Cisgender

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.

A good observation- and a few question for future research

Found at Sociological Images (specifically- here)

Finally, Cheryl S. noticed that J. Crew decided to market some of their boys’ clothing to girls. Rather than designating the clothes as unisex, or listing them as boys’ items in the boys’ section and girls’ items in the girls’ section, they instead created a section in the girls’ part of the website called Borrowed from My Brother:


Uploaded with ImageShack.us
As Cheryl points out, there is no “borrowed from my sister” section for boys. We accept the idea of women wearing men’s clothing, even seeing it as potentially sexy, in a way that we don’t tolerate or condone men crossing gender lines to wear women’s items or take on other aspects of femininity. J. Crew simply applies this wider cultural acceptance of women taking on some aspects of masculinity (as long as they balance it with enough signs of femininity), which we see in the marketing of “boyfriend jeans” to women, and applies it to kids.

Interestingly, J. Crew are also the ones who featured in an add a boy with pink painted toenails:



Scandal ensued, with media comments outraged about how the ad is "“blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children.”- or about how it would make the child gay (no kidding!).

So, why is it that we as a culture are OK with girls wearing guys' clothes, yet we are terribly appalled by guys wearing girls' clothes? Gender-egalitarian masculists and feminists argue that the idea that it is "wrong" or "abnormal" for a guy to wear female clothing is detrimental to men, as it limits their choices, and to women as well, as it is based on the assumption that male-specific things are somehow "superior" to female-specific things, therefore a woman acting like a man is to be admired while a man acting like a woman is to be ridiculed.

I wonder how far can the comparison go between men in our days who are attracted to clothes/objects/activities/habits that are deemed specifically female by our society and women who were trying to take up more "manly" roles in the XIXth or early XXth century.

On the same note... I wonder why popular culture associates so strongly crossdressing with homosexuality, while actually the percent of gay crossdressers is not higher than the percent of gays in the population.