Posted by mittens
https://www.metafilter.com/208507/contamination-is-the-companion-of-categorization
"One consequence of this series of coinages and definitional shifts is that the cisgender/transgender binary has a gaping hole in its middle. If, in the past, gender variance—epitomized by the queen—was the definitional center of homosexuality, now, in a historically shocking reversal, homosexuality has become gender-typical by default. [...] So what has happened to all the gender variants who do not desire transition? Put differently, what are the contemporary fates of those who would have been fairies, queens, and butches in the past?"
Kadji Amin with a deliciously complex argument on how we get to our current moment,
We Are All Non-Binary: A Brief History of Accidents.Editorial Note: I want to quote the WHOLE THING. But I won't. But just a taste more, because not everyone has time to read big gender theory papers during their lunch break.
"In keeping with the trend toward divergence as a strategy for managing taxonomical tensions, the cis/trans distinction has birthed a third term, nonbinary, which, unlike its seldom used predecessor, genderqueer, has caught on like wildfire in a few short years. Initially, nonbinary—an umbrella term for all those who identify as neither men nor women—offered a much needed home to all those orphans at the fuzzy edges of the cis/trans binary. But increasingly, nonbinary identity is being claimed by people who look and behave in a manner indistinguishable from ordinary lesbians and gays, or even ordinary heterosexuals."
"One precondition for the universalization of nonbinary identity is the trans idealization of cisgender. [...] Keep in mind that cisgender is not and has never been a social identity.
Like heterosexuality, cisgender is an opposite fabricated out of thin air. This is not to say that there are not people who are not transgender, in the sense of people who do not desire transition. [...] Strikingly, cisgender (and "officially" transgender) is now defined as a matter of "personal identity" alone. But how is a gender-typical person to go about developing a relation to their gender identity? In a context in which most gender-typical people have never had to think about their gender identity, when they look within to find some felt relation to it, they may well draw a blank. When they do find feelings about manhood and womanhood, these feelings are likely to be extremely ambivalent--how could they not be, since these terms are artifacts of patriarchal gender expectations and racialized civilization distinctions? While they may have heard trans people talk about gender dysphoria, they will search in vain for the feeling that indicates cisness. For there is none. The reason is that cisgender--the notion of an alignment so exact between one's personal sense of identity and the gender role assigned to one that there is no rub, no ambivalence, and no sense of constraint--is and has always been a fantasy.
Nobody has ever felt that way. We trans people invented the fantasy of cisgender as the opposite to the extreme gendered and sexed discomfort we have experienced. We are the ones responsible for the idealization of cisgender, and it falls partly to us to undo it."
"I propose that we throw a wrench in this identity machine. It may be necessary to generate new identities, given that nonbinary is not a true social category but rather a vast umbrella with no positive social content. However, we can abandon Western binary and taxonomic thinking by refusing to create a fictive opposite for each new term. We can drop the notion that gender is purely psychic and work instead toward creating a livable, valued, and legible social category for feminine male-assigned people (given the high cultural and erotic value of masculinity, a space for masculine femaleassigned people will likely always exist). Most importantly,
we can stop idealizing (and attempting to name) some version of normal gender, and we can refuse to use the misleading terms binary and cisgender altogether. For just as there has never been a heterosexuality without homosexual desire, there has never been a cis- or binary gender free from cross-identification or gender atypicality."
(spotted on this tweet from
nathan duford)
https://www.metafilter.com/208507/contamination-is-the-companion-of-categorization
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
metafilter_feed![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
