#cissexism

[queerism1969]

[librarycards]

The term “social transition” has a non-trans history in the psychology of adolescence. In the 1980s, it was an operative metaphor for describing adolescence through the American trope of a rocky period of self-making, what one psychologist in 1978 termed “the difficulty of adolescence as a transitional period.” The primary “transition” that concerned psychologists at the time was school, where social shifts in friend groups and hierarchies from middle school to high school affected a young person’s self-esteem and mental integrity, resulting either in positive self-actualization or, if the social transition went poorly, “problem behavior.”³

The term “social transition” was only later adopted by psychologists and psychiatrists looking to powerfully expand their jurisdiction over trans youth to include entirely non-medical practices that often spur parents to reject or harm their kids: wearing a dress, cutting or growing out hair, wearing a binder or a bra, wearing makeup, or adopting a new name and pronouns. Making those banal but concrete practices of changing gender into psychiatric events was intended to convince anxious and angry parents that they shouldn’t put down their children. By the same token, tying practices of clothing and self-description to healthy development overinflated them with a pathological degree of significance, upping the ante and creating a lucrative target, both for parents of trans youth who wanted to stop their children from transitioning and, now, politicians.

I don’t mean to imply that psychiatry directly caused HB 2885, just that it clearly holds one part of the blame for inventing the root vulnerability that Gragg has taken advantage of in Missouri. If anything, the attachment of sex offender felonies to a teacher complimenting a teenager’s haircut exposes, once and for all, how fraudulent the medicalization of transition has been all along. Gragg can claim the right of the state to control children’s dress and speech (masquerading as the rights of parents) through teachers and counselors, in part, because psychiatry and medicine first claimed the right to regulate trans youth’s practices of transition.

Still, the causal events that led to HB 2885 run far deeper than the shallow history of “social transition” as an especially foolish psychiatric fiction. Here lies the far bigger problem raised by this bill. Not only will psychiatrists prove to be the least effective political allies of trans youth in Missouri, but contemporary queer and transgender culture’s elevation of the private right to dress as the sine qua non of politics is also quite useless as a political strategy.

Part of what I gather stuns in bills like HB 2885 is their audacity. The law would target the most conservative, least politically subversive of all transgender practices: individual style, identification, and language-use. In the case of minors, “social transition” is also a cheap compromise offered to young people who are refused blockers and hormones by disapproving parents and doctors, but that compromise is offered in a broader queer and transgender culture that has elevated self-identification through style as the ultimate arbiter of being transgender, making it much harder to advocate for a genuine right to transition for anyone, teenager or adult.

[...]

Students have very limited First Amendment rights on school campuses, meaning that they cannot present themselves as private individuals enjoying the right to dress as they please.⁷Their self-expression is governed from the outset by a competing set of custodians, from parents to schoolteachers, to psychiatrists and doctors, to the Missouri House of Representatives. Trans youth’s interests are therefore materially extraneous to the mainline of contemporary queer and transgender culture, whose architects were wealthy, college-educated adults whose prior enjoyment of full-citizenship was the very reason they demanded only the affirmation of a right to dress.

I suspect that part of the genuine shock of bills like HB 2885 is that most people reasoned that LGBT liberalism’s elevation of the private individual over all other political concerns would inoculate dress and language from state interference. It evidently has not. What perhaps has been misunderstood, then, is how the state exercises power. The law cannot prohibit being transgender, for there is no such state of being. The state has no need to target people’s interior selves, either, for the law can seize people where it always has, in concrete social practices that it simply declares are the undesirable traits of transgender people—namely, practices of transition.

Jules Gill-Peterson, The Unimportance of Wearing Clothes. [emphasis added]

[aintgonnatakethis]

There's been a lot of pressure placed on transmascs recently to call our oppression cissexism instead of transandrophobia.

If we did that I guarantee you within a month there'd be a new outcry against the word cissexism. The people who've been pushing it would be all like 'I never thought leopards would eat my face'.

Because it's not about the words we use. It's about getting transmascs to sit down and shut up and be good little girls

[genderkoolaid]

"To put it another way: When a cis woman tells another cis woman to follow sexist social rules, she often does so as her equal. But when a cis woman tells a trans person to follow sexist societal rules, she does so to demonstrate her own power."

