It’s very popular today to call women who were born and raised as females ‘cis’ which Wikipedia defines as a person whose gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth.
This post is not going to delve into radical feminist theory about gender because we’re all aware of it. Instead I’m going to post a comment I found that perfectly explains why ‘cis privilege’ is a bullshit concept and a bullshit term.
CIS privilege does not exist for women. There is NO privilege to be had for ANY woman when it comes to gender. For us, it’s a no win situation; you conform, you get abused, you don’t conform, you get abused.
***The ONLY way someone can think that being a feminine (gender conforming) women is a privilege, is if they believe that “feminine” and all that goes with it, is an appropriate, even natural, way for a woman to be. They would have to see the female gender role (feminity) as positive, desirable, a social and personal good that should be upheld, even celebrated. Obviously, this means they are not just accepting of the female reality, but also of our oppression, as our role is the basis of our oppression.***
Again-
If a woman conforms to the gender role designated, by society, for women, she gets abused for it. If she doesn’t conform, she gets abused.While the actual oppressive acts may appear to differ between the two, it’s all the same in practice: objectification, economic coercion, harassment, threats, rape, assault, murder. Whether a woman conforms or not, the male violence will still be targeting her. For being a female.
Thus, use of the word “CIS” confers nothing but contempt for women, even though it is frequently done unwittingly by other women/libfems. Not only is there no privilege in CIS-ness, the use of the term also says that the woman is OK with her gender role! I am not the only woman that thinks “I am NOT OK with the means of my oppression!”. It’s an insult to be called CIS, not just a easy way to label someone “not trans”.
What about the (trans) MEN???
When M2T are abused, discriminated against, assaulted, or raped, it is because they are taking on attributes of the oppressed class. To be feminine is to be abused. I know that trans suffer dangers due to their non conforming actions, and this is reprehensible and should stop.*The abuse of M2T does NOT show that women have privilege! If MEN get abused in high numbers when they take on the FEMALE role, doesn’t that prove that the female role is the target for oppression? So, on what planet would the original “owner” of that role have any advantage at all?
Yes.
Mancheeze 
This is something I tried to say once in one of your comment sections, but this says it better. I’ll try, again, my way though:
If you, by some horrible twist of fate, fit a certain view of womanhood by virtue of the fact that you were born with a particular appearance – this is not a *privilege*! It is a nightmare – a living hell, to which you will be subjected and be expected to ENJOY it.
If you have the misfortune of looking like Miss January – this is not a “privilege”! It is a nightmare. You will look at yourself in the mirror every morning when you get up and try to figure out how not to “look like a whore” today. This hardly a privilege.
If you are then sought after by human traffickers because of your particular appearance – this is NOT a *privilege.”
I could go on… but, surely I’m communicating.
Oh, and you are not allowed “not to conform.” It’s not an option. You have a target on your forehead. You cannot escape. Even death may not be an escape because some pervert is going to comment on your body on the autopsy table and rape your corpse.
Non-conformity is not an option. You ARE what they say YOU ARE. You have no choice.
This is NOT a “privilege.”
Edited by HMQ for endless mansplaining and patriarchal assholery.
Edited for links by HMQ
‘Radical feminist theory’ <<<<< Do we really want to listen to anything he says after this?
I don't think so.
Edited by HMQ for clarity.
Just a small point here. Men are socialized (and almost certainly biologically inclined) to hierarchicalize everything. Gender is the model of setting the sexes apart, making men the dominant party in the dichotomy that is constructed. The men then rigidify the roles created and hold on to the power they have taken from the “Other” they have created jealously.
Not content with this, men have invaded the gender of Woman. They have immediately begun to consolidate power by setting themselves apart from women. They have attempted to redefine women according to their desires. Taking advantage of their media savvy, male power, and the sympathy of women, they have set biological women apart and objectified us as a bogus class they call ciswomen.
Then they have claimed that “ciswomen” are oppressors (by being members of a “privileged” group).. They have hierarchicalized our oppression to their advantage.
