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TRANSGENDER RIGHTS. EDITED BY PAISLEY CURRAH, RICHARD M. JUANG, AND SHANNON PRICE WINTER, MINNEAPOLIS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS, 2006
JULIA SERANO'S WHIPPING GIRL: A TRANSSEXUAL WOMAN ON SEXISM AND THE SCAPEGOATING OF FEMININITY, EMERYVILLE, CALIF.: SEAL PRESS, 2007
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 TjR, 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...