How Whipping Girl will answer all your burning questions on sex and gender

21-3-2024, updated 8-7-2024

Julia Serano's 2007 book Whipping Girl is an endlessly fascinating book. If I had to recommend just one book on gender -- not just transgender issues, but gender overall -- I'd probably recommend Whipping Girl. Few people talk with such clarity about modern gender issues -- when most people talk about gender, you get the sense of someone trying to describe a forest, while actually describing five specific trees and being unable to move and see some new ones. But not Julia Serano. She's been 5D-chessing all of us, for years, and I get the sense that none of us have been listening. But reading her I feel like I gain a better understanding of myself, of others, of sex, of sexism, of feminism, of meta-physics, of Taoism, of what the Pope is trying to tell me when he phones me in the middle of the night going off about gender ideology, well, basically, of everything.

Subconscious sex is to Serano this idea that we have a deep, subconscious, instinctive understanding of what our bodies are supposed to look like even before we ourself figure it out - sort of pre-natal, sexed map of our bodies. We already have a understanding of what our body is supposed to look like, before we know our body, and before we could articulate this instict, and it's when this understanding isn't met with a reality that reflects it that a disconnect happens.

In some kind of debate between Andrea Long Chu and Helen Lewis in the Atlantic, Lewis writes: "The most broadly appealing version of the argument for medical transition is that a small number of people have a psychological condition (gender dysphoria) that makes them unhappy (because their sexed bodies feel alien to them) and doctors have treatments (hormones and surgery) that can help," to counter Chu's position, framed as more radical, that transition shouldn't have to make a statistical promise of happiness to be granted as a medical treatment.

But I actually agree more with Chu on that specific point: basing the qualifications for rights on quantifiable happiness is, in my opinion, some form of degraded liberalism that sees escapism from pain and death as the foundation of humane society, rather than actual liberal values of freedom, dignity and self-determinance. "I’m telling you now: I still want this, all of it. I want the tears; I want the pain. ... The negative passions — grief, self-loathing, shame, regret — are as much a human right as universal health care, or food," Chu writes - and I think so too. Being a woman hasn't always made me happy, and we cannot decide sex based on happiness, but reality. I hate this argument for the same reason I hate when christians say: "just look how unhappy and anxious the atheists are. There world-view is clearly insufficient" (what Simone Weil calls the tooth-paste argument for christianity - 9 out of 10 dentist recommend christianity for your suffering!), whom I wish a very dark night of the soul. People may suffer for choosing truth, but it makes my blood boil when those suffering for freedom and truth are then surrounded by Job's friends telling them suffering is a secondary aspect of life they could've escaped by making better choices. You can be the man on the cross, or you can be the people below the cross asking why he doesn't save himself if he's so holy, but you cannot be both. We ought to give people every chance to throw themselves into freedom, wether the end result of that freedom looks like happiness. Life, freedom, reality, trumps happiness, and sometimes, that reality is that someone is transgender.

Apart from this click while reading Serano, she also unknowingly shreds the dominant narrative of trans medicine in conservative media a decade after the book's publishing. The narrative goes that known creep and sexologist John Money invented what was then known as sex-reassignment surgery, and used his theory that gender-identity (a concept invented by Money himself) wasn't fully form and could be maluable up to the age of 2, to mutilate a baby boy who'd had a botched circumsition and convince his parent to raise him as a girl. This "girl" as well as another son of the family suffered "experiments" done by Money that can only be described as sexual incestual coercion to prove Money's theory that children benefit from early sexual interaction, later found out that he was born a boy, went back to living as one, and later commited suicide.

What Sorano points out is that trans medicine existed before Money, and Money's contribution to it was largely negative, as well as many sexologists after him who - just like Money - wanted to use sex reasignment surgery not for the benefit of individual well-being, but as an instrument for gender-conformity, where only gender-conforming patients would recieve the care, and patients quickly learned to conform to strict gendered roles if they wanted to recieve the care they craved - a gender-conformity that Janice Raymond in the 1970's then criticizes, calling trans women overtly stereotypical and preformative in their femininity, despite the league of endocrinologist who would make sure any other trans woman never transitioned. The other problem, is that the tragic John Money story could just as well - and much more logically - be an argument for some type of subconscious sex. If you took an average baby boy, sterilized him, gave him female hormones and raised him as a girl, an intrinsic inclination would still tell him that something was deeply wrong. In fact, Sorano argues so without knowing that today people would use the same story to argue against any form of gender affirmative care. Money's theory that "gender identity" at the deepest level is malluable in the first two years of a persons life was wrong, but so would the argument be for someone trying to argue that a person can't have an intrinsic understanding of their sex that could contradict their genital and hormonal composition.

