A few weeks ago, in comments on my post critiquing the term “sex class,” Lisa Harney and Sunflower both prodded me to think and write more about transgender issues. While I feel like I need to keep offering disclaimers that I’m no expert in this area, I just read something that’s so obviously disrespectful toward trans people that I’m going to stick my neck out and say: hey! this is plain wrong.
In a list of “10 Reasons to Suspect You’re Not the Fun Kind of Feminist (Part I),” redmegaera writes:
6. You don’t describe yourself as being “cisgendered” and you are a woman who hasn’t had and doesn’t plan to have sex-reassignment surgery, hormone injections or a double mastectomy for cosmetic reasons.
Although I realize that the “10 reasons” format is intended to mark the post as humorous, I’m going to succumb to the old humorless-feminist stereotype and say: That’s not funny!
As Lisa Harney writes at Questioning Transphobia, the term cisgendered is intended to shake up the norm and highlight a privilege that often goes unnoticed (by those who are privileged enough to do so, that is):
Cis is a neutral term applied to people who aren’t trans. It’s intended to decenter the notion that not being trans is the natural, default state for human beings and that being trans is a deviation, and that trans people are other.
(This is part of Lisa’s longer explanation of why it’s not okay for cisgendered people to reject being labeled as such.)
I don’t describe myself as being “cisgendered” every day, but I realize that the term describes what I am and so I’m happy to claim it. I was born with female organs, I’m comfortable with being called a woman, I appear reasonably feminine despite my incompetence with nail polish, and so I don’t experience any dissonance between my anatomy, my gender presentation, and the way the world views me. That’s a big ole privilege.
Now, back to redmegaera’s list. Just to clear up any possible misunderstaning, the term “fun feminist” is not a compliment. It’s a term that some self-described radical feminists use to question the seriousness of people whose flavor of feminism differs from theirs. I suspect I qualify as a “fun feminist” by dint of being an unapologetic heterosexual who paints her toenails, however sloppily. I don’t much care if someone wants to impugn me for being too fun. Still, I can afford not to care only because I’m privileged in multiple ways. I’m white, middle-class, heterosexual, educated, and yes, cisgendered. More importantly, my relative imperviousness doesn’t change the intent behind the term: to denigrate and insult.
Similarly, calling sex-reassignment surgery “cosmetic” trivializes the embodied experience of trans people. Those who pursue such surgery aren’t just trying to conform to some beauty ideal. They’re hoping to achieve some congruence between body and self – perhaps greater integration of body and self. However far this particular form of embodied dysphoria may be from my personal experience, I can still understand and empathize with the need to feel at home in one’s body. This seems like such an obvious point that I’m almost sheepish about making it. Yet it obviously needs to be said.
Also: Surgery, for whatever purpose, is never fun. Mocking people for needing it? Not my idea of fun, either.
Finally, here’s yet another ought-to-be-obvious point: Trans people’s rights are one facet of human rights, and they’re important to defend because every human being matters equally. However, on a more selfish level, feminists who reject the trappings of traditional femininity also have a personal stake in trans people’s rights, whether they recognize it or not. A world in which trans people can be murdered on account of their gender is also a world where “a fat, ugly, unfeminine, hairy-legged man-hating dyke” (#7 on redmegaera’s list) is also at physical risk. Radical feminists who feel no fellowship with trans people should still be able to see how transphobia harms their own interests. And maybe – just maybe – that could stir the beginnings of real empathy. (I’m not holding my breath, though.)
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
For the record, I didn’t call sex-reassignment surgery “cosmetic”. I used the term “cosmetic” to help differentiate beetween double mastectomies performed on women who have been diagnosed with or have a genetic predisposition to breast cancer and the “top surgery” sought by transmen. I would also call the surgery sought by men with gynecomastia “cosmetic” since it is performed on a healthy body.
