Rating (out of five): ΔΔΔ

Do we all know the stereotype that females are not as capable at math as males? Folks, that old stereotype has just been debunked.

Gender Differences in Mathematics: An Integrative Psychological Approach, edited by Gallagher and Kaufman, essentially states that there are no real differences in mathematical ability. Beware, though, that this is not a book that gets the heart pumping. Not to scare people off from reading it but the book is a fairly dry read.

The book has a variety of ideas on differences in mathematical ability as it relates to gender. These ideas are presented in a conglomeration of essays written by academics and researchers, all of whom have their own personal experiences and biases. Often times the research essays disclosed that females overall ended up with higher grades in mathematics classes than males. However, when taking higher level mathematical ability tests, females tended to end up with lower scores on average than males.

This finding prompted many in the book to discuss reasons for this tendency. There was a range of explanations but most were vague or non-conclusive. One explanation was that as young children males are encouraged to play with blocks. This encouragement has the end result of leading to increased spatial ability. High spatial ability is correlated with doing well with certain types of math, and high spatial ability is especially conducive to success on mathematical ability tests such as the SAT.

This and other explanations for the test score differences as well as class grade difference raise questions about the impact of biology versus socialization on academic performance. If there are differences in mathematical ability how do they manifest and why? Are we as a society more responsible or are physical factors responsible? In some cases it was concluded that societal factors are more to blame and that there are no inherent factors outside of intelligence that lead to differences in mathematical ability.

Gender Differences In Mathematics also raises questions about the focus many research studies take. Why are we asking why males are outperforming females on the mathematical portion of SAT? Ultimately in one of the many essays the authors pondered that studies are asking questions that focus on the ways that males are outperforming females in mathematical areas, but the studies do not tend to focus on the ways that females are outperforming males. This leads back to the old and engrained stereotype that females are not as good at math and that researchers themselves carry that stereotype within them. The researchers have their own personal agendas. Not only the researchers have agendas but also the publishers of the studies.

While I could say more I leave it to you as readers to seek out your own conclusions. The book is worth a shot if you are interested in how child education is impacted by gender stereotypes. It is also worth reading if you are someone in a career that is involved with mathematics. I especially encourage educators to read this book and question the ways in which they approach their students based on gender. Peoples’ well-being depends on it.
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Rating (out of five): ΔΔΔΔ

Reading Judith Halberstam’s In A Queer Time & Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives was an altogether thrilling experience for a gender nerd like myself. Halberstam does not rest in one place while meandering through modern portrayals of gender; her flow, while erratic, keeps the reader’s brain jumping and eyes moving. In A Queer Time & Place is a symposium of chapters that probe many subjects, some well-known to the general populace but many not.

Halberstam begins with a number of pages detailing the concept of heterosexual time: there are attributes, or milestones, specific to so-called normal heterosexual lives. She muses on how queer lives in their many forms impact the straight timeline and how the queer digression from the timeline creates differing ideas of time and space.

Halberstam also prompts the reader to both appraise the impact of instant gratification on domestic relationships and examine how queer memory is transformed into a commodity.

At some point during reading one begins to ask themselves, “How do transgender people prove the construction of sex and gender?” When what they aspire to be is one of the binary, or in their brain many transgender people are of the binary? Is theory around gender construction yet another case of modern U.S. culture valuing the outer rather than the inner?

To help answer those potential questions Halberstam notes the distinction between realness and the real. Realness, she argues, is about a desire to take on “attributes” of the real whereas the real is fundamentally a fantasy, an unrequited love with the concept of belonging. Therefore even the real, in this case the gender binary, is shown to be a fantasy everyone is chasing. Eventually Halberstam equates Prosser as stating in Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality that transgender people do not prove that gender is a construct or even gender roles. It is cissexual people projecting their desire to believe that the cissexual experience is real onto the transgendered individual. This could be yet another case of making the transgender person a victim in the gender wars.

The chapters move on to address numerous icons of pop culture through a lens of gender acuity. Halberstam does not leave a stone unturned when she deconstructs the full gamut of genre including boy bands, contemporary art and movies like the Austin Powers series, and my personal favorite, the Full Monty.

Halberstam not only focuses on mainstream pop culture icons, she also discusses in depth queer culture icons such as Sleater Kinney, Alix Olson, Matthew Shepard, and so on. Some of her writing about queer culture is fluff, however the majority of her thoughts are deep and revealing of the complexities of the situations people may overlook. The writer frequently makes the decision, for example, to devote a number of pages to Brandon Teena, a well-known hate crime victim, and the media aftermath of the murders. This decision is not a mistake.

