Whipping Girl

Description

Whipping Girl brings personal experience, cultural criticism, and feminist argument together in a collection of transfeminist essays. Writing as a lesbian trans woman, Julia Serano challenges medical, academic, and media accounts that treat trans women as deceptive, artificial, or reducible to pathology. She argues that transphobia cannot be separated from sexism: contempt for femininity and the assumption that masculinity is more natural or valuable help police both transgender and cisgender lives. The essays examine how gender hierarchy, cissexism, homophobia, and opposing sexist expectations reinforce one another. Rather than asking feminism merely to include transgender people, Serano calls for a broader challenge to the devaluation of femininity itself and to systems that rank bodies, identities, and forms of expression.

Themes