Glitterbombing

Please read the critiques I have posted and the replies, and please continue to discuss.

There is a very cissexist assumption lurking in the idea that transphobia (or cissexism) is the same thing as sexism. That lies in the aspects of cissexism that are unique to cissexism, and by attempting to condense both terms into one, we wind up erasing the issues that the whole concept of cissexism is intended to illuminate.

My intention in writing that piece was twofold.

First, I wanted to get some discussion rolling, which I’m very happy to see.

Second was where I was coming from, which was noticing some similarities and overlap between the two I found very interesting and trying to find some way to describe them.

I do hope to continue both this discussion and this investigation.

Thank you to genderbitch and pianycist.

pianycist:

janedoe225:

glitterbombing:

This is actually a supercool idea. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Sexism is the structure of gender norms and their policing.
2. Functions of gender norms include body policing and body norms (body type, skin color, weight, height, voice, fat distribution, hair color, hair distribution, genital type).
3. One aspect of gender norms is gender essentialism (the concept that a man IS a thing and a woman IS another thing, and both are fixed, absolute, and exhaustive categories).
4. Gender essentialism includes the cissexist (← that means ‘non-trans-ist’) assumption that a physical sex and a metaphysical gender are fundamentally linked. It assumes that ‘penis IS man’ and ‘woman IS vagina.’ This leaves out lots of people, like someone with a vagina who identifies genderqueer, or someone who is intersex but identifies as a man. (From 2. and 3.)
5. Thus, sexism and transphobia can be linked in analogy: There’s not a whole lot of difference between refusing to go out with someone because of their weight and refusing to go out with someone because of their genitals. (From 2. and 4.)
6. Thus, transphobia is an instance of sexism as it is fundamentally an act of the policing of gender norms. (From 1. and 5.)

Some other cool points I like…

• It stops postulating trans* as necessarily different than the norm. (However, it does carry the potential hazard of reabsorbing trans* into the invisible margin.)
• I hate “*phobia” terms because they are terribly misleading.

(For those of you who are also philosophy majors, the above is not intended to be a formal argument.)

hmm

Actual trans person and philosophy major here. It’s 1:30 in my time zone, I need to wake up in seven hours, and I’m not feeling very articulate right now. Hopefully what I’m about to write will make sense.

Bolding above is mine. The above argument, as an argument, is not exempt from critical examination simply because it is not structured formally. I make arguments all the time on Tumblr and I expect other people to critically examine them.

Gender essentialisms are not necessarily cissexist. If a person subscribes to a transcendental gender essentialism, the essential quality of a gender is not something visible, biological or even physical. I take such a position, and it’s not out of any internalized cissexism. It’s because I know what I am.

Of course transphobia and sexism are linked. I do not know if your statement “Transphobia is sexism” is meant to mean the identity statement “Transphobia and sexism are equivalent” or the categorical statement “Transphobia is a category of sexism,” but I am not willing to commit to either position. Certainly both involve gender policing, but one involves the policing of gender-role transitions and the other involves policing of intragender expression. There is policing of intergender transitions (transitioning from assigned gender to something else) and policing of intragender transitions (expressing a personality trait associated with a gender other than the expressor’s). Sexism involves one of these. Transphobia can involve both, considering that trans people:

• encounter policing of their ability to make decisions about their appearances and medical decisions about their own bodies; and
• are held to a higher standard of masculinity or femininity in order to be seen as legitimately their identified genders by cis medical professionals and many cis people.

Cis people can only experience the policing of intragender transitions. Trans people can experience policing of both intergender and intragender transitions, considering that the definition of trans is to experience intergender transition.

To say either that transphobia and sexism are equivalent or to say that transphobia is a category of sexism contributes to the erasure of the problem of policing of intergender transitions. To subsume transphobia under the category of sexism contributes to the co-opting of trans movements by cis people.

Beautiful. Thank you.

A point of clarification: I didn’t mean to say that my words were outside critique. I just meant to say that they weren’t intended to fit a logically valid argument structure. :)

“Is” was definitely too strong. The whole thing was meant to be followed by an invitation to discuss, but I forgot to put it there. My post should be seen as a very rough draft to start hashing out mechanisms and similarities between the two in an attempt to understand them both and the concept of intersectionality better.

Again, thank you. I really respect and appreciate this kind of critique.

