Liya Rechtman November 9, 2011 Fashion, Gender, Queer

Queeries pt. 1: Serano Whipped

Take those labels off my dress!!!!

This was my first thought walking out of Julie Serano’s lecture last week “Putting the Femme back into Feminism.” Serano, the author of Whipping Girl , identifies as “transsexual woman on the femme spectrum.” Ok, sure, I’m cool with that… unless I think harder about it.

NOTE: I would like to premise this piece with the disclaimer that I am NOT a WAGS major, and this is probably one of the more conservative views that I have. I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about this issue, reading about it, and this is the conclusion I’ve come to. It is not a conclusion in line with my homo-normative upbringing, so I feel pretty uncomfortable about it. However, I think I have an opinion that needs to be voiced, and people rarely feel comfortable, in my experience, saying anything critical about the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Trans-Queer/Questioning-Intersex-Asexual (who has ever spelled that out?) community.

I don’t GET transsexual. I don’t get it as a choice, no matter how I look at it.

The weaker argument: Sometimes I am religious. When I’m religious I feel like my body and my life has been granted to me, temporarily, by god. I have divine spark, etc blah blah. If I fuck with my body, I’m also messing with god… Even though sometimes I don’t go to the gym, I eat something unhealthy, I would never alter my body in any permanent way. I have no piercing or tattoos. I have a scar on my forehead and even though, according to the settlement with the hotel (long story) I have a right to plastic surgery, which they would pay for, I have refused it. I don’t understand body altercations that aren’t necessary for health. There you go. I just got a little weird- conservative on you, didn’t I?

The stronger argument: My roommate, who is also not a WAGS major, wanted to go to the Julie Serano lecture because she said it was about fashion. I insisted that it was about feminism. Turns out, my roommate was right. The lecture was all about how you’re treated because of your “gender identity expression” – aka, how you dress. “Femininity,” in Serano’s eyes, was girly-ness. Gender expression and identity seemed to boil down to clothing and anachronistic stereotypes.

I don’t understand why a culture that’s supposedly so open-minded and accepting of the gender spectrum (meaning queer culture) would consistently have trouble with the full range of woman and man. If you are biologically a woman who dresses “like a man,” in my mind that just makes you a female bodied person in clothing that is socially accepted as male-bodied clothing. In other words, why are you less of a woman because you would rather tape your breasts than wear a bra? Why are you less of a woman because you would rather remove your breasts all together? To me it seems that then you’re still a woman, you’ve just expanded the definition of woman.

I get being gay/queer. I find the argument that you cant choose who you love to be compelling. I get androgyny too, blurring gender boundaries because no one has all “female” or all “male” traits, either physically or emotionally. Plus, androgyny is sexy as hell in my book. However, in order to choose your gender you must opt for expensive, invasive surgery. These two things do not seem equivalent to me.

If this is a naïve thought/comment on transsexuality – tell me now. It totally could be. I’ve been around transsexual, gay, and queer people all my life, though, and no one has been able to answer these questions.

As for Serano herself… it basically seemed to me that other than responding the feminists arguments from the 1970s (Brownmiller? Really?) instead of this century’s thinkers, the solution to all her socially anti-femme problems was that people should care less about what other people are doing with their gender identity and expression. True. But I was disappointed that she didn’t have a more activist inclination than that, considering how involved she clearly is in the transsexual femme spectrum community.

As a fairly feminine looking woman, I feel like there is so much to be said about femme culture, especially within the gay/lesbian community and the ways it mirrors the straight community (TBW – my new acronym which means “to be written”). I wish she had spoken about that. Serano spoke about how uncomfortable she felt wearing a dress because she worried about being catcalled. Well, try being 14 on the F train in Brooklyn. I grew up with this body and I haven’t changed it, and it doesn’t really matter what I wear, or what time it is, I get the same shit on the train every morning. I think that the way I dress, as a native to my body, has to be so radically different from hers. I wish she had spoken about her experience, so that I could actually compare them. I guess what bothered me most about this part is her assumption that just because the single interaction (namely, catcalling) is the same, our personal historiographies and relationships to those interactions would also be there same. I don’t believe that they are.

