Julia Serano - Sexed Up: How Society Sexualizes Us, and How We Can Fight Back

Human sexuality is such a vast and complex subject that its impossible to cover it in its entirety within a single book. So instead, authors usually examine these matters from a specific angle or focus on a particular subtopic.

A biologist might frame the subject strictly in terms of anatomical or neurological differences between the sexes. An endocrinologist might focus on the role that hormones play in driving sexual behaviors, while a geneticist might explain those same behaviors in terms of evolutionary pressures. A sexual minority of one stripe or another might pen a memoir that delves into aspects of sex and desire that fall outside most peoples purview. A psychiatrist might describe those behaviors as sexual deviations or dysfunctions, and speculate about what supposedly goes wrong in such individuals to make them turn out that way.

A philosopher might question the underlying belief systems that lead us to deem sexual behaviors either right or wrong in the first place. A historian might analyze changes in sexual norms that have occurred over time, while an anthropologist might chronicle differences in sexual identities and practices that exist from culture to culture.

And so on. Each of these perspectives has the potential to provide important insights, but they inevitably tell only part of the story.

I have been researching and writing about gender and sexuality for over two decades now, and I am quite familiar with all the aforementioned perspectives. But from my vantage point, one crucial piece of the puzzle is almost always missing from these narratives. Namely, they tend to portray sex and sexuality as things that individuals do or possess without giving much, if any, thought to how we see and interpret these aspects of people.

I first recognized the importance of these issues back in 2001, when I had a formative experience that relatively few people ever have. After having spent the first thirty or so years of my life being perceived as male, I transitioned to female. Most mainstream accounts of transgender people tend to place all the attention on the ways that we change: our identities, personal journeys, and physical transformations, and how our transitions impact our relationships with others. But having lived through that experience firsthand, what I found most fascinating was the way the rest of the world seemed to change . Small exchanges and mundane interactions at the grocery store, in restaurants, on public transit, and elsewhere suddenly shifted as people began to see and treat me differently.

Of course, going into my transition, I was well aware of the existence of sexism, and knew that I would likely face discrimination once people started perceiving me as female (and this did come to pass). But what I was not prepared for were the countlesssometimes subtle, sometimes majorways in which people interpreted my body and actions differently. Behaviors that would have elicited a particular reaction back when I was perceived as male suddenly went unnoticed or else provoked an entirely different response. People began to make all sorts of new presumptions about my history, interests, preferences, abilities, and motives, as well as how I would (or should) act, or react, in a given situation. In other words, while my body had taken on a new shape, mostly it just took on new meanings.

In addition to being transgender, I also happen to be bisexualthat is, I am attracted to people of the same gender, as well as people whose genders differ from mine. Over the years, Ive dated a wide range of people: Some were women and others men; some were transgender and others cisgender; some identified as queer and others as straight.