Simply by existing
Huh. Assigned Male has a new strip out.
Wednesday’s update is a collaboration I did with Eli Erlick. Don’t appropriate trans experience!
So…trying to escape or reject or disavow gender altogether is appropriating trans experience?
What does that mean, exactly? That everyone has to be either trans or cis? That choosing a third option is appropriating trans experience? That trans people have a monopoly on how we all think about gender? That trans people have a veto on what we say about gender?
That’s not how any of this works.
That comic is incoherent. It seems to be criticizing the following imaginary thought process:
– Some people don’t identify as women because they believe gender is an oppressive construct.
– Trans women identify as women, which perpetuates said oppression.
– Therefore, trans women are oppressing cis women.
But that doesn’t follow, because trans women aren’t the only women who identify as women. Lots and lots of cis women identify as women. So the last bullet should read “trans women and cis women who identify as women are oppressing” … and then I guess the question is, whom? Themselves? And is it now an OK thing to say, now that it doesn’t single out trans women as the bad guys?
Honestly, put that way, I almost kind of agree with it.
Whoever writes that strip is dim-witted little brat. It’s beyond puerile.
How the fuck is this not telling someone they’re defining their own gender wrong? How the fuck is this not saying, “No, you are a cis woman and saying otherwise is transphobic?” How the fuck is that supposed to be okay when any version of that thinking directed toward any self-identified trans person is abetting genocide?
Trans women and cis women are welcome to identify as women. What they are not welcome to do is to claim that everyone must identify as something.
And I think there is a straw person being set up here. It seems that Margaret *feels like* a woman, and would prefer to identify as a woman, but has *decided* not to, on the basis that it is unethical for her to do so. Of course, it is threatening to a transgender person to suggest that gender identity could be just a matter of a “decision” or a “choice”. But, as those of use who do not identify strongly with any gender know very well, in some cases, it actually is.
Margaret probably does NOT *feel* like a woman. She probably has a factual awareness of being female and having had experienced socialization as a woman. However, she’s had a sense of awareness of social definitions as oppressive, too. Margaret has decided that “not feeling like a woman”, because she isn’t sure what that means, means she’s probably not cis. She’s not experiencing feeling like a *man* though, so she’s decided agender is the *honest* thing to say, and therefore ethical because pretending that being a woman is something she feels is dishonest, and oppressive in that it perpetuates the “gender box” that she and everyone else gets shoved into before they have a chance to develop a sense of self without gender socialization.
She isn’t trying to appropriate the trans experience so much as relate to it, to understand and bring some sense of gender identity or statement of lack thereof into her life.
The kid is trying to guilt-trip her into *not* doing self-exploration.
Margaret is a straw person, @Theo, for sure. A straw person set up so that the comic can paint women who think that “gender is an oppressive social construct” as mean bitches.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2014/06/07/about-that-hate-crime-i-committed-at-university-of-chicago
@Samantha Vimes #5
I think your description of Margaret (which pretty much also describes my own experience of and relationship to gender) is more realistic than what the comic is portraying. But of course many trans people and “allies” claim that this approach is simply an artifact of cis-privilege. I’ve even heard some people who describe themselves as genderqueer or genderfluid claim that they feel just as strongly about whichever gender they are currently identifying with as the (possibly different) one they identified with last week, and utterly reject the idea that there are people who honestly do not ever strongly identify with a gender. But the fact that a person is uncomfortable in their box doesn’t necessarily mean that they are in the wrong box – maybe there shouldn’t be a box at all.
Cue outrage from people who love the box and detest the idea that maybe there shouldn’t be a box at all.
I identify as agender and I’m male. I must be a really unsavory character.