To address hate crimes she writes a supremely logical statement within an already steady flow of logic: “The desire, in other words, the desperate desire, to attribute hate crimes to crazy individuals and to point to the U.S. justice system as the remedy for unusual disturbances to the social order of things must be resisted in favor of political accounts of crime and punishment.” She then calls for more narratives on hate crimes through the context of questioning homophobia, racism and classism, all which ultimately are state-sanctioned discrimination. It is not simply about love and hate, she writes, like the Boys Don’t Cry movie implies. The Hollywood movie is simplified for mainstream viewers and distorted into a story focusing more on the romantic connections that Teena develops rather than questioning the system that created an environment that enables persons like Teena’s murderers to commit horrific acts like rape or murder.

Readers, prepare for more than a few preconceptions challenged; Halberstam’s work here goes down easy, but brews into something quite impressionable after settling in just a little while.
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Rating (out of five): ΔΔ

You know the phrase, “I couldn’t put the book down”? After reading Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors my reaction was the exact opposite. I couldn’t put the book up. Leslie Feinberg is a hero for many people, including myself. Feinberg’s personal gender story, Stone Butch Blues, is a story I can relate to in many ways. After reading Stone Butch Blues and having heard Leslie Feinberg speak at the Translating Identities Conference in 2005 I was sure that Transgender Warriors would be a good read. That was not the case, however.

Transgender Warriors aims to be a history of people who do not conform to traditional gender roles. Instead the book ends up being an outlet for the socialist ideas Feinberg adheres to. Often Feinberg veers off-topic, making comments such as, “McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts were in full frenzy…,” writes about factory strikes and denounces capitalism. This review is not saying there is anything particularly wrong with socialism. It is simply that if one wants to read a book about socialism they can go read What Is the Real Marxist Tradition? or The Communist Manifesto. If you’re looking to read about the history of gender nonconformity Transgender Warriors is not the book for you.

Feinberg goes into detail at times about persons who transcend gender roles and characteristics, which is fine. But in addition, Feinberg goes too far by calling various people in different cultures transgender. This may not make sense at first but keep reading. The term “transgender” originates from Latin and English. The word “gender” in Latin means 'kind', 'type', or 'sort'. Feinberg comes off as being yet another colonizer within the book when Feinberg takes apart important spiritual symbols for Native Americans and places the Western label of transgender, first made popular in the 1970’s, onto those Native American customs. It is offensive and potentially degrading. Feinberg’s book is disempowering rather than empowering in that sense.

This book is one example of many that indicates there is a big problem with the word “transgender,” which is that the term “transgender” is too broad. Merriam-Webster’s definition of transgender is, “Having personal characteristics (as transsexuality or transvestism) that transcend traditional gender boundaries and corresponding sexual norms.” It is too broad for several reasons, one being that traditional gender boundaries vary from culture to culture. In one country, for instance Scotland, it may be acceptable for a male to wear a skirt and in another country the action is reviled. Does it make the male in Scotland transgender to wear a skirt? In addition, traditional gender boundaries may change within a culture. Women playing an active role in the U.S. military used to be a rarity. There are women throughout U.S. history who disguised themselves as male in order to be in the military. Would we call these women transgender? Would we call female soldiers of modern age transgender? Where do we draw the line?

In many instances Feinberg claims that persons from various cultures are transgender. Unless someone has a medical diagnosis (and sometimes not even) since when is it okay for someone to label someone else transgender? For instance, Feinberg claims that the infamous Amazon warriors were transgender. This was because, as Feinberg writes, “To the Greeks, these Amazons were masculine women who bore themselves like men.” This is the biggest failing in the book. It is ludicrous to say that individuals are transgender because their gender expression is different than modern-day societal expectations. Many people would take offense to being labeled transgender by another person on the basis that they do things that aren’t considered traditional activities for their assigned gender. Imagine calling a woman transgender for being athletic or being good at mathematics, or calling a male transgender for cooking or cleaning.

Certainly, the Amazons cut off one of their breasts because one of their primary weapons was the bow and arrow. Feinberg, however, tries to indicate that this is further evidence of the Amazons being transgender. Maybe some of them got breast cancer in one breast. Who knows? The point is that it is impossible to look back at other cultures of which there is not much knowledge and try to fit those culture’s customs into a convenient box to prove something. Feinberg assuredly had the best of intentions, but it ends up being a discredit to Transgender Warriors.