I take surgery very seriously. Especially when it’s used as a means for invisibilzing lesbians and homosexuals (as in Thailand and Iran) or when patients are ‘misdiagnosed’ or otherwise unsatisfied with the outcome. I also understand that sex-ressassignment drastically improves many people’s lives. The point of the post was not to trivialize sex-reassignment surgery or the mental anguish, harrassment and abuse suffered by transpeople. It was an in-joke about some of the unpopular positions held by radical feminists and our lack of social and political currency.
My rejection of the adjective “cisgendered” stems from a belief that sex/gender is socially constructed. I don’t identify with the cis/trans binary because it reifies “gender” (masculinity/femininity) and transforms it into a biological property rather than a political construct. If you can explain to me why such a position is “transphobic”, I’d be very much obliged.
Thanks for your response, redmegaera. (By the way, I misspelled your name and have now fixed it – sorry about that!)
I’m glad to hear you take surgery seriously. I think your point would have been more clearly made, though, if you hadn’t used the term cosmetic. For both the general population and feminists, “cosmetic” is too closely linked to procedures aimed at achieving the beauty ideal. Perhaps you could have written “double mastectomy for reasons unrelated to cancer.”
I’m glad, too, that you recognize a place for sex reassignment. *All* surgeries need to be voluntary and performed under fully informed consent. What constitutes “informed consent” can be tricky, but it’s clearly absent in cases where it’s used to render people invisible. That’s also clearly a different category than surgery sought in the Western world by people who are suffering from their current sex/gender incongruence.
What I still find highly problematic is the rejection of the term “cisgender.” I regard gender as primarily socially constructed, yet I can’t ignore the lived experience of trans people who feel a disconnect between their anatomy and their gender identity. This is also true for some intersex people who were assigned a sex at birth that just feels wrong to them.
Using the term “cisgendered” doesn’t mean I’m signing onto a purely biologized conception of gender. Instead, it decenters my own experience of an easy match between body and gender, and thus helps make space for the lived experiences of trans people. Refusing the term cisgendered disrespects the needs of trans people to shake up the idea only cisgendered people are “normal.” Lisa Harney’s post, which I linked above, has lots more to say on how important this issue is to trans people, and why.
We’re going to have to agree to disagree, Sungold. While I understand the decision to undergo sex-reassignment surgery, to say that I “recognize a place for sex- reassingment surgery” is a slight mischaracterization of my position. I understand sex-reassignment surgery to be a harmful cultural practice and the last resort available to make life liveable for people in a toxic culture.
I stand by my use of the term “cosmetic”, though “double mastectomy for reasons unrelated to cancer” is probably a little clearer. I personally don’t think that you can isolate the permanent and mandatory condition of body dysphoria from which most women suffer (to a greater or lesser degree) under patriarchy, the surgical erasure of lesbians and homosexuals and transvestic fetishism from “transsexualism”. I think they are related, intersect with one another, and need to be analyzed as such.
I also believe that one can acknowledge and respect the lived experience of transpeople without evacuating politics from the discussion; that one can be compassionate and respect transpeople’s human rights without leaving one’s critical faculties at the door.
You wrote:
Using the term “cisgendered” doesn’t mean I’m signing onto a purely biologized conception of gender. Instead, it decenters my own experience of an easy match between body and gender, and thus helps make space for the lived experiences of trans people. Refusing the term cisgendered disrespects the needs of trans people to shake up the idea only cisgendered people are “normal.”
I am against using the term “cisgendered” for similar reasons. Cis/trans is a binary distinction that dovetails nicely with the male/female dichotomy. It’s problematic because it invisibilizes the social construction of gender by enforcing a rigid distinction between the experiences of transsexuals and biological men and women, including the experience of gender non-conforming people. In terms of lived experience, I think a continuum model would be more appropriate. I don’t believe that the majority of “cisgendered” men or women experience the kind of congruence between body and gender that you describe. If they did, there wouldn’t be so many social conventions and prohibitions whose sole purpose is to clearly demarcate men from women. Simone de Beauvoir’s famous dictum that one is not born but becomes a woman seems appropriate here.
