Equally Othering

One can generally determine the intent of an idea by its supporters’ explanation of. This is particularly true when it comes to politically loaded issues where the greater importance is maintaining political correctness rather than respecting conflicting positions. A blogger recently provided a good example of using political correctness to bolster an untenable. When questioned about the meaning of “cisgender,” the blogger responded with:

[Cisgender is] not mental and physical [gender]. Rather, it’s that the gender you were assigned at birth, and the gender you identify as, are the same.

The poster later stated that “cisgender” is essentially the norm, so there is no need for a special term in normal (i.e. general) discourse, to which the blogger replied:

Maybe it doesn’t come up in your “normal” discourse, Ron, but I find that the term is useful in my day to day discourse.

Plus, as a political matter, it’s important that the unmarked “defaults” have names. Imagine if, instead of the words “Jewish” and “Christian,” we had only “Jewish” and “normal.” Or if, instead of “heterosexual” and “homosexual,” we had only “normal” and “homosexual.” We can’t discuss things on an equal basis without an equal vocabulary.

The issue is not actually the term or the usage of the term “cisgender,” but what the term represents, i.e. its political motivation. The notion that a person is assigned a gender at birth and that biology plays absolutely no role in a person’s gender is a political belief, and those who agree with that belief seek to enforce it on everyone. The problem, as is true with all beliefs, is that they cannot fully explain it. It is something that is just accepted outright, leading to the conflict about identifying terms or transpeople defining everyone else’s identity as “cisgender.”

Several of the posters fall back on the argument that average people should just accept the term “cisgender” because it works for describing a difference. The irony of the argument is that the same people would not, by virtue of political correctness, accept that as a valid reason in a whole host of other situations. It may work well for white people like the blogger to call people born with high melanin counts who are or whose ancestors were from Africa “negroes.” However, the people he would call that, particularly those in the United States, would likely object to being called such. There is technically nothing wrong with the term as it describes (not really) what those people look like.  However, would it be reasonable for a white person to respond with “Why does it bother you? I’m just describing what you look like and it’s less clumsy than saying ‘people born with high melanin counts who are or whose ancestors were from Africa’?” The examples are not limited to African Americans. There are many groups who do not want to be referred to by a host of different labels, and in a politically charged environment those labels would not be used because using such terms allows the group labeling them to control and dictate their identity.

Therein lies the issue and it is that the term “cisgender” is less about normalizing transpeople and more about othering everyone else. The overwhelming majority of the human population is not transgender. In any other instance in which one deals with the same rare rate of variance, one finds that only disproportionate group is named. There are tigers and white tigers, jaguars and melanistic jaguars, lions and white lions, etc. At no point would anyone suggest renaming the rest of the species because there is a rare variance among them. Likewise, no one implies that white tigers are not tigers by calling them white tiger. It is assumed that that they are tigers, that through some genetic rarity, have white fur.

In that sense, the term “cisgender” is simply a political ploy designed to — ironically — prevent a discussion on an equal basis by requiring one group to accept without question the transgender position.  It is about forcing others to accept ideas, and it is done through challenging those people’s self-identities. The overwhelming majority of the people labeled “cisgender” do not think they were assigned their gender at birth and that their sense of their own identity matches society’s determination. The overwhelming majority of men and women consider themselves as such because they were born that way.  They think they were biologically set up to be that way (which is curiously considered “transphobic”).

A term like “cisgender” implies that it is just pure happenstance, which attacks those people’s identities, intentionally or not. If the goal is discussion on an equal basis, one cannot start by calling into question another person’s identity while demanding that they not do the same in return.  More importantly, of those who know what “cisgender” is supposed to mean, the majority do not want to be called such. In terms of politics, it is bad form to call a group something they do not want to be called and even worse form to justify it with, “It works for us.” Again, if the goal is discussion on an equal basis, then one must be willing to extend the same respect one wishes to receive, which includes respecting other people’s right to define themselves regardless of how convenient it is for one to do it for them.