I upset quite a few people the other day with that Nail polish post. Some of the people who were upset are, frankly, assholes, and they can go ahead and be upset, but a lot of them aren’t, and I’m sorry I upset those people.
I didn’t like or agree with everything in that Elinor Burkett article, and I skipped over most of them – but maybe I should have said I wasn’t endorsing the whole thing.
Someone in a Facebook group recommended this tumblr post cis by default, and I found what it says resonates with me a lot. It starts with some body discomforts, and then moves to the social.
I also just had a lot of discomfort with the more social (not physical) aspects of gender. And this admittedly did start from a lot of conversations about trans and variant gender identities – partially because they made me realize that everyone else did not, in fact, think about gender the way I did. Hearing both cis and trans people talk about how they had this mental sense of gender confused me, because I never felt that way. I identified as female, yes, but only because I I had the traits that defined that category – the same way that I was seen as [mostly] white (another whole issue) or labelled as upper middle class, it was just a role that was assigned to me based on how society organizes categories. And I could deal with that.
That’s just it, you know? It’s a fact – that is, it’s what you’ve always been told. That doesn’t necessarily make it something you identify with. The more I read about this and have conversations about it, the less convinced I am that I’ve ever identified as being female – but I haven’t (mostly) rejected it either. It’s just there. I deal with it.
But when people talked about what it meant to them to identify as a woman, and things like that, I felt left out in the cold. Because for me, while I’m fine with the fact that I have certain physical traits, and thus fall into a certain category, if it comes down to that sense of “me” that makes my core mental personality…there’s nothing about being a “woman” there.
Yeah. There isn’t.
Or at least…not very much. Other things loom much larger.
On the other hand I do identify as a feminist. That’s one of the things that looms larger. And being a feminist does in a way cause me to identify as a woman more than I otherwise would. And that makes me think about what it would be like to be a woman if feminism didn’t exist…and I can’t wrap my head around it. Everything I try to think on the subject is itself feminist, so it breaks down. “If there were no feminism I…I…I would be frustrated and angry.” If there were no feminism what would I be frustrated and angry about? It’s hard to think about. At any rate the idea of being a woman with no feminism in existence is bleak.
But there have been women in that situation since forever, and there still are. Yes, but that’s a different world. I grew up in this one, and it’s what shaped me, and that one would be like air to a fish.
What if there were no feminism but there were trans people, and transitioning were totally mainstream and unproblematic?
I don’t know. I can’t tell. I can’t tell if what I would feel in that situation is gender dysphoria, or something much milder. I suspect it’s the latter, but I really don’t know.
So eventually, even though I had questioned myself for a long time, I ended up just staying as “cis” because it mostly worked, even if imperfectly; and for the most part I don’t usually bring up my discomforts unless it’s with people who I think are worth opening up to about it. I’m aware that I still have a privilege over trans people in many ways since for all intents and purposes, the world still sees me as cis. (Even though when I’ve had some bits of worse dysphoria, and craved to have someone see something other than “cis girl”, it’s never happened, and I’ve sort of just given up on that. Although it still makes me a bit happy when someone accidentally says “sir”, even if it’s a bit disappointing when they immediately correct themselves. But that’s still relatively minor compared to what other people have to deal with.)
It works for me too, but that’s because I have a lot of room to be eccentric. If I didn’t…I don’t know, I can’t even imagine how I would function then, because that would be a different person. I’m a cis by default weirdo; that’s my identity.
The main problem feminists have with “cis” is that it imposes the gender system, which they reject. The author elucidates this, although she may not be aware of that, and expresses discomfort with it. She decides to accept it to be conciliatory. That’s her decision, but it isn’t something that women should be coerced into accepting. Feminists have been discussing gender for a long time, and the “cis” label is directly in conflict with our understanding of it. It’s fine to have a debate about whether you agree with the feminist analysis of gender or not. It’s not fine to insist that people suspend their own political analysis without further discussion.
@sylvania, I disagree. I may be misunderstanding what you mean by “gender system,” but the categories cis and trans do not impose a strict gender binary, or social gender constructs. There’s plenty of fluidity between and within those categories.
