Categotry Archives: cis-o-rama

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A Fractured Fairy Tale

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, teh tranz

While it doesn’t indulge in the same kind of thematic miserablism of other movies about transgender sex workers, Olaf de Fleur Johannesson’s The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela (2008) still can’t avoid the fact that at least part of its narrative–arguably the dominant part–is constructed from a cisgender man’s preconceptions of who transgender people are. The conceit of the movie is that it’s half documentary and half fiction, mixed together in such a way as to obscure the lines between the real and the fake. The director himself calls this shambolic portmanteau structure a “visiomentary.” You can probably see the flaws in this approach without even seeing the movie, but I’ll elaborate anyway.

The movie begins with its central character, a trans sex worker in Cebu City, The Philippines, speaking directly to the camera and swearing to tell the truth and the whole truth. This is Raquela Rios, essentially playing herself. The filmmakers spend a good deal of time following Rios through her life, which includes interactions with her family, attempts to find employment outside of the sex trade, clubbing with her friends, and generally walking around the city. This is where the film is heavy on the documentary and while it’s letting Raquela speak for herself, the movie is on pretty firm ground. Raquela is bright, funny, optimistic, and gregarious. Were she in different circumstances, she would undoubtedly be a success at whatever she did. The same might be said for her friends, Aubrey and Olivia, who also make their livings as “ladyboy” sex workers. Unfortunately, the filmmakers can’t leave well enough alone. They also start the film with a title card that says, “Raquela is transsexual. A chick with a dick,” and once the movie acquires a narrative, the attitude behind that pronouncement seeps into the whole enterprise. Continue reading →

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Protest Against Ticked Off You-Know-Whats With Knives

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, don't get your panties in a bunch, hipster irony must die, Humorless Tranny™, i get around, takin' it to the streets!, we don't put the "T" in LGB

So if you are going to be in New York tomorrow, and you care to protest the shameful exploitation of both trans women and some of the most brutal murders of trans people, you might want to run down and help us protest the Tribeca Film Festival’s decision to screen Ticked Off…Disparaging-Word-For-Trans-People…With Knives.

Here are the details of the protest, from its Facebook page:

“Protest/rally Against Tribeca’s Decision to Premiere Transphobic Film “Ticked Off Trannies With Knives”

What: A protest/rally demanding that Tribeca Film Festival remove the transphobic film “Ticked Off Trannies With Knives (TOTWK)”. Melissa Sklarz- Director of New York Trans Rights Organization, celebrities, elected officials & LGBT activists will be speaking. A candle light vigil for trans victims of hate crimes will also be held.

When/Where: Tuesday, April 6th, 2010 6:30-8:00pm @ Tribeca Cinemas @ 54 Varick Street, NYC

Why: The movie makes light of violence and rape against trans women, exploits the high-profile murder of teenager Angie Zapata, includes the pejorative term “trannies” in its title, inaccurately depicts trans women’s identities as drag queen “performers” and “caricatures” and misrepresents the lives of an extremely disenfranchised group who suffer violence at alarming rates.

Continue reading →

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In Unexpected Delights

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, gender oh eff me, i get around, kyriarchy, let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz

Hey, the takedown of that London Times article I did over at Tiger Beatdown got included in the 13th Carnival of Feminists! Drop by to read the other stuff, you know it’s good!

And in other unexpected pleasures, I haven’t been flayed to pieces in the comments section at the Guardian. And Julie Bindel replied to me! And I replied back! Wow!

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Ron Gold, Choice, And The End Of The Affair

Categories: cis-o-rama, Humorless Tranny™, i heart oppression, kyriarchy, the transsexual empire strikes back, your RDA of intersectionality

So on further reveiw, the infamous Ron Gold post was taken down and he had his contributor status revoked. This was the proper step to take: one doesn’t run a blog that supposedly caters to every letter in the LGBT spectrum and then publish something like that.

In the past I’ve found Bilerico to be pretty approachable for trans people and trans bloggers, which makes this failure hurt so much more than if it had been on a blog that didn’t have that reputation. It revealed an enormous blind spot in the editor’s outlook. One thing is certain: nothing that attacked the gay and lesbian identity in such a way would have been posted there.

However, one must wonder about the screening process over there. Were they aware that Ron Gold had previously claimed that being gay was largely a matter of “imprinting”?

