stickygirl
All the witches
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2012
- Posts
- 21,199
Serano's books are academic ones and for the sake of clarity in her arguments, she introduces words that outside of those discussions are quite alien: passing centrism, oppositional sexism, cissexualism, trans-facsimilation, ungendering... but necessary to her essays. She goes to the trouble of defining the terms she employs and, as you have highlighted, she uses transsexual in its dictionary-defined sense again for the purposes of discussion. A problem such academic language can run into is when the Daily Mail latches onto a word like cisgender, to the outrage of its bigoted readership who wail "How dare you label us - you're the weird ones!"Thank you Bramblethon for your input. ~snip~
As I said before...not always cut and dry when it comes to some of the words we use. But it's good to discuss them because that brings us closer together. And to be honest, even after I read her piece I had no real idea whether or not her opinion was respected or not. That's the trouble with the web, it's easy to find answers, but are they good answers? However, after reading what others thought, it appears she is a respected voice in the Tran's community.
I really admire her and am grateful to her for the way she dissects the layers of societal nuances that affect us in western society, both as women and trans women. I have to say that there were a number of paragraphs in Whipping Girl that I had to re-read in order to understand the point she was making! At times I struggled to place the instances she cites into my own experience. That's probably because my brain works differently to hers... I still have to remind myself what intersectionality means, or who the fuck third generation feminists are!