Brain, soul and body

Almost everyone - no matter the political color - who wants to argue that a certain thing - gametes, chromosomes, orderliness towards pregnancy or not - decides sex, will at some point claim that trans people imply a brain/body dichotomy. Radical feminist Janice Raymond does so in her infamous book The Transsexual Empire and the Catholic conservative Abigail Favale does so as well in her book The Genesis of Gender. Both argue that saying someone could have "a female brain in a male body," or a female soul in a male body, (or vise-versa,) implies a disconnection between the brain and the body, as if the brain wasn't part of the body, and a disconnection between the soul and the body, as if the body wouldn't be the physical manifestation of a concept such as the soul. Michael Knowles makes the same argument - pretty poorly - on the whatever podcast, calling "transgenderism" a "gnostic" view of the human being that thinks humans can have one soul and a separate body, where the spiritual takes dominion over the material (i.e. the "sex" of the soul would take predominance over the sex of the body.) (Can we also talk about the absurdity that content today is having a guy explain his head canons on Aquinas, Aristotle and Gnosticism to three hot chicks on a podcast?)

The problem with this is that most trans people are not gnostics who literally believe they have a female or male soul, rather the people with the lived experience of a physical male/female bodily disconnect. And trans people implies almost the opposite of a gnostic view of the human being, or a cartesian separation between conciousness and the body. The brain is a body part - it is part of the body. What you're brain tells you is not a separate type of thing to what the rest of your body is telling you. It made me flabbergasted in Whipping Girl to hear someone use the same language to argue for the trans experience as I've so often heard used against it:

"(..) many of us tend to think of ourselves as brains or souls crammed inside of a shell—a shell that is our body. We delude ourselves into believing that the shell itself is not important, not connected to our consciousness, that it’s merely a vessel that contains us, or a vehicle that we move about with our minds. But the truth is, our bodies are inseparable from our minds.

"(..) my decision to transition was primarily driven by my choosing to trust my body feelings—in this case, my subconscious sex—over my conscious understanding of gender."

And to answer Michael Knowles concern that transgenderism is gnosticism slipping into a Godless society, it's worth noting, again, that the mind and it's experiences are part of the body, and part of reality. Abstractly valuing a Aristotailian understanding of femaleness (a woman is someone ordered towards pregnancy) over the dignity of individual bodies, is closer to gnosticism, since this understanding doesn't actually value the body at all but takes individual parts of the body (genitals, chromosomes, gametes) and abstracts them to point to a higher ideal that our consciousness are obligated to follow, despite what our stupid body might say. Here's an attempt at an actual non-"gnostic" (the big scare-crow of many religious conservative spaces) understanding: the body is fallen, it will do things that we have no control over. This will often times be painful. And we should listen to our body when it tells us something is wrong. There is no dichotomy between body and mind. If a persons mind/experience tells them they're a woman/man, that's part of their body telling them they're a woman/man. If there was a disconnect between body and mind, soul and being, having a consious experience of being one and a physical reality of the other would be a non-problem, or paradoxical. It's precisely the intertwined nature, the oneness of a human being, that would make the experience of having "one mind" and "one body" strange and disorientating (and in the case of ta trans person, it would be the "mind" or consciousness that can understand itself as the sex assigned based of physical sex characteristics, since our conscious thinking is maluable to outside influence and understanding of itself based on things like genitalia, and a central part of the body, i.e. the deeper part of the neurological system, that sees itself as a percieved sex discongruent with the rest of the body. I.e: a trans woman would be someone with a conscious understanding of themselves as a man, with a deeper subconscious understanding of themself as female, making the conscious identity discongruent until it's resolved by thinking of oneself consciously as a woman. Transexuality would be the body speaking over the consciousness, not the other way around as commonly understood.) And considering lobotomies a) don't work and b) are extremely intrusive and inhumane, we should just allow the discongruency to be relieved through other types of changes to the human body.

If someone understands all this and still goes yeeah, that sounds rough buddy, but that's the cross God gave you. I am sympathising with you at a christian distance and then goes on to argue for bans and social retribution for gender affirming care, it's taking a sound idea (suffering is inevitable and persevering through it is a human virtue that pulls light out of darkness) and twists it into a world-view of suffering that incorporates Evil into the nature of God, and would in practice make it impossible for christians to do anything to relieve people of the pain, meaninglessness and inhumanity of the natural world when given the chance -- something christianity, and worldviews inherited from it, are occassionally quick to slip into -- not realising there's a dramatic rift between suffering because you have to, and suffering because other people are making you; the difference between suffering with the care of others doing all they can and suffering because people have left you to do so; suffering as someone choosing the suffering that serves one's need for freedom and self-growth, and suffering as completely self-suffocating.

