The bed of roses isn’t
A blogger drew up a Cis Privilege Checklist in 2007. I took a look. I was unsurprised to find that I disagreed with much of it. Some of it I don’t agree is really privilege, but that doesn’t matter much. The part that does matter, I think, is the radical simplification and absolutism about what “cis” people experience. It’s another version of that yes or no thing I made such a point of refusing last summer. It’s profoundly wrong.
Like –
6. Clothing works for me, more or less.
- I am a size and shape for which clothes I feel comfortable wearing are commonly made
- There are clothes designed with bodies like mine in mind.
- If I am unable to find clothing that fits me well, I will still feel safe, and recognizable as my gender
- If I have a restriction on what clothing I will buy (e.g. vegan, allergy, non sweatshop), I can expect that specialty stores will have them in my size/shape.
No. Not at all. That’s never been my experience of clothes. It doesn’t worry me much now but that’s because I’ve been able to arrange my life so that I don’t have to show up in a workplace every day looking normal. And people can and do feel unsafe for a million reasons that have nothing to do with clothes – and for plenty of reasons that do have to do with clothes but have nothing to do with being “cis.”
9. Perception/acceptance of my gender is generally independent of:
- Anything mentioned in 8.*
- My clothing choices, how my clothing fits
- My adherence to traditional roles of my gender (both “too much” and “too little”)
- Holding sexist, sex-negative, or rape-culture beliefs
- Holding feminist or sex-positive beliefs
- My sexual choices/desires
- With whom? (gender, number)
- Frequency
- Circumstance (marriage, love, one-night-stand)
- What (e.g. penetrating/enveloping, fetishes, dominance)
- Being assertive, aggressive, or passive
- Being in a position of power
- Being intellectual or not
- My dietary habits
- My weight
- My height
- My occupation
- My musical taste
- My hairstyle
- My hobbies
- Wanting gendered things/actions labeled “immature” or “childish”
- Whether or not I have had a specific medical procedure
No, no, no, no, no. Not at all. Perception and acceptance of everyone’s gender is far from independent of all those things except the last one. It’s true that most cis people mostly don’t have to clarify what sex they are, but it’s not true that they’re all always free of criticism for how well or badly they fulfill their duties to their gender. I get that it’s far sharper and more intrusive and often more dangerous for trans people; I don’t dispute that. But the fact that it’s worse for trans people does not mean that it’s non-existent for cis people.
16. Commonly used terminology that differentiates my gender from other genders/sexes implies that I am normal, and that I have unquestionable right to the gender/sex I identify with. The implications these terms make about my gender, my body, my sex, my biology, and my past are all acceptable to me.
No. Absolutely not.
22. My gender is acknowledged universally, immediately, and without hesitation
- My birth certificate, drivers’ license, social security card, etc are correct from the moment I get them.
- I have no need to establish that I am a different gender than someone already thinks I am.
- I lived my childhood in a gender that felt appropriate for me at the time, and still does. I lived my childhood in the gender that I want to have lived it in.
- I was trained into whatever gender was appropriate for me, and so I am prepared to live in my current gender, without having to go back and learn vital skills I was not taught when I was young.
- I experienced puberty, and being an immature girl/boy, at a time in my life when there were allowances for puberty and immaturity.
- My preferences for my gender have been honored my whole life, by my doctor, my parents, my teachers, my professors, my relatives, my classmates, my bosses, etc., except before I was able to state preferences, when I was forced to adopt the gender which I now inhabit.
Oh, no, no, no, no. 1 is ok, 2 is ok-ish, but after that, it’s complete nonsense. No, my gender did not “feel appropriate for me at the time” and no it doesn’t still. Every time I turn the damn tv on I’m made aware that I’m not “a woman” as the world of tv-makers understands women. That idea of what “a woman” is has never, ever, ever “felt appropriate” to me. Aha! says the alert privilege-spotter – so you’re trans then, you just won’t admit it. No, I’m not – I’m not “a man” either. Ok then you’re non-binary.
But in that sense maybe everybody is non-binary. Or the vast majority of people. Or well over half. Or half, or a substantial fraction. We don’t know. But it’s complete bullshit to claim that everyone who isn’t trans is described by that list under 22. It’s a mistake to think that everyone who doesn’t have your particular complication or difficulty or disadvantage is therefore wallowing in bliss and perfection. Life isn’t like that, and most people aren’t like that.
I must have missed the classes. :P I wasn’t “trained into” my gender. I picked stuff up by watching my mother (while I had her) and other women, but I sometimes felt adrift and perplexed.
What is meant by “vital skills” in this context anyway, I wonder.