— from I Don’t Feel Safe Around Cis Women by Devon Price

[aronarchy]

[intersectionalpraxis]

I don't know who this person is, but I got to know them through an insensitive stitch someone did belittling them, and I just wanted to talk about a few things.

A lot of the comments on this original video and the stitch that I saw are unsurprisingly ridden with transphobia and cissexism (TikTok is a cesspool of embolded bigots, anonymous and not), and I just wanted to talk about how utterly disgusting it is that white women/cis folks there are more upset by being called cis (which is just a Latin prefix), than being outraged over an ongoing genocide... ya'll need to start taking a long, hard look in mirrors before you spew your shit.

[transenbyconfessions]

i wish there were more trans kids at my school. i wish i knew more trans people. i wish there were more safe spaces i could go to and meet more trans and queer people there. sometimes it’s so tiring to always be flooded with cis people and cis things and straight people and straight things and those people are always so just unaware

Submitted March 25, 2023

[pallpokipoki]

Transfems treat you this way not because they see you as a type of man but because you're afab and therefore, in their eyes, a latent terf threat.

They disempower afabs (adapting their tactics according to the context and the gender identity category of the afab group) because they perceive this as disempowering (/subjugating) a terf danger.

Their tactics for afab dismpowerment manifest with concepts, ideologies, narratives and behaviors that increase amab control (power) over afabs. They can take many differents forms, which sometimes are contradictory (misrepresenting transmascs' social condition & how patriarchy functions, portraying afabs as privileged and oppressors, pitting afabs against each others, claiming that trans men oppress because they are men or afabs, claiming that afabs are not oppressed, etc) but the end goal remains the same.

Once you understand that they see afabs as a terf threat, you'll understand why they interact with cis women, trans men, transmascs, non-transmasc afab trans people the way they do. They're trying to subjugate us in order to neutralize what they perceive as a Terf threat.

Transfem political ideologies & behaviors on gender-related stuff, consciously or not, are oriented toward afab subjugation to amabs.

[librarycards]

any 'social contagion' logic presupposes (white, cis, tme, straight, abled, sane) ppl - especially those under 18, are 'pure' by default and thus in imminent danger of corruption, even possession, by unnamed forces of evil. (and, conversely, that those who cannot meet those criteria are vectors of sin –– i mean, symptoms. we can see this in very obvious ways re: discourses of trans contagion, sex ed as grooming, and the like, but it's definitely also worth considering the overlaps w/ Madness & neurodivergence:

before existing anti-trans moms had the main stage, discourses of "feminine contagion" were already being whipped up by many of these same moms, worried that their daughters' [sic] bodily autonomy was the 'evil' at the root of their disordered/disorderly eating, their self-injury, their suicide. fear of anorexia-as-contagion (and self-harm/injury more broadly) is rooted in this fear of bodily autonomy as a force of corruption, and as such, demands to "recover" in normative ways demands a kind of exorcism. it presumes that the Bad Part of us is unnatural and removable, because the person we are Ought To Be occupies the role prescribed to us already. cissexism, ableism, saneism, entangled once more.

one other interesting example of this - and by interesting i mean evil - is 00's A$ rhetoric around the "I Am Autism" video/campaign. Again, autism is a thing that comes in and "possesses" the hitherto "pure" child and must be cured - eradicated - battled. it's no coincidence that the most violent anti-trans bigots rest on the relationships between gender noncompliance and noncompliance with alimentary/behavioral norms, not because there is some magic genetic link between them, but because they are all expressions of willful & "impurifying" autonomy.

[genderkoolaid]

"Cis women say they want women’s only spaces for reasons of safety, but what they actually want are spaces where there are no cis men. This leaves them as the most powerful gender minority around. Any sense of safety that hinges on holding power over other people is a false one. Abuse is made possible through imbalance and inequity."

— from I Don’t Feel Safe Around Cis Women by Devon Price

[aronarchy]

[CW: transphobia]

Transmisogyny is misogyny, transphobia is patriarchy.

The only main difference is that trans people are more oppressed than cis women so while cis women have gotten relative progress from feminism trans people are often left behind by cis feminists, and “progressive” transphobes will even naturalize patriarchal gender roles and definitions and manufactured constrictions, specifically bringing them out or bringing them back when it comes to defending transphobia.