And as with any categories or definitions there are going to be gray areas and some fuzzy boundaries. The important thing is that trans people have the chance to define themselves and (more-or-less) cis people stop being regarded as the default that doesn’t need a name (or whose name is “normal.”) Happily, that in itself is a big blow to the gender system.
I wonder whether women in our culture, in general, identify less with our gender than men do. I had an experience years ago that brought this to mind. I was listening to Radiolab, and the narrator was saying ‘imagine you’re a monkey, and you’re swinging through the trees, and picking fruit’…and I obligingly did so while listening to the story. Then the narrator said ‘now imagine you see…a lady monkey’ and I was immediately drawn up short. Was I supposed to have been imagining myself a male monkey? The narrator didn’t specify that. I’d like to do an experiment where people are asked to imagine themselves as people, animals, etc. and then suddenly be asked what gender they’re imagining these avatars to be. My hypothesis is that most of the men would say ‘why male, of course’ and most of the women would say ‘um, I never really thought of it.’
Julia Serano on “cis”
(my bolding)
More recommended reading:
A Quick Note About Feminism and Transgender People
@Stacy, Well said. The “gender critical” view is based on this strawman that they do, along with dogmatic biological essentialism. They also advocate for “abolishing gender”, nothing says hypocrisy quite like force-ably placing people into gender boxes when you supposedly want to abolish them O_o
Some trans peeps on Twitter have also made some interesting observations about how “abolishing gender” is utopianism along the lines of the “colourblind” racist ideology. Strictly speaking if everyone didn’t see race then racism would disappear, but PoC have to live under a system where that isn’t the case so it’s stunningly racist to blame them for it. I think it’s an apt comparison to gender, trans people have to live under the patriarchal binary system that is created by cisgender people. Hardly fair to blame them for that, or expect them to be “gender blind” when its a system imposed on them by society as a whole.
Lady Mondegreen, I agree that nobody identifies with the binary. People are, every one of us, more interesting than that. However, the way I see it, gender is an imposition, and it is binary. And it’s a more onerous imposition on women than men. It starts from the instant your genitals are seen at birth. In some places it starts before that, millions of girls have been aborted for their sex. After that,no matter how complex and interesting you are as a person, the messages that are sent that form your self image are incessantly binary. They are really entrenched, because we live in a patriarchy, and they are really hard to combat. I’ve been a radical feminist since I was young, and I still find myself having to think twice about a lot of behaviours that I perform that are designed to subordinate me.
Sylvania @6
I’ve run into a lot of people who do, at least if you interpret “with the binary” as “with their assigned binary gender”. There are a lot of men who make a point of how being a man is an essential part of how they see themselves, the same way as many USAans consider being American as a big part of who they are. I’m guessing that there are women who are the same way.
And there are a lot of trans people who are very attached to their (trans) gender; I once posted to a trans forum a “what if” of a society where gender wasn’t seen as any more significant than, say, eye color, and boy did a lot of people get upset!
There’s a great post up on Ebony by Laverne Cox that is very much related to this ongoing discussion. It’s titled “You Ain’t the ONLY Woman: The White Cis Grasp on Womanhood Is Failing” [x]
There’s something that a lot of trans people report and I’m becoming aware of in myself that doesn’t get mentioned in feminist discussions of gender.
It’s that feeling that at some fundamental level, you just don’t belong with the people you share a birth gender with, and in many cases you don’t feel right in your body. That something just doesn’t fit, no matter how perfectly you may seem to fit. And when you transition, medically and/or socially, you just feel right for once.
I haven’t transitioned yet, so I can’t say for sure how I’ll feel, but I know that I have _never_ felt at home with being a man or having a male body, and I’ve tried every way I can think of for 60 years. It’s like when my father convinced me (for an afternoon) that I could sell stuff door-to-door. I went out and canvased the neighborhood. And I realized: it’s just not me. I am not cut out to be a salesman. It’s the same thing with being male. I have yet to find anything about being a man (as opposed to a generic human being) that I can relate to. I can intellectualize it, but I can’t feel it. Whereas when I read about or hear women’s experiences, it fits.
Julia Serano describes this a lot better than I can in her book (Whipping Girl), and besides, she’s transitioned, so she can compare before and after.
I get the impression that cis people don’t experience the same sort of not-rightness. Maybe there’s something deep inside, independent of all the social constructions, that just works right for cis people and doesn’t for trans people, and, for lack of any better language, we call it gender.