She reminded me why I’m not a Jewish Studies major, too. This woman has spent her whole life studying… herself… healthy? It just doesn’t seem to me like her concepts of herself have very powerful implications in the wider world. While being able to speak from the position of insider is sometimes crucial to give voice to your niche population in an academic setting, it is necessary to create some distance between yourself and that community in order to say anything useful. Serano doesn’t seem to have distance necessary to actually impact anyone, in any way other than validating and reaffirming people who would already agree with her.

So there it is. Some stuff that I don’t really get. Please, educate me.

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1

lena on November 9, 2011 at 6:01 pm
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Disclaimer: I am a cisgender mixed race lesbian so feel free to correct me on trans* experience.

I think the thing that bothered me most is your assumption that being transgender/transsexual is a choice. I think you were probably referring to an operation as opposed to existing. I feel like the disconnect here is between transgender and transsexual. I think that gender is innate in some sense, although there is much to be considered and complicated when one takes into account all sorts of ideas based on biology and society and all that jazz. For example (sorry for the anecdata) , I know that I identify as a woman, even though I do exhibit masculinity in my clothes and in my stance. I don’t know why that is or what causes it (I don’t think it’s purely sex), but I know that I am happy in my body as it is and I am happy with the way that society perceives my body as a woman and fitting into that societal construct. For someone who is transgender (again here comes territory where I don’t have any experience), that identification does not happen between the mind and the body. That lack of correspondence can result in mental and emotional problems, such as body dysphoria. True, this dysphoria can be influenced by society because of gender norms, but it does not make the problem any less severe. Having a sex change operation would be like having a hip or knee replacement; it is not strictly necessary for survival, but it would be beneficial for the person’s health and well-being.

You also say that “in order to choose your gender you must opt for expensive, invasive surgery.” Many transgender people do not even have an operation; they are able to identify as “real men” or “real women” or “real genderqueer person” without physical changes. But I see nothing wrong with using these changes to make one more comfortable in one’s body.

Following those lines, I also think that the idea of self-identification needs to be addressed. No one can tell me whether or not I am a man or a woman or something else other than myself. You say that someone taping or removing their breasts would be “expanding the definition of woman”. This is true so long as that person is identifying as woman. The agency of the person is integral in defining gender because it gives power to act outside of societal norms or constraints and to own agency over my own body.

Moving on to Serano’s lecture, I think that she addressed stereotypes that were indeed anachronistic and stereotypical because they reflect what the majority of society thinks about masculinity and femininity. I did not get the sense that she thought femininity or masculinity was encompassed by those lists or that we need to conform to those. I think she was expressing a wish to have feminine people accepted at all, so that those who choose to present as such (from transwomen to ciswomen and from lesbians to heterosexuals) don’t become victimized for making these choices,

There is a difference between gender and gender expression, which I think is what Serano was trying to get at in her lecture by talking about femme trans men or butch trans women. These people identified as a gender that did not correspond to their given sex. But they still presented outwardly as feminine or masculine, something that I believe her point was that gender and gender expression do not have to correspond even in a queer or feminist context.

I do agree that Serano could have talked more about practical ways in which to stop genderpolicing, but then again she is a theorist, and from my experience that is a whole other level from thinking to doing (or at least another paper/lecture).

Just as a point of curiosity, do you think that being a member of the community she researched really hindered her studies so much? Personally I don’t feel like I’m super connected to the reading every time I read something about lesbians or about women in my WAGS classes. It’s a really interesting idea, though.

Hope I wasn’t too rambling or repetitive and that some of this made sense. 
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Alicia on November 9, 2011 at 6:15 pm
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Interesting read. Some comments:

1. “people rarely feel comfortable, in my experience, saying anything critical about the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Trans-Queer/Questioning-Intersex-Asexual (who has ever spelled that out?) community”

Perhaps irrelevant, but this is by no means the common experience.

