Or, I wrote a mini-essay in response to a random meme slogan and now I’m turning it into a blog post

For context, the slogan was “Cis-passing is not privilege, cis-passing is a survival tactic”. As you might realise from this blog post existing, i have Thoughts about this one.

A brief discussion of The Cis

To not clickbait with that title, I should probably do a brief explanation for those in the back who might not be familiar with uhhh “cis” people.

The long story short is that cis is a category that exists definitionally in contrast to the Other of trans people, unable to exist without being that which it stands in contrast to. To be trans is to transcend the gender you were assigned at birth, to be a scary transgression of “natural”, and to be subjugated to pursue a non-existent ideal. So thus, to be cis is to be natural and ontologically Good, on a pedestal above the Other.

And both are socially constructed, not existing outside of the culture in which they are defined. Cis is something you perform and something you can earn and have taken away, not something you inherently can be – see: TERFs and friends in sport policing cis womanhood, among other things.

Privilege and oppression: reloaded

Back in August last year, I wrote a little thing about privilege in the context of whiteness and how it’s more complicated than just, “you are X, you get privilege X and you are Y so you do not get privilege X”. So when I saw the above slogan, I immediately smelled another case of this, with a dash of terminal onlineness to the side. I would posit that a discourse that perverts the discussion of intersectionality to turn it into a competition and oppression qua measure of goodness incentivises minimising anything that could be seen as a privilege to increase one’s measure of how good they are a priori to their actions. And I will not laboriously make the point that actually, no one is intrinsictly good nor bad, as that should be quite obvious.

What even is privilege?

Privilege is a description of an advantaging of one person over another for arbitrary factors. Privilege is not and should not be a currency or a measure of someone being inherently a Bad Person, but here we are. Having it is like having a car in a car-dependant– you can get places you couldn’t, you can take others with you using it, and you’re only a bad person if you argue against creating better mobility for everyone so that all people can go places and idk uhh ram YIMBY gatherings with your car or something.

Privilege is also not additive, subtractive, or mathematical in any way. You can’t add up white, trans, gay, and neurodivergent to get a better number than black, cis, het, and neurotypical and win an argument. But I wouldn’t be drawing that example if I hadn’t see it before, would I?

Cis passing is NOT a privilege

And now we get back to the main show, that whole Mess.

I think that the suggestion that cis-passing is “survival” and not a privilege can only come from a place of terminal onlineness, and particularly, a misunderstanding or even an intentional obfuscation of intersectionality. If we indulge the notion of mathematical privilege, trans and invisibly queer is a worse goodness ranking than trans and very visibly queer, which is a problem. The solution? Wield the accurate observation that passing is not, in fact, all sunshine and roses as a tool to absolve oneself of the guilt of having privilege compared to other people who also live in the same category as you. I don’t know if this is going too hard in the club but I genuinely think that people who are cis-passing saying that it’s actually a survival tactic (pls think of oppression!!) are comparable to wealthy people who complain about how hard it is to have [large amount of money]. Like, yeah, it can be stressful having to manage large sums and it limits you in how you act but at the end of the day, it massively lubricates your passage through society so it’s not The Most Evil Thing Ever to want more money than you currently have if you’re poor. Heck, even if you’re afloat but not like Wealthy™️, you’re not bad for wanting $$$

Interestingly, cis-passing can be both a privilege and an axis along which someone could face hardship (read: be oppressed). It doesn’t need to be something that marks you as better than others and thus intrinsicly evil, it can be messy and complex and multifaceted without reducing down into a yardstick for whether your take or the other person’s take on an issue is More Valid and Correct.

But but internalised transphobia!!

Yes and?

I’m not one of those trans people who wants to pass as cis (what even is “cis non-binary”?) but a not insignificant plurality of trans people do want to pass as cis, because that’s just what their brain is saying. Further, trans people have existed as long as humans have, and societies look very different to 1500s Aztec empire or 300BCE Greek city-states, or even 1890s British Empire. The definition of cis-passing is as diverse as societies in the present world and in history, so to merely argue that it comes from a place of internalised transphobia just doesn’t pass the pub test. I find it far more interesting to interrogate western beauty standards in the context of what people actually mean when they say “I want to look cis”, but I don’t think the idea is fully formed for many people who are trying to just grasp at straws to not look too privileged.

So let’s interrogate it here. Is it bad to want to look cis because it makes things easier and not everyone can be an activist, is it bad because being cis is an unhealthy standard to strive for and is assimilationist, or is it because most people mean they want to be a cis conventionally attractive version of their preferred binary gender? BZZZZT nope, it’s not because of the first one. It’s actually because of the third one, as “conventionally attractive” is rooted in western white cisheteronormative ideals of beauty that definitionally exclude people who are not western white people. The internalised transphobia I guess comes into play with that second option, but even then, see the above “trans people have existed throughout various cultures and times” and I think it’s not so simple as “you shouldn’t want to be cis!!”.

As someone who doesn’t want to be cis¹, there is no aspirational Cis Non-Binary™️ for me to be, but I understand that a lot of people just want to live their life and not be pushed into inherently being a political statement just from being themselves. Society obviously disagrees, because allegedly queer people are Scary, but is it so bad for some people to just want to exist? Is it fair to call them out for internalised transphobia? I would say probably not, unless they then start to dunk on people who don’t “pass” or don’t even want to, which is where you get bullshit like 4chan’s /LGBT/ board where the crabs in the bucket pull each other down with extreme prejudice. But I would hope that it’s clear how that’s different to purely just wanting to appear as cis, for various normal and fine reasons.

A digression to idealised non-binaryness

I wrote above that there’s no “Cis Non-Binary” thing for me to want to be, but there is still (within western anglophone societies) an ideal of non-binary that wields social capital in some contexts over less normalised or “traditional” ways of non-binary existence. Could I be that? No, I’m AMAB and don’t sound vaguely transmasculine, but then again, it’s a case that feels somewhat similar to “model minority” mixed with infantilisation of women (or, in this case, people who society imposes womanhood onto) so it’s not the greatest state of affairs in any case. Needless to say, FUCK racism, transphobia, and misogyny et al.

Online (in)activism

To tie this all up with a neat bow, I would suggest that the reason people even feel a need to post a slogan about how a thing that brings some privilege to themselves is not reaaaaally a privilege is because they have been induced into thinking that posting means something. I’m not going to relitigate that, but needless to say, the analysis of privilege in online discourse is ineffective in doing anything useful at best, and often actively harming people’s mental health. And yeah, I’m also not doing anything useful other than having fun writing. That’s art, baby!