Another problem with the cis/trans binary is that it invisibilizes the heirarchical nature of gender roles whereby femininity is assigned a subordinate position and masculinity a dominant one. This is notable because the term “cisgender” is typically used in the context of acknowledging one’s “cis privilege”. The idea of “cis privilege” is problematic because it doesn’t take into consideration other variables such as the considerable privileges accrued by MTFs who undergo sex-ressassignment surgery lin later life. It’s main problem, however is that it creates the illusion of parity between male and female sex-roles. The common denominator and motivating force behind transphobic violence and discrimination is disdain for women. The cis/trans distinction doesn’t adequately reflect that. ( Just as a side note, why, for example, are there overwhelmingly more MTF transsexuals in systems of prostitution than FTMs?)
Another example is that of butch/femme relationships within lesbian culture. The “butch” may suffer discrimination and violence because she does not “pass” and in this respect, her “femme” (read: gender-conforming) partner is privileged. However, to the extent to which traditional heterosexuality is imported wholesale into lesbian relationships “butches” are privileged, at least within the confines of their relationship. This is because masculinity corresponds to the privileges which are assigned to the political class “men”, the dominant class under heteropatriarchy.
I suspect that you’ll disagree with (and possibly be offended by) my analysis. That’s okay; I’m happy to agree to disagree. The disagreements between some transsexuals and some radical feminists are sufficiently well-rehearsed not to need repeating here. Thank you for responding to my post. I have read Lisa Harney’s post in its entirety a couple of times. For a different (lesbian feminist) perspective I would recommend one of Amy’s old posts over at feminist reprise: http://www.feminist-reprise.org/wpblog/2007/01/wading-in-or-how-easily-002-becomes-a-pocketful-o-quarters/
That’s me weighing out.
Yes, I think we’re going to continue to disagree on the utility of the term “cisgendered.” However, I do think we agree in a few respects, as your response indicates.
I too think a continuum model best represents all of the phenomena we’re discussing: biological sex (which is basically male and female but with various intersex configurations between them); sexuality (where some people identify as wholly heterosexual or homosexual, but many are somewhere in between); feminine and masculine (with an almost infinite variety in between the two poles); and trans and cis (some people consider themselves to be genderqueer). Naming the two poles that our culture has identified doesn’t necessarily entail effacing all the possibilities in between. I don’t, and you don’t, and I think we’re largely in agreement on that point. At the same time, though, while I chafe at certain aspects of femininity as it’s socially constructed, I don’t have a radical experience of body dysphoria. I don’t live outside of the influence of the beauty ideal, but in my day-to-day life I feel basically comfortable in my female body, and I feel comfortable calling myself a woman. That’s qualitatively different from the experience of transpeople, as far as I’m able to understand it.
I also agree that cis privilege is one of many privileges. But I’m much less sure than you that MTFs experience the same degree of male privilege that a cisgendered man would enjoy. Failing to conform to hegemonic masculinity comes with lots of its own penalties. I do think that disdain for women plays a role in transphobic violence, but as someone who hasn’t walked in the shoes of a transperson, I’d be hesitant to say that this is the *sole* motivating force, anymore than I’d reduce homophobia to misogyny. I see all these forms of hatred as interlinked but not identical.
Finally, while I’m not willing to dismiss gender reassignment surgery wholesale as a “harmful cultural practice,” I do think there’d be less need for it in a world where gender identities and boundaries were much more fluid. I’m hesitant to say that the need would entirely wither away; that sounds too much like socialists who claimed that the woman question would solve itself after the proletarian revolution.
Thanks for the civil discussion.
[...] I’m not “cisgendered” Below is my (second) response to Sungold’s accusation on Kittywampus that my “Ten Reasons to Suspect You’re Not the Fun Kind of Feminist” post was [...]
