Whipping Girl, Introduction
& Chapter 5
The novel Whipping Girl, is
an extremely personal account of the author’s (Julia Serano) views on how the
transsexuals are viewed by the general public mixed with the initiatives and
pondering that she suggests that the ‘cissexuals’ take in order to understand
transsexuals in a more positive and accepting light.
In the introduction, she
tells us that her novel is not going to be a reaffirmation of the current
general ideas of sexuality and gender or like any other novels on trans-sexualism
by non-transsexual authors, but something that takes a new path. Furthermore,
she proposes to fill in the ‘gaps’ created by our lack of knowledge on gender
issues related to transsexuals by coming up with new terms and suggesting more
intimate ideas that we are not yet familiar with or never heard of. She goes on
to elaborate that under the title ‘transsexuals’ that we have made and accepted
so far, there are a variety of different forms of gender. It seems as though
she tries to completely break away from the binary gender system that we adopt
now and encourage the readers to think of each individual a special and
different case. By doing this, she demonstrates how she will be able to
eradicate the pre-conceived notions and prejudices that ultimately result in
discrimination against transsexual people.
Serano gives us a glimpse of
the general prejudices of the public that she plans to attack and rectify such
as the idea and importance of disparity between femininity and masculinity in
our society which plays a huge role in people’s minds and decisions. She
asserts that the general notion that females who are ‘feminine’ are inferior to
men who are ‘masculine’ inhibits people’s understanding of transsexuals and
their lifestyles and life decisions. Her candid confessions and real-life
examples of meeting numerous people and asking them about their views on
feministic qualities and transsexuals make this novel an exciting and novel
one.
In Chapter 5 of her book
titled ‘Blind Spots: On Subconscious Sex and Gender Entitlements’, her main
objective seems to be to encourage people to understand their own sexuality
before they try to understand transsexuals. And when they do, it becomes easier
and an obvious thing to understand them. The Chapter begins with her early
years when she realized that she was trapped in the wrong body (in a
conventional sense) of a boy while her brain told her to be more feminine than
most boys. She introduces the idea of the conscious sex and subconscious sex
which differ in a way that conscious sex is what we recognize us to be and subconscious
sex is what our brain and the subconscious tells us what we are. For most
people, these two criteria match (bodily and psychological gender). However, a
lot of transsexuals find themselves at crossroads when the view their conscious
and subconscious sex. For instance, Julia Serano herself was physically a male
but her brain told her, from her early ages, that she had more feminine
qualities. She defines the mismatch of these two characteristics to be a ‘gender
dissonance’ which, if plagued by it for years, could result in depression and
extreme mental and psychological stress which, in turn, arise from insecurity
from the society’s dictating eyes.
She asserts that if we all
understood the meaning of subconscious sex and come in terms with our ‘blind
spots’ (refers to the ideas and notions regarding our sexual orientation that
we take for granted), we will be looking at transsexuals and any other queer
gender-oriented people as equal and same human beings. The idea that ‘normal’
people should identify themselves as not ‘normal’, but heterosexuals, a member
of a large group of gender orientations (according to Serano), is literally
convention-shattering and extremely novel. Getting rid of our blind spot and
recognizing that each person’s sexuality and gender identity are different when
it comes to the fundamentals, according to Serano, will improve our understanding
of the transsexual community.
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