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The term "cis-gender" has always gotten under my skin a little bit, and I wasn't sure why until it came together for me this week. (For those who have not run across the term, it's intended as a counterpart for "trans-gender." It means someone who self-identifies with the gender identity they were assigned at birth.)
I'm still a trainee at work, which means I have a certain amount of latitude in how I choose to spend my time. I have to practice certain television networks, but I can bend toward certain shows without anyone objecting - at this point it's not about capturing specific content but about honing my ability to capture content. Over the last month, I've done my best to time it so that I hear almost all of the C-SPAN-aired functions of the Congressional Black Caucus. I tell myself that this is clever professional development because they speak in a wide range of styles, but in fact it's just that they seem to spend more time saying things that are true than saying things that are politically clever. They're also the only ones who seem not to talk about poverty in the abstract. (I generally like CSPAN, though. It's hard to be cynical about politics when you see people working so hard to do the right thing.)
Meanwhile, I've been having a lot of conversations with a coworker whose desk is next to mine who is similarly a big spec fic geek (makes chainmail, updates me on Twilight fandom hijinks) and we've had conversations about the racial changes made to Avatar: The Last Airbender, and also about how throughout her life people have gotten into crazy arguments trying to guess whether she's hispanic, black, or native american. (As far as she can tell, whether they guess the latter depends on whether her hair is in a braid.) Both of us are kind of unsettled that people care so much given that she doesn't make a point of claiming any definitive ethnic identity. And in the background, I've been hearing about Obama (white mom, black dad, identified as black) and Tiger Woods (quarter quite, quarter black, half chinese, identified as black) and thinking about Malcolm Gladwell's description of Jamaican racial categories and what they meant for his mother, and about how much Sioux blood you have to have to count as a Sioux and who counts and Jewish, ad nauseum.
There's this division of white and not white, and it's not as simple as that. And there's this division of straight and gay that has nothing to do with the continuum on which I live -- ditto for autistic versus not autistic. Cis-gendered just gives me another binary. It forces me to declare that I think of myself as a woman when sometimes I think of myself as a woman and sometimes I think of myself as a man and sometimes both and sometimes neither. It ignores people like Castor Semenya, who has a clear gender but not a clear sex, and who has been absolutely cut up over this genetic quirk. Not only is gender not binary - sex is not binary. Chromosomes and hormones are all over the place in terms of both baseline and expression.
Transgendered describes something that is real. Cis-gendered reinforces the idea of dualistic sex and gender identities. I know it's a well-meaning attempt to show one group that you recognize it, but it mostly reinforces the (illusionary) status quo. I hope the term (and the idea) dies quickly and broadens into something more representative of the true spectrum. I don't understand why we have to draw lines around everybody - why people get mad at me for not having a favorite color or a favorite soda. I feel like I should be smart enough to understand this binary thinking, but it baffles me. It makes it hard to stand up against it when it mostly looks like a big confusing computer construct intruding on my environment.
I'm still a trainee at work, which means I have a certain amount of latitude in how I choose to spend my time. I have to practice certain television networks, but I can bend toward certain shows without anyone objecting - at this point it's not about capturing specific content but about honing my ability to capture content. Over the last month, I've done my best to time it so that I hear almost all of the C-SPAN-aired functions of the Congressional Black Caucus. I tell myself that this is clever professional development because they speak in a wide range of styles, but in fact it's just that they seem to spend more time saying things that are true than saying things that are politically clever. They're also the only ones who seem not to talk about poverty in the abstract. (I generally like CSPAN, though. It's hard to be cynical about politics when you see people working so hard to do the right thing.)
Meanwhile, I've been having a lot of conversations with a coworker whose desk is next to mine who is similarly a big spec fic geek (makes chainmail, updates me on Twilight fandom hijinks) and we've had conversations about the racial changes made to Avatar: The Last Airbender, and also about how throughout her life people have gotten into crazy arguments trying to guess whether she's hispanic, black, or native american. (As far as she can tell, whether they guess the latter depends on whether her hair is in a braid.) Both of us are kind of unsettled that people care so much given that she doesn't make a point of claiming any definitive ethnic identity. And in the background, I've been hearing about Obama (white mom, black dad, identified as black) and Tiger Woods (quarter quite, quarter black, half chinese, identified as black) and thinking about Malcolm Gladwell's description of Jamaican racial categories and what they meant for his mother, and about how much Sioux blood you have to have to count as a Sioux and who counts and Jewish, ad nauseum.
There's this division of white and not white, and it's not as simple as that. And there's this division of straight and gay that has nothing to do with the continuum on which I live -- ditto for autistic versus not autistic. Cis-gendered just gives me another binary. It forces me to declare that I think of myself as a woman when sometimes I think of myself as a woman and sometimes I think of myself as a man and sometimes both and sometimes neither. It ignores people like Castor Semenya, who has a clear gender but not a clear sex, and who has been absolutely cut up over this genetic quirk. Not only is gender not binary - sex is not binary. Chromosomes and hormones are all over the place in terms of both baseline and expression.
Transgendered describes something that is real. Cis-gendered reinforces the idea of dualistic sex and gender identities. I know it's a well-meaning attempt to show one group that you recognize it, but it mostly reinforces the (illusionary) status quo. I hope the term (and the idea) dies quickly and broadens into something more representative of the true spectrum. I don't understand why we have to draw lines around everybody - why people get mad at me for not having a favorite color or a favorite soda. I feel like I should be smart enough to understand this binary thinking, but it baffles me. It makes it hard to stand up against it when it mostly looks like a big confusing computer construct intruding on my environment.