Reality is male. It is whatever men decide it is. Women are now to lose the reality of our oppression so that transactivists can focus the world’s eyes on their problems. We are to return to complete invisibility and scorn in all hierarchies.
That’s the idea, anyway.
The question is whether by giving this our serious attention we are assisting in making all this into a real threat.
All this has to be placed in the perspective of the numbers involved — a few thousand transactivists at most, versus a few BILLION women.
Is any of this really a threat to our liberation? Or is it just another grotesque insult to our dignity as an oppressed group, piled on top of all the others, that once again is derailing us and siphoning off our energy? should we consider just pointing out the insult and not in any way taking it seriously?
I’m whining. I’m an MRA.
The owner of this blog erased all my whining so I’ll whine moar.
I listened to an hour long podcast w/ Sheila Jeffreys. Here’s the link http://t.co/qzT2EuFg43 search for Nov 3. access hour.
She seems to think this whole transmovement will end. It will be a flash in the pan that ppl will look back on and say ‘wtf?’
She thinks feminists are waking up to the problems of calling women ‘cis’ and ‘transmisogyny’ and all that other happy shit.
It’s a great podcast but it will only b available a few more days.
Thanks for the link. I just finished listening to it.
I’m already looking at and saying WTF?!
There is certainly a trendy, ephemeral, campy pomo, over-the-top feeling to transactivism. I’m not talking here about the trans people who are trying to assimilate with respect, and those who are working to ensure legal equality. I’m talking about the people who make trendy-sounding wild statements such as that there is no such thing as a biological female, and who are muscling in to feminists groups not to support feminism but to deconstruct it, sow discord, and siphon off feminist energy.
Statements like that seem to me to be insincere from the beginning. They are intentional provocations that reach far beyond what the activists seek, that are made to cause their real goals to seem more moderate in comparison.Their tactics are similar to MRA tactics of aggressiveness and provocation, designed to bring up the media profile of their tiny group rather than to discuss anything substantive.
The mechanics and politics of surgery and hormine replacements are of narrow interest to feminists. Our concern there is whether the gender system is causing us women to injure themselves. This could be discussed without much animosity, I think.
But the vocal transactivists are attacking women wholesale when they attempt to appropriate the oppression of women for themselves. To do so, they denigrate the significance of women’s bodily and childhood and historical experiences. This is unacceptable. It is also hugely insulting to all the women who have struggled so hard to define and thereby begin to end our oppression.
They are not a class or caste of women, they are a group that is experiencing oppression, if that is the word, on a specific basis that is only tangentially related to women’s oppression. They are a tiny group that perhaps believe they can only gain a voice through appropriating the hard-fought-for voice of women. So they pronounce themselves a new category of woman, that is at the height of an oppression pyramid they construct within the group of Woman.
Any potential strategic alliance or solidarity radfems might initially have is made impossible by this presumption and aggression. Not only are they losing these potentials, they are also wasting THEIR energy in focusing on their appropriative efforts instead of going after their oppressors, the ones who do injure them and scorn them.
I am not a special category of woman. I am a woman, with commonalities to all women worldwide, including our common biology, our common socialization, our common birth into a subordinate worldwide caste, our long common history as property, and our common goals to become fully “human”. I will not be re-marginalized by attempts to shove me into a “special” category, as the concept “cis” does.
There are some voices within the trans community speaking up more reasonably recently. I hope they are heard and that the current direction is abandoned.
Yes. There are some transvoices that are reasonable and respectful of women.
I’ve been reading this blog http://transhumanoid.wordpress.com/
It’s great.
I agree with her. The foundations are too flimsy. The radical feminist critique is pretty much unassailable. People with brains are only going to find flat, unqualified declarations like, “Trans women are women” persuasive for so long.
