Julia Serano

Julia Serano (born 1967) is a transsexual American writer, biologist, musician, poet, and activist. She lives in Oakland, California. In 2007 her first full-length book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity was published by Seal Press. In October 2013 ''Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive'' was published. Her essays have also been published on websites and in magazines and books about feminism.

Serano did a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Columbia University. Serano worked at UC Berkeley as a researcher for seventeen years.

She was a member of the indie rock band Bitesize.

Personal life

Serano is a feminist. She is bisexual.

For years she was a crossdresser. She wore clothes made for women but still called herself a man. In 1998 Serano moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. There she met her wife Dani. Around this time Serano started identifying as bigender and transgender. In 2001 she started identifying as a trans woman. She calls herself a "femme tomboy".

Writing

In 2002 made a chapbook called Either/Or. In 2004 she made a chapbook called Draw Blood. In 2005 Serano made a chapbook called On the Outside Looking In: A Trans Woman's Perspective on Feminism and the Exclusion of Trans Women from Lesbian and Women-only Spaces.

Serano's first book Whipping Girl talks about transmisogyny. Transmisogyny is a word that Serano uses to talk about a kind of misogyny (woman-hating) that is experienced by trans women. Whipping Girl has updated versions of three of the four essays in On the Outside Looking In.

In her second book Excluded, Serano wrote about how feminist and queer movements have left out transgender women, feminine people, bisexuals, sex workers, and others.

In both of her books Serano talks about how gender is not a performance.