queer women’s communities. What I was primarily objecting to in some of the chapters that follow is how that participation
tended to be practiced—for instance, how some trans men’s emphasis of theirformer status (e.g., as “girls” or “lesbians”) encouraged others to continue usingtrans women’s former “male” status against us; or how lesbians who excluded
trans women would so frequently point to trans men in the space in order tomake the claim that they couldn’t possibly be “transphobic.” It is this latterclaim (which I heard scores upon scores of times back then) that seemed tonecessitate the coining of an entirely new trans female/feminine-specific term.
To be honest, I am not sure that I would have gravitated toward the neologism“trans-misogyny” if it were not for my activist work challenging this particulardisparity.
Anyway, once my On the Outside Looking In chapbook was complete, I
passed it along to Seal Press, and they liked it. So I followed that up with abook proposal, which they accepted. I was thrilled by the possibility of having abook published, especially with Seal Press, as their history of publishing books“by women, for women” would likely help the book garner some legitimacy andattention among feminists who might not be especially familiar with transgender people and issues.
I was also highly aware of how lucky I was: While Bitesize had been playing out for eight years, and many people had expressed excitement and appreciation for our music, none of them worked for a record company that had
the means to release our music to a wider audience. And yet, here I was—arelatively unknown writer with three chapbooks and a handful of magazine
articles to my name—who just so happened to be at the right place at the righttime to get noticed by someone who expressed interest in publishing my book.
While I was excited about the opportunity, I was also naturally quite nervous, never having written a full-length book before. I had a handful of essays
and spoken word pieces in hand, but I still needed to write the bulk of thebook. Seal Press gave me a year and a half to work on it before the entire manuscript would be due. And that was pretty much all I did for that year and ahalf of my life. I was working full-time as a biologist at UC Berkeley, so I got
up every morning and wrote from 5 to 8 a.m. And when I got home from work,Articulating Trans-misogyny

73

I read voraciously for my book research.
I have learned a lot about writing from reading authors of various genresand styles. But during the time that I was working on Whipping Girl, I remember being influenced by four authors in particular: Audre Lorde, Riki Wilchins,
Patrick Califia, and bell hooks. While these writers are admittedly quite different from one another in content and style, all four had penned collections of
essays that I found to be powerful and uncompromising, yet simultaneously accessible, easily discernable, and highly persuasive. These authors seemed to use
fierce combinations of logic, passion, personal experience, and humor to win
over readers to their point of view—and this is precisely what I was striving to
do in my book. Audre Lorde’s style of poetic prose especially resonated withme as a “recovering slam poet” (as I sometimes half-jokingly refer to myselfnow). While I am incapable of writing prose as beautiful as hers, I try (in myown way) to incorporate some of what I’ve learned from writing performance
poetry and song lyrics into my essays. Rather than just stringing words together, I am always thinking about the cadence of a sentence or paragraph, and I
often purposefully try to arrange words and phrases so that they internallyrhyme and/or flow into one another. Even when I am writing for the page,I am always considering how the piece in question would sound if it were to
be spoken aloud. I’m sure that most readers never consciously pick up on this,but I’m inclined to believe that it likely makes the book a more pleasant andcompelling read.
The most difficult decision that I faced while working on the book waswhether or not to use the then relatively unknown “cis terminology” (in which
the prefix “cis” is used to refer to the non-trans majority); I discuss my reasonsfor choosing to do so in Chapter 25. I had discovered this language online,
but it was not yet widely in use within trans communities (or at least the ones
that I was involved in), and I had never before seen it in print.4 So I very much
worried that including this new language—in addition to several other new
terms that I was introducing (e.g., trans-misogyny, effemimania, subversivism, subconscious sex, gender entitlement)—might make the book seem alien
or unintelligible for some readers. But thankfully, rather than driving readers
away, cis terminology eventually caught on, and is probably one of the mainconcepts (along with trans-misogyny) that people most commonly associatewith Whipping Girl.
The book underwent a number of title changes while it was a work inprogress. The tentative title in my book proposal was Hot Tranny Action, but

