A great, must-read book if you're not just jerking off—literally & figuratively—about being transgendered. 

I finished this book with a sense of humiliation & shame at the relatively shallow way I've been thinking of my own transgendered state. Instead of insisting on a right to equal existence, which I've never felt, and which I was never encouraged to feel, I've developed a manner of thinking consistent with my need to eroticize the unbearable in order to make the pain of my existence something I might survive. I've been complicit in my own marginalization by suggesting that I can be of purpose to society by being, basically, the sexual "whipping girl" of a cisgendered society.  Heterosexual men,  I reasoned, looking for an embodiment of the femininity that many women have abandoned as being beneath dignity & which has been systematically disdained by the women's movement and queer activists as politically incorrect, will increasingly turn to sexualized, overtly, & overly feminized transgendered girls like me to get their femininity fix. And it's true, it worked, and, in my case, even had a happy ending. But Serano, taking a wider, healthier, less solipsistic, &  socially responsible approach, illustrates, quite correctly, that my attitude is playing right into the hands of our oppressors, keeping us forever marginalized, hidden away like spare-time secret sex toys. I am turning what is a sexual fantasy into a philosophy of life and a social programme. It would be akin to African Americans openly admitting that the idea of being a slave turns them on sexually or a Jewish person admitting to having concentration camp sex fantasies (who knows…maybe some people do have such fantasies) but then doing the truly unthinkable: crafting a way of living around this admission. What I am doing is what I did as a child: conceding that I have no power, ceding all rights to my superiors (starting with parents and extending to everyone), and then taking comfort in masturbatory fantasies of my eroticized subjugation and victimization.

That's clearly no way to actually live one's life and no way to change an unjust society.

Serano has a very sophisticated and savvy theory that feminine transgendered woman are targeted for derision and exclusion not just because they are transgendered—F-to-M don't suffer to nearly the same  degree—but because they transgress not only society's strict binary gender expectations, but also because they choose to be feminine. It is femininity itself that is under attack. And the reason femininity gets such a bad rap is that it has always been regarded, even when regarded well, as a weakness, a limitation, an artificiality, a submissive orientation: the idea that a woman is meant to be a pretty ornament, for instance. A woman might be said to be a societal victim of the femininity trap. But what male-born person would voluntarily choose to give up his male-privilege & power to become a powerless feminine woman? She must be stupid or crazy, self-hating or perverted or otherwise just plain beneath contempt. What Serano seeks to do is show how transwomen are victims not just of transphobia but good old fashioned misogyny. Femininity does not equal doormat. Serano is fighting to take back the idea of femininity and give it the positive value it deserves. She is trying to show that a femme transgirl doesn't have to be a pushover, a public urinal, a whipping girl. She is trying to give girls like me a bit of backbone, one vertebrae at a time. Part of what makes her book so successful is that even submissive, masochistic transwomen like me already know deep down how much strength, determination, and desperation it has taken to get as far as we've gotten in our transition, how much ridicule & rejection & isolation we've had to bear in order to stay sane, stay alive, and continue forward. She knows how hard a fight it is to be true to our nature and our natural femininity in the face of unrelenting public hostility, while at the same time bearing the hypocrisy of that same public's lurid fascination, and, in secret bedrooms, the taboo lightning rod of its erotic desires. 

The problem is that, given my nature, I'm never likely to take the whip from the hand of my oppressor. So how do you demand respect from an inferior position? How do you top from below? Every masochist has her own strategy but this game is usually played out in private. How do you do it publicly? How do you take a stand socially and politically? How does a whipping girl make demands for respect and equality while tied, often willingly, to the whipping post and have those demands heard, taken seriously, accepted and satisfied? That's the trick. And in this book Julia Serano tries to provide at least the basic understanding necessary of the obstacles we face in figuring out a strategy for freeing ourselves—Houdini-like—from what would seem to otherwise be an all-but inescapable trap.