A Semester With Anastasia

               After reading parts of Julia Serano's book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity , I was reminded of the harsh contrast between the treatment of women and men in society. This reading also brought the slander that transgender people are commonly exposed to.       Serano portrays the marginalization of transgender women by exemplifying common occurrences. These include the hyper feminization of transgender women on the media along with the constant questioning as to whether or not they have had gender reassignment surgery performed. Serano also explains how they are also often hypersexualized and objectified.        Toxic masculinity is very common in all aspects of everyday life and influences the way people are treated. A woman will be judged if she's too masculine in which a man will be judged for being too feminine. People who defy social ...

       When beginning the reading of Asta's book, Categories We Live By: The Construction of Sex, Gender, Race and Other Social Categories , I was introduced to the metaphysics of social categories from a feminist analytic metaphysics perspective.       As opposed to the reading of Butler’s book, Beyond the Binary, I frequently found myself researching certain words and topics to try to better understand what I was reading. For example, I learned that metaphysics is a branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space through the use of the Oxford Dictionary.       Asta’s book focuses on the question of what a social category is and why it has come to exist in our present-day society. Asta uses metaphysics to explain social categories as a feminist. She does this by giving a theory of the social properties of the in...