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as I discuss in Chapter 45, we decided that that would create too many misconceptions about what the book was about. In the book contract, the tentative title was listed as Feminine Wiles, which I liked, but it ultimately wasdeemed too old-fashioned sounding. My publisher and I went back and forthwith alternate titles for quite a while. In an interview I gave in August 2006,
I referred to the tentative title as Who’s Deceiving Who?: Transsexual Women,
Sexism and the Future of Feminism (which I had completely forgotten about
until I stumbled upon that article last year).5 Then one day, after Brooke had
emailed me a list of potential titles, we were talking on the phone and she
asked me what I thought about her suggestion of “Whipping Girl.” I repliedthat I was confused by that one (honestly, the first thing that popped into myhead upon seeing that title was BDSM!), until she pointed out that the phrase
was intended to be the feminine version of “whipping boy”—this seemed to fit
perfectly with the book’s discussions of the societal scapegoating of femininity,
so we eventually settled on it.
While the book touches upon a number of topics related to gender andgender-variant people, it is primarily focused on challenging societal critiquesof three particular subgroups—transsexuals, trans female/feminine-spectrum
individuals, and people who are feminine in gender expression—as I found thatthese three aspects of my own person were rarely defended at the time, bothin mainstream society and within many strands of feminism, queer, and transgender activism. Since these three subgroups were routinely maligned within
activism and academia, I spent a significant chunk of the book debunking or
re-thinking certain entrenched beliefs within feminism, gender studies, queer
theory, and transgender activism. This (unsurprisingly, I suppose) led to a few
sensationalistic synopses of the book (such as a San Francisco Chronicle bookreview headlined “Transsexual finds sexism in feminism”6), and I have since
encountered a few claims that I was somehow disproportionately blaming
feminists and queer activists for the marginalization of these three subgroups.
That was not my intention—I was simply working to make these movements
more aware and inclusive of transsexuals, trans women, and feminine people,
as I believe that we have a stake in these movements as well.
Upon its completion, I was pretty sure that the book would be well received among trans women and other trans-spectrum people, as I was writingfrom that particular standpoint. I also hoped that it would resonate with many
femmes, and perhaps even garner some attention within queer and feminist
circles more generally. So I was really excited to find that, soon after the bookArticulating Trans-misogyny

75

was released in June 2007, it seemed to make an impact outside of the transand femme bubbles. But I had no idea that, in subsequent years, some would
consider it to be an important feminist text, or that it would eventually be usedas teaching materials in gender and queer studies, sociology, psychology, andother college courses. While I was writing it, I very much saw myself as an
outsider challenging the feminist and academic orthodoxy, so it was somewhat
surreal to witness the book become accepted in many (albeit most certainly notall) corners of activism and academia.
Whipping Girl was originally intended to be a book of personal essays,
and as such, it is replete with my own personal stories and perspectives on theworld. Of course, these particular anecdotes and interpretations stem in partfrom me being socially situated as a white, middle-class, able-bodied, “generation X,” out, queer-identified transsexual woman living in a major city in the
U.S in the early 2000s. But now that it is often presented in classrooms andother settings as an “authoritative” or “definitive” book about trans people andissues, its rather specific focus unfortunately results in a number of other important topics getting relatively less consideration. Whipping Girl offers little
discussion about the issues and experiences of non-binary-identified people,
intersex people, trans male/masculine-spectrum people, straight-identified
trans people, trans people of color and other cultures, and so forth. Over theyears, numerous people have expressed to me their disappointment in theseomissions. Had I known at the time that the book would one day be viewed as
an authoritative or definitive “transgender book,” I probably would have written it very differently: less personal and transsexual-focused, and more generaland intersectional. But, for better or worse, it is what it is: the perspective of
one individual trans woman situated in a particular time and place.
I’d like to think that Whipping Girl makes numerous points that remain
insightful or useful. But I will be the first to admit that it is far from the wholestory, and I am grateful for the many other gender-variant writers of various
identities, backgrounds, generations, and geographies that are filling in the
many gaps that the book overlooks.
Postscript added June 2016: A Second Edition of Whipping Girl was recently
published—it is pretty much the same book, albeit with a new Preface thatplaces the book in historical context, clarifies several arguments I made overthe course of the book, and discusses the many changes in transgender activism
since the book’s initial release.7 I further expound on some of the ideas that I

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first presented in Whipping Girl (e.g., gender entitlement, subversivism andthe “reinforcing” trope, subconscious sex and my “intrinsic inclinations” model)
throughout Excluded. On my blog, I penned several responses to frequently
asked questions about the book regarding terminology, the original book cover(which depicts a woman putting on a necklace), and the chapter “Submissive
Streak.”8 Finally, I update my thoughts about media depictions of trans people
in the recent article “Expanding Trans Media Representation: Why Transgender Actors Should Be Cast in Cisgender Roles.”9