AMM, I love that analogy.
That’s the bottom line.
The definition may be imprecise, but it describes something, and I’m not going to question any trans person’s experience of it or their way of expressing their own.
I remember as a very young child explaining to other kids that (essentially) gender was an outmoded concept and that we were all genderless people in a couple of different shaped bodies. I never objected to being labeled a girl or woman because it was clearly understood by me that this ONLY referred to the shape of my body.
So then I got educated about transgender and cisgender and I’m thinking, okay, where do I fit in? Actually, it’s very important to me under these conditions that I get to identify and be identified as gender neutral. If the word ‘woman’ doesn’t simply mean having a particular body shape, then I’m not a woman (or a man). And on the other hand, the world ‘woman’ even as body shape never meant enough to me that I would feel the need to defend it. Apparently it does mean a lot to some other people. As long as I get a way of describing myself, I’m happy.
We seem to conflate sex and gender in these discussions even though we know better. When we say I feel or don’t feel like a woman, for example. Do you mean woman in the social constructed sense, the stochastic physical sense? What?
When I say I’m a woman, I happen to mean both. I think that if you considered me a woman, that you’re mental shortcuts about what that meant would be more true about me than the other option. Is it perfect? No, of course not. I’m a person, not an abstract. But it IS more accurate.
I also mean it physically. I am quite sure that if we destroyed the concept of gender completely, that I’d still have dysphoria centered on my body. My heart would ache seeing a pregnant woman, knowing that it could never be me. I would have still felt so rigid hugging people without a bosom of my own. I know I’d still feel like a hollow mannequin when I looked in the mirror.
I know that within 3 weeks of starting HRT, even when other people still saw me as ‘a guy’, my depression and dysphoria all but vanished. Instead, over the last few years, I’ve grown into myself. I’ve become real. A person.
Here’s what I know is true for me. When society said pretty girls shouldn’t have body hair, something deep inside whispered, “Hey, they are talking about you.” Like everyone, I internalized the messages that society forces on us, and like everyone some of those applied to me, and some didn’t. What I, instinctively, applied to myself is remarkably similar to what other women my age applied to themselves.
To say I’m not a woman is to deny that essential part of me. I mean, look, I spent literal DECADES trying to deny that part of myself, to rationalize it away… all that did was cause me pain. I am a woman, that’s the truth.
Possibly treading dangerously where I shouldn’t, but there’s also a limit to how much I’ll learn sitting on the sidelines forever. If I offend or say something stupid, and you have the patience, please point me in the direction of an appropriate resource.
I don’t. Facile as it may seem this is because being a salesperson (in the widest sense) is a learnt skill, not a state of being. People we call naturals at sales simply have personalities that better enable them to quickly get over the hump of sucking at it and finding it hard. They probably learn how as kids. It’s closely linked to performing (acting). For the rest of us we practice, try and eventually get at least tolerably good at sales, but never actually enjoy it, even if we get satisfaction from our success.
Having said that I understand AMM’s intent behind the analogy, but it doesn’t resonate for me.
I’d be labelled cis-male-hetero, but I know that that doesn’t actually begin to describe me as an actual person at any given point in time, let alone over time. I couldn’t tell you what it is to be cis-male-hetero. Mostly because I don’t ‘feel’ that way particularly. I don’t especially like my body, but if I could swap it would most probably be for another male body. I find women physically attractive, but then I have had fleeting attractions to males -what does that mean. I’ve been shown pictures of trans women who were beautiful and whom I found equally physically attractive both before and after I knew they were trans – again what, if anything does that mean? I’m uncomfortable around extremes of both masculine and feminine behaviour. Again, what…
When I pictured myself as a monkey in the forest, I didn’t assign myself a sex until I pictured the female monkey. Then I knew I was male. Is it possible we define ourselves by what we are not?
I don’t understand or like the TERF idea (as it has been explained to me) that accepting trans-woman somehow damages feminism (because theory). Isn’t it enough to accept that when someone identifies or presents (in a broadly binary manner) as one gender or another, then they take on the baggage associated with that. Worse of course in that if a trans person doesn’t pass well at being firmly of one gender or another, then they take on the downside of that new gender, while keeping the downside of their former assumed gender as well.