We all experience the sex of the body as such an integral part of the self that we shudder at the thought of someone changing any part of it without our immediate consent. I actually think a lot of transphobia stems from the fact that for a lot of people, the idea of having sex-characteristics changed opens up some kind of abject unknown body horror, similar to gender dysphoria. I think it's easy to project those rumblings of the subcounscious sex when we come into contact with the idea of gender affirming care, because it can contradict with the naturality and integrity we feel towards our own bodies. But we deny trans people this integrity when we say they can't change their bodiese, even if they stood in stark contrast with their perception of themselves, like a cross-experienced-sex puberty, and if they do so they're "playing gods with themselves." I wonder if anyone would accuse Sara Forsberg of "playing god" when she at fourteen went through a medical female puberty, because she found out she was chromosomically male. Giving human beings control over their own bodies when there's a discongruity or disorder, and there's the human ability to give said control and comfort, is part of the human mercy of a society in a "world subject to the bondage of decay" and speaks to the integrity of the body and the human person, not the opposite. And arguing that a sexed discongruity arising from deep within the brain is different than a discongruity arising from any other body part, is just arguing for a mind/body dichotomy that modern metaphysics, psychology, theology of the body-christians, radical feminists and conservatives debating 20-year olds on podcasts, all movingly unanimously want to disparge of.

Something I see all the time in this discussion is the tendency to confuse a theory of transexuality with the practical existence of trans people - for example: trans people exists because people are born with female brains and male bodies. Trans people exists because people are born with female souls and a male body. Trans people exists because gender is a social construct. All of these statements are theories, and you could pretty easily see holes in those theories that you can pick apart. Even Soranos subconcious sex theory could be wrong, even if I personally think it's pretty epic, and it still wouldn't mean trans people were officially destroyed and had to all detransition. Just because someone has a shitty theory on something doesn't mean the thing itself doesn't exist. And if we for one second imagine that maybe transgender people aren't the most well understood group, and also that sex is something so closely tied to our being that a lot of times discerning it is like reading a book with your nose touching the paper, it's pretty easy to see how a bad theory that misses the mark completely could just spawn out of someone's head.

The dominant narrative today of social constructionism is one of those theories, that's popular but dumb, and mostly fails to even account for a trans experience. If you want to argue that gender is just a social construct, not only do you have to invalidate the experience of a vast majority of people who very deeply experience themselves as their gender on a biological, psychological, and cultural level, but you also can't explain the existence of trans people in any other way than a groups of "fakes," to quote Serano, "so distressed by their own exceptional gender expressions and/or sexual orientations that they are willing to go to the extreme lengths of surgically altering their bodies and unquestioningly embracing sexist ideals in order to fit into straight mainstream society." The social constructionist view of gender and sex usually uses a whole lot of words to end up with the conclusion that "if someone likes to wear dresses, maybe she's a woman." A statement that at the same time manages to offend all women everywhere and trivialize the trans experience, especially of those that were pretty gender-conforming before their transition. If the social constructionist tries to go into any more nuance than this, it usally breaks on it's own contradictions (gender is decided on a conglomeration of social symbols - social symbols don't decide someone's gender) and devolves into a circular argument (a woman is someone who identifies as a woman) or schreeching that someone even questioning social constructionism must hate the group of people that they're very barely managing to defend. Both of these things happened when Matt Walsh (to be fair, a hater) tried to interview a social constructionist about gender. The unavoidable feeling becomes that if this is the people that have crowned themselves as the authorities on gender, the entire thing must be a dupe.

And so I have a lot of sympathy for sociologists, feminists, clinical psychologists and even youtubers, who question these theories of gender, and I think that a lot of times they get called hateful for wounding someone's confidence and world-view by with one finger tearing down the jenga-tower of bad philosophy and sociology of someone trapped in an academic circle. But problems in terms of sympathy and grounding in reality arise when these same sociologists, feminists and psychologists - and youtubers - so caught up in tearing down false theories, want to explain why there's a sizable group of individuals describing a sexed discongruency while refusing to acknowledge the discongruency as a symptom of something real and substantial. In other words: reverse Occams Razor-ing trans people is when the real craziness starts to pour out. The most obvious conclusion - and almost unavoidable, if you go beyond light social constructionism criticism towards full on gamete-realism - is that trans people are delusional. And like, delusional people exist, and they don't deserve our un-questioning validation, even in intimate questions about their inner-lives. They benefit from empathising with their emotional experience, but not from curving reality after an illogical point of view.