(via metapianycist)

genderbitch:

janedoe225:

glitterbombing:

This is actually a supercool idea. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Sexism is the structure of gender norms and their policing.
2. Functions of gender norms include body policing and body norms (body type, skin color, weight, height, voice, fat distribution, hair color, hair distribution, genital type).
3. One aspect of gender norms is gender essentialism (the concept that a man IS a thing and a woman IS another thing, and both are fixed, absolute, and exhaustive categories).
4. Gender essentialism includes the cissexist (← that means ‘non-trans-ist’) assumption that a physical sex and a metaphysical gender are fundamentally linked. It assumes that ‘penis IS man’ and ‘woman IS vagina.’ This leaves out lots of people, like someone with a vagina who identifies genderqueer, or someone who is intersex but identifies as a man. (From 2. and 3.)
5. Thus, sexism and transphobia can be linked in analogy: There’s not a whole lot of difference between refusing to go out with someone because of their weight and refusing to go out with someone because of their genitals. (From 2. and 4.)
6. Thus, transphobia is an instance of sexism as it is fundamentally an act of the policing of gender norms. (From 1. and 5.)

Some other cool points I like…

• It stops postulating trans* as necessarily different than the norm. (However, it does carry the potential hazard of reabsorbing trans* into the invisible margin.)
• I hate “*phobia” terms because they are terribly misleading.

(For those of you who are also philosophy majors, the above is not intended to be a formal argument.)

hmm

This erases a huge section of issues unrelated to gender essentialism and more related to simply finding trans bodies disgusting or to the interlacing that cissexism and ableism have were being trans is equated to mental illness and then psychophobia is applied.

This also completely erases the intersection of sexism (of the misogyny variety) and cissexism, causing trans women to face a heightened level of body policing, essentialism and misogynistic tropes from even feminists.

And considering how easy it is for feminists and the cisGLB community to erase trans people in general, merging cissexism into sexism is probably one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of if we ever want to avoid disappearing entirely from the discourse of social justice.

This just won’t work, no matter how connected some of sexism’s causes and sources and elements and cissexism’s causes and sources and elements are.

Also, I’ve really never seen a logical basis where an element being shared between two things (gender essentialism) makes them the same. Related perhaps. Of similar sets depending on how the sets are described, but to claim cissexism is sexism is ridiculous.

Also sexism is only woman targeted for the most part (although some nonbinaries and even some men of the trans variety can get hit by it. Some, not all) whereas cissexism is targeted at anyone who isn’t cis, regardless of gender.

I just find this whole thing problematic and not viable.

Points taken.

• The IS statement is definitely too strong.
• I wonder if I am using a different definition of sexism than you are.
• I definitely agree that the danger of trans erasure would be greater were we to avoid the term.

My interest is in attempting to find connections between things that may illuminate hidden problems. I’m interested in the invisible boundaries that transphobic anti-sexists may create.

Ultimately, I feel that the concepts in my head may work better than the words I have used to describe them. I just came up with this thing and it’s almost 1 AM, so it’s a bit difficult to word. I’ll try to formulate this some other way at some point.

If it helps, what I’m interested in is finding commonalities and those networks under and within the two forms of oppression. By describing both systems as norms and working out the functions of how each norm carries out its nasty business, I think we can find a lot of interesting similarities. Aside from the theoretical points, I think that finding these sorts of connections can help us in the PR games that is cultural evolution.

Thank you.

This is actually a supercool idea. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. Sexism is the structure of gender norms and their policing.
2. Functions of gender norms include body policing and body norms (body type, skin color, weight, height, voice, fat distribution, hair color, hair distribution, genital type).
3. One aspect of gender norms is gender essentialism (the concept that a man IS a thing and a woman IS another thing, and both are fixed, absolute, and exhaustive categories).
4. Gender essentialism includes the cissexist (← that means ‘non-trans-ist’) assumption that a physical sex and a metaphysical gender are fundamentally linked. It assumes that ‘penis IS man’ and ‘woman IS vagina.’ This leaves out lots of people, like someone with a vagina who identifies genderqueer, or someone who is intersex but identifies as a man. (From 2. and 3.)
5. Thus, sexism and transphobia can be linked in analogy: There’s not a whole lot of difference between refusing to go out with someone because of their weight and refusing to go out with someone because of their genitals. (From 2. and 4.)
6. Thus, transphobia is an instance of sexism as it is fundamentally an act of the policing of gender norms. (From 1. and 5.)

Some other cool points I like…

• It stops postulating trans* as necessarily different than the norm. (However, it does carry the potential hazard of reabsorbing trans* into the invisible margin.)
• I hate “*phobia” terms because they are terribly misleading.

(For those of you who are also philosophy majors, the above is not intended to be a formal argument.)

(EDIT: Please look through the various critiques on my page about this post. This should be seen as an invitation into discussion and a very rough draft attempting to explore the intersectionality, connections, and similarities between sexism and cissexism. Attempting to combine the two has some cissexist consequences. Thank you to genderbitch and pianycist for the critiques.)

fuckyeahradicalcartoons:

Fuck cis centrism!

(via djkjfjglgk-deactivated20120430)

Having been reading bits of Revisioning Gender, and being so affected by gender and hyperaware of gender, I’ve been continually trying to make sense of what gender is.