First, about the science of the thing.  My reading of the literature gives me no cause (despite highly publicized research by Simon LeVay and others) to believe that there is any physical, chemical or genetic difference between heterosexuals and homosexuals.  Indeed, I think the current data leads to the inescapable conclusion that all human beings are born with the capacity for both homosexual and heterosexual responses.  Preferences for one or the other seem, in most cases, to be fairly fixed by the age of six, but within the species homosexuality and heterosexuality do not appear to be discrete entities, with preferences running the continuum from exclusivity at both ends to genuine bisexuality in the middle.  Even within individuals there is ample evidence that people can and do change, whether situationally (as in same-sex settings like prisons) or culturally (as in virulently homophobic societies).
So what causes sexual orientation?  My guess is that preferences for one gender or another is much like preferences for people who are dark or fair, young or old, tall or short; imprinted patterns that are usually formed quite early in life.  How these imprints occur has yet to be discovered, principally, I think because the bulk of the research has been looking for “the cause of homosexuality” rather than the cause of sexual preferences in general.  Do we choose our imprints?  No, but we do choose not only whether to act on them but whether our feelings are appropriate for our self-image.  It really isn’t too hard to repress feelings that embarrass us or make us feel guilty.  It’s a bit harder to try, as I’ve tried, to expand my imprints beyond young, short, dark men to others I might like just as well if I gave it a chance.

You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s remarkable how this presaged the line of argument he used in his anti-transgender piece–with the exception that he was respectful of gay identities, but didn’t deliver the same courtesy to trans folk.

I should note that one of the few good things about this mess is how many LGB and straight cis folk defended transgendered people and decried the bigotry of the Gold article. Peterson Toscano has a nice post about this, with many wonderful replies. (h/t to helen boyd, with a side order of snark.)

It should be noted too that not every trans person in the world acquitted themselves spotlessly. Our old friends the HBSers leaped in to score their usual desiccated points about “the transgender.” There were some posts of fail in the various comment threads–even having bigotry shoved in your face shouldn’t be an excuse to shove bigotry right back. These were few and far between, and somewhat ameliorated by the shocking level of insult Gold heaped out.

And by the fact that, well, we’ve heard it all before. Bil Browning said he wanted to “challenge” the readers of The Project, but how the fuck was the latest reiteration of the same old argument I’ve heard for all my life from all kinds of cis people, queer or not, challenging? Would Peter LaBarbera be allowed to be a contributor to The Bilerico Project? He’d certainly “challenge” the views of many in the gay community.

I think Lisa Harney of Questioning Transphobia said it best in the comments thread to the non-apology apology:

Don’t you think trans people are constantly challenged already? Why do we need to be shocked out of a comfort zone that we largely do not have access to? […] Would you honestly allow a post that called all LGB people deluded and unnatural, and said that same-sex attraction doesn’t really exist? And when your commenters respond predictably (that is, with anger), would you deliver this same apology?

And with that, let’s put L’Affaire Ron Gold to bed. I’m sure by tomorrow morning the world will have found a new champion to tell me that I don’t exist.

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Nonsense is as Nonsense Does

Categories: cis-o-rama, kyriarchy, the transsexual empire strikes back, we don't put the "T" in LGB

As a companion to my new post on Below the Belt about use of the term “cis,” I thought I’d amplify my issues with helen boyd’s recent post on (en)Gender (“Jeez Louise this cisgendered nonsese”: nothing dismissive there, nope!) about her objections to the term, as I found the post highly problematic for a number of reasons.

First, she claims that “cis” is unclear, because you can’t tell if it means cisgendered or cissexual:

[…]I’m going to claim a difference between cisgender & cissexual. Cisgender, the problem seems to me, is not the easy opposite of transgender. Cisgender implies, or means, or could mean (depending on who you talk to), that someone’s sex and gender are concordant. So your average butch woman, who is not trans, or is, depending on how she feels about it (see Bear Bergman), is now somehow cisgender. So is someone like me. So is a femme-y gay man who maybe performs a more gender normative masculinity for his job. That is, those of us who have variable genders, who maybe are gender fluid or gender neutral but who don’t identify as trans, are now somehow cisgender.

