If you are a lesbian, you must be butch femme. If you are gay, you must be top or bottom.

[rinue]

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.

Comments

Concurred!

[bluezybunny.livejournal.com]

I hadn't heard of 'cis-gendered', but I agree that it's annoying and sometimes insulting to be labelled solely and improperly as a distinguisher from another group.

First of all, the obvious: atheist. Unlike 'cis-gendered' versus 'trans-gendered', there's a true dichotomy between 'theist' and 'atheist', but atheism itself means nothing more than not being part of the theism camp. To understand why the label is annoying, you'd have to consider what it would be like to be labelled an atoothfairyist, as though toothfairyism had an intellectually valid leg to stand on and those who deny it are freaks. There's a further annoyance within atheism itself between the terms 'strong atheist' versus 'weak atheist'. The prior is used to describe someone who's absolutely, 100% certain that there are no deities, while the latter is either uncertain or unconcerned. However, there's an implication here that the 'weak atheist' is less likely or less capable of acknowledging or defending their lack of belief when the contrary may be and is often true. What exactly is a weak lack of belief if not a partial belief?

When so-called 'pro-lifers' were pointed out the hypocracy of their self-labelling, in the light that many of them were also in favor of the death penalty (hence they couldn't call their opposition 'pro-death'), a handful of them graciously accepted their being relabelled as 'anti-abortion', but apparently under the hidden condition that their opposition be relabelled from 'pro-choice' to 'pro-abortion'. I don't think they quite understand how relabelling works. Until they've pointed out the hypocracy of the 'pro-choice' stance, they aren't given free reign to imply that we either enjoy abortions or would prioritize it as the first option whenever possible.

From what I can tell, counter-labels that are offensive (whether deliberately or not) usually won't stick unless they're technically true. I doubt the term 'cis-gendered' will last, and certainly hope it won't.

I wouldn't call this phenomenon 'binary thinking', though. All too often I'll come across those who frequently make false dichotomies that tend also to deny the correlatives. It seems the problem doesn't stem so much from black-and-white thinking as it does from not thinking logically. Although I doubt I've cured you of your bafflement to their thinking, and I agree that it's baffling, I hope I've at least made it a little less baffling.

-Quip

[ksmeg.livejournal.com]

Interesting, I hadn't really looked at cis-gendered from that point of view. I've found it to be a useful word to describe the condition of having your sex match your gender, because it is a condition that so many people have but they don't even think about it as a state of being. It's merely the assumed normal. Obviously if you didn't match up *then* you label yourself. So it's helpful in the process of unpacking your privilege to be able to pro-actively label yourself, rather than simply saying 'I'm not that.'

I do believe, though, that some people use it to set up a false cis/trans dichotomy. It’s not an either/or categorization, there are many people who fall outside of it. It’s like saying you’re either straight or gay. Straight is a good, valid term for people who enjoy romantic/sexual relations with members of the opposite sex. But to say if you don’t identify as straight, then you’re gay, that leads to faulty thinking.

Although really trans itself is not a great word. What all does it encompass? Just you’re tradition transsexual? Or those who are transgender as well? I’ve seen it used trans* which I think is clever and more encompassing, but can only be used in the written word. (Unless you call it transwildcard, which is a bit unwieldy) Much like the alphabet soup that GLBTAQQ, etc has become, is there a point at which you need stop trying to include ever group (because you’ll never get them all) and simply say what you mean: ‘not straight’? Or does that bring us right back where we started as identifying everyone based on their relation to the predominant, privileged group?

[rinue.livejournal.com]

I'm right with you on the need to unpack privilege and the assumptions that come with you. I wish I could work out a clever way to do it. Mostly what confuses me is the idea of "if I'm not this then I must be the opposite." (I never liked true/false tests either.) Ciro has sensibly suggested that humans' tendency to build these false dualisms is the result of a general survival trait where you need to be able to quickly class things as dangerous/not dangerous. I don't know, though - it seems like our brains are pretty big now.

Big brains.

[bluezybunny.livejournal.com]

Some of us have big brains. There's a term, 'evolutionary misfiring', where an evolved instinct leads us to do things for survival in the wild that no longer necessarily help us survive in a modern human society. Take, for example, sex - a survival trait which is rarely used for survival anymore, but has become a world-wide obsession in spite of this. There are plenty other examples, including foreign aid and the death penalty, so it isn't as though we're too smart to be unlikely to act on primal and often unnecessary instincts.

-Quip