2. “I don’t GET transsexual. I don’t get it as a choice, no matter how I look at it.”

A choice? Transsexuality is about not being able to reconcile your biological gender with your gender identity. Perhaps we get to choose some of the aspects that go into forming our gender identity, but certainly not all of them (perhaps you grew up with only a father, for example, which could have implications for the formation of your gender identity). Transsexuality is a struggle, and few choose to struggle without necessity.

3. “I don’t understand body altercations that aren’t necessary for health.”

Not all transsexuals undergo gender reassignment surgery and, for those who do, they must go through a serious screening process to determine that it IS necessary for their health. If you do not see why living in a body that does not feel like your own would be detrimental to mental health (and consequently physical health), then our arguments are different and mine need be considered no furthur. (Try to imagine keeping your current conception of your gender identity but starting tomorrow your biological gender is changed. You are now expected to live a mentally stable life. This clearly would prove difficult, and this is the daily dilemma of the transsexual.)

4. “In other words, why are you less of a woman because you would rather tape your breasts than wear a bra? ”

This is an interesting perspective, but I think what really occurs is that you would rather tape your breasts than wear a bra BECAUSE you feel like less of a woman, not the other way around. While certainly not all women wear bras, the majority do so. Because transsexuals wish to bring physical expression (beyond just changing their genitals) in line with their gender identity, it makes sense for them to deny traditional expressions of the gender with which they do not identify.

5. “Serano spoke about how uncomfortable she felt wearing a dress because she worried about being catcalled. . . I grew up with this body and I haven’t changed it, and it doesn’t really matter what I wear, or what time it is, I get the same shit on the train every morning. I think that the way I dress, as a native to my body, has to be so radically different from hers.”

Here I think you’ve made my point for me. It is precisely because you are a native to your body that you are willing to accept this ‘shit’ every morning–that is, it is (although admittedly unappealing) a part of the expression of gender with which you identify. Transsexuals, however, do NOT feel like natives in their bodies–on the contrary, they feel like complete foreigners. They therefore do not expect this behavior (they may understand it logically, but intuitively it is confusing and understandably very distressing), and therefore when it occurs they do not have the frame of reference you do for dealing with it. Thus by wearing a dress she not only incurs an unavoidable result of something that is a part of her, but rather an unpleasant result that she doesn’t understand because she feels that this thing (female gender identity) is NOT, in fact, a part of her. It’s like if you were walking down the street and someone started petting you like a dog. You don’t feel like a dog, so the act is bewildering and distressing.

Hope that makes it a bit more understandable, if still a little strange.
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Bunnies on November 10, 2011 at 4:45 pm
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This may be a tangential thought, but when I read Lena’s comment about gender perception and experience I was reminded of Ramachandran’s research on body integrity identity disorder. The man in the New York Times article below had two healthy limbs amputated because due to some chemical weirdness in his brain they felt “foreign” to him. I am not trying to insinuate that people who identify as transgender have a disorder, only that their identity-confusion (meaning the incongruity between physical and spiritual gender) may be supported by research in neuroscience. Reading this article may give you a framework through which to “get” transsexual.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/22/health/psychology/22ampu.html
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ConstantLy on November 10, 2011 at 5:04 pm
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I want to respond to all of this, but I don’t have time just yet. I just wanted to clarify, in case it wasn’t understood, that I wasn’t attacking transgender or transexual people here. Regardless of whether I get it, I will always stand up for the right of people who are being discriminated against. I was merely voicing my questions on the issue.

More soon. And thanks to you all for commenting!
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Transgender 101: Queeries Pt. 3 « AC VOICE on November 14, 2012 at 12:02 am
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[…] named Julie Serano spoke at Amherst about “Putting the Femme back into Feminism.” I wrote an article berating her for complaining about being cat-called, and more broadly for choosing to define […]

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