Trans Woman Manifesto

When reading Julia Serano's "Trans Woman Manifesto" in her book, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, I personally felt inspired. While I do not identify as a trans woman, I see the harassment that many trans men and women receive in our community. This type of prejudice is considered a form of cissexism, which is "the belief that transsexuals's identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals" (Serano 14). Seeing the harassment and dehumanization of trans individuals makes me incredibly disappointed, as each and every person deserves to be treated with respect. A person does not deserve to be treated as less of a human just because they were assigned a different sex at birth than what they identify themselves as when they grow up. 

For this blog post, I wanted to talk about what Serano means when she states that "there is no such thing as a 'real' gender - there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive other to be" (15). I found this to be an incredibly powerful statement because I thought she was ultimately stating that we should get rid of gender categories.