Tag: this is helpful

platovevo:

platovevo:

i feel like part of the weirdness with gender on this site is that like…. cis is a useful term and social locator and i want to be clear i’m not denying that but cis women do not relate to gender the way cis men do and people on here kind of know that but also don’t really talk about it which muddies the ideas of both what it means to be cis and what it means to be a woman

a couple people asked for elaboration so this is very cursory, but

womanhood is inherently unpleasant. it’s a social location relative to patriarchy that is constraining and harmful, and while of course there are a multitude of individual experiences that fall under womanhood, i think it’s safe to say that most women, cis or trans, are conscious of some degree of discomfort with it. this runs the gamut from comparatively “minor” things like chafing under compulsory femininity to more overtly harmful things like fearing and/or surviving rape, abuse, intimate partner violence, and so on. women of color specifically are often coercively masculinized and denied their womanhood because much of “femininity” is constructed around whiteness.

and yet there’s often an idea on this site (i almost always see it perpetrated by well-meaning cis people) that all trans people must be miserable in their experience of gender and all cis people must be at worst indifferent to it and at best delighted about it. that’s really just a completely misleading and oversimplified dichotomy, and one of the ways in which it breaks down is that cis women overall are just way more likely than cis men to be unhappy in our experience of gender and alienated from it to some extent, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t still in the social position of being cis. (i don’t have time to unpack this as it relates to nb transmisogyny-exempt women.)

this is obviously also harmful to trans people, who then become viewed only in terms of pain and suffering, and are frequently expected to demonstrate how miserable they are in order to access things like medical/legal transition or basic compassion. 

again, this is really bare-bones and it’s not the only way in which the suffering/not suffering dichotomy fails us. for instance, men of color, particularly black men, don’t get afforded “easy” cis manhood or masculinity the way white men do; even cis manhood is not as simple or unified as some people on here think. if cis just meant “completely loves their assigned gender and is never unhappy about it, excluded from it, or forced into it” there would be far fewer cis people. basically, these terms are useful because they convey information about a person’s relation to certain power structures, but sometimes people try to turn them into intrusive psychological evaluations and it’s not effective.