This is a fantastic book that really helped me to understand a lot more about gender. Very important. I highly recommend it.

• cissexism
• • cissexism, which is the belief that transsexuals’ identified genders are inferior to, or less authentic than, those of cissexuals (i.e. people who are not transexuals and who have only ever experienced their subconscious and physical sexes and being aligned). The most common expression of cissexim occurs when people attempt to deny the transsexual the basic privileges that are associated with the trans person’s self-identified gender. Common examples include purposeful misuse of pronouns or insisting that the trans person use a different public restroom. the justification for this denial is generally founded on the assumption that the trans person’s gender is not authentic because it does not correlate witht the sex they were assigned at birth. In making this assumption, cissexists attempt to create an artificial hierarchy. by insisting that the trans person’s gender is “fake,” they attempt to validate their own gender as “real” or “natural.” this sort of think is extradorinarily naive, as it denies a basic truth: We make assumptions every day about other people’s genders without ever seeing their birth certificates, their chromosomes, their genitals, their reproductive systems, their childhood socialization, or their legal sex. There is no such thing as a “real” gender – there is only the gender we experience ourselves as and the gender we perceive others to be.
  • recognizing the difference between transphobia (which targets those whose gender expression and appearance differ from the norm) and cissexual privilege (which targets whose whose assigned and identified sexes differ) is important, especially when one tries to make sense of contemporary queer/trans politics. rather than calling trans-woman-exclusion policies “transphobic,” it is more accurate to say that they are cissexist, as they refuse to accept transexual women’s female identities as being as legitimate as those of cissexual women.
  • unfortunately, confronting transphobia has done very little to ease cissexism, i.e., the belief that transsexual genders are less “real” or legitimate than cissexual genders.
  • The cissexual indiscriminately projects their cissexuality onto all other people, thus transforming cissexuality into a human attribute that is taken for granted.
  • If you look at the entire spectrum of social and class issues, you will see a trend of people trying to “naturalize” their privileges in some way – whether it be wealthy people who try to justify the huge gap between rich and port by appropriating Darwin’s theory of natural selection , or white people who make claims that they are smarter or more successfully than people of color because of their biology or their genes. When it comes to gender, “natural” is the ultimate trump card because it takes the relevant issues – privilege and prejudice – off the table and frames the very real and legitimate perspectives of sexual minorities as “unnatural” or “artificial,” and therefore unworthy of any serious consideration.
  • if a transsexual does not “pass,” cissexuals often use it has an excuse to deny that person the common decency of having their self-identified gender acknowledged or respected.
• oppositional sexism
• • if being a man means taking control of your own situation, then being a woman because living up to other people’s expectations. When we buy into the idea that female and male are “opposites,” it becomes impossible for us to empower women without either ridiculing men or pulling the rug out from under ourselves.
  • if a woman acts feminine, she will be delegitimized by traditional sexism, and if she acts masculine, she will be delegitimized by oppositional sexism.
  • i would argue that today, the begets bottleneck in the movement toward gender equity is not so much women’s lack of access to what has traditionally considered the “masculine realm,” but rather men’s insistence on defining themselves in opposition to women (i.e., their unwillingness to venture into the “feminine realism”).
• Gender
• • In retrospect, when testosterone was the predominate sex hormone in my body, is was as though a think curtain were draped over my emotions. it deadened their intensity, made all of my feelings pale and vague as if there were ghosts that would haunt me. but on estrogen, i find that i have all the same emotions that i did back then, only now they come in crystal clear. in other words, it is not actual emotions, but rather their intensity that has changed – the highs are way higher and the lows are way lower. another way of sating it is that i feel my emotions are more now; they are in the foreground rather than the background of my mind
  • since so few people ever have their chromosomes examined, once could argue that the vast majority of people have a genetic sex that has yet to be determined.