This dynamic is especially exacerbated by racism, colonialism, Orientalism; the cultural imperialist Western gaze targets racialized trans people and even cis women and queers to naturalize or essentialize the patriarchal oppression they experience, treating it as an arbitrary cultural quirk occurring because of happenstance which must and/or can only be preserved, rather than a historically contingent form of oppression with specific material causes and consequences which can and should be overthrown. The relativist authoritarian often chastises consistent anti-authoritarians for supposedly being racist, white-privileged, disseminating “Western” viewpoints, etc. (erasing the non-white/Western intersectionally marginalized people who are the most harmed by such discourse, of course), but don’t be fooled: they’re the ones leveraging structures and ideologies originating in Western imperialism (the notion that The East and The West are ontologically different in grand historical ways, that nothing “Western” can be related to anything “Eastern” and vice versa, that The East is static and unchanging and underdeveloped, that The East’s cultures, values, practices, etc. are mysterious, exotic, inscrutable by The West, and so on), and when we expose this we peel away their façade (an important step that they always struggle to prevent by any means possible). (I don’t just say this in a vague abstract online discourse way; these dynamics also pop up in day-to-day personal political contexts, often the mechanism of violence/abuse; they are behind a great deal of material oppression in the real world today and have left a great deal of trauma upon marginalized people.)

It doesn’t occur to relativist transphobes that if someone doesn’t consider themself a woman / man because they feel they aren’t allowed to identify as or be one because they don’t fit the cissexist standard of having to be able to give birth (and fulfill the hegemonically defined (subordinate) wife role) / impregnate (and fulfill the hegemonically defined husband (patriarch) role), then that might possibly be a result of internalized patriarchy/misogyny/(cis)sexism and not an ideal state, and their mental health and self-image might improve and they might be living lives more closely in alignment with their internal selves if some friend went up and told them it could be an option. This is liberal choice “feminism” but specifically a version targeting trans people and transphobic oppression under patriarchy.

If a (white) infertile cis woman / cis man vented about feeling like they’re a failed Other rather than a real woman or real man because they can’t give birth / impregnate and the society around them says Real Women / Men are people who can give birth / impregnate (respectively), would people like this say as readily that it’s true they really are an ungendered unwomanly / unmanly Other, despite their own desire to be a woman / man and feelings which align with that? Or likewise for other forms of gendered nonconformity among cis people. (Much less likely, I think.)

Would they say, “cis women without children” is a whole separate gender from “cis women with children,” a third gender after “cis women with children” and “cis men with children”? Then “cis men without children” as a fourth gender. What about married with children versus married without? Then split the above into eight. Some trans people do get married, either while closeted, as an attempt at conversion or punishment by family or society, while passing for their correct gender (if they have a gender from the binary), or with updated laws which have assimilated trans people more. Trans people can have children too, even if not in the same patriarchal way which secures intergenerational patrilineal inheritance. More gender-categories for them then? (It’s obvious where this leads: there are in fact as many ways to be women and men as there are women and men, and different gender roles and social gender locations are assigned or designated in a gradient or internally distinguished way for all gender differences or social role differences, but there are some general categories which could be broadly termed different “genders” which group together, and thus it would be irrational/illogical and arbitrary to exclude trans women from womanhood or trans men from manhood under such a linguistic system.)

The transphobic takes above prioritize what “society” says, what other (cis) people surrounding someone says about what gender is, what their gender must be, as if what they say matters so much in defining us (or even at all), and then also equates the viewpoint of oppressive surroundings with the viewpoint of the oppressed individual (as if the oppressed will always just bow down and accept their oppression). That is not how we define gender or determine what anyone’s gender is, because that literally goes against the whole point of transness in the first place, which is that we define our own identities, we say what our genders are, we don’t limit ourselves by a cissexist society which constrains people by setting rigid inaccurate definitions; the subversiveness, the contradiction with surrounding norms, is literally the point; it wouldn’t be transness if there were no preexisting cisness (top-down/nonconsensual gender assignments) to struggle against in the first place.