I’m not exactly sure how rejecting “cis” isn’t in fact an excercise in privilege–that is, it allows the continual “othering” of trans people, i.e. “non-trans” is normal, “trans” is different. (Redmegaera quotes de Beauvoir, but the whole theme of “Le deuxième sexe” was how “man” is constructed as normal, default, and “woman” as permanent and irredeemably “Other.” So I’m not sure how you can use de Beauvoir to justify othering someone.)
Nor does it necessarily destroy other axes of oppression/privilege to acknowledge that another one exists.
As for the biological/social construction of gender: surely nowadays we can agree that this is not an either/or issue? The tragic case of David Reimer would seem to strongly argue that neither nature nor nurture completely explains internal gender identification. (A precis: Only a few days old, David’s penis was accidentally destroyed while undergoing circumcision. Following the advice of John Money, one of the leading advocates of “gender as social construct” theories, David was raised as a girl, Brenda. However, despite the positive reports Money published, “Brenda” never felt comfortable as a girl and continually rejected his imposed gender–even though his parents never told him about the accident, even though to teachers, friends, twin brother, etc., he was always and only a girl. After years of being suicidal and maladjusted, “Brenda” became David after his parents finally told him about the accident.)
This is why I and other trans people find construction of our transitions as “cosmetic” (or a “harmful social practice”) so frustrating, and, well, insulting. It silences our voices, it implies that what we do to our bodies is somehow wrong (isn’t control of your own body a feminist issue?) and it in general enforces heirarchical constructs based on dualisms that non-trans people would reject having imposed upon themselves. If I am to fight against slut-shaming, abortion-shaming, body-image shaming (as I do) because I believe these are egregious impositions upon a person’s dignity by heirarchical society, why am I supposed to sit in the corner and be quiet when people do the same to me as a trans woman?
It’s the same when people use the language of trans/any oppressed group to describe a form of their own oppression; it creates the very false equivalency that Redmegaera opposes. For example, I’ve suffered both gender dysphoria and body-shaming for being female; and while they both feed similar anxieties, they are not same, do not stem from the same causes, and are experienced in quite different ways by myself. (I’ll hasten to add that I would also not claim that my own experience of having my body shamed is the same as a woman who was raised female and thus had those ideas inflicted upon her at a younger age.) Colonization of other people’s experiences is not liberation.
I’m all for discussions of privilege. I acknowledge freely the privilege I accumulated before I transitioned; I talk about it all the time on my blog, as do many of the trans feminists I know. Often we use it as a way to open up examinations of the invisible privileges that bind us all inside the insiduous system of kyriarchy. Hell, my own feminism would approach radicalism, if it weren’t for the fact that most radical feminists won’t have anything to do with me.
It does not dimish the reality of sexism and male oppression of women to note that other forms of oppression exist, or even to note that sometimes the other forms of oppression are more oppressive and urgent; but that’s what radical reduction of all issues into a sexist template does. As bell hooks says,
Othering isn’t liberation. Silencing isn’t liberation. Imposing your own description on people isn’t liberation. Normalizing your own condition isn’t liberation.
Or more pragmatically, why is it, when so many trans feminists are working against the same issues cis feminists work against, that we get left out in the cold so often by those same cis people?
I was thinking of David Reimer’s story (among others) when I wrote that “I regard gender as primarily socially constructed, yet I can’t ignore the lived experience of trans people who feel a disconnect between their anatomy and their gender identity.” He was neither trans nor intersex, as far as I understand; he was the victim of a terrible medical error (which occurred during an unnecessary procedure, circumcision) which was then compounded by an ideology that held gender identity to be infinitely plastic. His very difficult life gives the lie to that ideology. We just don’t know enough to say how biology and society/culture interact. It’s obvious that social construction is required to prop up the system; otherwise we wouldn’t start gendering babies in the nursery already, and the penalties for nonconformity wouldn’t be so steep. But biology plays a role, even if we don’t understand it well, and even though I’m very impatient with crude biological determinism.