We don’t need to be blind to gender or race or sexuality. We need to be more accepting of whatever the person presents as and less judgemental of it. Frankly I suspect that if society reached that point feminism would be a moot point anyway. Maybe not.
sorry about the shitty formatting I seem to have lost the art of getting a space between paragraphs
I’m really enjoying this conversation, and I’m so glad we’re having it. It’s very clear to me that trans people and cis women are both classes of people who are oppressed by societal constructions of gender, but in some very different ways. As such we need to be accepting and caring for and learning from each other- but instead we’re butting heads.
This has a long history: I remember Janice Raymond as the first feminist I read and said “FUCK NO!” to – and that was way back in 1982 or so. It was so clear to me that NO-ONE was going to go through the hells of sex change surgery (as it was called then) just to infiltrate the women’s movement. What was she even smoking? Anyway, this isn’t going to be solved overnight, but avoiding it won’t help.
Rob @14
You missed the point. Could I have learned to be a salesman if my life had depended upon it? Probably.
But I would have hated it. I would have had to spend every day stomping down my revulsion at what I was doing. I would have died inside, and at some point felt like dying was better than living. At some point, it wouldn’t have mattered whether I killed myself or not. I figured that out in a half-hour. And Rob, if you don’t believe I could figure that out in that short of a time, you simply have no clue, you are one of those “knows not, and knows not that he knows not.”
This is the point that cis people miss. They don’t seem to understand what it is like to feel revulsion at having to live as one’s assigned sex to the point that one has to deaden oneself and become an empty shell and maybe come to the realization that being alive is worse than being dead. Most trans people learn to act out their assigned gender role and to believe that that’s what life is like. Many go to extraordinary lengths to silence that inner voice and squeeze themselves into being what everyone tells them they are. But at some point, it just doesn’t work any more. At some point, there is nothing that society and life can reward or threaten you with that makes it worth going on that way.
How much of it is biology? How much is social gender BS? How much of it is one’s nature? Would I feel less alienated from myself if I lived in some sort of feminist gender-free utopia? Who knows? And who cares? We are what we are, however we got that way, and we have to live (or not) in the world as it is, not as we wish it would be. If transition (medical and/or social) makes us feel less alienated from ourselves, if living as genderqueer or asking to be referred to as “It” makes us feel less revulsion at ourselves, then I don’t care what the theorists and scientists and feminist pontiffs and Dr. Knowitalls have to say, we’ll take it.
^^^Let’s please see some of AMM’s and besomyka’s comments lifted up above the fold as guest posts, if they’d be ok with that.
Thanks for sharing, y’all.
@Rob
Not quoting you to create a pile on, Rob. But the analogy hit home for me, and your objection was helpful too because it gave AMM an opportunity to address the point further. I feel that deep revulsion to salespersonship and anything approaching it (asking for donations on behalf of a group or project, etc.) I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again and I’ve gotten better at it, but it violates something in me to do it. It’s a tiny violation, I get over it, but if I had to do that for a living, Idontknowwhat.
I’ve been thinking that I would have been fine if I’d been born biologically male, that it wouldn’t make much difference to my sense of self in any really fundamental way. But now thanks to AMM I’m seeing that I can’t possibly know that. Our deepest sense of ourselves is something we just know, difficult to articulate even to ourselves sometimes.
@AMM
Beautifully put.
Seconded.
i definitely do not feel like a man. My sex is male, but I don’t identify much at all with the genders man or woman. There were times where I felt more in tune with the social construct of “manliness” but that was mostly due to conforming to social pressures to act and think in certain ways. I don’t fit into or like the traditional gender stereotypes and don’t want to limit my behaviours or ideas to them. I want to be free of those expectations and the biases that come with them.
I am also wondering whatever happened to the sex-gender distinction.
I’ve never felt happy with my gender: mostly the allotted roles are insulting and restricting and so NOT what I wanted to do. Femininity is not me, not even the revised modern version where it’s about style rather than subservience and stupidity. (I can’t think feminine without thinking of the kind I grew op with; I prefer to think “femme” for the style.) I chuckle with glee when all those online tests tell me I could never pass as a woman, or that I’m more masculine than feminine etc.
But I’ve never felt wrong about my sex, being a woman. Which is lucky because I could never pass for a man in this curvy body.