The problem though is that trans people don't speak like delusioned individuals. The simplest trans statement - that of yeah, I was born x sex, but something always made me feel detatched from my own body, and that feeling wasn't resolved until i transitioned, leading me to believe that in some way I was inherently always that sex, considering I somehow sensed that something as practical as an endocronologically sexed-body I had never even experienced would be this natural to me - just isn't a delusional statement, it's one built on rational conclusions from practical experience.

"(...) they have tended to overlook or dismiss the possibility that intrinsic inclinations (i.e., subconscious sex) drive trans people toward transitioning. Framing the issue this way has ensured that transsexuality can only be understood as a form of “false consciousness” and that transsexuals themselves can only be conceptualized in one of two ways: as “dupes” (who are misled into transitioning by gatekeepers) or as “fakes” (who are so distressed by their own exceptional gender expressions and/or sexual orientations that they are willing to go to the extreme lengths of surgically altering their bodies and unquestioningly embracing sexist ideals in order to fit into straight mainstream society)."- Whipping Girl

The risk is thinking you know why someone does something better than they themselves do, because the risk is always putting up theories that will be ridiculous and frustrating to the person actually experiencing it. That's why these reverse-occams razors end up being offensive, no matter how carefeully stated and promising of trans peoples inherent dignity as their assigned-sex they are, because they still value some personal experience over other: that is, the personal experience of having a subconscious sex in alignment with the rest of the body, and refusing the idea that there could be any other way of life even when it's standing in front of them and asking to be recognized. I actually think this is the part that I am most personally embarrassed of being guilty of doing.

THE NATURE OF REALITY ITSELF

So why am I so obsessed with this issue? Is it because gender ideology is the biggest threat to western society? The See of Peter himself thinks so, stating: "Today the worst danger is gender ideology, which erases differences," and that "to erase difference is to erase humanity. Man and woman, on the other hand, stand in fruitful 'tension.'" Now, I agree that man and woman stands in fruitful tension, but the fruitfulness in any tension is that the tension is eventually released. We can call this ultimate union, "integration", which Janice Raymond, as a radical feminist, opposes, claiming that there is no need of this integration, instead posing that each individual has the potential for a pre-fallen nature (yes, she uses the language of the Bible) gender "integrity." How exactly this gender integrity will be achieved within the individual is not clear, other than that transexuality is not the answer - her criticism is that it fails to trancend the false duality of the feminine and masculine:

"The transsexual, therefore, seeks the illusion of transcendence at the hands of the surgeon. Instead of becoming a more genuine self and overcoming cyclic existence, the transsexual short-circuits transcendence by taking false leaps and by endowing his or her self-hood with artificial reality (..) transcendent being is sought where only cyclic and static being can be found."

This is a very annoying quote. (In fact, the last chapter of The Transsexual Empire were Raymond becomes some sort of terf-metaphysician, is very annoying. In fact, Janice Raymond is very annoying. In fact, radical feminists, are often very annoying.) For one, it's a good example of a reverse-occams-razor, making 1000 IQ theories about how trans people are fraily trying to escape samsara, and the enlightened rad-fem Buddhas ought to explain to them that transcendence shall never be achieved at the hands of the surgeon. But the most annoying thing is that no one is even trying to claim that trans people are attempting to trancend the duality of yin and yang, Raymond. Most people are just trying to live their lives, Raymond. Through the politicization of sexuality and gender, radical feminists amazingly, consistantly, manages to disgard the idea that human beings can have an innate sexuality, and an innate sexed being, that isn't a chosen androgynous (sorry, "gender integrity-focused") lesbianism. And oddly, by arguing that trans people don't trancend the boarders of reality and are merely moving within what Raymond calls a "false" duality (male-female), Raymond inadvertedly says something true about the nature of gender: feminine and masculine are "false opposites" where no trancendence is needed for a transition in the first place; the feminine always carries the seed of the masculine, and the masculine carries the seed of the feminine. You could just as well subscribe to Raymonds genesis-head canons (all girls have genesis-head canons, it's kind of our thing) and say there's one human gender, that has split in two and fractured into infinite number of possible divisions ( ... he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man), while engaging with the reality of these divisions in the same way we can engage with the reality of all other dualities.