  • the use of the word “biological” (and its abbreviation “bio”) is just as impractical as the word “genetic.” whenever i hear someone refer to cissexuals as being “biological” women and men i usually interject that, despite the fact that i am a transsexual, i am not inorganic or nonbiological in any way. if i press people to further define what they mean by “biological,” they’ll often say that the word refers to people who have fully functioning reproductive system for their sex. Well, if that is the case, then what about people who are infertile or who have their reproductive organize removed as the result of some medical condition? are those people not “biological” men and women? people often insist that “biological” refers to someone’s genitals, but i would ask them how many people’s genitlas they have ever seen up close. ten? twenty? a hundred? and in the vast majority of instances where we meet somebody who is fully dressed (and therefore their genitials are hidden), how do we know whether to refer to them as “she” or “he”? the truth is, when we see other people and classify them as either female or male, the only biological clues we typically have to go on are secondary sex characteristics, which are themselves the products of sex hormones. that being the case, as someone who has had estrogen in her system for five years no, wouldn’t i be considered a “biological” woman?
  • one can only imagine how furious and frustrated most cissexuals would feel if they had to undergo psychotherapy for three to six months (so the psychiatrist could rule out the possibility that they are transexual) before obtaining permission to undergo hormone replacement therapy or gender-related surgeries they required.
  • male pride is not really about pride. it’s about fear – the fear of being seen as feminine. And that’s why “girl stuff” is so dangerous. And as long as most men remain deathly afraid of it, they’ll continue to take it out on the rest of us.
• trans
• • the only thing that has ever been shown to successfully alleviate gender dissonance is allowing the trans person to live in their identified gender. there is an extradorinary amount of historical and anthropological evidence to further support this strategy, as trans people across cultures and throughout history have chosen to live as members of the other sex, often taking on the roles, manner of dress, and/or occupations associated with their identified genders and, in some cases, physically and hormonally altering their bodies via castration.
  • we should stop buying into the myth of deception [that transexuals are trying to deceive], because the truth is that every day, each of us is guilty of committing countless acts of assumption.
  • in order to survive as a trans woman, you must be, by definition, impervious, unflinching, and tenacious. in a culture in which femaleness and femininity are on the receiving end of a seemingly endless smear campaign, there is no act more brave – especially for someone assigned a male sex at birth – than embracing one’s femme self.
• Femininity
• • a hatred of women – which has clearly gone underground, disguising itself as the less reprehensible derision of femininity.
  • What truly unites feminists is not a shared history (as we each bring a unique set of life experiences to the table), but our shared commitment to fighting against the devaluation of femaleness and femininity in our society and the double standards that are placed onto both sexes. in this respect, cissexual female and MTF spectrum feminists do have a lot in common.
  • I have a battle plan for absolute sexual equality, but you have to trust me on this. see, feminists have made it ok for girls to explore what used to be an exclusive boy world. But true equality won’t come until boys learn to embrace girl stuff as well.
  • the feminist assumption that “femininity is artificial” is narcissistic, as it invariably casts non feminine women as having “superior knowledge” while dismissing feminine women as either “dupes” (who are too ignorant to recognize they have been conned) or “fakes” (who purposely engage in “unnatural” behaviors in order to uphold sexists societal norms). indeed, one would have to have a rather grim view of the female population to believe that a majority of us could easily be “brainwashed” or “coerced” into enthusiastically adopting an entirely contrived or wholly artificial set of gender expressions.
  • negative connotaions like “artificial,” “contrived,” and “frivolous” become built into our understanding of femininity – indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “uncomplicated.”
  • we must rightly recognize that feminine expression is strong, daring, and brave – that it is powerful – and not in an enchanting, enticing, or supernatural sort of way, but in a tangible, practical way that facilities openness, creativity, and honest expression.
• Other
  • in the media, stories produced by men, and that feature male protagonists, are seen as universal, while those created by women and featuring female protagonists are often regulated to their own genre (woman’s literature, chick flicks, etc.).
• • instead of centering our beliefs about heterosexual sex around the idea that a man “penetrates” the woman, we were to say that the woman’s vagina “consumes” the man’s penis. this would create a very different set of connotations, as the woman would become the active initiator and the man would be the passive and receptive party. one can easily see how this could lead to men and masculinity being seen as dependent on, and existing for the benefit of, femaleness and femininity. similarly if we thought about the feminine traits of being verbally effusive and emotive not as signs of insecurity or dependence, but as bold acts of self-expression, then the masculine ideal of the “strong and silent type” might suddenly seem timid and insecure by comparison.