I have a number of issues with this. For one thing, she does not make the same objection about “trans”: that is, when we use trans, there’s no clear indication as to what kind of trans person you are talking about: crossdresser, drag queen (yes, some are trans), transsexual, etc. So it demands something more from the term cis than is demanded from trans, which in of itself is an act of privilege.

But I also don’t think that the division between cissexual and cisgender is clear, or even as important as helen (and Julia Serano) make it out to be. Yes, I know, it seems so logical: we make a division between sex and gender, so we should make a similar axis for trans and cis.

On closer inspection, however, it simply does not hold up. There are trans people, for example, who live fulltime in a gender other than the one they were assigned at birth, with legal recognition of that gender, who have never had either hormones or surgery. Yet I feel more than comfortable calling them transsexual. And this just points out another issue: it puts so much focus on a transsexual’s body, and not his or her gender–and that plays far too easily into the very ways that anti-trans people attempt to invalidate trans people’s genders. Finally, I’ve met many trans people of all stripes, and all have had some sort of body issue that the cis people I know simply don’t have–the motivations are completely different. Both a straight man and a heterosexual crossdresser might pluck their eyebrows: but only the crossdresser does it to look more like a woman. So even if we were to accept that cissexual is a valid distinction, it is experienced quite differently by cis- and transgendered people.

The key point for me is that you have to be transgendered to be transsexual. That is, transsexuality is a phenomenon within the larger trans condition. It is a variety of trans experience, not an essential axis of being. Therefore, I think it is safe to say that in the absence of other qualifiers, “cis” means cisgendered and “trans” means transgendered.

So, taking helen’s two examples, can we call them “cisgendered”? I think we can, because both a butch lesbian and an effeminate gay man don’t ever identify as a gender other than they were assigned. That is, a butch calls herself a woman, a queeny gay man calls himself a man. And when they stop–we call them something else.

Telling me, & other partners whose lives are profoundly impacted by the legal rights / cultural perceptions of trans people, that we are “not trans” implies that we are also not part of the trans community. I’ve been saying for years now that we are. When trans people are killed, harassed, not hired, fired due to discrimination, denied health care, etc. etc. etc., their loved ones suffer along with them. Their families, their lovers, their kids especially. We are not just “allies.” We are vested, dammit, & a part of the trans community, so when “cisgender” comes to mean, or is used to mean, “not part of the trans community,” we are once again left out in the dark.

And…wow. This is an extraordinary statement and I am struggling to understand why it was said.

First, I’d have a lot easier time figuring it out had helen not ended her post with this:

I have lots of genders, but I’m not trans.

So…this is only a problem if trans people say it?

Second, replace “trans” with “in a wheelchair” in that paragraph and you can see how this starts to get queasy for me.

What do we mean by “community”? When we say “gay community” or “deaf community,” do we mean allies and families of gay or deaf people, or only those who are gay or deaf? I think the usage is often contextual, but most commonly we mean only those members who have the trait being discussed. And with good reason, because while an ally may simply stop being an ally–friendships can end, married people can be divorced, a person’s political alignment may change–for the person with the trait it is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to remove that trait. I don’t think it is uncalled for to make the primary meaning of community those people who have the greatest self-interest in it.

This leads us to another of helen’s points:

Likewise, cisgender seems to get used a lot in place of “ignorant or unsympathetic to trans issues” which is also bullshit. Being cisgender or experiencing cissexual privilege – say by having a doctor assume correctly that I have a uterus – is not the same thing as being ignorant or unsympathetic to trans issues.

The exclusion and silencing of allies is a problem for all progressive movements, not just trans movements: witness the problematic relationships between men and feminists, for example. Some people certainly make attempts to cold-shoulder cis people from trans discussions, and often this is hurtful and unnecessary. At the same time, however, we should recognize that a movement needs both safe spaces and leaders from within its primary constituency: I call this the “no male president of NOW” theory. And just as straight or white people can condescend, obstruct, or even derail gay or black rights movements, cis people can do the same in trans movements, and trans people are well within their rights to talk about it and safeguard the goals of their movements.