It’s especially nasty to imply that Western trans people identify as “really” the gender they feel they are because the West’s social definitions of gender uniquely recognize that women don’t have to be wives, childbearers, and mothers (for patriarchs) and men don’t have to be husbands (patriarchs) and property-owning child-investing patrilineage-obsessed reproductive futurists. That erases the fact that there’s rampant institutionalized socially prevalent patriarchy in the West too; many people do believe that still; the point is, no society, no culture is a monolith. But it’s very obvious why sweeping portrayals of white, Western PoVs highlight the “progressive” parts while sweeping portrayals of non-white/non-Western PoVs highlight the “regressive” parts (racism, Enlightenment teleology). (And yes, people oppressed by racism can also be racist themselves.)

That also implies that trans people and our feelings and desires are dependent on cis people and their choices. That none of us will think against the grain until cis people create the conditions which allow for it. This prioritizes cis feminism and cis women’s rights over that of trans people, telling us they’ll always come first, we’ll always need them (though they won’t ever need us), if they’re not class-conscious yet then there’s no scenario where we might be more class-conscious already, which erases how we’re actually pressured to know much more about feminism than them, to understand their issues and ours and to be able to argue perfectly for both our rights and theirs in order to be relatively tolerated. These notions are only legible because of cissexism.

Trans people whose gender includes one (or both) genders from the binary are only treated as not being “allowed” to be “properly” considered as people of that gender because of cissexism. This denial is a form of oppression and social subordination, not something neutral or good or just naturally occurring. It’s cruel and it’s wrong. Notice how such discussions about “difference” never say that, e.g., “cis men are Different(tm) from trans men because they occupy different social niches, and trans men are more manly than cis men, because cis men don't fit into our/the Paradigmatic Image of What A Man Is(tm) and we only begrudgingly acknowledge cis men as probably ‘men’ in some way because of their self-identification but that won’t alter how we fundamentally categorize ‘men’ and we couldn’t possibly put forth a cis man as Paradigmatic, Archetypal, or Representative because smh he’s cis not trans, we couldn’t do that, that doesn’t intuitively make sense, a Man(tm) is a trans man unless otherwise specified?” (or likewise for women). Which makes it clear that this is about a power imbalance, a hierarchy placing cis people above trans people of the same gender and prioritizing cis people, which pushes out trans people from equal recognition and epistemic authority. (And no, the “unless otherwise specified” is not good enough, it’s still implicit misgendering; it’s just a half-assed attempt to cover the problems with your ideology; we want more.)

There is a (very obvious) reason why, despite having very different contexts at times, all patriarchies share certain common characteristics (patrilineage; intergenerational private property/power transfer of some sort; socially-mandated, enforced, or disproportionately incentivized binary heterosexual marriage/the couple-form; child-ownership by the patriarch; rigid definitions of “woman” as childbearer and mother and “man” as the one who possesses/owns the children (and “girls” and “boys,” respectively, as future “women” and “men,” requiring coercive socialization/indoctrination); condemnation of autonomous deviation from the prescriptive binary definitions of gender (in desire, in self-regard, in private or public identification/claiming, in differences or alterations in aesthetics/appearance/biological sex characteristics or role performance); etc.). Of course it’s not just arbitrarily landing on that every single time. These are social structures which arose from a historical process during which children, women, and queers were domesticated or forcibly excluded (as colonialism is imposed through an initial conquest and then ongoing counterinsurgency), relatively stabilizing after the patriarchs won the battle.

There is no reason why “man” or “woman” (or male, female, wife, husband, mother, father, boy, girl, masculine, feminine, gender, sex, “two genders,” “third gender”) would be terms any more transhistorically relevant, self-evident, coherent, or applicable than “transgender,” “nonbinary,” “trans woman/man/girl/boy/female/male,” etc. (And for that matter, “transmasc(uline)” (and “transfem(inine)”) shouldn’t be treated as “safer” terms to slide in third-gendering of binary trans people to avoid using the words “trans man” or “trans woman”; there’s no reason why they would automatically be more accurate either.) The people who would be called “trans” here today have existed and will exist in every society, and there will always be trans people under any patriarchy, and some language that would apply (whether a word or set of words or phrase or set of phrases or way of describing) to denote people rejecting or not aligning with their birth-assigned gender, so long as gender is assigned at birth. There will always be resistance, at least somewhere, sometime, when there is oppression. You will never have 100% internalized acceptance of cissexism. It’s time that relativists recognized this.

