Cisgender fragility or cis fragility is:

a tendency to engage in defensive posturing and outright denial, minimizing concerns raised by trans communities while overemphasizing good intentions.[1]

Another description of cis fragility:

It is a combination of lack of stamina in interrogating [cis people's] conceptualizations of gender, as well as a resistance to challenging those conceptions. ... When cis people encounter challenges to their conception of a binary gender, they often react with defensiveness, forcing trans people to do the emotional labor of comforting the cis person in addition to educating them and explaining basic concepts about gender or divulging personal experience to satiate cis curiosity and confusion. This derails conversations about trans experiences with oppression and devolves them into assuages of cis guilt and potential violence.[2]

Here's a hypothetical, fictional example of cis fragility:

Kay, a cisgender woman considers herself open-minded, yet shares with her transgender colleague that gender-affirming surgery is “going too far.” When challenged by her colleague, Kay feels embarrassed and begins crying as she retreats to her office. She then emails the boss, letting her know that her colleague made her cry and created a negative workplace culture.

In this scenario, Kay neither considers the impact of her words on her colleague nor the workplace culture. She then utilizes her embarrassment to try and silence her colleague. The fragility in this scenario is evident by Kay’s inability to see how she utilizes her cisgender privilege to both create an unsafe working environment and silence gender-diverse individuals. Similar to and often at work with white fragility, cisgender fragility serves as a tool for further disempowering the marginalized and stigmatized.[3]

Here's another purely hypothetical, fictional example:

Zora, a non-binary person, comes across a post on the Effective Altruism Forum that tangentially mentions trans people and uses the term "transgenders". The full sentence is: "Lately, society has become more accepting of transgenders, which is a good thing." Zora leaves a comment saying that a better term is "transgender people" or "trans people". She backs up her claim that these terms are better by quoting from the Associated Press Stylebook and from a glossary of LGBTQ terminology by GLAAD. 

Nobody responds to Zora's comment, but it gets heavily downvoted, so much so that she becomes rate-limited from commenting on the EA Forum. Eventually, her comment gets deleted and she gets banned from commenting on that author's forum posts ever again. In private, the author accuses of her of being rude, obnoxious, and preachy and of thereby alienating potential cis allies.

Based on the two definitions and the other example above, can you determine why this second example is also an instance of cis fragility? It's cis fragility because it's an extremely defensive reaction to a simple attempt to convey information about the preferences of trans people with regard to the language cis people use about them. The ideal response, from Zora's point of view, would be to make a tiny edit — simply change "transgenders" to "transgender people" or "trans people" — and acknowledge her comment with as little as a one-word reply, such as, "Okay." In other words, the implicit request is for something very small. To Zora, it's a matter as simple as pointing out a typo or a broken link.

Well, what if Zora really was rude, obnoxious, and preachy in the way she worded her comment? Defining what constitutes rudeness, obnoxiousness, or preachiness is subjective and elusive. That makes it difficult to come to any agreement about the fact of the matter. This is the murky land of tone, subtext, and modelling of strangers' mental states, which is notoriously fraught with text-based communication on the Internet.

One potential solution: bite the bullet. Forgive people when they're rude, obnoxious, or preachy about the equality or rights of historically subjugated minority groups. Chalk it up to the price of progress. Maybe nicely ask them to be nicer next time.

A less radical solution: be cautious about the intentions, motives, feelings, thoughts, tone, or subtext you attribute to a stranger such as Zora. Be conscious that your attributions are not reality; ask yourself what you really know based just on what was written. Remind yourself that this subject matter tends to make people feel defensive, notice any defensiveness welling up inside you, and hold back your knee-jerk response. I conjecture that this caution and self-reflective process would avoid any outward hostility in the majority of cases where someone is perceived to be rude, obnoxious, or preachy about minority rights or equality. 

If you stop yourself and introspect, you might end up thinking something along the lines of, "I want to tell them to be nicer to me, but, actually, they were the normal level of nice. I think I felt attacked because it felt like they were acting superior or were calling me a bad person. But if I look at what they wrote and imagine what a person who wasn't doing those things and only had the best intentions would have written... They might have written exactly the same thing."