This doesn’t mean, however, that use of the term cis means open season on trashing allies. Trashing is a serious problem for any movement; bell hooks talks at length about this in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Trans people have a responsibility to make sure that they use the term responsibly, and not just as a shorthand for “bigot.” But cis people have a responsibility too–to listen to trans people, and not get so caught up on a point of terminology that they use silencing tactics wholesale to shut down discussion. Men didn’t like the term “male privilege” but feminists insisted on it because it was a valuable concept that made visible a previously invisible prejudice; and while sometimes people used it in an irresponsible or even hateful way, the term has entered our discourse and is an important part of everyday discussions about gender.

i guess the point is that there are women, & gay men, who actually have legitimate & well thought out reasons for objecting to the term […] so if all these explanations of why some people criticize the term or how it’s used, only convinces some trans people that anyone who is uncomfortable being called cis is (1) ignorant, (2) unhip, and (3) unwittingly transphobic, then i guess there’s been no point whatsoever in explaining that maybe people have their reasons, & that none of them have anything to do with being any of those things.

which i suppose means i should go ahead & go back to using “tranny” since i think it’s playful & sweet, & to hell with any trans people who don’t like being called that, because obviously they’re just (1) unhip, (2) ignorant, and (3) self hating.

This comment was addressed to me on the discussion boards at helen’s site. But the thing is, and as I argued there, there really haven’t been any good reasons to object: just people who feel that they’re being called bigots, or saying that they don’t identify as cis and thus the term shouldn’t be used–on them, or really, on anyone.

But both arguments fail. First, it is not clear that every use of the term cis is conflated with “transphobic bigot”; plenty of feminist and progressive sites use the word every day in its primary meaning, “the opposite of trans.” And yet I don’t see posts by helen directed at Liss McEwan at Shakespeare’s Sister, for example. It only seems to be problematic when trans people use the term. Now, the argument can be made that trans people use it the most more often in a problematic way. And I’ll agree, but always with the caveat that trans people are also going to be the ones with the greatest understanding of cis privilege, and will call people out on it more frequently than others will. After all, who uses male privilege more often? Feminists or non-feminist guys? So yes, the most problematic uses of “male privilege” will be by feminists, but there will also be a much higher volume of overall use.

And it’s not as if there isn’t any oppression here or anything. That can make people upset.

The other argument is that cis is an identity. But it’s not; as I said on Below the Belt, it’s a descriptive term, like trans. That trans has more in common with an identity is purely a function of the oppression and disprivileging of trans people, just as it is with being black, or disabled. We use terms like “identify as trans” because there is a step you have to take, an identification you have to make: you have to reject the dominant culture’s discourse about who you are–perverted, subhuman, crippled, and instead find a positive strength in who you are. Trans isn’t an identity: it is the act of being trans, of being unashamed for what you are, that is the act of identification.

I mean, we don’t talk about whiteness or being able as identities: and neither is being cis.

So all we are left with, then, is a really elaborate tone argument. And a tone argument is never an acceptable objection–it’s a silencing technique. (As is helen’s idea that the word only be used in an “appropriate” context, like a classroom.) And make no mistake, that’s what’s happening here. By telling trans people that there can be no word for people who aren’t trans, we are being told that we are so unique and so different that we are the pure exception of the human race; that every other oppressed group gets to have de-centering language (sighted, able, hearing, straight) but we don’t. That it is impossible to talk about not being trans without mentioning being trans. (Quick: I can write an article about dating as a straight woman, put straight in the title or the first paragraph, and never mention lesbians anywhere; that is impossible to do with a term like “non-trans.”) And what happens when there is no term for non-trans? Simple. All too often, when people are talking about being non-trans, they will simply not even mention it: they will remain comfortably normal.

I am neither alien nor monster. I am not permanently othered by the accident of being born. And I will not accept a permanent second-class existence in the world simply because a three-letter word pisses some people off.

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Normal

Categories: cis-o-rama, internuts, teh tranz

I have an abnormal relationship with–normal.

For most of my life, I looked normal, but never felt normal. Sure, I moved around the world as a (sorta) guy, even acted like one–ok, hell, sometimes even felt like one; but I was always aware of this thing about me that made me not feel normal: this awkwardness, this discomfort, this constant wondering if I was the wrong gender, and if so, should I do something about it.

Nowadays, I feel much more normal, but to large chunks of my world I don’t look normal: the friends, family and coworkers who knew me before transition now have to look at me a different way, and who knows what they think? And even beyond them, I’m tall for a woman, broad-shouldered…well, you get the picture.

But inside? Inside I feel right as rain.