I think this is a potential hinge for solidarity. I do think it’s something many cis people do miss, but could appreciate if they gave it some more thought. If I had been born decades ago in my country, or today in many others, there’s a good chance I would have experienced what it is “to live as one’s assigned sex to the point that one has to deaden oneself and become an empty shell and maybe come to the realization that being alive is worse than being dead.” When I read historical or contemporary accounts of women who are denied education, exposure to ideas, and opportunities to do anything other than give birth and raise children, even when they’re not poor or abused, I feel almost sick thinking about that being my life. (I feel the same way about having to be a miner, but the possibility of being forced into that life are less present for me as a woman.) The fear of such a situation spreading or returning is a real one.
The point isn’t about the content of any role or activity – vastly different roles and activities can be fulfilling to different people – but the lack of freedom to choose one (or more) other than that which is assigned to you. Everyone should be able to understand that.
***
This is such an important point. There seems to be a widespread inability to realize that trans people aren’t, for example, women socialized as men and carrying all of those privileges into “womanhood.” If you’re a girl, you’re socialized as a girl – in terms of the messages you receive if not each and every experience – regardless of how others identify or assign you. And even though those identified as or assigned to “girls” have different experiences, those are only salient to the extent that they identify as girls. So, even though it’s not really a quantitative scale, trans women can have been “more” socialized as girls than those who were always so identified/assigned.
***
I suspect you’re trolling. In any case, it’s not by Laverne Cox, but by Lesli-Ann Lewis. I don’t like it. It’s unduly hostile and generalizing, and makes several inaccurate claims. It does the opposite of genuinely seeking solidarity.
And…I’ll note: This is a digression – I don’t intend to derail this discussion. I HATE the framing of any human struggle against oppression as one to be recognized as “human” or “fully human.” Human is a species, not a status. There are no degrees of human. It isn’t and should never be seen as the basis for respect or rights or freedom from exploitation or oppression. And the violence toward other species and ideologies that necessarily accompany it are the basis for ideologies supporting violence against humans (see, for example, David A. Nibert’s Animal Oppression and Human Violence). We’ll never keep some humans from being seen as “less than human” until we dismantle this system. And that can only happen through solidarity across species lines. And hey, if anyone has to “understand what it is like to feel revulsion at having to live as one’s assigned sex to the point that one has to deaden oneself and become an empty shell,” it’s a cows used for dairy. (And while we’re on the subject of identification, I often identify with other animals more than humans, and always have. So there’s that.)
If I had been born decades ago in my country, or today in many others,
Or in many places in my own country today. (All a matter of degree, in any event.)
So here‘s a bit of cheer.
I’m also finding this conversation, and related ones, illuminating.
I have a lot of personal issues regarding identity. I am male, and not gender dysphoric, but I purposely avoid many things that are considered traditionally masculine. I am a light-skinned person, normally seen by others as white, but my father is black, and I identify as black or as mixed. I have Native American ancestry, and my mother’s side of the family is Jewish.
I think it’s important to support people’s rights to check off whatever boxes make sense to them. We can do this, I think, even while trying to work with some objective understanding of what the boxes mean. Sometimes this is in conflict; in my experience, it has resulted in many arguments, and in a lot of confusion in my own head.
In my atheist group, the most common version of this is: “he’s not a Christian, he doesn’t believe X”; “yes, he’s a Christian, he identifies as such”; “no, he’s not allowed to identify as a Christian”. In my mind, the most common versions are confusion about whether I have any sort of “right” to identify myself as black or as Native American, despite my ancestry, given my lack of any sort of strong connection to the culture and the experience, even though I somehow “feel” black and sometimes wish my skin were darker. Occasionally, it’s Jewish relatives or friends insisting that I should resume identifying as Jewish, given my ethnic background, and insisting that doing so obliges me to follow the religious practice.
So, I dunno. I like the idea of people being free to dress or adorn or comport themselves or modify their bodies in ways that make them feel more comfortable and more themselves, whether those ways align with some set of societal stereotypes and expectations or not. I like the idea of being expansive and inclusive when fighting for social justice. I also understand the benefit of trying to be precise in language, and I recognize this causes conflicts that I have not a clue how to handle.
