You're viewing a single thread.
I think most cis people don’t understand their own gender that well. If you’re trans you’re kind of forced to do research about gender to find a sense of your identity. Through this research you learn a lot about what gender entails.
I don’t think a lot of cis people can even explain how they know they’re cis lol
Most cis people do understand their gender identity, I think.
The "they feel they were born in the right body" part is waaaay off, though. I was born in the cheapest body they could find in the back that would still run for a few decades. It wasn't "right" as much as briefly available and technically alive enough for the doctors to let my parents take it home with them. There are entire pieces that don't run at all, others are way out of spec, none of them look good. It's a mess in here.
as a cishet dude I also had the privilege to not worry about it that much. toxic masculinity can suck but if your family doesn't get weird about it you can just live without your gender really occupying much of your brain. I learned what I learned way later in life because it became an issue politically.
But in my personal life irl and online I have the privilege to afford to not care if I'm misgendered. weird thinking about how easily I could've been a wreck if I felt I was in the wrong body though.
you might get comments and whatnot but people get bullied for all kinds of things anyway. this is why I'm ultimately a gender abolitionist I guess, people gendering everything (toys, activities, clothes) never made sense to me.
I think the whole concept is pointless ultimately, but of course as long as we live in a gendered society I believe in people's right to be and express theirs however they like. trans rights are human rights.
Many trans people are gender abolitionists. The best way to abolish gender is to not adhere by the rules. All trans people break the rule that gender is decided at birth. Trans people fight for the freedom of choosing their own body, their own expression and their own sexuality. I my opinion that is the most gender abolitionist stance one could have.
I kinda wonder sometimes how many cis people actually are cis and just haven't had a reason to confront it. Like, I thought I was for a long time so it's not unreasonable to me that there are probably a lot more trans people than any of us think, they just don't ever discover it 🤔
I largely agree with you, however i think the more accurate thing is that no one is truly cis, no one is truly any label. We just have a tendency to force everything in the world into discrete categories, which is very annoying.
Even "biological sex" is a mess and not binary at all, so i see no real reason for the concepts of gender and sexuality to exist. All it does is limit people from being able to explore themselves and their preferences.
A comparison can be made to how no one cares what your diet is unless they're going to serve you food, why should anyone but those near a person care how they identify? Why should we have categories for sexual attraction anywhere other than on pornhub?
I can see where you're coming from and I kind of agree, from my perspective - and perhaps many other people's perspectives - being able to attach a label to myself after some exploration and introspection really helped me get things straight in my head. I felt much better about myself along the way when I was able to say "I'm asexual", then again when I was able to say "oh shit I'm agender too". I struggled more with "oh shit I'm transfem too" but that's partly because of all of the everything going on in the world lately and also because now I'm aware of dysphoria in a way I wasn't before I put a label on it. Overall, mixed result 🤷♀️
I think what we should be aiming at is not clinging rigidly to labels - it should be treated as OK and normal for people to think about their labels and if they still really feel like those labels fit at every point in the process. We treat it as relatively normal for someone to go "I think I'm straight?", "oh no wait, I think I'm bi?", "oh wait no, I think I'm gay", for example, but then we treat that final stage as the final stage, like now you're gay and it's set in stone.
The gender binary is a form of oppression that is enforced by medical doctors, governments, educators and anyone who benefits from it (a gendered society is easier to control). Trans and nonbinary gender labels exist to communicate a certain difference from the enforced status quo.
To say that labels should not be enforced is something many people (especially trans people) would agree with. Sometimes people get the impression that it’s trans people who decide these labels and also enforce them by simply existing. That is false. The labels are enforced by those who enforce the binary gender system. Enforced gender (and gender labels) can only ever be abolished once the binary gender system is abolished.
Also, gender isn’t necessarily bad. It’s only ever bad if it’s enforced without consent. Anyone who would like to describe themselves as woman or man or cis or trans should be free to do so. But it should never be forced upon anyone to choose a label.
There are probably many people who live a cis life who would live a different life if they were completely free in choosing their gender and expression. There’s many barriers currently that prevent people from realising and/or accepting the fact that they’re trans.
A good starting point would be normalising questioning it and exploring it, and making it OK at the end to conclude that you are trans or you are cis, but that feels like a long way off