Objections to cis

[cheeseismydownfall]

Really good blog post here by Helen Saxby

notthenewsinbriefs.wordpress.com/2020/07/16/objections-to-cis/

It’s interesting, because I would agree with queer theorists that I “belong to the social role of woman”. What I do not agree with them on is that this is because I identify as one.

I belong to the social role of woman because that is imposed upon me by virtue of being identifiable as an adult female human. Similarly anyone who is non-binary it is a non-passing trans man is also subject to the social role of woman, despite not wanting to be so.

You can’t identify your way out of gender. It’s attached to you based on how others see you, presently and in the past.

People who transition and pass may in my opinion experience some of what it means to be a member of the opposite sex. But gender identity alone does not do this, obviously.

someone told me that I would be upset if I were to be misgendered, or if I woke up in a male body. If the first were to happen, I wouldn't care, and if the second did, I'd just roll with it.

If the second happened, then I’d know I was in an episode of Doctor Who, and I’d be quite excited to see which Doctor turned up. Fingers crossed David Tennant.

(On a more serious note; debate points based on a ‘Freaky Friday’ premise don’t really need or deserve much countering!)

You can’t identify your way out of gender. It’s attached to you based on how others see you, presently and in the past.
Interesting follow on musing - recognising that gender doesn’t really belong to the individual to control and influence, rather is an externally, societally imposed expectation, strikes me as the core difference between liberal and radical feminism. Liberals accept the gender stereotypes, the status quo, and want to support people to feel ‘empowered’ within them, and believe that attempting to divorce gender from sex will do this. Radicals reject gender full stop, and want to influence society to stop assigning roles, traits, colours, toys and activities based on sex in the first place, whilst recognising that sex does still determine the needs and vulnerabilities of some individuals.

@Cwenthryth

someone told me that I would be upset if I were to be misgendered, or if I woke up in a male body. If the first were to happen, I wouldn't care, and if the second did, I'd just roll with it.

If the second happened, then I’d know I was in an episode of Doctor Who, and I’d be quite excited to see which Doctor turned up. Fingers crossed David Tennant.

(On a more serious note; debate points based on a ‘Freaky Friday’ premise don’t really need or deserve much countering!)

You can’t identify your way out of gender. It’s attached to you based on how others see you, presently and in the past.
Interesting follow on musing - recognising that gender doesn’t really belong to the individual to control and influence, rather is an externally, societally imposed expectation, strikes me as the core difference between liberal and radical feminism. Liberals accept the gender stereotypes, the status quo, and want to support people to feel ‘empowered’ within them, and believe that attempting to divorce gender from sex will do this. Radicals reject gender full stop, and want to influence society to stop assigning roles, traits, colours, toys and activities based on sex in the first place, whilst recognising that sex does still determine the needs and vulnerabilities of some individuals.

I thought about the fantasy of waking up in a male body. I think I would try to compare male and female orgasms even before getting up and then I would go out walking to see how others react to me (how it changes). To be honest. But of course it's hard to truly think this through as it will not happen. What I do know, though, is that the part I feel as 'me' has no gender of the type gender theory posits. No female soul either.

Excellent. This paragraph sums it up for me:
‘Cis’ is the other side of the coin to the ‘transwomen are women’ mantra, in that it ensures the category of women contains both sexes. In this system a ‘transwoman’ is a male woman and a ‘cis woman’ is a female woman, and these are now equal subsets of the category ‘woman’. Cis is doing the job of letting men into the female sex class, and it means you can no longer be just a woman, you have to make a choice over what sex of woman you are.

because I would agree with queer theorists that I “belong to the social role of woman”. What I do not agree with them on is that this is because I identify as one.

I belong to the social role of woman because that is imposed upon me by virtue of being identifiable as an adult female human. Similarly anyone who is non-binary it is a non-passing trans man is also subject to the social role of woman, despite not wanting to be so.

Really well put @FWRLurker

As I said on another thread - I don't feel like a woman. I simply am one. Others may feel differently, and that's fine. But we must have social & legal structures that don't value one "feeling" above another's biological reality.

To talk "high theory" (but not queer theory): Louis Althusser (Marxist philosopher & social theorist) talked about the experience of "interpellation" - moments when we are confronted with the ways in which we are pigeon-holed and and positioned by the social structures in which we live. His example (or the one that is usually quoted), is a police officer hailing a man in the street, who responds "Who me?" and in that moment is interpellated (slotted into) into the structure of State power and legal/police authority.

I think my moment of interpellation (and emerging feminist consciousness) was in the First Form at school, when we were choosing subjects for the next year, and I - being provocative at a mixed sex comprehensive - asked about doing technical drawing and woodwork. I was told sternly by the (male) teacher that "Girls in the top set don't do woodwork." Instead of treating me like a human being he treated me like a girl.

Another moment was my (totally sexist) science teacher, who regularly only answered boys' questions, regularly only asked boys questions, and once marked me down because I hadn't covered my exercise book in brown paper - all the work inside my exercise book was 100% correct, but I wasn't performing femininity properly: no neat cover or prettily drawn pictures.

It just occurred to me that if a "cis" woman is on the near side of woman, then aren't TRAs admitting that there is an actual thing as a woman? I certainly object to being called something close to what I actually am. But the flip side is that this means that by definition, anyone trans anything is on the opposite side of the thing that is being defined. These two definitions exist in this way. They are on opposite sides of something. One's near you, and the other is in the opposite direction from you. Although it is still manipulative garbage, it is a testament to the weakness of their case that by using trans/cis as a standard, TRAs reveal that THEY think that the nearest thing to a woman is a biological female and that those who define themselves as women are the opposite of that.

gender doesn’t really belong to the individual to control and influence, rather is an externally, societally imposed expectation

I think this is why I find the idea of ‘gender identity’ so hard to understand. I am a woman and I have a personality; the way people treat me has to do with both of these but is also massively dictated by external factors. I can’t identify my way out of my body or out of the society in which I live. I don’t ‘identify’ with my sex, it’s just the sex I am. Sometimes I experience a clash between what society expects of me as a woman and sometimes I don’t.

@durgasarrow It just occurred to me that if a "cis" woman is on the near side of woman, then aren't TRAs admitting that there is an actual thing as a woman?

But I think TRAs absolutely accept that there is an actual thing as a woman, it's just that they would define a woman as "anyone who says they're a woman" which is so meaningless as to be a useless definition.