Serano's thoughts on Gender

In doing the readings for Julia Serano, I came across some interesting ideas that changed the way I thought about the transgender movement in general. Before reading Serano, I always thought that the transgender movement (for the most part) believed that gender identity was determined through socialization and other forms of institutional applications of power. In other words, I thought they believed that it is society that influences our gender roles. However, Serano suggests something a little different and more biological. She said that there have been studies performed on a small region of the brain named the BSTc region.  In trans women the BSTc region "closely resembles" the BSTc region of a woman. And conversely, the BSTc region in trans men resembles the region in men. Although Serano herself modestly shrugs it off and admits that such scientific studies have certain "limitations and caveats," I still think the idea that that could be the case is fascinating. For her, this brain hypothesis does give an explanation to the feelings of her childhood, but she isn't too quick to jump on the bandwagon. If there is some sort of predisposition towards a gender naturally in our brains, it would explain the dissonance that so many transgender people feel; also, it would probably get the people who claim that the transgender life is freely "chosen" to stop talking for awhile. Frankly, in the beginning of the class, I wasn't too sure if I would be very interested in the material for this class, but to my surprise, its a much more academic discipline than I had thought. There's a lot of area to be explored here that hasn't been explored much or at all in past years. Fun.

Response to Political Intersectionality & Its Disempowerment

In this post, I wanted to specifically focus on Political Intersectionality -- its function, positives and negatives. Dis-empowerment, the author suggests, occurs when the need arises to "split one's political energies between two sometimes opposing groups."  Her example for this is colored women.  Colored women belong to two groups. On the one hand they are women and on the other they are colored.  This means they are a part of the feminist movement as well as the anti-racism movement.  Unfortunately, however, the anti-sexist group focuses more on "white" women. And the anti-racist group focuses more on African-American males.  Personally, I find this point really interesting.  Its almost ironic to me how in creating a group that is supposed to represent someone underrepresented that one ends up under representing a subset of that group. In other words, a group that is against oppression is in turn oppressor. But does that make it excusable?  Its almost absurd to think about; and frankly, I'm not sure what I think about it yet. I'm almost curious if this is just a facet of human nature and as people we just accidentally and easily neglect things. Surely, these groups don't deliberately neglect these intersections -- why would they?  Another point I'd like to bring up is how far should one go in splitting up these groups into subgroups and so on? Will we really be able to accommodate for everyone? -- Maybe not, but I do think its important that we push for the greatest accommodation to all people possible.