I’m grateful for your stepping in and providing a first-person perspective. As I said in my post, I’m trying to be more than just a passive ally, and yet I worry because I don’t want to speak *for* you. I can’t do that. I can name my own privilege, and I can try to empathize, but I don’t inhabit your lived experience. And that calls for a certain degree of humility. I hope I wasn’t off-base in saying that my occasional discomfort about my appearance is in a different category altogether from your experience of gender dysphoria. It sounds as though – having experienced them both yourself – you’d put them in quite separate categories.
Thanks for an eloquent, powerful response. Redmegaera posted hers on her blog, and I hope you’ll do the same.
Also, thanks for leading me to your blog, which I’m going to start following. You like both Atwood and Mahler? Then we share a couple of heroes.
It seems those aren’t the only areas of congruence between us–in another life (ahem) I wrote a 7th grade-level text book on the flu, I have two cats, I liked The Corrections despite the hype, und ich spreche Deutsch auch! (Although these days, je préfere parler français.)
I haven’t thought a whole lot about the differences between gender dysphoria and female body-shaming; I’m trying to forget the one, and the other doesn’t hit me nearly as hard as it does women who were raised with it. If I had to take a first run at it, I’d say that GD is an inward-directed thing–I can’t stand my body/who I appear to be because it doesn’t match how I feel, and body-shame is an outward-directed feeling–I don’t like how I look. Like I said, there’s definitely overlap, though.
I agree tons about not liking crude biological determinism; even though I think there’s an organic explanation for my transness, I’m not exceptionally curious about it–I think you’ll find many trans people feel that way. Sure, I’d like to know, and having a definite biological factor sure goes a long way to fight the “lifestyle choice” folks, but like the “gay gene” there can be a lot of problems–like, what happens when they find a cause, and some gay/lesbian/trans people don’t have that biological factor? Bad stuff? Forced heteronormativity? Ye gads!
Thank you for being fair and principled in what you wrote. I am encouraged lately by the large number of feminist voices I’m finding in the blogosphere these days that are trying to engage transness thoughtfully. It’s a learning experience for me too: I’m trying to learn how to engage my own feminism with a larger world that I don’t understand nearly as well as people who have lived with sexism their whole lives have.
And likewise on your blog (note to self: update the darn blogroll at my place, FFS!)
Agreed, biological determinism is really a double-edged sword. If you’re “just born that way,” you can’t be morally faulted – but you could sure be forced into “scientific” experiments, if history is any indicator.
Thanks for your reflections on the differences between gender dysphoria and body-shaming of women. The inward/outward distinction makes some sense. I think there’s another dimension to women’s body dissatisfaction that’s less outward directed, and that’s the feeling that one’s aging body isn’t really one’s *self.* I wrote about this a while back, and I also see a similar phenomenon among women who get plastic surgery after childbirth, not so much with the hope of a “perfect” body, but mostly just wanting their “old body” back.
On a totally different note, I’m curious about your flu textbook! My own background is in the social history of medicine, so I’m not actually a doctor or public health expert, I just pontificate as if I were.
If you don’t think it’s outside the scope of your blog, I’d like to see a post with your thoughts on the current pandemic.
[...] Fun Feminist Says: Transphobia’s Not Funny! on Kittywampus [...]
The David/Brenda Reimer case, more than 230 studies in the past 15 years all establish, in the case of classic transsexuals, the reality of gender identity as a biological function. That said, gender roles are something else completely. This is where so many feminists get it wrong.
Further, there is NO agreement on transness. That illusion is maintained by patriarchal silencing by non-classical transsexuals who have appropriated the condition of transsexuality while trying to erase it at the same time.
The Lisa Harneys are examples of those with identities that are not fully female because if they were, they’d reject the cis nonsense for what it is, othering of trans conditions that ultimately insure the impossibility of actual transition for you cannot be something you’ve defined as “other”.
WordPress linked our blog entries, you might want to explore some of my other entries at radicalbitch.wordpress.com as well if you wish alternate views from within a perspective of having lived with a transsexual/intersexed history.
