Transgender Rights, and: Whipping Girl : A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (review)

What is the relationship between the transgender movement and the feminist movement: are they allies, rivals, opponents, or a complex mix of all three? The two books under review offer some answers to this question.

Transgender Rights (hereafter TR) is a magisterial collection of essays covering cutting-edge legal developments, movement histories, and political theory, written by some of the most celebrated names in both trans activism and scholarship. In addition to the three editors—all national figures in the transgender movement—contributors include some of the leading lights in gay and lesbian legal scholarship, such as Kendall Thomas and Ruthann Robson. The collection even includes an essay by Judith Butler, whose pioneering work using the practices of drag to understand gendering makes her both celebrated and controversial. The essays are all relatively short and accessible to a wide audience, yet they are also uniformly theoretically challenging and conceptually rich, suggesting heroic labor on the part of the editors. This is an indispensable collection.

Whipping Girl (hereafter WG) is a collection of personal narratives, political polemics, academic exegeses, and media critiques, thrown at you at top speed with dark wit and a dizzying number of neologisms. Unlike TR, which mostly speaks in the dispassionate third person, WG takes the passionate, sardonic voice of a pissed-off trans woman who doesn’t intend to take it anymore. Like TR, however, WG moves with facility across a wide terrain, addressing academics, nonacademics, trans people and nontrans people (or “cissexuals” as Serano names people whose subconscious sex has always been identical with their ascribed sex). One moment, Serano is speculating about the biological origins of gender dysphoria; the next she is penning a furious diatribe against all those creepy straight men who want to tell her how turned on they are by the idea of a “she-male.” TR engages with a number of identity movements, including the disability rights movement, the intersex movement, and the gay and lesbian movement. WG also interrogates the gay and lesbian movement, but is particularly concerned with feminism.

These books revealed for me three issues common to feminist and trans agendas: identity politics, the relationship between “nature” and “culture,” and the value of the feminine. Regarding identity politics, the essays in TR make clear that at least some trans scholars and activists have internalized the lesson that many feminists had to learn the hard way: race, class, sexuality, and gender are not severable. Trans activists and scholars come by antiessentialism honestly. As nearly every book on trans identity begins by acknowledging, the term is an umbrella that attempts to shelter very different kinds of folks. Proliferating terms vividly illustrate the diversity: transvestite, cross-dresser, trannie, trans, genderfuck, genderqueer, FMT, MtM, trans men, boyz, bois, bigendered, third sex, nellie, queer, eonist, invert, androgyne, butch, femme, she-male, he-she, boy-dyke, girlfag are all identities that have been claimed by (and sometimes inscribed upon) people who in some way violate the rigid gender-norm system enforced by United States heteropatriarchy. The trans movement has lacked a stable and homogenous subject position from the get-go, and so by necessity has avoided some (not all) of the painful internal “authenticity” purges that African American, lesbian, and other communities have endured.

As the trans movement has learned from feminism’s failures, so feminism can learn from the trans movement’s successes. Both TR and WG show how it is possible to acknowledge the heterogeneity of identity while still challenging subordination in politically potent ways. The co-constitutive nature of subordination means that the most far-reaching political work in an identity movement is not done on behalf of the “but-for” people—the people who “but for” a single stigma would be able to realize the American Dream—but on behalf of the queerest, those who live...