[intersectionalpraxis]

Poilievre is DANGEROUS. He's a transphobic, cissexist, and transmisogynistic piece of trash (his use of the word 'female' reminds me of manosphere terrors on the internet -and someone who tries to continue to normalize biological essentialism). I'm much more worried about white cishet men like you every I go -ya'll are the are the REAL threats to so many of us. Keep this despicable disgrace from getting ANY political power. Protect and defend trans and non-binary folks.

[defining-trans]

Ask a Transgender Person Anything 🏳️‍⚧️

I'm tired of watching the same heated conversations over and over again where nothing gets solved. This blog is the solution I've come up with.

Ask me any question YOU have about being transgender.

I don’t care if it’s phrased “problematically”, insensitive or intentionally invasive, I will do my best to answer. However, you may not like the answer I give you.

Whether you're just trying to learn more about us, are too scared to ask a trans person you know for fear of ridicule, or genuinely believe people like me are deluding ourselves into identifying the way that we do and that we need to be "taught better"/"shown the truth", you have full permission to ask me, a trans person, whatever the hell you want.

Ground Rules:

I will respond only to asks and anonymous messages sent directly to my inbox. Any questions directed at me via comments, reblogs or tags on my posts are fair game for me to ignore.

If your question is indeed rude, or would most likely be perceived as such by a trans person you know IRL, I'll explain why and, if possible, give you an example of a better way to ask it.

If your question is about queer and/or trans discourse in general, I will answer it to the best of my ability. If it's about my personal stances on said discourse, I may or may not answer it. That will depend on whether or not I feel like it.

Regardless of how I feel about the questions I’m being asked, I will not resort to ad hominem attacks. (Your background and personal beliefs have no bearing on whether or not I’m capable of answering the question you’ve asked, therefore the most I will do is discuss how said potential background/belief may have prompted you to ask it.)

The only assumption I will make about you is that you want me to answer your question. I believe this to be a fair assumption, considering you will have to go out of your way to send me your question.

Leading questions (ones intended to coerce a specific predetermined answer out of the party being asked) and sealioning (feigned ignorance with the intention of wearing one down through the emotional labor of continually explaining one’s point of view) will be treated differently than genuine questions—I will first point out what about them I find objectionable, then dissect the question. If any part of the question is salvageable or could be a genuine question in another context, I will also attempt to give a genuine answer.

I am doing this purely out of personal interest. There is no secret agenda, I will not attempt to “convert” you to my “side” of things. I’m just curious about what questions people actually want to ask a trans person but are too shy or afraid of being judged to ask someone they know.

I will answer your questions based on my broader knowledge and my own personal experiences. Neither of these things are reflective of the trans experience as a whole and should not be interpreted as such. The only trans person whom I speak for is myself.

Insults are not questions. Words such as "anything other than male or female is a mental illness" and slur-flinging and so on - by themselves - are not questions, so I refuse to entertain them. Additionally, sarcastic questions like "so were you dropped on your head as an infant or are you just stupid by choice?" will be ignored.

We are not entitled to personal information about each other. You can ask me about stuff aside from being trans (i.e. completely unrelated political beliefs), but the focus of this blog is trans stuff, so I may decline to answer any off topic questions.

I'll get to your question when I get to your question. If you start sending me entitled or guilt-tripping nonsense, it will make me less inclined to answer your question. (Not all of us have the luxury of enough free time to entertain the questions of strangers on the internet who may or may not believe we deserve to die horrible deaths, and those of us that have that and the stomach to do it won't be up for it 24/7.)

It's fine to reblog and comment on my posts even if you don't have questions for me. In fact, that would help me reach more people who might have questions about transness that I can help answer.

I'm undecided as to whether or not I'd like to open my direct messages to people looking for a civil debate or more private atmosphere. Please respect my boundaries and do not DM me with questions or arguments at this time.

[angelsarecomputers]

fuck it you know what. if you dont talk about how this roe v wade shit affects transmascs and intersex people then ur a dickhead and an arsehole actually