In this post, I focused on cis fragility, but you can apply what I've written, mutatis mutandis, to white fragility, male fragility, straight fragility, and so on. If you're a person of colour, a woman, an LGB person, etc., you can use your experience of being a member of that group, and perhaps occasionally being in Zora's shoes with regard to your own group, to empathize with the Zoras of groups you're not part of, and clamp down on your defensiveness. 


This post exists only for archival purposes.

  1. ^

    Streed, C. G., Jr, Perlson, J. E., Abrams, M. P., & Lett, E. (2023). On, With, By-Advancing Transgender Health Research and Clinical Practice. Health equity, 7(1), 161–165. https://doi.org/10.1089/heq.2022.0146

  2. ^

    2016, D. 22 F., & Categories: Gender, T. (2016, February 22). Cis fragility. Morgan Potts. https://web.archive.org/web/20160224204826/morganpotts.com/2016/cis-fragility/

  3. ^

    Perspectives on cisgender and transgender relations. Pride Veterinary Medical Community. (2023, March 6). https://pridevmc.org/perspectives-on-cisgender-and-transgender-relations/

     

New Comment
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[-][anonymous]40

While I agree with the post, I don't really think it's appropriate for LW, which usually avoids directly addressing political issues. I did weak upvote because I think the rationalist community has a bit of a blind spot when it comes to empathy and trans issues.

Nobody responds to Zora's comment, but it gets heavily downvoted, so much so that she becomes rate-limited from commenting on the EA Forum. Eventually, her comment gets deleted and she gets banned from commenting on that author's forum posts ever again. In private, the author accuses of her of being rude, obnoxious, and preachy and of thereby alienating potential cis allies.

Assuming such a comment was written in a neutral or collaborative tone, I wouldn't expect it to be downvoted. Possibly ignored, but not downvoted (of course, I'm giving some credit here that the EA forum follows LW norms, which I know it doesn't, so maybe it's got more folks who would downvote to just say boo trans people?). Lacking an example, this premise doesn't seem very believable to me, even though I do believe this kind of thing would be likely to happen elsewhere on the internet.

This is subtweeting the fact that (iirc) the OP wrote a comment sort of similar to the one described, on Duncan's most recent post.  I think it is much less surprising that such a comment got downvoted on LW (vs. the EA forum), and am not at all surprised that Duncan then deleted the comment and banned the OP from comment on their posts, after the comment spawned a (probably-annoying-to-Duncan) longer comment thread.

Yeah, this is definitely a minimally-obfuscated autobiographical account, not hypothetical. It's also false; there were lots of replies. Albeit mostly after Yarrow had already escalated (by posting about it on Dank EA Memes).

It's also false; there were lots of replies.


There were comments on Facebook, to be sure, but I never saw anyone (except me) reply to my comment here on LessWrong, ever after (what felt like) several days. 

For anyone curious, you can view the original comment here.

Thanks. I wish you would have just directly made this post about this specific thing that happened rather than try to generalize from one example. Or found more examples to show a pattern we could engage with. Now my read on your post is you just wanted to vent, which seems fine but I don't really want to read that in a LessWrong post. Seems better for Twitter or short form.

Also your example in this post is different than the thing that actually happened, though similar I guess?

I also don't totally understand why your comment was downvoted. Lacking context it seems like it was likely just irrelevant to the discussion, but then I would have expected most people to just ignore it. But then again people get pretty annoyed with language policing, especially when there's not serious confusion about what's being discussed or clear harms being caused (here the harm, as explained, seems indirect and speculative).

I wish you would have just directly made this post about this specific thing that happened rather than try to generalize from one example. Or found more examples to show a pattern we could engage with.

There are so, so many examples of things like this that happen all the time in the world. I used two hypothetical examples in the post. I thought that would suffice.

You might be surprised!

[-]jimrandomhModerator Comment-10

LW gives authors the ability to moderate comments on their own posts (particularly non-frontpage posts) when they reach a karma threshold. It doesn't automatically remove that power when they fall back under the threshold, because this doesn't normally come up (the threshold is only 50 karma). In this case, however, I'm taking the can-moderate flag off the account, since they're well below the threshold and, in my opinion, abusing it. (They deleted this comment by me, which I undid, and this comment which I did not undo.)

We are discussing in moderator-slack and may take other actions.

[+][comment deleted]00