Julia Serano is an Oakland, California-based writer, performer, activist, and biologist. She is the author of two other books, 2007''s Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (which Ms. Magazine ranked #16 on their list of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time) and 2013''s Excluded: Making Feminist and Queer Movements More Inclusive (which was a finalist for the 2013 Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction). Julia''s other writings have appeared in over a dozen anthologies, in magazines and news outlets such as TIME, The Guardian, The Advocate, The Daily Beast, Bitch, AlterNet, Out, Ms., and Salon, and have been used as teaching materials in queer and gender studies, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and human sexuality courses across North America. As a scientist, Julia has a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics from Columbia University, and spent seventeen years as a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, in the fields of genetics and evolutionary-developmental biology. She also writes silly, surreal, sex-positive fiction under the pen name Kat Cataclysm, and creates music under the moniker *soft vowel sounds*. More about all her creative endeavors can be found at juliaserano.com.