It was a lovely summer evening in Covent Garden, and I was engaged in a conversation with a fellow gamer (from the Intellectual Games Society at LSE. I think I was telling him about my degree or something; the conversation had gotten to a point where we were discussing the experience of being male and female; he said something (I don't remember what) and then I replied something along the lies of "Yeah, but that only happens if you are cisgender"; or 'cisgender privilege', or 'this theory is cisgender-centric'. All I remember is that I used the term.
"It's nice to talk to someone who uses the word 'cisgender', he said, with a hint of good-natured amusement.
"Um... that's how people whose self-identified gender coincides with what sex they've been classified as at birth are called...".
Cisgender. I guess there's something subversive about the word. 'Standard' human beings are cisgender; by naming them this you disrupt their privileged status.
'Cisgender' is a word that we need because trans and genderqueer people exist; it's a reminder that they do. 'Cisgender' as opposed to "normal people" (trans people are abnormal and/or mentally ill) and to 'real men/women' (trans people aren't really the gender they identify as). It is a word very factually describing a category of people (that I happen to identify with btw- I am a cis, heterosexual female); yet somehow when I say it I feel like I am making a political statement. Now that I think about it- so many people still casually use "normal" to mean "heterosexual". Yes, it does make me angry.
Ruth Frankenberg once said: 'Privilege is the non-experience of not being slapped in the face'; the privileged: white, male, heterosexual, cisgender- are unnamed. They are the standard human beings. Women, thirld-word men, third-world women, Blacks, Rroma/Gypsies, LGBTQ people bear the mark of Otherness, maintained in language and discourse. We have no words to think them otherwise than as the radical Other to 'normal people'.
From the Judeo-Christian myth of Eve made out of Adam's rib (notice how Adam was still Adam before Eve was created- he didn't become a person -or become male, for that matter- through her creation), to John Stuart Mill's proposing in the British Parliament that the Reform Bill's clause which read "man" be changed to "person."- and not succeeding, to relationship advices in magazines who nonchalantly assume everyone is heterosexual, to 'nude'/'skin-colored' objects that are invariably the color of a white person's skin, to outraged Romanian people refusing to vote for an Eurovision pre-sellection song with lyrics in rromani (Gypsy language) because "we can't be represented by Gypsies"...
I did get my share of funny looks for using words such as "heterosexual" or 'cisgender', or for referring to trans people with the pronoun of the gender they identified as and to genderqueer people as 'zie'. For the privileged- it is political corectnes gone mad. For the non-privileged, it is as basic as acknowledging their existence as human beings.
"It's nice to talk to someone who uses the word 'cisgender', he said, with a hint of good-natured amusement.
"Um... that's how people whose self-identified gender coincides with what sex they've been classified as at birth are called...".
Cisgender. I guess there's something subversive about the word. 'Standard' human beings are cisgender; by naming them this you disrupt their privileged status.
'Cisgender' is a word that we need because trans and genderqueer people exist; it's a reminder that they do. 'Cisgender' as opposed to "normal people" (trans people are abnormal and/or mentally ill) and to 'real men/women' (trans people aren't really the gender they identify as). It is a word very factually describing a category of people (that I happen to identify with btw- I am a cis, heterosexual female); yet somehow when I say it I feel like I am making a political statement. Now that I think about it- so many people still casually use "normal" to mean "heterosexual". Yes, it does make me angry.
Ruth Frankenberg once said: 'Privilege is the non-experience of not being slapped in the face'; the privileged: white, male, heterosexual, cisgender- are unnamed. They are the standard human beings. Women, thirld-word men, third-world women, Blacks, Rroma/Gypsies, LGBTQ people bear the mark of Otherness, maintained in language and discourse. We have no words to think them otherwise than as the radical Other to 'normal people'.
From the Judeo-Christian myth of Eve made out of Adam's rib (notice how Adam was still Adam before Eve was created- he didn't become a person -or become male, for that matter- through her creation), to John Stuart Mill's proposing in the British Parliament that the Reform Bill's clause which read "man" be changed to "person."- and not succeeding, to relationship advices in magazines who nonchalantly assume everyone is heterosexual, to 'nude'/'skin-colored' objects that are invariably the color of a white person's skin, to outraged Romanian people refusing to vote for an Eurovision pre-sellection song with lyrics in rromani (Gypsy language) because "we can't be represented by Gypsies"...
I did get my share of funny looks for using words such as "heterosexual" or 'cisgender', or for referring to trans people with the pronoun of the gender they identified as and to genderqueer people as 'zie'. For the privileged- it is political corectnes gone mad. For the non-privileged, it is as basic as acknowledging their existence as human beings.
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