I bring this up because of the recent controversy surrounding a very short word: cis. This word has apparently caused the Internet to catch fire and burn down. Well, at least my part of the internet–sure, it may only be a studio apartment with a kitchenette, but when there’s a fire it’s still quite alarming.

It all started with this post on Pam’s House Blend, and specifically this comment:

There has always been a certain amount of animosity between the L’s the G’s the B’s and the T’s. We all know this. When I start to tune out of a debate is when someone describes a whole group of our community as “cisgendered, transbigoted, privileged assholes”. Cisgendered is not even a word that gay men identify with but one created by people to single them out in a way that I personally find offensive and derogatory especially when used in this context. Not all white gay men are privileged, nor are they transphobic, lumping them in this category serves no purpose to a greater dialogue.

That’s how it started, but it didn’t end there. There was a huge pile-on in that thread about the use of cisgendered, followed by this thread at PHB (including this now-infamous comment) and then another follow-up at Questioning Transphobia and then the next thing you know cis isn’t allowed to be spoken at PHB but then it is (along with a–sorry, Autumn–“we need to struggle against the real oppressors” derail.) But by then it was all over the internet and even our old friend Carolyn-Ann had to check in.

All over a rather obscure Latin prefix. Color me impressed, I guessed: I mean, even the real c-word has four letters.

By now perhaps you are shaking your head: most likely in confusion. What is this cis you might wonder, and how may I get some? Or, maybe I should get rid of it? What, C.L., is the dish with cis?

It’s actually very simple. Cis– means not-trans.

That’s it.

Would, of course, that it would be so simple.

It comes from Latin, likely via biochemistry, where cis– and trans- are used to distinguish isomers from each other based on where the molecular bonds fall: on the same side, then cis (meaning within or on the same side), on opposite sides then trans (meaning across or on the other side.) The term has been kicking around for about two decades, but gained prominence thanks to Julia Serrano’s extensive use of cissexual in Whipping Girl, her groundbreaking work about transfeminism.

Julia does a much better job than me at talking about why cisgender/cissexual isn’t a pejorative word, so I’ll just quote her quoting Emi Koyama

I learned the words “cissexual,” “cissexist,” and “cisgender,” from trans activists who wanted to turn the table and define the words that describe non-transsexuals and non-transgenders rather than always being defined and described by them. By using the term “cissexual” and “cisgender,” they de-centralize the dominant group, exposing it as merely one possible alternative rather than the “norm” against which trans people are defined. I don’t expect the word to come into common usage anytime soon, but I felt it was an interesting concept – a feminist one, in fact – which is why I am using it.

Yet as the brouhaha above shows, a lot of people–cis people, natch–seem to somehow feel that somehow it is pejorative. That somehow trans people are forcing an identity onto non-trans folk. That somehow it lumps them in with all the other bigots out there–racists, homophobes, chauvinists.

To which I say: you bet your ass it does. That’s the point.

By which I mean not that all cis people are bigots, but rather that they belong to a bigoted power structure. So do I. So do we all–we are all caught in the trap of kyriarchy, and pretending not to see the chains that bind us doesn’t make them not exist.

The thing is, there are privileges to being not trans–I doubt much that anyone is going to fight about that. I’m just going to refuse to agree that one of them is the right to be normal.

Because that’s what it comes down to. I’d have no problem ditching the term cis in favor of another term for people who aren’t trans; I’m just not going to concede that we don’t need one. Because every time I write not-trans instead of cis, I’m calling attention to myself; I’m pointing out that I’m the weird one, the one with a problem, the one that needs to be differentiated. And fuck it, I’m just not going to put up with that forever.

It does not invalidate other axes of oppression to demonstrate that another one exists. Kyriarchy is complicated; it is devilishly difficult to sort out. But that does not refute it’s existence–quite the contrary.

Now, it may well be true that cis is a unique term in one respect: it is being used by a disprivileged minority as a term for a privileged majority–some would say, forced upon a majority. This seems pretty different from some of the other terms that have evolved out of usage, like homosexual or heterosexual–in both of those cases, they were conceived by the privileged majority as decentering terms. But again, I say: good. Because we should celebrate the fact that so many people of privilege (cissexist privilege, that is) are willing to decenter themselves based on the suggestion of a disprivileged group. That’s not tyranny: it’s progress.

Telling other people what normal should be is where the tyranny begins.