Acknowledgments
BEFORE I BEGIN THANKING all of the people who have helped me in this endeavor, I figured that—since this is the acknowledgments section, after all—I should acknowledge the privileges that have enabled me to write this particular book. There are a number of them, but the one privilege that I believe has most influenced this project is one of time and place. I had the invaluable experience of transitioning in the early 2000s in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of the trans-friendliest places on the planet. While I certainly wouldn’t describe my transition as a “cakewalk,” I was able to change my lived sex without losing my job, my housing, my wife, my family and friends, and so on. Nearly everybody in my life gave me the benefit of the doubt, the space to grow, the opportunity to change my physical sex without feeling like I had to revamp my entire personality or start from scratch in a brand-new life someplace else. While I thank my family, friends, and coworkers for the support and understanding they’ve given me, I also realize that my experience—my relatively nontraumatic transition, that is—is a relatively recent phenomenon, one that did not generally exist even a decade or two ago. My experience was only made possible due to the countless transsexuals who have gone before me, who took on the hard work of clearing the path that many of us now follow. It was also made possible through the work of many gender activists (transsexual, transgender, queer, and feminist) who have helped to create a little cultural wiggle room, gender-wise, for all of us over the years. While I spend a good deal of this book critiquing the views put forward by past feminists and transgender and queer activists, it’s not because I don’t appreciate the work these previous generations have carried out. It’s simply that I believe that this new and very different time and place requires very different strategies of gender activism. Having said that, most of the ideas that I put forward in this book were developed on the foundation that these earlier writers and activists have built, and for that I am grateful.
A second privilege that I would like to acknowledge, as it has greatly shaped the ideas in this book, is what many in the trans community call “passing privilege.” This privilege (one that most cissexual people take for granted) allows me to be accepted in my identified gender, to move through the world without constantly having to correct people’s use of pronouns, deflect their unwanted stares, or have them harass me because of my gender difference. For me, this privilege mostly stems from my size—it is the flip side of the same coin that made my life as male so difficult to manage, as I grappled with gender difference both in regard to being trans and because I was inevitably the smallest guy in any room that I entered. While my small stature made me the target of other people’s anxiety and ridicule, particularly during my school years, it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Once I began taking female hormones, my small size allowed me to be gendered by others as female without having to alter my appearance or behaviors, which gave me unique insight into the processes of gendering and cissexual privilege that I describe in this book. Needless to say, if I did not “pass” on a regular basis, I probably would have written a much different book.
For better or for worse, I have found that the fact that people tend to experience me as female before they learn that I’m transsexual helps make it easier for me to defuse or debunk their misconceptions about transsexuality and gender. It forces them to consider (often for the first time in their lives) how their own expectations and assumptions greatly shape they way they perceive gender in other people. While I often exploit the fact that I “pass” in order to bring into question the way that people project gender stereotypes onto other people’s behaviors and bodies, I am also aware that this can be a double-edged sword, one that could inadvertently lead to the perspectives of trans people who “pass” trumping or drowning out the views of those who do not. Similarly, the fact that other privileges that I experience (e.g., that I am white, middle-class, able-bodied, etc.) remain largely unmarked in this book could lead others to mistakenly assume that my rather specific perspective is somehow representative of the entire trans community. That would be a grave error. All trans people have different insights into gender, insights that arise out of the unique combination of privileges and life histories that we each bring to the table. Each of us has a somewhat different take on being trans, and all of our voices need to be heard before we can even begin to develop any kind of overarching understanding of what it means to be transsexual. Therefore, I hope that people who read this book will see it not as the “definitive statement” on transsexuality or trans womanhood, but rather as simply one piece of a much larger project that involves many other people.
I want to thank everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area spoken word and queer/trans performance communities, who offered me much love, support, and the opportunity to read and perform my work when I first began writing. I also want to thank everyone I met at Camp Trans when I attended in 2003 and upon becoming more involved in the organization in 2004. It was during those experiences that I first began to give some thought to the ways that trans women are viewed and treated very differently (both in straight and queer culture) from our FTM spectrum counterparts; that recognition was the germ that eventually grew into this project. I also want to thank Bitch magazine for publishing “Skirt Chasers: Why the Media Depicts the Trans Revolution in Lipstick and Heels”—the essay that in many ways became the starting point for this book—in their Fall 2004 issue (no. 26). Special thanks to Rachel Fudge, my editor on that piece, and to Lisa Jervis and Andi Zeisler, for later including the piece in their BITCHfest anthology.
Other pieces included in this collection have also previously appeared elsewhere. The essays “Bending Over Backwards” and “Trans Woman Manifesto” (originally entitled “Hot Tranny Action Manifesto”) first appeared in my chapbook On the Outside Looking In (2005). “Barrette Manifesto” originally appeared in my chapbook Either/Or (2002) and in Cubby Missalette 13: The Girly Mag (2003). And “Deconstructive Surgery,” “Self-Deception,” and “Submissive Steak” all originally appeared in my chapbook Draw Blood (2004). Special thanks to the organizers of the 2004 UC Berkeley production of The Vagina Monologues, who offered me the opportunity to write and perform “Deconstructive Surgery” for that event. Other snippets and sentences in this book may have been lifted from previous pieces that I have written, most of which are contained within the three aforementioned self-published chapbooks, or on the following websites: www.juliaserano.com, www.hottrannyaction.org, and www.switchhitter.net.
While many of the perspectives and concepts put forward in this book have originated with me, others are simply my interpretations of ideas that have been kicking around in the trans community for a while, or that have been previously expressed by others. In particular, I would like to thank the following writers, artists, and activists who—through their work and/or in conversations we have shared—have influenced and inspired many of the thoughts and arguments in this book: Carolyn Connelly, Sadie Crabtree, Sean Dorsey, Thea Hillman, Rocco Kayiatos, Emi Koyama, Viviane Namaste, Jay Prosser, Lauren Steely, Michelle Tea, Max Wolf Valerio, and Shawna Virago. Extra-special thanks to my wife, Dani Eurynome, for being a vital sounding board for me, for providing invaluable insight and focus to my work, and for indulging my incessant need to talk about the book when it was a work in progress.
Finally, I’d like to thank my editor, Brooke Warner, and everybody else at Seal Press for giving me the opportunity to share my ideas with the rest of the world, and for being perhaps the only woman-focused publishing house with the courage to release a book that claims a place for trans women within the feminist movement, and that critiques many taken-for-granted feminist assumptions about trans women, femininity, and sexism. This book would not be possible without their hard work and the wonderful support they have provided me.