Hi Catkisser – and thanks for your perspective.
I did look at the entry WordPress linked to, and I appreciated your perspective. I can definitely understand that you’d want to attack the “othering” at its root. And to the extent that you feel like you’re no longer personally subjected to othering, that is terrific.
I definitely don’t want to judge *your* identity, or Lisa’s, or anyone else’s, because you are only experts on your own lives. Still, I’m not willing to reject the cis/trans terminology precisely because I don’t think it ought to describe a binary. There’s definitely a continuum of genders and gender identities. Some people identify as genderqueer; others as trans; and I don’t think that “cis” negates any of that variety. It simply decenters the idea that people like me ought to be privileged because of our (relatively) uncomplicated relation to our gender, and that there ought to be a norm at all.
Finally, gender roles are not the same as gender identity, and I’m glad you emphasized that point. Gender roles are highly variable, as even a cursory look at different cultures reveals. They’ve varied historically, as well. The one thing they haven’t done is become irrelevant. At the very least, I’d like to see them become a whole lot less salient, and a lot more flexible.
Hey, I was actually called “trans-lover” yesterday (not linking), and the similarity to another word I used to get called, totally blew my mind.
I was assured it’s not the same thing, though, not to worry.
Now I’m curious about where that happened – though I understand why you didn’t link.
Gee, how comforting to know it’s “not the same thing.”
“I’m not cis! I’m normal.”
There are some radical feminist arguments I can respect, even if I don’t at all agree. That one I can’t even respect. That’s privilege, pure and simple.
To be fair, Redmegaera didn’t say that verbatim. But I do agree the radical feminist rejection of “cis” implicitly lays a claim to being “normal” – and at the very least, fails to recognize an important form of privilege.
[...] 10, 2009 by Sungold In my post on the utility of the term “cisgendered,” many of the comments revolved around the question of whether gender had any biological component or [...]
[...] to teach my kids that same-sex love is just as groovy as hetero pairings? I’m an oppressor. If I reject the term “cisgendered” because I’d rather just see myself as the norm? I’m an [...]
Here’s a comment that came to me from “anon.” I don’t allow anonymous posting on my blog; you need to have a pseudonym that correlates with a real email address, and this poster didn’t provide a valid email, otherwise I would have written and asked for resubmission of the comment. (The reason for the policy is that I got some very abusive comments while I still used Blogger, and so I expect at least the amount of accountability that goes with a stable pseudonym.)
But I thought this was an interesting comment, so here it is. I encourage the commenter to pick a pseudonym for the future, because I don’t want to unnecessarily hinder reasonable debate.
————
Hm. I reject being called cis-gendered because I am NOT. I do not do the typical things called for my “gender”. I am, however, cis-bodied, because the body I have is the right one for me. So I’ll take cis-bodied, but not cis-gendered, because believe you me, I get plenty of shit for not behaving the way I’m supposed to.
I just think the term reflects sloppy thinking about the constructs around “sex” “gender” and all those other inconveniently ambiguous and misused terms and I dare say that trans people can be just as fucked up and mixed up about what these words mean as anyone else…
My reply to “anon”: Of course it’s perfectly OK if you don’t see yourself as cisgendered if the term doesn’t apply to you personally! My concern is with people who deny that there’s a need for *some* sort of nomenclature. If you see yourself as transgendered, somewhere on a spectrum between cis and trans, that makes sense. I’m not interested in defending a hard binary, only in using language that may help question entrenched privilege.
I know there’s disagreement among trans people; I’d question whether “fucked up” captures this. Cis people disagree all the time without that making them some sort of basket cases.
Here’s one more from “anon”:
———-
“Fucked up as anyone else…” meaning I think we are ALL pretty messed up about what such things are, not just transpeople.
I don’t give email addresses out on blogs due to some very unfortunate experiences on my own end. But I understand your reasons, so I’ll go back to lurking. Just wanted to tidy that last end up a bit.