More on Reality is Male:
“He generalizes that because he doesn’t feel grounded in and connected to his own skin, the body is thus an abstraction, and that women—biological females, always—must surrender to this notion, agreeing with him that it is not, in fact, that he has a disorder which views biology as an abstraction, but that rather biology itself is generally abstract, and our own consciousness and healthy relationship to our own biology is a violation of him. His insistence that his own mental state is an objective reality which women must participate in is projection and abusive. “Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with absolute truth” (Simone de Beauvoir). ”
quoted from Radfem Reblog: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Radfem-Reblog/1412262375662461
Exactly what’s happening ie. misgendering.
‘OMG she called me HE! How could she harm me so!’
But of course it gets worse than just calling someone a TERF for misgendering.
The trouble is that her (womanofthewoods) scenario of men still objectifying a woman after she is dead has already been preserved on film. 2 to 3 years ago channel 4 in a Despatches programme reported on the UN investigation s of alleged war crimes committed by the Sri Lankan government in the last few months of the civil war with the Tamil tigers s. One piece of footage clearly showed dead women bodies on the ground being loaded onto a truck. most of the women were face down but one woman’s face could be seen. She was identified as a news reader on televsion and this meant other victims could be identified. The footage was of great significance and the soldiers voices were translated into English. It was clear that they had raped the women (nearly all were naked a few still had pants on). They had been made to lie face down in two neat rows evenly spaced apart and then executed by a shot in the back of the head. As the bodies were being dumped on a truck you clearly hear one man say to another that one of the corpses has a body. The others man agrees but says the tits are better on another corpse. If Mike Buchanan can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the victims’s families why he would label a woman as whiny and having a personality disorder for describing a scenario so similar to these women’s murders he can award any certificate
HE likes
Edited by HMQ to remove certain references to an MRA.
Well, we do know that men will use a dead woman for his own sociopathic sexual drives. Mike Buchanan is an idiot.
That’s kind of strange how dickface apparently fixated on the part of my comment to do with being raped after death. I missed his original comment. I love your edits, though!
I was born and grew up with the Green River Killer running around in the background and all that fear and terror experienced by women at the time. I’m sure everyone knows his M.O. I’m, also, sure men raping corpses is more common than we know.
It’s funny how men really can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
The point is
Edited by HMQ for mansplaining
Oh, HMQ, your edits are just killin’ me! I am laughing so hard. I’ve been up all night and I just finished a long, very serious blog post and I popped over here and had a look at that last one and it just hit me with its simplicity. I am ROTFLMAO! I, also, really need some sleep.
Thank you for running interference on the trolls.
I’m doing a series over there and this fatigue you’ve been experiencing as a result from all the psychological assaults… I’m thinking and hoping that maybe I’ll have some ideas that could help you feel better. Those will be in the next post, probably in a few days. I’ve been working on trying to get my own energy level up – it’s tough, especially with nonsense going on in the background that shouldn’t be going on. (Things are better here, though – the wife-beater got out of jail – there is no hope for the justice system in this country! – and was causing some trouble for a few days, but I put the whammy on him, again, and it literally stopped in less than five minutes. That was a few days ago. I’ve been resting well since then. I gotta get some sleep, now. I’ve been up all night. Thanks, again, for the laugh!
You are awesome WoTW.
I would love some advice on detoxing from the Manosphere and i readily admit I’m shit at self care when it comes to these bozos. Glad u like my edits. I love em too!
I don’t know what Mike said, something about having sex with a corpse? Because, I mean, people do that you know. Granted, they’re very sick people, but it happens nonetheless. Gary Ridgway, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer — yeah you can probably sense a pattern or two. Also seconded on not caring what Mike Buchanan has to say. He should stick to promoting white supremacists on his website.
Edited by HMQ for mansplaining and asking dumb questions.
Thank you for posting this, HMQ. I always point out to people who use the word “cis” that they’re using a woman-hating slur, but it’s hard for me to explain succinctly why that is so. I will link them to this instead.
I had some woman on Twitter take issue with the fact that men don’t have ovaries and uteri and don’t menstruate. She told me ‘science says different.’
LOL
Well yea obviously. When you debate religious people long enough, you learn that their concept of “science” means: any scientific result that confirms my beliefs, and any pseudo-scientific position that contradicts any scientific result that goes against my beliefs.
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