Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

by Julia Serano

I usually respond by telling them that before I transitioned I looked exactly like I do now, except that I was a boy. They never seem particularly satisfied with that answer.

Rather, these goals were primarily designed to protect the cissexual public from their own gender anxiety by ensuring that most cissexuals would never come face-to-face with someone they knew to be transsexual.

While this requirement was purportedly put into place to protect the transsexual from the cissexual public, it is clear that what concerned the gatekeepers the most was protecting the cissexual public from the transsexual.

In the realm of social interactions, the only difference between my transsexual gender and their cissexual genders is that my femaleness is generally mischaracterized as second-rate, as illegitimate, as an imitation of theirs.

When you break it down like this, it becomes obvious that the words “biological” and “genetic” are merely stand-ins for the word that people really want to use: “natural.”

For instance, if a store clerk were to say, “Thank you, sir,” to a cissexual woman, nobody would say that she “passed” as a man or failed to “pass” as a woman; instead, we would say she is a woman and was mistaken for a man.

it occurred to me that, rather than simply removing the gender identity disorder diagnosis from the DSM, we should perhaps consider replacing it with transsexual etiology disorder, to describe the unhealthy obsession many cissexuals have with explaining the origins of transsexuality.

My femaleness is so intense that it has overpowered the trillions of lame-ass Y chromosomes that sheepishly hide inside the cells of my body.

For example, when I ask my cissexual female friends if they would have preferred it if their parents had decided to raise them male rather than female, most of them immediately answer “no.”