First of all, I have to highly recommend the book. At least for me, it contains a lot of really beautiful conceptual discussions and challenges a number of assumptions we tend to make.

However, both from the book and from the discussions it has provided for, I’ve come up against something that I’d like to share.

It’s common thought (so far as I see it) among us gender aware people to make a distinction between sex and gender. This is in part due to gender ambiguities among those who are not gender typical, but also in part due to a conceptual need to account for trans* individuals.

One of the chapters argues that the sex/gender distinction is unworkable and actually an improper way to go about doing things, because we tend to assume sex as an objective biological duality and this may in fact be more socially/culturally driven than we think. I will leave this aside for now, because while I think it has some merit and should be investigated further, it is only the golden thread by which I arrived at this idea.

My idea is this:

We cannot account for the diversity of gender, nor its origin, by a simple sex/gender distinction. “Gender” simply means too many things, and as such is a fuzzy term. I argue that we should make further distinctions to make sure that we know what we are talking about.

I believe we should define the following (or something similar):

• Sex - Biological sex, not defined as binary, but in purely biological terms. Sex is gendered, but gender is not sexed. Thus, intersex people and ambiguously sexed individuals are sexed as they are, but this carries with it no inherent value. While biological sex DOES affect behavior/development, so do a variety of other biological functions and circumstances, and as such it is not a simple category. To quote Kinsey, “It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories.”
• Gender Role - Socially defined nodes of identity, with the expectations involved with such a role. This is not necessarily dual, as it could carry three or more places easily. Most importantly, I see this as cultural definitions of gender. There is MAN and WOMAN and HIJRA* and TWO-SPIRIT* (etc). These are placeholders and discrete categories. I also argue that there is a necessary OTHER category while existing nodes are exclusionary. Thus, our American/Western culture would recognize three places, MAN, WOMAN, and OTHER. The first two are obviously valued more than the third, and the third is poorly defined, and certainly a negative definition (defined by a lack of something) rather than a positive (defined by a presence of something) one. We may be moving towards a more nuanced system (particularly in queer subcultures), but for now this is how I see it. This is also the stage where sex is gendered. Bathrooms are evidence of this. This is relational from the outside in.
• Gender Identity, First Form - One’s personal identity. If I see myself as a man, or a woman, or a trans girl, or genderqueer, those are all personal categorizations. This is a more complex relational position, because it seems to function in a more circular fashion. Fundamentally, it is one’s identification from the inside, filtered through Gender Roles (defined through but not necessarily within culturally defined Gender Roles — you could come up with something else, but then it takes the position of something else), and back to one’s identity. There must be some function of non-socially-created gender, to account for the occasional split between externally assigned gender and internally/fundamentally assigned gender. I don’t think that gender identity functions in discrete categories, but rather works through the matrix of cultural Gender Roles. Thus, Gender Role and Gender Identity are in a feedback loop. This part alone is probably one of the most complex in my entire model, and much more needs to be said on it.
• Gender Identity, Second Form - I don’t know how else to define the difference between the two forms of Gender Identity. Both of them start from a place of innate identity, some sort of self-place that then relate somehow to the world. The difference comes in how they do so. This one is the one that specifically relates to one’s body. If I feel that my body is the right one for me, or the wrong one, or that I like certain aspects of my body but not others, then this is how. One can have different positions between the two Forms of Gender Identity. It is both for this reason and to account for the relation of transsexual people to their bodies that I feel this category is necessary.
• Gender Expression - If Gender Identity is one’s identity within a category, then Gender Expression is one’s expression of that identity. This category may not be necessary, instead working as a subprocess/nuance of Gender Identity. How this would work is again through Gender Roles, but would not carry with it the categorical weight of Identity. Rather, it would define one’s position within that identity — masculine/butch, feminine/femme, that sort of thing. Whether this would be a simple line between the points of masculine and feminine; a circle where masculine and feminine are at opposite points, androgynous (both) at a third point, and agendered (neither) opposite that; or something entirely different is likely contingent upon culture.

*Hijra and Two-Spirit are both cultural genders (Indian and Native American), and there are legitimate reasons to refrain from calling yourself one or the other without being of that culture/ethnicity. 

Making Classrooms Welcoming for Trans Students

genderqueer:

Tips for teachers.

fireeyedboi:

thehapfem:

Knitting truckers:  ”Kevin Abraham-Banks, a Sioux Falls, S.D., trucker, likes to knit while passing the time on the road. Here he makes a sweater for his wife.”  [Photo by Gretchen Abraham-Banks]

Not only is he knitting her a sweater, but he seems to also have hyphenated his last name, taking her last name along with his. Who is this dude? And does he have 5 million or so brothers?