Sorano calls the idea that male and female are two polar opposites that can never intertwine oppositional sexism, but I think you could just as well call it bad philosophy. Night becomes day and day becomes night. Between 0 and 1, there's an infinite amount of possible positions, but there's no point where one becomes the other. There's a movement, that can be broken down for empirical reasons, but there's no singular point where 0 becomes 1. A ball that's thrown across a room exists in an infinitibly divisible number of points in space, but the movement from one place to the other is one. Winter becomes spring, spring becomes summer, summer isn't winter, but it always has the potentiality of the other. We can draw clear borders between the seasons, like the first snow, or certain temperatures or dates, or when the birds come back or the first flowers grow, but in the end those distinctions will be for either empirical reasons or narrative ones. If it snows in the summer, we just say, "it snowed in the summer." There's no singular point where a child becomes and adult, a boy a man, where the line is drawn between male and female, just like there's no point where the brain ends and the body starts, where the soul begins and the body ends, it's all one.

Well, you wanted to discuss metaphysics, there ya go. What's a woman? What is the feminine? St. Edith Stein: "To speak to Him thus is easier by nature for woman than for man because a natural desire lives in her to give herself completely to someone. When she has once realized that no one other than God is capable of receiving her completely for Himself and that it is sinful theft toward God to give oneself completely to one other than Him, then the surrender is no longer difficult and she becomes free of herself." This is a pretty old understanding of femininity connecting it to the concept of receptivity, of void; but of course Stein could never deny that men have this receptive feminine-labeled trait, or she would deny that men had the capacity of surrendering, receptivity, and ultimately, freedom from the self, not through darkness but through the breaking in of someone else. Jonathan Pageau, orthodox speaker, goes even further, claiming this notion of the feminine is unspeakable: "The aspect of God that is beyond being is the aspect of God that we should not speak of; that's the nature of things that are beyond being. You are betraying it's mystery in the very pronounciation of the mystery. This is one of the problems with the mystery of the feminine. Everybody today wants to talk about the divine feminine. Everyone's like: "let's talk about the divine feminine! What's the divine feminine?" And the answer is shut up. That's basically the answer." (Where I would disagree with him is that I can't help but think that the unspeakable has a dot of the speakable, and that the speakable has a dot of the unspeakable.) The reason these abstract concepts (receptivity and giving, being and non-being) are described as masculine and feminine, is because we recognize that they function in the same way as masculinity and femininity, that is to say dualistically, inexplicable without the other, contingent on one another to exist, and on some level always existant within the other. I really don't think this is mysticism - I think this is just the way the universe is generally, where the borders between things - even, or maybe especially things we consider opposites - are not always as clear cut as we would like them to be. And thank God they aren't, I'd say, or we'd be trapped - there'd be no shades or movements or meetings, no moment when a thing turn into it's opposite, no possibility of unity.

While I am now rapidly girlblogging out of my own control, beyond my understanding of phenomenology and physics, out into space, I think of a quote by physicist Adam Frank, discussing how he through quantum-physics came to abandon his view of the scientific study as a "perfect, human-free perspective—a God’s-eye view of the world", and his discussions with fellow physicians: "We each knew that the orthodox story of science [that of being able to explain the universe free from the center of human observation] was a mistake. Although it had once made sense, now it was leading to paradoxes and dead ends in fields as varied as physics, biology, and consciousness. We also saw its profound and mostly negative effects on society at large." Frank describes his past view of mathematics as seeing "an invisible skeleton on which the flawed flesh of the world had been hung," which is a very gnostic way of describing scientism, seeing mathematics as a sort of idealism and the human experience as the "flawed flesh."

I am not questioning the authority of empirical science, I am yes-and-ing it. Yes, there's a biological reality to the human sexes. Yes, if you dig up the bones of a trans woman, those bones will be those typical of a human male. Yes, and, that's still an observation done through the lense of human classification, the value placed on human bones is still that of a human mind, not of God or science. Bone theory, or gametes, or over-arching aristoteilianism, seems to me like the gender-critical "skeleton," the underlying supposedly objective structure "on which the flawed flesh of the world has been hung." This view has nothing to do with valuing the human body, because the human body and human experience go hand in hand. "Now, is life to rule over knowledge, over science, or is knowledge to rule over life? Which of these two desires are the higher and decisive one? No one will doubt: life is the higher, the ruling authority, for any knowledge which destroys life will also have destroyed itself. Knowledge presupposes life and so has the same interest in the preservation of life as every being has in its own continuing existence." Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.

Maybe social constructionism is just an incomplete truth, the negative side of understanding sex as viewed inescapably through the perspective of the human experience, lacking the trust in the findings of that experience; lacking trust in experience as a real thing indistinguishable from the physical body and reality. Maybe the answer is a sort of phenomenology of the body, rather than a theology of it.

You know when guys go so misogynistic that they start wondering if sharing your life with a woman isn't a bit gay, because union with your yin is only possible through the awakening of the yin already existent within the yang. A woman is the gayer sex. It's your mom, lol.∎