I cannot completely knock the book. The pictures included throughout the book were very beautiful and meaningful. It seems though there are too many images and not enough content. Transgender Warriors is enlightening in the sense that it does describe aspects of history in a different way and opens the readers’ mind to new concepts and events throughout time. This goal could have been fulfilled in a very different way.

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Rating (out of five): ΔΔΔΔΔ

A rare event has occurred in the area of gender studies, and that event is the publication of The Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman On Sexism and The Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano. Not often do readers have the luxury of reading a thorough, fairly objective yet personal appraisal of misogyny from a transsexual woman. In this segment I simultaneously present a review of The Whipping Girl while tying what Serano writes into some of my personal experiences with gender.

Julia Serano’s book courageously presents situations in which femininity is treated with sincere disdain. The Whipping Girl’s main focus is to show how transgender phobia is not based on dislike of persons who are transgender solely for those persons being transgender. Rather, transphobia is described as being based on the hatred of femininity. What is most striking in the book is how Serrano sheds light the ways in which femininity, in particular, is frowned upon within the queer community and explores how masculinity is often most applauded. When femininity is accepted in the queer community it is within the drag show setting where femininity becomes a show, an act to please an audience. Serrano repeatedly illustrates how society as a whole carries the perception that femininity is a farce created to please those who witness it.

To make this a little more personal, in my late teens I transitioned from female-to-male (FTM), and I identified somewhere between being a gay and bisexual male. To fully embody living as a male I underwent a series of physical alterations such as two years of testosterone hormone therapy and several surgeries that ultimately gave me a masculine appearance. But after two years of transition I began to have an experience similar to what Serrano herself describes in her book as going through. That experience being that my subconscious sex was misaligned with my physical body. In my early 20s, I decided to de-transition and live as a woman again because I came to realization that my subconscious sex is female, much like Serano.

Serrano’s explanation of the concept of “subconscious sex” is an eloquent description of what many transgender people experience. Subconscious sex as described in Whipping Girl is the mental understanding of what one’s sex is regardless of what sex the physical body is. Many people are born with their physical sex and subconscious sex aligned but transgender people often times have subconscious and physical sexes at odds with each other.

The concept of “subconscious sex” that Serano touches on not only correlates with a lot of transgender people but also with non-transgender people, or cissexual people, as Serano states. For instance, one can examine cases where non-trans women who have had masectomies feel the strong desire to have breast implants because they feel incomplete without breasts. The concept of subconscious sex could be part of an explanation for that desire. Serano also discusses the effect large amounts of testosterone has on someone whose subconscious sex is female and goes as far as using the term “testosterone poisoning”. Cissexual women also experience similar effects when misusing androgens to develop muscle mass.

While there is minimal mention of the problematic fetishization of masculinity and dislike of femininity in the queer community there has been little to no recognition of this phenomenon in the realm of gender studies. The Whipping Girl dissects the sexualizing of female-to-male transsexuals within the lesbian community and briefly discusses the misogyny within the gay male community as well. When I was transitioning from female-to-male, many people in the queer community not only treated me with more respect (I felt empowered) but I was also pursued sexually and in some ways treated like some kind of sexual force. This was vastly different from when I was a female lesbian in the queer community; while I was well-liked, I was rarely sexually pursued and not given nearly as much authority or respect as when I transitioned to male. And now that I am living as a woman again I experience the same shift of treatment where I feel less valued, less powerful, less attractive.

And, of course, the funniest part of this situation is that within the straight world that I now technically identify with… I am told I am too masculine. Serano writes in great detail on heterosexual attitudes about gender and how women are expected to be feminine and men masculine. From reading her book it is clear that there is still much misogyny in heterosexual society, even with feminist movements. Serano talks about how feminist gender deconstructionist theory considers femininity to be a social construct and how transsexual womens’ experiences contradict gender deconstruction theory. She berates those gender theorists who take transgendered experiences and maim those experiences to prove the theory du jour.

To sum this all up, The Whipping Girl is a meaningful read. Do I recommend it? Without a doubt. This book is an unsinkable ship in the turbulent sea of gender theories.
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Bookmonkey, our newest contributor, joins us on Tuesday as BTB's official book reviewer. Stay tuned for her engaging review of Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity.

Also of note: a) the new comment/trackback system, and b) as a result of installing this system, all old comments have been erased. Hooray for toughstuff's technical skills! The comment business should be pretty self-explanatory, but trackbacks are rather cool: contributors and commenting individuals may alert me to posts on other blogs that relate to a particular post of ours. This way, under "Trackback", readers can easily find other posts out there in the greater blogosphere they might be interested in.

Sincerely,
ts