Rave On: Julia Serano on Daring to Be Bad
Page Turner blog post by Ellen Papazian, July 16, 2009 - 4:36am
This edition features writer, performer, activist, and biologist Julia Serano on Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75, by Alice Echols.
http://bitchmagazine.org/post/rave-on-julia-serano-on-daring-to-be-bad (http://bitchmagazine.org/post/rave-on-julia-serano-on-daring-to-be-bad)
I transitioned from male to female in 2001. While I considered myself to be a feminist before my transition, once I began to be treated as a woman day in and day out, feminism really helped me make sense of what I was experiencing. It also helped make me aware of how many of the assumptions that people have about trans women are rooted in misogynistic assumptions about femaleness and femininity more generally.
I came across Daring to Be Bad in late 2006 as I was doing research for my book Whipping Girl. I was looking for references that chronicled how lesbians were often excluded from feminist groups in the 1960s, as there are many parallels between the rhetoric used in those instances and the language that has more recently been used to justify the exclusion of trans women from lesbian-feminist groups and spaces.