I think what drives my feminism is that I am identified by society as a woman, in a way that entails certain expectations around appearance and behaviour. I don’t want to be forced to identify as anything. I don’t identify as cis either. I don’t like people “identifying”, ie, slapping genderist labels and expectations on me, me as either a “woman” or as “cis”. I don’t dress in a “feminine” way because I want to be recognised in a particular way, I dress in a “feminine” way because I get social rewards from doing it. Just like I get rewarded by going and working my crappy job that I hate doing. I hate looking after my hair, I hate waxing my legs, I hate doing all the laundry that comes with maintaining a nice wardrobe, I hate wasting money on it: I do it for the rewards. It makes it easier to find a partner and it makes it easier to get a job and it makes people like me more. And because I defy gender expectations in other ways, like being very outspoken and political, etc, it helps take an edge off that. I really don’t like other people “identifying” me in a particular way based on something I ultimately do just to survive. Yes, I try to make it more enjoyable by pouring some of my visual creativity into it (I enjoy creativity), but don’t confuse my struggle to survive as an expression of a privileged identity.
elephantasy, your avatar looks like a trombone, which reminds me, tenor trombone tunes to Bb but reads in C. I play Bb trumpet and flügelhorn the same way; my instruments tune to Bb but I read in C. Someone told me “You’re transposing” and I replied “I used to” because I don’t transpose anymore; I just do what a tenor trombone player does, and we don’t call that transposing.
Society does something strange here. Physically, tenor trombone and Bb trumpet both tune to Bb on a piano. But socially, young trumpeters are told they’re in Bb, and young trombonists are told they’re in C.
My Bb/C story is about society assigning our identities and categorizing us (a feminist issue), but I read trans people here saying their identity issues run deeper than how society sees them. (This last paragraph is me working to understand how that’s different, not addressing your comment in particular.)
“cis by default” sounds a lot like me.
You mean, I have a choice between being a submissive uneducated housewife in a pink dress and being my dominant self, keeping my long education and good job, wearing my jeans/boots/T-shirt, but I have to be a man? Yeah. I’m a man.
AMM @ 10:
I definitely feel that. I hardly ever feel “at home” in a group of women, and never if we’re grouped together because we are women. And no, it doesn’t help if they’re lesbian, in some ways that just makes it worse – they’re like you, so why don’t you fit in? Why are you so weird? I feel much more at home in mixed gender groups or male-except-for-me groups. (BTW, being a salesperson feels much more “wrong” than being either a man or a woman, for me. Which probably means it’s a really good analogy.)
SC (Salty Current) @ 23:
What a strange thing to say. If people treat you in a specific way because they see you as a girl, that’s going to have an effect whether or not you identify as a girl.
I don’t see the problem with cis/trans any more than black/white, male/female etc. As long as it’s understood as a social label and possibly the ends of a spectrum.
And I do have cis privilege because I don’t need to have expensive surgery and hormones to feel at home in my body; and I don’t need to fight any battles to be socially and legally accepted as a woman. I might still be raped or otherwise assaulted because of it, of course – being a woman is no picnic. But my odds are lower than the odds for trans women, though IIRC still higher than for trans men.
I’ve been away and busy, hence the late, and by now possibly irrelevant, reply.
Lady Mondegreen @19, Not a pile on at all. I asked to be included in a conversation so I can hardly complain if people take me at my word and respond!
AMM @17, I didn’t miss the point. I didn’t and don’t agree about the analogy. I totally accept that it works for you and Lady Mondegreen (and others). It didn’t and doesn’t for me. However, that’s ok. Reasonable people can disagree about many things and this was an analogy, not a quantitative fact. My mileage varies from yours and as a result I think I understand your point at an intellectual level, but the analogy that doesn’t resonate with me means my emotional (?) connection is less strong. In my experience I am never the first or only person to think or experience something, so I’m sure there would be others who would respond in a similar manner.
It’s true, in fact almost a truism, to say “you don’t know what you don’t know”. How could you not? It applies equally to matters of privilege, fact and education. At least thanks to my time reading at FTB I’m more aware of the areas where I know nothing. Hopefully It’s now clear that my difficulty was with the analogy, not with the value of your experience.
See now, for me that was powerful and real (and analogy free). I wish you nothing but good.