I’ve noticed more frequent usage of the word “cisgendered” among my friends’ facebook feeds and progressive news media outlets. Cisgendered means: “You identify with the gender assigned to you at birth.” "Assigned" makes my gender feel inauthentic. When was I assigned a gender? Was I not born with a penis, with a Y chromosome? Was it not evident that no gender assignment was necessary? Why should I have to identify as something at all when I am just living out my gender in the most natural way I know how?
Well, there are a few things to consider when responding to this line of questioning.
Biology vs Society
Society’s conference of gender upon the individual is not necessarily based in biology. Indeed, masculinity and femininity are what gender really looks like in at-large society’s eyes; “gender” is therefore a much bigger (and complicated) deal than it would be if we were operating on solely biological criteria. See: Patriarchy, cultural and societal gender norms.
Privilege
Accepting a label is also an acknowledgement of privilege. During (more) racist eras of our nation’s history, white people ascribed to black people any number of labels, the n-word among the most frequent and heinous. They did not, however, call each other “white.” They called each other “sir” or “folk” or “lady” or “woman,” but they did not use a race label among their own kind. This was because they refused to acknowledge in honest terms what their privilege really was. For example, instead of giving voting rights to “landowning members of the republic” as the American Constitution is writ, they could have just cut to the chase and said “all white males may vote.” Race language pertinent to the oppressor is usually absent in history. Words like “pure” or “high-breed” or “high race” have been used, though. (See: Third Reich.) It is therefore an expected feeling as a cisgendered person unaware of my privilege as such to feel compartmentalized (or judged by my identity) in accepting the fact that others may label me as cisgendered at their discretion, in the same way that I may label someone else as “trans.” It is no coincidence that the most frequently labeled demographics also come from a legacy of oppression. We take for granted that “others” have a label, but we have always just been “us.”
I have often wondered if the dis-identity many people experience with their assigned gender is mostly a consequence of the social and cultural enforcement of gender and whether the biological features of gender seem to be associated with that gender because that’s just how society at large interprets them. It almost seems like biological gender has been taken hostage by social and cultural gender (for millennia). At the end of the day one is forced to ask: What do we really know about gender?
Well, there are a few things to consider when responding to this line of questioning.
Biology vs Society
Society’s conference of gender upon the individual is not necessarily based in biology. Indeed, masculinity and femininity are what gender really looks like in at-large society’s eyes; “gender” is therefore a much bigger (and complicated) deal than it would be if we were operating on solely biological criteria. See: Patriarchy, cultural and societal gender norms.
Privilege
Accepting a label is also an acknowledgement of privilege. During (more) racist eras of our nation’s history, white people ascribed to black people any number of labels, the n-word among the most frequent and heinous. They did not, however, call each other “white.” They called each other “sir” or “folk” or “lady” or “woman,” but they did not use a race label among their own kind. This was because they refused to acknowledge in honest terms what their privilege really was. For example, instead of giving voting rights to “landowning members of the republic” as the American Constitution is writ, they could have just cut to the chase and said “all white males may vote.” Race language pertinent to the oppressor is usually absent in history. Words like “pure” or “high-breed” or “high race” have been used, though. (See: Third Reich.) It is therefore an expected feeling as a cisgendered person unaware of my privilege as such to feel compartmentalized (or judged by my identity) in accepting the fact that others may label me as cisgendered at their discretion, in the same way that I may label someone else as “trans.” It is no coincidence that the most frequently labeled demographics also come from a legacy of oppression. We take for granted that “others” have a label, but we have always just been “us.”
I have often wondered if the dis-identity many people experience with their assigned gender is mostly a consequence of the social and cultural enforcement of gender and whether the biological features of gender seem to be associated with that gender because that’s just how society at large interprets them. It almost seems like biological gender has been taken hostage by social and cultural gender (for millennia). At the end of the day one is forced to ask: What do we really know about gender?
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