Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Right Pronouns For All Is A Matter Of Respect: Binary-Identified, Non-Binary-Identified, Women, Genderqueers, Men
This guest blog post was written by The Angry Chihuahua. He can be found at his online home over at his personal blog at The Angry Chihuahua yipping and yapping (together at last!)
http://destrantalk.blogspot.com/2010/03/right-pronouns-for-all-is-matter-of.html (http://destrantalk.blogspot.com/2010/03/right-pronouns-for-all-is-matter-of.html)
Let it be known from the outset that I love me some Julia Serano (http://www.juliaserano.com/ (http://www.juliaserano.com/)). Her breakout book, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (http://www.juliaserano.com/whippinggirl.html (http://www.juliaserano.com/whippinggirl.html)), blew my mind and was the best feminist work I'd read in years. And I am a dude who reads feminist essays like other people read People magazine, so that's no small statement.
I am saying all this to establish that I really value and appreciate what Dr. Serano's written on feminism and, specifically, about feminism's intersections with trans women. Because in this post, I want to talk about something that I think Serano got very, very wrong.
In Whipping Girl, she briefly discusses her perception that genderqueer and other non-binary-identified folks (especially trans male spectrum genderqueer folks, i.e., those assigned female at birth) get a better deal than trans women in queer circles. Genderqueers (and, again, female assigned at birth genderqueers specifically) are regarded as radical and progressive and cool, whereas trans women get hit with the derogatory labels of "retrogressive" and even "anti-feminist."