Of all the things about this list that bug me (and there are a lot), the biggest one is that it reflects no understanding of the power dynamics at play. Some assertions are superficially correct but reflect a blindness to the underlying problem of unequally-allocated power.
Take for example “I was trained into whatever gender was appropriate for me.” I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that they mean “I was trained into girl gender or boy gender as determined by my sex/genital characteristics.” Who on earth would think that being trained into girl gender is the same privilege as being trained into boy gender? You have to be either ignorant of the power difference or just find it inconvenient to acknowledge.
“Cis” seems to be achieving longstanding anti-woman goals by helping supposedly-liberal people ignore the relevant power dynamics. The goal of gender is to keep women down. Trans people are caught in the splash damage from that, and the fact that some “cis” women use and benefit from the system doesn’t change it.
Actually, I take 9 to mean: “people will accept I am the gender I say I am, independent of 1,2,3… ” which is probably mostly true. Doesn’t mean people aren’t policed as to how they’re performing, of course.
I think it’s mainly a good list. Many of the items on the list are probably not true for women in general: healthcare (wrt contraception / abortion), privacy, “wronging me is taken seriously”, though I suspect they impact trans people, or more specifically trans women, even more strongly.
But what really gets me are the privacy issues. I can’t imagine what it must be like, to know that any kind of trivial thing – letters, photos, a greeting, a routine presentation of documents – can turn into a nightmare, where intensely private and perhaps painful experiences are exposed to the eyes of unsympathetic strangers.
The whole trans issue shouldn’t serve to keep women down, I agree, but there is such a thing as cis privilege, and we should acknowledge that.
That’s not even true for cis middle-aged straight men unless they happen to be both affluent and thin.
6.3 is a fair point, though it depends on your definition of “accepted.”
On the clothing one? Absolutely not. My shoulders happen to be broad. I often find even XXL clothing, baggy elsewhere, to pinch and pucker at the shoulders. Men’s shirts, otoh, fit my shoulders fine and still have room for my big ol’ boobies.
Being recognized as female does not make me feel safe. Or respected.
I guess you have to have some kind of privilege to think cis-women aren’t questioned as women if they are too brainy, don’t want kids, dress masculine, cut their hair short, etc.
Delft @ 3 – I did acknowledge that.
My point exactly…although it could be not so much some kind of privilege as being so focused on your own issues that you just can’t see other people’s.
Ophelia –
A huge YES! to everything you said. Clothes don’t fit or are ‘too girly’, and office apparel is appalling to my taste. I suppose that makes me a femme phobe,
I’ve been fighting the gender straightjacket all my life and thought that at my age, after finding a job I can wear what I want and no one cares that I don’t display ‘normal’ gender behavior (except, of course, “be nice to the boys and tread lightly around their egos”, I’m stunned to find there is a group of feminists that insist on defining ‘woman’ as behavior and identity.
WTF does that make me?
Being trained into our gender is kind of a really big part of what makes feminists angry about society.
And gender training isn’t great for boys either. Fragile masculinity, toxic masculinity, and bullied boys all are thanks to that privilege.
I know, gender training is terrible for boys except for the most “typical” types. I suppose there must be some of those, because if there weren’t, surely all this “man up” “grow a pair” “I always wanted a daughter” “you throw like a girl” shit would die out.
And, again, this is why I find the idea of “cis privilege” so dubious.
Yes, but I guess I was lucky: I experienced little to no explicit “training”*–and I sometimes felt out of things around other women (not all other women–the ones who were big on what I guess the kids would call “performative” gender expression). Gender expectations, though, are a really big part of it for all of us. Apologies if I’m being pedantic here, but that word “training” seems wrong here; for me the word implies deliberate, systematic education. Not that I doubt that such gender “training” is a thing. I’m dubious it is or confers “privilege” though.
* When I was 3 or 4 a neighbor boy bullied me. I told my dad, ex-Golden Gloves, and he taught me to throw a punch. Next time the kid picked on me, I decked him. Then my mom was upset with me. I guess you could say I grew up with mixed messages.
OB @ 11, even ‘atypical’ boys/men will conform and use the phrasing you mention because it gives them cover and makes them part of the group. I know I did. It felt kinda cheap, but was better than getting yet another hiding/mocking/exclusion.
LM @ 12, You’re being way too literal on the training front. Sure sometimes that occurs, but mostly it’s by example or simply performative in nature. Kids are sponges and they soak up for more cues at a far younger age than adults give them credit for. It’s just when you get the rare child who is articulate and confident enough to comment on or question what they are seeing that you realise what is going on in those tiny skulls.
Rob, well, some of us either never learned that stuff or learned it by trial and error. It’s not a given that cis women all know correct way to apply make up, for example. (I always struggled with that, and never did get the hang of applying eyeliner.)
