Nick Kiddle (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} ksej) wrote,@ 2008-03-21 23:12:00 |
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More on those privileged transfolk
Another matter arising from this whole thing is a bunch of radfems insisting that they are neither cissexual nor cisgender and certainly do not possess cissexual privilege. In fact, teh trannies have all the privilege because they're so gender normative.
There is a certain amount of confusion about what cisgender and cissexual actually mean and why they're necessary. The definition of cisgender is a horrible fuzzy mess, but cissexual basically means "not transsexual". The theory behind having a separate word is that saying "not trans" suggests a distinction between normal people and freaks, whereas cis/trans suggests a distinction between two different populations, neither of which is any better than the other.
The problem is that it's not easy to coin a quibble-proof definition of cissexual that says what cis folk are - the workable definitions all revolve around "not trans" or "having no desire to transition". And just as we'd like a word that isn't "non-trans", we'd like that word to have a definition that isn't "not trans", so we come up with things like "having an internal sense of gender that matches the sex assigned at birth", whereupon radfems declare that they have no internal sense of gender at all because that would be essentialist and an assortment of trans and trans-friendly heads meet desks.
Having got all that out of the way, I'm going to use "cis" to mean "having no desire to transition" and try to discuss this whole "gender normative privilege" thing.
No-one's denying that behaving in a gender normative kind of way (that is to say, men acting masculine and women acting feminine) gets some measure of privilege. But so does not transitioning (see my previous post). And the thing about privilege is that you can't easily compare privileges in different directions to work out who's got it worse.
If you compare a masculine-acting cis woman to a feminine-acting trans woman, you're going to see various ways in which each comes out ahead, with no real way to weight the different effects. Compare a masculine acting cis woman to a feminine-acting cis woman and lo! it is indeed true that gender normative behaviour is privileged. Compare a masculine-acting cis woman to a masculine-acting trans woman, and it's pretty obvious that being cis is privileged.
Nobody is trying to claim that being a cis woman is Easy Street, as some outraged radfems seem to be saying. One of them claimed that the very notion of cis privilege is a crock of shit unless it meant being the target of a statistically higher chance of sexual abuse and rape. But cis women don't have a statistically higher chance of sexual abuse than trans women. What cis women get, trans women get and worse, which is the whole point of cis privilege.
And the thing to remember about the feminine-acting trans woman is that her gender normative privilege can disappear in an instant if her medical history becomes public knowledge. She loses her womanhood in many people's eyes, while remaining a target for any kind of abuse anyone feels like throwing at her. And because she "lied" and hid her "true sex", the world will happily line up to excuse her attackers and suggest she had it coming. Yeah, that doesn't sound much like privilege to me.
Another matter arising from this whole thing is a bunch of radfems insisting that they are neither cissexual nor cisgender and certainly do not possess cissexual privilege. In fact, teh trannies have all the privilege because they're so gender normative.
There is a certain amount of confusion about what cisgender and cissexual actually mean and why they're necessary. The definition of cisgender is a horrible fuzzy mess, but cissexual basically means "not transsexual". The theory behind having a separate word is that saying "not trans" suggests a distinction between normal people and freaks, whereas cis/trans suggests a distinction between two different populations, neither of which is any better than the other.
The problem is that it's not easy to coin a quibble-proof definition of cissexual that says what cis folk are - the workable definitions all revolve around "not trans" or "having no desire to transition". And just as we'd like a word that isn't "non-trans", we'd like that word to have a definition that isn't "not trans", so we come up with things like "having an internal sense of gender that matches the sex assigned at birth", whereupon radfems declare that they have no internal sense of gender at all because that would be essentialist and an assortment of trans and trans-friendly heads meet desks.
Having got all that out of the way, I'm going to use "cis" to mean "having no desire to transition" and try to discuss this whole "gender normative privilege" thing.
No-one's denying that behaving in a gender normative kind of way (that is to say, men acting masculine and women acting feminine) gets some measure of privilege. But so does not transitioning (see my previous post). And the thing about privilege is that you can't easily compare privileges in different directions to work out who's got it worse.
If you compare a masculine-acting cis woman to a feminine-acting trans woman, you're going to see various ways in which each comes out ahead, with no real way to weight the different effects. Compare a masculine acting cis woman to a feminine-acting cis woman and lo! it is indeed true that gender normative behaviour is privileged. Compare a masculine-acting cis woman to a masculine-acting trans woman, and it's pretty obvious that being cis is privileged.
Nobody is trying to claim that being a cis woman is Easy Street, as some outraged radfems seem to be saying. One of them claimed that the very notion of cis privilege is a crock of shit unless it meant being the target of a statistically higher chance of sexual abuse and rape. But cis women don't have a statistically higher chance of sexual abuse than trans women. What cis women get, trans women get and worse, which is the whole point of cis privilege.
And the thing to remember about the feminine-acting trans woman is that her gender normative privilege can disappear in an instant if her medical history becomes public knowledge. She loses her womanhood in many people's eyes, while remaining a target for any kind of abuse anyone feels like throwing at her. And because she "lied" and hid her "true sex", the world will happily line up to excuse her attackers and suggest she had it coming. Yeah, that doesn't sound much like privilege to me.
