i was going to wait until i finished it, but i just can’t. this book is amazing. julia serano is insightful, intellegent, and cuts right to the root of the issues. i was amazed even after the introduction and the trans woman manifesto, which are even before part one, chapter one. she rocks. this is required reading for *everyone*. and it’s even available on amazon. buy it and read it. now.

jay sennett has a post up entitled interview with alexis arquette that links to the newsweek article none of us are safe; actor alexis arquette on the politics of gender in america. in the article, and quoted in jay’s post, alexis arquette says:

There are a lot of people who are attracted to people like myself because they like boobs and a penis, and let’s just be honest about that. They like she-males.

this, after she says:

I’m a transgendered female who started as a male, I’m now female, you know all those things, so why do we need to go further than that?

so i find myself asking the question “then why did you go further than that?”

i guess i’m one of those uptight transwomen who dislike the term “shemale”, just as i dislike the term “jewboy”, or “kike”, perhaps because i’m also one of those uptight jews.

that doesn’t mean i don’t use the term, or find its usage inappropriate in all contexts. perhaps it’s like the “n” word in african american culture, though i can only imagine the parallels, as i see that term through the perspective of a white person, and can’t ever even bring myself to say it or type it out.

i did a google search on the term “shemale”, and it came back with:

The word “shemale” has been filtered from the search because Google SafeSearch is active.

apparently, the folks at google aren’t too fond of the term either, though perhaps for different reasons than my own. turning off “safesearch”, and selecting “100 search results per page” results in a listing of 99 porn/hate sites, and one wikipedia entry on transwoman (the 15th hit, so it would be on the second page in the default “10 search results per page” google settings).

so clearly, the term in our society has a specific meaning.

perhaps alexis is attempting to reclaim the term, and i find some value in that. though certainly, i have now permanently prevented this site from being viewed on a computer in any library, school, hospital, or other facility that has any kind of filtering enabled. alexis has her work cut out for her (no pun intended).

overall, i think her interview is a positive step, as it represents an example of the media depicting a transgender person (not “transgendered”, for marti’s sake) in a “not totally negative” way. i also agree with many of her views, though not all. i particularly liked that she works toward debunking the “man trapped in a woman’s body, or vice versa” stereotype, though i found it interesting that the interviewer framed it that way. most often, we hear the “vice versa” version, my personal nemesis.

i also note that alexis is very much an example of a much needed variation in the depiction of trans people in our culture. transwomen are always shown as broken people in search of the elusive surgery, in hopeless despair over their identity as wholly female (ok, perhaps that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not too much), where shemales are these sex-starved men with breasts. of course, transmen are never shown.

Yes, I am transgendered but I also am a cross-dresser—I dress as a woman. It’s not that I just want to be seen as a female in our society, I’m also a drag queen and a performer—there are many levels there. I started grappling with all the boxes one has to fit into and all the flags I was willing to wave, and I started to realize it’s hard to fit into one realm and be a productive member of society. I realized I’m not the kind of person who wants to go with the flow and fit in. I’m an agitator, I’m opinionated, I’m a libertine and leader. I wasn’t willing to fall in line.

she expresses a mix of identities, that are far too often seen as separate absolutes. i’d venture to say that this type of mix is more common than the trans community would have us believe. and this is my favorite part of the interview.