So, again, I have to wonder: what counts as a “vital skill” in this context? Knowing how to apply makeup? Being able to walk in heels? Consciously or unconsciously avoiding conflict and deferring to men?
The boys who were picked on become fathers who tell their little boys to man up, because they are afraid their boys will be victims and also not be able to compete.
I was trained to be a girl, even though I didn’t know it, when my mother taught me that saving a relationship by apologizing is more important than standing on the facts. My husband was trained to be a boy, whether or not he knew it, when he learned that apologizing destroyed credibility, even if he knew he’d done badly.
Lady Mondegreen, I believe you, me and Samantha Vimes are very much on the same page although we have expressed ourselves differently depending upon our individual experiences.
So many things on that list just had me saying “nope” for a whole host of reasons.
The bit that bothered me most was the introduction:
“So, for everyone: Don’t quibble with privilege lists. If you read them from a standpoint of wanting to deny your privilege, you’ll come out having successfully denied it but learning nothing. Read sympathetically and think about it. If there’s something that seems like a privilege not all cis people have, try to consider about why someone would put it on the list, what larger scale patterns I might be to pointing to, rather than just rejecting it whole cloth. If there’s something you want to refine, or make better, add, or something you want clarified, let me know. This list is subject to continual revision without notice.”
In other words don’t you dare disagree with what I tell you is your experience. If you do that shows your privilege more.
I do not need to be persuaded that it is very difficult to be trans and I would not deny that trans people have problems with all the things on the list or that many are specific to trans experience. However, I resent being told that I am not allowed to point out that I actually can’t take many of those things for granted for a whole host of reasons.
Lady Mondegreen @12,
I think ‘acculturation’ a better word for the concept to which Samantha refers.
[oops]
Having Googled, the word I should have used is ‘enculturation’.
The development of conforming gender ‘style’ is not systematic at all. Random commercial input, relentless bullying of the machismo-deficient, simple infant responses to the behavior of adults etc. etc.
I certainly was never given an opportunity, let alone a ‘privilege’ to be at home in my gender, or have my body deemed ‘acceptable’ by any majority standard.
Transgendered folks have terrible circumstances to deal with, and face VERY real threats. This kind of waffly, post-modern, piffle is a set of empty gestures. So much easier to accuse Ophelia of ‘oppression,’ or even murder, than it is to address real trouble with real action.
The language of Competitive Victimology, Purity Policing, and yes, Political Correctness, bears a shocking resemblance to the Perpetual Offendedness of theocratic fascists.
This is just a list of “problems I have, that I imagine other people must not have”.
Lots of special-snowflaking here, presumably to contradict the same points you’d otherwise accept (beauty-compliance is a form of oppression, and most women are aware of the many ways in which they are deficient in their compliance because full compliance is impossible). When trans girls and women make this same point, suddenly butch, self-identified “nerdy,” cis women have never heard these lessons! They don’t know what you’re talking about! They don’t even FEEL like women! But they sure know what being oppressed as a woman feels like. Funny that.
Mookie, other than undertaking an indignant flounce what’s your point? Individual experience and behaviour covers a spectrum. That applies equally to cis-women and trans-women. It is entirely possible for individual cis-women to miss or reject socialisation with respect to gender norms. They will then experience a range of both positive and negative responses depending on their circumstances. Similarly so for trans women. The fact is that individual experience differs does not invalidate the ‘average experience’ or vice versa. It is exactly why one word answers to complex questions are seldom appropriate.
I don’t see how you got those points from this list, nor how you imagine anyone here is contradicting them.
Please explain.
Actually, it’s not funny at all. We’re oppressed because of our biological identity, whether or not we “feel like” women.
True, some of us are then also be oppressed for not expressing the “right” gender, or expressing gender the “wrong” way. That’s true for cis as well as trans people, though trans people, rejecting their assumed “right” gender as extremely as they do, on the whole get it even worse. But bigotry toward (specifically) trans people does not make statements like “I was trained in whatever gender was appropriate to me,” coherent descriptions of “privilege.”
I think there’s a bit of the availability heuristic at work here. A trans person must see around them an awful lot of cis people who seem to fit easily into their gender roles. This does not mean that all cis people easily fit into their roles; which makes universals like “if you are cis then you had it easier than me regarding gendered behaviour X” wrong, because not all cis people do.
There’s also the issue of gender-role gatekeeping around the availability of therapy and surgery for trans people; you typically can’t get transition surgery unless you have spent a certain amount of time “living as” a member of your target gender; this in turn pressures trans people to conform to the gender stereotypes, and so we end up with trans people effectively pushing for gender-essentialist stereotyped roles when feminists are pushing for freedom from those same roles.