epershand: A hero. And the text "My hero". (My Hero)
epershand ([personal profile] epershand) wrote 2012-02-09 06:37 pm (UTC)

Yeah, I didn't really play with Legos either, for equally gender-unspecific reasons. It's like how I haven't played the video games people are sentimental about because I was... mostly playing educational computer games instead. In part because I really only played games that belonged to school districts my mom worked for, and in part because those seemed more fun than games where you didn't get to learn history or solve math problems or whatever.

And yes, I STRONGLY recommend reading the book. Serano's brilliant, and she completely changed the way I think about a ton of stuff. She points out that there are multiple spectra of misogyny. First, there's the idea that women are inferior to men, and then there's the idea that feminine things are inferior to masculine things. And while a lot of the early strides of feminism broke down the first notion, they mainly did so by working to prove that women can do masculine things too. We're a lot further behind at overthrowing the second notion, and so, for instance, boys who like stereotypically feminine things get stigmatized a lot more than girls who like stereotypically masculine things. (And how, as a result, trans women are stigmatized across multiple axes--they deal with transphobia, misogyny, and are stigmatized for femininity.)

And if you can't get ahold of the book right away or want something shorter to read, Here's an essay of hers about how trans women push hard on the assumptions of feminism

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