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bentarm comments on 2014 Less Wrong Census/Survey - Less Wrong
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Did the survey. I don't know what cisgender means, but I assume that's me, as I'm definitely not transgender...
It means experiencing little or no conflict between the gender you're generally treated as, the anatomy of your body, and the gender you regard yourself as.
"Gender normative" is another phrase that sometimes gets used. (More often, no phrase at all gets used and it's treated as an unmarked case... most people understand "male" to mean cis-male, for example.)
It is perhaps worth noting that the term is treated as a tribal signifier on much of the Internet... people who describe themselves as "cisgender" are seen as expressing social alignment with transgender people, which is seen as a "left" position when viewed in U.S. left-right partisan terms.
The reasoning here is that being an unmarked case is a form of social power, so by explicitly marking what would otherwise be an unmarked case, the speaker is... well, I'm not sure what, exactly. Calling attention to that power, I guess. Which in this context is understood as aligning with the relatively powerless, though in other contexts (e.g., white people describing themselves as "white") the reverse is true.
Well, that feels like it should be a sliding scale.
I'm not sure where I'd put such a conflict meter, if one existed, but it isn't at 0.
Agreed that it's more accurate to model such conflict (and gender identity more generally) as existing on a continuum than as some kind of binary.
Trans people are oppressed by having the existence of transgenderism denied, so by calling yourself cisgender, you are acknowledging the existence of transgenderism and countering that oppression. But Black people are oppressed by having the existence of race affirmed and exaggerated, so by calling yourself White, you are emphasizing race and exacerbating that oppression.
From what I've seen on the SJ side, they've done a lot to make white into a marked state (in other words, white people being referred to as white) rather than whiteness being an implied default.
Yeah, "cis-" (on this side of) is the opposite of "trans-" (across or on the other side of). So if you're currently the same sex as the one you were born as, you're cisgnder.
Actually, that's the definition of cissexual.